Tall Tales from the Trees

JANE REYNER (c1850-1938) AND THE COCKBROOK MILL

2012-01-28T07:30:00.000Z

My great grandmother Jane Reynercame from one of the oldest mill-owning families in the Lancashirecottonmill town of Ashton Under Lyne.I would like to know more about the family business which spanned the whole of thenineteenth century in an industry absolutely central to the social and economicchanges of the times.

Jane Reyner (c1850-1938) with two of her sons,

Fred and Frank Salter, c1914

Jane’s grandfather Thomas Reynerwas a haberdasher in London whodecided to move from selling cotton goods to making them. In the first decadeof the nineteenth century he saw opportunities in the north and brought hisyoung family to Ashton: his wife, after whom my great grandmother Jane wasnamed; and among their children their infant son Frederick, Jane’s futurefather after whom she would in time name her eldest son, my grandfather FredSalter.

By 1811 Thomas was listed as amuslin manufacturer at Bank Top in the town. Ashton’s earliest mill, Throstle’sNest, was probably built around the 1780s, and it was powered by a water wheel onthe Cock Brook. Later, the Cockbrook Mill itself was built by Tom and JamesWilson, straddling the beck just downstream of Throstle’s Nest. The CockbrookMill was state-of-the-art, powered by a 12 horsepower steam engine, and by 1832 it had changedhands. Now it was owned by Reyners: the family was on its way up.

Thornfield Hall, the Reyner family home in Ashton Under Lyne

(now demolished)

By 1861 when Jane was 11, thefamily had made it and was living in Thornfield Hall, built on a gentle hillsideoverlooking Cockbrook. At some point Reyners took over the running of anotherlong-established manufactory, the vast Albion Mill on the River Tame in the town.Over the years the family firm survived many business crises – the cottonfamine of the 1860s when the supply from the US was interrupted by the AmericanCivil War; and two disastrous fires at Cockbrook Mill, after both of which itwas rebuilt and enlarged until it covered 22,000 square yards and was operatedby 100 employees working 20 pairs of spinning mules (the machines that spun theraw cotton into yarn).

But in March 1903 the decision wastaken to close Cockbrook down and move all its machinery to Albion.By then Cockbrook (and the Reyners’ association with Ashton) was nearly 100years old and, as a spokesman told the local paper, “it has no chance withmodern factories.”

It really was the end of an era. Now the Cockbrook Mill islong gone, although Reyner Streetwhich ran down alongside it marks the site. Thornfield Hall lies under sportsfields; and even mighty Albion has been swept aside fora supermarket. One branch of the family diversified into road haulage, anduntil very recently Reyners articulated wagons could be seen on motorways thelength and breadth of Britain,playing a continuing part in the Reyner family’s contribution to Britishindustry.

Reyners – two hundred years of selling, then making,

then delivering the goods

CHARLES CASTLE (1813-1886), HIS PASSPORT AND HIS HONEYMOON

2012-01-21T07:30:00.000Z

I have the contents of thewriting desk of my great great great uncle Charles Castle, passed down to me bymy uncle John Salter. It’s a treasure trove of correspondence from the mid-nineteenthcentury. Uncle Charles was active in Bristolpolitics and business, and the letters are peppered with details which build arich picture of the times.

Charles Castle (1813-1886)

traveller

Tucked in amongst all the lettersand business papers is the greatest jewel in the box, his passport. The documentand its associated visas provide some great snapshots of Charles’ life. Themain passport is a simple printed form folded up and pasted into a red leatherwallet on which is stamped in gold “CAPTAIN CASTLE. Passeport”. It’sbeautifully tooled and inside is the maker’s name: J.LEE440.WEST STRAND LONDON.

Charles Castle’s passport

Also stuck into the wallet is abook of blank pages, and on the last Charles has written in pencil, “+Austria,+Bavaria, +Prussia.”Sure enough, elsewhere in the book or on the passport sheet itself are stampedVisas from the London consulates ofeach of those states, all dated 1^st August 1861. The passport itself was issued two weeks earlier on 18^thJuly and signed, as was the custom, by the Secretary of State for ForeignAffairs, Lord John Russell.

The passport unfolded - Bavarian visa just visible top left

It’s a wonderful artifact –everything about it is of historical interest. John Russell, a liberal, servedtwo terms a prime minister. In the 1850s his government was brought down by hisown foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, who joined a vote of no confidence inhim after a long-running personal feud. In 1861 the tables were turned andPalmerston was the PM, Russell the foreign sec. It was Palmerston’s suddendeath in 1865 that raised Russell once again to the top spot. In the year thispassport was issued, he stopped being Lord John Russell when he was elevated tothe peerage as Earl Russell.

The separate visas for Prussia,Bavaria and Austriatell the story of the Deutsche Bund (German Federation), formed in 1815 and about to disintegrateunder tension between Prussiaand Austria. Bavariahad been an independent kingdom since 1806. It sided with Austria,who lost the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; it then backed Prussiain the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and remained independent even after it joinedthe Bund’s replacement, the Deutches Reich (German Empire) in 1871.

“Captain Charles Castle … accompanied

by his wife … with a maid Servant.”

But the chief joys of thispassport and its visas are their dates of issue. Two days after Charles hadrushed round the consulates of Londongetting his stamps in order, he was off to Melton Constable in Norfolk– to get married! The passport was made out to “Captain Charles Castle (BritishSubject) accompanied by his wife, travelling on the Continent with a maidServant.” It was for their honeymoon!

Castle, who was 48, had led afairly carefree dilettante life up to this point, and perhaps felt he needed tosettle down at last. His new wife Ada Crickland, born like Charles in the Cliftonarea of Bristol, was half his age,and he may have watched her grow up. The marriage was, as far as I can tell, asuccess, although touched with sadness; three of their four children (allgirls) died before their father, all under the age of 20. Only Charles and Ada's second daughter Mary lived to spinsterold age, and it was from her that my uncle John inherited her father’s papersand passport. I wonder who I’ll leave them to!

Mary Castle c1925

with her great nephews John and Charles Salter

Charles Castle, an orderly man, used his 1861 passport to store visasacquired for earlier journeys in the 1840s. Truly fascinating historicaldocuments, they will be the subject of a future post here.

JOHN SALTER (1798-1874) AND THE ORIGIN OF (VARIEGATED) SPECIES (Part 2)

2012-01-14T07:30:00.000Z

John Salter, a cousin of my greatgreat grandfather’s, was a pioneering horticulturalist. As a prolific breederof new varieties he was intensely interested in, and acutely sensitive to,variations in leaf and bud (see Part 1). Given his wide reputation, it is unsurprising thatanother enthusiast for the process of variation should have joined in acorrespondence with him.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species By Means Of NaturalSelection was published in 1859 and its impact was no less earth-shaking inbotanical circles than in any other sphere of biology. He regarded Origin asmerely an abstract of his theories, and immediately began work on a new moredetailed book, The Variation Of Animals And Plants Under Domestication. Duringthe research for it, he noted, he “applied to two great authorities on thissubject [of bud variation], namely, to Mr. Rivers with respect to fruit-trees,and to Mr. Salter with respect to flowers.”

Charles and John exchanged ideasabout the nature and fixity of variations in botany and the best conditions formaintaining them. Many of John’s observations found their way into Charles’ newbook when it was published in 1868. Darwinwas interested that Salter mimicked nature in using selection (of the mostappropriate buds or stock or soils) to refine and fix new varieties. It was asort of pro-active, interventionist version of the survival of the fittest, anexperimental proof of Darwin’sideas.

The variegated plants discussedby Salter as reported by Darwinincluded:

Euonymusjaponica (golden-striped form liable to revert, silver-striped more stable)
Pelargonium“Dandy” (dwarfed with variegation, remains dwarfed even after reverting)
Phlox(two varieties variegated from suckers, but could not be repeated byroot-joints)
Tussilagofarfara (can be propagated by root-joints)
Berberisvulgaris (seedless variegated form propagated by cuttings, but suckers revertand produce seeded berries)

Darwinalso described in some detail the relative merits of different methods ofpropagation of variegated forms, as practised by Salter. It would beinteresting to know how they compare with current techniques. (If you want tocheck, Darwin’s Variation Of Animals And Plants is availableat time of writing as a free download for Kindle!)

Title page of the first volume of The Variation Of Animals AndPlants Under Domestication, published in1868

Salter knew what he was doing:those famous winter chrysanthemum displays were often set in a mosaic ofvariegated species of Sedum, Sempervirum and Echevaria. In the summer months hestaged entire speciality displays of variegated plants at RHS shows in Crystal Palace and elsewhere. This reportfrom The Journal of Horticulture, CottageGardener and Country Gentlemen describes his show at Kewin early May 1863:

In a house devotedto hardy variegated plants, a variety of Sedum telephium or Orpine, calledpicturatum, had the leaves beautifully mottled with rose; Oxalis corniculatapicturata was also very pretty, the leaves being brown mottled with brightpink, instead of being green. Funkia japonica picta from Dr. Siebold had largeyellowish-green leaves with dark-green edges; and in Convallaria angustifolia,another Japanese plant, the leaves were prettily edged with white. Anotherornamental-foliaged plant was a variety of the common Comfrey, endowed with aname of formidable length — Symphytum officinale variegatum superbum, in whichthe leaves had a margin of yellowish-white. Artemisia maritima, Mr. Salterstates, forms an excellent cut-leaved plant for bedding-out, the foliageturning quite white when out of doors. We also observed a new Centaurea withwoolly leaves, which measured 17 inches long by broad, and which, we are told,become much longer and as white as those of C. candidissima.

Does anyone recognise anythingthere? A fortnight later, the same journal reports from another RHS exhibition,held on 27th May 1863. Thecorrespondent notes that Mr Salter’s variegated collection was “to my mind asinteresting as anything there. … [In it] were Funkia undulata variegata; andvariegated forms of Acer negundo, Hedera helix, Ruta graveolens, Scrophularianodosa, Hesperis arabidtefolia, Tussilago farfara, Salix caprea, Spiraeaulmaria, &c.”

The Versailles Nursery, Hammersmith

from Stanford’s Library Map Of London And Its Suburbs (1872)

(available from http://london1872.com/index.htm)

In the late 1860s the businesswas trading as John Salter and Son – Alfred had worked alongside his father sincethe founding of the original nursery at Versailles.He exhibited separately and won honourable mentions in both Franceand England.But by 1871 both men had retired and the Versailles Nursery was closed down.Perhaps cashing in on the value of land in Hammersmith was too tempting forAlfred to consider continuing the family firm. Although the nursery stillappeared on maps for a few years, it and William Street on which it stood were soon buried beneaththe newly laid Avonmore Roadestate.

John Salter (1802-1874) was askilled craftsman who made a valuable contribution to horticulture, not only inthe breeding of chrysanthemums but in his invaluable exchanges with CharlesDarwin. Perhaps best of all and least celebrated, he promoted variegatedspecies at a time when England’smiddle classes were going garden-crazy. Variegated enthusiasts today owe him asmall debt of gratitude for suggesting, as the reviewer of that late-May RHSshow pointed out, “how much may be done in adorning our gardens with this sectionof ornamental-foliaged plants.”

I am indebted to the editor of The Sport, Ian Warden, for bringing the variegated aspects of myplantsman ancestor John Salter to my attention. I’ve posted here, with hispermission, the article which he commissioned.

JOHN SALTER (1798-1874) AND THE ORIGIN OF (VARIEGATED) SPECIES (Part 1)

2012-01-07T07:30:00.000Z

I’m a genealogist, not agardener. There is a strained joke to be made about roots, branches, familytrees, cross-pollination and bad apples; but the pages of the magazine of theVariegated Plant Group of the Hardy Plant Society of Great Britain (where thisarticle first appeared) are probably a better place for it than here. Thanks toIan Warden,editor of The Sport (the magazine inquestion), I am however enormously proud to have found an ancestor who left hismark in several spheres of horticultural endeavour, not least the study ofvariegation.

Symphytum officinale, Common Comfrey

in (L-R) its normal and variegated forms

When I started looking into myfamily tree nearly 20 years ago, one of the first things I came across in a boxof papers was a note from a long dead aunt Emily to my recently deceased UncleJohn: “Your namesake was head gardener at the Tuilerie Gardens (until the coupd’état). He came to Englandbringing his wife (a French lady, whom I well remember), & his 2 children,Alfred & Annie (Mrs Holborn).”

To cut a long story short, dearold Aunt Emily got it wrong on virtually every count. My uncle’s namesake John Salter, a cousin of my great great grandfather’s, was not head gardener at theTuileries but proprietor of a thriving English-style garden nursery at Versailles.(And Jane his wife, far from French, was born in Reading,Berkshire.) John’s father, a cheesemonger, left money inhis will for his children to be apprenticed in the trades of their choice.John chose horticulture, but quite what took him in 1838 to practice his art in French soil remains amystery. Perhaps the global reputation of English gardens contributed tohis success there.

He regularly won medals at the Versaillesspring and autumn exhibitions, notably for his dahlias and chrysanthemums. Twoof his most successful varieties, Annie Salter (named after his daughter) andQueen of England, both introduced at Versaillesin 1847, were still listed in the National Chrysanthemum Society Register over110 years later. John Salter published his seminal work, The Chrysanthemum: ItsHistory And Culture, in 1865. Original copies complete with their fine colourplates fetch hundreds of pounds now; but it is still available today in a blackand white facsimile edition, a measure of its continuing authority.

Achimenes picta

as pictured in 1845 by Van Houtte

Of more direct interest toreaders of The Sport is the excited headline from the Revue Horticole (Journaldes Jardiniers et Amateurs) in 1844. In translation:

FLOWERING OF ACHIMENES PICTA.

Achimenes picta, anew species, will flower for the first time, before the end of September, atthe premises of Mister Salter of Versailles(32, Picardie Avenue).

Achimenes picta (Benth. ex Hook)has many modern synonyms – Giesleria picta, Tydaea picta, Diastema pictum, D.vexans, Kohleria amablis var bogotensis. It’s a beautiful flower in trumpetform, the upper half orange-red, the lower half yellow with bold vertical linesof orange-red dots. The leaves, rising from dark red stems, are variegated:deep green, with a silver-grey shading spreading from the midrib and the veins.The earliest illustrations of it which I’ve been able to find are Paxton’s of1846 and Van Houtte’s of 1845. So in 1844, John Salter’s successful blooms ofthis Mexican native must have been among the very earliest seen in Europe.Was A. picta Salter’s first brush with variegation? It certainly wasn’t hislast.

Perhaps the royalist tendenciesindicated by his choice of name for a new Chrysanthemum – Queen of England – werethe reason for his hasty departure from Francein 1848. When the French King Louis Phillipe was deposed in a coup d’état thatyear, John was forced to return with his family to his native Hammersmith.There, in William Street heand his son Alfred established a new business, defiantly named the VersaillesNursery. (Indeed, he subsequently created varieties of Pyrethrum andChrysanthemum both called Versailles Defiance.)

Chrysanthemums Versailles Defiance (purple)

and (L-R) La Sapojon, La Ruche and Golden Drop

by C.T. Rosenberg, 1852

The new nursery flourished as theold one had. Over the next twenty years his annual display became “anestablished floral tradition of the metropolis, for it is a show of no meanorder. Year by year it becomes more extensive, and at the same time more variedin its details. No description we can give will do due justice to thisadmirable winter-garden, when seen about the second week in November, just asautumn is merging into winter; and when "The flush of the landscape iso'er, The brown leaves are shed on the way".” (This description is from afeature on the 1868 event in The Gardenermagazine.)

As a prolific breeder of newvarieties Salter was intensely interested in, and acutely sensitive to,variations in leaf and bud. Given his wide reputation, it is unsurprising thatanother enthusiast for the process of variation should have joined in acorrespondence with him. Who, you may ask, could possibly be interested in thevariations of species? Find out in Part 2!

JOHN DAVIS (1714-c1783) AND THE MALTSTER’S PATENT

2011-12-31T10:29:00.000Z

With the help of someone who gotin touch via this blog I recently found the identity of my 5x greatgrandfather, John Davis of Little Missenden in Buckinghamshire. I don’t knowJohn’s religious denomination, but the area of Buckinghamshire around Littleand Great Missenden was one of the earliest centres of non-conformist dissentin England.

Many of my earliest knownancestors from the region around Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were devoutnon-conformists – Quakers and Baptists. Two of John Davis’s daughters married twoSalter brothers: John, and my 3x great grandfather Samuel Salter who was adeacon of the first Baptist Churchin Watford, Herts who bought a £100 share in thedissenters’ university, London University.Two more of John and Samuel’s brothers also embodied the family’s staunchnon-conformist tradition: William Salter gave the land for a Congregationalist chapel in Norwood, south London;and David left money in his will for a row of four almshouses in Watford HighStreet.

A typical late 18^th century malting house and kiln

(this one at Burwell in Cambridgeshire)

John Davis was a maltster.Malting was an important process, a key stage in the business of brewing beer.In the days before a reliable clean public water supply, beer was the safe,healthy option for quenching your thirst – everyone drank it – so malted grain wasin high demand and malting was big business (and consequently highly taxed bythe governments of the day).

What the maltsters did was toconvert the starch in grain crops, especially barley, to sugar which thebrewers of beer needed for the fermentation of their brew. This conversion wasachieved by soaking the barley in water and spreading it out on the floor ofthe malting house, where it began to germinate.

