Category Archives: Biographies

Biographies, General Interest, London Life

Berners Street – speculators and a famous hoax

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Theodore Hook – the Berners Street Hoaxer

When Robert Cooper Lee returned to England from Jamaica with his family at the end of August 1771, they lived for a short time at Old Bond Street in London. But within a very few weeks Robert found a house in Berners Street on which he signed a lease for thirty years. Today in Britain anyone who can afford to buy a house also buys the freehold and therefore owns both the house and the land on which it stands. In 18th-century London such a situation was uncommon. Even the very wealthy would sign a lease on a house for anything from a few months (to attend the London social season) to a period of years. Thirty years was common but it could be anything up to ninety-nine years.

The London to which the Lee family returned had expanded hugely in the two decades since Robert had left. There were two new bridges across the Thames – Westminster Bridge which had been under construction when he left was opened in 1750, Blackfriars Bridge opened in 1769. London Bridge had finally lost its jumble of medieval houses and shops in 1757 and acquired a new and elegant Italian balustrade.

In addition to the development of new bridges, London was spreading rapidly outwards, covering areas that had been just fields in Robert’s youth, and the population had grown from about half a million in 1750 to three quarters of a million two decades later. Once fashionable areas like Covent Garden had gone downhill and were now the haunt of thieves and prostitutes. Their former inhabitants moved westwards, and large areas to the north and south of Oxford Street saw the development of elegant streets and squares, many of which still retain at least some of their Georgian houses.

Berners Street runs at right angles to Oxford Street, then still sometimes known as the Oxford Road, and while it later acquired a reputation as a location for artists and writers, there were a number of families with Jamaican connections who settled there and its occupants were generally wealthy and well connected.

The houses were new – elegant, Georgian terraces with rear access to their stables via Berners Mews. The Lee’s house at number twenty-six was described as having lofty airy bed chambers of good proportions, servants rooms and numerous closets, lofty capacious drawing room with an elegant chimney piece and stucco cornice, a large dining room and sideboard recess, library, lofty entrance hall, and suitable attached offices well arranged, and supplied with water; standing for two carriages, stabling for five horses and dry arched cellaring.

The history of the development of this area goes back to the middle of the previous century when, in 1654, Josias Berners bought an estate in the parish of St Marylebone for £970 from Sir Francis Williamson of Isleworth. Substantial development was carried out in the first half of the eighteenth century by William Berners, and so the family gave their name to the street.

The Berners family were connected to Jamaica three times over through the Jarrett family. Three of William Berners’ grandchildren married Jarretts of Orange Valley, Trelawny – Maria Berners married Herbert Newton Jarrett (the third of that name), her brother William married Rachel Allen Jarrett (the second of that name) and their brother Henry Denny Berners married Sarah Jarrett. Sarah and Rachel were sisters, Herbert was their father’s much younger half-brother. But to return to Berners Street!

The usual pattern of development in the eighteenth century was for the land owner to lease out parcels of land for development to speculative builders who would erect a group of houses and then lease these on to tenants. Sometimes the builder would merely erect a shell and the interior finishing would be carried out by someone else, often under the direction of the intended tenant. There was no requirement for consistency in the appearance of the houses, although the fashion for classical proportions to some extent encouraged it.

Unlike today no planning permission was required and there were effectively few building regulations to control the quality of the build. There were some regulations relating for example to the materials of construction and the width of streets that had followed from the Great Fire of London in 1666. It is for this reason that these elegant Georgian houses were generally constructed of brick, the brick earth being dug from the very substantial clay deposits which surround London. For example the small town of Ware in Hertfordshire had substantial brick fields and a good line of transport for the bricks into London by barge down the Lea navigation (at the end of which today stands the Olympic Park).

Among the owners of land in Marylebone were the Dukes of Chandos, of Devonshire and of Portland whose names are commemorated today in its streets and squares. You can read a contemporary description of the area’s development written at the end of the 18th century by Daniel Lysons whose Environs of London is a wonderful source of information on 18th century London.

The extent of settlement in the area by members of the Plantocracy is evidenced by the numbers of records in the parish registers of St Marylebone, for their baptisms, marriages and burials. Later in the century these wealthy occupants moved gradually northwards as development continued over the old Marylebone Gardens, once an elegant walking place but now overtaken by the profits to be made from development. Even Robert Cooper Lee moved on. Though he retained the lease on the Berners Street house, he moved to the newly completed Bedford Square, also occupied by Jamaican ex-pats such as Marchant Tubb, and members of the Hibbert family.

Although Bedford Square (above) remains largely unchanged, Robert Cooper Lee’s Berners Street house is long gone, along with much of 18th century London, replaced by Victorian apartments, flattened by wartime bombs, rebuilt after the war and replaced again by glass and steel tower blocks. To see some of those original houses, and architectural features such as mentioned in the description of Robert Cooper Lee’s house, visit the Collage website and put Berners Street into the search option.

At the beginning of the 19th century Berners Street became famous, or infamous, for a complex and well organised hoax perpetrated by Theodore Hook on the unsuspecting Mrs Tottenham who lived at number fifty-four. I cannot do better than refer you to the account on the Museum of Hoaxes website which describes how Hook fulfilled his bet to make an unassuming dwelling the most talked about house in the kingdom. Hook was an engaging but not entirely admirable character. He was a talented composer of comic operas and a writer, but after being given the appointment of Accountant General in Mauritius (as a result of the influence of the Prince Regent) where he was the life and soul of the party for several years, he was held responsible for the embezzlement of  about £12,000 by a deputy and recalled to England. He spent time in a sponging house, wrote prolifically and fathered six children with Mary Ann Doughty but eventually died deeply in debt.

What happened to his children and their mother, to whom he was not married, I do not know. One has to hope that his relations, who were well connected, made provision for them.

 

 

 

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Curtis Brett – Spanish Town Printer

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18th Century style wooden Common Press at The Tom Paine Printing Press Lewes, Sussex

I have to thank Professor Roderick Cave* for reintroducing me to Curtis Brett, who had only merited a footnote in my book. Until now I had been completely unaware of Curtis Brett’s key role as the printer to the Jamaican Assembly at a time in the island’s history when the location of its capital was in dispute. The Kingston merchant lobby wanted to relocate the capital there and avoid the hot and dusty ride across the St Catherine plains to Spanish Town to attend to legal matters. The Plantocracy and its lawyers on the other hand wanted to be able to come in from the surrounding countryside to attend the law sessions in Spanish Town and combine this with residence in their town houses, attendance at balls and social functions, and days at the races.

Brett, who had been born in Ireland in 1720, had trained as a printer, and although his early ventures in Jamaica were as a storekeeper in Kingston, and then as a plantation overseer, he moved on to work in a counting house in Spanish Town for Archibald Sinclair. It was here that his previous printing experience led to his appointment as printer to the Assembly.

In order to raise the start-up capital required it was agreed to invite subscriptions to publish a book of The Laws of Jamaica. Brett finalised the manuscript on board ship, returning  to London in June 1755, where the book was printed and bound by his previous master William Strahan. Back in Jamaica he was to be assisted by Charles White, whose work on the Spanish Town Census of 1754 has already been described here.

