Betty Ashbolt: the lady with four surnames

Betty Ashbolt, from Southampton, was planning a trip out of the country with her daughter Maureen. But her request for a first ever passport uncovered a tangled web.

“I lost my mother (Elizabeth) when I was born,” said Betty. “She died at childbirth and she left six of us.

“It must have been dreadful. Fancy a man being left with six children.”

Born in Melbourne Road in 1922, Betty’s surname was Routledge. She was taken in by her Aunt Annie Allen and, although not formally adopted, was known as Allen throughout her childhood.

“They just looked after me, which made life difficult,” she explained. “As a child, you don’t understand things, do you? And I was never allowed my birth certificate because it had a different name on it. As far as I knew, I was adopted by her.”

Betty met her first husband Denis during the war and they married in 1944.

“His surname was Commins,” she said. “But, strangely enough, he was in exactly the same position as me. He lost his mother. An aunt and uncle brought him over here from Ireland and never took him back. He was born O’Byrne but was never known as O’Byrne.

“So we had to go through a solicitor to sort that out.”

The newly-weds moved into a flat in Derby Road and bought a bed with winnings from the Grand National.

“I don’t know the name of the horse,” she laughed. “But I won four guineas and we bought a bed. I’ve never forgot that. I was so excited.”

Denis died in March 1973. In August the same year her sister Elsie died.

Betty then married her brother-in-law.

Elsie’s husband Harold ‘Nobby’ Ashbolt and Betty had been close since childhood. Nobby had been her brother-in-law since she was 12.

“I grew up thinking of him as a brother,” Betty recalled. “They used to come to us for tea on a Sunday. He used to say that I used to wait at the gate and think ‘hope they take me’. I was eight years younger than my sister and he used to say to Elsie: ‘Have we got to take her around?’

“In 1975 we got married, and we were married for 27 years. When he said we might as well get together, I didn’t know what to do. I was very hesitant but I stipulated that he’d have to come to live in my house and sell his home because I wanted to be near the church, and I wanted to be near work. So he did. He sold his house and came over to me.”

They were married by Father Pat Murphy at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Portswood.

When Nobby died in 2002, aged 86, after a long illness Maureen suggested that Betty needed a holiday after nursing her husband for so long. So the pair made plans to travel to Rome.

Betty had never left the country before “apart from going to Jersey for our honeymoon”.

The passport office asked: “What name?”

And there the problems began.

“They sent me the passport, eventually, with Ashbolt on,” added Betty. “So I’ve been a Routledge, an Allen, a Commins and an Ashbolt.

“Very complicated life I’ve had.”

Betty died in May aged 89. God bless.

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