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John Gould – Dorset Birdman With a Dark Secret

Mar 3rd, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Dorset can number many noted figures among its sons and daughters. Perhaps the most extraordinary character to emerge from the county in the 19th century was John Gould, though many would not have heard of him. Gould made a name for himself as an ornithologist of undeniable ability, and apparently he was also a gifted illustrator, who rose to become the toast of Victorian society.

John Gould was borne in Lyme Regis in 1804, the son of an estate gardener. Of his earliest years and education little or nothing is known, though his schooling appears to have been very elementary. His father’s own talents however, led him to secure a position as a gardener in a country estate and, ultimately, to a position of head gardener at the Royal Gardens at Windsor. But his son John’s real educator was the natural world. In the gardens, woods and fields of Dorset the boy’s future passion for ornithology was fostered.

This led young Gould onto an almost obsessive desire to preserve birds and animals for posterity. From another gardener who was skilled in the practise he learnt taxidermy, and discovered in himself an ability to preserve birds using only their dehydrated skins and feathers. With this newly acquired skill John Gould set up a taxidermy business in Windsor, where his unusual eye for the natural stance of birds and animals won for him the recognition of many clients and even the patronage of George IV.

When in 1827 the newly formed London Zoological Society held a competition to fill the position of its first director and curator, Gould entered and won the competition. Three years later, following the acquisition by the Society of a large collection of Himalayan exotic bird skins, the first curator was fired with the desire to bring the specimens to life in a lavishly illustrated book. The subsequent publication proved to be the turning point in Gould’s life. It won such great acclaim from the scientific world that it was said of John Gould that his expertise even surpassed that of the great French artist Audubon. Other books of exotic bird illustrations followed including ‘Birds of Europe’ and the seven-volume ‘Birds of Australia,’ which has an estimated value of over £150,000 at auction today.

But Gould’s reputation didn’t stop at being a master-ornithologist and illustrator. He was also a producer, director, publishing magnate, and entrepreneur – even a bit-player in the emergence of evolutionary theory. For it was John Gould to whom Charles Darwin entrusted for identification the bird-skins he had collected in the Galapagos Islands during the famous voyage of The Beagle. He was able to classify the specimens as eleven new species of finch – the very birds, which through the subtle changes or adaptations to different niches they displayed, Darwin would later use as a pivotal piece of evidence for evolution by natural selection. Darwin, on later reviewing his notes for ‘The Origin of Species’ realised that the birds had come from different islands in the archipelago, but it was Gould’s eye for detail which played an important part in the conclusion the naturalist came to concerning evolution.

Though his Victorian public were awe-struck by the apparent skill he showed in the reproductions in his bird books the underlying truth about John Gould was rather different. The buyers of his books were led to believe that he was a gifted ornithologist and illustrator, but Gould was no artist. He was actually perpetuating a caddish deception upon his readers when he had absolutely no need to mislead them.

The myth was perpetuated partly through a crafty captioning of the pictures in a way that suggested that he and his wife Eliza were the co-illustrators responsible for them. Certainly Eliza Gould was responsible for some of the lithographs in the books. But the truth is that the brilliant hand-coloured pictures were mainly the work of others, and the main illustrator was not mentioned at all. Some of the lithographs featured were even the work of Edward Lear! Gould is said to have worked these illustrators unreasonably hard, though he had no need to resort to the pretence of being a competent artist; his genuine reputation as an ornithologist would have stood by itself, as his knowledge of birds was second-to-none.

Furthermore, John Gould was far more a shrewd businessman than an accomplished draftsman and one with a very mean streak. His avian knowledge assisted Darwin in conceiving the theory of evolution, yet he would brazenly lie to dealers to save himself the expense of a new specimen, borrowing it instead for an artist to draw before returning it unvalued. Gould seems to have believed that his books would have greater appeal if they were considered the work of his genius alone. And almost certainly he intended that the general public and the scientific establishment would believe he was as much bird artist as bird expert.

But if Gould was miserly and deceitful in business he was a genteel and affectionate father in his family life. After Eliza’s early death he reveals in a surviving letter to another correspondent a heartfelt concern for his offspring’s welfare, writing that he “wanted to do the best for my dear little children.” But to Edward Lear, himself riddled with insecurity he was “a queer fellow who meant well, though a more singularly offensive-mannered man hardly can be.”

Gould’s life is now well told in a biography by travel writer Isabella Tree. In ‘The Bird Man: the Extraordinary Story of John Gould’ the author suggests that it was insecurity about his lack of education which lay at the root of Gould’s predisposition to deceive and plagiarise.

But bird fanciers have him to thank for one more legacy: he was responsible for introducing the budgerigar into Britain.

John Mowlem

Feb 21st, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Many people will have noticed the name Mowlem on the side of heavy construction machinery without giving a thought to the story behind the name. But this business of international renown had, as had so many others, very lowly beginnings: with a man born in an ancient cottage at Carrants Court, Swanage on October 12th, 1788. John Mowlem was one of six children; four of who were boys, born to a general store keeper whose name was also John.

By the early 1800’s when he would have been in his early teens, young John joined his three other brothers at work in the Tilly Whim Purbeck stone quarry. These were the days when child labour for farms and industries was universal because it was cheap. But by 1812 the effect of the recession caused by the long naval war with France had hit the Purbeck quarries, and Tilly Whim closed.

During these years it is believed that Mowlem came under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Bell, Rector of Swanage from 1801 to 1809 and a learned schoolmaster, though the younger John’s education came mainly through the experience of his working life. Another milestone for Mowlem came in 1804, when Henry Manwell, a son of a friend of John Mowlem senior, left Swanage to go to work as a stone cutter in Portsmouth, but not before suggesting that his son John could find employment in the same industry in the Isle of Wight.

Accordingly and soon after, Mowlem threw up his job in the Purbeck Quarry with the original intention of finding a job in London. About this move there is a romantic story of how, with little more than his sack of tools, John persuaded a local captain to grant him a free berth on his vessel. But Mowlem’s nephew George Burt later noted that John did not go directly to London but stopped off at the Isle of Wight. Here, at the Norris Castle Quarry, he found his first job outside of Dorset.

After he had been at work in the Norris Castle Quarry for some while Mowlem was spotted by James Wyatt, an architect who recommended him to Henry Westmancott, one of two brothers in charge of running a masonry and sculpture workshop for the Government Masons Department in London. Following up this recommendation Mowlem left the Isle of Wight and moved into lodgings adjacent to the Westmancott’s in Mount Street, near to the site of the shared workshop in Pimlico.

It was during these earliest years in London, sometime in the first decade of the 19th century, that Henry Manwell’s sister Susannah visited her brother, by then living in London and working as the rate collector for St. Marylebone. Inevitably this brought her into contact with John Mowlem, to whom she soon found herself attracted, and in 1812 he and Susannah were married. That year Robert Burt, long a friend of John’s married Susannah’s sister Letty in Swanage Church.