In the spring of the following year Curtis Brett returned to Jamaica with copies of the Laws of Jamaica and all the equipment required to set up as a printer in Spanish Town. By the 8th of May he was ready to produce the first edition of the St Jago Intelligencer, of which sadly only one (or possibly two) issues are known to survive.

 

 

This very rare book, of which only three copies are known to exist was printed by Curtis Brett in 1757. Details of this copy, for sale by the William Reese Company, can be viewed online here.

 

By insisting that subscribers to the Intelligencer paid their subscriptions in advance, and by printing materials for the Assembly and probably a book almanac as well as the book highlighted here, Curtis Brett found his business so successful that by 1761 he had accumulated about £5000 and was looking for fresh challenges.  Roderick Cave believes Brett was then bought out by his partner Charles White before setting off to pursue activities as a merchant in Jamaica, New York and London.

 

By this time Curtis Brett was married and the father of a son. His wife was the widowed Ann Allwood, whose first husband was Hayward Gaylard. Hayward Gaylard had a chequered history, he had been a haberdasher and merchant in Cornhill, London but had been declared bankrupt in 1746, and had presumably travelled to Kingston in the hope of mending his fortunes. There was in London at the same time a printer called Doctor Gaylard (c.1699-1749). He was not a medical man, for Doctor was indeed his baptismal name! and although he came from Sherborne in Dorset it is not unreasonable to suggest that he was connected with the family of Hayward Gaylard and hence through the printing connection Curtis Brett may have been introduced to Hayward.

Hayward Gaylard married Ann Allwood, in Spanish Town, on the 25th of  December  1752. The marriage was to be short lived and apparently without surviving children, for Hayward Gaylard was buried in the North churchyard at Kingston on the 24th of July 1756. It seems possible that when Curtis Brett first travelled to Jamaica it was with Hayward Gaylard, and this would account for how he came to meet his future wife.

What is harder to account for is how Ann came to be there in the first place. We know that she had at least two brothers, both of whom had interesting careers. Her brother John was an artisan painter who took an apprentice in St Giles in London in 1765 and spent some time on the Carolinas, painting an altarpiece in Charleston in 1772.

Her brother Thomas was apprenticed to Thomas Johnson in Liverpool in 1752 and became a master carver and gilder. In this role he exhibited sculptures and created picture frames for Romney, framed works by George Stubbs and undertook decorative carving work for the Prince of Wales at Carlton House. Whether because the Prince was notorious for not paying  his bills or for other reasons, sadly, in 1799 Thomas was declared bankrupt, and family properties in Great Russell Street and Charlotte Street had to be sold. What happened to him after this is unknown, but it seems likely he lived out his life at Barking in Essex, died in 1819 and was buried in the family grave in the Whitefield’s Memorial Church in Tottenham Court Road, London. My reasoning on this is governed by the burial in the same church in a ‘family vault’ of his brother-in-law Curtis Brett in 1784.

John Allwood, who died in about 1796, left a wife, seemingly his second, and the only reference to a child was to his son John who had some years previously left for Bombay and had not been heard of since.

So how did Ann Allwood come to be in Jamaica in 1752? It is possible that she travelled there with her brother John, since we know he ventured to the Americas twenty years later. There is the further possibility that there was a third brother, called Francis, who set up shop in Harbour Street, Kingston and lived out his days as an established member of the community there, dying in Liguanea in April 1793. He was noted for having blown up his own house in Kingston to prevent the spread of a conflagration in 1782. The Cornwall Chronicle of 1789 reported that ‘His long pursuit of that business, and known integrity, see from the year 1774, until the fatal conflagration in 1782, which, to save the town from still further destruction, had his house blown into the air by gunpowder, for which he has never received the smallest recompense.‘[1]

If she did travel out to Jamaica with her brother Francis, this would have placed Ann firmly within the merchant community in Kingston and in a position to meet both of her husbands.

We know of only two children of Ann and Curtis Brett. Charles Richard Brett was born in Kingston on the 4th of September  1761 and he may have been the child mentioned in his father’s letter,  quoted by Daniel Livesay[2], as being sent to England. A second son, Curtis Brett, was born on the 8th of October  1765 and one on-line source suggests he was baptised at Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex on the 11th of November that year, which would imply he was born in England, but I am unable to verify this.

The second Curtis Brett signed  Articles of Clerkship with John Windus of Tooks Castle Yard on the 19th of  November  1781, but I am unclear whether he ever practised law. In due course he inherited all his father’s estate, including mining interests in North Wales, when Curtis Brett senior died in 1784. Four years later he married Anna Maria Johnson and they had a family of four sons and two daughters.

Of their children, Charles Curtis became an army veterinary surgeon; Henry Richard was a wine merchant and later Brewer’s Agent whose son Walter spent several years in Belgium before he migrated to Canada where his sons both became taxidermists; George fared less well and in 1851 seems to have been a Watchman at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The third Curtis Brett fell even further and seems to have ended his life in the Camberwell Workhouse, perhaps his previous employment as a grocer and later wine cooper and brewer’s agent had led him to drink. I cannot trace Louisa, but Emily Maria married well to a respected clergyman and her grandaughter  Emily Mary Edith Lloyd married the wealthy Charles Bosanquet. It was however a tale with a sad ending. Of their three children Muriel died aged only seven, Sydney died of wounds in the early months of the Great War aged barely twenty and his brother Leslie, who appears not to have served, died aged eighteen in November 1918 perhaps in the Spanish Flu epidemic.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously given the social set they all moved in, Charles Bosanquet was related to descendants of Robert Cooper Lee whose letters form such a major part of A Parcel of Ribbons.

 

* ‘Two Jamaican Printers’, in Roderick Cave, Printing and the book trade in the West Indies (London: Pindar Press, 1987) pp. 206-218.

 

 

[1] http://jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/C/CornwallC_01.htm

[2] Curtis Brett to his son, c. 1777, MS 10, letter no. 19, 40, National Library of Jamaica,  cited in Children of  Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820,  Daniel Alan Livesay, unpublished PhD thesis (book in preparation)

These Curtis Brett letters are partial transcriptions of the originals, the whereabouts of which are sadly currently unknown.

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

The Swymmer family of Bristol

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College Green Bristol where the Swymmer Family owned property during the 17th and 18th centuries. Bristol Cathedral is in the background*

 

 

The Bristol-based Swymmer family played a key part in the development of merchant venturers in that city, in the early history of Jamaica, and in the slave trade.

There are records of seventy-three indentured servants (mainly men) despatched to Jamaica from Bristol by the Swymmers between the 16th of September 1676 and the 10th of August 1685 . With the growing demand for plantation labour and a shortage of indentured servants the trade in the latter decreased as the trade in enslaved Africans increased.

Anthony Swymmer was present in Jamaica from the early days of the colony and in his Will dated the 11th of October 1684, he referred to himself as “Anthony Swymmer of the City of Bristoll, Esq , late resident in the Island of Jamaica, and now bound thither again”. Probate of the Will was granted in 1688 and it is presumed that he died in Jamaica. This Anthony Swymmer was married to Jane Langley, the sister of Elizabeth Langley who was married to Fulke Rose and later to Sir Hans Sloane.

