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Emily Alice Beardsworth (nee Farnham)

Julie Jakeway wrote in January 2019 with this charming photo: This is a photo of my grandmother, Emily Alice Beardsworth, on the Great West Road in 1924. Emily Alice reminisced about her time as a lamplighter in Brentford at some time between 1910 - 1917. Do you have any information about lamplighters in Brentford? I have already noted the reference to lamplighting in the Dear family of Brentford on the website. I would be interested to know who employed them, the routes allocated, rates of pay, etc.

Webmistress notes

Julie's email reminded me of a photo on the site showing a slim lady up a ladder attending to a gaslamp: Emily Rebecca Goddard (nee Carr). She worked for the Brentford Gaslight & Coke Company, and was employed to clean and trim the gas street lamps.

A look at the British Newspaper Archive on Findmypast shows some councils employed lamplighters but a reference to a Brentford lamplighter shows he was employed by the Brentford Gaslight & Coke Company; it seems likely Emily Alice was too. Edmund King's blog has a compilation of newspaper items about lamplighters and at the end are some useful links.

Julie aded:
Emily Beardsworth became stout after the birth of her two babies, so it is possible that she, like Emily Carr, was capable of climbing ladders in the years of WW1 - I do have photos of her wedding, and photos of her in the years preceding it, so can verify she was slim during her teenage years!

Also see Julie's A Wartime Romance, the story of a wartime romance between a Brentford girl, Joan Beardsworth, and her Welsh fiance Ray Llewellyn, who married in 1944.

In 2024 Julie's book My Grandmother: Emily Alice and her Farnham family was published as an e-book available through Amazon.

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Page published January 2019; updated June 2024