JOHN TEMPLEMAN (1782-1867) AND THE DUNFERMLINE DAMASK

My 5x great grandfather John Templeman was from Torryburn in Fife, just west of the ancient Scottish town of Dunfermline. He was a damask weaver, in an area which had been a centre for the trade since the fifteenth century. Linen weavers from the French town of Tournai first brought the skill to Dunfermline; and although Scottish damask (or “dornick”) never quite matched the continental fabric for quality, its weaving was for nearly 600 years a trade to be proud of.

Damask is any cloth with a woven pattern which can be viewed from both sides of the material. These days damask is usually linen and usually, although not always, single-coloured. It gets its name from Damascus, an important trading and manufacturing city in the early Middle Ages, standing on the Silk Route. It first appeared in Europe (in France) in the 14^th century, so the Dunfermline industry, kick-started by those Tournai craftsmen, was quick off the mark.

Abbot House Museum in Dunfermline

tells the story of damask’s contribution to the town

Traditionally, women did the spinning and men did the weaving, although by John's grandchildren's generation things had changed - his granddaughter my 2x great grandmother Agnes Mitchell was a damask weaver too. For centuries before her time both operations were carried out by hand. Linen thread is spun from flax, which was grown in the fields around Dunfermline, but not in sufficient quantities. The local harvest was augmented with imports from Danzig – modern-day Gdansk in Poland – shipped to the nearby ports of coastal Fife.

Dunfermline damask was supplied to the Scottish Royal Household, and the industry suffered after the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 when the Royal Household moved south to London. A fire which destroyed much of Dunfermline in 1624 also contributed to the decline. Damask production drifted south across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh and the surrounding area.

An industrial-scale damask hand loom (date unknown)

(picture from the Gazlay Family History site)

But a clever piece of industrial espionage brought the trade back to Dunfermline in 1718. A Dunfermline weaver called James Blake gained the confidence of the workers in a new Edinburgh damask mill at Drumsheugh, by passing himself off as a simpleton with whom they saw no harm in sharing their sophisticated weaving techniques. In a move reminiscent of a footballing injury, Blake promptly “regained” his senses and returned to Dunfermline with a complete plan of the Drumsheugh loom in his head, a design far more advanced than that of any traditional looms still working in the town. By 1766 there were 600 looms in the town, and by 1792 (when John Templeman was probably entering the industry as child labour) that figure had doubled. In the same year, mechanized spinning came to Dunfermline thanks to a water-powered spinning mill at Brucefield.

The earliest powered weaving loom mills began to appear in Dunfermline around 1835, when John was already in his 50s. So John was part of the last generation of weaving men to make damask by hand. The ancient guild, the Dunfermline Weavers Incorporation to which he and his fellow skilled craftsmen may have belonged, was wound up in 1863, just four years before John’s death. By then there were at least four spinning and weaving mills in the town, employing around 6000 workers.

Jacquard-style mechanised damask loom - an early example of computer programming, a Jacquard loom used punched cards to deliver a repeatable pattern

(picture from the Craigavon Historical Society)

The Dunfermline damask industry survived into the 1930s. But laundering, starching and ironing table linen was hard work and the decline after the First World War in the employment of domestic servants to do that work led to the eventual closure of the mills. The mechanised process lasted a little more than two hundred years in Dunfermline. But the handworked tradition, of whose final chapter my 5x great grandfather was part, had a Scottish history nearly 400 years long. Its roots in Damascus stretch back 500 more.

AUSTIN NATHANIEL COOPER (1853-1898) AND BOATS, BONES AND TRAINS

It’s been a while since I wrote about anyone called Austin Cooper – there are dozens of them in my Cooper tree, all taking their name from the celebrated 17th century founder of the Irish family dynasty.

Austin Cooper (1759-1830), father of Rev Austin Cooper (1804-1871), grandfather of Austin Damer Cooper (1831-1900) and great grandfather of Austin Nathaniel Cooper (1853-1898)

Austin Nathaniel Cooper’s father, grandfather and great grandfather all bore the name, although sadly ANC was the last of his particular Cooper line – his only child, a daughter, died in infancy. Austin died at the early age of 44, outlived by his father, and to be honest I don’t know much about his life. But I have been able to find more than the one widely recorded professional position which he held.

