GEORGE VERRALL (1800-1830) AND THE FISHER FAMILY (PART ONE)

George Verrall (1800-1830) is a cousin so distant that it’s hardly worth mentioning the fact. But although he died young he packed a lot into his short life, and it’s a pleasure to remember him here.

George was the son, grandson and great grandson of men called George Verrall, and he even had a half-brother also called George (from his father’s second marriage). His father must have thought that the future of the name was secure, but as fate would have it the half-brother died in 1843 at an even younger age, 21, than the George I’m writing about today. Both died before their father and neither had any children.

One or other of these sons painted portraits of their George Verrall father and grandfather which, just to complete the confusion, were inherited by a nephew of theirs. The nephew’s name was, I’m afraid to say, George Verrall. This last George (1848-1911) also died without children, and the whereabouts of the paintings is, to me at least, unknown.

Shakespeare relaxes with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men,

one of whose names George Verrall took as a stage name in tribute

With so many George Verralls to confuse the historian, I’m rather grateful that the George I started this post with changed his name to George Vernon when he became an actor. “Mr Vernon,” recalls Henry Dickinson Stone in his 1873 memoir Personal Reminiscences of the Drama, “was one of nature’s noblemen, a gentleman of the old school, highly educated, and a dramatic artist of the very first order.”

As George Vernon he emigrated to Albany in New York State in 1827 in the company of the Fisher family, actors all. What a fascinating bunch! Two brothers and four sisters, all marinaded in theatre from an early age by a librarian father Frederick George Fisher who was obsessed with Shakespeare.

South Pearl Street Theater, Albany NY in the 1880s

when it became part of Proctor's chain of vaudeville theatres

Vernon married one of them, Jane, soon after their arrival in Albany. She and her brother John joined him in forming a theatre company when he took over as actor-manager of the struggling South Pearl Street Theatre in the town. He turned its fortunes around over two seasons. He probably also devised the scenery, because elsewhere in the town he demonstrated a flair for architectural design – he worked on Albany Town Hall, and the pulpit of St Paul’s Church in the town. (Proof perhaps that he was the George Verrall who painted those portraits of George Verrall and George Verrall.)

But the strain of holding the reins at the theatre took its toll on George Vernon’s health. He lost his singing voice, and became too ill to act. He bought and retired to Woodstock Farm outside the town (now an animal sanctuary) where he died in 1830 only three years after arriving in America.

Woodstock Farm, south of Albany NY

As Mrs Vernon, his widow achieved considerable success as a comic actress. “Though never noted for her beauty,” reports an 1880 history of Albany theatres, “she possessed an intelligent and expressive face, and a polished manner, that' at once denoted the woman of intellect and refinement. She was tall and till the last possessed a graceful figure. Her education was liberal, and it was said that during her connection with the Park theatre, her opinion, in all passages of disputed readings of the Shakespeare dramas, was considered final.”

It sounds as if she did her father (and her husband) proud, and she wasn’t the only one. More on the rest of the Fisher acting dynasty in my next post.

STEPHEN SALTER (bef1681-c1734) AND THE ISLAND OF COLESHILL

Stephen Salter is my 6x great grandfather and oldest identifiable Salter ancestor. He or his father brought the family from Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire to Coleshill in Buckinghamshire … no, Hertfordshire … no, Buckinghamshire … no, Hertfordshire.

Coleshill, home of the early Salters;

a little piece of Hertfordshire in Buckinghamshire

until the Counties (Detached Parts) Act of 1844

Coleshill isn’t an island. It’s a landlocked little village on top of a steep hill between Amersham and Beaconsfield. But although it’s completely surrounded by Buckinghamshire, it is (by an accident of history and land ownership) a detached part of Hertfordshire – a little island of Herts in a sea of Bucks. When counties were taking shape, Coleshill and the parish of Amersham in which it lies belonged to someone whose main property was going to be included in Hertfordshire, so Coleshill jolly well had to be in Hertfordshire too.

