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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHARLES HENRY SALTER (1918-2008) AND THE SPARKLERS

I have mentioned my “difficult” relationship with my father here before. He made himself a hard man to love. In a letter to an old flame in 1973 he wrote “My children by my first marriage are doing alright, and this combined with large inheritances from my father and aunt has freed me from anxiety. Not being anxious about the children does mean I am less interested in them.”

We sensed this loss of interest at the time. I was fifteen; the youngest of us was nine. He became dismissive, then critical, then vindictive, as he convinced himself that our lives were being guided by our mother’s values and not his (as if we could be expected to choose only one or the other).

Charles Henry Salter (1918-2008), c2007 aged 89

Since his death seven years ago I have tried again and again to forgive him for the cruelties inflicted on his wives and children. Much of this blog has been an attempt to bypass him and look for the good in my ancestors of earlier generations. But in every moment when I thought I might have tried harder during his life to connect with him, a memory popped up of the times when I did and was rebuffed. Every good memory was countered by a bad one.

Until two weeks ago.

Bruntsfield Links, Edinburgh

It was bonfire night, and in the early gloom of a November evening I was walking my dog on Bruntsfield Links, a large grassy space in Edinburgh’s Southside. Later in the night reckless student fireworks parties would colonise the place, setting off bangs to wake the dead and the elderly and terrify their pets. For now however, at six o’clock, small family groups were huddled in corners of the Links, lighting sparklers in the dark while Dad set off the threepenny flares, sixpenny rockets and shilling roman candles I remember from my childhood.

Fireworks parties were an annual highlight in our back garden in Glasgow. They were somehow more carefree and relaxed than Christmas and birthdays. My father strung a rope halfway across to keep us out of danger, although in those days a box set of Brock’s fireworks always came with some extraordinarily dangerous handheld flares, for which Dad distributed gloves. He set off smaller rockets from milk bottles, but sunk a long hollow curtain rod into the ground for the larger missiles – rockets the size of a packet of digestive biscuits rather than a sherbet fountain.

There were showers of sparks in every colour, Catherine wheels the size of steering wheels, always a huge bonfire of garden waste, and indoor fireworks too – floating ferns, uncurling snakes, smoking cowboys, Bengal matches. My father loved to organise these parties, and he had a particular look of unaffected glee which he wore for such childlike fun: head cocked to one side, eyes sparkling, the tip of his tongue popping in and out as if in two minds about whether to blow a raspberry.

By the end of his life we were more or less estranged. I visited him once in hospital, where he was taken after collapsing in his home. He had lost the power of speech, and babbled like a baby while nurses and doctors fussed about him. It seemed to me that, like a birthday boy delighted to be the centre of attention, he wore the same gleeful expression. He died that night.

Charles Henry Salter (1918-2008), c1921 aged 3
 

As I watched the sparklers and rockets fizz and whoosh on Bruntsfield Links the other week, the memories of childhood parties and of my father’s gleeful expression then and at his death welled up, unopposed by the usual counter-memories of hurts and disappointments. Somewhere a firework exploded and crackled, and to my surprise I started to cry. For the first time not just since his death but in forty years, I found myself thinking, “I miss my dad.”

WILLIAM HARWOOD (1809-1862) AND THE BRISTOL & EXETER RAILWAY

My great great great uncle Michael Henry Castle was the deputy chairman of the Bristol & Exeter Railway. His brother in law, my great great great uncle William Harwood, was the company Secretary; and I suspect that many members of their families including my great great great uncle Charles Castle and my great great grandfather William Henry Castle were shareholders. All of them were prominent Bristol businessmen for whom an improved connection to Exeter was a worthwhile investment in the 1840s. I wrote about the line itself in a previous post here.

My most direct connection with the B&ER is something of a mystery. Among the papers of my great great great uncle Charles Castle which I inherited are two letters written in 1857 on B&ER letterheads, to Charles from his brother in law William Harwood, the Secretary of the railway company. I am not very sharp on financial business, but money is changing hands and the South Australian Banking Company is involved.

 Letters from William Harwood, Secretary of the Bristol & Exeter Railway Company, to his brother in law Charles Castle, 5th and 7th November 1857

Harwood is reporting on a meeting at his home, Studley Villa, with Charles’ brothers Robert and Michael (Michael the deputy chairman of the B&ER). Charles, Michael, Robert and William seem to have opened an account at Baillies Bank with a deposit of around £800; and William has separately loaned the B&ER £400. There is a reference in the first letter to clearing the estate of the brothers’ father, Thomas, who died in 1827. William questions in the second letter, “whether the investment and sale should appear in the Books of your father’s estate or not.”

Is Thomas’s estate only now being wound up? Under what circumstances?

 "... and the difficulty arose as to the investments in Consuls - whether the investments and sale should appear in the Books of your father's estate or not."

