John Walden Poulson – The Wastrel – was my great grandfather and his first wife Polly (Mary Ann) was my great grandmother. After she died, he married Polly’s sister Emily, but ran off to Canada leaving his six children behind. It was only recently I learned that he had married a third time – no more children as Bertha was a 45-year-old widow when they were married.

Bertha Hollyer, neé Buckstone, John Walden’s third wife, came from a very famous theatrical family with sisters and brothers who followed in their father John Baldwin Buckstone’s footsteps and became actors. I have no pictures of Bertha, but based on pictures of two of her sisters, I’m guessing she was beautiful. He certainly didn’t marry her for money as there wasn’t any – her famous father had died when Bertha was 3 following a bankruptcy where he lost the lease of the Haymarket Theatre which he had run for over 20 years, in spite of the success of many of the plays he wrote as well as his own performances.

John Baldwin Buckstone was much older (37 years older) than his wife, Isabella Copeland, herself an actress. Reports said that Buckstone had been smitten with the actress Fanny Fitzwilliam (neé Copeland), and after her husband died, they were planning to marry in 1854. A month before the wedding, Fanny died of cholera; in 1857, Buckstone married her18-year-old cousin – he was 55. They had at least eight children, the last of whom was Bertha, born 3 years before her father died.

Bertha’s older sister Lucy was also an actress (who sadly died of tuberculosis in 1893) and it’s only a guess that Bertha and Lucy might have shared similar looks, but somehow Bertha caught John Walden’s eye in 1921 by which time she was herself a widow with a 14 year old son.

I have no idea how John Walden and Bertha met, but this time in his life was troubled – I’ll cover his legal problems and prison in a separate post, but it’s likely that Bertha left him some time in 1922 or 1923. Even with many missing details, there are some juicy tid bits in this story that leave me sad that I’ll probably never know the entire tale.

John Walden’s first two marriages were by license – a shotgun wedding to avoid a scandal for Polly Shepherd and a technically illegal one in Newcastle-on-Tyne to marry his deceased wife’s sister. This time, John Walden married the old fashioned way, by the banns being read for three weeks in January 1921 prior to his January 25th wedding. He had a job running the Sydney Hotel in Goole, Yorkshire (courtesy of his Dad Edwin calling in a favor with the hotel’s owner).

It’s not clear how he managed to run the hotel and court a widow in Putney (London), but in less than a year he was declared missing as he’d run away from home. If that newspaper report is accurate, he started at the Goole hotel around December 1920, just a month before he married Bertha. John Walden Poulson & Bertha Poulson were on the voter rolls for Goole for 1921 & 22 but gone thereafter.

Another notable detail from the church’s marriage record is that John Walden’s oldest daughter, Emily Muriel the school teacher, was a witness, as far as I know the only family member to attend. Whether this was duty or love I can’t say, but January 25th was probably a school day, and the distance from Chelmsford to Putney non trivial, so it required effort to attend. It’s completely understandable why everyone would have written John Walden off, but poignant that Emily chose to look on this latest adventure with kindness and/or optimism.

When the 1921 census becomes available in 2022 I hope to find out whether Bertha’s son Lawrence Hollyer (14) lived with her in the Sydney Hotel. He and Bertha had been on their own since Montague Robert Hollyer left for Ontario, Canada in May 1913. Possibly he’d been planning to get established and then send for his family, but it wasn’t clear how a bank clerk was going to make it as a Canadian pioneer. He never got to prove himself as he died of pneumonia in October leaving Bertha a widow.

Bertha’s mother, Isabella, appeared to have survived after John Baldwin Buckstone’s death in 1879 (when she was 40) courtesy of the kindness, and possibly affection of Frederick Lawrence. She was listed as a boarder and housekeeper in different censuses, but even as he moved, so did she and her children (including a couple of married daughters). It suggests they were a couple but never married, but I know only what the census shows.  As JB  Buckstone was bankrupt, I can’t imagine there was much money beyond royalties for performances of his many plays and what the adult children earned. It’s possible Bertha was able to manage as a single parent –  I have been unable to find a probate record to know if Montague left her any money, but it seems unlikely given what he did for a living. Possibly Frederick would not have minded yet another Buckstone family member moving in?

Having been married to one man who left her for Canada and then kicked the bucket, Bertha married a man who’d already done the Canada thing and returned alive. But he took only a year to embezzle money from the Sydney Hotel and run off. So she turned him in…