The malting house was a longbuilding, and the maltster moved the germinating barley along the length of itover the course of a few days with a shovel, turning the barley over as he didso to ensure an even conversion by the time it reached the end of themalthouse. In nature the germinating grain uses the sugar to sprout and grow;to preserve the sugar for the brewer and prevent sprouting, the maltster nextroasted the grain in a kiln to the brewer’s specification. The brewer relied onthe skillful judgement of the maltster in producing the desired flavour ofmalt: light malts for pale ales, darker malts for stouts such as Guinness.

The Malt Shovel, popular English pub name

recognises the importance of the maltster to the nation’s beer

(L-R: pubs in Sandwich in Kent, Harden in Yorkshire and Oswaldkirk in Northumberland)

Before I learned of John Davis, Iknew that his grandson-in-law Samuel Salter was also a maltster. Samuel camefrom a long line of brickmakers, and the switch from bricks and mortar to maltfor brewing had intrigued me. I convinced myself that the family had at somepoint taken their expertise in the technology of the kilns used to fire bricks,and simply applied it to the process of roasting barley. But having discovereda maltster ancestor two generations earlier than Samuel, I now have a differenttheory.

As far as I can tell John hadonly two male Davis grandchildren,one of whom emigrated to Australia– so there was certainly room in the Davismalt business for new blood. Samuel on the other hand was the youngest of fivesons, and unlikely to inherit a share or even a role in the Salter brickmakingbusiness. It seems likely therefore that his entry into the malt industry was adirect result of his marriage in 1800 to John Davis’s granddaughter Sarah,a dowry in the form of a business opportunity.

Samuel certainly took to his newtrade with enthusiasm and an eye for innovation. In 1808 he took out a patenton “an apparatus for the purpose of drying malt, hops or any kind of grain.”And his eldest son, also Samuel, followed him into the business. His youngeston the other hand followed the other family tradition: William Augustus Salter,my great great grandfather, went to the university which his father helped tofound, and became a Baptist minister.

JOHN COOPER-CHADWICK (1864-1948) AND CHRISTMAS IN MASHONALAND

2011-12-24T07:30:00.004Z

I’ve written here before about my cousin John Cooper-Chadwick’s exploits in the imperial colonization of southern Africa. In between his uniformed adventures with the Bechuanaland Police and Cecil Rhodes’ Pioneer Column JCC found time for a spot of gold-prospecting with his brother Richard.

John Cooper-Chadwick (1864-1948)

serving with Methuen’s Company of Horse

His memoir Three Years with Lobengula contains vivid descriptions of conditions – a really gripping first-hand account of a time very different to our own comfortable present. Without even the most basic supplies of clothing, tools, medicines and food, the early European settlers in Africa were dependent entirely on their wits, their hands and their rifles. But special occasions still demanded special provisions, however meager the available resources.

Here’s JCC’s description of Christmas 1890:

We had no proper mining tools, dynamite or even rope for a windlass, which was a great disadvantage as the latter was absolutely necessary. … Many of the pioneers were laid up with fever, in want of medicines and the bare necessaries of life. … It was an everyday occurrence to see men walking about bare-footed, or with bits of hide for boots. … Pumpkins and mealies were then the backbone of Mashonaland, and what most of us depended on for our daily bread. …

John and Dick were re-digging ancient African mining shafts

(photo by Jono Terry)

We worked on until Christmas without striking anything, and so far escaped the fever. No doubt the active life, and a dry hut on high ground to sleep in, had a good deal to do with it, in spite of bad food and frequent wettings.

The few of us around made an attempt to keep up Christmas, and contributed what we could for dinner. A railway pudding was manufactured, a plum here and there, like the stations on a line, few and far between. Four diminutive Mashona fowls, blue-legged and skinny, flanked with biltong and a liberal supply of rice and pumpkins, composed the feast.

About ten of us assembled round the festive board, which was laid out on the hut floor, each man supplying his own cutlery and plate. Someone mysteriously produced two black bottles, which made a great sensation, as they were expected to contain whiskey, but they only turned out to be sour Cape wine.

John and Dick were mining near the Mazowe River,

which is still panned today (photo by Jono Terry)

In April 1891 Dick and John finally struck gold, although their triumph was short-lived. Dick got malaria, and John had a serious accident with his rifle which forced them both to return to Ireland. Both men survived however, and the memory of that Mashona Christmas must have made them grateful for all the family Christmases they enjoyed thereafter. Happy Christmas to you, dear reader! May your fowl be not blue and your black bottles not foul.

WILLIAM WINDLE PILKINGTON (1839-1914) AND HIS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

2011-12-17T07:30:00.005Z

In all my family tree research I am constantly in debt to the earlier and more thorough research of others. Recent contact with a cousin in my Pilkington line emphasises this: Isabel Pilkington Henniger has produced an invaluable book, full of photographs, based on the audio recordings of her late uncle Roger Pilkington. Isabel has done a really delightful job of editing Roger’s remarks into A Pilkington Memoir while still retaining the distinctive voice of Roger, a born raconteur. (She’s also tidied up the very occasional memory lapse on Roger’s part with discreet footnotes.) Isabel has sent me a copy of her book, which is full of the sort of detail and colour my own research could never have unearthed.

William Windle Pilkington (1839-1914)

industrialist, educationalist

Roger’s grandfather, Isabel’s great grandfather, my great great uncle William, was a pillar of the community, a leading industrialist in Lancashire. He poured a great deal back into the community and served in its offices as town councillor, mayor and alderman. He was made a freeman of the borough of St Helens in 1905 (the statue of Queen Victoria which he donated to the town on that day still stands there) and he was appointed Second Lieutenant of the county in 1908.

He was a member and trustee of the St Helens Congregational Church and chairman of the Congregational Union. He founded the St Helens YMCA, and co-founded two schools – the Ragged School where he taught with his wife on Sunday afternoons, and an infant school for which he provided land.

St Helens YMCA, founded by William Pilkington

His passion for education, typical of nineteenth century non-conformists, regularly brought him into idealistic conflict with the authorities over the way local schools were run. As you’d expect of a dynamic captain of industry, William was not one to stand idly by when he saw what he regarded as wrong being done. Roger tells it far better than I could:

“The schools were run by the Church of England and paid for out of the rates, and when he got his bill for the rates he worked out carefully what proportion of that went to support Church of England schools, and he deducted it and sent in the cheque short.

“Then, of course, he got another application, and eventually he got one of those red warning notices that unless he paid the rest within seven days, action would be taken. And this was the signal for the butler to clear out all of the furniture out of the front hall and lock the doors leading off it, and to put in the front hall certain pieces of furniture which my grandfather had bought at auctions.

The indoor staff at Windle Hall,

home of William and Louisa Pilkington

(furniture-toting butler pictured standing second from right)

“He had a very good eye for furniture, antiques, and this furniture was bought specially for this occasion always and was put around the front hall, and eventually the bailiffs drew up and stormed in the front door and seized the furniture, and off they went happy to have done their job, but not so happy as was my grandfather, because they had to sell what they had taken by public auction, and they had to give him anything more than the amount owed plus presumably, some sort of bailiff’s costs.

“It was customary in those days when people did this sort of thing for the local people to go to the auction and make incredibly low bids in order to prevent the thing being sold at all. But in his case this was not so. The general public bid, dealers bid, the things were sold, and he managed to achieve what free churchmen always like to do, which is to be true to their ideals and make a good profit at the same time.”

I can hear the twinkle in Roger’s voice as he told this story, and see the sparkle in William’s eye as he got one over on the Church of England!

Col. W.W. Pilkington’s statue of Queen Victoria

in Victoria Square, St Helens

JOHN STUART HEPBURN (1803-1860) AND THE HEPBURN SPRINGS

2011-12-10T07:30:00.005Z

I’ve been exploring the noble Scottish Hepburn pedigree lately – far more than I needed to really, but that’s genealogy for you! My genuine connections with the ancient family are only through a couple of early 19^th century marriages, and it would be cheeky to claim much relationship with them. (If you must know, the Hepburn grandfather of one cousin of my grandfather’s, and the mother-in-law of another, share a 12x great grandfather with John Stuart Hepburn, the subject of this post!)

But at about the time I was discovering all this, I heard from a literary colleague who had recently begun a year travelling in Australia and who had just reached Daylesford in Victoria. And Daylesford, I had read only that morning, was one of the places where Captain John Hepburn made a mark.

Captain John Stuart Hepburn (1803-1860)

Young John Hepburn, born on the Hepburn lands of Whitekirk near North Berwick on the east coast of Scotland, went to sea. In 1833 he became Master of a 226-ton brig The Alice, which sailed between Britain and Tasmania. En route for Hobart in 1835 he fell to talking with one of his passengers, a former banker called John Gardiner who was going into the cattle business. When the following year Hepburn’s new steam ship The Ceres ran aground and sank off the coast of New South Wales, it was suddenly a good time to join Gardiner in his venture.

Gardiner and Hepburn drove a herd of cattle overland to Port Phillip in Victoria in the summer of 1836, and it seems to have gone well. In 1837 Hepburn’s wife Eliza and their two children joined him in Australia and he organised another drive with another partner, William Coghill, with a view to finding land worth settling on. While the land he had crossed in 1836 had already been claimed and settled by other pioneers, this time he was driving sheep from eastern New South Wales into new territory in the heart of Victoria.

John and Eliza Hepburn’s two-month journey in 1838

From Braidwood NSW they set off in February 1838, west to Gundagai where they hooked up with a third pioneer, William Bowman. The three parties pressed on southwestwards on the route now followed by highway 31, crossing the Darling river at Albury and coming across the tracks of an earlier pioneer Thomas Mitchell as they entered Victoria at Wangaratta.

Major Mitchell, a fellow Scot from the industrial port of Grangemouth explored and surveyed much of southeastern Australia for the government. In September 1836 he was the first European to climb and name Victoria’s Mount Alexander, a traditional aboriginal ceremonial ground and lookout. Following his route, Hepburn, Coghill and Bowman set up a lambing camp on the slopes of the mountain in April 1838. From its summit Hepburn saw the land around Mount Kooroocheang to the southwest. He had seen a lot of land in the past three years and the slopes of Kooroocheang looked good.

While Coghill and Bowman pressed on westwards, John Hepburn staked his claim on a stretch of grazing land he called the Smeaton Run (after Smeaton House the Hepburn home at Whitekirk), on the southern slopes of Kooroocheang. It was good land. John and Eliza’s next child was born at Smeaton later that year, and The Hepburns prospered, extending their property with purchases from a succession of new land releases by the governments of the day. At the time of his death it stretched over 24,000 acres. The townships of Smeaton, Blampied and Daylesford sprang up on its fringes to service the growing population of workers which the Smeaton run supported.

Smeaton House, Victoria

symbol of prosperity built in 1849

Conditions were rough in the early days. Governor Sir George Gipps reported in October 1840 that “a race of Englishmen are living in bark huts in a state of semi-barbarism because the conditions of their leases do not make it worthwhile to build permanent dwellings.” But in 1849 Hepburn built his own Smeaton House, a symbol of his prosperity which still stands today.

About the same time, to the east of the Smeaton Run, gold was discovered in the Jim Crow Diggings; the goldrush town of Hepburn became home to miners from China, England, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. The strong European contingent also appreciated the properties of the many mineral springs in the area. When in 1865 pollution from the mines threatened to ruin the waters’ qualities, the government established the Hepburn Mineral Springs Reserve to protect them. Jim Crow Creek was diverted through the Blowhole Gold Diversion Tunnel (dug by Chinese miners) and the spa resort of Hepburn Springs developed to the north of Daylesford, complete with a bathhouse and a Palais de Dance.

Hepburn Springs Bathhouse and Spa

renovated in 2008 at a cost of $13 million

The town even boasted a pasta factory to feed its European and Chinese population. Let’s hope for the Hepburns’ sake they served it with mutton.

JOHN HUBERT VERRALL (1845-1909), THE DRINKING AND THE DIARY

2011-12-03T07:30:00.003Z

My great aunt Helen’s ancestors, the Verrall family from Lewes in Sussex, were a prominent lot, at the heart of Lewes life for many generations through their inn-keeping, auctioneering and racing interests.

When I started to read descriptions of John Hubert Verrall as “a Lewes ne’r-do-well” and “the black sheep of an illustrious Lewes family” my ears pricked up. The more I looked into his life however, the less I thought those pejorative labels were justified. He faced a series of setbacks in later life from which, because of his character and upbringing, he was ill-equipped to bounce back. But I don’t believe he was as wilfully disreputable as those tags suggest.

John Hubert Verrall (1845-1909)

dressed for drill

Hubert was the sixth of seven children of John Verrall the auctioneer. The eldest, Frederick, was in line to take over the business and Hubert, with no responsibilities now or in the future to worry about, spent his time breeding and exhibiting exotic birds – canaries, parrots and so on. He lived with his parents, and like other reputable gentlemen of the time, he did his patriotic duty by enlisting in the local Volunteer Militia.

This carefree existence was powerfully shaken from early 1874 onwards when first his mother and then over the next three years his father, sister and eldest brother Frederick, died. Hubert, still living at home with his brother Marcus, never really rcovered from these losses. While Marcus stepped up to take over the running of both the family home and the auction house, Hubert turned to drink.

It quickly became apparent that he had a problem. In 1879, when his younger brother George (of whom I’ve written before) was getting married and beginning a successful career in racing administration and entomology, Hubert wrote in his diary:

Walking all day, did not eat or drink, only tea, all day, by doctor's orders … I am of a strong suspicion that I have been a trifle insane ever since Tuesday through drinking whiskey every day last week and eating and walking too much … From this day I intend trying to be if possible an abstainer from beer and spirits and have not tasted beer of any description since 14 June 1878.

Lewes Union Workhouse

Worse was to come. Marcus died, unmarried, in 1895. Hubert was in no fit state to take over the reins, and the business and the family home were both sold up. Hubert became homeless. I’m not sure what happened next; perhaps he moved into rented accommodation. Certainly he carried on drinking, and on 20^th March 1902, having presumably run out of money and the ability to look after himself, he was admitted to the Lewes Union Workhouse. His brother George paid for his maintenance there – George, who shared with Hubert a passion for the natural world, had made a rather more successful career of it as an authority on British insects.

In 1907 Hubert moved in with his niece, but on 17^th May 1909 he was admitted to the County Asylum at Hellingly “in a dying condition,” suffering from enormous enlargement of the liver and from the dementia which he had foreseen 30 years earlier. He died there of liver cancer three days later.

Hellingly Mental Asylum is abandoned now,

an unfortunate name and the subject of a moving photo essay by Joe Collier at

http://www.abandoned-britain.com/PP/hellingly/1.htm

The bare bones of Hubert Verrall’s life make for a pretty sorry tale. Perhaps in his alcoholic final years he did build a reputation around Lewes as a ne’r-do-well (as the East Sussex Archives rather bluntly describe him).

But we know that he continued to enjoy, and take part in Lewes events at least until his entry into the workhouse. Hubert kept a diary, every day of his life until that date, which now forms an invaluable record of Victorian life in East Sussex. Hubert records local news, reports his service in 1890 on jury duty and describes the high days and holidays of his time – the Lewes races, Guy Fawkes Night and so on.

The diaries are preserved; they formed the basis for an exhibition of local history in October 2007, and were the subject of a BBC programme, Inside Out in 2008. So Hubert Verrall has in a way left the best legacy of all his brothers for the town his family made such a mark in.

ARTHUR EDWARD REYNER (c1846-1902) AND THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

2011-11-26T07:30:00.008Z

When we were growing up, the only family “heritage” of which my father spoke was the line of his great grandmother, the staunch non-conformist Gurney family. There was never any mention of the more recent (and, you might think, more influential) lines of his Castle mother or Reyner grandmother – or indeed of his own male line, the Salters of Hertfordshire. From a purely genealogical point of view this seems like a terrible waste of ancestors!

This post marks the second anniversary of this weekly blog, in which I try to recover and celebrate some of those lost ancestral souls. Since my father took whatever he knew about his non-Gurney forebears to the grave with him, it has not always been a simple matter to snatch even a glimpse of the lives of some of mine. The Reyners are a case in point. They too were liberal non-conformists, a family of Lancashire cotton mill owners for several generations. But I am not in touch with any Reyner cousins (if you’re reading this, Reyner cousins, please write!); and for a long time I knew only the name of my great grandmother, Jane Reyner.

Arthur's sister, Jane Reyner (1850-1938)

my link to the world of Lancashire cotton

This morning however I stumbled across three of her brothers and sisters of whom I had previously never heard. Better still, one of them is described in the sort of detail which no amount of FreeBMD or Ancestry statistical records can convey. I now know I had a great great uncle Arthur, who was

a bachelor of uncertain health, and lived at Thornfield Hall near to Ashton-under-Lyne, with a mother whose strength and stateliness of spirit, coupled with extreme personal fragility, advanced years, and only occasional visibility through the bevelled glass of an ancient brougham, constituted her one of those occasional reproductions of Queen Victoria which appeared during the reign of that monarch, his life being one in which music, travel in Switzerland, Gladstonianism, a perilous habit, for one of his weight and build, of riding to hounds, and the current number of the Nineteenth Century, played a great part.

It sounds as if Arthur was a bit of a playboy. He certainly doesn’t seem to have played any active part in the running of the family mills, and only appears on one British census return throughout his adult life (suggesting that he travelled aborad a lot). He never married, and clearly enjoyed the good life, judging from the weight and build which made riding to hounds such an ill-advised hobby. The Nineteenth Century was a monthly literary magazine which from 1877 to 1972 published debate by leading intellectuals of the day.

