WILLIAM HARWOOD (1809-1862) AND THE BRISTOL & EXETER RAILWAY

My great great great uncle Michael Henry Castle was the deputy chairman of the Bristol & Exeter Railway. His brother in law, my great great great uncle William Harwood, was the company Secretary; and I suspect that many members of their families including my great great great uncle Charles Castle and my great great grandfather William Henry Castle were shareholders. All of them were prominent Bristol businessmen for whom an improved connection to Exeter was a worthwhile investment in the 1840s. I wrote about the line itself in a previous post here.

My most direct connection with the B&ER is something of a mystery. Among the papers of my great great great uncle Charles Castle which I inherited are two letters written in 1857 on B&ER letterheads, to Charles from his brother in law William Harwood, the Secretary of the railway company. I am not very sharp on financial business, but money is changing hands and the South Australian Banking Company is involved.

 Letters from William Harwood, Secretary of the Bristol & Exeter Railway Company, to his brother in law Charles Castle, 5th and 7th November 1857

Harwood is reporting on a meeting at his home, Studley Villa, with Charles’ brothers Robert and Michael (Michael the deputy chairman of the B&ER). Charles, Michael, Robert and William seem to have opened an account at Baillies Bank with a deposit of around £800; and William has separately loaned the B&ER £400. There is a reference in the first letter to clearing the estate of the brothers’ father, Thomas, who died in 1827. William questions in the second letter, “whether the investment and sale should appear in the Books of your father’s estate or not.”

Is Thomas’s estate only now being wound up? Under what circumstances?

 "... and the difficulty arose as to the investments in Consuls - whether the investments and sale should appear in the Books of your father's estate or not."

Two letters from the South Australian Banking Company are attached to Harwood’s two, mostly couched in technical fiscal terms. It is about to send £300 to two executors living in Adelaide, South Australia, one of whom “is I believe now on his passage to England.”

Who are they, and whose executors? Through the marriage of Charles, Michael and Robert’s sister Mary Castle to William Edward Acraman, the Castles had Acraman relatives in Adelaide. But it seems unlikely that they would be executors of Mary’s father Thomas’s will. Perhaps there were other antipodean relatives.

Harwood underlines at one point: “All postages and other disbursements in this matter we must take care to pay ourselves because it is quite evident that this money will never benefit William.”

Who is William? My great great grandfather William Henry Castle, brother of Charles, Michael and Robert? Or William Harwood’s son William Madoc Harwood, aged 11 or 12 at the time of this letter? Or William Edward Acraman, brother in law of Charles, Michael and Robert?

 "... because it is quite evident that this money will never benefit William."

My best guess is that the family were selling shares from the estate of their late father in order to lend capital to the B&ER. But why? The B&ER was by all accounts a reasonably successful, profitable company. So why was its Secretary lending it large sums of money? The Board had agreed to borrow up to £2000 from him at 4.5% interest.

The letters I have were written in early November 1857. In August of that year the West Somerset Railway was given the go-ahead by parliament to build a line from the B&ER station at Taunton to the harbour town of Watchet. The proposal had the effect of extending the B&ER’s broad gauge network and the B&ER raised much of the initial £120,000 required to build the new line.

It is entirely possible that the letters from Harwood to Castle were in connection with the WSR. Some say that WSR subscriptions were hard to raise, others that the money was all in by the end of the year. The line itself opened in 1862, and its working was from the start leased to the B&ER. 

 "Believe me yours sincerely Wm Harwood"

Even if the letters are about B&ER involvement in the WSR, they don’t explain the correspondents’ quandary about whether to include the transactions in the estate accounts, or why the unidentified William was being deprived of the benefit the money. Perhaps the approaching Adelaide executor might have had something to say about the matter! We’ll never know, but – as William Harwood, Charles, Michael and Robert would no doubt agree – it’s fun to speculate.

MICHAEL HENRY CASTLE (1808-1891) AND THE BRISTOL & EXETER RAILWAY

My great great great uncle Michael Castle was the deputy chairman of the Bristol & Exeter Railway. His brother in law, my great great great uncle William Harwood, was the company Secretary; and I suspect that many members of their families including my great great great uncle Charles Castle and my great great grandfather William Henry Castle were shareholders. All of them were prominent Bristol businessmen for whom an improved connection to Exeter was a worthwhile investment in the 1840s.

