Author: BEVIL, Elizabeth Iliff
Biography:
BEVIL, Elizabeth Iliff (1796-1895: ancestry.co.uk)
Although obituaries gave her age as 107 at the time of her death in 1895 (or late 1894), she was born on 24 Apr. 1796 to John Bevil and his wife Mary Ann Skinner. They had married in the church of St. Clement Danes in London on 18 June 1795 and Elizabeth Bevil was baptised in St. Martin in the Fields on 12 June 1796. Nothing is known about her education but it equipped her to set up a school in Ipswich in the 1820s and, in the 1830s, in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. A Mary Ann Bevil died in Bury St. Edmunds in 1849; possibly she was a sister. The 1851 Census records that Elizabeth Bevil worked as a governess in the family of a prosperous farmer, William Bennett, in Withington, Gloucestershire. She subsequently moved to Clifton, near Bristol; the 1861 Census shows her lodging with a dressmaker there. Later she lived in Hill’s Almshouses in Clifton. At the end of her life she was cared for by the Little Sisters of the Poor at Cotham Hill, Bristol. No copy of her book has been found. (ancestry.co.uk 10 Feb. 2023; Suffolk Chronicle 5 Jan. 1828, 29 Jan. 1838; Shield’s Daily Gazette 18 Jan. 1895)