It wasn’t until 1844’s Counties (Detached Parts) Act that this and similar anomalies throughout the country were rationalised. Until then its unusual status was open to exploitation. In a nutshell, the parish didn’t fall under the jurisdiction of Buckinghamshire magistrates, and was beyond the everyday reach of Hertfordshire magistrates. So it was, at least potentially, a refuge from justice, and for one man at least, a refuge from injustice.

One of Stephen Salter’s neighbours in Coleshill was Thomas Ellwood, student and  friend of the poet John Milton and an important figure in the early history of the Quaker movement. Ellwood (1639-1713) had been much persecuted and imprisoned for his faith. In 1669 he married Mary Ellis, a Coleshill girl, and moved to a house just inside the parish boundaries of the village! He must finally have felt safe, and wrote a cheerful poem that year giving directions to his sanctuary:

Two miles from Beaconsfield, upon the road

To Amersham, just where the way grows broad,

A little spot there is called Larkin's Green,

Where on the bank some fruit trees may be seen;

In midst of which, on the sinister hand,

A little cottage covertly doth stand.

"Soho!" the people out and then enquire

For Hunger Hill; it lies a little higher.

But if the people should from home be gone,

Ride up the bank some twenty paces on,

And at the orchard end, thou may'st perceive

Two gates together hung. The nearest leave,

The furthest take, and straight the hill ascend,

The path leads to the house where dwells thy friend.

Hunger Hill, Thomas and Mary Ellwood’s home in Coleshill

Ellwood lived the rest of his life there, and it’s hard to resist the thought that he and the Salters discussed theology outside some brick-built cottage in the village. Surely meetings with Ellwood must have contributed to the shaping of the Salter family religious conscience, which is evident in their domestic and public life, their sense of public service and personal denial, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Stephen Salter’s great great grandson William Augustus Salter became a Baptist minister, the first Salter to attend university when the University of London opened its doors in 1828. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Salters of Coleshill were makers of bricks and tiles. Their work survives in Coleshill in several old buildings including their own home (then a farmstead and now a rather grand house called The Rosary, which remained in the ownership of the family until it was sold on by Stephen’s great granddaughter Mary Smith).

There in Coleshill, Stephen laid not only the foundations but also the bricks and mortar of a family legacy.

The Rosary, c1930 and c2000, built with Salter bricks and tiles

SIR RALPH SADLEIR (1507-1587) AND THE GOSSIPS

My 12x great grandfather John Sadleir commanded a company at the siege of Boulogne in 1544. Which is pretty impressive, until you meet his brother, my 13x great uncle Ralph Sadleir. Ralph served under four English monarchs from Henry VIII (for whom he was Secretary of State) to Elizabeth I (who appointed him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster). As a man serving in such high public office, Ralph had a hand in many events of national importance.

Portrait of a Man, by Hans Holbein, painted in 1535

and considered a possible portrait of Sir Ralph Sadleir (1507-1587)

His state papers contain details of his roles in the suppression of two rebellions and as ambassador for many years to Scotland. They were edited and published in Edinburgh 222 years after his death by a descendent, Arthur Clifford, with historical notes by none other than Sir Walter Scott. The two thick volumes of them are a priceless collection of first hand accounts covering 50 years, 1537-1587, from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries to Elizabeth’s execution of Mary.

Ralph first entered royal service in 1518, at the tender age of 11, under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex. Cromwell himself was then under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey fell from grace for opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon; Cromwell rose by facilitating it, and Ralph rose with him. Cromwell fell very suddenly from grace in 1540 when he was blamed (and beheaded) for Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, and Ralph kept on rising.

Thomas Cromwell (c1485-1540) by Hans Holbein, painted in c1533

He was perhaps lucky that Henry died only seven years later, before Ralph had time to fall from grace himself. In the event, Henry still regarded Ralph highly enough to appoint him to the Council of Regency for his underage heir the future king Edward VI. As a favourite of Henry and official protector of Edward, Ralph was now pretty well set up for life.

