MonoMay 8

Seeking Annie May

I first really became aware of my maternal grandmother on my return from my mother’s funeral. Of course it is obvious that my mother had parents, but I grew up knowing nothing about them. I returned home to Edinburgh from my mother’s funeral in Cornwall with a large pile of documents. One of these was a letter from a woman called Wendy in Australia. There was no evidence my mother ever replied to it. On behalf of her family, she was seeking information about her great aunt, my maternal grandmother - Annie May Storer. It was easy to connect with Wendy on social media and she supplied me with more information about this Australian family that I had no clue existed. This was my first awareness of my grandmother as a person rather than an abstract concept. I knew that my mother was born in Australia, but I had assumed that my grandfather had gone to Australia with his wife. I now discovered that he had gone out as a single man and married an Australian woman. The journey to find Annie May had begun. It began with a surprise: that Annie May was Australian. It has been littered with more surprises along the way. So, what follows from here relates my discovery of Annie May through documentary evidence obtained, along with some anecdotal evidence from various family members, and combined with a degree of speculation on my part.

Born in St. Arnaud, Victoria, Australia on 22 August 1906, Annie May Storer married Albert James Hanna on the 3rd October 1926. Their first child, Albert (a.k.a. Bertie), was born in January 1930, and the second, Elsie May (my mother), was born 2 November 1931. Shortly after the birth of my mother Albert decided that they should return to Northern Ireland. Anecdotal evidence in the family suggests that this was because there was ‘no work’ in Australia. Even though Australia was in the grip of a depression at that time, something there strikes a false note with me. Passenger lists show that they embarked in Melbourne. There is no visible date on the lists, but it must have been May 1932 as my mother is listed as being 7mths old. Apparently Albert’s mother had sent him the passage money. Annie May must have had thoughts and expectations about what the journey would be like, as unlike Albert, she would not have experienced it before. There must also have had a degree of apprehension that she was embarking on a journey around the world with no idea what the future may hold. There she was in Melbourne with a toddler and a baby in arms, and she knew that soon she would be thousands of miles from her family and friends and the only people she would know would be her husband and children. That must have been quite daunting. Among other things, she must have been wondering if she would ever see her family again.

The journey appears to have taken about three months until they disembarked in Tilbury on 1st September 1932. After that they seem to have gone straight to Northern Ireland, to stay with Albert’s mother in Kilkeel. One could speculate that Annie May would have found the climate somewhat different to that which she had been used to in Australia. We know that they stayed in Kilkeel until at least 1933 as their third child Samuel was born there. We do not know exactly when, but at some point between 1933 and 1942 the family moved to Blackburn. This is obvious from the next solid piece of evidence for Annie May, gleaned from obtaining copies of her medical records. These concern her admission to Queens Park Hospital Blackburn, and from there her move to the Mental Hospital at Whittingham, near Preston on 30th May 1942. The reason given for her committal was that she was deemed to be a ‘person of unsound mind’ (very much a phrase of its time), who should be detained by order for care and treatment.

Here again I have to speculate, as family memories are absent. Sam, the youngest child, who was still alive when I started researching this story, said he had no memory of his mother. We do know that by this time Albert had gone into the army and had left Annie May with three children and very little money - if any. There is anecdotal evidence within the Australian family that Annie May had a tendency to be ‘highly strung’. So, given that she was in a strange place with little, or no, money, three children, very few friends, and no family support, her life must have been stressful to say the least. It is therefore quite likely that the stress she was under triggered a bout of depression or some form of breakdown. The one thing we have to remember is that at that point recognisably modern ideas about mental health were only just emerging.

When Annie May was committed, the children were sent back to Kilkeel to live with their grandmother, Albert’s mother. It is at this point that any family allowance being received from the army was withdrawn. So, it seems that Annie May had been pretty much abandoned by Albert, and was in a distressed/destitute state. No wonder that the doctor responsible for her committal described her as being very melancholic, depressed, and very confused. There is familial anecdotal evidence that Albert went to Kilkeel to see the children, and that, for whatever reason, his mother kicked him out of the house. A negative picture begins to emerge of Albert. Whilst researching Annie May’s life, I recall someone telling me that at some point Albert was informed that his wife was fit to be released, but that he just ignored it. I am not sure where this information came from, and I cannot find the evidence of it. But it would not surprise me if it were true as, by this time, it seems that Albert had got together with another woman. It seems that as far as he was concerned Annie May could be left to rot in Whittingham Hospital, which is where she remined until her death on 2nd March 1956. It was just a couple of months before my fifth birthday.

The journey to find Annie May has been one of many surprises. In 2018, I was able to travel to Australia with my partner for eight weeks. We included time to visit Wendy, who was living in Bendigo, Victoria. She organised a family get together so that we could meet some of the Australian ‘rellies’. This was a somewhat stressful event, because it involved meeting a lot of new people all at once. She also took some time off to show us around. It was fascinating to visit St. Arnaud where my mother was born, although I suspect the town was much changed since that time. We had a poke around the cemetery there and found the graves of a couple of ancestors that by then I was aware of. Whilst we were sitting having a coffee and a chat, Wendy saw her mother drive past the café and called her to suggest that she come and meet us, which she did. We were discussing Annie May when Kathy dropped a bombshell, along the lines of ‘of course Annie May was sent to Melbourne to have a child before she was married’. This was news to Wendy who had spent years trying to research Annie May, yet her mother had never told her this salient fact.

Annie May was clearly unfortunate to fall for someone like Albert Hanna who seems to have been manipulative and destructive in his behaviours. When they came back to Northern Ireland, he effectively removed any familial support that may have been given to Annie May. If Albert did know about the earlier ‘visit to Melbourne’, it suggests that he had a penchant for vulnerable women. It seems that his second wife also had a vulnerability, in the form of a secret affair that also led to a pregnancy. That Albert was only too aware that Annie May remained alive after the Second World War is demonstrated by the fact that he only married the other woman after Annie May died, having lived with her for decades. This leads me to believe that he had been informed that Annie May was fit to be released, and that he just ignored it. The most distressing part of the story for me is that Annie May spent almost fourteen years in that awful place, until she died. By this stage her Australian family had lost touch and could do nothing to help her. Albert left her in the situation where not only did she miss her children growing up, but also probably never even knew that she had grandchildren. The most my mother would ever tell me about her mother was that she had ‘gone mad’. The truth is much more complex. I think that there is more to discover. The journey continues.