REV EDMUND THOMAS DAUBENY (1840-1914) AND THE BEDHAMPTON VESTRY

Mary Castle, a first cousin of my great grandfather, got married in 1865, the same year her new husband Edmund Daubeny began a living as rector of St Thomas’s, then a country church in the village of Bedhampton near Havant in Hampshire. They married in Bedminster – no connection at all to Bedhampton but a rapidly expanding industrial suburb of Bristol.

Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Bedhampton

served by Rev E.T. Daubeny for 19 years, 1865-1884

(photographed in 2007 by M. Eyre)

The Castles and the Daubenys were both old Somerset families who migrated to the city of Bristol in search of wealth and power. The Castles were particularly successful, supplying the town with councillors, sheriffs and two mayors and making a fortune in the distillation of spirits, part of the Triangular Trade on which Bristol was built.

It was natural when Mary got married that they would wish to bestow some of that wealth on their new son in law. His new church had been built in 1140 – a Norman arch survives at the western end of the chancel – and Edmund followed contemporary thinking in deciding that it was long overdue for a makeover. There were undoubted limitations to the old building. It lacked a vestry for a start, although it did have a beautiful Georgian rectory ten yards away across the lane which no doubt fulfilled the function more than adequately.

St Thomas before the vestry extension of 1993,

showing the Castle vestry, bell tower and north aisle

Between 1869 and 1878 Edmund undertook a series of improvements. As well as adding a small vestry to the north of the chancel and replacing the wooden bell tower with a stone one, he increased the capacity of the nave with new pews and a fine north aisle. All these building works were undertaken with generous donations from the Castle family back in Bristol. At the same time he found in the garden of the rectory the remains of the Norman font, in use I suspect as a Victorian planter. This was restored and replaced in the church, where it now serves its original function once more.

Perhaps the biggest outward change introduced by Edmund was a change in the church’s dedication. It had been known since at least the 16^th century as St Nicholas, and in 1869 it was renamed St Thomas in deference, I imagine, to Thomas Castle the principle subscriber to the works. Thomas was Edmund’s brother in law, Mary’s half-brother by their father’s first marriage. He was probably giving money recently inherited from their father, who died just a year after Mary and Edmund’s marriage.

Old Bedhampton School

a place of Dust, Stone and Daubeny

according to the logbook

(photographed in 2007 by M. Eyre)

Although presumably life as a country rector was not too demanding, Edmund Daubeny was obviously an active incumbent, determined to leave his mark on his church and his community. The year before he began his program of works on the fabric of the church, the first ever school in Bedhampton opened its doors, under the tutelage of the splendidly named Miss Dust. According to the early school ledgers, both the village squire (the equally splendidly named Mr Stone) and the rector were regular visitors to the school and took a keen interest in her work.

The Norman font and the Victorian pews and north aisle

(photo by permission of www.bedhamptonparish.org.uk 
from whom much fascinating detail informs this article)

WILLIAM PIPER (1891-1919) AND THE IMPERIAL CAMEL CORPS

Most of my paternal ancestors are elsewhere – if not actually overseas, then certainly in corners of the United Kingdom not immediately accessible to me. Like me, they wouldn’t stay put, always moving on to new opportunities – in fact, I live in Scotland because my London father took a job here and relocated, eventually meeting my Scottish mother.

Her roots are therefore much closer to what for the time being I call home. Many generations of them, the Piper family, lived and died in a small area of Ayrshire. Many lie buried in a quiet country churchyard in the tiny village of Sorn there, just a morning’s drive away from me. Amongst the graves is a memorial to “Pte William Piper, Imperial Camel Corps.”

William Piper (1891-1919)

c1914 in the uniform of the Ayrshire Yeomanry

Sorn’s population may have fluctuated over the years, but today it is no larger than it was in the 1790s – around 300. Everybody has always known everybody else. When war broke out in 1914, many young men who had grown up together at Sorn School queued together to enlist with the Ayrshire Yeomanry – among them my Piper-born grandmother’s cousin William Piper.

The Ayrshire Yeomanry on manoeuvres at Sorn, c1914

After some basic training, the still-raw Yeomanry recruits were shipped off, literally, to one of the worst theatres of the war. They were attached, as the 1/1^st Lowland Mounted Brigade, to the 52^nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, fighting at Gallipoli.

The Gallipoli campaign was a disastrously unsuccessful attempt by the Allied Powers to capture the Ottoman capital Constantinople and secure a sea route through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea and Russia. Casualty rates on both sides ran to around 60%, nearly half a million men in total. Although only two further Allied soldiers were wounded by enemy action in the mass evacuation which followed in December 1915, many more died in the rain and snow which accompanied it. Disease in the unsanitary trenches also took its toll. Will Piper survived.