Ralph must have had mixed feelings about the execution of his mentor Cromwell. Not only did he owe Cromwell his elevated position in court; the earl of Essex was also godfather to Sadleir’s first two sons. The letter survives, quoted in the State Papers, in which Ralph asks Thomas to act as such for the second boy:

“Syr, after myn humble comendacions … it is so, that my wyfe, after long travaile, and as payneful labour as any woman could have, hathe at the last brought furth a fayre boy; beseeching you to vouchsafe ones agayne to be gossip unto so poore a man as I am, and that he may bear your name. Trusting ye shall have more rejoyse of him then ye had of the other; and yet ther is no cause but of gret rejoyse in the other, for he dyed an innocent, and enjoyeth the joyes of heven …

“At Hackney, this Saturday, at iii of the clocke at after none, with the rude and hastie hand of

Your most assured and faithful serante duringe his lyf,

Rafe Sadler.”

Gossip originally meant godparent. The child did indeed take Thomas’ name – in 1603 Sir Thomas Sadleir, Ralph’s son and now sheriff of Hertfordshire, entertained James VI of Scotland for two nights. James was en route from Scotland to London to become James I of England, succeeding Elizabeth I who, 16 years earlier, had beheaded his mother Mary Queen of Scots.

As evidence of happier times in Mary and Elizabeth’s fractured relationship, Mary had invited Queen Elizabeth (with King Charles IX of France) to be King James’ gossip. And although James could not be expected to remember it, the father of his Hertfordshire host in 1603 had been present at his birth in 1566.

Mary, Queen of Scots, her infant son who later became James the First, and Sir Ralph Sadleir, painted by Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846), a historical artist of whom Charles Dickens wrote:

“No amount of sympathy with him and sorrow for him in his manly pursuit of a wrong idea for so many years … ought to prevent one from saying that he most unquestionably was a very bad painter, and that his pictures could not be expected to sell or to succeed."

Present whereabouts of the painting, and indeed the authenticity of the scene it depicts, unknown.

JOHN COOPER-CHADWICK (1864-1948) AND THE FOUNDING OF RHODESIA

This is a tale of one man’s Imperial African adventures, but it also refers to terrible injuries which he sustained. If you’re squeamish about the latter, look away now. If on the other hand you are curious about the former, read on. Don’t worry – the details (in paragraph 7) are sketchy.

John Cooper-Chadwick’s grandfather was my 3x great grandfather, so we are cousins of a sort. The snippet of biography I have found about him is a paragraph of gems, a handful of little prisms through which you can get blurred glimpses of Britain’s Imperial Past. It begins:

“served with Sir Charles Warren’s Expedition in S Africa 1878-81, with Bechuanaland Border Police 1885 and with Rhodes’ Pioneers in Mashonaland 1888”

Sir Charles Warren (1840-1927)

photographed by Herbert Rose Baraud of London in the 1890s

Sir Charles Warren was something of an Imperial Stormtrooper, a troubleshooter whose business in 1878-81 was the suppression of an uprising in Bechuanaland, then a British Protectorate and now the state of Botswana. His main talent was as a military surveyor, in which role he made some contributions to archaeology in the middle east. It was the need to establish borders in the Northern Cape (northern South Africa) that first took him to that region. After his successful quelling of the Botswana rebellion, he later secured the region against Boer incursions from the Orange Free State to the east, in time for John C-C’s service there in 1885.

(Sir Charles’ subsequent career was less glorious. A spell as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London made him many enemies – his political clashes, his grandiose uniform, his failure to solve the Jack the Ripper case, and his Bloody Sunday suppression of a demonstration in Trafalgar Square all contributed to his resignation in 1888. He returned to military service; as a General in the Boer War he was described as “perhaps the worst … and certainly the most preposterous … a duffer” whose indecision led to the catastrophic British defeat at Spion Kop.)

From Botswana JCC moved to Mashonaland, now the region around Harare in Zimbabwe. Cecil Rhodes’ Pioneer Column officially moved into the territory in 1890, to secure the area ahead of any German, Portuguese or Boer efforts to do so. It was a remarkable incursion of a mere 250 men, which in three months that year founded Rhodesia, imposing a a new political and moral order on the native populations of Mashonaland and Matabeleland. When the column was disbanded in October 1890, its members were given land to become the country’s first white farmers.

