STEPHEN SALTER (1825-1896) AND THE ALLITERATIVE ARCHITECTS

Parents just love alliteration, don’t they? In my Salter family tree there are countless Samuel Salters and Sarah Salters and Sophia Salters – and a positive explosion of Stephen Salters. This, parents of the future, is not helpful to us genealogists. If anyone reading this can help sort out the following, please do.

I was going to write a nice short post about my cousin Stephen. His great grandfather, also Stephen Salter, is my 4x great grandfather. I was just going to write about the fact that my cousin was an architect, and hope that I got lucky on Google in finding some building or other that he worked on.

Well, you go looking for one Stephen Salter, architect; you find three! There was plenty to go at on Google, and my admiration for a man with such a long and varied career crumbled around p15 of the search results when I noticed that many of the buildings I was looking at had been built long after my cousin’s death. Nothing’s ever simple.

Who designed this building?

a)  Stephen Salter, b) Stephen Salter, or c) Stephen Salter

(Examinations Hall and Laboratories

of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians)

I already knew that cousin Stephen’s father, b. Hammersmith c1801 (who I suppose is also a cousin, and is definitely, and inevitably, also called Stephen Salter) was also an architect. The father started out as an architect’s modeller, and at some point his son must have joined him in the practice – two sons in fact. Cousin Stephen’s brother Frederick Thomas Salter (c1830-1866) was an architect too, from at least the age of 21 until his untimely death.

Is it confusing things to mention at this stage that cousin Stephen had a son b. Wesminster c1859, also called Stephen, who mercifully was not an architect but a physician surgeon? I think not, because his medical career rules out the possibility that this third generation is responsible for the buildings designed after cousin Stephen’s death.

Instead, I have found a Stephen Salter b. Ryde on the Isle of Wight 1861, who was also (yep) an architect and was also (yep) “son of Stephen Salter.” Pretty sure he’s not one of mine, but further proof of parental fondness for the alliterative arts.

Who designed this building?

a)  Stephen Salter, b) Stephen Salter, or c) Stephen Salter

(Wesley Hall, now Cowley Road Methodist Church, Oxford)

So there we are: three architects, three Stephen Salters (or six if you include all the ones I’ve mentioned who were mere relatives of architects). The next problem is to sort out who designed which building – and there was a period in the 1860s and 1870s when all three were alive.

I think that’s enough for now! More confusion next week when I list the buildings I know about and try to allocate them to the right architect. (Some pretty impressive buildings, by the way.)

THOMAS GURNEY (c1636-c1688) AND THE PRICELESS POCKET KNIFE

My 7x great grandfather Thomas Gurney of Bedfordshire was already shrouded in the mists of time when my 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney wrote his “Particulars,” a biography of himself “and his immediate ancestors,” in 1845. Even in 1845, details were sketchy.

WBG would dearly have loved to match this Thomas with a Thomas who was of the great Gurney family of Norfolk, ancestors of whom had come over from Gournay in Normandy with William the Conqueror and actually fought at the Battle of Hastings). But in genealogical terms it is only considered “probable.” Personally I’d have been frustrated not to be able to prove the connection – Hastings, that’s some pedigree – but for WBG, Thomas had another, more certain and far more impressive connection.

William Brodie Gurney was a prominent non-conformist campaigner in his day. Many of his children would either become or marry non-conformist ministers, continuing a proud tradition of religious dissent which stretched back … well, at least four generations, to Thomas Gurney of Bedfordshire.

George Fox (1624-1691)

founding father of the Society of Friends

Thomas was a Quaker, and an almost exact contemporary of George Fox (1624-1691), the founder of that Society of Friends, as it was more formally known. More than that, Thomas was at one time travelling with Fox as the latter went about the country preaching his disaffection with the established Church of England. Reception was sometimes hostile, sometimes even violent. In Derby in 1650 Fox was imprisoned (and not for the first time) for blasphemy – and when in court he commanded the judge to “tremble at the word of the Lord,” the judge mockingly described Fox and his followers as “quakers.” The name stuck!

The following year Fox went to Lichfield with a party of Friends, a party which must have included my ancestor Thomas. How do we know? Because in 1845 WBG told the story of a family treasure in the possession of his grandfather (also called Thomas Gurney) who was Quaker Thomas Gurney’s grandson: a well worn pocket knife, on the cover of which were carved the initials “T.G.” and the inscription “Given to me by George Fox at Lichfield.”

