Violet Tillard (original) (raw)
Sections
- Arrest and Imprisonment
- First World War
- Society of Friends
- Primary Sources
- Student Activities
- References
Violet Ellen Anstey Tillard, the daughter of Captain George Henry Tillard and Louisa Fanny Anstey Tillard, was born in Madras, India, on 29th December, 1874. Her mother died at the age of 36, at Wimbledon in Surrey. By the time Violet's father, George Tillard, retired from the British Indian Army on 28th January 1887, he had risen to the rank of Colonel in the Madras Staff Corps. (1)
After her training at Poplar Hospital in London she worked as a hospital nurse for over the next ten years. Tillard was a supporter of women's suffrage and was a member of the Women Social & Political Union (WSPU). In a conference in September 1907, Emmeline Pankhurst told members that she intended to run the WSPU without interference. As a result of this speech, Charlotte Despard, Teresa Billington-Greig, Elizabeth How-Martyn, Dora Marsden, Helena Normanton, Margaret Nevinson and seventy other members of the WSPU left to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL). Like the WSPU, the WFL was a militant organisation that was willing the break the law. (2)
Tillard became a member of the WFL and in 1908 became Assistant Organising Secretary of the organisation. In May 1908 she helped establish branches of the League on a caravan tour of the south-east counties of England. Her biographer, Sybil Oldfield, commented: "Tall, slender, delicate, reticent, graceful, Violet Tillard looked too much like a nice, quiet lady to be recognized by her opponents as the committed subversive she really was." (3) During the tour she met Muriel Matters who was to remain a lifelong companion. Matters would later write of her friend's courage, sympathy, generosity and selflessness, stating that Tillard, "set one a standard to live by". (4)
Arrest and Imprisonment
Tillard also established WFL branches in Ipswich, Carmarthen and Cardiff. On 28th October 1908 she was arrested for taking part in a demonstration in the House of Commons. Two women chained themselves to the grille in front of the Ladies' Gallery. Meanwhile a group of women including Tillard demonstrated in St Stephen's Hall. Tillard was one of the fourteen women arrested and taken to Cannon Row Police Station. (5) As a result of this action she spent a month in prison. (6)
The following month she visited Sussex. On 28th November 1908, she spoke at a meeting at Upminster addressed by Alice Schofield and Henria Williams. Together with Williams she established a branch of the Women's Freedom League in Upminster. (7)
Violet Tillard (c. 1908)
Violet Tillard was active in promoting women's suffrage in newspapers. In one letter she pointed out the difference between the Women's Freedom League and the Women Social & Political Union. "The Women's Freedom League differs from the Women's Social and Political Union chiefly in the internal organisation, which in democratic; and in the fact that it is not part of its policy at present to interrupt Cabinet Ministers at meetings; but the societies at one in their aim the removal of the sex disability, and in their policy of opposing the Government at bye-elections. Also both societies send deputations to Mr Asquith at the House of Commons, which has resulted in the past in varying terms of imprisonment for their members." (8)
In 1910 Violet Tillard journeyed to Australia with Muriel Matters in an attempt to win Commonwealth support for suffrage for British women. "Her courage, sympathy, selflessness, determination and almost daredevil gaiety were by-words among her colleagues in that much mocked cause. From 1912 to 1914 she was in Dublin, supporting the striking Irish transport workers." (9)
First World War
In 1912 she travelled to Dublin to assist workers taking industrial action for better conditions. Tillard was a socialist and pacifist and was opposed to Britain's involvement in the First World War. A member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) she joined forces with other radicals to stop the government from introducing conscription. (10)
Lilla Brockway and Fenner Brockway were both opposed to the war and feared the introduction of conscription. On 12th November, 1914, Lilla had a letter published The Labour Leader that suggested the forming of an organisation that was "open to all men of enlistment age who will refuse to bear arms in the event of conscription." Women could be associate members of the proposed organisation. (11) There was a great response to the letter and 150 people joined the organisation, the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) in the first six days. By October 1915 it claimed 5,000 members. (12)
