HUGH PIPER (1885-1917), THE TRAMS AND THE RUNAWAY TRAIN

“Chum” isn’t a word you see in print very often. But there it is in the Ayrshire Post’s report of the funeral of Hugh Piper, my grandmother’s distant cousin. “Lance-Corporal Haswell, a chum of the deceased” broke the news to Hugh’s parents, and accompanied the coffin on its procession from church to cemetery.

My Piper line’s origins are in Ayrshire in southwest Scotland. Although my grandmother’s branch had migrated to the capital, Edinburgh, most had stayed in the area. It was Hugh’s father who brought his branch from its rural roots into Ayr, the county town. There, by 1901 and aged 16, he had a job as an apprentice coach painter with the newly established Ayr Tramway Company. It was a steady, secure, respectable job and four years later Hugh married an Ayr mill-worker, Sarah McConnachie. 

An Ayr Corporation Tramcar, 

probably painted and driven by Hugh Piper;

Trams ran in Ayr from 1901 to 1931. 

Over the next nine years they had six children, the last two – twins – born in May 1914 just two months before the outbreak of the First World War. Hugh had just turned 29. With a large family and good employment prospects with the town corporation, where he was now a tram driver, Hugh was in no hurry to volunteer to fight. Indeed, the rush to enlist nationally was so great that there was no shortage of soldiers to send to the front.

But as the number of dead began to soar, volunteers became thinner on the ground. Britain was running out of cannon fodder and in January 1916 conscription of men aged 18 to 41 was introduced. At first only single men were called up, but the new compulsory enlistment failed to solve the problem. There was soon a huge backlog of appeals by men seeking exemption on the grounds of conscientious objection, health or employment in civilian occupations essential to the war effort. Running the trams did not fall in any of those categories. In May 1916 conscription was extended to married men; Hugh did not immediately receive his papers, but in due course he joined the 4^th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

 Carriages and engine heading downhill from Catterick Camp 

(photo taken in 1950s)

He was not alone, and many of his chums at the tram depot went off with him to their basic training at Catterick Army Camp in North Yorkshire. When their training was complete in September 1917 they were allowed home on leave before being sent off to war. They marched up from the camp to its railway station at 3.30am on 15^th September, where their carriages (not yet hitched to an engine) were waiting. In his letter to Hugh’s parents, his chum William Haswell takes up the story:

“We had some time to wait. I spoke to Hughie as we were sitting on our kitbags together – little did we know it was for the last time. Hugh got into No. 1 carriage, and just as I was about to climb into mine the carriages began to move, and I slipped off again until the train would stop.

“But it did not stop, and some of us were left standing, hoping there would not be an accident. We waited in suspense until the sergeant came back and reported that the carriages had overturned and many were hurt. A party set off at once. I was one of them, and we met two men walking back with bandaged hands. It was a dreadful scene. When we got there the carriages were in all positions, some right over with their wheels in the air, and others smashed to matchwood.

“I asked people if they had seen Hughie, but no one had. The first man I saw was Donald Hogg, and he had been helped out of the debris. He was cut about the head and body, but able to walk. Then I met Aitken, his face cut and covered with blood. Neither had seen Hughie.

“Later, I saw some men take someone from underneath the carriage and carry him to a wooden hut. I went with an officer to see if it was one of the men from my platoon. When they removed the coats, I saw the back of his head. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘is it Piper?’ Then the next thing I remember was the officer saying, ‘Come away old chap, we can do no good.’ Hughie must have been killed instantaneously.”

Lance Corporal Hugh Piper (1885-1917)

Four men died in the accident, and at least two of Piper’s and Haswell’s Ayr tramway colleagues – Hogg and Aitken – were injured. An inquest into why the brakes of the carriages had not been applied that night could only guess that escaped German prisoners of war might be to blame. The weight of the men boarding the wagons had been enough to send them on their way down the steep incline which led away from the platform, until, travelling at over 60 miles an hour, they came to a curve and derailed.

