WILLIAM TALFOURD SALTER (1827-1883) AND THE BABY ELEPHANT

I had a lot of trouble learning about Talfourd Salter, a cousin of sorts. Thanks to a couple of mistakes in transcription by Ancestry.com, I spent some years looking in vain for more information about a Talpurd Salter, and later a Salsound Salter. Only very recently did a very helpful correspondent put me right, and suddenly I find a great many references to him online.

He was a QC, and transcripts of several of his cases at the Old Bailey are available. He was a jobbing barrister, and his cases dealt with everything from petty theft and sheep-rustling to bigamy and murder.

The process of the law is a sober and serious business, but even QCs should be allowed to enjoy their work sometimes, as a report in the Times of 17^th July 1879 shows.

This was a peculiar and amusing case, and would almost tend to show the advisability of extending the privilege of witnesses to the brute creation under the Attorney-General's new code ; for to-day, for probably the first time in the history of our legal procedure, an elephant appeared in court and gave forcible, if dumb, testimony.

The Nubian Encampment, Alexandra Palace, 1877

The plaintiffs had been visiting the Nubian Encampment, an exotic attraction of North African tents and animals at Alexandra Palace. Rather than pay to go in, they were standing on the wagon they came in, to look over the fence, when the pony pulling the vehicle was startled by an passing elephant. Never having seen such a creature the pony bolted, throwing a Miss Thurman from the cart. She was off work for several months with a fractured collarbone, and was now suing the circus owners, Bertram and Roberts, for her loss of earnings and medical expenses.

Talfourd, acting for the defence, disposed fairly quickly of the case, arguing that they had been warned not to park where they did, that they and their pony should expect strange sounds and sights at a circus, and that in any case the elephant in question was well beyond them when the pony took off. So something else must have been the cause of its alarm.

As a character witness for the elephant, Talfourd then called its keeper Mr George Kibble. When Mr Kibble did not immediately appear in court, Talfourd explained:

Mr. Salter said: I am told he is in charge of the elephant outside, in Palace Yard, my lord.

Baron Pollock [the judge]: Pray do not let him leave the elephant. (Laughter.)

Mr. Salter : I believe the baby elephant has excessively amiable manners, and that he will come into court and get into the witness-box.

Baron Pollock : If so, I think it very desirable that we should see him.

Kibble then entered the box and was sworn, and said he was bringing the baby out by the ear as usual, after the performance on the day in question. He was a "baby," – that was, under 10 years old. Elephants grew till they were 43.

Mr. Hall [Mr Salter’s assistant]: The average age, I believe, is from 100 to 150 years.

His Lordship: Do you know that of your personal experience, Mr. Hall?

Mr. Hall: Happily not, my lord. (Laughter.)

A baby elephant and its keeper:
the famous Blue Peter incident, BBC, 1969

At this point the scene in the courtroom began to resemble a Walt Disney family movie or a  children's TV program.

The baby elephant then walked into court himself, with bells on his head, following Kibble in the most perfect way. He threaded his way through the " mazes of the law" in the body of a crowded court in the most wonderful and clever fashion, like the most accomplished Q.C., and caused some consternation by making his exit at the other side, where no passage had been cleared in the crowd. While he stood, a mute witness for the defence, before the jury, Mr. E. Jones said, cross-examining, "I have no questions to ask," which caused a roar of laughter.

Mr. Salter: That is, I am thankful to say, the last witness in the case.

In the end Bertram and Roberts agreed to pay Miss Thurman’s medical bills provided no blame was attached to them for the accident. Miss Thurman accepted. As always, the judge had the final word.

His Lordship : That is very proper, as the elephant has come to offer his apologies in person. (Renewed laughter.)

Another baby elephant and its keeper
Dumbo, Walt Disney, 1941

SIR JOHN BOWRING (1792-1872), THE OPIUM WAR AND THE CHINESE BAKERY

I wonder how many of my ancestors have started wars! Of course everyone has family feuds but I’m talking about armed conflict, and specifically international armed conflict.

Sir John Bowring, my 3x great uncle, was a pugnacious polymath, an early proponent of decimal currency for Britain whose views on reforming public accounts were too radical both for the Tories and for his own party, the Whigs. A devout Unitarian, a poet and hymnwriter, a multi-linguist, a railway speculator, an iron magnate … I could fill this blog with his exploits. His public service was distinguished although often controversial; it is sad that much of his good reputation was discredited by events during his last appointment.

