ELIZABETH JEANETTE BLANEY – THE EARLY YEARS

While Elizabeth (Bess) was not the first member of the Blaney family to leave Birmingham for Canada, she is the central figure of my family history.

Her parents were Harry Blaney (1876-1955) and Martha Jane Elcocks (1877-1961). They were married July 9, 1895 in Birmingham, England. According to their Entry of Marriage document, Harry was a house painter at the time. His father is shown as Edwin Blaney, a saddler (deceased) and Jane’s father was William Elcocks, a brewer. 

Elizabeth was born on Upper Ryland Road, February 23, 1897. This was a poor and tough working class area of Birmingham. Her grandmother and an aunt lived at the top of the hill.

Birmingham was the 2^nd largest city in Britain. It was a dirty and crowded industrial city. Ryland Road was an area of “back to back” housing; high density clusters of very small attached houses, built back to back and surrounding a communal courtyard. It was crowded and dark. Since three of the four walls were shared with other houses the lack of windows resulted in poor ventilation as well as low light. It was a harsh environment for poor working class families; disease and malnutrition were common

In the 1901 census, Elizabeth, her parents and her two brothers are shown still living on Ryland Road with Harry working as a general labourer in a lumber yard. The house contained only three rooms and the toilet facilities were likely outside and shared with the neighbours. 

Elizabeth was the second child of Harry and Jane, her older brother William was a little more than a year older than her having been born on January 9, 1896.

    

In the next nine years Elizabeth was followed by three more brothers, Edwin (Ted) born August 19, 1900, Albert born September 4, 1904 and Stanley born January 16, 1906. Her mother had many unsuccessful pregnancies as well, once telling her great-granddaughter-in-law there were twenty-two confinements in all. Infant mortality was high in Birmingham in those times. There is no official record of stillborn births until 1927 which limits research in this area. Perhaps more information could be found in the parish records.

Young Elizabeth had a few adventures. While attending Bristol Street School, she used a slate board and slate pencil. She “carried 4-5 stitches between my nose bridge and left eye where my slate broke up as I fell up the wide steps to the school door”. She also remembered how they used to salute the Union Jack before entering the school “it kept us proud”. In re-visiting the site in 1954 she “closed my eyes and expected to see Miss Coomes looking down at me from the balcony”.

Elizabeth also told of climbing the bridge on Pritchatt’s Lane, slipping and falling into the canal below, where a barge man pulled her out with a long hook. She ended up 2 days later in the Fever Hospital. (This was likely the Birmingham City Infectious Hospital, which handled scarlet fever cases) She told of "going up The Cut (canal) in a coal boat". 

A happier memory involved the annual Lord Chamberlain’s children's summer party at Highcroft where he received them in his wheelchair with an orchid in his coat. "All the children had a bag of candy and an orchid from his greenhouses to take home to their mothers, after a tea party and a tour around his beautiful rose gardens."

Very early in her life, as the only daughter, Elizabeth had a lot of responsibilities including many of the household chores and helping to raise her younger brothers. Likely her mother was indisposed much of the time and there was very little money, although Harry always worked hard at a wide variety of jobs to look after his family.

Church was always present in Elizabeth’s life, beginning in Sunday school at All Saints Church nearby. Throughout her life she sang and participated in the local church wherever she resided.

                                                                                                             

Just a year before Elizabeth left home to be married, Harry and Jane had another daughter, Martha Louise who was born in Birmingham on February 28, 1915. The birth of a son Alfred, born in Birmingham on January 1, 1920 completed the family.

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/birmingham-back-to-backs

WALTER LANGLEY RI (June 8, 1852 - March 21, 1922)

My favourite stories told by my grandmother Elizabeth Blaney Welch were those of a talented and famous ancestor.

Photo of poster in Penlee House Gallery

He was Walter Langley, her great uncle on her father’s side. Walter was the brother of Elizabeth’s grandmother, Ellen Elizabeth Langley (1838-1915) who had married Edwin Blaney (1834-1885) in 1855.

Walter Langley was a watercolour painter who is most well known as a founding member of the Newlyn School. He created large scale watercolours of people and scenes from everyday life in a fishing village and the seafaring tragedies along the coast near Penzance in England. Walter had great empathy for the struggles of the poor and of disadvantaged workers.

Gran was very familiar with his work and had some artifacts that she passed along to me when she knew I was interested. I am pleased to have a catalogue from an exhibit of his work held at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in June 1984.

She also gave me some correspondence between his second wife, Ethel and the Birmingham Lord Mayor’s secretary E. Sanford. It concerned a Memorial Exhibition in 1923 and A Brief History of Walter Langley R.I. (Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour) written on June 25, 1931 by Edward Harper, RBSA, Hon. Sec. of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Edward Harper was a fellow student and friend of Walter Langley.

Lickey Hills

 In his early years Walter painted rural scenes close to his home in Birmingham, not until 1882 did he choose to make the life of fishermen and their families, his subject matter.