Austin Nathaniel Cooper, born 9^th December 1853,married late in life. On 6^th October 1893, just ahead of his 40^th birthday he wed Mary Thom of Tamworth. Their only daughter died two years later on 20^th November 1895, and Austin himself passed away less than three years after that on 11^th July 1898.

The Royal College of Surgeons, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin

The British Medical Journal of 12^th August 1882 reports that Austin was one of 30 gentlemen who, “at the Court of Examiners, held on Monday July 24^th and following days, … having passed their final examinations for the letters testimonial, and having made the declaration and signed the roll, were admitted licentiates” of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.

He was 28. He went into medical practice, we know, because on 29^th March 1890 he is recorded as a doctor, arriving in Southampton on board the RMS Don from Buenos Ayres. The Don, formerly the SS Corcouado, was a 2400 ton ship built for the Royal Mail in 1875. It plied between Britain and South America, the West Indies and the Portuguese coast for 30 years. (Her 1890 trip from the River Plate back home was her last under Captain P. Rowsell. Was he the same Captain Rowsell who lost his life a year later when he was the last man making for shore from the Royal Mail Steamer Moselle, wrecked off Panama, from which he had heroically and safely evacuated all its passengers and crew?)

Austin Nathan Cooper on the passenger list of the RMS Don, 1890

Age 40 an exaggeration! Single, and a Doctor in Medicine

I don't know whether or not he was the ship’s doctor. (I notice that James Leeson, next on the list, is “ditto.”) But it would make sense, if he was, of his later position – Surgeon to the Great Southern and Western Railway Company of Ireland.

The GSWR ran the Dublin-Cork and Dublin-Waterford lines and operated a chain of railway hotels too. The name was preserved when, with the emergence of the Irish Free State, all the railway companies operating south of the border with Northern Ireland were amalgamated in 1924 under the banner Great Southern Railways. Much of the GSWR’s network survives as part of Iarnród Eirann’s Intercity network today.

The arms of the Great Southern and Western Railways Company

It may seem strange for a railway company to employ a surgeon, but in the days before a National Health Service it made sense for employers to take an active interest in the health of their staff. Although I can find no references to GSWR’s need for Austin’s skills (thank goodness!), there was a landmark case during his lifetime involving the GSWR which set a precedent for health in law. In Byrne v The Great Southern and Western Railway (1884), courts took their first tentative steps towards the recognition, and the evaluation, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which had previously been regarded as too intangible for law or the medical profession to assess and value.

As usual an ancestral story raises as many questions as it answers. I’m afraid I don’t know the details of poor Byrne’s suffering. I don’t know what caused Austin’s early death. Who was his travelling companion and fellow doctor James Leeson? And what became of his wife Mary? What became of Captain Rowsell? Sometimes the interconnectedness of all things drives me mad!

MARTHA DAVIS (c1771-1811) AND THE FAMILY BIBLE

I’m a rotten businessman, and if I were a bookseller I would specialise in the entirely unprofitable area of old family bibles. Besides being big beautiful old books in their own right, they are often invaluable sources of information for those researching their family tree. The fly leaf of the family bible was where you recorded births, marriages and deaths, particularly if (like my forebears) you followed a non-conformist branch of Christianity, outwith the recognised Church of England. Sometimes those hand-written notes are the only surviving evidence of the lives they report.

Of course in these secular and highly mobile times it’s almost impossible to match an old bible with those who might be interested in any of the knowledge within. People die; property is dispersed; families relocate. In my wilder and even less profitable daydreams I imagine starting a central repository or database for old bibles to help genealogists find their biblical roots. Needless to say however, this stems mostly from a selfish interest. I want to find my own family’s Holy Book.

John Salter’s 1939 transcription of the family bible entries

I am however in the tremendously lucky position of not needing to, because in 1939 my uncle John borrowed the bible from its last known owner, my great great aunt Emily Katherine Salter. Although the book itself has disappeared, I have John’s carefully typed 1939 transcription of the entries in it, eighteen family events between 1728 and 1832. Regular censuses in England didn’t begin until 1841 and information of this sort from before then is priceless.

The entries name and date four generations of my ancestors from my 5x great grandfather John Salter of Coleshill to my 2x great grandfather William Augustus Salter. In several cases the notes record wives by their maiden names. This was one of the earliest documents to set me off on my family trail, and it was a comprehensive one, opening up lots of avenues for exploration.