Sir John Bowring (1792-1872)

In 1849 he left Britain to take up an position as Consul in Hong Kong, and later as Plenipotentiary in China. By 1854 he was back in Hong Kong as Governor. Britain had imposed some treaties of trade access on China in 1842-43 and was having trouble enforcing them. To Palmerston, the foreign secretary, Sir John’s keen intellect and able negotiating skills must have seemed perfect for the job.

It was not a happy posting for Sir John, one dogged with personal loss and misfortune. Early during his absence from Britain his father and two of his sisters died, and his wife’s health declined so much during their time in the colony that she died without him soon after her return to Britain. Her condition was due in part to an extraordinary Chinese attempt to poison the entire European population of Hong Kong by baking arsenic into their bread, from whose effects she never fully recovered. (It's through Sir John's second wife Deborah Castle that I am related to him.)

Bowring was extremely conscientious and competent in his duties in the Far East, amongst other things concluding an important treaty with Siam. But Mr Yeh, the Chinese Imperial Commissioner of Canton, tested his patience by continuing to block access to the city by British merchants. When Yeh ordered the boarding of  the Arrow, a pirate ship flying a British flag which he suspected of smuggling opium, Bowring decided the time had come to take firm action; he ordered a naval bombardment of the city and occupied it with land troops. Thus began the Second Opium War which rumbled on until the British burnt down the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860.

Imperial Britain attacking Imperial China
in a contemporary Chinese cartoon

Unfortunately Sir John didn’t have the military force to sustain the occupation, and the Chinese retaliated by burning down European properties in Canton including the British consulate (killing a nephew of Bowring’s for whom he had found an appointment there). War junks attacked and massacred the passengers of a postal steamer en route from Canton to Hong Kong; and the arsenic bread was another act of the same war.

Bowring was criticised for his aggressive tactics and relieved of many of his duties. He bitterly resented being sidelined, and more sorrows followed in the deaths of a son, a daughter in law, a brother, and finally of his wife. In 1859, now aged 67, he was relieved of his post and left Hong Kong for good. But even the voyage back to Britain was cursed with bad luck when his ship struck a reef in the Red Sea. All escaped drowning, but his daughter was washed up on rocks in nothing but her nightgown.

I’m afraid this is not a cheerful introduction to Sir John! He really was a remarkable Victorian, and I promise I will return to him in his sunnier days.

 I'm delighted to add in August 2014 that a new biography of Sir John Bowring has just been published. "Free Trade's First Missionary" is written by Sir John's descendent Philip Bowring and deals with his time in Europe and Asia. Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, said of the new book: "This scholarly and very readable biography, written by one of Asia's most distinguished journalists, shows how free trade became part of Hong Kong's DNA." It's published by Hong Kong University Press and is available on Amazon as a real book and also in a Kindle edition. (And this blog is acknowledged in the introduction!)

EDMUND GURNEY (1847-1888) AND THE CROSS-CORRESPONDENCES

I now find that I have not two but three connections with the strange case of the cross-correspondences. The mediums at the centre of it, Margaret Verrall (see my earlier post) and her daughter Helen, were my great great and great aunts, but one of the dead correspondents is also an ancestor.

Edmund Gurney (1847-1888)

My cousin Edmund Gurney (his great grandfather was my 4x great grandfather) was an intellectual philosopher, a frustrated musician, a too-sensitive medical student, a bored lawyer, a gullable sceptic. In short he was a complicated, intelligent man prone to depression and addicted to the chloroform which relieved his neuralgia.

Edmund was the son of a Unitarian minister but Darwinian science had undermined his Christian faith. His search for a greater meaning and value in mundane existence led him to devote the last fifteen years of his life to experiments and research in hypnotic states, telepathy and hallucinations. In 1882 he was a founder member of Frederick Myers’ new Society for Psychical Research.

Gurney’s published works included “The Power of Sound” (1880), an essay on the philosophy of music; and “Tertium Quid” (1887), which might loosely be translated as “The Third Way”, an argument for open-minded discussion, ideas developed from more than one aspect, and the existence of a third state between mental and physical, between god and atheism.

