It has been a positive and eventful women’s empowerment month in Barking and Dagenham. Last weekend some of the Barking Heritage Volunteers joined up with the East End Women’s Museum to guide a Women of Barking Walking Tour around the town centre.

Tour guide, Alexandra Lynch, opposite St Mary and St Ethelburga's RC Church, Linton Road, beside the new House for Artists

The event was so popular that an additional date has been added and free tickets can be booked here: Women of Barking - Walking Tour Tickets, Sat 9 Apr 2022 at 11:00 | Eventbrite

It was a wonderful celebration of Barking women and as Mother's Day approaches it is worth sharing some of their stories, focusing on Barking mothers through the ages.

Research undertaken for the Barking heritage project has uncovered several stories of Barking mothers from across the centuries who we can nominate and admire. It is the perfect time to introduce you to them. They are not all famous, but they are all mothers linked to Barking, with stories which should intrigue and even inspire others, this Mother's Day.

The earliest Barking mothers were nomadic hunter-gatherers and migrant farmers who sought out these marshy lands close to the Thames. The women and their families relied on their knowledge of nature for their survival and left little behind to reveal their daily lives. The first Barking women to appear in written records were the nuns of Barking Abbey – which was established in the early years of Saxon Christianity, in AD666.

The ‘mother’ superior of this religious house was known as the abbess and during its earliest days she was overseeing monks as well as nuns and all the abbey's lands and interests. The first of these powerful women was Ethelburga who was gifted her elevated position and responsibilities by her brother Erkenwald, who was abbot of Chertsey before he established Barking Abbey for his sister, and later became Bishop of London. Both were cannonised by the early church for their local miracles. Bede the venerable Saxon monk and author, wrote about the founding of the Abbey and the life of its community. The abbey was more than a spiritual sanctuary it provided important social services for local people too.

Charity was an essential component of abbey life, including care of the sick, especially the poor. In the twelfth century abbess Adeliza founded a leper hospital at Ilford, which survived the dissolution. Alms for the poor included food (pittances), clothing and money as well as Alms-houses. The abbey also contributed to the local economy by acting as an employer on a large scale.

Another service was the care and education of patrons' children. Members of the Tudor royal family, including Edmund Tudor, father of King Henry VII, were sent to Barking Abbey to be raised by the abbess. The final abbess, Dorothy Barley, had several godchildren, many of whom were mentioned in her will - they came from the most important Essex families. The nuns themselves were well educated - creators of textiles, glass, artworks, dramas, music, songs, books, and manuscripts. Historians are in awe of their achievements and contributions to religion and culture across the centuries, including probably the first play script written by a British woman, Katherine of Sutton, Abbess 1358-76. The abbey probably had the longest tradition of female literacy in Britain before it was dissolved by King Henry VIII in 1539. Find out more here.

Mothering Sunday, does not refer to the mothers we celebrate on Mother’s Day but the annual opportunity for workers to return home to their ‘mother’ church. This custom which dates to the sixteenth century enabled people such as servants, to attend their parish church, and visit their family, including their mothers of course.

We recently discovered a Barking mother in the parish records when we were researching the Oyles family (merchants of Dutch heritage). This name is marked on Thomas Fanshawe’s 17th century manorial map, showing who leased his land in the Manor of Barking. The Oyles family had the land north of East Street, at that time.

Thomasina Oyles (born 1693), probably the daughter of William and Margaret Oyles was possibly related to another Thomasina Oyles who was buried in St Margaret’s churchyard in 1689 and John Oiles whose children were baptised at the parish church in the 1650s. We are more certain that she married city banker Robert Surman and the young couple moved into Valentine's Mansion, in Ilford, in 1724. They had two daughters Thomasina and Sarah. The only other details we know of this mother is that she died in 1734 aged 41, leaving behind her husband and teenage daughters. She did not disappear into history, as they raised a tomb for her within St Margaret’s parish church and her brother Thomas Oyles, a deputy of the ward, was buried beside her in 1743. Sadly, her daughter Thomasina died following childbirth in 1750 at the even younger age of 30, and was also buried with her mother, and uncle in the family tomb. The church organ was later erected over these tombs and we still wonder if these members of the Oyles family or their earlier relatives had lived at Cobblers Hall in East Street.

