A selection of extracts from Edward Morgan – husband of the life and times of Doris, as told to David Morgan his son, and David’s own recollections.

In brief, Doris met Edward in a more gentle and quieter way than Harry met Sally, in the Midland Institute, or the Workers Education Association. Both equally important organisations for self-improvement in a largely Socialist leaning Birmingham in the 1920’s. This was the Chamberlain legacy era of Council supplied Gas, Water and Electricity and “Corporation “ housing and transport (the buzzez).

“Just opened yr comment on my comment.  I wd be delighted to tell you all I know about Doris.  Unlike you, I’m not a blood relation although if she had lived I suppose she could – sort of – have been my mother. My own mother – Florence,  was a different kettle of fish altogether.  Physically like Doris – or so my father said –  which is why he married her, but temperamentally the opposite – a bossy and controlling person compared with Doris.

             “I can only know Doris from snapshots – I have a lot – and I get the impression of a gentle, sweet, and rather submissive character.  Somebody much too easily awed by what she saw as my father’s superior education and the fact that he was a vicar’s son. He’d also inherited  some old-fashioned ideas  from his father – a Welsh Presbyterian minister – about a man being the boss in a marriage and making the rules.  As a young man he was also very good looking with a beautiful baritone speaking voice, so I can imagine Doris being – at least at first – impressed by him and happy to go along with his ideas..  

             “I was astonished on your website to see a reference passed down the years, about him turning Doris into a vegetarian like himself and  weakening her resistance to TB.  This is exactly what my mother told us and it’s just one example of how he organised her life. I’ve already mentioned the hiking and camping trips – often to socialist summer camps where she had to rough it in a way she probably wasn’t used to and where she may have picked up chills which helped her incipient TB develop.  According to my mother several of her sisters also died of TB, that it was in the family.  You will know if this is true or not.  

             “What I’ve written may make my father sound like an ogre and that the marriage – brief flash that it was – was unhappy.

“We forget that a lot of women in those days liked the man to be in charge in this way, so she may have been happy to submit.  If she WAS unhappy, it was because she wanted children and her letters are full of references to their women neighbours having them and how she pined for a chid.  I think she also knitted baby-clothe for their and her sisters’ children.  On the happy side, she and Edward were prominent in the Middlemore Road Tenants Association (or at least he was as Secretary) and I have photos of them playing tennis and badminton there.

“Both read a lot, with him no doubt telling her what to read and I have a snapshot he took of her looking up at a bookcase full of books that they had installed.  The bane of their lives was having to drag into B’ham, each to a job they hated – he to the Alliance Assurance in Colmore Row, she to Bourneville where she worked in the typing pool.

             “A couple of years ago I approached the chap now living in their tiny Middlemore Rd terraced house to see if I could look over it .  He agreed and my brother and I drove to Northfield from London.  It was sad and pokey and but almost unchanged with a tiny outside lavatory still.  One horrible change from the bookish little house it had been, was that this character was a martial arts freak and the house was littered with daggers and samurai swords arranged on stands. A horrible experience

           “You may wonder  — Why my interest in a long dead woman who I’m not even related to?    I don’t know why.  Maybe just being so intrigued as a boy at seeing her bits an pieces hidden away in a drawer and all the snapshots. I just feel close to her.

“But I see nothing strange about the  Raybould clan coming together to get interrogate its own history.  I think it’s great.  You mention questions and answers.  One question I ask myself is why my father kept so much of Doris’s stuff.  He pretended to my mother that he was glad to escape from the marriage but in a letter to his elder sister back in Wales, he describes touching Doris”s hair in the mortuary at Rednal Hospital just after she had died and calls her his ‘old pal’,  So who knows what the truth was.

         “All the photos I’ve referred to are safe in my old flat in London and I can’t get there, but my brother scanned some of them so it may be possible to add them to the website if of interest.  I also have letters – one is a note from Doris to Edward from her hospital bed asking for a tomato and for him to bring in their record of ‘The Laughing Policemen’, which the matron will let her play. 

         “One last Q from me.  The website shows a sepia photo of a group of people sitting on the ground in what cd be a garden. In the middle is a woman EXACtLY like Doris in my photos.   Is this Doris?  Don’t hesitate to write back if you have any Qs.”

“Dear Harry

                 I was hoping you’d get back to me fairly quickly while all this is fresh.  Snap – as far as age goes – am in my 80s too but I’ve got all my marbles apart from occasional word-blindness re names.

                Briefly – my background:  born Shirley 1939, eldest of 3 brothers. KES Grammar School Stratford-on Avon.  Nervous breakdown at 17 because of stress at home so didn’t go to Uni like my brothers.  Unemployed in Stratford on the dole.  Tried to get back into society by self-educating and got myself into art-school.  And weirdly, re one of the Raybould girls I went to B’ham School of Art.  From there to the Royal College of Art, followed by a teaching job at Chelsea School of Art where I ended up running the Dept of PT Studies. Retired in 2070.  Bought cheap bungalow in Wiltshire where I now live with my daughter Angharad.  Still not over death of my wife in 2021.  Spend time researching and writing articles for Wiltshire folklore magazines under name ‘David Aneurin Morgan’.

