Evelyn
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Stories and memories
Evelyn Hyacinthe Freke Hewitt was born at 10 George Street, Westminster on 2 April 1896 although the story goes her mother decided she couldn’t love a child born on April 1st so she got out of bed and put the clock hands forward to after midnight. Evelyn officially arrived on the 2nd. While Victorians may have been making significant advancements in science and technology, they were still incredibly superstitious in daily life.
Evelyn fully admitted to being a tad naughty: “We were very strictly brought up and I was never popular with Mother who often walloped me. I gently goaded her, just to see her reaction. I was never insolent or rude as I didn’t want to upset dear Dad, but I learned how to push things to the limit while staying on the right side of the law. I wanted to have fun and laugh, and I was damned if I was going to let Mother’s disapproval stop me. I encouraged my siblings to join me in gently kicking against authority with some success, more so with Wyn than Sybil.
Sybil and I were packed off to school as soon as possible and I think Mother was thankful to be rid of me. We started at a school in Worcester Park to which we drove in the Victoria or Brougham carriage. Miss Walsh, the Headmistress, was baloney. If anyone told a lie they had to eat soot and go about with a black mouth. I remember forgetting to do my laundry once and was made to go to church with the laundry bag around my neck. When Dad heard of this, we were removed and sent to St Mary’s, Wantage. I was always in trouble and once forged the Chaplain’s name and sent a love letter to one of the girls enclosing the first primrose out of his garden. I remember being severely ticked off for that prank by Sister Anne Louise, the head nun."
Evelyn passed all her exams without having to do too much work and was good at games; she was in the cricket XI, the netball V and had a gym tunic festooned in badges. She was also good at enjoying herself and laughed her way through school with her many friends.
Eve recalls being presented at Court
"In 1914 when I was 19 and had left school, I was presented at the last Court before the Great War. I was such a gauche Deb for Mother to take round with her to smart London parties. I had large clumsy feet, hands with chilblains and was very tall while she was petite, very attractive and immaculately dressed. It must have been an awful bore and possibly very embarrassing for her. Mother was very clever at designing clothes on you, so my court dress and train were made at home with the help of a seamstress who lived in our street.
We had our first car – a green Daimler Silent Knight – at the time and on the appointed day, left home with Dad wearing his tight court dress breeches, carrying a tricorne hat. Mother was accompanied by a very smart American friend. We had to drive slowly up the Mall, around the Queen Victoria monument, down to Admiralty Arch and back again as part of the snaking procession past the curious crowds that lined the streets. Once we went inside we were all directed to the ‘Ladies’ but in those days there weren’t enough loos for so many people, so they erected screens with chamber pots behind them. Friends lent a hand to hold up our trains while we spent pennies.
As Dad was part of the Royal Household, Mother and I had a very privileged position in the throne room itself (only women were presented inside). It was the specified day when Debs had to wear three ostrich feathers in our hair kept in place by a small diamond or diamanté band, and a train from our shoulders, possibly nine feet long. We were shepherded to the throne room door where our trains were spread out behind us by two footmen (we carried them over our arms otherwise). Mother was first, then me, then the two footmen. There was an awful pause as I stood firmly on Mother’s train with my big feet, and she couldn’t move. In front of the King and Queen! Someone whispered urgently: “The train! The train!” and I jumped off it. I made a very deep and red-faced curtsy to the King, then the Queen and followed an infuriated Mother out with my train hooked back on my outstretched arm. Her fury broke out of earshot of the monarchy thank the Lord. A very nice Scottish friend of ours called George Ford, resplendent in a kilt and waiting for my Dad outside the chamber, saved my life by whisking me away to find some food."
Meeting her dashing Captain
"I had a lot of fun in London during the war. I’d been to India in 1917 and met lots of young men who had by this time returned home. One of them, Vivian Lloyd, was very amusing and a beautiful dancer. I was going out with him one night to the Ritz or the Savoy, or maybe it was the Criterion in Bond Street, when I was introduced to a man called Freddy Page-Roberts. I rather impetuously asked him to make a four with Vivian’s sister that night. He was 6’3”, blonde with blue eyes, most romantic and very handsome in his uniform and on crutches of all things. Irresistible!”
