CATHERINE GURNEY (1848-1930) AND THE OTHER FIVE BABIES (PART 2)

All those 62 granchildren of William Gurney conjure some riotous images of Victorian festive family gatherings at his house. Particularly after hs wife died, Brodie gradually took to the role of family patriarch, holding court at his home in Denmark Hill, South London. 

Denmark Hill House (now demolished)

scene of unforgettable Christmas parties

Rather wonderfully, a description by my great grandfather William Henry Gurney Salter (who was one of those grandchilden) survives of Christmasses in the William Gurney household, and of Christmas 1848 in particular:

"No one who was at the Christmas parties can ever forget them. The parents and children of the different families came trooping in about two o'clock, and each was welcomed with a  present, given with a few kindly words by the grandfather in his library. The presents were really well chosen - a toy, or a magic lantern, or an electrical machine, or a book, so well suited to the receiver that he often found it on eof his chief sources of pleasure in the following year. 

"Then there was a great dinner for the seniors, the large community of cousins who were not old enough amusing themselves with games in the hall or the nursery meanwhile. After the young ones had gone home, there was in many years a little family masque, the poetry for which was contributed mostly by my  uncle Jameson and my uncle Henry Gurney. It turned on the events of the year within the family and in the world without.

"The first that I can recall was in 1848. I remember that, no doubt, because I had a part to play [presumably in the masque]. In that year there had been two weddings, - my uncle Henry Gurney's and my aunt Maria Grey's - and the "six babies", as they have ever since been called, had arrived. ... It was therefore an eventful year, and Father Christmas extended a welcome to the new-comers with more ceremony and more fun than usual. Later in the evening there was generally a game of Blind Man's Buff for the boys in the hall, while the girls sat on the stair and gave the applause."

The garden at Denmark Hill House

which is now part of Ruskin Park, Camberwell

William also recalled other occasions:

"In the summer too there was always a cousins' party to celebrate the birthday of two of them. The garden was large and diversified. Immediately under the windows of the house was a long terrace walk from which the lawn sloped gradually downwars for a considerable distance. At the bottom of it were two of the finest cedars I have ever seen, so rich in foliage below as well as above that their lowest branches resting on the ground formed an almost impenetrable hiding place for us boys and also for the bowls when they strayed too far.

"We cousins used to meet in considerable numbers and so frequently that we knew one another almost as well as if we were brothers and sisters. Until there were nearly fifty of us it was the rule that a Christian name given in one family should not be used in another.

"Besides playing bowls and rounders and other ordinary games on the lawn and in the field, we had free range of the garden, though with reasonable restrictions about the fruit. The fields had great attractions. On one side was a long row of tall trees, rich in birds nests, on the other side was a pleasant shady walk fringed with gooseberry bushes,  with which we were allowed to do our worst, and in the fields themselves was a pond.

"Those of my cousins who remember the house, the garden, and the delightful life there, will I sure gladly tell their children more of it than I have been able, even imperfectly, to relate."

The Portico, Ruskin Park, Camberwell -

all that remains of Demark Hill House

William Gurney led a very public life as a staunch Christian and a Baptist campaigner. William Salter's record  some sixty years later of Gurney's private family life is shot through with genuine warmth and affectionate memory, which trigger similar memories of my own grandfather and our high days and holidays in his country home and garden. Let William have one last word:

"Our grandfather's sympathetic nature led him to follow with real interest the incidents of the lives of his friends, and especially of his children and grandchildren. We boys always took leave of him before going back to school, and we found the interview not only comforting to our pockets but in every way pleasant. He could look at things from a boy's point of view to the last and was tolerant of practical jokes, even booby traps, so that we did not shrink from the serious counsel which he never failed to give."

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!

AUSTIN COOPER (c1614 –bef1690) AND THE HEAPS OF DUNG

Another gardener in my family tree! And another Austin Cooper, my 8x great grandfather. He’s known as Austin the Settler because he’s the man who brought the family to Ireland in 1661. (They stayed there for 300 years and more than 20 of them are named after him.)