At this time the Government masons works had contracts for work at Greenwich and Kensington Palaces, the Royal Mews and Somerset House. For all these contracts in the capital Mowlem was made foreman over all the workers in 1816. He was later to record that he was put over men “..old enough to be my father.” But despite the promotion, Mowlem did not hold his boss in any high esteem. Indeed, he said of Westmancott that he was a hard niggardly taskmaster who paid him only punitive wages. He further wrote that the only virtues he (Westmancott) possessed, which he made a point of emulating were punctuality and cleanliness.

Mowlem left the Westmancott’s works in 1822 to found his own company with only about £100 capital, though he was much helped by several friends including MacAdam, who pioneered pitched road surfacing. Initially the company had much to do with the paving of roads, but as soon as he was solvent Mowlem took out a lease on a wharf in Pimlico basin, on the site later occupied by Victoria Station. It was to these works that the contractor imported Purbeck Limestone, York Sandstone, and Aberdeen Granite for many of the London landmarks we know today. With the help of his brother-in-law Henry, Mowlem next moved his office and yard to Paddington Wharf, then known as Little Venice.

Two of John’s brothers James and Joseph also went into business of their own in London, leaving Robert the only one of the brothers never to leave Swanage. Then in 1853 George Burt, who had mastered the craft of masonry in the Swanage Quarry, went into partnership with Mowlem in the capital. A third, a Yorkshireman called Joseph Freeman then joined the two men to form a company, which then operated under the name Mowlem, Burt and Freeman. Freeman married Elizabeth Burt, George’s sister in 1839.

Shortly before 1840 the company began work on its first major contract: re-paving Blackfriars Bridge with a Telford pavement of Granite setts. This was the first such pavement of its kind, and the contract specified that a delay in completion would incur a heavy penalty with no stage payments. But a shortfall in the supply of the granite led Mowlem to purchase another quarry on Guernsey. It was therefore Burt and Freeman who were left to manage the business during the time that Mowlem was overseeing the shipping of the rock from the Channel Island. Following the success of the undertaking Mowlem went on to re-pave London Bridge and the Strand.

But Mowlem was considering retirement before 1838, when he would have been 50. He is often regarded, together with Burt and William Morton Pitt, as one of the three gentlemen of Swanage. Morton Pitt was a wealthy entrepreneur and Dorset MP who had built Belvedere, a seven-room house in Swanage for which Mowlem made a failed purchase bid of £260. A Chancery sale took place at the Royal Victoria Hotel in 1838 and included the hotel itself, the Quay, Seymer Place, Sentry Field, the Watch and Preventative Station, Durlston Quarries and Whitecliff Farm. Mowlem moved into 2, Victoria Terrace, a road named after the future Queen who, when a Princess, made a brief stay at the hotel Pitt had developed and which was itself re-named after her.

Between 1858 and 1860 Mowlem bought the estate now occupied by most of Swanage north of the brook and extending to Ulwell. During these years he played a part in the construction of the town’s first pier (now gone) and the granite memorial on the seafront to King Alfred. In 1862 he added a memorial to Prince Albert and founded the Mowlem Institute, now the Mowlem Theatre.

Mowlem passed his retirement by watching the coast from an observatory on the roof of the house and by starting a famous diary, which he kept for the rest of his life. Burt meanwhile took full charge of Mowlem’s company in 1844 and undertook an ambitious landscaping project in what is today Durlston Park. This included the estate’s castle and The Great Globe, a massive 40-ton stone ball made in the Mowlem works and shipped to Durlston in 15 segments. Here the monument was set up on a platform just below the castle.

John Mowlen died in 1868, ten years before his company would become involved in electrifying the tramways, including the work of building the Northumberland Avenue Tramway, so beginning the long association of the name Mowlem with today’s transport infrastructure. In recent times Mowlem’s company also built the Dorchester by-pass, the new London Bridge, the Vickers Tower on Milbank, London Airport, and roads and docks, sewers and tunnels.

Dr. Andrew Bell

Feb 12th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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In 1801 a young Episcopalian minister from Scotland was appointed Rector of Swanage on a stipend of £240 a year. He was the Reverend Andrew Bell, and his incumbency at this popular resort of the future was one of unprecedented philanthropy and innovation. As Rector of Swanage Bell energetically set up benefit societies, social clubs and even a small cottage industry for plaiting straw. He arranged for every child in his parish to be inoculated against smallpox, a great contagious scourge of the 19th century. And this minister had a considerable influence on the young John Mowlem, the master mason of Swanage and founder of the international construction company of that name.

But Andrew Bell will probably be remembered for one thing above all others: as the inventor of the method of elementary education known as the Madras System, after the state in India where it was conceived. The Madras System was a legacy of a past period of colonial servitude in Bell’s life, but by the time of his death it would be adopted across much of Britain. Several educationalists even sought Bell’s advice about how they could implement the system themselves, including Joseph Lancaster, an opportunist businessman and rival. Lancaster, however, infuriated Bell when the latter discovered that he was passing off the Madras System as his own conception. At one point Bell took two years leave of absence from the church to concentrate on disseminating his educational method more widely. Eventually he had 13 day schools and three Sunday schools using the system in Dorset, but would by no means neglect to further the provision of education in his Scottish home town.

Dr Bell would devote only about a decade of his life to the spiritual and material wants and needs of the Swanage people, yet he had no leanings towards an ecclesiastical career until he was 32. Before then he was something of a maverick, a speculator in New World cash-cropping, and while his life in holy orders was a resounding success the same would not be said for his business interests or his marriage, which ended acrimoniously in divorce after only six years.

But the single-mindedness so indicative of his character throughout his life doubtless showed itself early. Born in St. Andrews, Fife, on 27th of March 1753, Andrew Bell was the son of a barber/wigmaker-cum-horologist who in the latter capacity was responsible for regulating the clock of St. Andrews University and making scientific instruments for the physics (then National Philosophy) faculty. Andrew was first educated at the grammar school where mathematics was his greatest strength and languages his greatest weakness. However, during these early schooldays he was the subject of bullying from older boys, an experience that would instil in this future educationalist a lifelong abhorrence of corporal punishment. Bell’s proficiency in maths led him, at 16, to matriculation at the United College of St Salvatore & St Leonard’s in St. Andrews University. Here he studied for four years, but there is no evidence that he graduated at the end of this time. However, it was common in those days for graduates not to undertake a formal graduation ceremony.

So with his sound academic background Bell sailed from Glasgow in 1774 to take up a post as a tutor to tobacco plantation owners in Virginia, though not without “moonlighting” as a tobacco trader with a good sense of business. In 1779 Bell was engaged as tutor to the sons of a Virginia planter Carter Braxton, but with the colony in a politically unsettled state in the aftermath of the War of Independence Bell returned to Britain two years later with the Braxton Boys, so that their education could be finished. During the voyage however, their ship was grounded on an island near Nova Scotia by a storm for a time before they could be rescued, whereupon they eventually reached London in June. But Bell’s charges were not inclined to stay on the right side of the law, and after two years he returned to St Andrews to eke out a meagre living by running a small private school.