"Phantasms of the Living", by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, 
the results of their early experiments in thought-transference

He was a clever and energetic researcher. It is astonishing and tragic therefore that he should have entrusted the execution of his experiments in hypnotism to a theatrical producer by the name of George Albert Smith. Smith, it emerged in Spring 1888, had been using stage effects and techniques to falsify phenomena. This was precisely the sort of deceptive showmanship which the SPR’s early studies of mediumship had exposed, and it undermined all of Gurney's results.

Edmund was a broken man. His rising reputation as a man of science was dashed on the rocks of theatrical illusion. In June that year he was found dead in a hotel bed in Brighton, a chloroform pad still held to his nose. The coroner passed a verdict of accidental death, although suicide seems a clear possibility.

So much for Edmund Gurney’s life and death. The most extraordinary part of his story now follows. Edmund was part of the group of surviving dead who entered into cross-corresponding communication with the living through a number of independent mediums all over the world (including my great great and great aunts) to prove their survival. Once they had provided proof, at least to their own satisfaction, of an existence beyond the grave, the group came up with an even more ambitious experiment.

Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874-1956) 
Welsh writer, politician, suffragette, patron of the arts 
and, as Mrs Willetts, celebrated medium

To prove further the ability of the dead to influence the living, the group asked one of the mediums, Mrs Willett, to bear a child, a son, who would be the fruit of Edmund Gurney’s psychic paternity. The physical father was to be Gerald Balfour, her lover and the brother of former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and of Eleanor Balfour the wife of another cross-correspondent Henry Sidgwick, founding member and first president of the SPR.

It is a little surprising that the group should have chosen Edmund for the job, of psychic godfather to the new Wunderkind: a manic depressive dilettante, a possible suicide with four failed careers behind him. Nevertheless the boy was born on 9^th April 1913, Augustus Henry Serocold Coombe-Tennant (Mrs Willett’s real surname), amidst great expectations. Before the birth Mrs Willett had almost messianic visions of him, and the group spoke of his coming in terms of a New World Order. 

The boy, highly intelligent, was unaware, perhaps throughout his life, of the burden placed on him. But one day he told his sister-in-law during a walk on North Berwick beach of a terrifying dream he had had: “He seemed to be three persons: he would rise up from the bed and look at his three selves. There were other people in his bedroom and he got the impression that they were trying to make him do something.”

Perhaps the three were Gurney, Myers and Sidgwick. But like Gurney, Henry’s life never fulfilled its enormous potential. He was described as sexless and lacking inner fire, which was perhaps smothered during an over-protective childhood. At any rate after an unremarkable military career and the death of his mother in 1956, he converted to Roman Catholicism and entered the Benedictine order as a monk. He died in a monastery near Bath in 1989.

The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, by Trevor Hall (1964)

Despite the ambitious aims of the cross-correspondents to prove life after death, the often obscure knowledge of classical literature which they used to do so, and the staggering boldness of the scheme to create in Henry a being of a higher order … despite all this, Edmund Gurney seems to have maintained in death the depressed underachievement of his living years. He once communicated to one of the receiving mediums these plaintive, self-effacing, rather sad words:

“You never seem to realise how little we know. I’m not … sometimes I know and can’t get it through, but very often I don’t know.”

MARGARET DE GAUDRION VERRALL (1857-1916) AND THE CROSS-CORRESPONDENCES

There is a strong non-conformist streak that runs through many of the branches of my family tree: Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians, brought together by their common perspective on social injustice and religious intolerance. My great great aunt Margaret Verrall, née Merrifield, seems to these 21^st century eyes to be unconventional in the extreme, but in her day she was a prominent figure in a popular area of scientific and spiritual enquiry.

Margaret de Gaudrion Verrall (1857-1916)

Margaret was at the centre of an extraordinary attempt to prove the reality of life after death, conducted (if it is to be believed) by several deceased founders of the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR was founded in 1882 with the aim of “understanding events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal  by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and "examining allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way" and it still exists today.

In the year of the SPR’s founding Margaret married Arthur Woolgar Verrall, a classical scholar with a taste for convoluted commentary of classical Greek and Latin texts. In the light of Margaret’s subsequent career, and the fact that one of his future students was Aleister Crowley (notorious sex-magick mystic), one wonders just what Arthur was teaching in his lectures.

