JOHN TOLER SADLEIR (1816-c1852) AND THE BIRKENHEAD DRILL

My great great grandfather Richard William Ralph Sadleir remains elusive, my knowledge of him tantalisingly free of detail. But he was one of ten brothers, and lately I have pieced together some of the life and death of his brother, my 3x great uncle John. (Toler was the surname of their paternal grandmother.)

Colours of the 1st Bn. Of the 2^nd Regiment of Foot, with Queen Catherine's Colour in the centre

On the 2^nd June 1843, the London Gazette reported, John Toler Sadleir, gentleman, was to be an ensign “by purchase” in the 2^nd Regiment of Foot. John was from Tipperary, and the regiment was a natural choice for an Irish gentleman in need of a military career. It had a long history, having been founded in 1661 to guard Tangier, part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, from where it holds the oldest battle honour in the British Army: Tangier 1662-1680. Since 1798 it had been based in Ireland, where it was sent to suppress the Irish rebellion that year; but throughout its history it fought in Britain’s many overseas campaigns.

When John signed up he first saw action with the 2^nd Foot in India during the First Sikh War. The regiment sailed back to England on 17^th September 1846 and was stationed for a while in Gosport. Its troops were certainly there long enough for John to meet and – in St Thomas’s Church, Old Portsmouth – to marry his wife, Mary Mitchell in May 1847.

Presentation of new colours to the Second (Queen's Royal) Regiment, at Gosport, 10^th July 1847

The following year the regiment came home to Ireland where they remained until 1851. I assume that John and Mary spent time in the family home, Sadleirswells, northeast of Tipperary. There is no record of children, and unfortunately the next we hear of Mary is her second marriage, as a widow, in 1854. What follows here is conjecture as far as John's part in it is concerned, but fits with what little I know of his life.

In 1851 the regiment returned to Portsmouth to be fitted out for action in the Kaffir War fought against the Xhosa of South Africa. John may have sailed from there when the paddle steamer HMS Birkenhead embarked at the start of January 1852, or he may have joined ship at Cobh in southern Ireland where it stopped on 5^th January to pick up further troops with wives and families.

HMS Birkenhead (built 1845) - in 1846 it pulled Brunel's stranded SS Great Britain off the sands of Dundrum Bay, Ireland

After seven weeks at sea, most of the families were put ashore near Cape Town on 23^rd February. Two days later the Birkenhead set off again to deliver the troops to their final destination, Algoa Bay. But at 2am on 26^th February the ship struck a submerged rock two miles off Danger Point. Water rushed in, and as the captain tried to reverse his vessel it struck again, ripping open the bulkheads, flooding the engine rooms and drowning over 100 soldiers in their bunks.

The surviving men mustered on deck where they manned the pumps and assisted with the disembarkation of the women and children who had remained on board. Through poor maintenance many of the troopship’s lifeboats were unusable, and only three were successfully launched.

The commanding officer realised that if he allowed his men to seek their own safety he risked overloading and capsizing the lifeboats and their precious family loads. Instead he ordered all soldiers to stand to attention in their ranks. With the discipline and stiff upper lip for which the British Army in the nineteenth century was most admired, this is what they did, in silence, as HMS Birkenhead sank in the space of twenty minutes beneath them.

The Wreck of the Birkenhead, painted by Thomas M. Hemy in 1892

Of those who now swam for shore, most were killed by sharks or died on the perilous rocks of the aptly named Danger Point. We’ll never know whether John Toler Sadleir was amongst them because the muster books went down with the ship. Did he drown in his bunk? Did he get to shore and die fighting the Xhosa? Was Mary with him? News of the selfless courage of the British men spread quickly, and their final assembly on the decks of the ship became known as Birkenhead Drill after Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase in a poem, Soldier and Sailor Too:

Their choice it was plain between drownin' in 'eaps

An' bein' mopped by the screw,

So they stood an' was still to the Birken'ead drill,

Soldier an' sailor too.

Of the 643 people on board at the time of the accident, 450 were lost, none of them women and children (although in fact only twenty family members had remained with the ship beyond Cape Town). 113 soldiers, 6 marines and 54 seamen also survived. The behaviour of those men who went down with the Birkenhead directly inspired the now established shipwreck practice of shouting, and saving,

Women And Children First.

JOHN TEMPLEMAN (1782-1867) AND THE DUNFERMLINE DAMASK

My 5x great grandfather John Templeman was from Torryburn in Fife, just west of the ancient Scottish town of Dunfermline. He was a damask weaver, in an area which had been a centre for the trade since the fifteenth century. Linen weavers from the French town of Tournai first brought the skill to Dunfermline; and although Scottish damask (or “dornick”) never quite matched the continental fabric for quality, its weaving was for nearly 600 years a trade to be proud of.

Damask is any cloth with a woven pattern which can be viewed from both sides of the material. These days damask is usually linen and usually, although not always, single-coloured. It gets its name from Damascus, an important trading and manufacturing city in the early Middle Ages, standing on the Silk Route. It first appeared in Europe (in France) in the 14^th century, so the Dunfermline industry, kick-started by those Tournai craftsmen, was quick off the mark.

