ROBERT JOHN LECHMERE GUPPY (1836-1916) AND THE EPONYMOUS FISH

What’s not to like about Lechmere Guppy! Tattoo’d school inspector, once-shipwrecked son-in-law of a refugee from the French revolution, furniture-making almanack-founder, civil engineer by trade and palaeontologist by passion, agnostic map-maker, author on molluscs … and then there’s That Fish.

Robert John Lechmere Guppy (1836-1916)

Lechmere was a cousin of my 3x great uncle Thomas Richard Guppy. The Guppys are an extraordinary family, and I not going to let the fact that I am only related to them by marriage stop me from writing about them here. Thomas Richard’s mother and father were both inventors, whose achievements certainly inspired their son to his own significant contributions to civil engineering. Lechmere’s lawyer father was the mayor of San Fernando in Trinidad; and his artist mother was a pioneering photographer who navigated the Orinoco River with the help of some local Indians.

He was without doubt a tremendously inquisitive and open-hearted character. His daughter Yseult Bridges said he “loathed deceit, disloyalty, dishonesty and cant; felt all men should find work well done its own reward." And A.D. Russel, writing only six years after Lechmere’s death, described him, “apart from his contributions to scientific periodicals, lectures etc … [as] a man of remarkable individuality. Tall, gaunt, white-haired, grey-bearded, rugged in speech, combative in his opinions. A whiff of cold air seemed to go with him wherever he went. Watching him stride over the savannah, one imagined a Yorkshire moor.”

Kinnersley Castle, Herefordshire: Elizabethan remodeling of a defensive castle built on the Welsh borders in the reign of Henry I

With his parents living in Trinidad Lechmere was raised by his grandparents back home in England in a 12^th century Norman castle, Kinnersley, not in Yorkshire but in the Herefordshire Marches. Ignoring expectations that he would remain there as an adult to run the estate, he instead sailed away from England at the age of 18.

Two years later in 1856 he was shipwrecked on North Island, New Zealand, “living [according to Yseult] very happily amongst the Maoris who had rescued him, roaming the hills and forests, collecting specimens, and thoroughly enjoying himself. Although this was at the time of the Maori Wars, they treated him with great hospitality, and to the end of his life he loved to talk of his adventures with them, and to display the tattoos on his back – of various designs including a sailing canoe – and on his wedding finger – a ring! He had left only just in time, he declared, to avoid marrying the chief’s daughter.”

Lechmere also mapped the region during his two-year stay with the Maoris, and in 1858 sailed to Trinidad to join his parents. There he married Alice Rostant, a creole descendent of French aristocrats who had fled to Trinidad to escape the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Lechmere became Trinidad’s first Superintendent of Schools and spent the rest of his time pottering about the West Indies studying their geology, fossil remains and marine molluscs (a subject I’ve written on in the past).

The Victoria Institute, now the National Museum and Art Gallery

Port of Spain, Trinidad

He founded the Victoria Institute in Port of Spain in honour of the Queens Golden Jubilee in 1887. It’s now a national institution, as is the Trinidad Almanack which he began in 1866 with his brother Francis – it was later adopted by the government and became Trinidad’s official Year Book.

1866 was also the year he discovered a new fish in the waters around Trinidad. He sent it off to the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum who named it Girardinus guppii in Lechmere’s honour – the Guppy fish. It was later found to have been discovered separately and earlier in off Venezuela by another naturalist Wilhelm Peters and named Lebistes reticulatus (now reclassified as Poecilia reticulate). But the popular name for the fish remains the Guppy.

The Guppy, Girardinus guppii

drawn in 1903 by Plantagenet Lechmere Guppy

son of Robert John Lechmere Guppy

(picture: Natural History Museum London/ Science Photo Library)

WALTER SYDNEY MASTERMAN (1876-1946) AND THE BRITISH BOY SCOUTS

Is it possible for a family tree to have black sheep? Shouldn’t they be black leaves? Or are black sheep only found in genealogical database fields? Whatever. Walter Masterman, my second cousin twice removed, is turning into my favourite black sheep. He’s the man who in his fifties began a successful career writing pulp fiction, after an extremely checkered past which culminated in a spell in prison.

Walter Sydney Masterman (1876-1946)

crime author, soldier and pacifist youth leader

photographed in 1899, before the Boer War

I have now read some of his racy 1920s crime novels, and I wrote about the many phases of his life here once before. They are full of remarkable changes of direction; but I was unaware, when writing then, of yet another strange episode in which he was closely evolved during his time on civvy street between the Boer and Great Wars.