The Bristol & Exeter termini at Temple Meads (above, photo by AfterBrunel) and St Davids (below, photo by Geof Sheppard) – the Exeter building replaces Brunel’s original. Both photos from Wikipedia

The engineer for the route was none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with whom other branches of my ancestry have personal connections: my 4x great aunt Sarah Guppy discussed bridge-building with him before he built the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol , and my 4x great uncle Daniel Wade Acraman supplied ironwork and machinery for Brunel’s masterpiece the SS Great Western. Sarah, her husband Samuel and her son Thomas Guppy all introduced innovative engineering solutions for the SSs Great Western, Great Britain and Great Eastern. Thomas and Isambard were lifelong friends and set up the Great Western Railway Company together, which connected London with Bristol.

The Bristol & Exeter naturally adopted the GWR’s broad track gauge of seven feet. It opened in 1844, seven years after the GWR, and to save money it operated for the first five years with GWR steam engines. When James Pearson took over as the B&ER’s Locomotive Engineer in 1850, he designed a succession of remarkable steam engines. Railway buffs are particularly fond of his 4-2-4 locomotives which used a flangeless driving wheel of exceptionally large diameter, up to nine feet. These huge wheels gave the Pearson machines an advantage in terms of speed, and at least one B&ER train travelled at over 80mph on a downhill section in Somerset.

James Pearson’s original 9ft 4-2-4T locomotive design (No.44, built and pictured c1854)

The B&ER was innovative in other ways, the first significant line to operate the block system of working to avoid collisions, and one of the first to use an electric telegraph for communication throughout its length. It was moreover a profitable line. 

In the 1870s it bowed to the inevitable and began to convert its track from Brunel’s broad gauge to the Stephenson standard of 4ft 8½ins, which had won the So-called Gauge Wars for domination of the railway system. The conversion would allow the B&ER to carry through trains to and from the rest of the British network. But the costs involved in this pushed the B&ER into an amalgamation with the GWR in 1876, and the line’s history as an independent operation was over. 

My most direct connection with the B&ER is something of a mystery. Among the papers of my great great great uncle Charles Castle which I inherited are two letters written in 1857 on B&ER letterheads, to Charles from his brother in law William Harwood, the Secretary of the railway company. I am not very sharp on financial business, but money is changing hands and the South Australian Banking Company is involved. (More in my next post!)

FREDERICK GURNEY SALTER (1874-1969) AND THE DEAD WAR POETS SOCIETY

I am not one to glorify war or the injuries of war. I don’t think it’s clever of nations to send their finest young men and women to death or disfigurement: “the old Lie,” as Wilfred Owen put it with a capital L, “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori.” It is sweet and right to die for your country. Did you know Owen’s middle name was Salter? No relation.
 

Frederick Gurney Salter (1874-1969)

Try as I may, I cannot understand the attitude of men like my grandfather Fred Salter (1874-1969) who, too old to enlist at the start of the First World War, persisted in trying until he found an enlisting officer willing to turn a blind eye to his age; and who was determined to return to active frontline duty even after his leg was amputated, having been hit by a German sniper in January 1916 while he was on a barbed wire patrol beyond the trenches.

He got a Certificate of Gratitude from the king and a wooden leg from the hospital, an actually wooden prosthesis, on which he walked painfully for the last 54 years of his life. Without complaint, my father always said.

Lieutenant F.G. Salter

5th Battalion The Rifle Brigade (The Prince Consort’s Own)

Served with honour and was disabled in the Great War

Invalided from the Service 12^th February 1919

George R[ex] I[mperator]

At least, my grandfather may have felt, he survived. A great friend of Fred’s, Tudor Castle, died later the same year that Fred was injured, when a shell struck his trench at Arras in August 1916. Tudor was a poet: I still have the first edition copy of Rupert Brooke’s first volume of poetry which Tudor gave Fred in 1914, and the first edition copy of Brooke’s posthumous collection which Tudor gave his sister May in 1915. Fred and May were married three months before Tudor was killed.

Tudor Castle (1882-1916) and Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

When Fred enlisted, it was with his best friend Robert (the poet R.E. Vernède) who was also too old to sign up. Once he was hors de combat, Fred sent Robert knitwear, food and magazines in the trenches and Robert wrote Fred a poem which began

Peaks that you dreamed of, hills your heart has climbed on,

Never your feet shall climb, your eyes shall see:

All your life long you must tread lowly places,

Limping for England, well – so let it be.