Whatever happened to that knife?! WBG’s grandfather died before he was born; did Wiliam’s father inherit it? Did he? Hang Hastings – I’d love to know where that pocket knife ended up.

Thomas the elder, for all his companionship with George Fox, eventually became a Baptist, a denomination which the next four generations of his family would actively serve in a variety of offices in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and London. But they kept that priceless pocketknife!

George Fox at Lichfield

a painting by Robert Spence (1871-1964)

(It was at Lichfield that Fox asked his friends to wait in the house while he obeyed a call from the Lord to go into town and proclaim “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!” It was only later, he claimed, that he learned of the legendary martyrdom of 1000 Christians there under the Roman emperor Diocletian in around 300 AD, which he presumed is what the Lord must have had in mind. But Lichfield was also the more recent scene, in 1612, of the last public burning for heresy in England. That would certainly have been fresher in the minds of dissenters only 39 years later.)

JOSEPH ANGUS (1816-1902) AND THE USEFUL SPURGEON

The advance of non-conformist congregations in the nineteenth century was a grand movement of empowerment for the ordinary people of England. They had for centuries been the little people, the fodder, the also-rans in the hierarchy of English social structure. Their place in society was to know their place, which was below, permanently below, those better than themselves – those above them, the wealthy and powerful.

Gradually it became clear that this social order was not fixed. It was possible to challenge it, to better yourself and change your position in that order. The Church of England of course had no interest in promoting this idea. Its higher clergy were the wealthy and powerful. It was up to the radicals, the Dissenters, to preach Change and a New Order. It was an early example of Liberation Theology.

Joseph Angus (1816-1902)

Baptist minister and educator,

engraved by Thomas Armitage in 1890

Non-conformists sought improvement on every level – spiritual, physical and social – and the key to self-improvement, or usefulness as they called it, was Education. My 3x great uncle Joseph Angus embraced this doctrine wholeheartedly. He had a thorough education himself – studying for the ministry at Stepney College in the east end of London, then graduating MA from Edinburgh – and liked it so much that he devoted most of his life to it.

He was appointed president of his alma mater Stepney in 1849, having earlier served for six years as its secretary. He remained at its helm until he stepped down in 1893 at the age of 77. Under his watch the college moved, in 1856, to a new location in Regent’s Park where it became more closely associated with University College London. UCL had originally been founded in 1828 by non-conformists (including my 3x great grandfather) whose sons were excluded from any other English universities.

The original buildings of Stepney College, founded 1810

As Regents Park College the institution moved once again, in 1928, to Oxford. It still thrives there, and one of its greatest assets is the incomparable Angus Library, built around his own enormous collection of non-conformist publications. Angus himself wrote prolifically. As well as theological texts his works included handbooks on English Language and Literature, in which he was an examiner much in demand.

He was also an energetic fundraiser. Before his presidency of Stepney he was for ten years secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, and in that time raised £32,000 to repay debts and expand its missionary operations. At Stepney he raised a similar amount to endow the college with scholarships for its students and professorial chairs for its teaching body.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Baptist minister and college non-attender

In one notable instance did Angus’s passion for education not prevail. In 1852 a young man called Charles Spurgeon arranged to meet Angus as president of Stepney College, at which the former was considering enrolling. An absent-minded servant ushered the two men into different rooms within the building, forgetting to tell each of the presence of the other. They never met, and soon afterwards Spurgeon decided not to attend Stepney.

Instead Spurgeon accepted a position as minister at New Park Street Chapel in Southwark, which had been Angus’ own first appointment as a Baptist pastor in 1838. Now he was concerned that Spurgeon should not “settle without thorough preparation. He may be useful in either case, but his usefulness will be much greater, he will fill at all events a wider sphere, with preparation than without it.”

Charles Spurgeon preaching at Surrey Music Hall, 1858

In fact Spurgeon turned out to be pretty “useful,” even without a higher education. He became without doubt the nineteenth century’s brightest Baptist star, a crowd-pulling and charismatic preacher. For him, New Park with its capacity for a mere 1200 worshippers had to be rebuilt as the 5000-seater Metropolitan Tabernacle. Joseph Angus spoke at the first of many memorial services for Spurgeon in 1892.

