Category Archives: Biographies

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

The White Witch and a Cautionary Tale

5 Comments

The story of the White Witch of Rose Hall in Jamaica is a huge tourist attraction for the beautifully restored Great House of Rose Hall.  The story goes that Annie Palmer murdered her several husbands and numerous black lovers and was eventually murdered in her bed by the slaves she had tortured and cruelly treated.  Having come from Haiti and being brought up in the traditions of voodoo, it is said she haunts the place to this day.

Before we go into the detail of the story let me tell you a cautionary tale.  Some years ago a historian of science was interested to read in an academic paper that the ancient Greeks had discovered photochromic chemicals, which meant that a piece of cloth dipped in the liquid would change colour according to the light.  Intrigued she checked out the reference in a respectable academic journal, and found that paper referred to another one.  Finding the second paper she tracked the reference to yet another respectable academic journal.  The trail eventually led through a series of about a dozen academic papers back to its source – a university student Rag Mag which told the story of how Alexander the Great had dipped a piece of cloth in the chemicals and wound it round his wrist, the cloth changing colour according to the time of day.  It was known as Alexander’s Rag Timeband!

The moral of this tale is always check your sources, and always if you possibly can go back to the original.

So it is with the White Witch of Rose Hall.  If you go online you will find lovely footage of the house as it is today and numerous references to the story which has done wonders for the tourist trade in the area.  But for those interested in the real background, it is a case of never let a good story get in the way of the truth.

It is no wonder there was confusion once the tale had become current, for there are two estates in Jamaica called Rose Hall (one near Linstead and this one at Montego Bay), two John Palmers with four wives between them, and Rosa Palmer who was herself married four times. It is sometimes said that Rose Hall was name after Rosa, but it is more likely that, like the other Rose Hall near Linstead, the root lies with the Rose family with whom Rosa’s husband John Palmer was connected.*

Rosa’s first husband was Henry Fanning who began to build the first Rose Hall but died in 1747 less than a year after their marriage. Next she married George Ash in 1750 who died about two years later having spent £30,000 building Rose Hall; and thirdly Norwood Witter who seems to have spent her money and died leaving her to sort out his debts about twelve years later. There is nothing suspicious about any of their deaths, and eventually Rosa married the widowed John Palmer who owned the neighbouring Palmyra estate and who outlived her. They were happily married for nearly twenty-three years and Rosa was seventy-two when she died in 1790. Her husband created a splendid marble memorial to her and he lived until 1797, having married his third wife Rebecca Ann James two years after Rosa’s death. However he had extensively mortgaged the Rose Hall and Palmyra estates, and both properties were no longer lived in when he died at Brandon.

The widowed Rebecca Ann left for England where she re-married, living on an annuity funded by her former husband’s estates which had passed to his two sons by his first wife, absentee landlords who lived and died in England.

Enter the second John Palmer and the fourth Mrs Palmer in this story – the one to whom the legend now attaches. John Rose Palmer was a great nephew of the owner of Rose Hall and in 1820 he married Annie Mary Paterson, a Jamaican of Scots descent, who was not brought up in Haiti and of whom nothing unpleasant is known. The huge debts on the Rose Hall and Palmyra estates were too much for John Rose Palmer to recover from and the properties passed into the hands of the receivers, having been empty and cared for by just one or two slaves for many years. Thus when John Rose Palmer died in 1827 his wife sold out what little interest she still had in the estate for £200. She died in 1846, a good decade after her supposed murder, leaving what little she had to her god-daughter Giolia Mary Spence.

So how did two perfectly blameless women and their several husbands come to be attached to a tale of lechery, torture and murder?

A Falmouth newspaper editor published a pamphlet in 1868 containing most of the ingredients of the tale, but linking it to Rosa Palmer rather than Annie. Others then pitched in with different versions, supposed family memories, hearsay and third hand accounts.  By 1911 a book on “Old St James” had transferred the blame to Annie Palmer and claimed her husband’s fate was unknown, which was clearly untrue since his death was reported at the time in the Royal Gazette and in the Kingston Chronicle and, his obituary read “His intrinsic worth, kind heart, and generous disposition obtained him the esteem of all his acquaintance, but to his family, and those friends who had the pleasure of being intimate with him, his loss is irreparable.”[1]

The legend became complete and fact and fiction inextricably merged, with the publication in 1929 of the novel “The White Witch of Rose Hall” by Herbert G. de Lisser. In the 1960s various serious and successful attempts were made to establish the facts behind the legend, those by Geoffrey S. Yates and Frederick J. DuQuesnay are republished on the Jamaican Family Search website and a third by Glory Robertson is in the Jamaica Journal.

For anyone researching a family story with lurid details, the White Witch provides a cautionary tale – always go back to the original sources. The real story may differ from the legend, but may be no less interesting.

Rose Hall c. 1930

Unoccupied and unloved for 130 years Rose Hall Great House declined and was in a state of near collapse, as sadly are so many of Jamaica’s great eighteenth century mansions, but unlike many others it was rescued and restored between 1966-71 by John Rollins and his wife which shows clearly what can be done with buildings others have thought impossible to save.

Rose Hall (Jamaica)

Rose Hall Restored

And if its continuance depends in part on a legend with no basis in fact? As I said earlier – why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

* UPDATE: 08 February 2019.
I have recently received the following helpful clarification about the naming of Rose Hall from Paul Hitchings, for which many thanks.
“In your article The White Witch you cast doubt on the tradition that Rose Hall was named after Rosa Kelly (successively wife of Fanning, Ash, Witter and Palmer) and suggest the root of the name more probably lies with the Rose family. The tradition, however, seems supported by the circumstance that the property is mentioned in the marriage settlement of Rose Ash and Norwood Witter, 12 May 1753, which recites that Rosa Ash is seised in her own right of Rosa (sic) Hall in the parish of St.James and is now made the subject of special settlement whereby she is to receive into her own hands the rent and proceeds of Rosa Hall. In the probate inventory of Norwood Witter, 17 January 1767, reference is made to slaves on the Rose Hall estate – so it looks as if the property’s name migrated from Rosa to Rose Hall in the interval. It is certainly the case that Rose Hall was in Rosa’s hands before her marriage to John Palmer, with whom you connect the Rose family – though I dare say her previous husbands also had dealings with the Roses. The Witter marriage settlement is detailed and referenced to Lib.151, fol.225, in a letter written by Leslie Alexander (who worked for many years in the Jamaica Records Office) and printed in The Daily Gleaner on 23 July 1895; this is accessible on-line.”

[1] http://jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples2/mpalmer.htm

Rose Hall Restored – By Urban Walnut (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons.

