Elizabeth Yonovia Acland died December, 1920, aged 81[i]

Philip Acland died , July, 1920, aged 81[ii]

They do not have a gravestone[iii], but they were buried in a Consecrated Private Grave[iv].

Philip was born in Keynsham, Somerset. His father, also Philip, was a Canal Officer.[v] In 1858 he appears in the local paper as he rescued a boy from drowning in the canal near Sydney Gardens.[vi]

In 1851, our Philip is at school.

In 1862 Philip married Jane Fryer in Bath[vii]. She was 15 years older than him.[viii] They had one child, Mary Jane born 1863 in Bath[ix]. Jane died in 1877.[x] They were by this time living in the Newbury area at Dean Wood. Jane is buried in Speen Churchyard.[xi]

In 1881 Philip, a widower, is a lodger at a Beerhouse Keeper’s place in Speen. He is working as a gardener, aged 42.[xii]

In 1882 Philip marries Elizabeth Johnson Horner in Settle, Yorkshire, her home town. Elizabeth was a spinster.[xiii]

In 1891 they are living at 1, Hassell’s Buildings on Oxford Street. Philip is a gardener (non domestic). Elizabeth is a hospital nurse, presumably at the District Hospital on Andover Road.[xiv]/[xv]

In 1901, Philip is living in the same place, Hassell’s Buildings but Elizabeth, at the time of the census, is Head of the Newbury Isolation Hospital at Wash Common. This opened in 1893.[xvi] She is looking after four child patients from the Woodley family, aged 1 to 8 years old. They seem to have survived.[xvii]

In 1911 they are back together, having been married 29 years, living at 9, Church Almshouses.[xviii]

Philip dies first at 99, Newtown Road, the Workhouse and Infirmary, July 1920. Elizabeth died later that year.[xix]

Philip and Jane’s daughter, Mary Jane, by 1891 is living in a large house in Hurstbourne Tarrant and working as a nurse.[xx] Still a nurse in 1901, she is living on her own in Newbury.[xxi]

Mary Jane died in 1909 and is buried in Cholsey.[xxii] This is the cemetery used by the Berkshire Lunatic Asylum. Was she a nurse there or was she a patient?

Author: Ros Clow
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