REBECCAH WICKS (active 1756) ESCAPES THE ERASER

I wrote here a couple of years ago about an ancestral puzzle created by my 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney’s attempts to write someone out of the family history. The Gurney family so disliked the second wife of their beloved grandfather Thomas Gurney of Blackfriars(1705-1770) that they referred to her only by her initial. They did the same with her son in law and with the town in which her grandchildren lived, making it impossible, or at least very difficult to identify and trace them.

All that W.B. Gurney allowed us to know was that Thomas Gurney had married a Miss R., sometime after the death of his first wife on 29^th May 1756 and (obviously) before his death in 1770. Thomas and Miss R. had one child, Rebecca, who married a Mr F of Hertfordshire; and Rebecca and Mr F. had two children: Thomas who had 5 children, and Martha, the latter still living, in W., when WBG’s history was published in c1850.

Thomas Gurney (1705-1770)

Rebeccah Wick’s husband

R., F. and W. – not much to go on. Someone suggested that the R. might be a first name not a surname. Given their daughter’s name, could it stand for Rebecca? Sure enough, Thomas Gurney widower married Rebeccah Wicks in Southwark on 8^th October 1756. The location is right too, because Southwark is where the Gurneys worshipped – another Thomas Gurney marriage, to Rebecca Austen, took place in 1766 in Kent, a county with which Thomas had no previous association.

I can find no other definite trace of Rebeccah, either as Wicks or Gurney. But in the search for her daughter I found Rebecca Gurney marrying John Flindall widower in London on 18^th October 1798. The date fits for a woman born around 1757, especially if she had remained a spinster for a while as many daughters did, to care for her widowed mother. And her husband is a Mr F.

So, armed with a potential surname at last, I started looking for Rebecca (Gurney) Flindall’s children Thomas and Martha. There were too many Martha Flindalls to tell; but there was also a Thomas Flindall born in Hertfordshire in around 1800, soon after Rebecca and John Flidall got married.

I cross-checked, and found him elsewhere on Ancestry.co.uk, where a contributor had added his middle name – which as far as I’m concerned pretty much confirmed that I had followed the trail of initials correctly. The grandson of Rebeccah Wicks and Thomas Gurney, son of their daughter Rebecca and her husband John Flindall, was Thomas Gurney Flindall, named by Rebecca after her father. 

Rebecca must have been aware of the hostility to her mother and perhaps to her from the rest of the Gurney family, and she was defiantly confirming the connection which they would like to have erased from history.

William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855)

whose family history dismissed his grandfather’s second marriage

Miss R. may have “dissipated Thomas’s property to gratify her habits of intemperance,” as W.B. Gurney alleged, or she may not. And I can understand the family’s hostility to a marriage which took place only five months after the death of their beloved matriarch. But blood is thicker than water, or gin. I’m pleased to have uncovered her identity, and for that matter Mr F.’s.

Oh, and what about the W.? Thomas Gurney Flindall was, at the time of the 1841 census, a blacksmith in the Hertfordshire town of … Welwyn.

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

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

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

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

Hamper Mill, Watford, Hertfordshire

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

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

Golden Valley Mill, Bitton, Gloucestershire (c1935)

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

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

A sheep-pig

CAPTAIN ROBERT URQUHART JENKINS (1828-1857) AND THE CAWNPORE MASSACRE (PART 2)

Read Part 1 here! My great grandfather’s cousin Robert Jenkins served in the 2^nd Bengal Light Cavalry. He cut his campaign teeth as a cadet on the siege of Multan in 1849 and by 1857 was stationed at Cawnpore, having risen to the rank of captain. Major-General Hugh Wheeler (a cousin of my 3x great grandmother Matilda Frances Massy), officer in command at Cawnpore, was married to a high caste local woman; he had learned the local customs and language too, and felt relatively safe from the violent acts of rebellion which were breaking out amongst Sepoy troops elsewhere in India that year. But tensions rose, and on the evening of 2nd June 1857 it only took one drunken British officer, Lieutenant Cox, firing off a shot at one of his own Sepoy men, to spark the revolt.

