ERASMUS SMITH (1611-1691) AND THE DROGHEDA SCHOOL

My 8x great grandfather Austin Cooper, Austin the Settler as he is known in the family, was the first Cooper in my family tree to settle in Ireland, which he did in 1661. His father held a position in the court of Charles I and Austin’s children were all born at Hampton Court, the royal palace on the Thames. At Hampton Court Austin married his bride, my 8x great grandmother Mary Dodson. Mary was a niece of the great Irish educational philanthropist Erasmus Smith, my 10x great uncle.

Erasmus Smith (1611-1691)

merchant, philanthropist

Austin remained a royalist during the English Civil War, and his move to Ireland despite the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was the result of his having bought property from a Cromwellian officer (the real estate equivalent of sleeping with the enemy). Erasmus Smith on the other hand was a staunch republican, a shrewd merchant who supplied Cromwell’s armies with food rations, particularly during those armies’ ruthless campaigns of suppression in Ireland. One can’t help wondering how Austin and Erasmus got on.

While Austin the Settler had to sell up in England for only £1500 and start from scratch in Ireland, his uncle-in-law Erasmus amassed vast estates there. Erasmus received 666 acres of confiscated Irish land from a cash-strapped Cromwell, in lieu of payment for his services to the army. Many English officers in the same position were very happy to sell him their unwanted Irish land for ready money. By the time of his death his original 666 acres had been expanded to the tune of some 19,000 acres.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) (1656, painted by Samuel Cooper, no relation)

and Charles II (1630-1685) (c1670, painted by Peter Lely)

After the restoration, when Charles II was installed on the throne, Erasmus Smith – unlike Austin Cooper – was able to retain his Cromwellian holdings. One of the keys to his success was an annual £100 donation to Charles II’s favourite school, Christ’s Hospital (now in Sussex, but from 1552 to 1901 in London itself). He also won favour by his establishment in 1669 of an educational Trust, funded by part of the income from the Irish estates. Such a charitable act, he convinced his former enemies, could hardly be rewarded by the confiscation of the very estates which funded the charity.

Erasmus was a pious protestant, who believed – like many of the protestant dominations which emerged during Cromwell’s regime – that education was the key to godliness. He was convinced that the Irish rebellion of 1641 (whose suppression his rations fuelled) was the result of poor education.

Erasmus Smith’s idea of education was to teach children “fear of God and good literature and to speak the English tongue.” To this end he put money into two existing Dublin institutions, Trinity College and the Kings’s Hospital School; and founded three grammar schools, at Templemore, Galway and Drogheda.

Templemore Christian Brothers School

formerly Erasmus Smith’s Grammar School (building of c1820)

Drogheda had been the scene of one of the worst of Cromwell’s atrocities in 1649, a massacre of thousands of Catholic Irish men, women and children in which I’m sorry to say another of my 8x great grandfathers General Hugh Massy may have had a hand. The memory of the event was still fresh and raw when Erasmus established Drogheda Grammar School only twenty years after it; excluding Catholic children from it cannot have helped local feeling.

Galway Grammar School (building of 1807)

after its restoration by Yeats College in 2006

Of Erasmus Smith’s three grammar schools, Templemore in Tipperary is now a Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers. Galway’s closed in 1958, but the derelict building has recently been restored and now forms part of Yeats College. Drogheda Grammar School is now run on Quaker principles for children of all faiths and none. It will celebrate the 340^th anniversary of its opening in 2019.

Drogheda Grammar School’s former premises, the two red-brick buildings in which Samuel Cooper was a schoolboy. They were built 1730-1740 and demolished in 1989. The school moved to a new rural campus in 1976 (picture from www.geograph.ie)

In the 1760s when Drogheda Grammar School was approaching its first centenary, one of its pupils was my 4x great grandfather Samuel Cooper (1750-1831), great great grandson of Austin the Settler. Samuel could have called Erasmus his 6x great uncle, and I wonder if he was aware of the relationship. Probably not, after four generations – but when Samuel grew up, he became a professional estate manager; and amongst his portfolio were the estates of the Erasmus Smith Schools Trust.

JOHN JAMES SMITH (1813-1903) AND THE SHEEP-PIG

This is my 150th weekly posting here, and I thought I'd celebrate with a nod to another writer in the (extended) family.