Margaret joined the SPR in 1889 and towards the end of the century began to develop psychic powers, perhaps as a result of her observational study for the Society of the work of a famous medium of the age, Leonora Piper. Frederick Myers, the Society’s founding father, had asked her to hold sittings with Piper. He died in January 1901, and in March that year Verrall began producing scripts by automatic writing – messages written by her hand but supposedly directed by minds beyond the grave.

Mrs Verrall was one of several mediums around the world to receive messages like this, although none of them was aware of the activities of any of the others. All however sent their writings in to the SPR for further study. It was there that Alice Johnson, a researcher, began to notice cross-references between these various communications from the dead. She coined the term cross-correspondences for the increasingly elaborate intellectual puzzles which, it seemed, could only be solved by the combination of several independently written scripts.

Those sending the messages included Frederick Myers who had been the Society’s second president, and Henry Sidgwick its first (who had died a year before Myers). It was no surprise to anyone that such SPR luminaries should attempt to prove the survival of the mind after bodily decease. Their choice of material for the conundrums sent to provide that proof was appropriately obscure and, one might say, convoluted. Clues came in the form of little known quotes from a specialised university text book, “Greek Melic Poets” by the American scholar Herbert Weir Smyth, used by their old friend and colleague Dr Arthur Verrall.

SPR presidents and correspondents 

Frederick Myers (1843-1901) and Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900)

It was certainly NOT a book likely to have been known or read by all the mediums involved (except Margaret), so its use as a source was seen as quite compelling proof. This is not the place for a full discussion of the evidence or the conclusions of the series of cross-correspondences. Margaret produced hundreds of scripts in the fifteen years until her own death in 1916. Her daughter Helen also had the gift and began writing automatically in 1903. The correspondences continued with an expanding cohort of living mediums and dead correspondents until 1930, when researchers asked Helen Verrall and her colleagues to stop receiving – there were by then tens of thousands of pages of evidence waiting to be annotated and analysed.

The wedding of Helen Verrall and Willy Salter,

28th September 1915

In 1916 Helen Woolgar de Gaudrion Verrall (1883-1959) married William Henry Salter (1880-1970), a lawyer whom she introduced to psychical research. He joined the SPR that year and wrote extensively on the subject of survival, automatic writing and telepathy (incidentally, a term first coined by Frederick Myers). He served as president of the Society 1947-48 and after his death he contributed to the debate by leaving a wealth of private papers which were not to be opened until 1995-96. These papers are still being examined.

Opinion remains divided about the truth of life after death. In our sceptical age the jury is still out, and perhaps the last word for now should go to Salter, who wrote:

"As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."


More on the cross-correspondences in my next blog.

ARTHUR GURNEY SALTER (1883-1893) AND THE LITTLE STORIES

Some stories are long, and some are short. Some are funny; some are sad. Some touch the hem of history, but this one has no impact on anything or anyone, except Arthur's parents, nurse and siblings.

By the late nineteenth century, child mortality was greatly reduced. Samuel Salter (1773-1842) lost at least two children before they the age of two (not counting any that went unrecorded through dying at birth). Brodie Gurney (1777-1855) lost three. Their grandson William Henry Gurney Salter (1837-1928)  benefitted from advances in medical science; he only lost one. The other five of his babies made it to childhood.

Four of them made it to adulthood. Arthur wouldn't even have made it to this blog if he had died two years earlier. But he lived through a census year, 1891, just one: and here is his entry, taken on 5th April that year. 

The Salter Family census return

5th April 1891

Arthur G. ditto: 7: [born in] Kensington. Middlesex: imbecile from childhood. [He's not a scholar, we know that too.]

Also in the household, a companion for Mrs Salter; a cook; a domestic nurse; a house- and parlourmaid; an under-parlourmaid; and Esther Warren, nurse to imbecile child. 

Arthur's death aged 10 is recorded two years later in the second quarter of 1893. Se we know that his birthday was after the 5th April and before the end of June. But that's really about it.  For the rest we just have to guess - what were his toys? how did he get on with his brothers and sisters? did he want to be a train driver? did he want to be a barrister and shorthand writer to the Houses of Parliament like his father?

William and Jane Salter

on their 50th wedding anniversary, 1920

Back row, their surviving children 

(with wives and grandchildren)

Whether he struggled all along, or took a sudden turn for the worse at the end, I do know this. From what I've read in William Salter's memoirs of his own childhood, little Arthur's father was a loving family man, and Arthur's death even if expected will have hit the whole household hard. And ten years is enough to make an mark, and he won't have been forgotten. He isn't.