King Lobengula of Matabeleland and Mashonaland (c1845-c1894),

by Ralph Peacock after E.A. Maund

If JCC was there in 1888, then he was part of Rhodes’ entirely unofficial softening campaign. Rhodes’ first step was to sign a treaty with the Matabele King Lobengula, giving not Britain but Rhodes’ own British South Africa Company mining rights and administrative powers in the area. It seems that JCC formed part of Rhodes’ administration in some way, possibly attached to Lobengula’s entourage.

The evidence for this is in the 1894 publication of JCC’s memoir (of which a new edition was printed in April 2010), and here comes the squeamish bit, from his biography again:

“author of Three Years with Lobengula (which he wrote with a pen tied to his elbow joints as a result of losing his forearms in a shooting accident)”

Lobengula was a powerful warrior in his youth and ruled through terror and kidnap; but in middle age he became obese and ill. Rhodes secured his treaty partly through the services of his doctor who treated Lobengula for gout. When it became clear that Rhodes’ plans included the colonization of his kingdom, Lobengula tore up the treaty and ordered the British out. But his large and disciplined army – Matabele means men of the long shields – was no match for British maxim guns. He died in January 1894 a hunted man, in a tzetze-ridden swamp, probably of smallpox or dysentery.

Lobengula’s army fought fiercely to protect their king’s retreat in December 1893

John Cooper-Chadwick’s injuries were the resul not of war but, as he admits, of his own carelessness; he was leaning with both hands on the muzzle of his loaded gun when his dog leapt up and stumbled on the trigger. He was, if these dates are correct, only 14 when he first went to Africa, and under 30 when he had his accident. Retiring to the family home in Tipperary he married at the age of 32 the daughter of a local JP, with whom he had two sons. Having already lived an extraordinarily full life, he lived another 52 no doubt eventful years, long enough to see the birth of his two grandchildren. I rather wish I had known him.

John Cooper-Chadwick (1864-1948), centre,  in 1885,

at Langford Camp on the Orange River

WILLIAM VERRALL (1715-1761) AND THE COOKERY CLASSIC

I described in an earlier post how Richard Verrall was set up by the Duke of Newcastle to run a Whig coffee house in the Sussex town of Lewes. The Duke was sparing no expense to ensure the Whig party’s advantage in the town. He was also pouring money into a club which met every Wednesday in a richly appointed Club Room at the White Hart Inn across the road from the coffee house. The landlord of the White Hart was none other than Dick Verrall, Coffee House Richard’s father, 4x great grandfather of my great aunt Helen Verrall.

The White Hart Inn Lewes

Victorian on the outside, Elizabethan on the inside

As a building the White Hart goes back to the late sixteenth century, when it was a mansion belonging to ancestors of the Duke of Newcastle. Much evidence of this remains in the internal lay-out of the rooms and some surviving paneling. But in the early 1720s Dick Verrall remodelled it (presumably with Newcastle backing) as a large hostelry. Downstairs there was a bar and parlour as well as the essential service areas – kitchen, buttery and brewhouse, and stables (the pub car park of the day, which could accommodate 100 of its patrons’ mounts). Upstairs, as well as the Duke’s Club Room, the premises now contained a “Great Room” with a balcony, a billiards room, three private “best bedrooms” and a dormitory in the attic for lesser guests.

Between the White Hart and the coffee house (which also contained the Lewes Assembly Rooms), the Duke of Newcastle’s influence on the town, exerted at arm’s length through the Verralls, was substantial. In addition to their roles in hospitality, several Verralls also served as constables for the town, a post which included duties as returning officer for parliamentary elections at which the Duke and his fellow Whigs hoped to do well! Dick was a constable; so were his sons Edward, Henry who ran the coffee house after the early death of his brother Richard, and William who took over the running of the White Hart after his father’s death in 1737.

As an exercise in mutual back-scratching, Dick had persuaded the Duke to engage young William Verrall in his kitchens. Although it might have been a hiring based on politics rather than talent, William took to cooking with great enthusiasm. He served his time under the Duke’s brilliant French chef M. de St Clouet who later returned to France to serve Marechal Richlieu (a nephew of the Cardinal’s).

