Mary Septima Taylor
She is buried in the Roman Catholic ground at Maitland under a Spanish surname she took at about twenty. Her own name is a piece of arithmetic, and it turns out to be exactly right.
The name is a count
Documented Mary Septima Taylor was born 17 September 1884, the ninth of ten children of William Taylor (1826–1902) and Mary Ann Hellen Brayley (1843–1900).
| Child | Born | Died | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kathleen Georgina | 4 Nov 1870 | 29 Feb 1940 | 1st daughter |
| William John | Nov 1870 | 11 May 1951 | m. Fanny Ellen Jefferey |
| Horace A | Apr 1872 | 18 Jan 1934 | |
| Isabella Temple “Edie” | 1874 | Dec 1953 | 2nd daughter · m. Dalling |
| Margaret Hellen Walker “Maggie” | 1876 | after 1953 | 3rd daughter · m. Bell |
| Irene “Rene” | 1879 | 25 Mar 1969 | 4th daughter · a twin · m. Burton |
| (unknown twin) | 1879 | — | 5th daughter · Irene’s twin; her name is not recorded |
| Lucy Elizabeth | 4 Aug 1881 | 26 May 1957 | 6th daughter · m. Sweet |
| Mary Septima | 17 Sep 1884 | 15 Nov 1935 | the SEVENTH daughter · m. Pablo Armando Lerena |
| Agnes Walker “Aggie” | 3 Aug 1889 | 29 Apr 1974 | 8th daughter · m. Wood |
Septima is Latin for seventh, and Victorian parents used such names literally. Count the daughters in order of birth — Kathleen, Isabella, Margaret, Irene, Irene's twin, Lucy — and Mary Septima is the seventh.
Inferred Which incidentally settles something the tree leaves blank: the unnamed twin of 1879 must have been a girl, or the arithmetic does not come out. The name her parents gave her ninth child records a sister whose own name has been lost.
Her granddaughter's generation kept it: an infant Antoinette Septima Lynette Lerena was born on 3 January 1943 and died four days later.
The line behind her
Documented Above William Taylor stands James Taylor, born about 1796, and his wife Harriet Reynolds (1803–1827). Harriet died on 12 November 1827, when her son William was twenty-one months old. A first William Taylor had been born on 29 December 1824 and died the following September at eight months; the William who lived was given the dead child's name, as families then did.
That reaches back four generations above Mary Septima, to a man born in the 1790s — further than this archive has yet got on the Lerena side, where Pablo Armando's own parents are still unknown.
Northam and Bideford, north Devon
Documented Mary Septima Taylor was born at Bideford, Devon on 17 September 1884 — registered there, and christened on 30 October at St Margaret's, Northam, in the Anglican church.
Source: England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837–2008, citing the birth registration at Bideford, Devon, General Register Office, Southport. Held in the family's own tree.
Her father William Taylor was born at Worlingworth in Suffolk on 11 February 1826 and came west: he married Mary Ann Hellen Brayley at St Mark's, Bideford, on 26 January 1870, and their children were born and raised between Bideford and Northam — 23 Geneva Place, North Street, 2 Fore Street. He died on 30 November 1902 at 2 Park Terrace, Northam, of chronic bulbar paralysis, his son Horace Archibald present and giving the information; he lies in Northam churchyard, old grave XB28–K8.
Brayley is a north Devon name, from Bray. This archive inferred a Devon origin from that surname alone, before any place had been seen written down. The family's own records put them at Bideford and Northam — six miles apart, and both in Bray's country. The inference held.
A coachman's daughter
Documented William Taylor's trade is given as coachman — with domestic servant, and pensioner at the last.
So the horses are on both sides of this marriage. A coachman's daughter of Northam married an Argentine horse-dealer at the Cape. The horses →
A scholar
Documented On 1 December 1900 — six weeks after her mother's death, at sixteen — she was awarded the Bishop Phillpotts' Prayer Book Prize by the Exeter Diocesan Board of Education, in the general examination in religious knowledge for monitors, candidates and pupil teachers: Class III, monitors over sixteen and pupil teachers, one of forty-three out of eighty-eight who passed.
She was a pupil teacher — a girl of sixteen already teaching, and being examined on it. She signed her own name in a firm hand at her wedding eleven years later.
In the 1891 census, aged six, she was at 2 Crystal Villas, Stanton Road, Barnes, Surrey — living with an aunt, away from Devon.
The ship
Family lore The story is that Mary Septima and Pablo Armando met aboard a ship bound for South Africa.
The objection is a fair one and was raised by the family itself: she was in England, but he was an Argentine going from Argentina to South Africa — so what was he doing on a ship out of England? Three things make the story work better than it first looks.