Violet Tillard joined the NCF. Other members included Clifford Allen, Bertrand Russell, Philip Snowden, Bruce Glasier, Robert Smillie, C. H. Norman, C. E. M. Joad, William Mellor, Arthur Ponsonby, Guy Aldred, Alfred Salter, Duncan Grant, Wilfred Wellock, Herbert Morrison, Maude Royden, John Clifford, Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Catherine Marshall, Alfred Mason, Winnie Mason, Alice Wheeldon, William Wheeldon, John S. Clarke, Arthur McManus, Hettie Wheeldon, Storm Jameson, Ada Salter, and Max Plowman. (13)
Ramsay MacDonald organised a Central Fund for dependents of imprisoned COs and this Maintenance Department was administered by Violet Tillard and Ada Salter. "The Central Fund was not centralised but districts were co-ordinated by Ada: she could move a surplus from one district to another with permission. Typical of ILP's decentralised centralism. Ada had a separate office in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It co-ordinated the NCF branches relief work all over the country." (14)
In January 1918 Violet Tillard was appointed General Secretary of the No-Conscription Fellowship, (15) She would visit men in prison. Corder Catchpool later recalled that she was "of inspiration in personal contact, and of strong, quiet leadership in common counsel... Violet Tillard was the first, except one member of my own family, to greet me on my release from prison, and I shall never forget her welcome." (16)
Violet Tillard
In May 1918 she was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act and was fined £100 and costs for refusing to furnishing the name and address of the publisher of a leaflet which was circulated by the NCF. (17) When she refused to pay the fine she was sentenced to 61 days' imprisonment. (18) In prison she refused "to obey those prison rules which she felt to be immoral and enforced with the object of degrading prisoners." (19) A friend said: "She (Violet Tillard) united a deep hatred of all evil institutions with a quiet and tender regard for human beings." (20)
Society of Friends
After the war Violet Tillard and Ada Salter worked on Friends Service Committee to rehabilitate Conscientious Objectors. This entailed finding clothing for them and training them for new jobs. (21) In 1919 Violet Tillard joined the Society of Friends Nursing Unit. "It was a natural fit for Tillard. Quakers have always tended to strongly emphasize peace and social justice." (22) She first went "to Germany to help in relieving the distress among the destitute and starving University students". (23) "From 1920 to 1921 she was still in Germany, concentrating on the student feeding programmes, especially in the University of Tübingen, where, like Joan Fry, she was made an honorary member of the Students' Union, and where the richer students were taxing themselves to help the poorer ones. German students then were sleeping in rags, on straw, living on crusts of bread or one meal of potatoes or cabbage a day. They collapsed in lectures, and did not have the strength to write their examination papers." (24)
Joan Fry asked Violet Tillard to move to Buzuluk in Russia, where she attempted to deal with the ravages of famine. Like other relief workers she had to learn to make herself swallow her own minimal food ration while seeing and hearing the cries of the starving: "One feels horrible to live in such conditions when the people are literally starving at our doors - a boy of sixteen lies dead a few yards away... Some of these people come into our kitchen to beg before they give up. On Christmas Day 114 died in Buzuluk; on the 26th, 355, on the 27th, 212. 509 of these were children. It isn't so harrowing to see them lying dead. They suffer no more. It is the doomed shadows one sees around the streets and in the homes that are most horrible." (25)
Violet Tillard wrote to Ruth Fry: "Yesterday I was in one of the Receiving Homes. In one big dreary room are children, sometimes a hundred, sometimes more; all along one side runs a long platform on which crouch little bundles of misery; here they live day and night - no beds, no other coverings, not room for all to lie down, no clean clothes. The only thing one could do to improve this place would be to be able to give to them... The only cheering thing is that in every Home one finds that the death rate has gone down very much because of our food. I have been to two of the Homes for Sick Children... in one of which the sister in charge has made wonderful efforts - the children were only two in a bed but again there were absolutely no bed clothes. (26)
