Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

Lizzie Harrowell was born Elizabeth Davies in Wilstone, Herts in about 1846, the oldest daughter of John and Martha Davies. John was a farm labourer and their sons worked as wood sawyers. Martha was a straw plaiter, as were their daughters. By the time Lizzie was 14 the family lived in Northchurch, moving later to Gossoms End by 1871. Family folk-lore held that Lizzie was born in Wales and met her husband in “The Lamb” where she had stopped off on the way between Wales and London driving sheep to market. This was the story that her grandson, Jim Harrowell told to The Berkhamsted Review in 1996. There is no evidence for this and the truth is rather more prosaic. Lizzie married a brick maker called William Harrowell in 1868, when she was 21. They soon had a daughter, Emily and a son, Harvey and by the 1871 census were living in New Road, Tring. During the next ten years they moved to the High Street in Berkhamsted and had another four children, Alfred, George, Nelly and Charles. Ten years later, in 1891 with the addition of Etta, Frank, Albert and Ethel, they had a total of ten children, still all living at home. William had risen in the world to be a builder and the oldest four children were working. Emily, their oldest daughter was a dressmaker and Harvey, their oldest son, had moved away from manual labour and was a solicitor’s clerk. The other two older boys were following their father and working in the building trade. It must have been a very busy household with five workers, five school children and a 2 year old toddler. In 1892 Lizzie and William’s eleventh and last child, James was born when Lizzie was 42 years old. So she had spent half her life having children. By this time William was a builder employing a number of men, including some of their sons. He was building many of the houses we can still see in Berkhamsted, including 6 Clarence Road which is where they moved to by 1901. By 1911 they had moved along the road to number 12 and that is where they spent the rest of their married life. By the beginning of World War I four of Lizzie’s sons were of an age to be recruited for military service. Charlie, aged 34 worked in England as a carpenter in the Royal Naval Air Service. Frank, aged 30 joined the Machine Gun Corps and died at Loos in May 1918. Albert, aged 28 joined up as a private in the Hertfordshire Regiment and died at Ypres at the end of August 1917. Both Frank and Albert have their names on the Berkhamsted War Memorial. James, their youngest child at 22, joined the Kings Royal Rifle Corps as a private and survived the war. Both Frank and Albert were married and had children when they died. Jim Harrowell, the solicitor who founded Harrowell and Atkins in Berkhamsted in 1945, was one of Albert’s sons. Frank’s widow Ada remained in Berkhamsted for the rest of her life and never remarried. Most of Lizzie’s other children also married and set up families so she must have had many grandchildren, most of whom stayed living in Berkhamsted. Lizzie died at the end of 1925, aged 79 and is buried with her husband and two of her sons in Plot 757.