… in keeping with tradition …

When William took over at the White Hart he immediately began to promote it for its cooking “after the French method.” The inn went from strength to strength, bolstered by the new stagecoach routes between Lewes and London, and by the political successes of the Duke of Newcastle. William not only cooked for the classier clientele of his inn but also ran an outside catering operation for the gentry of the surrounding area.

By 1759 (the year Guiness was first brewed) he was able with some confidence to publish his book, “A Complete System of Cookery,” an early classic of the genre full of surprisingly modern recipes and useful tips for kitchen equipment and work practices. Its admirers included his contemporary the poet Thomas Gray, and the cookery writer who reintroduced French cuisine to Britain in the mid twentieth century, Elizabeth David. It was republished in 1988, reprinted in 1999, and a new edition will appear in April 2011 complete with the notes which Gray made in his own copy of it.

William Verrall’s “A Complete System of Cookery” (1759)

The Duke of Newcastle’s investments all paid off, and he served two terms as Prime Minister, during which he was much caricatured as the George W Bush of his day, a geographically ignorant buffoon. History views him a little more kindly, particularly for 1759 (the year of Verrall’s publication) which became known as Annus Mirabilis, the year of miracles, because of his success in foreign policy especially against the French.

Verrall’s own fortunes mysteriously went into sharp decline. His first wife had died in 1757. Perhaps grief distracted him from the business of running the White Hart; perhaps illness did; or perhaps his success as a chef caused him to take his eye off the ball. For reasons unknown, he was declared bankrupt and his inn and stock sold off in March 1761, only two years after the publication of his book. He was dead within the month.

He was survived by his second wife, whom he had married only a few weeks earlier on 2^nd March 1761. Perhaps she was unaware of the state of his finances, or his health. Certainly she declined to act as his administrator when his will was proved later in the year. She herself died four years later. But William’s culinary legacy lives on.

William Verrall’s “A Complete System of Cookery” (1759)

reprinted 1988, 1999 and 2011

HENRY VERRALL (1713-1794) AND THE SEEDS OF STARBUCKS

The Verralls of Lewes in Sussex are a respectable old family. In time they became doctors and solicitors, but they began (at least so far back as I’ve been able to trace them) as shopkeepers and innkeepers. For at least two generations in the eighteenth century they kept the White Hart Inn in the town and in around 1734 Richard Verrall, a son of the White Hart landlord, was invited by the local toff the Duke of Newcastle to set up a coffee house.

The White Hart Inn, Lewes

Coffee houses arrived in Britain in 1650. Charles II  considered them "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers" and they were hugely popular. When the New Coffee House opened in Lewes, there were about 550  coffee shops in London alone, many affiliated to a particular profession or political persuasion. The Duke of Newcastle set Richard Verrall up in business in order to give the Sussex town’s Whigs a meeting place and talking shop. As one French visitor to London put it, coffeehouses, "where you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government," were the "seats of English liberty."

When Richard died young only eight years later, his brother Henry (my great aunt’s 3x great grandfather!) took over the running of it. Henry kept the coffee house for over 40 years, and must have been at the centre of the town’s gossip and political debate, hosting the radical movers and shakers of the day in his shop. One such radical was a certain Tom Paine, an excise officer from Norfolk who was posted to Lewes in 1768.

Tom Paine’s house in Lewes, 1768-1774

Thomas Paine involved himself in local politics, and also campaigned for a pay-rise for his fellow excise officers – he himself had to pad out his income by running a tobacco shop in Lewes. Henry certainly knew him, and it is reported that one day, after a game of bowls, they repaired to the White Hart for a bowl of punch. As the drink flowed Verrall quipped, in reference to Frederick II of Prussia (with whom Britain had been allied during the recent Seven Years’ War), “the King of Prussia was the best fellow in the world for a King, he had so much of the Devil in him.” Paine apparently subsequently reflected that “if it were necessary for a King to have so much of the Devil in him, Kings might be very well dispensed with.”

