ARTHUR GURNEY SALTER (1883-1893) AND THE LITTLE STORIES

Some stories are long, and some are short. Some are funny; some are sad. Some touch the hem of history, but this one has no impact on anything or anyone, except Arthur's parents, nurse and siblings.

By the late nineteenth century, child mortality was greatly reduced. Samuel Salter (1773-1842) lost at least two children before they the age of two (not counting any that went unrecorded through dying at birth). Brodie Gurney (1777-1855) lost three. Their grandson William Henry Gurney Salter (1837-1928)  benefitted from advances in medical science; he only lost one. The other five of his babies made it to childhood.

Four of them made it to adulthood. Arthur wouldn't even have made it to this blog if he had died two years earlier. But he lived through a census year, 1891, just one: and here is his entry, taken on 5th April that year. 

The Salter Family census return

5th April 1891

Arthur G. ditto: 7: [born in] Kensington. Middlesex: imbecile from childhood. [He's not a scholar, we know that too.]

Also in the household, a companion for Mrs Salter; a cook; a domestic nurse; a house- and parlourmaid; an under-parlourmaid; and Esther Warren, nurse to imbecile child. 

Arthur's death aged 10 is recorded two years later in the second quarter of 1893. Se we know that his birthday was after the 5th April and before the end of June. But that's really about it.  For the rest we just have to guess - what were his toys? how did he get on with his brothers and sisters? did he want to be a train driver? did he want to be a barrister and shorthand writer to the Houses of Parliament like his father?

William and Jane Salter

on their 50th wedding anniversary, 1920

Back row, their surviving children 

(with wives and grandchildren)

Whether he struggled all along, or took a sudden turn for the worse at the end, I do know this. From what I've read in William Salter's memoirs of his own childhood, little Arthur's father was a loving family man, and Arthur's death even if expected will have hit the whole household hard. And ten years is enough to make an mark, and he won't have been forgotten. He isn't.

MARTHA GURNEY (1733-1816) AND THE POWER OF PRINT

My eighteenth century Delap and Halliday ancestors never knew personally those in my Gurney tree. But if they had, they would have been sworn enemies. It is quite possible that the former would have been aware of the latter, and particularly of the activities of my 5x great aunt Martha Gurney. While they were enjoying the fruits of their use and abuse of slaves on a sugar plantation in Antigua, aunt Martha was campaigning for a boycott of the products which earned them those fruits.

An Address to the People of Great Britain,

on the Consumption of West India Produce

written by William Fox, published by Martha Gurney in 1791

She was a remarkable woman, a bookseller and printer of whom her biographer Timothy Whelan writes, “No British woman played a more prominent part in raising the consciousness of the English people against the slave trade.” Her pamphlet An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (written by William Fox in 1791) sold more than 200,000 copies in Britain and America and was the best selling pamphlet of the eighteenth century. With public debate on the topic at its height, the publication ran to about 30 impressions or reprints, and drew 20 further pamphlets responding to its contents either for or against.

Report on Remarkable Trials

(including those of 32 prisoners "capitally convicted")

published by Joseph and Martha Gurney

She published fourteen such anti-slavery pamphlets and another 25 transcriptions of state trials and other proceedings – one of the benefits of being the sister of Joseph Gurney, official shorthand writer to the Old Bailey and the House of Commons, who had privileged access to such events. Joseph was also able to bring first hand knowledge of the debate over slavery which raged in parliament in 1791 and 1792.

Medallion of the logo of the Society for Effecting 
the Abolition of Slavery, produced in 1787 by the manufacturer 
and abolitionist Josiah Wedgewood; 
it became a fashionable accessory in polite society

Joseph, also a bookseller, had subscribed to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery since its founding by Quakers in 1787, and Martha published her first anti-slavery leaflet the following year. It was A Sermon on the African Slave Trade, by James Dore the minister at Maze Pond Baptist Church of which all her family were members.

Joseph introduced Martha to William Fox, another bookseller and like Joseph a member of the Humane Society. In 1782 she moved her printshop from its premises in Bell Yard of the Strand, a few hundred yards north to Fox’s place in Holborn, and it was from here that they collaborated on their campaigning publications. They became close friends personally and professionally, and when Fox died in 1794, she remained there until her death.