The famous Quaker prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry (nee Gurney) born in 1780, was buried in the nearby Quaker Burial Ground in 1845.

Tour guide, Sue Hamilton, in the Quaker cemetery, now gardens, in North Street

The Society of Friends (as the Quakers were known) believe that all people are equal in God’s eyes – this led them to despair at inequalities in society and endeavour to improve the lives of the enslaved, and the poor, women, and children. Elizabeth was a mother of eleven children and if that wasn’t a challenging enough, she is famous for initiating the reform of prisons, particularly for women and their children - who were incarcerated within them… In 1818 she was the first woman to give evidence at a House of Commons committee, during an inquiry into British prisons. She also raised concerns about conditions in prison ships, asylums and hospitals besides the lives of the poor in general. She advocated for the education of working women and better housing conditions for those living in slum conditions. She also established the original soup kitchens. Mrs Fry’s reports and suggestions were gradually enacted across Europe

Quakers remained humble in life and death and refrained from ornate tombstones often preferring unmarked graves. Hopefully Elizabeth will not mind if we praise her achievements today – there is now a memorial to her in the gardens where she was buried, opposite the Sikh Gurdwara on North Street. Her portrait is also engraved into the marble of the glorious new Gurdwara building.

Perhaps Elizabeth Fry was inspired by another famous mother who briefly lived in Barking - Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary had a turbulent and transient childhood moving from place to place as her father tried and failed to elevate himself and turned to alcohol instead. Meanwhile Mary escaped his abuses by wandering along the Barking levels and enjoying nature, especially laying down to look up at the sky! The sky really was the limit for her, as young Mary educated herself to become a companion, governess, journalist, philosopher, translator, and famous author. Her most renown and influential text was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Strict Quaker Mrs Fry was unlikely to have approved Mary’s bohemian lifestyle, which seems unrestrained by eighteenth century mores and thoroughly modern, but most likely shared her progressive views on the rights of women!

Whilst reporting on the Revolution in France, Mary became pregnant but was jilted by her lover, which led to two failed suicide attempts and a complicated life as a single mother to Fanny. Yet she managed to find love and happiness once more with philosopher William Godwin. They married in 1797 and their daughter Mary Shelley (nee Godwin) was born soon after. Tragically the feminist philosopher was lost to complications following childbirth 11 days later. A light that burned as bright as it was brief, was not put out on her death, as her works have had an enduring legacy especially for modern women for whom she beat a path towards equality with men. Whilst Mary Shelley, her second daughter, married a Romantic poet and created a classic novel with universal themes – Frankenstein - which burst onto the page, stage and screen, and has remained popular ever since. Its horrifying representation of the monstrous and tragic consequences of a man acting as God, has not lost its impact or relevance. Her mother would have been proud of her too…

Continuing on a theme of trailblazing mothers linked with Barking, Susannah Mason married a radical young doctor, Hugh Herbert Mason, who argued for improvements in the lives of the poorest Barking residents and established a dispensary on Broadway where poorer customers could pay a small subscription which would cover future medical costs in an era before the NHS. Meanwhile Susannah, became a mother to Edward and Marianne and a member of several local boards aiming to improve the town – including the Burial Board which managed the creation of Rippleside Cemetery and the Education Board which opened the first council schools, including Gascoigne - the headteacher's logbook shows she visited regularly. In 1894 she stood for election for the newly established Urban District Council and was duly returned as its first female councillor (her husband was not elected, but was voted in as the first Chairman). In 1897 however their only daughter Marianne tragically died of ‘croup’ aged just seven. It was her mother who is recorded as commissioning an artist to create dedicated stained glass windows in the new Rippleside Chapel – conceived by local architect CJ Dawson as non-denominational place for spiritual reflection. Marianne lies in an unmarked grave next to the Dawson family but her name and even her portrait remain with us, as the artist beautifully recreated her likeness in glass… In the wake of Marianne's death, the Mason family returned to their childhood origins in the midlands, following a faithful service to Barking and dedication to improving the lives of Barking Residents.

