Vousden

Thursday, July 03, 2008. last updated Thursday, December 10, 2009

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My mother's name was Emma Florence Elizabeth Vousden, which sounds rather grand, and she was. But in general our branch of the Vousden family was anything BUT grand; being mostly short-lived agricultural labourers and their families who stuggled from time immemorial in the heavy clay of the Medway parishes of the Kentish Weald. Then as now, the river was liable to sudden floods in winter. Work was unending. Pay a pittance. They held neither freeholds nor copyholds and they left no memories or records of their lives except when the local parson wrote their name in the parish register of births or marriages or death. From 1841 they can be traced in the ten-year national census. That's about it except for the case of Thomas Vousden who in 1604 was was accused of stealing two hens valued at 6d.[1]. Nothing special. But continuity is a sort of power. They kept out of trouble with the law unless you count Thomas Vousden.

But I'm thinking of more recent Vousden ancestors - the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. They were part of the great mass of countryfolk who didn't share too much of the amazing economic progress enjoyed by the captains of industry at that time. It was neo-conservatism with a vengeance and Adam Smith's Iron Law was being fully applied. If we were able to go back in time and ask my Vousden relatives about Milton Friedman's ideas, they might say that Victorian England's great wealth was all very well in its way - but precious little was trickling down their way.  'Going into service' in the houses of the nouvaux-riches became routine for the Vousden girls. Perhaps that was a sort of trickle down benefit.

Emma F.E.Vousden was born in 1901, among hop-fields and apple orchards a few miles from the village of Hadlow in Kent. Her arrival into the world would have been helped by Mrs Giles, who had no formal training in midwifery other than plenty of on-the-job experience. She charged a shilling (5p) for each baby delivered. Mother and child were usually fine, but tragedies were not unknown (children two years or under made up nine of the twenty-eight Vousden deaths in the local registration district netween 1869 and 1899, and three of the twenty-eight were women of child-bearing age). Later on the kids faced the usual onslaught of bugs for whooping cough, diptheria, measles, mumps and scarlet fever. And then pneumonia and the dreaded psthisis (TB).

Emma went to school until she was thirteen, walking the road to Hadlow and back. From the school journal [2]  we learn quite a bit about struggles against the spread of head vermin and about problem parents who kept their children away in the hope that they might not get sick. So there were plenty of prizes and medals handed out for good attendance, though (bright spot) the kids got time out for things like looking after younger children during the hop-tying (May),and for helping at strawberry-picking (June 24-July11),and  fruit picking (July 2-19), and hop-picking (September 1-October 7). In 1916 Emma's dad died unexpectedly - her had to support her brood of children through farm piecework plus hopping and gleaning. Gleaning means crawling with a sack over recently harvested grain fields, looking for ears of wheat that the farmer's binder missed. Eventually the sack gets filled with grain and you take it to the miller - he keeps his part and you finally get a bag of flour. That's the way it was. Once when one of Emma's baby brothers had a whooping cough and could'nt breathe, their mother was desperate to find help. Did she go to the doctor at Hadlow? Not an option because of the fee. She went to the local gypsies and came home with a bit of tarry string to put round the baby's neck. He survived despite, or possibly because of, the string. For the past sixty years the UK's NHS has provided universal free-at-the-point-of-care medicine. It's hard to see this as anything but a good thing.

For earlier generations of Vousdens life was tougher. Occasionally a young person would somehow manage to escape the hard drudgery of a farm servant's life. Take the case of Hannah Vousden, born at Yalding to Richard Vousden and Jane Tester in 1840. As soon as she grew up, Hannah married Roland Ware, also from Yalding, and in 1862 they produced a daughter whom they named Elizabeth Cecilia. Roland promptly died of TB, and three years after the birth of her baby Hannah died too, aged 25. The 1871 census finds their orphan being raised by Vousden grandparents. Ten years later we find her living as the sole companion of an octagenarian maiden aunt. Not promising. But somewhere in the mid 1880's Elizabeth Cecilia got friendly with a painter and decorator and by 1891 she had married him. They prospered and in the 1901 census we find them in their own house with a seven-year-old daughter - and their very own domestic servant. This time the census shows Elizabeth Cecilia's husband as a manufacturer and an employer! Encouraging, yes? I can hardly wait for the public release of the 1911 census.

And then as now, farm boys could join the Army and see the world. Another branch of the Vousdens turned out to have a talent for fighting. As a 34 year-old Captain of the 5th Punjab Cavalry, William John (later Major General) Vousden so distinguished himself by his bravery in the Second Afghan War that he was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for military valour.

"On 14 December 1879 on the Asmai Heights, near Kabul, Afghanistan, Captain Vousden charged with a small party into the centre of the line of the retreating Kohistani Force, by whom they were greatly outnumbered. After rapidly charging through and through the enemy backwards and forwards several times, Captain Vousden and his party swept off round the opposite side of the village and joined the rest of the troops."

Fighting a hopeless war in Afghanistan in 1879?

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As for those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in the post-war democratic period, there have been many other opportunitites. A Google search on the name reveals all sorts of clever and distinguished Vousdens.

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Vousden is not a particularly common name. Before the age of steam railways and steamships it was only found in the SE corner of England. And there never seem to have been more than two hundred people carrying it at any time. The details of the name's distribution in England (and, later on, in USA and Canada and Australia and New Zealand) is dealt with in Nigel Brown's excellent one-name study (see www.one-name.org/profiles/vousden.html   and www.vousden.blogspot.com ). Nigel shows that several (and maybe all?) present lines of Vousden /Fowsden etc can be traced back to one family near Goudhurst in Kent in the sixteenth century . My own line of Vousden ancestors can be traced through a list of names that originates in Goudhurst at that time. 

As for Fowsden/Vousden's origin, there is a persistant notion that it has something to do with immigrant weavers or iron-workers from Flanders or Northern France. Alternatively it could refer to an ancient English place-name. For example one Robert de Fowelstone is mentioned in a document dated 1251 [3]. and in Elizabethan times the Kentish seaside town of Folkstone was known as Fowston [4]  Possibly the name died out by ~1500 - except in the Goudhurst region, where a strong family kept the Vousden Y-chromosome intact for future times.