ARTHUR BROUGHTON GURNEY (1877-1962) AND THE CANADIAN PACIFIC

A great grandson of my 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney (so a second cousin of my grandfather), Arthur Broughton Gurney is the one that got away. So much of my family history is decidedly British; but Arthur went to Canada. Almost nothing that he did in his life has its roots in my ancestors’ British history; nothing ties him to family traditions. He’s a stand-alone ancestor.

Arthur’s father was a Baptist minister who seems to have moved around a lot. Arthur, the eldest child, was born in Chelsea, but the second, Edith, arrived in Ramsey on the Isle of Man; and Grace, the youngest of five, was born in Nova Scotia in 1885. What took them there? By 1891 the family was back in Britain, most of them in Harwich but Arthur at school on the Isle of Man. And by 1898 he was back in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he married Anna Maria Sutherland, the daughter of Scottish immigrants (although she herself was a native Canadian, born after her parents arrived).

The Dawn of Majuba Day, by R. Caton Woodville, depicts troops of the Royal Canadian Regiment celebrating their victory at Paardeberg during the Second Boer War

He signed up with the Royal Canadian Regiment. He is listed as a Captain with 3^rd (Special Services) Batallion, which was recruited in 1899 to garrison Halifax and release the 1^st Bn to fight the Boer in South Africa. The 3^rd Bn was disbanded in 1901, but one memoir describes Arthur as a Boer War veteran; so perhaps he was transferred at some point, or found some other way to get involved.  The Second Boer war ended in 1902, and there’s Arthur, sailing from Liverpool to Halifax for the last time in March 1904, still only twenty-six years old, to rejoin family and his Canadian home.

But he still wasn’t done travellin’. Next thing you know it’s 1907 and he’s accepted a position on the other side of the continent in British Columbia. What took him there? His wife’s family perhaps – Anna’s father came to Canada from Western Scotland in 1854 to help build the railways, and her brother George had the privilege of being the trainmaster (what in Britain I would call the guard) of the train which carried the dignitaries on the occasion of the Driving of the Last Spike some thirty years later in 1885. The momentous completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad took place at Craigellachie in British Columbia.

Driving the last spike to complete the Canadian Pacific Railroad, 7^th November 1885 – bearded George Sutherland is the tallest figure in the photograph, on the right staring at the camera

And what was Arthur doing in BC? Nothing that any of the above would lead you to expect. In 1907 Arthur Broughton Gurney took over as the keeper of the newly constructed Pine Island lighthouse, a square wooden pyramid on a tiny outcrop in the Queen Charlotte Strait, which separates northern Vancouver Island from the mainland. It was the first of three lighthouses of which Arthur had charge over the next 37 years.

Pine Island was desperately remote for a couple with a family of three young children, and after much lobbying (or as one memoir tells it, incessant pestering) Arthur was transferred in around 1912 to North Ballenas Island, off Vancouver Island in the Strait of Georgia. There are two Ballenas Islands, and in 1900 they built the lighthouse on the wrong, southern one. In the year that Arthur took it on the Canadian Coast Guard dismantled the original concrete tower and rebuilt it on the northern island.

Vancouver Island, and the lighthouses of Arthur Broughton Gurney

Civilisation was a lot closer for the family now in the form of the village of Parksville, whose popular beaches were only six miles away across open water. But Arthur was still unhappy. He wanted a pay rise, or permission not to hire a fog-horn assistant from his own salary as he was required to do. When World War One erupted, he exploited a loophole which allowed state employees who enlisted to continue to draw their old civilian salaries as well as their new military ones. He signed up again, and transferred the keepership of the Ballenas light to Anna, thereby giving the family three incomes instead of one for the duration of the war.

Maybe the isolated life was getting to Arthur. There are reports that “his comportment  at Ballenas Island prompted complaints from his neighbours.” Whatever that meant, in 1921 the Gurneys moved again, to Active Pass lighthouse on Mayne Island, part of the fragmented archipelago at the southern end of Vancouver Island through which the border with the US runs. Here he served as keeper until his retirement in 1944, despite a Provincial Police report into his actions there in 1938 which was “in no way favourable.” Whatever that meant. One memoir describes him as “a crusty fellow.”