Eight of the entries are for deaths, including the first – “Stephen Salter, son of John Salter of Coles hill near Ammersham Bucks born 5^th November 1728. Died at Watford Herts 8^th June 1807 and Buried in Family Vault in Watford Baptist Meeting House.” A family vault! Seven named in the bible are buried in it or in a “new vault adjoining the old family vault of the Salters.” I just had to visit, and finally arranged a trip in 2008.

Beechen Grove Chapel, Watford (erected 1878)

The first Baptist chapel in Watford was founded in 1707. My 3x great grandfather Samuel Salter, whose birth and marriage are both recorded in the bible, served as a deacon there; and his son William Augustus Salter, raised a Baptist, was ordained as a Baptist minister. (WAS's birth is also noted in the bible.) The Watford Meeting House was renamed Beechen Grove Chapel in 1868 when a second chapel opened in the town; and the original Beechen Grove building was replaced by the present grand structure in 1878.

Unfortunately the chapel’s burial ground, and all its vaults, were demolished in 1963 to make way for a very 1960s institution, the Harlequin Shopping Mall. I would like to think that someone had at least photographed the monuments before destroying them, but repeated enquiries to Watford’s archive department have not been answered. I do know that the remains of the deceased were gathered up and reburied not far away, in the town’s sprawling Vicarage Road Cemetery.

The Salter Family Grave,

Vicarage Road Cemetery, Watford.

Not a vault.

A modest plaque is engraved: “The remains of those buried between 1721 and 1860 in the graveyard of the original Baptish church, Beechen Grove, Watford, were reverently re-interred here in October and November 1963. Further remains, being those of David Salter and his family were re-interred here on the 18^th March 1974.” For the record, and according to uncle John’s transcription, the Salter remains included:

Stephen Salter (1728-1811)

John Salter (1756-1812) [son of Stephen]

Sophia Salter (1807-1808) [dau of Stephen’s son, deacon Samuel]

Stephen Salter (1809-1811) [son of Samuel]

Martha Davis (c1771-1811) [sister of Samuel’s wife Sarah]

William Salter (1770-1821) [Samuel’s brother]

Sarah Davis (c1770-1832) [Samuel’s wife]

No doubt deacon Samuel, who died in Watford in 1842, is also buried here. David Salter, who died in 1848, was William and Samuel Salter’s brother – he founded almshouses in Watford. Presumably he, his unknown wife and his two children Sarah and Samuel are all interred here now. The deaths of both Stephen the elder’s wives are recorded in the bible without burial sites, but they may well be here too – Elizabeth Lewin (d.1756), mother of John; and Sarah Groom (c1733-1798), mother of William, David and Samuel.

Sarah and Martha Davis had a sister, Maria, who married John Salter. So perhaps Maria Salter nee Davis is buried here too. Martha herself died a spinster, and it’s a sign of the closeness of the two dissenting families that she was interred in the Salter vault. That’s all I know about Martha, and it’s all thanks to the entry in the family bible.

CATHERINE GURNEY O.B.E. (1848-1930) AND HER 1379 CHILDREN

At Christmas in 1848 my 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney celebrated the birth of half a dozen new grandchildren that year. This was quite a tally, even for a man who eventually had 62 of them, and 1848 became known mock-memorially in the family as The Year Of The Six Babies.

Catherine Gurney (1848-1930)

One of them was my great grandfather William Henry Gurney Salter’s cousin Katie Gurney. A deeply Christian woman, she first made her mark by starting a Bible Class in Wandsworth Prison in the early 1870s. A chance remark from one of the policemen who made safe her journey from Wandsworth back to her home in Notting Hill – “What? D’you think a police officer has a soul?” – led her to found the Christian Police Association in 1883. To accommodate the Association she opened London’s first Police Institute, a drop-in centre for comfort and conversation.

In 1889 she helped an ailing officer find a place in a convalescent home, only to see him check out again when he found his neighbour in the next bed was a violent criminal whom he had put behind bars. Katie realised the need for a dedicated sanctuary for policemen recovering from injury or illness, and founded the Southern Provincial Police Home in Brighton the following year.

