JOHN SADLEIR (1813-1856) AND THE CARSON’S CREEK GOLD MINING COMPANY

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of writing a study guide to the great American author Mark Twain. I was asked to include some of his many witty aphorisms in an appendix, a terrible task of selection. One that didn’t make the cut was this definition: A mine is a hole in the ground, owned by a liar.

John Sadleir (1813-1856)

Which brings me to my ancestor John Sadleir, MP for Carlow in Ireland and a liar and swindler on a grand scale. In the end he took his own life, belatedly weighed down with remorse about the thousands of investors whose lives he ruined. One of them was, I believe, his cousin my great great grandfather Richard William Ralph Sadleir. John started out being fairly honestly successful in amassing wealth through business and land transactions. But when his financial star waned he turned to increasingly desperate and ill-judged speculation to fund his earlier investments. One of his more colourful get-rich-quick schemes was the founding of the Carson’s Creek Gold Mining Company in February 1852.

Gold was discovered in California at the start of 1848. Although word was at first slow to spread, the trickle of prospectors travelling to the territory soon became a flood. In 1849 some eighty seven thousand men (and three thousand women) joined the Gold Rush. Known collectively as Forty-Niners they found gold in abundance more or less lying around in surface ore. You didn’t even have to go underground – a stick of explosive would send up a shower of gold-bearing quartz, or you could just pan for gold in the silt of the rivers. 

A Forty-Niner (pictured in 1850 – picture from Wikipedia)

In 1849 the pan-handlers extracted $10 million worth of gold. In 1850 it was $41 million. In 1851 it was $75 million and in 1852 $81 million. It must have seemed the answer to all John Sadleir’s prayers, if he could just carve himself out a tiny fraction of the wealth being generated in California. 

He found his opportunity and went into partnership with the new American owners of a mine on Carson Hill, which stand above the Stanislaus River in central California. Carson Creek, through which the river flowed below the mine, was one of the early centres of the gold rush after James H. Carson found plentiful gold in the riverbed and staked his claim there.

But by 1852 the easy gold was running out. Now you had to dig for it, hard work with uncertain returns. In pitching to London investors Sadleir was able to assure them on the matter of legitimate ownership of the mine (previously occupied by illegal squatters); but there was no knowing how much ore the mine might deliver. But greed, like love, is blind: when Sadleir described the luxury in which the squatters had lived, and wheeled out a tame U.S. attorney eager to buy up any shares left over after the flotation, the money, £154,000 of it, poured in.

A mine and mill on Carson Hill, still being worked in the 1920s

And out again. John Sadleir, now the chairman of the Carson’s Creek Gold Mining Company, borrowed large amounts of money from it which he told investors had been earmarked for the purchase of mining machinery. He could not repay it when it became due in January 1855; so he lodged the deed of some of his Irish property with the London and County Bank as security. 

But he was also the chairman of the London and County Bank, and he quietly retrieved the deed without the knowledge of the bank’s directors and lodged it elsewhere as security against further loans – a bit like selling the land twice. At least the bank had directors; the Carson’s Creek company had none, and after John Sadleir’s suicide no one even knew where he had kept the invested sums, let alone that he had by then spent it all, every last fool's gold penny. 

When in the depths of his remorse he swallowed prussic acid one night on Hampstead Heath, his overdraft at the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank, of which he and his brother James were directors, had risen to around a quarter of a million pounds, while he and his brother had reduced the bank’s assets to only £75,000. Besides defrauding that bank's and the Carson’s Creek Mining Company’s investors, Sadleir had also been selling forged shares in the Royal Swedish Railway Company, to which he owed at the time of his death a further £300,000. 

Landmark sign in Carson Hill, now a ghost town

Gold extraction never again reached the glittering heights of that 1852 value. But nine months after John Sadleir’s death, Morgan Mine elsewhere on Carson Hill yielded a giant piece of gold weighing over thirteen pounds and worth $43,000 at 1856 prices. It is still the largest single nugget ever found in California.

EYRE COOPER SADLEIR (1857-1920) AND THE SADDLER’S ARMS

There’s very little documentary evidence for my Merseyside great great uncle Eyre’s life: records of his baptism, marriage and death, and an incomplete set of ten-yearly census returns. Where was he, and what was he doing, between those of 1871 and 1901?

His brother Richard Ralph Sadleir is similarly absent from the National Archives, reappearing only in 1911 when he describes himself as a “retired prospector.” Perhaps the brothers went off adventuring together. Eyre turns up just once during those thirty years, on a passenger list – he is in steerage when the SS Lake Superior leaves Liverpool on 2^ndApril 1898, bound for St John’s in Newfoundland. Was he rejoining his brother in the Canadian gold fields?

Eyre is described in the Lake Superior’s list as a steam fitter, the same trade by which he defines himself in the UK censuses of 1901 and 1911. He seems to have gone where the work was. Presumably Newfoundland didn’t work out, because three years later in April 1901 he was back in Britain, in Walsall; and only a few months after that, in Belfast.

Walsall Station’s ornate canopy – Station Street in the foreground, and the large railways yard beyond. The canopy and the grand booking hall behind it were demolished in the 1990s to make way for a new Marks & Spencer store.

