Acclaimed film, theatre and television actor Lesley Manville was born on 12 March 1956 in Brighton and is 68 years old. All her grandparents apart from her maternal grandmother were dead by the time she was born, so she’s keen to learn more about her family history on Who Do You Think You Are? “Through understanding where I’ve come from,” she says, “I’m hoping to understand myself more.”
To start, Lesley meets her son Alfie and her sister Diana to look at family photographs. They reminisce about their grandmother Harriet, who famously wasn’t married to their grandfather James and left her previous husband and children to be with him.
To find out more, Lesley goes to Brighton. She learns that Harriet was married to a man named George Thomas Barton and they had three children together. The 1911 census shows that her grandfather, James Arthur Edwards, was also married to a woman named Mabel and had two children with her. However, Mabel had a child with the family’s lodger in 1921. By 1923, James was in a relationship with Harriet, when Lesley’s mother was born. Because divorce was very expensive to obtain at the time, it wasn’t unheard of for working-class couples to simply end their relationships with each other and move in with other partners, while still being legally married to each other. The 1939 Register shows Harriet living with James and using the surname Edwards. When he died in 1943, his will leaves all his property to Harriet, who he describes as “my friend… with whom I have been living”. Having never known her grandfather and heard him described as “cold”, Lesley is moved by evidence of his love for Harriet.
Next, she wants to find out more about her father’s family. She speaks to Hazel Manville, her cousin’s wife, who has researched their family history. Hazel shows her the records of her 3x great grandparents, Aaron Harding and Sarah Stacey. They applied for a marriage licence in 1810 in Hampshire. However, Hazel has never found Aaron’s death record.
In Selborne in Hampshire, Lesley meets historian Carl Griffin. He tells her that Aaron’s wife Sarah died in 1829, leaving Aaron a widower with nine children, struggling to make ends meet. In 1830 matters came to a head when Aaron was the ringleader of a local riot as part of the Swing Riots, a wave of riots by agricultural labourers protesting against low pay, hard conditions and the increasing use of machinery to replace workers. They tore down two local workhouses.
“I love him for doing that,” Lesley says. “He’s got gumption, he’s not going to put up with what he thinks is a massive injustice. He may be going about it in the wrong way, I don’t know, but I admire the man who says ‘This is not good enough’.”
Aaron and the other rioters, including his brother Thomas, were arrested, facing the death penalty. The death sentence was commuted but Aaron was sentenced to be transported to Australia for life, whilst Thomas was sentenced for seven years.
Lesley flies to Australia, following in Aaron’s footsteps. She learns that in Australia, he worked as a labourer for a settler, John Atkinson. Fortunately, Atkinson had a reputation for treating convict labourers fairly. In 1837 Aaron and the other Swing Rioters were given conditional pardons after a campaign by their supporters. This meant he was free, but couldn’t leave Australia and New Zealand. However, Aaron went on to have children with Alice Sargent, another convict. Like Harriet Barton, she was previously married but left her husband to be with Aaron.
Aaron and Alice’s descendants are still living in Australia and Lesley is delighted to meet her distant cousins, Rebecca and Claire Watts, who show her an old photograph of Aaron and Alice. An old newspaper article shows that Aaron ultimately died in an accident in 1851.
“It has been quite a journey,” Lesley says, “but I already feel grounded in a way that I didn’t before… I can just feel the essence of all that bravery of my family.”