St George’s House, Harrogate c1898

soon after being opened as the Northern Police Orphanage

The institution began to serve a second purpose as a home for the orphaned children of policemen, for which it soon became clear there was a very great need. Children were being sent to the south coast orphanage from as far away as Manchester in the north. In 1897 Miss Gurney arranged the purchase of St George’s House in Harrogate and a year later opened the Northern Police Orphanage there. Within the grounds she then built the Northern Police Convalescent Home.

All these institutions were paid for through the personal fund-raising efforts of Catherine Gurney amongst her friends, family and other wealthy patrons in the north and south of England. Where funding fell short, she arranged loans on which she paid the interest herself. She remained closely associated with them throughout her life. She was on hand to show him around when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, opened a new chapel at the southern Home in 1923, and shortly before her death in 1930 she was awarded an O.B.E.

Catherine Gurney (right) with the Prince of Wales (centre left)

at the opening of the new Southern Police Orphanage chapel

27^th November 1923

735 children passed through the doors of the Southern Police Orphanage from its founding in 1890 until 1939. (No doubt even more followed before its closure in 1947.) The first was James Henry Archer, five years old, from a family of seven in Leicestershire. The first admission to the Northern Orphanage in 1898 was a little girl from Sunderland called Minnie Smith; she was followed by 643 others before the institution closed in 1956.

Thousands of police officers have benefited from the convalescent homes, and continue to do so through the St George’s Trust. Attitudes to orphanages have changed, but the fatherless children of policemen are still cared for in Britain by the Gurney Fund.

Memorial to Catherine Gurney

in the chapel of the Southern Police Orphanage

Katie, who never married or had children, was born in an age when women were seen and not heard. She ignored that dictum. With the support of her relatives, and the example of her ancestors (for example her great grandmother Rebecca Brodie and her great great aunt Martha Gurney of whom I have written here), she made a difference. She still changes lives.

THOMAS COOPER GOTCH (1854-1931) AND THE GOLDEN DREAM

Thomas Cooper Gotch is today an overlooked pre-raphaelite, impressionist and realist painter, who doesn’t even gain an entry in my Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists. But during his life he was a successful artist and influential member of the Newlyn art colony in Cornwall and the New English Art Club which challenged the conservative authority of London’s Royal Academy.

Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931)

Self-Portrait with Two Square Brushes (c1880)

Thomas’s 2x great grandfather was my 5x great grandfather, John Davis of Little Missenden - making TCG some sort of contemporary cousin of my great grandfather, although I don’t think they knew each other. Thomas was born in Kettering and travelled widely in Europe and Scandinavia. He lived and studied in France for a while and it was on his return in 1885, with fellow students including Stanhope Forbes, Frank Bramley, Walter Sickert and John Singer Sargent, that he co-founded the NEAC.

Forbes and Bramley were also involved with Gotch in the Newlyn School, established at around the same time. As Wikipedia puts it, “Newlyn had a number of things guaranteed to attract artists: fantastic light, cheap living, and the availability of inexpensive models.” The Newlyn group was one of several from France to California at the time who rejected studio-based painting (working from sketches made on location) in favour of painting in the open air, an art movement known by the French translation, en plein air.

A Golden Dream (1893)

by Thomas Cooper Gotch, painted en plein air

Newlyn, a small fishing village on Cornwall’s south coast, boasted tremendous natural light of course – all that sea and sky – and also provided interesting outdoor scenes of working life. Thomas was a superb painter of figures, and frequently used his own family as models in his work. But his imagination ran beyond simple real-life scenes to paintings rich with symbolism; in the aspirational A Golden Dream, the gilded apples were achieved with most unnaturalistic gold spraypaint.

Gold symbolized purity, unspoilt by the world, and Gotch often associated it with youth, as in the portrait of his daughter Phyllis, The Child Enthroned. He was a master colourist, whether working in the sharp realism of his middle period or the tonal impressionism of his final decades.

Qua-Qua (1912)

south of Johannesburg,

painted during a tour of South Africa

I’m no art critic, and too big a fan of Gotch’s work to try to do justice to it in a short blog post! Instead, I cannot recommend too highly The Golden Dream, the biography of him by his 21^st century champion Pamela Lomax. It’s extremely readable, full of illustrations and very detailed about his life and work. I’m very proud to be even a remote cousin of this finest of fine artists.

