REBECCA BRODIE (1744-1814) AND THE WALWORTH MATERNITY SOCIETY

My 4x great grandmother Rebecca Brodie “had not the gift of large resources,” her son William Brodie Gurney observed, “but my mother knew how to set others to work, and made the most of what she had.” She was born in Nottinghamshire to Paisley parents, and I imagine a persuasive, talkative, cheerful woman: William wrote that she spent the last ten months of her life, when she had been diagnosed with cancer, visiting friends and relatives to tell them that she would “soon be shut up!” 

Rebecca (Brodie) Gurney (1744-1814)

Around 1787 Rebecca prevailed on her neighbours in Walworth, South London, with greater resources than hers to set up a Girl’s Charity School. She played a very active part in the running of it, and also in the organisation of a Maternity Society which she set up there. Thirty years after her death in 1814, William was still meeting people whose lives had been touched and changed by her activity.

The girls’ schoolteacher was encouraged to extend the school’s activities to include religious instruction every Sunday, and he was offered a penny for each child attending on a Sunday, up to a maximum of thirty pupils. Unsurprisingly attendance at the Sunday school ran at a steady thirty week after week after week, netting the teacher a regular extra income of half a crown. When, as was expected of a pious young man, William Gurney went along to volunteer one Sunday in 1795, he found a less than spiritual reason for the full classroom. If ever there was a shortfall, the teacher sent his son out on the streets to round up extra children with the promise that they wouldn’t be kept long – just long enough to have their heads counted by the chapel treasurer.

William took over the running of the Sunday school and his success there led to the founding of the Sunday School Union eight years later. William’s son in law William Augustus Salter met his future wife, Gurney’s daughter Emma, while volunteering at a Sunday school run on Gurney's lines. Salter would go on to found two schools himself, and in 1860 Emma, without doubt inspired by her grandmother’s Maternity Society, set up the first ever Mother's Meeting in Leamington Spa.

JULIA JENKINS (1838-1920) AND THE GRAPE SCISSORS

Amongst the hundred or so pieces of family and business correspondence belonging to my 3x great uncle Charles, which were passed to me by his great great nephew John, is a delightful thank-you note.

It’s from Charles’ niece Julia Jenkins. The Jenkins and Castle families were Bristol neighbours connected by marriage at various points along their respective family trees. Julia’s parents were Richard Jenkins and Charles’s sister Julia Castle; Richard’s parents were Richard Jenkins the elder and Mary Naish Castle, who was actually a (much older) first cousin of Julia Castle. So Julia Jenkins’ Castle grandmother was also, I think, her first cousin once removed.

Julia Jenkins’ thank-you note

As some of Charles Castle’s other correspondents did, Julia Jenkins saves paper by writing in two directions on the same sheet rather than starting a new page. It works surprisingly well, although it’s a trick that requires very neat handwriting and wouldn’t work so well I think with a modern, more rounded style of lettering.

My dear Uncle Charles,

I do not know how to thank you sufficiently for the very handsome present you propose sending me, which will be a valuable addition to my plate to which you have contributed before. It was indeed most kind of you to think of me, and I shall value the grape scissors doubly from their having belonged to your dear Grandmamma.

From the selection of the present, it is evident you expect me to possess someday a grapery and hothouse of my own, and when that time comes I promise you an early invitation to partake of the fruit of the vine. As Mamma has written, I will not say any more, but with much love, believe me dear Uncle Charles,

Your affectionate niece

Julia Jenkins

The letter is undated, probably from the mid to late 1850s. Julia Jenkins was born in about 1838 and became Mrs Francis Charlesworth Kennedy in late 1862. I don’t know which of Charles’ grandmothers she is referring to, but his mother Mary (Morgan) Castle died in 1856, so perhaps he was here passing on a treasure which Mary had inherited from her mother. The writing is graceful and the language good-mannered, slightly stilted, reminiscent of the thank-you letters I wrote as an awkward young man. I like this letter because in a few short lines it hints at all these lines of enquiry. Mainly though, I think I like it because of Julia’s polite delight at the prospect of owning a pair of antique grape scissors.

Silver grape scissors

by William Eley and William Fearn,

London 1815

EMMA GURNEY (1815-1893) AND THE MOTHERS’ MEETING

Emma Gurney, my great great grandmother, was the daughter of a Baptist passionate about education. The work of her father William Brodie Gurney led to the founding of the Sunday School Union and the publication Youth’s Magazine.  Mr Gurney himself served on the committees of those institutions and of countless others, as secretary, treasurer or president. He was a leading Baptist of his day. Particularly after her mother died in 1828, he also played the role of family patriarch, holding court from the Gurney home in south London. There, the Christmas parties for his eight surviving children and (by the time of his death) 62 grandchildren were legendary.

 Emma Gurney Salter (1815-1893)

photographed in 1856

For a daughter, such a role model was a hard act to replace. What potential husband could ever reach the lofty, idealistic heights, the moral, political, social and religious standards set by her father? The man she married in 1836, William Salter, was a close match. They had met through their voluntary work as teachers at their local Baptist Sunday school in Denmark Hill, South London. It was while teaching there that William (her father’s namesake!) felt the calling to train for the Baptist ministry. He studied at Stepney Baptist College, whose treasurer was his future father-in-law W.B. Gurney.

Salter’s fundraising activities on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society (of which Gurney had become treasurer in 1835) must further have endeared him to Emma’s father. His selection as minister of Henrietta Street Baptist church in London’s Covent Garden clinched the deal, and William and Emma were married on 19^th October 1836, only a fortnight after his ordination.