At least one piece of his art is resident in Canada. Elizabeth owned a miniature watercolour scene, about 2½ by 4 inches in size, of Lickey Hills, painted by Walter Langley in 1875. It was originally owned by one of his elder sisters and has been passed down through the family. There are some handwritten notes attached to the painting and I am currently researching to confirm the details of its provenance.

As a result of my Grandmother’s influence, Walter Langley became my first family history research subject. It was an easy place to start as much information has been written about him and his work still hangs in the Birmingham Art Gallery in England. The artifacts she gave me inspired my first trip to England and led me to get in touch with a couple of cousins near Birmingham.

I have been fortunate to visit the gallery twice and see some of his original art works. I found them to be very beautiful and moving.

I was also able to travel to the south west coast of Britain and visit Penlee House in Penzance where I saw a photograph of Walter on display as well as some prints of his art. I stood on the seawall in the nearby village of Newlyn that appears in several of his paintings. It was very thrilling to be standing there knowing that he had painted that very scene a hundred years earlier.

I have just received a book about his life that I am looking forward to reading; Walter Langley: From Birmingham to Newlyn, written by his grandson, Roger Langley, published June 2011. It is a revised and rewritten edition of a study first published in 1997 with many new illustrations.

Walter was very prolific and I have some prints and posters of his work hanging on my living room wall that I enjoy immensely. Some came from my grandmother and some I was able to purchase in Birmingham and Penzance when I visited there.

It seems that this is where the artistic talent in our family’s current and past generations originated.

http://www.penleehouse.org.uk

THE STORYTELLER

Elizabeth Blaney was very knowledgeable of her own family history but she didn’t think of herself as a genealogist. We saw her as the family storyteller, a talent she seems to have inherited from her father, Harry. When his children were very young he often entertained them with his stories, some of which turned out not to be true but were nonetheless interesting.She meticulously recorded the births, addresses and deaths of family members and friends which turned out to be very helpful in my research.

As I listened to her stories, told in what seemed to me to be a distinctive upper class British accent, I wondered how coming from a working class English family, she spoke as she did.  I later discovered that when she was about fifteen she became a nursemaid for the prominent Lewis family who were connected with the Birmingham Small Arms Company (she referred to them as the gun family). Mrs. Lewis required her to “speak properly” in order to be a good example for the child in her care and so she did. 


Gran told us that her grandfather, Edwin Blaney, while working for Birmingham saddlers, Lamplugh & Brown, had made a saddle for Queen Victoria.  Imagine Elizabeth’s surprise when Mrs. Lewis (nee Brown) who was the daughter of a saddler, showed her a photograph of Edwin taken with that very saddle. She also told of another employer who had two paintings by her Great Uncle Walter Langley, hanging in their dining room. She met her future husband, Harry Welch, while he was working as a chauffeur for a family where Elizabeth worked as a baby nurse.

My Fair Lady 2nd prize at age 79

While she had a difficult and physically hard-working life, she continued to develop an appreciation for music, art, poetry, antiques and "fine things" which she passed on to her daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughter. She was a lifelong singer, She loved to laugh and dress up in costumes; she loved to make jewellery, read and collect poetry, occasionally writing some herself.

It is interesting and emotional to pursue the history of my grandmother's life because it gives me a much deeper understanding of how her life experiences shaped the person I came to know as I grew up and how I knew her in her later years. 


I struggle to read her journals written during her later years and her personal papers because they contain much sadness and some bitterness but they do include some explanations for those feelings. There were also many inspirational poems she collected and recorded over the years that seem to represent her hopes and ideals.She always aimed high.

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

My travels into the past began as a young girl, when I was impressed by my maternal grandmother's seemingly "total recall" of her life. My family was living in North Vancouver, next door to her and my grandfather, Harry Welch, in the late 1940s building our own homes.

She was Elizabeth (Bess) Jeanette Blaney and we would sit in her little kitchen on Coleman Road, at the top of Grouse Mountain, with a cup of tea while she told tales of her relationship with her beloved father in Birmingham, England, raising her family in Montreal and Toronto and stories of my mother's childhood. I loved her stories and admired her skill in telling them.I later learned that she inherited her story telling ability from her father, Harry.

She was very proud of her ancestors particularly her great uncle, Walter Langley (1852-1922) who was a well known watercolour painter and her grandfather, Edwin Blaney (1834-1885) who made a saddle for Queen Victoria.

I was in my early twenties when I began to pursue the genealogy of our family. There have been many stoppages in my research as life got in the way but I am now retired and resuming my research and the proving of the family lore. To me, family history research seems like a giant jigsaw puzzle that pulls you into needing to find all the missing pieces. It is always exciting when I uncover something previously unknown to me.

From the age of twelve I corresponded regularly with my grandmother but was only able to visit occasionally. My family had returned to Toronto and so we were 3000 miles apart. I regret not having had more conversations with her about her family history. I am lucky to  have her personal papers and some family artifacts that have further piqued my interest.

My mother is now almost ninety-five years of age, with a failing memory, so it seems urgent to capture her stories as well and preserve our family stories for my children and their children.

I am hoping to use this blog to share my research, tell these stories and make connections with extended family..