It was at this point that Bell considered studying for the priesthood, but with the Church of England, since he was an Episcopalian. His first living following ordination was at Leith Episcopalian Chapel under a one-year contract. The St Andrews MP, George Dempster, approached Bell with the proposition of a lecture tour to Calcutta teaching science. The newly-appointed minister duly accepted the offer and sailed for Calcutta in 1787, but stopped off on route at Madras. Here Bell decided to stay and give a brief course of lectures, but when appointed as Chaplain to four regiments, he decided to abandon going on to Calcutta.

In 1789 Bell was asked to take over running the Madras Male Orphan Asylum, an orphanage-school for the bastard sons of soldiers and native women. Struck by the great inadequacy of the teaching methods at the asylum, Bell was instead impressed by an open-air school where the pupils were being taught their letters by inscribing them in sand. But his employees, embittered by his forthright manner, were obstructive in Bell’s plans to improve the methods of education. Bell then introduced sand-trays into his school instead of books, but the move was not approved by the master and ushers either. In desperation Bell then instructed a boy called Jonnie Frisken in his lessons, teaching the eight year-old to teach even younger children. This led to the school being segregated into classes where boys could be masters, pupils and sometimes both, and Bell found that this way the children had no learning difficulties. But the school master and two ushers were so disgusted with the method that they left Bell to continue running a school going from strength to strength.

The Madras climate however, proved so indifferent to Bell’s health that in 1796, though much praised for his work, he returned to England. Here he immediately prepared a report on the asylum, then another report in the summer of the following year setting out the operation of the Madras System, i.e. in which all but the youngest children could hold pupil-teacher status. All lessons were taught and learnt by rote. A boy “master” teaching young children a lesson after learning it himself. The 1797 report was circulated to all important figures in the Church and Government. Child education would now be Bell’s consuming passion for the rest of his days.

Funded from his own pocket and with some outside support, Bell opened a few charity schools putting his system into use. It was then in 1801 he came to Swanage and as Rector involved himself in the parish and Sunday school (soon converted to the MS.) Soon Mrs Sarah Trimmer, a religious pamphlet writer, was writing to Bell desiring his opinion of Joseph Lancaster and at the same time extolling Bell’s system above that of his rival. She was convinced Lancaster had merely improved Bell’s system, while basically plagiarising it. Bell, after persistent entreaties from Sarah to come to London to organise a campaign against Lancaster and his method, eventually did so in 1807, staying there a month.

Once in the capital, Bell set up a charity school in Whitechapel with the assistance of two or those who had been involved in running the Swanage Sunday school. Realising it had become impossible to undertake his parochial duties at Swanage, Bell obtained a special licence from his Bishop in May1807 for two years leave of absence. As new schools were opened Lewis Warren, a teenage boy who had been assisting at the Swanage Sunday school, undertook their organisation in the West Midlands. On the expiry of the first two years Bell realised he would have to relinquish the Swanage living entirely.

In 1811 Bell was appointed advisor and sponsor for the newly formed Society for the Education of the Children of the Poor, and the Church versus non-denominational education schism came to public attention. Raised to a pitch of ire, Lancaster came out into the open and even declared in an article that he alone invented the Madras System, that all other claimants (presumably including Bell) were counterfeiters and impostors! The feud wasn’t to be defused until 1818, when Quaker friends sent Lancaster to America to disseminate the blunders of his system there. The organisers of his society then gave Bell the authority to travel the country as an inspector of his schools. He also travelled and lectured on the continent for some years, before ill-health forced his return to England.

On his return Bell retired to Cheltenham, where he revived his aim of furthering education in St Andrews. He acquired two properties in South Street for a school, and in 1831 established a fund of £120,000 to finance the building of a Grammar and English School. Under the terms of Bell’s will his estate at Egmore was left in the hands of Trustees who were supposed to set up another Madras School at Cupor, in Fife.

But the trustees, in defiance of his wishes, instead spent the money on projects to build an observatory, provide a dispensary and improve public water supply. Nor would the educationalist-cleric live to see his school finished. Dr Andrew Bell died on 27th of January 1832, just ten weeks before the foundation stone was laid, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The Death of Lawrence of Arabia

Feb 4th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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“Lawrence of Arabia fights for his life” ran the headline in the “Dorset County Chronicle” of May 16th, 1935. A charismatic figure who had played a key part in the events surrounding the First World War had come off his motorcycle on the way to his Dorset home from Bovington Camp. The headline was replaced the next week with: “Dorset village grave for Lawrence.” The saga was over. Countless books have been written about him, amid speculation that a mysterious car was involved.

According to the “Chronicle”, for a week the whole world had its eyes on the camp near Moreton, where Lawrence, a brilliant military strategist known more recently as Mr T.E. Shaw, lay at death’s door. Distinguished statesmen inquiring about him included Mr. (later Sir) Winston Churchill. Calls came in from all over the country and abroad.

The funeral was attended by peers, politicians, diplomats, distinguished soldiers, writers, artists and foreign emissaries, together with local villagers and private soldiers and gunners who had served with Lawrence in his famous campaigns in the Arabian desert. The Royal Air Force, in which he also served, was represented. The King and Queen were among hundreds who sent messages of sympathy.… A verdict of accidental death had been returned.

Lawrence loved motorcycling, travelled to and from London and explored parts of England on his machine. As King George V wrote: “His name will live in history. ”The King recognised in a telegram “his distinguished services to his country.”

Thomas Masterman Hardy

Feb 1st, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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“I have done my duty, thank God, Kiss me Hardy.” The last words have resonated across two centuries, and were there ever any, spoken by an Englishman, more famous than these? Then Admiral Nelson expired, mortally wounded by a musket shot fired from the French warship ‘Redoubtable.’ Thomas Masterman Hardy, his first officer, had the honourable distinction of having Britain’s greatest naval hero dying in his presence, if not his very arms. The place was the surgeon’s quarters of the flagship HMS Victory; the occasion, the last phase of the most famous sea battle in British history.

But the Battle of Trafalgar, fought over two hundred years ago, probably owes its triumphant outcome as much to Hardy as to the admiral under whom he so lovingly served. Writing after the event, Hardy noted “it has cost the country a life no money can replace, and whose death I shall forever mourn.” Hardy was a witness to Nelson’s last will and testament, and bore the colours at his funeral. He was made a baronet in recognition of his gallant service at Trafalgar, receiving also the gratitude of parliament, a gold medal, and swords of honour from the City of London and the Patriotic Fund.

Such accolades would likely not have surprised Nelson had he lived to see them bestowed. There had been a long tradition in his family that young Tom told his parents as soon as he could talk that he was determined to be a mariner. He grew into a well-built man with the potential to be a fine sailor of officer material and of good character. He was also courageous and daring, at least once setting off in rough seas in a lifeboat in an attempt to rescue a man overboard. Hardy had an instinct for doing the right thing at the right time, and took great pains to master every technical detail of proficient seamanship.

Hardy’s paternal ancestors were minor squires of the Melcombe area, descendants of the le Hardi’s, Norman French immigrants from the Channel Islands who spread into south Wessex in the 16th century. We find a Joseph Hardy in possession of the principal house in Portesham in the mid 18th century; it was his son Joseph Jr. who married Nanny. They were Thomas Masterman Hardy’s parents.