Jenkins’ own unit, the 2^nd Bengal Cavalry, was the first to rise up. Joined by other Indian troops their action escalated into a siege of the British community in barracks on the south of Cawnpore. It was a poor position, with only one unprotected well, but Wheeler was relying on early relief from other British units. After three insanitary weeks at the height of summer, the British strength trapped at Cawnpore had been reduced by a third and supplies were almost exhausted. On 25^th June Nana Sahib, commander of the besieging forces, offered Wheeler and the entire surviving British community safe passage to Allahabad downriver from Cawnpore. Wheeler had no choice but to accept.

Jenkins, who had survived the siege while a hundred of his comrades had fallen, led one of the last sorties before Wheeler’s surrender, possibly to retrieve water from the well. A fallen Sepoy who seemed dead mustered enough strength to fire off a shot at him, which struck him full in the jaw. He died of his wound two days later, as the British were preparing to be escorted to the river for their journey to Allahabad.

The hospital in General Wheeler’s entrenchment, in which Robert Jenkins and many others died during the Siege of Cawnpore, photographed in 1858, the year after his death (photograph by Dr John Murray)

He was buried rather hurriedly by the departing survivors, along with all the other British dead of the siege, in the only available grave for such a large number: the well. Later a cross was raised over the well, with the inscription

“In a well under this cross were laid by ye hands of their fellows in suffering, ye bodies of men, women, and children, who died hard by during ye heroic defence of Wheeler's Entrenchment when beleaguered by ye rebel Nana, June 6th to 27th, A.D. MDCCCLVII.”

There are individual memorials to some of the soldiers, and Jenkins’ reads

“In memory of Captain Robert Urquhart Jenkins of the 2nd Light Cavalry, who died from wounds received shortly before the surrender of the Garrison of Cawnpore and was buried in this well with many others.”

I don’t know exactly what happened to Robert Urquhart Jenkins’ wife. She may have died before him during the siege, and if so it was a kinder death than it might have been. As General Wheeler led the convoy of exhausted British to the river bank, a bugle call from one of their captors signalled a treacherous attack by sword and gun from the Sepoy rebels. Injured stragglers and Sepoys who had remained loyal to Wheeler were cut down, and any boats that managed to get away were pulled back to shore and set on fire. Any who tried to escape in the water were slaughtered by Indian cavalrymen. All the surviving men were rounded up and shot. Wheeler died here. His son, serving alongside him, had died during the siege.

Of the 900-strong British community of Cawnpore, only four men managed to escape downriver. 206 women and children and five men were held as hostages in a nearby house, the Bibigarh. After two weeks it became clear that the British would retake Cawnpore, and – perhaps in a clumsy bid to hide the evidence of their involvement in the siege – the captors sent in hired men with hatchets and meat cleavers to kill all their prisoners. The scene is unimaginable. To conceal their crime, the rebels threw the living, the dying and the remains of the dead down the Bibigarh’s well. There wasn’t room in the fifty-foot shaft for all of them, and the rest were tossed into the Ganges. Wheeler's wife and two daughters were among them.

Memorial raised in 1860 over the Bibigarh Well

As Britain regained the upper hand in India, its revenge was swift and merciless. The British public was particularly horrified by the Cawnpore Massacre, and “Remember Cawnpore!” became a battle cry. The East India Company was dissolved in 1858, and the British Crown took back direct control of the region which it had granted to the Company in 1600.

CAPTAIN ROBERT URQUHART JENKINS (1828-1857) AND THE CAWNPORE MASSACRE (PART 1)

Allen’s Indian Mail of 6^th January 1846 announced the names of cadets recently joining the Bengal Army of the East India Company. Robert Urquhart Jenkins, a cousin of my great grandfather William Henry Castle (and a great grandson of my 4x great grandparents Rev George Castle and Mary Edye), had signed up with the Bengal Cavalry on  8^th December 1845.

His father was Robert Castle Jenkins, a Calcutta merchant, and his mother was Annie Palmer, daughter of John Palmer, whom The Times described as “one of the most famous merchant princes of Calcutta.” The language is an indication of the unassailable right to rule India which the East India Company had by the 1840s firmly assumed. R.C. Jenkins’ first three sons were all born in Calcutta (modern-day Kolkata). The eldest, Richard Palmer Jenkins, served in the Bengal Civil Service, and R.U. Jenkins’ younger brother Charles Vernon Jenkins rose to the rank of Major-General.

