The Cheltenham Examiner of January 1874 reflected on a theft of holly that had taken place before Christmas, one of the very many in which the local population helped themselves to these symbols of Christmas celebrations. The newspaper remarked that ‘two girls, Elizabeth Loveridge and Sophia Scarrett, were summoned for the damage done to trees of berried holly . . . on the 19th ult., ‘ and added disapprovingly that they treated their position as a ‘matter for levity.’
It was not at all uncommon, either, for Gypsies and Travellers to cut holly for sale in markets before Christmas festivities, which was perhaps what these two young Gypsy girls had planned to do. Sophia Scarrott, the daughter of Eliza Jane Cleverly and Moses Scarrott, was only about 13 years of age at the time of the summons for stealing holly, Elizabeth Loveridge some three years older.
In the 1861 census Moses Scarrott, a tinman, is in the Cirencester registration district of Gloucestershire, with his wife, and their younger children Henry (11), Mary Ann (9), Susan (7), Jonathan (4), Sophia (1). The following year Moses, although only in his forties, died and Eliza Jane Scarrott, remaining in the area, is recorded in the 1871 census as a widow, a hawker, with three daughters Susan, Sophia and Jane.
By 1875 Sophia’s partner in crime, Elizabeth Loveridge, is also a member of the Scarrott family, for she and Jonathan, Sophia’s brother, were to baptise their first child in the autumn 1876. The following autumn Sophia married a local man, a bricklayer named William Green, who was himself only about 18 years of age, but claimed to be 20, his sixteen-year-old bride claiming to be 18. By this time Susan, Sophia’s sister, had formed a partnership with Charles Loveridge, Elizabeth’s brother, and had a small family of her own.
Both Sophia and Elizabeth had very large families and Sophia and William Green also supported Sophia’s mother in her last years. In the 1881 census the Green family are living in Cheltenham, where William is recorded as a bricklayer, employing one man, together with his wife, Sophia, two sons, William (2) and Joseph, an infant, and mother-in-law Eliza Scarrott, a licensed hawker. Jonathan and Elizabeth, also in Cheltenham, have six children, Alice (14), Jonathan (11), Albert (7), Florence Elizabeth Ada (5), Charles (3), Matilda (1).
By the time of the 1891 census Jonathan Scarrott is now a dealer in antique furniture and an umbrella mender, Elizabeth is an umbrella hawker, and they have added another child, William James, to their brood. Meanwhile, William Green is working as a coal merchant and he and Sophia have a growing family, having added Annie (8), Elisha (6), Lily (3) and baby Stuart. The next ten years saw even more children added to these families, with Valentine, Thomas and Ellen Nora born to Jonathan and Elizabeth, and the addition of Herbert, Randolph, Cora and Violet Agnes for the Green family, by which time William has returned to his profession as a bricklayer. Two more sons, Baden and Reginald, were to complete Sophia and William’s family, recorded in the 1911 census.
Sophia was to be mentioned in a local newspaper once more, but in a very different manner from her first appearance, for, by 1927, she and William were celebrating their Golden wedding anniversary. This was noted in an article in the Cheltenham Chronicle, which remarked that the couple, marrying when very young, had enjoyed a happy union, during which they had sixteen children. Five of their sons had served in the Great War, and all their surviving children, having married locally, had settled in the Cheltenham area. Long forgotten, it seems, was Sophia’s childhood conviction, together with her sister-in-law, for the theft of berried holly.