Plan of the slave ship Brookes, 1789,

licensed to carry 450 slaves, but often taking over 600

It is not really any surprise that Martha espoused the abolitionist cause. She came from a long line of radical religious dissenters. Nevertheless, her willingness to nail her colours so explicitly to the mast was brave – the pamphlets all carried her name as publisher when many of their authors remained anonymous (including Fox on that 1791 Address). In her shop, her nephew Brodie Gurney remembered 40 years later, she openly displayed on a wall the now-famous drawing of the sardine-like packing of slaves on the slave ship Brookes, which was commissioned by the Abolition Committee in 1789.

Trading in slaves became illegal in Britain in 1807. Having slaves however did not. In 1823 a new Anti-Slavery Society was formed, which soon called for a new boycott of West Indian produce. In 1830 Martha and William’s 1791 pamphlet was reprinted and at last in 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act was passed – a landmark of humanity which Martha Gurney can take some small credit for having helped to build.

AUSTIN COOPER (1890-1964) AND THE ART OF THE POSTER

No. 3 in an occasional series about the seemingly endless list of Austin Cooper namesakes in my family tree. This Austin Cooper is a remote cousin of my great grandmother’s to whom I hadn’t paid much attention. That changed a couple of weeks ago when I bought a beautiful coffee table book of old railway posters of Scotland.

Austin Cooper, graphic artist (1890-1964)

I’m old enough to remember the beautiful watercolour prints of scenes from around the country which used to grace the old wooden carriage compartments, and the combination of that artwork with the scenery of Scotland AND the romance of steam rail travel was irresistible. I was happily leafing through when the name Austin Cooper leapt off the page.

 

LNER travel poster from the 1920s, by Austin Cooper

He was born in Manitoba, although his father was an Irish farmer, and studied at the Cardiff  School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Allan-Frazer College of Art in Arbroath. He returned to Canada to work as a commercial artist, and during the Great War he served in Europe with the Canadian Black Watch. 

In 1922 he settled in London and won the first of many poster commissions from London Underground. Over the next twenty years he built an enviable reputation as a poster designer for such clients as London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), Underground Electric Railway Company, Royal Mail Line, Indian State Railways, and London Transport. 

 Summer and winter campaigns for London Transport, 1924

From 1936 to 1940 he also served as the first principal of Reimann School of Industrial Art, a private school of German origin for practical design and the first commercial art school in Britain. It was here that I think he really made his lasting mark. The Reimann played an important role in introducing continental modernism to Britain through immigrant artists and designers in the 1930s. It is credited with opening up the traditional architecture-oriented  view of  exhibition and display design to a more interdisciplinary approach based on a wider understanding of modernism in design. 

 Poster for a V&A exhibition of posters, 1931

Cooper’s book “Making a Poster” was published by The Studio in 1939. It ran to several impressions and is something of a classic design text. In it he expressed his design philosophy: “The functions of a poster are dual: to arrest the attention and then, having caught the eye of the passer-by, to deliver a message swiftly, convincingly, effectively.”

In 1943 he abandoned poster design to concentrate on painting. But public acclaim for his advertising designs and paintings led to a post-war show at the London Gallery in 1948, the first of many. Almost half a century after his death, his railway posters regularly command hundreds of pounds when they come up for sale at auction houses. (More elsewhere in Tall Tales on Austin's market town posters for LNER and his Tube posters for museums!)

 Montrose (1925) by Austin Cooper

GRACE GOGGIN (b. c1640) GETS THE SACK

Several of my family trees, a significant cluster, grew in the self-contained little forest of the Protestant Ascendancy in co Tipperary. Many of them have their roots in the soldiers whom Cromwell paid off with grants of land in Ireland when he had run out of money, or in the earlier plantation of Englishmen into that country by Elizabeth I. Sadleirs, Coopers, Bourchiers, Massys, Bakers … they were all there, and kept themselves very much to themselves, intermarrying rather more often than was probably good for them.

Chadwicks too. William Chadwick was the first of his line to settle in Ireland, taking advantage of the fall from grace of the Fitzgeralds of Ballinard to snap up their estate when it was put up for grabs in the 1650s. By some accounts he was an English gentleman of good standing who had to sell up in Lancashire after some political or family falling-out, taking advantage of the Cromwellian settlement to relocate out of harms way in Ireland.

Ballinard to the northwest of Tipperary is a near neighbour of Sadleirswells to the northeast. The Sadleirs of Sadleirswells (called Kingswells when the Chadwicks arrived and presumably by a more Irish name before that) had come over in Elizabethan times. Over the next two hundred years the families of Sadleir and Chadwick became very close indeed.