On his mother’s side Thomas was descended from the Masterman family, then tenanting Kingston Russell House near Long Bredy. Indeed, Joseph and his wife occupied this home for some years and it is generally believed it was here, on April 5th 1769, that Thomas was born, though obituary information credited to his elder brother states that he was born at his maternal grandfather’s home in Martinstown, near Maiden Castle. Thomas was the sixth of his parent’s nine children and their second son. The children’s grandfather, the elder Joseph, died in 1778, the family then leaving Kingston House to take his place in residence at Portesham.

Few details of Thomas’s childhood survive, though it was noted that he would often climb the hills above Portesham to gaze across the Channel that some twenty years later he would be helping to defend. With the Portesham house now crowded out with many children the Hardy boys were packed off to Crewkerne Grammar School over the border in Somerset. Here, under the headmasterships of Dr Patch and Dr Aske, Thomas received his spartanly disciplinarian, though not inefficient education.

When he had been at Crewkerne for three years a wish of Thomas’s – that he should be able to go to sea at the first opportunity – was fulfilled. Captain Francis Roberts of Burton Bradstock, long an acquaintance of the family, agreed to take Thomas on as an apprentice aboard his brig, HMB Helena on November 30th 1781. From then on Hardy’s general education took second place to his naval apprenticeship, though protracted periods of shore leave did enable him to return to school, as Roberts intended, “to learn navigation and all that is proper to a sailor.” Later, Roberts and Hardy transferred to the Seaford until April 1783 when Thomas returned to shore, first to attend Milton Abbas Grammar School and then to undertake a short period of training in the Merchant Service.

Hardy’s induction into seamanship in the Merchant Service continued until 1790 when he re-entered the Navy as a midshipman under Sir Alexander (Lord) Hood on the Hebe. That year he was promoted to Master’s Mate and went on to serve on the sloop Tisiphone with Captain Anthony Hunt. In 1793, still a midshipman, Hardy transferred to the Amphitrite, a ship of Lord Hood’s fleet, for operations against the Spanish in the Mediterranean.

By mid-November 1793 Hardy was a Lieutenant serving on the Meleager frigate, a vessel of Nelson’s squadron then under Captain Tyler, but replaced in June 1794 by Captain Cockburn. It was therefore about this time that Hardy was introduced to Nelson. By then he had matured into a slow, cautious and tranquil naval officer of genial humour, both fearless and tenacious.

Hardy’s next significant posting came in August 1796 with Cockburn on the Minerve. This year there was an engagement with two Spanish frigates during which Hardy courageously raised his colours to draw the Spaniard’s fire upon himself, thus enabling Nelson to withdraw to safety. However, Lieutenants Culverhouse and Hardy, with 40 other crewmen, were taken captive aboard the Santa Sabina. The next morning the Spanish fleet was reinforced, compelling the admiral to make his escape. The prisoners were later transferred to the Terrible, from where they disembarked at Gibraltar on 29th of January 1797. Here, Hardy and the crewmen were able to re-join Nelson on Minerve, which sailed from Gibraltar on February 11th, pursued by Spanish ships.

Nelson was taking the Minerve to rendezvous with Admiral John Jervis when a crewman fell overboard. Hardy immediately had himself lowered in the jollyboat to attempt a rescue, but the current took the boat astern towards a Spanish ship. Nelson averted Hardy’s capture by ordering the mizzen topsail to be backed. This bold action caused the Spaniard to shorten sail, enabling Hardy to be picked up, though the crewman could not be saved.

The Minerve reached Jervis in time for the Battle of Cape St. Vincent on the morning of February 14th. Nelson and Hardy’s conduct in the battle earned high praise. On June 16th Hardy, now a Flag-Captain, captured and was appointed to command the Mutine at Santa Cruz, then sailed for Aboukir Bay, Egypt, where Nelson drew up his plan to impound the French fleet for the Battle of the Nile in 1798. Here 13 of the 17 French ships were destroyed or captured.

That August Hardy was promoted to Captain of the Vanguard, in which he served before transfer to the Foudroyant under Nelson in Naples and Sicily in 1799. Two years later Nelson gave the French another mauling at Copenhagen, forcing the French commander Villeneuve to flee with the Vanguard in pursuit.

The 1802 Treaty of Amiens wrought a brief and fragile truce between the three powers, but Napoleon had styled himself Emperor and had trampled the whole continent underfoot. Only the British navy stood between him and the imperial domination of all Europe. He conceived a plan to cajole Spain into an alliance, and then build up a coalition armada in the West Indies, which would then re-cross the Atlantic and deliver a decisive blow against an outnumbered British fleet.

In May 1803 Hardy in the Victory attempted to blockade Villeneuve in Toulon harbour, but a strategy of keeping his distance enabled the French to break the blockade in April 1805 and leave the Mediterranean to head for the West Indies. Nelson gave chase, but contrary winds slowed the admiral’s progress. By June the French were nowhere to be found in the Caribbean, having re-crossed the Atlantic to put in at El Ferrol in Spain.

Nelson learnt that on September 2nd the French and Spanish fleets had assembled at Cadiz. Two weeks later Nelson and Hardy joined the rest of their fleet off Cadiz. The Napoleonic armada put to sea on October 18th in an attempt to head into the Mediterranean. Off Cape Trafalgar, on Nelson’s orders, the British fleet split into two columns, one led by Admiral Collingwood on the Royal Sovereign, the other by Nelson with Hardy on the Victory.

Engaging the Redoubtable, the Victory’s yardarm entangled in the enemy’s rigging. Sharpshooters on the Redoubtable took aim at figures on the deck. What happened next could so easily have turned out differently, since the French were firing semi-blind through a smokescreen; if Hardy had been hit instead of Nelson, his story would have ended here. After Nelson fell, Hardy took command of the Victory until Collingwood could relieve him. Amazingly no British ship was lost at Trafalgar – the French lost 18 destroyed or captured. There were 1,700 British casualties; 6,000 of the enemy were killed or wounded.

Clearly Trafalgar was a resounding British victory, but for Hardy it came at the expense of a great personal loss. Nelson, a Norfolk rector’s son, and the Wessex countryman would seem unlikely duo for a binding friendship. They had in common a ‘lust for brine’ from an early age but were in most other respects opposites. Hardy was tall, broad, robust in health and came through 58 years of naval service unscathed; Nelson was physically unimposing, prey to several minor ailments (including sea-sickness!) and had lost an eye, an arm and most of his teeth. Hardy was of strong character, humorous, and had many sterling qualities; Nelson could be morose, sexually over-passionate, despondent and suicidal.

For the rest of his life Hardy remained active in the service, though he would raise his colours at sea for the last time in 1827. He went on to captain the Triumph in the North American Station in 1806 and on November 17th the following year married Anne Louisa Emily Berkeley. From 1809-12 he was Commander-in-Chief at Lisbon, with the rank of Commodore of the Barfleur of the Portuguese service. From 1812-13, when Britain and the USA fought a naval war, Hardy commandeered a squadron from the Ramillies on the North American Station.

