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Amelia Rebecca Savers 1827-1855

Sarah Elizabeth
Gayleard

Rosina Amelia
Goldsmith Savers

Henry Joseph Stephen
Goldsmith Savers

Pat Tritton reflects on the short life of her 3 x Great Aunt:

Amelia Savers was the younger sister of Mary Savers.

She was born about 1827 in Portsea and at the time of the census in 1841 she was living in Albion Street, Portsea. Nearby were living Stephen Goldsmith, a shipwright, and his sons Joseph and Henry.

By 1851 Amelia was a needlewoman, living in Nicholls Court, Portsea with her three illegitimate children, Sarah (6), Rosina (4) and Henry (2). Rosina had been registered as Rosina Amelia Goldsmith Savers and Henry bore the names of Henry Joseph Stephen Goldsmith Savers - it is possible that one of the Goldsmith family was their father.

The Savers family lived in an overcrowded, squalid, insanitary part of the town close to the dockyard, where there was a pub on nearly every corner of every street. White’s Row where Mary lived and King’s Bench Alley where Amelia and her family later moved to were mean, dreary alleyways. King’s Bench Alley was 586ft long, with an average width of 3-4ft.

The houses off these alleyways contained one room downstairs and one up. They were damp, had no running water and no toilets. Because of the narrowness of the alleyways no daylight or fresh air penetrated so they were dark and smelly, too. Hardly surprising then, that disease was rife and with hardly any access to a doctor, the mortality rate was much greater in this part of the town.

Amelia died on 10 August 1855 from TB, leaving her young children to Mary’s care.

King's Bench Alley, photographed in 2006

Photographs supplied courtesy of
Paul Tritton

In 1910 Portsmouth Council decided to demolish about 200 houses in the White’s Row and King’s Bench Alley area and replace them with model ‘cottages’ for the working classes. The new area was named Curzon Howe Road – and the houses are still there today.