“Oh Paul McNeil! Thank you so much for this! I’ve always wondered about this sort of thing and now I can see that there is not one drop of Royal Blood anywhere in my tree!” Dann…
Source: Danny Baker’s Family History, the Riddle of Windsor Riches to Poplar Rags
Lunch at Gilray’s Old London County Hall Building
In Part 1 Part 1: Finding the “Lost Temple” for an old mate and Part 2 Part 2: “What’s all the Waller about then?” we traced the maternal and paternal families of my mate Les Temple, who had slung a family mystery onto the dinner table when we were out for one of our occasional
“…let’s ‘av a pint and a bit of nosh, and tell each other the same old stories so we won’t forget ’em before we get dementia…” bashes.
…and it was a good laugh, as it always is. This lunch was in Gilray’s Steak House which is housed in the old Greater London Council (GLC) headquarters on the Southbank of the Thames, an institution for which we both used to work 40 years ago. Gilray’s overlooks Westminster Bridge, and brings back some great memories. Probably put me in a good mood, so the revelation that there was such a great mystery in the Temple Family, was too good to pass up. As we always say at Time Detectives:
“Every working class family has as much right to have their family history remembered and cherished as any family of the nobility.”
So having found the genetic ancestry of Les’s Family in parts 1 and 2, the last part of the puzzle was how and why did the Family end up with the Surname Temple, when their paternal line were the well to do, but slightly mental Wallers, and the maternal line were the hard working Gunmaking Scots Erskines. we can start by finding out were the Temple line came from.
The Temple who gave Les’s Temples the surname Temple was one William Henry Temple born around 1820 in Stockton-On-Tees County Durham.
William turns up in living in lodgings at Falmouth Road, Newington, Southwark, South London in 1871. He was a travelling “Commission Agent” which was basically a travelling salesman, although what he was selling is not clear. He was an unmarried 51 year old man and profoundly deaf, he probably wasn’t a great catch. There the story may have ended with William passing his life as a Bachelor, but his life would change in 1871.
In 1821, within a year of William Temple’s birth in Stockton-On-Tees, a child named Frederick Brown was born in Woodham Walter, just to the East of Chelmsford in Essex. He worked as a Gentleman’s Servant and married Mary Ann Gardner in 1842, the following year they were blessed with their first child Sarah Ann Brown. The couple went on to have a further eight children over twenty years. But the one we will focus on will be the eldest child Sarah Ann.
Sarah Ann, like many of the women in this story found employment as a Domestic Servant, and at the tender age of 18 was working miles away from Essex for a household in Croydon Surrey. Like the women in the Erskine Family Domestic service didn’t work out for Sarah Ann, and at the tender age of 19 she was back in Springfield Chelmsford with her family where she gave birth as an unmarried mother to her son Edward.
Edward was looked after by his Grandparents whilst Sarah Ann worked in domestic service nearer to home in Chelmsford. Her father was working as a Carman and Coal Porter, so life wouldn’t have been easy with several children to feed as well as a new grandchild.
At some stage around 1870 Sarah Anne Brown met William Henry Temple the same age as her father. How they met is not clear, most likely Sarah Ann came back down to London to work in Domestic service again, and met William Temple there. They hit it off and the middle aged deaf salesman found a wife, and the unmarried mother Sarah Ann Brown, along with young Edward in tow, found a husband and protector.
The couple set up home in a flat in Camden House, Kensington, and William took on Edward Brown as his own son, and he was renamed Edward Brown Temple in recognition of this. The boy did well, working in a Warehouse and then as a Grocer’s Assistant. It may have started as a marriage of convenience for both of them, but it undoubtedly had a loving core to it as the couple had seventeen happy years together until William’s death in 1888.
Edward continued to prosper after his step father’s death, looking after his mother in Cavendish Buildings Clerkenwell. Cavendish Buildings were a reclaimed school building, redeveloped as a site for “artisans’ dwellings”. Known at first as St Paul’s Buildings and later as Cavendish Buildings, these opened in 1890, and the Browns moved in when they first became available. The Block was developed into 72 two and three-roomed flats arranged in four linked six-storey blocks, those at the north and south ends apparently retaining some of the school fabric. Access was via a doorway on Dallington Street into a small courtyard, where a large, cast-iron staircase with decorative balustrading led to long, gallery-like balconies.
Cavendish Buildings
These Buildings were classed as very respectable, with no broken windows, and flowers on show on the windowsills, put there by the housewives to brighten up the area.
Edward was doing well working as a Grocer’s Assistant, and in 1900, married Martha Annie Bond.
Martha Annie Bond was the eldest daughter of George and Clementine Bond from Offley in Hertfordshire. George was a Groom, who looked after horses for their owners, but after becoming unemployed in 1871, went out on his own as a Cab Driver (a horse drawn cab that is).
Martha Annie went to London to find work in Domestic Service, and found employment with a wealthy Widower’s household in Jermingham Road New Cross, South East London. She was taken on as a “Lady’s helper” looking after the Widower’s elderly Mother-in-law who lived at the address. How she met Edward Brown temple is not clear, but in 1900 they married at Hatfield in Hertfordshire in her parent’s home Parish. Within a few years, 1903, their daughter Vera Ethel Clementina Brown temple was born at Little Heath Hertfordshire.
There the story may have ended, but then in 1912 “Cyril Waller”, Les’s Dad, was born illegitimately to Emma Erskine, quietly away from Clerkenwell in Deptford, looked after by Emma’s mother, and financed we assume by the Father’s family the Wallers.
From the records it seems that Cyril was raised by Edward Brown Temple and Martha Annie Temple (Bond). When this happened is not clear, but there is a distinct possibility that Cyril was “informally” adopted by the Brown/Temples, soon after birth.
I would speculate that after the birth of their daughter Vera, the Edward and Martha found that they were unable to have anymore children, and there is a distinct possibility that Edward would have liked to have had a son, and in 1912 Cyril came along unwanted it would seem because of his illegitimacy by both sets of his parents.
Baby Cyril’s plight would have resonated with Edward who was himself the illegitimate son of a Domestic Servant, but who’s mother had keep hold of him, and with the help of her parents managed to bring him up albeit in relative poverty until William Henry Temple, the kindly deaf middle aged travelling salesman had come along and offered safety and security , and raised the boy in a loving home of his own. Cyril represented Edward’s opportunity to pass on the same selfless kindness to another illegitimate boy and raise him as his own son. Compassion passed down through the generations as a noble Meme in the Temple Family.
So we know what happened, i.e. Edward Brown Temple and Martha took on Cyril as their own, and Cyril took not only the Temple surname, but also dropped the “Waller” and adopted Edward’s name as his own middle name, which says a lot for his love for his adopted parents.
So how did the connection come about? This will need to be intelligent speculation based on the facts we do know. The family storey is that Cyril was brought up by an Aunt, but we were not able to find an obvious relationship between Cyril and Martha who raised him, so it seems there must have been another relationship.
There is a common theme linking the women in the story to Domestic Service in South East London. Emma Suttle had worked as a Maid in Camberwell before winding up in Wandsworth Prison, and was living in Camberwell when she married William Dodd Erskine, her daughter Emma Erskine was a Domestic Maid in Bromley South London, Martha Annie Bond who along with Edward Brown Temple adopted Cyril had been a domestic servant in Deptford, Emma and her mother went to Deptford to give birth to Cyril, so it is likely that the various women involved. So it is possible that the women had some contact earlier in their lives.
Another explanation would be that Edward Temple the grocer new the Erskines from Clerkenwell, as they did not live that far from each other, we may never know for certain.
Before we leave the story there is a postscript of a possible Temple/Erskine/Waller connection.
In 1924 Emma Erskine, Cyril’s Mother married a widower, and ex-Royal Navy Sailor called George Francis William Hand and moved to Hackney. George Hand was now a Post Office Sorter.
Perhaps a coincidence but William Charles Waller, Cyril’s putative father Stanley Waller’s Uncle, was a Principal Clerk in the London Postal Service, a very important role.
In 1939 we find Cyril living in Ealing with Martha Temple (Edward Brown Temple having died in 1923) doing very menial work stuffing hemp under bedding.
In the 1940s Cyril manages to get a job as a Postman, a good job at the time, and a major step up from where he had been stuffing hemp mattresses. Did he receive a helping hand? Either through his Mother’s guilt via her new husband George Hand, or perhaps, were the Waller’s still paying their debt to young Cyril? Did Cyril’s Father’s Uncle come to the rescue in Cyril’s hour of need, as a way perhaps of keeping the situation quiet going forward? perhaps coincidence perhaps not?
A footnote into modern times, Les’s putative Grandfather Stanley Waller was still alive in 1969, a few years before we worked together, and his Grandmother Emma Erskine/Hand died in 1956 in Sidcup just South East of where Cyril was living in Peckham, and the same year that Martha Annie temple died, so Cyril lost two mothers in a single year. Despite being so close in both time and space, the Family story was lost until now.
Les’s surname is now Temple, but it has no genetic link with his family whatsoever. despite this the elderly deaf salesman from Stockton-On-Tees, William Henry Temple who died in 1888, passed down a legacy of compassion and the idea of Family as a loving unit whether there were blood ties or not. What better legacy could a man ask for, and how proud can a family be of bearing the name of such a man?
So having found out about Les’s Dad Cyril and Grandmother Emma’s origins Part 1: Finding the “Lost Temple” for an old mate, it was time to try to unravel who Les’s paternal Grandfather was.
Which brings us back to the mystery of the “Waller” surname as a middle name on Les’s Dad’s birth certificate.
We know that Les’s Grandmother Emma Waller had been a young Domestic servant in the household of a widow called Chappell, and that the widow’s daughter Jessie Chappell had married a clerk called Harold Waller, but what was the background to the Waller Family?
The first Waller in the line that we could find was John Waller, born around 1764 who was a Ladies’ Stay Maker, he ended up living on a private pension in the 1840s on Blackheath, then a village, now a suburb of South East London.
The Stay Maker’s son Charles Waller, was born around 1791, and was trading as a Cheesemonger during the Napoleonic War, from at least 1811, based at 176 Bermondsey Street Southwark, South East London now, Surrey in the early 1800s. This may not sound very grand, but cheese was a staple of everyday life and also a very valuable commodity, and Charles’s business was thriving, enough to allow him to have a dwelling, a shop, a warehouse, and stables in Bermondsey Street. Charles had been fortunate enough to gain from the lack of foreign imports during the Napoleonic Wars forcing food prices up, as well as the demand for food supply to the Army and Navy that had the same inflationary effect on food prices at home.
Prosperous, Charles married the wonderfully named “Mary Cock” at St Antholin’s Church, 
Budge Row in the City of London in 1810. They would be together until Mary’s death in the 1830s, the couple had four children, three boys and a girl between 1813 and 1831.
Charles’s shop is no longer there, it was demolished in the mid-19th century, but the site has been mentioned in the context of an Archaeological Survey for some redevelopment work:
“176 Bermondsey Street, was insured as a cheesemonger and butcher to Charles Waller in 1819, according to Royal and Sun Alliance Insurance Group records. It appears the ground floor was used as a shop at this time (LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/480/953062), probably with residential occupation above”
The Archaeological survey was carried out prior to demolition of the mid nineteenth century building that had replaced Charles’s Business. The site is now due to be developed as a Hotel in 2016: “Historic Environment Assessment ©MOLA2016 14 P:\SOUT\1646\na\Assessments\176-178_Bermondsey_St_HEA_06-09-2016.docx”
The location of Charles’s business is marked on the map below:
Charles was doing very well, thank you very much, he had a warehouse full of cheese, a shop to sell it from, and a stable for the delivery cart, albeit in an area surrounded by the smell urine and dog droppings used by the tanneries in the locality, but a good existence none-the-less. Charles Waller’s life took a downturn in the 1830s when his wife died, but he picked himself up and life and business went on, in 1838 he married Harriett Gibson (originally Harriett Moss) a widow, and had two more children a boy and a girl.
Charles and Harriett remained in wedded bliss for ten years, until 1848 when their circumstances changed in a way that was out of their control, and that would affect the whole of Bermondsey and indeed the whole of London.
In September 1849 the great social reformer Henry Mayhew visited Bermondsey to report on an outbreak of Cholera that hit London in 1848 and lasted through 1849. This Cholera almost certainly started in India and was transported by infected seamen coming into the London Docks. Mayhew chose Bermondsey in particular to visit because, in his own words from The Morning Chronicle:
“Out of the 12,800 deaths which, within the last three months, have arisen from cholera, 6,500 have occurred on the southern shores of the Thames; and to this awful number no localities have contributed so largely as Lambeth, Southwark and Bermondsey, each, at the height of the disease, adding its hundred victims a week to the fearful catalogue of mortality. Any one who has ventured a visit to the last-named of these places in particular, will not wonder at the ravages of the pestilence in this malarious quarter, for it is bounded on the north and east by filth and fever, and on the south and west by want, squalor, rags and pestilence.”
Granted Bermondsey Street where Charles had his business was not as bad as some other areas, such as Jacob’s Island (where Bill Sikes made his last stand in Dicken’s Oliver Twist to die sucked into the Mud of the local creek) being several hundred yards from the Thames, but Charles’s property was only about two hundred yards from the Neckinger River which ran up to the Thames at Jacob’s Island. The Neckinger derived it’s name from the practice of hanging Pirates at the point where this river met the Thames, hence the River’s local name of “Devil’s Neckerchief” or “Devil’s Neckcloth” and maybe from that to “Neck-hanger” and in the Cockney dialect to “Neck-‘ang-ah” and so Neckinger or “Neck-ing-ah” as it was pronounced in the Transpontine Cockney dialect of the Surrey Side of the Thames. The deathly associations of this River with hanged Pirates was nothing compared to the death it brought in Charles Waller’s lifetime.
Cholera is spread both by contact with infected people, and more widely by infected water sources, usually contaminated by sewage from infected people. To all intents and purposes the Neckinger River was a partial sewer, as noted by Mayhew on his visit to Bermondsey:
“We then journeyed on to London-street, down which the tidal ditch continues its course. In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity. As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer the sun shone upon a narrow slip of the water. In the bright light it appeared the colour of strong green tea, and positively looked as solid as black marble in the shadow – indeed it was more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink. As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women, built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it, and the limbs of the vagrant boys bathing in it seemed, by pure force of contrast, white as Parian marble. And yet, as we stood doubting the fearful statement, we saw a little child, from one of the galleries opposite, lower a tin can with a rope to fill a large bucket that stood beside her. In each of the balconies that hung over the stream the self-same tub was to be seen in which the inhabitants put the mucky liquid to stand, so that they may, after it has rested for a day or two, skim the fluid from the solid particles of filth, pollution, and disease. As the little thing dangled her tin cup as gently as possible into the stream, a bucket of night-soil was poured down from the next gallery.”
So unbelievable did this seem to Mayhew and his companions, that they felt they had to test what they had seen:
” In this wretched place we were taken to a house where an infant lay dead of the cholera. We asked if they really did drink the water? The answer was,
“They were obliged to drink the ditch, without they could beg a pailfull or thieve a pailfull of water”.
“But have you spoken to your landlord about having it laid on for you? “
“Yes, sir; and he says he’ll do it, and do it, but we know him better than to believe him.”
Again Charles’s business was on the edges of this, but given the tide of Cholera that was tearing through the area, it is hardly surprising that we find Charles and his eldest son Charles Cock Waller (bearing his Mother’s maiden name), both died in 1848, quickly followed by Charles’s wife Harriett in 1849. All carried away on the tide of pestilence that stalked the streets of Bermondsey, seeping up and down the watercourses of the area.
Where the Neckinger meets the Thames 1840
The deaths reveal some other interesting points about the Family. Charles’s death must have been rapid and unexpected, as there are no signs of a will, Harriett does leave a will, and in it she leaves all of her possessions, including Linen, Furniture, Plate, and interestingly “Carriages”, as well as money, to her two children by Charles, that is daughter Harriett and son Thomas. Although the will is witnessed by Charles’s eldest surviving son from his first marriage, John Waller, the Executors are not the Wallers, but rather the Biddle Family, Harriett’s sister and brother in law. It as though there may have been a slight rift between Harriet on one side, and Charles’s children from his first marriage to Mary Cock on the other.
Business wise, we can see the results of the early deaths of Charles and his eldest son
176 Bermondsey Street
Charles Cock Waller. Firstly the partners of Charles’s Cock Waller, who ran a Provisions Merchants with him formally dissolved the partnership. Charles’s landlords at 176 Bermondsey Street took the opportunity of the two Charles’s dieing to re-claim the lease, and knock down the building and develop it into something more modern, which is the building pictured here that is now worth £4.5M and is being demolished after over 150+ years to make way for the proposed Hotel.
The children from the two sides of the Waller family go their separate ways after the their parents’ deaths.
John Waller, Charles’s eldest son, and the witness to Harriett’s Will, took up the remnants of his father’s business and moved it across the Thames to Catherine Street in Limehouse, where he lived with his elder sister Emma and a live-in Shopman as an employee.
Thomas Waller, Charles’s son with Harriett, doesn’t gain much from the Biddles after his mother’s death and winds up in the workhouse between 1857 and 1859, but is lucky enough to be apprenticed to a Mr White, a Shoemaker of Bermondsey, where he learns his trade to became a Cordwainer, someone who made shoes, rather than a cobbler who simply repaired shoes. He lived on in Bermondsey.
William Ruglys Waller, Charles and Emma’s youngest son, lives-in as a Clerk in a large Draper’s business in the posh shopping district of Regent Street in the 1850s. In 1861 he married a milliner Caroline Riddett from the Isle of Wight who he may have met at work, which meant they they couldn’t afford to live together in the west End, so moved to Deptford where William took up work as a Clerk in an Iron Monger’s Warehouse. William and caroline have a good life for many years through the 1860s and 1870s, they have six children, between 1863 and 1872, four boys and two girls, and sets up a good business as a professional Mercantile Clerk, and is able to move back north of the river to Islington, a better area than Deptford.
William also undertakes some work as an accountant, so is a very accomplished and intelligent man. During the 1870s, despite his success, both professionally and in his private life, William starts to suffer from depression and paranoid delusions. Things get so bad that in 1878 Caroline has to be temporarily admit William aged 47 to Bethlem Hospital (pronounced as “Bedlam” by local Cockneys, from where we get the word itself). After some time in the Psychiatric Hospital, William recovered enough to be discharged back to his wife, and indeed carries on with his career becoming the Manager of a Trade Protection Association in 1891.
Bethlem Hospital Ward
Unfortunately William’s ill health didn’t fully go away, and flairs up disastrously as the new century comes in and between 1900 and 1904 he is admitted for more lengthy spells at Bethlem Hospital, suffering from depression, and believing that he was an evil person who had let his family down, was suspected of wrong doing by his employers, and was being followed by Detectives who wanted to observe and apprehend him. Of course, none of this was true, he was loved by his wife and children, thought highly of by his employers, and was a generally successful man, but his wife would find him standing for long periods in their hallway with his ear pressed to the wall “listening for Detectives who were following him”. His notes from the Hospital show the depth of his paranoia.
The situation goes from bad to worse. Psychiatry was basic in the late Victorian period, but not as brutal as it had been earlier in the century. The doctors did their best for William, but had no effective treatments for his malady. Worse was to come, his constant “picking at his skin” had caused a large carbuncle on his neck. The well meaning doctors decided to lance this bioil, made three incisions in it which wept puss profusely, in the days before effective antibiotics, they were really shooting in the dark.
