I first encountered Hope Bourne in February 2014 when I visited Dulverton, on the Exmoor border, for a job interview. I say “encountered” but Bourne had passed away in 2010 and so what I saw was a poster advertising an exhibition of her work. Never having heard of her, even her name seemed mysterious, and I couldn’t decide if it belonged to a person, or was a reference to a literary text or perhaps even the name of some kind of group or society.
As I was to find out, Bourne (1918–2010) was an artist and author, well-known on Exmoor. She had lived there in a series of caravans and semi-derelict cottages from the 1950s until her death. Her life was wild and rough but Bourne herself was cultured, genteel-sounding and extraordinarily knowledgeable, particularly about her adopted home. Over the next four years or so I felt as if I got to know her intimately, even though I could never meet her. She had left her entire estate to the Exmoor Society and when I got the job with them as archivist, all her papers, drawings and objects were mine to sort and care for.
The responsibility felt immense and the experience taught me a great deal about archiving and conservation. Nominally a venture in cataloguing, the society had carried out a house clearance. We had a leather jerkin made from a hide that Bourne had cured herself; deer antlers; silver napkin rings and teapots; thousands of sketches and watercolours; books; letters; unpublished manuscripts and thousands of fragments of writing. As an archivist I was supposed to catalogue all these things. Sticking to archival theory, these should have been organised in the way that Bourne, as originator of the collection, had kept them. Except that she kept them in random stacks in a bungalow full of Bantam hens, piled them up in old caravans, wedged them into spaces in neglected barns. How was I supposed to instil order on this? How could I second guess what Bourne would have wanted and arrange the material accordingly?
I came to see how writing and drawing were a compulsion for Hope. There was no other way to accumulate this quantity of art and paperwork unless in some way she felt impelled to create images and writings. I read some things so personal that I’m really not sure she intended them to be kept for public consumption. And there were scraps of sketches that I was loath to dispose of but unsure whether or not to keep because it seemed unlikely that she would want to be remembered for such scrappy drawings when so much of her work was so striking. Whilst Bourne did not achieve widespread fame as an artist there is no doubt for me that she captured something of Exmoor and of nature that few manage. But there I was as caretaker of this archive, seemingly in charge of how Hope Bourne was to be remembered.
Bourne had lived on the outskirts of society. She wrote a newspaper column in pencil and walked to the nearest post office to send it off to the newspaper to be typed up. She arrived at people’s houses as they were cooking meals, wearing wellington boots with massive holes, her favourite green jumper from a jumble sale and with a rather large knife tucked into her belt. She lived on homegrown vegetables and whatever she could hunt and forage. She had no running water or mains electricity and only scant access to a telephone. She was on the edge, pushed towards the outside or perhaps willingly moving there. She lived alone and in some ways isolated. And there were questions about her legitimacy, about the way she fitted in to legal structures, about whether or not her parents ever married.
Whilst I was in charge of her archive I never really tried to find out too much about her family circumstances. I couldn’t prove that her mother was unmarried and I seemed to be finding out enough about her, without pushing any further. However, once my contract at the society ended and I began to undertake more family history research, Bourne’s family seemed like a good test case. And I was curious. How had she become so isolated? I knew there were cousins and I had been in touch with relatives of hers but in her life on Exmoor she rarely mentioned family and from what she said, her mother dying had been an absolute turning point for her. She had grown up with her mother and never left the parental home. But when Lilian Bourne, nee Dudman, passed away in the 1950s, Hope was left with no money, no career, no training and, she felt, no way of earning a living. It was at this point her rough life on Exmoor began, as she sought to acquire the basic necessities of life with minimum expenditure.
So I began to dig around. Hope’s mother was the youngest of seven children. This meant that any cousins of Hope’s would likely be older, particularly given that Lilian was nearing 40 years old in 1918. Parts of the Dudman family’s life emerged as I went on. The girls attended Stockwell teacher training college, a suitable career path for the daughters of a police inspector. Lilian’s own mother, Louisa Dudman, herself had a curious history. She was born Louisa Applegate. Her mother’s maiden name was Mary Applegate meaning that Hope’s maternal grandmother was probably born out of wedlock. As an illegitimate child she went on to marry George, at that point a farm servant in Wiltshire. But by 1871, Laura was resident in a police station and George was a police sergeant. From illegitimacy to law enforcement, in one marriage.
I dug some more. Family history can become quite addictive, not least because it produces some surprises. I warn clients of this – some births are illegitimate, some take place within 6 months of marriage, others take place 2 years after the named father’s death. Sometimes relatives die in the workhouse or asylum. Some things you want to find out you can’t and at other times you find out things you wish you didn’t know. I had spent years wondering if Hope was illegitimate but not really trying to prove it. And then I found Lilian’s probate records and the stark truth became clear. Lilian had died unmarried. Her probate record gives her name as Bourne but declares her to be a spinster. She left nearly £2600 to Hope, a fairly considerable sum in 1953, but not enough to set her daughter up for life.
It was at this point that the full force of what it meant to be illegitimate became clear to me. Hope was outside the law. The Merriam Webster dictionary gives the definitions “not recognized as lawful offspring” and “not sanctioned by law”. Illegitimacy means not being a lawful descendant of a line. Generally you can prove who your mother is but proof of who your father is is shadier and even if he is named on the birth certificate, you do not have an automatic legal right to inheritance.
I do not know when Hope found out the truth of her birth. It may not have been until her mother’s death. I do not know how or when Lilian alighted on the surname “Bourne”. It may have been Hope’s father’s name but Lilian could simply have chosen Hope’s first and last name as symbolic of how she felt. She was 38 years old when Hope was born. Unmarried, towards the end of a hugely destructive war which left many women as widows or single with no prospect of marrying because of the gender disparity, Lilian probably felt that Hope was her only chance of a family. Her two brothers were by this stage married with children but none of her four sisters married and indeed one, Anne, had already passed away. Hope may have been, well, her only hope of having a family, if that is what she wanted. The name may have been conjured quite deliberately.
The probate records answered some other questions too. Lilian died 11 April 1953 at Chibbet Ford near Exford. I had previously not known the year and had no idea of the place. Chibbet Ford was one of Hope’s favourite places to draw and there are exquisite pencil sketches dating from this time. Hope spent her final years living in Withypool, some 2 miles from where her mother had died half a century before. I had finally solved a mystery about Hope Bourne’s origins. In one short paragraph much speculation ended. I cannot however say that I am happy about this, or feel that it is conclusive. Indeed I feel in some ways as if I have intruded on her, but this may be the nature of what I do.
Further, I had begun to uncover more about what illegitimacy meant. I can trace one half of Hope’s lineage. And then, because of her maternal grandmother, the amount I can trace is further reduced so where I should have eight great-grandparents I have only three. Illegitimacy takes away lineage but what remains are the female lines. I can name more of Bourne’s female ancestors than male, whereas so often, people searching for lineage concentrate on their surname and all but ignore the women. Hope's mother Lilian made a life for herself as a school teacher. She brought up her daughter on her own when having a child out of wedlock placed her beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour. She must have been a remarkable woman.
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