Walter, who had fought in South Africa and lost a brother to disease there during the Second Boer War (1899-1901), struggled to find a role in civilian life. He and his brother Charles briefly took over the running of an ailing boys’ school, Horsmonden in 1903. But by 1905 it had gone bust, and Charles had begun to pursue a successful career in Liberal politics. Perhaps given some introductions by Charles, who was already established as a writer, Walter dabbled in journalism – his no doubt authoritative report “Plaice Fisheries of the North Sea” appeared in 1909.

He also involved himself in the very early days of the Boy Scout movement. Lord Baden-Powell held his first experimental scout camp in Dorset with 20 boys in 1907; his Scouting For Boys magazine was published in six fortnightly parts the following year, and prompted boys to form scout troops all over the country, the core of the new Boy Scout Association.

Lord Baden-Powell (1857-1941)

Chief Scout 1920-1941

founder of the Boy Scout Association

Baden-Powell’s reputation at the time rested on his Boer War role in the defence of Mafeking during its long siege by the Boers 1899-1900. The principles and techniques of scouting which he had learned with the British Army in South Africa were the inspiration for his new movement. But there were many who felt after the war that its ideals were altogether too militaristic.

On Empire Day, 24^th May 1909, an alternative and explicitly pacifist scouting organisation was launched, The British Boy Scouts. Its formation was led by a troop in Battersea which withdrew from Baden-Powell’s Association in protest at its army-style administration and the undue influence over the organisation of the National Service League, which campaigned for compulsory military conscription.

Sir Francis Vane (1861-1934)

Grand Scoutmaster 1911-1912

founder of the Order of World Scouts

What began as a small breakaway protest became by the end of the year a full-blown schism, following the sacking by Baden-Powell of his London Commissioner Sir Francis Vane. Vane had dared to express his concerns about militarism from within, with the support of some 300 fellow scoutmasters, most of whom now followed him to the British Boy Scouts. It seems likely that one of those scoutmasters was Walter Masterman. Vane, who became Grand Scoutmaster of the BBS in 1911, promptly appointed Masterman in a specially created post of Assistant Grand Scoutmaster. 

Vane bankrolled the organisation’s early expansion, supplying a London office and organizing the supply of uniforms while founding a new Order of World Scouts (in which he was ahead of Baden-Powell). Unfortunately Sir Francis overextended himself. When his income proved insufficient to cover the cost of uniform manufacture, he was declared bankrupt in August 1912. He resigned both his Grand Scoutmastership and the Presidency of the organisation, which he had held since 1909.

A British Boy Scouts rally, c1930

The BBS was thrown into confusion by the loss of its driving force (and the London office which he had provided). A vengeful Baden-Powell rejected Masterman’s request for BBS troops to return en masse to the Boy Scout Association in a corporate affiliation. Instead he insisted that each troop must apply individually for Association membership. 

Fearing perhaps the imminent demise of the BBS, Masterman accepted this condition and led the eight BBS troops under his direct control back into the Association fold. Although the move was regarded then and now as a defection and a betrayal, Masterman’s troops included Junior Scout sections which he now introduced to the BSA for the first time. The idea spread and in 1916 became the BSA’s Wolf Cubs – I was a Cub in the 24^th Glasgow Troop in my 1960s youth! – known today as the Cub Scouts.

A British Wolf Cub in the 1960s (not me!)

descendent of Walter Masterman’s Junior Scouts

(picture from Wikipedia)

Masterman’s commitment to the pacifist BBS seems at odds with his continuing role during those years as an Inspector of Musketry attached to the 1^st Cadet Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifles, a quite explicitly military unit for boys. When war broke out in Europe two years later, he returned to active service and by all accounts fought for his country with distinction. Returning to civvy street again after the armistice in 1918, he lost his way once more until – after a four year jail term – he built a successful writing career in the final 20 years of his life.

At its height in 1910 one in three boy scouts in Britain was a British Boy Scout. Thanks largely to the international network set up by Sir Francis Vane, the BBS survives to this day, and there are once again several British BBS troops, led by Grand Scout Emeritus Dr Michael Foster. Dr Foster has done a great deal to preserve and record the history of the BBS and this article owes much to his writings.