Memorial plaque on the wall of the White Hart Inn, Lewes

In 1774 Paine was sacked from his job in Excise and met Benjamin Franklin in London, who suggested he emigrate to British colonial North America. There he became known as the father of the American revolution because of the radical ideas he published in a pamphlet called “Common Sense” in 1776. He returned to Britain in 1787, and in 1791, on the eve of the French revolution, published his masterpiece, “The Rights of Man.”

A descendent of Henry’s (the writer Edward Verrall Lucas, not me!) was thus able to claim that Thomas Paine, the driving force behind the two greatest political events of the age, had been inspired by a casual remark over punch in the pub by Henry Verrall. Although that may be a little unlikely, it does seem a distinct possibility that Paine’s ideas were honed in the talking shop that was Verrall’s New Coffee House in Lewes. 

DEBORAH CASTLE (1816-1902) AND THE SWEDISH NIGHTINGALE

What better way to celebrate my fiftieth post on this blog than with a song!

Deborah Castle was my 3x great aunt. Her brother Charles was travelling widely through Europe in the autumn of 1847. He left Deborah a list of addresses and she wrote to him frequently with news of family and events in and around their home in Bristol.

Her news regularly included recent or forthcoming public entertainments. There was the Weymouth Regatta for example, at which “there were a great many about, chiefly as you may suppose of the lower orders.” She went to a concert by a singer called Phillips, “a very thin attendance hardly enough I should think to cover his expenses.”

Deborah's letter of 19th September 1847 to Charles,

sealed with wax and written in two directions to save paper 

- surprisingly easy to read (although you may disagree)

When Charles reached Milan in October 1847 he got Deborah’s news that

“Jenny Lind is coming here [Bristol] to sing at the theatre for one night, and one in Bath. The prices are raised 5/- gallery and various prices up to 25/- boxes. Whether the theatre will fill at such a figure I rather doubt, as so many have now heard her. We talk of going. Michael [brother of Deborah and Charles] protests against giving so much but I think it will end in our going with Miss Adams who is in want of a chaperone.”

Jenny Lind (1820-1887):
(left) as Alice in the opera Robert Le Diable by Meyerbeer (ceramic figurine c1847)

(right) in a portrait by Eduard Magnus now in Stockholm (painted 1862)

Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale, had been famous in Europe for nine years before she made her English debut in the presence of Queen Victoria at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, in an opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer. It was 4^th May 1847, only four months before Deborah wrote to Charles, and Lind spent most of the rest of the year touring the provinces of Britain and Ireland.

She was at the height of her powers. A year earlier, Mendelssohn had written the soprano part in his new oratorio Elijah with her in mind, including the high F sharp for which she was famous. Mendelssohn fell in love with Lind (as Hans Christian Andersen had done four years earlier). There are persistent rumours that they had an affair, and that in 1847 Mendelssohn asked her to elope with him to America. She didn’t go, but she was so devastated by his untimely death that November that she was unable to sing Elijah for a year afterwards. When she finally tackled it, it was to raise funds for a Mendelssohn Scholarship (of which a young Arthur Sullivan, later of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, was the first recipient).

PT Barnum brought all hs showbiz razzmatazz

to the promotion of Jenny Lind in America

(cartoon of her first concert there, 1850)

The great showman PT Barnum finally persuaded her to go to America, where she gave 93 concerts between 1850 and 1852. She made $250,000, much of it for charity; Barnum made $500,000. She returned to England however, retiring and settling in Malvern where she died in 1887.

I do hope that Deborah, Michael, Charles and Miss Adams bit the bullet and paid the extortionate ticket price. They could afford it. Jenny Lind would never again be as confident and care-free as she was in that summer and autumn of 1847, royally applauded by kings and queens, universally admired by the public, and passionately adored by Mendelssohn. Although the Bristol concert was to be given in 1848, after Mendelssohn’s death, it would have been a pity to pass the once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear the nightingale sing.

The Victoria Rooms, Bristol,

in which Jenny Lind sang in 1848,

had been opened only six years earlier

SIR JOHN BOWRING (1792-1872) AND BRITAIN’S FIRST DECIMAL COIN

I wish I had some record of the reaction of Deborah Castle’s family, her brothers and sisters, to her marriage at the age of 44 to Sir John Bowring. I know that Sir John’s family, in his case his children, were not pleased that she was replacing their mother in his affections and in their family home.