Ballenas Island Light, the Gurney family home 1912-21

Active Pass Light as it was in Arthur Gurney’s time 1921-44

 

The Gurneys retired to nearby Salt Spring Island where Anna could get the medical attention she now needed. In 1967, like communities all across Canada, Salt Spring created a Centennial Park to celebrate 100 years since Canadian Confederation. Trees were planted for each of Salt Spring’s pioneer residents past and present, including the Gurneys.

As part of the national celebrations, on the railroad laid by the Sutherlands, a special Centennial Train ran all year long, carrying an exhibition of Canadian culture for school children in communities the length and breadth of the country. It was allowed its own unique livery and four-tone horn, the first four notes of the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada.”

Canada’s Centennial Train, 1967

ARTHUR WOOLLGAR VERRALL (1851-1912) AND THE PROPER BOOK

I’ve been writing about books recently, those handed down from generation to generation in my family, and the inscriptions inside them. One that came up was Essays on Two Moderns by my great uncle, the historian William Henry Salter (1880-1969). It’s a 1911 collection of four essays: three about Euripides, the ancient Greek tragedian, and one on Samuel Butler, author of the 1872 Utopian novel Erewhon. My copy belonged to my father, and he got it from his father, my grandfather Frederick Gurney Salter, to whom it was given by his brother the author. It’s inscribed

“F.G.S. from W.H.S.

With thanks for much valuable assistance

6 Feb. 1911”

My father produced it for me as an example of a “proper book” (by which I think he meant one with serious ideas and no pictures) when I tried one last time to impress him with one of mine (a frivolous and illustrated approach to kick-starting your artistic genius, since you ask) in 2008.

Arthur Woollgar Verrall (1851-1912)

In his preface, Uncle Willy pays lavish tribute to the leading Euripidean scholar and translator of the day, Arthur Woollgar Verrall. Both men attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Verrall was a tutor there from 1889 to 1899, the year Salter went up to Cambridge, and Willy (who graduated with a 1^st Class degree in 1901) mentions having attended one of Dr Verrall’s lectures on Euripides in around 1908. Their views on Euripides chimed, and Willy was at pains in the preface to stress that he had reached his long before hearing Dr Verrall’s thoughts or reading Verrall’s latest books on the subject.

Verrall’s views were, in his day, unorthodox. He was one of the first classicists to consider ancient Greek drama on its theatrical merits and not just as dead poetry. He used examples from modern literature to illuminate the text, a radical departure from traditional self-contained classics practice. Verrall sometimes overthought challenges of interpretation, choosing over-complicated explanations for difficult passages instead of the more obvious ones generally accepted by other scholars. Supporters described him as ingenious, detractors as convoluted.

Euripides (or is it Dr Verrall?)

His translations reflected his idiosyncratic approach, to the extent that Uncle Willy remarked in his preface, “Euripides (or is it Dr Verrall?) is the most notable dramatist of the modern school.” Verrall’s very modern approach made him an excellent choice when the university appointed its first ever professor of English literature in 1911. Before then he had already given popular lectures on Walter Scott and on Victorian poets, and in the new chair he delivered a course on Dryden. But by 1911 he had become so disabled by arthritis that he had to be carried to and from the lectern, and he died the following year.

The two men, Verrall and Salter, certainly knew and respected each other through their academic work at Trinity College. I would like to think that they were friends too, not least because four years later Willy married Arthur’s daughter Helen, my great aunt.

William Henry Salter and Helen Verrall on their wedding day, 28^th September 1915

Helen, like her mother Margaret, was amongst other things a psychic medium, active in the Society for Psychic Research and particularly involved in receiving the so-called Cross-Correspondences from beyond the grave. One of her correspondents after 1912 was, it was claimed, her father.

Helen, named I feel sure after Euripides’ romantic comedy of the same name, introduced her new husband to the work of the Society, which he joined in 1916 and served at various times as Treasurer, Secretary and – in 1947-48 – as President. As far as I can tell, all his published work after his marriage was concerned with psychic phenomena. Probably not what my father would call “proper books.”