WILLIAM HENRY GURNEY SALTER (1837-1928) AND THE TOTLE

I have written here before about the role my ancestors played in the founding of London University. Baptists and other non-conformists, who were barred from graduating at Oxford and Cambridge, England’s only two universities, decided to start their own. My 3x great grandfather Samuel Salter bought a £100 share in the proposed institution and his son my 2x great grandfather William Augustus Salter was in the very first intake of students, studying Latin and Greek.

William Henry Gurney Salter (1837-1928)
a portrait from his "History of the Gurney System of Shorthand" 
published after his retirement in 1912

William’s son, my great grandfather William Henry Gurney Salter, followed in his father’s footsteps. He went to Amersham School (“for the sons of liberal gentleman”), where his father had been a Baptist minister; and then he too studied Classics at London University. Like his father, WHGS began his working life in the office of a London merchant. But in 1859 he joined the firm of Gurney & Co, shorthand writers; and in 1872 he succeeded his uncle Joseph Gurney there as Official Shorthand Writer to the Houses of Parliament, a post he held for over 40 years until his retirement in 1912.

On his death The Times printed a lengthy obituary, a measure of his long service at the heart of British political life. It dwelt of course chiefly on his professional and religious achievments; but there is a short, delightful passage about his personal life:

He was a great lover of poetry and pictures, and was a man of many friends; friendship played a great part in his life. Since the death of Sir John Rotton, K.C., he must have been the last of a small band of classical scholars known as the "Totle", who used to meet weekly to read Aristotle and other Greek authors, and who included in their number Theodore Waterhouse, Lord Cozens-Hardy, Lord Justice Kennedy, James Anstie, K.C., and Sir W.H. Winterbotham.

What a wonderful picture! The great and the good of the day, taking time out from their public schedule to share a laugh and a glass of something over some Greek philosophy with Alexander the Great’s tutor! Apart from anything else, it’s a rare bonus to be presented with a list of your ancestor’s friends. WHGS’s Totle circle were obviously important enough figures to be name-dropped in The Times, so who were they?

Brigadier General Sir John Rotton, K.C., (not pictured) WHGS’s last fellow Totler died in 1926. He served on the Council of London University from 1869 and donated his library, including several important theological tracts, to it on his death. Rotton and Salter were born in the same year, and perhaps went to school and university together.

James Anstie, K.C., was also born the same year as WHGS, and also an alumnus of London University, for whom later he was an examiner in common law and practice. He was called to the Bar the year Salter joined Gurney & Co. His wife was Annie Winterbotham, sister of fellow Totler William Winterbotham.

Theodore Waterhouse (1838-1891) was from a distinguished family of Quakers. No doubt therefore, he too attended London University. His architect brother Alfred designed London’s Natural History Museum; his brother Edwin is the Waterhouse in accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper; and Theo founded the London law firm now called Field Fisher Waterhouse.

Sir William Howard Winterbotham (1843-1926) was a neighbour of WHGS in Ladbroke Terrace, Kensington. He was not just another solicitor, but from 1895 The Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court of Judicature. Fellow Totler James Anstie married his sister Annie.

Sir William Rann Kennedy, Lord Justice Kennedy (1846-1915) was another prominent legal mind of his day; a failed Liberal candidate who ordered a by-election after accusations of Liberal bribery in Maidstone in 1900. A caricature of him in Vanity Fair in 1893 (the year after he was appointed) is captioned “our weakest judge;” but he was created a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1907 and a Privy Councillor two years later.

Herbert, Lord Cozens-Hardy (1838-1920), another alumnus of London University, was a lifelong friend of WHGS. Their connection went right back to their time together at Amersham School. Herbert’s daughter Hope married WHGS’s nephew Richard Austin Pilkington, and to this day at least one member of the Salter family uses the legal firm of Cozens-Hardy. Herbert was Master of the Rolls, the second most senior judge in Britain after the Lord Chief Justice.

It’s a legal Who’s Who of late nineteenth and early twentieth century England. Salter himself was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1874, although he never practiced. His Greek texts remained in the family until the death of my father, himself a Classics scholar and lecturer. Hooray for the Totle!

Aristotle, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome

Roman 2^nd century BC copy of a Greek 4^th century BC original

COLONEL WILLIAM MASSY BAKER (c1759-1829) AND THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE

Why do I write about all these people? Sometimes it’s because I know they have a story worth telling. Sometimes I pick on someone precisely because I know nothing about them – it’s a way of forcing myself to look deeper into their lives. Sometimes you think there just must be a story, and only by starting to write can you tease it out of them – it’s like thinking aloud to know what you’re thinking.