Biographies, Genealogy

Happenstance and Villainy

Comment

 

George II shilling

One of the things I love about genealogy is tripping over a discovery while looking for something quite different.  Earlier this week I was working my way slowly through the Kingston marriage register when a name suddenly jumped out at me – nothing whatever to do with the person I was looking for.

If you are a regular reader of this blog you may remember I have previously written about Scudamore Winde who spent many years as a merchant in Kingston, dying there in 1775.  He was the son of John Winde and Mary Scudamore who had married at Kentchurch in Herefordshire in January 1728.  Their first child Mary was baptised at Kentchurch in December 1729.  The only information I had about when Scudamore went to Jamaica related to the fact that his father had committed suicide in October 1759, after which he had sold a family property at Twickenham and left for Jamaica with his younger brother Robert.  I knew nothing of any earlier connection with Jamaica.

Now suddenly there was the name Maria Scudamore Winde in the Kingston parish register five years earlier.  It is not a common name and therefore I have no doubt that this was Scudamore Winde’s sister who was three years older than him.

On the 2nd of  October 1755 at Kingston she married Gershom Williams Esquire.  To date I have no idea why she was in Kingston and whether her father had a previous connection with Jamaica, which seems likely. At twenty-six she would not have required her father’s permission to marry, but it would have been conventional and perhaps he was present. Indeed that could explain why Scudamore Winde went there after his father’s death, possibly picking up the reins of a merchant house his father had established there.

So I went in search of Gershom Williams and thanks to the Jamaican family search website and an abstract from Caribbeana I found a Will written in December 1759 by William Williams of the parish of St Anne Jamaica.  The Will begins in conventional fashion requesting his executors to pay all his just debts and then deals with the disposal of Flatt Point and Woodstock plantations and sugar works, together with a plantation pen and pimento walk and a Mansion house in the parish of Saint James.  These were being put in trust, with the trustees being Robert Arcedeckne and Zachary Bayly both of Jamaica, and Michael Atkins a Bristol merchant.  The money raised was to be devoted to a cause referred to as “the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of exposed and deserted young Children in Lambs Conduit Fields London”.  This was the Foundling Hospital established by Thomas Coram about fifteen years earlier to provide for the needs of abandoned babies and children, and was indeed a worthy cause.

The Will went on to leave £500 Jamaican apiece to a niece and nephew and then –  “Item I give and bequeath to that most abandonedly Wickedly Vile detestable Rogue and Imposter who hath assumed and now does or lately did go by the name of Gershom Williams pretending to be a Son of mine one Shilling only to buy him an Halter wherewith to hang himself being what he hath for a long, long, very long while past Merited and deserved from the Law and hands of the Hangman for his great and manifold Villanies.”

What on earth had Gershom Williams done?  Was he really the son of William Williams, or a conman who had been passing himself off as his son?  In either case William Williams had thought it important to include him in his Will.  Today we sometimes refer to someone being cut off without a shilling, but the importance of leaving somebody only one shilling, or one penny, or some very small amount of money, was that it would prevent them from contesting the Will on the grounds that they should have been included.

It appears that William Williams actually made an earlier Will dated the 26th of May 1759 leaving the plantations to his son William Williams and the remainder to the trustees to sell on behalf of the Foundling Hospital, however by December of that year his son William had presumably died and the Will was revised, leaving the majority of the estate for the benefit of the foundlings.

There is a reference in the catalogue of the Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection at Hamilton College[1] to articles of agreement between Gershom Williams of Jamaica and the governors of the Foundling Hospital, dated October 1763, by which Gershom Williams agreed to pay £4,500 to the Foundling Hospital by instalments in return for the governors assigning their interest in all the estates of William Williams to the use of Gershom Williams. Did the Foundling Hospital ever receive the money?

If Gershom Williams had pulled a fast one he did not live long to enjoy it.

Maria Scudamore Williams was buried in Kingston on the 17th of December 1763. Following the death of William Williams, and barely two months after the death of his first wife, Gershom Williams remarried and in his own Will, dated September 1765, he left most of his worldly goods to his “faithful and beloved wife Anna Williams”, formerly Anna McNeal and to his brother Job Williams.

Administration of the will of William Williams was finally granted in 1768 to John Edwards who was Zachary Bailey’s attorney.  Robert Arcedeckne was by then living in North America, and Michael Atkins had died.

And what had Gershom Williams done that so alienated his father?

I have absolutely no idea, and if anyone can tell me what his supposed or actual crimes were I would love to hear about it.


[1] University of Florida Press, 1994

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

The Story of a Mourning Brooch

Comment

 

One of the delights of running a website like this is when a reader gets in touch to provide further information relating to something they have read here.

When I wrote about Marchant Tubb and his wife Ann in one of my earliest pieces I was not then certain who his wife was. I did know that she had previously been married to Stephen Morant and had a daughter called Mary Powell Morant.

The reader who contacted me collects mourning brooches such as this lovely Georgian example made for Mary Powell Royall to commemorate her mother, and where possible researches the person commemorated. By a piece of clever detective work, decoding the coat of arms on the tomb that Marchant Tubb had erected for his wife, my informant was able to show that Stephen Morant’s wife Ann was called Ann Anderson and that they were married in Jamaica on the 4th of June 1737.

Ann Morant gave birth to two children, Stephen and Mary Powell Morant, before her husband died on 30 October 1742. Mary Powell Morant was baptised when she was eight months old, her baptism being recorded in the register for St Thomas in the East “Christen’d at Wheelersfield in Plantain Garden River a female child of Stephen Morant and Ann his wife aged 8 months 2 days and named Mary Powell whose Godfathers are Messrs Thomas Wheeler and Richard Swarton ye first of ’em being represented by Mr Gibbons Hodgins and Godmothers Mrs Mary Crames and Mrs Elizabeth Swarton, ye first of ’em being represented by Mrs Mary Cussans the father and mother being present.”

On the 14th of February 1745 Ann Morant remarried to Samuel Wheeler who in turn died about 1755. Some time after this she married her third husband, the surgeon Marchant Tubb, but sadly neither I nor my informant have been able to track down a record of this marriage which I am sure took place in Jamaica. By 1768 Marchant and Ann Tubb were in England together with their daughter Mary Powell Morant.

Mary Powell Morant was a considerable heiress and when after her mother’s death she decided to marry Joseph Royall in 1782, her stepfather took great care to ensure that the marriage settlement protected her rights, for as a femme couverte she might have lost control of it all to her husband. It provided further considerable work for the lawyers when, within a very short space of time, she left her husband and returned to live with Marchant Tubb. Temperamentally it seems the couple were completely unsuited, at least according to Mary ‘s very close friend Frances Lee who wrote to her brother “And what do you think is come to pass? Mr and Mrs Royall are separated by mutual Consent. They each complain of the violence of the others Disposition. Mrs R. is returned to her father whom she no longer calls Tubby. The marriage was concluded in such haste that I am not the least surprised at the separation – I pity neither.”