Settler William's granddaughter Grace Chadwick married Clement Sadleir, and Grace’s great great great grandson Richard William Ralph Sadleir (the chemist – see my earlier post) married Eleanor Wilhelmina Octavia Cooper (see my earlier post about her and the starter pack she left me).

Meanwhile his grandson William Chadwick had a grandson Richard “Parson Dick” Chadwick who married Margaret Sadleir, and Richard and Margaret’s granddaughter (you may have seen this coming) was none other than Eleanor Wilhelmina Octavia Cooper, my great great grandmother.

So I am related to settler William Chadwick through both his grandson William and his granddaughter Grace. Through the boy he is my 7x great grandfather, and through Grace's line (where they married sooner and younger) he is my 8x great grandfather.

William and Grace, his first two grandchildren, were named after him and his wife, Grace Goggin, whom he had met in England. This Grace was about four years William’s junior, and a ward of Chancery – what today we call a ward of court, which probably meant her parents had died and she was too young to inherit.

The Lord Chancellor of the day, under whose care she now fell, refused to sanction her marriage to William Chadwick – she was probably under age at least in some legal, moral or fiscal sense; and perhaps there were political disagreements between him and Chadwick which also affected the Chancellor’s judgement in those turbulent republican years.

But William and Grace were young and in love, and love will find a way. They fled to Ireland together, and Grace escaped detection as they travelled by concealing herself amongst William’s luggage – in a sack. It’s quite romantic really! And thanks to that sack, here I am nine or ten generations later.

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.”

CHARLES CASTLE (1813-1886) AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION (PART TWO)

On Friday 7^th November 1851, my great great great uncle Charles Castle hurriedly composed a staunchly worded petition of support for exiled Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth. It was published the next day on posters throughout Bristol. By Wednesday 12^th November the petition had attracted 5585 signatures which (wrote Castle’s fellow petitioner JF Gilbert) “I think is highly satisfactory.”

Kossuth in England

commemorative book published in 1851

It was an impressive total. But Kossuth wasn’t coming to Bristol. What do you do with a 5585-strong petititon? Time was short – Kossuth was about to set sail for America after his triumphant but whirlwind tour of English cities, and of course Charles Castle wanted him to know before he left just how much support he had from the citizens of Bristol.

First name on the petition was not Charles but Michael Castle’s – Michael, Charles’ brother, was a magistrate, and they agreed that his would be a more impressive headline signature pour encourager les autres. But the text, and the motivation, were principally Charles’. He was justifiably proud of the results, and determined to present the ornate scroll of names to Kossuth in person if possible.

He wrote on the 12^th to Ferenc Pulsky, Kossuth’s aide and fellow exile to announce his imminent arrival in London with the petition. Kossuth’s secretary Mr Day hastily replied on the 13^th that Kossuth was still out of town [speaking in Manchester and Birmingham as it happened], politely implying that Castle hadn’t given much notice to a busy man about to take his cause across the Atlantic to the American people.

I have all these letters, although frustratingly I’m missing the one in which the exchange was finally arranged! But it had been conveyed to Kossuth by Saturday 15^th November, when the statesman wrote a long letter of thanks not to Charles but to Michael Castle as first-named petitioner, in terms which must have made their hearts swell. “Among the many generous addresses which I have had the honour to receive since my arrival … there has been none which shows a more just appreciation of the circumstances of my country … than this Address from the inhabitants of Bristol.” The letter, on paper with a Hungarian coat of arms, in an envelope with a red wax Hungarian seal, continues across three hand-written sides with an impassioned analysis of his country’s situation, and is signed with a flourish, Lewis Kossuth.

Kossuth's signature on his letter to Michael Castle

There seems to have been a delay in the post! Although earlier letters in the correspondence were delivered within a day, Kossuth’s thanks did not arrive until at least the 24^th. The hold-up prompted one slighted signatory, Henry Prichard, to complain to Charles Castle about Kossuth’s seeming ingratitude. In truth, one can imagine Charles’ own disappointment at not having received any acknowledgement of his efforts, as the days rolled by and Kossuth had left the country, apparently without a word. But just imagine his spirits the day the letter came!

