JOSEPH COOPER (1674-1735) AND LORD ROCHESTER’S DAIRY MAID

Austin Cooper, Austin the Settler, my 8x great grandfather who came to Ireland in 1661, laid out the parkland of Blessington House for the Archbishop of Dublin, Michael Boyle. Perhaps he passed on skills of landscape management to his youngest son Joseph: Joseph returned to England and found a position as Keeper of New Park – better known today as Richmond Park – west of London. There he lived up on Sawyer’s Hill, in a building which became known as Cooper’s Lodge. It still stands, a listed building these days more prosaically called Bog Lodge but still the headquarters of the park superintendent.

Map of Richmond Park, after one by Edward John Eyre drawn in 1754

Cooper Lodge is shown near the top in the centre

(Somewhere along the way, Joseph married Elizabeth Slade, who had been before her marriage Lord Rochester’s dairy maid. Lord Rochester’s wife was Henrietta Boyle, great great granddaughter of a certain Roger Boyle, one of whose great grandsons was Michael Boyle of Blessington, for whom Joseph's father had laid out the park. It’s a small world.)

Joseph was appointed to the New Park post in around 1705, and his appointment is likely to have come directly from the Park Ranger, the monarch of the day. Only in 1727 did the rangership pass from royal control. In that year, as an act of royal patronage presumably designed to ensure the loyalty of his prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, new king George II conferred the role on Sir Robert's son. The park became a playground for the king and the prime minister. They hunted together there; Walpole often chose to work in the peace of the Old Lodge in the park; and the New Lodge (now called White Lodge, built near the old one in 1727) was a favourite home of the king’s consort Queen Caroline.

To preserve their privacy Walpole removed ladder stiles from the perimeter of the park and installed gatekeepers to limit access to “respectable persons.” This was unpopular enough, but when Princess Amelia, the hedonistic daughter of George II,  was appointed Ranger in 1749, she closed the park completely to all but a few special friends.

HRH the Princess Amelia (1711-1786)

c1738 by Jean-Baptiste van Loo

Going the long way round when you were used to cutting through the park was a great inconvenience. After polite requests, direct action and other avenues failed, a group of gentlemen took the deputy ranger to court over the exclusion in 1754. It was a chaotic trial, with a total of 64 witnesses called for prosecution and defence, all stating categorically that in their experience there had either always or never been a right of way through the park.

27 people spoke for the prosecution, including someone who, at the age of 71 and having lived in the park for 50 years, could be expected to know a thing or two about the matter. Elizabeth Slade Cooper, Joseph’s widow and Rochester's old dairy maid, was amongst those who remembered free rights of passage across the land going back to their father’s and grandfather’s time. The defence however produced 37 witnesses, including Lord Palmerston and someone, Mary Cooper, who was presumably not the daughter of Joseph and Elizabeth Cooper of the same name.

They carried the day by sheer strength of numbers and the case was dismissed. But four years later, a local brewer called John Lewis mounted another legal attack (based on his having being refused admission in 1755), and this time won the day. The ladder stiles were reinstated, and eventually in 1761 HRH the Princess Amelia gave up the rangership in disgust. 

So, losing the battle but winning the war, Lord Rochester’s former milk maid Elizabeth Slade played her part in establishing the principles of rights of way for ordinary people in England.

 

The 1754 trial is recorded in great detail in a book (author unknown) published only a year later by M. Cooper, W. Reeve and C. Sympson, called Merlin’s Life and Prophecies. The book uses the trial to prove the accuracy of the fifth century wizard’s prognostications in dubious verse about “all the Kings and Queens who have fat on the Britifh Throne … with some other events relating [to the Richmond Park Trial] which have not yet come to pafs, but no lefs wonderful than thofe which have already happened.” It makes for spell-binding reading.

MARY CASTLE (1841-1926), HER OVERSEAS SISTER AND COX’S AND KING’S

I’ve been sifting through another bundle of letters from the writing desk of my 3x great uncle Charles Castle. This lot are from his niece Mary, who married the Rev Edmund Thomas Daubeny. To be honest, these letters, from early 1871, are rather dull as correspondence – concerned with a series of delays in the reinvestment of interest received on mortgages which Mary and her sister Augusta had funded with some sort of inheritance. Not my field, anyway! But as ever they are littered with fascinating references to the family and to the times they lived in.