Disentangling the members of the Swymmer family can be tricky – for example not only did this Anthony Swymmer have a son called Anthony but so did his brother William. Both brothers were themselves sons of another Anthony Swymmer and his wife Joan Hayman. Unfortunately Swymmer baptisms on IGI are patchy, although there are also some marriage and burial records. There are fifteen Wills of members of the Swymmer family at the National Archives and I am gradually working my way through transcribing some of them. Some already appear on this website – you can see the current list here. There are also records of property owned by the family held at the Bristol Record Office for members of the family owned considerable property in Bristol on College Green, and also Lower Green, Nicholas Street, Small Street and Kings Square. They also owned land and property at Marshfield, at Rowberrow in Somerset, in Buckinghamshire and later in Flintshire and elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lord Mayor’s Chapel in Bristol where Bridget Swymmer was buried in 1820**

 

 

 

 

 

The Swymmer family may have originated in Cornwall where John Swymmer and his wife Susan had three sons Peter, Warne and John baptised in Padstow in 1631, 1634 and 1637. Peter is recorded as a mercer and issued his own tokens (there being regular shortages of small coins). One website suggests that he also lent money at interest. With his wife Grace he had a daughter Elizabeth and a son, another Peter Swymmer. That there were connections with the Bristol branch of the family is further hinted at through the marriage in Padstow in 1700 of a Susanna Swymmer and Arthur Merrett, while a Barbara Swymmer married Anthony Merrett in Gloucestershire about 1698, and Rebecca Merrett married John Swymmer in 1696 at St Philip and St Jacobs, Bristol. Moreover in his Will of 1726 William Swymmer of Bristol left a legacy of £100 to another William Swymmer, the son of John Swymmer of Padstow.

John Swymmer of Bristol died relatively young, and childless, in 1700. He was the eldest son of William (c.1650-1715) the stay-at-home brother of the first Anthony who went to Jamaica. That first Anthony had a son called Anthony who married first a daughter of Bernard Andreiss, possibly called Johanna (widow of a Dutchman called William Kupius resulting in ‘a petition of Mr Swymmer for an escheated estate of one Kupuis, late of Jamaica, deceased’) and then a woman called Milborough (surname unknown) who was the mother of Jane Langley Swymmer and Anthony Langley Swymmer.

John Swymmer’s widow Rebecca (Merrett) shines through his Will as a young woman well endowed in her own right, with a large collection of family jewellery and a passion for both needlework and riding. John, who left the majority of his estate to his brothers, nevertheless explicitly left Rebecca all the needlework hangings she had made and her own bay horse with its saddle and other ‘furniture’. He also left her half the contents of the house in Small Street, Bristol, made sure her marriage settlement was honoured and that she was repaid the twenty-five pounds of her own money she had paid out for his medical bills. A Memorandum attached to the Will also listed items of furniture and other household goods. Whether he remembered them after writing the Will or whether she persuaded him to add such detail is unclear, but at a time when a married woman’s property belonged to her husband such a precaution, preventing as it did all these items from being included in the residuary estate, did secure her position.

The Wills of the Jamaican Swymmers – Anthony, Anthony and Anthony Langley provide an insight into the accumulation of family lands by 1760, when the last of these died in St Thomas in the East. Apart from his extensive holdings and mineral rights in Flintshire in Wales, Anthony Langley Swymmer left 2036 acres at the Nutts River plantation, 1120 acres at Clark’s River, 332 acres acquired from Richard Risby, 4000 acres in Vere and 1100 acres in the parish of St George. There was also land and buildings in Spanish Town ‘near the Beef Market’. As he died childless the main beneficiaries of all this were the children of his sister Jane who had married Richard Chandler Champneys whose first wife was Sarah Daines, Jane’s second cousin.

I must apologies incidentally to any Welsh speakers for my inability to read the names of the various places in Flintshire where Anthony Langley Swymmer held property!

Sadly the Champneys family squandered their inheritance:

“Sir Thomas Champneys inherited several estates from his father, but from mismanagement lost all but the Orchardleigh and Nutts River estates. He died at Exton, Hampshire, aged 76 in July 1821. His son and heir, Thomas Swymmer Champneys, squandered what was left of the family’s fortune and ended up in the insolvent debtors court in the 1820s which declared his the largest amount of debt ever filed in the court since its establishment in 1813, with debts and liabilities upwards of £429,000.”

It is a tale not at all untypical of wealth accumulated in Jamaica, using slave labour, by the early migrants who managed their estates in person, but whose successors became absentees spending the profits of an earlier generation. The Swymmer family however, not only made their fortunes on the plantations, they had also made much of it directly through the slave trade, and in the process contributed to the wealth of Bristol derived from that trade.

 

*By Snapshots Of The Past (College Green Bristol England) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Original image: Photochrom print (color photo lithograph).

**By NotFromUtrecht (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Bits and Pieces

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Royal York Crescent Clifton, Bristol*

This last week has been a busy one, taken up with a variety of activities and so by way of catching up this week’s blog piece is a bit of a patchwork, piecing together some of the scraps of information recently acquired.

Part of the week was spent stitching together a family tree for a friend of a friend who will probably be as surprised as I was to discover in it a Jamaican connection. In his case this was a young soldier who joined up at the age of seventeen in the first half of the nineteenth century and served with his Regiment, the 33rd Foot the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, in the West Indies, among other places.

Yesterday I spent in Bristol at a conference on Jamaica and the Caribbean: Beyond the Boundary. It took place in the Watershed, a converted dockside warehouse, now an arts centre and cinema, and was part of a three-day event to “reflect on the sometimes difficult political, economic and social development of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago since independence 50 years ago, and also the significant impact these countries have had on the Caribbean community in Bristol and the UK.”

The wealth of Bristol, a significant seaport for centuries, was in many ways derived from slavery, the slave trade, and the income from the products of slavery particularly sugar. Although it was a much smaller city than London, perhaps 20,000 people in the first part of the 18th-century, by the end of the century it had become one of the most favoured retirement spots for members of the Plantocracy returning home, especially in the area of Clifton. The names of streets today reflect this, Royal York Crescent, Regent Street, Merchants Road – in the fresh air high above the river Avon and the Avon Gorge with easy access to the city of Bristol and its trading connections, but set apart in genteel Georgian splendour.

Much of the conference was concerned with the modern Caribbean and the Afro-Caribbean migrants to Britain, Bristol in particular. It began, however, with a historical introduction to Bristol and Jamaica by Professor Madge Dresser of the University of the West of England. She outlined a little of the early history of Jamaica and the connections with the island of Bristol families such as the Penns and the Swymmers. Elizabeth Swymmer is one of the few women whose direct connections to the slave trade can be tracked. She mentioned the records of the Bybrook Plantation held at the Bristol record office, and the often chance distribution of Jamaican and Plantation records to other record offices around the country. Talking of the distribution of records she mentioned the use of the slave ownership compensation records compiled in 1833 for tracking both slave owners and enslaved people. Just as I have discussed here previously the way in which the mixed race Jamaican descendants blended into English society, so the profits derived from Jamaica were often used to build the great 18th-century British country houses, with the origins of the funds subsequently suppressed or forgotten.

