William Law Bestall Halpin, as Tavern has shown, qualified in England as a mining engineer. In the 1911 England and Wales Census, his occupation is Colliery Manager in Derbyshire, near Sheffield. He was the youngest son of Dr Stopford William Halpin of Arklow, where he was born in 1871.
In 1901, it seems he returned to Dublin to marry his English born wife, who was baptised Annie Margaret Winnifred Johnston in Plumstead, Kent, near London, but who thereafter is always recorded as Wynnfred Halpin.
In 1902 they had their one child, Iris Wynnfred Violet Halpin, who may have been born at the home of William’s brother, Dr James Eaton Halpin, in South Normanton, between Alfreton Derbyshire and Mansfield Nottinghamshire (these days a junction of the M1).
By 1922 William and Wynnfred had moved from The Lodge, Warmsworth, Doncaster to Oak Alyn, near Wrexham, now a nursing home. A series of three notices in The Times in 1921 and 1922 announce the engagement, forthcoming marriage and then the marriage of Iris on July 4 to Major Charles Caulfield Hewitt, DSO, MC of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Machine Gun School, Seaford. No child is found, nor a divorce or his death, however Iris remarries in 1935 to Commander Hedworth Lambton RN, whose father was a younger son of the Duke of Durham. They have been recorded returning 1st Class from Buenos Aires in 1939. They had a daughter Rosemary Ann who, in 2003, lived at Onslow Square, London. Lambton divorced Iris in 1963 to remarry and Iris is recorded dying in 1997 (aged about 94) in the Kensington and Chelsea district of London, which may possibly have been the address in Onslow Square.
Wynnfred’s daughter and granddaughter returned to her city of birth but at the other end of town, both literally and figuratively. Wynnfred meantime had died in 1974 in the Worksop district of Derbyshire.
I have not yet found the death of WLB Halpin. He had been appointed in 1932 as an executor of his brother James Eaton’s will and as late as 1967 there is an advertisement giving his name seeking information from a ‘close relative’ for the purposes of the estate of JE Halpin.