For three years from 1815 Hardy captained the Royal Yacht Augusta, and that year was awarded the KCB. In 1816 he fought a duel with the first Duke of Buckingham. From 1819-24 he was Commander-in-Chief of the South American Station, during which time (1821) he served as a Colonel of the Royal Marines. He was Rear Admiral of the Blue in 1825. In 1826 he escorted an expeditionary force to Lisbon and commanded an experimental squadron in 1827.

1830 saw Hardy as Rear Admiral of the White and then First Sea Lord. In September 1831 he was awarded the GCB. In April 1834 he was appointed Governor of Greenwich Hospital and on 10th January 1837 was made Vice-Admiral of the Blue.

Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy died on September 20th 1839, and was buried at Greenwich Hospital. There is a memorial at St. Paul’s, but his native county did not forget him. In 1844 an octagonal tower 70 feet high was raised upon Blackdown Hill near his beloved Portesham, 770 feet above the level of the English Channel he had so often gazed across with eager eyes when just a boy.

Footnote:

On a day in August 1805, 2 months before Trafalgar, a crowd has gathered by Gloucester Lodge in Weymouth. A man wearing a blue uniform of a naval officer, gilt epaulettes, cocked hat and sword, acknowledges the cheers of those who have come to see this local hero. He is Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy, the Captain of Nelson’s ship Victory and he is in Weymouth at the King’s command to tell his Majesty of Nelson’s latest voyage. A few days later Capt. Hardy boards a coach at Dorchester for Portsmouth where he joins Nelson on board the Victory.

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.

Elizabeth Muntz

Jan 20th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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People out walking along a path near the Purbeck coast for a time during the late 1940’s may have been surprised by the regular appearance of a woman in a duffel coat and boots, riding a pony with a spaniel keeping pace beside them. The woman was Elizabeth Muntz, then almost 40, and her rides along the coast path in those years were not simply for pleasure, but to undertake more work on an ambitious piece of craftsmanship: one of many which she would become famous throughout her adopted county and far beyond.

Certainly to many, Elizabeth Muntz would have been regarded as a Dorsetian. For most of her life her home and her base of operations were in Dorset. Several of the splendid sculptures of her life were made for, and reside in Dorset. Muntz lived with her sister, and both women died and were buried in Dorset. Yet this renowned sculptor was born and raised in Toronto, Canada – over three thousand miles from the county in which she made her home so early in her life.

She studied at the Acadamie Grand Chaumier and Boudelle in Paris, as well as in London under Frank Dobson RA. Her work was first shown publicly in 1928, a piece in yellow Mansfield stone, though Muntz also worked in bronze and some other metals. One of her bronze sculptures – a double figurine of a woman and a baby – prompted the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein to remark that it was “decidedly the work of a woman”. But she was an all-rounder of great skill, a polymath of the arts. Small wonder that many architects found in Elizabeth’s work the inspiration for works of their own.

With her sister Isabelle Hope Muntz, a noted historical novelist, Elizabeth settled in East Chaldon (Herring), acquiring two adjoining Elizabethan cottages she knocked into one to accommodate her studio using, it is said, timbers from a Spanish Galleon wrecked during the Armada. She named this cosy retreat Apple Tree Cottage, because at the time of the purchase an apple tree was the only thing to be seen growing in the garden. But possibly her choice of this home was a strategic one, for it was conveniently close to the Portland and Purbeck quarries from which she would obtain the stone for her remarkable sculptures.

Though she never married or had any of her own, Elizabeth Muntz had a lasting affection for children, who were so often the inspiration for her drawings, paintings and sculptures. Once, a seven-year-old local boy sat for her as she produced a series of sketches of him. For a time during her long years at Apple Tree Cottage her studio doubled as a successful summer school for enthusiastic young people to come and learn painting, pottery and sculpture. Flowers, fruits and cheeses also particularly inspired her. Elizabeth even co-authored a story for children called ‘The Dolphin Bottle,’ which she also illustrated.

Other subjects for her sculptures were decidedly more unconventional, yet they nevertheless demonstrated her versatility. One of these was a replica of Margaret Alice, a cutter that used to be seen sailing in Lulworth Cove and Ringstead Bay. She expended four years in producing a replica of a Cotswold Manor called ‘Child Court,’ was then presented to the Heritage Craft Schools and Hospitals for crippled children in Chaley, Sussex.

1936 also saw Muntz holding winter instructional classes on Sculpting at a school in London. But it was around 1949 that she undertook one of her most demanding commissions. Llewylin Powys, the youngest of three literary Dorset brothers, desired to have a memorial in stone set up to him. He invited Elizabeth to his home to produce an extensive series of drawings which would be used as a blueprint for a sculpture carved from a single one-ton block of Portland limestone. Before his death in 1939, Powys had chosen the location for his memorial: a cliff-top vantage point near White Nothe in Purbeck.

Since the Powys memorial had to be sculpted in situ, Elizabeth Muntz had to journey to the site from Chaldon each day to see the work through to completion. Taking her food and drink for the day, and with Rumple, her beloved spaniel alongside, the sculptor rode the three-and-a-half kilometres on Merrylegs her pony for a four-hour shift of hammering and chiselling at White Nothe.

The Powys commission, if not the most portable of Elizabeth’s pieces, is probably the most southerly located. But she undertook several other noted commissions for works in Dorset. These included mural panels in carved stone for Broadwey School near Weymouth, Griffins for the entrance gates to Lulworth Manor and lead candlesticks for Eric Kennington’s effigy of Lawrence of Arabia, which resides in St. Martin’s Church in Wareham. She also produced the Dodington memorial in Purbeck stone for the churchyard in Chaldon Herring.

But probably the most unusual sculpture Muntz ever produced was in remembrance of the only cat ever to be awarded the animals VC. Simon was on-board mascot with the Royal Naval sloop ‘Amethyst’. In 1949 the ship was deployed on the Yangste River when the first bombs dropped by the Chinese Communists struck the vessel. In the attack Simon was wounded, his courage later being recognised through the special honour bestowed upon him. The Muntz memorial to Simon’s fortitude took the form of a plaque for the PDSA centre in Plymouth.

In 1949, close to the time that the ‘Amethyst’ was being bombed, an exhibition of Elizabeth’s work was held in London’s West End. In the post-war phase of her creative life she produced, apart from the Simon memorial, a plaque commemorating the late Sir Oliver Lodge’s father for a village in northern England, and a stone effigy of King Harold which now stands in Waltham Abbey. Other works went on display at King’s College, Cambridge and Manchester and Bristol Art Galleries. There was a major exhibition of Muntz works in Dorchester during the summer of 1971.

In later years also, her sculptures won her peculiar honours and worldwide recognition. She was nominated as the first woman freeman of The Ancient Order of Purbeck Marblers & Stone Cutters and was a founder member (and first woman member) of the Guild of memorial Craftsmen, a body formed to maintain and further the standard of memorial sculpting.

At the end of her productive life Elizabeth Muntz died in East Chaldon on 30th of March 1977 in her 82nd year. Possession of her enormous collection of sketches, drawings, paintings, notes, photographs, manuscripts and family memorabilia went to her sister, Isabelle Hope, who lived on at the cottage. When Hope herself died in 1981 the Muntz collection was entrusted to Catherine Morton, a friend who had by then moved in with her. In February 1988 Catherine bequeathed the entire collection to the County Museum in Dorchester. In her will Elizabeth had left £65,116.