The route of Hugh’s last journey was lined by thousands of Ayr citizens. It followed the tramline which Hugh himself once drove. Mourners including his chum and his father went either on foot or in a heavily draped Ayr Corporation tramcar which followed the cortege. Hugh’s coffin was accompanied by the brass band of the Royal Scots Fusiliers and a funeral party of his military colleagues, who fired three volleys at the graveside before sounding the Last Post. He was, reported the Ayrshire Post, most popular and highly esteemed by all who knew him.

RUSSELL GURNEY (1804-1878) AND THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON

When my ancestral cousin the British MP Russell Gurney died in 1878, he rather surprisingly received a transatlantic obituary from the New York Times. Russell, a first cousin of my great great grandmother Emma, had a successful career in England both as a lawyer and as a Member of Parliament for Southampton. But what interest did New York have in a southern English Conservative?

The Right Honorable Russell Gurney was the Recorder for London, an MP from 1865 till his death, and from 1866 a member of the Privy Council following his service as a commissioner on the enquiry into the Jamaica rebellion of 1865. The rebellion, which broke out at Morant Bay in Jamaica, was a protest at the slowness of change following the abolition of slavery in 1834, something many of Russell’s ancestors including his great aunt Martha had fought for.

The Right Hon. Russell Gurney QC, MP (1804-1878)

pictured in Vanity Fair in 1871

Within parliament he was given responsibility for the details of a number of significant new Acts including the Married Women’s Property Act (1870) and the Medical Act (1876), the latter making it possible for women to practise as doctors. I write this with some pride as my own niece is about to enroll in Medical School.

These achievements alone would be enough admire Russell for. But in 1871 he was dispatched to America to oversee the legal details of the Treaty of Washington then being negotiated between Britain and the U.S. The Treaty was the result of talks to resolve a couple of delicate issues which had been overshadowing U.S./British relations since the Civil War; and it seems that by his skills of tact and diplomacy Gurney ensured the smooth application of the Treaty’s terms. Widely respected as a politician in Britain, he was also appreciated in America for expressing “high admiration for the United States and his pleasure that an amicable settlement of the differences with England had been arrived at.” (So said the New York Times.)

The Treaty of Washington addressed two mains areas of conflict between the two governments: the northwestern border between the U.S. and Canada, which had been under dispute since the glorious Pig and Potato War of 1859; and the damage caused by British-built warships sold to the Confederate side during the American Civil War of 1861-1865.

CSS Alabama (right) sinks USS Hatteras, 11^th January 1863

The Alabama was built by John Laird of Birkenhead and crewed by British mercenaries

In the latter matter, Britain was found to have breached its neutrality by supplying ships (particularly the CSS Alabama), which were subsequently used to attack the American merchant and naval fleets. Under the new treaty, Britain apologised for the damage caused (without admitting liability) and paid America the sum of $15.5 million – considerably less than the U.S.’s original demand of either $2 billion or the transfer of all Canadian territories to U.S. control.

As for the Pig War, the precise path of the U.S.-Canadian border through the cluster of small islands between Vancouver Island and Washington State had been the subject first of confusion (because of poor early map-making) and then disagreement. Things came to a head after both Britain’s Hudson Bay Company and a handful of American pioneers occupied the largest little island, strategically important San Juan.

There, in 1859, an American farmer, Lyman Cutlar, shot a pig belonging to an Irish Canadian farmer, Charles Griffin, for eating American potatoes. When Griffin complained, Cutlar told him to control his animals, and Griffin retorted that it was up to Cutlar to keep his potatoes out of Griffin’s pig. When British troops threatened to arrest Cutlar, American troops were called in to back up the settlers. No shots were fired (except at the pig) and an eventually friendly truce existed for twelve years between the northern (British) and southern (American) halves of the island. Finally, as a result of the Treaty of Washington, an independent tribunal headed by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany awarded San Juan to the U.S.

San Juan Island’s British and American Camps are still celebrated 140 years after the outbreak of war between the two countries

(The emerging Dominion of Canada, it should be noted, were not at all happy with the settlement, which included not only the loss of territory but the permission of U.S. fishing boats to hunt in Canadian coastal waters. Only the sweetener of a cash payment for the fishing rights, and a guaranteed loan of £4 million to Canada for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, enabled the Treaty’s ratification in the Canadian Parliament.)

