Susannah Phillips & Beatrice Phillips
The sisters of our great-grandmother
Our great-grandmother Catherine AM Phillips had four siblings, two brothers and two sisters. Their parents, Catherine and Ebenezer Phillips, were both from large farming families and raised their five children at Bryngwyn Farm on Nash Road in Newport. The farm comprised of a comfortable farmhouse with 28 acres of pastureland and a valuable orchard.
In this story we are looking at Catherine’s two younger sisters, Susannah born 1873, and Beatrice born 1877. Although the family were financially stable, childhood would still have held some challenges for the girls. Their father had several brushes with the law, usually for alcohol related issues, and was fined for not ensuring the children went to school. The children also lost their mother at a young age after Catherine Phillips Snr. died in 1896.
Susannah Phillips
Susannah Emily Phillips was born in October 1873 and baptised in Christchurch on the 7th December 1873. She was born at Spitty Farm in Newport but as a young girl the family moved to nearby Bryngwyn Farm. She appears on the census in 1881 but is not present in 1891, when she would have been 18, and there is no confirmed trace of her after that.
Several family researchers have linked our Susannah to a 17-year-old namesake who died near Pontypool in 1890. We aren’t convinced this is the right person as her middle name doesn’t appear on the death record, and also the location doesn’t seem an obvious choice. We have examined all death and marriage certificates that match the name, but to date we don’t have a definite match for Susannah.
Beatrice Phillips
Beatrice Rebekah (often spelt Rebecca) Phillips was born at Spitty Farm in 1877 and baptised in Nash on 18th March 1877. The family then moved to nearby Bryngwyn Farm where she grew up with her siblings. On the 1891 census, aged 14, Beatrice was helping her mother on the farm and was not in education. Beatrice continued to live at home following the death of her mother in 1896. This changed in 1900 when she married a man named Edwin Heckley Hogg and left home.
Edwin Hogg hailed from Bradford in Yorkshire and was born 18th November 1866, the son of James Hogg, a policeman who later rose to the rank of Superintendent. As a young man Edwin worked as an Errand Boy and by 1891 was a Timekeeper on the railways in Yorkshire. It may have been this job that brought him to Wales where he met Beatrice.
The couple started their married life at number 11, Law Street South in Pembroke Dock, where Edwin worked as a Cashier for a railway contractor. It was whilst living in West Wales that their daughter Alice was born in 1901. Alice Hogg was baptised in Pembroke Dock on 19th June 1901. By the 1911 census the family were back in Monmouthshire and were living at Court Perrott Farm in Llandegveth, where Edwin was a farmer of 100 acres. Edwin had no prior farming experience so we would imagine they had support from the wider Phillips family.
The couple lived at various places including New House Farm in Caerwent, but by the 1921 census had settled at Spitty Farm in Lliswerry. The Hoggs succeeded Herbert Haime at the farm. Although hard to imagine today, this was a rural area of Newport surrounded by other farms including Bryngwyn and Upper Lakes. Although in a sign of what was to come, Pill Farm had been redeveloped for the Orb Steelworks.
By moving to Spitty Farm, Beatrice returned to the place where she was born. The 1921 census showed that Alice was still at home aged 20, and James Kerr, a farm worker, also lived on the property. Edwin was still farming at Spitty when he died in January 1946, leaving his estate to his wife. Beatrice continued to live at Spitty Farm for many years until her death in 1970.
Spitty Farm was redeveloped for housing in the 1970s, although the original Spitty Lane (now spelled Spytty) which once led to the farmhouse, still exists. Beatrice’s daughter Alice married John (Jack) Waters in 1927, he was from a notable farming family and there were many links between the two families. John worked as a farmer and they later settled at the Moorlands in Goldcliff. The couple had two children, Rosemary, and Richard Phillips. John died in 1973 and Alice in 1986, at the age of 85.