They had a nice life in Surrey up until then. His father, it’s believed, had a position in the court of Charles I at Hampton Court, and they were Royalists during the Civil War. They were also pragmatists, and when land adjacent to their property at Byfleet came up for sale, they jumped at the chance to extend their estate. 

Unfortunately the vendor was one Colonel Thomas Hammond, a Cromwellian soldier. After the Restoration in 1660, and despite his loyalty to the crown, Austin Cooper was obliged to forfeit his lands for dealing with the enemy. He sold up, and with the proceeds (a massive £1500) took his family to Butterhill in Co Wicklow, where they began a new life as yeoman farmers.

 Blessington House from the north

with the town of Blessington beyond

In 1669, the nearby manor of Blessington was created and awarded to Michael Boyle, the Archbishop of Dublin at the time. Boyle first set about building a town on his new estate, presumably to provide revenue for it and housing for its workers. When he began work on the house and grounds in 1672, Boyle turned to Austin the Settler to lay out the gardens. 

It’s not at all clear why Boyle should have considered Cooper the right man for the job. Perhaps it was Austin’s experience of the royal estates at Hampton Court. But he came up with an ambitious geometric plan of avenues and orchards. One report describes fruit being forced there, and there is a bill for £16 13s 6d “for 6 collomes to ye garden.”

Estate map of Blessington, by Langford (1804)

The works seem to have been carried out pretty much as envisaged. When I visited Blessington in the early 2000s, the house itself was long gone - burnt down in troubles in 1798, now just a few stones in the corners of the farm fields to which the once grand estate had been turned. But Austin’s long straight avenues were clearly visible in the landcape, and still in use by farm traffic; and the ornamental pond in front of the house was still there.

I’m glad I saw Blessington when I did. It was already earmarked for a massive development of housing, shops and hotels as a dormitory town for Dublin, ironically a planned new town arising on the manor on which Boyle built his own new town in 1669. What’s more, much of the original Cooper estate at Butterhill has been drowned forever under the vast network of Blessington Lakes which were created to form a crucial water supply for Dublin.

Blessington Shopping Centre

(not what Austin had in mind)

There’s a lovely description of Austin the Settler in Burke’s “ Irish Family Records” which may in part suggest why Boyle chose Cooper for his landscaping. Austin was, we read, 

“famed for his feats of strength such as taking two men, one in each hand, slapping them together and throwing them on a dunghill! … If he held on to a cart, the horse could not go … taking a man in one hand, pulling down his breeches with the other then buttling his backside in the River Weye …”  

Quite a character to found a family dynasty.

AUSTIN COOPER (1759-1830) AND IRELAND’S ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE

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My 5x great uncle is known in the Cooper family as Austin the Antiquary, to distinguish him from the more than twenty other Austin Coopers who occur in the Cooper family tree.

Austin Cooper FSA

In his lifetime he achieved high office in the Irish treasury, but he owes his lasting fame to his extracurricular interest in the ancient buildings of Ireland. As he went about his work of collecting taxes and inspecting the British military institutions which peppered the Irish countryside, he began to sketch what he saw around him – the ruins of earlier fortifications, castles and abbeys, early churches and even prehistoric sites.

It must be said that my family has produced finer artists than he. But his drawings emphasise the fact that he had the eye of an antiquarian rather than that of an artist. He was a civil servant, a recorder of information; and the information that he left now forms, 180 years after his death, an invaluable record of Ireland’s past.

Cloghleagh Castle, Co. Cork

(Austin Cooper in the coach with a military escort, 

taking the Cork taxes back to Dublin)

He was not the first person to wake up to the importance of antiquities in the landscape. In Ireland Gabriel Beranger was already working to record such sites when Cooper began his own activities. In Britain John Aubrey had been drawing detailed plans of prehistoric remians a century earlier, and William Stukeley was working in the same field around the time of Cooper’s birth.

All these men were however at the vanguard of the antiquarian movement which was part of the emergence of science as an academic discipline, a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and for the better understanding of the human condition.