To this day the British flag still flies over the site of the British camp on San Juan, raised and lowered daily by U.S. Park Rangers. It is a symbol of the so-called special relationship between the two countries, which has flourished unbroken (more or less) since Russell Gurney helped to resolve these outstanding issues back in 1871.

TUDOR RALPH CASTLE (1882-1916) AND THE DREADNOUGHT HOAX

My great uncle Tudor looks strained and miserable in his official army portrait. He enlisted in 1915, but army life cannot possibly have suited him; before he signed up he was a gentle playful soul, a poet, a loving brother to his sister my grandmother May Castle … and a friend and partner in crime of the greatest practical joker of the twentieth century.

 

Tudor Ralph Castle (1882-1916)

described by Virginia Woolf as “tinged with romanticism”

Five years earlier he was part of a notorious hoax perpetrated against the Royal Navy, which made the so-called senior service of the British military machine look very foolish indeed. The hoax was devised by Horace de Vere Cole, a friend from Tudor’s Cambridge University days and, like Tudor, part of the wider circle centred on the Bloomsbury Group of radical artists and writers.

Horace de Vere Cole (1881-1936)

who described Tudor as “so noble as to be unique and therefore not easy for outsiders to see”

Tudor and Horace were already seasoned pranksters. During the 1906 British General Election they and a third joker, Dummer Howard (Tudor’s future brother-in-law), had staged a spoof hustings, masquerading as politicians. Horace led off proceedings with an interminable and meaningless political speech from the podium. As anticipated, the audience grew restless and began to heckle the speaker – and that was the trio’s cue for fun. We are used these days to seeing unpopular politicians pelted with rotten eggs; but on this occasion Tudor and Dummer turned the tables and suddenly began hurling eggs into the crowd. Brilliantly subversive of convention!

H.M.S. Dreadnought (launched in 1905)

In 1910 Horace’s plan was audacious – to disguise himself and his friends as a group of visiting dignitaries from Abyssinia and con their way into a state inspection of the navy’s flagship, HMS Dreadnought. It was classic Cole – puncturing the pomposity of authority, in this case by taking advantage of imperial Britain’s eagerness to show off its might to “lesser” countries. The stunt was to take place during the election campaign of early 1910, an election triggered in part by the rejection of a budget which proposed building four more Dreadnought-type ships at a cost of £1.5 million each.

The Abyssinian royal party and their British guide and interpreter

L-R: Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, Horace Cole

To cut a long story short, the prank was a huge success. Cole’s friends, dressed up by a London theatrical costumier, travelled down to Weymouth by train, learning a little Abyssinian on the way from a phrase book for missionaries to the country. They were met with great ceremony which included – the band being unable to find the sheet music for the Abyssinian national anthem – the playing of the anthem of Zanzibar. They were shown around the ship by Admiral May, and returned by a different rail route to London, undetected even by Cole’s cousin who was a member of the ship’s crew.

The key to the whole operation was their sudden arrival, announced by a telegram which left the navy no time for questions about its authenticity. It was Tudor who sent that telegram, without which there would simply have been no prank. When Cole, an incurable self-publicist, leaked the story to the press, it entertained the public and embarrassed the navy, forcing them to review their security procedures. They decided not to prosecute the perpetrators for fear of further public ridicule.

HMS Dreadnought's log has been doctored, but Tudor Castle’s telegram to the Royal Navy, 7^th February 1910, survives

Uncle Tudor’s unseen role in it remained unknown until, naively, he wrote to the Great Western Railway a month later, requesting a refund on return train tickets which the “Abyssinians” had bought but not used. Police matched his handwriting to that of the original telegram order. But he too escaped legal action. Perhaps his death at the Somme is the reason that this wonderful illustration of his playfulness has not been passed down in our family. The tale was never told, and I only found out about it last month thanks to a message from a reader of this blog. (Thanks, Ralph!)

The Dreadnought Hoax, Adrian Stephen’s published account of the stunt, and The Sultan of Zanzibar, Martyn Downer’s biography of Cole, both give far greater detail of the hoax itself than I can include here. I recommend them both.

