PHYLLIS MAUREEN GOTCH (1882-1963) AND THE CHRISTMAS ELVES

Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of my first post on Tall Tales From The Trees. Since then, with a couple of breaks to draw breath, I’ve been posting an article every Saturday, taking one of my ancestors as the starting point for a look at the world and the times in which he or she lived.

To date the blog has had around 220,000 page views. This is my 275^th article, and I’m going to take another break now, to decide what to do with all the lovely people whose memory I have, I hope, honoured in these pages. I suspect there will be a book or two in them!

Many fellow researchers and many previously unknown relatives have got in touch as a result of this blog: I hope more will continue to do so. I am always happy to answer questions, correct inaccuracies and compare notes.

For now, I leave you with an early Christmas card, sketched in ink by Phyllis Maureen Gotch – a cousin of my grandfather’s generation (her 3x great grandfather John Davis is my 5x great grandfather).

“My Crown and Sceptre”: Phyllis Maureen Gotch (1882-1963) painted by her father Thomas Cooper Gotch in 1891

I’ve written about Phyllis’s bohemian life here before; the daughter of artist Thomas Cooper Gotch, she grew up being the centre of attention as the frequent subject of her father’s paintings and the little girl who loved to dress up and perform at the parties of her father’s artistic circle in Cornwall.

This hand-drawn card is uncharacteristically monochrome for such a colourful woman. But it captures the mischievous joy of the snow-covered season, and with it I wish you much mischievous joy over the coming weeks.

Hand-drawn Christmas card of unknown date by Phyllis Maureen Gotch (original now in the Thomas Cooper Gotch archive at the Tate)

Whether you have followed Tall Tales From The Trees regularly, or simply stumbled across it today, thank you for reading; and Happy Christmas!

PHYLLIS MAUREEN GOTCH (1882-1963), THE BOO-BIRDS AND THE REVOLUTION

As I write, the new British government has just appointed a homophobic, karaoke-loving Conservative who voted against equal pay for women as the new Arts and Culture Secretary. I fear for the future of the arts in Britain. I’ve worked in theatre, applied arts and publishing my whole life and never earned anything approaching the national average wage. If you want to live in anything other than a cultural desert, the state MUST support the arts. Arts workers cannot otherwise afford to support the culturally enriching creative industries which bolster the nation’s mental and physical health.

I’m proud to have many artists in my family tree, past and present. I’ve celebrated the work of Austin Cooper here on many occasions, and also that of Thomas Cooper Gotch. Gotch was a cousin of my 2x great grandfather, and his daughter Phyllis followed her father into the profession.

“The Child Enthroned”: Phyllis Maureen Gotch (1882-1963) painted by her father Thomas Cooper Gotch in 1894

She had little choice. She was raised by her parents and their circle of friends in the very Bohemian atmosphere of the Newlyn group of artists in Cornwall. They were painting most of the time, and very often they were painting her. When they weren’t painting, they were putting on entertainments; and Phyllis loved to dress up, to sing and to stage colourful parties and pageants.

It’s all reminiscent of the circle surrounding George Macdonald, to whom I’m also related by marriage, about which I wrote here earlier. It must have instilled a love of imaginative story-telling in Phyllis. At the age of twenty-one she published her first book: The Romance of a Boo-Bird Chick, a morality tale in verse about the evils of gossip, which she both wrote and illustrated. A sequel followed in 1904, Tuffy and the Merboo – More Boo-Birds, in which Tuffy, a chicken, goes in search of a mate and finds love with a mer-boo, half fish and half bird.

Tuffy and the Merboo (R Brimley Johnson, London,1904), the cover and an inside page, written and illustrated by Phyllis Gotch

Phyllis too found love, three times. Her first husband was Ernest Doherty, with whom she had a daughter and lived in South Africa until his death in 1918; her second was a Frenchman, Andre, Marquis de Verdières, with whom she lived in France until their divorce; and her third, from 1936, was Jocelyn Bodilly, with whom she finally settled down back in Newlyn. (Jocelyn, a grandson of the artist Francis Bodilly, was himself descended from Gotch stock. After Phyllis’s death he served as Chief Justice of the High Court of the Western Pacific for four years, based in the Solomon Islands.)