Lajos Kossuth

cover of centenary exhibition leaflet

Budapest, 1994

Lajos Kossuth died in exile in Turin in 1894. In 1994 we went to Budapest with copies of the letters, although I wasn’t aware of the man’s significance until we found that our hotel was in Kossuth Street, and saw his name and face on every 100 Forint banknote. We took the letters to the National Museum, which we found was running a centenary exhibition of Kossuth’s life. There was the desk he sat at; there was a picture of the house where he was born; there was his pen; his chess set; his sword. And there, in the last glass case, was the Bristol petition, headed by the names of Michael and Charles Castle. Just imagine our spirits when we spotted that!

The Bristol Petition

composed by Charles Castle,

displayed in the Hungarian National Museum,

Budapest, 1994

CHARLES CASTLE (1813-1886) AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION (PART ONE)

In 1848, while my great great great grandfather Brodie Gurney was celebrating the birth of six grandchildren, the rest of Europe was in chaos. Revolution was breaking out all over the place, including France, from which my cousin John Salter had had to flee, rapidly relocating his Versailles nursery to the less glamorous Hammersmith.

In Hungary there was also revolution, but of a different form. It was led not by a popular rabble but by Lajos Kossuth, a lawyer, and its aim was not to overthrow the Hungarian government but to throw off the yoke of Imperialist Austria. Austria, they felt, was rather overlooking the Hungarian in Austro-Hungarian Empire. My great great great uncle Charles Castle agreed.

Charles Castle (1813-1886)

In Britain the Chartists were agitating for a revolution of their own. Mass demonstrations were planned; the lamps outside Buckingham Palace had been smashed and cries of “Vive La Republique!” had been heard, and the Royal Family were advised to leave London. The Chartists wanted parliamentary reform including universal (male) suffrage; but in the international mood of rebellion prevailing in 1848, they represented greater change and anti-imperialism too.

In the event, the government of the day toughed it out and there was no British Revolution. But resentment simmered, and there was great popular support for the upheavals on the continent, particularly the struggles in Hungary. Austria had roped in the support of another imperial power, Russia, and with severity crushed the revolution on their doorstep. Although Kossuth had the support of Lord Palmerston the British foreign secretary, it was politically impossible for the British government to lend the Hungarian revolution any material or diplomatic aid. The English people however made their feelings known – on a visit to Britain in 1850 the savage Austrian general Haynau, who had executed revolutionary martyrs and whipped women sympathetic to the cause, was beaten up and thrown into a horse trough by the draymen of Barclay Perkins Brewery in London.

Kossuth went into exile in 1850, arriving in Britain in 1851. He was a popular hero, attracting widespread support, civic testimonies and crowds of workers up to 100,000 strong in Winchester, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London. And in Bristol …

Address to Kossuth

by Charles Castle of Bristol

In Bristol Charles Castle, a local lawyer and wine importer, wanted Bristolian sentiment to have a voice too. Time was short – Kossuth had arrived at Southampton on the 23^rd October and was in Britain for only three weeks. On Friday 7^th November Castle hurriedly composed a staunchly worded petition of support for Kossuth. It was published the next day on posters throughout the city with a note of where supporters might sign it. By Wednesday 12^th November the petition had attracted 5585 signatures which (wrote Castle’s fellow petitioner JF Gilbert) “I think is highly satisfactory.”

It was an impressive total. But Kossuth wasn’t coming to Bristol. What do you do with a 5585-strong petititon? (Find out in Part Two!)

THOMAS PIPER (1875-1939) AND THE BICYCLE AGE

There’s a wonderful short novel called “The Stone Book Quartet” by Alan Garner (incidentally the greatest English story teller since the Second World War). He paints the picture of four generations of an artisan family and the craft trades they pursue. As times change they change too, working first as weavers, then stone masons, then quarrymen, then blacksmiths. What remains constant is their connection with nature, with the materials it provides, and with the craftsmanship of their hands and minds.

An invoice from Thomas Piper Bicycles issued in 1926

It popped into my mind last week when I was thinking about my great uncle Thomas Piper. He was a bicycle agent, and in the 1920s he opened a shop in Churchill in Edinburgh which was still there when I was a student in 1981 – in fact I ended up with a room in a flat right over the shop for a few weeks one summer. Of course the shop had long since lost any contact with the Piper family, but it was nice that the name carried on. (In fact there are still internet references to it, at an address in South Clerk Street in the city – but if you go there, it’s a burger joint, a reminder not to believe everything you read on the internet, especially in the field of family history research!)

