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Biography
Stephen was born on the 27th October 1881, most probably at home in one of the Milton Cottages in Chartham, Kent. The arrival of a boy was probably very welcome after three girls. Stephen was destined to be the only boy although he had seven sisters in all, not all of whom lived to adulthood. Sometime between the birth of Alice c. 1889 and the 1991 census, the family moved to Bramley Bottom in Littlebourne. By the 1901 census the family was living in South Street, near Boughton-under-Blean.
Banns of marriage for Stephen Andrews and Agnes Annie Streatfield were called in the parish church of Saints Peter & Paul at Boughton on the 20 & 27 October & the 3 November 1901. The marriage took place on the 9 November. The ceremony was conducted by the vicar, J.A. Boodle and witnessed by Agnes’s father Edward Streatfield and her sister [Gilliah] May Streatfield. Is the lack of an Andrews witness indicative of a lack of support for the wedding, or was it a sign of deference? The Streatfield family were probably better educated and of higher status than the Andrews. Agnes’s father was listed as a farm bailiff on the marriage certificate.
By 1901 Stephen, like his father before him, was working as an agricultural labourer. I recall George saying that his father was particularly good with the cattle and was responsible for taking the bull to the cows. This suggests that in spite of his wiry appearance, Stephen was pretty strong. Jim recalls him having “permanently bloodshot eyes” which ties in with my memory of my father saying that he had an eye that wouldn’t close properly, so it was impossible to tell if he was asleep or awake. When my father was a boy he sometimes found out the hard way that Stephen was watching his every move!
 Agnes and Stephen’s first child, a girl, Caroline Elizabeth Agnes was born in South Street on the 6th November 1902. Caroline was baptised in the church of SS Peter and Paul Boughton Under Blean. South Street is a pretty hamlet mostly of old cottages, some half-timbered some of brick, surrounded by fruit farms growing apples, pears, blackberries, redcurrants, etc. Their son, George Stephen was born on the 19th January 1907 and another daughter, Edith May on the 7th January 1909. Both of these later children were also baptised at SS Peter and Paul, Bouchton Under Blean.
The family moved to the even tinier, two cottage hamlet of Twitham, Wingham in Kent. When the census was taken on 2 April 1911 the family were still there living in just 4 rooms (RG78PN189 RD64 SD2 ED3 SN26). Stephen was a Farm Labourer and Agnes was working at fruit-picking and field work. Caroline (8) is listed as Elizabeth on the census, this perhaps being the name she was known by and her brother George (4) and sister Edith (2) are there too . The family were lucky, in that they do not appear to have lost any children. However, the marriage itself was not to last. Agnes died on the 6th July 1915 from the combination of pulmonary tuberculosis and exhaustion. Agnes was buried on 10 July 1915 at the St. Mary The Virgin in Wingham. No doubt thirteen year old Caroline was then called upon to look after her siblings and the house.
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 Stephen married again on the 24th April 1919 to Doris Annie Beerling, the daughter of Thomas and Charlotte Jane Beerling. Doris was 20 years his junior. This time Stephen’s mother Ann and his sister Louisa acted as witnesses to the ceremony, performed after banns by the vicar, Charles A. Manley at St. Dunstan in Canterbury. The Beerlings were associated with the hamlet of Summerfield near Staple, and the couple appear to have lived there for a while. Confusingly there are two Summerfield Farms, but the photo on the right is of the lovely Summerfield Cottage. More modest cottages can be found nearby.
After his retirement, Doris and Stephen lived in a council house at 6 Jubilee Cottages in Staple. Jim, who lived at number 8 recalls:
The houses were brand new council houses and competition for them was, I believe fierce, and for years there was a certain amount of ill feeling about who got what. Never mind, we got ours and moved from a thatched farm workers cottage with no running water, electricity or sanitation to a place, which had all these and more. Apart from that they were poorly built and to this day require constant work to keep them right. The Andrews had moved from Summerfield where they had been on a smallholding of which if my memory serves me at all, the house was destroyed in a fire which necessitated their removal to new accommodation. ... I think Mr and Mrs Andrews hankered for their previous life as Steve had a range of rather dilapidated sheds at the top of his garden where he kept various fowls and not a few rats. He was a tall thin man, who spoke with a gruff voice in a strong Kent accent, and the Jubilee Cottages kids were a bit leery of him. ... He sticks in my memory as being very “country dressed,” always with an old cap and clothes which tended to fit where they touched. That said, we never had any real reason to fear him, and like many country people he just kept to himself. The Andrews had for a long time a lodger [who] might well have been a near relative. [The] Lodger was in his late middle ages and did not work. I think he might well have been a retired miner from the Kent Coalfield, but he did not appear in any way unusual because at that time Staple had a significant population of single men in their middle to late years who were either widowed or never married. I suspect the First World War had something to do with that, and in a recent test of my failing memory I managed to name around twenty such blokes without too much trouble. Steve the lodger was a good customer of the Black Pig public house and there were some times when he required assistance to return home after a good ”lunch.”
Doris died on the 1st February 1959 from a combination of coronary artery occlusion and diabetes. Stephen lived on alone on the cottage until the 60s, when ill health finally forced him in a nursing home. However, before then my brother remembers him borrowing the blacksmith’s car to come visiting our parents in Dartford. Stephen died at Bensted House in Faversham on the 25th March 1968 from a combination of cerebral thrombosis and arteriosclerosis. Bensted House was the former Faversham Union Workhouse, but after 1935 it served as an old people’s home and geriatric hospital.
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