The fort at Multan

(photographed in the 1860s by William Henry Baker)

Robert Urquhart Jenkins joined in time to help fight the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-49) which saw the East India Company invade and capture the Punjab when Indian rulers in the Sikh city of Multan resisted the imposition of higher taxes and a puppet governor. RUJ was involved in the siege of Multan whose fall led to the establishment of the North-West Frontier Province.

The British soon ran railways into Multan, and if RUJ was involved in their building it would explain his presence as Captain in command of the Railway Engineers Post in the important garrison town of Cawnpore eight years later in 1857. Cawnpore (modern-day Kanpur) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, midway between Calcutta and Multan, controlled a number of important supply routes. It was home to a British contingent of 900 men, women and children – soldiers, engineers, merchants and their families. Captain Jenkins’ wife was with him, which suggests that his was a long-term posting in the town.

Nothing is known of Robert’s wife. She may well have been a local woman. The wife of Robert’s commanding officer General Hugh Massy Wheeler was one; Wheeler had learned the local customs and language too, and felt relatively safe from the violent acts of rebellion which were breaking out amongst Sepoy troops elsewhere in India that year. (Incidentally, Wheeler’s grandparents were my 5x great grandparents Hugh First Lord Massy and Rebecca Delap. Small world.)

Sepoy troops (here in uniforms of 1812) made up more than three quarters of the East India Company’s Bengal Army – sepoy literally means soldier

The causes of the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny, as it was known in Britain at the time, are of course complex. But it is hardly surprising that the erosion of native princely power, and the ruthless exploitation of the Indian people for the East India Company’s commercial benefit, had been building massive resentment in the local population for decades and centuries. One example of British insensitivity to local custom was the often cited rumour that army gun cartridges were greased with either cow or pig fat, which soldiers had to bite through to prime their weapons. This caused offence to Muslims and Hindus who held, respectively, pigs and cows sacred.

Unrest was in the air, and it prompted Wheeler to prime his cannons as a precaution. This in turn alarmed the large Sepoy contingent of the Bengal Army stationed at Cawnpore. Despite the relatively cordial relations between the British and the Sepoys in the town, suspicion fed suspicion. On the evening of 2^nd June 1857 it only took one drunken British officer, Lieutenant Cox, firing off a shot at one of his own Sepoys, to spark the revolt.

Read just how wrong Wheeler was in the events leading up to the Cawnpore Massacre, and what happened to Jenkins and his wife, in Part 2, via this link.

MICHAEL HINTON CASTLE (c1785-1845) AND THE BRISTOL RIOTS

Rioting seems terribly un-British somehow. We’re more ready to march in protest than we used to be. But by and large we continue to place our faith in the democratic process, despite the efforts of some politicians in recent years to discredit the political process completely. Expenses are fiddled, promises are broken … but representation of the people in parliament was hard won, so we cling to it.

Some places are more ready to riot than others, and perhaps none more so than Bristol, home of my Castle family ancestors. In 1793 for example, riots over continuing bridge tolls were ruthlessly quelled when soldiers fired into the crowd killing 11 people, many of them innocently caught up in the demonstrations. In 1831 the most violent riots in modern British history left up to 500 dead and the city in flames.

A rioter hangs a French tricolour revolutionary cap on a statue of King William III in Bristol’s Queens Square, 30^th October 1831

The odd thing is that the year after both of these dramatic uprisings, the annually elected post of Bristol town sheriff was filled by a Castle – in 1794 by my 4x great uncle Robert Castle, and in 1832 by his son, my great great grandfather’s cousin Michael Hinton Castle. I don’t really know what to make of that. Was it just coincidence? Both men also served in other years as mayor. I like to think that they were considered suitable candidates for sheriff because, with their family tradition of liberal, Presbyterian non-conformism, they were more in touch with popular sentiment than any Tories in the running.

The bloody disturbances of 1831 were a pivotal event in the nation’s slow march towards representative democracy. They were triggered by the defeat in the broadly Tory House of Lords of a liberal Reform Bill which had been passed by the Whig-dominated House of Commons. The Act sought to increase the electorate and reduce the number of rotten boroughs. In Bristol for example only 6,000 out of a population of 104,000 were eligible to vote in 1831. Meanwhile some Members of Parliament represented so-called rotten boroughs, constituencies whose population had dwindled in some cases to zero and whose seats could simply be bought from the local landlord. Everywhere the ballot was not secret, and votes could be won with money or threats. Reform of the electoral system was desperately needed.