The Vote reported: "In that typhus infected region, say her fellow relief workers, she was one of the most splendid and one of the most bravest of women, cheerfully carrying out the repulsive details of the work, in daily contact with pestilence and death. She nursed to health one English worker stricken with typhus, then, in a little four-roomed wooden outpost, where two relief workers lived with a few Russian peasant servants. The woman worker fell ill with the scourge, and a nurse was sent from the Unit. Miss Tillard volunteered to go, and after a long cold night journey over the snow, she and one or two companions who were to take over the relief organisation, knocked at the door, to find that all three were stricken by the disease, lying helpless and untended in three of the rooms of the little house. Miss Tillard set to work and undertook the whole nursing of the three patients. They all recovered, but the anxiety and over-exertion which saved their lives was due to the fatal ending of her own illness when soon afterwards she was herself attacked by the disease." (27)
Violet Tillard died of typhus on 19th February, 1922. (28) During a speech given to the Moscow Soviet, Leon Trotsky ackknowledged the sacrifice made by Tillard: "We know, too, that the Society of Friends', the Quakers, are feeding 189,000 children, and so on. These organisations have come here with their staffs, and they are doing very difficult work. Of 170 employees of the ARA, fifteen have gone down with typhus. Two members of the Nansen organisation have died of that disease – the British Dr Farrar and the Italian Guido Pardo. The Swedish Red Cross nurse Karin Lindskog and the German Red Cross worker Dr Gerner have died, as also have two young Quaker girls, named Pattison and Violet Tillard ... When you think of these sacrifices, you want to say that, in our bloodstained and at the same time heroic epoch, there are people who, regardless of their class position, are guided exclusively by the promptings of humanity and inner nobility. I read a brief obituary of this Anglo-Saxon woman, Violet Tillard; a delicate, frail creature, she worked here, at Buzuluk, under the most frightful conditions, fell at her post, and was buried there." (29)
At the time of her death, Violet Tillard had effects valued at £4,505, which was passed on to her half-sister Lilian Irene Middleton (wife of Humfrey Middleton). (30) The Friend, the Society of Friends journal, commented: "It would be good for the world that her name should become memorable". (31)
Primary Sources
(1) Exmouth Journal (31 October 1908)
Suffragettes cause of another scene in the House of Commons on Wednesday evenings. Two women chained themselves to the grille in front of the Ladies' Gallery, and a portion of the grille had to be removed by the police in order to release them…
Disturbances also occurred at the same time outside the House, leading to numerous arrests for disorderly conduct outside St. Stephen's Hall, and for attempting to harangue a throng at the base of the monument in front of the House of Lords. The two women who were the principal figures in the disturbances in the Ladies Gallery gave their names of Helen Fox and Muriel Matters…
No less than fifteen arrests were made in connection with the disturbances in St Stephen's Hall. They gave their names as follows: Arnold Cutler, Miss Violet Tillard, Miss Edith Bremer, Mrs. Emily Duval, Miss Margaret Henderson, Miss Alison Neilans, Miss Marion Leighfield… They were taken to Cannon Row Police Station, and were bailed out later.
(2) Eastern Daily Press (21 August 1909)
Will you allow me to correct an inaccuracy in your London Letter in today's Daily Press?
Mrs. Despard and Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, who went to Downing Street to "waylay Mr. Asquith," do not belong to "the non-militant section of the suffragettes, but to the Women's Freedom League, one of the two militant societies.
The Women's Freedom League differs from the Women's Social and Political Union chiefly in the internal organisation, which in democratic; and in the fact that it is not part of its policy at present to interrupt Cabinet Ministers at meetings; but the societies at one in their aim the removal of the sex disability, and in their policy of opposing the Government at bye-elections. Also both societies send deputations to Mr Asquith at the House of Commons, which has resulted in the past in varying terms of imprisonment for their members.
I should like to mention that Mrs. Despard, who has been one of the deputation which has been waiting outside the House for the last six weeks will be in Norwich this week, and will be addressing meetings on the question of "Votes for Women".
