provided for the children varies almost very day. Monday there is boiled beef; Tuesday, soup, with a good proportion of milk in it; Wednesday, rice-milk with treacle, Thursday, they have boiled leg of mutton; the following day they have soup again, and on Saturday bacon; On Sundays they always dine on rice with treacle in order that as few as possible may be kept from attending public worship. The Orphans breakfast at eight o'clock, dine at one and take tea at six.....Then there are the washing places. They are furnished with baths; and all around the walls ere hung bags containing the brush and comb belonging to each child, and the number of the said child painted over each (The child's number referred to here is the number of the child's bed). The greatest care seemed to be taken to insure thorough cleanliness in the children, and to guard against the spread of infectious complaints, should they at any time exist.....the Girls are instructed in reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, geography, English history, a little of general history, and in all kinds of useful needlework and household work...there is evidently a more earnest desire to educate and discipline he mind, and to draw out the kindly affections, than to cram the head with a large variety of knowledge, which may be, to say the least, of very questionable utility to children in their sphere of life....one noblem(a)n observed that the writing from dictation of some of the children exceeded those which he had lately inspected at one of our large National Institutions. As regards the religious teaching imparted to these destitute children, it may be well to state, that the most diligent efforts are made to render them familiar with their Bible. The great doctrines of religion, in which all Evangelical Christians agree, are carefully taught them, without, so far as we can learn, the slightest sectarian bias.......As regards the Orphan girls, Mr. Muller gives us the following particulars :- "Our am" says he, "is to keep them till they shall have been sufficiently qualified for a situation....We uniformly prefer fitting the girls for service, instead of apprenticing them to a business, as being generally better for their body and soul.....if the girls give us satisfaction while under our care, so that we can recommend them to a situation, they are fitted out for the place, at the expense of the Establishment. The girls enerally remain under our care until they are seventeen or eighteen years old".....as a general rule the number of applications made to Mr. Muller...for the girls as servants..is so much above the supply as to afford a full opportunity for advantageous selection.
Elizabeth stayed in the Orphanage at Bristol or perhaps in an associated house in nearby Chipping Sodbury until she reached the age of 17. She was "dismissed" on the 19th February 1874 with he following official record :
"2179 Elizabeth Rebecca Bryan, admitted under No. 2403 on the 5th June (error, should read January) 1869, born on the 29th June 1857 at Grantham,was sent, 19th February, 1874, as Housemaid, to Mrs. Parsons, Melbourne House, Blackheath, London. A believer."
This was standard practice. At present I know nothing else about Elizabeth's time in service but, six years later, by 1880 she is back in the Hartshorn area preparing for marriage to my GGrandfather Charles Stubbs. One imagines that perhaps Elizabeth might have got to know Charles while paying a presumably rare visit to her Aunt and Uncle Lloyd. There may have been some acquaintence between the Lloyd/Bryan and Stubbs families in that Mary Hill, my GGGrandmother and wife of my GGGrandfather John Stubbs (to become Elizabeth's mother-in-law) had been Christened at Hartshorn (and presumably born there) in 1827. Further, John Stubbs nephew, Joseph Clulow, son of his sister Susan, and therefore Charles' cousin was living a few doors from the Lloyds cottage in Hartshorn by 1881. It is in this social millieu that courtship may well have taken place.
