The busy Rye family

This attractive headstone drew my attention, partly because of the number of people recorded on it.

It is a scroll which in funeral symbolism can mean several things. It can indicate that the person buried had a religious conviction and a love of learning. When it is unfurling, like this, with the beginning and end rolled up it can mean a life half lived – the past is hidden and the future yet to be revealed. This is more often used on the grave of a young person, but no one buried here is particularly young.

Let me introduce you to Arthur Joseph Rye. The more I researched this family the more I pondered on the life led by Annie Rye, the last person recorded here who died in 1950.

This is the Rye family grave plot – Arthur Joseph Rye, his two wives and his eldest daughter Annie. The Rye family home had always been a bit crowded so their busy grave is no surprise.

We think 21st century family life is complicated …

Like so many Swindon residents, Arthur was an incomer. He was born in April 1856 in Irthlingborough in Northamptonshire but he didn’t come to Swindon because of the railways.

In 1871 Arthur was at a school in Spalding, Lincolnshire run by John C Jones, a Baptist Minister. Ten years later Arthur was in Swindon, newly married to Emily Beckingsale Greenaway and living at 1 Faringdon Road, employed as manager at the Castle Iron Works. In 1885 the Rye family moved to 55 Commercial Road.

In 1892 Arthur was taken into the ironmongery partnership and the firm became Edwards, Bays and Rye, with the Castle Iron Works and shops in Wood Street and Faringdon Road.

In 1901 Arthur and Emily are living at 2 Devonshire Villas, The Sands with their four children, eldest daughter Annie who at 19 is working as a Telegraphist in the Post Office; Joseph 15; Margaret 7 and six year old Frank.

Emily died in the summer of that year but Arthur doesn’t hang around and in the summer of 1902 he married Adelaide Lucy Langfield and the Rye family part 2 begins.

In 1911 we find Arthur and Adelaide at 58 Upper Mall, Hammersmith with Adelaide’s brother Herbert, their mother, sister and two nieces. They are all listed as one large household – there’s no mention if they are just visiting. Arthur and Adelaide have just two of their five children with them, Olive 7 and Arthur E. 7 months (I think the baby’s name might be incorrectly transcribed as they already have a son called Arthur). But where are the rest of the Rye family.

Back home in Swindon 29 year old Annie is the head of a busy household at 100 Bath Road. She continues to work at the Post Office as a Sorting Clerk and Telegraphist. At home she is looking after her sister Margaret 17, who works as a milliner’s apprentice, her brother Frank 16 who is still at school along with her father’s three younger children by his second marriage Arthur 6, Herbert 5 and Kenneth 1. She has a live-in general servant called Clara Holland Mayling, but that’s still a pretty heaving workload.

Arthur Rye died here in Swindon in 1919 and Adelaide in 1922 but I can’t help wondering about Annie. Was she a career woman or did she miss the opportunity to marry and have her own family in order to help look after her father’s one?

Annie spent her last years at 89 Avenue Road. She died on October 24 and left effects valued at £3,347 7s 5d to the administration of her brother Joseph and her solicitor John Wignall Pooley.