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January 26th, 2010:

Alice Maud Trent (1887 – 1937)

Jan 26th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Keeping Her Memory Alive

The village of Winfrith, with its thatched cottages, shop and old church, lies equidistant from Dorchester and Wareham in the farming county of Dorset. It hasn’t changed much since 1887 when Alice Maud Trent was born there, daughter of an agricultural labourer.

She must often have walked the four miles over the hills to Lulworth Cove, the beautiful circular inlet where the tides come in from the English Channel, and perhaps she dreamed of other lands, for she was to sail the world’s oceans.

Her father was William Trent, one of 14 children born to his father John Trent. The Trent family was a large group established primarily in the parish of Winfrith Newburgh, and especially in the Blacknoll area. William was baptised in 1852 at St. Christopher’s, Winfrith. He married Arabella Baker in 1874. She was also born in 1852 in the same place and baptised at Winfrith, and both were 22 years old when they married.

The couple had 11 children. William and Arabella both died in 1901 within a few weeks of each other from unrelated illnesses, having been born in the same year 48 years before.

Alice Maud was only 14, and had left home and the village. The most probable explanation for her whereabouts being that she was a ‘living in’ servant. The next sighting we have of her is in London where we know that during WWI she was a member of the Women’s Police Volunteers and was seconded to work with the wartime Ministry of Munitions.

She was, according to Steven Trent Galbraith, her grandson, “a very worldly woman” in the sense that at 36 she decided to go to the other side of the globe. During 1923 she worked as an asylum nurse in Australia, while visiting her sister Emma there.

She decided to return to England via the United States so as to call on her other sister, Sarah Kate now married to Henry Burden, in Brigham City in the far west state of Utah. And here a rather astonishing thing now takes place: she meets somehow or other, at the age of 37, with George Galbraith, 73 – and in May of 1924 they are married. George, who was Steven Galbraith’s grandfather, had an exciting life.

The first son born in the United States of Scottish immigrants, at 19 he was working on cattle drives from Texas to Wyoming. But when she said goodbye to Alice Maud in Australia, Emma could have had no idea that her sister would meet up with a former cowboy.

Robert Galbraith and his wife Helen had come across the Atlantic from Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, via Liverpool with four children. They settled in Illinois.

George was a perfect candidate for the Wild West. He was to have eight children by his wife Grace, and became foreman of a huge cattle ranch on the Utah-Wyoming border. He lost his wife in 1918 when he was 67, and later took his family to Utah where he made a good living from a fruit farm.

When Alice Maud married George in 1924, one of her children by law was older than she. They had a son, William Trent Galbraith, in 1925: he only lived for two days. Three years later Ernest, Steven’s father, was born when Alice Maud was 40.

The Great Depression now descended on the country. And in 1937, Alice Maud passed away: leaving a twice-married widower aged 86, and Ernest, aged 10. Two years later in 1939, George died leaving Ernest an orphan and the remaining half-brothers and sisters ranging in age from 47 to 61. One of the sisters raised Ernest to adulthood, and from the age of 16 he was going to sea, visiting ports all over the world – perhaps taking his cue from his adventurous mother and aunt.

Steven was given the middle name of Trent to keep alive the memory of the girl from Dorset. And he says today, after considerably digging into his family’s history: “The night before I married Lori, my wife, my Dad pulled me aside and gave me the ring that his father married Alice Trent with. Then, when my son Joshua was born, I named him Joshua Trent Galbraith….”  Steven hopes and expects Joshua will similarly name his first son.

It was back in 1985 that Steven started on his genealogical journey, with very little to go on, one of the family having destroyed all the documents and photographs of Alice Maud that she could find. A few have survived.

We have only the briefest information about the youngest sister Alice Emma Trent, baptised March 10, 1895. She was only six years old when her parents died and it is likely she lived with the eldest child in the family, Rhoda Trent. She had married and was still living in Winfrith. All we know about Alice Emma is that she travelled to Australia where it is believed she married a man named Ernest Cummings and lived in New South Wales.

It is worth saying something about Alice Maud’s sister Sarah Kate. We know she was at home in 1901 when she would have been 16 years old. The next we know of her is that she is in the United States working as a maid in the household of Lord Bryce, the British Ambassador.

