Family and Friends

Abstract

Lockyer’s first wife was a fecund bearer of children; during the first fifteen years of their marriage, nine children were born. The first child, called Joseph Norman like his father, died young; so the second child, another boy, called Norman Joseph, who was born in 1860, became the eldest. After him there was a regular succession of children every two years until 1873. Only two of these were girls; the elder, Rosaline Annie, born in 1864, seems to have inherited something of her father’s stubbornness. Lockyer was moulded somewhat in the popular image of a Victorian father, and although intent on hel** his children, was noticeably authoritarian. It appears that his children, even when grown up, found him a little overawing. Rosie, however, when she was 23 insisted on marrying a man of whom her father strongly disapproved. Lockyer’s prognostication that the man was a waster may not have been entirely incorrect, for, in the nineties, Rosie had to go on the stage to make ends meet. The second daughter, Winifred Lucas, on the other hand, never married. She was the last member of the family to arrive, and, after the death of her mother, acted as companion first to her father and then to his second wife. She also seems on occasion to have acted as a moderating agent between her father and her brothers.