SIR JOHN BOWRING (1792-1872) AND THE KING OF SIAM

“Polymath” is the word regularly applied to my 3x great uncle John. He turned his agile mind to everything from translation to devising Britain’s decimal currency. He was an active industrialist and politician; and in the latter capacity he was both a trouble-maker and a trouble-shooter for the British government.

There’s not much more trouble you can make than dragging your country into a war. That’s what Uncle John did in 1856 while governor of the British colony of Hong Kong – the Second Opium War, all his doing, raged on until 1860. It was sparked by his rather high-handed, imperious stand-off with his opposite number the Chinese Imperial Commissioner in Canton. That typically British imperial over-confidence may have been encouraged in him by his success as a negotiating trouble-shooter the year before.

Sir John Bowring 1792-1872

trouble-shooter and trouble-maker

sculpted in 1857 by François-Félix Roubaud

In 1855 Sir John was dispatched to Siam (modern-day Thailand) to negotiate a trade treaty with the country’s King Mongkut. It was a fairly one-sided negotiation, if the truth be told. Britain had recently demonstrated its military might in the region with victory in the First Opium War. Its response to a failed negotiation with Siam five years earlier was the threat of gunboat diplomacy – the same threat with which Sir John triggered the Second Opium War in 1856, and the same threat which now helped to conclude what's now known as the Bowring Treaty.

The treaty opened Bangkok up to international trade, and other diplomats more or less duplicated the Bowring agreement in negotiating for their own countries. In return, Siam’s independence was guaranteed by the most important world powers of the time. So in effect my great great great uncle’s work kick-started the modern economic development of Thailand and trade in general across Southeast Asia (the Second Opium War notwithstanding!).

L-R: Anna Leonowens (1831-1915) painted c1900 by Robert Harris);

King Mongkut of Siam (1804-1868) photographed c1865 by John Thompson)

One of the unexpected benefits of the new British freedoms within Siam was the employment of an English schoolteacher, Anna Leonowens, in the education of King Mongkut’s wives and children. She taught at the royal court in Bangkok from 1862 to 1868, and her experiences there were fictionalised by author Margaret Landon in her 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam. The novel was filmed with Irene Dunn as Anna and Rex Harrison as the king in 1946, and the film’s success prompted the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein to write a stage musical with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner in the lead roles.

Anna played by Irene Dunne, Gertrude Lawrence and Deborah Kerr

Their musical The King and I opened in 1951 and a film version was released five years later with Brynner again as Mongkut and Deborah Kerr taking on Anna in place of the late Gertrude Lawrence. Two other screen interpretations of the story, both called Anna and the King, have been made: a 1972 TV series with Brynner playing opposite Samantha Eggar, and a 1999 non-musical film adaptation of the Landon novel, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat. A cartoon version of the musical appeared in 1999 with Miranda Richardson voicing Anna and Martin Vidnovic the king. (Christiane Noll sang Anna's songs.)

Anna played by Samantha Eggar, Miranda Rchardson and Jodie Foster

Just think, if it hadn’t been for Sir John Bowring’s diplomatic skills and Britain’s naval rule of the south-east Asian waves, we might never have had a Second Opium War. But nor might we have had such show-stopping songs as Hello Young Lovers and Getting To Know You. History is full of what-ifs.

I'm delighted to add in August 2014 that a new biography of Sir John Bowring has just been published. "Free Trade's First Missionary" is written by Sir John's descendent Philip Bowring and deals with his time in Europe and Asia. Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, said of the new book: "This scholarly and very readable biography, written by one of Asia's most distinguished journalists, shows how free trade became part of Hong Kong's DNA." It's published by Hong Kong University Press and is available on Amazon as a real book and also in a Kindle edition. (And this blog is acknowledged in the introduction!)

THOMAS RICHARD GUPPY (1797-1882) AND THE MAUDSLAY MACHINES

I wrote earlier about my 3x great uncle Thomas’s contribution to the career of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of whom he was a lifelong friend and colleague. Thomas Guppy was closely associated with Brunel’s work on the Great Western Railway and the Great Western Steamship Company, which he backed not only financially but also professionally. For Thomas too was an innovative civil engineer.

