The Matron
Each set of almshouses was overseen by a matron living in a lodge on site, although the Bailiff visited the rooms once a quarter. Responsible for looking after the residents, she was also entrusted with ensuring that they kept the rules; maintained their rooms cleanliness; did not stay out after 10pm at night; and applied for the Bailiff’s permission if they wanted to go away for more than a day.
Mrs. Ann Starling
Mrs. Anne Starling, née Rossiter, was appointed in 1839. Her background indicated that she was not from the poor. Born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset in 1788, as a young teenager she moved to London to join her older sister in service with Lady Vincent before becoming maid to Lady Walpole. Her 10 years’ employment “was nothing but one long round of late hours and enervating gaiety; for my lady was a famous Court beauty and leader of fashion, whose dresses cost £500 apiece, who gave grand parties, and visited everywhere. Mrs. Starling frequently had to dress her mistress for two or three balls and receptions of a night. When Lady Walpole gave a dance, her maid presided at the ice and refreshment tables till long after chanticleer (cockrell) proclaimed the morn”.
Still the grandest scene she ever saw, one she never forgot, was at the Duke of Devonshire’s in Piccadilly when the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia, and Field-Marshal Blücher were entertained at a magnificent fête. Amongst Mrs. Starling’s other reminiscences were the first gaslighting she saw, “And how it did surprise us all, after being so used to the old oil lamps. We thought wonders would never cease”. Engaged to a tradesman’s son, Lady Walpole bought Ann Starling’s wedding dress and furnished a house for the couple, even to the silver. Sadly, her fiancé died of consumption a few days before their wedding. Happily, after a few years, she fell in love again and married, moving with her husband to Birmingham where he worked for the Mining Copper Company.
Following his death after a works’ injury, Ann Starling was left with children to support and “but for the kindness of one of the firm she might have found herself in necessitous circumstances. It was through his instrumentality that she was appointed matron of one of the lodges of Lench’s Trust. So much satisfaction did she give that she was she was appointed matron of one of the lodges of Lench’s Trust. So much satisfaction did she give that she was afterwards entrusted with the supervision of all the almshouses under the Trust”.
First serving as matron of the Hospital Street almshouses, Ann Starling’s two young sons lived with her. She then went on to the Ladywood almshouses, retiring in her 70s. After a time with one of her family, she travelled to America to visit a son. She was 84 and stayed there for two years. Returning to Birmingham, she rented a house in Ladywood and took in a boarder, before moving back into the local almshouses.
“... if she had her choice of the whole town she could not have a more congenial habitation... where every want is studied by a kind matron and the nurse who never leaves her, and where smiling faces gather round, and chase away the gloom from the long winter of an eventful life. How many people half of her age are heard to say that the dregs of life are not worth having. These querulous pessimists should visit Ladywood, if they wish to see an edifying picture of old age and perfect contentment .”
On Ann Starling’s 100th birthday, there were ‘high jinks’ and “she sat in state all day receiving visitors, chatted gaily to numerous Edgbaston ladies who drove up in their carriages with congratulatory birthday cards, and told the long story of her life a dozen times over without showing the slightest symptom of fatigue”. Boasting that she never had an ailment in her life or needed a walking stick, she stressed that she didn’t like to lie in bed late like an old woman. One of her rules was “to make sure and have a good meat dinner whatever happens”.
Although abstemious, she wasn’t an abstainer, and enjoyed stout and sherry in moderation, but had a strong dislike to spirits, with nothing disgusting her so much as gin drinking among women. In 1891 aged 103, she died quietly in her sleep but was praised as instigating “many of the improvements which have made Lench’s Trust the model institution it is today”. (Birmingham Daily Mail, 16 April 1888, Weston Mercury, 3 October 1891, and Censuses).