The evacuated Allies were ferried south to British-occupied Egypt, where they regrouped. Will, who had spent all his life working with horses, volunteered to join the new camel mounted units being formed to deal with local rebellion and the threat of Ottoman attacks. These units eventually coalesced as the Imperial Camel Corps. Three of the Corps’ four battalions were drawn from Australian and New Zealand light horse, which had suffered very high attrition at Gallipoli. The 2^nd Batt. however was composed from the remnants of the various British Yeomanry regiments who had fought there.

Members of the 2^nd Battalion, Imperial Camel Corps, c1917

As a force composed largely of antipodeans the Corps had a reputation from the start for disrespect for authority, an attitude derived also in part from its exclusively male camels. Male camels were used because they were cheaper than the female of the species; and they were cheaper because they were noisier and less docile. The roaring from a large group of male camels could apparently be heard for miles. What they presumably lost in the element of surprise by this behaviour, they made up with their ability to go nearly three times as long as a horse without water.

Although losses were still high, the Camel Corps were successful in their role throughout 1917, particularly at the battle of Maghdaba and the third battle of Gaza. In May 1918 many troops were redeployed from Palestine to the Western Front, including what was left of the Ayrshire Yeomanry, now part of the 12^th (Ayr and Lanark) Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Their redundant camels were given to Maj T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

Winston Churchill (left) challenged T.E. Lawrence (3^rd left) to a camel race in Egypt in 1921, perhaps on surplus camels of the Imperial Camel Corps. Lawrence won.

Will however remained in the Middle East, serving in the Cavalry Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Machine guns had proved their value on the Western Front earlier in the war, and by now a machine gun squadron was attached to every brigade of cavalry including those of the Imperial Camel Corps. The Machine Gun Corps had a reputation for heroism, and being often deployed in advance of front lines suffered such high casualty rates that it was known as the Suicide Club. By 1918 however, Egypt and Palestine were relatively stable, and Will Piper saw the war out in Cairo.

Four camel ambulances of the Imperial Camel Corps

Having survived Gallipoli and seen further front line service in Palestine with the Imperial Camel Corps and the Suicide Club, it is a cruel twist of fate that Will caught a cold after the end of the war, while on patrol in the cold desert air of Winter 1918. He died of pneumonia in an Egyptian field hospital in February 1919, so very far from his family and his Ayrshire home.

 Sorn members of the Ayrshire Yeomanry at training camp c1914

(for the record, back row: Smith of Smeathston, Hugh Sloan of Blairmulloch, S Ferguson, A Thomson, Templeton, S Kennedy; front row: W Mair, R Strathearn, J Alston (Visitor), J Eccles)

WALTER SYDNEY MASTERMAN (1876-1946) AND SOME FISHY BUSINESS

Walter S Masterman, whose grandfather Thomas Gurney was my great great grandmother’s brother, is best known as a prolific author of the 1920s and 1930s. He churned out fairly lurid and strange blends of mystery, fantasy, horror, sci-fi and detective fiction from his first in 1926, The Wrong Letter with its preface by GK Chesterton, to his last in 1942, The Man with No Head.

Walter Sydney Masterman (1876-1946)

in 1899, by Thomas Stearn & Sons, photographers

It wasn’t his first choice of career, or his second, third or fourth, and definitely not his fifth. After a well-heeled private education he merged from Christ’s College Cambridge with a blue in football, and played for a while alongside his brother Harry for Tunbridge Wells FC.  He and Harry both joined the Welsh Regiment on its formation and went with it to South Africa in February 1900 to fight the Boer. Harry didn’t come back, and lies buried in Prieska where he was the garrison adjutant and died of malaria and meningitis.

On his return, Walter (now a captain) entered civvy street like so many officers as a teacher at a private institution, Horsmonden Boys’ School, where he was from 1903 to 1905 joint headmaster. He maintained his military role through an attachment to a Cadet Batallion of the King’s Royal Rifles, and in 1910 was appointed Inspector of Musketry with the Welsh Regiment, with whom he served again as a major during the Great War of 1914-19.

Grimsby after the Great War

When he was demobbed in 1919 he got a job in the civil service – the Ministry of Agriculture to be precise. In the days when expertise was no criterion for government work, Walter was made a Fisheries Inspector and posted to Grimsby, then still an extremely busy fishing port in north Lincolnshire. From footballer to soldier, then teacher, and at the age of 43 fisheries officer. It's possible that he was assisted in getting this appointment by his brother Arthur, a zoologist who published extensively on the life-cycles and importance of the fish we eat, including some reports for the Ministry. Otherwise, it seems an unlikely fourth career choice for Walter.

The next year he married Olive Doreen Lowrie, 24 years his junior, the youngest of eight children of a Northumbrian commercial traveller who had stopped long enough in Cardiff for it to be birthplace to Olive and her two nearest siblings. How Olive and Walter met, and how they found life in Grimsby, I do not know. But in Febraury 1922 this news item was cabled to colonial newspapers around the world (I found it in the Sunday Times of Perth in Western Australia!):

Walter Sidney Masterman, fishery inspector at Grimsby, a brother of a former Liberal Minister, is being charged with embezzling £862 belonging to the Board of Fisheries. The prosecution alleges that the defendant paid into his own account sums received, for the sale of coal and gear handed over from German trawlers.

