The Soup Dragon

Despite the vast majority of my family having a distinct southern bias, my grandma Blanche May Robson, was from Sheffield. Grandpa Frank was a southern boy from Buckinghamshire and seemed ancient to me - he was born in 1899 and didn't have my dad (his only child) until he was 47. Grandma must have been about 34. Old parents seem to be a common feature in my family, which is fairly comforting given that I'm now 30 and still show no signs of being ready for parenthood. It's good to know that Blanche was capable pre-IVF to be what they used to call a 'geriatric mother' and that another of my relatives had her last child at 49 in the late 19th century.

I make no bones about the fact that I didn't like grandma Blanche much. She was a terrifying woman for a small girl, and I always preferred visiting mum's side of the family more. Even dad didn't get on with her much and often referred to her as the Soup Dragon. She died a few days before my 11th birthday, grandpa having died the year before. I remember crying more over my dog Ben's death that year. However, now that I've come to research the family I'm coming to realise the hard life she must have had in her early years.

She was born in Grimesthorpe, Sheffield in 1912 to Eliza Maylor Baker and Edward Stanhope Robson. Eliza was a dressmaker and Edward a blacksmith and tool maker. In this area most work was focussed at the steelworks, which came to hugely important in the build up to the Second World War, making ammunition and weapons, though I don't know how much work there was to be had in the 1920s, when Edward was in business as a self-employed hammer forger.

Eliza I will no doubt talk about again as she has always fascinated me, but I won't go into detail here. Blanche was the eldest child of this couple, but not Eliza's first child. She had given birth to an illegitimate daughter - Lilian - the year before Blanche was born to an unknown father somewhere in Halifax. Lilian was also the only one of her children that she ever saw. In the year between Lilian and Blanche's birth Eliza went blind. I've been told it was probably cataracts as her eyes apparently had that filmy quality, and I find this extremely sad, given how easily this is treated today. The nature of Edward and Eliza's relationship intrigues me though. Did he know about Lilian before he married her? Was she already blind at their wedding? There are things I'm just going to have to live without knowing sadly.

Eliza was an extremely formidable woman, by all accounts, and it seems her blindness didn't hold her back a great deal, though it can't have been easy as, in 1927 when Blanche was 15, Edward died at the young age of 44 leaving Eliza with four children to look after - Blanche, Ivy, Ted and Gladys (Lilian was not brought up with the rest of the family it seems). The family weren't well off and he was buried in a common grave, with no headstone in Burngreave cemetery.

The three girls were sent out to work as servants from a young age to ease the burden on Eliza, and this is the only way I can imagine my grandparents ever having met. As Blanche was in service she seemed to move around the country wherever work was. They married at St Cuthberts in Grimesthorpe in 1938 when she was 26 and had to wait another 8 years for her first and only child.

I can only imagine it was a fairly tough life for Blanche growing up in a poor area to a blind mother, losing her father at a young age and entering service. Adding to that what was probably common knowledge of her half-sister which, I suspect, did not go down too well in the local community. Moving around was probably easier in that respect.

It doesn't mean that I've changed my mind about grandma. She was a woman with very rigid Victorian values and a cold attitude towards her grandchildren, who seems far removed from the photographs I have of her as a young woman, and the recollections of her nephew who claims she had a wicked sense of humour. But, it goes some way to letting me understand to a certain extent why she was how she was, and the problems she faced in her younger years. I wish I knew more...