In this article we’re looking at another two of the photographic portraits in the collection of glass plate negatives from Tom Carlyle Leaman’s studio at no.7 The Corridor. Research has led us to find out about the life and career of Bessie’s husband, a draper at Jolly’s department store.
Bessie White (feature picture) was born in 1870 in Bristol, the daughter of a commercial traveller. In 1893 she married Anthony Gunniss Franklin Spurr (born 1862 in Devon, a farmer’s son) and they had two children, Muriel (born 1896, pictured) and Norman (born 1899). The portraits of Bessie and Muriel can be dated to c.1898. Bessie Franklin Spurr wears a tightly-corseted dress with exquisite black jet beading on the bodice, and narrow fitted sleeves with huge puffs.
Little Muriel wears a very elaborate and rather overwhelming bonnet with ribbon pleating and fur, a stiff-looking coat with puffed sleeves, and a fur collar and muff. Her mother’s portrait has a plain background, but Muriel is seated in front of one of the studio backdrops, showing a lake with trees; you can make out the bottom of the roller where it rests on the floor.
Unfortunately we do not have a portrait of Anthony Franklin Spurr. At 18 he was a Draper’s Apprentice in Hitchin, Herts., and ten years later (1891) had worked his way up to Draper’s Assistant at Jolly’s in Bath. At this date he lived-in (over the shop) at 12 Milsom Street. James Jolly and his son Thomas had opened their linen drapers shop in 1830/31. They gradually acquired more shop premises in Milsom Street, to create the enormous shop that we know today (recently closed, but now acquired by Morley’s and to re-open in 2026 as Jolly’s). In the 1901 Census, Jolly’s had 46 employees as boarders in rooms above 11-14 Milsom Street, and there would have been more in their other properties. By 1911, the Census records Anthony Franklin Spurr (aged 49) as promoted to Draper and now a Director at Jolly’s (and also in 1921 and 1939). Perhaps the clothes that Bessie and Muriel are wearing for their portraits were from Jollys? (a staff discount, no doubt). Anthony later became a Bath City Councillor for Lyncombe Ward and was Chairman of the Waterworks Committee.
The family lived for many years in Bloomfield Road, Bear Flat, where Bessie died in 1933. The Bath Blitz Memorial Project website shows that their house and many other properties nearby received direct hits from bombs in the Bath Blitz of April 1942. The Spurr home, Selworthy Cottage, is recorded as “major damage, demolish”.
Muriel married Arthur G. Saxty in 1923. But she divorced him in 1933 due to his having an affair – a brave and relatively unusual step for a woman at the time – so during the 1930s and throughout the war she was back at home with her widower father. She re-married to Edwin Davison Hawthorn in 1944, and died in 1984. Her brother Norman died in 1956 and her father Anthony a year after in 1957 aged 95.
Ann Cullis
Trustee & Friend March2025
Thanks to Alison Phillips for her very detailed research on the Spurr family, and to Kirsten Elliot for the research into Jolly’s.