Killenure Castle, Co Tipperary

(Austin Cooper's childhood home)

Cooper’s drawings and plans remained virtually undiscovered, kept together by his descendents in the Cooper family, until his great grandson Albert Damer Cooper left money in his will for their publication. In 1942 “An Eighteenth Century Antiquary – The Sketches, Notes and Drawings of Austin Cooper (1759-1830)” finally made it into print and the public domain.

In the 1960s the Cooper family left Ireland, and in 1993 donated all Austin the Antiquary’s work, including his diary notes about the places he had visited, to the National Library of Ireland. In 2000 the Library published a new collection of the work, “Cooper’s Ireland – Drawings and Notes from an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman.”

EUSTACE FOSTER BARHAM (c1825-1895) AND WINE VERSUS THE LAW

I came across one of those meaningless flukes of genealogy a few years ago, one of those entirely coincidental little loops of history which show just what a small world it is (although you wouldn’t want to have to serve writs on, or wine to, everyone in it). Now pay attention.

Eustace Barham (whose 4x great aunt Rebecca Delap is my 5x great grandmother) was in the early 1850s a business partner of my 3x great uncle Charles Castle, in the Bristol legal firm of Castle, Henderson and Barham. Castle and Barham were not otherwise related, but Charles’ nephew William Henry Castle would later marry Eleanor Wilhelmina Sadleir, a great great granddaughter of Rebecca Delap by another route.

Is that clear?! No, of course not - but what I'm trying to say is that both men are related to me, by quite different and circuitous lineages although both are descended from Rebecca Delap. And by coincidence they ended up working in the same law firm together for a while. It really is that trivial.

Henderson and Barham were connected by marriage, having married the sisters Arabella and Ellen Hore in the 1840s; and by business, having formed the firm of Henderson and Barham in 1852. A year later they admitted Charles Castle as a partner, but it was a short-lived and unhappy partnership.

Castle, whose father Thomas was a distiller and merchant in the important Bristol spirits industry, had from the start expressed a desire to move into the business of wine-importing; and it was understood (at least by his legal colleagues) that he would withdraw from the partnership if and when that happened. When it did happen, and to the dismay of Barham in particular, Castle showed no sign at all of withdrawing, but rather of sitting tight and continuing to draw a third share of the legal firm’s profits.

There followed a delightful correspondence of veiled, restrained anger between Castle and a very unhappy Henderson acting on behalf of Barham. In a series of letters, all sides expressed their “disappointment” in the other party’s position, and their failure to comprehend the other party’s “disappointment”.

Under duress, Castle offered to repay part of his share of the profits in recognition of his lesser part in the business of the firm; but he made the offer with such bad grace that both Henderson and Barham withdrew their acceptance of it. In November 1854, the partnership was formally dissolved, although not until 1857 and following further bitter exchanges between Barham and Castle would the latter’s financial settlement from the firm be settled finally. (Castle had taken part of his share in the form of a client’s mortgage debt, on which I think the client had subsequently defaulted just when Castle most needed a further injection of capital in his wine business.)

Barham continued with Henderson for a while before setting up in business for himself as Barham and Co, later Carslake and Barham and later still as Barham and Barham (Eustace with his son Thomas).

I’m not sure what happened to Henderson. Charles Castle, many of whose letters I inherited, seems to have tried his hand at many things in his life – mini careers in the law and as a vintner sit alongside periods of political activity and military service. Without a doubt, more from him in future posts!

JOHN SALTER (1798-1874) AND THE FLORAL TRIBUTES

I found a note amongst the papers I inherited from my uncle, from my great aunt Emily about a distant cousin John Salter, who
“was head gardener at the Tuilerie Gardens (until the coup d’etat) (in the time of Louis Phillipe I believe). He came to England bringing his wife (a French lady, whom I well remember), & his 2 children, Alfred & Annie (Mrs Holborn).”

Well this was all very glamorous and historical, and as it turned out not very accurate.

“Head gardener at the Tuilerie Gardens” – I went to the Tuileries in 1991 and stopped short, thank goodness, of asking the authorities about previous head gardeners in their employ. I did read a short horticultural history of them which made no mention of an English head gardener. The Tuileries, Marie Antoinette’s pleasure grounds, had indeed been overrun by the sansculottes at the time of the 1789 French Revolution. But her king had been Louis XVI. Louis Phillipe was The Citizen King, whose abdication was forced by the French Revolution of 1848 (when any European citizens worthy of the name were revolting).