(3) The Scotsman (9 May 1918)
At Bow Street yesterday, Violet Tillard, secretary of the No-Conscription Fellowship, was fined £100 and costs for refusing to furnishing the name and address of the publisher of a leaflet which was circulated by the Fellowship. Notice of appeal was given.
(4) The Daily News (1 March 1922)
The Friends' Relief Committee announced the death from typhus of Miss Violet Tillard, who was born in 1874, was for ten years a hospital nurse. In 1908 she became the organiser of the Women's Freedom League, and during a suffrage deputation to the House of Commons was arrested and imprisoned.
When the war broke out she took up a strong attitude against conscription, and for two years was general secretary of the No-Conscription Fellowship. In this connection, and for two years was general secretary of the No-Conscription Fellowship. In this connection she came into conflict with DORA and was sentenced to 61 days' imprisonment.
After the Armistice she joined the Society of Friends, and more than a year ago went out to Germany to work, principally on behalf of underfed university students.
In November last she joined the Friends' Unit in Busuluk, the worst famine district in Russia, and there she was seized by typhus, from which she died.
(5) The Vote (10 March 1922)
Last week the Women's Freedom League heard with pride and sorrow and regret, of the heroic death of our old member, Violet Tillard, in the early days of the Women's Freedom League, because of one of the most valued and enthusiastic organizers.
In October 1908, during a deputation to the House of Commons, she was arrested, and served a month's imprisonment in the 3rd division of Holloway.
Subsequently she worked in Ipswich, Carmarthen, Cardiff, and other parts of the country, and in Battersea and the London suburbs.
When war broke out she became the General Secretary of the No-Conscription Fellowship, and these came into conflict with DORA, this time serving an imprisonment of 61 days in Holloway gaol.
Over a year ago she proceeding to Germany to help in relieving the distress among the destitute and starving University students, and last November joined the Friends' Unit in Buzulut, the worst famine district in Russia. In that typhus infected region, say her fellow relief workers, she was one of the most splendid and one of the most bravest of women, cheerfully carrying out the repulsive details of the work, in daily contact with pestilence and death. She nursed to health one English worker stricken with typhus, then, in a little four-roomed wooden outpost, where two relief workers lived with a few Russian peasant servants. The woman worker fell ill with the scourge, and a nurse was sent from the Unit. Miss Tillard volunteered to go, and after a long cold night journey over the snow, she and one or two companions who were to take over the relief organisation, knocked at the door, to find that all three were stricken by the disease, lying helpless and untended in three of the rooms of the little house. Miss Tillard set to work and undertook the whole nursing of the three patients. They all recovered, but the anxiety and over-exertion which saved their lives was due to the fatal ending of her own illness when soon afterwards she was herself attacked by the disease.
(6) The Daily Herald (24 February 1922)
News reached London yesterday that Miss Violet Tillard well-known in the feminist and pacifist movements, died of typhus in the Russian famine on February 18, where she was working in the relief organisation of the Society of Friends.
(7) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)
The No-Conscription Fellowship (N.C.F.) was founded in November 1914 by a young Labour Leader journalist, Fenner Brockway (1888-1988), initially at the prompting of his wife, Lilla, to mobilize men of military age against conscription. The members of its National Committee were mostly young, middle-class I.L.P. socialists such as Clifford Allen (1889-1939), its Chairman, who, like Brockway, worked for the socialist press, and Morgan Jones (1885-1939) and J. H. (Jimmy) Hudson (1881-1962), both schoolteachers. Only a few came from outside the ranks of socialist activists: the Revd Leyton Richards (1879-1948), for example, a Congregationalist who had already, unlike most British pacifists, found himself in conscientious disagreement with conscription in the form of the compulsory military training introduced in Australia in 1910, shortly before he came there to spend three years as minister of a Melbourne chapel and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, a Whiggish individualist who had espoused 'pacifism' during the Boer War but did not join the I.L.P. until 1915 and even then insisted that he was not a socialist... Its moment of ostensible failure, the introduction of conscription in 1916, was to prove its finest hour: from being a small propaganda body it became a substantial movement - though never as substantial as implied by its grossly exaggerated boast of 15,000 members in the summer of 1916 - and the acknowledged voice of the whole conscientious objection movement. In particular, it proved an efficient information and welfare service for all objectors; although its unresolved internal division over whether its function was to ensure respect for the pacifist conscience or to combat conscription by any means, sincerely "conscientious" or otherwise, had reduced it to a demoralized state by the last year of the war.
