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Maud Ethel Bone (MEB) was the second child of Thomas Henry Bone and Annie (1) Woodhurst, and was born in 1897 - the year of Queen Victoria's Second Jubilee. Her birth certificate [Birth Index: Pancras 1b 146, 1897 (Sept)] states that she was born at her parents' address 44, Oakford Road, Kentish Town on June 23rd 1897. The informant was her father who described himself as an engine fitter journeyman. Although MEB liked to pass herself off in later life as a true Cockney "born within the sound of Bow Bells", this is possibly belied by the fact of her birthplace being more than four miles from Bow.
She was baptised at Homerton St. Barnabas on July 25th 1897. Her family address was given in the register as 54, Roding Road (whereas it had been given as No. 58 when her brother Thomas Richard had been baptised two years earlier) and her father's occupation as engineer's labourer.
The 1901 Census finds her living with her parents at 183, Dartmouth Park Hill, Tufnell Park in Kentish Town.
Owing to her father's quests for promotion and better living conditions the family moved around a lot, but always within the North London area - MEB related that they had moved "up to a dozen times". She remembered having lived at houses in Hendon (where her younger sister Doris Olive was born in 1902), in Elsden Road (in Tottenham, where one of her brothers Harold Edward (1) was born in 1905) and in a "Bruce Road" (perhaps actually referring to the district Bruce Grove). One of her earliest memories was the celebration of the Coronation of King Edward following the death of Victoria in 1901.
Her schooling came to an end when she was 13 years old, at which time she had been attending the school situated at the confluence of Burghley Road and Oakford Road. She wanted to stay on longer at school, but her father made her leave to look for work. Her first job entailed making false teeth for an American company named Claudius Ash, which she believed was the first company to make them. She spent at least three years there until she was aged about 17. With the 1914-18 War now in progress she took a new job at another factory, stitching belts and webbing for service uniforms. Here she had to work a 56-hour week - six days a week - and to spend a further two hours each day on the Underground travelling to and from work. She kept this up for a year, after which - in order to reduce her travelling - she took a new job near Goodge Street, working on a "47K" ( or "48K") machine making the metal interiors of helmets; but now she had to work 14 hours each day of the week, starting at 8 a.m. and continuing until 10 p.m., or even later if warranted by the demands of the War production effort.
By 1915 her mother had been sent away to a convalescent home in Weston-super-Mare to recover from alcohol abuse, entailing the break-up of the family. MEB and the younger children were variously taken into the care of other family members, primarily their aunts Maude Edith and Blanche (1), both of whom lived relatively nearby - the former at 15, Warrender Road in Islington and the latter at Morpeth Lodge, Wick Lane in Bow. Thereafter Maude Edith refused to have any association with Annie (1). Both MEB and Doris Olive spent periods with both these aunts, which is probably why MEB looked upon this sister ever afterwards as her closest family confidante. It was during this time that MEB's father died suddenly from a heart attack at the relatively young age of 48. Annie (1), being still in Weston-super-Mare, was unable to attend his funeral.
On the day of that funeral MEB somehow came to meet, for the first time, an Irishman named Henry (2) Hanlon, familiarly known as "Harry". He was a detective employed by and on the railways, a Protestant inclined towards Orange politics who had emigrated to England from Bray, a small coastal town in the Irish Republic about ten miles south of Dublin. About a year afterwards they married. The marriage certificate [Marriage Index: Islington 1b 536, 1916 (Dec)] states that the wedding took place at the Parish Church of St. George in Tufnell Park, Islington on November 18th 1916. She was just 19 years old and he was 23. Their place of residence was cited as Maude Edith's home in Warrender Road. The witnesses were Maude Edith's first husband William Ward and Annie (1)'s brother William (2) Woodhurst. This church has long since been deconsecrated and now serves as a local drama and community centre known as St. George's Theatre; it is situated just a couple of streets away from Holloway Prison.
It seems that, soon after marrying, MEB and Harry took up residence at 91, St. Paul's Road, Camden Square in North-West London, for that is their address as cited on the birth certificate of their first child. The birth of this daughter took place, however, not in London but at 25, William Street in Holyhead in the Welsh county of Anglesey. This was the address of Harry's brother William Hanlon.