Brougham carriage

as occupied by Queen Victoria (left) and Helen Reyner nee Bayley (right)

The description of his mother Helen Reyner, née Bayley (1816-1892) is tremendous! How I wish I had more pictures of this pair of ancestors. Helen was 15 years younger than her late husband Frederick Reyner and outlived him by just that length of time, shutting herself away in Thornfield Hall, the family home, and mourning Frederick (who died in 1877) in perpetuum just as Queen Victoria had been mourning Prince Albert since 1861. Arthur died only ten years after his mother.

These descriptions come from a 1917 article about industrial relations in the northern cotton mills, and it was in this sphere that Arthur did make a mark in public life. He was the president of the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ Associations which represented the mill owners, although he seems to have fulfilled the role with mixed results:

In his speeches on the public platform great fluency of thought and expression struggled with anguish against a marked defect of utterance. He had Robert Lowe's inability to perceive the effect he was making on his audience, and his position as leader at once of a Liberal organisation which wanted all sorts of democratic changes, and an Employers' Federation which wanted a reduction of wages, was a vexatious inconsistency, and probably accounted very largely, though it was not suspected at the time, for the recurrent Conservatism of the borough in which he lived.

The tension between his liberal non-conformist inclination to help the working man and his capitalist responsibilities to the family business must have been hard to balance. Around the time of his mother’s death Arthur was one of three employers appointed by the Federation to negotiate a new deal with employees about working practices in the mills. The deal, following a bitter dispute over wage cuts, was thrashed out in a room at the Brooklands Hotel outside Manchester in one all-night session in March 1893 and became known as the Brooklands Agreement. Arthur was the first signatory, but in fact his ill health (perhaps made worse by his mother’s dying days) meant that he was absent from the negotiating table for much of the process.

Sir Charles Macara (1845-1929)

closer of the 1893 Brooklands deal

(and in 1891 creator of Lifeboat Flagdays)

In fact the absence of Arthur and his “defect of utterance” from the final stages made the agreement possible. He had adopted a much harder line over the 5% wage cut and subsequent 20 week strike than his conservative colleague Charles Macara; with Arthur indisposed, Macara was able to take a more flexible approach with the trade union leaders and reach a satisfactory compromise. The Brooklands Agreement introduced a structure of negotiation, conciliation and appeal procedures which remained in place for more than 20 years.

One rather happy side effect of the rancourous 20-week dispute was also described by the same 1917 writer. As the dark satanic mills, and their chimneys, stopped working, pollution levels began to fall:

[The lock-out] lasted long enough to clear the sky, and nearly long enough to clean the earth. Distant objects acquired that startling visibility which in South-east Lancashire usually signifies nothing more serious than " the wakes," and the operatives wandered up and down amid unfamiliar tracts of morning and afternoon, and were, for all their faith and fortitude, in the suspended and deeply disordered state of those who are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

LOUISA SALTER (1843-1917), PRETERISM AND THE PROFUSION OF BIBLES

2011-11-19T07:30:00.011Z

Louisa Salter, a first cousin of my great grandfather’s, spent her life surrounded by new editions of the Bible, or rather by men driven to produce more accessible versions of it.

Her uncle the biblical scholar William Augustus Salter, my great great grandfather, worked with the Religious Tract Society to produce the Annotated Paragraph Bible – which as the name implies introduced paragraphs and footnotes to the King James translation to make it more readable by the ordinary man and woman. And her husband’s legacy was The New Testament in Modern Speech, a translation from the Greek into nineteenth century English which has regularly been reprinted since its publication in 1903.

The New Testament in Modern Speech, published 1903,

translated from the Greek by Richard Francis Weymouth

Louisa married Richard Francis Weymouth in 1892 when she was already 49 years old. Like so many daughters of her times, she had been obliged by convention to remain unmarried well into adulthood, caring for her widowed mother. She shared this duty with her only sister Charlotte Amelia Salter; Charlotte’s early death in 1871, and that of their mother only a few months later, must have been cruel blows.

Richard Weymouth was considerably older than Louisa – aged 70 at the time of this, his second marriage. He was a lay Baptist biblical scholar, having been educated like Louisa’s uncle William at the nonconformist-funded University of London. Richard returned to the university as a Fellow in 1869 and taught there until his retirement in 1886. During this time he also edited the Resultant Greek Testament, a standardised form of the original Greek text of the New Testament agreed by a consensus of leading biblical scholars of the day, from which he would prepare his modern-speech translation.

The Resultant Greek Testament, published in 1892,

edited by Richard Francis Weymouth

He and Louisa enjoyed ten years together before he died in 1902 – the Weymouth New Testament, as his translation is now known, was published posthumously. Its success after his death will at least have helped to provide for Louisa in her own old age. One of the executors of her own will in 1917 was her late husband’s secretary Rev Ernest Hampden-Cook, who had prepared Richard’s manuscript for publication. Ernest had obviously become a family friend. Keeping in touch with him must have eased Louisa's sense of loss after Richard's death.

Ernest had published his own volume of biblical criticism, The Christ Has Come, in 1891, the year before Louisa and Richard were married. His book took a strong preterist stance on biblical interpretation – that is, the view that much of the Bible, particularly the books of Daniel and Revelations, contain prophecies which were fulfilled in the first century AD.

The Christ Has Come, published in 1891,

written by Rev Ernest Hampden-Cook

Weymouth’s New Testament has also been cited in support of a preterist viewpoint, central to which was a second coming of Christ in AD 70 and the promise of a third coming yet to happen. It is tempting to imagine that a lonely Louisa, losing in the space of a few months the last two members of her immediate family, turned to the possibility of a third coming of Christ for spiritual comfort in a time of despair. She would not have been the first or last spinster of the parish to long for future happiness in any form. If she did, then (whatever the truth behind preterism) that comfort brought her belated joy in the form of her husband.

Louisa should not be confused with her first cousin also called Louisa Salter, her uncle William’s daughter, who married William Windle Pilkington the St Helens glass magnate.

MICHAEL CASTLE (1762-1821) AND THE BOULTON AND WATT ENGINE

2011-11-12T07:30:00.007Z

Michael Castle, my 4x great uncle, was part of a powerful merchant family in 18^th century Bristol. He was a whiskey distiller in partnership with his older brother Robert and a third businessman called John Ames. Together they ran several public houses as well as the Bristol Distillery; and when Robert died (while in office as mayor of Bristol in 1803), Robert and Michael’s younger brother Thomas, my 3x great grandfather, took his place in the partnership.

Michael Castle (1762-1821)

modern manufacturer

I’ve written about the distillery previously here. Recently I found out that the distillery was a modern operation, employing state-of-the-art technology – the energy source which powered the Industrial Revolution. In 1793 Castle & Ames took delivery of a mighty Boulton & Watt beam engine.

It was the largest of three Boulton &Watt “sun-and-planet” machines known to have been supplied to manufacturers in the city of Bristol in the 1790s. Sixteen engineering drawings for the Castle and Ames machine survive in the archives of Boulton and Watt, held by Birmingham Central Library. Sun-and-planet refers to the gearing mechanism, one wheel revolving around another, which transferred the up-and-down vertical motion of a beam engine onto a round-and-round horizontal drive shaft.

Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) and James Watt (1736-1819)

both painted by Carl Frederik von Breda in 1792,

the year before they supplied Castle & Ames

The Watt in Boulton & Watt is James Watt, the Scottish engineer who improved the efficiency of steam engines beyond all recognition when he was asked to repair an early machine at Glasgow University in 1763. Watt the mechanical genius understood his limitations as an entrepreneur, and to realise the full potential of his innovations he went into partnership with Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer.

In 1776 Boulton & Watt began producing engines which used only 25% of the fuel of previous steam engines. They transformed the industrial landscape not only by producing a more efficient, powerful machine but by cutting industry’s ties to other forms of power. In particular, factories no longer had to be positioned near a suitable head of water to drive the water wheels which had previously been the best source of energy.

Boulton & Watt engine

originally supplied to Barclay & Perkins Brewery, Southwark

(now in the National Museum of Scotland) -

sun-and-planet gear clearly visible

Boulton & Watt manufactured 450 engines between 1776 and 1800. They were used in a broad range of settings to drive other machinery or to pump water. In Bristol, besides the Castle & Ames distillery, engines were supplied to a woolen manufactory and a lead works. I don’t know exactly how the Castle & Ames one was applied in their production of strong spirits; but a surviving Boulton & Watt sun-and-planet engine now in the National Museum of Scotland was originally used in a London brewery to grind barley and pump water.

Boulton & Watt continued to develop new models, and in April 1823 the Bristol distillery, now known as Thomas Castle & Co following the death of both Robert and Michael, ordered a new larger crank-type beam engine from them, for which again drawings survive in Birmingham Library. As a measure both of the distillery’s progress and Boulton & Watt’s, the new engine had a six-foot stroke compared to the old one’s five; and where the old one delivered in the region of 15 horse power, Thomas Castle’s new machine was capable of a whopping 40 h.p. Matthew Boulton summed it up when he boasted to the diarist James Boswell who was touring his factory in Soho, Birmingham: "I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have - POWER."

REV EDMUND THOMAS DAUBENY (1840-1914) AND THE BEDHAMPTON VESTRY

2011-11-05T07:30:00.014Z

Mary Castle, a first cousin of my great grandfather, got married in 1865, the same year her new husband Edmund Daubeny began a living as rector of St Thomas’s, then a country church in the village of Bedhampton near Havant in Hampshire. They married in Bedminster – no connection at all to Bedhampton but a rapidly expanding industrial suburb of Bristol.

Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Bedhampton

served by Rev E.T. Daubeny for 19 years, 1865-1884

(photographed in 2007 by M. Eyre)

The Castles and the Daubenys were both old Somerset families who migrated to the city of Bristol in search of wealth and power. The Castles were particularly successful, supplying the town with councillors, sheriffs and two mayors and making a fortune in the distillation of spirits, part of the Triangular Trade on which Bristol was built.

It was natural when Mary got married that they would wish to bestow some of that wealth on their new son in law. His new church had been built in 1140 – a Norman arch survives at the western end of the chancel – and Edmund followed contemporary thinking in deciding that it was long overdue for a makeover. There were undoubted limitations to the old building. It lacked a vestry for a start, although it did have a beautiful Georgian rectory ten yards away across the lane which no doubt fulfilled the function more than adequately.

St Thomas before the vestry extension of 1993,

showing the Castle vestry, bell tower and north aisle

Between 1869 and 1878 Edmund undertook a series of improvements. As well as adding a small vestry to the north of the chancel and replacing the wooden bell tower with a stone one, he increased the capacity of the nave with new pews and a fine north aisle. All these building works were undertaken with generous donations from the Castle family back in Bristol. At the same time he found in the garden of the rectory the remains of the Norman font, in use I suspect as a Victorian planter. This was restored and replaced in the church, where it now serves its original function once more.

Perhaps the biggest outward change introduced by Edmund was a change in the church’s dedication. It had been known since at least the 16^th century as St Nicholas, and in 1869 it was renamed St Thomas in deference, I imagine, to Thomas Castle the principle subscriber to the works. Thomas was Edmund’s brother in law, Mary’s half-brother by their father’s first marriage. He was probably giving money recently inherited from their father, who died just a year after Mary and Edmund’s marriage.

Old Bedhampton School

a place of Dust, Stone and Daubeny

according to the logbook

(photographed in 2007 by M. Eyre)

Although presumably life as a country rector was not too demanding, Edmund Daubeny was obviously an active incumbent, determined to leave his mark on his church and his community. The year before he began his program of works on the fabric of the church, the first ever school in Bedhampton opened its doors, under the tutelage of the splendidly named Miss Dust. According to the early school ledgers, both the village squire (the equally splendidly named Mr Stone) and the rector were regular visitors to the school and took a keen interest in her work.

The Norman font and the Victorian pews and north aisle

(photo by permission of www.bedhamptonparish.org.uk
from whom much fascinating detail informs this article)

WILLIAM PIPER (1891-1919) AND THE IMPERIAL CAMEL CORPS

2011-10-29T07:30:00.011+01:00

Most of my paternal ancestors are elsewhere – if not actually overseas, then certainly in corners of the United Kingdom not immediately accessible to me. Like me, they wouldn’t stay put, always moving on to new opportunities – in fact, I live in Scotland because my London father took a job here and relocated, eventually meeting my Scottish mother.

Her roots are therefore much closer to what for the time being I call home. Many generations of them, the Piper family, lived and died in a small area of Ayrshire. Many lie buried in a quiet country churchyard in the tiny village of Sorn there, just a morning’s drive away from me. Amongst the graves is a memorial to “Pte William Piper, Imperial Camel Corps.”

William Piper (1891-1919)

c1914 in the uniform of the Ayrshire Yeomanry

Sorn’s population may have fluctuated over the years, but today it is no larger than it was in the 1790s – around 300. Everybody has always known everybody else. When war broke out in 1914, many young men who had grown up together at Sorn School queued together to enlist with the Ayrshire Yeomanry – among them my Piper-born grandmother’s cousin William Piper.

The Ayrshire Yeomanry on manoeuvres at Sorn, c1914

After some basic training, the still-raw Yeomanry recruits were shipped off, literally, to one of the worst theatres of the war. They were attached, as the 1/1^st Lowland Mounted Brigade, to the 52^nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, fighting at Gallipoli.

The Gallipoli campaign was a disastrously unsuccessful attempt by the Allied Powers to capture the Ottoman capital Constantinople and secure a sea route through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea and Russia. Casualty rates on both sides ran to around 60%, nearly half a million men in total. Although only two further Allied soldiers were wounded by enemy action in the mass evacuation which followed in December 1915, many more died in the rain and snow which accompanied it. Disease in the unsanitary trenches also took its toll. Will Piper survived.

The evacuated Allies were ferried south to British-occupied Egypt, where they regrouped. Will, who had spent all his life working with horses, volunteered to join the new camel mounted units being formed to deal with local rebellion and the threat of Ottoman attacks. These units eventually coalesced as the Imperial Camel Corps. Three of the Corps’ four battalions were drawn from Australian and New Zealand light horse, which had suffered very high attrition at Gallipoli. The 2^nd Batt. however was composed from the remnants of the various British Yeomanry regiments who had fought there.

Members of the 2^nd Battalion, Imperial Camel Corps, c1917

As a force composed largely of antipodeans the Corps had a reputation from the start for disrespect for authority, an attitude derived also in part from its exclusively male camels. Male camels were used because they were cheaper than the female of the species; and they were cheaper because they were noisier and less docile. The roaring from a large group of male camels could apparently be heard for miles. What they presumably lost in the element of surprise by this behaviour, they made up with their ability to go nearly three times as long as a horse without water.

Although losses were still high, the Camel Corps were successful in their role throughout 1917, particularly at the battle of Maghdaba and the third battle of Gaza. In May 1918 many troops were redeployed from Palestine to the Western Front, including what was left of the Ayrshire Yeomanry, now part of the 12^th (Ayr and Lanark) Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Their redundant camels were given to Maj T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

Winston Churchill (left) challenged T.E. Lawrence (3^rd left) to a camel race in Egypt in 1921, perhaps on surplus camels of the Imperial Camel Corps. Lawrence won.

Will however remained in the Middle East, serving in the Cavalry Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Machine guns had proved their value on the Western Front earlier in the war, and by now a machine gun squadron was attached to every brigade of cavalry including those of the Imperial Camel Corps. The Machine Gun Corps had a reputation for heroism, and being often deployed in advance of front lines suffered such high casualty rates that it was known as the Suicide Club. By 1918 however, Egypt and Palestine were relatively stable, and Will Piper saw the war out in Cairo.

Four camel ambulances of the Imperial Camel Corps

Having survived Gallipoli and seen further front line service in Palestine with the Imperial Camel Corps and the Suicide Club, it is a cruel twist of fate that Will caught a cold after the end of the war, while on patrol in the cold desert air of Winter 1918. He died of pneumonia in an Egyptian field hospital in February 1919, so very far from his family and his Ayrshire home.

Sorn members of the Ayrshire Yeomanry at training camp c1914

(for the record, back row: Smith of Smeathston, Hugh Sloan of Blairmulloch, S Ferguson, A Thomson, Templeton, S Kennedy; front row: W Mair, R Strathearn, J Alston (Visitor), J Eccles)

WALTER SYDNEY MASTERMAN (1876-1946) AND SOME FISHY BUSINESS

2011-10-22T07:30:00.014+01:00

Walter S Masterman, whose grandfather Thomas Gurney was my great great grandmother’s brother, is best known as a prolific author of the 1920s and 1930s. He churned out fairly lurid and strange blends of mystery, fantasy, horror, sci-fi and detective fiction from his first in 1926, The Wrong Letter with its preface by GK Chesterton, to his last in 1942, The Man with No Head.

Walter Sydney Masterman (1876-1946)

in 1899, by Thomas Stearn & Sons, photographers

It wasn’t his first choice of career, or his second, third or fourth, and definitely not his fifth. After a well-heeled private education he merged from Christ’s College Cambridge with a blue in football, and played for a while alongside his brother Harry for Tunbridge Wells FC. He and Harry both joined the Welsh Regiment on its formation and went with it to South Africa in February 1900 to fight the Boer. Harry didn’t come back, and lies buried in Prieska where he was the garrison adjutant and died of malaria and meningitis.

On his return, Walter (now a captain) entered civvy street like so many officers as a teacher at a private institution, Horsmonden Boys’ School, where he was from 1903 to 1905 joint headmaster. He maintained his military role through an attachment to a Cadet Batallion of the King’s Royal Rifles, and in 1910 was appointed Inspector of Musketry with the Welsh Regiment, with whom he served again as a major during the Great War of 1914-19.

