steepholm

I mentioned my grandfather's sailor's palm a while ago, but at that time I wasn't sure whether my mother still had it. Turns out she has - and the bodkin too! I'm very glad they've not been lost.

Trying it on, I discover that my grandfather had smaller hands than I do. I never thought of him as dainty.

i) My mother showed me the Grove Park Jubilee Anthology - a collection of poems written between 1896 and 1946 by pupils at her Wrexham grammar school. It includes three poems by her: a Keatsian pastiche addressed to a cello, a poem about "stooking" (something she did as part of her "bit" during the summer holidays, sharing the fields with Italian prisoners of war), and this one, which I include not so much for its quality as poetry - though I like the sly satirical note in the last line - as for its 1941 topicality:

( Read more... )

ii) The green space in front of Romsey Abbey used to be a graveyard. It still is, in the sense that there are scores of dead bodies buried there, but in the early '60s the gravestones - mostly 18th century - were taken down so as to open the space to the living. Many's the time I played on the Abbey Green, for my primary school ran on one side of it, and home was just five minutes' walk away. They did leave a couple of box tombs at the edge, which I suppose would have been hard to move (but good for hide and seek); and I understand one family objected to the removal of their loved one's gravestone, so that was spared. It stood there solitary towards the back of the field throughout my childhood. Then it was vandalized and the carious stump sat for several years more. Finally it was removed altogether, family objections or no - though whether by the church or some less official vandals, I'm not sure. I can find no trace of it today.

Generally, I'm all in favour of giving the living priority - let the dead bury their dead, and all that - but I jib at what they did with the gravestones...

( Behold... )

iii) The electricians who came to fix my mother's outside light are based in the nearby village of Baddesley, not Ampfield (a couple of miles away). But they call themselves Ampfield Electronics: "Because it sounds more electrical". Subliminal advertising is alive and well in rural Hampshire.

iv) Finally, thanks to Cheryl Morgan for alerting me to this manga - which I so want to exist on the other 364 days of the year, and not just April 1st. Won't someone make it happen?

My mother gave me two treasures yesterday. I don't think either's very valuable, but their treasureliness lies in their interest to me.

( Here they are... )

What do you know? It turns out that Ruth got a Guardian obit. Not a bad one, either, as these things go: she's had far more dismissive treatments in the past.

My mother once told me that when she first met her in-laws she was amazed and a little shocked to hear how disrespectfully my grandfather was addressed by his children. I don't suppose they called him a silly old fool except in a jocular/affectionate way, but she couldn't imagine talking to her father like that at all. But then, one grandfather was a vegetarian, pacifist Esperantist and the other a professional sailor from Wrexham who'd spent much of his youth on down-and-dirty cargo runs.

One of the documents I've been looking through recently is a scrapbook, maintained by my Esperanto grandfather, with photos and various childish sketches by his own offspring. Amongst the rest, there is evidence that the father-mocking spirit set in as early as the 1920s. Here, for example, is a (presumably imaginary) scene of domestic violence, as he punishes my grandmother for burning the Yorkshire pudding. It also gives an insight into the English-Esperanto pidgin that was being spoken in Kingston upon Thames at that date:

That was by my aunt Myfy, the eldest child. A little later, there are renditions by both her and her brother James of my grandfather on a missionary trip to Guildford, trying to convert the townsfolk to the glories of Esperanto. (One gathers it wasn't a great success.) First James:

Then Myfy, not to be outdone:

It's quite interesting to see so many of the graphic techniques later utilized by The Beano already in common currency. Either way, I think we can say from the fact that my grandfather carefully pasted these scurrilous pictures into the family scrapbook that he wasn't too offended.

Those of you who follow my family maunderings will know that when I went to the British Library in September to research Daniel Southwell's voyage to Australia with the First Fleet, I was surprised to find him referring to a young cousin of his on another of the Fleet ships - a lad named Daniel Butler. This was a shock, as I'd never come across young Dan Butler in my family tree, even though most of the children of that generation are listed. There were several potential Butler uncles for Dan to be the son of, but none had his name attached. Dan comes across as a lively character - not very disciplined, a bit untidy though "a clever little tar" when he puts his mind to it, bad about writing letters home, an artist of sorts, something of a rogue in fact (as my great*4 grandfather Weeden calls him in a letter to Southwell). Southwell - only in his mid-twenties himself - takes him under his wing and is solicitous about him in letters after their paths diverge, but there is never any mention of his having parents, although he is clearly only in his mid-teens. The last sight we have of him - and that's really a non-sighting - is in a letter of June 30th, 1793, from Southwell to Uncle Weeden:

Does my enquiry about Dan. B. slip your memory or has any thing particular come to hand? I have left off to ask my mother, as possibly she might not like to inform me of any mishap but you Uncle need not be sway’d by any such reasons. We know “we’re born to die”. I was going to say particularly soldiers and sailors, and you yourself once did tell me or ask me, if “Botany Bay would not sound as well at the Day as Nicholas Lane or Chelsea.” So also I imagine Africa, or the sea between it and us.

