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

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

JOHN HALLIDAY (c1715-1779) AND THE LADY OF QUALITY

John Halliday, my 6x great uncle, was a very big, very rich fish in a small pool. He was the tax collector in St John’s on the tiny island of Antigua, a British Caribbean sugar colony a very long way from home. There was a lot of money to be made by the little circle of white plantation owners, who lived extremely well on the island with minimal disruption from London. 

Antigua in 1750

drawn by Eman Bowen 

Some owners chose to be absentee planters, living extremely well in London with minimal involvement in the affairs of their plantations; but they were dependent on their plantation managers, who were not always scrupulously honest in posting the income of the estates to their owners back in Blighty. One friend of Halliday’s, William Mackinnen, had to move to the island in 1773 having never been there at all until 

“his overseer forgot he had any superior, and having occasion for the whole income, had sent his Master no remittances for above two years. He [Mackinnon] found things however in very good order, as this gentleman for his own sake, had taken care of that.” 

Mackinnen owned two plantations. Halliday had seven, a measure perhaps of his success in the post of Customs Collector, which he held from 1739 to 1777. In addition he had married Elizabeth, a daughter of another very successful plantation owner on Antigua, my 6x great grandfather Francis Delap, creating a powerful island dynasty. (By 1829 Delaps Plantation on Antigua was owned by John Halliday’s grandson, Rear Admiral John Delap Halliday Tollemache.)

Cutting the sugar cane on the Delap Estate, 1823

by Wlliam Clark 

John Halliday was lucky. Abundant and rich as life was on Antigua, two things were in short supply: water, and women. There was only one small spring on the island, and what rainwater the owners could collect in large cisterns frequently ran out in periods of drought. In times of peace, water was imported from the neighbouring French island of Guadaloup; in wartime they had to send to Montserrat for it. As for women, the island council once went as far as to petition London to send some.

One remarkable woman visited the island in December 1774, en route not from London but from Burntisland in Fife, bound not for the West Indies but her brother in law in North Carolina. Janet Schaw of Lauriston in Edinburgh kept a diary of her travels which lay virtually unknown outside academic circles until it was finally published in 1921 as the “Journal of a Lady of Quality.” It is a rich, very human account, full of her observations, interests, prejudices and amusements. And it is thanks to her that we have a glimpse of Halliday’s private life beyond his public position.

1921 title page of Janet Schaw's

"Journal of a Lady of Quality" 

Halliday was one of a party of prominent Antiguans of Scottish decent who called on Miss Schaw’s lodgings on the day of her arrival, clamouring for news:

“Here was a whole company of Scotch people, our language, our manners, our circle of friends ans connections, all the same. They had a hundred questions to ask in a breath, and my general acquaintance enabled me to answer them. We were intimates in a moment. … Mr Halliday is from Galloway, extremely genteel in his person and and most agreeable on his manners; he has a very great fortune and lives with elegance and taste. His family resides in England and he lives the life of a batchelor.” 

There is no suggestion that Halliday behaved in any way improperly, although the following morning it was Halliday’s carriage that Miss Schaw and her companions chose from the seven which arrived after breakfast – all sent by their owners to be at the travellers’ disposal. “Mr Halliday’s [wrote Janet Schaw] was drawn by English horses, which is a very needless piece of expense, as they have strong horses from New England, and most beautiful creatures from the Spanish Main.” 

The following Sunday after church they took lunch at one of John Halliday’s grand plantation houses, a meal of such luxurious largesse that it “might figure away in a newspaper had it been given by a Lord Mayor or the first Duke in the kingdom.” They dined on an Antiguan staple – turtle – in two forms. First came soup, made from old turtles, and “remarkably well dressed today.” And there was the shell,

“indeed a noble dish, as it contains all the fine parts of the Turtle baked within its own body; here is the green fat, not the slobbery thing my stomach used to stand at, but firm and more delicate than it is possible to describe.” 

Taste is a relative thing, I suppose. Bear in mind that when Miss Schaw and friends set off again for North Carolina, the first thing the Scottish captain of the ship did was to slaughter one of the live sheep in the hold – that evening they 

“had a Scotch dinner under the Tropick in the middle of the Atlantick. We ate haggis, sheep-head, barley-broth and blood-puddings. As both our Capt and Mate are Scots, tho’ long from home, they swore they had not seen such an excellent inner since they left their native land.”

LADY JANE HALLIDAY (1750-1802) AND THE UNSUITABLE MARRIAGES

I confess I’m only very VERY distantly related to Lady Jane, and then only by marriage, but she’s one of those unconventional people one would so like to have met.

Lady Jane Halliday, nee Tollemache (1750-1802)

growing old disgracefully

She was born Jane Tollemache, into a very wealthy old family. At the age of 20 she eloped to Gretna Green with John Delap Halliday, the son of a rich tax collector on Antigua and grandson of Francis Delap (1690-1766, my 4x great grandfather), a slave and plantation owner whose name still survives as a district of that island. Fearing disinheritance or at least disapproval, the runaway couple had the pragmatic good sense to remarry formally in Worcester the following year to legitimise their relationship under English law as well as Scots.

It was a smart move. Their inherited wealth increased in leaps and bounds, and they had four children. But blood will out. Their daughter Charlotte Elizabeth Halliday was disinherited by her father for … yes, eloping to Scotland to “enter the connubial state” without his approval!

It came out in the next generation too. Their first grandchild, Elizabeth Jane Henrietta Tollemache (whose father had taken the Tollemache name on inheriting a fortune from a maiden aunt) was considered something of a rebel. Against family advice she first married, and presumably for love, Captain Christian Frederick Charles Johnstone a man of modest means – far too modest for her as it turned out, and the marriage failed.

Lady Jane’s granddaughter then eloped, in 1823, with the rather wealthier 7^th Earl of Cardigan (of Charge of the Light Brigade notoriety); but although they did eventually marry in 1826, she eloped again in 1827. This may have been with Lord Colville, described as her final intrigue, or perhaps an earlier affair. Her marriage to Cardigan finally ended in 1846, and it’s a miracle it lasted that long.

Jane herself, widowed in 1794, no doubt sailed through it all. Indeed, she lent her name to a ship owned by a Sir Richard Neve (who must have had his own reasons for naming one of his vessels after her). While tied up in Britain in 1796, the Lady Jane Halliday was burgled of 20 lbs of raw sugar (perhaps from her inherited interests in Antigua and St Kitt’s). The sugar was valued at eight shillings, and the thief, a dock worker called William Blue, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Botany Bay. Seven years for eight shillings.

In March of 1802 Lady Jane remarried, against all family advice, a Mr G.D. Ferry. It was no doubt a happy marriage, but a short one; she died on 28^th August the same year, having undeniably and magnificently grown old disgracefully.