1885: From Yorkshire
- louisewatsonaustra
- May 30, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 13
Maggie Tunaley was born Margaret Eliza Ann Simpson on the 19th of February 1885. Her father was a farm labourer and the family lived in a tenant's cottage on an agricultural estate in North Yorkshire. The cottage was in a hamlet called Ruston.
Maggie's mother Sarah (née Gillance, b.1855) had grown up in Ruston and had worked as a domestic servant in the years before she married.
Her father William Rodgers Simpson (b.1855) was born in a village seven miles away near Scarborough, called Yorkshire Scalby.
Maggie's parents had married in Ruston on 3rd May 1884. We don't know how they met but it is possible that William had relatives in a neighbouring hamlet on the Dawnay estate. The only photograph we have of William and Sarah was taken many years later in Manchester (picture). William was a tall man and presumably had to sit down in this formal portrait with his wife so they would both fit in the frame.
According to custom, Margaret Eliza Ann was named after close relatives on both sides of her family: her father's mother Margaret (née Rodgers), possibly after her great-aunt Eliza (Sarah's father's sister); and for her maternal grandmother, Ann.
The baby baptised "Margaret Eliza Ann Simpson" at Wykeham Church in 1885 soon became just "Maggie Simpson". This was the name she wrote as a sixteen year old inside a leather-bound Prayer Book above her address and the date of her confirmation and it was the name her father used on the household census form in 1901. Years later in Australia, Tom Tunaley would jokingly serenade his wife with the song, When you and I were young, Maggie which seems to confirm that she went by this name.
The parish baptismal register indicates it was uncommon for the child of a tenant farmer to have three first names. When Maggie's mother Sarah Simpson reported her six year-old daughter's name to the census collector in 1881, it was shortened to "Margaret A Simpson", presumably due to lack of space on the form. Years later, Maggie told her own daughters that she would know when her mother was cross with her if Sarah uttered, "Margaret Eliza Ann" in a stern voice. So it was useful as a reprimand at least.
A few years after Maggie was born, Sarah Simpson gave birth to a second daughter called Pauline who died in infancy. We know about her because Maggie always intended to name her first-born daughter after the sister she had lost. However, when her first daughter was born in 1914, Maggie's husband Tom Tunaley wanted her to be named after his sister, Edith. The child was duly baptised "Edith Pauline Tunaley", but was always called "Pauline".
We don't have any pictures of Maggie during her Ruston childhood, the nine years she lived in a rural hamlet as the daughter of an agricultural labourer, surrounded by her mother'sextended family. The earliest image we have of her is as a young woman taken in Manchester, after she had left Yorkshire for good (pictured).
Ruston
Ruston is a hamlet on what is now called the Dawnay Estates, a vast agricultural landholding formed by the dissolution of a Cistercian priory in the 16th Century. Owned by a lord, it relied on the labour of hundreds of tenants who were housed with their families in clusters of cottages in the hamlets of Ruston, Hutton Buscel, Langdale End, West Ayton and Wykeham village. A tenant's accommodation was likely to change if his marital status or work changed, but he could expect to be housed somewhere on the estate for life.
Maggie's family lived in Cottage No. 48 at the end of a row called Burton Terrace, Ruston. In 2017, I was graciously shown through Cottage No. 48 by its current owners, who have hosted quite a few of Maggie's descendants from Australia since John Tunaley (son of John Charles) made their acquaintance! The view in this photograph I took from the front upstairs window is probably close to what Maggie would have seen when she ran up and down the stairs as a child in the late 19th Century.
Cottage No. 48 has two small rooms downstairs (one of which would have been a kitchen) and two rooms upstairs. The low ceilings rest on exposed beams and the doorways are lower still. John Tunaley (son of John Charles) who accompanied me on the visit, remarked how uncomfortable our great-grandfather William Simpson would have been inside these rooms. A man of towering height and broad shoulders, in ordervto move around inside, William would have been forced into a semi-permanent stoop.
The rear of Cottage No. 48 (pictured) opened onto a long back yard, which Maggie would have crossed regularly to reach the outdoor privy on its boundary.
The long back yards of the cottages are grassy now, but in Maggie's time they were productive plots tilled by tenants, to help feed their families. All tenants on the estate were provided with a quarter acre to grow food for themselves and were permitted to keep a cow. Some cottages also had a "creep" - a small area outside or under the house - for a pig (Maggie's cottage didn't). This old aerial photograph (left) illustrates the long cottage yards when they were under cultivation.
The village of Wykeham, a short walk from Ruston and the neighbouring hamlet of Hutton Buscel, sits at the heart of the estate. Wykeham boasts an impressive Church, a parish school (which Maggie attended) and a pub, all of which still operate. In Maggie's time, Wykeham also had a blacksmith's forge and a sprawling stables, a shop and a Post Office as well as many more rows of tenants cottages.
A scant mile away, well hidden behind stands of trees lies the manor house of the estate's owner, now Viscount Downe. The grand Wykeham Abbey, was built over the ruins of the old priory. When I drove down its "private" road in 2017 to take a peek, I found the mansion covered in scaffolding, solid and silent under a grey northern sky. There are better images online, but here's the photograph I took from the car window.
Family life
Maggie's small family of three was somewhat unusual in rural Yorkshire. Neighbouring tenants' cottages on the Dawnay Estates typically housed five or more people. But although she grew up an only child, Maggie was surrounded by relatives from her mother's family, the Gillances, who had worked on the estate for generations.
In the 1840s, when the UK's first modern census was conducted, two agricultural labourers with the surname Gillance were living in the parish of Wykeham. Both had been born in Hutton Buscel and were living in Ruston on census night in 1841.