 John James Smith was a great-nephew of my 4x great uncle David Salter – David’s wife Sarah and JJ’s grandmother Elizabeth Lepard were sisters. Or to put it another, simpler way, JJ, who married Caroline Gurney, sister of my great great grandmother Emma, was my 3x great uncle. 

The Salter and Smith families were further bound by religious and business partnerships between JJ’s grandfather (also John James Smith) and my 3x great grandfather Samuel Salter. That pair were deacons together from 1800 to 1821 of their local Baptist church, Beechen Grove Chapel in Watford; and there is also evidence (from insurance records) of joint dealings between 1811 and 1818 in connection with White End Farm in Watford.

Hamper Mill, Watford, Hertfordshire

JJS junior carried on the family trade of paper manufacture at Hamper Mills started by his grandfather, and also in partnership with his younger brother Charles King Smith the stationery business from their premises at 29 King Street, Covent Garden. (To save you looking, the shop is now occupied by Simon Carter, novelty cufflink designer.)

JJ’s brother Charles changed his name in time to Charles King-Smith. Charles' son, also Charles King-Smith, also stayed in the business and, when the opportunity arose in around 1900, bought a 150-year old paper mill in Bitton in Gloucestershire called Golden Valley Mill. Charles junior moved there with his family, including their six-year old son Ronald, and they ran the mill for 60 years, even providing the village with its first electricity supply until 1932.

Golden Valley Mill, Bitton, Gloucestershire (c1935)

Ronald’s first son Ronald Gordon King-Smith was born there in 1922, and grew up working on the family farm which supplied the Golden Valley works canteen with milk and eggs. Although Ronald junior subsequently tried his hand at other careers including soldiering and primary school teaching, it was his formative years on the farm which shaped his final calling, as a children’s author of farmyard stories. Writing under the name Dick King-Smith, Ronald junior (my fourth cousin, I think!) achieved international fame with his 1984 story The Sheep-Pig, which was a global hit in cinemas when filmed as Babe.

One way or another, it’s been pigs, pigs, pigs, for the Smiths and Salters. I don’t know what their joint enterprise at White End Farm was; but back in 1825, following the death of John James Smith senior, my 3x great grandfather Samuel Salter moved to London. There he began a new enterprise in Panyer Alley off Newgate Street, as a bacon merchant.

A sheep-pig

DAVID SALTER (1771-1848) AND THE CAR PARK WHERE HIS ALMSHOUSES STOOD

Last week the very helpful and friendly staff at Watford Museum sent me a newspaper cutting from the Watford Observer of 7^th February 1958. It discussed the town council’s plans to demolish a row of four almshouses, in order to enlarge the car park behind the Three Crowns Public House on Watford High Street.

The David Salter Almshouses, Watford

built in 1843 (photograph from the Watford Observer, 1958)

The almshouses were erected in 1843 at the expense of my 4x great uncle David Salter, a deacon of Watford Baptist Meeting Place (now called Beechen Grove). A 1956 history of Beechen Grove by Walter Bennewith describes him as a hero of the Faith. He does seem to have been a mainstay of the Beechen Grove congregation in the first half of the nineteenth century, although a 1907 history by the incumbent of the time, Rev James Stuart includes a lengthy description of him as “of strong and forceful character, … with marked peculiarities which led him to pursue a path of his own. … He would not today have escaped the charge of dogmatism.” The Bennewith history goes further and calls him bigoted and eccentric. I like the sound of him!

David was baptized in 1799, along with  one Daniel Alcock, the first new members of the church under its new pastor Rev W. Groser. The two were soon joined by David’s younger brother Samuel and by John James Smith, the new owner of nearby Hamper Paper Mill – which was just a stone’s throw from Oxhey Lodge where David and his four brothers were born.

David Salter’s Watford, one street town

(from the First Series of Ordnance Survey maps,

dated 1856 but not showing railways which were built twenty years earlier!)

John James Smith ran a London stationery business in partnership with one William Lepard and was already married to Lepard’s daughter Elizabeth when he moved to Watford. He is certainly therefore responsible for David Salter’s greatest happiness, by introducing him to Elizabeth’s sister Sarah, whom David immediately fell in love with and made his wife. (History would repeat itself later in the century when Samuel Salter’s son William Augustus married Emma Gurney and introduced John James Smith’s grandson – also John James – to Emma’s sister Caroline!)