Some time during the next year or so, Harry was transferred to Manchester by his railway employers. So he, MEB and their child left London and moved to 21, Upper Moss Lane in the Hulme district of Manchester. This street seems no longer to exist as such - probably it was eliminated either by the bombing raids during the Second World War or else by the massive redevelopments that took place after it. Other members of the Hanlon family were also living at the same address, including Harry's mother and his unmarried sister Lilian. At this new home MEB produced, over the period 1919-21, three further daughters, the second of whom died in infancy.
By 1921 the marriage had run into serious difficulties, resulting in MEB leaving her home and taking refuge in the house of some friends nearby. In order to maintain herself she took up work in the linen-making trade with Lilian, but otherwise avoided the Hanlons. In 1922 she was shocked to learn that Harry had returned to Bray, taking the rest of the family with him. From that point on she lost all contact with, and knowledge of, her daughters for the next 63 years.
Not long afterwards MEB met a younger, unmarried man named Frank Livesey. He had been born in Salford on November 3rd 1895. They became close and soon afterwards set up home together at 49, Monton Street, Moss Side in Hulme. In 1924 they produced there two non-identical twin daughters. Presently they moved to Salford where in 1926 they produced a son. In 1928 one of the twin daughters died from diphtheria, contracted from her father who had been a symptomless carrier of the disease.
MEB and Frank carried on with their lives in Manchester for several more years, but around 1934 they decided to make a new life in the South. They paid a brief but tempestuous visit to MEB's mother in Leicester before moving down to Middlesex. For the first few months they stayed at the home in Harrow of Doris Olive and her husband Arthur Ernest Bailey, and then moved into a newly-built property - 24, Dawlish Drive in Ruislip - which Arthur had bought. Here they stayed for the remainder of the Thirties. Eventually the Second World War arrived, and Frank built an air-raid shelter in the garden to protect the family against the bombing raids on London (which began in August 1940). Perhaps it was partly due to these events that in 1940 the Liveseys decided to migrate again, this time to Builth Wells in Breconshire, Wales.
It was at Builth that Frank died on June 14th 1943 at the age of 47. In 1944 MEB and her two children returned to Ruislip, only to find that their former home in Dawlish Drive had been requisitioned and that all the possessions they had left there in storage has disappeared, for ever. For some time they were compelled to lodge in rather dire conditions at various places around Ruislip.
By 1945 MEB had begun a relationship with a widower and bus conductor named Alphonso Cooke, who was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire on January 14th 1889 [Birth Index: Doncaster 9c 715, 1889 (March)]. He married MEB in 1945 [Marriage Index: Brentford 3a 986, 1945 (June)] in the belief that she was merely a widowed Mrs. Livesey, knowing nothing at that time - or at any time thereafter - of her Hanlon history. Nor did MEB know (apparently) that Harry was still alive, making her union with Alphonso bigamous. It is a remarkable quirk of history that Brentford was where her grandfather Richard William (1) had also married bigamously 83 years earlier.
MEB and Alphonso lived in the Heston, Hounslow and Hanworth districts of Middlesex until the mid-1950s when, both having retired, they moved first to a tiny, rented upper-floor flat in West Looe in Cornwall, and then to a somewhat similar flat 2, Shutta View in Shutta, East Looe. MEB had moved to Looe to be near the family of her now-married daughter, then living in a village called Trewidland a few miles away. In 1957 she and Alphonso moved to a ground-floor flat in a neighbouring property called Elmina, and her daughter's family simultaneously moved from Trewidland into 2, Shutta View.
In the 1960s they moved from Looe to their final home together, a bungalow in Four Marks, Hampshire owned by one of Alphonso's three sons by his previous marriage. In 1984 it was discovered that MEB's Hanlon daughters were alive in England and that Harry had not died until 1973 [Death Index: Coventry 9c 1873, 1973 (Sept)]. In June 1985 MEB was taken, in secret, to visit her long-lost daughters and many of their own descendants. Alphonso knew nothing of this and in early 1986 he died aged 97 [Death Index: Basingstoke 20 230, 1986 (March)].
MEB now moved out of the bungalow and into Orchard House, a council-run home for the elderly in nearby Alton. In June 1994 she was accidentally knocked over by a man running along the pavement and suffered a serious femoral fracture. At the same time she was found to have a perforated gastric ulcer. She made a remarkably good recovery, however, and resumed her normal pattern of life until her death from a coronary attack in Alton Community Hospital on January 16th 1996, aged 98. She was cremated at Aldershot on January 25th. Her funeral service was attended by just six persons, all family members.