The village school in Bremhill, consisting of a school room and school teacher’s house, was built in 1846. Between that year and the school’s closure in 1969 it saw many school teachers come and go. Here are the stories of some of them.
The 1851 census shows the school mistress at Bremhill School to have been Jane Prior, a young lady of 21 years born in Surrey. She was assisted by the “teacher” Ann Selman, a 14-year-old local girl from Studley who would have been a pupil at the school. Ann lived with Jane Prior in the schoolhouse in Bremhill. In the nineteenth century It was quite a common arrangement for the pupil teacher of a village school to live with the school mistress as a companion cum housekeeper.
Ann’s family is a sad illustration of infant mortality rates in Victorian times. It seems that her father, George Selman of Calne, and her mother, Elizabeth Summers of Bremhill, had a child together out of wedlock when they were just nineteen and sixteen respectively. Sadly, the boy, whom they named George, only survived for a year and seven months. In 1830, four years after their child’s death, George and Elizabeth married at the Parish Church in Calne. In 1833 they had a daughter, Ann, who was buried on New Year’s Eve 1835, not having reached her third birthday. In 1836 our teacher Ann was born, followed by a brother William in 1839. Then came a sister Sarah, who died aged two, and finally a brother John in 1844 who lived only to the age of fifteen.
We do not know how long Ann worked at the school in Bremhill. 1859 must have been a particularly hard year for her, as she lost both her mother and her brother John. In the 1861 census she was living again at home in Turnpike Road, Studley, presumably keeping house for her widowed father, her brother William having moved to Overton near Marlborough to work as a groom. All was not sadness, however, as just before Christmas 1862 Ann married Joseph Brown, a bachelor three years her junior, in the Parish Church in Calne. It would be fascinating to find out how they met, as Joseph lived in Frome, working as a ticket collector at Frome Station.
By 1864 Ann and Joseph were living in Waterloo Place in Frome, where their daughter Florence was born. By the end of the decade, however, they had moved to Islington, Middlesex and according to the 1871 census now also had two small sons, Frederick and Joseph, aged two and 10 months. Ann was a full-time mother; her husband Joseph’s career had taken a completely new direction and he was working as a warder at nearby Pentonville Prison. Ann was also to experience the pain of the loss of a child, George, born in 1872 and buried in 1874. She was to have a further daughter, Emily, in 1875.
The trail for the Brown family disappears until 1891, when Ann, now a widow in her fifties, was living at 115, Arlington Street, Islington with her four children, ranging in age from twenty-seven to sixteen. She was once again working as a school mistress. Ten years later, Frederick as the elder son was head of the household at 41, Gloucester Road, Islington, which included his mother and two unmarried sisters. Ann was now Head of a school, described as an employer, and Florence was keeping house for the family. Ann’s final appearance is as a widow of seventy-four, now retired and still living with Frederick and Florence at the same address. What a long journey, personally and professionally, from her school days in Bremhill.
Sources: Baptism and marriage records for Calne Baptism records for Frome Burial records for Bremhill Census records for Studley, Bremhill and Islington