When Marchant Tubb died Mary inherited the share of the Wheelersfield estate that had come to him via his marriage, and on her death in 1816 she in turn left it to Frances Lee. There is no specific mention in Mary’s will of items of jewellery or the mourning brooch, although she did leave all her clothes to Elizabeth Pack (formerly Elizabeth Harrison) the black servant who had come to England with the Lee family in 1771.

There is one further little mystery that my informant found as a result of the researches into the mourning brooch. On 22 June 1739 a child called James Morant was baptised at Wheelersfield in St Thomas in the East said to be aged one year ten months and eight days old, the son of Stephen Morant and Ann Gowing. Stephen Morant was present at the baptism but Ann Gowing was not, and his godmother was Mrs Ann Morant. The infant James Morant appears to have been born about two and a half months after the marriage of his father to Ann Anderson.

Exactly one month later the adjacent record in the parish register shows the marriage of Ann Gowing to James Frazier a bricklayer. The marriage was by special licence rather than by banns which means that someone was able to put up the money for the licence and it took place in the house of Mr Roger Wood with Mr Richard Jephcott a millwright standing in place of the bride’s father.

Illegitimate children were of course very common in Jamaica, and in this case it would appear that Stephen Morant’s new wife was entirely happy to stand godmother for his illegitimate child, and that provision was being made for his mother. There is no mention in the parish register (which does generally record colour) of Ann Gowing’s colour or status, and therefore it seems possible that she was a poor white girl, perhaps a servant, rather than a slave or “housekeeper” to Stephen Morant.

Whatever the actions of Mary Powell Morant’s father, the brooch she had made to commemorate her mother and the tomb created by her stepfather for his wife are tributes to someone who was clearly very much loved during her lifetime.

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

The Sugar Barons – Book Review

Comment

 

Matthew Parker’s book The Sugar Barons tells the history of three families in the West Indies and does so in a way that covers a wide sweep of the history of the Caribbean from the mid 17th century to the early 19th century. It is a compelling read and extremely well researched.

Quoting a number of contemporary sources Matthew Parker describes the background to the context in which sugar would become so important, and the early settlements in Barbados peopled by royalist prisoners of war shipped out of the country by Cromwell. By 1649 rebellion in the poor white population and a fall in their numbers when indentured servants found no land available for them in Barbados, led to the rise of slavery as a means of providing the large labour force needed for the cultivation of sugar. In discussing slavery Parker says “Sugar did not cause slavery in the British Caribbean” and he demonstrates the conditions that led the Barbados sugar planters increasingly to use slave labour, and the international context in which this was set. He shows the rise of the sugar planters in the context of British and international politics and conflict from the mid 17th century onwards.

The founder of the first family empire Parker discusses was James Drax  a former Roundhead leader who developed plantations in Barbados. Drax Hall which he built sometime in the early 1650s still stands, the oldest surviving Jacobean mansion in the American colonies.

After covering the establishment of the colony in Barbados, Parker describes the invasion of Jamaica and the rise there of the Beckford family. The third family who form the focus of this book were the Codringtons. In the migration of colonists from Barbados to Jamaica they not only extended personal fortunes but also took cultivation and production techniques with them that helped to boost sugar production and make Jamaica the most important of the sugar colonies.

Earthquake, hurricane, and epidemic disease all shaped the experience of the Sugar Barons as did the fear and experience of slave uprisings and the Maroon wars in Jamaica. In spite of all this the rising demand in Europe for sugar, and its by product rum, not only created fortunes but also led to the rise of the important West Indian sugar lobby in London.

Matthew Parker not only covers the rise of these three important colonial families but also their decline as absentee landlords failed to manage their estates well, spent their fortunes rashly, and did not adapt to changing international conditions. Nevertheless he argues that “The success of the sugar industry helped shape the modern world. After all, the landscape of Jamaica was dominated by ‘dark satanic mills’ long before that of England. The far flung trading system that shifted the sugar and rum to their distant markets and supplied the islands with machinery, raw materials and luxury items, issued in an era of global commerce, long supply chains, and ruthless exploitation of human and natural resources…. The legacy of the sugar Barons for Britain is about more than just the resulting riches…. The sugar empire also helped to define the country’s role in the world and what it meant to be ‘British’ “.

The endpapers include a map showing the West Indies and the Spanish Main about 1700, there are several other maps, and there are a number of black and white illustrations of the places and people described in the book. There are also three outline family trees for the Drax, Codrington and Beckford families, and a chronology of contemporary events setting the family stories in a wider context.

Matthew Parker’s book is a compelling read, thoroughly well researched, and a brilliant introduction to the history of the Caribbean  and the rise not only of the Sugar Barons but of the modern world.

 

 Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons Family, Corruption, Empire and War, Hutchinson, London 2011. ISBN 9780091925833 Hardback.

And just out in paperback, Windmill Books, ISBN-10: 0099558459 ISBN-13: 978-0099558453

Biographies, Jamaican Life, London Life

Mixed Race Jamaicans in England

2 Comments

The status of  mixed race Jamaicans in eighteenth century Jamaica was always going to be less than than of white colonists, but it was possible for them to become established and successful in England. A case in point are two of the children of Scudamore Winde.

Ambrose Scudamore Winde (he seems to have dropped the Ambrose early on) was born about 1732 at Kentchurch in Herefordshire, son of John Winde and Mary Scudamore.  The beautiful Kentchurch Court is still in the hands of the Scudamore family as it has been for the last thousand years or so. In 1759, following the suicide of his father, he and his brother Robert went to Jamaica where Scudamore Winde became an extremely successful merchant.  He was also Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court of the Judicature and a member of the Assembly.

Like many white colonists of the island he had relationships with several women but did not marry.  When he died in late September 1775 he left generous legacies to his various children. His business had prospered and a large part of his assets were in the form of debts owed to him. According to Trevor Burnard[1] he had  personal assets of £94,273, of which £82,233 were in the form of debts. This would be equivalent to about £9.3 million relative to current retail prices or £135 million in relation to average wages today.

Scudamore Winde freed his negro slave Patty who was baptised as Patty Winde in 1778 at Kingston when her age was given as about 50.  Patty and her daughter Mary were left land that he had bought from Richard Ormonde in Saint Catherine’s with the buildings on it, and £100 Jamaican currency together with two slaves called Suki and little Polly.  It is not clear whether Mary was Scudamore Winde’s daughter for although her name is given as Mary Winde she is referred to as a negro rather than mulatto.

