| Notes |
- Census Listings;
1861 Laburnam Place, Bellis Street, Edgbaston, daughter. age 6. (61-383)
Emily married her eldest brother's best friend, William Pitt, a lawyer's clerk who died at the early age of 43. She and William had three daughters - Ethel, Nan, and Dorothy. Dorothy married Keith Dannett, a photographer, and lived at Thames Ditton. Keith had studios in Brighton, Croydon and in 1949 in Surbiton and in the late 1920s became President of the Royal Photographic Society.
Emily Pitt in the late 1920s she was a tiny, asthmatic, elderly lady with a parchment skin living most of the year in London flats with her crippled daughter Ethel and Ethel's former business partner Sister Clausen (nieceof Sir George Clausen, the landscape painter). They often moved, taking over the ends of leases. They also rented (?10 a year) a cottage on Caldey Island, near Tenby. Emily and her daughter, Ethel, had been in the nursing homes business.
Emily trained as a nurse at the time when surgery was being revolutionised by the introduction of Lister's Antiseptic Spray and was the senior of two night nurses at Birmingham General Hospital. Later, after the death of her husband, she opened a
nursing home at 16 Peak Hill Avenue, Sydenham, South London, under the patronage of Sir James Bruce (Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Alexander). In 1901 she was living there with her daughters, Florence (aged 17) and Ethel (aged (16) plus two patients and a housemaid. It is reported that Emily at one time had another nursing home at Hindhead, Surrey.
Emily related three interesting events :-
(i) She successfully hid the Chinese revolutionary Dr Sun Yat Sen (the first President of China after the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty in 1911) from the Chinese Tongs in her nursing home for two years, following a failed uprising in 1895. He had been brought there by Sir James.
(ii) Sir James later brought a feeble-minded young aristocrat to be a permanent resident only for him to throw himself over a balcony to his death. Unknown to Emily, the young man had been earlier certified and as the home was not qualified to care for the insane the coroner recommended that Emily lose her nursing home licence.
(iii) In the years preceding WW1, great embarrassment was caused to Emily by her brother Samuel's son persisting in leaving passengers' luggage which he had stolen at London railway stations, his principal means of livelihood.
Ethel and her partner Clausen operated a nursing home at Easy Row, Birmingham in the 1920s. Later they moved to elegant premises, The Surgical Nursing Home, 84 Hagley Road, under the patronage of Sir Gilbert Darling, Dean of Birmingham University Medical School. But by the late 1920s Ethel's hip condition and Clausen's arthritis forced them into retirement. They, together with Emily, spent the years of WW2 on Caldey Island.
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1854 - 1945 (91 years)
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