William Massy Baker’s brother Godfrey was my 5x great uncle, who was married to my 4x great grandfather Eyre Massy’s sister Margaret. The Massy and Baker families intermarried pretty regularly, hence William’s middle name. William and Godfrey both served in the Bengal Army, one of three private armies owned and operated by the British East India Company.

The flag of the East India Company

before (above), and after the 1800 Act of Union

Granted its Royal Charter in 1600 to trade in the sub-continent, the Company exploited its trade monopoly to become the administrative power in large parts of India. It operated more or less beyond the control of the British government for 100 years, making its owners, British merchants and aristocrats, very wealthy men. Only after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8 was the British Crown forced to assume some direct responsibility for the colony.

This was all after William’s time. He was a quartermaster in the Army, responsible for the purchase and distribution of supplies of all kinds. It was position from which he was able to generate a great deal of personal wealth, setting up a number of private commercial enterprises to boost his basic army pay. When he came home to Cork (in Ireland, another British colony) on leave in 1796, he splashed out a massive £2500 on a large estate in nearby Glanmire. There he built a well-appointed mansion which, after the manner of the times, he named Fort William.

Fort William, Glanmire, Cork

Generating wealth wasn’t Baker’s only enterprise. In Calcutta in 1785, he arranged the christening of Eleanor, his lovechild with an Indian mistress. It’s not clear whether he brought either or both of them back with him in 1796, but he certainly returned to Calcutta for another tour of duty from 1800 to 1806. When he finally came home to Ireland, it was to make a “suitable” marriage, in 1807, with Mary Towgood Davies.

Mary, daughter of a protestant minister, took over the running of the Fort William household. As one may readily imagine, she was keen to give William a fresh start, a break with the past. It’s known that one Dean Mahomet, an Indian guest in the house, left very quickly at this time.

What became of Eleanor, and indeed her mother? One report I’ve read says Eleanor, now 22, got married to a James Swayne. I can’t find any confirmation of this; but one of William and Mary’s many children (at least eight, some say twelve) was christened James Swayne Baker. Another, rather surprisingly, was called Eleanor Davies Baker.

Troops of the Bengal Army c1785

In writing about Eleanor I came across the remarkable Dean Mahomet, and learned more about my 5x great uncle Godfrey. (More on them in a future posting.) But Eleanor is the story I wanted to tell here. Such Anglo-Indian relationships were no doubt common; and no doubt wives were expected to accept the past and present affairs of their husbands. But to call your children James Swayne Baker and Eleanor Davies Baker is a sign either of a very understanding wife or of a very insensitive husband. Another daughter was called Katherine Pope Baker, and one begins to wonder who Katherine Pope might have been!

HAMNET SADLEIR (active 1585-1616) AND HIS GODSON’S DAD

Some family stories are proved or even unearthed in the course of research. Others are disproved by the same process. Some remain beyond confirmation or debunking, the stuff of legend and speculation, a story good enough to tell whether or not it turns out to be true. With that in mind I’ll just tell this straight out and you can make up your own mind. Just the facts!

Hamnet Sadleir is reputed to be the grandson of my 11x great grandfather John Sadleir. That’s the part – admittedly a fairly fundamental part of a family story – that I can’t confirm. He was a baker in Stratford on Avon where another grandson, my 9x great grandfather (also John Sadleir) also lived. They may have been cousins, they may even have been brothers. (And yes, they may have been completely unrelated.)

Stratford on Avon, home of my ancestors and their friends

Hamnet married Judith. In 1585 the Sadleirs became godparents to the newborn twins of their friends Anne and William, such good friends that the new parents even named their new children Judith and Hamnet. When William, who died in 1616, wrote his will, Hamnet Sadleir was a witness.

One of the twins, Hamnet, died at the tender age of 11. His sister Judith married, in the year of her father’s death, Thomas Quiney, a tobacconist and vintner in Stratford on Avon born around 1589. Meanwhile my 8x great grandfather (yet another John Sadleir) married Elizabeth Quiney, born in 1587. Elizabeth certainly had a brother called Thomas – I don’t know for certain that he was the same Thomas who married Judith, but Judith’s Thomas’s father was called Richard Quiney – and so was Elizabeth’s and her brother’s.

