The Sole Society, a Family History Society researching Sole, Saul, Sewell, Solley and similar names

 

Seven Sewell Children

Their Orphanage Years

 

From Rosemary Bailey

 

This article was published in the April 2018 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society

 

 

We’ll, not really an update, but a bit that I missed out of the original article in the August 2016 journal! The original article by Richard Jones told of his mother’s siblings who were sent to Newland Homes Orphanage in Hull in the 1930s. It doesn’t add to the story but is a lovely bit of social history which, as regular readers of the journal will know, I am very fond of!  Richard writes:

 

One of the most memorable new pieces of information that came out of my first conversation with [my uncle] Glen is his knowledge of a book, At the flick of a wish, written by George Elton in 1988.  The initial chapters of George’s book cover his time from the age of 3 Years and 5 Months, October 1915, to his 15th birthday in May 1927, where George was confined to the same orphanage and at much the same ages as the Sewell Children.  Although his life at the orphanage was a decade before those of the Sewell Children, there are three statements from the book that I would like to include in this document that I think are indicative of the lives the Sewell Children would have lived in the orphanage.

· Children up to the age of 7 were sent to bed at 6 p.m., from 7 to 11 years at 6.30 p.m. and 11 to 15 years at 7.30 p.m.

· Even brothers and sisters were kept apart forcibly and effectively... those boys who had sisters living in the forbidden territory were allowed just half an hour contact on a Sunday afternoon. Immediately after compulsory Sunday school they would meet at the front of the school building.  A strict condition of the friendly half hour was that they had to keep walking round and round the flower bed all the time.

George Elton also wrote: I  do know that for a very long time many of us little ones assumed that the Lord’s Prayer was intended as an exercise to remind we fatherless children that our fathers must not be forgotten