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!

THOMAS HENRY GOTCH (1805-1891) AND THE REVEREND SPECULATOR

How times have changed. It used to be that the three pillars of the community in which you could trust absolutely were the school-teacher, the vicar, and the bank manager. From 1858 here’s the tale of a banker and a minister that would undermine your faith in both, had events in the early twenty-first century not already done so.

I’m related by the marriage of a Davis (my 3x great grandmother’s family) to the Gotch family of Kettering; but family or not, I have to admit the Gotch banking skills left much to be desired. Gotch’s Bank, the family firm, didn’t even notice that it had been broken into in 1812 until the burglar’s accomplice turned on him and blurted it out in court. That was under the presidency of John Cooper Gotch. When John died in 1852, his sons Thomas Henry and John Davis Gotch took over a bank which was technically insolvent, with debts of over £28,000.

One of the main debtors was the Reverend Allan Macpherson, the vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Rothwell, a village four miles outside Kettering in which the Gotch family’s assets included a brewery. Maybe the reverend had some sort of understanding with Gotch the father which he didn’t have with Gotch the son; when Gotch senior died, Macpherson – who owed the bank £2,900 – effectively did a runner, abandoning his parish and moving to Brussels “to retrieve himself,” as he put it. There he set himself up in comfortable apartments, from which in 1853 he got back in touch with the bank, writing: “I shall be obliged by your addressing me as Monsieur Macpherson as I have not brought my clerical designation with me to the continent.”

The reason he gave was that, surprisingly, he had not described himself as a clergyman on his passport; and that he was engaged in secular business in which being a man of the cloth might confuse matters. He now began to borrow relatively small amounts from the bank in support of those secular business activities, holding out always the imminent success of them as the point at which he would be able to repay the bank for all its trust in him.

Holy Trinity, Rothwell, Northhants, where Monsieur Allan Macpherson preached before exchanging the cloth for the con

His letters to the bank, some 450 of them over the next four years, are short on hard facts and long on vague self-aggrandisement and any-day-now. His get-rich schemes revolved around a series of patents (including improvements to gas lighting and the recycling of human sewage) which he purchased at the bank’s expense in several European countries. He was also involved in various slate, iron and lead ore mining projects and a scheme to dig a canal from Hanover to Holland.

How much of this is true (I have found one record of one patent registration by him, in 1856, “for improving and applying motive-power”) and how much a Macpherson fantasy I cannot tell, and neither could the bank. All they had to go on were his own reports – he had “conditionally sold for £1,000 his French patent for double fish-tail gas burners;” he had “actually asked £20,000 for only one of his mines;” he had “orders for 123,000 slates;” “gentlemen of experience who had visited his various works said, that in a few years he must be a man of large fortune;” he had “very large contracts for the delivery of stone to the Government and the Luxembourg Railway, at large profits.”

A Gotch’s Bank note of 1856 signed by Thomas Henry Gotch – in 1857, not worth the paper it was printed on

None of these, it seems, ever came to anything. Yet on his word alone the bank continued to honour cheques for anything from £20 to £200 right up to the point, on 9^th June 1857, when they filed for bankruptcy with a deficit of £82,000. Of that enormous sum, Macpherson’s debt amounted to £25,000.

Bankers always bounce back, don’t they? Thomas and Henry Gotch rebuilt the family fortunes – not in banking but in shoe manufacture. By the time of the bank’s collapse, Macpherson was almost seventy years old. With the bank's funds no longer available to him he turned to his family. They might have forgiven his financial incompetence, but when they learnt that he had fathered an illegitimate child back in Rothwell they cut him off. He died in Paris in poverty in 1864 at the age of 76. A full account of his spree comes in an edition of the Monetary Times of 1858.

The Market House, Rothwell, Northhants, now the town council chamber - begun c1578 by Sir William Tresham and completed 1895 by John Alfred Gotch (1852-1942) eldest son of Thomas Henry Gotch

It is possible, I suppose, that the death of his daughter Matilda in 1843 at the age of nine, or of his wife Caroline a few years later, may have set him off on his criminal path. The church of Holy Trinity may also have played its part – a once great thirteenth century building, it was far too big for its parish and had fallen into such disrepair over time (aided by an eighteenth century earthquake and a seventeenth century bolt of lightning which toppled the steeple) that by 1819 it was considered fit only to house the Rothwell fire engine! Perhaps his early borrowings were on its behalf.