MARTHA GURNEY (1733-1816) AND THE POWER OF PRINT

My eighteenth century Delap and Halliday ancestors never knew personally those in my Gurney tree. But if they had, they would have been sworn enemies. It is quite possible that the former would have been aware of the latter, and particularly of the activities of my 5x great aunt Martha Gurney. While they were enjoying the fruits of their use and abuse of slaves on a sugar plantation in Antigua, aunt Martha was campaigning for a boycott of the products which earned them those fruits.

An Address to the People of Great Britain,

on the Consumption of West India Produce

written by William Fox, published by Martha Gurney in 1791

She was a remarkable woman, a bookseller and printer of whom her biographer Timothy Whelan writes, “No British woman played a more prominent part in raising the consciousness of the English people against the slave trade.” Her pamphlet An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (written by William Fox in 1791) sold more than 200,000 copies in Britain and America and was the best selling pamphlet of the eighteenth century. With public debate on the topic at its height, the publication ran to about 30 impressions or reprints, and drew 20 further pamphlets responding to its contents either for or against.

Report on Remarkable Trials

(including those of 32 prisoners "capitally convicted")

published by Joseph and Martha Gurney

She published fourteen such anti-slavery pamphlets and another 25 transcriptions of state trials and other proceedings – one of the benefits of being the sister of Joseph Gurney, official shorthand writer to the Old Bailey and the House of Commons, who had privileged access to such events. Joseph was also able to bring first hand knowledge of the debate over slavery which raged in parliament in 1791 and 1792.

Medallion of the logo of the Society for Effecting 
the Abolition of Slavery, produced in 1787 by the manufacturer 
and abolitionist Josiah Wedgewood; 
it became a fashionable accessory in polite society

Joseph, also a bookseller, had subscribed to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery since its founding by Quakers in 1787, and Martha published her first anti-slavery leaflet the following year. It was A Sermon on the African Slave Trade, by James Dore the minister at Maze Pond Baptist Church of which all her family were members.

Joseph introduced Martha to William Fox, another bookseller and like Joseph a member of the Humane Society. In 1782 she moved her printshop from its premises in Bell Yard of the Strand, a few hundred yards north to Fox’s place in Holborn, and it was from here that they collaborated on their campaigning publications. They became close friends personally and professionally, and when Fox died in 1794, she remained there until her death.

Plan of the slave ship Brookes, 1789,

licensed to carry 450 slaves, but often taking over 600

It is not really any surprise that Martha espoused the abolitionist cause. She came from a long line of radical religious dissenters. Nevertheless, her willingness to nail her colours so explicitly to the mast was brave – the pamphlets all carried her name as publisher when many of their authors remained anonymous (including Fox on that 1791 Address). In her shop, her nephew Brodie Gurney remembered 40 years later, she openly displayed on a wall the now-famous drawing of the sardine-like packing of slaves on the slave ship Brookes, which was commissioned by the Abolition Committee in 1789.

Trading in slaves became illegal in Britain in 1807. Having slaves however did not. In 1823 a new Anti-Slavery Society was formed, which soon called for a new boycott of West Indian produce. In 1830 Martha and William’s 1791 pamphlet was reprinted and at last in 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act was passed – a landmark of humanity which Martha Gurney can take some small credit for having helped to build.

AUSTIN COOPER (1890-1964) AND THE ART OF THE POSTER

No. 3 in an occasional series about the seemingly endless list of Austin Cooper namesakes in my family tree. This Austin Cooper is a remote cousin of my great grandmother’s to whom I hadn’t paid much attention. That changed a couple of weeks ago when I bought a beautiful coffee table book of old railway posters of Scotland.

Austin Cooper, graphic artist (1890-1964)

I’m old enough to remember the beautiful watercolour prints of scenes from around the country which used to grace the old wooden carriage compartments, and the combination of that artwork with the scenery of Scotland AND the romance of steam rail travel was irresistible. I was happily leafing through when the name Austin Cooper leapt off the page.

 

LNER travel poster from the 1920s, by Austin Cooper

He was born in Manitoba, although his father was an Irish farmer, and studied at the Cardiff  School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Allan-Frazer College of Art in Arbroath. He returned to Canada to work as a commercial artist, and during the Great War he served in Europe with the Canadian Black Watch. 