Both Thomas and Judith Quiney outlived all three of their children. Young Thomas (named after his father) and Richard (named after his paternal grandfather) died within a fortnight of each other at the start of 1639, aged 19 and 20. The third had died long ago, only six months old, in 1617. Named after his maternal grandfather, the baby’s name was Shakespeare Quiney. That’s WILLIAM Shakespeare.

19^th century German engraving of the Shakespeare household

Hamnet standing to his right, Judith leaning on his left shoulder

SO! If everything I have read and connected is true: Shakespeare’s daughter Judith was the sister-in-law of Elizabeth Quiney, my 8x great grandmother. Her godfather Hamnet Sadleir, witness to her father’s will, was a cousin, perhaps brother, of my 9x great grandfather. But only if.

Oh, and Hamnet Sadleir’s name on the will is spelled “Hamlett.”

CATHERINE GURNEY O.B.E. (1848-1930) AND THE POLICE OFFICER’S SOUL

My great grandfather’s cousin Catherine Gurney (known as Katie in the family) founded four convalescent homes and orphanages for English policemen and their children. As I write I've just heard that on 22nd April 2012 a plaque is to be unveiled in Harrogate in honour of her work. It was a lifelong commitment to police welfare spurred by the observation of one serving officer whom she visited in hospital in the 1880s: that the force lacked the sort of provision afforded by the public to distressed members of Britain’s army and navy.

Catherine Gurney (1848-1930)

Her commitment came from a sense of Christian duty almost genetic in its depth. The Gurneys had been devout non-conformists since the earliest days of Quakerism, at least four generations before Catherine was born. That devotion had shown itself in radical acts of humanitarian charity such as opposition to the slave trade and the provision of education to women and children.

Katie’s desire to follow the family tradition of Christian service led her first, in the early 1870s, to start a Bible Study Class in Wandsworth – a high-security Men’s Prison in South London and scene from 1878 to 1961 of regular hangings for murder. Wandsworth was a long way from the comfortable surroundings of her west London home and she became quickly aware of the debt of gratitude owed to the policemen of the time who kept the streets safe on her journeys between the two.

The first gallows at Wandsworth Prison,

transferred from Horsemonger Lane Gaol in 1878

and installed in a shed built over a 12-foot deep drop-pit

Perhaps she chatted with them about the spark of goodness in even the most hardened criminal, or perhaps about the risk to policemen’s souls of exposure to so much evil in the world; but a remark by one of her protectors, “What? D’you think police officers have souls?”, set her thinking. Of course they did, and those souls needed nurture and support as much as any murderer’s.

In 1883 Miss Gurney founded the Christian Police Association and held prayer meetings at her home. As they became quickly popular, she moved them first to rented offices and then to a building at 1a Adelphi Terrace which became London’s first Police Insititute, a drop-in refuge from the stresses and temptations of the job.

On And Off Duty,

the magazine of the Christian Police Association in Britain

It was a landmark in police welfare, but Catherine Gurney was a woman with a mission. She began to travel the world promoting the values of the Association. In October 1891 she arrived in the United States as a delegate to the International Convention of Christians At Work. Between then and May the following year she met with representatives of police forces from Maryland to Michigan, and CPA’s sprang up throughout the eastern states (and in Toronto too!).

The very first US group was in Washington DC. In 1898 the president of the New York CPA wrote, “It has always seemed wonderful that the Lord thought so much of the policemen of America as to send Miss Gurney all the way across the water. Yes, God is interested in police officers. He it was who awakened in Miss Gurney’s heart the desire that He should bless them and Lo! what hath God wrought from that little seed.”

Policemen served as pallbearers at Catherine Gurney’s funeral in Harrogate, 13^th August 1930

What indeed! Catherine Gurney, a small but determined woman, devoted 50 years of her life to police welfare. Her Christian legacy, now the International Christian Police Association, survives to this day, as does the work she began in her convalescent homes and orphanages. When her travelling days were over she remained active in their interest to the end of her life. When she died she insisted on being buried near her beloved Northern Police Orphanage and Convalescent & Treatment Centre on Otley Road, Harrogate in the grounds of All Saints Church, Harlow Hill.

Much information for this post comes from the splendid history of the CPA in the USA at http://www.cpa-usa.org/history.php. There is also a fine page about her work at http://www.stgeorgesharrogate.org/stg01gurney.htm, from which some of the photos in this article are taken. 