We know he was only passing through Walsall, because he was staying in digs at 27 Station Street right opposite the London & North Western Railway’s station yard. Digs is perhaps the wrong word. It conjures up images of fussy landladies and theatrical acts in chintzy lounges. 27 Station Street was one of two beer houses on the road, which also had three hotels (one of them a temperance establishment).

Beer houses were the lowest form of drinking den, the product of an 1830 licensing law designed to steer poor people away from mother’s ruin, gin. It was so successful that in 1869 they passed another act prohibiting the opening of any new beer houses. They were the original spit-and-sawdust bare-boarded establishments, no more than the front parlours of family homes, barred from selling gin and other spirits. The last of them disappeared in the early twentieth century, all either closed down or upgraded to public houses.

William Hogarth’s satirical 1751 images of the evils of gin and the merits of beer were part of an earlier attempt to reduce public consumption of the ruinous spirit

Because no new beer houses could be opened, they became assets and changed hands frequently. In the three Kelly’s Directories which I’ve seen, for 1904, 1912 and 1914, 27 Station Street is owned by three different families. In 1901 when Eyre Sadleir was staying there it was run by a family of … saddlers, the Hills. Into that typical small railway terrace home was crammed a family of ten – father Charles Hill (“saddle- and harness-maker, publican”), his wife, his widowed mother-in-law, two daughters, five sons (four of whom were old enough to join their father as harness-makers in the leather industry for which Walsall was famous). Of nearly forty houses in Station Street nearly half were connected with the leather trade. Also in the Hill household were three itinerant tradesmen: another leather worker, a plasterer, and steamfitter Eyre.

Most beer houses, including the two in Station Street, didn’t even have names until they sought the respectability of being a Public House. I don’t know for certain what 27 Station Street became. By the time the Great War broke out, the street was the (un-numbered) address of the long-established Queen’s Hotel, the Railway Inn, the Commercial Inn, the Star and Garter and … the Saddlers’ Arms.

I’d love to think that the house Eyre Sadleir stayed in, the house Charles Hill the saddle-maker sold beer in, became the Saddlers’ Arms. The building is, I'm delighted to discover, still in use as licensed premises, now also selling wines and spirits, in its present guise as Smokey’s American Diner.

STOP PRESS! I've just heard from the good people at Smokey's that their premises are indeed the former Saddler's Arms. So a Sadleir DID stay with a saddler at the Saddler's!

Smokey’s Diner, 26-27 Station Street, Walsall

EYRE COOPER SADLEIR (1857-1920) AND THE BELFAST STEAM

I am frustrated by Richard William Ralph Sadleir (1819-1876) and his family who, in a century obsessed with leaving its mark for posterity and recording everything, have left almost no record of themselves. Worse than that, it is beginning to appear that they left almost no descendents either. Can it really be that I and my few siblings are genetically all that remain of my great great grandfather?

His was a family on its way down. In 1854 he was forced to sell the family’s estates in County Tipperary following the collapse of the Tipperary Bank – a financial disaster caused by his own cousin John Sadleir’s reckless and fraudulent dealing in bogus shares. The impoverished and embarrassed Sadleirs moved to England to begin a new life on Merseyside. My great great grandfather invested unwisely in the new chemical industry of the region. When his business partner fled, the former Tipperary landowner ended his days as a bank clerk in Toxteth.

Sadleirswells, where my great grandmother was born,

home of the Sadleirs until 1854

Of his five children, my great grandmother Eleanor Octavia Wilhelmina Sadleir had three children, only one of whom (Eleanor May Castle) had children of her own – three again, of whom only my father Charles Henry Salter had children. RWRS’s other two daughters Margarita and Alicia never married, one son Richard married too late in life to have children; and the other, Eyre, died single and down on his luck in Belfast in late 1901.

Or so I thought. I went in search of Eyre and found him in the April 1901 census, unmarried, a paying guest at an inn in Walsall. Then I looked for a death date, and found it, late 1901, among the BMDs - the Births, Marriages and Deaths columns. Typical Sadleir, I thought, decessit sine prole – died without issue (which is how genealogists say died childless) like the rest of my great grandmother’s siblings.

Only, it wasn’t a D, it was an M. In fearing the worst I had found what I was looking for, not what was there. In the final quarter of 1901 Eyre Cooper Sadleir got married, not buried. His new wife was Elizabeth Dawson Milligan (b. 1883), a Belfast girl half his age who worked like the rest of her family in Belfast’s internationally important linen industry.

 Ewart’s Linen Factory, Belfast, 1897

Steam power turned its wheels and shafts

Eyre was by trade a steam pipe fitter, and it was surely this that took him from his native Lancashire to Belfast. The linen mills needed power, and they got it from steam engines. It was the city’s expertise in steam engineering which helped it to become a major centre for ship-building by the beginning of the twentieth century. I don’t know precisely when he moved to Belfast, but it made sense to move to a city of such opportunity. If the move came after the April 1901 census (when he was in Walsall), it would make for a whirlwind courtship of Elizabeth. From Walsall pub in April to Belfast marriage in December is only nine months, and I fear it may have been a shotgun wedding.