JOHN OKEY DAVIS (1777-1836) AND THE ANCESTRAL DOG PARK

I broke my collarbone at the end of January while out walking my dog. Typing up Tall Tales has been a challenge – one-fingered and wrong-handed. But the legs still work, so this morning before settling down to write this I was walking the dog again in my local park in Edinburgh, Scotland when I met Robin, an Australian visitor tracking down her family’s roots in this city. By coincidence dogs, and Robin’s home city of Perth in Western Australia, are all bound up in today’s Tall Tale.

Bobby, Edinburgh, 2012

Some of my earliest ancestors come from the area around Chenies in Buckinghamshire. In the eighteenth century Chenies was part of the estate of the Dukes of Bedford, whom at least two generations of my Davis forebears served as land agents. In this capacity they were responsible for the good use of the land by overseeing the tenants and collecting their rent.

Two Davis sisters, Sarah and Maria, married two Salter brothers, Samuel and John, in nearby Watford and became my 3x great grandmother and 4x great aunt. Sarah and Maria’s first cousin John Okey Davis, unlike his father and grandfather before him (both also called John), did NOT become the duke’s man. I don’t know why: was it a fall from grace, or the prospect of a better life? Instead, John Okey emigrated to Western Australia with his wife and six children (aged from 23 to 4) in the summer of 1829, sailing on board the SS Lotus, only the second ship to make the passage to Western Australia. They arrived in the Swan River on 23^rd October.

Families on board ship, emigrating to Australia (1849)

The Lotus, under the command of Captain Summerson, was a new ship, built only the previous year at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast (where a century earlier Captain James Cook had discovered his love of the sea). It was 397 tonnes, and sheathed with copper – a recent technological innovation in which my Guppy ancestors had a hand. Having only a single deck, I imagine the Lotus’s journey to Australia may have been quite arduous for its sixty passengers. In 1833 the Lotus carried convicts, but on this trip most of its passengers – and perhaps also John Okey Davis, were part of an ambitious emigration scheme to settle 100,000 acres of land in the Leschenault area around Bunbury, south of modern-day Perth.

The plan was conceived by an entrepreneur called Colonel Peter Latour, to whom many of John’s travelling companions were indentured – that is, bound by contract. He had signed up bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, farmers and others with the trades necessary for the success of his venture. Although I don’t know whether the Davis family was also involved, the estate management skills which John must have learned from his father and grandfather would certainly have been useful to Latour. (On the passenger list John is listed as a servant, although we don’t know to whom.)

In the event, the Leschenault scheme quickly failed – not the last to do so in an area of poor soil and low rainfall – and all the settlers were released from their indentures. In 1829 John Okey Davis claimed land on the far more fertile and temperate banks of the Canning River near its confluence with the Swan at Perth. There he and his family began their new life. At first they grew wheat and vegetables, and later planted citrus and almond trees. Under their management the land thrived.

Plan of early settlement allocations around Perth, Western Australia – the Davis family were given Canning plot 16 (presumably just off the bottom right of this image) which they named Chenies in memory of their English home

After John’s death his son, also called John Okey Davis, took over the running of the family estate, but he had already moved to Freemantle before he sold the Canning property in 1862. The new owner was John Gosnell, a London Perfume manufacturer. Although Gosnell bought the land as a private estate, its abundance of fruit trees and arum lilies gave rise in time to a myth that he bought the Davis grounds for their fragrance.

Fruit and nut trees on the land settled by the Davis family

(early 20^th century, when the land was owned by John Wilkinson) –

some of the Davis almond trees can still be seen today in John Okey Davis Park

That imagery did the Gosnell’s land no harm when he sold it in 1903 to developers. They kept the name Gosnells for its sweet-smelling associations, and the trick seems to have worked: the population of Gosnells rose from 737 in 1911 to 106,585 a century later. Gosnells, growing from virgin land settled by the Davis family in 1829, became a formal city on 1^st July 1977. By coincidence (I think!) Gosnells’ westernmost point, jutting out into the Canning River, is Salter Point.

Coat of arms of the city of Gosnells, motto Servire, “to serve” – the city was founded on land settled by John Okey Davis, servant

John Okey Davis the father died on 5^th March 1836, nine days less than a year after his wife Frances Harriet Wombutley. They are buried together in a corner of their Canning River land, and their gravestone can still be seen today. The area around it has been preserved as parkland, and their name is preserved in its name – John Okey Davis Park. The park also contains the archaeological remains of the Davis mud-brick family home and a 500-year old Jarrah tree which John and Frances will have seen every day.