Mary's sister Augusta married Edmund’s brother Albert James Hesketh Daubeny in 1866, a year after Mary and Edmund’s wedding. One imagines Albert in his dress uniform turning heads at the earlier occasion; he had joined the 12^th Regiment of Foot in 1862 as an ensign and was working his way up through the ranks. By 1866 he was a lieutenant, and he eventually retired as a Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment.

Uniforms of the 12^th Regiment of Foot in 1848

probably procured by Cox & Co, Army Agents

In 1870, just before the correspondence in front of me began, he was posted to India with their wife and their two children to date, Augusta (nearly four years old) and Margaret (two). Mary wrote to Charles in February 1871 of news from Augusta that they had “got over the effects of the climate, and are strong and well.”

Mary was saddled with having to sort out the financial complexities by herself on behalf of both her and her sister, about which she probably understood almost as little as I do. She turned to her uncle, who had a lifetime of business experience behind him and she was at great pains to get everything in writing, often repeating in her replies what she had understood from his letters to her.

The interests and dividends, when they did come, were easy enough to transfer to her account. But in the days of Empire before global banking, how to get Augusta’s share out to her in India? Needless to say, the British Army had a system.

Richard Cox (1718-1803) by Sir William Beechley

banker and freight agent to the British Army

It all started in 1758 when the Right Honourable John, Viscount Ligonier, colonel of the First Foot Guards appointed his secretary Richard Cox as a “military agent” with responsibility for paying Ligonier’s troops. Cox had been in Ligonier’s service for some 15 years and had an understanding of soldiers’ ways and requirements. Soon other regiments were taking advantage of his expertise not only in financial matters but in the shipping of property, the selling of officer commissions and the provision of uniforms and even armaments. By the time of Cox’s death in 1803, Cox & Co were bankers to virtually the whole of the British Army.

Cox’s grandson continued the business, expanding as the British Empire expanded. They were the natural choice for Mary Daubeny to use when sending funds to Augusta. At the outbreak of the First World War, troop numbers rose rapidly of course, and Cox & Co were there to take advantage of the fact. Their staffing levels rose from 180 in 1914 to 4500 in 1918.

Cox & Co played another, surprising humanitarian role during the war. Often the cashing of a Cox & Co cheque in Hamburg or Hanover was the first intimation that a missing British officer was captured and not dead, and the company was able to trace prisoners this way to the relief of their families. (Truly, they were different times, when a captured officer was able to cash a cheque!)

Sir Henry Seymour King (1852-1933) by Bassano

banker and unlikely women’s lib pioneer

Like many companies whom war benefited, Cox & Co struggled in the ensuing peace. They hung on long enough to buy out their main rivals in India, the Henry S King Bank, in 1922. (King’s deserve recognition for being in 1887 one of the first firms to employ women typists, some 25 years ahead of the field.) But as Cox’s and King’s they were in turn swallowed up by Lloyds only a year later. Cox’s and King’s formed the basis of Lloyds new Eastern Department, based at their Pall Mall branch in London.

In the 1930s changes in banking regulations forced Lloyds to sell off its non-banking activities, including the travel and shipping aspects of Cox’s and King’s. The resulting independent company survives to this day as prestigious travel agents Cox & Kings.

A cheque from Cox & Co c 1880 
during their heyday at Craig’s Court, Whitehall

All of which is why Mary Daubeny wrote to her uncle on 2^nd February 1871, “I enclose a statement (as you wished) of the Interest due up to that date; Augusta’s share has to be paid in to Messrs Cox Army Agents, Craig’s Court, but I will gladly see to that matter, if more convenient to you to send the whole sum to us.”

FREDERICK JASPER CHADWICK (1838-1891) AND THE GUELPH GAS WORKS

I am descended in one branch from a long line of Tipperary Chadwicks who first came to Ireland from England in the 17^th century. Chadwicks of Ballinard in the county and their near neighbours the Coopers of Killenure frequently intermarried. My 3x great grandparents were William Cooper and Rebecca Chadwick; and William’s sister Elizabeth married Rebecca’s first cousin John Craven Chadwick.

