WILLIAM TALFOURD SALTER (1827-1883) AND POPE’S GARDEN

My ancestral cousin Talfourd was a lawyer whose Old Bailey caseload has been the source of a few articles on this blog. He was moderately successful and lived at least the last ten years of his life in a mansion of sorts in the leafy London suburb of Twickenham. It is more likely that he rented rooms in it than that he owned the mansion outright.

Its address was Pope’s Garden, and I had always assumed that the name was a reference to some historical connection to Catholicism. In fact it’s built on the site of the celebrated garden of the poet Alexander Pope.

Pope’s Garden, Twickenham, built in 1864

(picture from the builder’s prospectus)

In 1713 Alexander Pope (1688-1744) began the translation of Homer’s works for which he would become most famous. Published in parts between 1715 and 1720, it made him a wealthy man, and in 1719 he bought land by the Thames in Twickenham. On it he built a villa owing much to the prevailing Palladian style of the age, inspired by the classical architecture of Homer’s Greece.

In its cellar he constructed a grotto, a fantastical cave decorated with crystals and mineral specimens (including pieces of the Giant’s Causeway and stalagmites from Wookey Hole). During construction they stumbled on a spring, a happy accident which allowed the warren of tunnels to be filled with the sound of trickling water.

Pope’s Grotto, sketched in 1786 by Samuel Lewis

Pope described the grotto in a letter to a friend:

When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture…And when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular Forms…at which when a Lamp…is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the place.

The grotto was famous, and much imitated in country houses throughout Britain. It continued to attract visitors after Pope’s death, and in 1808 Baroness Howe (the then owner of the villa) demolished the house in an effort to deter souvenir hunters and vandals. Subsequently two new houses were built on the site, mercifully preserving the cellar grotto beneath.

Pope’s Grotto in 2012

Over time parts of Pope’s gardens, which ran from the grotto down to the banks of the Thames, were sold off for further building development. A pub called Pope’s Grotto was built on one corner in 1852. Pope's Garden, the building in which Talfourd lived, was erected on the former lawn between the grotto and the river in 1864.

He must surely have visited both the pub and the grotto itself, and as an educated man he certainly read Pope’s Iliad at school. I don’t have Talfourd Salter’s copy; but I do have an 1834 pocket edition which once belonged to my great great aunt Margaret Merrifield’s great uncle Victor William Charles Ferdinand DeGaudrion.

The Iliad of Homer, translated by Alexander Pope, Esq., printed and published by J.F. Dove of St John’s Square, London; another page is inscribed "Victor William Charles Ferdinand DeGaudrion, Southampton 1834, aged 12 years"

Twickenham suffered from heavy bombing during the Second World War. In 1941, Talfourd’s old home was damaged beyond repair in one air raid; and in 1944 the pub was destroyed in another. Pope’s Garden was eventually demolished in 1954, and a new pub, still there today as the Alexander Pope Hotel, was built on the site of the old one in 1959.

Pope’s Garden in a ruinous state in 1954, just before its demolition

MARGARET DE GAUDRION MERRIFIELD VERRALL (1857-1916) AND THE COMMON CAUSE OF HUMANITY

The one thing that everyone knows about my great great aunt Margaret (if they’ve heard of her at all) is that she received the psychic cross-correspondences. It’s an extraordinary story, and was the subject of my earlier post on her.

But I know that her grandchildren and great grandchildren regret that such a one-sided picture is always painted of her (and of her daughter and son-in-law who were best known for similar reasons). It's too easy in researching one's family tree to pounce on the "good stories" and forget that these are real people, and that they are other people's ancestors as well. I am guilty as charged, and would like to make some small amends with the following obituary of her which gives a much more rounded impression of her than I had before I found it this morning online.

In Memoriam.

MRS VERRALL.

Our “common cause,” writes a correspondent, has lost a wise and steadfast supporter in Mrs Verrall, whose death, after some months of suffering, took place at her Cambridge home on July 2^nd. Both she and her brilliant husband, Professor Verrall, who died in 1912, had done much to help women to realise their powers, and to give of their best, unhampered by artificial restrictions. Mrs Verrall (formerly Miss Margaret De Gaudrion Merrifield) was one of the early students of Newnham College, where she worked with success for the Classical Tripos and where she afterwards held the post of classical lecturer and tutor. She was a remarkably able teacher, for her own brain was clear as well as powerful, and she knew how to make a subject clear to those she addressed. She was also a good speaker, but she preferred the life of the study to that of the platform and committee room, although her political interests (which were, in general, on the side of the Liberal party) were deep and keen. Her work as a scholar included the translation of the text of Pausanias for “The Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens,” brought out by herself and Miss Jane Harrison, and she arranged for publication of her late husband’s lectures on Dryden. As a member of the Society for Psychical Research, she gave much of her time and thought to the investigation of mental and physical phenomena in some of their many mysterious and as yet uncomprehended forms.