Scudamore Winde had a mulatto son called Robert, possibly the son of Patty, who was born about 1759, and three children with Sarah Cox herself a free negro or mulatto (records vary).  Her children were Penelope, John and Thomas born between 1768 and 1774.  John may have died young and Thomas elected to remain in Jamaica where he had a successful career as a merchant in Kingston.  Robert and Penelope travelled to England under the eye of Robert Cooper Lee who was trustee and executor of his close friend Scudamore Winde’s Will.

Robert went into business in London as a merchant, listed in various directories from 1784 and for some of the time in partnership.  The firm of Koithan & Winde traded out of 20 St Martin’s Lane London in the 1780s, and there are records of Robert Winde ‘gentleman’ at 48 Jermyn Street in the 1790s when his wife Jane is listed as a haberdasher taking out fire insurance with the Sun Insurance company.

Robert married Jane Bateman at Holy Trinity Clapham in 1781 and they had at least six children. Four were living in 1794 when Robert Cooper Lee left legacies to ‘the two sons and two daughters of Robert Winde’, but only Jane Anne seems to have lived to adulthood.  She married late in life to a widowed solicitor called Henry Pinniger of Westbury in Wiltshire, who had seven children by his first wife.  The implication is that Jane Anne Winde had inherited sufficient income of her own to live comfortably as a spinster until then.

Robert Winde’s partner Frederick Koithan was born at Bremen in Germany and applied for naturalisation in England in 1791 by Private Act of Parliament.  He died in 1809 but the partnership seems to have ended before this with Robert Winde then trading on his own.  I have not found a burial for Robert Winde, but his wife Jane was recorded as living in Downing Street Westminster at her death in 1822.

Robert’s half sister Penelope married a young lawyer called David Steel on 1 May 1786 at St Martin Orgar and St Clement Eastcheap.  Robert Cooper Lee was a witness at the wedding.  Penelope was a considerable heiress. She had been left  £2000 in the first part of her father’s Will with a further £2000 on the death of her brother John plus another £1500 in a codicil.

This is particularly interesting since under the 1761 Act of the Assembly illegitimate mixed race Jamaicans were debarred from inheriting more than £2000 and I have not found any private Act permitting the Winde children to have more. I can only guess that since Robert Cooper Lee was administering the trust from England he had liquidated the Jamaican assets so the trust fund was based in England and therefore exempt.

Although David Steel began married life as a barrister, on the death of his father he took over his business as a nautical publisher and bookseller.  When he died in 1803, aged only 39, the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded

David Steel Esq. of Little Tower Hill. He was universally respected by those who had the pleasure of his acquaintance, and has left a widow and a large family to lament the irreparable loss of an affectionate husband and fond father in the prime of life. Mr. S. was orginally employed in the Navy Office, but quitted his situation to the study of law and practiced for several years with the profession of a barrister; he quitted the profession on his father’s death and succeeded him in his business as a book, map and chart seller. The literary world are under great obligation to him for the active part which he took as one of the committee for obtaining the repeal of the duty on paper[2].

 

He had been publisher of the Navy List and of “The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship and Naval Tactics” which is still available as a digital reprint.

Penelope found herself a widow with five small children and remarried to William Mason in 1806.  It seems likely that her eldest son David Lee Steel did not get on with his stepfather, and when he died at the age of 31 of “a rapid decline “(probably tuberculosis) his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine hinted at a family row over his inheritance.

 Gentleman’s Magazine  Vol.88 Part 1 Jan-June 1818, p.572

 

His younger brother Scudamore Winde Steel was made of sterner stuff and had a long and distinguished career in the Indian Army ending up as a Lieutenant General and with a knighthood. Their sister Penelope Sarah became a schoolmistress at the National School, Batson Street, Limehouse and lived to the age of 84.

Lt.-Gen. Sir Scudamore Winde Steel

Anne Steel followed in her father’s footsteps marrying twice into the printing and publishing trade. Some of her descendants live today in the USA but her nephews and nieces had all died without children by the early twentieth century.

Her nephew Charles, son of Sir Scudamore Winde Steel, married the sister of Kitty O’Shea – but that as they say is another story.

 

 


[1] Kingston Merchants and the Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century, Trevor Burnard, BGEAH, Stirling, 3 September 2009

[2]    Gentleman’s magazine Vol. 73 (1803), p 93.

 

Biographies, Genealogy

Wills, silver candlesticks, and green handled knives

4 Comments

Samuel Alpress c. 1780

 

The most disappointing Wills from every point of view are those where a man leaves everything to his ‘beloved wife’ (un-named) and says nothing else, apart perhaps from commending his soul to God and requesting payment of all his just debts – not the unjust ones of course! Admirable as it is that he provides amply for his widow, he leaves little to the family historian.

The best Wills for a genealogist are those that mention lots of friends and relations by name, perhaps even including their home town or street. If they also include details of the relationship so much the better, although you do have to remember that ‘my sister’ might be ‘my sister-in-law’, my niece could be a great niece and ‘my kinsman’ may give you weeks of work trying to work out just how they were related.

By far the greatest quantity of seventeenth and eighteenth century Wills relating to Jamaica were written by men, but there are Wills for those women who outlived their husbands and had property in their own right. In some cases such as thrice-married Mary Rose who I wrote about a while ago, although the main part of her husbands’ estates went to her sons she still had property of her own.

In the case of Margaret Eleanor Alpress, whose Will I recently transcribed, she had outlived her husband by many years and was wealthy in her own right.

Margaret Eleanor Alpress ‘of the City of Bath in the County of Somerset Widow but now in London’, was born Margaret Aikenhead in Jamaica in the early 1740s and married Samuel Alpress in the parish of St Andrew on the 27th January 1761.  He died in 1784 leaving his widow and three surviving daughters.

Samuel’s father George Alpress had owned 125 acres in Clarendon and 51 acres in Vere in 1754 and used his wealth to send Samuel to be educated in England where it has to be said he did not shine! During his time at Jesus College, Cambridge Samuel  was said to have started a riot in Ely and in a letter to Stephen Fuller in 1757 (the Fuller family were in loco parentis on George’s behalf) William Hawes wrote that ‘The conduct of Mr Allpress does not warrant his remaining at college’. He also appears to have run up considerable debts.

Samuel returned to Jamaica where his father died sometime before 1766. His mother Jane remarried on the 25th of June 1766 to Dr Cholmondeley Dering of South Carolina but was drowned at Dry River four days after her wedding while returning  from Spanish Town to Withywood. Samuel inherited £4000 Jamaican currency and the plantations.