While William and Rebecca’s line (and mine) remained in Tipperary until the 1960s, John and Elizabeth’s son John Craven Chadwick junior emigrated to Canada in 1830 and founded a Canadian Chadwick dynasty. They settled eventually in the town of Guelph, 60 or so miles west of Toronto. Guelph was a flourishing colonial trading post, established by the Canada Company in 1827 on land which was already a market and meeting place for indigenous Canadians before the British arrived.

Frederick Jasper Chadwick (1838-1891)

as Mayor of Guelph, Ontario in 1877

Chadwicks played no small part in the development of the city. John junior served in several militia units during the rebellions of 1837 which sought to overthrow British rule in Canada. He subsequently served on the Commission for Peace locally. His son Jasper also did military service: Jasper and his father were first in line when the Guelph Rifles (No. 1 Company) were being formed in February 1857, and Jasper rose to the rank of Captain.

Jasper was a prominent businessman, a Provincial Land Surveyor who served on the town and county council and was elected Mayor of Guelph in 1877. It was a big year for Guelph, the 50^th anniversary of its founding, and Jasper must have presided over many celebratory events. He was from 1871 to 1885 the proprietor of the conservative Guelph Herald newspaper, and under his tenure it went in 1872 from a weekly to a daily edition. (The Herald was eventually bought up in 1924 by its lifelong rival the radical Guelph Mercury, which still publishes to this day.)

Guelph Town Hall (built 1856)

(pictured in 1879, the year the town became a city)

Guelph Town Hall which housed the mayoral offices (as well as courts, market stalls, jail and library)  had been built in 1856, during a period of prosperity triggered by the arrival of the Grand Trunk Railroad in the town that year. Guelph itself had only been granted town status a year earlier. That prosperity was soon boosted with another rail connection to the outside world by the Great Western Railway.

Guelph Board of Trade was determined to capitalise on these transport links and attract manufacturers to the town, and Jasper Chadwick was a founding director of the Guelph Gas Works, one of the Board’s schemes to that end. Its gas first came on stream on 18^th January 1871. Gas meant heat and light, which in turn meant longer working hours in factories; and like moths to a flame, industries were indeed drawn to Guelph. (The gasworks survived until they were demolished in the 1960s.)

Guelph Junction Railway’s monopoly-busting Freight Office

(the line was leased to the Canadian Pacific Railway from 1888)

In 1879, two years after Jasper’s mayorship, he could take some credit when Guelph was declared a city. Three years later, when the Grand Trunk and Great Western Railways merged, fears of a monopoly of rail access to the city prompted Chadwick and several other leading citizens to found the city-owned Guelph Junction Railway. At a dinner in his honour that year, he could say with much justification:

“When I came to Guelph in 1848 it was a small place; the spot on which is now erected the Wellington Hotel [in which he was speaking] being a lumber yard and scarcely a building of any pretensions between here and the market place. Her population at that time being counted in hundreds where now there are thousands. Coming here at an early period of my life I might almost claim to be a native, and as you have been kind enough to express in the address, I have been identified with everything that has made Guelph what she is. Nothing, since I was able to take my share, has been done for the advancement of our good city in which I have not taken an active part.”

Well done, Jasper Chadwick - power, media and transport tycoon, citizen and benefactor of Guelph!

Guelph Junction Station in 1986

(built in 1888, demolished in 1989)

Photo by William D. Miller

EYRE MASSEY (1719-1804) AND THE SECOND-LAST BATTLE (Part 2)

Eyre Massey my Irish 6x great uncle fought on the wrong side, from my Scottish point of view, at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil. Massey’s military career was built on the bravery he showed that day. There, the Scottish Highlanders were massacred by a Hanoverian army of English, Irish and lowland Scots, and the Jacobite cause of an independent Scotland was ended.

Instead therefore, I prefer to concentrate on the second-last battle, fought three months earlier and 100 miles further south! If the Scots had been able to capitalise on their successes that day, the English advance might well have stalled along with Massey’s career.  

The Jacobites had retreated from their advance deep into English territory, but were at full strength and in high morale, 8000 of them encamped at Bannockburn to the south of Stirling. Massey was with Blakeney’s Regiment, under siege in Stirling Castle where they had been garrisoned to harry the rebellious Scots from within Scotland’s borders.

