The Westerman family

 Catherine Westerman was just a name on our register, a widow admitted to the Charterhouse on 2 July 1896 who died on 5 November 1910.  But as with so many people, a bit of digging reveals an interesting life.

Catherine Brownrigg was born in Hull in 1829 and married Joseph Robert Westerman in 1850.  The young couple were both from typical poor, working families.  On the 1851 census they were living on Waterworks St and Joseph was a hairdresser.

Waterworks St

Ten years later, with two children, they had moved to Howard St in Sutton.  Joseph had a job as a foreman in a cotton mill and Catherine was working as a dressmaker.  Such career changes were common enough.  Men took work where they could find it, and this may have been a step up in income.  But Joseph was more restless than most.  By 1871 they had moved to Linwood Terrace in Sutton and he had become a grocer.  Of course, we only have these ten-yearly snapshots, so there may have been other upheavals as well.

But soon after this the Westermans' lives took a distinctly unusual turn.  Joseph became a shipbuilder.  That must surely have required capital investment; where did he get it from?  The 1881 census shows the couple living at 17 John St with 4 of their children and a servant.  

John St today

We know that Joseph had gone into partnership with William Sanderson as shipbuilders but that this partnership was dissolved in 1879.  We also know that Joseph had a shipyard and dry dock in Hull.  

I can only find two ships built by or for Joseph R Westerman, both of them sailing ketches.  The first is the 71-ton ketch City of London, built in Rye for Westerman in 1883.  That was followed by another ketch, the 79-ton City of Manchester, built by Westerman in 1884.

But that was the last.  On 12 July 1884 Joseph Robert Westerman died of cholera, aged only 52, at his home on John St.  He was not a poor man.  In his will he left £1,910 19s 2d, worth about £126.5k today.  His executors were Catherine and their eldest son, John Albert.  But John Albert died in April 1885, aged only 25.  Two daughters, Mabel and Kate, also died in 1902 and1909.

What happened to Catherine in the aftermath of Joseph's death is something of a mystery.  Two Hull directories, Kelly's (1889) and Bulmer's (1892) show her living at 5 Reed St, Hull, in an "apartment".  But the 1891 census shows her living with a family in Streatham, London, as a "monthly nurse sick".  The term "monthly nurse" usually meant a nurse tending a mother after her confinement; there was a new baby in the Streatham household.  Why was Catherine there?  Was this a temporary favour to someone she knew?  If so, one would expect her to be described as a visitor rather than a servant, as the census has it.  Whatever the reason, it seems that Catherine was not the comfortably-off widow that Joseph's will would lead us to expect.  Perhaps his legacy was consumed by debts.

She was awarded a room in the Charterhouse on 2 July 1896 and lived there for 14 years before her death on 5 November 1910, aged 81.  Her name (as Katherine, a spelling we find nowhere else) was added to the family gravestone in the Hull General Cemetery.  This no longer exists, a casualty of the City Council's remarkable act of vandalism in the 1970s, but the inscription was recorded by the EYFHS.  The life of Catherine Westerman reminds us that behind every name in a list is a person with a fascinating story.

*Thanks to Bill Longbone for some of this research.