Beatrice Vaughan: Illegitimate Daughter of the Howell Dynasty?

Just before Beatrice Vaughan’s death in 1985, she confided in her son a secret she had kept her entire life. In her final moments, she revealed she had been born in a workhouse. A fact she had concealed, possibly ashamed of the stigma attached to such institutions.

But there was a second, even more startling secret. Beatrice said her mother, while in service with the prominent Howell family in Cardiff, had become pregnant by one of James Howell’s sons. She was forced to leave her position, returning to Swansea to give birth to Beatrice in the workhouse.

Beatrice Vaughan in 1982 with her great granddaughter.

If the story were true, the alleged father came from a family of extraordinary local prominence. James Howell, founder of the once prominent Cardiff department store, was born in 1835 at Clyn Farm, Llanychaer, in Pembrokeshire. By the 1890s, his store on St. Mary Street was the flagship of Welsh retail. His family lived at 21 The Walk in Cardiff, and two of his sons would have been about 27 and 21 years of age at the time of Beatrice’s conception.

The secrets Beatrice told have intrigued the family for forty years, becoming a persistent piece of folklore. As with many family stories, it may not be entirely accurate, but it is rarely entirely false.

Investigation confirms the first secret. Beatrice was born in Swansea Union Workhouse on the 4^th of November 1893. Her mother, Dinah Jane Vaughan (often recorded as Jane), a 21-year-old domestic servant, is listed with no father named. Her address was the Cwmdonkin Shelter, a refuge "for the reclamation of fallen and abandoned women."

The parallels with the Howell family are intriguing. Dinah Jane was born in 1871 in Little Newcastle, Pembrokeshire, just five miles from James Howell's birthplace. Her father, Thomas Vaughan, was a farmer, just two years younger than James Howell. Could the farming families have known each other? Could this connection explain how a young woman from Pembrokeshire found work with Cardiff's premier family? Maybe further time and research will give the answers.  

The coincidences are compelling. They form a perfect narrative supporting the story Dinah Jane told her daughter. Whether it reveals a biological link to Cardiff's commercial dynasty or a deeper, more personal secret now lost to time, the tale Beatrice Vaughan carried for a lifetime remains a poignant testament to the shame, stigma, and silenced stories of Victorian women.