(Maud, my cat, sits on the memorial to give an idea of size.)
The Evans’ Connection at Gloucester Cathedral
Emma and Jane EVANS
There lies in the north walk of the cathedral two memorial
tablets(1) set in the floor
where underneath lie the bodies of members of the Evans family. The cloisters
are full of such stones and tablets but it is a great many years since bodies
were allowed to be buried in such archeologically sensitive space.
One tablet is of white marble with a somewhat extravagant black marble border
around it. It is totally out of keeping with the limestone of the cloisters and
of the original stone flooring – but it comes from a time when such niceties of
‘fitting in’ were not a priority. The extravagance of the memorial is certainly
a sign of much love for the two who were buried there.
The stone tells us of two
women Emma and Jane Evans, sisters.
(Maud, my cat, sits on the memorial to give an idea of size.)
JANE EVANS
THE MOST DEARLY BELOVED AND MOST DEEPLY LAMENTED NIECE
OF THE REV. ARTHUR BENONI EVANS M.A.
HEADMASTER OF THE COLLEGE SCHOOL GLOUCESTER.
AND SECOND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. LEWIS EVANS VICAR OF FROXFIELD WILTS.
DIED THE 14TH
OF FEBRUARY 1857 AGED 52 YEARS.
“WHEN THE EAR HEARD HER, THEN IT BLESSED HER, AND WHEN THE EYE SAW HER, IT GAVE
WITNESS TO HER.”
JOB.
“KINDNESS, MEEKNESS, AND COMFORT WERE HER TONGUE”
ECC.CUS
(Ecclesiasticus)
“HER BODY IS BURIED IN PEACE: BUT HER SPIRIT LIVETH EVERMORE.”
ECC.CUS
COME RESIGNATION! WIPE THE HUMAN TEAR
DOMESTIC ANGUISH DROPS O’ER NATURES BIER:
BID SELFISH SORROW HUSH THE FOND COMPLAINT
NOR FROM THE GOD SHE LOVED, DETAIN THE SAINT
TRUTH, MEEKNESS, PATIENCE, HONOURED WERE THINE
AND HOLY HOPE AND CHARITY DIVINE;
THOUGH THESE THY FORFEIT BEING COULD NOT SAVE.
THY FAITH SUBDUED THE TERRORS OF THE GRAVE.
OH! IF THY LIVING EXCELLENCE COULD TEACH
DEATH HAS A LOFTIER EMPHASIS OF SPEECH.
IN DEATH THY LAST, BEST LESSON STILL IMPART,
AND WRITE, “PREPARE TO DIE.” ON EVERY HEART.
HANNAH MORE
EMMA EVANS
SISTER OF JANE EVANS, ALIKE BELOVED AND LAMENTED
BY HER SORROWING UNCLE.
DIED APRIL 27TH
1838, AGED 55 YEARS.
Of their mother Anne Norman- (1750 - 1788) little, if anything, is known
personally - except she came from a well-known Welsh family. This family could
claim kinship with great many other well-known families of South Wales who had
lived there long before that land became industrialised and other people had
poured down from the north of Wales looking for work in the mines. These
families had farmed the land and pastored the people for many generations. Her
brother John Norman had been a pupil at College school in Gloucester where he
had won lasting fame for himself by knocking down the headmaster before running
off. He was nicknamed ‘the Bold’ for his intrepid nature.
It is interesting how it is details like this that get remembered.
How often is
history shaped by what was done and remembered by men? I don’t mean to be wholly
critical here, because apart from some notable exceptions girls and women’s
lives were far more shielded in the past; so they didn’t have the same freedom
to do things like climb up into cathedral galleries. But I bet they would have
loved to.
The Reverend Lewis Evans (1753 -1827) their father, also Welsh who had escaped
the confines of his native land, had been a country parson but his main interest
in life was that of astrology. He used to observe stars from the bottom of the
dry well in the Rectory garden. He set up a stone in the nearby churchyard
recording the latitude and longitude of the village of Froxfield in Wiltshire.
He designed instruments for himself and set them up in a small observatory he
had built in the garden; he entered eclipses and sightings of interest from
night sky in the parish register. He planned and made a most complicated
astronomical clock. His scientific interests led him to lecture at the Artillery
Barracks at Woolwich, which took him away for many months at a time from his
parishes.
Lewis Evans was not easy to live with. His children were far more attached to
their father’s brother, the bachelor Uncle Arthur Benoni at Gloucester. After
their mother Anne’s death in 1788, (Emma aged 6 and Jane aged 5) together with
their three brothers looked towards Uncle Arthur.
The two older boys Thomas Simpson EVANS (1717 – 1818) and Arthur Benoni EVANS
(1781 – 1854) went to live with him and were educated by him at the College
School which we now call Kings School.
When they were old enough, the two girls, Emma and Jane kept house for Uncle
Arthur. We have no record of how or where they and their younger brother Lewis
were educated or anything much of their lives between the year their mother died
and the time they kept house for their Uncle Arthur. However we do know that
their father married the woman who had come to act as housekeeper to him and the
motherless daughters at home. She, Elizabeth HALLIDAY, the step mother, in turn
bore him two daughters (Cunitia and Hypatia.) Their father Lewis Evans died
nine/ten years before Emma and Jane.