At the simple funeral service, conducted at St. Giles’s Church, Cambridge, on the 5^th inst., by the Rev M.A. Bayfield, rector of Hertingfordbury, the members of Newnham College, including Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, the former Principal, Mrs. B.A. Clough and Miss Jane Harrison walked in procession behind the coffin, which was preceded by the nearest relatives, Mrs. W.H. Salter (Mrs. Verrall’s only daughter) with Mr. Salter, and Miss F. de G. Merrifield (sister) being the chief mourners. The kindness shown by Mrs. Verrall as Hon. Secretary of the Belgian University Committee in Cambridge was recognised by the attendance of some of the leading Belgian professors and their wives, and beside a wreath from Newnham College was one inscribed “Le corps professorial Belge reconnaissant.”

The obituary appeared on p.181 of the newspaper “The Common Cause of Humanity,” the organ of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, on 14^th  July 1916.

MARGARET DE GAUDRION VERRALL (1857-1916) AND THE CROSS-CORRESPONDENCES

There is a strong non-conformist streak that runs through many of the branches of my family tree: Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians, brought together by their common perspective on social injustice and religious intolerance. My great great aunt Margaret Verrall, née Merrifield, seems to these 21^st century eyes to be unconventional in the extreme, but in her day she was a prominent figure in a popular area of scientific and spiritual enquiry.

Margaret de Gaudrion Verrall (1857-1916)

Margaret was at the centre of an extraordinary attempt to prove the reality of life after death, conducted (if it is to be believed) by several deceased founders of the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR was founded in 1882 with the aim of “understanding events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal  by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and "examining allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way" and it still exists today.

In the year of the SPR’s founding Margaret married Arthur Woolgar Verrall, a classical scholar with a taste for convoluted commentary of classical Greek and Latin texts. In the light of Margaret’s subsequent career, and the fact that one of his future students was Aleister Crowley (notorious sex-magick mystic), one wonders just what Arthur was teaching in his lectures.

Margaret joined the SPR in 1889 and towards the end of the century began to develop psychic powers, perhaps as a result of her observational study for the Society of the work of a famous medium of the age, Leonora Piper. Frederick Myers, the Society’s founding father, had asked her to hold sittings with Piper. He died in January 1901, and in March that year Verrall began producing scripts by automatic writing – messages written by her hand but supposedly directed by minds beyond the grave.

Mrs Verrall was one of several mediums around the world to receive messages like this, although none of them was aware of the activities of any of the others. All however sent their writings in to the SPR for further study. It was there that Alice Johnson, a researcher, began to notice cross-references between these various communications from the dead. She coined the term cross-correspondences for the increasingly elaborate intellectual puzzles which, it seemed, could only be solved by the combination of several independently written scripts.

Those sending the messages included Frederick Myers who had been the Society’s second president, and Henry Sidgwick its first (who had died a year before Myers). It was no surprise to anyone that such SPR luminaries should attempt to prove the survival of the mind after bodily decease. Their choice of material for the conundrums sent to provide that proof was appropriately obscure and, one might say, convoluted. Clues came in the form of little known quotes from a specialised university text book, “Greek Melic Poets” by the American scholar Herbert Weir Smyth, used by their old friend and colleague Dr Arthur Verrall.

SPR presidents and correspondents 

Frederick Myers (1843-1901) and Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900)

It was certainly NOT a book likely to have been known or read by all the mediums involved (except Margaret), so its use as a source was seen as quite compelling proof. This is not the place for a full discussion of the evidence or the conclusions of the series of cross-correspondences. Margaret produced hundreds of scripts in the fifteen years until her own death in 1916. Her daughter Helen also had the gift and began writing automatically in 1903. The correspondences continued with an expanding cohort of living mediums and dead correspondents until 1930, when researchers asked Helen Verrall and her colleagues to stop receiving – there were by then tens of thousands of pages of evidence waiting to be annotated and analysed.

The wedding of Helen Verrall and Willy Salter,

28th September 1915

In 1916 Helen Woolgar de Gaudrion Verrall (1883-1959) married William Henry Salter (1880-1970), a lawyer whom she introduced to psychical research. He joined the SPR that year and wrote extensively on the subject of survival, automatic writing and telepathy (incidentally, a term first coined by Frederick Myers). He served as president of the Society 1947-48 and after his death he contributed to the debate by leaving a wealth of private papers which were not to be opened until 1995-96. These papers are still being examined.

Opinion remains divided about the truth of life after death. In our sceptical age the jury is still out, and perhaps the last word for now should go to Salter, who wrote:

"As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."


More on the cross-correspondences in my next blog.