Samuel and Margaret had at least three daughters born in Jamaica of whom only Elizabeth survived. Two more daughters followed – Milborough, who may have been born in Jamaica, and Jane Eleanor born in London in 1771. It was to these daughters that Margaret left her most personal possessions.

Elizabeth who had married Kean Osborn at Spanish Town in 1780 was left a silver christening bowl; and Milborough, married to Richard Crewe of Crewe Hall in Cheshire, was left a silver epergne. It was the youngest daughter Jane Eleanor who received the bulk of her mother’s personal possessions. Whether this disparity reflected earlier gifts to the older daughters, their husbands’ relative wealth or favouritism to the youngest is unclear. Kean Osborn and his heirs are shown as owners of the Caswell Hill property mentioned in the Will in various early nineteenth century listings, by which time they were absentee landlords, its size given as over 2000 acres in 1845. Jane’s husband Richard Bulkeley was the sole executor. It is possible both other sons-in-law were out of the country, Kean Osborn in Jamaica and Major General Richard Crewe serving with the army.

Jane received ‘three Mahogany Cases with Silver Locks and Handles, the two larger Cases containing two Dozen Green handled Knives and Forks ferrelled with Silver and one Dozen of Table Spoons, and a Marrow spoon in each Case and the smaller Case containing one Dozen of Green handled knives and forks ferrelled with silver and one dozen of Desert Spoons, and also a Silver Cruet stand both Compleat, two pair of high Silver Candlesticks, one flat silver candlestick, one large silver Tankard and Cover, two Silver Cups and Covers ,one large round Silver waiter, one ditto next size two hand round Silver waiters, one Silver Tea urn, one Tortoises Shell Tea Chest with silver Canisters Compleat, fifteen Silver Tea spoons and a pair of silver Tea Tongs’.

Margaret’s sister Elizabeth Townsend received a large square silver tea board, her sister Milborough McLean a large silver saucepan and cover, niece Elizabeth Trelawny Townsend a silver teapot, and a friend called Mary Stern a small silver saucepan for cream.

There were jewels also, with daughter Elizabeth receiving ‘my Diamond Necklace and Ear Rings, one large Diamond Pin, and her Father’s Picture set round with Diamonds’, while Jane was left ‘my two next sized Diamond Pins and six smaller ones, my Diamond Pin with her Father’s Hair and a smaller Diamond Pin with Hair in it and my Rose Diamond Ring’.

There was a hoop diamond ring for god daughter Elizabeth Raine(?) Wilhelmina Pringle and money gifts to grandchildren including grandson Kean Osborn, who sadly would die at Salamanca during the Peninsular War.

The item that most intrigued me was the green handled knives and forks with their silver ferrells. A little research showed that such handles were often made of ivory stained green. If anyone can tell me how this was done I’d love to know.


 

Biographies, General Interest

Robert Kelly – Master at Arms

2 Comments

The taking of the Princessa a Spanish Man of War, April 8, 1740, by his Majesties Ships the Lenox, Kent and Oxford

By Peter Monamy (Collections of the National Maritime Museum) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

In 1758 Robert Kelly, a Jamaican in the Royal Navy, endured an adventure that included capture by the French, imprisonment, escape and resulted in him fetching up in London penniless and alone.

Robert was the son of Ann Rose, sister of Mary Johnston Rose, mentioned here before. His uncle was Denis Kelly of Jamaica and Lisduff in Ireland, and his father was therefore one of Denis Kelly’s brothers – Edmund, Darcy, Charles or John, all of whom lived in Jamaica between about 1710 and 1740. Sadly gaps in the parish registers mean it has not been possible to establish which one was the father of Robert nor exactly when he was born, although it is likely this was in the 1730s making John Kelly the most likely candidate for his father since the other three all died between 1728 and 1731.

By 1757 Robert was a Master at Arms on board the Oxford, a man of war in the Royal Navy when the ship was paid off at Plymouth. He was promised a place on another ship, but having heard nothing decided to make his way to London on board a merchant ship in order to contact the Admiralty directly. The condition of the roads was generally so bad that travel by sea would normally have been the quicker route.

Somewhere in the English Channel the ship was captured by a French privateer and all on board were taken to Bayonne in France where Robert was imprisoned. The ship in question may have been either The Africa or The Venice, both of which were reported in the Leeds Intelligencer of Tuesday 15th March 1757 as having been captured by Bayonne privateers.

Another report refers to Bayonne as harbouring over thirty such privateering vessels. These were privately owned vessels licenced by Letters of Marque to prey upon ships of an opposing country, and whose master and crew hoped to make their fortune taking rich prizes. As such they aimed to capture a ship rather than engage with it or sink it. Sale of the captured goods and ransom of any important prisoners added to their income.

Robert was not wealthy, nor was there anyone who would have paid a ransom for him but by a stroke of luck after eight months in prison he was able to escape and made his way across the border to Spain, having by now lost everything he had. Somehow he found himself a ship, probably working his passage, and eventually arrived back in London expecting to be able to make contact with his uncle Denis Kelly. Disaster struck again, for he discovered that his uncle had died in an accident in Ireland the previous December when an eagle had attacked the horse of the chaise he was travelling in causing it to be overturned.

Robert now found himself at the Ship Ale House in Buckingham Court, Charing Cross, with the promise of a ship from Admiral Forbes and a lodging bill he could not pay. Unless he could discharge the debt he would be prevented from taking up the warrant from Admiral Forbes and would be destitute and deprived of all means of earning a living.

We know all this because Robert then wrote to the only person he could think of who might be able to help – Rose Fuller for whom his aunt Mary Johnston Rose had been housekeeper for many years, and who he had last seen sixteen years previously.

There is no account of what happened next, but I am inclined to think that Rose Fuller did come to the rescue – for one thing the letter from Robert Kelly is among his personal papers (East Sussex Record Office ref: ESRO SAS-RF/19/167). Also there are Admiralty records for a Robert Kelly who was a gunner in the navy between 1779 and 1783, although that may of course be another Robert Kelly.

It was a great pity that Denis Kelly, erstwhile Chief Justice of Jamaica, did not live to learn of his nephew Robert’s resourcefulness which was in stark contrast to the behaviour of his brother Edmund’s legitimate son Henry Kelly (who died in January 1745 aged nineteen). Henry was packed off back to Jamaica by Thomas Beckford in December 1740, his behaviour in England having been thoroughly reprehensible.