Grimsby after the Great War

When he was demobbed in 1919 he got a job in the civil service – the Ministry of Agriculture to be precise. In the days when expertise was no criterion for government work, Walter was made a Fisheries Inspector and posted to Grimsby, then still an extremely busy fishing port in north Lincolnshire. From footballer to soldier, then teacher, and at the age of 43 fisheries officer. It's possible that he was assisted in getting this appointment by his brother Arthur, a zoologist who published extensively on the life-cycles and importance of the fish we eat, including some reports for the Ministry. Otherwise, it seems an unlikely fourth career choice for Walter.

The next year he married Olive Doreen Lowrie, 24 years his junior, the youngest of eight children of a Northumbrian commercial traveller who had stopped long enough in Cardiff for it to be birthplace to Olive and her two nearest siblings. How Olive and Walter met, and how they found life in Grimsby, I do not know. But in Febraury 1922 this news item was cabled to colonial newspapers around the world (I found it in the Sunday Times of Perth in Western Australia!):

Walter Sidney Masterman, fishery inspector at Grimsby, a brother of a former Liberal Minister, is being charged with embezzling £862 belonging to the Board of Fisheries. The prosecution alleges that the defendant paid into his own account sums received, for the sale of coal and gear handed over from German trawlers.

Poor Olive, married two years and stuck in a cold town smelling of fish (sorry, Grimsby, I know you’re sweeter now) while her husband began a new career as a jailbird, convicted and imprisoned for three years for defrauding his employer. When he was released in 1925, it is safe to assume that he had blotted his copybook as far as future employment in any of his former careers was concerned.

Several Walter S Masterman titles were translated

for Dutch consumption in the 1950s

Perhaps he picked up some plot twists during his time inside. No longer employable, Walter sat down and began to write, a string of wild titles such as The Flying Beast, The Baddington Horror and The Hooded Monster. I confess I haven’t read any, but this synopsis from one of four new editions currently available on Amazon gives an idea of his style:

“THE YELLOW MISTLETOE is … the rollicking tale of murder in the tubes of London, which looks to be an accident, until Chief-Inspector Arthur Sinclair proves that it wasn't. The trail of evidence leads to the English countryside where he meets a cast of characters right out of a H. Rider Haggard novel. Then it's off to the wilds of Bulgaria where a hidden city provides enough ritualistic danger for a dozen thrillers.”

I’d love to know what happened to Olive Masterman. They had at least one daughter, born that disastrous summer of 1922. Did the marriage survive the jail term? Or did Olive, with her life ahead of her, find happiness elsewhere? The story of her life remains unwritten.

RUSSELL GURNEY (1804-1878) AND THE MELANCHOLY ACCIDENT

2011-10-15T07:30:00.027+01:00

A dahabeeah on the Nile at Cairo

A news item from the Suez Mail, relayed in New Zealand’s Southland Times on 25^th February 1876, reads:

A melancholy accident has occurred on the Nile. While Mr Russell Gurney, and three daughters of the Rev J.H. Gurney, were on the river, a squall capsized the boat, and all the ladies were drowned. Divers are seeking to recover the bodies.

The New York Sunday Courier carries a fuller version of the story (from the London Times) in its 30^th January edition that year:

A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT

Three Nieces of the Recorder of London Drowned in the Nile

[Egyptian Corres of the London Times]

Mr Russell Gurney himself had started on the Nile voyage first, leaving the rest of his party, consisting of his nephew and nieces, to follow him as rapidly as possible in a second boat, the Flora, with a dragoman, reis, or captain, and the ordinary crew. It is usual, on account of the sandbanks, shallows and many curves of the river, for dababeeahs on the Nile to moor at nightfall; but, in order to lose no time, the Flora pursued on after sunset, against, it is said, the opinion of the reis. At nine or ten in the evening they were some sixteen miles off Minioh, a strong northerly breeze blowing, with squalls. They were passing Gebel el Tayr, the Mountain of the Bird, whose lofty, precipitous cliffs rise abruptly from the river several hundred feet. The Nile, having no tributary for the last 3,500 miles of its course, only decreases in size as it nears its mouth, and is much wider here than it is at Cairo. It is as broad as the Thames at London bridge, and the winds rush down the ravines with great force. The Flora was under full sail – that big lateen sail, twice as big as the boat itself, which makes a dababeeah look like a great swan upon the water. As she rounded the point, a sudden squall took her, and before the sheet could be let go, she capsized in the darkness. The ladies in their cabins, most of the crew, the reis himself, were all lost in the deep, rapid stream, and only one passenger and the dragoman were able to reach the shore. A bright-eyed donkey-boy, well known to frequenters of Shepheard’s Hotel at Cairo, who had begged to be taken on the trip to avoid impressments as a soldier for the Abyssinian war, was among those lost.

As yet the bodies have not been recovered, but divers have gone up to the scene of the disaster, and it is hoped that their efforts will be attended with success. The sympathy for Mr Russell Gurney and his nephew is universal in Cairo, and the catastrophe has cast a great gloom over all English travellers in Egypt. It cannot be too strongly impressed on Nile tourists that the dababeeah is only a fair-weather boat. With its comfortable house on deck, its sixty feet or seventy feet of length, its enormous sail requiring a yard to hold it nearly double the length of the boat and, with all this, having a draft of barely three feet, a Nile boat is very easily capsized, and accidents would be frequent if travellers did not, as a rule, prefer safety to speed, and always seek the shelter of the banks when there is anything like bad weather.

Rt Hon Russell Gurney, QC, MP (1804-1878)

Russell Gurney was in loco parentis, his brother John Hampden Gurney the sisters’ father having died in 1862. He had no children himself. It’s rather sad that the names of the victims aren’t recorded here or elsewhere: only the manner of their collective death survives to preserve their memory. I do know that the surviving nephew was Edmund Gurney (1847-1888). This tragedy shook him to the core of course, and may well have been the root of his fascination with spirits and the afterlife, of which I have written here previously.

I wish too that I knew the name of the Egypt correspondent of the Times who wrote this moving, poetic account of the accident.

JOSEPH COOPER (1674-1735) AND LORD ROCHESTER’S DAIRY MAID

2011-10-08T07:30:00.015+01:00

Austin Cooper, Austin the Settler, my 8x great grandfather who came to Ireland in 1661, laid out the parkland of Blessington House for the Archbishop of Dublin, Michael Boyle. Perhaps he passed on skills of landscape management to his youngest son Joseph: Joseph returned to England and found a position as Keeper of New Park – better known today as Richmond Park – west of London. There he lived up on Sawyer’s Hill, in a building which became known as Cooper’s Lodge. It still stands, a listed building these days more prosaically called Bog Lodge but still the headquarters of the park superintendent.

Map of Richmond Park, after one by Edward John Eyre drawn in 1754

Cooper Lodge is shown near the top in the centre

(Somewhere along the way, Joseph married Elizabeth Slade, who had been before her marriage Lord Rochester’s dairy maid. Lord Rochester’s wife was Henrietta Boyle, great great granddaughter of a certain Roger Boyle, one of whose great grandsons was Michael Boyle of Blessington, for whom Joseph's father had laid out the park. It’s a small world.)

Joseph was appointed to the New Park post in around 1705, and his appointment is likely to have come directly from the Park Ranger, the monarch of the day. Only in 1727 did the rangership pass from royal control. In that year, as an act of royal patronage presumably designed to ensure the loyalty of his prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, new king George II conferred the role on Sir Robert's son. The park became a playground for the king and the prime minister. They hunted together there; Walpole often chose to work in the peace of the Old Lodge in the park; and the New Lodge (now called White Lodge, built near the old one in 1727) was a favourite home of the king’s consort Queen Caroline.

To preserve their privacy Walpole removed ladder stiles from the perimeter of the park and installed gatekeepers to limit access to “respectable persons.” This was unpopular enough, but when Princess Amelia, the hedonistic daughter of George II, was appointed Ranger in 1749, she closed the park completely to all but a few special friends.

HRH the Princess Amelia (1711-1786)

c1738 by Jean-Baptiste van Loo

Going the long way round when you were used to cutting through the park was a great inconvenience. After polite requests, direct action and other avenues failed, a group of gentlemen took the deputy ranger to court over the exclusion in 1754. It was a chaotic trial, with a total of 64 witnesses called for prosecution and defence, all stating categorically that in their experience there had either always or never been a right of way through the park.

27 people spoke for the prosecution, including someone who, at the age of 71 and having lived in the park for 50 years, could be expected to know a thing or two about the matter. Elizabeth Slade Cooper, Joseph’s widow and Rochester's old dairy maid, was amongst those who remembered free rights of passage across the land going back to their father’s and grandfather’s time. The defence however produced 37 witnesses, including Lord Palmerston and someone, Mary Cooper, who was presumably not the daughter of Joseph and Elizabeth Cooper of the same name.

They carried the day by sheer strength of numbers and the case was dismissed. But four years later, a local brewer called John Lewis mounted another legal attack (based on his having being refused admission in 1755), and this time won the day. The ladder stiles were reinstated, and eventually in 1761 HRH the Princess Amelia gave up the rangership in disgust.

So, losing the battle but winning the war, Lord Rochester’s former milk maid Elizabeth Slade played her part in establishing the principles of rights of way for ordinary people in England.

The 1754 trial is recorded in great detail in a book (author unknown) published only a year later by M. Cooper, W. Reeve and C. Sympson, called Merlin’s Life and Prophecies. The book uses the trial to prove the accuracy of the fifth century wizard’s prognostications in dubious verse about “all the Kings and Queens who have fat on the Britifh Throne … with some other events relating [to the Richmond Park Trial] which have not yet come to pafs, but no lefs wonderful than thofe which have already happened.” It makes for spell-binding reading.

MARY CASTLE (1841-1926), HER OVERSEAS SISTER AND COX’S AND KING’S

2011-10-01T07:30:00.010+01:00

I’ve been sifting through another bundle of letters from the writing desk of my 3x great uncle Charles Castle. This lot are from his niece Mary, who married the Rev Edmund Thomas Daubeny. To be honest, these letters, from early 1871, are rather dull as correspondence – concerned with a series of delays in the reinvestment of interest received on mortgages which Mary and her sister Augusta had funded with some sort of inheritance. Not my field, anyway! But as ever they are littered with fascinating references to the family and to the times they lived in.

Mary's sister Augusta married Edmund’s brother Albert James Hesketh Daubeny in 1866, a year after Mary and Edmund’s wedding. One imagines Albert in his dress uniform turning heads at the earlier occasion; he had joined the 12^th Regiment of Foot in 1862 as an ensign and was working his way up through the ranks. By 1866 he was a lieutenant, and he eventually retired as a Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment.

Uniforms of the 12^th Regiment of Foot in 1848

probably procured by Cox & Co, Army Agents

In 1870, just before the correspondence in front of me began, he was posted to India with their wife and their two children to date, Augusta (nearly four years old) and Margaret (two). Mary wrote to Charles in February 1871 of news from Augusta that they had “got over the effects of the climate, and are strong and well.”

Mary was saddled with having to sort out the financial complexities by herself on behalf of both her and her sister, about which she probably understood almost as little as I do. She turned to her uncle, who had a lifetime of business experience behind him and she was at great pains to get everything in writing, often repeating in her replies what she had understood from his letters to her.

The interests and dividends, when they did come, were easy enough to transfer to her account. But in the days of Empire before global banking, how to get Augusta’s share out to her in India? Needless to say, the British Army had a system.

Richard Cox (1718-1803) by Sir William Beechley

banker and freight agent to the British Army

It all started in 1758 when the Right Honourable John, Viscount Ligonier, colonel of the First Foot Guards appointed his secretary Richard Cox as a “military agent” with responsibility for paying Ligonier’s troops. Cox had been in Ligonier’s service for some 15 years and had an understanding of soldiers’ ways and requirements. Soon other regiments were taking advantage of his expertise not only in financial matters but in the shipping of property, the selling of officer commissions and the provision of uniforms and even armaments. By the time of Cox’s death in 1803, Cox & Co were bankers to virtually the whole of the British Army.

Cox’s grandson continued the business, expanding as the British Empire expanded. They were the natural choice for Mary Daubeny to use when sending funds to Augusta. At the outbreak of the First World War, troop numbers rose rapidly of course, and Cox & Co were there to take advantage of the fact. Their staffing levels rose from 180 in 1914 to 4500 in 1918.

Cox & Co played another, surprising humanitarian role during the war. Often the cashing of a Cox & Co cheque in Hamburg or Hanover was the first intimation that a missing British officer was captured and not dead, and the company was able to trace prisoners this way to the relief of their families. (Truly, they were different times, when a captured officer was able to cash a cheque!)

Sir Henry Seymour King (1852-1933) by Bassano

banker and unlikely women’s lib pioneer

Like many companies whom war benefited, Cox & Co struggled in the ensuing peace. They hung on long enough to buy out their main rivals in India, the Henry S King Bank, in 1922. (King’s deserve recognition for being in 1887 one of the first firms to employ women typists, some 25 years ahead of the field.) But as Cox’s and King’s they were in turn swallowed up by Lloyds only a year later. Cox’s and King’s formed the basis of Lloyds new Eastern Department, based at their Pall Mall branch in London.

In the 1930s changes in banking regulations forced Lloyds to sell off its non-banking activities, including the travel and shipping aspects of Cox’s and King’s. The resulting independent company survives to this day as prestigious travel agents Cox & Kings.

A cheque from Cox & Co c 1880
during their heyday at Craig’s Court, Whitehall

All of which is why Mary Daubeny wrote to her uncle on 2^nd February 1871, “I enclose a statement (as you wished) of the Interest due up to that date; Augusta’s share has to be paid in to Messrs Cox Army Agents, Craig’s Court, but I will gladly see to that matter, if more convenient to you to send the whole sum to us.”

FREDERICK JASPER CHADWICK (1838-1891) AND THE GUELPH GAS WORKS

2011-09-24T07:30:00.024+01:00

I am descended in one branch from a long line of Tipperary Chadwicks who first came to Ireland from England in the 17^th century. Chadwicks of Ballinard in the county and their near neighbours the Coopers of Killenure frequently intermarried. My 3x great grandparents were William Cooper and Rebecca Chadwick; and William’s sister Elizabeth married Rebecca’s first cousin John Craven Chadwick.

While William and Rebecca’s line (and mine) remained in Tipperary until the 1960s, John and Elizabeth’s son John Craven Chadwick junior emigrated to Canada in 1830 and founded a Canadian Chadwick dynasty. They settled eventually in the town of Guelph, 60 or so miles west of Toronto. Guelph was a flourishing colonial trading post, established by the Canada Company in 1827 on land which was already a market and meeting place for indigenous Canadians before the British arrived.

Frederick Jasper Chadwick (1838-1891)

as Mayor of Guelph, Ontario in 1877

Chadwicks played no small part in the development of the city. John junior served in several militia units during the rebellions of 1837 which sought to overthrow British rule in Canada. He subsequently served on the Commission for Peace locally. His son Jasper also did military service: Jasper and his father were first in line when the Guelph Rifles (No. 1 Company) were being formed in February 1857, and Jasper rose to the rank of Captain.

Jasper was a prominent businessman, a Provincial Land Surveyor who served on the town and county council and was elected Mayor of Guelph in 1877. It was a big year for Guelph, the 50^th anniversary of its founding, and Jasper must have presided over many celebratory events. He was from 1871 to 1885 the proprietor of the conservative Guelph Herald newspaper, and under his tenure it went in 1872 from a weekly to a daily edition. (The Herald was eventually bought up in 1924 by its lifelong rival the radical Guelph Mercury, which still publishes to this day.)

Guelph Town Hall (built 1856)

(pictured in 1879, the year the town became a city)

Guelph Town Hall which housed the mayoral offices (as well as courts, market stalls, jail and library) had been built in 1856, during a period of prosperity triggered by the arrival of the Grand Trunk Railroad in the town that year. Guelph itself had only been granted town status a year earlier. That prosperity was soon boosted with another rail connection to the outside world by the Great Western Railway.

Guelph Board of Trade was determined to capitalise on these transport links and attract manufacturers to the town, and Jasper Chadwick was a founding director of the Guelph Gas Works, one of the Board’s schemes to that end. Its gas first came on stream on 18^th January 1871. Gas meant heat and light, which in turn meant longer working hours in factories; and like moths to a flame, industries were indeed drawn to Guelph. (The gasworks survived until they were demolished in the 1960s.)

Guelph Junction Railway’s monopoly-busting Freight Office

(the line was leased to the Canadian Pacific Railway from 1888)

In 1879, two years after Jasper’s mayorship, he could take some credit when Guelph was declared a city. Three years later, when the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railways merged, fears of a monopoly of rail access to the city prompted Chadwick and several other leading citizens to found the city-owned Guelph Junction Railway. At a dinner in his honour that year, he could say with much justification:

“When I came to Guelph in 1848 it was a small place; the spot on which is now erected the Wellington Hotel [in which he was speaking] being a lumber yard and scarcely a building of any pretensions between here and the market place. Her population at that time being counted in hundreds where now there are thousands. Coming here at an early period of my life I might almost claim to be a native, and as you have been kind enough to express in the address, I have been identified with everything that has made Guelph what she is. Nothing, since I was able to take my share, has been done for the advancement of our good city in which I have not taken an active part.”

Well done, Jasper Chadwick - power, media and transport tycoon, citizen and benefactor of Guelph!

