Free The Nightingale Shore Murder by Rosemary Cook Page B

of Milford and Boyce.
    It is not unusual for corrections to be needed, according to a current Registrar at the Westminster Register Office, if a mistake was made at the time of the marriage, and neither the bride, the groom nor the witnesses spotted it when they signed the register entry. Normally, such corrections should be witnessed by either the bride or groom, or the original witnesses to the marriage – someone who knows the couple well enough to be able to testify to the changes required. But that did not happen in this case.
    It also seems unlikely in this case that the parties to the marriage overlooked the mistake accidentally. The correction is to an entry in the ‘ages’ column, where the bride’s age is recorded. ‘In column 3’, the correction reads, ‘for 23 years, read 20 years.’
    In the 19 th century, the age at which a woman could marry without her parents’ consent was 21. It seems that Annie and Offley were not willing to wait another year to marry with her parents’ consent: perhaps they did not expect to get it. Or maybe Offley did not know when he married Annie that she was under the age of majority. In either case, how the ‘mistake’ came to light, who reported it to the Registrar, why neither the bride nor the groom were available to witness the correction, and what impact the deception had on the marriage, are all unknown. What is clear is that Offley’s second marriage provided Florence, at the age of 22, with a stepmother two years younger than she was.
    Annie Wakefield Shore was not what she seemed in other ways too. She gave her father’s name as John Wakefield, deceased, and the family residence as Spalding in Lincolnshire: but no John Wakefield is recorded as living in Spalding, or dying prior to 1887, in UK census records. There is no birth certificate on record for Anne or Annie Wakefield, daughter of John from Spalding in Lincolnshire, for the years 1866 or 1867. Family historians often point out that marriage is one of the very few official occasions (the ten-yearly census being another) when the information required is supplied by the parties involved, and is not subject to any external checking. So people sometimes found it convenient to have a ‘deceased’ father to put on the marriage certificate, if the truth was more troublesome. In Annie’s case, there is an obvious explanation for the deception: what she was hiding was the stigma of illegitimacy. Her birth certificate shows that she was born on 7 th April, 1867, in Spalding. Her mother was Elizabeth Wakefield, but the columns for name and occupation of the father are blank.
    The 1871 census shows that, at the age of three, Anne Wakefield was living in Gosberton, near Spalding, Lincolnshire with her mother, Elizabeth, who was then twenty four; and her grandparents, William and Louisa Wakefield. Louisa had had her daughter Elizabeth at the relatively late age of thirty five. Elizabeth had given birth to Anne when she was just twenty one, and the three generations were living together in Seadike Lane, Gosberton.
    The next census shows the first signs of the fluidity of Anne Wakefield’s age. In early April 1881, when she was still 13, Anne Wakefield was a live-in general servant for a farmer, John Huntsman, and his housekeeper, Sarah Squires, in Fengate, Moulton, still close to Spalding. She – or they – reported to the census that she was aged fifteen. Whether the fiction originated with this household, or whether the Wakefields had added a couple of years to her age to make her seem more suitable to go out to work, is impossible to deduce.
    How the gentleman Dr Offley Shore met the barely literate (she took two attempts to sign her surname on her marriage certificate), illegitimate and under-age servant girl from Spalding is also impossible to guess. He did have links with the area, having worked for a time at the Stamford hospital, but he had not lived