The mystery of Annie Gidley, mother of VC hero Allan Leonard Lewis: now solved

This detailed post requires a post of its own.
Phil Nichols, in his December 2019 comment on the post about Allan Leonard Lewis VC of Hereford, had noticed on the censuses Frank Boswell, a photographer in Lyme Regis at the right time to be the parent of Annie Gidley, Allan Leonard's mother. He also noted that Frank Boswell had moved away to Frome, Somerset, by 1881, and that the children of Frank and his wife Mary were registered as Boswell, with the mother's maiden maiden name given as Gidley. They were:
1. Alice born March quarter 1867 Axminster registration district (this included Lyme Regis).
2. Elizabeth born June quarter 1868 Axminster registration district.
3. Frank born December quarter 1969 Axminster registration district.
4. Lucy born December quarter 1873 Axminster registration district.
5. Frank born June quarter 1875 Axminster registration district.
6. Emily born March quarter 1877 Axminster registration district.

However, none of the children are called Ann(ie).

1. Alice was christened in Lyme Regis on 25 December 1868. She can be followed through the censuses until 1911 when she is in Lyme Regis. She died in Axminster registration district in 1927.
2. Elizabeth was also christened on 25 December 1868 in Lyme Regis. She was apparently adopted by William and Elizabeth Mansfield, a cabinet maker and auctioneer in Lyme Regis, although in 1881 she is with her father Frank and his new partner, Emily, in Frome. The Mansfield couple also has three of the Boswell children resident with them in 1891, but not Elizabeth Boswell. She vanishes.
3.Frank died September quarter 1870 in Axminster registration district.
4. Lucy can be followed through the censuses to a pupil teacher training college attached to a religious industrial school in Wantage in 1891 and to a marriage to an organist, Frederick George Lloyd, in Middlesex in 1900. She died in Somerset in 1966.
5. Frank became a cabinet maker in Lyme Regis and died in Bridport registration district in 1961.
6. Emily appears to have become Mary by 1881. In 1901 she has moved to Bradworth, Devon, where she is a nurse at the vicarage. She was married as Mary Boswell in 1913 in Hackney, London, to Herbert Edwin Bell.

I think Elizabeth Boswell must for some reason have called herself Annie Elizabeth Gidley when she married, thence becoming Allan Leonard's mother, known as Annie.

So who was the mother of Elizabeth/Annie Gidley, partner of Frank and mother of the Boswells? We know her name was Mary Gidley, that she was 24 in 1871, so was born about 1846 or 1847, and in Devonshire, place not known (or at least whoever gave the details to the census enumerator didn't know). There were two Mary Gidley possibilities born in Devon about then. One was the confusingly named Mary Gidley Gidley (FreeBMD). But she turned out to be Mary Gidley Clampitt, born  in the June quarter 1846 in Okehampton, who died unmarried in Exeter in 1905. In 1871 she was a parlourmaid in Budleigh Salterton, and therefore not living with Frank in Lyme Regis.
That left Mary Gidley, daughter of  William Gidley and Miriam Sanford. William was born in 1822 in Christow, Devon, one of the Gidleys of Winkleigh, although this particular branch had fallen on rather hard times. William was married twice. His first wife Mary Ann Reed Board, whom he married at the age of 18, died after only two years of marriage. Their surviving son James (born only three weeks after his parents' marriage) doesn't ever seem to have lived with his father and his stepmother Miriam, and eventually emigrated with his wife Susan and their family to Australia.  To return to William Gidley, father of Mary "Boswell", his occupation was variously recorded as farmer, agricultural labourer, butcher and cattle dealer.  By the 1860s he had moved to Exeter, and had several brushes with the law, including for larceny (acquitted) and using obscene language and riding his horse furiously up and down the street (fined 10/-).  He died in 1898 in Exeter.
Mary's mother Miriam died in 1879. Mary was the oldest child. She had three sisters and one brother. John Gidley, her brother, died unmarried in Plymouth in 1933. The next sister Elizabeth married William George Payne in 1882 in Exeter.  Sister Miriam married Joseph Cashaldine in Calcutta, India, in 1879, and the youngest Annie married Walter Clarke in Exeter in 1893.
I had already tracked Mary Gidley's career through the censuses, except for a missing year - 1871 -  when it now seems she was with  Frank Boswell in Lyme Regis. For whatever reason she left Frank Boswell and her children between 1877 and 1881, when I had already found her working as a parlourmaid in Bideford. Then the two clinchers: I had already discovered her in Clyro, Herefordshire in 1891, which should have alerted me. She was a servant to Conrad Finzel of Lower Caebalva. Elizabeth/Annie must have joined her mother there, as her residence in 1893 on her marriage is given as Clyro. Then in 1893, at the age of 47, Mary married in Herefordshire Robert Carpenter, a blacksmith from London in his sixties. They remained in Hereford, where Robert died in 1920, and where Mary died in 1940. In the 1939 Register she was living with a master blacksmith and his family in Kingsway, Hereford. She had managed to accrue £176 19s 5d in her estate, which was probated by Mary Bell, married woman, her youngest daughter.

With grateful thanks to Phil Nichols for his research which put me on the right track. And an honour for Mary Carpenter nee Gidley to be the grandmother of a winner of the Victoria Cross.