Guelph Junction Station in 1986

(built in 1888, demolished in 1989)

Photo by William D. Miller

EYRE MASSEY (1719-1804) AND THE SECOND-LAST BATTLE (Part 2)

2011-09-17T07:30:00.003+01:00

Eyre Massey my Irish 6x great uncle fought on the wrong side, from my Scottish point of view, at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil. Massey’s military career was built on the bravery he showed that day. There, the Scottish Highlanders were massacred by a Hanoverian army of English, Irish and lowland Scots, and the Jacobite cause of an independent Scotland was ended.

Instead therefore, I prefer to concentrate on the second-last battle, fought three months earlier and 100 miles further south! If the Scots had been able to capitalise on their successes that day, the English advance might well have stalled along with Massey’s career.

The Jacobites had retreated from their advance deep into English territory, but were at full strength and in high morale, 8000 of them encamped at Bannockburn to the south of Stirling. Massey was with Blakeney’s Regiment, under siege in Stirling Castle where they had been garrisoned to harry the rebellious Scots from within Scotland’s borders.

Stirling Castle in the late 18^th century

For the Hanoverian English, an army of 13000 arrived in Edinburgh, and an advance party of 6000 was sent on to relieve the siege at Stirling. But Blakeney, a soldier’s soldier very much in the same mould as Massey, had simply been biding his time, allowing the Scots to commit time, men and money to the siege; hearing of the English advance he easily broke out of Stirling Castle, catching the besiegers by surprise and killing some 300 of them on his way to joining the relief column at Falkirk, a small town southeast of Bannockburn.

Thus it was that Massey found himself on the left flank of the Hanoverian army as the two sides lined up against each other on 17^th January 1746. Despite the strength of the Hanoverian forces they were caught unaware, largely because their commander General Henry Hawley refused to believe early reports of the Jacobite advance on his position. Rushing to meet them at last, Hawley’s men were faced with an uphill climb across boggy ground towards the Highland Scots occupying the ridge of Falkirk Hill.

Battle lines on Falkirk Muir, 4pm, 17^th January 1746

(plan from Wikipedia)

By four o’clock in the afternoon, with the two sides facing each other and spoiling for a fight, the short Scottish winter day was already drawing to a close. As dusk fell, the wind picked up and brought heavy icy rain. It was uncomfortable weather and a bad time of day for a battle.

The right flank was protected by a deep ravine from attacking or being attacked. So it fell to English cavalry on the left to lead the charge, past Blakeney’s infantry, where they faced three regiments of the Macdonald clan. The cavalry were routed by volleys of Scottish pistol fire and by a tactic of wounding the horse not the rider. As the survivors fled, the highlanders drew their claymore swords and charged. It must have been terrifying. The English front line turned and ran – Eyre Massey and the rest of his regiment, in the second line, were simply swept away in the retreat. It fell to Massey and his fellow grenadiers to pull some of the English cannon from the bog, because the horses had all been lost.

The Battle of Falkirk Muir –

wind and rain also shown

The fighting lasted less than half an hour. In the chaos of the rout the Hanoverian army fell back eastwards, first to Linlithgow and then to Edinburgh. As night came on, the wind became a winter storm of piercing cold sleat. Many English lives were probably spared by the poor visibility and confusion. Only in the grey light of morning were the Jacobites able to see the extent of their victory on a battlefield covered by hundreds on Hanoverian dead.

If the Scots had built on the momentum of this convincing and morale-boosting engagement, the future of their Jacobite cause might have been very different. But instead of pursuing the defeated and disorganised English army, they waited for weeks at Bannockburn for their heavy-drinking leader Charles Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, to recover from a head cold and make some decisions. The English were given time to regroup under a new commander, the Butcher Duke of Cumberland. Charles gradually retreated northwards, fighting a defensive rearguard action instead of seizing the offensive.

The Highlanders’ Medley, or the Duke Triumphant, published 1746

to celebrate the victory of the Duke of Cumberland (1721-1765)

(from the US Library of Congress)

By contrast Cumberland moved swiftly north along the east coast of Scotland, supplying his troops by ship. After six weeks spent in training at Aberdeen his forces were well-fed and highly disciplined. The defeat which he was able to inflict on the Jacobite army at Culloden on 16^th April 1746 was crushing and final. Thanks to his subsequent patronage of Eyre Massey (then a lowly lieutenant whose bravery at Culloden had caught the Duke’s eye) my ancestor rose through the ranks to become a general, and was eventually elevated to the Irish peerage as Lord Clarina. And I suppose you don’t get all that just for pulling some guns out of the mud in defeat.

EYRE MASSEY (1719-1804) AND THE SECOND-LAST BATTLE (Part 1)

2011-09-10T07:30:00.018+01:00

Culloden is a name that resonates like some doom-laden infinite gong throughout Scotland. It still sounds in Scottish heads, long after the day in 1746 when (as morose Scots will tell you) the birds fell silent on that blasted, blood-soaked moor. It rings with finality, the last battle on British soil; a romantic, heroic Scottish failure; The End of the Dream – as the Scottish Daily Record newspaper describes it in its partisan partwork The Story of Scotland. It haunts us with what might have been had the plucky retreating Jacobites of Bonnie Prince Charlie not been comprehensively, ruthlessly defeated by the Auld Enemy, England.

We conveniently forget that Scots and Irish troops fought alongside the English that day. The truth of history is never as simple as the mist of legend. I proudly call myself Scottish, conveniently forgetting the English and Irish muddle of ancestors who make up a good half of me.

Celebrity souvenir, c1748 (V&A, London)

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-1765)

widely lionised in both England and Scotland

for his victory at Culloden

Still, it’s embarrassing in certain circles to have to admit that one of those Irish ancestors lined up with the English ranks at Culloden. Lieutenant Eyre Massey, my 6x great uncle, was not only there on the wrong side. He distinguished himself sufficiently in the battle to attract the attention of the English commander – a man hated in Scottish oral history for his brutal persecution of Jacobites after the victory, William Duke of Cumberland, known around these parts simply as The Butcher.

Eyre served with the grenadiers in Colonel Blakeney’s Regiment, later known as the Enniskillens or the 27^th Foot. Blakeney was another Irishman. Although most of the regiment were held in reserve during the engagement and saw little action, the grenadiers led by Massey were in the thick of it. Massey was descended from a wealthy Irish military family and had bought his commission in the army; but he led from the front, earning the respect and support of his men. He was wounded at Culloden and his bravery won him the useful patronage of the Duke, a son of George II the English king.

2000 Jacobites and 50 Hanoverians died

at the Battle of Culloden, 16^th April 1746

Under Cumberland’s influence Eyre began to rise through the ranks – Captain-Lieutenant in 1747, Captain in 1751 and Major in 1755. He again distinguished himself in the Canadian campaign of 1757-60 (of which I wrote here some time ago) and afterwards in the West Indies. He was appointed Colonel in the regiment in 1773, Major-General in 1776 and became a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1782. After a period of frustratingly inactive if comfortable semi-retirement, Massey was called into service again to quell a mutiny amongst Irish troops and rewarded in 1796, at the age of 77, with promotion to the rank of full General.

His military career is impressive, even if it was launched with grenades against the Scots at Culloden. It could all have gone very differently. The second-last battle on British soil was fought three months earlier and 100 miles further south. Eyre Massey was there too. If the Scots had been able to capitalise on their successes that day, the English advance might well have stalled along with Massey’s military career. No Culloden – no end of the Scottish dream. Ironically, it was failure within their own ranks, and at the very highest level, which led instead to the death of the dream and of so many Scots at the hand of other Scots, English and Irish enemies. More in Part 2!

FREDERICK JAMES PIPER (1920-1943) AND THE EPONYMOUS LAKE

2011-09-03T07:30:00.009+01:00

I was lucky enough to visit Toronto on a couple of occasions in the 1980s when I was the stage manager for a Scottish theatre company. On both visits I was told proudly by (it seemed) almost every Canadian I met that they were Scottish. There has certainly been a substantial exodus from here to there over the last couple of centuries, prompted by the Highland Clearances and other periods of economic hardship.

In 1910 Archibald Piper, a grandson of my great great grandfather William Piper, joined the list of exiles. He lived first in Pincher Creek, about 70 miles west of Lethbridge in Alberta where his brother John had settled via Nebraska and North Dakota. At about the same time his sister Catherine had emigrated to Melbourne in Australia. All three really were Scottish, born in Sorn, the tiny Ayrshire village where generations of their ancestors and future cousins lived and worked as farmers and blacksmiths.

Frederick James Piper (1920-1943)

In time John moved a little east of Lethbridge to Bow Island (now known as the Bean Capital of the West, 2007 population 1868) and Archibald moved a little further east to Tuxford in neighbouring Saskatchewan. These days Tuxford’s population is under 100, but back in 1919 it was a thriving trading post of around 300 people. It was there that Archie’s youngest son, Frederick James Piper, was born.

Fred’s mother died in October 1940, and in January the next year Fred enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, the RCAF (which had coincidentally been founded in the year of his birth). The RCAF was expanding rapidly to assist in the British war effort, and a great many Canadians then as now retained strong links of loyalty to the Old Country. Frederick, a pilot officer, was posted to an airbase in Wales and took advantage of being in Blighty for the first time to visit his Scottish relatives.

Crew of a RCAF Lancaster bomber, 1944

He was probably attached, like many RCAF men, to No.6 Group, RAF Bomber Command. His father remarried in March 1943. In August that year no.s 5, 6 and 8 Group were assigned to Operation Hydra, part of a campaign to disrupt Germany’s development of V-weapons. Hydra was aimed at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre in northeastern Germany, where the V2 bomb was being developed and manufactured. The threat from such weapons was such that Churchill ordered that the facility be attacked “on the heaviest possible scale.”

The attack, by 596 bomber aircraft, took place on the night of 17^th/18^th August 1943. It was successful only inasmuch as it delayed the V2 programme by about two months, the time it took the Germans to move the project to a safer location in the mountains to the south. The raid killed two key scientists and several hundred civilian prisoners who had been forced to work at Peenemünde and were housed in a neighbouring concentration camp.

Bomb craters surrounding a V2 testlaunch site at Peenemünde after Operation Hydra – but many craters were mock-ups placed by the Germans to deceive allied reconnaissance flights checking the effectiveness of the raid

Allied losses were relatively slight considering the scale of the assault. 40 bombers were lost, with 215 personnel, of which about 86 were Canadian airmen. One of them was Pilot Officer Frederick James Piper. He is buried nearby in Kiel War Cemetery.

After the war, Canada honoured its fallen by naming some of the myriad lakes in the north of the country after them. Piper Lake, in northern Saskatchewan, is the rather beautiful memorial to my southern Saskatchewan cousin.

Piper Lake, northern Saskatchewan

Photo by Doug Chisholm of Woodland Aerial Photography

(www.woodlandaerialphoto.com)

JAMES FREW (born c1900) AND CHELSEA F.C.

2011-08-27T07:30:00.004+01:00

I have precious little to brag about in my family tree when it comes to sporting achievement. But, clutching at straws, I can claim a great great uncle by marriage who got pretty much to the top of his game.

James Frew (born c1900)

James Frew’s father was a miner in the Ayrshire coalfields, and naturally he too started down the pits as a young man. In 1919 he married local girl Jean Piper of Sorn. Like most lads he played football in his spare time, and demonstrated such a talent for it that he played regularly for Nithsdale Wanderers down the road in Sanquhar (pronounced Sanker, if you’re not from round here!).

Nithsdale was a club on the rise. In 1920 they moved to Crawick Holm, a new ground with a stone grandstand just outside the town, and in 1923 they were invited to join the new Scottish League third division. In 1925 they won the championship (and promotion to the second division) with an 8-0 victory over Montrose in the last match of the season.

If Jimmy Frew played a part in the momentum which led to these successes, he was not around to enjoy the results themselves. In 1922 he was spotted by a talent scout from no less a club than London’s Chelsea FC. It is hard to believe that they were keeping an eye on teams like Nithsdale, but nevertheless Jimmy made his debut at Stamford Bridge, the Chelsea ground, on St Valentine’s Day 1923 in a 3-1 win over Everton.

Chelsea FC, 1925-26 season

(Jimmy Frew, new father, back row, second from left)

Although his professional football career is quite well documented I can’t find any record of what position he played. I am guessing it was defensive because in 43 games with Chelsea and 58 with his next club, Southend United, he never scored a goal. If such things are genetic, it’s worth noting that his son Billy (born during his last season at Chelsea in 1926) was himself a good amateur goalkeeper.

Jimmy played his last match for Chelsea on 24^th April 1926 and moved to Southend in Essex for two seasons from 1927 to 1929. He finished his pro days back up north as captain of Carlisle United, playing his part in the club’s triumphant double trouncing of Barrow, the local derby rivals, in the 1929-30 season (2-0 away, 7-1 at home). Not bad for a miner’s son from Kilmarnock.

Where it all began -

Nithsdale Wanderers and the Crawick Holm stand, c1921

(Jimmy Frew back row, second from right)

RICHARD WILLIAM RALPH SADLEIR (1819-1876) AND THE RAILWAY SIDING

2011-08-20T07:30:00.010+01:00

I’m constantly delighted by how much information is now available online for historical research. There are those who claim that the internet is the lazy option and that it’s killing the art of “genuine” research somehow. I don’t agree on many levels. It certainly eases the process of going through the growing body of online archive material; so perhaps it is lazy in the sense that the invention of the plough killed the back-breaking art of digging fields by hand and made farmers lazy!

It’s not lazy, it’s just easier!

Almost all the contents of this blog over the past two years I’ve tracked down online, or from archive material in my own possession. I live in Edinburgh. I don’t have the luxury of time or money to be able to travel the country or the world to consult local documents. So I’m enormously grateful for the online material posted by others, and I hope I’m returning the favour just a little by setting some of it in context here.

By and large, as I say, I’m amazed at how much it’s possible to find out about the long-dead. I have a folder three bulging inches thick holding details of the life of my great great grandfather the Rev William Augustus Salter (1812-1879). But just occasionally I draw a blank. What I know about WA Salter’s almost exact contemporary Richard William Ralph Sadleir, another great great grandfather of mine, would not fill a single sheet.

I wrote up what little I knew about him here back in December 2009, and precious little more has come to light since. But tiny snippets all add to my picture of him. Following what few clues I had, I tried to track down John Kean, the partner in his failed business venture, a chemical works in St Helens near Liverpool.

Globe Alkali Works, St Helens, c1900 –

the New Street Works were probably a much smaller affair

I now know that the works, New Street Chemical Works, were registered under the Alkali Act of 1863, legislation passed just before they set up in business and an early example of environmental regulation. That gives a hint about the nature of the chemicals they were producing or working with. Apart from that there is almost no record, online at least, of the New Street Works, except for a document held in the St Helens Archives. It’s an agreement about the use of a railway siding in the town, dated to November 1864, which suggests they were either receiving raw materials or dispatching finished goods by rail.

I’ve also unearthed a third partner, William Holden. The chemical business lasted less than three years, 1864-66, before failing. In 1868 both Holden and Sadleir were declared bankrupt. Kean however was not! What’s more, he disappeared from the records for a while – no sign of him in the 1871 UK census, for example – before resurfacing in 1881 hundreds of miles away to the north in Glasgow. There, in the rapidly expanding industrial district of Possil Park, Kean’s occupation was listed once again as Manufacturing Chemist. The Argyle Oil Mills and Chemical Works stood (until 1914) jus a few hundred yards form his given address. All but his two oldest children were born in the Glasgow area within eight years of the census.

St Rollox Chemical Works, Glasgow c1880 –

the nearby Argyle Works in Possil were smaller

I have to remind myself that it’s not John Kean I’m interested in! But his disappearance and his movements do shed a little light on my great great grandfather’s life and the events that shaped it. Was Kean a shrewder businessman that Sadleir? Did he dupe Sadleir and Holden into carrying the can for the failure of the business? A few years earlier Sadleir had sold off thousands of acres of the Sadleir family estates in Tipperary – was he a cash-rich turkey ripe for plucking?

It’s too tempting and too dangerous to speculate wildly on the basis of a few more tiny facts. But I know a little more than I did 21 months ago! New information comes online all the time and I keep checking. But I think that sooner or later I am going to have to go to St Helens and see what I can find for myself on the ground.

RUSSELL HENRY MANNERS (1800-1870) AND THE MAP OF THE MOON

2011-08-13T07:30:00.018+01:00

Russell Manners was a brother-in-law of my cartoonist cousin Charles de Noé. Although a great many of my ancestors made their mark, good or bad, here on Earth, Russell is as far as I know the only one to have an extra-terrestrial legacy.

Russell Henry Manners (1800-1870),

a Manners on the Moon

(picture from www.sciencephoto.com)

His career was in the Royal Navy, but his interest was in astronomy. His enthusiasm led to his election to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1836 where, although not a practicing astronomer, he proved himself an administrative asset to the Society. He served for ten years as its honorary secretary and in 1868 was elected its president. When the time came to hand out names for features on the Moon, he had earned his place in the queue.

It turns out that there are rules for this sort of thing, administered by the International Astronomical Union. Planets are named after Gods and Goddesses, and their moons after the offspring of those gods. For example Mars is named after the Roman god of war; its two moons are called Deimos and Phobos, the sons of Ares, the Greek god of war (something which would probably have my father, a classical scholar, turning in his grave; that mixing of Greek and Roman traditions would offend his purist soul!). Deimos means Panic and Phobos means Fear, two inescapable products of War. Comets are named after their discoverers, and it is possible for more than one person to discover a comet simultaneously – hence Comet Hale-Bopp, discovered and reported separately on 23^rd July 1995 by both Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp.