Despite her divorce, Phyllis decided to keep the title Marquise, by which she was affectionately known for the rest of her life. In 1938, as Félise, Marquise de Verdières, she wrote a novel, Golden Hair, set in South Africa (and, one imagines from its title and setting, semi-autobiographical).

Golden Hair (John Long, London, 1938) by Phyllis Gotch writing as Félise, Marquise de Verdières

Phyllis Gotch was described by her contemporary, the artist Laura Knight, as impossible to resist. “Had she been a General,” wrote Knight in her memoir, “she could have led millions to death and glory for a hopeless cause.” In later life she used that charisma to campaign for the preservation of historic Newlyn after the Second World War.

Her political passions had earlier been aroused by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and in 1926 she published Once I Had A Home, the extraordinary fictional autobiography of Nadejda, Lady of Honour to Their Imperial Majesties the late Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia! Nothing about the book reveals that it is a fiction; it purports to be a warning to the British people about the dangers of socialism, written by someone who has suffered under it. There is a terrific article about the book and the author in a British Library European Studies blog.

Although I don’t agree with all her politics, I am fascinated by the variety of Phyllis’s life – her lovers, her locations, her writings, her very pen-names. I too find her impossible to resist.

“My Crown and Sceptre”: Phyllis Maureen Gotch (1882-1963) painted by her father Thomas Cooper Gotch in 1891

ALLAN MACPHERSON (1788-1864), THE REVEREND SPECULATOR (Part 2)

Allan Macpherson, youngest son of the quartermaster general of Bengal, struggled to make his way in the world when the family’s fortunes collapsed. You can read about his erratic early life in my previous post, here. In Calcutta, at the age of 45, he married Caroline Gibson, with whom the following year he had a daughter Matilda Harriet. When an opportunity to raise the family in England arose, Allan grabbed it; and in 1835 he took up the post of vicar at Holy Trinity, Rothwell.

The early years at Rothwell were without doubt the most stable of Allan Macpherson’s life. At the age of 47 he at last had a family life and a secure income in a comfortable climate. Rothwell was a growing community, thanks in part to the presence of the brewery owned by the Gotch family of Kettering. John Cooper Gotch, head of the dynasty, had also founded a bank which grew out of his financial support for Christian missionaries. The two men must certainly have known each other, and it may have been their friendship which allowed Macpherson to run up debts at Gotch’s Bank of around £3000, a huge sum at the time of the banker’s death in 1852.

Five pound note of the Kettering Bank of John Cooper Gotch & Sons, c1855

Was it just comfort buying? Sorrow came back into Allan’s life with the death of his nine-year old daughter in 1843 and of his second wife in the 1850s. His faith must have been sorely tested. In 1852, mindful perhaps of his mounting deficit at Gotch’s, he looked to Europe where he saw money being made through the patenting of inventions and the exploitation of mineral wealth. With the permission, one assumes, of his bishop, Macpherson moved to comfortable apartments in Brussels “to retrieve myself,” and began to speculate with the hope of accumulating. His duties at Holy Trinity were covered by his curate Rev Charles Iliffe Gibbon; and tellingly, he asked the bank to stop addressing him as Reverend in case it cramped his style in this secular activity.

Over the next five years he registered a number of patents – for a fee – in the hope of selling them on for a profit, in the fields of gas supply, motive power and sewage management. He invested in slate, tin and iron ore mines too, and kept the bank informed at every turn (in nearly 500 letters) with assurances of imminent and magnificent returns. Those returns never arrived. When the Kettering Bank finally failed in June 1857, having thrown much good money after bad, Macpherson (now 69) owed it £25,000 – a third of all its bad debts.

Beyond the reach of the law and deprived of the bank’s funds, he turned to family members for support. But if they frowned at his financial dealings, they were appalled by the news that he had fathered a secret child during his time in Rothwell. He married the mother in 1860 and they lived for a while in England, keeping a low profile. But his relatives would have nothing to do with her, and his sister – who had already funded him to the tune of £1000 – turned off the tap. At their last meeting in 1862, Allan could not even afford new clothes. She gave him £5 and six shirts, and he left for Europe where he might live for less. He died in Paris in 1864.

