Anne Browne 1813-1914
Anne Brown was born at Whitstone in 1813, when Wellington was still fighting Napoleon's armies, two years before the final battle, Waterloo. She celebrated her hundredth birthday with a 'street tea' in Lime Street, sitting proudly upright in her black bombazine and bonnet. Apparently at the time her memory of the past was still good and she recounted stories in her life. One was of her and her husband walking from Moreton to Plymouth and back to spend a week with her sister there.
Domestic service at the age of nine at Dunsford was the beginning of her working life, then at Holcombe, Christow, Okehampton and Drewsteignton before becoming cook-dairymaid at Leign and then cook at the Ponsford's in Cross Street, by which time she was twenty three. She married George Browne, a quarryman, who died of tuberculosis, as did their son when he was twenty-one, a common story in those days. She lived on in Moreton, presumably as a cook or domestic, becoming an expert needle-worker and quilter. She died in 1914 three months after World War One had begun. A memorial stone was subscribed by thirty of her fellow-worshippers at the Unitarian Chapel which surely must show in what respect she must have been held.
Click here for an account written at the time of her death.