Alcock, Smith and the two Salters threw themselves into church service. Smith and Samuel Salter performed something of a double act as deacons in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, their places eventually being filled by Alcock and David Salter. The Salter family paid for new gravel paths and for a fresh coat of paint on the building; David Salter and John James Smith tried to outdo each other in donating baptizing gowns; and when concern was expressed about the cost of a new and much needed extension to the vestry, David simply offered to pay for the whole thing himself.

Watford Baptist Meeting House, Beechen Grove, in 1810

(from Walter Bennewith’s history of the church)

David’s happiness was short lived. Sarah died after only about three years of marriage, probably in childbirth. They had two children, Sarah and Samuel, neither of whom outlived their father. (Sarah died in 1838; Samuel may have died with his mother.) The death of his wife left David inconsolable and he became reclusive and eccentric. He refused to serve as deacon alongside his go-ahead nephew James Smith, son of his wife’s sister – perhaps the proximity to such a relative induced too-painful memories – and only accepted the position, in 1826, when James agree not to. 

He continued to work tirelessly in the service of the church, although he was, I think, increasingly set in his ways and resistant to any change – he is reported to have been behind the abrupt departure of Rev Groser’s successor Rev Copley, and blocked an attempt by James to introduce open communion (communion for non-members). He was opposed to organ accompaniment for hymn singing, which James introduced when a new chapel was built in 1835.

He died in 1848, six years after his brother Samuel, four years after Samuel’s son Samuel joined David as a deacon of the church, and only one year before the death of his fellow deacon and 1799 applicant for baptism Daniel Alcock. Bennewith wrote of David: “Beneath his kill-joy, Puritan hide lay a heart that melted at another’s need. He did his best to be awkward, but Christianity would keep breaking in.” 

One can all too easily imagine what he would have said when his almshouses, old and in need of much repair, were demolished in early 1960; and what he would have further remarked on learning that the car park too has now gone. But the David Salter Almshouses Trust continues to do the same work it was founded to do, administered to this day by deacons of Beechen Grove Baptist Chapel.

Thanks to Watford Museum and Beechen Grove Baptist Church for information gratefully received.

SUSAN SMITH (1783-1814) AND A GOOD GLASS OF PORT

My brother is getting married in the Minho region of Portugal today! I’m delighted of course, not just for his future happiness, but because it renews the family’s connection with the region and the country, first made in 1808.

In that year, Susan Smith became the fist wife of Michael Hinton Castle, a nephew of my 3x great grandfather Thomas Castle. Michael like his uncle was active in the Bristol wine and brandy trade (about which I’ve written here before). As well as distilling brandy and whisky in the city, the Castle family also imported wines from Europe. This is how Michael met Susan.

Susan was the daughter of John Christmas Smith, a sea captain who shipped wine from the Douro region of Portugal. The vineyards along the Douro river are today best known for producing a fortified wine named after the town at the mouth of the river, known simply as “the port” – Oporto.

Barrels of wine being unloaded onto a bustling quayside in 18^th century Bristol

John Smith was born in Biddeford in Devon in 1753, and will certainly have sailed out of nearby Bristol, England’s biggest port at the time. His wife, Susan’s mother Charlotte Maria Bearsley, was a resident of Oporto, and continued to live there after their marriage while John plied his trade between Oporto and Bristol. All four of their daughters, including Susan, were born in the Portuguese port.

Charlotte Bearsley was not Portuguese but part of the large British colony who controlled wine production along the Douro. The Bearsley family were one of the very earliest founders of that colony. Charlotte’s grandfather Peter Bearsley had been the first British wine trader to venture personally into the Douro region – before him, merchants dealt with representatives of the Douro quintas based in Oporto.

One of the “lean, austere” wines of Monçao

(also available in red)

Peter Bearsley was expanding a family business which already had a foothold elsewhere in Portugal. His father Job Bearsley first came to Portugal in 1692, trading not in port but in the wine known at the time as “red Portugal.” Job owned the Ram Inn in London’s Smithfield district, and red Portugal was the product of the Minho region in northern Portugal, where my brother is getting married. No doubt I will be drinking some tonight!

The centre of production was/is Monçao on the banks of the upper Minho river, and it was exported from the harbour city of Viana do Castelo, where in time Job’s son Peter, as a prominent local citizen, was appointed British consul to look after the significant British interests in the region. After Peter expanded into the Douro, his sons, most notably Charlotte’s father, Susan Smith’s grandfather Francis Bearsley, developed the family business into a major port house.