In the late nineteenth century there was a large female workforce in Barking, mainly employed at the extensive Jute Works, located at the southern tip of Fisher Street (now Abbey Road). In her recollections Mrs Story (nee Stearne) recalled that many of the skilled female weavers had been brought in from Dundee and the spinners from Ireland. They were known for their ‘plaid (tartan) shawls’, braided hair and when they were at leisure their ‘highly coloured dresses’.

Over a thousand people were employed there including hundreds of ‘outworkers’, sewing sacks at home, who were mostly local women and children. Eliza Bailey of Wall End – the tiny hamlet just west of the Roding River, was recorded as a Jute worker at eight years of age, in the 1871 census. Probably starting out as a sack sewer, by 1881 teenage Eliza was a spinner. She married Joseph Roe in 1883 and became a mother to 10 children!

Ellen Brick, a working mother, was also discovered in the 1881 census. She was an Irish jute worker who was living in a female household in Heath Street. Ellen had at least six children, her two eldest daughters worked fulltime at the Jute works and her thirteen-year-old son worked ‘half time’. Another female jute worker from Ireland is recorded as living with them but there are no men recorded there, perhaps they were working away from home or maybe the women and children were self-sufficient…

Another example of a household of women and children was that of Ann Withers, a sack sewer from Sligo, Ireland. She lived with her children at 10 Weatherals Court in 1881. Her eldest daughter Sarah is also listed as a sack sewer, but Mary who was only 14 is noted as a more skilled ‘jute weaver’ in the census, and her older brother George as a ‘jute worker’. Nora Sullivan another Jute Worker from Ireland, and her four children lodged with them. Again no men are listed, although twenty years earlier when Ann was living in the notorious Flower & Dean Street (Spitalfields’ Rookery) – ‘perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole of the Metropolis’, she had a husband, aged 61, over 30 years older than her. He was a labourer who could well have died before 1881. These working mothers and their children seemed to manage to get by, by living and working together with their children (who were not listed as 'scholars' for long)…

Meanwhile Mathilda and John Forrester, of Hart Street had migrated from Scotland and were both 'overseers' at the Jute Works. Their eldest daughter Mathilda, aged 13, is also recoded as a Jute worker. This family returned to Scotland when the Jute works closed in 1891. The closure of the works had a devastating impact on the workers who had been employed there. Several charities were employed to relocate many of the women to Scotland, Ireland, and Canada, to transfer them to domestic service, or to support their daily needs. St Margaret's Church Magazine noted that during July, '165 coal and grocery tickets were issued' to those in need! Thank you to Felicity Hawksley and Lesley Gould for these findings as they continue to investigate the Barking Jute workers and you can read Felicity’s previous article on the Jute Works here.

It has not been easy to find out about Barking mothers in the past, with limited documented evidence of the women who lived in past centuries, but the painstaking detective work is very rewarding. Every precious insight into our foremothers’ lives is a revelation and inspiration to the women of Barking today.

As we celebrate our mothers this weekend, we might spare a thought for those who went before us - many struggled to survive poverty and childbirth and some bravely paved the way for better living conditions and greater opportunities for their sisters and daughters and women living today…

Thank you to Karen Rushton, borough Archivist, and Teresa Trowers, Local Studies Librarian for all their dedicated support for this project and helping us to find out more about the Barking women who came before us. Visit the Valence House website for further information. We look forward to discovering more when the East End Women's Museum opens in Barking, you can find out more about them on their website. As always we thank The National Lottery Heritage Fund for funding this project!