Robert’s publisher rejected the poem for being too unsupportive of the war effort. But Robert too lost his life, on Easter Monday 1917, when his platoon stumbled on a German machine gun position. And Robert’s poem about Fred was included in the posthumous collection of his work published the following September.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was killed in action in France on 4^th November 1918, a week before the end of the war.

R.E. Vernede (1875-1917) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

ELEANOR MAY CASTLE (1880-1950) AND THE RULE OF HOLY LIVING

My grandmother May Salter née Castle died before I was born, and yet it is through her that I have some of my best ancestral material. She was close to her widowed aunt Ada, and often visited her at Frome Lodge in Bristol. When Ada’s last surviving daughter Mary died in 1940, May was one of Mary’s executors. She inherited the writing case belonging Mary’s father, May’s uncle Charles Castle, which contained a hundred letters written by family members in the mid-nineteenth century. When May died in 1950, the case passed to her son my uncle John; and after John’s death in 1984 his widow gave the contents of the case to me, along with a wealth of May’s own correspondence and photographs.

So May is very much alive to me, although I know very little of her life beyond her role as wife to my grandfather. I have childhood letters between her and her brothers. But what was her education? How did she spend her time before her marriage at the age of thirty-five?

Eleanor May Castle (1880-1950), centre, and friends, c1900

One source I have for clues is her books, many of which I found in my father’s library after his death in 2008. He idolised his father at the expense of his mother, whom he once described to me as “a jumped-up grocer’s daughter who married above herself.” But his bookshelves contained many volumes once owned by her or given by her to his father. People of my grandparents’ pre-television generation were in general better read than we are today, but it looks as if my father’s literary education owes at least as much to his mother as to his solicitor father.

Her interests were broad. I know she liked contemporary literature in the form of the Russian authors newly translated into English; and contemporary verse such as the emerging Georgian poetry movement. Her brother Tudor was himself a poet and friend of the Bloomsbury Group, and it was through Tudor that May met her future husband Fred Salter. You could say that it was a marriage founded on poetry.

In contrast to her modern tastes, May also owned a beautiful edition of a book first published in 1650. More than any other of her books it hints at her character, inasmuch as it is a pious book of instruction for moral living. It is The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living by Jeremy Taylor, still regarded as one of the finest examples of prose writing in the English language more than 350 years after it first appeared.

Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), title page of the 1900 JM Dent edition of The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living

Jeremy Taylor was chaplain in ordinary to Charles I (in other words, official chaplain in the king’s household), a position which got him into trouble under the puritan regime which followed the Civil War. He was imprisoned several times both before and after the publication of Holy Living, but produced a steady stream of work throughout those years. Eventually he was allowed to live quietly, a safe distance from power and influence in London – first in Wales and later in Ireland where, after the restoration of the monarchy, he became bishop of Down and Connor, and vice-chancellor of the University of Dublin.

I’m no literary critic, no theologian, not even a Christian; but Taylor’s text flows easily. It is prescriptive but not thunderous, firm but compassionate. On chastity for example he writes:

Chastity is either abstinence or continence; abstinence is that of virgins or widows, continence of married persons. Chaste marriages are honourable and pleasing to God; widowhood is pitiable in its solitariness and loss, but amiable and comely when it is adorned with gravity and purity; … but virginity is a life of angels, the enamel of the soul … ; and being empty of cares, it is full of prayers; being unmingled with the world, it is apt to converse with God.

May Castle’s copy of The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living

May signed and dated her copy “EMC Easter 1905”. It’s a two-volume edition produced by J.M. Dent in 1900, and printed in Edinburgh by Colston & Co Ltd. Colston deserve some recognition. There had been Colstons trading as stationers and printers from the same address at East Rose Street in Edinburgh since at least 1715, and they continued to trade well into the twentieth century. If May’s copy of Taylor is anything to go by, they were excellent craftsmen: her two volumes are bound in beautiful olive-green leather embossed in gold with an owl, the symbol of wisdom. The spines are dried and cracked with much use and contemplation, but the fine lettering spelling out the title and author is still legible 110 years after May first read them.