Stella Budrikis

After reading my book Susan, several people have asked me “So which of Susan’s children are you descended from?” It’s intriguing to hear their guesses, although I didn’t intend to make it a guessing game. The relevant information was included in the first draft of the book, but later I edited it out of the main text and then forgot to add it to the postscript.

The answer is that my great grandmother was Eliza, Susan and David’s second child, who went to England with them as an infant. Eliza married Bill Beales, a staunch Salvation Army man from the Colchester area, in 1891. You can read their story on my blog Clogs and Clippers. Their daughter Rosina, whose wedding I mention briefly in the last chapter, was my grandmother.

The photo shows Eliza in what appears to be a homemade Salvation Army uniform, probably around the time of her marriage. I’ll let you decide if there’s any family resemblance between us.

The red coated uniform worn by many regiments of the British Army in the 18th and 19th centuries may have made the ladies swoon, but it wasn’t exactly practical. The 50th regiment to which Susan’s husband, David Whybrew, belonged, became known as the “dirty half hundred” because at one stage the dye on the black cuffs of their jackets wasn’t colour fast and rubbed off onto their hands and from there to their faces.
Here’s a video demonstrating why modern armies usually wear loose fitting khaki uniforms.