The truth about John Salter eventually turned up in a history of the chrysanthemum. His father, a cheesemonger and the half brother of my great great great grandfather, had left money in his will for all his children to be apprenticed in the trade of their choice. John chose to be a gardener, and having served his time he established a nursery selling the popular notion of the English Garden ... to the French!

His nursery was at Avenue de Picardie, Versailles, not the Tuilleries, and he had obviously learned his trade well because he was a frequent medal winner at the regular Versailles flower shows. In the troubles of 1848 he did indeed return to England, where he set up shop in his native Hammersmith as “The Versailles Nursery.”

Chrysanthemum Annie Salter (in yellow)

He was particularly adept at breeding dahlias and chrysanthemums. Two of his inventions were still listed with the Chrysanthemum Society in the 1960s. One he had named Queen of England in honour of Victoria – a spawn of it he later called Empress of India. The other he named in honour of his eldest child. Chrysanthemum Annie Salter was still a staple of floral arrangements for decades after his death, a beautiful yellow firework of a flower and a lovely thing to be immortalised by.

Amongst his other creations were the chrysanthemums Mrs W Holborn (in memory of Annie’s marriage) and Alfred Salter, for his son. Alfred ran the Hammersmith business alongside his father.

Chrysanthemum Alfred Salter

As for his French wife, she was called Jane and came from Reading in Berkshire!

THOMAS MARSOM (d. c1726) AND THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

Amongst my 128 6x great grandfathers, Gurney was a miller, Salter was a brickmaker and Delap was an owner of slaves and sugar plantations. Thomas Marsom was an ironmonger to trade, a useful profession but not his main claim to fame.

(I’m going with the majority here in calling him my 6x great grandfather, but from the dates and a reference to him by my genealogical predecessor Brodie Gurney he may well have been a generation earlier. Thomas was certainly a family name across several generations, and a later descendent Thomas Marsom (1743-1815) wrote a New Year’s Day hymn. My Thomas Marsom’s daughter or grand-daughter Martha married my 5x great grandfather Thomas Gurney in 1739, but Marsom himself died in 1725 or 1726 and was old enough to have been in prison in the mid to late 17th century. Martha was born in about 1705.)

Anyway, this Thomas Marsom’s place in history was assured when he found himself in Bedford Gaol along with 59 other religious dissenters, one of whom was none other than John Bunyan. We can’t be sure of the exact date, because Bunyan was in and out of prison several times between 1660 and 1675.

John Bunyan, asleep in Bedford Gaol

During one such incarceration Bunyan had been inspired in a dream to begin work on a new allegory. And it was while the two men shared a cell that Bunyan showed Marsom an early draft of it. Marsom was sufficiently impressed to say to Bunyan, “John, print it.”

The draft was of Bunyan’s great work The Pilgrim’s Progress, and it duly appeared in print in 1678. It became the most widely read book in the English language after the Bible. Chances are that it would have got to print even without Thomas Marsom’s ringing endorsement; but Thomas certainly played his part in the history of English literature, and in the evolution of the dissenting church which would be central to the faith of his descendents for 200 years.

Thomas Marsom's contribution to English literature

THOMAS GURNEY (1705-1770) AND THE DIFFICULT SECOND MARRIAGE

The Gurney family’s attitude to my 5x great grandfather Thomas Gurney is full of contradictions. On the one hand he invented the system of shorthand by which the family made its name; and they celebrate his ingenuity, his piety, his religion, his character, his geniality, his family leadership and his first wife their common ancestor.

Thomas Gurney (1705-1770)

twice-married inventor of the Gurney system of shorthand

On the other hand there is his second wife – not I hasten to clarify a bigamous relationship, but the woman he married some years after the death in 1756 of his first. Of course it’s quite common for the children of a first marriage to resent a second (although I ought to make it clear to my own half-siblings that this wasn’t the case for me!). But the opprobrium heaped on her head in the biographical memoirs of his grandson Brodie Gurney is quite shocking to see in Victorian print.

