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married James Bristow, a 34-year-old carman, in May 1917.
She said she was 25, and gave no occupation, probably having none of any account or repute.
She told the registrar that her father was dead (he was still alive), and failed to remember or
provide his first name. Clearly she had strayed very far from any regular or respectable home
life. Maybe she never knew any such thing.
What else do we know of her father, George Honeycombe? A porter when he married in 1887
in Southwark, he was a journeyman bootmaker in 1891, a hairdresser's assistant from 1898 to
1901, and a general labourer from 1903 until his death, although he is described as a barber in
1916 on the death
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certificate of his daughter, Lilian. Over this period he and Charlotte lived in various back streets
in Southwark. But he died in Whitechapel, north of the river, in October 1926. He was 69, not
71 as his death certificate states, and he died of septicaemia caused by a septic foot.
Charlotte died ten years later, and like him in St Peter's Hospital. She was 70, and had been
living at 81 Plumber's Row, Whitechapel, a poverty-stricken address.
Such was the life of squalid destitution of George Wilkins' bastard son, born by Jane
Honeycombe in 1847, and abandoned by both of them to decay, along with his family, in the
grimy purlieus of Victorian and Edwardian London, that formed the other, fouler face of the
gleaming coin of Empire.
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4. Australia Felix
If Jane's father, William the stonemason, knew of her seduction or rape by his partner, George
Wilkins, we have a very good reason for the dissolution of their business association. But al! we
can be sure of at this time is that in 1846 the five-year partnership came to an end and William
moved from Meadow Street to Dove Street.
His next major move was to Australia.
Why did he make this most drastic decision to emigrate, so final and far-reaching? He was 50 in
January 1847: he could not expect to return. Why did he choose to go?
It was not as if working or living conditions in England were especially dire then, certainly not
for a master mason in a growing city like Bristol, if of course he was still there after 1847.
Britain had been involved in no foreign wars for over 30 years; Victoria had been Queen for 11;
and by 1848 the growth of national prosperity was being shared not just by the upper and
middle classes but to some degree by the. mass of craftsmen, and artisans, even the. labourers,
on whose actual physical industry the industrialisation of Britain heavily relied. Certainly there
was much urban hardship and rural privation; wages were low almost everywhere and hours
were long. But medical skills and knowledge had much improved, as had sanitation; the Corn
Laws were repealed by Peel in 1346V the Navigation Laws three years later: free, trade
became at last something, of a reality; and the Ten Hour Bili, limiting the daiiy working hours of
women and children, was passed in 1847. The iniquities of the old poor laws had by now been
sorted out, as well as the chaos of local administration, and in 1847 the Poor Law Commission
was replaced by the Poor Law Board.
The presence of policemen in. towns and cities made the streets safer at night and reduced civic
disorders. These streets were now gas-lit, and properly paved; roads were macadamised. The
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