Elizabeth was buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, East Chaldon, where today the graves of her sister and a life-long colleague-companion, Andre Bonnamy, lie nearby. As already mentioned this churchyard is the home of Muntz’s Dodington memorial, though some may consider it could just as well double as a memorial to Elizabeth herself. It is of course not the sole monument to represent Dorset’s legacy of the works of her hand.

Sir Frederick Treves

Jan 20th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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SURGEON BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT

With heavy hearts a small band of elderly men stood around a small grave in Dorchester cemetery on a bleak afternoon of wintry drizzle. It was January 1924 and the mourners were paying their last respects to a figure of great philanthropy and achievement, born 70 years before in Dorchester. They watched as a small box of ashes was lowered into the deceased chalky native soil. The man they were saying farewell to was Sir Frederick Treves, one of the most remarkable of men from an age of giants and one of the greatest luminaries in the progress of medicine and surgery.

Treves was born in Dorset’s county town in February 1853; the son of a cabinet maker and furniture dealer who had a business on the premises now occupied by No 8, Cornhill. A housemaid fondly recalled that in his earliest days at school Treves’ shyness led him to hide behind the coats in the cloakroom after lessons. In 1860 however, he began attending a school run by the poet and Rector of Winterbourne Came, William Barnes, in South Street.

His famous pupil remembered Barnes as: “…an old clergyman of great courtliness, ever gentle and benevolent, who bore with supreme simplicity the burden of a learning, which was almost superhuman.” Thomas Hardy, who’s family lived only a few miles from William Treves’ furniture shop, early became an inevitable acquaintance; it was a friendship which would last for the rest of young Frederick’s life.

Upon the death of his father William, Treves’ mother Jane sold the shop and moved with her children to London. After attending the Merchant Tailors School and University College, Treves with his two elder brothers embarked upon a medical career. In 1871 he became a student at the London Hospital, where his hard work and dedication saw him rise to become Licentiate of the Society of the Royal College of Surgeons.

In 1877 Treves married Elizabeth Mason, a brewers daughter. That year he joined a GP practice in Cheshire, but soon after fell out with the senior partners over their objections to his suitability to attend the confinement of an upper class socialite. For Treves, the social caste of the baby to be delivered matter not at all, but the principle did. He threw up his practice and returned to London in 1879, living first in Sydenham.

From this time he held a succession of posts over the next 20 years. He became an authority on anatomy and surgery, specialising in the abdomen. On one occasion he wrote to The Lancet urging the importance to public health of the registry of disease by hospitals. He was an effective lecturer, able to communicate well with both academics and undergraduates, and encouraged his students to take notes in the wards as well as in lectures. He also founded the Students Union at the hospital.

One of the several curious and unusual cases of his career during these years came when he was summoned to the home of the American millionaire J.P. Morgan. A new-born baby in the Morgan family was evidently dying from an undetermined cause, which baffled all the specialists present. After examining the baby Treves had to admit that he too was baffled by the condition until a second examination revealed the head of a needle which had penetrated the heart. After seeking permission to perform a dangerous operation Treves opened the child’s chest and removed the needle. As he later stated: “..there was only one thing to do: make a grab for it. If I got it there was some hope. If I missed…. but I got that needle!.”

In 1884, Treves encountered Joseph Merrick, a man born with a hideous deformity of the face caused by an abnormal accumulation of spongy tissue, which also included a curious of the nose, so earning him the name of Elephant Man. At that time a travelling showman, an indignity that incensed Treves and led him to rescue the accursed man from his showman master, was exhibiting Merrick for profit as a side-show freak.

He was examined, but Treves was only able to offer minimal treatment. The physician had to rely entirely upon his kindness and humanity in offering Merrick a better life, which he did by taking him to the Dury Lane Theatre and to visit Princess Alexandra.
Treves later wrote, “…I suppose Merrick was imbecile from birth. The fact that his face was incapable of expression, that his speech was a mere spluttering, and his attitude that of one who’s mind was void of all emotions and concerns gave grounds for this belief. It was not until I came to know that Merrick was highly intelligent, that he possessed an acute sensibility and a romantic imagination that I realised the overwhelming tragedy of his life.”

On another occasion he attended Sir Henry Irvine after the great actor had accidentally swallowed the nozzle of a throat spray. Treves examined Irvine and then had x-rays taken, but on his second visit the doctor discovered that his patient had coughed up the nozzle and needed no surgery to remove it.

Treves left the hospital in 1897 to concentrate on private practise and to develop a career as a writer. Upon the outbreak of the Boer War he was appointed consulting surgeon to a South African field hospital. Here Treves found himself defending the Royal Army Medical Corps against criticism that it was dealing inadequately with sickness. This in turn drew criticism upon himself, though he was active in pressing for improvements. One case in particular during this conflict that would leave a lasting impression in Treves’ mind, and one of many demonstrations of the depth of his human understanding, was his deathbed comforting of Frederick Roberts, son of Lord Roberts of Pretoria, who had been mortally wounded during the battle of Colenso.

In the winter after the soldier’s death Treves upon visiting the grave, found that the heat had drawn Robert’s stark corpse from the ground. The doctor – entirely alone – re-interred the body himself. In 1900, before the end of the war Treves’ services in South Africa were recognised in Dorchester when he was made a Freeman of the Borough. In 1903 he opened an operating theatre in the County Hospital.

But the act of duty he is best remembered by came in 1901, when he was appointed to operate on the as yet uncrowned Edward VII for peritonitis. Treves recalled how, to allay public suspicions that anything was wrong with the King on the eve of his coronation, he was allotted a code number, alias and casual disguise, even disembarking from the train at the previous station and walking the rest of the way to the royal residence.

After the operation Treves joined the King on the royal yacht. In gratitude for literally saving his life Edward made the surgeon a Baronet, Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order and gave him a grace and favour house, Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park. It was here that he was once visited by his great friend and fellow countyman, the Cassells publisher Newman Flower, about a matter of publication. Flower lovingly recalled in his ‘Just as it Happened’ how he found every chair but one in the living room piled high with papers which, upon enquiring, discovered were the pages of an Italian dictionary the doctor was compiling, but which was never published.

In 1904 Treves retired from surgery to concentrate on travel and writing books, medical papers and letters to The Times. That year he also undertook a visit to Japan, where he was presented to the Emperor, an event, which inspired one of his greatest works ‘The Other Side of the Lantern.’ On a later occasion he also met the President of the USA. In the summer of the following year (1905) he made a phenomenal blanket cycle tour of every settlement in Dorset, which became the raw material for his ‘Highways & Byways of Dorset’ (1906.) The retired doctor wrote vividly of his impressions of what he saw in the countries he visited, and in one of his letters to the Times expressed his reservations about the nature of the restoration work being carried out on Puddletown Church.

He held the first presidency of the Society of Dorset Men in London, standing down three years later to make way for Thomas Hardy, though he continued to contribute several articles to its Yearbook thereafter, including ‘William Barnes the Dorset Poet’ and ‘Dorset Seventy Years Ago.’