Within a few days of the incisions being made, William takes on a sudden fever, his temperature rose to 101 degrees, and he died within a few hours. It is declared that he died due to his dementia and fever. But without a doubt the real cause of his death were the less than expert surgery his doctors had attempted that had lead to septicaemia (blood poisoning), as witnessed by his sudden fever, which caused organ failure and death.
I have seen many death certificates from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and can confidently say that many deaths were caused by mismanaged interventions by doctors, which the doctors then managed to cover up with weasel words and lies rather than admit to their culpability, and this was a classic case of one of them.
There is an old joke about a Doctor watching a Bricklayer at work. After a few minutes of observing the Bricklayer’s skill the Doctor smiles and comments to the Bricklayer:
“I see that there are many errors covered up by a trowel.”
The Bricklayer turns to the Doctor, with a wry smile of his own and replies:
“Yes, and many more and bigger ones with a shovel.”
His wife Caroline was heartbroken and died soon after him in the same year of 1905.
William Ruglys Waller and Caroline’s children did well in life, despite the trials of their father’s mental health, which further shows the tragedy of the situation, he had been a very good father.
The boys followed their father as Clerks, the eldest William Charles became a senior Civil Servant (more of him later) Sidney and Lionel, the younger brothers became Mercantile Clerks in Shipping and Banking, doing well for themselves, and Catherine the youngest daughter worked as a Milliner’s Saleswoman, no doubt picking up on the Drapery contacts of her father.
This leaves the second son, Harold, who we first saw in part one of this investigation (Part 1: Finding the “Lost Temple” for an old mate). He married well, into the Chappell Family of well to do itinerant Teachers and Clergymen. Jessie Chappell, his wife, was born in Sandhurst Australia, once she and Harold were married they spent their life living with Jessie’s Mother in a large house, along with their only child, Stanley Harold Chappell Waller. Also living at in the house was Jessie’s brother, a clergyman. This household was where the young Emma Erskine, my mate Les’s Grandmother, comes into the Waller story, as the fifteen year old Domestic Servant to the family.
As was stated in Part 1 of this story, Emma got pregnant out of wedlock, in about February 1912, probably around Valentine’s Day. When her baby Cyril was born, she failed to name the father explicitly, but gave us a clue by giving Cyril the middle name of “Waller”. naming an illegitimate child with the Father’s surname as a middle name was a tradition among unmarried girls who could not legally name the father of their child if the man refused to admit his involvement. It is therefore highly likely that one of the Wallers was Cyril’s father. But which one?
Normally, the suspicion is that the male head of the household would be the main suspect, but in this case Harold Waller, had died in 1903 some years before Cyril was conceived. There is a possibility that one of Harold’s brother’s could have been responsible, but that’s more of a long shot, given that they were not living in the same household. This leaves the intriguing conclusion that Cyril’s likely father was the lone remaining Waller, Stanley, the boy she had spent some of her youth growing up with, in the Waller/Chappell household.
As we said in Part 1 of this story, Young Emma Erskine would have spent some time looking after young Stanley Waller as part of her duties. Stanley would have idolised Emma as a young woman who took an interest in him, walking him to school, and feeding him his meals when he was at home. A good arrangement for everyone.
Having grown up with Emma as his nearest non-related female in the household, Stanley was undoubtedly attached to her. Emma for her part would have seen the young boy grow into a strapping young man. As the years went on there was ample opportunity for the relationship to change, and the six year age gap would have seemed a lot less of a difference once they were older. By 1912 Stanley was a twenty year old single man studying to be a Pharmacy Student, and Emma a twenty seven year old single woman, seeing her chances of married happiness in life slowly slipping away.
Emma and Stanley’s birthdays were within a few days of each other in January, and as we said above Cyril would have been conceived sometime between the couple’s birthdays and Valentine’s Day 1912. All of this is circumstantial evidence of opportunity and motive. Only a DNA test can prove the fatherhood of Cyril beyond doubt, which isn’t likely to happen any time soon. But it does paint a picture of circumstances arranging themselves to throw the couple together.
There is one last piece of the puzzle that points in the direction of Stanley as Cyril’s Father. Quite often when a son of a well to do family had “sowed his wild oats in the wrong field”, the family would do two things, firstly they would make arrangements to have the child financially taken care of or adopted, depending on whether the girl’s family were struggling financially or wanted to hide the shame of birth. In the Erskine part of this story, we saw that someone had paid a not inconsiderable amount of money to allow Emma to have the baby Cyril south of the river in Camplin Road Deptford, where Emma and her mother resided for a while before the birth, it is highly unlikely that Emma’s family had the money to afford this, so there was a well off benefactor paying to keep the birth discrete.
Secondly where there was a child born “on the wrong side of the sheets” between classes, the offending randy youth (almost always the man was from the moneyed Family and the woman from the working class Family) would be married off rapidly to a suitable, or just available girl of his own class, so that he would no longer pose a danger to the working class maids of the household.
This rush to marriage appears to have happened to Stanley Waller in the same year that Emma became pregnant. Stanley was married off to a near neighbour in Hornsey, one Constance Florence Minnie Hamilton. Perhaps a hint of something lacking in the marriage comes with the fact that no children are born in the first six years of the marriage. Was Stanley still pining for Emma his Maid Servant?
As we have seen again in the Erskine story of Part 1, Emma’s brothers served their country in the front line and suffered the horrors of trench warfare and hand to hand fighting in the fields of France and Belgium, indeed her younger brother Henry being awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the face of the enemy. This type of story is common for the millions of working class men who put their lives on the line to defend their country, even though these working class men didn’t have the vote at home until 800,000 of them had been slaughtered in the War, and bought the vote for working men with working men’s blood.
However if you came from the right background it was entirely possible to have a “Good War” without exposing yourself to too much hardship. Once again it appears that Stanley Waller’s family connections in the Church and Business ensured that his would be a “Good War” just as it appears that the issue of an illegitimate child and a “ruined” Domestic Maid would not be allowed to stand in the way of his marital stability.
We don’t find Stanley in the Trenches “up to his neck in muck and bullets” as the working class men were. To his credit he did join up in 1915, we find Stanley serving in the East Anglian Field Ambulance Unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Stanley did see some casualties from the war, and indeed parodied them in a short poem that was printed in a local paper.
Stanley is promoted from private in the Ambulance Corps based in England, to 2nd Lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment and shipped to Egypt, and then to Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, in order to be taught aviation. The strings that must have been pulled to promote a man straight from Private in a non-combatant unit to an Officer, and then straight into the newly formed and elite Royal Flying Corps can only be marvelled at. His name is memorialised on an inscription of Metropolitan Waterboard Employees who served in The Great War, now held at the Steam Museum, Green Dragon Lane.
After the War Stanley Harold Chappell Waller had two children a boy and a girl, with Constance, and settled back into the Metropolitan Water Board, as an accountant, a revenue Collector’s Clerk, at the outbreak of World War II Stanley acted as a Volunteer Warden, and his son Gordon followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a full time Ambulance Driver, and in the Chappell family’s footsteps by becoming a Theological Student.
Stanley retired from the Water Board as a Managerial Supervisor, from where he retired on a good pension in 1955. He would remain married to Constance until his death in 1969. Stanley lived with Constance at 171 Higham Road, Tottenham, N17 from the late 1940s until the 1960s. There is no evidence that he had any further contact with Cyril or Emma.
So we may have explained “What’s all the Waller about then” but there still remains the mystery of how Cyril came to take the surname “Temple”. That will be explained in the next part of Les’s Family Story.
I know. We just haven’t grown up.
I have known Les since we started our first job together at the Greater London Council’s Electronic Maintenance Section, he was sixteen and I was eighteen. Electronics sounded like New Technology in the early 1970s, but this place was housed and managed in a very old tech way, being based in a small industrial estate in the back streets of Camberwell, South London.
Jobs like these were what cockney boys like us did if you didn’t work hard enough at school to get your A levels and go to University, but showed more intellect than was needed to work on a building site or digging up roads. And we had a great time.
So much so that now, more than forty years later, having both had varied careers we meet up a few times a year to laugh about exactly the same stories from when we worked together, that we dredge up to tell each other every time we meet. It’s got to the point now where I’ve started taking my grown up sons along, just so we’ve got a new audience to tell the same stories to for the next few decades. If they were children it would probably be considered a form of psychological abuse, and we’d have social services down on us like a ton of bricks.
However, sometimes, we tell each other a new story, and the last time we met, Les told me a corker. Apparently his dear old long departed Dad Cyril, was a bit of a mystery in terms of his Family background. Les had never really known his grandparents on his father’s side, Les’s sister had found their father’s birth certificate, which contained a strange middle surname that had never been discussed in the family, and there were tales from older family members that Cyril had been raised by “an Aunt”. Having a friend that you’ve known since your teenage years is a great joy, being able to help that friend solve a family mystery is a gift of an opportunity that can’t be passed up.
Les’s Family the Temple’s were Londoners as far as he knew, when we were kids both of our families had lived within half a mile of each other in Peckham, in Les’s case just off of Peckham Rye, although he did once claim that this was practically East Dulwich, but no way was he going to get away with that one. After Les’s Dad and Mum passed away, Les’s sister found their Dad’s birth certificate amongst their family papers, this was where the mystery began. Les’s Dad was he was christened Cyril “Waller”, as Les put it “What’s all the Waller about then?” intriguingly, Cyril’s Mum Emma Erskine, had left the space for Cyril’s father’s name a blank, invariably this indicates an illegitimate birth, and usually means that a mother wasn’t prepared to name the father rather than not knowing who he was. In the days before Jeremy Kyle style DNA tests, naming a Father without his permission could be both hard to prove, and could lead to legal repercussions.
So the first step was to trace Cyril’s mother to see what she had been up to before, during, and after the birth of Cyril, and her family background generally.
Emma Erskine was born in 1885 the eldest daughter of William Dodd Erskine and Emma Suttle. The Erskines were originally from Wigton in Scotland were Gunsmiths by trade, Thomas Erskine (Emma’s Great Grandfather) had started the Company in 1795 at Newton Stewart he was succeeded at Newton Stewart by James Erskine, who invented and patented the Erskine Cartridge Loading Machine. The Erskine Company was one of the oldest firms in the trade., specialising in Gunsmithing and Fishing Tackle Trade, and Manufacturing of Cartridge Loading Machines.
James Erskine 1866 model shotgun
John Erskine, one of the founder’s sons, and the father of William Dodd Erskine had come to England, in fact to Liverpool and was apprenticed with his brother James to the Williams Company in the 1840s when there was a demand for British shotguns for export to the USA and Germany. Together they built a business, and won a Bronze medal in 1851 at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace for their shotguns.
John stayed in Liverpool for nearly thirty years, married a local girl, and had three sons and a daughter, but their two elder of sons had died relatively young, leaving William Dodd Erskine to carry on the line in England after his parents retired up to Scotland. Most histories of the Erskine Family claim that the male line died out after this generation, but Time detectives research has shown that the male line carried on in London with William Dodd Erskine.
William Dodd Erskine was a Watch Dial Painter, a skilled job, providing a liveable income, he would never get rich, but would always be able to provide for his family. After his parents moved north of the border, William Dodd move south to London, where he found work and lived in the Finsbury area of London.
William Dodd Erskine was a creature of habit, and like stability, he lived at his first address of 37 Northampton Street Finsbury for seven years, his second address at 14 John Street for four years, and his last address of 32 Clerkenwell Green from 1897 to 1929, over three decades. These were humble lodgings in amongst more affluent areas. He kept the same trade during his entire life, sitting at a workbench carrying out the careful and detailed work of painting watch faces. It seems the only adventurous thing he did in life was to marry Emma Suttle in Emmanuel Church Camberwell in 1880. It seems that William married Emma for love.
Emma had travelled down from Clare in Suffolk to find employment as a Domestic Servant in London, and wound up in 1871 working for the MacLean family in Windsor Road Camberwell. Alan MacLean was a fairly well to do Post Office Clerk who could afford Emma as a general servant and another woman as a nurse to help his wife with their baby son. This genteel lower middle class household must have seemed a far cry Emma’s dirt floored background in the family of agricultural labourers, and it seems that the vision of conspicuous consumption that she witnessed proived too much for her.
Her short lived career with the MacLean household came to an end a year later in 1872 
when Emma was tried and found guilty of stealing a Gown from the family and was sentenced to 6 months in Wandsworth Gaol. Wandsworth was firm and run with military precision, women who couldn’t read when they went in would sometimes come out in a more literate state, and they would also be taught to sew and make clothes. On the other hand there were not great opportunities for fraternisation, and women would be made to wear a veil (see picture) when taking exercise in the prison yard. Spending time in Prison would have made it very hard for her to find work going forward and she faced a life of poverty as a result, until of course she met and married the stolid and unadventurous William Dodd Erskine, who saved her from that life. What we know from the prison record is that Emma was petite, 5 feet tall weighing 7stone 5 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes, she could read and write a little imperfectly.
Whatever trials she lived through during and after her incarceration, William was her saviour, she was still living in Camberwell when they were married, perhaps he never knew of her past imprisonment, perhaps the blue eyes and slim figure were too much for the quiet bachelor. Whatever the varying degrees of mutual attraction, the couple had four children in the eight years between 1882 and 1890. The only girl would be Emma Erskine born in 1885 and named after her mother.
The one thing we can say about Emma Erskine, Cyril’s Mother, and Les’s Grandmother, is that she took after her mother in character more than her father. She also went to work as a Domestic Servant, and in 1901 we find Emma as a live-in General Servant at the age of sixteen with the widow Emma Chappell and her family at 13 Wellington Road, Bromley-by-Bow, Poplar in the East End of London.
Also living with the widow Chappell were her grown up son William Chappell a Church of England Clergyman, and her married daughter Jessie. Jessie was married to an accounts clerk named Harold Waller, with them was their nine year old son Stanley Waller. So this is the first time that the name “Waller” appears in our story.
Young Emma Erskine would have spent some time looking after young Stanley as part of her duties. Stanley would have idolised Emma as a young woman who took an interest in him, walking him to school, and feeding him his meals when he was at home. A good arrangement for everyone.
By 1903 the Chappells and Wallers had moved to a large eight roomed house in Hornsey, a more salubrious area outside of the East End of London. 1903 was the year that Harold died, leaving Jessie Waller as head of the family with her son Stanley and Mother-in-Law Emma Chappell still living with her. They now had a new servant fifteen year old Beatrice Cooper. Stanley the son was in education as a Pharmacy Student.
Emma Erskine was back home with her parents in Clerkenwell Green, still noted as a domestic servant, but not living in. In October the following year, 1912 Cyril “Waller” was born. Intriguingly, the address where Cyril was born, and the address of the witness (Emma’s Mother) was given as Camplin Street in Deptford, South London.
75 Camplin Street
There are no other records of the Erskines living in Camplin Street Deptford, and the address itself was one of many privately rented small houses in a well to do comfortable working class area south of the river Thames, not that far from Clerkenwell, but far enough that you could be a stranger in the area but still in reach. It looks highly likely that someone had paid for the renting of the place in Camplin Street so that Emma could have her baby quietly and out of sight with her worldly-wise mother in attendance to make sure she was alright during the birth. Camplin Street, was inhabited by very respectable working class people, railway workers and junior clerks, so would not have been cheap to rent, Young Emma would not have been able to afford the rent on her own, and her father had always been very frugal in the accommodation for his own family, with four adults living in two rooms on the first floor of the Clerkenwell Green apartment, so it is highly unlikely that Emma’s father William Dodd Erskine could have paid Emma’s lodgings in Deptford. So why was Emma living in Deptford with her mother at the time of Cyril’s birth?
The reason for this was that Cyril was illegitimate, the same reason the father is not mentioned in the relevant place on the birth certificate. So why the “Waller”? A mother putting a surname as a middle name on an illegitimate baby’s birth certificate is invariably a way of the mother naming the father without risking legal action against her. If the parentage can’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt and if the father refused to acknowledge the baby, then claiming the father’s name could lead to serious consequences for a working class girl if the father’s family were prepared to pursue a case against her. The surname as a middle name was their legal way out whilst still pointing the finger at the culprit. As for the rental of the Camplin Road lodgings, it seems a reasonable conclusion that that was paid for as “hush” money by Cyril’s unnamed father’s family to avoid a scandal.
The funniest part of all this is that being born at 75 Camplin Street, Cyril was born within sight of Millwall Football Ground, as Camplin Street (as it’s now called) leads off of
Cold Blow Lane where the club was from 1910. Les is loyal West Ham fans, this makes for a wonderful irony, but lost on anyone who doesn’t understand the bitter rivalry between the two London Football clubs. …and just for Les, here’s Millwall’s club logo, enjoy Les.
At least two of Emma’s brothers (my mate Les’s Great Uncles) served in the Great War. Unfortunately not all their war records have survived the German bombing of the Records Offices in the Second World War, but we do know that Emma’s eldest brother John William George Erskine was a Corporal in the London Regiment. Emma’s younger brother Henry Erskine, joined up well before the Great War, and in 1911 was serving as a Private in the Bedfordshire Regiment in Bermuda and Jamaica.
The really interesting time for Henry came in the Great War, when long term professional soldiers like him were the core of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that blunted and stopped the Blitzkrieg tide of the massive German advance across Northern France and Belgium.
Henry’s 7th Battalion Bedfordshire Regiment WW1
Henry’s greatest hour came in the Battle of Thiepval and The Schwaben Redoubt in September 1916. The commanding officer described the action that Henry took part in, and I’ve abbreviated it below:
” The Lewis Guns did great execution at this point.Two more strong points were taken at point of bayonet after a bomb preparation. The situation hereafter became very difficult as it was impossible to recognise any trenches owing to the intensity of the Artillery preparation which had obliterated everything. The final objective was almost impossible to locate accurately. This may account for parties of men over reaching by far the final objective. The final objective was held early on in the day and the whole of the Boche front line by parties of Lancashire Fusiliers, Bedfords & West Yorks. until the two latter were withdrawn at dawn, 29th.
The whole of this operation was carried out with great dash, personal cases of daring bravery were very numerous. The taking of strong points with a determined rush came off every time both on 27th & 28th. The fact that the right of the right attack was blotted out by machine gun fire may have led to the Queens filling in the gap and causing them to lose their real line.
I was fully prepared to hold line won by us till day light or even later. Considering the great difficulties and the continuous barrage communication though slow was good. The work done by all the runners of the Battalion was beyond all praise. They were run off their legs from Zero until day light next morning and yet were ready to go on. As inevitable the question of later was one of extreme difficulty, by far the larger majority of the men fought on without fluid (water etc) of any sort from Zero. The courage, resolution & endurance displayed by all ranks was quite wonderful. They were out to kill and the Battlefield is a witness that they carried out to the full their intentions.
Even when the Battalion had been relieved by the R.W.K. and volunteers were called for in the event of a counter attack being successful on the ground they had so dearly won the preceding day, every man declared his willingness to return at once if needed. I might mention the extreme need for more stretchers. The Regimental stretcher bearers were absolutely inadequate to cope with the numberless cases of all Regiments, some means might be devised to alleviate the sufferings of the wounded and perhaps save many valuable lives. As it was the stretcher bearers of every Battalion worked right through the night and into the morning still leaving many men untended, who might have been brought in were more bearers available.