It must have been a rather sad family after Emma and Jane’s mother’s death in
1788. Four other children had died in
infancy. The last child died the same year as their mother Anne – so I assume it
was childbirth that brought on her death. This was common in those days before
women could have control over their fertility. This was her ninth child and she
had no choice in the matter, unless her husband and she ceased intercourse.
These were still the days when women didn’t have the vote, whose lives were
bound up only in their families. Most women’s ambitions were no more than to
marry the right man, have babies, keep house. If you were of the servant class
and you worked as maid or in service and maybe to keep your job, to provide
finance for parents or others in the family, you did not marry in service. But
Emma and Jane were not of the servant class. They were of the
intellectual/educated ‘old’ family class – but not rich, although they had rich
cousins; not poor, although parsons and schoolmasters were increasingly looking
poor alongside the emerging noveau riche.
Why didn’t Emma and Jane marry? Perhaps they were not inclined. Perhaps the fear
of endless pregnancies ending one day in premature death leaving six children
under the age of ten as their mother had, was not an attractive option. Perhaps
Uncle Arthur had not the time or inclination to find suitable partners for his
nieces. Perhaps they were contented with their lot. Perhaps they felt they
hadn’t sufficient dowry or ‘bottom drawer’ fitting for their class. Perhaps they
saw it as their Christian duty to look after the Uncle who had been so kind to
them and more of a father than their own father had been, especially after he
had married a second time.
Maybe the right men were never in that small world of the Cathedral cloisters,
although this is hard to imagine as cathedrals were very masculine institutions
then, together with College School. There would have been many lay clerks,
clergy, and school masters – but no, they remained unmarried.
One interesting point is though is that there is a pattern that follows through
many generations of the family. The women (that is, the women born into the
family descended from the Evans’s, not those who married in) were often single
or if they married did not have children, apart from a few exceptions. This does
not mean to say they were hard or unloving – quite the reverse.
It was such a different life to ours today. Music was chief pleasure in the
circle of friends around the cathedral. There was the Three Choirs Festival
connections; Dr. Lysons and William Mutlow the then cathedral organist (who is
also buried close by in the cloisters) made up part of the music circle that the
Evans family so much enjoyed and was part of. One can imagine that Emma and Jane
may have played and sang in musical soirees popular in those days by way of
entertainment, and expected of young ladies whether or not they had natural
talent.
As well as keeping house for their uncle, playing a full part in entertaining
guests and visitors and overseeing the running of the house, they no doubt sewed
and went for walks in their long skirts. Visiting was very much an art form in
those days. Being ‘At Home’ or not and leaving visiting cards. There was the
etiquette of saying the right thing, arriving and leaving at the correct time.
Joan Evans’ writings on which I depend so heavily talks of the Evans family
living ‘in the Cloisters.’ This does not make sense – but their living in Little
Cloisters does. This ancient building would have made an unusual but comfortable
home. It is now part of the Kings School complex. It contains within it some of
the domestic buildings belonging to the former abbey.
Gloucester held a pleasant society in those days of the late 1700’s into the mid
1800’s, and a very small one. The city still lay within the circuit of its
mediaeval walls; and though tree-shaded walks had replaced the walls, the
ancient gates and bridges yet remained. Beyond them lay unspoilt countryside.
The city was the centre of a microcosm bounded by Stroud, Cirencester,
Cheltenham, Tewkesbury, Ross and Monmouth; and within this little world the
clerics, lawyers, doctors and minor gentry kept up a society all of their own: a
society narrow and insular, yet both cultivated and polite. The port of
Gloucester, to which came wine and corn and all sea-borne produce, and the
Gloucester market, were its economic centres; the Cathedral Close, and the few
decent squares were centres of its social life. This has all but disappeared
with so much callous and needless destruction in the 1960’s – just a whisper of
the old Gloucester remains as you view it from the top of the cathedral tower.
Here and there behind modern facades the occasional mediaeval sloping roof gives
a clue to the true age of a few remaining old buildings. The Close around the
Cathedral – College Green together with Millers Green and Pitt Street is an
island from the past.
It was another world where Jane and Emma lived and yet the same cathedral, the
same cloisters walk.
Who knows the inner thoughts of these two young women? We may never know. Why
did they die comparatively early? We may never know. They were not worn out by
child bearing as their mother was. We may never know. We can only ponder.
Emma and Jane both died before their Uncle. Jane died in 1837 aged 54 and Emma
in the following year of 1838 aged 56.
Their uncle Arthur Benoni, died just a few years later 1841 aged 82, a
good age even by today’s standards.
And so lies the remains of Emma and Jane in the north cloister walk lying close
to the house of Little Cloisters much lamented by their loving Uncle all those
years ago. To nearly all people walking over their memorial today they remain
mere names. Nothing really known of them except the fragments I have gathered
here. Their lives are their own secrets long gone We can only muse on our own
span of life, our own fleeting breath of life. That we take with us our own
secrets which others may never know. That when we are gone, life will continue –
none of us are indispensable.
Other Emmas and Janes will come and go as we will, and our secrets are our own
will go with us. Life continues, the cathedral lives on, none of us are
indispensable. When we are gone life will still continue – differently maybe but
nevertheless will continue.
Judith Frances HUBBARD
March 1999, Gloucester Cathedral.
(Part of a Quiet Day at Glenfall House - adapted.)
(1) The other memorial stone is to Emma and Janes' uncle the Reverend Arthur
Benoni EVAN