(8) Violet Tillard, letter to Ruth Fry (30th December, 1921)
One feels horrible to live in such conditions when the people are literally starving at our doors - a boy of sixteen lies dead a few yards away... Some of these people come into our kitchen to beg before they give up. On Christmas Day 114 died in Buzuluk; on the 26th, 355, on the 27th, 212. 509 of these were children. It isn't so harrowing to see them lying dead. They suffer no more. It is the doomed shadows one sees around the streets and in the homes that are most horrible.
(9) Violet Tillard, letter to Ruth Fry (8th January, 1922)
Yesterday I was in one of the Receiving Homes. In one big dreary room are children, sometimes a hundred, sometimes more; all along one side runs a long platform on which crouch little bundles of misery; here they live day and night - no beds, no other coverings, not room for all to lie down, no clean clothes. The only thing one could do to improve this place would be to be able to give to them... The only cheering thing is that in every Home one finds that the death rate has gone down very much because of our food. I have been to two of the Homes for Sick Children... in one of which the sister in charge has made wonderful efforts - the children were only two in a bed but again there were absolutely no bed clothes.
(10) Leon Trotsky, speech at the Moscow Soviet (12th March, 1922)
In August the ARA undertook to feed one million children. In October it was already feeding 1,200,000, and today it is feeding two million, plus 30,000 hospital patients. At the same time we are to receive from America 20 million dollars, to be used to relieve Russia's famine-victims. This means that in two or three weeks' time we shall be able to feed five million adult famine-victims. If you compare the aid contributed by the ARA with that furnished by other, European organisations, you find that all of the latter put together are doing only one-tenth as much. We know that Nansen's heroic efforts were wrecked on the rock of Europe's callousness, and we know, too, that the ‘Society of Friends', the Quakers, are feeding 189,000 children, and so on. These organisations have come here with their staffs, and they are doing very difficult work. Of 170 employees of the ARA, fifteen have gone down with typhus. Two members of the Nansen organisation have died of that disease – the British Dr Farrar and the Italian Guido Pardo. The Swedish Red Cross nurse Karin Lindskog and the German Red Cross worker Dr Gerner have died, as also have two young Quaker girls, named Pattison and Violet Tillard ... When you think of these sacrifices, you want to say that, in our bloodstained and at the same time heroic epoch, there are people who, regardless of their class position, are guided exclusively by the promptings of humanity and inner nobility. I read a brief obituary of this Anglo-Saxon woman, Violet Tillard; a delicate, frail creature, she worked here, at Buzuluk, under the most frightful conditions, fell at her post, and was buried there ... Probably she was no different from those others who also fell at their posts, serving their fellow human beings ... Here we count six such graves. It may be there will be more, it is even probable that there will be. These graves are a kind of augury of those future, new relations between people which will be based upon solidarity and will not be shadowed by self-seeking. When the Russian people become a little richer they will erect (we are profoundly sure of this) a great monument to these fallen heroes, the forerunners of a better human morality, for which we, too, are fighting. Yes, indeed: without faith that, some day, people will behave to each other like brothers and sisters, what would be the point of fighting, building barricades, fighting battles.
