A Tale of Two Siblings

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I dipped back into the family tree work yesterday after a short break from it - you can tie yourself in mental knots if you don't leave it out periodically - and came across  the above photo, posted by another researcher on Ancestry, who himself is a cousin of mine, although we don't know each other. The photo shows the children of Ironfounder Walter B. Rudge of Stafford, taken some time in the 1890s. All are my second cousins twice removed. The two in the foreground are Mary Constance and her brother Tom. Their lives panned out very differently indeed.

Mary Constance was born in 1889 in Stafford, and by the age of twenty-two was an assistant schoolteacher in the employ of the County Council, where she appears to have stayed until 1927, when on the 28th of July, she embarked at the port of London on the P&O liner "Khyber", and bound for Shanghai, a journey of some three to four weeks in those days, sharing a berth with another teacher, from Cheshire. She was to stay in China for just over ten years, arriving back in London on the 11th of March 1938 - now 49 years old - travelling back home to Stafford, where she continued to live and presumably work, until her retirement to Devon, after the Second World War, living to the age of 94, into the early 1980s. Tom's life, as I've written about before [blog posts passim], could not have been more tragically different.

Five years younger than Mary, Tom was born in 1893. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he enlisted in the 1st Battalion, Coldstream Guards and joined the British Expeditionary Force into France and Belgium: The Western Front. According to The Staffordshire Advertiser of March 20th 1915, his regiment arrived within twenty miles of the front on December 13th, and a week later underwent a forced march to the trenches, where they saw action the following day. Tom celebrated his twenty-first birthday - according to the article - the day after his arrival on French soil, reflected in a letter home of that day. He was still officially deemed to be missing in action as of the date of publication of the newspaper article, but was later determined to have been killed on December 22nd, his war having lasted [actually] only a matter of weeks: I say this because the newspaper couldn't possibly have had the exact and accurate timings and dates because of operational secrecy. His battalion actually saw action at the Battle of Mons and thence in the First Battle of Ypres - which lends the lie to the quoted dates - where their number was reduced to just 150 men and their Lt. Quartermaster; but it serves as historical context to frame the death of my unfortunate relative, nonetheless:

Two lives created from the same womb. One long and fulfilled, spanning nearly 100 years, the other a lasting a mere fifth of that, snuffed out before it truly began...

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