She decided to stay in the United States and travelled to Brigham City, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake and surrounded for hundreds of miles by mountains up to 10,000 feet – a vast contrast to the rolling wolds of native Dorset. Here she married Henry Burden. We think there is little doubt she knew him before travelling because he, like her, was from Winfrith.

In June 2002 Steven and Ernest came to Dorset: they met Trent family descendants still living in the area and others travelled to meet them.

Steve related how when a 12 year old boy his Mother had told him how difficult it had been for his father as a youngster and how other family members had “tried so hard to destroy the memory of Alice Maud Trent.”  Steve says “ She and my Dad in a way to keep her memory alive, gave me Trent as a middle name and they asked me if I would like, it would be a nice thing if I did the same if I ever had a son.”

Those few days in Dorset the culmination of years of searching mean Steven has fulfilled a promise he made 36 years ago, when as a 12 year old boy he pledged he would find her and keep her memory alive.

More photographs of Alice Maud Trent and a photograph of Steven Trent Galbraith with his father Ernest taken during their 2002 visit to Dorset, can be found in the gallery section.

Ernest Galbraith passed away on the 28th June 2003.

Photos in the gallery

What the Papers Said

Jan 26th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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In January 1901, the captain of a Spanish steamer died after his ship was swept against a breakwater in Portland Roads. The lifeboat was manned and launched but could not get near the breakwater on account of the sea which was being swept by a violent gale.

The steamer named the Encourt, was from Bilbao and was bound there in ballast from Rotterdam. The crew of 26 were taken to the breakwater fort, and later on board another Spanish vessel. Their ship was badly holed and lay with a list, and sank in nine fathoms of water with the skipper on board.

Along the coast, the seas were high in West Bay, where a boat sank in the harbour. The gale blew down trees, took the roofs off houses, and made the streets dangerous.

Watchnight services had been held in the churches, reported the ‘Bridport News’ of January 1901. There the last moment of the dying year and the opening of the new, were spent in worship and in the parish church the hymn ‘O God our help in ages past’ was sung. Services were also held in the Wesleyan, Baptist and Unitarian chapels.

Meanwhile, far away in South Africa the Boers were making determined attacks and British officers were being killed and wounded. During a fog the Boers were repulsed with a loss of 24 killed including four officers.

In New York, influenza was raging, and a typical headline was: ‘Grip’ reigns in New York.’ Grip was the popular name for ‘flu. It was estimated that nearly 200,000 people in and around the city were suffering from it and it was now in an epidemic state all over the country. Even President McKinley was a sufferer but was recovering.

A great century of progress had closed, with momentous events concerning the British Empire. It was hoped that the enemy would lay down their arms. Dorset had provided horsemen and foot soldiers, meanwhile the Ashanti campaign had been brought to a close in West Africa, and an international force had defeated the aims of the Boxers in China.

Many Bridport bluejackets were in the thick of the fighting in the attempt to relieve Peking. While down under, Lord Hopetoun had been appointed the first Viceroy of Federated Australia. The Indian famine called for public subscription, and Paris had held its great exhibition, though at this point in history Great Britain had more friends in Germany than France. Away East, the Spanish had lost the Philippines to the United States.

Here in this country, the Conservatives had been returned to power and Lord Salisbury was Premier. Dorset again returned a quartet of Conservative members. Mrs. Gladstone, widow of the famous Prime Minister, was buried beside her husband, and the death of Sir Arthur Sullivan, called the greatest of British composers and a marvellous musician, had occurred. He was buried in St. Paul’s. The Bridport paper reflected on all this news.

On that south Dorset coast and going back a century, on August 19, 1800, three women and an infant were struck by lightning, and the infant, who turned out to be the fossilist Mary Anning, was resuscitated by being put into a warm bath. What would have been lost to archaeology if she had not been put in that bath?

Early in the 19th century fossils began to attract local geologists, especially John Crookshanks (alias Lock,) who committed suicide in 1802 because his yearly stipend for collecting fossils was discontinued! And Richard Anning (father of Mary) fell over the Charmouth cliffs by night, did not kill himself, but died soon after, in 1810, of consumption.

It was in the following year, 1811, that Miss Anning found her famous ‘crocodile’ fossil, and sold it to Mr H. Henley, lord of the manor, for £23. It was later presented to the British Museum.