A single-cylinder steam engine used in the linen industry,

manufactured c1900 by Victor Coates & Co, Belfast

[now in the wonderful Steam Museum at Straffan, Co Kildare]

It’s surprising to find Eyre ten years later on the April 1911 census, still in Belfast, describing himself as an unemployed steam fitter. Demand for his skills can never have been higher than then. Mass-produced cotton goods didn’t begin to threaten the city’s linen industry until after the First World War; and the shipyards were busier than ever. In December 1908 the city’s (and the world’s) biggest yard, Harland & Wolff, began work on a new commission from the White Star Line, the construction of three Olympic class liners. At the height of their construction over the next six years the yard was employing 15,000 men. Surely there was work for Eyre on the Olympic, the Britannic or the Titanic?

Steering engine for the TSS Olympic – her sister ship the Titanic had two such steam engines – to turn a rudder which weighed over 100 tons. Other even larger engines drove the propellors themselves.

Eyre died in Lisburn in 1920, having made, as far as I can tell, no other mark in life than his census returns and his marriage. But I’ve been wrong before. And there is one way, I now know, in which he did leave a legacy. In the 1911 census return Eyre Cooper Sadleir declares that as well as being an unemployed steam fitter, he is a father – to two children both then still living, cousins of my grandmother. Perhaps I and my siblings are not alone after all.

RICHARD RALPH SADLEIR (1854-1928) AND THE FAMILY WEDDING

The nineteenth century is the century when we became obsessed with keeping records, marking our achievements and our contributions to society. It’s all wonderful material now for anyone researching their nineteenth century ancestors. The fact that I can find almost nothing about my great great grandfather Richard William Ralph Sadleir (1819-1876) is frustrating in the midst of so much readily available data. It seems almost an insult to his sketchy memory. But for the time being I know I am beaten when – in any Google search of his name – it is only articles from this blog that come up!

His immediate family have been no easier to flesh out, not even Eleanor, the daughter who became my great grandmother. As for the next generation, Eleanor’s four siblings were not only obscure but unproductive of descendants. Her two sisters Margarita (c1850-1930) and Alicia (1855-1921), like so many of their era, were required at home as companions to their widowed mother and stayed on the shelf after she died in 1906. Then both in their 50s, they remained maiden aunts until their deaths.

St Silas Church, Toxteth, 
bombed 1940, demolished 1954, consecrated in 1865 
around the time the Sadleir family moved to the area

Of her two brothers, Richard Ralph lived a bachelor’s life with (I suspect) some adventures. Growing up in Toxteth on Merseyside, he was by the age of 17 a ship’s broker’s apprentice, before frustratingly disappearing from the radar. Forty years later in 1911 he re-emerged in County Wexford, still unmarried, describing himself as a retired prospector! Where had he been? What had he done? I cannot find him anywhere.

But surprisingly in 1913 he finally got married, at the age of 59. He was back on Merseyside and his 50-year old bride Mary Elizabeth Frances Louise Kennedy had been in the same position as his sisters, stuck at home with a widowed parent. Mary’s mother  died only the year before her wedding: Mary was free at last to marry, and one wonders how long she and Richard had waited for this opportunity. Were they childhood friends? In 1871 during Richard’s apprenticeship Mary was living in Sheffield, eighty miles away, so perhaps not. But were their families old friends? Mary’s parents were married in 1849 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, just thirty miles from Sadleirswells, the Sadleir family home which Richard’s father had to sell in 1854 (the year Richard was born); and the families were certainly in the same social circle.

Sadleirswells, in Co Tipperary

1849 was an interesting year to be in Clonmel. It was the focus of international attention when it became the scene of the trials of the Young Irelanders whose rebellion at the height of the Great Irish Famine the previous year had failed. The uprising, known locally as the Battle of Widow McCormack's Cabbage Plot, was not on the same scale as other European revolutions of that year, in Budapest, Paris and elsewhere. In Clonmel the local police force defeated the rebels, but Mary’s father Major Hugh Kennedy, an officer in the Royal Marines, may well have had a hand in their suppression. 

Mary and Richard’s late wedding was very much a family affair. All four of the couple’s parents were dead; but the officiating minister, in Christ Church in Birkenhead, was Mary’s reverend brother Hugh. And the witnesses were William Henry Castle (Eleanor’s husband, Richard’s brother in law, my great grandfather), Alicia Sadleir (Richard’s sister), Alexander Kennedy (another of Mary’s brothers) and Kathleen Mary Knight (who I’m guessing was the matron of honour).

Christ Church, Claughton, Birkenhead as proposed in 1846 – slightly amended, it opened for worship in 1849, the year Mary Kennedy’s parents were married. Mary Kennedy and Richard Sadleir were married there in 1913.

Marrying so late in life, there were naturally no children from Mary and Richard’s union. And so it seemed that I and my brothers and sisters were the only living descendents of my great great grandfather Sadleir, because Eleanor’s fourth sibling, Richard’s younger brother Eyre, died, like his spinster sisters, unmarried.

Or so I thought. Then this morning I discovered a transcription error in my  research notes about Eyre. More in the following blog!