Where his first wife Martha Marsom was “an excellent and sensible woman”, his second was a homewrecker so beyond the pale that Brodie Gurney can’t even bring himself to name her, and she is referred to only as Miss R. As he tells it, when his grandfather remarried, his children left home and his property was dissipated to gratify her habits of intemperance. In other words she drank the family silver.

Thomas and Miss R had a daughter, Rebecca; and Brodie Gurney denies us the chance to find out what happened to her by telling us only that she married a Mr F of Hertfordshire. That marriage produced two children – Martha, still alive in 1845 and living in W, wherever that is; and Thomas, who had died by then leaving five children.

That’s all Brodie Gurney gives us, which I think is shameful given the elaborate lengths he goes to in extolling the virtues spiritual and temporal of the descendents of Thomas’ first marriage. Maybe Miss R was a drunk, but that doesn’t seem like Thomas Gurney’s type given his hard-working life and staunch non-conformist religious convictions. And even if she did drink, marrying her was his call and perhaps his consolation late in life. And even if she did wreck the family home, it’s no reason to erase her child and grandchildren from the family history.

RICHARD WILLIAM RALPH SADLEIR (1819-1876) AND THE FALLEN MIGHTY

I’d like to know more about my great great grandfather Richard William Ralph Sadleir, but here’s what I’ve pieced together so far.

Sadleirswells, Co Tipperary, c1868

He was born in Sadleirswells, Co Tipperary, desecendent of a family with a proud tradition going back to the sixteenth century, a man whose relatives were among the great and good (and not-so-good) of the land. He married well, in 1848, to Eleanor Wilhelmina Octavia Cooper, daughter of another prominent Tipperary family of the Protestant Ascendancy.

Killenure Castle, Co Tipperary, c 2004

But by 1861 he was living in a cottage in Sutton in Lancashire with his wife, five children and a “poor dependant” man from Ireland. He was working as a chemical manufacturer’s assistant, and three years later he set up his own New Road Chemical Works in St Helen’s with a business partner, John Lawrence Kean. But the scheme failed in 1866 and he ended his relatively few days, aged just 57, as a banker’s clerk in a terraced house in Toxteth.

I think what happened is that he got caught up in the collapse of the Tipperary Bank brought about by the fraudulent activities of his cousins James and John Sadleir in 1852. It was a cataclysmic event for thousands of small and not so small investors in the county, who lost everything. John Sadleir, who it seems had been the criminal mastermind in the scandal took his own life that year by drinking prussic acid on Hampstead Heath one night. His brother James, who had also been implicated, refused to face justice and fled to Switzerland, where he was murdered for his gold watch in 1881 while out walking on the Zurichberg.

If Richard Sadleir lost all he had in the bank’s failure, it would explain why he went to find work in the industrial goldrush of mid-nineteenth century Lancashire. There’s no suggestion that he had any aptitude for chemistry, or any wealth with which to support his young family (only one of whom had been born before they left Ireland) in the lowly English addresses I have for them. I don’t know how he died, but it seems safe to say Life didn’t turn out as he might have expected it to.

Perhaps Holly Cottage looked like this ...

Ivy Cottage, Little Saughall, Cheshire, c1900

His wife had grown up in a Tipperary castle, and died in a Cheshire cottage, Holly Cottage in Little Saughall, where she had been living with two unmarried daughters. Another daughter, my great grandmother Eleanor Sadleir, left a note on the back of a photograph of her mother’s former home, keeping the memory alive, I’m grateful to say, for me and future generations.

DEBORAH CASTLE (1816-1902) AND OLDER MEN

Raking through the contents of my great great great uncle Charles Castle’s writing desk, I came across this furious letter to him from his mother about his sister, my great great great aunt Deborah Castle.

See the handwriting fizz and splutter!

Clifton Thursday Morning

My dear Son,

It is impossible for me to express in writing how much my feelings have been outraged or how many times! But that is nothing compared with his last act. So determined am I never to forgive it, that if the whole of their family were to fall on their knees to ask my pardon I never will.