The second speaker, Adrian Stone, was a hugely enthusiastic speaker about his own genealogical researches which had taken him from 21st-century Bristol to 18th-century Jamaica. A self-taught researcher he had begun by interviewing close family members and then more distant cousins about their origins in Jamaica and the complex interrelationships of a large family. Living now in London he had discovered cousins he did not know existed and had explored their joint history using resources such as the Mormon family history Centre in Exhibition Road, and the National Archives at Kew. He had found that many people asked if he was able to traces family origins back to Africa and demonstrated how the slave returns for Jamaica, which I discussed last week, could sometimes be used through the names of women such as ‘Ebo Venus’ to relate their origins to specific tribes and regions in Africa.

This brings me to another of this week’s bits and pieces, for I came across some material relating to slave names. I will cover it in more detail another time but, briefly, enslaved Africans in the early eighteenth century were often given names of classical origin such as Venus, Phoebe or Chloe. Christian baptism frequently over wrote such names with English ones. But throughout it all names of African origin persisted, for example, Cudjoe the leader of the Maroons during the war of the 1730s whose name from the Guinea Coast indicates he was born on a Monday. Where these names exist in the slave records they can be used, together with some tribal references which remain, to establish areas of origin in Africa.

My final fragment for this week concerns the sort of correction a genealogist sometimes has to make (but hopefully not too often). In dealing with partial records of baptisms marriages and deaths and information derived from Wills, we reconstruct family trees and sometimes we get it wrong!

When I was working some time ago on the Aikenhead family, three of whose daughters were prominent among the Wills I transcribed, I had attached them to Archibald Aikenhead of Stirling Castle, well aware that this involved a certain amount of guesswork. I now know that some of my guesses were wrong, for I recently acquired, courtesy of Dianne Golding-Frankson, the Wills of two men both called William Aikenhead. Doctor William Aikenhead, who died about 1762, left no direct heirs and made his uncle Archibald Aikenhead his residuary legatee. The other William Aikenhead who died about 1760, referred specifically to four children – his son John Lawrence Aikenhead, and his daughters Elizabeth, Margret Helen, and Milborough Aikenhead. By the time he wrote his Will his daughter Elizabeth was married to Gilbert Ford, and Milborough to John Harvie. Margret Helen, who I take to be Margaret Eleanor Aikenhead, brought her inheritance as dowry to her marriage with Samuel Alpress about a year after the death of her father. All this means not only that more of Archibald Aikenhead’s children had died in infancy than I had previously suspected, but also that Archibald and William must have had another brother, the father of Doctor William Aikenhead. Whether this brother had a presence in Jamaica or had remained in Scotland I don’t know.

So continuing the patchwork metaphor with which I began, the work of the historian and the genealogist is to attempt to make a pleasing (and it is to be hoped truthful) pattern from the scraps and pieces of information that have been left to us. Sometimes it is necessary to unpick a piece of work and re-make it in an attempt to produce a more accurate reconstruction of our past.

* Photograph of Royal York Crescent from lizzieparker.wordpress.com where you can find a whole treasure trove of photographs and information about Bristol and Clifton.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Wills, Property and Slave Returns

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Slave Return for 1817 from Ancestry.co.uk

I have commented before on how useful Wills can be in establishing family relationships, highlighting people one had missed when searching parish records, and filling in background on where a family was and when.

Following the piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Samuel Felsted I have done some further research on his family. His sister Mary, who married Stephen Cooke in Kingston in 1782, outlived her husband by a quarter of a century dying in Bethnal Green, London in 1843 at the age of ninety-three. Her Will is here.

Several branches of the family had settled in London, but Samuel’s youngest son John Lawrence (or Laurence) Felsted probably died in Jamaica, although we know from his Will that he owned a house in London. John’s sister Sarah also died in London and we know from her Will that she owned property in Kingston.

When John Lawrence Felsted died in about 1821 he left property to his two children Justina Frances and Samuel James. This included a house in Church Street, Kingston; a store in Water Lane (convenient for the harbour front) and a Penn in the parish of St Catherine. In August 1820 John had sworn an affidavit on his slave return that in June of that year he had owned three slaves. Only two are named – eleven year old Henry, a creole ‘sambo’, and seventeen year old Betsey a creole ‘negroe’ both of whom appear to have been passed on to John by his mother Margaret Mary Felsted. In 1817 she had been in possession of thirteen slaves, in 1823 this number had reduced to six. Betsey was still enslaved in 1832, the return then being sworn by the attorney for the Executors of John Lawrence Felsted, whose name incidentally was Justinn Nelson which suggests that John’s daughter Justina may have been named after him.

John’s sister Sarah was also a slave owner, the return for 1817 showing her as having a twenty-nine year old negro creole slave called Cassander and her three sons, Richard, John Walker and William aged twelve, two and four months respectively. She also owned a twenty-one year old African negro woman called Ellen. Sarah was listed as owning Ellen outright, but as having a one-sixth share of Cassander and her children. She shared ownership with  C.Dawson, S.M.Robertson (her sisters) S.M.Fry of London, J.L.Felsted and J.F.Fry ‘an infant of this Island’. All these are descendants of Samuel Felsted and although I have not seen his Will it is reasonable to suppose ownership of Cassander was passed to his children by Samuel. It is possible this list also provides evidence that Ann Cooke Felsted, who married Joseph Fry, had died before 1817 since S.M.Fry and J.F.Fry referred to are her children.

The information from the slave registers for Jamaica can be viewed on Ancestry for the years 1817, 1820, 1823, 1826, 1829, 1832 and 1834 (you do need to be a subscriber to view them). The registers were compiled following the abolition of the slave trade in order to try to ensure that the trade was not being continued.

Returns had to list not only slaves owned, but the changes in numbers since the previous return due to deaths of any slaves or the birth of new ones. Usually in addition to the name and sex of the person, their age and racial mix is given together with whether they were ‘creole’, that is born in Jamaica. I have seen one who was listed as American.

These documents may be one of the few ways someone with ancestors who were enslaved has of finding out about them, and of course they also tell us something about their owners.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of all the Jamaican Wills of the eighteenth century is the way in which slaves are routinely listed as property alongside stock, horses, carriages and all the paraphernalia of the plantation or merchant business. Just occasionally a named individual is able to stand out, perhaps through manumission or the gift of a small legacy, but too often by being passed on, still enslaved, to a new owner.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

Samuel Felsted – Jamaica’s first Classical Composer

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 Jonah and the whale (faux-bronze).Detail of a vault fresco “La Résurrection” by Michel Corneille the Elder (1601-1664), church Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, Paris. (via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Jamaica boasts the first classical composer in the Caribbean, and possibly in the New World. Samuel Felsted wrote an oratorio called Jonah which was first performed in 1775. This part of Jamaica’s history seems recently to have been rediscovered[1] and you can hear a small extract from the oratorio sung by Marie McMarrow here. Samuel also composed extensively for the organ.