During this attack Capt. Bridcutt [John Henry BRIDCUTT, DSO] who was observing the operations through a very excellent Boche periscope noticed that the Boches had run down the front and intermediate trench had lined their parados and shot into the left flank of the advancing troops. All available men consisting of servants, runners, signallers etc. were lined up in front of the Battalion Head Qrs and commenced rapid fire into the flank of the Boche doing great execution and causing them to retire hastily.”
For his part in this action Henry Erskine received the Military Medal, this medal was awarded to ordinary soldiers, not officers, for Bravery in the face of the enemy. The report is interesting not least as it refers to the Germans as “the Boche”, and reflects the desperate and savage nature of the fighting, with great emphasis on the soldiers “intention to kill” no fannying about with limited engagements in those days, this was hand to hand combat red in tooth and claw, even the generally non-combatant officers servants, runners, and signallers taking up arms and driving off a German flanking attempt at one stage.
So we’ve tracked down Les’s Grandmother, Cyril’s Mother’s Erskine lineage, but which Waller was the father? Well, we’ll find out in the next instalment.
I’m a professional Genealogist and writer, and I make a point of “collecting” interesting names, whether it’s on a commission to draw up a Family Tree, or just to set myself the odd challenge, and keep my Time Detective skills sharp.
A constant source of joy to me is meeting a complete stranger, hearing a name, and within a couple of weeks coming up with their Family Story, hopefully to their delight and amazement.
I have a terrible habit of engaging people to do work on my home, and to the horror of my wife, spend a couple of weeks distracting them from painting the window frames, or building the Orangery with wonderful insights into stories from their tree, that shows how they came to be where they are and who they are, bringing to life the people who gave them both their DNA (genes) and family mythology (memes) in the process.
The latest encounter happened when we bought our house down on the soft and sunny Hampshire coast in the village of Hamble-le-Rice on the peninsula between Southampton and Portsmouth. 
The old conservatory had seen better days, and after checking out check-a-trade to find a builder with a good reputation in the area, we brought in The Swede brothers from Platinum Windows and Conservatories (there’s a plug for you Dan) to build us an Orangery.
Dan and Mark turned up in the cold December one with a woolly hat, the other with a Russian fur hat and set to work with their varied electricians, plasterers, builders, and floor screed layers (Dan’s father in law as it turned out), and builder’s apprentice Reece.
Hearing the brother’s really unusual surname of “Swede” and seeing Dan in his Russian hat, on a frosty morning, for all the world looking and the brothers had just got off a Russian widow-maker class nuclear submarine parked at Hamble Quay, got my mind working. My wife spotted this, and I got the usual lecture on “…and don’t you start giving them loads of cups of tea and stopping them from working!” I assured her I wouldn’t, then of course, did the opposite, I am a bloke after all, as soon as she was out the door and off to Pilates class, I put the kettle on, and started asking them about their family.
To cut a long story short, the “Swedes” were from Liverpool, put the name obviously wasn’t so the search began, and I gradually unfolded their forgotten story.
In 1821 the Greek Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Gregory V was summarily executed in Constantinople by the order of the Turkish Ottoman Sultan Mahmud. The Sultan held Gregory responsible for failing to do enough to repress the Greek uprisings that would lead to eventual Greek Independence from Turkey, backed by such notaries as Lord Byron who travelled to Greece and took an active role in the uprising. The execution of Gregory was a typical reaction from an evil despot to a man who had failed to deliver his will.
Seizing of Patriarch Gregory of Constantinople By Nikiphoros Lytras
Gregory was dragged from his Cathedral after celebrating Easter, and along with many Greek residents in Constantinople, murdered by the Turks. To add insult to injury, and possibly to divert the guilt for what he had done, Sultan Mahmud ordered representatives of the Jewish population in Constantinople to drag the Patriarch’s body through the streets and then throw it into the Bosphorus, which they did albeit under some duress and fear for their own lives.
Gregory Thrown into the Bosphorus by Peter Hess
In retaliation to this the large population of Greeks living in the Southern Russian Port of Odessa in the Crimea rose up and murdered fourteen local Jews, there being few Turks available to be murdered, and the Jews made an easier target. So the murder of Patriarch Gregory falsely identified “Jews” as “enemies” of Orthodox Christians, and the subsequent Odessa riots by local Greeks showed that the Jewish population made an easier and more available target to attack than the few and far between Turks in Russia. Let’s face it, if you’re a bigoted psychopathic religious maniac, you don’t want to be wasting your time searching the docks for Turks, especially when they may be armed seamen capable of fighting back, much better to show your devotion to mother church by killing a few of your placid unarmed neighbours, murder, rape and pillage the easy way.
So, thanks to a psychotic Turkish Sultan, and the frustrated anger of Crimean dwelling Greeks, there began a long tradition of “Pogroms” i.e. murderous riots against Jews in Russia. Further riots happened in Odessa in 1859, but the real series of Pogroms that had a major effect on the Jewish population of Russia started in 1881.
During the late 1800s there was a rise in a pre-communist revolutionary movement in Europe, these Revolutionaries took the title of “Anarchists” and tended to be a mix of educated middle class leaders fired with a sense of social injustice and a desire to devolve society back to an imaginary simpler time of people all living together in happy communes, and the foot soldiers, usually young men, often from middle class families, or from families that had fallen on hard times, sometimes from the real actual oppressed minorities who had genuine grievances, and quite often either atheists or Jewish.
In 1880 Anarchists had made an attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II of Russia, which was a pity as he was one of the few Tsars in the whole of Russia’s history who had actually tried to bring about some reforms of the harsh Russian economic system that kept millions of peasants on the borderline of starvation. The 1880 attempt was unsuccessful, and the Government took precautions to protect their head of state.
In 1881, in St Petersburg, an anarchist, a young man named Nikolai Rysakov, a member of the Narodnaya Volya (Peoples’ Will) Movement, threw a bomb under the carriage of the Tsar, it exploded killing one of his cossack outriders and injuring a number of bystanders. The Tsar was fortunate to be travelling in a bullet proof carriage, a present from the Emperor Napoleon III of France, and was to all intents and purposes unhurt. The carriage had done what it was meant to, and completely protected him from harm.
The Tsar’s guards rushed in, captured Rysakov, and at that point the Emperor made the mistake of stepping out of his carriage to inspect the place where the explosion had happened. As Rysakov was being dragged away he saw one of his fellow terrorists in the crowd, Ignacy Hryniewiecki , and called out to him. Hryniewiecki shouted “it is too early to thank God!” a threw a bomb at the feet of the Tsar. The Tsar looked down in disbelief before the bomb exploded mortally wounding him and killing and maiming twenty other bystanders and members of his retinue. An eye witness described the white of the snow covered street littered with pieces of clothing, severed limbs, broken sabres from the Tsar’s guard, and bloody lumps of human flesh.
The assassination of Alexander II, drawing by G. Broling, 1881
The Tsar died the same day. This assassination brought a wave of repression from the authorities, police brutality, ironically held in check by Tsar Alexander, was now used as a tool of state, and thousands of political activists and peasant leaders were rounded up and imprisoned, exiled, executed, or simply “disappeared”.
One of the Anarchist conspirators, who hadn’t actually taken part in the assassination happened to be Jewish, and despite the fact that all the others were atheists, the Newspapers whipped up anti-Jewish feeling. Opportunists grasped on this to use it as a weapon to take down the businesses of their business rivals, and this quickly turned into an all out anti-Jewish pogrom, most notably in the South and Western provinces of the Russian Empire.
The Swede family described themselves in the records as coming from Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, which was a hot bed of anti-Jewish feeling. They also claimed to have travelled from St Petersburg where Tsar Alexander was assassinated. Given these locations and the fact that they arrived in the UK sometime between 1881 and 1891, the Swede Family were fleeing the anti-Jewish violence of the Pogroms. So a bomb thrown on a winter’s day in St Petersburg gave rise to a mass exodus of Jewish citizens from the Russian Empire, some to Germany, some to the USA, and many to the UK. A pair of terrorists set in motion a chain of events that would kick-off one of the greatest peacetime diasporas in modern history, for it is estimated that up to 2 million people, fled the pogroms in Russia from 1881 onwards.
During the 19th century, Liverpool was a magnet for migrants from Europe, and indeed Liverpool accounted for more migrants passing through to leave Europe than all other ports in the UK combined. The largest number were Irish fleeing famine, followed by Jews from the Russian Empire fleeing the pogroms.
The Swede family arrived in Liverpool with little more than the clothes they stood up in. Their original name may have been different from “Swede” but many Jewish families shortened or changed their surnames to fit in more easily with the native British population. They had the additional complication of not speaking any English, but were lucky in as much as the local Jewish population in Great Britain could at least converse with them in Hebrew, or more likely the “Yiddish” dialect of Hebrew.
Most of the Jewish immigrants to Liverpool transferred almost straight away to American ships and headed for the USA. The Swedes decided to stay in Liverpool. The reasons for this are not known, but there was a huge philanthropic movement backed by the already present and prosperous Jewish community in Great Britain, and it may have been that the Swedes decided that given the help they had been given on arrival by the local Jewish community, Great Britain was a surer bet than a long transatlantic journey for an uncertain future in America.
So, The Swede Family consisting of Reuben the Father and Bertha the Mother along with their four children Annie, Martha, Samuel also called Nathan, and Israel Asher, all born in St Petersburg or possibly Poland depending on which records we are to believe, between 1869 and 1881, settled for a life in England.
Jewish Refugees in Liverpool
Reuben was obviously a very resourceful man, as by 1891, from a penniless position on a Liverpool Dockside in the 1880s with a wife and four children in tow, he sets himself up as a Draper and General Dealer , living with his family in Gregson Street Everton. Reuben and Bertha are in their fifties, eldest daughter Annie twenty two was working as a tailoress, and eldest son Nathan, fifteen, was working as a Hawker most likely selling his father’s drapery output.
In the coming years Reuben would become a Draper’s Hawker perhaps a downturn in his
business, or maybe just an easier way to use his skills to make a living. The girls Annie and Martha marry Jewish immigrant men and settle in the Liverpool area. Bertha Swede died in 1895, leaving her husband Reuben to live with his younger daughter Martha and her husband and son Israel Asher Swede at 103 Scotland Road Liverpool, known locally as (Scottie Road). Israel Asher becomes a shopkeeper, a Grocer, but after 1901 drops out of the records, and it’s not clear if he died or emigrated. Which brings us to our Builder’s line with Samuel/Nathan.
Nathan Swede married Leah Rose (actually anglicised from Rosenblum) the daughter of Jewish immigrants to Liverpool from Poland in 1894, and in 1895 their first child Joseph was born in Liverpool, Joseph would be their only son, and would be followed by four sisters. Times were hard, and Nathan in desperation is caught stealing some cloth from his employer’s shop, and receives a month in prison for his crime. The clip from the Liverpool Mercury of 22nd February 1895 sums it up. Interestingly the reporter mistakenly mishears Nathan’s accent when he gives his address as “Scotland” rather than “Scotland Road”!
This would have meant lost wages and a struggle for employment once he was released, and in order to find a job he was forced to leave Liverpool, change his name to Samuel, and travel to Birmingham with his family where he finds employment as a Hawker of Hardware. Two of Nathan/Samuel’s children, Lillian and Iris, were born in Birmingham in 1899 and 1904.
There are no records of this part of the family being in the armed forces, which is strange as Joseph and Asher were of the right age to have served
It seems that the War had other implications for the Swede Family. Golda met a “Doughboy” (an American Soldier) and fell in love. Alexander Emanual Lovold, the son of Norwegian immigrant farmers, settlers in the Wild West of South Dakota, her very own Cowboy Doughboy. Alexander had tried to avoid joining up when War started as he was a Seven Day Adventist, and didn’t join until 1918, but was awarded a Purple Heart Medal so received an injury during his time in the Army. Golda was young, only 16 when Alexander shipped back to the States, but they corresponded after the war ended and she went by ship to join him in 1922 when she was over 18. Golda shipped out on her own, quite a trip for the young working class daughter of Russian immigrants to Liverpool. Off the ship in Philadelphia she married her Doughboy, .Alexander.
It’s quite possible that their love story was frowned upon by Golda’s Family, perhaps she had run away to marry Alex without her parent’s permission, the tickets bought for her by Alex. In any case the couple settled in Sioux City Iowa, where Alexander worked in the bustling railway goods yard. They would live together relatively quietly, Golda made a number of trips back on her own to Liverpool to visit the Family, between 1925 and 1937 but always alone, maybe it was the cost that stopped Alex accompanying her or maybe her parents hadn’t forgiven him for taking their daughter away from them? She would stay for 3 months at a time before heading back to the states.
Golda, Iris, and Violet Swede
After the war ended Golda visited again in 1948, and for a last time after Alexander’s death in 1956.
From a humble start the Swedes grow in size as a family. Nathan and his wife Leah have seven children between 1895 and 1919, only one child was a boy, Joseph, the eldest born in 1895. He married a local girl Ivy Ledsham, and like his siblings, it is this post First World War Generation that marries out of the Jewish Faith and into the local English working class Liverpool “Scousers”. The upheaval of the Great War had given people a different perspective on life, and old barriers were breaking down. Joseph and Ivy had ten children between 1925 and 1946, giving rise to a large extended family in the Liverpool area. In 1927 Ronald James Swede was born, he was my builders’ Grandfather.
The brought us back to modern times and a Liverpool family with deep Russian roots, and a family adventure born of persecution and hardship that had culminated in success and a Happy British Family.
Dan and Mark were surprised and happy with their new found Family History, and I was happy with my Orangery! And perhaps just as importantly, some brave but persecuted ancestors had had their stories brought back to life so that their descendants can have pride in their struggle, and a sense of achievement in how far the family had come from penniless refugees on the Dockside in Liverpool. Every family deserves to know and honour their ancestors, we wouldn’t be here with out them!
Oh, and the Orangery looks a treat as well.
This is a summary version of a Family Story researched by Time Detectives. You can have your own Family Tree fully researched, just drop me a line at paulmcneil@timedetectives.co.uk and I can trace yours for you. Prices start from £300 for a single surname tree with historical notes.
The East India Company, or Honourable East India Company (HEIC) as it was known, plays a major part in the Tom Hardy series “Taboo”. This struck me as interesting, as I had uncovered a connection between the Company and a relation of Danny Baker, the TV personality, in the Baker Family Tree. Even stranger, a further coincidence with the present echoing the past was thrown up involving Alexandra Baker, Danny’s niece, and now a very successful PR company owner in Los Angeles.
Tom Hardy’s character in the series on TV utters the memorable words “I do know the evil that you do” to the Head of the HEIC in London. To see what the implications of this were, and indeed, the impact, influence, and adventures of the Families involved in the Company’s business long after it’s demise, it was interesting to find it reflected in a real individual in a real Family Tree, as reflected in this excerpt below.
Family history can sometimes throw up some strange and unexpected coincidences that look like echoes of the past, and one of my favourites is in the Baker Family.
Phoebe Jeanette Baker was the youngest of eight children born to Robert William Baker a Chemist and Danny Baker’s Great Great Grandfather. Phoebe gravitated away from her parents towards her brother Robert William and his wife Maria, she was not that much older than Robert’s eldest children, so was treated like an older child. Visiting her older brother in the East End brought her into contact with the mystery of the Poplar Docks, sailors from all over the world, exotic sights and smells from the spices and other cargos coming into the port of London, and the sun tanned hard skinned men from the boats.
Then in 1889 the Docks exploded with the Great Dock Strike, when the Dockers came out en masse to get “The Dockers’ Tanner” – sixpence (2.5p in modern terms) a small reward per hour for the back breaking work they had to do, the strikes lead to violence and unrest in the Docks, and men’s families started to starve, the atmosphere was fragile and sometime chaotic, for Phoebe there were threats to stability nearer to home, as her Father’s health was being dragged down by Bronchitis.
Into this sea of unease besetting the 19 year old Phoebe breezed the 30 year old ship’s Captain Abel Wardlaw Best. Five feet ten (tall for the time), tanned and well built, with thick brown hair and grey eyes, a strong man fresh from the China Seas, Abel must have turned young Phoebe’s head.
Abel Wardlaw Best was indeed an exotic creature, born in Agra in India, the son and grandson of Barbadan Sugar Plantation Slave owners. The Family had built its wealth on the backs of its Planation Slaves, but this had been dealt a blow during the Napoleonic Wars, when in 1808 Great Britain banned the “Slave Trade” (but not slave owning) in the British Empire, and the Royal Navy intercepted and freed slaves from all it suspected of carrying them, including foreign vessels, much to the anger of the young, slave owning USA and Plantation owners in the Caribbean. This first step was followed by an outright ban, the Abolition of Slavery, in the whole of the British Empire in 1834.
Strangely Slavery was never abolished in Great Britain as Slavery had not been recognised as a legal state of existence since before the middle ages. This was actually defined under English Law in a court ruling, that neither in written law or “Common Law” (the unwritten Law of common practice by the English people) was slavery recognised as a state of being, and indeed was effectively in breach of an Englishman’s right of Habeus Corpus as enshrined since the 13th century, i.e. the English right not to be held against their will without trial. (“man” in this it’s original English definition of “a person” not the post Norman definition of “a male”) .
This had lead to some interesting situations, as legally any slave that set foot in Great Britain could be viewed as no more than a servant, effectively automatically free, and there are recorded instances of the Cockney “Mob” in cahoots with Black Londoners, attacking rich foreign and colonial slave owners in London and their slave catcher agents to spring black slaves from their servitude. This was such an issue, that no less than Justice Sir John Fielding, the man who developed the first Police force in London, advised American and Caribbean Planters visiting London, not to bring their Slaves with them, as once in London, seeing and being approached and encouraged by the numbers of free black people living in the metropolis, they would not only demand wages, but were likely to run off to get baptised and married, and the Planters could find themselves in mortal danger from the working class populace, “The London Mob”, should they try to retrieve their slaves.
Intriguingly some of these freed London slaves went on to join the Royal Navy and faced the prospect of being part of the Navy’s anti-slavery Patrols, thereby actively freeing up other African slaves. Even the plaque on the side of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar square in the heart of London shows a black sailor, holding a rifle on the left, on Nelson’s flagship fighting the French.
By Eluveitie – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18848707
Once not only trading in slaves, but the owning of slaves was itself outlawed, the Best Family from Barbados received over £7,500 in compensation from the British Parliament (the equivalent of around £10,700,000 in today’s economic terms) for the freedom of their 1,323 slaves.
Like many British West Indian Plantation owners, the Bests used their money and connections to maintain positions of power in the British Empire. Many plantation owning families like the Bests, seeded their sons into the British East India Company (EIC), and from there into the British Diplomatic and Judicial Corps in India. India up until the mid 19th century being run as a quasi possession of the East India Company under British Government sanction.
As well as their money and connections, the Planters’ families could boast a knowledge of trade in goods from the tropics to more temperate parts of the world, as well as a tolerance for tropical conditions generally, and an assumed superiority and willingness to exploit native workers. The Bests jumped into this world with a certain gusto, which is how Abel Best of our story managed to get himself born in Agra, the son of former slave owners, now having thrown in their lot, and indeed welcomed with open arms by the EIC in India, where Abel’s father served in a political and judicial role on behalf of the EIC.
