Facebook post #73 (#72 added to previous WWII Jersey post)
Just slightly more upliftingly, I just discovered an unexpected resident with our Essex family in 1939:
Vera Wisser, aged 17, Jewish refugee
I can find nothing else about Vera, but she was the maximum age for qualification for the kindertransport. This scheme was not a government initiative but volunteers were permitted to organise temporary immigration for unaccompanied children. It was on condition that the immigrants would cost the state nothing, including eventual repatriation.
Kindertransport, Liverpool St Station (Tony Avon)
The right were objecting to refugees, of course, e.g. “German Jews Pouring Into This Country” (Daily Mail). But an appeal for foster homes was put out on the BBC Home Service in November 1938. Cursory checks were made on potential foster homes, and eventually 10,000 children were settled.
“Some never saw their parents again; all suffered the pain of separation; some were so traumatised they couldn’t speak of what had happened to them for decades afterwards – not even to their children. But in each the light of defiance, humour and commitment to life shines through.” (Moss)
It seems probably that Vera was one of the 10,000. She would have landed at Harwich, and taken by train to Liverpool St – the pic is of the kindertransport monument there – and back up to Saffron Walden. The Barnards could afford it, and doubtless Vera was helpful around the house – Willmary, Newport. Still, a pleasing find.
The daughter of the niece from Jersey is Mum’s 2nd cousin Antoinette Hérivel, and she is a painter in Gabriola Island, British Columbia (which, incidentally but interestingly, she acknowledges as being on the unceded territory of the Snunéymuxw First Nation).
Antoniette’s work is often autobiographical, and I did know that she had spent time in Swindon when I found them in the census. However, it was still surprising to see that her Facebook banner is a picture of Swindon in the 1950s, complete with reference to the works hooter!
Painting of Swindon by Antoinette Herivel
She has had many exhibitions over the decades but her first publically displayed painting was in Swindon Town Hall.
More of Antoinette’s work can be seen on Instagram.
Found posted online a new pic, allegedly of my gt-gt gran (see posts #059 and #060). I originally posted that I would love to verify (I had doubts) but that the family resemblance is there.
Marilyn Beale has helped crystallise the thought. Looking at other photos, I think it is more likely to be my gt-gran’s sister Isabel Jane in about 1915. She had married a businessman of Scottish descent, and had a son and daughter in Jersey before they emigrated to Australia in 1913. The daughter Dorothy (presumably pictured) married in Tasmania. The son was lost at sea there while shark fishing in 1945.
Isabel (Le Brun) Mills
Incidentally, the exact dates for the family have been hard to pin down as they were methodists, and the records are yet to be fully digitised. Isabel’s niece, Estelle, married a Wesleyan minister, settling for a while in County Road, Swindon in the 1950s.
I found a Barnsley FC fan site where people are reminiscing about various scraps with Port Vale fans over the years. (2002, Vale chairman bought me a pint after his fans duffed me up; early 1990s coach window put through in a Stoke housing estate; 1976 FA Cup – kidnapping a Vale fan onto a Barnsley fan bus after he was banging on all the windows looking for trouble. They let him off in one piece at Penistone, so that’s all right, then.)
[In 1966] buses parked at top of hill, 2 chippy rowe coaches from cudworth go down the hill. Port vale fans at bottom of hill all scattered as young Arthur rowe put his foot down and went through them. Our driver bill ( lived in pinfold cottages in cudeth ) slowed down and the vale fans bricked the coach.
I take “young Arthur” to mean the son of Arthur Rowe (1875-1951), one-time greengrocer (1911), founder of the bus and coach business, and cousin of my gt-gt grandfather (via Mary Musgrave).
Arthur Rowe snr (Ancestry)
Grimly, I also found from the Commercial Motor archive, that in October 1947, one of the company’s coaches lost control descending into Holmfirth, when its propshaft broke. The driver attempted to stop the vehicle but the brakes failed to respond, and the vehicle careered out of control. It crashed into the side of a warehouse, part of which collapsed on top of the coach. Nine of the coach’s occupants were killed, and the remaining 24 were injured. The driver on the day of the accident, a week-end employee, had been with the firm for about three weeks, testified Arthur at the MoT hearing.
Later, (found via an ‘old bus’ reasearcher, Joe, on Old Bus Photos) that the partners in the firm were accused of failing to maintain the braking system and “Finding the case proved, the magistrates’ imposed a £3 fine on each of the five defendants—partners in the business [including Arthur].”
The ill-fated coach was an AEC Regal, like my snap from the National Bus collection.
William Evans, still remembered with great fondness locally, led the choir for 30 years through difficult times, including the war years, and a tragic accident in 1947 in which Mr Evans’s father was among the nine people killed when a coach carrying choristers, relatives and supporters to a music festival careered out of control down a steep hill as they approached their destination of Holmfirth, crashing into a warehouse in the centre of the town. William Evans died in 1965 when his choir was on the brink of its greatest achievements.