Abbot House Museum in Dunfermline

tells the story of damask’s contribution to the town

Traditionally, women did the spinning and men did the weaving, although by John's grandchildren's generation things had changed - his granddaughter my 2x great grandmother Agnes Mitchell was a damask weaver too. For centuries before her time both operations were carried out by hand. Linen thread is spun from flax, which was grown in the fields around Dunfermline, but not in sufficient quantities. The local harvest was augmented with imports from Danzig – modern-day Gdansk in Poland – shipped to the nearby ports of coastal Fife.

Dunfermline damask was supplied to the Scottish Royal Household, and the industry suffered after the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 when the Royal Household moved south to London. A fire which destroyed much of Dunfermline in 1624 also contributed to the decline. Damask production drifted south across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh and the surrounding area.

An industrial-scale damask hand loom (date unknown)

(picture from the Gazlay Family History site)

But a clever piece of industrial espionage brought the trade back to Dunfermline in 1718. A Dunfermline weaver called James Blake gained the confidence of the workers in a new Edinburgh damask mill at Drumsheugh, by passing himself off as a simpleton with whom they saw no harm in sharing their sophisticated weaving techniques. In a move reminiscent of a footballing injury, Blake promptly “regained” his senses and returned to Dunfermline with a complete plan of the Drumsheugh loom in his head, a design far more advanced than that of any traditional looms still working in the town. By 1766 there were 600 looms in the town, and by 1792 (when John Templeman was probably entering the industry as child labour) that figure had doubled. In the same year, mechanized spinning came to Dunfermline thanks to a water-powered spinning mill at Brucefield.

The earliest powered weaving loom mills began to appear in Dunfermline around 1835, when John was already in his 50s. So John was part of the last generation of weaving men to make damask by hand. The ancient guild, the Dunfermline Weavers Incorporation to which he and his fellow skilled craftsmen may have belonged, was wound up in 1863, just four years before John’s death. By then there were at least four spinning and weaving mills in the town, employing around 6000 workers.

Jacquard-style mechanised damask loom - an early example of computer programming, a Jacquard loom used punched cards to deliver a repeatable pattern

(picture from the Craigavon Historical Society)

The Dunfermline damask industry survived into the 1930s. But laundering, starching and ironing table linen was hard work and the decline after the First World War in the employment of domestic servants to do that work led to the eventual closure of the mills. The mechanised process lasted a little more than two hundred years in Dunfermline. But the handworked tradition, of whose final chapter my 5x great grandfather was part, had a Scottish history nearly 400 years long. Its roots in Damascus stretch back 500 more.

THOMAS PIPER (1875-1939) AND THE BICYCLE AGE

There’s a wonderful short novel called “The Stone Book Quartet” by Alan Garner (incidentally the greatest English story teller since the Second World War). He paints the picture of four generations of an artisan family and the craft trades they pursue. As times change they change too, working first as weavers, then stone masons, then quarrymen, then blacksmiths. What remains constant is their connection with nature, with the materials it provides, and with the craftsmanship of their hands and minds.

An invoice from Thomas Piper Bicycles issued in 1926

It popped into my mind last week when I was thinking about my great uncle Thomas Piper. He was a bicycle agent, and in the 1920s he opened a shop in Churchill in Edinburgh which was still there when I was a student in 1981 – in fact I ended up with a room in a flat right over the shop for a few weeks one summer. Of course the shop had long since lost any contact with the Piper family, but it was nice that the name carried on. (In fact there are still internet references to it, at an address in South Clerk Street in the city – but if you go there, it’s a burger joint, a reminder not to believe everything you read on the internet, especially in the field of family history research!)

What brought Alan Garner to mind was the fact that Thomas’ father John, and John’s father William before him, had been blacksmiths, in the tiny Ayrshire village of Sorn. The smithy was at a bridge by a bend of a tributary of the river Ayr, on a croft called Wealth o’ Waters. There’s such an image of generosity of spirit there, in that wonderful placename and the thought of a strong, hearty blacksmith working there, quenching his irons and his thirst there since the late 18^th century.

The Sorn Smiddy in the early 20^th century,

after it had passed from the Pipers to the Alston family

I like the transition from blacksmith to bicycle man too. Forwards in industry and modernisation! But there’s a nice line in change going backwards too. The family, originally peasant farmers, came to Ayrshire from a croft at Miln Ness, high on the watershed between Strathglass and Glen Urquhart. In 1773 the first wave of clearances took place in Strathglass in the form of a mass emigration to Nova Scotia.

If the Pipers weren’t actually part of this relocation, they certainly saw the writing on the wall clearly enough to get out before the next round of evictions in 1803-1831. By 1782, when Thomas Piper’s grandfather William was born, the family were living in Sorn. Nineteen years later, William married an Ayr girl, Janet Mitchell, and she was a sock-knitter. We don’t know if William had yet found his calling as a blacksmith; and it may well be that Janet, not William, was the family’s first industrial craft artisan.

And what of Miln Ness now? I don’t know if there are any remains of the Piper’s old homes. There is only one old house there now and three modern holiday cottages, but there are many more traces of those who preceded the Pipers in this beautiful place: the landscape is peppered with 4000 year old chambered cairns, stone circles and other prehistoric boundary markers. And who knows how long the Pipers were in Miln Ness before 1773?

Miln Ness, from Corrimony Chambered Cairn