The family seemed to court adventure, which they duly found in the city of Agra during the Indian Mutiny. The EIC ran a Private, but British Government sanctioned, Colonial Army in India. The EIC Army was actually three separate Armies, those of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, numbering at peak over 120,000 men, so one of the largest standing armies in the world. It was used both to maintain order in India, and to fight wars around the region, including major actions against, Sindh, Persia, China, Afghanistan, Burma, Nepal, the Punjab, and against the Sikhs, as well as providing volunteer officers and men for the Crimean War against Russia (via the Anglo-Turkish Legion). The largest number of men in the EIC Armies, were local Indians, armed, trained, and paid by the EIC and generally called Sepoys, alongside these native Indian troops, there were European, mainly British and Irish Troops under EIC pay. In the TV story Taboo, Tom Hardy’s character had been a Corporal in one such unit. The entire Officer class, needless to say, were British.
In 1857 the EIC authorities in Agra received news of the mutiny of Sepoys in other Indian Cities. In response they had the Bengal Fusiliers, the local EIC British Troops, disarmed the local Sepoy Troops. This was despite the fact that for two months the Sepoys had shown no sign of rising in revolt, despite the uprisings in other cities. In May 1857 6,000 refugees; British Families from the surrounding area, poured into Agra, this was triggered by unrest and rumours amongst the Indian population on the back of the general uprising against the East India Company in Delhi.
Disgruntled at having been disarmed, and faced with a massive influx of panic stricken British refugees, the local Agra Sepoys attempted a brief uprising in June 1857, probably more for effect than in any organised military manner, and lacking the arms of the EIC British troops, they were driven off and the British holed up with their civilians in the Fort at the heart of Agra. The Bengal Fusiliers sealed off and defended the Fort before any serious violence could occur, and the displaced Sepoys set up a half hearted siege, it seems almost pandering to a kind of wish fulfilment for the panicked British civilians.
The farce started to turn into a crisis due to the crowding of British and other European civilians in Agra, not because of shortages of food or water, but more because of fear and a lack of medical supplies. But the fear was real for good reason; the Sepoys in other areas did have a reputation for shocking treatment of captured men, women, and children, so the British Bengal Fusiliers held the City doggedly, driven by fears for the women and children. Many of the Sepoys lost interest and headed off for the siege of Delhi, which was a much more dangerous and exciting affair.
Delhi was eventually relieved by the British, who then sent a flying column of battle hardened British, Sikh, and Punjabi troops, to Agra. Contrary to popular myth, many Indians and other local troops including the Sikhs, Punjabis, and Gurkhas, stayed loyal to the British, and were a major factor in putting down the uprising. The relief column when it turned up at Agra, was initially treated with disdain, mainly because they had taken to wearing rough Khaki uniforms (the first time British Khaki was ever adopted by British soldiers) much more practical than the Redcoats that were generally worn. The British civilians in Agra, seeing this mixture of deep tanned men of various racial backgrounds, covered in dust with worn and bloodstained clothing, initially thought they were an army of invading Afghans, and for their part, the Flying column was surprised to find the Bengal Fusiliers in Agra resplendent in unblemished red uniforms with immaculate white cross belts, as if on parade rather than under siege.
The British column was initially attacked in camp at Agra by Sepoy artillery followed by a cavalry charge, but the British, Sikhs, and Punjabis, were battle hardened regulars, they formed ranks held the Sepoy attack, counter attacked around the Sepoy flanks with Cavalry, drove the Sepoys off, then followed up, catching them at a River crossing where they tore the Sepoy ranks apart with Artillery fire, and routed them with a final Cavalry charge. The siege was over, order and British rule were restored, and the Best’s settled down as part of the ruling elite, with Abel Wardlaw Best being born there on 24th March 1859.
Abel’s parents decided to send Abel back to Scotland for schooling, bt by the age of 15 it was felt better to send him to a Naval training ship, HMS Conway, in Liverpool. He graduated from here to the Royal Naval Reserve as a Mid-Shipman, but unable to find gainful employment, the restless young man at the age of 20 became a second mate in the Merchant Marine.
where he graduated to a Naval training ship, may have been a very wilful young man, ran off to London and worked on ships till he got his Master’s certificate.
After this Abel was off to sea, working his way up to a ship’s Captain in the South China Seas. His travels brought him back to the Port of London and it was here that he met Phoebe and swept her off her feet.
Robert William Baker had given in to love rather than follow the demands of his Middleclass Family when he married Maria Clerk, in so doing he swapped salubrious Kensington a perhaps life as a middleclass Chemist, for a working class existence as a Lamp maker to live by the docks in the East End. Seeing love triumph amid the adventure of the Docks, Phoebe set her mind on finding her own romance the way her older brother had.
Being wilful and young, just 19, she was literally Shanghaied by Abel Best, who whisked her away from London and from her Family to the other side of the world. The effect on her Mother and Father can only be imagined. Robert William Baker and his wife Anne must have been horrified, their youngest child taken away to the ends of the earth by a 30 year old hard bitten Ship’s Captain. And of course, the shame of it. Their eldest son having lived in sin and raised a family out of wedlock in the docks, and his influence had corrupted their youngest child, leaving her captive to the whims of an older man in a ship on the South China Seas!
On a more prosaic level we can believe that in Phoebe and Abel’s eyes, they simply had their honeymoon first, and their marriage after. When they got to Shanghai in China Abel did the decent thing, and on 15th April 1889 they were married in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Shanghai.
Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Shanghai
That same year 1889 her beloved older brother Robert died of Typhus in Poplar, and by 1897 her father had also died. By 1898 Phoebe and Abel were living in Hong Kong, where Abel was working for The Taikoo Sugar Company, once again sugar played a part in this story. Abel was a Wharfinger (Harbour Master) at Quarry Bay. An important job, where Abel would be responsible for the goods and storage on the docks, as well as the docking of ships, and settling disputes between ships Captains and crews, in keeping with his position Abel was also a Juror in the Hong Kong judicial system.
Tai-Koo Docks Hong Kong 1903
Phoebe and Abel, had no children during their marriage, and despite having run off and lived with Abel in China for some years, life away from home living in the strange environment of ex-patriot Shanghai and Hong Kong, a staggering change for a girl from Kensington, would have lead to some homesickness, especially as Abel was often away at sea Captaining Merchant ships between Swatow, Singapore, Saigon and Bangkok.
After she heared of her Father’s death, Phoebe sailed back to England to spend some time with her Mother and sisters. So we find Phoebe living in Hammersmith with her maternal family in 1901, where her mother lived off a pension from her her dead husband’s estate, whilst her sisters worked. Undoubtedly Phoebe was much better off than her mother and sisters, Able had both family money and had built up a good business of his own, so she no doubt helped her mother for a while. She must have seemed like a strange exotic creature now to her family, having lived in places they could only dream of and would never visit.
Abel did his best, and decided to move to a country more conducive to Phoebe, where she would feel less alienated; the USA. Abel arrived in New York in April 1905, Phoebe left Liverpool on 1st June 1906 and arrived in New York on 10th with £70 in her pocket. This would be the beginning of Phoebe’s next big adventure.
Our story now takes an even more interesting turn. When I put together a Family History, it’s not just a dry chart full of names. I always work from the point of view that all those people that once lived, and without whom we wouldn’t be here, have the right to have their stories told, otherwise they are just remain non-existent; telling their stories brings them back to life and a Family History adds to a Family’s dignity and helps explain their place in the world. The actions of our ancestors echo across the centuries in what we are and what we do.
So it is always nice when members of the families I produce these works for get in touch to discuss what I’ve found, perhaps do some research of their own, and, very, very, occasionally, become part of the story by unconsciously living a life of adventures that mirror those of their ancestors, showing that both Genes and Memes are passed through the generations. This is what makes the Culture, the Folklore, and the Mythology of a Family. For me, when this happens, it’s like finding a rare gem.
This was what I would find when I was contacted by Alexandra Baker, Danny Baker’s niece, who had some questions about The Baker Family Story. Alexandra is a successful Music promoter in California, the CEO of High Rise Public Relations, who started out in Kent and South London, and made her way in the tough world of the Music Industry to her current success, with acts as diverse as Boy George and The Maccabees. Just like Phoebe, Alexandra starting in the South of England, travelled to New York, and then to California forging success in a hard world.
So, Phoebe had followed Abel to New York and then to California. This made sense, Abel’s experience was predominantly in the South China Seas, so a California base was what was needed for Able, and something useful to do was what was needed for Phoebe, and sure enough we find Abel and Phoebe living at 251 Winston Street Los Angeles from 1907 when Abel becomes a naturalised American citizen. By 1910, perhaps having taken another lesson from her plucky sister-in-law Maria in Poplar, Phoebe started running a boarding house at the Winston Street address while Able was away.
Los Angeles early 1900s
Winston Street was full of boarding houses, providing clean decent lodging for the burgeoning workforce of Los Angeles. As well as Phoebe and Able, there were lodging houses run by a Japanese Family with Japanese lodgers, an Austrian Family with Austrian lodgers, and American Families with American lodgers, plus a German and his American family living in their own rooms. Phoebe and Able had two American lodgers, a salesman and a mariner. All the neighbours except the Austrians and Japanese spoke English. Years later in the 1930s the area would begin a slow decline as the richer owners moved out and slum landlords moved in. It is now the skid row area of Los Angeles, and is becoming gentrified again.
Phoebe and Abel move up in the world by 1917 when Abel is recorded as a Rancher. Abel would have been 58 by then, so long stints at sea were probably less attractive, and there was a boom in demand for food driven by the Army’s requirements for suppliers for the millions of soldiers shipped over to Europe, and to fulfil demand from Great Britain for food now that so many men were in the trenches rather than in fields. It was a lucrative business.
The timing was interesting as it coincides with a business consortium buying up large areas of relatively cheap Ranch Land, that had been subject to drought in previous decades, the day before the City of Los Angeles passed a bill to build and aqueduct to bring water to the area, and unsurprisingly a major member of the syndicate was also on the committee that passed the bill! The ranch land after initial development for food, soon became prime building land and was sold off in “the sale of the century” to allow for urban development on the suburbs of Los Angeles. It would appear that Able was in the right place at the right time.
But the ranching and speculating life didn’t suit the marriage of Able and Phoebe, and the couple divorced sometime between 1917 and 1920. Abel gave up ranching, and lived in the Harvard Military School in Los Angeles, possibly teaching seamanship, interestingly the ceremonial uniforms of the boys were confederate Grey.
Sometime after 1920 Abel went back to sea and headed once again for Hong Kong – he had cashed in his chips, and invested his small fortune in stocks and shares, there was nothing to keep him in California anymore.
In the 1874 when Jeremiah Joseph Hannon travelled as a teenager from Ireland to the Town of Milford, Worcester County, Massachusetts with his parents and younger brother and elder sister, he had little idea of the adventure his life would turn into. The civil war was over in the USA and there was plenty of work in the North for those willing to take it up, Jeremiah worked with his Father repairing Boots for the local Shoe shop.
Having crossed the Ocean, hammering nails into boots seemed like an anticlimax, and Jeremiah set out West in search of adventure. He was 6 feet tall with blue eyes, black hair, and a rosy complexion, and by 1892, in his early thirties, Jeremiah had made it to California to work as a Fireman on the Railroad in Los Angeles. A Fireman’s lot on a steam Train was a hard one, shovelling coal into the train’s boiler to keep the steam up and the engine rolling, it built hard strong lean men, but it was endless toil, and once the excitement of travelling the country by train had worn off, Jeremiah craved more adventure.
In 1898 when when Jeremiah was around 40 a new opportunity for adventure presented itself. With the blowing up of the American warship The Maine in Havana Harbour, the Spanish American War burst onto the scene. Spain had been losing power on the world scene since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s when The Duke of Wellington assisted by the Portuguese, and by Spanish guerrillas, had thoroughly defeated Napoleon’s forces in Spain. Years of civil strife followed, fuelled by the Anarchist movement in Europe. Late in the 1800s Spain gained some stability, but the previous weakness at the centre of Spanish politics and the successful overthrow of Spanish rule in Mainland South and Central America had encouraged liberation movements in far flung colonies, notably Cuba, The Philippines, and Guam. Most of these places had been under Spanish rule for around 400 years, and Cuba in particular was thought of as a Province of Spain by the Spanish rather than a colony (a parallel to the British attitude towards Ireland).
At the same time there was a movement to expand America’s interests on the World Stage by a number of powerful men in American public life, the US had already mounted an illegal invasion of Hawaii in 1893, this came about because of civil unrest carried out by a fifth column of US Sugar Planters and Missionaries living on the Island over a period of decades (sugar once again in this story). The US invasion, unsanctioned by the US Congress, and therefore to all intents and purposes illegal, was hastened by the fact that the Hawaiians had always leaned towards Great Britain for protection in the past, to the point where the British Government had provided troops and ships in 1843 to protect the Islands from the French, honourably pulling out after a few months when the danger had past, in stark contrast to the US approach in the following decades. The legacy of this Hawaiian-British relationship is defiantly proclaimed in the Union Jack flag still flying in the corner of the Hawaiian state flag!
After the invasion the Monarchy of Hawaii was replaced with a puppet Republic largely controlled by US Commercial (Sugar) interests, but this was too precarious for the expansionist forces in the USA, and in 1897, shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, an attempt to officially annexe the Hawaiian Islands was put before congress and defeated, the defeat in part driven by pressure from the signatures of 21,000 native Hawaiians protesting at the attempt to rob them of what little sovereignty they had left, but a year later, given the likelihood of war with Spain, the US desire for a naval base in the North Pacific was too tempting a prize to be left un-stolen, as the USA would badly need a stopover point for resupply en-route to the Spanish possessions in the Philippines if they were to in consider an invasion. So all pretence of protecting the independence of Hawaii was dropped, and an annexation bill was passed, effectively robbing Hawaii of any chance of independence and self determination.
A confrontation with Spain was guaranteed when ships from the newly developed and highly powerful US fleet were dispatch to various Spanish areas of interest, culminating with the sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbour killing over 260 of her crew. At the time the blame was firmly placed on a Spanish mine by the US authorities, but later investigations point towards an explosion caused by the poor quality coal used on the ship which gave off a high flammable gas in in the area of the ship’s ammunition magazine. Whatever the cause, the sinking of the Maine ensured that War would be the likely outcome with the Americans adopting the slogan “Remember The Maine, to Hell with Spain!”
Explosion Aboard the Battleship Maine, Havana Harbour
Not wanting to miss out on the adventure, Jeremiah enlisted on May 16 1898 at Little Rock Arkansas, into the 2nd Regiment of Arkansas Infantry, and after basic training, no doubt because of his age and Railway experience, Jeremiah was transferred to the 3rd US Volunteer Engineer Regiment and shipped to Cuba. After a few weeks he returned to the US and was disbanded. By this time Jeremiah had a taste for Army life and adventure, and re-enlisted within two months for a chance to fight in the Philippines in the 33rd US Volunteer Infantry.
The War in the Philippines against the Spanish took very little time and few casualties on the American side. The main Spanish garrison in Manilla had little stomach for the fight after seeing their slightly antiquated fleet sent to the bottom of Manila Bay by the vastly superior US Fleet, and offered to put up a token resistance just to save face, as long as the US forces didn’t allow their Filipino insurgent allies take control of the town or molest the surrendering Spaniards. There was some confusion, and some units of US soldiers were involved in heavy fire, but overall the “attack” went as planned.
If anything it went too well, as, now in possession of the Capital the US Government decided that rather than handing the Philippines back to the Filipinos, they would replace the Spanish themselves and rule the country as a colony. It was no surprise that the Filipinos didn’t take to this idea, and immediately opened a guerrilla war against American forces as they had for many years against the Spanish. The war was barbaric on both sides, fought in the jungles and villages of the Philippine Islands, and was a foretaste of conditions in Vietnam 60 years later. However, the US forces were so well armed and provisioned that it was a forgone conclusion that they would eventually overrun Filipino resistance. There was some outcry through allegations of looting, burning, and killing out side of battle by US soldiers, and to a great extent this was sanctioned by their higher command.
Jeremiah was in the thick of it, his Regiment the 33rd were known as “The Texas Regiment” because they were apocryphally believed to be cowboys, which was undoubtedly true of some but not all the volunteers, but it shows the general demeanour of the regiment who found themselves fighting through the Jungles of the North of the Island of Luzon, where they were instrumental in capturing and killing many important Filipino senior guerrilla leaders.
33rd USV Philippines
In 1900 Jeremiah was based in Bangued, and town named by the Spanish and meaning “Roadblock” in recognition of the obstacles the Filipinos had put in their way when Spain was conquering the country nearly 300 years before. The US forces suffered comparatively few casualties to action in the Philippines, but many more due to disease, and Jeremiah was no exception to this. He left the regiment in December 1900, and in 1903 when back in the USA.
One thing that can be said for the US Government of the time, they did look after their injured veterans well. Jeremiah was shipped to The National Home for volunteer disabled soldiers, Battle Mountain Sanitarium, Hot springs, Fall River, South Dakota. He was suffering from acute Arthritis anterior sclerosis, an inflammation of the eye associated with arthritis, which was leading to atrophy in one of his eyes, plus rheumatism, a hernia, varicose veins, sciatica. Jeremiah was in a bad way.
Hot Springs Sanitarium
By 1909 Jeremiah had made some progress and is well enough to be discharged to the home of his elder sister Mrs Mary McCarthy in San Francisco, where he plans to be a farmer. Whatever the results of this, we next find him working as a cook in The National Military Home in Los Angeles in 1916. He remains a cook for some years there, with a brief spell in 1918 when he is readmitted to the Sanitarium for his health. Sometime between 1917 and 1922 Phoebe met and married Jeremiah after her separation from Abel. The two live in Kiowa Avenue Los Angeles in the Sawtelle Veteran’s accommodation, and we can only assume happily, as Jeremiah, was hardly a catch given the state of his health and his lowly status, so it was most likely a love match between him and Phoebe. The even voted the same way; Republican!
The Veterans home had a noble pedigree, and had even housed Wyatt Earp’s father in his later years. Indeed Wyatt Earp lived with his family in Los Angeles, not that far from Phoebe during her time there.
Wyatt Earp Los Angeles Resident
Phoebe and Jeremiah would stay in Kiowa Avenue until Jeremiah eventually passed away in 1932, still an invalid, suffering from pneumonia, he had also contracted TB quite possibly in the Philippines (TB can take decades to kill after an initial infection), which lead to many complications including gangrene in his left foot. The care Phoebe must have provided for him can only be imagined, and with this care he at least managed to live to the relatively old age (for the time) of 75. Their love must have run deep, Phoebe had given up a life of wealth to live with a wounded veteran, as they say, love conquers all.
In the same year that Jeremiah died, Abel returned from Hong Kong to England, 19th August 1932. He had amassed a good deal of money during his time at Sea and invested $8,000 (somewhere close to $500,000 in today’s value) in Stocks and Shares, only to get hit by the Wall Street crash of 1929, after this he was quoted as saying “Chinese Pirates and dope smugglers are a picnic compared to the Bulls and Bears of Wall St.”. He was left. as he put it, “…finding that my share dividends would not buy me a cup of tea daily.” so returned to England to live quietly in retirement in The Royal Alfred Home for Aged Merchant Seamen in Belvedere Kent.
His last quote was concerning the political situation in Europe with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco; his verdict was;
“If I had my way, I’d treat some of these Continental fellers like we used to treat Chinese dope smugglers – hang ’em.”
So spake the last of the East India men. Nine years after his return on 28th February 1941 Abel died. He left £101 in his will, about £16,000 in today’s money. He is buried in St Clement’s Church, Cambridge, UK.