FREDERICK GURNEY SALTER (1876-1969) AND THE CONSTANCE GARNETT VERSION

I am struck by how many of these articles are bookish. The subjects have in many cases written books, or been the subject of books, and copies of many of them are in my possession. It has set me off on a new project, a more formal survey of all the books on my shelves with family connections. Several came from my father’s library. He was an English Literature lecturer and he inherited hundreds of his books from his father and aunt. They in turn … and so on, back into the eighteenth century.

Every book with an inscription in it adds to the family story. My grandparents for example seem to have conducted their courtship through the gift of books. There are several volumes of poetry to F.G.S. (Frederick Gurney Salter) from E.M.C. (Eleanor May Castle), including a collection called Georgian Poetry 1912-1915, published by the Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, London, in November 1915. It’s intended to be a survey of “poets of the newer generation” and has works by DH Lawrence and Rupert Brooke among others. It is dedicated in part to the latter, who had died in the war in May that year.

Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 and 1913-1915 – F.G. Salter already owned the first volume when E.M. Castle gave him the second

May’s brother was Tudor Castle, himself a rising poet and a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury set, who had given to Fred one volume of Brooke’s work (Poems, the only one published in Brooke’s lifetime) in February 1913 and to May a companion volume (1914 and Other Poems, published posthumously) in October 1915. I don’t know, but it’s very possible that Tudor and Rupert knew each other.

F.G. Salter's and E.M. Castle’s volumes of the poetry of Rupert Brooke

Tudor died in a gas attack at the start of the Battle of the Somme on the 31^st August 1916, another dead poet. Fred himself only lost a leg in the war – a note on his war record says “eligible for S.W.B. 20.11.15” and the S.W.B., the Silver War Badge, was awarded to soldiers who were honourably discharged from service through injury.

The Silver War Badge

“For King and Empire, Services Rendered”

The inscription in Georgian Poetry is dated 29^th January 1916. Another book confirms that Fred was convalescing in March 1916. It’s a Longman’s Pocket Library edition of William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope and Chants for Socialists, published in 1915. The copy I have inherited from my father has an inscription: “1916, to F.G. Salter, from May Morris.” A long letter dated 13^th March 1916 from May, William Morris’s daughter, is tucked inside the small volume, in which she writes: “Lately I heard sad news of you, and scarcely knew what to write, feeling so grieved, and yet knowing that like all the other men I know who are fighting, you are taking the thing that has come to you with fine courage and serenity.”

Letter and book from May Morris to F.G. Salter

Fred Salter and May Castle were married on the 16^th May that year. They raised a family of three sons and continued to give each other books. On Fred’s 46^th birthday in 1922 he received not one but three volumes of the Heinemann edition of the novels of Dostoevsky. From his parents he got The Idiot, rather formally inscribed “To F.G. Salter, with best birthday wishes from W.H. Gurney Salter and Jane Gurney Salter;” and from May, now signing herself E.M.S., Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Kramazov.

Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett

Britain had only just begun to discover Russian literature. The earliest translations appeared in 1894, and they were all made by Constance Garnett – the Heinemann Dostoevsky’s, first published just before the First World War, were by her. Garnett, who had once worked as a reader for Heinemann, translated 71 Russian works in forty years after meeting two Russian revolutionary exiles, Sergei Stepniak and Felix Volkhovsky, in 1891. She learned Russian and travelled there on several occasions. She deserves great credit for introducing the works of Gogol, Checkhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others to an English-speaking audience.

She is not however without her critics. Working at speed, she would sometimes gloss over difficult or sensitive passages “for readability,” and if she did not understand a word or phrase, she was quite likely simply to omit it from the text. This was particularly true of the versions of Dostoevsky which Fred received on his 46^th birthday. In general, she tended to ignore matters of individual style, to the extent that post-war Russian poet Josef Brodsky, remarked: “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett.”