Treves was a humanitarian, a man intolerant of humbug or deception. He was never slow to temper at any injustice yet had great reserves of kindness and compassion. He did not mince his words over matters, which animated or angered him, such as the standard of medical care in hospitals. During his hospital years in London he could still find time to put in an hour or so of writing each morning before his daily work on the wards began. He was a genius of surgery, yet found time to pursue a wide range of other interests. He was keen on sailing and gained a qualification certificate as a Master Mariner. He is said to have sailed the Channel to France and back every Boxing Day. His coterie of friends included many famous men of books and letters such as Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, William Watkins and William Barnes.

After the First World War failing health led Treves to spend most of his time on the Continent, first at Monte Carlo, then Vevey near Lausanne. Here he was visited by Newman Flower, who encouraged him to write ‘The Elephant Man & Other Reminiscences,’ the book which more than any other documented the extraordinary casebook of his career and his distinguished clientele. Other works were ‘The Lake of Geneva’ and ‘Tale of a Field Hospital.’ On a visit to England in November 1923 he joined Newman Flower for a dinner in London in the company of Edmund Gosse. It was the last time the trio of friends would ever meet up together. In the first week of December that year Treves went up the hill above Montreux to watch a football match. Possibly aggravated by the weather, the great surgeon was taken ill with peritonitis upon his return and after several days in a state of delirium he died in the hotel at Vevey.

William Watkins, who had founded The Society of Dorset Men in London, arranged the funeral in association with Thomas Hardy. But the ceremony had to be postponed twice because of bad weather on the Continent and a delay caused by having to produce the death certificate. After the funeral Newman Flower returned to have tea with the Hardy’s.

Later Lady Treves approached Flower with the suggestion that he should write the official biography of her husband, but the widow later had second thoughts about allowing Treves’ court connection to be publicised and withdrew the request. Since then no biography of Sir Frederick Treves has ever been written.

Mary Anning – Fossil Collector of Lyme Regis

Jan 19th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Visitors to the Dorset resort of Lyme Regis in the 1820’s would most likely have noticed a diminutive brunette in a dark dress with cloak and bonnet, holding a basket in one hand and a claw-hammer in the other, picking her way over loose boulders wasted from the cliff. Probably they little realised that they were watching Mary Anning, and her business on the shore in those distant days was more than just a past time. The girl was out beach combing – not for the man made artefacts of her own time, but the astonishing profusion of fossils being weathered out by wind and waves from the wasting cliffs.

The girl began in a small way, collecting the numerous bivalves locally known as “Devil’s Toenails” (Gryphaea) and the bullet-shaped shells now known as belemnites (the skeleton of an early form of squid) but popularly called “Devil’s Thunderbolts.” Other popular names for the various fossils were “Ladies Fingers” “John Dories” or “Crocodile Bones.”

Mary was born in the town in 1799, the daughter of Richard Anning, a man living a lowly existence as Lyme’s carpenter and cabinetmaker. The family was not wealthy, and Richard and his wife (also called Mary) and their two children spent much of the time living on parish relief. Looking for a means to supplement his income, Anning conceived the bright idea of collecting and washing the myriad fossils to be found along the beach, to sell to tourists. Daughter Mary was a bright girl who took an intense interest in her father’s collecting. Before she was ten years old, she too was going out onto the beach with hammer and basket, the intention being to increase her father’s sale stock displayed outside his shop. In these forays her brother Joseph was often to be seen at her side.

Her first big break however, came in 1810 when she was eleven. In that year Richard Anning and Joseph discovered what seemed to them to be the head of a crocodile, worked loose from a recent cliff-fall. The carpenter felt certain the rest of the skeleton must have been left behind in the cliff, so he advised Mary to watch out for it when out on her regular collecting forays. But only a few months later her father was dead. In the meantime Mary continued to collect from Black Ven and Charmouth beaches. Then four months after her father’s death a violent storm caused a landslide, and the much prized “crocodile” skeleton was revealed. Mary skilfully traced out the fossil, hiring help to transport it, but it was several years before the 30-foot long creature was reconstructed.

What Mary had found was the first in a series of marine vertebrate finds which would make her name. It was in fact an Ichthyosaur, a now extinct marine reptile of the Jurassic period. Mary sold the Ichthyosaur to a Mr Henley for £23, a man who in turn would later sell it to the British Museum for twice as much. The specimen is now in the Natural History Museum. Ichthyosaurs were reptiles with a dolphin-like body, paddles, a fish-like tail and large eyes, but without a neck.

The next big find came in 1811, when Mary and Joseph unearthed the first Plesiosaur, a creature broadly similar to Ichthyosaurs, but having a long flexible neck and larger rear paddles. It could reach up to 40 feet in length. This skeleton first went to a natural history museum in Piccadilly before being purchased by the British Museum in 1819. In 1824 Mary made the discovery of the first Plesiosaur in perfect condition, though this specimen was much smaller than 40 feet. She sold this specimen for £120 guineas.

But there was to be another remarkable find in 1828; not a sea reptile this time, but a flying one. With a wingspan of 4 feet (up to 26 feet in an adult) this was the first Pterosaur, a creature called Dimorphodon, to be discovered virtually in tact. The fourth finger of each hand was elongated and supported a flight membrane. Dimorphodon probably flew by gliding.

Mary made the last important discovery in 1832, when another fine specimen of a 30-foot Ichthyosaur emerged from the Jurassic clay on the shore. On this occasion an amateur was accompanying her. This is now in the Natural History Museum, Kensington.

The fulcrum of Mary Anning’s collecting and discoveries was principally the need to make a living in hard times. As she searched Mary encountered many other people higher up the social scale than herself, who were nevertheless interested in her work. The Annings were poor, but on one occasion they did have a lucky break when Lt.Col. Birch of Thorpe Hall in Lincolnshire, hearing of Mary’s work and the family’s plight, gave the Annings £400 from the sale of his own fossil collection. She made the friendship of two sisters called Philpott, who often came to Lyme Regis to collect fossils themselves. Two men in particular, Sir Henry De la Beche, who founded the Geological Museum and School of Mines, and William Buckland, a clerical West Country geologist were influential in winning for Mary her enduring reputation and success.

In Mary’s day Lyme was becoming a popular resort and collectors were finding rare curiosities. The Anning fossils were regularly being bought by visitors arriving off the horse-coaches at the Pilot Inn. But the growing interest in the ancient animal remains was at a time when geological knowledge was in its infancy and very much framed within literal interpretation of the Bible and Creationist orthodoxy. The fossils being collected by Mary Anning and others were considered to represent thousands rather than millions of years, or were perhaps the remains of creatures, which perished in Noah’s Flood. Over the course of her short life, Mary’s work would make her well known and respected by many famous geologists of the day. She was aware – possibly ahead of her time – that fossils were not just curiosities, but were things of greater significance in the understanding of life on earth in its remoter antiquity.