Phoebe outlived both of her husbands, stayed on in the apartment in Kiowa avenue as the widow of a Volunteer Serviceman, and she died on 28th February 1944. Her grave shares the same plot as her beloved Jeremiah at South Sepulveda Boulevard Los Angeles, California.
And so we come full circle. Having spoken to Alexandra Baker, Phoebe’s Great Great Niece and exchanged some information about Phoebe, I was delighted to see that Alexandra and her cousin took the time to find Phoebe’s memorial in California to pay her respects, from a pair of modern “Amazing Baker Girls” to the original one!
Given all the fuss about The Dyer’s Royal heritage, it’s surprising that there seems to be not a lot of meat on the actual tree, so, I’ve researched it independently, and below you can see the first cut of Danny’s actual tree going back to Royalty (Edward III) via Gregory Cromwell, son of Thomas Cromwell.
Now given that I’ve already had to successfully put two large Genealogy companies “under the cosh” for passing off my research as their own, I’d like to say that if anyone intends to use the above they’d better make sure they credit it back to Time Detectives ™ with a link to this blog site (www.timedetectives.wordpress.com) otherwise I’ll be forced to “send the boys ’round”, you have been warned.
The American West, and the use of land therein has become a major political topic in the USA in recent years. The Mormon Hammond Ranchers were prosecuted for infringements on Federal lands, which sparked the somewhat notorious Mormon Bundy Family and their Militia sympathisers to occupy Government buildings causing an armed stand-off with State and Federal Authorities both in support of the Hammonds and to highlight the issues around use of Land for grazing Cattle. In the latest turn of events, the Utes and other Native American Tribes are taking on vested commercial interests wishing to mine Uranium in the Bears Ears Mountain, asking President Obama to designate the area a National Monument as it has both cultural and religious relevance to the local Native American Tribes.
What may be less known are that all these issues have their ancestral roots in the mid 19th Century, where the mindsets and relationships of all involved have been formed by a triangular relationship of friction between mainly English descended Mormons, Native Americans, and the US Federal Government.
A typical picture of the history can be seen in the family story of a single Lancashire Family, who were amongst the first European settlers in Utah. It just so happened that Time Detectives researched the English Branch of this family and, in the process threw up a little known (outside of Utah) history of the American Mormon Branch of the Family.
The Story begins in 1837 with a great Mormon Evangelist, Heber Kimball, travelling thousands of miles from the USA to the North of England to find converts for the growing Mormon Church amongst the rich vein of non-Conformist Anglicans in Lancashire.
Kimball had little in common with the “wooden shoed” common men and women from the Docksides and villages of Lancashire, but used his gift of oratory to sell the Mormon religion. The upshot was that after high jacking a local Methodist congregation and putting his own ministers, Heber Kimball bowled the locals over by his charismatic preaching, and his offer of land and a good living on Earth, as well as the obligatory salvation in the after life. Heber sent the best of his converts to other parts of Northern England to drum up more converts to the Mormon following. Individuals, families and couples , travelled to the USA with other Mormon converts, up the Mississippi by steamer, to Nauvoo the Mormon Capital City in Illinois.
The Mormons had had a rough time with the State of Missouri, the Governor issuing an infamous extermination order against them if they didn’t leave the state. This had lead to the Mormons setting up the Church Militant arm of the Danites, a Guerrilla insurgent movement sworn to protect the Mormons against the State Militia. The most famous of the Danites was one Orrin Porter Rockwell, a dry humoured, psychopathic gunslinger, called The Avenging Angel, it was alleged that he attempted to assassinate the Governor of Missouri in retaliation for the extermination order, at his trial when asked if that was the case, Rockwell replied sanguinely:
“When I shoot someone they stay shot. He’s alive ain’t he?”
The Mormons had moved on to Illinois, and had built a city on the Mississippi as their new Capital of Nauvoo. Unluckily for the family I was tracing, a week after they set sail, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith had been captured by the Illinois Militia, and killed by a mob. As Richard the Methodist Carpenter and his young wife Phoebe stepped off of the steamer in Nauvoo the Mormon City on the Mississippi, he became Richard the Mormon Soldier fighting against the State Militia. Indeed Phoebe would give gave birth to their son whilst the battle for the town was raged on around them.
Outnumbered and out gunned Mormons in Nauvoo fought for their lives. Although perilously close to losing, the Mormon defenders held out long enough to force a perilous negotiation and a cessation of hostilities in 1845, with agreement that the Mormons would abandon their city by 1846. However, despite the truce, state and federal agents entered the city and attempted to capture Mormon leaders, prompting a thousand Mormons including Brigham Young and other Church Elders to flee in secret across the frozen Mississippi and head west. Others followed, and eventually only about a thousand of the poorest Mormons, including Richard, Phoebe, and Thomas along with the other most recent English immigrants, were left to defend the City of Nauvoo. They had no choice, as only recently having arrived with a few bags of belongings they had not the time to raise enough money to buy the Wagons and provisions to get out.
On realising that so many Mormons had left, and the remnants were mainly a group of ragged English immigrants, the State Militia broke the truce, about fifteen hundred of them marched on Nauvoo, genocide on their minds. As the Militia streamed into the City, Richard and a hundred and fifty Mormon men and boys prepared to defend their women and children. They threw up barricades in the streets, and although outnumbered ten to one, fought the Militia to a standstill.
Many of the English Mormon refugees made their way down river to St Louis, where in general they were welcomed, as the time needed craftsmen, and people with skills to service the thriving community there, especially in the less salubrious areas near the waterfront with its bars, whore houses, and gambling dens. The religious, trustworthy, and hard working refugees. Richard was a skilled carpenter, others worked as butchers and in other trades. They caused no trouble, worked hard and saved their money, until they had enough to buy wagons, livestock, and provisions, and moved north from St Louis, through Illinois, to a point where they could join a Mormon Wagon train and head West to Utah, or Deseret as the Mormons called their new land.
The pioneers had many tribulations on the way west, across the plains in their slow
plodding Ox wagons. Cholera killed a number of them, and the survivors had to bury the bodies as best as they could in unmarked graves on the trail. During this time the Richard and Phoebe adopted thirteen year old orphan girl whose parents had died during the march west. More spectacular, were the huge herds of Buffalo which would stampede in panic at the approach of the Pioneers, especially if shot at. The group would draw up the wagons in a defensive wall, with their oxen and horses drawn up inside the circle, and the pioneers crouching as best they could behind their beasts. Then it was a matter of keeping their heads down and covered to keep the huge cloud of dust out of their eyes and noses, some of the women even pulling their voluminous skirts up over their faces for protection. As long as they held their ground the Buffalo would swerve around them, but break ranks and they would be trampled. Occasionally there was a more insidious fear, as Indians would be seen trailing the Wagon Train, but a small band of Indians would not generally risk an outright attack on a well armed group of settlers, at this time they were largely relegated to spectators as their land was crossed and colonised.
Eventually, after months of travel, the party of Pioneers made it to Salt Lake City, a journey of over one thousand three hundred miles. Looking forward to settling down to a quiet life now that the summer of 1850 was turning to winter, Richard and Phoebe were to be told by Brigham Young, the Patriarch of the Mormon Church that they had been chosen to help found a new settlement in Southern Deseret (Utah). Loading their chattels back on the Ox cart, Richard and Phoebe must have needed more than their share of Lancashire stoicism, as they did what they were bidden, and headed south into Ute Indian Territory with another party of Pioneers. What they probably weren’t aware of was that there was a decided lack of enthusiasm among the established Mormons in Salt Lake City to go south, and so Brigham Young brought as much pressure as he could on the new settlers with less to loose in order to get the wagons rolling.
The reason Young was so keen to get a new settlement in the south at a place called Center Creek was that in January 1850 Parley Pratt and an expedition of Mormon explorers had discovered the Valley of the Little Salt Lake, and assessed its nearby Iron Deposits for mining. They raised a Liberty Pole at Heap’s Spring to claim the land, and named the uninhabited site, rather ambitiously, The City of Little Salt Lake. They reported back to Brigham Young that the prospects were good, and so Young wanted to dispatch a party of settlers south to set up a farming community that would provide a base for others to prospect, mine, and smelt Iron from the hills, thus making Deseret independent of Iron imports from the USA.
So in December 1850 with about 170 other Mormon Pioneers under the leadership of Mormon Apostle George A Smith, Richard, Phoebe, and their little family, set off as “The Iron Mission” towards Center Creek. They travelled in 101 Wagons, and on 100 horses, 12 mules, 364 oxen, 166 cattle plus assorted cats dogs and chickens, and tons of food supplies and tools. For defence against Indian attack the men had, 129 rifles, 52 pistols, and 9 swords, plus 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cannon called “The Old Sow” that had travelled across the plains from Nauvoo with the first party of Mormon pioneers.
The real enemy they faced wasn’t the Indians, it was the cold. To cross the great plains in the summer was one thing, to cross the mountains of Deseret in the winter was quite another. The portly expedition leader Smith, and the adopted son of Brigham Young, John D. Lee who had reputedly offered to pay Brigham Young $2,000 in order to avoid going on the expedition, were the only two on the expedition to travel in carriages with stoves, the rest of the band would have to make do with heavy clothes and camp fires. Unfortunately they had to set off in the winter in order to get to their destination before the spring in order to get crops planted, and cattle out to grass, otherwise they faced the risk of starving through the following winter. This was untamed territory, the men would build bridges and roads as they went, Richard Benson as Carpenter and Joiner would have played a crucial role. On Christmas Day 1850 they encountered the Sevier River and four inches of snow with the thermometer at 16 below zero, but they pushed on, got over the black mountains, firing off a salute on the Old Sow Cannon to celebrate, and after weeks of hardship they circled the wagons at the mouth of the Parowan Valley at one o’clock in the afternoon of 13th January 1851.
Pleased to be there, the families set about cutting timber and marking out the settlement, a Fort and log cabins were given priority but it would be some months before they were finished. The settlement was renamed Fort Louisa in memory of Louisa Beaman a wife of first Joseph Smith and then Brigham Young who had died in 1850. On 16th January the settlers elected a Captain Jefferson Hunt to represent them in the State legislature of Deseret, and celebrated a Thanksgiving service around a bonfire, the worst of their trials seemed to be over.
However not everyone was happy; from their first day of arrival many of the experienced farmers said that the soil and altitude made much of the uplands worthless for farming, and it was not long before those with better land up near Salt Lake City were heading back to a more comfortable and profitable existence there. However Richard and Phoebe didn’t have this option, they had arrived in Deseret with a little money and the essentials to stay alive in the wilderness, had not had the time to build up any other assets before being dispatched to this wild place, so for them it was make or break.
Come March Wah-Kara, the Chief of the Native American Utes, or 
King of the Mountain as the settlers called him, paid a friendly visit to Fort Louisa, was entertained with a plentiful rustic banquet by the towns folk, and explained something of their surroundings to them including the Ute name for the area and band of Paiutes who lived near the lake, “Paragoon” meaning vile water and Marsh people depending on which it was applied to. Brigham Young arrived in May to see progress, and anglicised the name Paragoon into Parowan.
At this early period the view of the Mormon Native American tribes was a somewhat sentimental one, seeing them as the lost 13th tribe of Israel, and therefore to be treated with respect, who although tending to sin, were not intrinsically inferior to Mormons other than in some of their “fallen” morals, a type of noble savage. But allowances weren’t really made for their ignorance of Western Civilisations laws and processes, with regard to land and property rights. The process of unopposed acquisition of Native American land was well underway, without real understanding on the part of the Utes, who saw the settlers as a novelty and source of trade goods, food via stolen cattle, and petty theft, while the average settlers just saw a seemingly empty, unowned landscape, just crying out to be claimed and built upon with settlements. Richard would have been kept working flat out as logs were dragged from the canyons to be trimmed, sawn, adzed, morticed and tenoned, into homes and public buildings. Once established, non-Mormon settlers started to pass through the town of Parowan on their way to other regions.
The 1850 census of Iron County in the new US Territory of Utah was carried out a year later on May 12th 1851, he federal authorities started to take a much closer interest in the area now that the hard work was already underway by the Mormons. For their part the Mormons saw “Utah” as “Deseret” their promised land, and could no see how the US Federal authorities thought that they had any claim to it. The Utes just watched in bemused amazement at the “White Mans'” strange belief that anyone could “own the land”.
There were some deep divisions between the new English Mormons, and the more established American born Mormon’s. Richard and Phoebe are shown in the census living in Parowan, and despite the fact that they’d helped build the town in the first place, interestingly, they are not assessed as owning any property of value, unlike their neighbours American born neighbours. All Richard owned was a Wagon, a log cabin, and as the town carpenter, some tools. On average the bigger neighbours owned between $40 -$5,000 of land and property, and even other some foreign immigrants owned $100 – $140 worth, whereas Richard and Family had been dispatched south to found the place with next to nothing. What is also noticeable are the mixed origins of the Benson’s neighbours; England, Ireland, and 12 different US States and Territories, and of these only one, two year old little boy was actually born in Deseret Territory. All these people, except for the new child, had crossed the great plains, before trekking through the mountains to get to Parowan. Their average ages were fairly young with a sprinkling of more experienced men. Everyone here has a hands on practical job, and knew what was expected of them in this new community, so in many ways those who had got this far must have felt that they could really make something of this fresh start, and perhaps weren’t too upset to see the farmers who wanted an easier life go back north to Salt Lake City.They had braved Indians, Buffalos, Cholera, heat and cold, forded rivers, and built roads, literally to carve a new life for themselves and their families. Also contrary to popular fiction, and the predilections of the Mormon gentry, the ordinary folks at this time were very solidly monogamous.
By 1852 the promise of better things offered by Heber Kimball to Richard in Lancashire had started to be fulfilled. Richard registers a Cattle Brand in September a capital “B” on the cow’s left thigh, showing that he was building up some wealth, no doubt trading his carpentry skills for livestock. This was far beyond what Richard could ever have hoped for In England.
In 1853 relations with the Ute Indians, specifically with Wah-Kara their chief, deteriorated. The trouble to some extent stemmed from Wah-Kara’s nomadic raiding lifestyle, which involved mounting raids against other tribes to take captives who were sold on as slaves to the Spanish settlers in the South West of the USA along the Spanish Trail that ran through Parowan. This trade was very profitable for Wah-Kara, and helped him keep control as pre-eminent Chief of the Ute tribes. All the tribes in the area did the same, it was an accepted, and indeed highly praised part of their way of life, and in general they made a point of not taking Mormon slaves, as the repercussions were likely to be too high coming from a culture that did not partake in the culture of slavery.
The Mormons philosophically objected to slavery, and it was especially alien to the English born working class Mormons in the area, slavery having been outlawed in the British Empire two decades before. At this time the Royal Navy actually intercepted slaving ships and freed the captives, as well as sending Royal Marines in to attack Arab and African slave trading posts on the coasts of Africa. So there was a heavy cultural aversion to the practice amongst the British, more so than some of the American Mormons who were from Slave owning US States. This came to a head when Mormon settlers started to break up such deals, and the Mormon trail had opened up the area to many non-Mormon “Gentiles” who regarded the Indians in a much more hostile way than the Mormons. There were a number of incidents where Natives had been murdered by these non-Mormon “Gentiles”
There were a number of incidents with such Gentiles. One particular score stretching back years lead to The Danite Destroying Angel, Orrin Porter Rockwell, being accused (but never convicted) of attacking one such Gentile group. This group included a Missourian, one of the great Mormon Leader Joseph Smith’s unconvicted murderers. He had been very ill advisedly in deciding to travel through Deseret on his way West; the man was discovered dead with his head cut off by a Bowie knife.
In 1853 Wah-Kara found himself being squeezed politically by a number of pressures; the Shoshones were starting to raid his lands and muscle in on his trade routes, the Mormons were interfering with his traditional profitable slave trading, the Gentile whites were killing innocent Indians, and a number of outbreaks of measles epidemicshad devastating effects on the Indians who had no genetic resistance to it. The fact that it mainly killed Utes and not the Settlers lead the Utes to believe it to be caused by White Men’s “magic” specifically to kill their enemies.
The Ute War (or “Walker’s War” Walker being the Anglicised name of Wah-Kara) started in July 1853 with an argument between settlers and Utes that resulted in the death of a number of the Utes. The Utes demanded reparations, which amounted to an eye for an eye under their laws, but the Mormons refused to give any settlers up to them. In order to even things up the Utes started raiding outlying farms, and the Mormons retaliated against groups of Utes. One family of Mormons were murdered whilst driving their Ox Wagon through the territory, so the Mormons retaliated by capturing a number of Ute young men and executing them two days later, these young Ute men probably had nothing to do with the Ox Wagon massacre, but the sides had become polarised and anyone from the other side was now considered a legitimate target in tit for tat killings. Brigham Young ordered Mormons from outlying farms to pull back to the safety of Mormon forts like the one at Parowan. The killings were ended by a personal negotiations between Brigham Young and Wah-Kara in the winter of 1853, with a treaty finally agreed and signed in May 1854, this stopped the immediate killing, shored up the relationship between Mormons and Utes, but did not solve the underlying problems. A year later Wah-Kara died and relations between Utes and Mormons became much harder to predict.
Things got no easier for the Mormons; during the 1850s the US Federal Government in Washington tried to exert greater control over the various individual states and territories, this would be one of the factors that would eventually lead to the American Civil War in the 1860s, foretaste of this came in 1857.
The senate and Congress in the East had received a series of often highly inaccurate reports from Federal Agents and Journalists in Utah concerning the Mormons, and indeed these were parodied by one Washington commentator who said that the various reports from Federal Agents “left unclear whether the Mormons habitually kicked their dogs” but apart from that they were smeared with every slander available. For their part Brigham Young the Mormon Leader and Governor of Utah said:
“I love the government and the Constitution of the United States, but I do not love the damned rascals that administer the government.”
The situation was made worse when Brigham Young, fearful of an invasion of Deseret in 1857, declared Marshal Law, and forbade settlers to pass through Deseret without Mormon permits. Apostle George A. Smith of the Benson’s hometown of Parowan told the people of the isolated fortified townships of Parowan and Cedar City to prepare for the apocalypse by stockpiling supplies and arms ready for an invasion by the United States, not to sell food and fodder to any settlers passing through, and to be prepared to fight, and if necessary burn their homes and take to the Hills, he also advised the local Utes to fight with the Mormons against any invading force from the US.
Into this powder keg of paranoia trekked a party of settlers from Arkansas and Missouri heading for California. The Mormons refused to sell them supplies, and resentment between the settler wagon train and the Mormons increased, fuelled by idle boasts from some of the more confrontational members of the wagon train that they had taken part in the assassination of Joseph Smith and were former members of the Missouri Militia. These were probably empty taunts grown out of bad feeling, but to the minds of the Mormons, worked to a pitch by the exultations of their leadership, these taunts and rumours grew more solid with each retelling, culminating in the Militia from Cedar City to exact “Blood Atonement” on the settlers for the murder of Joseph Smith.
