Author: Frank, Mary
Biography:
FRANK, Mary, later NIPPER, later RICKETTS (1806-1906: findmypast.com)
She was a Quaker of Bristol, where the Friends were numerous, born on Church St. on 21 Aug. 1806 to Arnee Frank and his second wife Hannah Benwell, who had married at Sidcot on 5 Apr. 1805. Both parents became ministers in their church. Arnee Frank was by trade a cutler and ironmonger; the 1851 Census gives his occupation as "retired pin-maker." He published Brief Remarks on the importance of "a guarded and religious education" for one's children in 1820. From 1818 Mary attended the Quaker school at Sidcot, where her half-sister Edith was mistress; she later contributed detailed recollections for its centennial history. The family appears to have been prosperous and there is no evidence of her having had any employment outside the home. The Censuses of 1841 and 1851 indicate that she continued to live with her parents, who by then had moved to Clifton. Her two younger brothers William Arnee and John were respectively a respected artist and a schoolmaster (from 1847 to 1852, superintendant of the Sidcot school). All publications in her lifetime appeared under her maiden name but in 1860, the year of publication of the last one, she married Rev. William Nipper (1787-1873), who was not a C of E clergyman, at Clifton. After his death at Axbridge, Somerset, she married George Frederick Ricketts (1803-93), a wax modeller, there in 1876. They lived together at Winscombe, Somerset, where she died, a widow, on 26 Jan. 1906. She and her husband both named a Frank family descendant as executor of their modest estates. No record has been found of her burial but it was recorded as a "civil" rather than as a parish one. Her Quaker connections saw to the printing of a final posthumous collection of poems under her married name Mary Ricketts, Village Sketches from Life (1906) of which a single extant copy is now recorded at the Friends Library in London. (findmypast.com 31 Oct. 2021; Journal of the Friends' Historical Society 3-4 [1906] 78, and 6-7 [1907] 44; Francis Arnold Knight, A History of Sidcot School [1908] 58; "Frank, John," Annual Monitor [1900] 52-6; Friends' Books; Bristol Mercury 23 June 1860, 4 Nov. 1876; information from AA) HJ