In 1922 he settled in London and won the first of many poster commissions from London Underground. Over the next twenty years he built an enviable reputation as a poster designer for such clients as London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), Underground Electric Railway Company, Royal Mail Line, Indian State Railways, and London Transport. 

 Summer and winter campaigns for London Transport, 1924

From 1936 to 1940 he also served as the first principal of Reimann School of Industrial Art, a private school of German origin for practical design and the first commercial art school in Britain. It was here that I think he really made his lasting mark. The Reimann played an important role in introducing continental modernism to Britain through immigrant artists and designers in the 1930s. It is credited with opening up the traditional architecture-oriented  view of  exhibition and display design to a more interdisciplinary approach based on a wider understanding of modernism in design. 

 Poster for a V&A exhibition of posters, 1931

Cooper’s book “Making a Poster” was published by The Studio in 1939. It ran to several impressions and is something of a classic design text. In it he expressed his design philosophy: “The functions of a poster are dual: to arrest the attention and then, having caught the eye of the passer-by, to deliver a message swiftly, convincingly, effectively.”

In 1943 he abandoned poster design to concentrate on painting. But public acclaim for his advertising designs and paintings led to a post-war show at the London Gallery in 1948, the first of many. Almost half a century after his death, his railway posters regularly command hundreds of pounds when they come up for sale at auction houses. (More elsewhere in Tall Tales on Austin's market town posters for LNER and his Tube posters for museums!)

 Montrose (1925) by Austin Cooper

GRACE GOGGIN (b. c1640) GETS THE SACK

Several of my family trees, a significant cluster, grew in the self-contained little forest of the Protestant Ascendancy in co Tipperary. Many of them have their roots in the soldiers whom Cromwell paid off with grants of land in Ireland when he had run out of money, or in the earlier plantation of Englishmen into that country by Elizabeth I. Sadleirs, Coopers, Bourchiers, Massys, Bakers … they were all there, and kept themselves very much to themselves, intermarrying rather more often than was probably good for them.

Chadwicks too. William Chadwick was the first of his line to settle in Ireland, taking advantage of the fall from grace of the Fitzgeralds of Ballinard to snap up their estate when it was put up for grabs in the 1650s. By some accounts he was an English gentleman of good standing who had to sell up in Lancashire after some political or family falling-out, taking advantage of the Cromwellian settlement to relocate out of harms way in Ireland.

Ballinard to the northwest of Tipperary is a near neighbour of Sadleirswells to the northeast. The Sadleirs of Sadleirswells (called Kingswells when the Chadwicks arrived and presumably by a more Irish name before that) had come over in Elizabethan times. Over the next two hundred years the families of Sadleir and Chadwick became very close indeed.

Settler William's granddaughter Grace Chadwick married Clement Sadleir, and Grace’s great great great grandson Richard William Ralph Sadleir (the chemist – see my earlier post) married Eleanor Wilhelmina Octavia Cooper (see my earlier post about her and the starter pack she left me).

Meanwhile his grandson William Chadwick had a grandson Richard “Parson Dick” Chadwick who married Margaret Sadleir, and Richard and Margaret’s granddaughter (you may have seen this coming) was none other than Eleanor Wilhelmina Octavia Cooper, my great great grandmother.

So I am related to settler William Chadwick through both his grandson William and his granddaughter Grace. Through the boy he is my 7x great grandfather, and through Grace's line (where they married sooner and younger) he is my 8x great grandfather.

William and Grace, his first two grandchildren, were named after him and his wife, Grace Goggin, whom he had met in England. This Grace was about four years William’s junior, and a ward of Chancery – what today we call a ward of court, which probably meant her parents had died and she was too young to inherit.

The Lord Chancellor of the day, under whose care she now fell, refused to sanction her marriage to William Chadwick – she was probably under age at least in some legal, moral or fiscal sense; and perhaps there were political disagreements between him and Chadwick which also affected the Chancellor’s judgement in those turbulent republican years.

But William and Grace were young and in love, and love will find a way. They fled to Ireland together, and Grace escaped detection as they travelled by concealing herself amongst William’s luggage – in a sack. It’s quite romantic really! And thanks to that sack, here I am nine or ten generations later.

