A Grim Almanac of Georgian London by Cate Ludlow

Author:Cate Ludlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750954037
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

George III, who narrowly avoided kidnap several times during his reign.

7 JULY1783 The London Magazine reported:

This day, a gentleman from Hackney was returning from Chigwell with his wife and daughter, a fine girl of three years of age, the latter leaning against the coach door. It unfortunately burst open, by which accident the young lady fell with great force against a tree stump and her skull was fractured. She died soon after she was conveyed home.

Also today, Mrs Christian Davies, more commonly known as ‘Mother Ross’, was buried. When Mrs Davies’ first husband, Thomas Welch, was kidnapped and forced to turn sailor, Mother Ross had decided to disguise herself as a man to find him. However, she enjoyed being ‘Christopher Welch, soldier’ so much that she had abandoned the search in favour of reliving the ‘masculine habits’ of her youth – ‘romping’ with every woman she came across and performing ‘the most desperate acts’ of valour on the battlefield. She was shot in the ankle, shot in the hip – imperilling her disguise – and finally suffered a fractured skull, whereupon she came clean about her true identity. She then found her husband and stayed with the army as a sutler. Her first husband later died at Taisnieres (she found his corpse after ‘turning over near two hundred bodies in search of him’); a second husband, a grenadier, died of a gangrenous wound at St Venant. Her third husband, a soldier from whom she took the name Davies, retired into the Chelsea Hospital, and she, living nearby, went to court twice a week. As Queen Anne had already granted her £50 plus a pension of a shilling a day for her achievements, to which the courtiers added more, she lived extremely comfortably, and, when she died on 7 July 1739, she was interred in the burying ground of the hospital with full military honours.

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