MICHAEL HINTON CASTLE (1785-1845) AND THE ANCHOR SOCIETY

We live by the moral standards of our times, not those of any others. It is to be hoped that we gradually improve and refine our moral and social values; that is the process of civilisation, and historically civilisations have reached a zenith of cultural and moral sophistication before corruption and decline set in. The Roman Empire is one example, and sometimes I worry that I see the early signs of decay in the present age of greed and extremism. Are we in the west past our best, our best-before date?

Sorry! Gloomy thoughts, the typical “in my day” perspective of a fifty-something, and what’s more a fifty-something who spends all his time writing about the past. But it’s part of the same perspective that says it seems crazy to apologise, as politicians often do these days, for the sins of your distant predecessors. Invasion, genocide, neglect – regret them, offer reparations, but don’t make meaningless apologies for acts for which you weren’t responsible and which you could not have prevented.

The Amritsar Massacre, 13^th April 1919

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 is a case in point. A British brigadier-general, afraid of insurrection, ordered his troops to fire continuously into a crowd of 20,000 men, women and children until their ammunition as exhausted. Afterwards, 2500 had been killed or injured. Ever since, there have been calls for a national British apology. The brigadier-general was at once removed from duty and Winston Churchill described the event as “monstrous” as early as 1920; in 2005 the then foreign secretary jack Straw called it “a terrible occasion … for which I feel ashamed and full of sorrow;” and in February this year David Cameron spoke in similar terms of the "deeply shameful" episode. The Queen, visiting Amritsar in 1997, said: “History cannot be rewritten, however much we might sometimes wish otherwise. It has its moments of sadness, as well as gladness. We must learn from the sadness and build on the gladness.”

I know there’s’ a philosophical and legal argument for saying that politicians are not individuals but representatives of their constituency or nation and all its decisions, because the past has an impact on the present. But you can’t choose your past any more than you can choose your family. You can choose your friends, and shape your future. That’s where your responsibility lies.

Wedgwood jasperware anti-slavery medallion, designed and produced by prominent abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood

This train of thought is prompted by Hinton Castle, a pillar of Bristol’s elite society who – I discovered very recently – owned 243 slaves on two estates in Trinidad. Bad man. When slavery was finally abolished in 1833, the British government set aside a vast sum, £20 million, to compensate slave owners for their loss. Hinton, a first cousin of my 3x great grandfather, received £11,293 6s for the slaves on his Palmiste and Cascade plantations, a vast sum in 1834 when the payments were agreed and a modest annual income even in today’s terms.

Even then the slaves were not freed. They were reclassified as apprentices and required to serve out their apprenticeship indentures for anything up to a further six years. In Trinidad, where Hinton had his properties, a group of former slaves drowned out the voice of the governor (who was addressing them about the changes in their status) with chants of “No six years.” This began a protest movement on the island which succeeded in winning full emancipation for all Trinidadian slaves without apprenticeship, ahead of slaves in other colonies.

But Hinton was a prominent Bristol citizen, a major local employer at the Castle brandy distillery, elected twice (1809 and 1832) as sheriff and once (1812) as mayor of the city. In 1820 he was president of the Anchor Society, a Bristol charitable institution founded in 1769 and still operating today. The Society cares for the poor and elderly in the city, and its main fundraising activity has always been the annual President’s Collection. Hinton’s father Robert Castle and uncle Michael had both held the office and raised generous amounts; but under Hinton’s tenure the collection reached a new record level – £374. Good man.

The Anchor Society’s annual dinner in 1909 – guest speaker Winston Churchill – when the President’s Collection raised £1216

Moral values have changed over the years, and Hinton’s ownership of slaves would of course not be tolerated today. But his charitable work, at a time when David Cameron's government is actively and enthusiastically withdrawing from social responsibility, is as important now as it has ever been. And for that I make no apology.

In the mid-1830s when so many of the Bristol great and good were presumably receiving their slavery pay-offs, it is disappointing to see that the Presidents’ Collections of the Anchor Society did not rise significantly. But in 1838 president Henry Palmer rounded up a worthy £757, a sum almost double the previous year’s effort and not surpassed for another thirty years.