JANE FARQUHAR REID (1833-1920) AND HER SERVICE AT GILMILNSCROFT

In a terrific example of sucking up to the local gentry, my 3x great grandfather William Reid named at least two and arguably four of his eleven children after the incumbents of the local Big House, Gilmilnscroft House in Sorn, Ayrshire. His eldest girl and boy were named after his parents Mary and Robert. (Luckily for him his resilient wife was also called Mary.) But thereafter, until he finally ran out of options, his children were all called after Gilmilnscroft’s inhabitants, James Farquhar and his wife Margaret née Baillie, or the nearest sounding equivalent.

Gilmilnscroft House, Sorn, in 1964

16^th/17^th century tower house with 19^th century additions

William’s second daughter was my 2x great grandmother, whom he named Jane Farquhar Reid. Jane not only sounds like James, but was also James Farquhar’s mother’s name. Next came Jane’s sister, Margaret Baillie Reid. Then came a fourth daughter, called - the name Jane now no longer being available - Janet; and finally another son, christened James. Only with his third son did William feel free to bestow his own name onto the next generation. (Thomas, Helen, Grace and John completed the brood.)

Margaret and Jane were also the names of James and Margaret Farquhar’s daughters, so William Reid must have been pretty confident that he had done everything he could to express his allegiance to the Farquhar family. He was a coachman at Gilmilnscroft, and sure enough at least five of his children successfully found employment there.

Some 19th century Farquhars of Gilmilnscroft

(servants not pictured)

His eldest, Mary, was a housekeeper and sick nurse there. Second daughter Jane was maid to Margaret Farquhar. Third daughter Margaret was a domestic servant in the house. Eldest son James was like his father a coachman and domestic servant, until he married and moved to Glasgow. William junior was a gentleman’s nurse, until he caught tuberculosis and died. (They definitely held these posts, although I don’t know for certain, except in Jane and Margaret’s cases, that they all held them in the Big House; but such situations were not available anywhere else in the immediate area.)

Jane Farquhar Reid and Margaret Baillie Reid both eventually married and left service, Jane to John Piper in 1857 and Margaret to a Mr Kirkland in 1866. About 60 years later, Margaret’s grandson James Kirkland married Jane’s granddaughter Agnes, whom I knew as my great aunt Nessie. Nessie’s sister was my grandmother, Jean Farquhar Reid Piper. They had all by then moved up in the world: Nessie married a solicitor, and Jean married a doctor!

CHARLES FREDERICK GURNEY MASTERMAN (1873-1927) AND THE CHESTERTON DEDICATION

Charlie Masterman was a grandson of my 3x great uncle Thomas Gurney. A biography of him by Eric Hopkins published in 1999 is subtitled The Splendid Failure, which is a bit harsh! If he didn’t fulfill all of his huge potential as a politician and author, he certainly accomplished more than most men.

Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman (1873-1927)

I wouldn’t dream of attempting to cover his whole life in a single post here, or even just the achievements of his political or journalistic careers. He was an occasional MP from 1906, in and out of Parliament and even Government on a regular basis only because he was unable to find a safe Liberal seat. (There were still such things before the First World War, before the foundation of the Labour Party.)

At the outbreak of the war he was serving as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, but with a background in journalism he was appointed as head of the new War Propaganda Bureau. One of his successes there was the introduction of the concept of the War Artist. In the last two years of the war he sent more than ninety artists to make a visual record of events in Europe. Although there were limitations on what they could exhibit during the war, they were given a fairly free hand in what and where they could paint. The long term legacy of the artists, who included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Augustus John, is an important one.

We Are Making A New World (1918)

Paul Nash’s ironic title for a painting of No Man’s Land

Charlie’s first move at the Bureau was to recruit Britain’s most talented writers to the cause, among them H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan (coincidentally a distant relative by marriage). Again, they were given pretty free rein in their written discourses on the war. Masterman took the view that as long as their facts were accurate, the facts spoke for themselves and that the public would be able to make up its own mind. Other disagreed, arguing that (as one writer put it), “the allied case should be as vociferously and as duplicitously made as the German [one].”

Under Masterman’s direction, “over two million books in seventeen languages were published in the first two years of the war, almost entirely without the readers’ knowledge that these were sponsored by the British government.”