The elder man, Henry Gillance (b.1811) was already married with five children in 1841 and would have five more over the next decade. The younger man, Francis Gillance (b.1821) would soon marry Ann Pennock (b. 1816) from neighbouring Brompton. After they married in 1846, Francis and Ann Gilliance had eight children, the fifth of whom was Sarah (b. 1855), Maggie's mother.
When Maggie Simpson was growing up her Gillance grandparents still lived in Ruston, in Cottage No. 68. On census night in 1891, Francis and Ann Gillance had four family members living with them: their youngest daughter Phoebe (b.1862), her husband Edwin Greenley and their five-year old son Harry Greenley (b. 1886); and a 16 year-old grandson called William Gillance.
William Leadley Gillance (b. 1874) was the son of Sarah's younger sister Alice (b. 1856), so he was Maggie Simpson's cousin. He seems to have been raised by his grandparents in Ruston as he was living in their household as a six year-old on census night in 1881.
This cousin whom Maggie knew as "Bill", was still on the estate sixty years later and was "discovered" by two of Maggie's children - John Charles Tunaley (b. 1909) and Margaret Tunaley (b. 1927) - on a visit to their mother's birthplace. A photograph of them all (including John's two eldest boys) with a caption penned by Margaret is in her photograph album (pictured).
Maggie had more cousins closer to her age in the nearby village of Wykeham where two of her uncles lived. Sarah's younger brother Frank (b. 1859) lived in Cottage No. 11 with his wife Mary and their three children: Hannah Elizabeth (b. 1881) Bertha (b. 1887) and John William (b. 1889). Sarah's oldest brother William (b.1849) and his wife Anne (b. 1847, nee Harrison) had three girls very close in age to Maggie Simpson: Gertrude (b. 1883); Florence (b. 1884); and Ina Maud (b. 1887).
After Maggie's Uncle William Gillance died in 1901, his family remained at the Wykeham Post Office, with his widow Anne as sub-postmistress. Eventually Maggie's cousin Florence (b. 1884) took over as sub-postmistress, and remained in charge until she retired in the 1950s. Remembered as "Florrie" by Maggie Simpson, she was later referred to as "Miss Gillance" by villagers during her decades in the Post Office.
When Maggie Simpson attended the parish school opposite the Wykeham Post Office, around 1891, the benches and desks would have been crammed with children, many of them her cousins from the Gillance family.
Where's William?
By the time Maggie was six, her father William Simpson had left Ruston. According to the census, on Friday 3rd April 1891, Cottage No. 48 had only two residents: Sarah Simpson as "Head" of the household with her six year-old daughter "Margaret A. Simpson". We don't know where William Rodgers Simpson was on census night in 1891, other than that he wasn't at his home, nor was he staying with his family in Yorkshire Scalby.
In 1891, England was suffering a severe agricultural recession which prompted many farm labourers to look for work in industrial cities. So it's possible that William Simpson had already gone to Manchester, some 200 miles away, without his wife and child when the 1891 census recorded Sarah and Maggie living alone in Cottage No, 48.
Sarah Simpson may have needed to stay behind in Ruston to help care for her elderly parents, Francis and Ann Gillance.
Francis Gillance died at the end of 1891. Eighteen months later, his wife Ann died during the first quarter of 1893. We don't know if Sarah and Maggie remained living in Cottage No. 48 during these years or if they moved in with Sarah's elderly parents in Cottage No. 68. If William Simpson was away from home on Census night in April 1891 for another reason, the family may well have all been living together in Cottage No. 48 in Ruston between 1891 and 1894.
All we know for certain, is that in1894, William Simpson's name appears in the Greater Manchester Rate Books as the tenant of a worker's cottage in an industrial suburb called Bradford. So it seems reasonable to assume that by early 1894, Sarah and Maggie had left Yorkshire and the Simpson family was living in Manchester when Maggie was nine years old.
A Yorkshire accent
Many of Maggie's Australian grandchildren still remember her Yorkshire accent. Her eldest grandchild, my cousin June Naylor (Pauline's child) can still give a fine impression of some of Maggie's favourite expressions:
"Eee by gum!" June declares, pronouncing "gum" as in "boom" (ie. not gumtree).
"What on earth does that mean?" I ask.
"She said it when she was pleased about something", June explains, a definition confirmed by online experts.
June also tells me that Nana Tunaley's word for "girl" was "lass", which she pronounced "luss." So if young June said something her grandmother wasn't pleased about, the rebuke would sound like:
"Mind yer toong, luss!"
Maggie Tunaley with granddaughter June. 1936.
Diane Tully (Geoffrey's child) also remembers the Yorkshire accent, telling me that Nana Tunaley would pronounce "pumpkin" as "poompkin" and that she used the subjunctive form of the verb "to be" instead of the past tense ie. "When I were a lass" ("luss") instead of "When I was a lass". Maggie also referred to her children as "our Bill, our Mary" etc. rather than "my son" or "my daughter".
During her rural childhood in Ruston, Maggie learnt skills that she would never use again after she left Yorkshire. From the age of nine, Maggie lived in the industrial cities of Manchester and Melbourne, where workers were housed in tenements on bitumen streets with scarcely a blade of grass in sight. Yet during her first nine years as the only child of a tenant farmer, young Maggie would have probably helped out with agricultural tasks, such as growing vegetables in the long yard behind their cottage in Ruston and milking the family's cow.
To her Australian grandchildren, who had only ever known Maggie in the context of industrial Abbotsford, Collingwood, the sight of their middle-aged grandmother casually leaning against a calf, seemingly in the act of restraining it, was so amusing that it was photographed for posterity (picture) .
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