(11) Violet Tillard and the Russian Famine (28th April, 2020)
Leon Trotsky was considered, in 1922 at least, to be the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union when he chanced upon the name ‘Violet Tillard' in the obituaries of a local newspaper. In a speech delivered in March 1922 he invoked Tillard's ‘humanity and inner nobility' at a time of profound suffering when a vicious famine was stalking millions of Russians. It was her, and other ‘forerunners of a better human morality' like her, who Trotsky thought ought to be thanked with a ‘great monument' in the future. Violet Tillard – or ‘Till' as she was often called by those who knew her best – was also, as it turns out, a lifelong friend of Muriel Matters. They first met in 1908 as the pioneering suffrage caravan came over a hill during its tour of south east England. So how exactly did this friend of Muriel's end up in Buzuluk, Russia, a place so far from her home? Tillard's is a story of someone always trying to make a difference; helping others in times of need. She is also, as it turns out, someone well worth knowing more about in these times of trouble and worry.
To understand the path that lead to Violet to Russia we first need know more about her background. Beyond privately held family recollections, not many have looked into her story besides Sybil Oldfield in Woman Humanitarians (2001) who does a wonderful job of sketching out many of the key details. Violet was born in December 1874, the eldest daughter of a Colonel. After her training at Poplar Hospital in London she worked as a hospital nurse for a full decade. By 1908 Tillard was motivated to join the suffrage movement. She soon became a devoted organiser for the Women's Freedom League during the highpoint of the suffrage effort. In fact, she was by Muriel's side for some of her most important accomplishments. Tillard was all hands on deck in the caravan tour of 1908, she was active in the Ladies' Gallery during the grille protest, and travelled with Muriel on her lecture tour of Australia in 1910.
From 1912 to 1914 she travelled to Dublin to assist workers taking industrial action for better conditions before World War I broke out across Europe. Tillard's pacifist beliefs came to the fore during this period. She was heavily involved in managing the donations to the ‘No Conscription Fellowship' an organisation that, among other things, financially supported conscientious objectors. She was no stranger to going to prison for her beliefs either. Tillard spent time in Holloway Gaol under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) for refusing to tell the British Government which printer had been responsible for publishing material for the ‘No Conscription Fellowship'. This followed a stint in the same prison exactly a decade prior for her role in the grille protest.
From 1919 to 1921, as the Spanish Flu pandemic was sweeping Europe, Tillard travelled to post-war Germany to assist destitute University students in Berlin. She also, during this period, officially joined The Religious Society of Friends. It was a natural fit for Tillard. Quakers have always tended to strongly emphasize peace and social justice. It was this commitment to helping the most vulnerable that led her to the relief effort in Buzuluk, Russia, upon the request of Joan Mary Fry. Joan was, as you may have already guessed, born into that line of famous Fry's – prominent Quakers who made their fortune in the confectionary business. Joan Mary Fry herself was an extraordinary humanitarian who tackled poverty in both England and Germany in particular.
Buzuluk is situated nearby the modern-day border between Russia and Kazakhstan; a 17 hour drive from Moscow even using today's roads. Back in 1921 to 1922 the region was in the grip of a terrible famine. It was not just a drought that was causing the hardship but the lingering impacts of war, political upheaval, and a lack of infrastructure to distribute aid. It was into this situation that Violet Tillard arrived to assist with managing supplies and to offer her skills as a nurse.
A letter sent by Tillard on 30 December gives an intimate, albeit harrowing, eye witness account of the situation she confronted. Take this passage as an example:
One feels horrible to live in such good conditions when the people are literally starving at our door – a boy of 16 lies dead a few yards away, last night 20 were found dead in one street here in Buzuluk. Some of these poor people came in to our kitchen to beg before they give up. On Christmas day 114 died in Buzuluk on the 26th 355, 27th, 212 – 509 of them were children. It is not so harrowing to see them lying dead, they suffer no more, it is the doomed shadow one sees round the street and in the homes that are most horrible. Yesterday I was in one of the receiving homes near the station. In one big dreary dorm are children, sometimes 100 sometimes more, all along one side was a long platform in these crouch little bundles of misery, here they live day and night, no beds, no other coverings – not room for all to lie down, no clean clothes.