He was driven from an early age towards the profession, not least by inventor parents Samuel and Sarah Guppy. They of course encouraged him, but others did not. At the age of eighteen and anxious to learn from the best, he presented himself for apprencticeship to none other than Henry Maudslay, the founding father of machine tooling, one of the great and relatively unsung heroes of the industrial revolution.

Henry Maudslay’s orginal screw-cutting lathe of 1797,

 now in London’s Science Museum

Without getting too technical, Maudslay’s work in improving machine tools such as lathes, presses and screw cutters quite simply made accurate mass production possible. Mass production reduced cost, and standardised components. For the first time components could be made in different factories to the same specifications, and assembled elsewhere. Before Maudslay, for example, any bolt had to be made along with its nut, because there was no guarantee that any other nut would fit it: if either item failed, you had to replace both. Without interchangeability and mass production, there would have been no industrial revolution.

Maudslay himself had been apprenticed at age eighteen to Joseph Bramah, the inventor of the hydraulic press. But in 1815 when Guppy came to him he seems to have forgotten the value of his own early training. Britain was no longer at war with France or anyone else, and large government engineering contracts had dried up. Maudslay, pessimistic for the future of his trade, showed Thomas his empty factory floor, the tools and machines idle and rusting. “All my earnings,” he complained, have been spent … in the extension of my works, and now I am about to be ruined. Go, and be any trade rather than that of an engineer.”

Plaque on Thomas Richard Guppy’s home on Berkeley Square, Bristol

(photo by Leo Reynolds)

Uncle Thomas travelled instead, first to America (where he unsuccessfully proposed a system for lighting New York City by gas); then to Europe (where he studied architecture and technical drawing at Leipzig, Dresden, Munich and Paris). Back in Britain in 1826 he and his brother took over the Friars Sugar Refinery in Bristol. But when Isambard Kingdom Brunel came to the city in 1830 to design the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Thomas‘s enthusiasm for his original calling returned. He ran away with the engineering circus, forming the Great Western Railway with Isambard and working alongside him for the next 29 years.

Despite Maudslay’s pessimistic outlook in 1815, that year had seen the first fruits of his move into the production of marine steam engines, when a 17 h.p. model built by his firm Maudslay & Field was installed in a Thames steamer called the Richmond. A Maudslay & Field engine powered H.M.S. Lightning, the first steamship commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1823. And in 1837, six years after his death, it was to Maudslay, Sons and Field that Guppy and Brunel turned when they wanted the best engines available for their world-shrinking transatlantic project, the S.S. Great Western. No hard feelings from Thomas Guppy then, for that earlier discouragement!

Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), pessimistic pioneer of the machine age

(lithograph by Charles Etienne Pierre Motte after Henri Grevedon)

RICHARD CHADWICK (1800-1827), THE BRIDGE AND THE GRACE-MARA VENDETTA

My 4x great uncle Richard Chadwick was murdered in circumstances remarkably similar to those surrounding the death of his cousins Austin Cooper and Francis Wayland twelve years later. Do such things run in families? In a sense yes – all three men were killed in their inherited roles as members of the hated ruling protestant class in Ireland.

Richard worked for his uncle Billy Sadleir as a land agent for the township of Rathcannon in Tipperary (Rathkennan on some of today’s maps), west of Holycross. Billy was a major landowner in the county and a leading Orangeman in Tipperary town, and Richard was according to one account “firm” in his dealings with Billy’s tenants.

Rathcannon, near Holycross, Co Tipperary

scene of rebellious acts in 1827 and 1848 which led directly to at least two murders,  eight hangings, and eight transportations

For “firm” read “ruthless.” Rents at that time were paid in the form of tithes to the protestant Church of Ireland, something which stuck in the craw of Catholic tenants. The Catholic Association was formed in 1823 to agitate for change, and its members did so through non-payment of rent. In 1827, two years into the job, Richard met such tactics by simply evicting tenants; they in turn responded by setting fire to houses and haybarns.

