This is another of the photographic portraits in the Museum’s collection of glass plate negatives from the studio of Tom Carlyle Leaman, taken in the 1890s and 1900s. We can trace the Sare family and their various business ventures through census returns and birth, marriage and death records. In the photograph Clara Sare wears her hair ‘down’. At this period young women put their hair ‘up’ at the age of about 16-17; Clara was born in 1886 so the photograph is probably around 1901. Her father Frederick Sare (b1848), a Master Furrier, was the son of a worsted cloth factory manager and her mother Mary née Ballin (b1848) was the daughter of a fur manufacturer. Both families came from Bath.
Initially the family lived above the furriers shop at 16 Union Street; by the 1891 Census they were at 1 Laura Place: the parents and five children (Frederick 13, Robert 12, Jane 10, Clara 5, and Arthur 2), an assistant in the fur business, and two servants. Around 1893-94 Frederick Sare also became Bath sales representative for Bristol United Breweries ‘family ales and stout’, working from home in Laura Place: the advertisement pictured is from the Bath Chronicle & Weekly Gazette 18 January 1894. Interestingly, in the 1901 Census, Mary’s occupation is Manufacturing Furrier and Frederick is an Insurance Agent; this seems to indicate that Mary was now in charge of the fur business – still unusual at this date for a woman to record a business profession in her own right.
In the 1911 Census, Clara and her older sister Jane were milliners working from home at Laura Place. The eldest son Frederick was manager of a chemist’s shop (pharmacy) at 14 New Bond Street, and the second son Robert had moved away to Beckenham, Kent where he worked as a publisher’s assistant. I haven’t been able to trace the youngest son Arthur in 1911. Their mother died in 1913 and in 1921 we find Jane and Clara (aged 40 and 35 and both single) running a boarding house in Weston super Mare – Landor House on the Boulevard – their widowed father Frederick living with them. This would have been a ‘respectable’ way to earn a living for two single, middle-class women. Frederick died in 1926 and sadly Jane died just a few months later.
Clara seems to have returned to Bath, because in the 1939 Register she was at 3 Walcot Parade working as a furrier – her parents’ original trade. Perhaps she not only learned the skills of stitching furs from her mother, but had also inherited specialist needles and other tools when her father died. There are some examples here in the collection of the Jewish Museum London. Clara – by now in her 50s – shared the premises with an older woman, Elizabeth Miles, who was a Spirella Corsetière – that is, she fitted women with ‘Spirella’ brand foundation garments. You can see what this highly skilled job involved on this marvellous website: Corsetiere Clara remained single all her life and died in 1979 aged 93 in Cheltenham.
Ann Cullis
Trustee and Volunteer Feb2025
Thanks to Laurence Kneale for the initial biographical research on Clara Sare.