AN AUSTRALIAN WOMAN is planning a 20,000 mile round trip to Bourne to seek out her ancestors and to find the missing branches of her family tree. 

Shirley Chaplin (née Milan) emigrated sixty years ago and is anxious to re-establish the family links that were broken by the move. Although many pieces of the jigsaw have been completed, there are still several gaps in the lineage that she is anxious to fill and feels that a trip to the other side of the world to find out would be worthwhile. 

The family were living in Leicester when they left England in 1951. Jack Milan and his wife Florence made their home at Adelaide in South Australia where he worked as a stonemason until he retired. During the Second World War of 1939-45, he had served with the Coldstream Guards in France and survived the evacuation of Dunkirk, later suffering a shrapnel wound in his leg. He died in 1993 aged 81 and Florence died in 1999, aged 87. 

Shirley was born in England in 1939 and was eleven years old when they emigrated. She joined the Women’s Australian Navy in 1958 and served as a radar plotter but left to get married and now, aged 72, lives in the small town of Langhorne Creek, sixty miles south of Adelaide, where she and her husband Russell have a sheep farm although both are now retired and with more time on her hands she is anxious to fill in those gaps in the family’s ancestry. 

This has enabled her trace the family back to Surrey in the mid-19th century and the Bourne connection began fifty years later when her grandmother, Mabel Jane Carter, daughter of a railway signalman, married Percy Arthur Henry Milan in July 1906, both aged 27, and moved to live at a white-washed cottage in South Road. 

Percy had been to the Bourne Council School in Abbey Road (now the Abbey Road Primary Academy) and volunteered for the army during the Great War of 1914-18, serving as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, being posted first to Egypt and then Palestine. During this time, he wrote frequent letters to his old headmaster, Joseph J Davies, telling him of his experiences and some of these letters have survived.  

They had three children, a daughter Ethel who was born in 1907 and two sons, Arthur (1908) and Jack (1911). After leaving the army, Percy worked as the school attendance and vaccination officer for the Bourne district but died in July 1922, aged 42, leaving Mabel a widow after only 16 years of marriage. Surprisingly for the time, she was appointed to replace him and continued in the job for the next ten years until it was phased out under a re-organisation of local authority services.  

Then in 1935, she married James Brown Toulson. She was 56 and he was almost 15 years her senior. Toulson had been employed by the Post Office and for thirteen years he drove the horse drawn mail cart every night between Peterborough and Bourne, making the last run on 9th May 1915 before it was finally taken over by motorised transport. He lived at a Victorian semi-detached house in Victoria Place and had been married to Charlotte Susannah, who had died on 19th June 1931, aged 61. They had four sons, William Morris (1897), John James (1899), Horace (1901), and Thomas Arthur (1904). 

James Toulson died in 1950, aged 85, and is buried in the town cemetery in the same grave as his first wife, Charlotte. Mabel died at St George’s Hospital, Stamford, in March 1960, aged 81, and is buried with her first husband in the town cemetery. 

A year after James Toulson’s death, Shirley and her parents left Bourne for Australia and now she is anxious to pick up the threads that were broken over sixty years ago. “Correspondence at that time was by air mail letter and even at best it was only very sketchy and so I did not manage to keep in very close touch”, she said.  

But she still has fond memories of Bourne as a pretty, rural community and of the Toulson home in Victoria Place with the Queen’s Bridge and the gasworks close by.  “We visited often when I was a child”, she said. “The house had a Victorian décor and was full of stuffed birds under glass domes, beaded door curtains and a lot more paraphernalia of the period. Next door was a large gasometer and we used to delight in watching it rise and fall as the gas was used and replenished every day. Nearby there was a stream with a bridge over it and we often stood on the banks and watched the fish swimming by and I also remember playing in the woods.” 

Now the search is on for more recent relatives, either from the Milan or Toulson families, and for this reason, Shirley is making the trip to England next spring, inspired by information and photographs she has been following on the Bourne web site. “I now want to fill in the gap years from when Mabel re-married to when she died and I am hoping that some of John Toulson’s descendants are still living in the town”, she said.  

“I would dearly love to complete details of my grandmother’s final years for those who are here in Australia. I have three daughters, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and would like to be able to provide some information for them about her life.” 

If anyone remembers Shirley and her family or is actually related, then please get in touch by email and perhaps a reunion can be arranged when she comes to Bourne in April.
 

PHOTO ALBUM
	The top picture shows grandfather Percy Milan (front row right) with army pals from the Citadel Military Hospital at Cairo, Egypt, in 1916. Grandmother, Mrs Mabel Milan (left), is pictured with her second husband, James Toulson.
The bottom photograph shows the Milan family about to leave for Australia in 1951. They are (left to right) Tony Milan, father Jack Milan with Peter, aged two, Shirley, Mrs Milan and Shirley’s sister Peggy.