My mother maintained a lifelong sense of grievance that her husband, David Lockwood Burnley, had been deprived of a rightful inheritance from a maiden great aunt by a scheming outsider. This caught our interest as children – goodness, we might have been rich!
So, it has been satisfying to search for the truth, or rather such facts as are in the public domain. My father’s great aunt, Emma Blanche Burnley, died suddenly in 1941, in Llanfarfechan, North Wales
David Lockwood Burnley
and left her small estate valued at £700 to her older sister, Gertrude Elizabeth. One Robin Arden Hayes, a lecturer in engineering at Trinity Hall, Cambridge was her executor. Elizabeth died two years later in Bangor, in 1943, age 70. She left my father £100 and the rest of her £1300 estate to her cousin Robin Hayes, in a Will of only a few lines, with no clue as to her reasons. I am certain he was not a first cousin but have been unable to trace how they might have been related. My mother maintained he wheedled his way into the old lady’s affections. Possibly he was an assiduous visitor, which my father most certainly was not. At a present day value of about £40,000 the inheritance was not a large sum but a feeling of grievance might be justified in comparison with the dutiful dispositions made by all the other spinsters in the family throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
On the other hand there was much to disapprove of in David’s feckless character and recent marriage beneath him, so to speak. So I am well aware that there may be another side to this story. However, all those directly involved took their reasons with them to the grave. Robin Hayes was a bachelor, but had relatives and if any of them know anything further I would be delighted to hear from them.
Margaret
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