               “Briefly too – my father’s background: born Mold, Flintshire 1902 (same year as Doris). son of Rev JJ Morgan, Calvin-Methodist minister, grandson of Dafydd Morgan who ran the great 1859 Revival in Wales.  Edward was the cleverest of the Rev JJ’s nine children but the worst behaved so an elder sister got the money to go to college and he was forced to leave school at 16 and be articled to the Alliance Assurance Co as a clerk.  Ended up at Alliance in B’ham. According to my mother Florence, he and Doris must have met at a WEA evening class at the Midland Institute in B’ham.  Thousands of people who had been forced to leave school at 16 were educating themselves via classes like this and after Doris died i 1930, Edward met my mother at drama classes at the Midland Institute. 

        “You guess wrongly about him being a chapel or bible type.  He hated his father and reacted strongly against the whole narrow Welsh holier-than-thou religious thing.  Was an atheist and briefly a communist and connected to House in B’ham, tho’ I’m not sure what that was.  BUT he had inherited his father’s penny-pinching and teetotalism and in 1938 he had saved enough to buy a bungalow in Shirley.  He and my mother lived their in sin until his appalled family intervened and made him marry her. His communism had softened into socialism and he did work for the Labour party in Shirley.  He was never a healthy man despite all the health fads he made Doris follow and in his mid 30s he was retired medically with a disability pension from the Alliance with an anal fistula and signs of bowel cancer.  In fact, he lived on into his 60s, dying alone in B’ham in 1968. 

        “He and my mother has by them separated and had been at loggerheads for many years because of her infidelity.  Life at home was in fact hell and why I had my breakdown.  He had married my mother as a replacement for Doris because she looked like her and because he thought he could dominate her in the same way. In this he was repeating the way his own father had ruled his wife and nine children in Mold.  But he’d got it wrong and very soon my mother had reversed the balance of power in the house and was dominating HIM and all of us. 

        “Anyway – that’s them.  On a different tack, I spent part of yesterday trying to get back to Raybould origins and I think I may have tracked them down not just to Netherton but a particular part of Netherton.  An A-Z of B’ham lists a tiny little road in Netherton called ‘Raybould’s Fold’.  In Black Country lingo a ‘fold’ (pronounced ‘fode’) was a paved yard or alley between buildings and this is exactly what it still is today, though it’s had a few new-builds added to it.  You can actually traverse it on yr lap-top on Google Street View.

“According to Wikipedia, there are several ‘folds’ in Netherton with a name attached.  This wasn’t always because the person had lived there but because they’d built it.  Censuses for Netherton show several ‘Rayboulds’ as builders, so that may explain it.  The other industry the Census says they were in was chain-making which was often done in small family foundries attached people’s houses rather than in big foundries,  And it started off as a cottage industry like this.

         “I’m not Q clear – have you traced Walter to Netherton?  Did his father Simeon come from Netherton?  My Q about Walter is where his burcher’s shops were.  As a boy we were taken on trips to the Lickey Hills.  Te bus went along the Bristol Road passing Northfield and Rubery.  And my father used to point out a shop to my mother and say it was one of Doris’s father’s butcher’s shops.

“I think it was  in Northfield.  Could this be why Edward and Doris bought (or rented) the house in Northfield?   Is there any time line of where Walter lived and where his shops were?

         “Another interesting thing is that my father lived in Sparkhill before he met Doris though as I’ve said, according to my mother they met in the city centre at the Midland Institute.

        “I have an overwhelming Q about this mandolin that somebody on the website refers to and Doris having an LLCM certificate.

“When I found Doris’s bangle ad handbag hidden away in drawers I naturally questioned my mother and my father had told her a lot.

“Why was there NEVER any mention of Doris and music and playing the mandolin?  As I said earlier,  a second wife tends to downplay the first, even to disparage her but she surely wouldn’t have left this out.   If anything she saw Doris as a victim.  The picture handed down to me was of a girl slogging away in the typing pool at Cadbury’s, trying to improve herself by evening classes, in awe of her highly educated husband (though he had in fact left school at 16 like her!).  He was however deeply read and had a rather lordly air inherited from his father so could impress people like this.  Doris the musician with a diploma puts her in a completely different light.  Please find out the truth of this for me.

          “Re photos, all my albums are in London but as I said my brother scanned a lot.  I will talk to him about them. Do the family have photos of Doris?  I feel she is somehow the invisible one.  And most poignant of all, I have this letter to Edward from her hospital bed in shaky pencil.  Again – damn it – in London.”

 “ Re 52 Solihull Road.  Look at Google St and see if you can spot 52.  I’ve got a feeling it may have all have been rebuilt in the 20s and 30s with bigger houses. The ones on it now don’t fit your account of the Raybould girls sleeping head to toe.  Or am i muddling it with the house in Aston where Doris was born?   I was interested in Walter’s debts ref butcher’s business after he died.  From that photo of him and Emily on the website, he looks like a respectable,  white hired old gentleman, not at all the chap I pictured turning up at our house in Shirley for  drink at the Colebrook.  Good for Walter.  Do you save the address of the house in Aston?  I stlll haven’t got a clear picture of Walter and Emily’s moves.