The settler wagon train divided into two parts, the Duke party from Missouri took a 
northern route and made their way to California, the larger group, the Fancher party from Arkansas, on advice from the Mormons took a southern route through Cedar City and up to Mountain Meadows on the Deseret/California borders. Whilst camped there they were attacked by a group of Indians covertly lead by Major John D Lee the Mormon Indian Agent and a leading member of the Cedar City Militia, Brigham Young’s step son. Although badly mauled by the attack the settlers circled their wagons and held out, until a group of Iron County Mormon Militia rode up to them under a white flag, and offered to negotiate with the Indians for the settlers’ safe passage back to Cedar City. The settlers quickly agreed, not realising that the Militia were orchestrating the attack, and as part of the agreement gave up their weapons to the Militiamen. Once they were unarmed and marched out of their defensive formation, Major Lee gave the order to attack and 120 settlers were shot, clubbed, and stabbed to death, the only survivors being 17 children who were thought too young to bear witness. It was even rumoured that two of the girls in the settlers’ party were raped before being murdered. Although the massacre was subsequently condemned by the Church authorities in Salt Lake City, the fear of invasion from the US, meant that no attempt was made to bring the perpetrators to justice. It would be 20 years before the US government was able to bring John D Lee to trial and execution by firing squad on the spot where the original massacre took place at Mountain Meadows. He had been made a scapegoat and took more or less the entire blame for the massacre, the other perpetrators cutting a deal with the US prosecutors, testified in person or in writing against him, and escaped justice. Distrust of US law was reinforced.
With news of the massacre reaching the United States, the scene was set for a reckoning, and shortly after his inauguration in 1857 President Buchanan decided to replace Brigham Young as Governor of Utah, and sent a third of the US Army with the new Governor to make sure it happened. What he didn’t do was try to talk with Brigham Young about this, and the first the Mormons knew of it was when the lurid reports of impending War reached them from the Eastern News Papers. Given that the Mormons had already fought two minor wars of extermination against them by the State of Missouri, and the Militia of Illinois, they naturally believed that they now faced another one with the Federal Government.
The US army marched west, and the Mormons again called in the settlers from the outlying farms back into the Mormon Forts, and it appears that English immigrant Richard took a leading role in the evacuations, being mentioned in John D Lee’s journal as taking families by Wagon into fort Parowan. The Mormon Militia, including the Danites lead by their terrible Avenging Angel, Orrin Porter Rockwell, the men who had served in the Mormon Legion at Nauvoo, and the Mormon Battalion who had served in the US Army during the Mexican War of 1846 (including two men that Richard’s sister would later marry), all took to the saddle along with their Ute Indian Allies and harassed the US Army, ran off their horses, and generally skirmished them to a standstill in the mountains and passes of Utah.
However Brigham Young realised that a political settlement was needed, so after stalling the Army long enough to make them ready to negotiate, Young agreed to step down as Governor, and his federal replacement was put in place. This allowed the federal agents to say they had won, whilst the Mormons of course carried on governing themselves with their own hierarchy and religious courts, running a parallel administration in the State for many years. To make sure the Mormons were contained, the Army was stationed in Utah until merican Civil War in 1861, when the US Government sold off their holdings in Utah to the local Mormons at knock down prices. The Federal soldiers were recalled, some going North, some South, depending on where their loyalties lay, and the Mormons were left in relative peace again.
But the frontier was by no means quiet or safe, and in 1865 war with the Utes erupted in what came to be called the Black Hawk War, named after a local Ute Chief Antonga Black Hawk the nephew of Wah-Kara, who led the Ute, Paiute, and Navajo tribes against the Mormons. Young Indian men lead cattle raids against Mormon settlements, and a number of Mormon men women and children were killed.
This war seriously held up Mormon expansion in Utah, the Mormons considered themselves in a state of open warfare with the Utes, the federal state refused to send help, probably due to the depredations of the Civil War taking its toll on available troops, and so the Mormons took matters into their own hands, building forts, abandoning exposed settlements, and rounding up any groups of Indians they came across whether apparently hostile or not.
Richards son also named Richard served in the Indian Wars. Richard was only 17 when he joined the Deseret Militia as a Scout. His platoon made up of men from Parowan.
They rode out to join a bigger body of Militia from St George sent out by General Erastus Snow under a Captain Andrus, and formed the 5th Platoon of his Company of men. The company were all volunteers, hired guns having been allowed to leave. The men rode out on a Scouting expedition to the area of the Green River to locate any enemy Ute activity in the area and deal with it.
Richard and his company subsisted on sweet potatoes and wild chickens they found in the brush as well as a good ration of Beef Jerky. They had skirmishes with Utes and lost one man and one horse to enemy action, but for the most part the Indians were out of the area, and the few that remained avoided contact with them.
The small band of men travelled up through Rabbit Valley, and crossed Dirty Devil Creek (Fremont River) to within sight of The Green River, but found the going very tough in the area, and so camped before making their way back across country. What they didn’t realise is that once at the Green River, they were within 3 miles of Black Hawk’s camp and herd, which were only defended by a group of old men, squaws, and children, Black Hawk and the Warriors being off on a raiding party. If Captain Andrus had had a little more fortitude, he could have captured Black Hawk’s camp and cattle, and thereby probably single-handedly brought Black Hawk to submission, or at least removed his means of continuing resistance for any length of time. Such are the fortunes of war.
They trekked down the East Fork of the Sevier River and passed through the town of Circleville, where they they rested and foraged their horses in a field of Oats that had ripened and not been harvested. Now, Circleville was infamous as the site of a recent atrocity. The town had been subject to raids by Utes, who penetrated right into the town, and initially the locals were not strong enough to defend themselves adequately resulting in the loss of cattle, and the massacre of families on outlying farms, so in response they organised themselves into a Militia, and decided to round up the local Paiutes, who, although peaceful, where armed, and were rumoured to be giving intelligence to the Utes.
The Paiutes were disarmed, and placed under guard in the Town’s Meeting Hall, the men bound, the women and children placed in the cellar. However one Paiute man had been shot dead during the round up when he tried to escape, and so they must have been extremely nervous as to their fate. Some of the Paiute men managed to slip their bonds, overpowered the guard in the Meeting Hall and made a break for it; the militia panicked, shot the men, and then, to remove any Indian witnesses who could have told other Indians what had happened, brought the women and children up from the cellar and executed them by slitting their throats. In the panic and confusion of the executions, three of the Paiute children managed to temporarily escape, by the time they were eventually found, some form of sanity had overtaken the Militia’s bloodlust, and the children were taken in by Mormon families appalled at what had occurred.
There were also stories of the heads of murdered Indians being displayed on poles in the town square, however it is not clear if this is true as it seems that the townsfolk and militia having realised that the violence had gone too far, buried the bodies and tried to cover up what had occurred. It had such a profound effect on the less blood thirsty town’s folk, that, fearing retribution from the Indians and wanting to distance themselves from the perpetrators, they left the town. By the time that Richard rode into town ahead of the Militia column from St George and Parowan, the town was completely deserted, it had literally died of shame. However, given the provocation of the Utes, and the fear engendered in the Mormons by their raids and indiscriminate killing of men women and children, the powers in authority in Salt Lake City verbally condemned the massacre but took no action against the perpetrators, however they were generally shunned by the majority of peaceable Mormons, and the Mayor of Circleville was forced to earn a living as a ranch hand, never again able to hold an office of responsibility.
Richard’s Patrol moved off from the ghost town of Circleville through Bear Valley, catching some chickens on the way, before descending into Parowan the following day. They had been away for two months, had put their lives at risk, and had made sure there was no Indian threat in the immediate future, and to the delight of the Parowan men, the column were greeted as heroes when they entered their home town; the flags were out, the girls put their best dresses on, and tables heaved with food and drink, the band struck up and a dance was organised.The following day the column divided, the men from Parowan, and Captain Andrus took the rest of the company back to Cedar City and from there to their homes.
As for the Utes, Black Hawk eventually surrendered, made his peace with the Mormons and retired to the hills where he died in 1870. Then, in 1871, with the hard work of the war already done for them, the US federal government sent in troops, rounded up the remaining Utes from the hills and herded them onto a desolate reservation.
The roots of the War lay partly with the duplicity of the US federal Government, who, signed a treaty with the Utes in 1865 coercing them into giving up most of their land for a pittance of an annual allowance (62 cents per acre) and forcing them to move to a reservation. This treaty was resisted by a number of Chiefs, especially the relatives of Wah-Kara, but being advised by Brigham Young that it was the best they were going to get from the Federal Government, they signed and for the most part were herded onto the reservation. However the US Congress subsequently refused to ratify the payments, and the Utes were cheated of their money. They had been played for fools by grasping and greedy politicians. Between the 1930s and 1980s the Utes managed to buy back and gain jurisdiction over many millions of acres of their former lands, although facing occasional setbacks due to Government duplicity like 100 years before, when in 1965 the Federal Government negotiated the diversion of a major river from Ute land, only to renege on the agreement to provide additional water storage for the Utes, fortunately the modern Utes are much more able to defend themselves legally than in the past, and financial compensation was paid in lieu.
It is estimated that Ute numbers were about 30,000 when the Mormons settled in Utah. By 1909 more than 90% of them had been wiped out by disease, starvation, and military action. To add insult to injury, a party of Mormons dug up Black Hawk’s grave in 1919, stole his body and put it on display, first in a Co-op shop in Spanish Fork (the Co-op being another innovation brought over from Lancashire), then in the Mormon Church Museum in Salt Lake City, only being finally returned to the Utes and re-buried in 1996.
The Mormons built a thriving State as part of the USA but always slightly out of step with the Government, and of course the USA is the richest Country on the planet. For the Utes it was a different story.
The Royal Victoria Country Park at Netley Abbey is due to undergo a £2.68M restoration of its historic buildings, via the Heritage Lottery Fund, secured by Hampshire County Council. As part of this the human side of its history is being brought together from memories of the site from locals with family or other links to the site. In charge of this is Paul Del-A-More, a Hamble local who is Project Manager for the venture. Paul’s Blog can be seen here:
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/countryside/countryside-service/country-parks/rvcp/rvcp-improvements.htm
Being based in the area Timedetectives decided to do some digging of our own, and came up with some interesting connections to the area via the Family History of the Kray Twins.
The Royal Victoria Hospital was a personal project of Queen Victoria, and when built was the largest Hospital in the world. It served the British armed forces from the time of the Crimean War, through the 19th century and on into the First and Second World Wars, until the demolition of most of the buildings in 1966 during the Philistine demolition boom that destroyed so much British History in the 1960s.
During its time, from the aftermath of the Crimean War to WW2 the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley served generations of soldiers from all over the United Kingdom, its Colonies, and allies. To understand how such a place could have an effect on generations of British Families I have taken an example of the Kray Twins Family as an extension to other Kray stories in this Blog.
The Kray Twins are of course synonymous with East End Gangsters, but the twins had an enduring connection with this area of Hampshire spreading from Southampton in the West, through Netley and the Hamble Peninsula, out to Waterlooville in the East, even ignoring Reggie Kray’s time in Prison on the Isle of Wight.
John William Kray, the Kray twins Great Grandfather’s brother, had left his job hammering rivets all day, to take up a life in the army at 18 years of age and in 1870 when he had joined the 65th Regiment of foot. His career in the army was a fractious one, with constant bouts of indiscipline and sickness. He came to be in Netley Hospital whilst stationed in England as veteran soldier with seven years under his belt. He was admitted on 30th April 1877, for a mystery illness, and the doctors scratched their heads whilst John Kray the brawny ex-riveter spent a lovely couple of weeks of bed rest and recuperation chatting to the nurses in the grounds of the large beautiful Hospital bordering the Solent. Eventually the Doctors after scratching their heads and listening to his diverse description of his ailments, decided that despite his protests of illness, there was nothing actually wrong with him other than a likely case of malingering by an experienced old lag of a Private.
Having failed to prove himself sick, he deserted for six months in 1879, then voluntarily re-joined in the same year having got bored with being on the run. On his return he was sentenced to a month’s hard labour and stoppages of wages. Shortly after this the Army decided that he would be better off out of harms way in the Far East, where he spent the next fourteen years serving in the East Indies; India, Aden, and the Soudan (sic). Having failed to get sick whilst at Netley, John Kray surpassed himself in India where he managed to get six year’s worth of diarrhoea, Malaria, Dysentery, Gonorrhoea, and Syphilis, despite this he continued serving, given his particular ailments he obviously made the most of his time in the tropics. He no doubt longed to be back in Netley enjoying the sea breezes off the Solent.
In 1884 the regiment was sent to the Sudan to fight the ISIS of their day, The Mahdists, led by the man from whom they derived their name, the “Mahdi” or the “Mad Mullah” as he was nicknamed by the British Troops. The Mahdi was , who had killed British General Gordon and overrun an Anglo-Egyptian outpost at Khartoum in the Sudan. John Kray would see some real action in the Sudan for the first time in his military career. John’s regiment engaged with the Mahdist Army after the Mahdists had destroyed an Egyptian force sent against them, and had captured the Egyptians’ modern British manufactured firearms in the process, so posed an even greater threat to the British Protectorate. 
The Mahdists had a defended position at El Teb but were overrun by British forces with light casualties (John’s regiment only receiving seven casualties) but killing two thousand Mahdists in the process. The Mahdists were later re-engaged by John’s regiment at the battle of Tomai where for a loss of just over two hundred the British killed four thousand Mahdists. 
After the actions in the Sudan John Kray’s regiment is sent home, and in 1889, after nearly twenty years in the Army John went back to civvie street, where he married, and settled down in Leeds where he worked as a commissionaire. The only member of the family at this time to move away from the London area. He would die in Leeds in 1906.
No doubt when John Kray reminisced to the rest of the Kray clan about his adventures in the Army, he would have told stories of his best remembered time during a balmy English Summer malingering in the grounds of Netley Hospital; his two weeks of contented holiday on the Banks of the Solent.
Clement Henry Kray, a second cousin of the Kray twins, also ended up in The Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley. The circumstances of him arriving there were very different from those of his malingering distant cousin John who we heard about above.
While the Kray Twins line of the family had been Lamp Lighters, Clement’s line of the family via his Grandfather had pulled themselves up by the boot straps to open a small tobacconist shop in Bethnal Green, and Clement’s Father, Henry Joseph, had managed to get an education and move into lithographic printing, eventually opening a small printing business for himself.
in 1900 Henry had volunteered for the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), not actually as implied by its name an artillery unit, but a mixed unit of Infantry and supporting artillery, drawn from Londoners from the area of the City of London, and the oldest volunteer Regiment in the British Army.
Clement Kray, Henry’s eldest son, had been doing well for himself before the War, he was a young commercial traveller from Harlesdon, and no doubt enjoyed life and expected great things to develop, as the Country moved from Victorian seriousness and poverty for the working classes, into a time of opportunity and a developing Middle Class in the Edwardian era. In 1910 he followed his Father as a part time volunteer soldier in the HAC, so had a good career, some status in a well respected volunteer force, and a bright future. But the Great War would change all of that.
Clement was shipped over to the French/Belgian border to fight the Germans in 1914. The HAC took part in the Battle of Ypres, and Clement’s unit was dug in around Kemmel, the highest point on the battlefield, which of course put them up as a prime target for the Germans. The Kray Twins’ Grandfather “Mad’ Jimmy Kray was in France in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC) another London regiment, at the same time as Clement, and no doubt heard about the action at Kemmel where his second cousin Clement was fighting.
The HAC were soon heavily engaged during the bitter winter of 1914. On 15th December 1914 the HAC went over the top and charged the German lines after an artillery bombardment, having to run uphill many of the HAC had been cut down by the Germans on the way in. Despite this they had overrun the German positions and had taken a terrible revenge on the Germans who had surrendered, shooting many of them out of hand in revenge for their fallen comrades. By their own admission many of the men had a blood lust brought on by battle, and such incidences of brutality outside the rules of war were far from uncommon amongst the hard-bitten British professional soldiers, for example in the same battle 300 German prisoners were reported slaughtered after surrender by the Royal Scots. Clement was one of the unlucky HAC soldiers who was wounded in the Battle. The wounds were far too serious to be treated in the field, or even further back from the battle front, bad enough in fact for Clement to be shipped back to England.
Clement was shipped back to Blighty on a hospital steamer, unloaded onto one of the specilaised Hospital Trains at Southampton Docks, which steamed the few miles down the coast to Netley, where he was taken into the care of the volunteer nurses at the Royal Victoria.
Netley, after much criticism, had been added to with a large number of huts to accommodate patients in better conditions than were previously available in the wards, and was visited by Sir Frederick Treves in November, just a month before Clement Kray was shipped across from from to it. Treves was famous as the rescuer of Joseph Merrick (sometimes mistakenly called John Merrick) better known as The Elephant Man. Treves was now very senior in the Medical Profession, looking after the Royal Family, and had also served in a field hospital in the Boer War, so was keen to make sure that facilities were as good as they could be for wounded soldiers in the Great War. In his report he describes The Royal Victoria Hospital as:
“It is a ‘Hut Hospital’ of 500 beds, essentially a Field Hospital capable of being readily moved. When completed at the end of the present month, it will be made up of 45 Huts disposed as follows:- 25 for patients, 9 for nurses, 5 for orderlies, 3 as recreation rooms, and 3 for isolation wards.
At present only 25 Huts are occupied, 10 of these being Ward Huts. The Operating Theatre is not yet completed. The staff under Sir Warren Crooke-Lawless consists of 18 medical officers, 65 female nurses, all fully trained, a matron, 20 quartermasters, and 130 N.C.O.’s and men. The Hospital is rationed from Netley. The wounded are brought into Netley by a special ambulance train, thence they are transported by stretcher to the Hospital, a distance covered in some four or five minutes.
The number of patients in the Hospital is at the moment 140; 80 being British soldiers and 60 belonging to Indian troops. In another week the Hospital will be able to accommodate 300 patients. As an illustration of efficient transport it may be said that a large batch of patients now in the wards were wounded on a certain Friday and were in bed at Netley on the following Monday. There has happily been only one death at the Hospital, that of a soldier with a desperate shell wound of the skull exposing the brain. The first major operation performed in the Hospital was not upon a soldier, but upon one of the Hospital orderlies, who was seized with appendicitis and is now a cheery convalescent in his own ward. The cases are practically all gunshot wounds. There has been no tetanus and little gangrene. No cases of typhoid fever have been received. The medical cases have been light, although among them are six cases of Beri-beri.
The Hospital has the general appearance of a toy town made up of grey Huts arranged, with great formality, in a meadow behind Netley. The Huts are the best of the type I have seen. They are light, airy and well ventilated. They are lit by electric light, are warmed by slow-combustion stoves (two to each Hut) and are amply supplied with water. The sanitary arrangements are quite admirable, the many difficulties that presented themselves having been surmounted with complete success. Each Hut contains 20 beds and has a well-arranged annexe. The furniture, beds, bedding and general equipment of the Huts leave nothing to be desired. The Hospital kit, issued to each man by Lady Wolverton is excellent and – if I may venture to say so – is better than that supplied by the Army. It consists of a blue jacket and trousers, both lined with flannel, a vest, shirt, night dress, towel, handkerchief and slippers.
The Red Cross store, managed by Lady Lawless and Mrs. Miller, is a model of efficiency and order. The new Operating Theatre, built under the direction of Mr. Cuthbert Wallace, is admirably arranged and will soon be completed. The nurses’ huts, with 9 cubicles in each, are very comfortable. The kitchen is furnished with every requirement for a hospital of 500 beds, and the sergeant cook is very proud of it. He exhibited a roast fowl and a bowl of beef tea with the confidence of an artist who was displaying finished works of art.
The Medical Officers, under the direction of Mr. Cuthbert Wallace and Dr. Miller, are doing excellent work, and these gentlemen speak in the highest terms of their efficiency. The matron pays a compliment to the Society in its selection of nurses by her assertion that her staff gives the greatest satisfaction and there is not a single nurse she would wish to change. The orderlies are men drawn from various Voluntary Aid Detachments throughout the country. It will be of interest to the Society to know that Sir Warren is not only entirely satisfied with these men and their exemplary behaviour, but also – although the staff is so large – that he has not had occasion to make a complaint of any one of them.