The features on our own moon are reserved for those who have explored the moon, either in person or through telescopes as astronomers. So for example three small craters near the Apollo 11 landing site are named Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong in honour of the pioneering crew of the first manned mission to the moon. And, only 100 miles to the north-west across the Mare Tranquillitatis from Apollo 11's historic Tranquility Base, you will find the rather larger Manners Crater.

The Sea of Tranquility:

Manners Crater (M) and the Apollo 11 landing site (A)

As I write these words, I’ve been staring at images of it all afternoon; and I must say it’s becoming rather beautiful to me! Manners is a perfectly circular crater about 15km in diameter and 1.7km deep, with a distinct mountain in the centre of it. It’s a banded crater, which means that it has streaky sides – illustrating I think the movement of material outwards at the time of impact.

Any further technical description would be well beyond my comfort zone or qualifications grade. I’m just pleased as punch to think every time I look at the Moon that one of my ancestors has made his mark there.

Manners Crater (the large crater on the right)

photographed from Apollo 10 in 1969

THOMAS GURNEY (1705-1770) AND THE BUNDLE OF BOOKS

2011-08-06T07:30:00.016+01:00

It’s my 100^th post here! I try to be eclectic in my choices of subjects – family name, period, occupation, home – and not to be too judgemental. I’m fond of them all, and quite sure they all did the best they could according to their own situation and the morals and conditions of their times. It’s one thing to regret the mistakes of former days; but I think it’s pretty meaningless to judge them by modern standards, or indeed to apologise for acts committed and views held by our ancestors centuries ago. I suppose I see my mission simply as keeping these memories of my ancestors alive.

I try to celebrate their achievements, not their weaknesses. No doubt it is because I’m a writer that I am particularly drawn to literary or educational contributions to society. But there does seem to be a strong strand in many branches and in every generation of my family tree: the urge to communicate, be it by book, poster, classroom or pulpit.

Thomas Gurney (1705-1770)

A great communicator, quill always to hand

A good example of this is my 5x great grandfather Thomas Gurney. He was the son of a Bedfordshire miller, driven by his Baptist faith and a belief in the worth of knowledge. By the age of nineteen he had not only founded a school but developed a shorthand system which would remain in use for two hundred years in the highest offices in the land. Communication was the key to redeeming, useful self-improvement for Thomas.

Here is the story of his early years, as told in a biography by his grandson William Brodie Gurney in 1845, some 120 years after the events.

[Thomas Gurney’s] indisposition to his father’s business, however, still continuing, he left his home, with his father’s consent, at the age, I apprehend, of nineteen, if not earlier, and opened a school in a neighbouring village, employing his time much in reading. It must have been when he was very young that he attended a sale and purchased a parcel of books, one of which was on Astrology, in which he was at the time much interested. The lot was described as “sundries;” and I think he purchased it for 1s 6d or 2s [7.5 or 10p].

One of these books was “Mason’s Shorthand,” a system which had been practiced, but had fallen into disuse in consequence of its complexity. This immediately engaged his enquiring mind, and he determined to simplify it, for the purpose of enabling himself to take down sermons; and I have a book of sermons taken by him at Ridgemount in Bedfordshire, in 1722-23. This purchase must have been before he left his father’s house; therefore he could only been only seventeen or eighteen years of age when he began taking these sermons.

One of the books, I have stated, was on Astrology. This subject had excited his attention, and, while it afforded him amusement, it gave him, among his neighbours, the character of a man of wonderful knowledge, and occasioned his being consulted more than once on matters of interest. One anecdote, while it displays his judgment in making the best of a thing, shows also the disposition to magnify that which fell from the wise man.

A lost cow is nothing new

(Farmville game on Facebook notwithstanding)

A woman having lost her cow went to my grandfather to learn whether she should ever recover it, and what means she should employ. After hearing her detail, taking down his great book he shut himself up or a few minutes; and then, returning with some figure he had drawn, judging from her account that the cow had not been stolen but only strayed, he told her very gravely that she should see it again shortly. In the evening the cow returned; and then the woman raised his reputation to the highest pitch by informing her neighbours that Mr Gurney had told her in the morning where the cow was gone and had enabled her to trace he animal in all its wanderings, and to ascertain beforehand the very time of its return.

Quite how a great book of astronomy could be imagined to give insight into the random movements of a cow, is open to question. But it’s a wise man indeed who knows what works in making an impression! The use of shorthand to record and disseminate Baptist sermons was significant at a time when religious intolerance was still rife and non-conformity was a radical, subversive alternative to the establishment Church of England. When Thomas’s great great grandson William Henry Gurney Salter joined the family shorthand business (by now the official medium of record of the Houses of Parliament), he practised his skills by recording the sermons of his father, the Baptist minister William Augustus Salter. So Gurney shorthand came full circle for another two generations of communicators.

CHARLES AMÉDÉE HENRI DE NOÉ (1818-1879) AND THE ECCENTRICITIES OF THE MOMENT

2011-07-30T07:30:00.007+01:00

I don’t know how I am related to Charles de Noé, only that I must be! His mother Frances Caroline Halliday is, somehow, at the heart of the closely knit circle of Hallidays, Tollemaches and Delaps from which my 6x great grandmother Rebecca Delap emerged. Frances’s connections by name, through wills and property are too numerous to be coincidences, but as far as I know, no one has been quite able to pin her to any specific part of the Halliday tree. There have been suggestions that she was the illegitimate daughter of Francis Delap Halliday and Frances Tollemache; but that would make her eventual marriage to the Count Louis Pantaléon Judes Amédée de Noé, a member of the French aristocracy, a socially unlikely union.

That said, scandal was never far from that generation of Tollemaches. Frances Tollemache’s sister Jane eloped with Francis Delap Halliday’s brother John (see my earlier blog about Jane); and Frances Caroline Halliday’s marriage to the Count was witnessed by another Tollemache sister, Louisa. It seems entirely possible that they might all have closed ranks over an illegitimacy in order to see Frances Caroline married off, and married off well at that.

Charles Amédée Henri de Noé (1818-1879)

Charles Amédée Henri de Noé was the fifth son of the marriage, and could therefore have little expectation of inheritance. He was expected to go out and work for a living, and was lined up for a career in engineering after education at an institut de technologie. Instead, he went to painting classes led by Paul Delaroche and Nicolas Charlet and began a hugely successful career as a satirical cartoonist.

In the same way that Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi adapted his initials to sign his work Hergé (the sound of R.G. in French), Charles Amédée took the pen name Ch-Am – Cham. Since his surname is the French for [son] of Noah, Cham was also a jokey reference to Ham son of Noah. Probably not a belly-laugh even in the 1840s, but perhaps enough to trigger a smile which might become a laugh as you read his cartoons.

"Noah and his family prepare for the rainy season."

Cham wasn’t above inserting his own image into his drawings.

From the rear: Charles, his brothers Franck and William,

and as Noah himself, Charles’s father Louis de Noé

Cham’s strength was as a social rather than a political commentator. In a career lasting 40 years he is credited with over 40,000 drawings, an invaluable resource in the twenty-first century for studying the French nineteenth-century middle class and what one reviewer, R.L. Mayer, describes as “all eccentricities of the moment.”

If your French is better than my schoolboy understanding, you will enjoy http://amedeedenoe.unblog.fr/ a blog dedicated to Cham’s memory.

Cham, son of Noah

ROBERT JOHNSTON BARTON (1839-1879) AND THE BATTLE OF HLOBANE

2011-07-23T07:30:00.017+01:00

It doesn’t take long to build up a detailed picture of the prominent Tipperary families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have direct lines through the Coopers, Sadleirs, Chadwicks and Massys, who are united frequently by weddings, sometimes in successive generations. The ruling class, the Protestant Ascendancy as they are known, were a tiny self-contained minority in Ireland for hundreds of years. They kept within their own social and political circle of course and so it’s no wonder that the same families repeatedly intermarried. Other names, although not my direct relations, are also interwoven through those lines; and I can’t help but become curious about another family which seems to be an integral part of the same circle as my own.

Captain Robert Johnston Barton (1839-1879)

of the 2^nd Coldstream Guards

commanded the Frontier Light Horse at Hlobane

So it is that I now have a large Barton family tree on file. None of my direct ancestors were Bartons; but for example my 5x great grandfather Hugh Massy’s cousin Grace Massy married William Barton, and Hugh’s wife my 5x great grandmother Rebecca Delap’s aunt Margaret married Thomas Barton. I’m fascinated by such connections – but even I have to admit that it’s a tenuous justification for writing today about Margaret and Thomas Barton’s great grandson Robert Johnston Barton.

Robert’s modest entry in the Barton tree – “killed in action in Zululand 28^th March 1879” – does not begin to tell his story. 1879 was the year of the Zulu War, a year which began disastrously for the British with the events depicted in the films Zulu and Zulu Dawn. 28^th March was the date of the last of three morale-sapping massacres inflicted on the British by the Zulu army.

The slopes of Hlobane

tough on foot, tougher still on horseback

(photo by Neil Aspinshaw)

He was part of a foiled attack against a 3000-strong Zulu stronghold on a plateau called Hlobane Mountain. The British approach, under cover of darkness on the night of the 27^th March, was hampered by the difficult terrain – steep, boulder-strewn slopes – and by a violent storm whose lightning flashes illuminated the British advance to the Zulu guards. At dawn it became clear that the Zulus were fully prepared for the attack with barricades and a network of caves and tunnels from which they were able to attack the British troops with ease.

Despite heavy casualties, the British fought their way onto the plateau. Barton was dispatched with 30 men to bury those who had died on the ascent. As he rode off, his commanding officer was horrified to see in the valley to the south a massive column of Zulu warriors, estimated at 22,000, moving quickly towards Hlobane. Retreat to the north was impossible because of even steeper slopes and the British were faced with having to fight their way back down through the very Zulus whose defences they had breached on the way up – Zulus now much emboldened by the approaching army of reinforcements – and towards the huge force now approaching them.

Massacre on Hlobane Mountain

(known to Zulus since 1879 as “Stabbing Mountain”)

Barton and another officer, Weatherley, joined forces, and with their combined cavalry of some 220 men, tried in vain to find another way off the mountain before forming a line and charging the defenders. Under a hailstorm of assegai spears, only 20, including Barton, survived. They fled down into the valley, straight into the arms of the advance party of the Zulu column. 15 more of them died then. Barton was injured, his horse too; but he paused to scoop up a wounded fellow officer before attempting to outrun the fast-moving Zulu army. After some miles the horse collapsed and they continued on foot; but escape in their condition was impossible.

A year later, with the war won and peace with the Zulus established, a British escort party was led to Barton’s body, still lying where he fell, by the very Zulu who had killed him; and Colonel Wood, who had planned the Hlobane raid, buried him at last.

A great deal has been written about the Zulu War. There are several accounts of the Battle of Hlobane, including vivid descriptions by JohnYoung, and by William Watson Race & Jon Guttman. Whatever you think of warfare, or imperialism, or even the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, there are tales of selfless, hopeless heroism at Hlobane which cannot fail to move you.

ANNE GURNEY SALTER (1839-1925) AND THE TOIL OF MAIDEN AUNTS

2011-07-16T07:30:00.014+01:00

Sometimes it seems to me to have been an absolute rule: the eldest daughter was saddled with the role of housekeeper or nursemaid to her elderly parents. There are many examples of this apparently inescapable destiny in my family tree. I sometimes wonder just how explicit the obligation was, not to get married but to remain on the shelf caring for your surviving widowed mother or father. Was it the ordered custom of the day? Or was it a self-imposed fate, simply the inescapable sense of duty and responsibility that any eldest child feels, combined with the passive and nurturing role fostered in women in the 18^th and 19^th centuries?

Anne Gurney Salter (1839-1925)
daughter and artist

My great great aunt Annie was the eldest daughter of my great great grandfather the Rev William Augustus Salter, and she spent her whole life in the service of her parents. I have no doubt that she had been helping her father out at his parishes in Brentwood and Amersham. In 1863, at the age of 23, she stepped up with her sisters Emma and Maria to help him run the school attached to his new chapel in Clarendon Street, Leamington Spa. They taught reading, arithmetic and singing to infants and young girls.

There was one paid teacher (Miss Baker, who worked for less because she was still studying for her certification) and one 13-year old pupil-teacher (paid a nominal sum to supervise the younger children). But the unrewarded labour of the Salter sisters will have made a huge difference to the school’s finances in the days before state provision of education. Parents paid a modest fee (between 2d and 9d) for their children to attend, so the temptation was always to increase the school’s population. But overcrowding at the Clarendon Street school was counter-productive as it often resulted in the withdrawal of the small state subsidy which the establishment received.

Clarendon Street Chapel, Leamington Spa

built for Rev William Augustus Salter in 1863

(a proposed reconstruction of 2009)

By the end of 1863 the school was regularly attracting around 150 children, although it was only permitted to teach 91, based on a calculation of 8 square feet per child. The pupil-teacher Miss Wyatt became ill with the responsibility of looking after them and had to drop out, increasing the workload of the Salters. They learned their teaching skills on the job, and better teaching was also good for the school’s finances. Pupils were regularly tested by external examiners, and poor results could lead to the withholding of part of the grant.

The demands on Anne and Maria increased in 1867 when Emma too became seriously ill. She died that November. Their younger sister Sarah could not help out, having got married earlier that year; and their youngest sister Emily was only 11. In 1869 the school lost almost all its grant because of overcrowding, and another year it received nothing at all because of understaffing.

The graves of William and Emma Salter, and their daughter Emma

in Warwick Cemetery (photographed Nov 2010)

The Rev Salter, perhaps worn out himself by the strains of keeping school and chapel alive, died in 1879. It was probably a blessing that he didn’t live to see the establishment of the Leamington School Board in 1881, which took over the struggling Clarendon Street school and quickly closed it down. Soon afterwards Anne, Maria and Emily moved to London with their mother (also called Emma). But when she died in 1893 (when Anne was 53) and was buried near Leamington beside her husband and daughter Emma, the surviving sisters took rooms again in the town. They never married, and as far as I can tell they lived out their days in the familiar surroundings of those intense years in education.

Their father had at least left them well enough provided for in his will, and I like to think of them passing their days in useful charitable work amongst the former pupils and parishioners of Clarendon Street. Emily was the last of them – she died before I was born, but lived long enough to pass on some family lore and treasure to my father and my uncle, from whom in turn I inherited it. One of my most prized possessions is a set of beautifully hand-painted coffee cups and saucers, decorated by the three maiden aunts with pictures of wild flowers. It’s just the sort of genteel, acceptable activity which one could imagine three conventional spinster sisters pursuing, to while away the long bright hours of the evening of life.

Coffee cups and saucers

hand painted with pictures of wild flowers

by Anne, Maria and Emily Salter, spinsters of the parish

EYRE MASSEY (1719-1804), THE FALL OF NIAGARA AND THE BIRTH OF CANADA

2011-07-09T07:30:00.005+01:00

In 1800 the Acts of Union abolished the Irish parliament in favour of direct rule from London. 26 new peerages, the so-called Union peerages, were created in Ireland to ease the passage of the bill, and one of the very last peers to be so elevated – on 27^th December 1800 – was my 6x great uncle Eyre Massey, 1^st Lord Clarina of Elm Park in Co. Limerick. (There was already another Lord in the family, so after 1800 Eyre added the e to distinguish his lordship from that of his brother Hugh, 1^st Lord Massy of Stagdale.)

It’s claimed that Eyre sought the honour not for himself but for his wife, in an attempt to console her for the early death of their eldest son George. And the title that he sought was not Clarina but Niagara. Not in Limerick but in North America. Why, you may ask?

PRO LIBERTATE PATRIAE

The arms of the Barons Clarina

incorporates two Grenadiers of the 27^th Foot,

Eyre Massey’s regiment of 60 years

As the youngest of six Massy brothers he had lived his life with no prospect of inheritance, and had therefore had to work for a living. This he did by a distinguished military career, serving for over 60 years with his regiment the 27^th Foot, the Enniskillings. He fought campaigns in the West Indies, Spain and Scotland with them and in 1757, on secondment to the 46^th Regiment, he sailed to North America as Major Massy, their second in command.

Britain was embroiled at the time in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) – a world war fought by the forces and allies of Britain and Germany on the one hand and France and Austria on the other. It was conducted on several fronts, in Europe, Scandinavia, Western Africa, India, Central and North America. The diplomatic causes of the war were complex, but the expanding British and French Empires of the time frequently collided in the jostle for control of new overseas territories. This was particularly true in what France was calling New France, the lands of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes, which both powers saw as the gateway to further acquisitions in the West.

New France in 1750

(from www.worldatlas.com)

Hostilities had been rumbling on in the region since 1754, largely with French success. But after early British setbacks, the tide turned. Britain was in general more willing than France to send troop reinforcements overseas instead of relying on locally recruited militias. Eyre’s arrival was part of this policy, which resulted two years later in the besieging of a French base on the south shore of Lake Ontario at the mouth of the river Niagara.

