They certainly seemed to have fallen on hard times after the death of their father! 😮
I had a reply from the Devon archives....
This is a Devon Heritage Centre archivist replying to your enquiry from home, where I am still working for 4/5 of the week.
First of all, to answer your query about records of St. Margaret’s Orphanage in Exeter, we do not hold any here in our archives, and I doubt very much that any survive anywhere, if it was a small, fairly short-lived girls’ orphanage, without affiliation to any larger children’s homes organisation – which I suspect it was.
In past years, when there were a larger number of archivists employed in our office, a former colleague and I compiled folders of information on the various children’s homes in Devon, including in Exeter (often prompted by enquiries from researchers). Because we don’t hold any orphanage or children’s homes records in our archives, as they have simply never been deposited here, we were trying to at least find out some background about the institutions to help people with their research.
But until now, I had never heard of St. Margaret’s Orphanage. It was not a home which we came across at that time.
I found the entry on the 1901 census myself to check what it was like, and I see that it was a relatively small girls’ home in St James parish (which was a 19th century parish created out of St Sidwell’s parish, just outside the old Exeter city precincts to the east of the city, and now a suburban area).
It housed girls from all over the country between 16 and 6 years of age, with only one matron and a parlour-maid on the staff. I presume that the older inmates did the rest of the domestic tasks. I gather that based on its name, it was associated with the Church of England, and I then spent a bit of time looking online at digitised Exeter newspapers (accessible through the genealogical subscription website Find My Past, though digitised through the British Newspaper Archive project commissioned by the British Library).
I only found one possible newspaper entry which probably related to the orphanage, in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette dated 22 August 1903 – it stated that “the children attending St Margaret’s Home Sunday School Exeter were entertained by Lady Harrison at Newcourt. The weather was fine and a very pleasant time was spent.”
By 1905 there was a well-known private girls’ school in Exeter called St Margaret’s, for middle-class girls, and there are many entries relating to the school in the newspapers - but I couldn’t find anything relating to the orphanage which bore (or had borne) the same name.
I did find a newspaper funeral report for the widow of the Ven. Archdeacon Woollcombe, a Church of England clergyman, which was attended in May 1900 by Miss F. Spargo (Fanny Spargo) who was the matron at St. Margaret’s in the 1901 census. So that confirms the orphanage’s links to the Church of England.
Mrs. Woollcombe may have been a supporter of C of E orphanages in Exeter, as there were also girls who had been former inmates of St Martha’s Orphanage (which had been in Exeter) who were mentioned in the funeral report, as sending flowers.
The only records which survive for inmates of children’s homes in Exeter are for those homes run by Dr Barnardo’s, and those run by the 'Waifs and Strays Society' (now the Church of England Children's Society), one of Britain's largest child care agencies from the late nineteenth century up to the present day. They hold their own records centrally and have their own websites. St Margaret’s Orphanage does not appear to have been associated with either of these societies.
It is possible that the orphanage will be listed in the Kelly’s Devonshire Directory for 1901 but generally only a name and address is listed in such a directory.
I imagine that like the rest of these girls’ homes run by the Church of England, the aim was to prepare the girls to work in occupations ‘fitting to their station in life’, particularly training them to become domestic servants. I gather that in 1911, judging from the census, Amy Wetton was working as a servant.
Jan Wood
Archivist
Devon Archives and Local Studies Service
