This is the third in my series of Women during WWI – focusing on the lives of my grandmother and her sisters. Before researching Agnes I knew very little about her, except that my mother thought that she had been an actress at one time.
According to her baptism record, she was born on 29th October 1884 and baptized at St. Oswald’s, Collyhurst as Agnes Annie READ.
After this my first search was the1901 census where I found the most likely entry for her as a domestic servant in Rixton with the Herden family. The Head of the household, James Herden was an architectural draughtsman.
It took me a long time to find her in the 1911 census. I did not know whether she was married at all, and no searches for her as Agnes Reid, or any Agnes born in Collyhurst came up with any results.
So I looked at marriages and found several possibilities. I then looked at the 1911 census entries for the respective husbands, and found that one with a spouse that was born in St. Oswald Parish. She had not come up on the census previously because the transcriber had written her name as James Annie. This is a common problem with online indexes – so it is always worth searching with different criteria until you find someone who looks right. Looking at the original record I could see that it was clearly Agnes Annie. The husband’s name was Whitfield Halstead, a paint brush maker. As is often the case for women, there is no occupation recorded for Agnes.
The marriage was in the April to June quarter of 1904 in the district of Prestwich.
Whitfield was born in Hulme in about 1882. By 1911 they had two children, Gladys May, born 13th December 1904, and Robert Whitfield, born 7th June 1906. They were living at 7 Springfield Avenue, Moston. This street still exists, but on Streetmap I found it full of modern houses, so it will look completely different now to how it did then.
A recent article in the Manchester Evening News describes what life was like in Manchester at the beginning of the war – and is worth a read. It pictures a city still clouded in pollution, noisy, crowded, dirty and unhealthy. The outbreak of war made things even more grim, with the imminent food shortages and young men being shipped off to fight.
From his war service record on Ancestry.co.uk I found Whitfield and Agnes were still at the same address. Whitfield enlisted in 1915 and joined the Bedford Regiment. I also found records for him on FindMyPast showing that he was in the 1st Battalion, 363rd Reserve Employment Company at the Eastern Command Labour Centre. He was also a member of the Welsh Regiment, 12th Battalion in 1916. A service record for 1919 shows the Bedfordshire Regiment again. A further record showed him in the Cheshire Regiment, 21st (Labour) Battalion.
Luckily, he survived the war, but died quite young at the age of 56 in 1940 in Manchester. We don’t know whether he was wounded in the war – but we do know that life expectancy in Manchester was still fairly low, so he may have just been one of those who succumbed to its pollution. Of course, I would be able to find out the cause of death from ordering the death certificate.
I did not find any official war records for Agnes, and presumably she was busy enough looking after two young teenagers while Whitfield was away. With the children old enough to understand what was happening, it must have been a difficult and tense time for them, as well as the difficulties of food rationing. When her sister Alice was widowed in 1916, it must have brought it home to her even more, though I am sure the sisters all pulled together through this time.
Possibly Agnes took on domestic work during the war, or perhaps worked in a munitions factory, while her unmarried and widowed sisters helped to look after the children. Unfortunately, we have few records for women’s work during World War I apart from some nurses’ records, so much of the time we can only guess from what we know from history.
The other possibility was some kind of theatrical career, as my mother seemed to think she had done some acting. I have searched newspaper records, including those accessible online at the Manchester Library, but found no reference to her either with her maiden or married name. It could be that she was part of the recruitment drive for the war – the theatres in the First World War were used for encouraging young men to enlist before conscription and also for fund-raising and as a morale booster.
We do not know whether she was a professional or amateur actress, but if we are right in thinking that she was, she must have been a busy lady!
Agnes married again – to Arthur Perkin in 1942, and died in 1960 aged 76. Both her children married. Gladys May to Herbert Hallewell in 1930 and Robert to Rose Green in 1932. I found that a one-name study has been made of the Halstead family at halstedresearch.org.uk and this tells me that Robert and Rose had a child, Geoffrey R Halstead. A search on PeopleTracer tells me that Geoffrey is still living in Manchester. He is my second cousin. If we are able to get in touch with him I will post updates!