Having put him on board the Ashted, Beckford wrote to Denis Kelly, who was then still in Jamaica:

I am very much concerned that he should have made no better use of the Education You have been at the expense of for him, and wish you may be able to turn his mind to better Principles; No advice would do him any service here, and had he stayed, I should have expected to have found him in some Gaol, for some Crime or other.  Mr Corkran, who I understood had married a Gentlewoman who was his Relation, was so good to invite him to his house, a little way from the Town, on purpose to divert him, and keep him from Ill Company, as well as to give him good advice, but he gave him the Slip, and Carried away two books which he sold.

(National Library of Ireland, Westport Papers, MS 40,910/5(5) ).

Henry Kellys’ behaviour was relatively extreme, but the lot of small children of the colonists was not always a happy one. Sent to England for the sake of their health and to obtain an education, they often lacked both love and supervision, boys in particular were often subjected to regular beatings at school. It is probably not surprising that some of them went wild.

I’d love to know what happened to Robert Kelly in the end, but as with so many of those we encounter in old letters and documents, we glimpse a moment in their lives and then they fade from view.

Biographies, Jamaican Life

Stephen Blankett – A Captain on the Jamaica run

2 Comments

 

Ships in Kingston Harbour c.1745

I first came across Stephen Blankett when he was mentioned in the Lee letters as captain of the Landovery, the ship in which Robert Cooper Lee sailed to Jamaica.  I was curious to know what might be discovered about such a man and amazed to see how much I could find out armed with only the name of the ship and her captain’s surname.

Stephen Blankett must have been born about 1705, or perhaps a little earlier, for he married Elizabeth Born in 1726 at St Marylebone by Vicar General’s licence issued on the 15th of September.  He may have come from a family of Thames lightermen, the skilled sailors of small boats who plied their trade in London’s river ferrying goods to and from larger ships anchored there, and acting as a river taxi service for passengers wishing to avoid London’s crowded  streets, or to cross from one bank of the river to the other.

Stephen and Elizabeth settled in Maidenhead Court in Wapping where the first six of nine children were born between 1728 and 1738, and baptised at the church of St John at Wapping.  About 1740 they moved across the river to Rotherhithe where three more children were born and baptised at St Mary’s Rotherhithe.  Living so close to the river was obviously ideal for someone who earned his living from the sea.

The first official record I have come across for Stephen Blankett and his ship the Landovery is in 1740 when for several months they were held in port, fully loaded and ready to sail, but unable to do so because no convoy was available to protect them on the voyage to Jamaica.  On June 25, 1740 the Landovery was waiting at Deptford, and the Sheldon under Captain William Bird was moored nearby at Gallions Reach.  By the 4th of July it was reported that The Industry a stores ship, with William Clarke as Master, was at Blackwall and due to leave for Spithead and then Jamaica with a cargo similar to that of the Sheldon and Landovery.  Official papers recommended that she should sail with the same man of war as the other two ships.  On the 7th of  July Stephen Blankett arrived at Spithead and wrote to request orders to sail.

However the National Maritime Museum holds a letter written in early October from “the owners of the Sheldon, Landovery and Industry transports who have been ready to sail for 3 months. Captain Renton, who was due to convoy them, sailed in July. Commodore Anson sailed on the 18th Sept without them. They claim demurrage from that time and ask for a special convoy.”  In four months the ships had only travelled as far as Portsmouth.

Sailing in the Caribbean carried with it the risk of hurricanes and in 1749 several ships leaving Jamaica in early September suffered severe damage, the Landovery however, leaving on the 1st from Pig Bay had escaped.

Throughout the 18th century, apart from the hazards of the weather, ships regularly faced the danger of capture by privateers, or opposing navies.  This posed particular problems for the colonists in the Caribbean islands who were far from being self-sufficient, unlike those on the mainland of North America, and who were over dependent on imported supplies.

Jamaica had virtually no indigenous manufacturing and imported a huge range of necessities.  The cargo of a ship like the Landovery would have included items such as barrels of salt beef and pork; casks of butter from Ireland (its rancid flavour on arrival being something of an acquired taste!); beer and wine; oil for lamps; clothing and shoes; rolls of cloth; pots and pans; powder and shot; copper stills for rum making and sugar boiling equipment; iron collars and shackles for restraining slaves; agricultural tools for working the plantations; high quality ready-made carpentry such as window frames for planters’ mansions; and luxury items such as tea, furniture, silverware, oriental silks and porcelain.

And of course there were passengers such as the young Robert Cooper Lee.  We sometimes underestimate the extent to which people travelled to and fro across the Atlantic during the 18th-century, and it was common for merchants and planters to make trips back to Britain on business, for families to travel “home” perhaps to visit England for the first time, for sick colonists to travel back to Europe in the hope of regaining their health, and for quite young children to be sent to England for their education. On the outward voyage there would also be young men (and they were mainly men) off to seek their fortune, and particularly in the early part of the century indentured servants who had sold their labour for a fixed term and hoped to gain independence and some land at the end of it.

The convoy eventually sailed, but in November 1744 the Westminster Journal was again reporting that the Jamaican convoy had been held in port since April for want of a naval escort.  It must have been a considerable relief to everyone concerned when the War of the Austrian Succession came to an end in 1748 and for nearly a decade the seas were a little safer – until the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1757.

It was common for Jamaican ships to be named after the estate which they supplied, and there was a Landovery estate in the parish of St Anns, so it is likely that the original owners of the ship were the owners of the Landovery estate.  Stephen Blankett may have had a share in his ship, or he may simply have made use of the opportunities it provided.  Either way by the early 1760s we find him trading as a merchant in his own right when ‘Stephen Blankett and Company of Rotherhithe’  based at Princes Street, owned a ship called the London, a vessel of 300 tons armed with 18 carriage and 4 swivel guns.

The Landovery herself seems to have had a chequered history during the 1750s. In November 1753 returning from Jamaica under Captain Miller, she was listed as lost off Boulogne and 20 crew were reported drowned. There may in fact have been more men on board than normal, for another newspaper reported that she had picked up the crew of the  Charming Betty sailing from Dublin to Bordeaux which had been run down by a Dutch dogger heading from Cork to Nantes. It seems possible the Landovery was successfully salvaged. At the time  “forty puncheons of rum and some planks of mahogany” were recovered, and in October 1756 the Leeds Intelligencer reported that a ship of the same name sailing from Liverpool to Jamaica under Captain Johnson was captured and taken to Havre de Grace.

By the time Stephen Blankett made his will in 1762 he was a relatively wealthy man able to leave much stock and personal property to his wife Elizabeth, and to request that she should sell enough of his investments in the 3% consols to provide each of his children with £500.  Blankett died at 26 Princes Street Rotherhithe in March 1765 and was buried at St Mary Rotherhithe on the 29th of March.