Stirling Castle in the late 18^th century

For the Hanoverian English, an army of 13000 arrived in Edinburgh, and an advance party of 6000 was sent on to relieve the siege at Stirling. But Blakeney, a soldier’s soldier very much in the same mould as Massey, had simply been biding his time, allowing the Scots to commit time, men and money to the siege; hearing of the English advance he easily broke out of Stirling Castle, catching the besiegers by surprise and killing some 300 of them on his way to joining the relief column at Falkirk, a small town southeast of Bannockburn.

Thus it was that Massey found himself on the left flank of the Hanoverian army as the two sides lined up against each other on 17^th January 1746. Despite the strength of the Hanoverian forces they were caught unaware, largely because their commander General Henry Hawley refused to believe early reports of the Jacobite advance on his position. Rushing to meet them at last, Hawley’s men were faced with an uphill climb across boggy ground towards the Highland Scots occupying the ridge of Falkirk Hill.

Battle lines on Falkirk Muir, 4pm, 17^th January 1746

(plan from Wikipedia)

By four o’clock in the afternoon, with the two sides facing each other and spoiling for a fight, the short Scottish winter day was already drawing to a close. As dusk fell, the wind picked up and brought heavy icy rain. It was uncomfortable weather and a bad time of day for a battle.

The right flank was protected by a deep ravine from attacking or being attacked. So it fell to English cavalry on the left to lead the charge, past Blakeney’s infantry, where they faced three regiments of the Macdonald clan. The cavalry were routed by volleys of Scottish pistol fire and by a tactic of wounding the horse not the rider. As the survivors fled, the highlanders drew their claymore swords and charged. It must have been terrifying. The English front line turned and ran – Eyre Massey and the rest of his regiment, in the second line, were simply swept away in the retreat. It fell to Massey and his fellow grenadiers to pull some of the English cannon from the bog, because the horses had all been lost.

The Battle of Falkirk Muir –

wind and rain also shown

The fighting lasted less than half an hour. In the chaos of the rout the Hanoverian army fell back eastwards, first to Linlithgow and then to Edinburgh. As night came on, the wind became a winter storm of piercing cold sleat. Many English lives were probably spared by the poor visibility and confusion. Only in the grey light of morning were the Jacobites able to see the extent of their victory on a battlefield covered by hundreds on Hanoverian dead.

If the Scots had built on the momentum of this convincing and morale-boosting engagement, the future of their Jacobite cause might have been very different. But instead of pursuing the defeated and disorganised English army, they waited for weeks at Bannockburn for their heavy-drinking leader Charles Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, to recover from a head cold and make some decisions. The English were given time to regroup under a new commander, the Butcher Duke of Cumberland. Charles gradually retreated northwards, fighting a defensive rearguard action instead of seizing the offensive.

The Highlanders’ Medley, or the Duke Triumphant, published 1746

to celebrate the victory of the Duke of Cumberland (1721-1765)

(from the US Library of Congress)

By contrast Cumberland moved swiftly north along the east coast of Scotland, supplying his troops by ship. After six weeks spent in training at Aberdeen his forces were well-fed and highly disciplined. The defeat which he was able to inflict on the Jacobite army at Culloden on 16^th April 1746 was crushing and final. Thanks to his subsequent patronage of Eyre Massey (then a lowly lieutenant whose bravery at Culloden had caught the Duke’s eye) my ancestor rose through the ranks to become a general, and was eventually elevated to the Irish peerage as Lord Clarina. And I suppose you don’t get all that just for pulling some guns out of the mud in defeat.

EYRE MASSEY (1719-1804) AND THE SECOND-LAST BATTLE (Part 1)

Culloden is a name that resonates like some doom-laden infinite gong throughout Scotland. It still sounds in Scottish heads, long after the day in 1746 when (as morose Scots will tell you) the birds fell silent on that blasted, blood-soaked moor. It rings with finality, the last battle on British soil; a romantic, heroic Scottish failure; The End of the Dream – as the Scottish Daily Record newspaper describes it in its partisan partwork The Story of Scotland. It haunts us with what might have been had the plucky retreating Jacobites of Bonnie Prince Charlie not been comprehensively, ruthlessly defeated by the Auld Enemy, England.

We conveniently forget that Scots and Irish troops fought alongside the English that day. The truth of history is never as simple as the mist of legend. I proudly call myself Scottish, conveniently forgetting the English and Irish muddle of ancestors who make up a good half of me.