HENRY BAYLEY (1804-1875) AND THE GENTLEMEN'S GLEE CLUB

Henry Bayley was a first cousin of my great great grandmother Ellen Bayley. With his brothers William and Charles he inherited the family cotton mill, Bridge Street Mill in Stalybridge, Cheshire, from his mother. In the 1830s they set about a programme of improvement and expansion, building a new operation on the other side of the river Tame on a plot of land called “The Stakes," which became known as Bayley Street Mills. William and Charles eventually withdrew from the business leaving Henry in charge.

Plaque on Stalybridge Town Hall

commemorating the General Strike

which was sparked by William Bayley

I know nothing of Charles at all, I’m afraid. But William (who features in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby) was the Bayley responsible for triggering a national General Strike by his intransigent response to the Plug Riots of 1842 (see my earlier post). It is little wonder that he chose to play a less active part in mill ownership, having made himself so deeply unpopular with the workforce.

Henry, I feel, could not have been more different in temperament to his brother. As a young man he showed considerable promise as a musician, which must mark him out as a civilized man! He encouraged other local musicians, and was himself “a player of quality,” promoting several concerts at Stalybridge Town Hall. (By this I reckon he redeemed his brother William’s future role at the building – William became the town’s first mayor when it was incorporated in 1857!)

Henry by contrast was a prime mover in the setting up of the town’s “Gentlemen’s Glee Club.” These glee clubs were a popular feature of middle class life in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the towns and cities of northern England. They were originally dedicated to amateur choral performances, although in time they broadened to encompass other art forms. (In Manchester the world-renowned Halle Orchestra can trace its roots to the Manchester Gentlemen’s Glee Club.) Henry Bayley is credited with attracting “several celebrated London actors” to give performances in Stalybridge.

Stalybridge Harmonic Society

(Could one of the musicians be Henry Bayley?)

As if that were not enough, in 1844 he was a chief supporter of the new Stalybridge Harmonic Society, another choral body. This one was formed when the choir of King Street Chapel fell out with their minister! Thereby, surely, there hangs a tale worth digging out.

Maybe he was just driven to save the good name of Bayley in the wake of his brother William’s exploits. As William was serving his third and final term as mayor, Henry was subscribing to the inaugural New Year’s Day Aged Persons’ Tea Party for the over-70s. The event ran from 1860 until at least 1907, when Samuel Hill’s wonderful book Bygone Stalybridge (from which I get most of what I know of Henry) was published.

Sadly I cannot relate whether Henry ever attended the tea party as an eligible guest. He died, suddenly, at the age of 71; so his opportunities were few. But he left a cultural mark on Stalybridge which long outlived him.

(I should mention one other aspect of his life which may also have placed him firmly opposite his older brother William. In 1841, the year before the Plug Riots, Henry was chairman of the local branch of the Anti-Monopoly League, a society connected to the Anti-Corn Law League and to the Chartists whose agitation was behind the riots. When Henry assumed control of the family mill years later, he must have had a very different approach to management and a very different attitude to his workforce.)

Both pictures are from the splendid archive of Tameside.gov.uk

ANNE DOUGLAS GAVINE (1870-1940) AND THE PASSING ZEPPELIN

I couldn’t help but notice after my recent blogpost that not one but two of my ancestors have had their whisky premises bombed out of existence in time of war. There was the Bristol Whisky Distillery, destroyed during the blitz on that city in December 1940 (admittedly some 113 years after the death of its former owner my 3x great grandfather Thomas Castle). And in an earlier conflict, the blended whisky warehouse in Leith part-owned by my great grandfather James Piper received a direct hit during the First World War.

I wrote a while ago about the reminiscences of one sailor in port at the time; he made the most of the gallons of “stagger juice” released by this explosion, which were flowing along the gutters of Leith like rain. Last week I came across some old notes I’d made from conversations with my grandmother in the 1980s, and they include a reference to the attack from a very different perspective.

I’d quite forgotten I’d made them – they date from an earlier and false start on the trail of my family tree and ended up as things do in a box of unrelated items buried at the back of the attic. Although my wife despairs, I thank goodness sometimes that I am a keeper and hoarder of archives – you just never know when they may throw up something worth the keeping and hoarding …

James Piper was very much alive at the time of the Leith bombing. After that event he got out of whisky and into farming; but at the time, he and his family were living in Cluny Gardens, a genteel street south of Edinburgh city centre and some distance away from Edinburgh’s northeastern port of Leith. Some of the grand houses of the area had been built by a Mr Gavine, the father of James' wife, Anne, including other houses in Cluny Gardens and in nearby Midmar Avenue.