As well as being easy on the eye, Evelyn quickly saw Freddy as being a means of escape from her controlling mother. She snatched her chance and married Captain Frederick William Page-Roberts on 27 November 1917 in Westminster when she was 21 and he was 28.
One struggle after another
Evelyn and Freddy started married life as temporary lodgers in his parents' house at Strathfield Saye near Reading. Freddy soon became well enough to go back to part time work at the Ministry of Agriculture HQ in Whitechurch Place, but the couple also took to farming at Highlands Farm, Slinfold in West Sussex, a property they had bought at auction from John Guille Millais, the son of the famous artist Sir John Everett Millais. It became obvious that farming was not one of Freddy’s strengths, that Evelyn loathed the life and that the couple were struggling badly, so Eve very uncharacteristically offered them the money to build a family home called Sawyers Land in Silchester in 1924. Freddy took up chicken farming, leasing 29 acres of land from the church to accommodate his flock, and was listed under ‘Poulterers’ in the 1927 Kellys Directory. The family ate a lot of chicken and eggs, with a roasted bird being the children’s choice when it was time for their birthday treat. Their dog Ben would help select the right bird, holding it down with its paw until Freddy could pick it up.
Wyn: "Freddy was never a success as a farmer or businessman, with Evelyn doing most of the organising and hard labour at home and on the farm. This was all the more surprising as I fear with an affluent city upbringing she was not naturally cut out for poverty or country life. The family was desperately poor during the depression, and I understand the Smithers side of the family (Freddy’s sister Marjory was married to the Tory MP Sir Waldron Smithers) generously subsidised my sister’s brood, paying school fees and passing on cars they had replaced with new ones. I remember they had a scruffy bull-nosed Morris bearing the number OT 70 in the early 1930s. The only way to get it to start was to heat the plugs in the kitchen oven, get them in hot and hope for the best! One sometimes had to jump out and push it up the nearby hill at Mortimer West End. One Christmas, the village brass band played carols in their driveway and there was not a note or coin to give them which made poor Evelyn cry."
By 1936 Freddy, and more especially Evelyn had had enough and they moved from the country to 78 Warwick Square in Pimlico where another new venture beckoned. In partnership with Hubert Garfield Prickett (listed as ‘Fish Restaurant Manager’ in the 1939 census) they opened the first, very modern fish and chip shops in Westminster: one in Vauxhall Bridge Road, another in Vincent Square behind the Army & Navy Store with a third in the pipeline. They were called Pages Hot Fish and they used a fryer fuelled by gas rather than coal which had been invented by an old Marlborough friend of Freddy’s. Each restaurant had a manager to run it but Evelyn kept a close eye on the books and she habitually zipped through the till rolls, adding three columns of pounds, shillings and pence up in her head with ease. On opening night of the Vauxhall restaurant, the immediate family all turned up in celebratory black tie much to the surprise and confusion of the locals. It also got a passing mention in the Daily Mirror on 30 September 1937 by the journalist William Connor who wrote a gossip column called KEEP IT DARK under the pen name CASSANDRA: ‘The influence of modern design has reached even fish and chips, for the lettering over the shop window was as fancy a piece of work as I’ve seen for many a day. Somehow I think I’d sooner have the good old chalked-up notices on the steaming window glass. But then I was always a reactionary.’
After Freddy died in December 1938, Evelyn struggled on in the restaurant partnership with Prickett until their shop in Vauxhall Road went up in flames during the first bombing raid over London and they lost all their stock. She sold up Warwick Square in late 1939 and downsized to a flat share in 11b Albert Hall Mansions, SW7 before she and Sybil took on 9 Evelyn Mansions, Carlisle Place in October 1943. She later met David Dally and married him in 1950. By all accounts, it was a very happy marriage.