There is an ominous, though constant, reference throughout her letter to disease. Typhus and cholera were particularly prevalent in districts with poor sanitation. Worse still that such illnesses were set to spread amongst the weakened immune systems of the starving. Tillard writes that the local passenger train services were to be stopped for six weeks in an effort to reduce the spread of disease "down the line". Still, there is reference to those doing all they could to help. One figure in particular stuck out to Violet: "[T]here is a dear old woman who bakes and washes, has to be restrained by force from working day and night."
Tillard was not long in Russia before she too fell ill. Her obituary in The Vote, a suffrage publication back in England,reveals how her final deed was one of profound sacrifice. She, along with one to two other workers, had volunteered to travel to a nearby relief outpost that had been rumoured to be riddled with typhus. Upon arriving at the address she found the three relief workers stationed there "lying helpless and untended" in the small house. She nursed these workers back to health but, in the process, succumbed to the same illness herself. Violet Tillard died on 19 February 1922, barely three months after she had arrived. The Russian famine was acutely felt for at least another year following her death. In total almost 5 million people died but over 16 million more were severely impacted.
(12) David Simkin, Family History Research (29th June, 2020)
Violet Ellen Anstey Tillard was born at Salem, Tamil Nadu, India, on 29th December 1874, the daughter of Louisa and Captain George Henry Tillard (1840-1915), an officer in the Madras Staff Corps of the British Indian Army.
On 17th Apr 1873, Captain George Henry Tillard (born 25th May 1840, Earith, Huntingdonshire), the second eldest son of Rev. James Arthur Tillard, the Rector of Connington, Cambridgeshire, had married at the parish church of St Leonard-on-Sea, Sussex, Louisa Fanny Anstey (born 18th July, 1846, Milverton, Somerset), the daughter of Rev. Arthur Anstey. After the wedding, Captain George Tillard returned to India with his wife, who gave birth to their only child, a daughter, at Salem, Tamil Nadu, on 29th December 1874. The child was christened Violet Ellen Anstey Tillard at the Madras Diocese Church in Salem on 24th January 1875. Some time after 1881, Mrs Louisa Tillard, returned to England. On 13th March 1883, at the age of 36, Violet's mother died at Wimbledon in Surrey. A few days later, on 16th March, 1883, Mrs Louisa Tillard was buried in the graveyard of St Mary's Church, Wimbledon. At the age of eight, Violet was left without a mother
On 5th June, 1884, at Christ Church, Ealing, Middlesex, Violet's father, Major George Henry Tillard, married Lilian Edith Hilliard (born 1855, Pewsey, Wiltshire), the daughter of Rev. Joseph Stephen Hilliard, the Incumbent of Christ Church, Ealing. After the wedding, Major Tillard returned to India with his new wife. Major Tillard's second marriage produced two daughters:
(1) Georgina Gwendoline Tillard (born 9th May 1885, Bangalore, Madras, India - died 10th May 1936, Stevenage, Hertfordshire). In 1907, married Noel Royston Harrison (1879-1974), a Company Secretary.
(2) Lilian Irene Tillard (1887-1939). Lilian went under the name of Irene Tillard, like her half-sister to Violet, was active as a Suffragette. On 1st April 1915, at South Kensington Presbyterian Church, Lilian Irene Tillard married Humfrey Middleton (1883-1975), a Builder's Merchant.
By the time Violet's father, George Henry Tillard, retired from the British Indian Army on 28th January 1887, he had risen to the rank of Colonel in the Madras Staff Corps.
In 1904, Violet Tillard travelled to the United States to visit a family in Milwaukee. (She arrived in New York on 11th July 1904, and on the arrival record she is described as a "Nurse", aged "29 Years, & 7 months".
In 1918, Violet Tillard was residing at 31 Clevedon Mansions, Lissenden Gardens, St Pancras, North London.
According to the National Probate Calendar & Index of Wills, Violet Ellen Anstey Tillard died on 18th February 1922 at Bazuluk, a town in the region of Orenburg in South Eastern Russia. At the time of her death, Violet had effects valued at £4,505, which was passed on to her half-sister Mrs Lilian Irene Middleton ("wife of Humfrey Middleton ".
.