Anne Douglas Piper nee Gavine (1870-1940)

On the night of 2^nd April 1916, when their youngest daughter my grandmother Jean was nearly eight years old, Anne came into Jean’s bedroom and gently roused her. “Jean, wake up! I want you to see something.” My Granny stirred sleepily. “Come over to window and look outside. Something you’ve never seen before.” Jean was wide awake now and curious. “What, mummy?” And Anne replied, “There’s a zeppelin at the window!”

Zeppelin L14, one of two which carried out the raid on Edinburgh

on the night of 2^nd/3^rd April 1916

(pic from Edinburgh’s War)

Well that got Granny rushing across the room and, with the lights out to preserve the blackout, opening the curtains onto the bright moonlit night. The scene is so vivid, and that must be because of the way Granny told it to me 25 years ago. Sure enough, there was a dirigible in sight over Edinburgh – an unforgettable sight, and made all the more memorable the next day when Granny’s father James came home with a piece of melted glass two inches thick from the burnt ruins of his warehouse. The bomb which fell there had caused £44,000 of damage.

The zeppelins also targeted Edinburgh Castle,

hitting Castle Rock and nearby streets

including this spot in the Grassmarket outside the White Hart Inn

Repelled from the port by naval batteries the zeppelins turned towards Edinburgh itself and dropped several more bombs including one which plunged through three storeys of a tenement building in Marchmont Terrace very near Cluny Gardens, but failed to detonate. (The Edinburgh Evenings News has an excellent article about the raid.)

I met an astronomer last night who talked of how he works back from the known to the unknown; from evidence present in the universe now he and his colleagues can find their way back by deduction to how things must have been only a few million years after the Big Bang which started it all. I feel the same way about Annie Gavine. I never met her and can never know her. But through conversations with my mother and grandmother who did, I can imagine.

THOMAS CASTLE (1767-1827) AND THE CHEESE LANE DISTILLERY

I have my fair share of the alcohol trade in my family tree! I am tantalisingly close to finding a link with the Salter brewing family of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, although that may just be wishful thinking. And my great grandfather James Piper definitely had a whisky warehouse in Leith which was bombed during the Great War.

Although the bombing is notable, the presence of bonded warehouses in Leith is not. Leith is in Scotland, after all! However, my 3x great grandfather Thomas Castle was a whisky distiller a century earlier and in an altogether more surprising location.

Thomas Castle (1767-1827)

Bristol Distiller

Bristol is not the first place you think of when you think of a drop of Scotch. But there was a thriving spirits industry there – at least five distilleries were in business there at the start of the nineteenth century. One of the oldest was the one owned in 1821 by Thomas Castle, in the city’s Cheese Lane. I don’t know when or how he first came into possession of Cheese Lane, which was established around 1761. Thomas' father was a Presbyterian minister in rural Hatherleigh in Devon, 100 miles to the west of Bristol, where the decline of the wool industry caused many to migrate to the cities in the late 18^th century.

It’s unfortunate that most of Bristol’s wealth was built on what is known euphemistically as the Triangular Trade. Brandy and other goods from Britain went to Africa to pay for slaves, who were taken to the West Indies in exchange for sugar and rum, which went to Britain, which sent brandy and other goods to Africa …

Georgian Bristol Blue Glass decanters

for rum, brandy and Hollands (gin - originally Dutch)

Bristol was a centre of apple brandy production for a while, particularly during times of war with France when French brandy was not available. After the British victory over the French at Waterloo (1813), and with the slave trade in terminal decline, the fortunes of British brandies also suffered. The Bristol Whisky Distillery, as the Cheese Lane manufactory was known, went from strength to strength however. Barley fields next to the distillery in the St Phillips area of Bristol supplied its pot stills, and the results were shipped to London and beyond.

Thomas Castle would have been unable to capitalise on the invention of the patent still in 1826, just a year before his death. But such stills were eventually installed and contributed to the survival of the factory, allowing for more efficient mass production of grain spirit. After Thomas’ death in 1827 it passed out of the family. But it continued under various ownerships until 6^th December 1940, when the blitz which destroyed so many of Bristol’s old streets and buildings also called “Last Orders” on the Cheese Lane Distillery. The flames of the burning spirits must have reached high into the night sky, and the bombs that landed in Cheese Lane that night also took the lives of a fireman, two members of the Home Guard and a civilian.