The injured and dying were, says Yorkshire Live, tended by a young Estonian refugee. She married an injured chorister, and their son became secretary of the choir (as of 2017).
The buses were nationalised by 1970 (Hansard) but, still, I found this:
A coach carrying home sixty children and staff of St John’s Junior School, after a visit to Crich Tramway Museum, went out of control on a steep Derbyshire hill. The quick reactions of the driver, Mr Brian Macey of Arthur Rowe and Sons, saved the children when he ran the bus into a grass verge and trees.
The pics are from a Barnsley history group – Rowe’s new yard, bought from a farm, 1960; the ‘Chippy Flyer’ Leyland; a Rowe coach, contemporary with the kidnap incident, latterly used as a home (photo: Flickr friend, Tim); .
Update on Family Tree Post #11. I finally saw the family gold at the Ashmolean. A small room full of gold things, and a big room full of silver things, bequeathed by cousin Michael Wellby.
Wellby Gold at the Ashmolean
Michael was a descendant of the wife of James Larard the clockmaker (post 35), whose family made the Dunkirk little ship (post 17). Harriett’s sister Charlotte married George Burrows, an officer in the Court of Chancery, Westminster Hall, and they lived close to the Larards in Kennington.
Their son George was a provisions merchant in Norwood, Croydon, moving in the 1880s to Ladywood, the Orpington mansion pictured in post 40. I’ve found that George had premises by Holburn Viaduct, near an early Nestlé depot, and owned the brewery in St Mary Cray. In 1901, he was at 211 Piccadilly. Their daughter Alice met and married diamond merchant Edward Wellby in Orpington. Edward was also a director of the hallmarked family silver dealers, and a neighbour when at his 9 bedroom country house, Crofton Hurst. In 1939, their son Hubert is listed as an antique silver dealer in Eton. Edward left £152k when he died the following year (around £9m today).
[At the age of eighteen, Hubert’s son Michael took a part-time job in the family business] where he acquired a lasting passion for the beauty and craftsmanship of early silver. He opened his own shop in Grafton Street in the 1960s, specialising in German silver of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which he became an acknowledged expert. Both at auctions in London and on trips to the continent with his wife, Joy, he made many discoveries and acquired many rarities. Several of these were sold through the shop but a few exceptional pieces were added to the personal collection which has now been bequeathed to the Ashmolean.
Artdaily
Update: my friend James Sallis sent this pic of 22 Piccadilly today (2022).
Routinely recording a wedding on the tree – Dorothy marries Peter in 1955 in Hemsworth, Yorkshire – I noticed something unusual. Peter had been born in Munich in 1923.
Upon investigation, I found that – in 23 Nov 1941 – his parents Siegfried and Paula has been deported by train from Munich, bound for a ghetto in Riga. There was apparently some controversy on how 59,000 deportees would be accommodated, and whether Reich jews were as inhuman as Ostjuden.
Eventually, five of the trains – 5000 people – were diverted to Kaunus in Lithuania. When the train reached the late C19 fortification on the outskirts of the city, the train was emptied and the SS shot everyone.
Mum has a third cousin, Dorothy, last known in Nottingham about 20 years ago. The picture is her mother’s wartime registration card showing that she was married in Jersey in 1942. It also shows that she was transported to Germany in 1943 with two children.
Phyllis Blampied Streader’s Registration Card
Hitler had ordered the first batch of over 5000 mainland-British-born deportations and their families in 1941 as reprisal for Britain holding German ex-pats in Persia. In 1943, 201 more – including Phyllis and her British-born husband Sydney and their daughters Dorothy and Marcia – were deported in reprisal for a commando raid on Sark.
The family were interned at a former Hitler youth summer camp, with a view of the Bavarian alps, at Biberach an der Riß. Conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary, and twenty died of disease, including – in October 1944 Sydney and, just before Christmas, Marcia. The camp was liberated on St George’s Day, 1945, and the internees flown to England in May. Phyllis died in Sheffield in July 1945. Dorothy was seven years old.
The (national, paywall, unmentionable) paper says that mum’s 2nd cousin (daughter of Donald Squire) has bought both Swindon theatres, amongst others (technically the operating co, I think). What a shame I don’t know her!
Best of luck to her in saving regional theatre, anyway. A dame (a real one, not a panto one) in shining armour.
“By this time next year, hopefully we’ll be back to the good old days,” she is quoted as saying.
Facebook post #062 and last of the original ‘lockdown project’ set (Mar 2021)
You will want a cuppa for this one.
Forget what you know – it wasn’t like that.