Back to dog-walking. It’s my impression that Australians are far less tolerant of dogs in public than we are in Britain. Dogs are restricted to designated public areas. So I’m delighted to discover that John Okey Davis Park in Gosnells is just such a place, reviewed on one of the many Australian dog-friendly web listings thus:

Great place to take the fur kids. Nice big open space with plenty of grass to run through. Usually few issues with other dogs as it is normally fairly quiet and it is just such a large area.

The grave of John Okey Davis (1777-1836) and Frances Harriet Wombutley (1783-1835) in John Okey Davis Park, Gosnells

JOHN COOPER GOTCH (1772-1852) AND THE BAFFLING BANK BREAK-IN

Kettering in Northamptonshire is sometimes called The Town That Gotch Built. The Gotch family were prominent in the town for 150 years, but in many ways my 3x great grandmother’s cousin Mary Anne Davis married the Gotch who made the most.

John Cooper Gotch was the only surviving child of thirteen of Thomas Henry Gotch, a Leicestershire farmer who brought the family to Kettering and started making boots there. Thomas Gotch was a deacon of his local Baptist chapel in Kettering and influential in the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in October 1792. His financial support of its early missionaries developed into a fully fledged banking operation, which was grown when John Gotch took over the running of both the financial and footwear operations. (John in turn handed them on to two of his sons, who – initially at least – made a bit of a hash of things. But that’s a story for another time.)

Gotch boots were originally made as piecework in the homes of the bootmakers – this factory in the centre of Kettering was designed later in the nineteenth century by John Cooper Gotch’s grandson, renowned architect John Alfred Gotch (1852-1942) – another reason why Kettering is The Town That Gotch Built

With John at the helm things went from strength to strength. The bootmaking factory employed 500 people at its height and the bank had added an insurance operation for the benefit of missionaries for whom such earthly protection could be hard to find. At the time of his death the Gotch assets extended beyond the firm’s core activities to a tannery and a brewery.

The bank was at first a partnership, Keep, Gotch & Cobb, only later known as Gotch & Sons. In 1812, when it was still called Keep & Gotch’s Bank, it had the embarrassing experience of being broken into without knowing it. A gang led by a local ne’er-do-well called Huffey White entered the premises of the Kettering bank so easily and with so little trace that Messrs Keep and Gotch were completely unaware that Huffey had been there at all. It was only some time later that it came to light; when White was arrested for another burglary, one of his accomplices turned king’s evidence and confessed to the earlier crime.

Even then, Gotch and Keep were incredulous – surely such a thing was not possible without their knowledge? Only when the informant recited information about accounts and balances which he could only have known by reading ledgers kept in the bank did the owners accept the truth of the matter.

 An 18^th century iron chest used by the Bank of Scotland; 

and a wrought iron chest from the 1820s, 

this one made by James Gray of Edinburgh. 

Safes in the modern sense began to appear in the 1830s and 1840s.

Apart from their tidiness as burglars, another reason for their invisibility was that they didn’t take anything. As they were searching the premises for loot, the gang came across a big old iron chest which they couldn’t open. Rather naively, they imagined that it must contain gold, in the manner of a pirate’s treasure chest; but with a certain criminal logic they decided that, since they had broken in so easily this time, they would slip away leaving everything as they had found it, and come back again another time with a selection of suitable keys.

It was a good plan in essence, and might well have worked had Huffey White not soon afterwards been fingered by around forty witnesses for the theft of money and papers from the strongbox of the Leeds-London mail coach. White and his accomplice Richard Kendall were arrested, despite their violent resistance, in a house cellar in Liverpool the following April. They were to be tried by Judge Baron Thomson, who two months earlier, in January 1813, sent 17 Luddites to the gallows with the no-nonsense remarks, “It is of infinite importance to society that no mercy should be shown to you. It is important that your sentence should be speedily carried out and it is but right to tell you that you have but a short time to remain in this world. I trust not only those who now hear me but all without these walls to whom the tiding of your fall may come, will be warned of your fate.” 

White and Kendall cannot have held out much hope for their own future.For this crime there was no turning king’s evidence. They were found convincingly guilty by the jury, and sentenced by the learned judge to death by hanging. Which rather put an end to any plans to return to Gotch’s bank for another crack.

A one-pound banknote 

issued by John Keep, John C. Gotch & Co in the 1810s