Sarah Frances Annabel – who seems always to have been known as Annabel – grew up in Amhurst Road, Hackney. In 1871 her parents had just moved to 13 Amhurst Road, but by the time of the 1881 census she and her mother are at Number 323, where they are to be found on census night together with a 45 year old general servant – Mrs Hall describing her source of income as "House Property." I thought this must indicate a house move, but Lynne Dixon, another Annabel researcher who is based in London, tells me that she thinks it is the same house, which stood in an isolated terrace before the rest of Amherst Road was built. I assume the street was then renumbered. The Halls were absent for the 1891 census and only the cook and her nephew were in the house. Annabel and her mother lived at Number 323 until towards the end of the century when they moved to Bournemouth.
The ancient village of Hackney had become urbanised after the first railway station opened in 1850, nearly 20 years before Annabel was born, and during her early years market gardens and orchards were giving way to shops and flats and terraces of houses, while industries and manufacturies were proliferating. Hackney parish was well-known for its charitable institutions including, interestingly in light of Annabel's later career, such Model Dwellings Companies
as the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes and the London Labourers' Dwellings Co (these companies provided social housing with a return on the investors' capital), while housing in the parish was leased to the London Labourers' Association, a political society founded by an Owenite radical in 1837.
Amhurst Road had been not long built up when Mrs Hall and Annabel moved into Number 13/323. These are terraces of tall houses, with three floors above the basement, and steep flights of a dozen steps up to the front doors. The Halls' neighbours were upper clerks and respectable tradesmen; the Charles Booth poverty map classified the road in 1889 as "Middle class. Well to do". Unlike her sister Margaret, who was left a widow with eight children aged between 3 and 23, Mrs Hall had only herself and her daughter to keep and so she could live a good deal more comfortably.
By 1901 Annabel and her mother had moved to Bournemouth. The census that year finds them, with a 28 year old general servant, living at Hylton House on Surrey Road, a road of comfortable villas and large private hotels and guest houses. (Photographs of these can be seen on Alwyn Ladell's flickr set; I think Hylton House has been replaced by flats.) It was there that her mother died on 20 October 1903 having had a stroke.
I have been able to find no information about Annabel's childhood. I think it is possible that she attended Lady Holles's Middle Class School, in Mare Street, Hackney, a mile and a half from her home, because, judging from its advertisement, the school must have looked very attractive to parents such as Mrs Hall. Opened in September 1878, it was designed to take 250 girls and had
a spacious assembly-room, eight class-rooms, three music-rooms, with all other conveniences and requisites ... The instruction afforded by the school will be of a sound, practical character, while the higher branches of education and suitable accomplishments will be efficiently taught.
Entry was after a "preliminary examination of candidates" and the fees were between £1 6s 8d and £2 per term. This included instruction in Latin, French, Drawing, and Vocal Music. The head mistress was assisted "by a very efficient staff of 20 Assistant Mistresses", according to an advertisement in August 1879, which announced that there were only 50 vacancies. This was the school attended by the younger sisters of Annabel's future husband Patrick Dott. These girls were a few years younger than Annabel; I have found their names in a newspaper report of prize giving day at the school.
I can find no information about Annabel's life after school and before her marriage at the age of 37, but we can see from her life after marriage that she was resourceful, adaptable and forthright and had no problem in exercising authority, organising a work force or assimilating new information. She was evidently well educated and in one interview is quoted as saying that she would have liked to have become an architect "if difficulties had not barred the way" [The Vote, 22 April 1922]. She does not say whether the difficulties were financial or came from her mother's expectations or needs.
So what did she do in those first 37 years? What were her expectations? We don't know how much income her mother had, or how much of it she expected to be able to pass on to Annabel. Annabel would be on her own after her mother's death, with no brother to help her out financially and quite probably no close family to assist her. Given her talents and her character, I think this makes it more than likely that she followed a course of study after leaving school – one of her future sisters-in-law studied art and another studied music – and quite possibly earned a living, perhaps as a teacher, before her marriage. The only census in which she appears as an adult is that of 1901 (I can't find her in the 1891 census) in which no occupation is mentioned – but women's occupations are notoriously under-represented in censuses, and so this is not conclusive.
However, everything was about to change for Annabel, and in the remaining 31 years of her life she would encounter opportunities and challenges that she can never have imagined.
On 30 December 1905, a little more than two years after Mrs Hall's death, a notice appeared in the Hampshire Chronicle:
A marriage has been arranged, and will take place at the Cape in January between the Rev W P Dott, rector of Woodstock, Cape Town, and Annabel, only daughter of the late Robert Hall and Mrs Hall, of Hylton-house, Bournemouth
Very many thanks to Lynne Dixon for the information on Amhurst Road
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