In June of 1765, two months after the death of Stephen Blankett, Princes Street in Rotherhithe, was largely destroyed in a terrible fire caused when a pitch kettle boiled over.  More than two hundred houses, numerous warehouses and other buildings were destroyed and 250 families were made homeless.

Of Stephen Blankett’s nine children, at least five lived to grow up.  William became a shipbuilder, Lydia married John Beach a mariner of Princes Street, Esther married Samuel Meek a ship owner, and Elizabeth married George Dominicus an East India merchant.

John Blankett (1741-1801) following his father to sea, had an interesting naval career. At one point condemned to death in Gibraltar for a murder, he was later reprieved and attempted to gain support for various voyages of exploration but was turned down in favour of Captain Cook.  By 1799 John Blankett had become a Rear-Admiral and commander of the Leopard. He died on the Leopard near Mocha on the 14th of July 1801.  According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he was described as ‘an unusually good linguist, having a perfect mastery of French, Italian, and Portuguese. Seen by many as a good officer and an accomplished and amiable gentleman, he was criticized by others for his bad temper and eccentricity during his last days in the Red Sea.’

Elizabeth Blankett outlived her husband by a decade, and was buried at St Mary Rotherhithe on the 8th January 1775.

Biographies, Jamaican Life

Mary Johnston Rose – How to become legally white

1 Comment

Sample of eighteenth century Indian chintz.

The Spanish Town census, featured here recently, listed three people who were described as “free Mulattoes or Descendants from them admitted to the privileges of white people by Acts of the Legislature”.

They included Mary Johnston Rose and her son Thomas Wynter. Mary was a free mulatto, the daughter of Elizabeth Johnston who died in 1753 a free negro. Mary may have been born as early as 1700 when there is the baptism of a Mary Elizabeth daughter of Elizabeth Johnston ‘a negro wench’ on 5th July 1700. If this is the right mother and daughter then Elizabeth was probably a house slave at the time and later freed. It seems probable that Mary’s father was one of the Rose family, possibly Francis Rose (1656-1720), or William Rose (d. about 1724).

There is no record of how Mary acquired her education, but that she did so at a time when most women, whatever their colour, were illiterate suggests that she had a favoured upbringing at the hands of her father.

Mary was said to be related to Rose Fuller (a plantation owner and key player in island politics; Francis Rose was his great-uncle and William Rose his cousin) and she was his housekeeper for about twenty years until he returned to England in the summer of 1755, landing at Portsmouth on the 18th August. The role of housekeeper frequently equated to that of common law wife and there was clearly a strong degree of affection between Mary and her employer who was the acknowledged father of her son William.

After Rose Fuller left Jamaica he sent her various items, including a carpet. In May 1756 she wrote that these were “such marks of your esteem for me as I shall never forget” and she forwarded a list requesting calimancoe[1] shoes, coarse linen (probably for servant or slave clothing), chintz (perhaps Indian chintz such as pictured above), tea and a white beaver hat. She sent him some boxes of sweetmeats “which will serve to remind you that you have left here a person who always thinks of you”. In a further letter in December 1756 she wrote “I most heartily thank you for all your favours which have been very great to me, but notwithstanding them, I have often known the want of your being here, since your departure. May you long enjoy your health is the sincere wish of your most affectionate honourable servant Mary Rose”.

Clearly she missed him, but knew that she would never see him again.

Mary had two sons by different fathers – Thomas Wynter who was probably the son of Dr William Wynter; and William Fuller – born on the 28th of January and baptised on the 18th of April 1735 – who was the son of Dr Rose Fuller. From a letter written by her nephew Robert Kelly to Rose Fuller in 1758 we know that William Fuller was sent to England to be educated at his father’s expense, but as nothing further is heard of him it seems he probably died young. Robert Kelly was the son of Mary’s sister Ann Rose, and his father was one of the five Kelly brothers whose Wills are on this website, most probably John Kelly who died in 1740.

Mary also had a sister Sarah Johnson, a niece called Peg whose child she took in when Peg was drowned in a storm, and nephew and niece John Schutz Johnson and Ann Rose – Sarah’s children.

Thomas Wynter, William Fuller and Robert Kelly were all classified by Jamaican society as quadroons and as such did not have the same rights as white people, although having mothers who were free meant they too were free. However in 1745 Mary applied for herself and her sons to be accorded the same rights as whites, and in 1746 the English parliament confirmed an Act of the Jamaican Assembly granting those rights.

“At the Court of St. James 17.12.1746.  Present the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in Council.  Whereas the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Island of Jamaica with the Council and Assembly of the said Island did in 1745 pass an Act which hath been transmitted in the words following viz An Act to Intitle Mary Johnston Rose of the Parish of St. Catherines in the said Island, a free mulatto woman and her sons Thomas Wynter and William Fuller begotten by white fathers to the same rights and privileges with English subjects born of white parents.  The Act was confirmed, finally enacted and ratified accordingly.”

This was not a wholly unusual event, there were a handful of such Acts each year from the early eighteenth century onwards, but the proportion of all the mixed race adults and children granted such rights was small and it does indicate that Mary had some influence over her own position, albeit presumably through the fathers of her sons, both of whom were members of the Assembly at the time.

Had her sons been born a few years later their position would have been more difficult, for in December 1761 the Jamaican Assembly, alarmed by the numbers of mixed race illegitimate children of the Plantocracy inheriting from their white fathers, passed an Act to “prevent exorbitant grants and devises to Negroes”.  William Wynter was one of three men to sign a protest against the Bill.

Nevertheless the Act was made law and so in 1783 Mary’s son Thomas was forced to petition for the rights of his own mixed race children William Rose Wynter and Mary Mede.  The baptism record for William Rose Wynter lists him as a mulatto so it is possible his mother was black.

Although Thomas Wynter was listed as a Millwright in the 1754 census, by the time of his death in 1789 he was able to leave £1000 to his daughter Mrs Mead, and an annuity to Mrs Hemming the mother of his two children, and to direct that Hampshire Plantation and Prospect Penn and all his other real estate and slaves in Jamaica should be sold by his Executors for the benefit of his children. His estate was valued at £65,820 and the money from the sale was put in trust invested in securities in England.

After a career in the Army, William Rose Wynter ended his days in England dying in Devon in 1846, and his sister married an English vicar and also left Jamaica for England. The descendants of William Rose Wynter through his son Thomas Rose Wynter can be tracked down through the nineteenth century, also in the Indian Army and later in Cornwall. The descendants of Mary Elizabeth Wynter Mead nee Hemmings can be tracked into the late twentieth century.