The mayor of Bristol, Charles Pinney,

escaping from Mansion House, 29^th October 1831

One of the fiercest opponents of reform happened to be the Bristol recorder, Sir Charles Wetherell. When he arrived in the city only a few weeks after the Bill’s defeat his carriage was pelted with stones. He was forced to abandon his sitting in the Assize Courts; he took refuge in the Mansion House but fled with the mayor across the rooftops as angry Bristol citizens broke in.

Things quickly escalated, inflamed by an advance on a crowd by a company of Dragoons with threateningly drawn sabres in which one man was shot. Buildings were set on fire and Bristol’s prisons were stormed, the escaped prisoners swelling the crowds of thousands. Finally, after three days of anarchy, the mayor of the day gave the order to “take the most vigorous, effective and decisive measures to quell the riot.”

Quelling the Bristol riots, 31^st October 1831

This time the Dragoons charged into the mob of men, women and children with sabres flying, cutting them down and pursuing fleeing bands of protesters into the surrounding countryside. The mayor was accused of neglecting his duties by not ordering the charge sooner, and the Captain of the Dragoons was court-martialled for refusing to use rifles on the crowd – he committed suicide during his trial. Four rioters were sentenced to hang and 88 others imprisoned or transported.

So representation of the people was hard won – in 1832, the year Michael Hinton Castle served as sheriff of Bristol, a watered-down version of the Reform Act was finally passed in Parliament. 56 rotten boroughs were abolished and the vote was extended to around one in seven of the population. A more peaceful demonstration, in the form of a 10,000-strong petition to the king to save the lives of the four men condemned to hang, failed.

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

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

The David Salter Almshouses, Watford

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

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

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

David Salter’s Watford, one street town

(from the First Series of Ordnance Survey maps,

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

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

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

Watford Baptist Meeting House, Beechen Grove, in 1810

(from Walter Bennewith’s history of the church)

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

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

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

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

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

FANNY BODDAM (1796-1825) AND THE BODDAM OF BOMBAY

I’ve been writing here recently about the Baker brothers William and Godfrey, who both served in the Bengal Army of the East India Company. And not so long ago in honour of my brother’s Portuguese wedding I wrote about my cousin Michael Hinton Castle’s first wife Susan Smith.

There are more powerful family connections to India than the Bakers, through MHC’s second wife (of three), Frances “Fanny” Boddam. Her family could be used to chart the early progress of the British rule in India. Fanny’s great grandfather Charles Boddam (active 1715-1726) was a warehouseman at Fort St George in Madras in around 1715. Her grandfather improved on that somewhat – Charles Boddam junior (1719-1794) rose to become a director of the East India Company. But her father Rawson Hart Boddam (1734-1812) topped the lot, serving for four years as the Governor of Bombay.

The British Dominion in India, c1783 –

little Bombay on the west coast, spreading Bengal in the east

(Rawson Hart Boddam’s son (also Rawson Hart Boddam, 1792-1836) served more modestly in the Bombay Civil Service, and his grandson (another Rawson Hart Boddam, 1818-1836) only achieved the rank of Ensign in the 50^th Regiment the Bengal Native Infantry before dying at the age of 18, only three months after his father.)

Governor Boddam held the post from 1784 to 1788. His main claim to fame is that he was the first governor to be paid entirely by salary, at nearly £10,000 a year, a massive sum. It ensured that he could retire in great comfort to his new and stately home, redbrick Capel House north of London.

Capel House, Bulls Cross, near Enfield, the Seat of Rawson Hart Boddam Esq, in an engraving by J. Asperne in 1804 
(now Capel Manor Hoticultural College, 
which counts singer Kim Wilde among its alumni)

Bombay came under British rule after the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza in 1661. But only seven years later the British Crown passed control to the East India Company in return for a token annual rent of £10. The colony thrived to become the jewel in the Company’s crown, until Bengal (where the Baker boys later served) overtook it in importance in the mid 18^th century.

Boddam’s rule sits in a period of relative calm between the first two Anglo-Maratha wars, both of which saw the Company expandng its influence by defeating serious threats to its authority from a confederacy of independent Indian rulers. The first war had ended with the Treaty of Salbai which, among other things, guaranteed peace for twenty years. So Boddam probably had a fairly easy time of it in earning his £40,000.