William, with Emma beside him, undoubtedly worked hard within his inner city parish. But London in the early Victorian era was not a healthy place. One historian writes that from 1830 to 1850, no Londoner was ever really well, and William became seriously ill in 1842. His doctor advised him to move to the country and he accepted a position as minister of the Lower Baptist House in rural Amersham. In Amersham he and Emma raised their family; most of their seven children were born and went to school there. In time William Salter joined his father-in-law on the board of Stepney College and continued his good work for the Baptist Missionary Society. In August 1854 he hosted a B.M.S. fundraising event in Amersham at which W.B. Gurney was the special guest.

William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855)

It was one of Gurney’s last efforts on behalf of the Society. He died on 25^th March the following year at the age of 77. Emma’s grief was immeasurable and plunged her into a spiral of declining health which forced William to resign from his Amersham charge to look after her. For two years Salter was without a parish, making ends meet by writing for the Religious Tract Society and temping at Brentford Baptist Church which was then between ministers. When in 1858 he did find a permanent post, as minister at the Warwick Street Church in Leamington Spa, he fell out with the church’s board over their failure to provide school rooms. After less than two years in post he felt obliged to resign again.

The Salters must have felt that life had become one long struggle. William was on the point of leaving Leamington. But some fifty of his former parishioners had resigned with him and they persuaded him to stay. With their support, the Salters at last felt re-energised and strong enough to recover from the many blows and difficulties of the last five years. A congregation without a church, they bought land in Clarendon Street and began to build one, on the site of the old Clarendon Inn.

And meanwhile the work of the Lord still had to be done. William and Emma determined to set up all the functions of a Baptist church, refusing to let the mere lack of a building stand in their way. Services were held in Beck’s Rooms on Upper Parade; a school for infants and girls was established in the Public Rooms on Windsor Street; and a night school for boys was held in the Tachbrook Street Missionary Rooms. William taught Scripture of course; their daughters Anne, Emma and Maria all assisted, teaching songs, reading and arithmetic; and in 1861, Emma Gurney Salter started up a regular Mothers’ Meeting, the first of its kind in the town.

Clarendon Street Chapel in 2010, much remodeled:

 a church 1863-1921, a school 1863-1937,

more recently a knitwear factory, offices and a warehouse

Clarendon Street Chapel (capacity 400) held its first service on 22^nd June 1863 and Clarendon Street British School opened three weeks later. The congregation was large enough to have paid off all the new building’s debts by the end of the year; and the school, officially licensed for 91 children, often attracted as many as 150. After the years of adversity, the establishment of the Clarendon Street church was an enormous achievement by both William and Emma. They remained there to nurture its development for the rest of William’s life. One feels that W.B. Gurney would have been proud of them both.

Much of my information about William and Emma’s time in Leamington comes from Lyndon Cave’s excellent book “Royal Leamington Spa” which has just been republished in a revised edition.

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

My distant cousin George Verrall 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.” (George Vernon was the name of a member  of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the early seventeenth century theatre company associated with William Shakespeare.)

He emigrated to Albany in New York State in 1827 in the company of the Fisher family, actors all. What a fascinating bunch! Like the Verralls, a Sussex family: 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.

Jane Merchant Fisher, Mrs Vernon (1796-1869)

Jane Fisher, the eldest, was a tall woman with a slightly pinched but expressive face who became one of America's greatest comediennes, having made her stage debut at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1817. She was probably also the reason that William Verrall made the trip – they married soon after their arrival in America.

John, her eldest brother also achieved a reputation as a versatile comic actor. Amelia, who possessed a high order of musical and dramatic ability herself, quite the stage in 1840 to run a dance academy.

Caroline, one feels, had rather been bullied into joining the theatrical profession. She never pursued it in America, opting instead for domestic life as the wife of a newspaper editor. Charles, the second youngest of the family, acted briefly in the US before founding a weekly magazine for sports and the dramatic arts called “Spirit of the Times.” He did marry an actress however, and their daughter, known as Little Clara Fisher, took to the stage with a beautiful voice.

Clara Fisher, later Mrs Maeder (1811-1898)

(not Little Clara Fisher!)

Little Clara was named after her aunt Clara, the youngest of the six children of Frederick Fisher. Aunt Clara had been a child star long before she came to America at the still-young age of 17. After her debut in 1817, aged 6 alongside her older sister Jane at Drury Lane, she was hailed (according to her New York Times obituary) as “the most wonderful child that the stage had known, and her popularity became at once very valuable in a pecuniary sense to her father. George IV went to see her act.”

Starting anew in America she rose to even greater fame in everything from opera to comedy. People named their babies, race horses, hotels, brands of cigar, steamboats … even whole city blocks after her! She made and lost fortunes, and by reinventing herself as a character actress she was able to carry on working until ten years before her death, becoming known as “the oldest actress alive.”

Frederick Fisher’s Library in Eastbourne, c1795

I don’t know whether the Fishers’ father came with them to America. He used to sell books and stationery in Eastbourne and was later an auctioneer in London. An amateur actor himself, he had without doubt pushed his children into the life he wanted for himself. And a little piece of him does exist in the US, as an exhibit in the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia – a series of papier mache models of Shakespearean locations in Stratford! Shakespeare's birthplace, the famous mulberry tree and so on. Frederick made them in 1830, perhaps for the Second Royal Gala Shakespeare Festival in Stratford that year.

How his handiwork ended up in Philly I don’t know. Souvenir-buying American tourists were presumably thinner on the ground in Stratford upon Avon in 1830 than they are now! Perhaps he sent it to one of his theatrical children in the States to remind them of their roots and their Shakespearean father. Or perhaps, if he did emigrate himself, he made it in America to remind himself of the roots of his great passion for the bard.

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