From Deborah’s point of view she was at last free to marry following the death three years earlier of her mother, whose lifelong companion she had resigned herself to being. She was 24 years younger than Sir John, whose first wife had died two years earlier. He was certainly in need of a friendly face, having just returned from a disastrous last public appointment as governor of Hong Kong (see my post about his launching the Second Opium War!).

Sir John and Lady Bowring,

photographed by Disdéri Eugène, 1864

Starting a war was not the best way to round off an illustrious career. Sir John had made his mark in many arenas – as a politician, linguist, iron magnate, hymn-writer, you name it. One of his last acts as an MP, just before his posting to Hong Kong, was to lay the foundations for Britain’s decimal currency.

The chain of events began with the fire which burnt down the old Palace of Westminster in 1834. When it was thought that the nation’s standard weights and measures had been lost in the blaze (the standard yardstick and so on) a new Royal Commission for Weights and Measures was set up. Its report in 1842 – how slowly things move in British politics! – went beyond its terms of reference in arguing the advantages of a decimal system of currency as well as of weight, volume, distance and so on.

The destruction of the Palace of Westminster

(JM Turner, 1834)

A second commission was deemed necessary, to confirm the findings of the first, which it did after only a year in 1843. A mere four years after that Sir John Bowring, a leading supporter of decimalisation, argued a proposal for it in the House of Commons.

Younger readers may not know the full extent of the madness that was Britain’s old currency: there were twenty shillings in a pound, although until 1816 the largest coin was not the pound but the guinea, worth twenty-ONE shillings. Twelve pennies made up each shilling and there were four farthings in each penny, 960 farthings to the pound. This was in the days when a farthing could still buy something and a pound was an unimaginably large sum of money for most people.

Other coins over the years included the crown (worth five shillings), the half-crown (worth two shillings and sixpence), the shilling, the sixpence, the threepence (pronounced thruppence or threppence), the penny and the halfpenny (pronounced hayp-knee). From 1816 there was for a while a coin worth one pound, called a sovereign.

British small change circa 1970

As Sir John said in 1847, “Great Britain stands alone with her complicated and entangled system, so unintelligible to foreigners, and often so embarrassing to her own subjects.” He suggested a pound divided into 100 new units called Victorias, with ten Victorias making an intermediate unit called a Queen. (He also suggested retaining and revaluing the smaller coins: the farthing would become 1/1000^th of a pound instead of 1/960^th, the ha’penny 1/500^th and the penny 1/250^th, to ease the transition for the public.)

Although it was a mathematical nightmare, the old currency was much easier to work with in common fractions: 240 pennies can be divided by two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, twenty and twenty-four and still leave a whole number of pennies, unlike 100 cents, centimes, centesimi, Victorias or anything else.

The principle objection to decimalisation in Britain however was not the maths but the fact that Britain’s major enemies of the past 50 years, France and America, had gone decimal with the franc and the dollar. Doing what they had done would never do! Instead the government decided to take a little time to consider the idea, and as a holding measure agreed to Sir John’s suggestion of a new coin worth one tenth of a pound (two shillings) to be called not the Queen but the florin. (Bowring later said he had wanted it to be called the dime.)

The Godless Florin of 1849,
"one tenth of a pound"

The “little time” the government took to decide in favour of full decimalisation was in fact 124 years, for most of which we lived with the madness of two almost equally valuable coins, the florin worth two shillings and the half crown worth two and a half shillings. Bowring’s florin survived the 1971 changeover to become the “ten new pence piece,” which was shrunk to its present 10p size in the bicentenary of his birth, 1992.

It is lucky to have survived at all. The first florins, appearing at last in 1849, became known as the godless florins. The design omitted the usual Latin phrase Dei Gracia Fidei Defensor” “By the grace of God, Defender of the Faith.” Queen Victoria and the general public were outraged, especially when it became known that the Master of the Mint was a Catholic. The coin was blamed for everything from economic misery to plague and pestilence, and quickly (1851, quick by British standards, at least) redesigned.

 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!)