Susan, baptised on 11th July 1832, at All Saints Church, Heathfield was the seventh of nine children born to George Lovel Harmer and Elizabeth Barber. She was one of John Harmer’s younger sisters. You can read more about the family’s life in Heathfield here.
Moving to Brighton
Susan probably left Heathfield in the late 1840s with her parents, initially staying with them and her sister Zilpah at 22 Lavender Street. By 1851, aged 18, she had found work as a live-in general servant for a draper’s collector, James Carney, and his family at 146 Western Road. At some stage between then and the spring of 1858 Susan met a man who would blight the rest of her life.
Life in Brighton – and two daughters
In 1858, when she was 26, Susan gave birth to her first illegitimate daughter, who’s birth was registered as Zilpah Elizabeth Greenfield Harmer, Greenfield representing the child’s father’s surname. She was baptised as Sarah Elizabeth Greenfield Harmer on 24th October 1858 at St. Peter’s Church, Brighton and was known as Elizabeth. Susan has yet to be found in the 1861 census, but two year old Elizabeth was living with Susan’s sister, Martha Lovell Revell née Harmer, at 3 Grand Parade, which was the address which Susan gave when she registered the birth.
On 14th July 1864 a baby girl named Rosa Emma Harmer came into the world. By 1871 Elizabeth was still living with Martha, and had been joined by a sister – Rosa – aged six. The obvious interpretation is that Susan had conceived another child out of wedlock, and again left the baby in the care of the Revells. With no father around and a mother who worked in domestic service the two girls would likely have ended up in the workhouse if it were not for the Revells and Underwoods.
Susan’s later life
In the 1871 census Susan was living at 69 Lewes Road, as a nurse. Eleazor (sic?) Redman (36) was the head of the house – and a plasterer. The street directories list number 69 as a tobacconists and confectioners at this time, run by E. Redman (who seems to have worked as a plasterer and left his wife Clara in charge of the shop). Clara had three young children, so Susan may well have been more of a nursemaid / childminder than a provider of medical care. It seems so sad that Susan was caring for someone else’s children, but circumstances had seperated her from her own daughters. Susan’s surname is given as Harmer, and her marital status as widowed. Had Susan been in a longterm relationship with someone who for reasons lost to history could not or would not marry her, and subsequently passed away?
Death
Susan passed away in the winter of 1877, aged just 45. As yet I am unsure of her cause of death. Hopefully it wasn’t a broken heart.
Rosa Emma’s marriage
In August 1886 Rosa Emma married Henry Bilke Hollis, at Brixton. By that time she was 22, and living at Andover in Hampshire, where she probably moved in pursuit of work after the deaths of the Revells. On the marriage registration document her father is described as a deceased farmer named Charles Harmer. Now, the concept of a Heathfield Harmer with the first name Charles is extremely obtuse, and the idea of a Sussex Harmer farming around Brighton is just as unlikely. The Heathfield Harmers migrated to Brighton to pursue lives beyond the agricultural employment limitations offered to them in Heathfield. So how could Susan, working in service in town, randomly meet and take up with a farmer – called Harmer? I have not had sight of Rosa Emma’s birth certificate, but if this also names her father as ‘Charles’, perhaps the Revells registered her birth, and Charles Revell gave his name as Charles Harmer so that Rosa could have her mother’s surname.
A potential candidate for Susan’s children
An Edward Greenfield, aged 41, of Horsham died at Brighton in October 1865 of an aortic aneurysm (a burst blood vessel in the heart). He was a bricklayer, like many of the Harmer men Susan had grown up around. He may well have been employed by one or more of her brothers (including John Harmer) for sporadic building work in Brighton which would explain how he could have met Susan. He was the son of an agricultural labourer, and grew up and lived with his parents and brother into adulthood at Farmhouse Lane, Horsham, adjacent to a farm run by a relative of the same surname – this would explain the farmer reference on Rosa’s marriage registration.