The Felsted family probably originated from the English village of Felsted in Essex. Samuel Felsted was born about 1743, most likely in Jamaica. His father, William Felsted, seems to be the same person as the one who in 1736 applied in Boston Massachusetts for permission to open a shop, and who was recorded there as an ironmonger who had arrived from Jamaica. He married Joyce Weaver in 1741 in Philadelphia.

The family were Anabaptists which means that they did not believe in infant baptism, and this contributes to the difficulty in locating all of William and Joyce’s children. Samuel Felsted was baptised on 20 November 1763 in St Andrews Jamaica when he was recorded as being aged twenty and an Anabaptist. There are also baptisms for Sarah and Mary Felsted on 21 August 1768 in Kingston when Mary was eighteen and Sarah twenty-two. It is highly probable that they were Samuel’s sisters. There is also a burial record for John Felsted in 1789 in Kingston, a “Practitioner in Physic and Surgery” – possibly Samuel’s brother.

Samuel became the organist for both the church of St Andrews, Halfway Tree and at Kingston, and in 1770 he married Margaret Mary Lawrence. They had at least nine children, and one source refers to William, James Lawrence and Christiana all playing the organ. Daughters Mary Stephens, Elizabeth Stephens, and Elizabeth all seem to have died young and a Sarah Felsted was buried in Kingston in 1804 (though this may have been Samuel’s sister rather than his daughter).

Three, and possibly four, of Samuel and Margaret Mary’s children had descendants outside Jamaica. Susanna married Captain James Robinson Commander of the ship HMS Castor in 1815, and their son James Felsted Robinson was born in Jamaica the following year.

James Lawrence Felsted and his wife Maria had a son Samuel James born in Spanish Town in 1818. James had been baptised in 1802 in Kingston, so unless he was unusually precocious he too was probably not baptised as an infant. Samuel James left for England where he seems not to have prospered. He married in 1844, worked as a commission agent (basically a salesman dependent on commission for his income) and had three children James Melville Felsted , Grace Lawrence Felsted and Frank Adolphus who died as a baby. Their mother died in 1856, and the two surviving children were boarded out. Although Samuel probably remarried in 1857, he died in 1860. His son James Melville was employed as a railway porter in 1873 but was dismissed the following year for unspecified reasons, and later census records show him as working as a plate layer on the railway, basically as a labourer. However James Melville’s only child Florence Felsted married a coal miner called Tom Rodwell in 1901 and by the Second World War her husband was running his own haulage company with their son, and they were able to afford two trips to New York on the Queen Mary.

Grace Felsted fared rather better than her brother and although she began her life in domestic service, in 1877 she later married David Charles Cox a young policeman and by 1911 they were living comfortably in a six room house in Wimbledon on his police pension. Three of their four children were still alive.

The two branches of Felsted descendants who seem to have fared best were the children of Ann Cooke Felsted and her sister Christiana. Ann married Joseph Fry in 1798 in Kingston. He was a Bristol merchant with connections to Livorno in Italy (known by the English at the time as Leghorn). The 1824 Jamaica Almanac shows Fry as the owner of Felsted’s Pen, with sixteen slaves and two stock. The number of slaves had reduced to nine in 1827, and by the end of the decade the Pen seems to have passed into other hands. The Frys had four children born in Jamaica and some time after 1812 they left the island.

Christiana also married in Jamaica, to John Dawson in December 1815, but almost immediately they left for England where four children were born in Bethnal Green. Joseph and Ann Fry’s daughter Sophia Mathilda married Peter Paul Pate, who is given in one source as having been born in Livorno and whose name is listed as Pietro Paolo Pate. However the marriage took place in England, in Bethnal Green, so it is not clear which rendering of the name is correct. Certainly their daughter Sophie was listed in the Census records as born in Italy but a British subject. Christiana and John Dawson had a son called William Richard born in 1823, and in 1857 he married his first cousin once removed Sophie Pate. So clearly the sisters Ann and Christiana and their families had remained in close touch.

Samuel Felsted died in 1802 and was buried at Kingston on the 29th of March. Margaret Mary his wife outlived him by many years and died on a visit to her daughter Christiana at Livorno in 1833 where she was buried in the Old English Cemetery[2]. Joseph Fry also died in Livorno in 1848.

The story of the descendants of Samuel Felsted illustrates very clearly the fate of families in the days before any kind of welfare state. Whereas the descendants of Ann Cooke Felsted and her sister Christiana remained firmly among  the middle-classes,  living in solid Victorian mansions and on annuities, the grandchildren of their brother John Lawrence Felsted descended into relative poverty.

All was not lost however and the rise of the Rodwell family during the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated what could be achieved through luck and hard work.

I am curious to know what the 21st century Fry, Dawson and Rodwell families would think of their famous musical ancestor who seems set to be reinstated in his proper place in Jamaican and musical history.

 

 


[1] http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Battle-for-an-old–historic-building_9870327

[2] http://leghornmerchants.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/jamaica/

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Puritans and Planters – the Halhed family

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The Cloisters at Westminster Abbey
from http://home2.btconnect.com/Crusader-Product/Westminster-Abbey.html

 

I encountered the name Halhed recently while reading about the early British Colony which settled at Providence Island, just over 100 miles off the coast of modern Nicaragua, and I remembered I had seen the name before in a Jamaican context.

Richard Halhed came from a distinguished Banbury family and indeed was apparently the last to be born in Banbury. His distant great-uncle Henry Halhed had joined a contingent of pioneers, the Providence Island Company, recruited by Lord Saye and Sele[1]. They intended to establish a colony according to puritan principles, and although Henry Halhed was already in his mid-50s he sailed with his wife Elizabeth and three of his youngest children – Patience, Grace and Samuel – in 1632.

Henry Halhed had been hit by the combined effects of a depression in the textile industry and a disastrous fire in Banbury in 1628. The colony was not a success and Halhed and three others were deported back to England on the Hopewell arriving in Bristol in early 1641. All four men were released and held to be guiltless of the charges against them, but this seems to have ended Halhed’s connection with the island, which was subsequently taken by the Spanish who deported all the English colonists.

Richard Halhed’s connection with Jamaica was very much more successful. He was born posthumously in 1685, probably apprenticed in London in 1700, and then went out to Jamaica as a planter establishing an estate called Banbury. Like many other single white colonists he fathered a number of illegitimate children of whom Richard baptised in December 1724 seems to have died young.

In 1746 Grace Hazel and her children Robert, Elizabeth, and Susannah Halhed were all granted the rights of whites by the Jamaican Assembly. The children were described as free mulattos, as was Grace Hazel, who was probably Richard’s ‘housekeeper’. Robert Halhed, later described as a surgeon of St Thomas in the Vale,  subsequently applied to the Jamaican assembly in 1752 and was granted “the same rights, liberties, franchises, and immunities as His Majesty’s liege people do now hold and enjoy”. Legally he had become white.

