Mabel Pearce: a mystery

29th July 1902 – 25th February 1954

(Also known as Mabel Chadwick, Mabel Barbara Howard, Mabel Smith
and Mabel Clark)

MABEL PEARCE was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England and was the first born daughter of JOHN EDWARD SALT and his wife HARRIET ANNE SALT, an older brother George was born in 1898 and a younger brother, Albert was born in 1900.

In 1897 John Salt married Harriet Brewer at the Salem Chapel, Barnsley. From the 1901 Census we know that John and Harriet were at Pindar Oaks cottages with their two young sons; George (my father) and Albert. We also now know that Albert was a poorly child. He died in 1907. Little Mabel was taken to Canada by a childless couple FERGUS O’CONNOR CHADWICK and his wife MARTHA CHADWICK who were friends of John and Harriet in about 1906.

MABEL CHADWICK married her first husband, ALBERT HOWARD, in 1917. At that time she gave her age as 19 but, in fact, was still not 17. It is clear from many of the documents we have managed to see that Mabel did know her birth date but not the year of her birth and we have found her age to vary on most of the documents we have seen.

This marriage appears to have been short lived and without children. Albert Howard died in 1926 at the age of 25. His mother seems to have dealt with the funeral of her son as there is no mention of Mabel in the Obituary Notices. The young widow Mabel Howard then married a man called ROBERT JOHN PEARCE and on the marriage certificate she called herself MABEL BARBARA HOWARD – WIDOW. We are not too sure what went wrong with this marriage but we know they parted company. Mabel was now separated (but not divorced) and Robert moved to Vancouver Island.

We believe that the love of Mabel’s life was a man called HARRY JOHN SMITH. She was with him for sure in 1931 the year her ‘dad’ Fergus Chadwick died (Mabel found Fergus and a companion dead in bed on 22nd December 1931. An inquest found that they died from carbon monoxide poisoning from Fergus' stove) and for sure she was still with him in the January of 1935. At this time in her life she called herself MRS. HARRY JOHN SMITH but we doubt there was ever a marriage.

What we do know is that in 1940 she called herself MABEL CLARK (alias Mabel Pearce) on the official form for the 1940 Civil Registration and she said that she could drive an automobile, was a trained waitress (she worked at one of the branches of the White Lunch) and could offer herself for any work for the war effort. She did not list any disabilities or dependants but she said that she had not worked for eighteen months.

We now know that Mabel died on the 25th February 1954 in a hotel room on Water Street belonging to CHARLES EDWARD CADIEUX – she was 51 but thought she was just 47. We do not know the exact nature of this relationship but Mabel did give his name as the person to be notified in case anything happened to her.

When she died it transpired that she had also been a patient in VANCOUVER GENERAL HOSPITAL and they knew her as MABEL SMITH but Charles knew her as MABEL PEARCE which we think technically she was. We have never found any record of a divorce from Robert Pearce, so in law she died as Mabel Pearce.

So to unravel the story as we understand it: Mabel had long since forgotten who she really was. She thought she was the daughter of Fergus and Martha and only realized her true origins after Fergus died. A will was never located and therefore Mabel had to apply for Letters of Administration to his Estate as his only next of kin.

She went to Victoria in early 1932 and she instructed the officials to amend the record of her marriage to Albert Howard (where Fergus had said his name was Clifford Chadwick) to reflect that his name was not Clifford but Fergus O’Connor Chadwick. She then went through the legal paperwork and inherited some plots of land from her ‘dad’. When we were in Vancouver of December 2004 we found a beautiful, and very large, and prestigious house on that land - it being a corner plot in quite a nice area.

Sometime between her dad dying in December 1931 and January 1935 she wrote home to her real family - we don’t reckon there could have been many letters in those days but we do know that she wrote to her mother, Harriet; her oldest brother George and his wife who was now married with four young children; her sister Lily and her husband Charlie who by then had just one little girl called June; and last but not least her brother Eddie. But she lied to them.

It seems she wrote in glowing terms about her wonderful husband HARRY and the fact that he had nursed her to health following some trauma - she never told them about Albert or Robert and the fact that she was still legally married to Robert. We can only assume that when the relationship to her beloved Harry broke down she just couldn’t keep up the pretence and she stopped corresponding. Her last letter to the family was 17th January 1935.

Mabel is buried in Mountainview Cemetery and in December 2004 my wife and I (Mabel was my Aunt, being the sister of my father George) visited Vancouver and paid our respects at her grave. This is a pauper’s grave, Mabel was buried by ‘the City’

FERGUS CHADWICK and his wife MARTHA are buried in Ocean View Cemetery and we went to visit their grave and also laid some flowers out of respect. To make matters worse FERGUS also used the first name of CLIFFORD and MARTHA used PATTIE – indeed it says Pattie on the double grave plot at Ocean View Cemetery... but to us they are FERGUS AND MARTHA.

I was only told about my Aunt Mabel about six years ago, until then I had never heard of her or anything about her. The cousin who told me about her thought I knew and she told me what she knew - which wasn’t much but once she let me have a copy of that last letter home and a couple of snaps of Mabel, that was it - my wife and I were hooked and we found her against all the odds.

We would ask anyone who knew Mabel under any of her surnames – SALT, CHADWICK, HOWARD, PEARCE, SMITH AND CLARK – to get in touch with us. We would love to know where they sailed from, where she went to school, whether or not she fell on hard times to have died as she did with two surnames. We would also love to know why she was known to Vancouver General as Mabel Smith and to Charles as Mabel Pearce and, by the way, at her death she had a body covered in scars and TWO BURR HOLES IN HER SKULL. What was the reason for these? Had she been in a massive car crash, was Harry killed, did she suffer brain damage, was she epileptic?

What a story. Can you help us fill in the blanks?
Contact: mrs.jean.edwards@gmail.com

 

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