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Letter dated 22 July 2025
from Carrie (Caroline) Wood (1884-1975)
to Martha Browne, née Wood (1882-1968) in South Australia

Here are three letters written by Carrie Wood, from the home in St Leonard’s Hastings, England, which she shared with her other unmarried sister and two brothers – Thomas, from the evidence of the letters, apparently was not with them at that period. Carrie was 73 at the time she wrote the letter below, the others younger. The youngest brother, Harry died at the end of the following decade in 1969. Carrie herself lived until the end of 1975 reaching the age of 91. The others lived on at 15 Salisbury Road for only another 14 or 15 months after Carrie. We have seen from the account by Thomas Wood’s daughter, Peggy Hargreaves, of their last days in the same house at 15 Salisbury Road that finally their lives ended in a distressing way. These three letters (in the possession of Judith Lloyd in Adelaide, Australia (Martha Browne, born Wood, was her great-aunt), provide some other evidence that even in the late 1950s they were not leading the best of lives. Of three of their other brothers and sisters – Edward, Julia, and Edmond – we know nothing. The oldest of this family, Louisa, had married in New Zealand, but she and her husband (Thomas Silk) soon after returned to England and Louisa had died much younger, towards the end of WW2. Thomas had married, but in the war his wife, with his daughter, had left him. Carrie and Grace in their early days had worked as servants in the Great Dixter house of the rich Lloyd family. Had this restricted their lives with the result that they never married? The oldest, Carrie, had been a accomplished cook, and it seems possible that the main burden of running the household fell on her. By the end of the 1950s, from the evidence of these letters, she certainly sounds under strain, intolerant of other people’s children. Looking at this image of the handsome Carrie when young it is surprising that she, like others in the family, should have remained single.

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