One of the windows on the South wall of the nave of Bow Church tells the sad story of Emma Warren and her family. Peter Selley of Bow has explored the archives to find out more.
Emma was born Emma Bartlett Bussell de Mey in about 1814 in Berbice, part of British Guyana, in South America. Her parents were Frances Bussell (whose father had been Mayor of Exeter) and Jan Jacob de Mey, a Dutchman who owned a slave-run coffee plantation in that colony. Both her parents died in Berbice when she was four years old, and she, her younger sister (Frances Delia) and her older half-sister (Christina) were sent to live with her uncle John Bussell in Exeter.
In 1841 Emma married William Warren, an Exeter doctor. Three years later he took up a job in Bow as medical officer to the Poor Law Union and they set up home in Bow, living in Winsor House on the main street. They had ten children over twelve years but, apart from the first three, none of them survived past infancy.
At the end of 1856 there was an outbreak of scarlet fever in Bow. Emma Warren and her youngest daughter both died and were buried in Bow Churchyard.
In 1868 her only surviving daughter commissioned a stained-glass window for Bow Church. Made in Exeter by Alfred Beer, it represents her as a mother surrounded by seven young children.
After her death, Dr William Warren carried on as doctor for Bow and the surrounding villages until he retired in 1868. In 1866 he dealt with an outbreak of cholera in Zeal Monachorum which claimed 15 lives. He remarried but was living on his own in Witheridge when he died in 1898.
John was ordained after studying at Oxford. He was a clergyman in Stowe, Buckinghamshire and in Oregon, USA.
William junior emigrated to Australia. His grandson, David Ronald de Mey Warren is renowned as being the inventor of the “black-box” that is used to analyse aircraft accidents.
Emma’s Exeter uncle, John Bussell, married her half-sister Christina, twenty years his junior. One of their daughters, Frances, married Samuel Norrish who farmed at Horwell Barton in Colebrooke. She was an organist at Colebrooke Church for 11 years. After her husband’s death she had a stained-glass window erected there in his memory. She also paid for the oak pulpit.
Another victim of the 1856 scarlet fever outbreak in Bow was Isabella Blomfield aged four, daughter of the rector. She too is commemorated in a window in the church.
The final twist to this story is that Dr William Warren’s daughter, Frances Andrews, arranged for his body to be exhumed, three months after he had been buried in Witheridge, and re-interred in the family grave in Bow.
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