WDYTYA? - Mary Berry

So, Mary Berry, that's an interesting family! Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of Mary's ancestors - Robert Houghton - was a baker. Perhaps more surprisingly, he lived in a street in Norwich known as 'blood and guts alley!'

Robert Houghton, as well as working as baker, also worked as a builder, and was on the parish council. He worked hard - no-one can deny that, over seven hundred loaves of bread with only 3 helpers per day is hard by anyone's standards - and fulfilled his contract to provide bread to the workhouse and the out-of-workhouse parish/poor law union relief. Unfortunately, what with margins being tight, most people who supplied bread to the 'paupers' of the Victorian period tended to stretch out the ingredients more than a little - with such scrummy ingredients as sawdust and bone. There were indeed complaints about the quality of Robert Houghton's bread, though nothing was ever proved.

On another side of the family, it was the story of another Mary Berry that caught Mary's attention. Mary (the ancestral Mary) had three or four children - none of which ever had a father recorded on a baptism or birth record. Poor Mary (the current Mary) didn't quite know what the explanation for the lack of a father was - celebrities can be more than a little naïve when it comes to illegitimacy. Mary (the ancestral Mary) would like have had a difficult relationship with her own father - Christopher Berry, a printer who had gone bankrupt, had in all probability abandoned his wife and six of his eight children, who ended up in the workhouse - it's not certain what happened to the other two in this period, but he probably kept them on as apprentices, or they found work elsewhere.

I really felt for Mary (the current Mary) when she found out what became of several of the children who were admitted to the workhouse - she was almost in tears when she saw their burial records at such young ages. Unfortunately this was likely to have brought up memories of losing one of her own children - William - when he was nineteen. She truly empathised with Mary (the ancestral Mary) who lost siblings as well as one or two of her children, as well as Mary's mother, whose children never left the workhouse.

There was a happy ending for Mary (the ancestral Mary) however, becoming a staymaker (posh definition: a maker of corsetry; practical definition: she made undies,) and earning enough to keep her small family afloat.