1. The River Plate reached the Cape through Europe
In the 1900s there was no dense direct passenger service between Buenos Aires and Cape Town. The ordinary way to make that journey was to sail to Europe and change ships — Southampton being the hub of the mail service to the Cape. On that reading he was never "in England" in any meaningful sense: he changed ships there, and the leg on which they met was the Southampton–Cape Town run. "He came from Argentina" and "they met on a ship from England" are not in conflict at all. Inferred
2. The horses were already moving that way
Documented The South African War of 1899–1902 consumed horses on a scale never seen before: of some 519,000 horses used, about 360,000 were shipped into South Africa, drawn from England, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Burma — and Argentina. Contemporary British officers grumbled about the "mongrel Argentines" and set Australian bushmen to breaking them.
Pablo Armando Lerena was born in February 1882. He was seventeen when that war began and twenty when it ended — and he was a horseman, later an Argentine cavalryman and a Cape Town trainer. A young man of exactly his age and trade moving from the River Plate to the Cape in those years was moving with a trade, not against the current. The horses →
3. She had a documented reason to be aboard
Documented Her mother died in April 1900 and her father in November 1902. She was fifteen and then eighteen.
And from 1901 the Colonial Office and the emigration societies ran an organised programme to send single British women to South Africa — a scheme the war had turned from charity into imperial policy, aimed at securing the new colonies by settling British women in them. An orphaned Englishwoman of nineteen or twenty sailing for the Cape between 1903 and 1905 is not an anomaly. She is the type the scheme existed to carry.
What would prove it
All three of those are context, not evidence about these two people. The story is testable, and by a single class of record:
UK outward passenger lists (BT 27) survive from 1890 and are indexed by name. If Mary Septima Taylor and Pablo Armando Lerena sailed from Southampton for the Cape between about 1903 and 1905, both their names are on one list.
Their first child Roque was born at Cape Town on 25 November 1905, which brackets the crossing: they were both at the Cape, and married, by early 1905. Open questions →
The marriage — and it is not where the story expects it
Documented
Cape Province marriage register no. 160, 3 September 1911, solemnized at Wynberg: "Married in St Dominic's at Wynberg aforesaid, after banns." Images supplied by the National Archives of South Africa.
| Groom | Pablo Armando Lerena, 29, European, bachelor, horse-dealer, of Diep River |
|---|---|
| Bride | Mary Septima Taylor, 27, European, spinster, of Diep River |
| Signed | Both signed their own names in full, in confident hands |
| Examined by | "Bert…" — very likely Bertram W. Glynn |
They married six years after their first son was born
Roque was born at Cape Town on 25 November 1905. His parents married on 3 September 1911, and the register calls them bachelor and spinster — so neither had been married before, to each other or to anyone.
Inferred That closes a puzzle this archive had already noticed. Roque's baptism was delayed six years, to 12 June 1911 — and it was performed by Bertram W. Glynn, whose name then appears examining his parents' marriage register three months later. The family was brought into the church in the course of a single year: the child in June, the parents in September. Roque was born outside marriage and legitimated by it.
Set down plainly, because this archive sets things down plainly. It is also, on the record, a couple who stayed together until her death and a man who never remarried — a widower still on his passport in 1940 and on his death certificate in 1950.
She changed her church
Documented On 16 December 1911, three months after the wedding, Mary Septima was herself baptised a Catholic at Corpus Christi, Wynberg.
So the year runs: the son baptised in June, the parents married in September, the mother received in December. An Anglican girl from a Devon vicarage parish, christened at St Margaret's Northam in 1884, came into her Argentine husband's church at twenty-seven — and was buried from it, in the Roman Catholic ground at Maitland, twenty-four years later.
And it changes how the ship must be searched
The marriage does not disprove the crossing; they could well have met in 1904 or 1905. But it removes an assumption. She was Mary Septima Taylor until September 1911, so on any passenger list before that date she appears under Taylor, never Lerena — and, being unmarried, the two may have travelled separately and will not share a berth entry.
It also gives his trade at the earliest date yet: horse-dealer. The sequence runs horse-dealer (1911) → trainer (1940, and a yard taking apprentices in the 1940s) → race horse owner (1950). The horses →
Her end
Documented She died on 15 November 1935 at 34 Florence Villas, Observatory, aged 51, of carcinoma of the uterus and bladder with septic nephritis, and was buried the next day in the Roman Catholic allotment of Maitland (Woltemade) Cemetery no. 1, plot 7719 A, six feet nine inches down, Father Graham officiating. The doctor who certified her death, J. R. E. Lee, would sign her husband's certificate fifteen years later.