Celebrity souvenir, c1748 (V&A, London)

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-1765)

widely lionised in both England and Scotland

for his victory at Culloden

Still, it’s embarrassing in certain circles to have to admit that one of those Irish ancestors lined up with the English ranks at Culloden. Lieutenant Eyre Massey, my 6x great uncle, was not only there on the wrong side. He distinguished himself sufficiently in the battle to attract the attention of the English commander – a man hated in Scottish oral history for his brutal persecution of Jacobites after the victory, William Duke of Cumberland, known around these parts simply as The Butcher.

Eyre served with the grenadiers in Colonel Blakeney’s Regiment, later known as the Enniskillens or the 27^th Foot. Blakeney was another Irishman. Although most of the regiment were held in reserve during the engagement and saw little action, the grenadiers led by Massey were in the thick of it. Massey was descended from a wealthy Irish military family and had bought his commission in the army; but he led from the front, earning the respect and support of his men. He was wounded at Culloden and his bravery won him the useful patronage of the Duke, a son of George II the English king.

2000 Jacobites and 50 Hanoverians died 

at the Battle of Culloden, 16^th April 1746

Under Cumberland’s influence Eyre began to rise through the ranks – Captain-Lieutenant in 1747, Captain in 1751 and Major in 1755. He again distinguished himself in the Canadian campaign of 1757-60 (of which I wrote here some time ago) and afterwards in the West Indies. He was appointed Colonel in the regiment in 1773, Major-General in 1776 and became a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1782. After a period of frustratingly inactive if comfortable semi-retirement, Massey was called into service again to quell a mutiny amongst Irish troops and rewarded in 1796, at the age of 77, with promotion to the rank of full General.

His military career is impressive, even if it was launched with grenades against the Scots at Culloden. It could all have gone very differently. The second-last battle on British soil was fought three months earlier and 100 miles further south. Eyre Massey was there too. If the Scots had been able to capitalise on their successes that day, the English advance might well have stalled along with Massey’s military career.  No Culloden – no end of the Scottish dream. Ironically, it was failure within their own ranks, and at the very highest level, which led instead to the death of the dream and of so many Scots at the hand of other Scots, English and Irish enemies. More in Part 2!

FREDERICK JAMES PIPER (1920-1943) AND THE EPONYMOUS LAKE

I was lucky enough to visit Toronto on a couple of occasions in the 1980s when I was the stage manager for a Scottish theatre company. On both visits I was told proudly by (it seemed) almost every Canadian I met that they were Scottish. There has certainly been a substantial exodus from here to there over the last couple of centuries, prompted by the Highland Clearances and other periods of economic hardship.

In 1910 Archibald Piper, a great grandson of my 3x great grandfather William Piper, joined the list of exiles. He lived first in Pincher Creek, about 70 miles west of Lethbridge in Alberta where his brother John had settled via Nebraska and North Dakota. At about the same time his sister Catherine had emigrated to Melbourne in Australia. All three really were Scottish, born in Sorn, the tiny Ayrshire village where generations of their ancestors and future cousins lived and worked as farmers and blacksmiths.

Frederick James Piper (1920-1943)

In time John moved a little east of Lethbridge to Bow Island (now known as the Bean Capital of the West, 2007 population 1868) and Archibald moved a little further east to Tuxford in neighbouring Saskatchewan. These days Tuxford’s population is under 100, but back in 1919 it was a thriving trading post of around 300 people. It was there that Archie’s youngest son, Frederick James Piper, was born.

Fred’s mother died in October 1940, and in January the next year Fred enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, the RCAF (which had coincidentally been founded in the year of his birth). The RCAF was expanding rapidly to assist in the British war effort, and a great many Canadians then as now retained strong links of loyalty to the Old Country. Frederick, a pilot officer, was posted to an airbase in Wales and took advantage of being in Blighty for the first time to visit his Scottish relatives.

Crew of a RCAF Lancaster bomber, 1944

He was probably attached, like many RCAF men, to No.6 Group, RAF Bomber Command. His father remarried in March 1943. In August that year no.s 5, 6 and 8 Group were assigned to Operation Hydra, part of a campaign to disrupt Germany’s development of V-weapons. Hydra was aimed at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre in northeastern Germany, where the V2 bomb was being developed and manufactured. The threat from such weapons was such that Churchill ordered that the facility be attacked “on the heaviest possible scale.”