Richard was also the local magistrate; and his next move in the so-called Tithe War was to arrange for the building of a police barrack at Rathcannon. If he hoped that this would deter the Association’s activities or help to monitor them, he had badly misjudged the mood (just as Francis Massy, another cousin did, eleven years later). At noon on 30^th June 1827 he oversaw the cutting of the first sod for the new building. On his way from the site to Holycross with his building foreman Philip Mara, his road was blocked by two gunmen. One ordered him to “give yourself up, you rascal,” and the other, favouring actions over words, shot him twice at close range.

“Oh Mara, I’m shot, I am killed,” Richard cried, and died. As Mara ran off, he saw the second gunman searching Chadwick’s clothing, from which he stole promissory money notes and Richard’s gun. He used this to fire a third shot into the lifeless head of his victim.

Paddy Grace was hung on a portable gallows at the site of his crime, the last man in Ireland to be so executed

Mara identified the gunman as Paddy Grace, a popular local activist already known to the authorities as a troublemaker. When Grace was arrested at dawn the following morning, and the stolen notes were found in his possession, his fate was sealed. He was tried and convicted in Clonmel on 17^th August before a jury of Orangemen and the sentence of death by hanging was carried out with great haste only three days later.

Of course the gunmen were not acting in isolation. Other men walking with Richard Chadwick as he left the site withdrew before the shooting, leaving him alone with Philip Mara; and after it, no one came running from either Rathcannon or the next village Bohernacrusha, although both were well within earshot. It was as if they all knew what had just happened. Mara himself, as Chadwick’s foreman, may have tipped the assassins off about his boss’s movements, then turned informer on Grace when he realised that he would come under suspicion.

Piery Grace, who had held his dead brother in his arms at the gallows, began to gather a gang of heavyweights to take revenge on Mara (the key witness to Paddy’s act, and now under protective custody) by killing his three brothers. They murdered one, Daniel Mara, in a house at Bohernacrusha, on 1^st October 1827; the other two only escaped the vendetta when the authorities spirited them out of the country for their own good. The gang of twelve was eventually caught: six, including Piery, were hanged, and six more transported to Australia.

A cartographical footnote to the story:

The sentencing of Thomas Meagher, Terence McManus and Patrick O’Donohue after the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 – death was commuted to life transportation

Twenty years later, when the Dublin-Cork line of the Great Southern and Western Railway was laid through the area, a bridge over it was built on the road (the modern R661) and at the very place where my 4x great uncle was shot. A year later, messrs Meagher, Leyne and O’Donohue, three leaders of another secret society, Young Ireland, were arrested on the bridge after a failed uprising. Meagher and O’Donohue were transported in 1849; and Leyne was eventually hung in 1854. The crossing is known to this day, perhaps surprisingly, not as Grace’s, Meagher’s, Leyne’s or O’Donohue’s but as Chadwick’s Bridge.

REV WILLIAM AUGUSTUS SALTER (1812-1879) AND THE UNFINISHED BIOGRAPHY

They say that Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations are variations on a theme which itself never appears. Instead, the music dances around an invisible tune; and musical scholars spend a lot of their valuable time trying to identify the absent theme by the shapes the 14 existing variations makes around it.

Many of the articles which I’ve written for this blog came about as a result of research into one particular ancestor of mine, about whom I have so far not written directly. But today, 22^nd September 2012, is the 200^th anniversary of his birth; so although in a sense he’s been here all along, here he is at last, my great great grandfather William Augustus Salter.

 Rev William Augustus Salter (1812-1879)

his Bible, two of his chapels, and his grave

I haven’t written more than passing references to him here because I have been trying to write his biography for the last five years. I had of course hoped to complete it in time for his bicentenary; and until its completion I wanted to keep him to myself. But I have written about (amongst others) his father, his uncles William and David, his wife, his father in law, his children William, Louisa, Frank, Anne, Maria and Emily. These are my variations!

Why, amongst all the remarkable adventurers and high achievers among my ancestors, did I choose to write about William Augustus? He was a humble Baptist minister, an unremarkable one in many ways. He had five pastorships in his career, none more than 80 miles from his place of birth in Watford. He published little; he fought no wars; he never travelled.