Poor Olive, married two years and stuck in a cold town smelling of fish (sorry, Grimsby, I know you’re sweeter now) while her husband began a new career as a jailbird, convicted and imprisoned for three years for defrauding his employer. When he was released in 1925, it is safe to assume that he had blotted his copybook as far as future employment in any of his former careers was concerned.

Several Walter S Masterman titles were translated

for Dutch consumption in the 1950s

Perhaps he picked up some plot twists during his time inside. No longer employable, Walter sat down and began to write, a string of wild titles such as The Flying Beast, The Baddington Horror and The Hooded Monster. I confess I haven’t read any, but this synopsis from one of four new editions currently available on Amazon gives an idea of his style:

“THE YELLOW MISTLETOE is … the rollicking tale of murder in the tubes of London, which looks to be an accident, until Chief-Inspector Arthur Sinclair proves that it wasn't. The trail of evidence leads to the English countryside where he meets a cast of characters right out of a H. Rider Haggard novel. Then it's off to the wilds of Bulgaria where a hidden city provides enough ritualistic danger for a dozen thrillers.”

I’d love to know what happened to Olive Masterman. They had at least one daughter, born that disastrous summer of 1922. Did the marriage survive the jail term?  Or did Olive, with her life ahead of her, find happiness elsewhere? The story of her life remains unwritten.

RUSSELL GURNEY (1804-1878) AND THE MELANCHOLY ACCIDENT

A dahabeeah on the Nile at Cairo

A news item from the Suez Mail, relayed in New Zealand’s Southland Times on 25^th February 1876, reads:

A melancholy accident has occurred on the Nile. While Mr Russell Gurney, and three daughters of the Rev J.H. Gurney, were on the river, a squall capsized the boat, and all the ladies were drowned. Divers are seeking to recover the bodies.

The New York Sunday Courier carries a fuller version of the story (from the London Times) in its 30^th January edition that year:

A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT

Three Nieces of the Recorder of London Drowned in the Nile

[Egyptian Corres of the London Times]

Mr Russell Gurney himself had started on the Nile voyage first, leaving the rest of his party, consisting of his nephew and nieces, to follow him as rapidly as possible in a second boat, the Flora, with a dragoman, reis, or captain, and the ordinary crew. It is usual, on account of the sandbanks, shallows and many curves of the river, for dababeeahs on the Nile to moor at nightfall; but, in order to lose no time, the Flora pursued on after sunset, against, it is said, the opinion of the reis. At nine or ten in the evening they were some sixteen miles off Minioh, a strong northerly breeze blowing, with squalls. They were passing Gebel el Tayr, the Mountain of the Bird, whose lofty, precipitous cliffs rise abruptly from the river several hundred feet. The Nile, having no tributary for the last 3,500 miles of its course, only decreases in size as it nears its mouth, and is much wider here than it is at Cairo. It is as broad as the Thames at London bridge, and the winds rush down the ravines with great force. The Flora was under full sail – that big lateen sail, twice as big as the boat itself, which makes a dababeeah look like a great swan upon the water. As she rounded the point, a sudden squall took her, and before the sheet could be let go, she capsized in the darkness. The ladies in their cabins, most of the crew, the reis himself, were all lost in the deep, rapid stream, and only one passenger and the dragoman were able to reach the shore. A bright-eyed donkey-boy, well known to frequenters of Shepheard’s Hotel at Cairo, who had begged to be taken on the trip to avoid impressments as a soldier for the Abyssinian war, was among those lost.

As yet the bodies have not been recovered, but divers have gone up to the scene of the disaster, and it is hoped that their efforts will be attended with success. The sympathy for Mr Russell Gurney and his nephew is universal in Cairo, and the catastrophe has cast a great gloom over all English travellers in Egypt. It cannot be too strongly impressed on Nile tourists that the dababeeah is only a fair-weather boat. With its comfortable house on deck, its sixty feet or seventy feet of length, its enormous sail requiring a yard to hold it nearly double the length of the boat and, with  all this, having a draft of barely three feet, a Nile boat is very easily capsized, and accidents would be frequent if travellers did not, as a rule, prefer safety to speed, and always seek the shelter of the banks when there is anything like bad weather.

Rt Hon Russell Gurney, QC, MP (1804-1878)

Russell Gurney was in loco parentis, his brother John Hampden Gurney the sisters’ father having died in 1862. He had no children himself. It’s rather sad that the names of the victims aren’t recorded here or elsewhere: only the manner of their collective death survives to preserve their memory. I do know that the surviving nephew was Edmund Gurney (1847-1888). This tragedy shook him to the core of course, and may well have been the root of his fascination with spirits and the afterlife, of which I have written here previously.

I wish too that I knew the name of the Egypt correspondent of the Times who wrote this moving, poetic account of the accident.

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)