From 1873 to 1885 Count Munster was the German ambassador to Britain, and in 1882 he was trying to find Robert Pattle, a British groom, who had spent some time in Hanover. There was a flurry of letters between the German Embassy and the Home Office, and an appeal to the Mayor of Cambridge for information on the whereabouts of Robert, who was thought to come from Cambridgeshire. Why were the German authorities so keen to find Robert? All is revealed in a letter from the Embassy dated 14 July 1882.
The letter relates how Robert Pattle, together with his German born wife Johanne Hormann, and young daughter Alice, had arrived in Hanover in 1874 to work as an instructor at the riding school there. Two more daughters, Caroline and Dorothea Amanda, had been baptised in Hanover. A few years later Robert returned to England with his wife. Alice and Caroline went with them, but little Dorothea was left in Germany in the charge of the Board for the relief of the Poor of the Province of Hanover. The German authorities were now anxious to return Dorothea to her family, and wanted to know “the name of the British Port, at which the child should be delivered over”.
I don’t know if the Mayor of Cambridge managed to find the child’s father. I have been unable to find any trace of Dorothea in England. But at the time, Robert and Johanne were indeed living near Cambridge. The 1881 census finds them at 8 Bakers Row in Newmarket, with daughter Caroline. Robert is described as a stableman. Daughter Alice meanwhile was working as a nursemaid in Wickhambrook, Suffolk.
Robert had been born in Soham in 1833, into a family of agricultural workers, and had gone to nearby Newmarket to work as a stable lad. His life had been spent following horses. In the 1851 census he was a jockey in Newmarket; in 1861 he was a groom in the hunting stables at Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire; in 1871, by now a married man with children, he was a huntsman in Sutton Veny in Wiltshire.
The surprising information revealed by the censuses was that Dorothea was not the first child to be abandoned by Robert and Johanne. When the couple went to Hanover they left two small daughters, Emma and Agnes, behind in Wiltshire, presumably in the care of the Poor Law authorities. I am left wondering whether the decision to abandon children was taken jointly by their parents or whether one of them put pressure on the other. And how did they choose which children to keep with them and which to leave behind?
Agnes stayed in Wiltshire; in 1911 she was a housekeeper. She died aged ninety-one in 1961, leaving a respectable sum of over three thousand pounds. Emma, the other daughter abandoned in Wiltshire, I have found no trace of after the 1881 census, where she had been boarded out in Devonshire. Alice, who was kept by her parents, worked as a servant and in 1911 was living with her widowed mother in almshouses in Newmarket. Caroline, the other daughter who was kept by her parents, also spent some time in service before settling down with an Italian chef, Giovanni Molina.
pottoingaround 