A raid two weeks before the Cheese Lane bombing

had already reduced much of the centre of Bristol to rubble

 Bristol historian Paul Townsend's website, The Changing Face of Bristol, is a rich source of stories and images of Bristol, including the above photograph of Wine Street on the morning of 25^th November 1940.

CAPTAIN AUSTIN SAMUEL COOPER (1835-1897) AND THE FAMILY HOME

Captain Austin Cooper, whose maritime career I described in an earlier post, retired (I believe) from the sea in 1878. It must have been a wrench, after a life of routine and duty aboard ship which must have lasted twenty or thirty years. But unexpectedly, at the age of 43, duty of a different sort called.

Austin’s eldest brother Samuel died in 1877, only 47 years old and unmarried. Austin had to come back to dry land to take over the running of the family estate and the family home which he had inherited – Killenure Castle near the village of Dundrum in Co Tipperary.

Killenure Castle in 1793

Killenure Castle was, reputedly, the stronghold of the O’Dwyer clan, who built it in the late 16^th century. It may already have been ruinous by 1640 but it fell, so the story goes, to Oliver Cromwell’s troops as they ruthlessly suppressed Catholicism in Ireland between 1649 and 1653. When I visited it in 2004, I was told that you could still hear the ghostly screams of the O’Dwyers, whom the English soldiers burnt alive within its walls.

Unlike many English families arriving in Ireland in the wake of Cromwell’s visit, who acquired huge tracts of land at the expense of the old Irish Catholic nobility, the Coopers did not benefit from such atrocities. In fact they came to Ireland rather reluctantly after the restoration of the monarchy (see my earlier post about Austin the first Cooper settler). The burnt-out castle changed hands a few times after the O’Dwyers forfeited it, before my 5x great grandfather William Cooper bought both the ruin and a modest single-storey thatched house beside it in 1746. Much extended since then the house became and remained the Cooper family home for the next 217 years. (One of seafaring Captain Cooper’s first acts on returning to Killenure in 1878 was to get married, obviously feeling that a family home should have a mother as well as a father figure!)

Killenure Castle in 1850

Living in a castle, or at least in a Georgian mansion beside one, isn’t always as glamorous or romantic as it sounds. Doreen Cooper, Austin Samuel’s granddaughter recollected: “At Killenure, we had no electricity, no water … [and] no telephone - no refrigerator, but we had five indoor servants, a groom, a chauffeur and a gardener. We also had no central heating and the limestone walls used to run with water on damp days.”

It was a note by my great grandmother on the back of a faded photograph of Killenure – her mother’s “old home,” she wrote (see my earlier post) – that got me started on research into my whole family tree. And Violet Cooper, widow of the late Austin Francis Cooper of Killenure (who most reluctantly sold it to the Irish Land Commission in 1963), recalled the happy centuries passed there when she wrote: “Our beautiful old home, Killenure Castle”; “all the ancestors hanging in their huge frames on the dining room walls”; “all the glorious treasures, the silver and antiques.”

Killenure Castle in 1960

If my seafaring Austin Samuel Cooper felt a wrench when leaving the sea after 30 years, imagine how it must have felt for Austin Francis Cooper to give up Killenure after more than two centuries? The treasures and pictures are all dispersed now; but the warmth and affection for the place in the hearts of any Cooper you speak to, those remain. 

Killenure Castle in 2010

CAPTAIN AUSTIN SAMUEL COOPER (1835-1897) AND THE SILVER MEDAL AT SEA

Another Austin Cooper from my collection! This one’s grandfather was my 3x great grandfather, so we’re cousins of a kind. Austin Samuel Cooper was one of three seafaring brothers from a family with a tradition of army rather than marine service. His brother Commander Astley Cooper RN died at home aged 29 of typhoid which presumably he contracted overseas; Edward Cooper was a Captain in the Mercantile Marine who drowned at sea. Austin survived.

Captain Austin Samuel Cooper (1835-1897)

Austin signed on with the Merchant Navy as a midshipman with the Green Blackwall Shipping Line. A book by Basil Lubbock, “The Blackwall Frigates,” charts the line’s history. In the preface he writes:

“They were first class ships – well-run, happy ships, and the sailor who started his sea life as a midshipman aboard a Blackwaller looked back ever afterwards to his cadet days as the happiest period of his career. … The training was superb, as witness the number of Blackwall midshipmen who reached the head of their profession and distinguished themselves later in other walks of life.”

