Three Sisters, Three Widows at 10 Guinea Street | A House Through Time | S3 E3

At 10 Guinea Street in Bristol, we uncover a milk tavern scandal, coded female remedies, and three sisters made widows as one house mirrors a century of upheaval. We begin in the 1880s with newlyweds Owen and Louisa at Counterslip Baptist Chapel, moving into crowded rooms at Number 10. Their first child, Emma, is born at home but dies weeks later of tubercular meningitis, a tragedy amplified by poverty and shared, unsanitary conditions. Determined to climb, Owen opens a “milk tavern” on Perry Road, riding the temperance wave with curds, whey and lunches instead of beer. But a Bristol inspector catches him selling watered milk; fined at the Magistrates’ Court, his reputation is shaken. As fears grow that tuberculosis can be carried in cow’s milk, he pivots to a “coffee palace” before the business fails, and he ends up packing tobacco in Bedminster to support a growing family. Four of their 14 children die from infectious diseases now preventable, and the family cannot afford headstones. In 1909, a small ad shocks: “Mrs Watson, lady specialist… safe and certain remedy” at 10 Guinea Street. Coded notices tout “steel and pennyroyal pills” widely understood, as a 1912 BMA report notes, to cut short an unwelcome pregnancy. There is no trace of a real Mrs Watson living at No. 10, but next door at No. 9 the Stewarts operate as herbalists, their remedies advertised nationwide. Years earlier they were fined under the Indecent Advertisements Act for promoting cures for “nervous debility” – Victorian code for impotence – part of a profitable, murky trade in quack medicine. Someone at No. 10 likely helped front this operation, though their identity remains unknown. By 1911, the Curley family fills the house. Three sisters – Jane, Rosina and Esther – marry just as war breaks out. Jane weds at St Mary Redcliffe; her husband Albert enlists and is later killed at the opening of Passchendaele. Within nine months, the other two sisters also lose their husbands at the front, turning Number 10 into a house in mourning. War pensions are meagre and policed, but the sisters persevere. Decades later, their descendant Jean, born in the house in 1928, recalls Saturday-night singalongs and laughter that reclaimed these rooms from grief. #AHouseThroughTime #Bristol #10GuineaStreet #HistoryDocumentary #WWI #VictorianHistory #Temperance