But he was a Baptist, at a time when Baptists and other non-conformists were shaping the social and spiritual morality of the nation. In particular he was an educationalist at a time when – long before the introduction of state schools – non-conformists were transforming the educational landscape of the country with Sunday schools, so-called British schools, and even a new university.

L-R: British School, Amersham, opened by Rev W.A. Salter in 1842;

Denmark Place Baptist Church and Sunday School, Camberwell (where William met Emma c1833); London University, attended by W.A. Salter 1828-31

William Augustus was actively involved in all these movements. He founded new schools for at least two of his chapels. He met his wife while they both volunteered at one of the Sunday schools founded by his future father-in-law William Brodie Gurney and others. He was in the very first intake at London University, founded by his father and others, the first to offer degrees to students who were not “churchmen” (members of the Church of England).

Joseph Angus, his friend and fellow student at Stepney Baptist College, became a high profile Baptist academic. By contrast William Augustus, a biblical scholar of some note, wrote anonymously the explanatory notes for a groundbreakingly accessible version of the Bible. All these were Baptist initiatives which were subsequently copied by the Church of England, the establishment religion with no initial interest in changing the status quo.

By telling William Augustus’s story I can paint the bigger picture, the theology of liberation through self-improvement which non-conformists offered in the nineteenth century. William Augustus’s life spanned the central two-thirds of that century. Baptists were obsessive recorders of their activities in magazines and minute books, and there are a great many references and details to be found of my ancestor minister’s deeds and thoughts.

“The pastor closed the meeting with prayer.” The last words written by Rev W.A. Salter in the minute book of Clarendon Street Chapel, Leaminton Spa, 18^th June 1879. He died 29^th July 1879.

Best and most personal of all, some of his sermons were published posthumously by his family, recorded verbatim (in shorthand, by his son) as he preached them – I can almost hear him speak. If you’re listening, William Augustus, Happy Birthday!

HUGH PIPER (c1818-1886) AND THE LATE START

I began this blog as a way of preserving my family history research for a time when my young nephews and nieces became interested in it all. But one of the great pleasures of Tall Tales from the Trees has been the new cousins who emerge from the eCloud to follow up on mutual ancestors. Sometimes whole new branches of my tree have come to light, as in the case of two Piper cousins, Billy and Sally, who got in touch recently. From them I have learned of my first cousin four times removed, Hugh Piper.

Hugh was the son of my 4x great aunt Janet Piper and an itinerant farm worker called Abraham Edward who was passing through Ayrshire at harvest time in 1818. Edward, who judging by his name may have been from Wales, may not even have known that he and Janet had produced a child. There is no official record of the birth, and no sign of a father at any point in the boy’s life.

The River Ayr at Woodhead – Woodhead was the Piper home for generations, and Hugh, his mother Janet and grandmother Jean lived nearby in the early decades of the nineteenth century 

(photo © Stuart Brabbs and licensed for reuse)

Instead, like so many dutiful daughters, unmarried Janet and her young son lived with her widowed mother Jean. I’ve written here before about the obligation of nineteenth century maiden aunts to stay at home caring for a parent when often they would rather be off getting married or having a career. So far so normal for Janet and Hugh.

But when Jean died in the 1840s, Janet – on her own, without a husband – effectively became the widowed parent herself. Hugh, already about 30 and her only child, a son without a father figure, stepped into the role of maiden aunt. He continued to care for her until her death at the great age (for the time) of 76 in November 1859.

By then he was 41. One senses that a certain amount of frustration may have been building up over the years: within four months of his mother’s death, Hugh had married 23-year old Jane Kay, almost half his age. He then, as my cousin Sally puts it, set about making up for lost time. Over the next fourteen years Hugh and Janet began a family of eight children, the last born when Hugh was 56.

Slaters were indispensable tradesmen when slate roofs protected all goods, livestock and human inhabitants from the wet weather of west-coast Scotland

Hugh blossomed in other ways too. Until his mother’s death he had been confined to the farm they lived on, where she was a washerwoman and he was a simple agricultural labourer. But in later life he branched out and got a skilled trade as a slater. Perhaps he was encouraged in this by his young wife, and by the large family he now had to provide for – then as now a tradesman commanded higher rates of pay than a general labourer.