Allan Macpherson (1788-1864), photographed a year before his death (from Stephen Foster’s A Private Empire)

I don’t think Rev Allan Macpherson was a bad man. As a slave owner, minister and speculator he was only following the example of the times and his ancestors. But he was unlucky, weak and ill-equipped to deal with life. His nephew remarked, “There is a great deal of genuine kindness about him – but his utter lack of the smallest fragment of the commonest of common sense makes him in my opinion entirely removed from the list of responsible human beings.”

I found some details of Allan’s life in Stephen Foster’s tremendous book A Private Empire, a history of five remarkable generations of the Macpherson family of which Allan was very much the product and the black sheep.

ALLAN MACPHERSON (1788-1864), THE REVEREND SPECULATOR (Part 1)

I am not related to the Reverend Allan Macpherson, only to the Gotch family whose private bank he almost single-handedly brought to collapse. But the vicar got under my skin when I wrote about him here a few months ago. As I looked into his background I uncovered an extraordinary life, which I had the great pleasure of writing up for the parish magazine of Holy Trinity, his former church in Rothwell, Northhamptonshire. Here is that article.

Reverend Allan Macpherson (1788-1864), who served as vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Rothwell from 1835 to 1855, lived a life so colourful that I can’t believe his Northhants parishioners knew the half of it. He hit the headlines in 1858 as The Reverend Speculator, the man who almost single-handedly caused the collapse of the Kettering Bank, and died in Paris penniless and abandoned by his family at the age of 76. The rest of his life was no less dramatic.

Macpherson means “son of the parson” in Scottish Gaelic. A different branch of Macphersons, on the Isle of Skye, had been Scottish ministers for three generations. Allan's branch were the Cluny Macphersons from mainland Scotland. Like many Scots after their hope of an independent nation was crushed at the Battle of Culloden, Allan’s father left Scotland to seek his fortune in the British Empire. He rose to become the Quartermaster General in Bengal.

Allan’s father Lieutenant Colonel Allan Macpherson (1740-1816), quartermaster general in Bengal, painted by John Thomas Seton (from Stephen Foster’s history of the Macphersons, A Private Empire)

For the Quartermaster handling supplies for the East India Company there were plenty of opportunities for augmenting one’s salary. When Allan’s father returned to Britain the year before Allan’s birth it was with the intention of investing his considerable fortune in Scottish estates. But he was unlucky in choosing a business partner who died suddenly with huge debts for which he became responsible. By the time Allan was born, the youngest of three children, the family was ruined.

With no prospects at home, Allan’s father sent him in 1805, aged 16, to learn business on the Guyana plantation of a family friend. He carried a letter of paternal advice which recommended him to “honour God, respect the negro, and avoid loose women,” ideally by taking a slave as a concubine. Allan already had a reputation within the family for being hot-tempered and flighty, and in Guyana he tried his hand at many things without much success – he joined the West Indian Army, he traded horses, he bred beef. By persevering in Guyana he missed the weddings of both his siblings and the death of his father. And from 1816 he fathered two children with Kitty, a slave twelve years his junior, whose freedom he bought before he returned – without them – to Britain in 1820.

James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856), who oversaw the Fraser plantations in Guyana to which Allan was apprenticed

Now, like many younger sons, he studied for the cloth. In 1823 received his first preferment, no doubt through family connections in Scotland, as the domestic chaplain to the Marquis of Tweeddale. He acquired a second living, Berwick St Leonard in Wiltshire, which was in the gift of his sister’s husband. And in 1826 he married Margaret Chalmers, the sister of his brother’s wife, with whom early in 1828 he moved to take up a post as chaplain at Dum Dum in Bengal, presumably as a result of his late father’s role in India. Although there is no record of children, there is a reference to “Allan Macpherson and family.” The Macphersons returned to Britain on leave that summer, but on the long voyage back to Calcutta in November, Margaret died.

Allan overcame his grief through work. He became chaplain at Calcutta’s newly built St James Church (consecrated in November 1829) and in 1833 married Caroline Gibson, with whom the following year he had a daughter Matilda Harriet. When an opportunity to raise the family in England arose, Allan grabbed it; and in 1835 he took up the post of vicar at Holy Trinity, Rothwell.

The early years at Rothwell were without doubt the most stable of Allan Macpherson’s life. At the age of 47 he at last had a family life and a secure income in a comfortable climate. But further personal loss and reckless financial dealings soon came to blight the unlucky Macpherson’s life once more. Read about his final descent IN PART TWO HERE.  I found some details of Allan’s life in Stephen Foster’s tremendous book A Private Empire, a history of five remarkable generations of the Macpherson family of which Allan was very much the product and the black sheep.

