Alice Maud Mary PECK
Early years
Alice was born on 17 April 1856, at 1, Golden Buildings, an old tenement building just off the Strand in London. She was the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Ann Rogerson who registered her birth name as Alice Maud Cowan Rogerson.
Two years later, Alice’s mother Elizabeth married widower George Andrews, a porter.
In the 1861 census, Alice Maud Cowan Rogerson was enumerated along with her mother, her stepfather George Andrews, two older children from George’s first marriage, and a young sister, at Angel Court, one of several courts accessed via an archway off the Strand.
By 1871, Alice, aged 15 and now using the surname Andrews, was working as a domestic servant for a dressmaker in Lambeth.
Marriage, and a daughter
In January 1881 Alice, as Alice Maud Mary Rogerson, married gas inspector Charles Edward Peck in Islington. A daughter, Alice Lucy Edith Peck, was born a year later.
At the time of the 1881 census, Charles and Alice were living at 71 Queen Margaret Grove in Islington. By the time of the 1891 census, they had moved to 37 Pellerin Road in Hackney.
Marriage breaks up
However, all was not well with their marriage, and by 1894 Alice was seeking a separation. She had also taken the unusual step of hiring a male attendant from Mr Wilson’s Institute in Wimpole Street to protect her from her husband, who was an alcoholic and had mistreated her.
Army and Navy Gazette 28 July 1894
The magistrate took a dim view of this arrangement:
“This is about the coolest arrangement I have ever heard of. Here is an institution to send young gentlemen to look after wives.”
Islington Gazette, 9 May 1894
Death of husband
In November 1895, Charles Peck’s “intemperate habits” lost him his job. He told Alice that he could not afford to keep her any longer, and so she moved out of the family home in Pellerin Road but she returned there on a regular basis to clean the house. One day in March 1896, she found the door locked and chained from within, and finding it still locked when she returned in the evening, she summoned a policeman who forced an entry and found Charles Peck hanging by a rope from a hook on the back room door. He had taken his own life.
Hackney Mercury, 14 March 1896
Insanity
We could not find Alice in the 1901 census, but we did find her daughter working as a domestic servant in Hackney.
We know (from later records) that Alice began behaving strangely around October/November 1900, and that at some point she was admitted to the Hackney infirmary in Homerton High Street, where, in November 1901, she was found to be of unsound mind and ordered to be admitted to Fisherton asylum in Wiltshire.
“She is rambling in her conversation — her ideas of time and place are confused. She is under the delusion that her neighbours conspire against her to injure her, she imagines that instead of the body of her late husband that another body was substituted and buried in his stead.”
Alice was to remain in the asylum system for the rest of her life. She stayed at Fisherton until April 1902 when she was moved to the newly built Horton asylum. We do not have any case notes for her but we know that she was at Horton in 1911, at Colney Hatch in 1921 and that she was transferred to Long Grove in 1939.
Alice died at Long Grove on 2 May 1941, from arterio sclerosis and senility. She was buried at Horton on 8 May in grave 2327a.
What became of her daughter?
Daughter Alice L E Peck trained as a teacher of cookery and housewifery, and taught at various schools and colleges in the London area. She died in Woodingdean, Brighton in 1964. She did not marry.