Someone once told John Stevens that the story he had uncovered was very much like a Catherine Cookson novel. He thought about it and decided they were right. It had romance. It had ambition. It had travel to the far edge of the world and back again. It had poverty, and a kind of riches, and poverty once more. It had, in his own word, pathos.
What it also had — and what John spent several years quietly piecing together — was the truth. Because the family had thought they knew this story already. They did not.
This is the account of two people: John Leonard Notley, born in Hackney in 1878, and Clara Elizabeth Baseley, born in a farmworker’s cottage in Northamptonshire the following year. They would not meet for over thirty years. When they finally did, it was on the other side of the world, in a frontier town in British Columbia called Kamloops. They married there in April 1913. Their daughter Margaret — who would one day become Margaret Stevens — was born the following year.
John Notley went back to fight in the First World War in 1914 and was killed in action in Belgium in 1917. He was thirty-eight years old. Clara lived on for another thirteen years, running a boarding house, raising their daughter, and eventually returning to England. She died in Toronto in 1930.
Those are the bare facts. But the story behind them — how they each came to be in Kamloops, what drove them there, what the family got wrong and what the evidence eventually showed — is considerably more interesting.
“It was to me anyway.” — John Stevens, presenting this research to the family, November 2016
Before We Knew What We Know Now
When John Stevens began looking into the Notley and Baseley sides of the family, the picture seemed reasonably clear. Clara was believed to have been born in London. Her father was thought to be a man called John Basely. She and John Notley had met in London and decided to go to Canada together to get married.
It was a tidy story. It was also almost entirely wrong.
John presented his findings to the family in November 2016. He structured it, with quiet pleasure, around the assumptions themselves — stating what the family had believed, and then showing, piece by piece, why it was not quite right.
Assumption One: Clara was born in London
The family believed Clara had been born in London to a father named John Basely. There was even a Clara Elizabeth Beasley living in London at the right time. For a while, the investigation went down that route entirely.
“We did actually find a Clara Elizabeth Beasley in London, and therefore we started going down the wrong route.” — John Stevens
She was not the right person. The right Clara Elizabeth Baseley was born on the 6th of May 1879, in Boddington, Northamptonshire. Her father was Bethuel Baseley, a plate layer on the Midland Railway. Her mother was Elizabeth, formerly Amos.
Clara, throughout her life, used an expression that nobody in London would say: Don’t mither me. It is a northern word, still heard in the East Midlands and beyond.
“Mum often said ‘Don’t mither me.’ That’s not a Southern expression. But you do hear it up north. My conclusion was that she must have got that off her mother.” — John Stevens
He was right. Clara carried that word with her through service in London, across the Atlantic, through the years in Canada — passed on to her daughter without her ever knowing where it came from.
Assumption Two: They met in London and went to Canada together
John Notley sailed to Canada in 1906 — alone, on the Empress of Ireland — and made his way to Winnipeg. He was twenty-seven years old, freshly discharged from eight years in the Royal Marines. He was not going to meet a woman. He was going to build something.
Clara Baseley did not sail until 1909, three years later. And she did not go to Kamloops. She went to Toronto.
They were not going together. They were not even going to the same place. Whatever brought them eventually to the same town and the same church on the 2nd of April 1913 was not a plan hatched in a London pub. It was something else — circumstance, chance, the particular way that lives can converge across enormous distances.
John Notley’s Journey
John arrived in Canada in 1906 and landed at Quebec. From there he travelled to Winnipeg — over two and a half thousand kilometres. He purchased a twenty-three acre fruit farm in Burton, on the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia.
By 1908 he had moved to Revelstoke, where he became a police constable. The main business of policing in that part of the country was cattle rustling and drunkenness. John Notley, former Royal Marine, apparently managed it without difficulty.
In 1910 he moved to Kamloops — a town of around four thousand eight hundred people — where he was eventually promoted to Sergeant. By 1911 he appears to have been running a boarding house alongside his police duties at 320 Seymour Street.
Clara Baseley’s Journey
In 1881, Clara was one year old in a farmworker’s cottage in Boddington. In 1891, aged twelve, she was already away from home, working as a servant in London. She had left home at eleven.
By 1901, aged twenty-one, she was a barmaid at The Castle public house on Holloway Road, London. She sailed in 1909 to Toronto, where she found work as a saleswoman in a department store.
By 1911 she was in Kamloops. By April 1913 she and John Notley were married at St Paul’s Church. The Inland Sentinel reported the wedding on the 2nd of April 1913, describing John Notley as one of the best known figures in the city police force. He was thirty-four. She was thirty-three — though the newspaper gave her age as twenty-nine.
Margaret, and the War
Margaret Elizabeth Notley was born in Kamloops in 1914. That same year, John Notley rejoined the Royal Marines. He was killed in action in Belgium in 1917. Margaret was three.
Clara continued to run the boarding house. By 1921 she had been elected Noble Grand of the Excelsior Rebekah Lodge — the highest office in the lodge. In April 1919, Clara and Margaret returned to England — Margaret aged five, Clara forty years old, widowed.
Margaret Notley would later become Margaret Stevens. And one day her grandson John would go to Canada to find out what was actually true.
Bethuel Baseley
Clara’s father Bethuel Baseley — known locally as Charlie — is a remarkable figure in his own right. He worked as a plate layer on the Midland Railway. As a young man he had served in the Royal Rifles and fought in the Fenian Campaign at the Battle of Fort Erie on Niagara Island in 1866. Decades later he was mentioned in a newspaper as a survivor of that battle — an old man in a Northamptonshire village, carrying a piece of Canadian history that nobody in the family knew about.
“Now I’ve just spent a few moments on this chap because it turned out he’s a really interesting fellow.” — John Stevens
It is one of the small, genuine pleasures of this kind of research — that you go looking for one person and find, just behind them, another person entirely, living a life you never expected.
This research was carried out by John Stevens over several years, culminating in a research trip to Canada in 2016 with his wife Gillian. He presented his findings to the family in November 2016. This archive is a record of what he found, and a tribute to the people he found it about.