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Would you have married her if you had known her family secrets…..

Setting the scene….. Pikey’s grandfather who died before she was born was a very respected clergyman and chaplain to the forces. His widow, whom Pikey knew well never ever mentioned her late husband’s siblings. Robert has now traced them via Jersey, Nigeria and the Divorce courts. We now know why Rev. Charles Clark Snell never mentioned his elder brother Walter Stuart Snell.

On 23rd May 1892 Charles Isaac Dannatt, a railway clerk living at 50 Neville Street, Cardiff married Ada Gertrude Philomina Brisland who lived at 45 Queen Street Cardiff at St David’s Roman Catholic Church, Cardiff. In 1897 he commenced divorce proceedings and Robert has obtained the copies of the court papers from the National Archives in which he is stated to be an operatic singer living at 19 Gardner Street, New City Road, Glasgow. The co-respondent was Walter Stuart Snell who had "lived and co-habited and habitually committed adultery" at Carn Villa, Aberdour, Fifeshire "for about six weeks in or about the months of July and August 1896". The divorce was granted in 1897 after a hearing at which the husband and the co-respondent appeared but not the wife. They were subsequently married in the first quarter of 1898 in Plymouth.

The case was fully reported in The Times of 29 April 1897 as follows:- Both the petitioner and the respondent were members of the theatrical profession. About Easter 1896, the respondent left town on tour with a company playing, ‘Lord Tom Noddy,’ and after terminating her tour at Oxford wrote to her husband asking his permission to allow her to go with a friend of hers to Aberdour, near Edinburgh, to recruit her health. After her return from Scotland, the husband found a letter addressed in his wife’s handwriting to Mr Snell, the co-respondent, and this it was that first aroused his suspicions. In the autumn of 1896, being himself in Edinburgh touring with a company, he learned that his wife had passed as "Mrs Snell" when on her visit to Aberdour. On learning this he immediately instituted divorce proceedings, and the respondent then confessed her guilt to the solicitor who had charge of the petitioner’s case, some correspondence having previously passed between them. The judge, after hearing the evidence in support of the petition, said that, subject to all the correspondence being laid before him, he considered the case proved, and granted a decree nisi.

Lord Tom Noddy was a musical which opened in London on September 15 1896 and ran for 62 performances at the Garrick Theatre in London. The cast list in The Times advertisement of September 1896 does not mention Ada. The star of the show was Little Tich but that’s another story……….

Robert was initially concerned that he was maligning the Snell family name but he now knows he was not. In a Bail et Vente dated 1901 Ada Philomena Brisland is named as the wife of Walter Stuart Snell. In the 1881 census Walter S Snell appears as a medical student and in the Medical Register for 1913 Walter Stuart Snell appears having qualified in Edinburgh in 1901 and by then was practising in Ogoja, E.P. (presumably Eastern Province), Southern Nigeria. He must be the same man as the chances of two Walter S Snells being doctors is nearly as remote as Ogoja. Robert has traced a record of a W S Snell boarding SS Mandingo on 11 January 1908 at Liverpool bound for Lagos; he was stated to be single at the time!

Was the entry "single" indicative of his travelling alone or of his marital state? Had he tired of Ada already or had she run off with yet another man? Or, as suggested by Margaret Tipping next door, had Walter done away with her? – as a medical man he could just say that she "died of natural causes"!!

What fun the internet is!!!

Loads of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Robert and Pikey.
PS We are both fine if tired!!!!
PPS Robert thinks that, on mature reflection, he would have married her despite……