The Child Enthroned (1894)

by Thomas Cooper Gotch

SAMUEL GUPPY (1755-1830) MAKES A TIDY PENNY

I wrote recently about the character-forming influence over my 3x great uncle Thomas Richard Guppy, a civil engineer, by his mother the inventor Sarah Beach Guppy. I was being a little disingenuous in not giving Thomas’s father some credit too.

Samuel Guppy married Sarah in the port of Bristol in 1795, and Thomas was born there two years later. Sarah’s first patent, for a better system for building the pilings for suspension bridges, was granted in 1811 – the same year this penny token was issued by the Patent Sheathing Nail Manufactory of Bristol.

Penny token of the Patent Sheathing Nail Manufactory, Bristol

The manufactory was owned by Samuel Guppy. In 1796 Samuel invented and patented a labour-saving machine for “cutting, heading and finishing nails” to which he added several patented improvements in 1804. His great innovation was the invention of a barbed copper nail for fixing copper sheathing to the wooden hulls of ships. Although a mere nail may not seem much of a contribution to marine engineering now, it was at the time such an important development that the British Government bought the patent for it from Guppy for the vast sum of £40,000 – about £3,000,000 at 2012 prices.

Wooden ships suffered greatly from wear and tear. The hulls were vulnerable to shipworm and seaweed infestations which affected both the structure and the handling of the vessels. Traditionally hulls were coated with oil, brimstone or tar to resist these perils. Early attempts at sheathing the hulls with lead or replaceable wooden skins met with partial success. From the mid-18^th century the Royal Navy began experimenting with sheets of copper.

Halfpenny token of the Patent Sheathing Nail Manufactory, Bristol

Copper was effective, and the corrosive electrolytic reaction of the copper bolts used to attach it with the iron bolts of the hull’s internal construction was addressed by using alloys. By 1780 Britain was at war with America, France, Spain and Holland; the supremacy of the nation’s navy was essential, and the order was given to sheath the entire fleet. By the end of the war in 1783 the hulls of 393 vessels had been clad. Over the following three years, as problems with corrosion recurred, the decision was taken to re-bolt every single hull with copper bolts. The cost of all this was high – copper sheathing was up to six times more expensive than wood. But with the nation’s fleet and supremacy at sea at stake, it becomes obvious that the government thought the price of Mr Guppy’s patent pure copper sheathing nails a price worth paying.

Merchant ship owners began to adopt the practice, although it was generally an expensive option applied only to the best ships by owners wealthy and farsighted enough to maintain their fleets. Copper-sheathed vessels attracted lower insurance premiums from Lloyds and a new expression entered the language for an investment with a safe, dependable return – such ventures were described as copper-bottomed.

Farthing token of the Patent Sheathing Nail Manufactory, Bristol

Samuel’s company traded at 34 Queen Square Bristol, Grove Avenue Bristol, and 22 Dowgate Hill London, both addresses where the farthing, halfpenny and penny tokens he issued could be redeemed for coin of the realm. I’m not sure why Samuel needed to mint them. The rapid expansion of the economy caused by the industrial revolution at the end of the 18^th century caused a severe currency shortage, which some industrialists overcame by paying their employees in their own currency tokens; but the building of a new Royal Mint in London was complete by 1809, two years before the issue of these coins.

After Samuel’s death, his wife Sarah’s last patent, in 1841, continued the family’s contribution to the science of wooden ship-building, with a device for the better caulking of wooden hulls. But by then, events in Bristol had already been set in motion which would render the wooden ship obsolete. In 1837 a family friend, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, launched his wooden-hulled SS Great Western, built at Bristol with financial and engineering backing from Samuel and Sarah’s eldest son Thomas. The success of that ship led directly to the construction of the iron-hulled SS Great Eastern in 1858, at that time far and away the largest vessel ever built. In their own ways, Samuel, Sarah and Thomas Guppy could all take some credit!

Since posting this, I've been told by a friend that when George Keats, the brother of the poet, emigrated to America in 1818, the ship he sailed on was advertised as being "copper bottom'd and copper-fasten'd." That's Guppy's doing!

SARAH MARIA GUPPY née BEACH (1770-1852) BOILS AN EGG

I recently co-wrote a history of inventions (Everything You Need To Know About Inventions, out in April 2012!) and I can say with some authority that female inventors are few and far between. Step forward, Sarah Guppy.