A whole-hearted enthusiasm and a determination to do their best pervade the entire staff of the Hospital from the highest to the humblest. This excellent spirit derives its inspiration partly from the fine example set by Colonel Crooke-Lawless himself and partly from the fact that everyone at work in Netley is proud of the Hospital he serves. In that pride the Society may well participate.”
Clement spent Christmas 1914/15 and New Year in Netley, but sadly died of his wounds on 22nd January 1915.
Clement’s Father had already lost his youngest son Frederick earlier that year, and had the sad task of having Clement’s body shipped back to London by Trainhis Mother and Father buried him at New Southgate Cemetery Enfield, with the following epitaph:
Clement Henry Kray
1st. Battalion Honourable Artillery Company who fell in the Great War. Wounded at Kemmel, nr. Ypres, 15th. Dec. 1914, Died at Netley Hospital, 22nd. Jan. 1915, aged 22 years
“Duty bravely done is the rising of the Sun of glory”
During the Second World War when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were children, their mother took therm away from the Blitz in London to the relative safety of Hampshire, it is not clear where exactly, but the episode did not end well, as the twins’ unruly behavior proved too much for the kindly Doctor who had agreed to take the family in, and very soon they were back to Lopndon, andn then evacuated again to Suffolk, where they saw out much of the War.
This time in the country made a big impression on the twins, although they were Cockney born and bred and the family had been since the 1700s, they had an abiding love of the country, and when things got a bit too intense in the East End, thye twins would come down to Hampshire for a little holiday, here Ronnie coulkd play Lord of the Manor with his silver topped cane and tweeds, while he and his brother Reggie would drink in their favourite Pub outside of London, The Bugle Pub near the waterfront in Hamble.
So taken were the twins with Hamble, that they bought a small house in the village, Hamble Manor Lodge, right next door to Hamble Manor. The twins didn’t just take it easy while in Hamble, they are rumoured to have had various dealings with the local underworld in nearby Southampton, where the docks were rife with money making opportunities, and there are even stories of a motor launch that was owned by the Twins being abandoned at Southampton Docks when they were finally banged up for murder. Maybe it was just a pleasure cruiser, or maybe it was used for other purposes? “Mad Axeman” Frank Mitchell was said to have been wrapped in Chicken wire, weighted down, and dropped in the Sea after he was murdered by the Kray’s associates.
There are also stories of a collection from a Bank Manager in Waterlooville of £85,000 that was taken to Ronnie Kray while he was in Prison. Maybe there are still some mysteries to be uncovered?
If you’d like to see the Time Detectives interview with Fred Dinenage on ITVMeridian you can find it here The Kray Twins on The Hamble Peninsula
…and if you have your own Family Stories about servicemen who spent time in The Royal Victoria Hospital Netley in Hampshire let me know and I’ll pass them on in time for its historic restoration. Please feel free to leave a comment on this page.
If you’d like your own Family History professionally researched, please contact me on paulmcneil@timedetectives.co.uk
“If I had my way, I’d treat some of these Continental fellers like we used to treat Chinese dope smugglers – hang ’em.”
It’s always interesting to discover a previously unknown story in a Family Tree, especially when the detail turns out to be unusual or sensational, and I had one such occurrence recently when re-rersearching Danny Baker’s Family Tree during the airing of his BBC comedy series Cradle to Grave ( #CradleToGrave ) based on his autobiography Going to Sea in a Sieve ( #goingtoseainasieve ), and now that he’s making an appearance in “I’m a Celebrity” I thought this would be a good time to share the amazing story of his female ancestors again.
It came about due to some missing links in the original tree that I researched back in 2005, notably with a number of the women in the Baker Line. It is a fact that on the average women are generally far less straightforward to trace than men in Family Trees. There are two main reasons for this; first, historically it has been the norm in most English speaking countries for women to change their surname when they marry, and therefore they suddenly disappear from your line of sight, and secondly, and this is a fact born of years of research not just stereotyping, women have a much greater tendency to knowingly lie about their age on census forms and marriage certificates, especially where there is a large age difference between a woman and her husband. So there tend to be lose ends to tidy up on the female sides of trees once the main research is complete.
The thing was, Danny’s Great Grandmother and Great Aunts had done a bit of a disappearing act in the archives, and so additional digging was required. One of their stories would yield a world spanning adventure, but we start with Maria Baker – Danny Baker’s Great Grandmother.
Maria was a farm girl from Salisbury, daughter of a Dairyman. She had come to London looking for work, which she found as a domestic servant, and she also found Robert William Baker, the son of a Chemist from Kensington and the grandson of Queen Victoria’s Yeoman of the Royal Wine Cellars at Windsor Castle.
Robert William, failed to follow his father into the Chemist’s trade, instead he was apprenticed to a Lamp Maker, making Tin Signal Lamps for the railways. This came about after a family split, caused by Maria, when she and Robert William started “living in sin” away from the upmarket surroundings of Kensington, in the working class cheaper parts of London’s East End – Bow and Poplar. The couple had seven children in the 12 years between 1877 and 1889, five boys and three girls. During that time Robert William moved from making signal Lamps for the Railways, to working as a Journeyman Tinsmith in a preserved food factory, i.e. making Tins for canned food, actually a new technology at the time, so not a bad trade for a working class man, but an extreme step down in a single generation, from his Father and Grand Father’s positions in society, and all for the love of Maria.
However the move to the East end was a bad one for Robert William, living down by the docks there was always the threat of serious disease from the living conditions. Working in crowded factories, with boat born disease from the scores of foreign sailors coming in from exotic climes. Like the storyline from a Dickensian tragedy, Robert William contracted Typhoid in 1889 the same year that his youngest son Arthur was born, Robert was acutely ill for two weeks and died on Christmas Eve 1889, leaving Maria to fend on her own for her seven children from Christmas Day 1889. Merry Christmas Maria.
Maria had had twelve happy years with Robert Baker, but now she would need to fight to keep body and soul together, working as a Housekeeper taking in lodgers, with the children recorded as working as shop boys and girls and errand boys from an early age. Between 1891-1901 the family lived in exactly the same area of Poplar, in Claremont Terrace and Alpha Road. This area was slowly improving through the 1890s especially around Alpha Road. The Booth inspectors who chronicled the relative poverty of London at the time, described Alpha Road as being comfortable looking with neat gardens inhabited by Dock Foremen and permanent hands. Alpha Road can be seen on the map of the Isle of Dogs below, it runs vertically on the left of centre in between West India and Millwall Docks. So Maria had managed to keep her family’s heads above water in a respectable working class neighbourhood, without the aid of a man in her life, quite an achievement in 1889.
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=836581
In 1899 Carl Oscar Blom a Seaman from Vastervik on the Baltic East Coast of Sweden, arrived in the Port of London, and made his way from Poplar Docks to the Scandinavian Seaman’s Temperance Hostel in Garford Street Poplar. The Scandinavian Seamen’s Temperance home was a famous institution in the Docks, having been opened in 1888 by no less than Prince Oscar of Sweden and Norway. The Swedish & Norwegian Royal Family were a great supporters of Britain, and of Scandinavian seamanship commerce and exploration, and had the distinction of being mainly of French descent, their Royal House of Bernadotte having been founded by the constitutional appointment of one of Napoleon’s Military Marshals when the Quisling Scandinavian politicians of the time were eager not to be at odds with the little dictator Napoleon, who had conquered and ruled most of Continental Europe until 1815. The Marshal himself was descended from a peasant farmer, so he epitomised the ultimate rags to riches story.
Carl Oscar Of Sweden and Norway By Anders Zorn – From Emil Hildebrand, Sveriges historia intill tjugonde seklet (1910), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52378
The Seaman’s home was therefore a magnet for the many Scandinavian Sailors and Officers from ships stopping over in the Docks, and as a consequence of this influx into Poplar of tall, blond, blue-eyed, cash flush sailors, it was also a Mecca for unattached young women, and although in the words of the song “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor” many of the not-so-nice girls liked them as well, and the Hostel did receive complaints from Church going locals about the “Ladies of the Night” who flocked around its clients, like bees around a honeypot.
The Mission was in Garford Street, which as can be seen from the map above, was only a short walk North along the River from Alpha Road. Despite the suspect activity of young women around the Mission, the romance between Maria Baker, the widowed mid-forties mother of seven children, and Carl Oscar Blom, the middle aged Scandinavian Seaman, was likely to have been a much more mellow affair.
Given that the Seaman’s home was a temperance establishment run under strict dour Scandinavian Protestant morality, Carl Oscar would no doubt have been pleased to have made the acquaintance of a woman of similar age, who could provide some affection, and the comforts of home to a sailor who was a long way from home. For Maria it was a chance to have companionship with a strong man of the world, and to become what she had never been in the eyes of Robert’s family; a respectable married woman.
So Maria saw to it that the relationship with Carl Oscar was respectable or “proper” as the working class expressed it (pronounced “prop-pah” in Cockney, or “prarp-er” in Maria’s slight Wiltshire burr) and their courtship culminated in Banns being read three times in All Saints Church Poplar between 21st May 1899 and 4th June 1899 (while Carl was at Sea) and on his return he was married to Maria on 17th June 1899. This of course was in contrast to her not marrying Robert William Baker, despite the love they shared. Maria had taken her chance to “make an honest woman of herself” in the speech of the day. She had a ring, a husband, respectability, and a small business. No one could turn their moralistic noses up at her or her children anymore.
Maria was also very conscious of her age, and reflected this on the wedding certificate where she gave her age as 32, when she was actually about ten years older than this, which says a little about her, in as much as she was probably quite an attractive woman and could bluff a younger age. Carl Oscar Blom, her merchant seaman betrothed, was 43.
Carl undoubtedly gave Maria some romance, and probably a little companionship, although not much, as he spent so much time away at sea. A sailor’s life was a tough one, and within two years Carl had died while on his travels. Where he died is not clear, although a Seaman off a Swedish Ship called Carl Oscar Blom died in Plymouth Workhouse Devon, of Spinal Meningitis in 1900, however his date of birth is given as 1871, abour 16 years younger than our Carl Oscar, so this may just have been a coincidence.
Robbed of a second husband after another ten years of wedded happiness, Maria never the less kept the family going, she had now lost two partners but still managed to do well by the standards of the time, so much so, that Maria was registered to vote in local elections from 1903, although it would be some time before she could vote in National Elections. Maria had overcome a double loss to become a woman of means in the area around the docks.
Maria was a born survivor, never a victim, and by 1911 she had setup in a five roomed house at 54 Poplar High Street as a Housekeeper, effectively a landlady running a boarding house. Arthur Baker, her youngest son, was still living at home, and was working as a Pawn Broker’s assistant, a healthy trade around Poplar Docks. Her boarders included young Ernest King a Dock’s Customs Officer, Harry Wright a sailor from Surrey, and notably two Danes, Johan Nielson the 80 year old caretaker of the local Danish Church in Poplar, and Henry Julius Otadel who was wealthy enough to be living “on his own means”.
Poplar High Street
So the Scandinavian connection continued, and Maria’s presence as a character in Poplar would continue until August 1930, when she died of heart failure in her seventies, having outlived two partners, seen a daughter die in tragic circumstances (as we shall see below) run a business, and become a well known figure in the Cockney and Scandinavian Community of the London Docks. In short she lived a long and successful life by the standards of the time.
Maria’s last address was in Toronto Buildings Poplar, these flats had been built by the London County Council (LCC) between 1899 and 1901 in Cotton Street, after land was purchased and houses demolished to make way for the Blackwell Tunnel under the Thames linking Poplar with North Greenwich, although not that attractive to look at, for their time the five story flats were spacious, self contained, better equipped, and sanitary, than what had gone before in the East End. Next door to Maria lived her ever loyal youngest son Arthur Baker and his wife Beatrice, it was Beatrice who reported Maria’s death.
Interestingly her death certificate shows how family stories contain seeds of truth, but get changed over time; her daughter-in-law Beatrice, knew the basic facts about Maria, but conflated her two husbands, telling the officials that Maria was the widow of “Robert Blom” a Lamp Maker.
Whilst researching maria, I managed to untangle the tragic story of Cecilia, Maria’s eldest daughter. She too had fallen out of the records, but I managed to discover that Cecilia had the same taste in men as her mother, at least as far as Scandinavians from the Docks were concerned. In the early 1900s she took up with a Norwegian called Engle Bjornson, a shipwright. Most likely Engle caught the eye of Cecilia while he was a boarder in her Mother’s guest House, and in 1905 Cecilia and Engle married in All Saints Church Poplar, just like Cecilia’s mum Maria had to her Scandinavian Sailor Carl Oscar Blom.
Work called, and shipbuilding started to focus on the North of England around Tyneside rather than in Poplar, so Cecilia moved North with her husband to Wallsend, where they lived in two rooms in Carlyle Street on Willington Quay. The couple had a tragically short lived daughter, poetically named Alida Lenea Bjornson, who died soon after birth in 1908. The shock took its toll on Cecilia, affecting her mental health, which in turn put a strain on the marriage. Around this time she started to change her name from Cecilia to Selina, with various spellings, as if she were trying to create a new start with a new name.
Things came to a head with “Selina’s” mental Health around the time of the First World War, so much so that in 1918 we find Selina back in Poplar with her Maternal family. But her mental state became too much for her family to cope with, and having a very unstable young woman in a guest house, was just too much. Reluctantly the family agreed to put her into the infirmary in Tower Hamlets Workhouse. When she was booked in, her second name “Ellen” is represented by an “H” in the admissions book, which may represent the Official’s interpretation of her Cockney accent, they mistakenly assumed that she was dropping an “H” from the front of “Helen” pronouncing it as “Ellen”. This perhaps is an indication of Edwardian Authority’s attitude towards the working classes, and her likely treatment, which saw her being sent to Colney Hatch Mental Asylum a few days later, where she died in the same year 1918.
For his part it seems that Engle lost no time in taking up with a local Northumberland girl named Minnie, taking up with her as soon as Cecilia was out of the way, but he himself died within the year in 1919, leaving £132 to Minnie (about £20,000 in today’s earnings). Minnie was called his wife in his will, but there is no sign that they were ever legally married, so she was very fortunate to have pulled off the inheritance. Within four months of Engle’s death Minnie with a small fortune in her pocket had married another local man, she must have made quite a catch. It seems that relationships in the docks of Wallsend could be taken up and set aside with little room for sentiment.
Family history can sometimes throw up some strange and unexpected coincidences that look like echoes of the past, and one of my favourites is in the Baker Family.
Phoebe Jeanette Baker was Maria’s sister-in-law, Cecilia’s Aunt. She was the youngest of eight children born to Robert William Baker the Chemist (not the Lampmaker mentioned above, he was her elder brother).
It seems that there was a rebellious streak in the family, shown by the younger Robert William moving away from leafy Kensington to squalid Poplar and marrying Maria the Cow Keeper’s daughter from Salisbury, but this pales into insignificance compared to what Phoebe did.
Phoebe gravitated towards her brother Robert William and his wife Maria, she was not that much older than Robert’s eldest children, so was treated like an older child. Visiting her older brother in the East End brought her into contact with the mystery of the Poplar Docks, sailors from all over the world, exotic sights and smells from the spices and other cargos coming into the port of London, and the sun tanned hard skinned men from the boats.
Then in 1889 the Docks exploded with the Great Dock Strike, when the Dockers came out en masse to get “The Dockers’ Tanner” – sixpence (2.5p in modern terms) a small reward per hour for the back breaking work they had to do, the strikes lead to violence and unrest in the Docks, and men’s families started to starve, the atmosphere was fragile and sometime chaotic, for Phoebe there were threats to stability nearer to home, as her Father’s health was being dragged down by Bronchitis.
Into this sea of unease besetting the 19 year old Phoebe breezed the 30 year old ship’s Captain Abel Wardlaw Best. Five feet ten (tall for the time), tanned and well built, with thick brown hair and grey eyes, a strong man fresh from the China Seas, Abel must have turned young Phoebe’s head.
Abel Wardlaw Best was indeed an exotic creature, born in Agra in India, the son and grandson of Barbadan Sugar Plantation Slave owners, and educated in Scotland. His family’s fortunes had initially taken a downturn during the Napoleonic wars in 1808 when Great Britain banned the Slave Trade (but not slave owning) and the Royal Navy intercepted and freed slaves from all vessels including foreign ones. this was followed by the Abolition of Slavery in the whole of the British Empire in 1834.
Strangely Slavery was never abolished in Great Britain as Slavery had not been recognised as a legal state of existence since before the middle ages. This was actually defined under English Law in a court ruling, that neither in written law or “Common Law” (the unwritten Law of common practice by the English people) that slavery was never a recognised state of being, and indeed was effectively in breach of an Englishman’s (“man” in it’s original English definition of “a person” not the post Norman definition of a male) right of Habeus Corpus as enshrined since the 13th century, i.e. the English right not to be held against their will without trial.
This had lead to some interesting situations, as legally any slave that set foot in Great Britain could be viewed as no more than a servant, effectively automatically free, and there are recorded instances of the Cockney “Mob” in cahoots with Black Londoners, attacking rich foreign and colonial slave owners in London and their slave catcher agents to spring black slaves from their servitude. This was such an issue, that no less than Justice Sir John Fielding, the man who developed the first Police force in London, advised American and Caribbean Planters visiting London, not to bring their Slaves with them, as once in London, seeing and being approached and encouraged by the numbers of free black people living in the metropolis, they would not only demand wages, but were likely to run off to get baptised and married, and the Planters could find themselves in mortal danger from the working class populace, “The London Mob”, should they try to retrieve their slaves.
Intriguingly some of these freed London slaves went on to join the Royal Navy and faced the prospect of being part of the Navy’s anti-slavery Patrols, thereby actively freeing up other African slaves. Even the plaque on the side of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar square in the heart of London shows a black sailor, holding a rifle on the left, on Nelson’s flagship fighting the French.
By Eluveitie – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18848707
Once not only trading in slaves, but the owning of slaves was itself outlawed, the Best Family from Barbados received over £7,500 in compensation from the British Parliament (the equivalent of around £10,700,000 in today’s economic terms) for the loss of their 1,323 slaves.
Like many British West Indian Plantation owners, the Bests used their money, and connections to maintain positions of power in the British Empire. To hedge their bets, a number of plantation families seeded their sons into the British East India Company (EIC), and from there into the British Diplomatic and Judicial Corps in India. As well as their money and connections, the Planters’ families could boast a knowledge of trade in goods from the tropics to more temperate parts of the world, as well as a tolerance for tropical conditions generally, and an assumed superiority and willingness to exploit native workers. The Bests jumped into this world with a certain gusto, which is how Abel managed to get himself born in Agra.
The family seemed to court adventure, which they duly found in the city of Agra during the Indian Mutiny. The EIC ran a Private, but British Government sanctioned, Colonial Army in India. The EIC Army was actually three separate Armies, those of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, numbering at peak over 120,000 men, so one of the largest standing armies in the world. It was used both to maintain order in India, and to fight wars around the area, including major actions against, Sindh, Persia, China, Afghanistan, Burma, Nepal, the Punjab, and against the Sikhs, as well as providing volunteer officers and men for the Crimean War against Russia (via the Anglo-Turkish Legion). The largest number of men in the EIC Armies, were local Indians, armed, trained, and paid by the EIC and generally called Sepoys, alongside these there were European, mainly British and Irish Troops under EIC pay. The entire Officer class were British.