It appears that Richard also had a daughter called Leah, who is mentioned in Robert’s Will as his half sister, who had married Thomas Leadbeater. There is a marriage for Thomas Leadbeater and Leah Phipps on the 24th of December  1738 in the parish of St Catherine, Jamaica. It seems possible however that Leah was already a widow, since the parish register record for the baptism of Elizabeth and Susannah Halhed was written on a scrap of paper, pinned to the main register, on which were also baptism records for Leah and Rachell Ydana on the same date. The Jewish Ydana family had patented land in Jamaica from the latter part of the 17th-century. It may be that the mother of Leah and Rachell (who were older than Richard’s other children) was connected with the Ydana family. There is no indication of Leah having been granted the rights of whites so she may not have been of mixed race.

Leah’s marriage to Thomas Leadbeater, a planter in St Thomas in the East, seems to have been a good one, and the baptisms of several of their five surviving children were sponsored by prominent citizens including Jacob and Sarah Neufville. It is likely that by time of the birth of the last of these children, Sarah in 1755, Robert Halhed had already left for England – a Robt Halhed was paying land tax in the parish of St Sepulchre in 1750. His father Richard died in Jamaica in July 1755 aged seventy, a very good age for a Jamaican colonist, and he was buried in Spanish Town on the 13th of July 1755.

Richard Halhed provided generously for his children. Although I have not found his Will, his son Robert’s Will (proved in 1778) indicates not only that he was wealthy but also that provision had been made by their father for the care of his unmarried daughter Susannah. Elizabeth, who at the time of the granting of the rights of whites was already married to Thomas Peirce of London, had probably died relatively young and without leaving children. Thomas Peirce married again and there is a record of a Chancery dispute involving the Halhed and Peirce families, held at the National Archives at Kew of which I hope to get a copy shortly.

Robert seems to have settled into English society with no difficulty in spite of his mixed race. He married a wife called Elizabeth, probably in England although I have not found a record for the marriage, and had one child Robert Spencer Halhed living at the time of his death. Very sadly Robert Spencer Halhed died just over a month after his father at the age of thirteen. Elizabeth outlived her husband by more than forty years, dying in 1829.

In England Robert prospered as a merchant and was close to his father’s first cousin William (1723-86)[2] who was much the same age as he was, and who became a Director of the Bank of England. Both Robert and William are recorded as merchants at 1 Bank Street, London which implies a partnership.

Robert’s successful career and marriage, and his sister Elizabeth’s marriage to Thomas Peirce are yet another example of the integration of mixed race Jamaican children into mainstream society. For Robert and his family this was crowned by their burial in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

When Elizabeth Halhed died at the age of ninety-two in October 1829 she requested burial with her husband and son and that the stone marking the spot should be recut. Her wishes very nearly failed to be carried out when a bizarre accident overtook the Will.

William Halhed had three sons, all of whom were in their seventies by the time Elizabeth died. The eldest Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, still remembered as a linguist and compiler of one of the first Bengali grammars, was according to Elizabeth incapable by then of managing his own affairs. Robert William and John were nominated as executors and when  John heard that Elizabeth was dying he travelled down to Tunbridge Wells, writing a letter to warn his brother that Elizabeth had not long to live. The following day, after her death, her companion Frances Bonnet produced a tin box with the Will and John wrote a letter to Nathaniel’s wife Luiza, detailing the legacies and asking her to forward it to Robert in London.

When John and Frances Bonnet arrived in London, Robert had not yet received the second letter although he had the first. So that evening the two brothers sat down to make a new list of the legacies, with Robert writing on the second page torn from the letter John had written to him. It was an October evening and as John read the Will by candle light he held it too close to the flame and the Will caught fire. Although the fire was quickly extinguished some portions of the will had been lost. However, because John had written to Luiza, and because he and Robert had been producing an abstract of the Will it was possible to correlate the various documents to produce evidence of Elizabeth’s intentions.

With the agreement of the legatees whose legacies had been obliterated, Robert William and John swore an affidavit which enabled probate to be granted on the 15th of October 1829. It was one of the last acts of John Halhed who was buried on the 4th of December 1829. He was survived by eleven of his eighteen children.

You can read a transcript of Elizabeth’s Will here, and also a transcript of the Will of Robert Halhed. As Elizabeth’s Will makes no mention of Jamaica and her legacies are mostly in 3 per cent consols (safe bank investments) it is to be assumed that at some time after her husband Robert’s death she sold the property and invested the proceeds to provide a regular income. As the great days of sugar were largely over, this was a sensible move freeing her from the worries of an absentee landlord. That she was still a wealthy woman, despite her investments having to support her into great old age, is an indication of the wealth accumulated by Richard Halhed in Jamaica and consolidated by Robert in London.

 

 


[1] Providence Island 1630-1641, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[2] Much information about the Halhed family may be found at www.halhed.com

 

Biographies, General Interest, London Life

First Catch Your Hare

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The title page from the facsimile first edition, Prospect Books 2012[1]

‘First Catch Your Hare’ is one of those apocryphal quotations that was in fact never written, in spite of being repeatedly attributed to Hannah Glasse.

Hannah Glasse was the author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy first published in 1747, and although she is less well remembered than Isabella Beaton she pioneered the method of writing recipes in a systematic fashion that could be understood by anyone who could read.

That her book sold so well gives the lie to the notion that all but the richest eighteenth century women were illiterate. In fact she was at the leading edge of the rise of the self-help book, something which would really take off in the following century with the introduction of steam-powered printing.

Hannah was the illegitimate daughter of Isaac Allgood (of Brandon White House and Nunwick, Northumberland) and Mrs Hannah Reynolds. Her parents’ relationship ended after the birth of three children. Perhaps surprisingly Hannah then lived, not with her mother, whom she called a ‘wicked wretch’, but with her father and his wife, and she grew up close to her legitimate half-brother Lancelot Allgood.

In 1724 her stepmother died suddenly and her father was in very poor health so she moved in with her grandmother Ryecroft in Greville Street, Hatton Garden. It was from here that she left in secret, aged just sixteen, to marry John Glasse at Leyton in Essex on the 5th of August 1724. A month later when her grandmother found out and threw her out, she and John Glasse moved to rooms above a chemist’s shop in the Haymarket.

Over the next fifteen years Hannah bore eleven live children and suffered at least one miscarriage of twins. She corresponded with members of her father’s family in Northumberland and those letters provide most of the evidence for her life with John Glasse, who seems to have been largely without visible means of support and who died in 1747.

By this time Hannah had already indulged in several money-making ventures including selling Daffy’s Elixir, writing her cookery book, and setting up a ‘habit warehouse’, a high class clothes shop in Tavistock Street. Quite how she managed it is unclear but among her clients were royalty, including the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was perhaps her bad luck that ‘poor Fred’ the Prince of Wales died suddenly, and possibly poor management or the unpaid bills of the aristocracy that led to Hannah’s bankruptcy in 1755. This resulted in the sale of the copyright of her book The Art of Cookery, in a story sadly very similar to the sale of the copyright in Mrs Beaton’s books a century or so later.

Hannah went on to write The Compleat Confectioner and the Servant’s Directory but neither had the success of her first book.