Two letters from the South Australian Banking Company are attached to Harwood’s two, mostly couched in technical fiscal terms. It is about to send £300 to two executors living in Adelaide, South Australia, one of whom “is I believe now on his passage to England.”

Who are they, and whose executors? Through the marriage of Charles, Michael and Robert’s sister Mary Castle to William Edward Acraman, the Castles had Acraman relatives in Adelaide. But it seems unlikely that they would be executors of Mary’s father Thomas’s will. Perhaps there were other antipodean relatives.

Harwood underlines at one point: “All postages and other disbursements in this matter we must take care to pay ourselves because it is quite evident that this money will never benefit William.”

Who is William? My great great grandfather William Henry Castle, brother of Charles, Michael and Robert? Or William Harwood’s son William Madoc Harwood, aged 11 or 12 at the time of this letter? Or William Edward Acraman, brother in law of Charles, Michael and Robert?

 "... because it is quite evident that this money will never benefit William."

My best guess is that the family were selling shares from the estate of their late father in order to lend capital to the B&ER. But why? The B&ER was by all accounts a reasonably successful, profitable company. So why was its Secretary lending it large sums of money? The Board had agreed to borrow up to £2000 from him at 4.5% interest.

The letters I have were written in early November 1857. In August of that year the West Somerset Railway was given the go-ahead by parliament to build a line from the B&ER station at Taunton to the harbour town of Watchet. The proposal had the effect of extending the B&ER’s broad gauge network and the B&ER raised much of the initial £120,000 required to build the new line.

It is entirely possible that the letters from Harwood to Castle were in connection with the WSR. Some say that WSR subscriptions were hard to raise, others that the money was all in by the end of the year. The line itself opened in 1862, and its working was from the start leased to the B&ER. 

 "Believe me yours sincerely Wm Harwood"

Even if the letters are about B&ER involvement in the WSR, they don’t explain the correspondents’ quandary about whether to include the transactions in the estate accounts, or why the unidentified William was being deprived of the benefit the money. Perhaps the approaching Adelaide executor might have had something to say about the matter! We’ll never know, but – as William Harwood, Charles, Michael and Robert would no doubt agree – it’s fun to speculate.

MICHAEL HENRY CASTLE (1808-1891) AND THE BRISTOL & EXETER RAILWAY

My great great great uncle Michael Castle was the deputy chairman of the Bristol & Exeter Railway. His brother in law, my great great great uncle William Harwood, was the company Secretary; and I suspect that many members of their families including my great great great uncle Charles Castle and my great great grandfather William Henry Castle were shareholders. All of them were prominent Bristol businessmen for whom an improved connection to Exeter was a worthwhile investment in the 1840s.

The Bristol & Exeter termini at Temple Meads (above, photo by AfterBrunel) and St Davids (below, photo by Geof Sheppard) – the Exeter building replaces Brunel’s original. Both photos from Wikipedia

The engineer for the route was none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with whom other branches of my ancestry have personal connections: my 4x great aunt Sarah Guppy discussed bridge-building with him before he built the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol , and my 4x great uncle Daniel Wade Acraman supplied ironwork and machinery for Brunel’s masterpiece the SS Great Western. Sarah, her husband Samuel and her son Thomas Guppy all introduced innovative engineering solutions for the SSs Great Western, Great Britain and Great Eastern. Thomas and Isambard were lifelong friends and set up the Great Western Railway Company together, which connected London with Bristol.

The Bristol & Exeter naturally adopted the GWR’s broad track gauge of seven feet. It opened in 1844, seven years after the GWR, and to save money it operated for the first five years with GWR steam engines. When James Pearson took over as the B&ER’s Locomotive Engineer in 1850, he designed a succession of remarkable steam engines. Railway buffs are particularly fond of his 4-2-4 locomotives which used a flangeless driving wheel of exceptionally large diameter, up to nine feet. These huge wheels gave the Pearson machines an advantage in terms of speed, and at least one B&ER train travelled at over 80mph on a downhill section in Somerset.

James Pearson’s original 9ft 4-2-4T locomotive design (No.44, built and pictured c1854)

The B&ER was innovative in other ways, the first significant line to operate the block system of working to avoid collisions, and one of the first to use an electric telegraph for communication throughout its length. It was moreover a profitable line. 

In the 1870s it bowed to the inevitable and began to convert its track from Brunel’s broad gauge to the Stephenson standard of 4ft 8½ins, which had won the So-called Gauge Wars for domination of the railway system. The conversion would allow the B&ER to carry through trains to and from the rest of the British network. But the costs involved in this pushed the B&ER into an amalgamation with the GWR in 1876, and the line’s history as an independent operation was over. 

My most direct connection with the B&ER is something of a mystery. Among the papers of my great great great uncle Charles Castle which I inherited are two letters written in 1857 on B&ER letterheads, to Charles from his brother in law William Harwood, the Secretary of the railway company. I am not very sharp on financial business, but money is changing hands and the South Australian Banking Company is involved. (More in my next post!)