The population of Lyme in 1800 was 1,535; in 1810 it was 1,925. In 1803, three seats were set up a yard from the precipice above the sea beyond the churchyard. The Church Cliffs in those days formed “the great place of resort, the Mall of Lyme, where the belles of the place and the sons of the aristocracy enjoyed the sea breeze.” There was no marine walk then.

People in the early 1800’s were still talking about  “a very singular fish” 14 feet long with a tail three feet wide, a circumference of six feet, and with long jaws, which came into the Cobb and was taken. In 1803 a great fire destroyed 42 houses near the Independent Chapel. It started at a baker’s.

In 1817, a breach of 192 feet was made in the southwest part of the Cobb, and several vessels were driven ashore or sank. The Cobb had to be repaired, and work costing well over £30,000 was carried out in the next nine years. Between 1810 and 1816 the annual average of vessels entering the Cobb harbour was 318.

We should be making a mistake if we thought that indecency offences were new: that Bridport paper at the beginning of the 20th century reported that at Weymouth County Police Court in early 1901 a sub-postmaster was summoned “in several instances for such offences of a serious character against young men.”

And a Royal Commission had been appointed to make investigations regarding the “beer poisoning epidemic.” Sickness and death had been caused in England and Wales through poisoning by arsenic.

Newman Flower – Publisher of Distinction

Jan 26th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Within the great cradle-roll of Dorset’s famous sons the name of Newman Flower is one not likely to be immediately recognisable as are, say Thomas Hardy and William Barnes. Yet in his chosen career he achieved outstanding success, and without him and the other practitioners of his profession the works of the great literary giants like Hardy may never have reached the printed page.

Newman Flower was born in the village of Fontmell Magna in July 1879, the eldest son of the village brewer. Being the elder son it was his father’s wish that he should succeed him in the business, but young Newman was a cerebral lad with far loftier leanings towards the literary world. These aims were further fostered at public school, especially when the boy was required by his father to help him out with the gruelling brewery work during his holidays. Then came the fateful day when he would at last confront his father and tell him that he did not wish to make his living as a brewer, but as a writer and publisher. So when his schooldays were over Flower took the “long white road” out of Fontmell shook the Dorset chalk from his feet and went to London.

As a consequence of following up a job lead he had spotted advertised on a board in an alley one hot summer day, Flower landed his first position as an editorial junior on a military paper called ‘The Regiment.’ Over the time he worked on this paper he acquired a yearning to break into Fleet Street to edit a magazine. To supplement his income in the meantime, he wrote articles for various publications as a freelance, though at first most of these were rejected by the editors he sent them to. However a feature he wrote about train drivers, as well as a few other articles were eventually accepted.

Then came his first big break when W.T. Madge, the proprietor of ‘The People,’ had Flower recommended to him as being the ideal man to write a weekly military column for his daily paper. Ideal, because during his years on ‘The Regiment’ Flower had acquired a considerable wealth of military knowledge. Having passed the test of a specimen article, the ambitious young sub-editor then left ‘The Regiment’ to join the staff of ‘The People’ for the next sixteen years under the alias of “Tommy Atkins.” Flower had realised his ambition: he had arrived in Fleet Street.

But then a more draconian initiation into journalism awaited him; Flower received an invitation from a Harmsworth press editor called Charles Sisley to join the company, which would eventually become Northcliffe Press. Sisley needed a new sub-editor for one of his magazines. Newman then agreed to join Harmsworth’s on the condition that his salary should be supplemented at reduced rates for what he wrote. But Flower had entered a hard school, and Sisley was a hard and humourless taskmaster. He invariably had some criticism about Flower’s weekly paste-ups for the magazine he was working on. Then in 1905, three years after Flower joined Harmsworth’s Sisley had a major disagreement with Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) and resigned. The “apprentice” was then left to run the magazine as best he could.

Largely out of desperation about the uncertainty of his position, the acting editor wrote to his friend Max Pemberton, asking if he could arrange for him to meet Sir Arthur Spurgeon, then General Manager of the Cassell publishing company. Its founder John Cassell, a Manchester temperance preacher, had built up the business from printing the labels for the tea he was buying up and re-selling in shilling packets as a weapon to fight alcoholism, among the northern industrial masses. But at the time of Newman Flower’s application Cassells was in the red and making heavy losses through incompetent management at board level. After telling Spurgeon that he had decided to accept an offer he had made to join Cassells, Flower learnt that the publishing house had made a £16,000 loss the previous year and the following year’s figures would be worse still.