There is considerable dispute about who really won the Battle of Fort Niagara for the British. General John Prideaux, the British commander at the beginning of the siege of the fort, was killed early in the siege by shrapnel from one of his own guns. Sir William Johnson, a war hero and former major general who had commanded provincial auxiliaries rather than British Army regulars, assumed command and insisted on retaining it even after a more junior but regular army officer arrived. The fate of the fort was decided by a skirmish on 24^th July called the Battle of La Belle-Famille, which Johnson is supposed to have planned or even led. But there is some question as to whether he was even present and to what extent he overstated his role and abilities in official reports.

left: Major General William Johnson

(in 1756, after a portrait by T. Adams)

and right: Major Eyre Massey

(in 1803, then a general, by Robert Hunter)

Eyre Massey claimed in his (let's face it) self-promoting memoirs that he, not Johnson, was the commander and tactician of the victory, which prevented a much larger French relief force from reaching the fort and resulted in its surrender two days later. It was a decisive engagement, and it allowed Britain to attack the French heartlands of Quebec from the west as well as the east. No doubt Eyre’s desire to become Lord Niagara on his elevation 41 years later was an attempt to cement his claim; and no doubt his elevation instead as Lord Clarina reflects the lack of documentary proof of that claim.

New France fell in September 1760, and Quebec (renamed Canada) began its long relationship with the British Empire and Commonwealth. As I write, 251 years later, the future British king and his new bride are in the middle of a Canadian tour, their first as a royal couple, which began with their celebration of Canada Day.

GEORGE HENRY VERRALL (1848-1911) AND THE FEN FULL OF FLIES

2011-07-02T07:30:00.000+01:00

The Verralls of Lewes in Sussex, cousins of mine by marriage, were prominent local auctioneers for five generations, selling everything from wine to houses to the highest bidder – and sometimes that bidder was themselves. By the fifth generation most of the auction house branch of the family had transferred their skills to the more specialised world of horse-racing, or as it’s called in England the Sport of Kings (of queens too, although Elizabeth II has just failed, at time of writing, to become the first monarch since 1909 to own an Epsom Derby winner with her horse Carlton House).

George Henry Verrall was the youngest of five brothers, the sons of John Verrall the fourth-generation auctioneer. Apart from George, John senior took the unusual step of naming all his sons John. Presumably they were known by their middle names! Second son John Marcus picked up the auctioneers’ hammer but the eldest, John Frederick, pursued a career as manager of Lewes Races, Clerk of Croydon Racecourse and a successful racing journalist.

The Grandstand, Lewes Racecourse, 1900

Third son John Claudius compiled an indispensable annual publication, A List of Horses in Training in England. John the fourth, John Hubert, was what the National Archives of Great Britain describe in their records as the black sheep of the family, a pigeon fancier. And then there was George.

George succeeded John Frederick (who died young in 1877) as Clerk of the Course at Lewes, where he was also a partner in Pratt & Co, a firm of turf accountants. George was also Clerk at the Gatwick and Lingfield courses, and he moved in 1878 to Newmarket, then as now the epicentre of British racing. Here he made his mark not only as a racing official but as a county councillor and (briefly) as Conservative MP for Newmarket.

Tabanus sulcifrons, the horse fly

His lasting legacy however arose from his lifelong enthusiasm for entomology. He joined the Entomological Society in 1866 at the age of 18, and in 1899-1900 served as its president. Entomology (not to be confused with etymology, the study of words) is the science of insects, and George’s particular passion was diptera – flies.

George seems to have spent most of his leisure hours in the observation of them, and his interest was almost certainly a factor in his move to Newmarket. In the triangle formed by the towns of Newmarket, Ely and Cambridge lies the irreplaceable natural habitat which is Wicken Fen. Wicken Fen, a wetland world, is an entomologist’s paradise, home to over 4000 species of insect alone. Charles Darwin collected specimens there in the 1820s, and George Verrall was one of many who recognised the area’s importance.

Sedge Cutting in Wicken Fen

(Robert Walker Macbeth RA)

1878

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Cambridgeshire fenland was under threat. The traditional industries of sedge and peat cutting, which had served to preserve the habitat, were becoming obsolete. The process of draining the fens to put them to more productive use had already begun elsewhere. And then, in a remarkable wave of collective environmental conscience, Wicken Fen was gradually saved, by the separate acts of generosity and concern of many men.

On 1^st May 1899, the National Trust bought two acres of Wicken Fen, a first act of rescue which created Britain’s first ever nature reserve. George Verrall was at the forefront of a band of entomologists who knew the value to the nation’s natural wealth of the place, and who began to buy up further parcels of fenland and donate them to the National Trust. Thanks to Verrall and his colleagues the National Trust’s holdings were expanded by more than 55 additions. Wicken Fen, now a UK National Nature Reserve, UK Site of Special Scientific Interest, European Special Area of Conservation and on the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance, extends in 2011 to over 1600 acres. Part of it is still called Verrall’s Fen.

Stratiomyidae and succeeding families

of the Diptera Brachycera of Great Britain (British flies, Vol 5)

Frontispiece (1909)

Besides saving Wicken Fen for the nation, George Henry Verrall made significant contributions to the sciences of entomology and botany. In his exploration of the fens he rediscovered many species of flora previously declared extinct. He published two books on different families of dipterae in collaboration with his nephew James Edward Collin. Between them the pair described over 550 species for the first time, and their collection of specimens (donated to Oxford University in 1967) is the most important in Britain, greater than that of the Natural History Museum in London. If you care about flies, the Verrall-Collin is your Bible of British Flies.

CHARLES CASTLE (1813-1886) AND THE WELL-PRESERVED STOMACH

2011-06-25T07:30:00.015+01:00

The death of Catherine Castle, young daughter of my 4x great uncle Michael, triggered an aggrieved, gossipy letter from her cousin Charles, to his sister Julia. Writing on the day of the funeral and will-reading, 28^th December 1834, he speculated that there had been much skullduggery, with undue influence exerted on Catherine over her choice of legatees.

Charles Castle (1813-1886)

amateur crime reporter

It’s good juicy stuff for a family historian, and I almost overlooked a short paragraph in the letter in which Charles broke off from outrage to report on local news from the family’s home city, Bristol. “There has been a horrid murder discovered in Bristol committed by the poisoning of an old woman in Trinity Street; but however you will see a better account in the newspapers than I can give you.”

It was a sensational case, a crime committed in 1833 which only came to light in 1834 and which would not be resolved until 1835. The ghoulish details were published in at least eleven broadsides at the time including

THE EXECUTION OF MRS BURDOCK, Aged 34 Years, Convicted at the Bristol Assizes, of the Wilful Murder of Mrs Clara Ann Smith, an elderly Lady, Lodging at her house No 17, Trinity Street, Bristol, and who was Executed upon the New Drop, Bristol Gaol, this day (Wednesday,) April 15th 1835. With 2 woodcuts, one showing the hanging, the other a portrait of Mrs Burdock. Published by John Bonnor, Printer, Nicholas Steps, Bristol.

60-year old Mrs Smith was a wealthy widow who disliked banks and stocks, and kept her wealth in the room in which she lodged – up to £3000 in jewellery and cash, including more than 600 sovereigns (worth a pound apiece). Mrs Wade her landlady (who remarried after Mrs Smith’s death, to become Mrs Burdock) took to making Mrs Smith a bedtime bowl of gruel, in which unfortunately one of the ingredients was arsenic. In due course, on 28^th October 1833, after much abdominal pain and vomiting of blood, poor old Clara Ann Smith died and her fortune disappeared.

What made the crime less than perfect was the presence on the night Clara died of Mary Ann Allan, a sixteen-year old servant engaged by Mrs Wade (who you’d think would want as few witnesses as possible) to warm Mrs Smith’s bed by sleeping in it with her. Not only did Mrs Wade hire Mary Ann, but she paid her six shillings and told her not to mention the death to anyone.

It was only a year later in Autumn 1834 that Mary Ann and Charlotte Thomas, another girl hired by Mrs Wade, began to compare notes and find their suspicions raised. Rumours began to circulate, and it was noticed that Mrs Wade, by now Mrs Burdock, was living rather larger since Mrs Smith’s death than before it.

Clara Ann Smith’s body was exhumed on 22^nd December 1834 and an inquest carried out on 1^st January 1835 in the Ship Inn. Her stomach was significantly better preserved than the rest of her, and the cause proved on examination to be the remarkably high level of sulphate of arsenic inside it. (Tests were carried out by Dr William Herapath, a pioneer of such forensic use of medicine in crime-busting; he was also, in 1847, the first man to use ether as an anaesthetic in an operation in Bristol, only a few weeks after its first use in London.)

Bristol was abuzz with the story, and the thrill of suspicion and criminal conspiracy might explain why the Castles were so ready to believe that their cousin's will had been tampered with. Julia Castle wasn’t the only person to be written to about the murder; James Surrage, a medical student from Bristol studying in Paris got a letter on 1^st January 1835 from his surgeon father back home with all the fascinating forensic details!

The ruins of Bristol New Gaol, built in 1820.

A trapdoor was built into the top of one of the towers

above which a gibbet was erected for public hangings.

Mrs Burdock was convicted on 2^nd January 1835 of the willful murder of Mrs Smith and her public hanging on 15^th April that year was attended by a crowd 50,000 strong. Her tombstone was displayed for a while later in the century in the Bristol Antiquities Room of the city’s museum, as an illustration of her notoriety. Unfortunately her crime resulted in at least one copycat murder. Almost exactly a year after Mrs Burdock’s hanging, on 20^th April 1836, twenty-three year old Sophia Edney met the same fate, having read about the landlady’s crime in the newspaper and been inspired to poison John Edney, her husband.

CATHERINE CASTLE (1812-1834) AND THE READING OF THE WILL

2011-06-18T07:30:00.004+01:00

My 3x great grandfather Thomas Castle was a partner with his brother Michael in the Bristol Distillery of which I wrote earlier. They were as a result prominent local citizens whom other prominent local citizens wanted to see in positions of power in the community.

At a time before general suffrage, electorates were small and more or less corrupt clubs of privileged burghers. There was in those days (the start of the nineteenth century) a political practice strange to modern minds, of nominating and even electing people for public office without their consent. Thomas, the younger of the three, was not unusual therefore in refusing to serve when he was elected an alderman of Bristol Corporation on two occasions, in 1812 and 1820. Michael also refused when he was voted in twice, in 1798 and 1806, although he relented when elected for a third time in 1809. He remained a member thereafter until his death in 1821, having also served terms as sheriff and mayor of the city. Robert, the eldest, had that eldest-child sense of responsibility and accepted his election from the start, in 1794. He was sheriff twice and as Mayor of Bristol died in office in 1803.

Michael Castle (1768-1821)

died intestate, a warning to us all!

At least his daughter Catherine didn’t make that mistake.

All this power and influence created enormous wealth in the Castle dynasty. Robert and Thomas had large families whose members inherited their wealth and married with many of the other prominent and powerful Bristol families of the day. Michael however left only one child, a daughter Catherine who died, unmarried, on 11^th December 1834, just three weeks after her twenty-second birthday.

Which is where I come in. Having inherited a suitcase full of nineteenth century Castle correspondence, I came across a letter to gladden the heart of any family historian – one dated 28^th December 1834 which begins, “I know you are very anxious to hear the result of today’s proceedings, and I am just returned from the reading of the Will.”

The same letter ends with a postscript – “Do not mention to anyone our suspicions of underhand work with respect to poor Kate’s Will, as it is better that it should not come from us; but you shall hear all particulars when you return and then judge for yourself.” In between, Charles Castle (a son of Thomas) writes to his sister Julia in scandalized tones about its terms. He is convinced that “there is some thing not quite right about the Will …, that there has been some undue influence over Kate’s mind. … [We] have suspicions of some others who shall remain nameless.”

This is all based on the fact that Catherine’s mother’s side of the family, the Kiddells, are rather better provided for than her Castle cousins are. He reports that Julia, Charles and their eight surviving siblings, and perhaps also the surviving children of Robert Castle, will share £11,000 – a pretty large bequest in 1834, I would have thought. But Charles goes on to point out that each Kiddell is getting at least £3000 apiece, as are various family retainers and business associates. One much disliked associate of Kate’s late father, Mr Harris, nevertheless described in the will as “the particular friend of my late father,” gets £10,500, almost as much as the whole Castle tribe. Another, the mysteriously named Sea Griffin, gets £30,000. “There is also a small quantity of plate left to Hinton Castle. That is all the Castles get from their sick relation.”

A hearse and four makes quite a statement at a funeral.

(This one is from horse-drawn carriage specialists Absolutely Fabulous)

There was certainly plenty of money floating about. The will reading immediately followed the funeral, which “was conducted on the most expensive scale. Six coaches and four, a chariot and four and a hearse another, and about six private carriages. In the chariot were Dr Carpenter & Mr Ackland; their followed two coaches filled with pall bearers, then the hearse then a coach containing uncle Henry, Hinton, Robt and Michael. Then a coach with Wm & yr humble servant, Sanders & Harris. How the remaining two were filled I do not know. Harris was “sighing like a furnace” the whole way from Stapleton to Brunswick Square, and I understand from Michael and Uncle Henry, who went up at separate times with him to see the Coffin before the procession started, that he was exercising his bellows in the same manner there.”

Charles and Julia’s father Thomas had died seven years earlier, presumably leaving similar legacies in favour of his own nearest and dearest instead of his brother Michael’s. So I’d say Charles and Julia didn’t have too much to complain about. But there’s nothing like a will for stirring a family up, I’ve found! And in the midst of Charles’s trouble-making, even he is forced to admit that “as far as regards myself I am very well satisfied. It is I think more than we had reason to expect.”

At one point in the letter Charles breaks off from legacy gossip to pass on a snippet of shocking Bristol news. Its nature may explain the readiness of the Castle cousins to believe in skullduggery concerning Kate Castle’s will. More in my next blog!

FREDERICK REYNER (1852-1915) AND THE ASHTON BENCH

2011-06-11T07:30:00.013+01:00

Call me romantic or call me nosey, I often find myself wondering how my ancestral couples met – how any two strands of my family tree bumped into each other and became one. In the case of two of my great grandparents for example, what connection was there between William Salter the London-based employee of Gurney & Co, shorthand writers to the Houses of Parliament, and Jane Reyner the daughter of a Midlands cotton mill magnate?

Jane Salter née Reyner, and

William Henry Gurney Salter,

in 1920, 50 years after they got married

The answer, I thought, was the old boy network. I found out that William Salter had exactly the same education as his future brother-in-law, Frederick Reyner. They were both at Amersham Hall, an “Academy for the Sons of Liberal Gentlemen” (by which they meant non-conformist gentlemen); and then both at University College London, the university established by non-conformist gentlemen to give their sons the further education they were barred from at England’s other universities. (William’s grandfather, and perhaps Frederick’s too, had bought shares in its foundation.) Naturally I put two and two together and assumed they were classroom friends.

Unfortunately William was Frederick’s senior by fourteen years. When Frederick was graduating at UCL in June 1869, William had been working at Gurneys for nine years. He and Jane were probably already engaged – they got married the following year – but if William did meet Jane through Frederick, it wasn’t as school or university chums. (Jane, two years older than Frederick, was still twelve years younger than William.)

William’s path at Gurney’s was mapped out. In 1872 he would become head of the firm, following his uncle, grandfather, great grandfather and great great grandfather in the position. Frederick’s future too was assured. Reyner’s Mill in Ashton under Lyne was a large concern, employing (in 1871) 1319 men and women. Frederick’s father took control of the business in 1871 (following the death of Frederick’s uncles), and Frederick and his brother Joseph helped with the running. They ran it together after their father’s death in 1877; and when Joseph died at the age of only 49 in 1891, Frederick was left in sole charge.

The Ashton-under-Lyne Working Men’s Co-operative Society

founded in 1857 by a group of overlookers and weavers

at Reyner’s Mill (pic from Tameside.gov.uk)

Their first joint purchase was a chest of tea

which was sold among the members.

Frederick, an important local employer, was in due course invited to sit on the bench as a magistrate, where he discharged his responsibilities as a pillar of the community. With such a large workforce, he must have known some of the defendants brought before him. Some of his sittings are recorded in issues of the Ashton Reporter newspaper, and some of the cases are more serious than others. Here’s one from the edition of Saturday 10^th October 1903:

THE TRIALS OF A LODGING-HOUSE. — Before the Ashton County Court Justices on Wednesday, Matilda Barlow was charged with being drunk and disorderly at Bardsley on the 18th of September. Matilda, in a confidential tone, told the magistrates that “she had gone down a bit in the world, you know, and she wanted to rise, but she was now living in a lodging-house, and — well, their worships knew what life in a lodging-house was.” — (Laughter.) “Now,” she said in a wheedling tone, “will your worships treat me leniently? You can bind me over for as much as you like.” — (Laughter.)

The Magistrates’ Clerk: You do not seem to know what being bound over means. You have been up before. Mrs Holt, the court missionary, stated that prisoner had a bit of money, but seemed to spend it all in drink. — A constable: She has a bit of property that brings in about 7s a week. — Prisoner, who had been reciting her troubles to Superintendent Hewitt during the evidence, vehemently broke in saying that she would attend chapel while she was in a lodging-house. — (Laughter.) — She was fined 5s 6d for costs.

Thanks to the Rhodes Family for their painstaking work of transcribing the Ashton Reporter.

PLUMER VERRALL (1782-1852) AND THE GOLDEN HAMMER

2011-06-04T07:30:00.011+01:00

I was writing here a while back about George Vernon the actor, born George Verrall, and made some poor jokes about the profusion, and confusion, of George Verralls in that branch of my family tree. But the Georges were part of an orderly line of Verralls who were prominent citizens of the Sussex town of Lewes, in their capacity as auctioneers.