Sarah Guppy (1770-1852)

Inventor

Sarah Guppy, nee Beach, was the mother of my 3x great uncle Thomas Richard Guppy. He turned out pretty well, an extremely successful civil engineer and entrepreneur; and when you read about Sarah you can see where he got it from. 

Sarah was married to Bristol merchant Samuel Guppy. She lodged her first patent in 1811 at the age of 41 and her last, when she was 74 years old, in 1844.

The first patent was an astonishing debut for a female inventor. Sarah was effectively an 18^th century woman, presumably raised amidst the prevailing attitudes towards gender of her day. Yet her first invention was not some aid to sewing or housework but a new approach to the construction of pilings for the safer erection of suspension bridges.

Thomas Telford (1757-1834)

suspension bridge builder

No less a giant of civil engineering than her contemporary Thomas Telford got wind of her innovation. He wrote asking her if he might use her ideas, and she agreed, waiving any licensing fees. Eight years later Telford began work on the Conwy and Menai suspension bridges. The latter was at the time the longest such bridge in the world; its span of 580 feet was only made possible by Telford’s genius and Guppy’s piling.

In 1864 the Menai bridge lost its crown to the Clifton suspension bridge which spanned 700 feet of the River Avon at Bristol. It was designed by a friend of Sarah’s son Thomas – none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with whom she also discussed her ideas.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859)

suspension bridge builder

Her last patent was for a device to improve the process of caulking ships. In between she came up with a system for taking exercise while still in bed; a design for a candleholder which burned the candles more efficiently and therefore longer; and, my favourite, a sort of multi-tasking breakfast machine. This was a tea urn which cooked eggs in the steam it produced, and contained a steam-heated plate on which to keep your toast warm.

Unlike many male inventors, Sarah Guppy didn’t seek widespread public recognition; it was, she felt, “unpleasant to speak of oneself – it may seem boastful, particularly in a woman.” But she was a central figure in Bristol society, a successful and well-rewarded businesswoman.

In 1837, aged 67 and by then a rich widow, she raised a few eyebrows by marrying 39-year old Richard Eyre-Coote. Richard, it has to be said, was not a good husband to her; he not only neglected her but gambled her fortune away on horse-racing. When he collapsed and died in the street in 1853, only a year after Sarah’s death, there was only £200 left.

Sarah Guppy remained largely unknown by the wider public for over 150 years. But in 2006 a blue plaque was erected outside 7 Richmond Hill, her former home in Bristol. Sarah had purchased the land opposite for the benefit of local residents, and it remains a green space in Clifton to this day.

Kim Hicks as Sarah Guppy in the Show Of Strength production

An Audience with Sarah Guppy, 2006, showing off her caulking

(photograph by Kevin Clifford)

The same year, as part of the celebrations marking the bicentenary of Brunel’s birth, the Bristol theatre company Show of Strength staged a one-woman play, An Audience With Sarah Guppy (written by Sheila Hannon), which marked her important contribution to the success of that man and reminded us of her own brilliant engineering mind. Sarah Guppy is a rare and welcome female star in the inventors’ firmament.

THOMAS COLLINS (1735-1830) AND HIS FANCY PLASTERING

I was set off this week on a piece of detective work by the successive hand-written notes on the back of a framed drawing of an unidentified house. Various mysteries arose from my complete ignorance of my great great grandmother Caroline Collins Jennings’ family, but what became clear was that I am in some way related to Thomas Collins, whose house the building turned out to have been.

The house, now Woodhouse College in Finchley, is described online as the former home of “the well-known plasterer Thomas Collins,” so I’ve been digging to discover just how well-known he was. Quite well known, as it turns out. He wasn’t just some popular local tradesman who had a way with lath and lime; Thomas Collins was ornamental plasterer of choice for the great 18^th century Scottish architect Sir William Chambers.

The Pagoda at Kew and The Pineapple at Dunmore, both 1761

Chambers built houses, mansions and follies for the highest in the land, and very often Collins decorated them. He spent some time in China, the inspiration for several fanciful buildings in London’s Kew Gardens. Kew may have inspired John Murray, 4^th Earl of Dunmore, to commission Chambers to design the eccentric Dunmore Pineapple near Falkirk in Scotland (now a Landmark Trust property which you can rent for holidays – I’ve slept there!).