The attack, by 596 bomber aircraft, took place on the night of 17^th/18^th August 1943. It was successful only inasmuch as it delayed the V2 programme by about two months, the time it took the Germans to move the project to a safer location in the mountains to the south. The raid killed two key scientists and several hundred civilian prisoners who had been forced to work at Peenemünde and were housed in a neighbouring concentration camp.

Bomb craters surrounding a V2 testlaunch site at Peenemünde after Operation Hydra – but many craters were mock-ups placed by the Germans to deceive allied reconnaissance flights checking the effectiveness of the raid

Allied losses were relatively slight considering the scale of the assault. 40 bombers were lost, with 215 personnel, of which about 86 were Canadian airmen. One of them was Pilot Officer Frederick James Piper. He is buried nearby in Kiel War Cemetery.

After the war, Canada honoured its fallen by naming some of the myriad lakes in the north of the country after them. Piper Lake, in northern Saskatchewan, is the rather beautiful memorial to my southern Saskatchewan cousin.

Piper Lake, northern Saskatchewan

Photo by Doug Chisholm of Woodland Aerial Photography

(www.woodlandaerialphoto.com)

JAMES FREW (born c1900) AND CHELSEA F.C.

I have precious little to brag about in my family tree when it comes to sporting achievement. But, clutching at straws, I can claim a great great uncle by marriage who got pretty much to the top of his game.

James Frew (born c1900)

James Frew’s father was a miner in the Ayrshire coalfields, and naturally he too started down the pits as a young man. In 1919 he married local girl Jean Piper of Sorn. Like most lads he played football in his spare time, and demonstrated such a talent for it that he played regularly for Nithsdale Wanderers down the road in Sanquhar (pronounced Sanker, if you’re not from round here!).

Nithsdale was a club on the rise. In 1920 they moved to Crawick Holm, a new ground with a stone grandstand just outside the town, and in 1923 they were invited to join the new Scottish League third division. In 1925 they won the championship (and promotion to the second division) with an 8-0 victory over Montrose in the last match of the season.

If Jimmy Frew played a part in the momentum which led to these successes, he was not around to enjoy the results themselves. In 1922 he was spotted by a talent scout from no less a club than London’s Chelsea FC. It is hard to believe that they were keeping an eye on teams like Nithsdale, but nevertheless Jimmy made his debut at Stamford Bridge, the Chelsea ground, on St Valentine’s Day 1923 in a 3-1 win over Everton.

Chelsea FC, 1925-26 season

(Jimmy Frew, new father, back row, second from left)

Although his professional football career is quite well documented I can’t find any record of what position he played. I am guessing it was defensive because in 43 games with Chelsea and 58 with his next club, Southend United, he never scored a goal. If such things are genetic, it’s worth noting that his son Billy (born during his last season at Chelsea in 1926) was himself a good amateur goalkeeper.

Jimmy played his last match for Chelsea on 24^th April 1926 and moved to Southend in Essex for two seasons from 1927 to 1929. He finished his pro days back up north as captain of Carlisle United, playing his part in the club’s triumphant double trouncing of Barrow, the local derby rivals, in the 1929-30 season (2-0 away, 7-1 at home). Not bad for a miner’s son from Kilmarnock.

Where it all began -

Nithsdale Wanderers and the Crawick Holm stand, c1921

(Jimmy Frew back row, second from right)

RICHARD WILLIAM RALPH SADLEIR (1819-1876) AND THE RAILWAY SIDING

I’m constantly delighted by how much information is now available online for historical research. There are those who claim that the internet is the lazy option and that it’s killing the art of “genuine” research somehow. I don’t agree on many levels. It certainly eases the process of going through the growing body of online archive material; so perhaps it is lazy in the sense that the invention of the plough killed the back-breaking art of digging fields by hand and made farmers lazy!

It’s not lazy, it’s just easier!

Almost all the contents of this blog over the past two years I’ve tracked down online, or from archive material in my own possession. I live in Edinburgh. I don’t have the luxury of time or money to be able to travel the country or the world to consult local documents. So I’m enormously grateful for the online material posted by others, and I hope I’m returning the favour just a little by setting some of it in context here.

