As a writer, when you put your work into the world you don’t really know what will happen to it. You hope that someone will enjoy it. You hope that someone may learn from it. You might even dare to hope that it’s made someone think. Sometimes you get comments back, and that is genuinely, a privilege.

Imagine my surprise when a gentleman called the museum to talk about the article that I wrote back in 2021, “Many Years of Devoted Friendship”. It was about the ladies of The Manor House, Redruth who lived together for many years. The man on the phone, Gerald Curtis, said, ‘Mother was raised by them.’ He asked if I’d go and see him, how could I refuse? It turned out to be one of the most wonderful things I’ve done throughout my volunteering at the Museum of Cornish Life.

As a researcher, you have a responsibility to be accurate, to stay with the facts that you’ve uncovered. There is, of course, room for suggestion and interpretation, but the facts that uncurl from the past are simply that. There are of course, different truths. People see things differently (which is why police investigating crimes are interested in different witness accounts, people seeing the same thing will notice and experience different things). My writing genre is narrative non-fiction, and I’m a reflective writer. I will try and find the story from the body of research, the facts, and write it from there.

Meeting Gerald

We talked for an hour – me thumbing through my notebook and sharing some specific things that had popped up in my research, things that didn’t make it to the piece I wrote. Mostly it was Gerald, telling me about his own memories and sharing some of his mother’s. Mother came to live in Redruth as she was fostered by Hannah Taylor in Leeds. Gerald said they came to Redruth in 1919, when Mother was 13. I’d found the sisters, Hannah, Annie and Margaret, living in The Manor House in 1922 from the Electoral Register. Gerald said that Margaret travelled between London and Cornwall, but Hannah and Annie remained in Redruth. I’d often wondered about just that.

The ladies of The Manor House: Margaret Taylor

Gerald and Mother called Margaret Taylor, ‘Auntie Margaret’. He said that Auntie Margaret appeared to be the ‘leader’ in the household. He described her as having grey hair, tied in a bun, that made him think of Queen Victoria. Gerald described The Manor House as a household of routines and order. All the ladies had their own chair in the sitting room, with Auntie Margaret’s being the best one, with views over the garden. Gerald said the gardens were extensive, well-maintained. Now, apparently, there are 18 homes in the area that was the grounds.

Margaret Taylor’s passion was stamp-collecting. She had a vast collection, Gerald said over 40,000 stamps. She was well-known in the field, with contacts in London and abroad. When she died, a London dealer, Stanley Gibbons, came to Redruth and bought the entire collection. Gerald said that his Auntie Margaret had tried to get him interested, but it didn’t excite him in the least.

The ladies of The Manor House: Emily Paterson

Emily’s life as an Egyptologist is well-documented, with Gerald and I drawing from the same research pool. However, Gerald told me that after her retirement, Emily continued to fund herself on explorations and went to one of the tomb openings in Egypt. Gerald remembered her fondly – a tall lady, always dressed in grey and very pleasant. It is certainly Emily’s artefacts that have made their way into the Museum’s collection. We know them as the Margaret Taylor Collection, but with an accession date of 1968, they were probably gifted on Manya Seguel’s death.

The ladies of the Manor House: Manya Seguel

Gerald’s mother was taught to play the piano by Manya, a skill she passed down to Gerald. Manya gave recitals at her grand piano in the large room at The Manor House, with audience members made up from local business and society to raise money for charity. Gerald seemed uncertain of what to make of Manya – he said she could be tricky, not as warm or kindly as the other ladies. Manya would survive all the ladies, and on her death, her estate was left to the animal charities that Margaret had specified in her own will. In life the friends had pledged to leave the estate to those that remained, and Manya marked the end of the line. Maud, the long-term housekeeper, was given a cottage attached to the house so that she always had somewhere to live.

Gerald remembered the formality of the household. In the 1930s and 1940s it must have felt like it was from a different era. When he visited, he would be welcomed into the hall to wait, and then announced in the relevant room to the person he was there to see – most times, his Auntie Margaret.

Meeting Gerald was a delight, and it feels like he’s added colour to the monochrome of my own research. Rather curiously, when he went to Kresen Kernow, he was told that there had been another researcher looking at The Manor House. He didn’t realise who it might be until he came across the article on the Museum’s website.

As I got up to leave, Gerald said to me that he thought this might be one of the last times he’d speak about them out loud. He’d written it up for his family, his niece in particular who was curious to know “Granny’s story”. Our own conversation shifted, and I expect that some things Gerald didn’t expect to say. To that end, there are some things that will remain in the space between us in Redruth.

Gerald was generous about my research, he felt that I’d had the sense of the ladies and their friendship, what they meant to each other. This is Gerald’s gift to me. Gerald also commented that he thought that our meeting had meant as much to him as it had to me. He was right. It will be something I treasure for a long time to come. 

Julia Webb-Harvey

April 2024