Relatively nearby, and now engulfed by Edinburgh, stands Duddingston House, built in the 1760s for James Hamilton, 8th Earl of Abercorn and a surviving example of Chambers’ work with Collins. The building’s great glory is its central hall, whose Collins ceiling plasterwork has recently been restored by the owners.

Duddingston House –

hall ceiling by Thomas Collins

But most of Chambers’ work, and most of Collins’ too, was executed in London. In the 1760s Chambers undertook a massive extension of Buckingham Palace, adding two wings, three libraries and a riding house. I don’t know if he used Collins or not at the Royal residence, and none of his work there survives now. Many other buildings do survive, including his masterpiece – and fellow genealogists will understand the pleasure it gives me to be connected to this one – Somerset House.

Somerset House was home for many years to the Registrar General, on whom we researchers of ancestry rely so heavily. It has housed many great departments of state since construction of William Chambers’ design began in 1776, including the Admiralty and the one we all love to hate, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs – the taxman.

The Strand Vestibule, Somerset House

by Sir William Chambers and Thomas Collins

Of the many parts of this sprawling building (which Chambers’ did not live to see completed), the Strand Block contained the entrance vestibule described by Chambers as “a general passage to every part of the whole design,” and rooms for various Learned Societies, intended for “the reception of useful learning and polite arts.” These were the parts of his design where he considered “specimens of elegance should at least be attempted;” and they are the parts where he employed Thomas Collins’ craftsmanship to its fullest extent.

A room in the Strand Block of Somerset House –

plasterwork by Thomas Collins, ceiling paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Collins also worked on his own behalf, sometimes in partnership with John White, another associate of Chambers. A number of houses in London’s prestigious Harley Street are their work. Collins was a skilled man, and his success allowed him (I think) to undertake the conversion of a row of three houses in Finchley into one dwelling, Woodhouse – the building of which I have inherited the faded pencil drawing which set me off on this trail of architectural investigation. I'm so proud of where it has led me.

THOMAS COLLINS (1735-1830) AND THE WOODHOUSE LEGACY

My father-in-law talks about leaving things on the Too Difficult pile, and goodness knows that’s often a very tall pile when it comes to family tree puzzles. One of the items in my Too Difficult pending tray has been for a long time this faint pencil drawing of (presumably) a former family home. It came to me amongst the many family papers which I inherited from my uncle John, and although there are some hand-written notes on the back, they refer to people I had never come across. So they only deepen the conundrum.

Woodhouse, Finchley

(computer-enhanced from a faded pencil sketch)

There’s no indication of the artist. On the back is written the name of the place – Woodhouse, Finchley – and the note “owned 1^st by Uncle Thomas Collins & left by him to Aunt Lambert” and, I think in a second hand, “my Castle grandmother’s sister.” Then a third faint hand, probably of my Aunt Pamela, John’s wife, has written on a sticker, “EMS grandmother was Caroline Jennings who m. William Henry Castle, their son was EMS father William Henry.” At the bottom on the back, someone – probably John – has added, “1965. Removed from frame to be photographed for Col Busby.”

The rear view of Woodhouse, Finchley

I have another picture with multiple notes on the back, the identity of whose hands I do know. (I wrote apiece about that picture here a couple of years ago.) On that picture, one writer adds a footnote to a description, “This was written out for me by my mother” and signed “May Salter.” Sure enough, May’s writing of the word “mother” and the hand that wrote “my Castle grandmother” on the Woodhouse sketch are identical.

So Aunt Lambert is sister to Caroline Castle nee Jennings, grandmother of Eleanor May Salter nee Castle (who is MY grandmother!). Aunt Lambert is a 3x great aunt I never knew I had. Was Lambert her married surname, or her Christian name? And who was Thomas Collins to her? May’s grandmother’s full name was Caroline Collins Jennings (1816-1876), so perhaps her mother was a Collins.

Woodhouse College in 2011

with the remodeled façade of 1888

The Wikipedia entry for the Woodhouse area of Finchley describes its origins with three houses called the Woodhouses sometime before 1655. In the mid 18th century there was a single house of this name and it was home, says Wiki, to the well-known plastererThomas Collins! It was reconstructed in 1888 (when the bay window just discernable in my pencil drawing was replaced with a grand classic façade with a pillar'd entrance). In 1925 it became Woodhouse Grammar School, now Woodhouse College. In 2012 it is hosting tennis camps for the young in the run-up to the London Olympics.