By and large, as I say, I’m amazed at how much it’s possible to find out about the long-dead. I have a folder three bulging inches thick holding details of the life of my great great grandfather the Rev William Augustus Salter (1812-1879). But just occasionally I draw a blank. What I know about WA Salter’s almost exact contemporary Richard William Ralph Sadleir, another great great grandfather of mine, would not fill a single sheet.

I wrote up what little I knew about him here back in December 2009, and precious little more has come to light since. But tiny snippets all add to my picture of him. Following what few clues I had, I tried to track down John Kean, the partner in his failed business venture, a chemical works in St Helens near Liverpool.

Globe Alkali Works, St Helens, c1900 –

the New Street Works were probably a much smaller affair

I now know that the works, New Street Chemical Works, were registered under the Alkali Act of 1863, legislation passed just before they set up in business and an early example of environmental regulation. That gives a hint about the nature of the chemicals they were producing or working with. Apart from that there is almost no record, online at least, of the New Street Works, except for a document held in the St Helens Archives. It’s an agreement about the use of a railway siding in the town, dated to November 1864, which suggests they were either receiving raw materials or dispatching finished goods by rail.

I’ve also unearthed a third partner, William Holden. The chemical business lasted less than three years, 1864-66, before failing. In 1868 both Holden and Sadleir were declared bankrupt. Kean however was not! What’s more, he disappeared from the records for a while – no sign of him in the 1871 UK census, for example – before resurfacing in 1881 hundreds of miles away to the north in Glasgow. There, in the rapidly expanding industrial district of Possil Park, Kean’s occupation was listed once again as Manufacturing Chemist. The Argyle Oil Mills and Chemical Works stood (until 1914) jus a few hundred yards form his given address. All but his two oldest children were born in the Glasgow area within eight years of the census.

St Rollox Chemical Works, Glasgow c1880 –

the nearby Argyle Works in Possil were smaller

I have to remind myself that it’s not John Kean I’m interested in! But his disappearance and his movements do shed a little light on my great great grandfather’s life and the events that shaped it. Was Kean a shrewder businessman that Sadleir? Did he dupe Sadleir and Holden into carrying the can for the failure of the business? A few years earlier Sadleir had sold off thousands of acres of the Sadleir family estates in Tipperary – was he a cash-rich turkey ripe for plucking?

It’s too tempting and too dangerous to speculate wildly on the basis of a few more tiny facts. But I know a little more than I did 21 months ago! New information comes online all the time and I keep checking. But I think that sooner or later I am going to have to go to St Helens and see what I can find for myself on the ground.

RUSSELL HENRY MANNERS (1800-1870) AND THE MAP OF THE MOON

Russell Manners was a brother-in-law of my cartoonist cousin Charles de Noé. Although a great many of my ancestors made their mark, good or bad, here on Earth, Russell is as far as I know the only one to have an extra-terrestrial legacy.

Russell Henry Manners (1800-1870),

a Manners on the Moon

(picture from www.sciencephoto.com)

His career was in the Royal Navy, but his interest was in astronomy. His enthusiasm led to his election to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1836 where, although not a practicing astronomer, he proved himself an administrative asset to the Society. He served for ten years as its honorary secretary and in 1868 was elected its president. When the time came to hand out names for features on the Moon, he had earned his place in the queue.

It turns out that there are rules for this sort of thing, administered by the International Astronomical Union. Planets are named after Gods and Goddesses, and their moons after the offspring of those gods. For example Mars  is named after the Roman god of war; its two moons are called Deimos and Phobos, the sons of Ares, the Greek god of war (something which would probably have my father, a classical scholar, turning in his grave; that mixing of Greek and Roman traditions would offend his purist soul!). Deimos means Panic and Phobos means Fear, two inescapable products of War. Comets are named after their discoverers, and it is possible for more than one person to discover a comet simultaneously – hence Comet Hale-Bopp, discovered and reported separately on 23^rd July 1995 by both Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp.

The features on our own moon are reserved for those who have explored the moon, either in person or through telescopes as astronomers. So for example three small craters near the Apollo 11 landing site are named Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong in honour of the pioneering crew of the first manned mission to the moon. And, only 100 miles to the north-west across the Mare Tranquillitatis from Apollo 11's historic Tranquility Base, you will find the rather larger Manners Crater.