What brought Alan Garner to mind was the fact that Thomas’ father John, and John’s father William before him, had been blacksmiths, in the tiny Ayrshire village of Sorn. The smithy was at a bridge by a bend of a tributary of the river Ayr, on a croft called Wealth o’ Waters. There’s such an image of generosity of spirit there, in that wonderful placename and the thought of a strong, hearty blacksmith working there, quenching his irons and his thirst there since the late 18^th century.

The Sorn Smiddy in the early 20^th century,

after it had passed from the Pipers to the Alston family

I like the transition from blacksmith to bicycle man too. Forwards in industry and modernisation! But there’s a nice line in change going backwards too. The family, originally peasant farmers, came to Ayrshire from a croft at Miln Ness, high on the watershed between Strathglass and Glen Urquhart. In 1773 the first wave of clearances took place in Strathglass in the form of a mass emigration to Nova Scotia.

If the Pipers weren’t actually part of this relocation, they certainly saw the writing on the wall clearly enough to get out before the next round of evictions in 1803-1831. By 1782, when Thomas Piper’s grandfather William was born, the family were living in Sorn. Nineteen years later, William married an Ayr girl, Janet Mitchell, and she was a sock-knitter. We don’t know if William had yet found his calling as a blacksmith; and it may well be that Janet, not William, was the family’s first industrial craft artisan.

And what of Miln Ness now? I don’t know if there are any remains of the Piper’s old homes. There is only one old house there now and three modern holiday cottages, but there are many more traces of those who preceded the Pipers in this beautiful place: the landscape is peppered with 4000 year old chambered cairns, stone circles and other prehistoric boundary markers. And who knows how long the Pipers were in Miln Ness before 1773?

Miln Ness, from Corrimony Chambered Cairn

CATHERINE GURNEY (1848-1930) AND THE OTHER FIVE BABIES (PART 2)

All those 62 granchildren of William Gurney conjure some riotous images of Victorian festive family gatherings at his house. Particularly after hs wife died, Brodie gradually took to the role of family patriarch, holding court at his home in Denmark Hill, South London. 

Denmark Hill House (now demolished)

scene of unforgettable Christmas parties

Rather wonderfully, a description by my great grandfather William Henry Gurney Salter (who was one of those grandchilden) survives of Christmasses in the William Gurney household, and of Christmas 1848 in particular:

"No one who was at the Christmas parties can ever forget them. The parents and children of the different families came trooping in about two o'clock, and each was welcomed with a  present, given with a few kindly words by the grandfather in his library. The presents were really well chosen - a toy, or a magic lantern, or an electrical machine, or a book, so well suited to the receiver that he often found it on eof his chief sources of pleasure in the following year. 

"Then there was a great dinner for the seniors, the large community of cousins who were not old enough amusing themselves with games in the hall or the nursery meanwhile. After the young ones had gone home, there was in many years a little family masque, the poetry for which was contributed mostly by my  uncle Jameson and my uncle Henry Gurney. It turned on the events of the year within the family and in the world without.

"The first that I can recall was in 1848. I remember that, no doubt, because I had a part to play [presumably in the masque]. In that year there had been two weddings, - my uncle Henry Gurney's and my aunt Maria Grey's - and the "six babies", as they have ever since been called, had arrived. ... It was therefore an eventful year, and Father Christmas extended a welcome to the new-comers with more ceremony and more fun than usual. Later in the evening there was generally a game of Blind Man's Buff for the boys in the hall, while the girls sat on the stair and gave the applause."

The garden at Denmark Hill House

which is now part of Ruskin Park, Camberwell

William also recalled other occasions:

"In the summer too there was always a cousins' party to celebrate the birthday of two of them. The garden was large and diversified. Immediately under the windows of the house was a long terrace walk from which the lawn sloped gradually downwars for a considerable distance. At the bottom of it were two of the finest cedars I have ever seen, so rich in foliage below as well as above that their lowest branches resting on the ground formed an almost impenetrable hiding place for us boys and also for the bowls when they strayed too far.

"We cousins used to meet in considerable numbers and so frequently that we knew one another almost as well as if we were brothers and sisters. Until there were nearly fifty of us it was the rule that a Christian name given in one family should not be used in another.