Francis Bearsley’s silver tastevin, which he used to test the maturity and colour of his ports

Francis, the longest-serving of them, was a partner in the business for 61 years. But he died in 1805 without sons to carry on the business. The Bearsley house passed at first to his sons in law (presumably including Captain Smith), but they had little aptitude for wine production.

In 1808, the year of Susan’s marriage to Michael Castle, Napoleon invaded Spain and advanced on British interests in Portugal. Many British firms including Bearsley’s transferred ownership of their enterprises to non-British hands (in the hope that Napoleon would therefore leave them alone). Thus Bearsley’s port house passed out of Bearsley family hands. But the business founded by Job Bearsley and developed by his grandson Francis survives today. The man who took it over in 1808 passed on the reins in 1816 to a manager in his London office by the name of Joseph Taylor. Today, Taylor’s Port is one of the oldest names in the industry and, as it happens, a personal favourite of mine. No doubt I will also be drinking some of that tonight!

Top tipple, Taylor’s Tawny

Congratulations, James and Raquel.

CATHERINE GURNEY (1848-1930) AND THE OTHER FIVE BABIES (PART 1)

In 1848, year of pan-European revolution in whose turbulent events many of my ancestors were caught up and even played a part, the focus of Gurney attention was much closer to home. 1848 was the year of the “Six Babies”, the birth of six of my great great aunts and uncles.

William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855)

genial grandfather

Brodie Gurney was blessed with, if I've got this right, 62 grandchildren. Like many Victorian patriarchs, Brodie Gurney had produced a large family. From the middle of the nineteenth century, infant mortality figures began to fall, and birth rates also came down as parents benefitted from the greater survival rate. But three of Gurney’s first four children succumbed to measles epidemics between 1810 and 1812. It’s no wonder that he and poor Ann, Mrs Gurney, kept churning them out.

Of his eight surviving children, two were getting married in 1848, so could not properly be expected to be delivering grandchildren just yet. The other six however were doing all that was expected of them.

So for the record, here are those “Six Babies” stats in full:

BABY ONE

Catherine “Katie” Gurney, 6^th of 7 children of Brodie’s eldest son Joseph (3^rd of 4 with his second wife Harriet Tritton). So far I’ve traced her to Harrogate in 1901, where she was the unmarried Honorary Secretary of the Northern Police Orphanage; ten years earlier she had held the same post at the Christian Police Association in London. I think she died at Steyning in Sussex in 1930.

BABY TWO

Arthur Frederick Gurney, 4^th of 8 children born to next in line Thomas Gurney (the last with his first wife Margaret Hanson). Arthur trained as a barrister but entered the church and was minister of Bournemouth Baptist Church in 1881; but by 1891 he was merely the manager of a Mission Hall in Ramsey. I think he died at Tendring in Essex in 1925.

BABY THREE

Florence Emma Jameson, 9^th of 13 children from Brodie’s eldest surviving daughter Mary Ann and her husband William Kingsbury Jameson. Florence never married, and died just short of her 94^th birthday in 1942.

BABY FOUR

Frank Salter, 6^th of 7 children of Emma Gurney and her husband the Rev William Augustus Salter. Frank was a gifted engineer – see my earlier blog about him – who died young in 1888.

BABY FIVE

Herbert Smith, 4^th of 7 children for John James Smith and his wife Caroline Gurney. Herbert doesn’t seem to have made good headway in life; 1n 1891 he was a clerk for a timber merchant, and ten years later, still unmarried, he was living in lodgings and working as a shoemaker.

BABY SIX

Amelia “Millie” Gurney Angus, 3^rd of 10 children born to Amelia Gurney and her husband the Rev Joseph Angus. Joseph was a leading churchman of his day, and his wife Amelia served as foreign secretary of the Baptist Zenana Mission from 1869 to 1893. On her death, Millie and her sister Edith filled the office as joint secretaries. Millie died unmarried at the grand age of 97, in 1945 in Hammersmith.

EXCUSED PREGNANCY

Henry Gurney and his second wife Phoebe Whitchurch, getting married. Henry had 7 children altogether.

Maria Gurney and her first husband the Rev Henry Grey, getting married. Maria had 3 children in total.

More on the Year of Six Babies next week!