       “I’m a great believer in God being in the detail, and I think I told you how I found that mysterious drawer as a boy with Doris’s stuff hidden at the back, and that there was a dried up perfume bottle.  And that the perfume was called ‘Ashes of Violets’.  On a hunch I googled :Ashes of Violets’ and – gorblimey – there WAS such a perfume sold by a french company who’d managed to synthesise the floral smell and sold it at a price working woman and  flappers could afford.  My father was so penny-pinching I found it hard to believe he would fork out for perfume.  She must have bought it for herself out of her Cadbury’s wages.  I think I’m right about another of her sisters working at Cadbury’s so maybe one sister followed the other there.“

“Looks like you’ve cracked how Walter and Em Jane met – when she was lodging with her aunt and uncle and he was lodging there as a butcher’s assistant.  I don’t want to sound mean about him but although we keep referring to him as a ‘butcher’ as if he owned a butcher’s shop he was probably only ever an assistant.  A ‘butcher’s journeyman’ was a man who had been thru an apprenticeship and knew how to trim and package meat but wasn’t a  ‘master’.  If Walter had a drink problem, he wd surely have been incapable of the day to day logistics of running a shop. 

       “I’ve found the same thing when researching my own ancestry.  I come from a line of ‘millers’ on both sides.  Before they turned to religion and became ministers, my father’s lot  built and ran water mills on those terrifying streams that tumble down to Devil’s Bridge.  They were genuine ‘master’ millers.  But on my Mother’s side it turns out that though the family refer to them as ‘the Miller of Witherley’, the Miller of X’ and so on , they were only ever working as assistants to a master miller. They were miller’s journeymen.”

“I’ve made a weird little discovery.  The name of the road where my father lived in Sparkhill was – wait for it — Doris Rd.

“This would have been after she died and he moved from their little home in Northfield closer into B’ham.  But Sparkhill was his stamping ground and he lived there before he met and married Doris.  I don’t know which road then. When he and my mother spit circa 1960, he yet again found lodgings in Sparkhill.

     “I’ve also remembered very telling about his and Doris’s marriage.  In Middlemore Rd they had friends called the Hines or Hindes who live a few doors down.  After Doris’s death, a few weeks after he bought the bungalow in Shirley my mother had a most terrible letter warning her against Edward and saying what a life of misery he had led Doris.  Presumably she had cried on the woman’s shoulder about the enforced vegetarianism and not having a baby.  These were people they’d socialised with and played tennis.  I’m guessing that the wife egged the husband on to write. My mother ignored it.”

“Really good stuff here.  Thank you.  I thought you’d forgotten the mandolin.  

Sadly, the bottom line seems to be  that music and the mandolin had nothing to do with Doris, it was the 2nd sister Gladys.

‘who also died of TB aged 26’.    I knew one of D sisters did sisters did.

“What’s tricky for me is that in what you’ve sent is that I don’t know who is being quoted –  who is saying ‘Granny saw a photo of her in academic dress with certificate’?  And who was Granny?  Is she one of Doris’s sisters?  

“Fantastic bit about the mandolin still exiting and being superglued.

“As I’ve said, Doris and music didn’t sound right because her evening classes were in literature not music.  So Edward didn’t squash talent in his wife.  They both read a lot and I think recited poetry together as he later did with my mother.

“A mandolin fits in perfectly to the Roaring Twenties with banjos and minstrel shows and light music like Ellis’s.  I’m going to google the Midland Institute and see if they did music classes in the early 20s.  Edward also had a connection with the WEA (Workers Educational Association) and it may have been liked to the Mid. Inst. 

“I apologise for this sounding like an inquisition, but do you have Gladys’s death date?  Were the Rayboulds buried in Yardley Cemetery?  I think I mentioned how Edward carted the urn with Doris’s ashes from lodging to lodging till her sisters complained  and made him ‘scatter them on Raybould graves in Yardley Cemetery.’  My mother recalled a horrifying event early in their marriage, when Edward asked her to shut her eyes and dip her fingers in something.  Which she did, then opened them to find shed dipped them into Doris’s urn and was feeling her ashes.  Thank god it wasn’t hidden in that drawer with her bangle and handbag for me to find as a boy.”

“Thanks for info abt 117.  But I need to sort out this business of the Mermaid pub. You sent me  a coloured photo of what looked like the side of a big shop taken over by Pakistanis and said it was The Mermaid.  Wikipedia confirms The Mermaid was on the Stratford Rd in Sparkhill but in the old photo of it attached below it looks huge and had a sculpture of a mermaid on the frontage.  It says it was on the junction of Stratford Rd and Warwick Rd. Please put me straight about this.

“As I said, I have the mermaid that hung over the bar.  I bought it many years ago on the Portobellos Rd in London and the stall holder said that was where it came from.  I may have a photo of it hanging on the wall of my old flat in London.   If I can find it I’ll send it.  Look forward to photo of Annie Maria.”