And so I told Mr Ricketts on Tuesday last with whom I had a long conversation. No marriage with him shall ever take place from this house – they may go where they please, the sooner the better. I never wish to see either of them again, and I do most earnestly entreat you not [doubly underlined] to be present at the Marriage or have any thing to do with it whatsoever.

Mr Henry Pulson is employed as her solicitor, and Mr Ricketts has most kindly agreed to be her trustee provided she has the whole of her property secured upon herself but not otherwise. Mr Crispin made himself too agreeable by half to D----h [sic] so much so that both Michael and myself have thought it proper to speak to her on the subject, I told her plainly that would never do. He is old enough to be her Father. He has nothing but his half pay, and in addition to this he is a Catholic which is an insurmountable Bar in itself.

[she then tries to write of other matters, but is so incensed that she cannot help returning to the subject]

Before I close this Dull epistle I must again revert to Mr Crispin; should he ever speak or write to you on the subject of your sister, say at once I will never hear of it. I have suffered too much misery lately to wish to begin a new game.

[then another attempt to end on a more cheerful note with some family news, but it’s no good – back she turns to the vexing topic of the moment]

I must in Pity to you leave off as I fear you will not be able to read half of what I have written. Give my very kind love to Edward [one of Charles’ brothers] & keep the same dear Charles from your ever affectionate Mother M. Castle

[but still she cannot leave the matter there, and there’s a post script]

Mr Carr nor Mr James Jenkins do not expect I will allow the marriage to take place here, I have just heard said.

Deborah Castle (1816-1902)

in 1864 when everything had worked out fine

Poor old Mary Castle, so consumed with rage that her spidery writing shakes and the fine nib of the pen slips of the page at times. Poor young Deborah, in love with Mr Crispin, a much older man, a poor man and a catholic to boot. Poor old Mr Crispin, with ideas so far beyond his means and rank and age.

The exact date of the letter is not given, but if Charles was going to be able to give his mother’s love to his brother Edward, it was certainly before 1845 when Edward emigrated to Adelaide. Still, she could have been in her late 20s and quite able to make up her own mind about marriage, except for the duty of a daughter to have her parents’ approval. I wonder what her father Thomas thought.

I wonder what Charles thought, but I suspect he will have toed the family line and had a word with Deborah. Deborah did not marry Mr Crispin. She did not leave home, never to darken her mother’s door again. In fact she resigned herself to a spinster life as her mother’s companion, and she wrote wearily to her brother Charles from time to time of walks on the esplanade at Bournemouth (where she and her mother would holiday every summer).

Sir John and Lady Deborah Bowring (1864)

Her mother died in 1856, and three years later Deborah, now 43, married John Bowring, an entirely suitable man. He was wealthy, a Non-Conformist, a brilliant polymath and a successful politician and statesman. He was however also old enough to be her father, fully 23 years her senior!

Deborah was not popular with the children of her husband’s first marriage. But she and John had by all accounts a happy and mutually supportive marriage – both were by now prominent figures in the Unitarian movement. He died in 1872, aged 80. Deborah was 56, and lived out her days in the Bowring mansion outside Exeter, for another 30 years. She compiled a book of her husband’s sacred poetry and hymn lyrics, and included a short biography of him. In it she wrote:

Deborah Castle's memorial to her husband, published 1873

"If my task has been a sad one, I may truly say that, in dwelling upon the scenes the circumstances, and the thoughts of bygone years; in reviewing the active political struggles and controversies in which my husband was engaged; and above all, in pondering on the God-like spirit that animated, the faith in the Divine love that cheered, the entire belief in the ultimate prevalence of truth and goodness, that encouraged him, I too have found sources of consolation."

I'm delighted to add in August 2014 that a new biography of Sir John Bowring has just been published. "Free Trade's First Missionary" is written by Sir John's descendent Philip Bowring and deals with his time in Europe and Asia. Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, said of the new book: "This scholarly and very readable biography, written by one of Asia's most distinguished journalists, shows how free trade became part of Hong Kong's DNA." It's published by Hong Kong University Press and is available on Amazon as a real book and also in a Kindle edition. (And this blog is acknowledged in the introduction!)