As with Isabella Beaton, Hannah Glasse did not invent her recipes, rather she plundered a variety of sources. It seems likely that although she had not had to earn her living as a cook and came from the gentry classes, that she actually enjoyed cooking. Although she took her recipes from other sources the main change she made was to provide precise measurements of quantities where none were given in the originals. She also gave very clear instructions and simplified much of the language that had been used in earlier recipes, for example changing ‘two right oranges’ to ‘two large oranges’, and instead of ‘lard them with small Lardoons’ she has ‘lard them with little bits of Bacon’. Where Hannah was not so systematic is in her arrangement of the recipes, there was no index in the first edition, nor are all recipes for similar ingredients grouped together.

One fascinating aspect of her work is that it makes clear to us that many 18th century ingredients were a little different from now, for example eggs were generally much smaller, so if instructed to take a piece of dough the size of a hen’s egg it is well to remember this. Poultry too were smaller, but teaspoons appear to have been larger and she is probably referring to the caddy spoon used for measuring out tea rather than the smaller spoon for stirring a cup of tea. The Prospect Books facsimile of her book includes not only background to her family, but also detailed discussion of her sources, ingredients and methods of cooking.

Here is a sample recipe chosen at random. I hope to post some more in future. It should be remembered that oysters in 18th century London were still commonplace and cheap. Whether the paper used over the breast was used dry or wet I am not sure.

To marinate Fowls

Take a fine large Fowl or Turky, raise the Skin from the Breast Bone with your Finger, then take a Veal Sweetbread and cut it small, a few Oysters, a few Mushrooms, an Anchovy, some Pepper, a little Nutmeg, some Lemon-peel, and a little Thyme; chop all together small and mix with the Yolk of an Egg, stuff it between the Skin and the Flesh, but take great Care you don’t break the Skin, and then stuff what Oysters you please into the Body of the Fowl. You may lard the Breast of the Fowl with Bacon, if you chuse it. Paper the Breast, and roast it. Make good Gravy, and garnish with Lemon. You may add a few Mushrooms to the Sauce.

And if it seems as if Hannah Glasse’s story has an exclusively London bias, there is a curious postscript. For a document preserved at Nunwick Hall lists some of her surviving children, as of about 1767. Hannah the eldest was alive and unmarried, Catherine was twice widowed and had one son then living, Isaac Allgood Glasse was in Bombay, George who had joined the Royal Navy was lost at sea in 1761, and Margaret (chief partner in the habit making business) had died unmarried in Jamaica.

This raises intriguing questions about why she was there. Clearly a good living could be made in London if her mother’s client list were exploited, so had she gone to Jamaica alone or with a brother? I have not been able to find a burial record for her, nor any other trace of the Glasse family, except perhaps an Edward Glasse who was in Port Royal, and who buried a daughter called Margaret there in 1741. Was he perhaps an uncle?


[1] First Catch Your Hare…The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by a Lady (Hannah Glasse), a facsimile of the first edition supplemented by the recipes which the author added up to the fifth edition and furnished with a Preface, Introductory Essays by Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain, a Glossary by Alan Davidson, Notes and an Index. Prospect Books, Totnes, 2012. ISBN 978-1-903018-88-0.

 

 

 

 

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

A lunatic in the family

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Hogarth’s image of the Rake’s Progress in which he has finally descended into madness in Bedlam

 

The treatment in the eighteenth century of those born mentally handicapped and those suffering from mental illness was often absolutely horrific.

The history of Bedlam (a corruption of Bethlem, the Bethlehem Hospital) shows that valiant attempts were sometimes made, but frequently failed, and the attitudes that saw the fashionable treating the inmates as a fit subject for sight-seeing demonstrates a lack of empathy we now find deeply shocking.

For the well-to-do, the alternative to putting a family member in a public institution was private nursing, somewhere quiet and well away from the family (the option taken by the British Royal family in relation to the epileptic Prince John in the early 20th century), or a private asylum. In general such relatives were quietly put aside and forgotten.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of private asylums were established on the edge of London in places such as Fulham and Kensington. I first came across this in relation to the fate of a brother of my 3 times great grandmother. The Parmenter family seem to have been particularly unlucky in their sons since a letter written in the 1790s refers to their eldest son Isaac being incapable of work, in some way handicapped, and his brother John being exceptionally small for his age and likewise unsuited to physical work – both died in their twenties. Their brother Robert Lee Parmenter (born in 1792) found work as a bank clerk in the family business, but by the mid 1820s the Lee family cousins were already making provision for care that would last for the rest of his life. When he arrived at the Kensington House Asylum is unclear, but it is to be hoped he was not there during the 1830s.

In 1838-41 it was the subject of an exposé by Richard Paternoster who had been forcibly detained there in 1838. Conditions were nothing like the idylic ones described in its prospectus.

‘He described an overcrowded, badly ordered institution in which the inmates were at the mercy of their often brutal keepers, some of them ex-convicts. “Occuption there was none, amusement none, music none, books none, newspapers none, baths none! cleanliness none, medical treatment none, friends none, food scanty and bad.” Paternoster detailed several examples of violence against patients, one of whom was beaten up for throwing a small bone over the wall into Sir John Scott Lillie’s garden.‘[1]

After the institution came under Cornishman Dr Francis Philp, from 1840 onwards, conditions improved significantly. Interestingly, from a genealogical point of view, although the inmates are easily found in the 1841 census, they are later listed only by their initials. Dr Philp was mis-transcribed as Philip and was away from home in the 1851 census, so the only solution to finding the inmates was to page through the census books to find Kensington House by its geographical location. You can find a fuller account of Kensington House here.

Many of the male patients seem to have been professional men – occupations listed in the 1841 census include farmer, planter, colonel, merchant, surgeon, several French people and a number of clerks. The relatively large number of French patients may have been due to the presence in the area of emigrés from the French revolution and the earlier use of Kensington House by the Jesuits. It is to be hoped that Robert Lee Parmenter did not arrive at the Asylum before 1840, but he was certainly there in 1841 and he died there of bronchitis in 1866.

Another sad and intriguing case is that of the second son of Frances Dalzell, who married George Duff in 1757 in Charles Street, London. Frances was a daughter of Susanna Augier whose family I have previously discussed. It appears that Frances met George in Bath, and although she was nearly seven years older than he was it was a love match. Her father was already dead and she and her brother had jointly inherited the Lucky Hill estate in Jamaica, and would also inherit from their grandfather General Robert Dalzell who outlived all his children and died in his ninety-sixth year.

Frances and George had a son called William Robert baptised in 1758, James in 1760, twins George and Jane Dorothea in 1765 and Frances who was probably born a year later. William Robert seems to have died young, both daughters died in their twenties and George, who went into the army, was for a time disowned by his father because of his wild lifestyle.

Two online references to James refer to him being ‘a lunatic from birth’, and one says that he was cared for in Beaufort House in Fulham under the name of James Thompson. Ironically it seems that he outlived his entire family, dying at the age of seventy-two. I have not as yet been able to verify these on-line references, but if correct they suggest that the care given in Beaufort House was good. It seems to have been a small institution, for a mid-nineteenth century report which listed Kensington House as having 44 inmates (2 under restraint) listed only five for Beaufort House, which also had two under restraint.