Charles Masterman himself had literary aspirations. He had been editor of the literary review Granta while at Cambridge in the 1890s; in the early 20^th century he was the literary editor of the Daily News; and before entering politics he had published several impassioned books about the social state of the country notably 1909’s Condition of England. Many of the writers whom her recruited for propaganda purposes were already acquaintances or even friends.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1836)

photographed in 1905 by Alvin Langdon Coburn

G.K. Chesterton was one such. Perhaps it was Masterman’s 1909 book which brought the two liberal thinkers together although it feels as if they were older friends than that. In 1910, Chesterton dedicated his new book What’s Wrong With The World to his friend with a lengthy and humorous introduction “to C.F.G. Masterman, M.P. – My Dear Charles.”

It’s a delightful few hundred words, packed with the Chesterton wit. It begins with smut: “I originally called this book What Is Wrong [and a] number of social misunderstandings arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, “I have been doing What Is Wrong all this morning.” And one minister of religion moved quite sharply when I told him … that I had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute.”

Chesterton goes on to praise the writing of Masterman, “one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of the moving millions of England, You are the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life.” In addressing the reason for dedicating the book to Charlie, he writes, “I do it because I think you politicians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals; but more because you will recognise the many arguments we have had. And perhaps you will agree that the thread of comradeship and conversation must be protected because it is so frivolous. It is exactly because argument is idle that men must take it seriously; for when  shall we have so delightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you because there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which, please God, will never break.”

Dust jacket for Walter S. Masterman’s The Wrong Letter

the US edition published by Dutton in 1926

That bond of friendship was strong enough for Chesterton to write another preface 20 years later, for the first pulp fiction novel by Charlie’s brother Walter S. Masterman. Chesterton, who as author of the Father Brown mysteries was no mean crimewriter himself, is again lavish in his admiration, finding (if I’m honest) far more than I did to praise about the new novelist’s first faltering steps in fiction. Walter definitely got better with practice!

I had the very great pleasure of speaking to Charlie’s son last year, and of sending him a copy of the Chesterton dedication to his father which he had never seen. Were Charlie my own father, I would be as proud as anything for him to have such a friendship as Chesterton’s.

JOHN TEMPLEMAN (1782-1867) AND THE DUNFERMLINE DAMASK

My 5x great grandfather John Templeman was from Torryburn in Fife, just west of the ancient Scottish town of Dunfermline. He was a damask weaver, in an area which had been a centre for the trade since the fifteenth century. Linen weavers from the French town of Tournai first brought the skill to Dunfermline; and although Scottish damask (or “dornick”) never quite matched the continental fabric for quality, its weaving was for nearly 600 years a trade to be proud of.

Damask is any cloth with a woven pattern which can be viewed from both sides of the material. These days damask is usually linen and usually, although not always, single-coloured. It gets its name from Damascus, an important trading and manufacturing city in the early Middle Ages, standing on the Silk Route. It first appeared in Europe (in France) in the 14^th century, so the Dunfermline industry, kick-started by those Tournai craftsmen, was quick off the mark.

Abbot House Museum in Dunfermline

tells the story of damask’s contribution to the town

Traditionally, women did the spinning and men did the weaving, although by John's grandchildren's generation things had changed - his granddaughter my 2x great grandmother Agnes Mitchell was a damask weaver too. For centuries before her time both operations were carried out by hand. Linen thread is spun from flax, which was grown in the fields around Dunfermline, but not in sufficient quantities. The local harvest was augmented with imports from Danzig – modern-day Gdansk in Poland – shipped to the nearby ports of coastal Fife.

Dunfermline damask was supplied to the Scottish Royal Household, and the industry suffered after the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 when the Royal Household moved south to London. A fire which destroyed much of Dunfermline in 1624 also contributed to the decline. Damask production drifted south across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh and the surrounding area.

An industrial-scale damask hand loom (date unknown)

(picture from the Gazlay Family History site)

But a clever piece of industrial espionage brought the trade back to Dunfermline in 1718. A Dunfermline weaver called James Blake gained the confidence of the workers in a new Edinburgh damask mill at Drumsheugh, by passing himself off as a simpleton with whom they saw no harm in sharing their sophisticated weaving techniques. In a move reminiscent of a footballing injury, Blake promptly “regained” his senses and returned to Dunfermline with a complete plan of the Drumsheugh loom in his head, a design far more advanced than that of any traditional looms still working in the town. By 1766 there were 600 looms in the town, and by 1792 (when John Templeman was probably entering the industry as child labour) that figure had doubled. In the same year, mechanized spinning came to Dunfermline thanks to a water-powered spinning mill at Brucefield.

