Vital Stats
Born
Swansea, Wales, 1884
Died
London, Ontario, 1967
Married
William Charles Rowley, 1905, Bristol, England
Children
6
Siblings
Rosella was the 2nd of 6
Rosella Victoria Vincent, "Rose" as she was known, was born in Swansea, Wales, on October 10, 1884, and died in London, Ontario on October 30, 1967, at age 83. She lost her father at 13 and went to work in Bristol's boot-and-shoe trade to help support her mother and four younger siblings, married William Charles Rowley in 1905, and in August 1913 crossed the Atlantic alone in steerage with four small children — including a newborn — to reunite with William, who had gone ahead to London, Ontario the year before. She raised six children through the Great Depression, was widowed in 1950, and spent more than fifty years in Canada before her death. She is buried with William, Edith, and Doreen at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in London.
In May 1897, when Rose was just 13, William Aquila Vincent, her father, died. There was no life insurance, no welfare state, and no safety net for a working-class Victorian widow left to raise six children alone. Rose's mother Emma had to adapt immediately, and one of the very few legal, socially acceptable ways for a widow to generate income without leaving the house was to take in a boarder.
By the time of the 1901 census, the family (Emma, 16-year-old Rose, and her siblings) was living at 11 Webb Street, Bristol. Rose is recorded as already working in the boot-and-shoe trade. This was not casual or after-school work. Bristol was a major centre of boot and shoe manufacturing, and the conditions were long, loud, monotonous piecework — hours that would have left little room for anything else. Rose's wages were, quite literally, helping keep a roof over her siblings' heads.
It was around this time that a teenage cycle mechanic newly arrived in Bristol, William Charles Rowley, needed somewhere to live and became a boarder in the Vincent household — an ordinary, unromantic way for many working-class couples of the era to meet.
William and Rose married on September 17, 1905 at St Matthew Moorefields, Bristol. The parish register records William as 23, a bachelor and mechanic, and Rose as 21, a spinster; both gave their address as 13 Dean Lane.
By the 1911 census, William and Rose — now 29 and 26 — were living at 35 Thomas Street, Bristol, with three young children: William Aquila, Edith Florence, and infant Hilda. Three rooms, total, for five people. No indoor plumbing. One coal fire for heat and cooking. Every domestic task — laundry, illness, a crying baby — was shared by the whole household at once, because there was nowhere else for it to happen.
It was in that cramped space that a "crazy idea" of leaving England for Canada started to sound entirely rational. Family memory lays the blame, fondly, on Rose's brother William Vincent: the whole move was, as the family tells it, "all Uncle Bill's fault." He convinced William Rowley that Canada offered a future Bristol's rigid class system never would.
William went first. He sailed from Liverpool aboard the RMS Lusitania in May 1912 — barely five weeks after the Titanic disaster, when the newspapers on the docks were still printing daily lists of the dead. He travelled on to London, Ontario, to find work and a home before sending for his family.
That left Rose in Bristol for fourteen months, managing four children — including a new baby, Ivor, born after William had already left — on whatever money he could send back, with nothing but slow transatlantic mail to know whether he was safe. There was no way to know, for weeks at a stretch, whether anything had gone wrong on the other side of the ocean.
On August 23, 1913, Rose — 29 years old — boarded the RMS Royal Edward at Bristol with all four children: William (7), Edith (5), Hilda (not yet three), and infant Ivor. The passenger manifest lists her occupation as "housewife" and, in the column for destination, simply "to husband." They travelled third class (steerage), deep in the hull of a coal-powered ship, alongside hundreds of other passengers, for a seven-day Atlantic crossing. No natural light, constant engine noise, the smell of coal smoke, near-universal seasickness — and in the middle of it, one woman keeping four children fed, clean, and safe.
The Royal Edward reached Quebec on August 30, 1913. From there, the family travelled inland — most likely by the Canadian Northern Railway, given the notation on the passenger manifest — hundreds of miles further, to reunite with William in London, Ontario.
The family settled first at 152 John Street. William, a skilled cycle mechanic in England, suffered a serious workplace accident at the Dennis Wire & Iron/steel works in London and lost an eye, ending his trade instantly, in an era with no functioning workers' compensation system yet in Ontario.
Rose had three more children in Ontario: Doreen Ellen, Marjorie Victoria, and Norman Charles — bringing the family to six children in total. The family moved several times around London: to the rear of 642 Richmond Street in the early 1920s, to 173 Central Avenue by 1931, and to 594 Talbot Street by 1935.
By the 1931 census, eight people — William, Rose, and six children — were living in a rented six-room brick house on Central Avenue for $25 a month, without a radio, a specific marker the census used for tight finances during the Depression. Rose is recorded as a homemaker, managing a household of eight through the hardest economic years of the century, while her eldest daughters (Edith as a tailoress, Hilda as a bank stenographer) moved the family firmly into Canada's skilled, salaried working and middle class. Hilda's own income alone, at $750 a year, was two and a half times the family's annual rent — a striking measure of how far one generation had moved from a Bristol shoe factory floor.
William Charles Rowley died in 1950. Shortly afterward, on December 14, 1950, Rose purchased the family's burial lot at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in London — Lot 1, west half, graves 5 through 8, Section T — securing a resting place for herself, William, and their children for good.
Rose lived another seventeen years as a widow, having by then spent more than half a century in Canada: she had survived a transatlantic crossing in steerage with four small children, raised six children to adulthood through the Great Depression, and watched her daughters build careers and lives her own mother, widowed on a Bristol boot-factory wage, could scarcely have imagined.
Rosella Victoria Vincent Rowley died in London, Ontario, on October 30, 1967, at the age of 83. Family sources note that both she and William battled heart conditions in their later years, though the exact cause of death is not in the records or family memory.
She is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, in the plot she bought for the family seventeen years earlier — alongside William and, in time, her daughters Edith and Doreen.
There is one detail on her gravestone that the family has always found striking. After more than sixty years of marriage to William, after building an entire life and a family of six children on the other side of an ocean from where she started, Rose's stone does not read "Rowley." It reads Rosella V. Vincent — her own name, carried all the way to the end.
Additional images of where the family lived can be found on Hilda's page. View Hilda's page →