Green Line’s SS Carlisle Castle

(by Thomas Goldsworth Dutton, c1868)

Lubbock might have had Austin in mind when he wrote this! Austin advanced through the ranks during his time at Green’s and in 1868 was appointed Commander of the newly launched sailing ship the Carlisle Castle. She had been built specially for the company’s London to Australia run, and Austin remained at her helm for nine years.

The Carlisle Castle was only the second of the company’s ships to be built of iron. Dicky Green, the son of the founder, who had died in 1863, was very much against them; and the introduction of iron ships is considered to have spelt the beginning of the end of the Green Line’s heyday. Her heavy rigging slowed her down considerably when wet, but she was nevertheless a solid, reliable workhorse on the run between London and Melbourne.

Her best times for the run – 80 days going out and 87 coming back – were achieved on what was probably Austin’s last trip as Captain. The return leg, against the prevailing Westerlies, was achieved in race conditions against three fast ships of the wool fleet who were also on their way home. Austin will have been disappointed that his best day on that journey only made 270 nautical miles, because he had on earlier trips occasionally broken the 300 barrier. But he came in second of the four ships, an honourable end to a successful career.

Green Line’s SS Seringapatam

(by Thomas Goldsworth Dutton, after 1843)

on which the SS Agincourt was modelled

 

He earlier served as Second Officer on another Green Liner, the Agincourt, which made the same Melbourne run. It was while in Port Philip Bay at Melbourne, on the 26^th March 1860, that Second Officer Cooper saved a man’s life. I don’t know the exact details of the situation, but I have elsewhere read the sad story of a Midshipman Reynolds. Reynolds first fell into the sea from the high rigging of the Agincourt in high winds two years after Cooper's heroic act. He survived that fall, but not another one six months later from another ship, the Alfred, when Reynolds was attacked and killed in the water by sea birds before the lifeboats could get to him. Perhaps the former Midshipman Cooper acted in similar circumstances to save a life at sea.

Cooper’s more successful rescue won him the Silver Medal of the Royal Humane Society. (The Society, originally called The Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned, was formed in 1774 by two doctors keen to promote the new medical technique of resuscitation, following a series of unfortunate burials of victims who were not in fact quite dead. The Society still exists today.)

The flag of the Green Blackwall Line

More on Austin Cooper’s life after maritime service in my next blog.

In addition to Basil Lubbock's book Blackwall Frigates, some information in this article comes from the Royal Humane Society's website, some from the National Maritime Musuem's splendid Blackwall Green webpages, and some from Richard Austin-Cooper's Butterhill and Beyond.

FRANCIS HUGH MASSY (c1822-1901), THE LAND LEAGUE AND THE UNPOPULAR HUT

I was writing recently about the history of Suir Castle and its Massy family occupants, which I have been putting together with the help of several people who got in touch via this blog. One of them sent me this snippet of Irish life as reported in Hansard, the official record of proceedings at the British Houses of Parliament.

27^th March 1882

SIR WILLIAM HART DYKE asked Mr Attorney General for Ireland, if his attention had been called to the position and case of Mr F Massy, of Suir Castle, Golden: whether it is true that, at the request of the Government, Mr Massy gave a piece of ground for the erection of a police hut; whether in consequence of this loyal act, he has been Boycotted, and deserted by his domestic servants and farm labourers; and whether the Government intend to take any steos for the relief of Mr Massy, and to supply him with assistance to work his farm, now out of cultivation owing to his loyal aid offered to the Government?

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR IRELAND (MR W.M. JOHNSON) The Chief Secretary requests me to inform the right hon. Baronet that his attention has been given to the position and case of Mr Massy, of Suir Castle; that it is the fact that Mr Massy, at the request of the Government gacve a site for the erection of a police hut; and that, in consequence of this act in the interests of law and order by Mr Massy, he has been “Boycotted,” and has been deserted by his domestic servants and by his farm labourers. I have only to add that the Chief Secretary will see that anything in the power of the Government shall be done to alleviate Mr Massy’s position.

