Strictly Come Dancing darling Rose Ayling-Ellis was moved to tears on BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, as she uncovered a “really difficult” piece of her ancestry.
During her heartfelt journey into her family’s past, Rose unearthed the tale of her great-great-great-grandmother Agnes, who ran a pub in the early 1900s. She headed to Aston Tavern in Birmingham seeking more clues and discovered that after losing her first husband, Agnes tied the knot again in an extravagant do right in the pub garden, only to be widowed a second time three years later, with her second husband leaving her a sumptuous £1,500.
Back in a time when a woman slinging drinks caused quite a stir amid societal panics about booze, Rose was deeply touched to find a bedroom at the now hotel-housed tavern named in honor of Agnes.
Overcome with emotion, Rose lifted a glass in tribute at the pub, letting slip: “I just feel really privileged to learn so much about this woman. So, to Agnes… I just want to say cheers, and thank you. I don’t know why I’m getting emotional about that! Because I feel like it must have been really difficult to cope with two deaths of her husbands,” reports the Mirror.
She continued, celebrating Agnes’ tenacity, “But she’s resilient. It’s not about her husbands. It’s about herself, and it’s about who she is and what she wants to do and she’s just doing it. And I like that. I have nothing but massive respect for her.”
Agnes, aiming to ramp up the rep of her pub, introduced all sorts like singalongs and a bowling club stuff that historian Julie-Marie Strange said was pretty cunning. “She’s using the pub in really strategic ways,” she observed.
This revelation had Rose over the moon. Cheering, she quipped: “I like that she’s sociable, she’s a feminist, she’s a businesswoman. She’d throw all these clubs, and she’s a mother to six children! She had a lot going on, but she did it all.”
Rose was gobsmacked to learn from her gran that her great-great-grandparents James and Ada were not short on offspring they had a staggering 17 kids!
(Image: BBC/Alison Gair/Unknown)
Sadly, two passed away young. James, who had lost one hand replaced with a hook possibly due to a railway accident, as many relatives had railway jobs.
Rose pondered, “I don’t know what happened, but possibly he’d been working on the railway and had some sort of accident. Because lots of family members worked on the railway, but I don’t know. He’d lost his hand. When he was at home he didn’t have a glove on.”
Rose uncovered that this branch of her tree lived on the breadline, in digs next to a workhouse where even though they coughed up rent, they had to keep shtum and stick to the shadows.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