AUSTIN COOPER (1825-1874) AND THE ROSCOMMON RAILWAY

Here’s another of my many ancestors called Austin Cooper. There are at least twenty-five even in my incomplete Tipperary Cooper notes, all ultimately named after the almost mythical Austin, the settler who brought the Cooper family to Ireland. I’ve written about some of them here – sea captains, tax collectors, artists, surgeons, murder victims. This one led an altogether less dramatic life, as the railway manager at Roscommon.

Roscommon Railway Station

It was then a very modern thing to be, of course. Austin was the eldest of three brothers, all of whom chose careers which simply weren’t available to their grandfather, Austin’s namesake the Irish antiquarian, or to the long line of landed Coopers before him. William was a chemical engineer in London, and John the youngest a telegraph engineer to an Ottoman Sultan. They had rather been forced into the modern world by the circumstances of their father.

Samuel Cooper had financial troubles: some of his Irish tenants (on the family estate at Kinsaley  north of Dublin) were withholding rent, and on top of that he was partly responsible for the debts of his late father. These troubles necessitated his living between 1832 and 1857 beyond the reach of the British legal system – on the Isle of Man at some stage, but chiefly in Brussels. (Brussels seems to have been popular with those on the run – the Rev Allan Macpherson, for example, brought down the Gotch Bank in Kettering from there at exactly the same time that Sam Cooper was an ex-pat resident.)

Matters were cleared up in the courts in 1851 although Sam didn’t return from Brussels until 1857 when his third wife died there. The railway came to Roscommon on 13^th February 1860 as part of the Athlone-Westport branchline. I don’t know when Austin got the job as manager there, or even precisely what the position involved – was “railway manager” the same thing as “station master”?

Roscommon Railway Station – the stationmaster’s house is the two-storey building on the left

Was he required to live on-site, or did he live at Kinsaley? Roscommon was then a small village and even now as the county town of County Roscommon it has less than 2000 inhabitants. The station’s main business was not in passenger traffic but as a railhead for the transport of cattle and other agricultural produce. If Austin lived in the stationmaster’s house at Roscommon, there won’t have been much to do there except raise a family. But of his large brood born between 1849 and 1871, only one was definitely born in Roscommon, in 1868.

Austin died relatively young in 1874. He was only 49, and his life at a quiet country railway station can now be measured only in wives (2) and children (15). At least two of his offspring emigrated to New York, and I feel there must be more to tell. Quiet little Roscommon Railway Station only hit the news in 1881, many years after Austin’s death.

Roscommon Railway Station, 130 years after it last hit the news

In 1880 the Land League lead by Charles Stewart Parnell had found considerable success in parliamentary elections. It was waging a land war – boycotting profiteering landlords, withholding rent, and intimidating new tenants of land from which the previous tenants had been evicted for such actions. In October 1881 the British government decided to act, arresting many of the Land League MPs including James O’Kelly, Roscommon’s representative.

Late one night, the graphic illustrator and engraver Aloysius O’Kelly (not I think a  relation of the MP) was asleep in his carriage as it arrived in Roscommon Station. “I was suddenly awakened by the screaming and yelling of the crowd on the platform [and] the frequent cry of “Hurray for Parnell!” I was astonished to find the platform lined with soldiers, two deep, behind whom was the screaming mob. They were shouting, gesticulating and waving hats to several men who had been arrested and who were being put in the train to be sent to Galway Prison.

“It appeared that these men were the leading Land Leaguers of the town of Roscommon, who had been arrested during the day. There had been reason to suppose that unless the assistance of the military had been obtained there would be an attempt to rescue the prisoners on their way to the railway station. The soldiers therefore marched into the town that night just in time to conduct the prisoners to the station. No one was aware that the soldiers were coming, so the people were taken by surprise, and their little plan for a rescue was a failure.”

“The State of Ireland: Arrested under the Coercion Act – A Sketch at Roscommon Railway Station” by Aloysius O’Kelly

There must have been hundreds of such scenes around Ireland that month, and this one would have been much less well remembered had Aloysius’s impression of it not been published in the Illustrated London News on 3^rd December 1881. What would Austin have thought?