Yet gradually the paper on which young Newman was employed began to see a revival in its sales. Encouraged by this turn-around Spurgeon invited Flower to design a new fiction magazine. During a holiday in Normandy the latter sketched out the format for the periodical the two men would name ‘The Storyteller.’ This magazine had to be brought out on a shoestring budget of just £1,600, yet it took newsagents by storm. When Flower resigned its editorship 21 years later he found that his creation had netted for Cassells £262,000. Flower had succeeded where the “greybeards” of the board had failed; he had put Cassells back in the black.

Flower then gave up the editorship of all his magazines and bought Cassells from Lords Camrose and Kemsley so that he could devote himself to his growing interest in developing Cassells as a book-house. It was then 1928 and he was 49. He had been publishing magazines for a quarter of a century, and would be publishing books for a quarter of a century more. Through ‘The Storyteller’ he had already published part works of Rudyard Kipling (whom he had met on a train;) G.K. Chesterton, Somerset Maughan and Phillip Oppenheim. But the 25 years or so he would be publishing authors inevitably brought him into intimate contact with many great literary figures.

Under Flower’s management Cassells published Churchill’s ‘Second World War.’ He saw into print Earl Jellicoe’s ‘The Grand Fleet,’ Frederick Treves’ ‘The Elephant Man,’ and H.H. Asquith’s ‘Fifty Years of Parliament.’ He further published or befriended among others R.C. Hutchinson, Lords Curzon and Birkenhead, H.G. Wells, Stefan Zweig, Sir Evelyn Wood, and edited the journals of Arnold Bennett.

But Flower was no mean writer himself, and through Cassells he published several books including some about the two great loves of his life: classical music and gardening. These were ‘G.F. Handel’ (1923;) and ‘Through My Garden Gate’ (1945.) From 1914 to 1920 he was honorary editor of ‘The Dorset Yearbook;’ in 1938 he was knighted.

During the Second World War, La Belle Sauvage, the ancient building off Ludgate Hill which Cassells, occupied was struck and burnt down by a German bomb. In 1947, the horror over, Flower decided to retire from active directorship of the company to make a new home with his wife and son Desmond at Tarrant Keyneston near Wimborne. Here he wrote what is probably his best-known book ‘Just as it Happened’ (1950) which virtually serves as his autobiography-cum-memoirs.

In his business dealings the reputation of Newman Flower is of one considered to be a stern critic but enthusiastic promoter. He was shrewd yet kindly, always willing to give new writers constructive advice. Flower also was actively involved in animal welfare and indeed made several bequests to animal organisations in his will. His propensity for readily seeking out, and befriending authors, even those who did not publish with him, is legendary. One memorable instance of this came during the First World War when he called on Thomas Hardy at Maxgate, the house the author had designed and built for himself, to commission from him a poem for ‘The Dorset Yearbook’ which, as has already been mentioned he was then editing. Hardy gave him the poem “…and something that was far richer: his friendship to the end of his days” as Flower later wrote. Some years later – towards the end of Hardy’s life – Flower, his wife and son, took Hardy and his wife Florence on a memorable picnic by car one blazing summer day, during which they covered many miles of rural Dorset.

The Cassell chief’s general good fortune was well demonstrated on another occasion, this time in 1912 when beneficent fate intervened with an illness and operation. By the time he had recovered, the Titantic – on which he was to have booked a passage – lay broken in two on the bed of the Atlantic. Flower’s operation paradoxically had, of course, saved his life.

After fifty years in publishing (40 with Cassells) and 17 years of fruitful retirement Newman Flower died at his home in Tarrant Keyneston on the 12th of March 1964, aged 85. Such was his fame by that time that on April 1st a memorial service was held for him at St. Pauls, in the presence of noted authors, editors and publishers, as well as of course the then Chairman, Directors and staff of Cassells. The author Ernest Raymond, who’s first book ‘Tell England’ had been published by the company after 11 rejections from other publishers, and whose later works were accepted by Flower personally, gave the address at the service. The music of Handel, which Flower had loved so much, was played on the organ.