Francis Massy, who owned Suir Castle House and its surrounding 330 acres of farmland,  was descended in a different branch from my 5x great grandfather Hugh, First Lord Massy - his great grandfather. It’s a fascinating little exchange in Hansard, not least because it uses the word Boycotted. These days it’s a very familiar idea, the withdrawal of economic support for political ends. But in 1882 the expression was only two years old, having arisen from a situation exactly like Massy’s. Captain Charles Boycott was a ruthless land agent in Co Mayo. When he began evicting tenants for non-payment of rent (they had asked for a reduction because of a bad harvest), the whole community ostracised him: farmhands refused to work his fields, shops would not serve him, tradesmen wouldn’t come to his house, the postman even refused to deliver his mail.

Captain Charles Boycott (1832-1897)

It wasn’t an isolated action, but the first implementation of a policy devised by Charles Stewart Parnell for the Irish National Land League. The Land League aimed to stop evictions and reduce rents. Its tactics were to boycott landlords, and also anyone who applied for the tenancy of a farm from which a landlord had evicted the tenants. Its leadership came up with the verb “to boycott” because they didn’t think the ordinary Irish people would understand the word “ostracise.”

I don’t know whether Massy’s application for assistance was successful. Charles Boycott used the British press to draw attention to this new tactic by the Irish Nationalists. A Boycott Relief Fund was set up and well supported. A force of 50 Orangemen from Co Cavan was dispatched to Co Mayo to save the Captain's harvest, protected from violent protests along the way by around 1000 policemen and a regiment of troops. The whole operation cost around £10,000, for the sake of salvaging Boycott’s crops which were subsequently valued at about £350.

Police guarding the Orangemen’s camp

at Lough Mask House, Boycott’s home, November 1880

It seems unlikely that, two years into this Land War (which lasted until 1892), Massy’s plight would have attracted the same support. The Massy family had come to Ireland with that enemy of Irish nationalism Oliver Cromwell, and seem to have done little to ingratiate themselves with the local population in the intervening 200 years. According to my correspondent, they “had a reputation for being very difficult and tough landlords. Evictions were apparently common and there was quite a bit of ill-feeling towards them amongst the locals.” He had spoken to someone who told him a story of a barracks on Francis Massy's land being blown up, resulting in repercussions for the locals. Offering a piece of land for a police station to suppress the Land League will not have improved Massy’s standing in the community.

A nice little family footnote to this story – the notes for Hansard were being taken by my great grandfather William Henry Gurney Salter, who was Official Shorthand Writer to the Houses of Parliament at the time. Massy and Salter bloodlines would meet in the following generation!

JANE FARQUHAR REID (1833-1920) AND THE GOLDEN WEDDING

I have so far avoided the cliché that every picture tells a story. It seems to me more the case that there are many pictures that don’t explain themselves – that need someone to tell their story for them. A photograph of a big cake decorated with the words “Happy Golden Wedding Anniversary John and Jean Piper” is clear enough; but what on earth, for example, is going on here?

John and Jean Piper on their golden wedding anniversary, 1917

John Piper and Jane Farquhar Reid, my great great grandparents, sitting in a bed! They were married in Sorn in Ayrshire in June 1857. It was something of a shotgun wedding, and their first child Mary was born the following September. Nevertheless, it was an enduring partnership, and their ruby wedding anniversary in 1897 was an occasion for a great family celebration.

John and Jean Piper’s ruby wedding anniversary, 1897

Joining them in the lane behind Barshouse, their home in Sorn, were (for the record), L-R:

Anne Gavine who the following year married their son James; their son Tom (see my earlier post about his bicycle shop); Kate Reid who married their son William; Maggie, who would marry bicycle Tom six years later; their son James, my great grandfather (see my post about his whisky warehouse); John and Jean at the heart of things; behind them John’s brother James (who would die only two years later); Jane’s sister Margaret and her husband (Mr Kirkland); behind them John and Jean’s son William; and the Lymburners (who we know were related somehow to John or Jane!).

That’s the story of that picture. But what about the first one? It’s reputedly John and Jane’s golden wedding anniversary, although it’s also reputedly “around 1918,” which would make it their diamond anniversary instead. It doesn’t matter: the date isn’t the story. Why were they celebrating it with a risqué two-in-a-bed anniversary photograph in their 70s or 80s? The truth, and the story of the picture, is this: Jane was confined to bed, not by age or love but by a cow which had kicked her a few days before.

That’s not the story of John and Jane’s marriage of course. When Jane died in 1920 (at Barshouse, and probably in that bed) their shotgun marriage had lasted 63 years. No doubt it had its ups and downs, but the fondness which started it all persisted to the end. John died only a year later.