The lack of a father as role model must have made his own fatherhood problematic, I imagine. Although he carried his mother’s maiden name, and passed that on to his descendents, he was certainly aware of the absent Abraham, and at one point adopted a sort of double barreled surname for himself and his children, who are recorded for a while as the Piper Edward family.

Hugh’s wife brought something to the family too – the twin gene! There have been twins in every generation  of his line since, where as far as I can tell there were none before. Hugh himself lived to watch all his children growing up, including my cousins Billy’s and Sally’s great grandfathers. In 1886 at the ripe old age of 68, he died of pneumonia, perhaps caught slating a roof in the Scottish rain. He was a late starter but a busy and hard-working one.

WILLIAM GEORGE COOPER (1721-1769) AND THE PRICE OF PORTER

I’ve written before about Killenure Castle, my ancestral home. Sadly for me (and the rest of the Cooper diaspora) it had to be sold out of the family in 1963, after 217 years of occupation.

The Coopers had already been in Ireland for more than 100 years when, in 1746, my 5x great grandfather William George Cooper leased Killenure in Co Tipperary from the Coppinger family who were using it as a hunting lodge. Before then the Cooper family homes had been the houses of Beamore in Co Meath and Butterhill in Co Wicklow.

William George Cooper (1721-1769)

William’s relocation to a new county was prompted, as all of mine have ever been, by a new job. In 1745 he was appointed to the post of Diocesan Registrar by the new Church of Ireland Archbishop of Cashel, Arthur Price (who himself had only been appointed the previous year). The Registry is the administrative office of any Diocese, the repository of all church papers including title deeds and other Episcopal records.

Cashel is an ancient Christian centre. Very briefly, Ireland was originally divided north and south between the archbishoprics of Armagh and Cashel, jurisdictions established in the year 1111. Henry VIII extended his 1534 Protestant Reformation of the Church of England to Ireland in 1541. The upshot was, from 1567, parallel Protestant and Roman Catholic archbishoprics. The Irish ruling class with its English roots were known as the Protestant Ascendancy and the Anglican Church of Ireland was the official church of state (despite the fact that the majority of the Irish population remained resolutely Catholic).

Cashel’s Anglican Cathedral , Co Tipperary

commissioned by Archbishop Price in 1749 
to replace the ancient cathedral on Cashel Rock 
(which he gutted and unroofed to prevent its re-use)

The Diocesan Registrar played a vital part the financial well-being of the Church of Ireland. Records were important because the C of I was funded in large part by tithes, proportions of income paid by all households regardless of faith – an arrangement unsurprisingly unpopular with the Catholic majority, as a future Cooper and his cousin found out to their cost. William Cooper’s brother John was a Chief Clerk in the Dublin Treasury, and perhaps William too acquired skills there which made him a suitable candidate for the Cashel post. His membership of the Protestant Ascendancy was probably a more crucial factor.

William’s role at Cashel moved him very quickly to the heart of local society. The same year that he acquired Killenure he retired from the Registry to concentrate on his new estate. A year later, in 1747, he married Jane Wayland, my 5x great grandmonther, whose father Henry owned the neighbouring estate of Kilmore to the south of William’s (having, according to the family historian Richard Austin-Cooper, also recently moved to the area with Archbishop Price). The Killenure Coopers had arrived.

Killenure Castle, Co Tipperary

my 5x great grandparents’ home, former stronghold of the O’Dwyer Clan until Oliver Cromwell dispossessed them of it in the 1650s

Archbishop Price remained in office until his death in 1752. He was the son of the vicar of Kildrought near Dublin, and before he took holy orders Arthur Price ran the town’s brewery. His production manager there was a certain Richard Guinness, and the two men became great friends and business partners, to the extent that Guinness may even have named his son after Price, who became the boy’s godfather.

When the archbishop died, he left £100 to Richard’s son, whose name was Arthur Guinness, to fund the expansion of the brewery which Arthur was by now running with his brother. Arthur soon struck out on his own and in 1759 bought a small brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin. The rest is history.

Arthur Guinness (1724-1803)