“It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in [Leadenhall St] London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator… The [East India] company had been authorised by its founding charter to ‘wage war’ and had been using violence to gain its ends since it boarded and captured a Portuguese vessel on its maiden voyage in 1602… By 1803, when its army had grown to nearly 200,000 men it had swiftly subdued or directly seized an entire sub-continent.” [William Dalrymple.]
EIC Flag
The EIC was not finally nationalised until 1858, by which time it had directly killed 300,000 Indians, half starved the population and crumpled the economy – the price of a cup of tea.
And the English gentlemen of the Raj? Step forward the ancestors: César Dupont, of Grenoble; Alexander McDicken of Glasgow; Thomas O’Leary; Donald MacDonald; James Bolton of Tipperary, Ireland; James Radley Hogan born to a Tipperary family in London. And yes, Samuel Crump of Middlesex; John Beale of Worcestershire and Warwickshire; and William Lewtey of Nottingham. It has been said that there were never more than 2000 white Britons in India (with 40,000 British soldiers in 1857).
Tipperary, 2009
James Bolton enlisted with the 11th Light Dragoons while it was in Ireland, and – at the tender age 16 – promptly deployed to reinforce Wellington’s army in the Peninsular Wars in Spain and Portugal. Then they were at the Battle of Waterloo, eventually bivouacked victorious on the Champs Elysees. In 1819, they were stationed at Cawnpore, India (the ‘Manchester of the East’), and were at the Siege of Bhurtpore in 1825. Three years later, in Allahabad, he married Mary Anne Blaney, who was probably Irish or Irish-Indian. By 1831, James had had two children, and died, aged 36.
Next up, Donald. Sadly, I haven’t yet managed to connect him to the 1100 years of documented Clan Donald history… He was probably a military man, born in Varanasi in 1795: his son Robert was a Gunner at the time of his marriage to James Bolton’s daughter Matilda in Calcutta in 1844. Their daughter, Lucy was born in the North West Frontier (now in Pakistan).
William Lewtey had also enlisted. When he died in 1854 – in the North West Frontier, at age 36, he was a Sergeant Major. He was awarded a medal for service in the Second Afghan War. He had married Elizabeth Hogan in Calcutta in 1842. She was born there in 1796, only three years after the East India company abolished Nizamat (local rule), and assumed full sovereignty of the region. Under the company rule, and later under the British Raj, Calcutta served as the capital of British-held territories in India until 1911.
Afghan War Memorial, ReadingAfghan War Medal
Elizabeth’s father had been James Radley Hogan. He was a Corporal with the Royal Scots in Trinchinopoly, Madras in 1820, and a Gunner with the 2nd Battalion Artillery in Bangalore (400km north), when he died 12 years later, at age 29. It may have been this James Hogan who, in 1819, was transported from London for life for stealing a handkerchief! He would have hoped to commute the sentence to a period of service with the EIC… William and Elizabeth’s son, William Henry Lewtey, was born 1000km NW of Calcutta, in Cawnpore.
Bangalore, 1890sBangalore, 2008
John Beale entered service as an Apothecary with the EIC’s European Bengal Army in 1817, and was with the 59th Foot in Fort William, Calcutta in 1818. “The apothecaries are charged with the preparation and administration of medicines, the care of wounds, accidents, and injuries, during the intervals of the visits of the surgeons, the admission of patients, and, in fact, are the general assistants of the medical officers in the performance of their professional duties in the field, in garrison, and in all the circumstances in which the troops are employed.” (more on the blog). Fort William was built to protect the city. The Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon there in 1756, when the Fort was briefly lost.
Mary Curley was likely also to have been from Bewdley, Worcestershire. (Apparently, Curley equates to the Irish Mac Thoirdealbhoigh – son of a man in the shape of Thor!). There is a Beale’s corner by the River Severn in Bewdley to this day. John and Mary married in Cawnpore in 1825, where their son Alfred Lionel was born in 1831. It was as well that they moved on, initially to the Police Hospital in Calcutta. In the year that John died in Chunar – 1876 – the Indian Rebellion came to Cawnpore, and nine apothecaries were killed.
Beale’s Corner, Bewdley
Alfred managed to land himself a clerical job – many were reserved for Anglo-Indians – but there was a strict ceiling on how high he could be promoted. He would have fitted in neither with the white nor the Asian community, and would have had a social requirement to keep up the appearances of the former with the means of the latter. By the time he married Jane Cotton in 1855, he was an accountant in a prison, 3200 km away in Moulmein (Burma). At one point, he was a 5th grade (Extra) Assistant Commissioner, possibly a travelling magistrate.
Jane’s father, Frederick, was a Clerk to the Commissioner and had the admirable brass neck to present Jane for baptism along with her sister Jeanette, who had been born a month earlier. Both are described as ‘base’ daughters, i.e. illegitimate. Jane seems to have been brought up by a step-mother, Hannah Fox, an “Indo Britain” (sic), who married Frederick when Jane was about eight. Hannah died at age 30, Frederick at 52.