The earliest powered weaving loom mills began to appear in Dunfermline around 1835, when John was already in his 50s. So John was part of the last generation of weaving men to make damask by hand. The ancient guild, the Dunfermline Weavers Incorporation to which he and his fellow skilled craftsmen may have belonged, was wound up in 1863, just four years before John’s death. By then there were at least four spinning and weaving mills in the town, employing around 6000 workers.

Jacquard-style mechanised damask loom - an early example of computer programming, a Jacquard loom used punched cards to deliver a repeatable pattern

(picture from the Craigavon Historical Society)

The Dunfermline damask industry survived into the 1930s. But laundering, starching and ironing table linen was hard work and the decline after the First World War in the employment of domestic servants to do that work led to the eventual closure of the mills. The mechanised process lasted a little more than two hundred years in Dunfermline. But the handworked tradition, of whose final chapter my 5x great grandfather was part, had a Scottish history nearly 400 years long. Its roots in Damascus stretch back 500 more.

AUSTIN NATHANIEL COOPER (1853-1898) AND BOATS, BONES AND TRAINS

It’s been a while since I wrote about anyone called Austin Cooper – there are dozens of them in my Cooper tree, all taking their name from the celebrated 17th century founder of the Irish family dynasty.

Austin Cooper (1759-1830), father of Rev Austin Cooper (1804-1871), grandfather of Austin Damer Cooper (1831-1900) and great grandfather of Austin Nathaniel Cooper (1853-1898)

Austin Nathaniel Cooper’s father, grandfather and great grandfather all bore the name, although sadly ANC was the last of his particular Cooper line – his only child, a daughter, died in infancy. Austin died at the early age of 44, outlived by his father, and to be honest I don’t know much about his life. But I have been able to find more than the one widely recorded professional position which he held.

Austin Nathaniel Cooper, born 9^th December 1853,married late in life. On 6^th October 1893, just ahead of his 40^th birthday he wed Mary Thorn of Tamworth. Their only daughter died two years later on 20^th November 1895, and Austin himself passed away less than three years after that on 11^th July 1898.

The Royal College of Surgeons, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin

The British Medical Journal of 12^th August 1882 reports that Austin was one of 30 gentlemen who, “at the Court of Examiners, held on Monday July 24^th and following days, … having passed their final examinations for the letters testimonial, and having made the declaration and signed the roll, were admitted licentiates” of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.

He was 28. He went into medical practice, we know, because on 29^th March 1890 he is recorded as a doctor, arriving in Southampton on board the RMS Don from Buenos Ayres. The Don, formerly the SS Corcouado, was a 2400 ton ship built for the Royal Mail in 1875. It plied between Britain and South America, the West Indies and the Portuguese coast for 30 years. (Her 1890 trip from the River Plate back home was her last under Captain P. Rowsell. Was he the same Captain Rowsell who lost his life a year later when he was the last man making for shore from the Royal Mail Steamer Moselle, wrecked off Panama, from which he had heroically and safely evacuated all its passengers and crew?)

Austin Nathan Cooper on the passenger list of the RMS Don, 1890

Age 40 an exaggeration! Single, and a Doctor in Medicine

I don't know whether or not he was the ship’s doctor. (I notice that James Leeson, next on the list, is “ditto.”) But it would make sense, if he was, of his later position – Surgeon to the Great Southern and Western Railway Company of Ireland.

The GSWR ran the Dublin-Cork and Dublin-Waterford lines and operated a chain of railway hotels too. The name was preserved when, with the emergence of the Irish Free State, all the railway companies operating south of the border with Northern Ireland were amalgamated in 1924 under the banner Great Southern Railways. Much of the GSWR’s network survives as part of Iarnród Eirann’s Intercity network today.

The arms of the Great Southern and Western Railways Company

It may seem strange for a railway company to employ a surgeon, but in the days before a National Health Service it made sense for employers to take an active interest in the health of their staff. Although I can find no references to GSWR’s need for Austin’s skills (thank goodness!), there was a landmark case during his lifetime involving the GSWR which set a precedent for health in law. In Byrne v The Great Southern and Western Railway (1884), courts took their first tentative steps towards the recognition, and the evaluation, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which had previously been regarded as too intangible for law or the medical profession to assess and value.

As usual an ancestral story raises as many questions as it answers. I’m afraid I don’t know the details of poor Byrne’s suffering. I don’t know what caused Austin’s early death. Who was his travelling companion and fellow doctor James Leeson? And what became of his wife Mary? What became of Captain Rowsell? Sometimes the interconnectedness of all things drives me mad!