The Sea of Tranquility:

Manners Crater (M) and the Apollo 11 landing site (A)

As I write these words, I’ve been staring at images of it all afternoon; and I must say it’s becoming rather beautiful to me! Manners is a perfectly circular crater about 15km in diameter and 1.7km deep, with a distinct mountain in the centre of it. It’s a banded crater, which means that it has streaky sides – illustrating I think the movement of material outwards at the time of impact.

Any further technical description would be well beyond my comfort zone or qualifications grade. I’m just pleased as punch to think every time I look at the Moon that one of my ancestors has made his mark there.

Manners Crater (the large crater on the right)

photographed from Apollo 10 in 1969

THOMAS GURNEY (1705-1770) AND THE BUNDLE OF BOOKS

It’s my 100^th post here! I try to be eclectic in my choices of subjects – family name, period, occupation, home – and not to be too judgemental. I’m fond of them all, and quite sure they all did the best they could according to their own situation and the morals and conditions of their times. It’s one thing to regret the mistakes of former days; but I think it’s pretty meaningless to judge them by modern standards, or indeed to apologise for acts committed and views held by our ancestors centuries ago. I suppose I see my mission simply as keeping these memories of my ancestors alive.

I try to celebrate their achievements, not their weaknesses. No doubt it is because I’m a writer that I am particularly drawn to literary or educational contributions to society. But there does seem to be a strong strand in many branches and in every generation of my family tree: the urge to communicate, be it by book, poster, classroom or pulpit.

Thomas Gurney (1705-1770)

A great communicator, quill always to hand

A good example of this is my 5x great grandfather Thomas Gurney. He was the son of a Bedfordshire miller, driven by his Baptist faith and a belief in the worth of knowledge. By the age of nineteen he had not only founded a school but developed a shorthand system which would remain in use for two hundred years in the highest offices in the land. Communication was the key to redeeming, useful self-improvement for Thomas.

Here is the story of his early years, as told in a biography by his grandson William Brodie Gurney in 1845, some 120 years after the events.

[Thomas Gurney’s] indisposition to his father’s business, however, still continuing, he left his home, with his father’s consent, at the age, I apprehend, of nineteen, if not earlier, and opened a school in a neighbouring village, employing his time much in reading. It must have been when he was very young that he attended a sale and purchased a parcel of books, one of which was on Astrology, in which he was at the time much interested. The lot was described as “sundries;” and I think he purchased it for 1s 6d or 2s [7.5 or 10p].

One of these books was “Mason’s Shorthand,” a system which had been practiced, but had fallen into disuse in consequence of its complexity. This immediately engaged his enquiring mind, and he determined to simplify it, for the purpose of enabling himself to take down sermons; and I have a book of sermons taken by him at Ridgemount in Bedfordshire, in 1722-23. This purchase must have been before he left his father’s house; therefore he could only been only seventeen or eighteen years of age when he began taking these sermons.

One of the books, I have stated, was on Astrology. This subject had excited his attention, and, while it afforded him amusement, it gave him, among his neighbours, the character of a man of wonderful knowledge, and occasioned his being consulted more than once on matters of interest. One anecdote, while it displays his judgment in making the best of a thing, shows also the disposition to magnify that which fell from the wise man.

A lost cow is nothing new

(Farmville game on Facebook notwithstanding)

A woman having lost her cow went to my grandfather to learn whether she should ever recover it, and what means she should employ. After hearing her detail, taking down his great book he shut himself up or a few minutes; and then, returning with some figure he had drawn, judging from her account that the cow had not been stolen but only strayed, he told her very gravely that she should see it again shortly. In the evening the cow returned; and then the woman raised his reputation to the highest pitch by informing her neighbours that Mr Gurney had told her in the morning where the cow was gone  and had enabled her to trace he animal in all its wanderings, and to ascertain beforehand the very time of its return.

Quite how a great book of astronomy could be imagined to give insight into the random movements of a cow, is open to question. But it’s a wise man indeed who knows what works in making an impression! The use of shorthand to record and disseminate Baptist sermons was significant at a time when religious intolerance was still rife and non-conformity was a radical, subversive alternative to the establishment Church of England. When Thomas’s great great grandson William Henry Gurney Salter joined the family shorthand business (by now the official medium of record of the Houses of Parliament), he practised his skills by recording the sermons of his father, the Baptist minister William Augustus Salter. So Gurney shorthand came full circle for another two generations of communicators.