A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories blog, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

A Woman Overcoming Personal Crisis

Australian-born Eva Milway Sellen (1865–1958) lived with her husband Herbert Tear, a photographer, at 22 Loughborough Road at some time between 1900 and 1906. They had three children.

The couple had a strained relationship. In 1905, when she was living apart from Herbert, Eva was found drunk in Atlantic Road, Brixton and charged at Lambeth Court as an ‘habitual drunkard’. She received a sentence of three years in a reformatory. The 1898 Inebriates Act allowed non-criminal inebriates to be held for up to three years. 

Kate Cakebread, a notorious inebriated woman, who was incarcerated multiple times. By Phil May c.1895

No. 22 Loughborough Road, once the home of Eva Tear

The reformatory records show that Eva started drinking brandy and claret at the suggestion of a doctor at a time when she may have been suffering from postnatal depression. She told the staff that she had been caused great unhappiness by her husband. Nevertheless, at the end of her sentence, she was released into his care.

Unsurprisingly the marriage ended, and Eva moved to her own place in Perivale in West London, before going to live with her son Frank in Southend, Essex. 

Herbert and Eva divorced in 1914 and Eva acquired a new partner, William James, who was cited in the divorce case. She outlived both Herbert and William by some 20 years, dying in Chichester, Sussex, at the age of 92.