Jessica Ennis-Hill discovers heartbreaking household historical past

Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill was shocked to discover her heartbreaking family history on the BBC‘s Who Do You Think You Are – describing her great great grandmother’s story as ‘awful in every way’.

The Olympic hero was stunned to discover that relative Maud Powell was admitted into a South Yorkshire Asylum after a doctor came to a conclusion ‘she is a person of unsound mind’.

Dame Jessica’s maternal grandad Rodney also told her that Maud had abandoned his father Jack at the age of eight.

Jack and his dad were out together when they met Maud walking down the road with a suitcase. According to Rodney, she kissed her young son goodbye – and he never saw her again.

But records from the magistrate’s court also showed that Maud left her family home amid a ‘dispute’, leading the gold medalist to think she must have been a victim of domestic abuse.

Dame Jessica, who won pentathlon gold at London 2012, was told the story of her great grandfather Jack’s abandonment from her grandparents Rodney and Margaret.

However, she learnt more about Maud from court records and found out a maintenance order was put in place on her marriage, which typically was what a husband was ordered to pay a wife to ensure she lived in a respectable manner if a marriage had broken down.

Maud was admitted to South Yorkshire Asylum in 1919, after she told a doctor she must communicate secrets she’d heard during the war and that she’d been robbed of valuable papers. 

This led him to proclaim she was ‘delusional’ and describe her as ‘violent and excitable’.

In modern times, it’s likely that Maud would have been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar, but back then there was no such diagnosis.

Jess said: ”It’s just awful in every way, I wonder how much my great grandad Jack actually knew?’

In another upsetting discovery, Dame Jessica found out that Jack’s sister, named after her mother and known as Little Maud, had died in 1924 from a heart condition aged 11.

Shedding a tear, the athlete said: ‘I don’t know who knew about this. How must she have felt when she had to leave them? And the realisation now that she never got to see her daughter again.’

Maud never left the hospital and died aged 85. In another move to protect the family from the shame of having a relative in a mental hospital, her death certificate records her as having died in a place with a different name.

At the time of Maud’s death, Dame Jessica’s mother Alison was four years old, her grandad Rod would have been 31 and his father Jack would have been 58.

Dame Jessica revealed that her grandfather Rod was upset about hearing all this information, saying: ‘His dad had never really spoken about what happened to him as a child, and what happened to his mum.

‘So he knew there was some kind of sadness, but he didn’t know the details and he’d never seen a picture of Maud. Both my grandparents and my mum felt really quite sad that she was just kind of put away and forgotten about.’

Dame Jessica also said she would be proud to have inherited even an ounce of the ‘grit and determination’ shown by a descendant of her grandfather, who was born into slavery.

Having learned her four-time great-grandfather was enslaved at a Jamaican sugar plantation following his birth in about 1795, she said it was ‘hard’ to learn that members of her family had been ‘through the most awful period of time and been subjected to unimaginable life’.

Dame Jessica travelled to the sugar plantation where her relative, George Thomas White, had been enslaved and where he worked as a cooper, making barrels for rum.

‘It’s quite a strange feeling to be stood here. This view probably hasn’t changed that much,’ the 38-year-old said.

‘It feels quite sombre. It just feels like it’s got quite a negative energy I feel walking down here.’

In the episode, Dame Jessica visited the plot of land that her relative George Thomas White bought once he was freed from slavery, having earned money from his skilled and in-demand job as a cooper.

She visited the plot with her father Vinnie Ennis, who moved from Jamaica at the age of 13.

‘I didn’t imagine that I’d be stood here at the beginning of this whole journey,’ Dame Jessica said, reflecting on tracing her family history.

‘It’s incredible to think what my four-time great-grandfather, George Thomas White, went through in his life, but he never gave up.

‘I definitely wanted to find out more about – did that grit and determination that I had throughout my career with the sport, did that come from anywhere? And I’ve seen that massively demonstrated.

‘What he went through, I think that displays the most resilience and determination I’ve ever seen.

‘If I got an ounce of that from him, then that’s an amazing thing to have.’

Dame Jessica said she had an overriding sense of pride after uncovering more about her family history.

Britain’s involvement in the slave trade spanned more than two centuries before it was banned in 1833 throughout the British Empire.

It took until 1838 for the same rights to be granted to those in British colonies. 

The episode of Who Do You Think You Are? starring Dame Jessica will air on September 12 at 9pm on BBC One.