"Besides playing bowls and rounders and other ordinary games on the lawn and in the field, we had free range of the garden, though with reasonable restrictions about the fruit. The fields had great attractions. On one side was a long row of tall trees, rich in birds nests, on the other side was a pleasant shady walk fringed with gooseberry bushes,  with which we were allowed to do our worst, and in the fields themselves was a pond.

"Those of my cousins who remember the house, the garden, and the delightful life there, will I sure gladly tell their children more of it than I have been able, even imperfectly, to relate."

The Portico, Ruskin Park, Camberwell -

all that remains of Demark Hill House

William Gurney led a very public life as a staunch Christian and a Baptist campaigner. William Salter's record  some sixty years later of Gurney's private family life is shot through with genuine warmth and affectionate memory, which trigger similar memories of my own grandfather and our high days and holidays in his country home and garden. Let William have one last word:

"Our grandfather's sympathetic nature led him to follow with real interest the incidents of the lives of his friends, and especially of his children and grandchildren. We boys always took leave of him before going back to school, and we found the interview not only comforting to our pockets but in every way pleasant. He could look at things from a boy's point of view to the last and was tolerant of practical jokes, even booby traps, so that we did not shrink from the serious counsel which he never failed to give."

CATHERINE GURNEY (1848-1930) AND THE OTHER FIVE BABIES (PART 1)

In 1848, year of pan-European revolution in whose turbulent events many of my ancestors were caught up and even played a part, the focus of Gurney attention was much closer to home. 1848 was the year of the “Six Babies”, the birth of six of my great great aunts and uncles.

William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855)

genial grandfather

Brodie Gurney was blessed with, if I've got this right, 62 grandchildren. Like many Victorian patriarchs, Brodie Gurney had produced a large family. From the middle of the nineteenth century, infant mortality figures began to fall, and birth rates also came down as parents benefitted from the greater survival rate. But three of Gurney’s first four children succumbed to measles epidemics between 1810 and 1812. It’s no wonder that he and poor Ann, Mrs Gurney, kept churning them out.

Of his eight surviving children, two were getting married in 1848, so could not properly be expected to be delivering grandchildren just yet. The other six however were doing all that was expected of them.

So for the record, here are those “Six Babies” stats in full:

BABY ONE

Catherine “Katie” Gurney, 6^th of 7 children of Brodie’s eldest son Joseph (3^rd of 4 with his second wife Harriet Tritton). So far I’ve traced her to Harrogate in 1901, where she was the unmarried Honorary Secretary of the Northern Police Orphanage; ten years earlier she had held the same post at the Christian Police Association in London. I think she died at Steyning in Sussex in 1930.

BABY TWO

Arthur Frederick Gurney, 4^th of 8 children born to next in line Thomas Gurney (the last with his first wife Margaret Hanson). Arthur trained as a barrister but entered the church and was minister of Bournemouth Baptist Church in 1881; but by 1891 he was merely the manager of a Mission Hall in Ramsey. I think he died at Tendring in Essex in 1925.

BABY THREE

Florence Emma Jameson, 9^th of 13 children from Brodie’s eldest surviving daughter Mary Ann and her husband William Kingsbury Jameson. Florence never married, and died just short of her 94^th birthday in 1942.

BABY FOUR

Frank Salter, 6^th of 7 children of Emma Gurney and her husband the Rev William Augustus Salter. Frank was a gifted engineer – see my earlier blog about him – who died young in 1888.

BABY FIVE

Herbert Smith, 4^th of 7 children for John James Smith and his wife Caroline Gurney. Herbert doesn’t seem to have made good headway in life; 1n 1891 he was a clerk for a timber merchant, and ten years later, still unmarried, he was living in lodgings and working as a shoemaker.

BABY SIX

Amelia “Millie” Gurney Angus, 3^rd of 10 children born to Amelia Gurney and her husband the Rev Joseph Angus. Joseph was a leading churchman of his day, and his wife Amelia served as foreign secretary of the Baptist Zenana Mission from 1869 to 1893. On her death, Millie and her sister Edith filled the office as joint secretaries. Millie died unmarried at the grand age of 97, in 1945 in Hammersmith.

EXCUSED PREGNANCY

Henry Gurney and his second wife Phoebe Whitchurch, getting married. Henry had 7 children altogether.

Maria Gurney and her first husband the Rev Henry Grey, getting married. Maria had 3 children in total.

More on the Year of Six Babies next week!