Emily Bertha Crowley, née Bishop

Born: 1848.

Died: 14 April 1917.

Emily Crowley was born in Yately, Hampshire, England. She married Edward Crowley on 19 November 1874 in the Kensington Registry Office in London. She was the mother of Aleister Crowley.

The youngest daughter of farmer John Bishop (c. 1793–1854) and his second wife Elizabeth Cole (1808–1896), Emily had gone from working in 1871 as governess for Kensington brewer Alexander Gordon to marrying, on 19 November 1874, the devout and independently wealthy Edward Crowley. The marriage took place at the register office in Kensington, witnessed by her brother Tom Bond and her half-sister Anne, along with the families of Edward’s two siblings (Jonathan came with his daughter Agnes and second wife, Anne, while Mary came with her husband, Charles). Because of her slight form and vaguely Asian appearance, she was dubbed “the little Chinese girl” at school. She had a talent with watercolors but, despite academic training, never pursued art as a career. Now she was joining her husband to raise a family in the beautiful and affluent health resort town of Leamington Spa. Warwickshire’s spa on the river Leam was at the peak of a growth spurt that had transformed a sleepy little borough of just over five hundred into a newly incorporated town of 26,000 in 1875. Visitors flocked to its artesian wells and saline springs, which were advertised to relieve the symptoms of gout, rheumatism, “stiffness of tendons,” and “other paralytic conditions.” The gardens outside the Jephson and Royal Pump Rooms were likewise botanical spectacles. Emily was already into her third trimester of pregnancy late that summer when she moved to 30 Clarendon Square, about four blocks from the Leam.

Within six weeks, a sudden gale turned her idyll into a nightmare. On the Saturday morning of 8 October 1875, a violent storm struck Warwickshire, uprooting trees, breaking telegraph lines, and blocking roads. Flash floods turned fields into lakes, inundated the baths and gardens, and spewed a two-foot-deep river into the town’s Great Western railroad station. The flood damaged crops, killed large numbers of livestock, and drowned two people. While it is unknown whether Emily was among those forced to flee in boats, it is doubtful her property escaped flood damage.

When the storm abated and the flood slowly began to recede, she went into labor. On Tuesday, 12 October 1875, between the hours of eleven and midnight, Emily Crowley delivered a son to her husband. They dubbed him Edward, after his father and the father before him, with the middle name taken from his father’s friend Alexander. Edward Alexander Crowley would not change his name to Aleister until adulthood, and to his family the child was simply known as Alick. He was tongue-tied, and within the first few days of his birth, a doctor cut the frenum that connected his tongue to the bottom of his mouth. Despite the intervention, he would never pronounce the letter r correctly. Within his first three months of life, he was baptized into the Plymouth faith.