MEMORIES AND MEMOIRS

by Beverley Warren Allen, 1994

revised & organized by Carolyn Allen, 1998

Introduction

It is fifty-five years since I started writing my book, As Families Go. Most of the people for whom I wrote it are now gone. With them went the stories and records of a century of family. This book, Memories and Memoirs, is an attempt to record highlights of the dozens of lives remembered, and to pass along traditions to later generations. But the story is far from complete. It begins in 1066, at the time of the Battle of Hastings, and ends in 1936, just as the adult part of my life was beginning. Those in the family who read this book should know that they, too, have a responsibility to save, record, and add their memories to mine.

Family lore and research in libraries in Toronto, Chicago and Boston formed the basics of my research of the distant past. Much of the research done was lost in sundry house cleanings. Some parts recorded by my father-in-law, T. George Allen, still exist, along with the lengthy farewell written by my father, J. H. Warren, before he took his life in the spring of 1937.

The Rawlinson Family

English records before Cromwell have been erased except for what exists in a few noble families. After Cromwell=s time, better written records exist. According to family lore, the Earl of Goodwin (Godwin) was present in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. This was a focal point in the family in Great Britain. My mother=s father, Marmaduke Rawlinson, talked about Earl Rawlinson who had been important in the adventures of the explorer Sir Henry Stanley (1841-1904). Stanley is remembered mainly for his expedition into central Africa at the end of which, in 1871, he found Dr. David Livingstone, and greeted him with the now famous words, ADr. Livingstone, I presume?@

My grandmother Rawlinson=s maiden name was Margaret Whitlock. As far as I know, the Whitlocks did not leave any family records.

Rawlinson was the name of a large family. The eldest brother moved to Australia around 1870. In 1980, my sister Virginia and I met his granddaughter in Sidney, Australia. She has since moved to London, England. The family included a sister, Henrietta, who was blind and died in a London hotel fire some time after 1881. I can recall an elderly great-uncle Philip. Three Rawlinson sons of this family married three of the daughters of the Whitlock family. Marmaduke married Margaret, Lionel married Mary, and Henry married Harriet. Marmaduke and Margaret--who was known as Meggie--became my mother=s parents.

Marmaduke and Meggie lost two sons to lung disorders. Two other sons, Ernest and Arthur, were okay. Henrietta was a sickly child. When she was about two years old, the doctor said she would die of a lung disorder if she remained in the English climate. So around 1884 the three brothers, Marmaduke, Lionel and Henry, and their wives and families, all moved to Toronto, Ontario. The fourth brother, Philip moved to a nearby town. Some of the Whitlock family moved to Stratford, Ontario.

Marmaduke set up Toronto=s first moving and storage business, M. Rawlinson Co., at 610 North Yonge Street. His daughter, Hettie, attended Bishop Strachan School for Girls until she was married in 1908 at age 27. In those days, college was not considered acceptable for women, so Hettie went to Acontinuation classes.@ She made several trips to England and one to Chicago.

Hettie=s two brothers went to school in Toronto. Ernest got his degree at the University of Toronto and then returned to England. He got his M.D. in Oxford. He and his parents exchanged visits to Toronto and England in alternate years.

Lionel Rawlinson went into making and selling fine furniture. His shop was near his brother Marmaduke=s office and warehouse. Lionel and Marmaduke often provided a living for their relations, Philip and Henry, and they helped with Whitlock co-managements. Lionel and Mary had four daughters and two sons. The youngest son died early, and his mother never recovered from the loss.

Henry and Harriet Rawlinson had half a dozen children. Henry became an alcoholic and his family needed the support of his brothers.

The Warren Family

AThe Irish, the Irish, they don't amount to much.@

Among the passengers on the Mayflower when it left Plymouth, England, were several partly Irish people, including a Warne (Warren). For a time the Warrens were very active in the public eye. My father often talked of his uncle, an officer who was known as the Warren of Bunker Hill. There were many politicians. One was governor of California, while his cousin was governor of Florida. The activities of the various men seemed to be quite contentious. There were a number of books written about their lives. Each one made a point of degrading the achievements of his relation, or just eliminated it from his writing. When I read them, I was impressed by how numerous and biased these books were when they presented a situation.

My father, Joseph Henry Warren, was the Aseventh child of the seventh child,@ born in Key West, Florida, August 8, 1875. Lack of any other information made me believe the family lived as pirates. They were not fishermen and there was no industry in Key West, but the family had money. So they must be pirates, I thought.

Joe=s father married Emma Moss, who came from Puerto Rico. There being only a Methodist minister on the island at the time, he was asked to officiate at the marriage. Eight babies later, a Roman Catholic priest arrived in Key West. He declared the eight children to be bastards as no priest had performed the wedding of the parents. With this insult, they left the Catholic church formally and became Episcopalians.