Alfred and Jane had two children before they were married, and seven later children. The first of these, born seven months after they were married, was our Arthur (or Alfred) Curley Beale – my grandmother remembered he was known as ‘Curley’. Alfred snr made it to 59.
Alexander McDicken enlisted with the 72nd Regiment of Foot, which was deployed to India in 1782. His son Hugh was born in Secunderabad in 1803. Thomas O’Leary was a Sergeant Major with the 5th Native Cavalry, implying that he was of mixed race. He had two daughters by a woman with perhaps an Asian name, ‘Yaramah’. Hugh married Thomas’s daughter Ellen in 1824 in Bangalore. Hugh was a Gunner with the Horse Brigade when he died, aged 39. His widow lived until the ripe old age of 55.
Secunderabad, 1880Hyderabad, 2008
Next up, the Dupont family. Their most illustrious member was the Pierre who switched sides during the French Revolution, defended Marie Antoinette from the mob, escaped execution when Robespierre was killed, fled to America. There he founded one of the United States’ most successful and wealthiest business dynasties. Roosevelt married one of them. Our César, like other Huguenots in the family, fled mainland Europe for England. His son was the virulently anti-Catholic Vicar of Aysgarth and chaplain to the Chancellor of Lancaster (more on the blog). His son, John Dupont, was born in Wensleydale in 1740. He married Susanna Leonora D’Veer in India. She died of a ‘mortification’ when she was 24.
Despite surrendering a fort during the Siege of Arcot when “the Nabob’s people refused to fight”, John was promoted to Lt-Colonel and was commandant of Fort St David, the second centre of British power in southern India, until his death in 1807. Fort St David is where Clive of India – the aforementioned unstable predator – met his wife. She was from Swindon, of course. (There is more on the blog about all these places – see also map below.)
Map of British India
John and Susanna’s second daughter, Elizabeth, married Lieutenant George Crump’s son in Cuddalore, now in Tamil Nadu. Their son, George Samuel, married Ann Matilda Holland in Calcutta in 1828. Their son George Theophilus married Alexander McDicken’s daughter Agnes in 1851 at Fort St George, Madras. George S died of liver failure in 1873, aged 45. George T also died at age 45 – Agnes went first, so lived no longer than 37. Both the Duponts and the Crumps have monumental tombs.
Crump Tomb
Fort St George was where it all started in 1640, the first significant British settlement in India, built to secure the EIC’s interests in the spice trade. It was known as White Town (where the white people lived). The surrounding Black Town became Madras, capital of southern British India – it’s now Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu.
Fort St George
George T Crump was described on his death certificate as a government pensioner. He left a detailed and god-fearing will, stipulating how his house and worldly goods should be disposed of (mostly to the church, as his family had “behaved very shamefully negligent” towards him). The neatly written text is underlined when he stipulates that his dogs should be given to those who desire to have them but they may not be destroyed or brutally turned out of doors. Likewise, his black milk cow was on no account to be sold to a Musselman or butcher but rather to a Hindoo man or woman!
Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon
His daughter, Florence Eleanor Crump married Curley Beale in 1878, in Rangoon, and died 12 years later, aged 30. Curley had a clerical job like his father. Rangoon compared favourably with London for its civic conditions at the time. William Henry Lewtey joined the British Indian Army as an Apothecary in 1863, and married Lucy MacDonald at the Sanawar/Kasauli Hill Station (300km north of Delhi, in the lower Himalayas) in 1869. He was an assistant surgeon in Rawalpindi (now Pakistan) and moved to Meerut only a few years after the Indian Rebellion started there, and then on to Burma.
An offending cartridge from the “Indian Mutiny”
These were my grandmother’s four grandparents. George Lewtey met Olive Beale in Rangoon, and they married there in 1909. I told their tale into WWII in post 29.
“Are you White British?” I was asked when I had my Coronavirus jab last week (“More or less”). Perhaps, as well as ‘English’ and ‘European’, I could have written ‘One Quarter Anglo-Indian’ on my census form.
My magazine editor cousin, Tina Gaudoin, has written movingly in The Times about her reconnexion with Burma, stemming from the “Why does your dad always have a suntan?” question in her Norfolk playground (Google it). For me, like so many, that is not going to happen. I have exchanged letters and emails with people in America and Australia who remember India, but most of them are no longer with us, including one relative who had been posted to Swindon in WWII. I have now started to connect online with genetic relatives, so I really am part Hogan, and part O’Leary, and so on.
But the Anglo-Indian community, once strong, has been scattered to the four winds, and assimilated on every continent. Such is the fragility of identity. And so ends my last instalment.
at the Ashmolean. A small room full of gold things, and a big room full of silver things, bequeathed by cousin Michael Wellby.