When Rose Fuller died in 1777 he left his house in Spanish Town to the lifetime use of Mary Johnson (sic) Rose “to whose care and attention under God I conceive my life has been more than once preserved in several dangerous illnesses I had in Jamaica”. He left her an annuity of £100 Jamaican currency (worth a bit over £70 sterling) annually for her lifetime, which was the continuance of a similar annuity he was already paying her. She was also left the lifetime use of the contents of the house except for what might be needed for the use of his attorneys managing his property from the Grange, and he requested, but did not require, that she might live at the Grange Pen to assist the attorneys when necessary. Mary was also left the use of six female slaves with any children they might have, again for her lifetime; and mention is made of her chaise and horse. Clearly she was left well provided for, but she later supplemented her annuity by letting out lodgings and she was able to buy her house in Spanish Town. She died a relatively wealthy woman.

On the 19th of March 1783 the parish register for St Catherine recorded the burial of “Mary Rose mulatto Old Age”. She had reached the age of over seventy and possibly as much as eighty three, a very good age in Jamaica, after a full life which had seen her and her sons become legally white.

 

If you would like to know more about women and the African Diaspora, and about Mary Rose, you can find it in Gendering the African Diaspora, Indiana University Press 2010, which contains a paper by Linda L. Sturtz entitled Mary Rose: “White” African Jamaican Woman? Race and Gender in Eighteenth Century Jamaica.

The letters written by Mary Rose and others referring to her are in the collection of the Fuller papers held at the East Sussex County Record Office at Lewes, England.


[1] Calimancoe was a dense, and expensive fabric used for shoes, stiffened petticoats and waistcoats. It was a shiny fabric with a striped or chequered pattern made of wool with silk or mohair.

 

Biographies, Jamaican Life, London Life

The Portrait of Frances Lee

14 Comments

 

Francis Cotes (English, 1726-1770), Portrait of Miss Frances Lee, 1769.

Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Vogel M1964.5. Photo by Larry Sanders.

 

This beautiful portrait of Frances Lee was painted for her parents by the English artist Francis Cotes in 1769 and today hangs in the Milwaukee Art Museum. If she looks rather solemn perhaps it is because she had been sent away from her family to school in England and neither she nor they could know whether they would ever meet again.

Frances Lee was born in Spanish Town Jamaica on the 31st October 1758, the eldest child of Robert Cooper Lee and Priscilla Kelly, and was baptised in the St Catherine’s parish church Spanish Town on the 23rd of January 1759. The parish register entry for Frances reads:

“Frances Lee a Quadroon” and on the line below, John Venn the vicar who transcribed the registers wrote “I believe a white illegit. child “. Technically since Priscilla Kelly was a free quadroon, Frances was in fact an octoroon.

In late 1767 or early 1768, at the age of nine, Frances (known in the family as Fanny) was sent to school in England. It is not clear whether there were specific fears for her health, although she suffered health problems throughout her life and early mention is made in the family letters of a six month period away from her school in Streatham.

Then in May 1768 her uncle Joseph Lee made a trip from Jamaica to England, leaving in haste because of fears for his health. While in England he visited his niece at Mrs Endleigh’s school in Streatham. It is likely the school was recommended by the Fuller family who had a house there. At first Fanny did not recognise her uncle, perhaps because she had not seen him for so long or perhaps simply because she did not expect to see him in England.  Joseph however was able to report that she was ‘admirably improved’ and ‘in extreme good health’.

I have been at the school where every thing is in the utmost Order and Regularity…Mr Fuller and myself have been all over the School and seen the Beds and other accommodations which are all with the greatest neatness and elegance.

It was important for the family to verify that Frances was being well cared for since even expensive girls’ schools could be chill and unpleasant places. In an account of Camden House where his daughter was until her death in 1797, Arthur Young recalled that ‘The rules for health are detestable, no air but in measured formal walk, and all running and quick motion prohibited, preposterous! She slept with a girl who could only hear with one ear, and so ever laid on the one side, and my dear child could do no otherwise afterwards without pain, because the vile beds are so small they must both lie the same way…..She never had a bellyful at breakfast.  Detestable this at the expense of £80 a year’.[1]  Why he allowed his poor daughter to continue there is a mystery to me.

On his first visit to the school Joseph stayed an extra day in order to see his ‘pretty niece’ dance. While in England he spent some time on business trips, on sightseeing and on family visits out of town, but he saw Fanny in London when she was staying with friends and he reported in a letter to his brother having seen her again and said that he considered her to be ‘the Flower of the School’. Fanny had become a firm favourite with her Uncle Joe, and there were plans for a family celebration during the Christmas holidays with her Aunt Charlotte Morley, and her three Morley cousins.  Joseph confessed to Robert that he had taken the liberty of presenting Frances with a new silk dress for the winter – possibly even the one in the painting.

The portrait must already have been commissioned by the autumn of 1768 because Joseph promised his brother that he would see it finished during the Christmas holidays. In March 1769 Joseph wrote to his brother

I have had her Picture drawn by Cotes who is in great repute here and is considered as next to Reynolds in the Art and when it is completed it shall be sent to you by the first safe Opportunity – the Price will be a few Guineas beyond the sum you mentioned which I apprehend will not be disagreeable to you as it will always remain a handsome Picture even after she has outgrown the likeness.

There was a delay sending the picture ‘a very strong likeness of her’, so that it could be put into a ‘neat Italian fluted frame’ and it was not until October that year that it was finally despatched to her parents in Jamaica .  The cost was thirty Guineas ‘the usual sum for a picture of that size’, and the frame cost an additional six pounds eight shillings. You can see the shipping order that included the portrait here.

At school in Streatham, Frances received a letter written by her father in April and carried by Mr Moulton, a friend who presented her with a guinea from her mother.  A Christmas letter from Frances had reached her parents together with a purse and ‘swordknot’ (an ornamental tassel attached to the pommel of a sword) that she had made for her father.  The main news to reach her was that her young brother Robert was to sail for England. Joseph Lee remained in England long enough to meet his six year old nephew, who was sent to Harrow School in the autumn of 1769, and finally returned to Jamaica in 1770 where he died in 1772 at the age of thirty-six.

In 1771 Robert Cooper Lee brought his family back to England and like many who had made their fortune in Jamaica he never returned there. The portrait of course came with them. Frances, who suffered from health problems throughout her life, never married. She inherited substantial Jamaican interests from her father and from two friends and lived to a comfortable old age dying at her home in Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London on 7th December 1839. Her younger sister Favell married the banker David Bevan and according to Audrey Gamble (née Bevan) who wrote a history of the Bevan family[2], the family failed to buy the portrait of Frances Lee back at an auction in the early twentieth century and so it rests now, beautifully restored, in the care of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century,  Penguin, London 1966,  p.342

[2] Gamble, Audrey Nona, A History of the Bevan Family, Headley Brothers, London. 1923.