Thrupp, Mrs Anne, Elmfield, Northam
Anne Elizabeth Thrupp[1] (1832–1925) was born Anne Pyke on 7 December 1832 in Swaffham, Norfolk, where she was baptised on 14 January 1833. She was the daughter of John Pyke, a Captain in the Royal Navy, and Caroline, née Yonge, daughter of the Vicar of Swaffham. Anne had an older sister, Caroline. When Anne was a child the family moved to Devon, John Pyke’s home county. They lived at first in Northam, where they were living at the time of the census in 1841. John Pike then bought land at Bideford, where during the 1840s he built Ford House[2] on the west bank of the Torridge above the town. The family were living there with four resident servants by 1851, well established in local life. Captain Pyke was a magistrate. Anne became a keen archer and member of the Littleham Archery Society.[3]
Caroline married William Dowell, a naval officer, in 1855. Anne married Arthur Thrupp, a Captain in the Royal Navy, on 10 April 1861 in the parish church at Bideford.[4] They moved first into Ford Cottage, in the Ford House grounds, and then in the 1880s to Elmfield, a 20-room house in Northam. They had no children. Vivian Henderson, who married Anne Thrupp’s great-niece, visited them in the 1880s. He described Anne Thrupp and their household: ‘She was a typical mid-Victorian; we had prayers twice a day, no smoking except in the kitchen after the maids had gone to bed, and meals served promptly on the stroke of the gong.’[5]
Captain Thrupp continued his naval career, progressing to the rank of Vice-Admiral by the time of his retirement. In 1871 he had obtained a level of notoriety when he faced a court-martial in Plymouth for deliberately beaching the ship under his command, HMS Magaera, on St Paul’s Island. He was able to show that the ship was unseaworthy and that his action was taken to save the lives of the crew. He was honourably acquitted and continued to receive preferment, and was awarded the honour of Companion of the Order of the Bath.[6]
Arthur Thrupp became a magistrate, and Vicar’s churchwarden (both in Bideford and in Northam) and a member of the Bideford and District Infirmary and Dispensary.[7] He was also a prominent Conservative. Anne supported him by membership of the Primrose League; she was Ruling Councillor of the Iddesleigh Habitation (Bideford) in the 1880s[8] and was also a member of the Ladies’ Committee of the Infirmary and Dispensary.[9] Arthur Thrupp died at the age of 61 at Elmfield in May 1889, after suffering a stroke when playing golf at Westward Ho! the previous year.[10]
In 1891 Mrs Arthur Thrupp, landowner and householder, was listed as having signed the Women Householders and Ratepayers Petition, originally started in the Women’s Suffrage Journal. This declared that their exclusion from the vote was ‘an infraction of the principle that taxation and representation should go together’, and expressed their ‘desire for an alteration in the laws’.[11]
Anne Thrupp continued to be active in Primrose League work, supporting habitations in Appledore, Bideford and Northam, and in charitable work generally. In 1891 the Bideford Centre for the Cambridge University Extension scheme was established, where a first series of lectures was run that autumn, on ‘The Growth of our Colonial Empire’. In 1892 this was followed by one on ‘Victorian Poets’, and Mrs Thrupp was named as having taken on the duties of honorary secretary.[12] She was a diligent publicist and fund-raiser,[13] and ensured publicity for the successes in the examinations undertaken by the students.[14] All those examined were women, although the lectures were open to ‘all classes and either sex above 16 years of age’.[15] It was, however, a struggle to raise the funds. The charges were set at 5d per hour (2½ d for teachers) and the balance required to raise the 55-60 guineas required to mount a course was meant to be covered by subscribers. It was a challenge for a small community like Bideford. Thrupp arranged for a public meeting in 1894 to be addressed by Jessie Montgomery (q.v.), the Exeter Centre secretary, to provide ideas about how the centre might best be developed.[16] Attendance was, however, ‘very small’, and after a fifth course in 1895,[17] the only further reference is to a ‘short course of University Extension Lectures’ in 1897.[18] By 1901 the University Extension Scheme lectures are spoken of as firmly in the past.[19]
Thrupp was also involved in other ventures in the development of educational opportunities. She is referred to in 1893 as present at the opening of the Travelling Dairy School arranged by the Committee ‘for the purpose of Technical Education in the Bideford District’[20] and was appointed to the first Northam District Council Technical Instruction Committee in 1895, and subsequently re-elected.[21] She led the fund-raising effort for the Bideford Municipal College of Art,[22] and was elected a manager for the Northam National and Infant Schools.[23]
After her initiative to sign the householders petition, Anne Thrupp does not appear to have been active in the movement for women’s suffrage, but it is perhaps no co-incidence that when the Bideford branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was re-formed in 1913[24] the new secretary was Lilian Kelsall (q.v.), the daughter of Marie Kelsall, who had been a fellow committee member of Thrupp’s on the Northam Education Committee.[25] Ellen Kelsall, Lilian’s sister, had been a student on the Bideford University Extension Courses.[26]
Anne Thrupp lived on at Elmfield, where she is listed, with three resident servants, on the 1911 census. She did not die until 19 May 1925, at the age of 93. She left her estate, valued at over £4300, to her sister’s daughter, Annie. She is buried with her husband in Northam churchyard. Her ‘good works’, the obituary states, ‘were much esteemed by a large body of friends.’[27]
Entry created by Marilyn Smee and Julia Neville, March 2019
[1] Census and family information from http://www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] For Ford House, see: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1209723 Accessed 18 Mar 2019.
[3] North Devon Gazette, 5 Jul 1864.
[4] North Devon Gazette, 15 Apr 1861.
[5] Vivian Henderson, The Story of a Family, printed for private circulation in 1958 and available at https://archive.org/details/storyoffamily00hend/page/86 Accessed 18 Mar 2019.
[6] Recounted by his brother and reprinted in North Devon Gazette, 28 May 1889.
[7] North Devon Gazette, 7 May 1889.
[8] North Devon Gazette, 22 May 1888.
[9] North Devon Gazette, 19 Feb 1889.
[10] North Devon Gazette, 7 May 1889.
[11] Janet Horowitz Murray & Myra Stark (eds), The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions, 1891. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, 102.
[12] North Devon Gazette, 11 Oct 1892.
[13] e.g. North Devon Gazette, 4 Oct & 15 Nov 1892.
[14] North Devon Gazette, 14 Feb 1893, 30 Jan 1894
[15] North Devon Gazette, 17 Jul 1884.
[16] North Devon Gazette, 20 Mar 1894.
[17] North Devon Gazette, 9 Jul 1895.
[18] North Devon Gazette, 2 Feb 1897.
[19] North Devon Gazette 31 Dec 1901. The Town Council are seeking to arrange a series of Gilchrist Lectures.
[20] North Devon Gazette, 19 Sep 1893.
[21] North Devon Gazette, 25 Jun 1895; 18 Jul 1899; 18 Aug 1903.
[22] North Devon Gazette, 18 Feb 1896.
[23] North Devon Gazette, 4 Oct 1904.
[24] Common Cause, 28 Mar 1913, 874.
[25] North Devon Gazette, 25 Jun 1895, 18 Aug 1903.
[26] North Devon Gazette, 10 May 1892, 14 Feb 1893.
[27] Devon and Exeter Gazette, 25 May 1925.