A perhaps final word on George Thomas Tovey, (1862-1949), my maternal grandfather, as I remember him in the last 15 or so years of his life. (See posts around #138).
FURTHER MEMORIES OF EMILY BLACK AND GEORGE THOMAS TOVEY AT 35 HIGH STREET, HARBORNE (ca. 1940 - 1949)
written by ChrisM in 2025.
My mother retained a significant degree of loyalty to her father, George Thomas Tovey, despite the fact of the latter's marriage breakup in the very earliest years of the twentieth century and her having spent most of her childhood in the care of George's mother, Elizabeth Tovey and his stepfather, George Snook. Unlike the relationship she retained with her estranged mother (Rachel Tovey, whose existence she denied to her own children throughout her life), the three of us shared in this and enabled my brother to recall remarkable detail of it from the early 1920s onwards. I myself later participated, no doubt from an early age, and can provide a few further fragments of memory of it from my own childhood.
My memories follow a similar pattern to those of my brother who recorded nothing other than meetings with Grandpa in or very near the latter's Harborne home. Perhaps there was never any meeting elsewhere: nothing is mentioned from the 1920s/30s and I am wholly unaware of Grandpa ever visiting us at our home in Streetly. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, does any photograph of him or Mrs Black survive amongst the many other family images which I have. Whether a similar relationship was shared between George and his younger daughter, Beatrice, who was a baby at the time of the break-up in the very early 1900s, was only confirmed some fifty years after my last visit to my grandfather. In 1998, after my mother's death, I sought out Beatrice's only daughter who was still living in Birmingham. In the course of a long, affectionate and sometimes hilarious conversation I learned that, yes, Beatrice and she had visited Grandpa and Mrs. Black regularly, just as Mother and my brother, Graham (and later I) had done, for decades. These meet-ups never included the mother, of course, Rachel. Her comment to both of them, on their return home, was normally "And how WAS the old sod, then?"
Family break-ups often had all the bitterness which they can still have in the 21st century but, added to that, there was then a degree of shame and disgrace as well, probably encouraged by older family members clinging firmly to their Victorian values. This particular one had immense repercussions in our family: the splitting up of two sisters (who, to their credit, retained some sort of relationship for most of their lives); very different upbringings; and in each case subsequent lives which were, for better or for worse, defined by it for a generation or more. And so I suspect that, while my mother's relationship with her father was a loving and caring one and she ensured that her own children shared in it, it was something which was kept at arm's length and very separate from her own life in Erdington and later Streetly - in fact two long bus rides away.
It was always after such two long bus rides that my mother and I would walk along High Street, Harborne – with Mother usually carrying a basket of some sort - and reach the row of cottages were Grandpa and Mrs Black lived. My brother felt that the appearance of these dwellings belied rather better accommodation than one might have expected. Looking at the 21st century images of them (and how wonderful it is that the buildings have survived – I was convinced that they hadn't) they appear to me to be superior to those prevalent at that time in many parts of Birmingham and no doubt these days make nice homes; but perhaps in the period he was talking about they were run down and drab. And certainly, to me looking at them uncritically in the 1940s, they appeared little different from those streetfuls of terraced properties which I regularly saw from the upper deck of our Midland Red bus as I travelled in and out of the City. And they seemed old - in fact, they had been there for a century, originally as nailers' cottages, before I first set eyes on them – grimy and drab, which most old things seemed to me to be, at that time.
A couple of yards off the street and then, ignoring the unused front doors on either side of us, down through the fascinating tunnel and, at the back, left and a knock on the door of no.35. In we would go to be greeted by the old people. They always seem pleased to see us. The back door opened into their kitchen. I don't remember cellar steps or the gas stove which my brother mentioned, but possibly a flight of stairs to the upper story up which I never penetrated. Otherwise the overwhelming memory is of a cosy small room, dominated by a black kitchen range on the right hand wall which stretched up far above my head and was topped by a wooden mantelpiece from which a row of Staffordshire ornaments looked down on me. A couple of easy chairs were on each side of it and, between them, a rag hearth rug. The fire itself was always burning - as I remember it, summer and winter. And it was also never without its copper kettle, or so it seemed to me, usually bubbling away and ready for use. The range was one of the fascinations to me of their home. (So different in this and so many other ways from our own which was a recently built semi in Streetly where you had a fire in the living-room grate in winter but would never have used it in any other way than perhaps to toast your piece of bread or pikelet on a Sunday afternoon - and of course in its own room a gas stove together with a crock sink with an Ascot water heater over it which roared into life to give you hot water as soon as you turned on its tap. And of course, electric light).
Gas was the main service into the Harborne property although I think there must have been a cold water tap in the sink. Lighting was via a gas mantle suspended from the middle of the ceiling and was no doubt supplemented by oil lamps and candles. But I was never there after dark to see any of that. There appeared to be no electricity and I have no idea when that came to those properties. It must have been after I last saw them in 1949.
Beyond the kitchen/living room was the front room which I only ever saw used on one occasion. The room was dark and a bit dingy and a large sofa with a black, shiny, unyielding cushion on it, no doubt stuffed with horse hair, obstructed an outside door which, I worked out, was the front door. Another source of fascination – why did you have door and then put a huge, heavy piece of furniture in front of it? Quite outside my limited scope of experience.
Mrs. Black and Grandpa were of course always there when we visited. Grandpa must have been approaching 70 when I first remember meeting him and had long since retired from Cadbury's. Mrs. Black was eight years his senior. She was a smallish, energetic little lady always dressed in black which I recall feeling as appropriate, bearing in mind her name. It did pass my mind that it was strange she was not called Mrs. Tovey or Grandma because they appeared to be like any other couple whom I encountered. But the situation was like any other facing a young child - something a bit different which you accepted as just something new and part of the big world you were learning about. Mrs. Black's status was briskly explained to me by my mother - she was Grandpa's housekeeper. (The census returns from earlier days show a slightly different emphasis - Mrs. Black was the householder, Grandpa a boarder. And from the same recent research it also emerged that in 1901 they had lived in the same area with their then spouses, in Gt. Colmore Street: George Tovey at 10 Ct. 5 and Emily Black at 3 Ct. 24). It is not known whether they were acquainted with each other at that stage).
But whatever the situation it was clearly Mrs. Black who ran the domestic side of things in Harborne and that came as no surprise as me as a small boy absorbing the life I saw going on around me. Grandpa seemed, as I remember it, almost always firmly established in his armchair on the right-hand side of the range, back to the window, in jacket or waistcoat and with newspaper on lap and cup of tea to hand, while Mrs. Black and Mum fussed around. (My big regret, later, is that, unusually in our family, absolutely no image of either him or Mrs. Black has survived. This is almost certainly because all the meetings which I recall took place in that little living-room/kitchen, in my school holidays, and never involved my father (and his camera). Nothing especially significant in that but it does mean that I cannot visualise the faces of either, at one time so familiar to me and now lost.
I was never conscious of accent. Both old people were entirely comprehensible to me. I did not notice, either, whether Mrs. Black spoke differently from Grandpa or Mum or any of us. Whether she retained any vestiges of her Yorkshire childhood or not, I was certainly never aware. My visits to them involved, for me, a surrounding buzz of natter, as they and my mother did their regular catch-up and no doubt talked of family and other things. I don't ever remember being transfixed with boredom - which would have left me with great reluctance to participitate in the next visit - but almost everything talked about was either absorbed by me and later forgotten or went entirely over my head.
To be continued.....