Verralls were auctioneers for five generations

It was George Verrall (1716-1801), brother of William Verrall the chef, who founded the auction house. It remained a family business until at least his great great grandsons’ generation. From George it passed to his son, also George (1750-1825), and son George passed it on to his son, Plumer Verrall. To quote from the recent bulletin (no. 10, 6 May 2011) of the Lewes History Society, “Lewes auctioneer Plumer Verrall sold anything he was asked to – estates, individual houses, business stock in trade, wine, investments, standing timber and crops, livestock, farm equipment and furniture. He sold whole households, or individual items such as beds, chairs and pianos. He and his son often bought and sold items in the sales on their own account.”

The bulletin mentions an occasion on 10^th November 1838 when Plumer snapped up a valuable property within the precincts of Lewes Castle when the bidding stalled. Not only did he pick up a bargain, but he sold off the contents at auction a few weeks later for a tidy sum. I suppose it is one of the perks of being the auctioneer! Clearly no one thought any the worse of him for it, and on 21^st March 1842 he was presented with a gold auctioneers’ hammer, “to commemorate the triumph of integrity.”

One of the reasons for the high regard in which he was held was an extraordinary event six years earlier. The winter of 1836-37 was exceptionally harsh. Snow began falling heavily in the south east of England on Christmas Eve 1836 and continued for several days. On 27^th December a large overhanging cornice of snow on the steep chalk cliffs behind the town of Lewes, sculpted by the high winds of the blizzard, gave way and crashed down onto a row of houses below.

The Lewes Avalanche (unknown artist)

a painting now hanging in the Anne of Cleves House Museum
in the town

Seven houses were destroyed and eight lives lost, although a further seven people were pulled from the avalanche and survived. The Lewes Avalanche of 1836 remains the worst such natural disaster in British history. A pub named the Snowdrop Inn, built soon afterwards on the site of the demolished houses, still stands and trades under that name. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Plumer Verrall was one of several prominent figures in the town to establish a fund in support of survivors and the families of the deceased. His charitable generosity must have earned hm widespread respect.

The Snowdrop Inn, Lewes,

beneath the chalk cliffs from which the snow fell

Plumer’s son William Richard Verrall (born in 1812, the only boy of nine children) took over the family business, by now known as Verrall & Son, when Plumer died in 1852. Richard acknowledged in advertisements “the very extensive patronage his Great-grandfather, Grandfather, Father and Himself had enjoyed for upwards of a century, and trusted by punctuality, perseverance, and prompt settlement of accounts to maintain the high position of his predecessors.” Sadly it was not to be. On 27^th May 1855, Richard was found near the locks of the Ouse Navigation, drowned, with his throat cut.

The business passed to Richard’s cousin John Verrall (1805-1874) brother of George Verrall/Vernon the actor. John's son John Marcus Verrall (1839-1895) inherited the golden hammer and the family business. But when JMV died unmarried aged only 56, I think it was the end of the line for the Verrall auction house. But not for the hammer of for Verrall auctioneers. The hammer passed to JMV's brother George Henry Verrall (1848-1911).

George was a remarkable man, of whom I will write in a future article. Both brothers were very much involved in the sport of kings, in several capacities including Clerk of the Course at Lewes and elsewhere. Maintaining a tradition begun by Plumer Verrall of striking a golden blow only when lots fetched a thousand guineas or more, George is reputed to have used the golden hammer for horses sold in the ring at Newmarket. I don’t know where the hammer is now!

THOMAS GURNEY (1705-1770) AND THE OFFICIAL RECORD

2011-05-28T07:30:00.003+01:00

The last edition of the current series of Word of Mouth (BBC Radio 4’s programme about aspects of the English language) was broadcast earlier this month. It was a brief history of the art of shorthand-writing, in which I have an ancestral interest, so I tuned in out of curiosity.

Thomas Gurney (1705-1770)

with the symbols of his invention

It was a good programme as far as it went – the Romans used shorthand, which I didn’t know; and the Elizabethans reintroduced it, which I did know (all those transcription errors in trying to capture Shakespeare’s scripts from live performances!). However from there it cut straight to some admittedly fascinating archive recordings of the original Mr Pitman, leaving a glaring gap - no reference at all to the Gurney System of Shorthand, the first modern system, invented in 1722 by my 5x gt grandfather Thomas Gurney.

It was the first system used in verbatim reporting of events, in which it was proved to be capable of extremely accurate record. Gurney Shorthand was the official system of both the Old Bailey (from 1750) and of both Houses of Parliament (from 1813) throughout the 19th and early 20th century, presided over by at least six generations of the Gurney family and widely used - not least by Charles Dickens who used it as a young reporter in the House of Commons, and whose firsthand experiences of learning shorthand were quoted in the Radio 4 programme!

Shorthand notes written by Charles Dickens

and preserved in the Dickens Museum, London

My first ever blog post here was about William Brodie Gurney, Thomas’s grandson, who took eye witness statements at the shooting of prime minister Spencer Perceval in 1812. WBG was also present at the trial of Queen Caroline in 1820 and at many other great political events and proceedings. The firm of WB Gurney & Sons still exists, and recorded proceedings at the inquiries into the sinking of the Titanic (1912) and the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster (1987).

The first edition of Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy: Or An Easy And Compendious System Of Shorthand appeared in 1750. By 1924 when his great great grandson William Henry Gurney Salter was writing A History of the Gurney System of Shorthand, Brachygraphy was in its 18^th Edition. WHGS, my great grandfather, also held the official post in the Houses of Parliament; he was succeeded in it by his nephew William Gurney Angus, the last direct descendent of Thomas Gurney to follow in the founder’s footsteps.

Frontispiece of Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy:

Or An Easy And Compendious System Of Shorthand

(15^th Edition)

It’s probably just as well that Word of Mouth made no reference to Gurney Shorthand: there’s enough here for a whole other programme. And if anyone from the BBC is reading this, I’m happy to write the script!

EYRE MASSEY (1719-1804) AND THE UNION PEERAGE

2011-05-21T07:30:00.020+01:00

I am writing during a week in which Elizabeth II has made a historic and controversial state visit to the Republic of Ireland, the first by a British monarch to that country since 1911, when it was still under British rule. My thoughts turn to my Irish ancestors, who were themselves descendents of earlier waves of English settlers planted in Ireland by earlier conquests. Known as the Protestant Ascendancy, such descendents were the ruling classes of Ireland, the landed gentry against whom the ordinary people of Ireland fought for their independence.

The Massys were a large and powerful Ascendancy family. They first came to Ireland in 1641 and through consolidation of their position they acquired estates running to many thousands of acres. Such wealth seems to attract further wealth, and in 1757 Hugh, 1st Baron Massy and my 5x great grandfather, inherited the estate of Elm Park at Clarina, Co. Limerick. Having already the huge Duntrileague estate in the county, Hugh passed Elm Park along to his younger brother George, an Anglican clergyman who lived life to the full at Elm Park and died of apoplexy in 1782.

Eyre Massey (1719-1804)
in a portrait possibly by Robert Hunter

sold in 2009 by Christie’s for £22,500

Elm Park then passed to Hugh and George’s youngest brother, my 6x great uncle Eyre Massey. Eyre was 63 at the time. As the youngest of six Massy brothers he had lived his life with no prospect of inheritance, and had therefore had to work for a living. This he did by a distinguished military career, serving for over 60 years with his regiment the 27^th Foot, the Enniskillings. He fought campaigns in the West Indies, Scotland and Canada (to which I’m sure I’ll return in later posts), retiring from active service with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1782 to take on the responsibilities of Elm Park.

Eyre came out of comfortable semi-retirement in 1794 to take military command of the city of Cork, then preparing for the threat of invasion by Napoleonic France. His suppression of a mutiny by 2000 young recruits there in 1795 earned him a promotion to the rank of General. Two years later he was appointed Governor of the city of Limerick, and further promoted to Marshal of the Army of Ireland.

You’d think, now that he had estate and rank, that the 78-year old would be content with his lot. He had a very happy homelife by all accounts, having wed Catherine Clements, 25 years his junior, whom he described in 1798 as “a very virtuous good wife, and a most excellent mother … whom I adore” – remarkably affectionate language for the times, and after 30 years of marriage too. But in 1796 their eldest son George had died aged only 25; and more in an attempt to console Catherine than for his own aggrandisement, he now sought a further honour – a peerage.

His desire for elevation coincided with political events in Ireland – the move towards a formal union of Ireland and Britain by the Acts of Union in 1800, which abolished the Irish houses of parliament in favour of direct rule from London. 26 new peerages, the so-called Union peerages, were created in Ireland to ease the passage of the bill, and one of the very last peers to be so elevated – on 27^th December 1800 – was Eyre Massey, 1^st Lord Clarina of Elm Park.

Eyre, by now 81, lived as Lord Clarina for only four years before his death in 1804. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland legitimised by the act survived until it was violently dissolved by the Irish War of Independence in 1921 – which is why it has taken until now for a British monarch to walk on Irish soil again.

The Union flag, (above) of Great Britain (1606-1800)

(and below) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801-1921)

Information in this article comes from various sources, not least the detailed biography of Eyre by Matthew Potter in the Summer 1998 edition of the Old Limerick Journal.

HAMPDEN GURNEY JAMESON (1852-1939) AND THE ART OF BRYOLOGY

2011-05-14T07:30:00.004+01:00

Apologies if you’ve come here in search of Jameson Moss the young actor and musician! What are the chances of you finding instead my cousin Hampden Gurney Jameson, the celebrated botanical artist who specialised in illustrations of British mosses?

Hampden Gurney Jameson (1852-1939) c1892

I wrote recently about my indigo-trading Jameson ancestors, of whom William Gurney Jameson was the last to deal in the exotic dyestuff. Hampden was William’s younger brother. Coming like so many of my ancestors from a proud philanthropic and nonconformist background he enrolled in around 1870 as a medical student at the University of London (the institution established in 1826 by nonconformists at a time when they were barred from other universities in England).

But perhaps in emulation of his mother’s cousin, his near namesake John Hampden Gurney who became a priest, Hampden Gurney Jameson dropped out of medical school and himself trained for holy orders at Oxford. After his ordination he served parishes in London, Lincoln and Eastbourne. But it was probably at Oxford that he fell in with a group of rarified botanists, the bryologists – students of mosses.

Capillary thread-moss (Bryum capillare) on a stone wall

photographed in Dumbartonshire by Lairich Rig

I imagine that bryologists are to botany what indigo merchants are to general trade – pretty specialised. But if you’ve stopped for even a moment on a country walk to look closely at a patch of moss on a tree or wall, you’ll know just how varied and beautiful these plants are – so much more than merely the wadding to line your summer hanging baskets with. Hampden was clearly swept along by his Oxford companions’ enthusiasms and began to study, write and draw.

He wasn’t the first or the last man of the cloth to make an important mark on the study of nature – think of Rev Gilbert White’s pioneering 1789 Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Hampden’s contributions included a Key to Genera and Species of British Mosses (1891) and his Illustrated Guide to British Mosses (1893).

Hugh Neville Dixon (1861-1944)

Hugh Neville Dixon’s Student’s Handbook of British Mosses first appeared in print in 1896, with 40 black and white plates of detailed illustrations by HGJ, many of them from Hampden’s own Guide. The third edition of Dixon’s book, in 1924, was reprinted twice, in 1954 and 1970 but has by now largely been displaced by E.V. Watson’s British Mosses and Liverworts (1955). However a facsimile edition of Dixon and Jameson’s long-running collaboration is now available once again, 115 years after it first appeared. Hampden’s drawings are kept in the archives of the Natural History Museum.

Dixon’s Student’s Handbook of British Mosses

with illustrations by Hampden Gurney Jameson

Much information for this article comes from Mark Lawley’s excellent online biographical sketch of Hampden.

WILLIAM KINGSBURY JAMESON (1806-1864) AND THE INDIGO TRADE

2011-05-07T07:30:00.011+01:00

An odd series of coincidences led me here. First of all I was writing an article on the history of dyes for a book about inventions. Quite separately about the same time, a friend lent me a copy of Simon Garfield’s popular history of the colour mauve. And then a day or two later someone got in touch with me via this blog: it turned out that our great great grandmothers were sisters, Emma and Mary Anne Gurney. Emma married William Augustus Salter, a young Baptist minister – he was ordained in his first church less than a fortnight before their wedding. Her older sister Mary Anne married William Kingsbury Jameson, son and heir of William Jameson senior, an indigo merchant in the City of London.

Now that’s a profession you don’t hear much of these days! But when WKJ died in 1864, he left an estate of nearly £70,000, an indication of the economic importance of the global indigo trade at the time. Indigo the colour comes from indigo the plant, Indigofera tinctoria, which for thousands of years has been soaked in water and beaten to a pulp with bamboo sticks to produce the richest of all blues for painting and dyeing. For ease of storage, transport and trade the liquid is heated until it dries to a block of deep blue paste.

Indigo paste

The plant comes originally from the Indian sub-continent (which gave indigo its name), and contains in stronger measure the same chemical component as woad, the plant which was the traditional western European source of the colour blue. Indigo came to Europe when a Portuguese trading ship returned from the East with a cargo. From Portugal a consignment found its way in the 1570s to the docks of London.

Some European states put up protectionist resistance to indigo, which they saw as a threat to their native woad industry. But in time Britain saw the advantages of a valuable crop grown in the colonies of its expanding empire. In 1770 it was importing nearly a million pounds worth not only from Bengal but also from its plantations in South Carolina. France and Portugal also introduced the plant to their colonies in the Americas from Brazil to Mississippi.

Navy blue frock coat of a British admiral, c1805

when Britannia ruled the waves

It is the sheer depth of colour which made indigo such a precious commodity. And it became so valuable that merchants dealt in it as a currency of credit. As a dye, its popularity increased as the British textile industry expanded towards the end of the eighteenth century. The dark satanic cotton mills of northern England boosted demand for the deep exotic blue, in everything from Union Jacks to Navy Blue uniforms. A whole new class emerged in Britain, the blue-collar workers. In the age of Empire, Great Britain wore blue.

Britain, and merchants like the Jamesons, dominated the world indigo market in the first half of the nineteenth century. William Jameson senior was originally in partnership with a German entrepreneur called Charles Aders. But in 1832, the year William junior and Mary Anne got married, the firm of Jameson & Aders was restructured as William Jameson & Son. I imagine it was a wedding gift; but it may also have been that Aders was glad to be bought out. He was a passionate collector of early Flemish art who might have welcomed an injection of cash to pay for his acquisitions. As it was, Aders was declared bankrupt with a year or two of parting company with Jameson.

William Henry Perkin

invented mauveine, the first synthetic dye

Dealing in indigo was a license to print money, to judge from the value of WKJ's estate. What could possibly go wrong? Why aren’t the Jamesons indigo millionaires to this day? In 1856, an English chemist called William Henry Perkin accidentally invented the world’s first synthetic dye – he had been trying to synthesise quinine, a treatment for malaria. The new colour was mauve, the first of a wave of unimagined shades which excited the fickle world of fashion. Why be boring blue any more? Prices of traditional natural dyestuffs almost halved over the next five years, as colourful chemical alternatives were found. Although it was more than thirty years before a true synthetic version of indigo was found, cheaper approximations replaced it in many uses.

Karl Heumann

produced a viable synthetic indigo dye

Never again would indigo be the blue gold it had been for William Kingsbury Jameson and his father. WKJ’s son William Gurney Jameson did, it’s true, follow his father into the business. But trade tapered off, and in 1890 the German chemist Karl Heumann finally produced a viable synthetic indigo. By then WGJ had shut up shop. In 1881 he described himself merely as a general merchant; 1891 found him “living on his own means” at a boarding house in Bristol, and he died unmarried, the end of the line, the following year. Within twenty years of Heumann's breakthrough the indigo industry was all but extinct.

Thanks to Ian Mackintosh, archivist of the Worshipful Company of Dyers, for help with background information about the indigo trade; to descendents of WKJ, who have shared their family knowledge with me; to Simon Garfield’s history of synthetic dyes, “Mauve;” and to Kate Long, whose definitive online thesis on indigo is a damn good read!

AUSTIN COOPER (1890-1964) AND THE OLD MARKET-PLACES OF ENGLAND

2011-04-30T07:30:00.004+01:00

I wrote about my cousin Austin Cooper once before. He was Canadian, but served with the Black Watch Regiment during the First World War. With them he went through four years of trench warfare in some of the grimmest confrontations of the conflict including Passchendaele and Ypres. At the latter he survived a gas attack which killed many of the 60,000 Canadians lost in the war.

Austin Cooper was discharged in 1919

with the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major

In peacetime Austin was an artist. Between the wars he settled in England and made his mark as a poster designer, mainly for transport operations such as London Underground and the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company. For my money his best work was for the London and North Eastern Railway, LNER.

In later years he moved towards modernism and cubism, and eventually gave up poster design altogether in favour of completely abstract paintings. But in the 1920s and 1930s he produced several series of themed travel posters for the company including one for literary destinations called The Booklovers’ Britain, and this one, Old World Market-Places.

Old World Market-Places, 1927

Norwich, Boston, Barnard Castle and Knaresborough

It’s a beautiful set of stylized woodcuts, a nod to a medium recently repopularised by Noel Rooke and others. Cooper was a master of the type face too, and I think his design here particularly suits the graphic style of the images.

I don’t know whether there were any more destinations in the series. The Upper Teesdale line which served Barnard Castle is long gone. But Boston, Norwich and Knaresborough all still have railway stations. I'm a sucker for a market town, and all four (and particularly my soft spot Barney, as we used to call it) are still well worth the trip that Austin Cooper’s artwork was urging over 80 years ago.