Rawson Hart Boddam’s epitaph in Bath Abbey

He died, almost exactly 200 years ago, on the 30^th May 1812, in Bath in western England. I imagine there must have been a family home there in addition to the seat at Capel House. His son also died in Bath; and Bath is only a few miles from Bristol where his daughter Fanny’s future husband lived.

Fanny and Michael Castle had four children, two boys and two girls, before Fanny died of complications following the birth of the fourth. The boys were named after her parents Boddam and Tudor (her mother’s maiden name). The name of Tudor Castle recurs: my great uncle of that name was a promising poet before his early death in World War One; and Governor Boddam had a grandson called Tudor Castle Boddam, remembered on his memorial tablet in Bath Abbey.

Fanny and Michael's other son Boddam Castle, on the other hand, grew up to be a barrister and brought some shame on the family when he appeared in the Old Bailey in 1849 on the wrong side of the witness box. He stood accused of failing to pay maintenance for his illegitimate child. But that’s another story.

GODFREY EVAN BAKER (c1751-1786) AND THE HINDUSTANEE COFFEE HOUSE

My 5x great uncle Godfrey served alongside his brother William in the Bengal Army of the East India Company in the late 18^th century. Despite being court-martialed once for insubordination he continued to rise through the ranks to become a Captain. But in 1782 he was eventually persuaded to resign amidst accusations that he had held an entire native village to ransom. Is this how the British Empire was forged?

It was fairly common practice for Britons serving with the East India Company to find inventive ways of augmenting their modest Company pay. Godfrey, like his brother William who followed him in the post, was a quartermaster responsible for the purchase of supplies to the Bengal Army. William certainly set up his own enterprises from which to purchase those supplies, and presumably Godfrey pursued the same income-expanding policies. But extortion on a village scale seems to have been a scheme too far.

Dean Mahomed (1759-1851)

writer, restaurateur, therapist

Godfrey returned in disgrace to the city of Cork in his native Ireland, where his father (also Godfrey) was a prominent merchant. He brought with him the faithful companion of his years in India, Dean Mahomed, a muslim who had served him since the age of 12 when Baker first arrived in India as a fresh-faced cadet. Mahomet had risen to the rank of Subedar, the highest attainable by an Indian in the Bengal Army; but when Baker resigned Mahomed resigned with him in an act of loyal solidarity.

Back in Cork, Mahomed’s life took a remarkable series of twists and turns, bearing in mind that he was an Indian in Imperial Britain in the late 18^th century. He went to school, where he received a thoroughly British grounding in English language and literature. He applied what he had learned to the publication in 1794 of the first ever book written in English by an Indian, snappily titled The Travels of Dean Mahomet, A Native of Patna in Bengal, Through Several Parts of India, While in the Service of The Honourable The East India Company Written by Himself, In a Series of Letters to a Friend.

Jane Mahomed, née Daly

“wife of Mr Mahomed, Shampooing Surgeon”

During his studies he fell in love and eloped with a fellow student, Jane Daly – a teenage member of the ruling white Protestant Ascendancy. Although you might expect this to have been a shocking event, it does not seem to have done Mahomed’s standing in local society any harm. In fact, the publication of his Travels was funded by advance subscriptions from many prominent Cork families. Today the book is regarded as a unique social record, a view of India by an Indian working for the occupying power. There is a superb modern edition with biographical commentary by Michael H Fisher, well worth tracking down.

After the death of his patron, Mahomed joined the household of Godfrey’s brother William. But when William got married in 1807, Dean and Jane Mahomed were no longer welcome there and they moved to London. In 1809 they opened what is now regarded as Britain first-ever Indian restaurant, the Hindustanee Coffee House at 34 George St. After some initial success, the venture went bankrupt in 1812 and the couple moved to Brighton.

Mahomed’s Baths

Brighton

There Mahomed established himself in perhaps the strangest role of his life, as a massage therapist of sorts, practicing what he called shampooing – not what you’re thinking, the word comes from the Hindi word “chhampa,” meaning to press. He opened Mahomed’s Baths, a bath house offering Indian oil massage and medicated vapour baths. The business thrived, bolstered by claims no worse than those of many quacks of the day. It even launched a branch in London run by one of Dean’s sons. But eventually the fashion for it declined; and Mahomed died in 1851 almost forgotten by the world.