JOHN HALLIDAY (c1715-1779) AND THE LADY OF QUALITY

John Halliday, my 6x great uncle, was a very big, very rich fish in a small pool. He was the tax collector in St John’s on the tiny island of Antigua, a British Caribbean sugar colony a very long way from home. There was a lot of money to be made by the little circle of white plantation owners, who lived extremely well on the island with minimal disruption from London. 

Antigua in 1750

drawn by Eman Bowen 

Some owners chose to be absentee planters, living extremely well in London with minimal involvement in the affairs of their plantations; but they were dependent on their plantation managers, who were not always scrupulously honest in posting the income of the estates to their owners back in Blighty. One friend of Halliday’s, William Mackinnen, had to move to the island in 1773 having never been there at all until 

“his overseer forgot he had any superior, and having occasion for the whole income, had sent his Master no remittances for above two years. He [Mackinnon] found things however in very good order, as this gentleman for his own sake, had taken care of that.” 

Mackinnen owned two plantations. Halliday had seven, a measure perhaps of his success in the post of Customs Collector, which he held from 1739 to 1777. In addition he had married Elizabeth, a daughter of another very successful plantation owner on Antigua, my 6x great grandfather Francis Delap, creating a powerful island dynasty. (By 1829 Delaps Plantation on Antigua was owned by John Halliday’s grandson, Rear Admiral John Delap Halliday Tollemache.)

Cutting the sugar cane on the Delap Estate, 1823

by Wlliam Clark 

John Halliday was lucky. Abundant and rich as life was on Antigua, two things were in short supply: water, and women. There was only one small spring on the island, and what rainwater the owners could collect in large cisterns frequently ran out in periods of drought. In times of peace, water was imported from the neighbouring French island of Guadaloup; in wartime they had to send to Montserrat for it. As for women, the island council once went as far as to petition London to send some.

One remarkable woman visited the island in December 1774, en route not from London but from Burntisland in Fife, bound not for the West Indies but her brother in law in North Carolina. Janet Schaw of Lauriston in Edinburgh kept a diary of her travels which lay virtually unknown outside academic circles until it was finally published in 1921 as the “Journal of a Lady of Quality.” It is a rich, very human account, full of her observations, interests, prejudices and amusements. And it is thanks to her that we have a glimpse of Halliday’s private life beyond his public position.

1921 title page of Janet Schaw's

"Journal of a Lady of Quality" 

Halliday was one of a party of prominent Antiguans of Scottish decent who called on Miss Schaw’s lodgings on the day of her arrival, clamouring for news:

“Here was a whole company of Scotch people, our language, our manners, our circle of friends ans connections, all the same. They had a hundred questions to ask in a breath, and my general acquaintance enabled me to answer them. We were intimates in a moment. … Mr Halliday is from Galloway, extremely genteel in his person and and most agreeable on his manners; he has a very great fortune and lives with elegance and taste. His family resides in England and he lives the life of a batchelor.” 

There is no suggestion that Halliday behaved in any way improperly, although the following morning it was Halliday’s carriage that Miss Schaw and her companions chose from the seven which arrived after breakfast – all sent by their owners to be at the travellers’ disposal. “Mr Halliday’s [wrote Janet Schaw] was drawn by English horses, which is a very needless piece of expense, as they have strong horses from New England, and most beautiful creatures from the Spanish Main.” 

The following Sunday after church they took lunch at one of John Halliday’s grand plantation houses, a meal of such luxurious largesse that it “might figure away in a newspaper had it been given by a Lord Mayor or the first Duke in the kingdom.” They dined on an Antiguan staple – turtle – in two forms. First came soup, made from old turtles, and “remarkably well dressed today.” And there was the shell,

“indeed a noble dish, as it contains all the fine parts of the Turtle baked within its own body; here is the green fat, not the slobbery thing my stomach used to stand at, but firm and more delicate than it is possible to describe.” 

Taste is a relative thing, I suppose. Bear in mind that when Miss Schaw and friends set off again for North Carolina, the first thing the Scottish captain of the ship did was to slaughter one of the live sheep in the hold – that evening they 

“had a Scotch dinner under the Tropick in the middle of the Atlantick. We ate haggis, sheep-head, barley-broth and blood-puddings. As both our Capt and Mate are Scots, tho’ long from home, they swore they had not seen such an excellent inner since they left their native land.”