V
ery little is known about Ann Briggs. She was born in about 1760 and, according
to the 1841 census, was born in the county of Middlesex which covered London north
of the River Thames. Most likely, her father was an artisan or tradesman and she
was born and raised in the east of London around Stepney. On Monday 22 July 1776
she married Stephen Ducro, a bricklayer of French Huguenot descent, at the Church
of St Dunstan in Stepney. A few years later, in about 1782, she gave birth to a daughter,
Mary, although it is likely that other children were born before her husband’s death
in 1804.
Nothing further is known about Ann until the 1841 census. This shows that she was
living in Spitalfields and was of ‘independent means’, presumably living on an income
from an annuity or a legacy. By this time, she was 81 years of age and living with
her widowed daughter, Mary, and Mary’s two unmarried daughters, Mary and Ann Martha.
All four ladies lived at 2 Wilkes Street (previously Wood Street and shown on the
map below).
In the eighteenth century, Wilkes Street was one of the most desirable streets in
Spitalfields, and 
was one of the street where people ‘improved to’ before advancing
to the desirable Spital Square. Number 2 was a double-fronted house built in 1725.
It consisted of three main floors, plus a cellar and a garret. Although its grandeur
was somewhat faded by 1841, its front door was flanked with wooden fluted Doric columns
and protected by a cornice hood, and there was a stone step up to protect the occupier
from the muck of the streets; inside was a wooden dog-leg staircase with carved balustrade.
The photographs below are from two recently renovated houses in Spitalfields’ Fournier
and Wilkes Streets and give an indication of how the interiors may have looked when
the houses were newly built in the 1720s, although the interiors would have been
painted in darker colours and the lower walls panelled with wood. The four ladies
probably rented a floor, as there was another family of three, plus two single ladies
living in the house (in all, seven ladies and one man), but with many of the neighbouring
properties housing up to eighteen people, it offered a comfortable existence of faded
gentility.
Sometime between 1841 and 1845, Ann moved with her family moved to 25 Brown’s Lane
(now Hanbury Street), and it was where Ann died on 12 March 1845 of old age. On 23
March 1845, she was buried at Christ Church in Spitalfields; she was 85 years old
and had survived her husband by over 40 years.