Dean Mahomed deserves credit for his capacity to reinvent himself after setbacks. He led a life rich in variety – I’ve barely scratched the surface here – and as a writer, restaurateur and therapist pioneered the art of marketing “exotic” Indian culture to a western audience.

Uncle Godfrey himself did not live to see any of his old friend’s successes. Perhaps the shame of his dismissal from the Bengal Army sent him into physical decline. Perhaps the shock of the Irish climate was just too much after 13 years in India. He died only four years after his return to Cork, the year Dean and Jane got married.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the “lean, austere” wines of Monçao

(also available in red)

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

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

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

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

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

Top tipple, Taylor’s Tawny

Congratulations, James and Raquel.

ROBERT JOHN LECHMERE GUPPY (1836-1916) AND THE EPONYMOUS FISH

What’s not to like about Lechmere Guppy! Tattoo’d school inspector, once-shipwrecked son-in-law of a refugee from the French revolution, furniture-making almanack-founder, civil engineer by trade and palaeontologist by passion, agnostic map-maker, author on molluscs … and then there’s That Fish.

Robert John Lechmere Guppy (1836-1916)

Lechmere was a cousin of my 3x great uncle Thomas Richard Guppy. The Guppys are an extraordinary family, and I not going to let the fact that I am only related to them by marriage stop me from writing about them here. Thomas Richard’s mother and father were both inventors, whose achievements certainly inspired their son to his own significant contributions to civil engineering. Lechmere’s lawyer father was the mayor of San Fernando in Trinidad; and his artist mother was a pioneering photographer who navigated the Orinoco River with the help of some local Indians.

He was without doubt a tremendously inquisitive and open-hearted character. His daughter Yseult Bridges said he “loathed deceit, disloyalty, dishonesty and cant; felt all men should find work well done its own reward." And A.D. Russel, writing only six years after Lechmere’s death, described him, “apart from his contributions to scientific periodicals, lectures etc … [as] a man of remarkable individuality. Tall, gaunt, white-haired, grey-bearded, rugged in speech, combative in his opinions. A whiff of cold air seemed to go with him wherever he went. Watching him stride over the savannah, one imagined a Yorkshire moor.”

Kinnersley Castle, Herefordshire: Elizabethan remodeling of a defensive castle built on the Welsh borders in the reign of Henry I

With his parents living in Trinidad Lechmere was raised by his grandparents back home in England in a 12^th century Norman castle, Kinnersley, not in Yorkshire but in the Herefordshire Marches. Ignoring expectations that he would remain there as an adult to run the estate, he instead sailed away from England at the age of 18.

Two years later in 1856 he was shipwrecked on North Island, New Zealand, “living [according to Yseult] very happily amongst the Maoris who had rescued him, roaming the hills and forests, collecting specimens, and thoroughly enjoying himself. Although this was at the time of the Maori Wars, they treated him with great hospitality, and to the end of his life he loved to talk of his adventures with them, and to display the tattoos on his back – of various designs including a sailing canoe – and on his wedding finger – a ring! He had left only just in time, he declared, to avoid marrying the chief’s daughter.”

Lechmere also mapped the region during his two-year stay with the Maoris, and in 1858 sailed to Trinidad to join his parents. There he married Alice Rostant, a creole descendent of French aristocrats who had fled to Trinidad to escape the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Lechmere became Trinidad’s first Superintendent of Schools and spent the rest of his time pottering about the West Indies studying their geology, fossil remains and marine molluscs (a subject I’ve written on in the past).

The Victoria Institute, now the National Museum and Art Gallery

Port of Spain, Trinidad

He founded the Victoria Institute in Port of Spain in honour of the Queens Golden Jubilee in 1887. It’s now a national institution, as is the Trinidad Almanack which he began in 1866 with his brother Francis – it was later adopted by the government and became Trinidad’s official Year Book.

1866 was also the year he discovered a new fish in the waters around Trinidad. He sent it off to the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum who named it Girardinus guppii in Lechmere’s honour – the Guppy fish. It was later found to have been discovered separately and earlier in off Venezuela by another naturalist Wilhelm Peters and named Lebistes reticulatus (now reclassified as Poecilia reticulate). But the popular name for the fish remains the Guppy.

The Guppy, Girardinus guppii

drawn in 1903 by Plantagenet Lechmere Guppy

son of Robert John Lechmere Guppy

(picture: Natural History Museum London/ Science Photo Library)