Without further information it is impossible to know what was the matter with James. The description of him as ‘a lunatic from birth’ suggests either that he was mentally handicapped, or perhaps that he had Down’s syndrome, although it would be unusual for someone with Downs to live into their seventies. He may have been autistic or have suffered from epilepsy, or perhaps he had a degree of cerebral palsy sufficient to make him socially unacceptable, but not to shorten his life.

Frances Dalzell died in 1778 and in her Will, written two years earlier, she makes no mention of her son William. She left £100 to James and £200 to each of her daughters with the residue of the Jamaican estates left to George. She left her shares in the Sun Fire Office in similar proportions with one each to James, Jane Dorothea and Frances and twelve to George. That she did not leave a substantial share to James, the eldest, reinforces the suggestion that he was incapable of minding his own affairs.

George Duff senior died in 1818 and George junior, described at the time as his only son, died in 1828. James was probably still living at the time.

NOTE I have recently added the following update to my previous article on the Augier clan.

POSTSCRIPT : 2nd August 2012 I have been looking again at the children of Susanna Augier and I think a confusion has arisen over her children with Peter Caillard. I now think that her children with Peter Caillard were Mary, Peter and Susanna and that there is only one child called Frances – the daughter of Gibson Dalzell.


[1] British History online.
Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

London graveyards and the Wonderful Mrs Basil Holmes

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 “Bella” Holmes, photographed in 1895 (courtesy of Jake Holmes)

But for the efforts of the wonderful Mrs Basil Holmes much of what we know about London graveyards and burial grounds would have been lost. Instead of which we now have not only the results of her labours in her book on The London Burial Grounds, but its descendants in modern websites such as Londonburials to aid in our search for lost ancestors. Many of those who went to Jamaica had London roots, and many who made their fortunes in Jamaica came ‘home’ to settle in and around the capital.

Isabella Matilda Gladstone was born in 1861, the sixth of seven children of John Hall Gladstone (FRS and a Scientific Chemist) and his first wife Jane Mary Tilt. Isabella’s mother, her eldest sister and her only brother died when she was three in an epidemic of scarlet fever and diphtheria. Her father’s second wife died in childbirth six years later, barely a year after their marriage. Margaret, the child of this marriage, would go on to become the wife of Ramsay Macdonald, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.

In 1887 Isabella married Basil Holmes who was Secretary to the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association (MPGA) which had been founded five years earlier. Between 1888 and 1896 Isabella had two daughters and two sons, with another son coming along in 1905. During the 1890s the family lived at  5 Freeland Road, Ealing in west London and were able to employ various nursemaids, a cook and a housemaid. The Freeland Road house was a solid brick-built Victorian villa, comfortably situated between Ealing Common and the Ealing Lawn Tennis Club, but the founders of the MPGA were only too well aware that many Londoners lived in squalid slums, seeing little sunlight, rarely seeing any greenery and with no safe places for their children to play.

It was the dawning age of metropolitan socialism that brought about the clearing of slums, the building of ‘model dwellings’ and the first social housing, and the erection of public baths, lavatories and wash-houses for those with no proper sanitation or running water at home.

Before she married Basil Holmes, Isabella had already been providing information to the MPGA. Looking at one of the classic eighteenth century maps of London, by John Rocque, she had noticed that many burial grounds and churchyards marked on it no longer existed. Intrigued, she  investigated what had happened to them and drew up a list which was published in the first MPGA report in 1884.

There was a serious lack of good information. From the mid-nineteenth century many burial grounds were so overcrowded as to become a serious health hazard, the ground level having risen several feet as coffin was piled upon coffin. Many were closed for new burials, and as congregations moved out of the City to the suburbs church attendances fell and churches were closed and demolished, replaced by commercial developments.

In 1884 the Disused Burial Grounds Act was passed with the aim of preventing unregulated development on graveyards. One consequence of this however was that builders finding bones would hush up the discovery and hastily cart away the evidence for disposal elsewhere. Isabella mentions that even in poor Whitechapel building land was worth £30,000 an acre, putting every unrecorded and forgotten burial ground in danger of development.

This then was the context in which she began her work, a task that lasted more than a dozen years, from the early days of the MPGA through marriage, a family, and finally the production of her book in 1896 which accompanied a set of colour-coded maps that she presented to the London County Council. The maps comprised 60 Ordnance Survey 25-inches to the mile sheets, with burial places still in use coloured blue, those that were disused coloured green and those now converted for public recreation coloured red. In the County and City of London she had documented 362 burial grounds, of which 41 were still in use and 90 had become public gardens or playgrounds for slum children. She did not include in this number churches and chapels which had burial vaults but no graveyard. She did however extend her searches to include non-conformist, Quaker and Jewish burial places.

Early on in her work Bella realised that there was no substitute for seeing things on the ground, and off she went notebook in hand searching for burial grounds that she knew should still be there, but which now were often back yards filled with rubbish. Often access was difficult, but a letter of introduction got her into a Jewish cemetery from which her Christian status would otherwise have excluded her. And she was not above climbing fences to peer beyond – ‘One day I climbed a high rickety fence in a builder’s yard in Wandsworth in order to see over the wall into the Friends’ burial-ground. No doubt the men in the place thought me mad, – anyhow they left me in peace.’

She would knock on doors and ask to look out of people’s rear windows to locate old graveyards. Moreover, intrepid but careful, she was quite happy to venture into parts of London she was told were unsafe. ‘An appearance of utter insignificance and an air of knowing where you are going and what you want, is the passport for all parts of London’. One feels she would have made a good spy!

Having collected a wealth of books and information during her searches, Isabella’s own book includes much useful background information on the development of London, albeit some of her archaeological comments have been superseded by more recent work. The book covers British and Roman burying-places; the graveyards of priories and convents; the Cathedral, the Abbey, the Temple and the Tower; the City churchyards; London churchyards outside the City; pest-fields and plague-pits; the dissenters’ burial-grounds; burial places of foreigners in London; hospital, almshouse and workhouse grounds; private and promiscuous cemeteries; the closing of burial grounds and vaults; graveyards as public gardens; cemeteries still in use and a ‘forecast for the future’.

In this last chapter she showed herself somewhat ahead of the times in discussing cremation of the dead, which would help to reduce the need for additional burial places. Not until after the First World War, when so many of the dead had no known resting place, would cremation become as accepted as burial.

The book also has an appendix with extensive listings of extant and disappeared burial grounds, and instructions on how to lay out a burial-ground as a garden. There are also many illustrations of churches and graveyards and contemporary photographs.

It all makes fascinating reading, and moreover her book is still in use by professional archaeologists in London. It is fascinating to compare Isabella’s descriptions of St Pancras after the arrival of the Midland railway, with the Museum of London Archaeology book on the St Pancras Burial Ground, published last year, following the redevelopments for St Pancras International station.

You will be hard put to find a copy of Isabella’s original book for sale, and if you do it will not be cheap, but thanks to print-on-demand technology you can easily obtain  a reprint from the British Library Historical collection.

It is well worth the read.