Family memory, recorded by David Defranceski
"She had a difficult time, especially when she got ill, with Luis being so challenging and at odds with his father Pablo… She was very soft with her sons and loved all three dearly; it broke her heart when Pablo cut Luis off from the family and home."
Inferred That is not only a memory. It is legible in the will. When Pablo Armando died in 1950 he left Luis half a share — the same as Rose Lilian Theys, "no relation" — while Ricardo and Nuno held three-quarters of the estate between them. The estrangement his mother grieved over is written into the arithmetic of his father's estate. The estate →
She left three grown sons — Roque, Ricardo and Nuno — and her husband did not remarry. He was still described as a widower on his Argentine passport in 1940 and on his death certificate in 1950. The estate →
The Taylors had horses too
1891 and 1901 censuses of Northam, Devon.
This archive carried William Taylor — Mary Septima’s father — as a coachman. The censuses say something sharper. In 1891, aged 65, the enumerator writes his occupation as:
“Cab driver retired sergt p cavaloy” — cab driver; retired sergeant, cavalry
By 1901 he is a widower of North Street, Northam, and simply an army pensioner. His eldest son drove a cab beside him; his second son was a footman.
So the woman Pablo Armando married came from horses as well. The family story about him is entirely a horse story — trainer, breeder, stables on the Koeberg Road, four generations of jockeys after him. It turns out her father spent his working life in the saddle and on the box: a cavalry sergeant, then a cab driver in a small Devon town.
That is not evidence of anything, and it does not explain how they met. But this archive has spent a long time treating Mary Septima as the ordinary English half of the story, and that was plainly wrong. Horses stand behind both sides of this marriage.
| 1901 — North Street, Northam | Age | Occupation |
|---|---|---|
| William Taylor, head, widower | 75 | Army pensioner |
| Kathleen, daughter | 30 | — |
| Margaret, daughter | 24 | — |
| Lucy, daughter | 18 | — |
| Mary, daughter | 16 | School teacher |
| Agnes, daughter | 11 | — |
Her mother, Mary Ann Hellen, is recorded in 1891 as born in London, Middlesex — though Brayley, her maiden name, is a north Devon surname. Also worth resolving.
What she was doing at sixteen
Western Times, 4 April 1901, page 7 — repeated in the North Devon Herald a week later.
The Exeter Diocesan Board of Education examined the pupil teachers and monitors of Devon’s Church schools each year, and printed the results by name, age and parish. In April 1901, under Set II — monitors over sixteen, and pupil teachers in their first year, eighty-eight candidates were examined. In Class III, between a boy from Honiton and a girl from Honiton, sits:
“Mary Septima Taylor, 16, Northam”
She was training to be a schoolteacher. A pupil teacher stayed on at her own village school and learned the work in it, examined once a year, paid a little. It is the first thing this archive knows about her that is not a date.
And it sharpens the shape of her life to something quite startling. A pupil teacher at Northam in April 1901. “Mrs Lerena”, crossing from Cape Town to Southampton with a small son, by February 1909. Eight years, and the whole distance between a north Devon parish school and an Argentine horseman’s household at the Cape. What happened in those eight years is the largest thing still missing from her story.
The newspaper OCR is poor and the lists run together. Her own entry reads unambiguously in both papers; the class boundaries around it were reconstructed from a damaged column and should be re-checked against the image before anything is built on them.
The eight-year hole — and two ships that might close it
A pupil teacher at Northam in April 1901. “Mrs M T Lerena”, crossing from Cape Town to Southampton with a three-year-old son, in February 1909. Between those two facts lie eight years and six thousand miles, and they are, I think, the largest answerable gap left in this family’s story — larger than where Pablo Armando was born, and sitting in records that survive and are indexed.
The outward passenger lists give a clean negative first: no Mary Taylor of her age left Britain for South Africa at all, in the whole range 1890–1960. But the index frequently carries no forename. Drop it, and filter on surname, age and destination, and two candidates appear in exactly the right window:
| Passenger | Sailed | Ship | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miss Taylor, 19, single, Domestic | Southampton → Cape 9 September 1903 | Harlech Castle Donald Currie & Co, 254 passengers | TNA BT 27/0420, p.68 |
| Miss Taylor, 19, single | Southampton → Cape 9 April 1904 | Walmer Castle Union-Castle, 271 passengers | TNA BT 27/0448 |
A candidate, not an identification Taylor is among the commonest surnames in England, and “Miss Taylor, 19” will have sailed for the Cape many times in those years. Two records fitting a window is not proof. The original manifests would show the forename — the index does not carry it, but the page usually does. Both references are given above.