In 1857 the EIC authorities in Agra received news of the mutiny of Sepoys in other Indian Cities. In response they had the Bengal Fusiliers, the local EIC British Troops, disarm the local Sepoy Troops. This was despite the fact that for two months the Sepoys had shown no sign of rising in revolt, despite the uprisings in other cities. In May 1857 6,000 refugees; British Families from the surrounding area, poured into Agra, this was triggered by unrest and rumours amongst the Indian population on the back of the general uprising against the East India Company in Delhi.
Disgruntled at having been disarmed, and faced with a massive influx of panic stricken British refugees, the local Agra Sepoys attempted a brief uprising in June 1857, probably more for effect than in any organised military manner, and lacking the arms of the EIC British troops, they were driven off and the British holed up with their civilians in the Fort at the heart of Agra. The Bengal Fusiliers sealed off and defended the Fort before any serious violence could occur, and the displaced Sepoys set up a half hearted siege, it seems almost pandering to a kind of wish fulfilment for the panicked British civilians.
The farce started to turn into a crisis due to the crowding of British and other European civilians in Agra, not because of shortages of food or water, but more because of fear and a lack of medical supplies. But the fear was real for good reason; the Sepoys in other areas did have a reputation for shocking treatment of captured men, women, and children, so the British Bengal Fusiliers held the City doggedly, driven by fears for the women and children. Many of the Sepoys lost interest and headed off for the siege of Delhi, which was a much more dangerous and exciting affair.
Delhi was eventually relieved by the British, who then sent a flying column of battle hardened British, Sikh, and Punjabi troops, to Agra. Contrary to popular myth, many Indians and other local troops including the Sikhs, Punjabis, and Gurkhas, stayed loyal to the British, and were a major factor in putting down the uprising. The relief column when it turned up at Agra, was initially treated with disdain, mainly because they had taken to wearing rough Khaki uniforms (the first time British Khaki was ever adopted by British soldiers) much more practical than the Redcoats that were generally worn. The British civilians in Agra, seeing this mixture of deep tanned men of various racial backgrounds, covered in dust with worn and bloodstained clothing, initially thought they were an army of invading Afghans, and for their part, the Flying column was surprised to find the Bengal Fusiliers in Agra resplendent in unblemished red uniforms with immaculate white cross belts, as if on parade rather than under siege.
The British column was initially attacked in camp at Agra by Sepoy artillery followed by a cavalry charge, but the British, Sikhs, and Punjabis, were battle hardened regulars, they formed ranks held the Sepoy attack, counter attacked around the Sepoy flanks with Cavalry, drove the Sepoys off, then followed up, catching them at aRiver crossing where they tore the Sepoy ranks apart with Artillery fire, and routed them with a final Cavalry charge. The siege was over, order and British rule were restored, and the Best’s settled down as part of the ruling elite, with Abel Wardlaw Best being born there on 24th March 1859.
His parents decided to send Abel back to Scotland for schooling, bt by the age of 15 it was felt better to send him to a Naval training ship, HMS Conway, in Liverpool. He graduated from here to the Royal Naval Reserve as a Mid-Shipman, but unable to find gainful employment, the restless young man at the age of 20 became a second mate in the Merchant Marine.
where he graduated to a Naval training ship, may have been a very wilful young man, ran off to London and worked on ships till he got his Master’s certificate.
After this Abel was off to sea, working his way up to a ship’s Captain in the South China Seas. His travels brought him back to the Port of London and it was here that he met Phoebe and swept her off her feet.
Robert William Baker had given in to love rather than follow the demands of his Middleclass Family when he married Maria Clerk, in so doing he swapped salubrious Kensington a perhaps life as a middleclass Chemist, for an albeit skilled working class existence as a Lamp maker to live by the docks in the East End. Seeing love triumph amid the adventure of the Docks, Phoebe set her mind on finding her own romance the way her older brother had.
Being wilful and young, just 19, she was literally Shanghaied by Abel, who whisked her away from London and her Family to the other side of the world. The effect on her Mother and Father can only be imagined. Robert William and Anne must have been horrified, their youngest child taken away to the ends of the earth by a 30 year old hard bitten Ship’s Captain. And of course, the shame of it. Their eldest son having lived in sin and raised a family out of wedlock in the docks, and his influence had corrupted their youngest child, leaving her captive to the whims of an older man in a ship on the South China Seas!
On a more prosaic level we can believe that in Phoebe and Abel’s eyes, they simply had their honeymoon first, and their marriage after. When they got to Shanghai in China Abel did the decent thing, and on 15th April 1889 they were married in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Shanghai.
Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Shanghai
That same year 1889 her beloved older brother Robert died of Typhus in Poplar, and by 1897 her father had also died. By 1898 Phoebe and Abel were living in Hong Kong, where Abel was working for The Taikoo Sugar Company, once again sugar played a part in this story. Abel was a Wharfinger (Harbour Master) at Quarry Bay. An important job, where Abel would be responsible for the goods and storage on the docks, as well as the docking of ships, and settling disputes between ships Captains and crews, in keeping with his position Abel was also a Juror in the Hong Kong judicial system.
Tai-Koo Docks Hong Kong 1903
Phoebe and Abel, had no children during their marriage, and despite having run off and lived with Abel in China for some years, life away from home living in the strange environment of ex-patriot Shanghai and Hong Kong, a staggering change for a girl from Kensington, would have lead to some homesickness, especially as Abel was often away at sea Captaining Merchant ships between Swatow, Singapore, Saigon and Bangkok.
After she heared of her Father’s death, Phoebe sailed back to England to spend some time with her Mother and sisters. So we find Phoebe living in Hammersmith with her maternal family in 1901, where her mother lived off a pension from her her dead husband’s estate, whilst her sisters worked. Undoubtedly Phoebe was much better off than her mother and sisters, Able had both family money and had built up a good business of his own, so she no doubt helped her mother for a while. She must have seemed like a strange exotic creature now to her family, having lived in places they could only dream of and would never visit.
Abel did his best, and decided to move to a country more conducive to Phoebe, where she would feel less alienated; the USA. Abel arrived in New York in April 1905, Phoebe left Liverpool on 1st June 1906 and arrived in New York on 10th with £70 in her pocket. This would be the beginning of Phoebe’s next big adventure.
Our story now takes an even more interesting turn. When I put together a Family History, it’s not just a dry chart full of names. I always work from the point of view that all those people that once lived, and without whom we wouldn’t be here, have the right to have their stories told, otherwise they are just remain non-existent; telling their stories brings them back to life and a Family History adds to a Family’s dignity and helps explain their place in the world. The actions of our ancestors echo across the centuries in what we are and what we do.
So it is always nice when members of the families I produce these works for get in touch to discuss what I’ve found, perhaps do some research of their own, and, very, very, occasionally, become part of the story by unconsciously living a life of adventures that mirror those of their ancestors, showing that both Genes and Memes are passed through the generations. This is what makes the Culture, the Folklore, and the Mythology of a Family. For me, when this happens, it’s like finding a rare gem.
This was what I would find when I was contacted by Alexandra Baker, Danny Baker’s niece, who had some questions about The Baker Family Story. Alexandra is a successful Music promoter in California, the CEO of High Rise Public Relations, who started out in Kent and South London, and made her way in the tough world of the Music Industry to her current success, with acts as diverse as Boy George and The Maccabees. Just like Phoebe, Alexandra starting in the South of England, travelled to New York, and then to California forging success in a hard world.
So, Phoebe had followed Abel to New York and then to California. This made sense, Abel’s experience was predominantly in the South China Seas, so a California base was what was needed for Able, and something useful to do was what was needed for Phoebe, and sure enough we find Abel and Phoebe living at 251 Winston Street Los Angeles from 1907 when Abel becomes a naturalised American citizen. By 1910, perhaps having taken another lesson from her plucky sister-in-law Maria in Poplar, Phoebe started running a boarding house at the Winston Street address while Able was away.
Los Angeles early 1900s
Winston Street was full of boarding houses, providing clean decent lodging for the burgeoning workforce of Los Angeles. As well as Phoebe and Able, there were lodging houses run by a Japanese Family with Japanese lodgers, an Austrian Family with Austrian lodgers, and American Families with American lodgers, plus a German and his American family living in their own rooms. Phoebe and Able had two American lodgers, a salesman and a mariner. All the neighbours except the Austrians and Japanese spoke English. Years later in the 1930s the area would begin a slow decline as the richer owners moved out and slum landlords moved in. It is now the skid row area of Los Angeles, and is becoming gentrified again.
Phoebe and Abel move up in the world by 1917 when Abel is recorded as a Rancher. Abel would have been 58 by then, so long stints at sea were probably less attractive, and there was a boom in demand for food driven by the Army’s requirements for suppliers for the millions of soldiers shipped over to Europe, and to fulfil demand from Great Britain for food now that so many men were in the trenches rather than in fields. It was a lucrative business.
The timing was interesting as it coincides with a business consortium buying up large areas of relatively cheap Ranch Land, that had been subject to drought in previous decades, the day before the City of Los Angeles passed a bill to build and aqueduct to bring water to the area, and unsurprisingly a major member of the syndicate was also on the committee that passed the bill! The ranch land after initial development for food, soon became prime building land and was sold off in “the sale of the century” to allow for urban development on the suburbs of Los Angeles. It would appear that Able was in the right place at the right time.
But the ranching and speculating life didn’t suit the marriage of Able and Phoebe, and the couple divorced sometime between 1917 and 1920. Abel gave up ranching, and lived in the Harvard Military School in Los Angeles, possibly teaching seamanship, interestingly the ceremonial uniforms of the boys were confederate Grey.
Sometime after 1920 Abel went back to sea and headed once again for Hong Kong – he had cashed in his chips, and invested his small fortune in stocks and shares, there was nothing to keep him in California anymore.
In the 1874 when Jeremiah Joseph Hannon travelled as a teenager from Ireland to the Town of Milford, Worcester County, Massachusetts with his parents and younger brother and elder sister, he had little idea of the adventure his life would turn into. The civil war was over in the USA and there was plenty of work in the North for those willing to take it up, Jeremiah worked with his Father repairing Boots for the local Shoe shop.
Having crossed the Ocean, hammering nails into boots seemed like an anticlimax, and Jeremiah set out West in search of adventure. He was 6 feet tall with blue eyes, black hair, and a rosy complexion, and by 1892, in his early thirties, Jeremiah had made it to California to work as a Fireman on the Railroad in Los Angeles. A Fireman’s lot on a steam Train was a hard one, shovelling coal into the train’s boiler to keep the steam up and the engine rolling, it built hard strong lean men, but it was endless toil, and once the excitement of travelling the country by train had worn off, Jeremiah craved more adventure.
In 1898 when when Jeremiah was around 40 a new opportunity for adventure presented itself. With the blowing up of the American warship The Maine in Havana Harbour, the Spanish American War burst onto the scene. Spain had been losing power on the world scene since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s when The Duke of Wellington assisted by the Portuguese, and by Spanish guerrillas, had thoroughly defeated Napoleon’s forces in Spain. Years of civil strife followed, fuelled by the Anarchist movement in Europe. Late in the 1800s Spain gained some stability, but the previous weakness at the centre of Spanish politics and the successful overthrow of Spanish rule in Mainland South and Central America had encouraged liberation movements in far flung colonies, notably Cuba, The Philippines, and Guam. Most of these places had been under Spanish rule for around 400 years, and Cuba in particular was thought of as a Province of Spain by the Spanish rather than a colony (a parallel to the British attitude towards Ireland).
At the same time there was a movement to expand America’s interests on the World Stage by a number of powerful men in American public life, the US had already mounted an illegal invasion of Hawaii in 1893, this came about because of civil unrest carried out by a fifth column of US Sugar Planters and Missionaries living on the Island over a period of decades (sugar once again in this story). The US invasion, unsanctioned by the US Congress, and therefore to all intents and purposes illegal, was hastened by the fact that the Hawaiians had always leaned towards Great Britain for protection in the past, to the point where the British Government had provided troops and ships in 1843 to protect the Islands from the French, honourably pulling out after a few months when the danger had past, in stark contrast to the US approach in the following decades. The legacy of this Hawaiian-British relationship is defiantly proclaimed in the Union Jack flag still flying in the corner of the Hawaiian state flag!
After the invasion the Monarchy of Hawaii was replaced with a puppet Republic largely controlled by US Commercial (Sugar) interests, but this was too precarious for the expansionist forces in the USA, and in 1897, shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, an attempt to officially annexe the Hawaiian Islands was put before congress and defeated, the defeat in part driven by pressure from the signatures of 21,000 native Hawaiians protesting at the attempt to rob them of what little sovereignty they had left, but a year later, given the likelihood of war with Spain, the US desire for a naval base in the North Pacific was too tempting a prize to be left un-stolen, as the USA would badly need a stopover point for resupply en-route to the Spanish possessions in the Philippines if they were to in consider an invasion. So all pretence of protecting the independence of Hawaii was dropped, and an annexation bill was passed, effectively robbing Hawaii of any chance of independence and self determination.
A confrontation with Spain was guaranteed when ships from the newly developed and highly powerful US fleet were dispatch to various Spanish areas of interest, culminating with the sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbour killing over 260 of her crew. At the time the blame was firmly placed on a Spanish mine by the US authorities, but later investigations point towards an explosion caused by the poor quality coal used on the ship which gave off a high flammable gas in in the area of the ship’s ammunition magazine. Whatever the cause, the sinking of the Maine ensured that War would be the likely outcome with the Americans adopting the slogan “Remember The Maine, to Hell with Spain!”
Explosion Aboard the Battleship Maine, Havana Harbour
Not wanting to miss out on the adventure, Jeremiah enlisted on May 16 1898 at Little Rock Arkansas, into the 2nd Regiment of Arkansas Infantry, and after basic training, no doubt because of his age and Railway experience, Jeremiah was transferred to the 3rd US Volunteer Engineer Regiment and shipped to Cuba. After a few weeks he returned to the US and was disbanded. By this time Jeremiah had a taste for Army life and adventure, and re-enlisted within two months for a chance to fight in the Philippines in the 33rd US Volunteer Infantry.
The War in the Philippines against the Spanish took very little time and few casualties on the American side. The main Spanish garrison in Manilla had little stomach for the fight after seeing their slightly antiquated fleet sent to the bottom of Manila Bay by the vastly superior US Fleet, and offered to put up a token resistance just to save face, as long as the US forces didn’t allow their Filipino insurgent allies take control of the town or molest the surrendering Spaniards. There was some confusion, and some units of US soldiers were involved in heavy fire, but overall the “attack” went as planned.
If anything it went too well, as, now in possession of the Capital the US Government decided that rather than handing the Philippines back to the Filipinos, they would replace the Spanish themselves and rule the country as a colony. It was no surprise that the Filipinos didn’t take to this idea, and immediately opened a guerrilla war against American forces as they had for many years against the Spanish. The war was barbaric on both sides, fought in the jungles and villages of the Philippine Islands, and was a foretaste of conditions in Vietnam 60 years later. However, the US forces were so well armed and provisioned that it was a forgone conclusion that they would eventually overrun Filipino resistance. There was some outcry through allegations of looting, burning, and killing out side of battle by US soldiers, and to a great extent this was sanctioned by their higher command.
Jeremiah was in the thick of it, his Regiment the 33rd were known as “The Texas Regiment” because they were apocryphally believed to be cowboys, which was undoubtedly true of some but not all the volunteers, but it shows the general demeanour of the regiment who found themselves fighting through the Jungles of the North of the Island of Luzon, where they were instrumental in capturing and killing many important Filipino senior guerrilla leaders.
33rd USV Philippines
In 1900 Jeremiah was based in Bangued, and town named by the Spanish and meaning “Roadblock” in recognition of the obstacles the Filipinos had put in their way when Spain was conquering the country nearly 300 years before. The US forces suffered comparatively few casualties to action in the Philippines, but many more due to disease, and Jeremiah was no exception to this. He left the regiment in December 1900, and in 1903 when back in the USA.
One thing that can be said for the US Government of the time, they did look after their injured veterans well. Jeremiah was shipped to The National Home for volunteer disabled soldiers, Battle Mountain Sanitarium, Hot springs, Fall River, South Dakota. He was suffering from acute Arthritis anterior sclerosis, an inflammation of the eye associated with arthritis, which was leading to atrophy in one of his eyes, plus rheumatism, a hernia, varicose veins, sciatica. Jeremiah was in a bad way.
Hot Springs Sanitarium
By 1909 Jeremiah had made some progress and is well enough to be discharged to the home of his elder sister Mrs Mary McCarthy in San Francisco, where he plans to be a farmer. Whatever the results of this, we next find him working as a cook in The National Military Home in Los Angeles in 1916. He remains a cook for some years there, with a brief spell in 1918 when he is readmitted to the Sanitarium for his health. Sometime between 1917 and 1922 Phoebe met and married Jeremiah after her separation from Abel. The two live in Kiowa Avenue Los Angeles in the Sawtelle Veteran’s accommodation, and we can only assume happily, as Jeremiah, was hardly a catch given the state of his health and his lowly status, so it was most likely a love match between him and Phoebe. The even voted the same way; Republican!
The Veterans home had a noble pedigree, and had even housed Wyatt Earp’s father in his later years. Indeed Wyatt Earp lived with his family in Los Angeles, not that far from Phoebe during her time there.
Wyatt Earp Los Angeles Resident
Phoebe and Jeremiah would stay in Kiowa Avenue until Jeremiah eventually passed away in 1932, still an invalid, suffering from pneumonia, he had also contracted TB quite possibly in the Philippines (TB can take decades to kill after an initial infection), which lead to many complications including gangrene in his left foot. The care Phoebe must have provided for him can only be imagined, and with this care he at least managed to live to the relatively old age (for the time) of 75. Their love must have run deep, Phoebe had given up a life of wealth to live with a wounded veteran, as they say, love conquers all.
In the same year that Jeremiah died, Abel returned from Hong Kong to England, 19th August 1932. He had amassed a good deal of money during his time at Sea and invested $8,000 (somewhere close to $500,000 in today’s value) in Stocks and Shares, only to get hit by the Wall Street crash of 1929, after this he was quoted as saying “Chinese Pirates and dope smugglers are a picnic compared to the Bulls and Bears of Wall St.”. He was left. as he put it, “…finding that my share dividends would not buy me a cup of tea daily.” so returned to England to live quietly in retirement in The Royal Alfred Home for Aged Merchant Seamen in Belvedere Kent.
His last quote was concerning the political situation in Europe with the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco; his verdict was;
“If I had my way, I’d treat some of these Continental fellers like we used to treat Chinese dope smugglers – hang ’em.”
Nine years after his return on 28th February 1941 Abel died. He left £101 in his will, about £16,000 in today’s money. He is buried in St Clement’s Church, Cambridge, UK.
Phoebe outlived both of her husbands, stayed on in the apartment in Kiowa avenue as the widow of a Volunteer Serviceman, and she died on 28th February 1944. Her grave shares the same plot as her beloved Jeremiah at South Sepulveda Boulevard Los Angeles, California.
And so we come full circle. Having spoken to Alexandra Baker, Phoebe’s Great Great Niece and exchanged some information about Phoebe, I was delighted to see that Alexandra and her cousin took the time to find Phoebe’s memorial in California to pay her respects, from a pair of modern “Amazing Baker Girls” to the original one!