The youngest of the eight Warren children was Sadie. She married a Spanish speaking resident of Key West. Shortly thereafter he lost his life in a gunfight. Sadie continued her career as an opera singer. She remarried, a man named Ben Tryillo. They lived in Miami and Sadie sang in the opera there. In later years her nieces and nephews found her very exciting, with her shockingly flaming (artificial) red hair and exotic manners.

About 1890, my father's parents arranged for advanced education for two of his brothers, William and Louis. There was only a primary school in Key West, and little more in the rest of Florida. William and Louis were going to attend seminaries in Minneapolis, Minnesota. William was to be an Episcopalian priest; Louis elected to be a Roman Catholic. En route to Minneapolis, Louis had a heart attack and died. Will returned home with his brother=s body. The family decided that as the expenses already had been paid, Joe should go to school instead of Louis. Joe often talked about not feeling the cold at all in Minneapolis the first winter. He said, by contrast, his father in Key West was never warm enough and had worn woolen underwear the year around.

So, because of his brother=s unexpected death, my father spent his school and college years in Minneapolis. He never talked about this period, except for his big adventure at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 with its amazing Ferris Wheel, Midway Lagoon and Urban Gondolas. He went to Chicago and recorded the wonders on film. In 1935 I had prints made from the negatives. This visit to the Columbian Exposition was a great event, the light of his life. It may have played a large part in his decision to go into electrical engineering at college. Mathematics and engineering were his primary concern.

Years later, remembering his own visit to Chicago in 1893, Joe put his blessing on a Model T Ford which was used by his children, sons, Joe and Stanley, daughter Evelyn, and a friend, Wilfred Hall, when they visited the Chicago World=s Fair in 1933.

In 1899, during my father=s fourth year of college, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) put its finger on him. He moved to Hyde Park, a suburb of Chicago, and worked at the Western Electric branch at South Wacker and Franklin. He never talked to me about it, but he must have walked or ridden a horse drawn street car to and from Hyde Park at first. Later, the Illinois Central Railroad came. It was bordered on the east side by Lake Michigan bog and swamp. It was not a public transportation system until 1906. The elevated line may have been operating by that time.

The Appalling Irishman

In 1906, Margaret Henrietta Rawlinson went to Chicago to visit family friends who had moved from England some years earlier. Cissie Sharp and her daughter, Frances, were also friends of Joe Warren=s. They attended St. Paul=s Episcopal Church at 49th and Dorchester in Hyde Park. Hettie met Joe at St. Paul=s, and it was love at first sight. Family legend is that Joe saw Hettie as she was walking out of the church, turned to Cissie Sharp and said, AThat=s the girl I=m going to marry.@ As things turned out, it wasn=t exactly as simple as that to get his plan.

Hettie finished her visit in Chicago and returned to Toronto. Joe went up to visit. The Rawlinsons were horrified. AA red headed Irishman!!@ Hettie was sent forthwith back to England to visit relations and to forget this Irish horror. She didn=t forget him. She came home from England with her mind unchanged, and they were married on November 11, 1908 in Toronto with a large wedding as befitted the daughter of an alderman. The marriage was held in the house the bride=s father had built in Rosedale seven years earlier.

Back in Chicago, Joe had been transferred from the Chicago location to Pittsburgh. He went by train to Pittsburgh, visited the city and its smoggy atmosphere, and promptly left. He went instead to the New York recruitment center and was accepted there.

Joe and Hettie had a short November honeymoon en route to their new home in East Orange, New Jersey. Margaret Elizabeth, their first child, was born ten months later, on September 25, 1909.

During the years from 1909 to 1912, Joe Warren was busy making himself a place in the Western Electric section of AT&T. He invented the electric fan. Once I assembled a snapshot album with pictures of the big dinner celebration for that invention. He also worked on the telephone, going to such places as Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands.

The Family Grows

When I was born in 1912, there were no heralding comets such as had led up to my sister Margaret=s birth. I arrived with a great deal of help from the doctor. For years I could feel the places where forceps had grabbed my skull. I was born hairless and scrawny and even worse, I was a girl, not the longed for son. My parents could not give me a name. The doctor registered me as Violet. When Joe and Hettie discovered this fact some time after my arrival, there was a long debate. Margaret was named for her grandmothers. A son was to be Joseph Rawlinson. Finally for me they decided on Beverley after the Englishman.

I was a scrawny infant, seeming to survive only on the juice pressed from roast beef, fed to me three times a day. I had something called Aintestinal indigestion.@ I often felt Dr. Cook was part of the family because he was in the house so often. I was never allowed to stay with my grandmother Rawlinson because of my hair color and my need for beef juice. It is hard to decide which she felt was my worse defect.