Mary’s later years were spent in relative comfort. But she had never been robust, and by 1845 she had become morose and ill tempered, a trait which may have led to her becoming a lone beachcomber. The underlying cause of her disagreeable nature was probably the cancer, which was eventually to kill her. Nevertheless, this did not prevent her worth being appreciated by the scientific establishment, and she was elected a member of the Geological Society in recognition of her help to geologists of her day.

After her death in 1847 a stained glass window was dedicated to her memory in Lyme Church.

Henry Moule

Jan 17th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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With their accustomed inertia officials of the Duchy of Cornwall were unmoved by the letter of desperation they had just received, highlighting squalid living conditions in Fordington near Dorchester. The correspondent described how, in places, the floors of cottages lay beneath the level of the pond, how waste was being cast into drains or into the open street, and the fact that the population density in places was higher than that in Manchester.

The letter however, was not from a desperate councillor or villager, but from Fordington’s vicar, the Revd. Henry Moule, though his plea for action was never heeded. The Duchy had imposed a ban on development, so allowing the community to degenerate into a rural slum. But although he failed on this occasion many more examples of the energy and vision of this remarkable cleric have stood the test of time. But it was one innovation in particular, arising partially by accident in 1859, which made Moule’s name more widely known.

In the summer of that year something inspired Moule to fill his cesspool and instruct his family to use buckets instead. At first he buried the sewage in trenches but then noticed that after about a month no trace of the excrement remained. So he built a shed, sifted the dry earth beneath it and mixed the bucket waste with the dry earth. After ten minutes nothing offensive remained, and furthermore Moule found that the earth could be recycled about five times.

Equally interested in the composted waste’s effect on plant nutrition Moule, in collaboration with a farmer, fertilised one-half of a field with his closet earth while the other half was fertilised with conventional super-phosphate. Swedes planted in the manure grew a third larger than those grown in the phosphate. It was later said that Moule’s invention could be more effective in disease prevention than vaccination.

Such dynamism and passionate evangelical conviction on Henry Moule’s part was legendary. Born in Melksham, Wiltshire, on January 27th 1801, the sixth son of a solicitor, Henry attended Marlborough Grammar School then entered St. Johns College, Cambridge in 1817 to read classics, physics, astronomy and mathematics. After graduating with a BA in 1821 he accepted a position as a peripatetic tutor to the children of Admiral Sir William Hotham. In 1824 he was ordained a deacon, becoming a priest the following year. Appointed vicar of his native Melksham for some years he then took up the living at Gillingham in Dorset, where he was obliged to tighten up a lapse in discipline and standards found to be prevalent and in the conducting of services.

Just before his entry into St. Johns in 1817 Moule had been warned not to enter Trinity Church because of the tainted reputation of its fanatical minister. Theologically Moule was a follower of Charles Simeon, the Cambridge evangelical bulwark against liberal theology in the Church, and wrote several letters to The Times on theology. But Moule was also a great patriot and conservative in politics. In 1824, the year of his deaconcy, he married Mary Evans, a woman related to a London publisher.

Moule moved to Fordington in 1829 to take up his ministry there, though at first he was met by considerable hostility. His deliverance of feisty sermons denouncing local morality and the grievous structural and spiritual state of the church brought him into conflict with locals, who even jeered at his children in the street. Furthermore, Moule’s acceptance into the community was not helped by his demolition of the church’s musicians gallery on deciding to dispense with the orchestra, and by persuading the Morton-Pitt family to end the Dorchester Races on ethical grounds in the early 1830’s.

But on an initial stipend of £225 per annum the new minister made the vicarage a success and in 1840 he purchased adjoining land to create a garden. The year before he had sponsored winter relief work on a major archaeological excavation of over 50 complete skeletons from a Roman cemetery underlying Fordington High Street, even forensically examining some of the bones himself. For some years too, he served as Chaplain to Dorset Barracks, a position that inspired him to write his Barrack Sermons. From the royalties he received from the publication of this book Moule built the church at West Fordington.

In the autumn of 1862 Henry Moule was faced with perhaps the greatest of his pastorship when he undertook the religious counselling of Edwin Preedy, a 21-year-old man being held in Dorchester jail awaiting trial and execution for murder. During the final weeks of the prisoner’s life Moule struggled to force Preedy into an eleventh hour repentance in the face of the condemned man’s fits of despair and physical violence. Moule’s death-cell consultations with Preedy are recounted in his rare 94-page booklet Hope Against Hope*

Henry Moule finally won some approval from his parishioners when he brought their lamentable living standards to the notice of the Duchy of Cornwall. Though he was not successful, in 1861 he produced National Health & Wealth, a twenty-page pamphlet in response to the disease, nuisance, waste and expense caused by cesspools and water drainage. Following his development of the earth closet Moule took out a patent for it in partnership with James Bannehr, thus forming the Moule Patent Earth Closet Company, which made and sold earth closets in oak and mahogany.

In The Field of the 21st November 1868 it was said “…in towns and villages not exceeding 2000 or 3000, we believe the earth closet will be found not only more effective but far more economical than water drainage.” The August 1st 1868 edition of The Lancet reported that 148 dry earth closets were in use at the Volunteer encampment at Wimbledon by 2000 men without any odour being produced. At his death, Moule was still trying to persuade the government that the earth closet was the sanitation of the future. He wrote pamphlets including The Advantage of the Dry Earth System; The Science of Manure as the Food of Plants; Manure for the Million: a Letter to the Cottage Gardeners of England, and a paper on town refuse in 1872. In this paper Moule argued on the three principles of (1) “There can never be a National Sanitation Reform without active intervention by central government” (2) That active intervention can never take place under the water sewerage system without a large increase of local taxation (3) Let the dry-earth system be enforced, and with a vast improvement in health and comfort, local taxation may be entirely relieved.

One of Henry Moule’s proudest friends and admirers was Thomas Hardy, who recognised his worth and even considered himself one of the minister’s parishioners even though he (Hardy) had reverted to agnosticism. Moule was no less active in the affairs of Dorchester and was fervently involved with William Barnes and Canon Charles Bingham in founding the Dorset Museum in 1845, the forerunner of today’s County Museum in the High Street. Moule also founded, in 1850, the Institute of Adult Education and was involved in the foundation of the Dorchester Mutual Improvement Society.

The Revd. Henry Moule BA died in 1880, but five of Henry and Mary’s six children became eminent figures in their own right. Handley Carr Moule became Bishop of Durham and wrote a treatise on Simeon. George Moule became Bishop of mid-China and Arthur E Moule also served as a missionary in that country. Charles became President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Henry J. Moule became an archaeologist and Dorset Museum’s first curator. But a sixth son, Horace, slit his throat in a fit of depression in Cambridge in 1871. Though gifted musically and academically, his life was blighted by depressive and alcoholic tendencies. But the most tragic aspect of Horace Moule’s wasted life and death was that he, like his father, was a friend and mentor to Hardy, his demise having a significant impact on Dorset literature, for through Hardy it inspired the author’s intemperate and failing hero Jude in Jude the Obscure. A grandson of one of these siblings occupied a chair as Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

*available for examination only by special request at the County Museum (handling fee £10). We will be publishing an article about Edwin Preedy’s short life soon – it will be posted in Real Lives.

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