Well-known 18^th century plasterer Thomas Collins was the subject of a biography published in 1965 by John Henry Busby, “Thomas Collins of Woodhouse, Finchley and Berners Street, St. Marylebone.” That solves the mystery of the 1965 footnote, and there’s further confirmation in the existence of the Thomas Collins Papers, an archive of correspondence at the Centre for South Asian Studies donated by Col TH Busby, my uncle John and my aunt his cousin Deborah Scott nee Castle!

Thomas Collins’ blue plaque

outside the Woodhouse College office

Collins (1735-1830) was barely contemporary with 19^th century Caroline Jennings (1816-1876). I can find no trace of her sister Aunt Lambert, or any of Caroline’s family except her father William Jennings. When Thomas died at the grand age of 95, Caroline was only 14 and presumably Lambert was of a similar age; why leave her the big house at Finchley? As always, there are as many questions as answers in the Too Difficult pile; but at least, by figuring things out this far, I have replaced some of the questions with others!

STOP PRESS! Thanks to the generous intervention of the Birmingham & Midlands Society for Genealogy and Heraldry (via Twitter) I now know who Aunt Lambert was - Caroline's sister Martgaret Collins Jennings (1802-1877) married William Lambert. He must have made an impression. Caroline and Margaret's oldest sister Susannah Rees nee Jennings had a son she called Lambert Rees.

JANE REYNER (c1850-1938) AND THE COCKBROOK MILL

My great grandmother Jane Reyner came from one of the oldest mill-owning families in the Lancashire cottonmill town of Ashton Under Lyne. I would like to know more about the family business which spanned the whole of the nineteenth century in an industry absolutely central to the social and economic changes of the times.

Jane Reyner (c1850-1938) with two of her sons, 

Fred and Frank Salter, c1914

Jane’s grandfather Thomas Reyner was a haberdasher in London who decided to move from selling cotton goods to making them. In the first decade of the nineteenth century he saw opportunities in the north and brought his young family to Ashton: his wife, after whom my great grandmother Jane was named; and among their children their infant son Frederick, Jane’s future father after whom she would in time name her eldest son, my grandfather Fred Salter.

By 1811 Thomas was listed as a muslin manufacturer at Bank Top in the town. Ashton’s earliest mill, Throstle’s Nest, was probably built around the 1780s, and it was powered by a water wheel on the Cock Brook. Later, the Cockbrook Mill itself was built by Tom and James Wilson, straddling the beck just downstream of Throstle’s Nest. The Cockbrook Mill was state-of-the-art, powered by a 12 horsepower steam engine, and by 1832 it had changed hands. Now it was owned by Reyners: the family was on its way up.

Thornfield Hall, the Reyner family home in Ashton Under Lyne

(now demolished)

By 1861 when Jane was 11, the family had made it and was living in Thornfield Hall, built on a gentle hillside overlooking Cockbrook. At some point Reyners took over the running of another long-established manufactory, the vast Albion Mill on the River Tame in the town. Over the years the family firm survived many business crises – the cotton famine of the 1860s when the supply from the US was interrupted by the American Civil War; and two disastrous fires at Cockbrook Mill, after both of which it was rebuilt and enlarged until it covered 22,000 square yards and was operated by 100 employees working 20 pairs of spinning mules (the machines that spun the raw cotton into yarn).

But in March 1903 the decision was taken to close Cockbrook down and move all its machinery to Albion. By then Cockbrook (and the Reyners’ association with Ashton) was nearly 100 years old and, as a spokesman told the local paper, “it has no chance with modern factories.” 

It really was the end of an era. Now the Cockbrook Mill is long gone, although Reyner Street which ran down alongside it marks the site. Thornfield Hall lies under sports fields; and even mighty Albion has been swept aside for a supermarket. One branch of the family diversified into road haulage, and until very recently Reyners articulated wagons could be seen on motorways the length and breadth of Britain, playing a continuing part in the Reyner family’s contribution to British industry.

Reyners – two hundred years of selling, then making,

then delivering the goods