Edward is ticking a lot of boxes so far!
- Deceased at the time of Rosa Emma’s wedding.
- A farmer? Well, he might as well have been and probably did work on the farm when bricklaying work was slow or his family needed him to.
- Correct surname for Zilpah Elizabeth Greenfield Harmer’s birth registration.
- Connections with Brighton.
- Worked in a trade through which Susan’s bricklaying relatives could have found jobbing work for him in Brighton over the years thus enabling their (relatively) long distance relationship to remain on the boil.
- Susan had no known children after he died and describes herself as a widow by 1871 despite having never legally married.
But there are other reasons why I think Edward may have been the baby-daddy. He wasn’t a very nice man. In his teens he was convicted of larceny, and from newspaper reports we know that he and his family had a rough reputation; they were heavy drinkers, and regularly got into brawls. In 1865 his bricklayer brother was imprisoned for neglecting his starving wife (who was subsequently taken into the ‘care’ of the workhouse) whilst swanning round drunk with gold watches and large amounts of cash on his person [Chichester Express and West Sussex Journal 11th Sep 1866]. They don’t seem like the sort of family who would be interested in paying child support for their ‘bastards’.
But more importantly, Edward was a convicted bigamist. At the Kent Lent Assizes of March 1861 he was found guilty of marrying a lady at ‘Dodlington’ (possibly a typo for Dallington near Heathfield but more likely to be the village of Dodington in Kent) , having already married at Slinfold, near Horsham, in 1852. His first wife seems to have been called Ann Booker. If he was Susan’s partner of sorts, we will never know if she knew about Ann when she got together with Edward; as he was a very duplicitous piece of work he would probably have kept this from her and repeatedly promised to marry her. The ultimate act of cruelty was to bigamously marry his second ‘wife’ during the very month that Susan gave birth to who was possibly their second daughter. Talk about having your cake and eating it! If they were involved, poor Susan would have been little more than his ‘go to’ when he was working in Brighton, and he likely had other accommodating women dotted all round the South East. His second ‘wife’ seems to have been Sarah Ann Bartholomew who married a ‘William White’ in the Faversham district which included Dodington in Dec Q 1858.
To keep taking back a man like Greenfield Susan would surely have been utterly desperate or completely blinded by love. And then, after all her heartache and waiting and being made a fool of, he dropped down dead leaving her with two children! Perhaps Edward’s aneurysm was the result of juggling at least three women and goodness knows how many illegitimate offspring.
It is interesting to note that Susan’s niece Sarah Ann Harmer married an Edward Greenfield in 1865, who went on to abandon her. The two men were born approximately 20 years apart, which quashes any consideration as to whether Sarah Ann married her aunt’s on/off partner. But perhaps the two Edwards were related, or at least Sarah Ann’s husband was related to the father of Susan’s first child.
Susan’s Children
Zilpah/Sarah ‘Elizabeth’ Greenfield Parsons née Harmer (Oct 1858 – 1890)
Elizabeth appears to have been brought up by her mother’s sister’s family from birth until adulthood, although in 1871 she was living with Susan’s older sister Zilpah Underwood née Harmer and working as a general servant (presumably for another family). After the deaths of Martha and Charles Revell, who must have felt like parents to her, she is again recorded at their family home in the 1881 census, and by then was working as a schoolmistress. Martha’s daughter Martha (Elizabeth’s cousin) and her husband Walter Watts had kept the house on, and Elizabeth probably stayed with them until her marriage on 17th December 1881 to Charles Wallace Parsons at St. Martin’s Church on Lewes Road. Again, it would be interesting to see how Elizabeth described her father in her marriage entry. To be continued!
Rosa Emma Hollis née Harmer (14th July 1864 – 1945)
Like Elizabeth, Rosa Emma was raised by the Revells, although she was living in Andover by 1886 when she married. Her husband Henry Bilke Hollis passed away in 1938.
