DEARMAN & MOLLETT

The IGI has this child’s name as Esther Maude, but there is also a reference in Burke’s peerage to her name as Ethel, and I have since found other records which clearly have her as Ethel, so I think that the IGI has mistranscribed the original document.  Although her sister Kate mentions her here and there in her memoirs, she never tells us her name.  When their mother died and they returned to Ireland, Kate says of her that she “was of an easy-going temperament, [and] seemed able to adapt herself to the new existence without any sense of hardship.  She seemed always content to read, but not so I.”

But then she was two years older than Kate, which may have given her more resilience.  She would have been nine when her mother died and they were sent back to Ireland to live with their maternal grandmother and two great aunts.

In 1894 Ethel married Cecil Orpin, a relatively recently graduated (1891) doctor (another one).  “I missed her horribly,” writes Kate, “for we had always been great chums in spite of our different temperaments.”  And indeed, having been orphaned at such a young age, the two girls must have been close.  

In 1911 the Orpin family was living at 1 Marina Terrace, Youghal in County Cork (the Esplanade is shown at right) and were still there in 1919 according to the Medical Directory.  Cecil, like Sarah's second husband Edwin Jackson, seems to have been a go to person when it came to being an executor of wills.  My husband confirms that ‘aunt’ Susan and ‘cousin’ Johnny - her brother, two of Ethel’s children, did indeed come from Cork.  So however, wealthy and well-connected these Nason and Bateman women were, they all seem to have married doctors. She died in 1919.

There were at least four children of the marriage.