Much of this archive date from the 1870s onwards. The main players appear to be George Shaw and Caroline, his wife, plus their daughter Agnes Mabel (known as Mabel).
Mabel has a most fascinating life history. She was a talented musician, and after the First World War she secured a job as a music and elocution teacher at Manchester School for Girls. Whilst working there she met Jane Saunders who taught art at the school. Jane Saunders and another art teacher called Hannah Ritchie lived together in Manchester during the mid 1920s and were close friends of the famous artist Frances Hodgkins. Hodgkins was struggling somewhat at the time and was given lodgings and financial help by Saunders and Ritchie (who appear together as the subjects of one of Hodgkins’ most famous paintings).
Frances Hodgkins and Jane Saunders are known to have had a relationship, which had ended by 1929 when Saunders began a new relationship with Mabel Shaw. Eventually Saunders and Shaw left Manchester to settle down together in Wiltshire. Mabel worked as a freelance teacher of music and elocution at numerous other schools, and this lot of ephemera includes various employer references and details of her employment history.
Saunders and Shaw lived happily together for the rest of their lives. They accumulated a significant collection of paintings by Frances Hodgkins, including several of her best known works that are now hanging in major galleries around the world, such as the Tate.
