FIVE GENERATIONS

Southland Times, Issue 19311, 1 August 1924, Page 8

FIVE GENERATIONS

PATRIARCHAL OLD HOUSE. WONDERFUL FAMILY RECORD. Lamberhurst is a sleepy little village about eight miles from Tunbridge Wells, and until a few weeks ago few people except those living in these Kentish woodlands had ever heard of it. But the birth of little Queenie Barrett, a dark-haired mite, has changed all that. For when she made her appearance at Woodbine Cottage she brought the total of generations of a single family living there up to five, and far and wide people have been interested in this long-lived chain.

“When I called at the cottage,” says a correspondent of the Daily Chronicle, “the first person I saw was Miss Queenie gurgling on the lap of her young mother, who is 22 years of age. The next person I saw was old Mi's Bailey, who is 83 and still going strong. Mrs Bailey is Queenie’s great-great-grandmother, and also living in the house to link up the generations are Queenie’s young mother and, when he is home on leave, her sailor father, her young uncle, and two-year-old aunt, Joan, Mr and Mrs William Waters, the grandparents, and Mr Thomas Waters, old Mrs Bailey’s son, now aged 64.

“Old Mrs Bailey’s family think nothing of this record. Why, I’ve got six brothers and sisters living in Kent, and all drawing the old age pension,’ the old lady told me. We’re a long-lived lot. My father was 90 when he died ,and my mother 88.’ The great-great-grandmother of this happy family has never been to London, and does not very much want to go. She was born a few miles from Lamberhurst, and has lived at Woodbine Cottage over 30 years.

“A few years ago there was some question of the old lady having to leave the cottage in which she has lived happily for so many years. Mrs William Waters, a capable countryman in a blue print frock, told me how Mrs Bailey’s descendants put their heads together and decided to buy the cottage and set up a sort of patriarchal establishment, so that the old granny need not turn out. When grandmother was a girl, she told me, this cottage and the other next to it were barns, but it is many a year since they were turned into cottages.”

Mr William Waters is an ex-soldier who was wounded in France and receives a small pension. He is unable to do heavy work, and as a means of adding to the family income he keeps bees. In fact, all five generations seem to be attached to the land, and to look to it to keep them.”