And that's where our story ended in September. Since then, however, I've been contacted by Michael Flynn, an Australian historian currently working on a new edition of The founders of Australia: a biographical dictionary of the First Fleet. He's given me quite a bit of help with the two First Fleet Daniels (and I hope I've given him a little too). The story is now coming together, although it's sadder than I would have liked...
( Read more... )

Thanks to the generosity of

gillpolack I am now the proud possessor of a Banksia pod and some very striking views of Sydney harbour.

Isn't it pretty? In the spirit of the great Sir Joseph's Linnaean endeavours, I think I can safely say that it's is a close relative of the hedgehog, though this one thankfully is free of fleas.

Thanks,

gillpolack - I'm very grateful.

This is the last gleaning of my British Library harvest. Time beat me, I'm afraid, before I was able to write down very much of what Daniel Southwell had to say about Australia itself. Also, quite a bit of it was written in his log books rather than his letters, and there he tended to write very small indeed, to the extent that I had to borrow a British Library magnifying glass to pick my way through. I'm particularly sorry that I never got as far as his discussions of Aboriginal language, but console myself that I can always go back, and that the Australian sections are the parts that have probably been pored over most thoroughly by others before me. Indeed, I quoted some of them in my entry from three years ago.

Still, I do have some material, both about the land and its inhabitants. As for the former, Southwell found the country beautiful, but he was unimpressed with the potential of Sydney cove for agriculture, and couldn't understand how such a lush forest could be sustained by such poor soil.

Here the settlement is fixed, and the place already wears some appearance of cultivation. The soil near the sea is at best but indifferent, and nothing can be more strange than to see so much of vegetation, and that of the gigantic sort, on a soil that one would think scarcely could afford nutriment for tinder-wood.

This district, so far as hitherto we know of it, yields not vegetables for which we have a kitchen name, but here are several green things, of which we make use, that are not unwholesome, and in the eating we endeavour to think them better than they are. It is extraordinary, that no good fruits, or such as might be made so by management, are here. Some berries of the basest order, bastard figs, and the like are now and then to be met with. […]

In the excursions which our people occasionally make into the country, they find however, that the trees in certain places stand farther apart, and here and there are some tolerably good spots, compared to that where we are fixed. And so it had need be; but still it is all as nothing compared to the arable and pasture of our own dear shore. […]

The largest quadruped yet seen on this continent, shall we call it? – is the kangaroo, being of the size of a large dog. There are vast timbers, and a great variety of birds, but they too are hard to be got at.

He wrote at first that yams were doing quite well, but later had to amend the letter after they too failed, admitting that "the reign of the yam" was over.

There are some intriguing descriptions of the flora and fauna, but I was able to decipher only small amounts. He was impressed with the "Snakes of 2 yards 2 ½ chequed with very agreeable colours and scales all over"; and he was well aware not only that kangaroos had a "false belly", but that other species did so too, including opossums and a "kind of rat". I experienced a thrill of excitement when I saw the following, which at first glance seemed to anticipate evolutionary theory, but is perhaps just a throwback to the Great Chain of Being (it all depends on what the words are that I was unable to make out):

Most of the [?] of this place are handy with their paws [...] partaking of the monkey yet very monkeish in their manners and seem to have some relationship, and I am apt to think are a distant gradation from them as are links in the chain which makes nature in [?] [?] from one form to another.

As far as the indigenous Australians are concerned, the reading was something of a wince-fest, although it did seem to me that Southwell's attitude moderated over time. In his initial description to his mother in 1788 he describes them as "brandishing their lances with a variety of anticks, more like monkies than warriors; and in truth their chattering, tho’ somewhat more sonorous, put one in mind of those small gentry[?]." Uncle Weeden, writing on 24th May 1789, is at least an advocate of good relations, but perhaps just a wee bit patronising?

I am happy to learn that rigour is avoided towards the natives. They may in a course of time guess better at their interests, and then come to. But if you once draw the sword against them, you will assuredly have very little occasion for the scabbard. Captain Tench’s book pleased me much. He seemed a man well calculated to negociate matters with the more intelligent, if there be any such, among your dark neighbours. The first especial point is to lure such to your society so as to introduce Language as the medium of good fellowship.

Perhaps Daniel takes this to heart, because he does start trying to find out all he can about the indigenous population. Unfortunately, he discovers that they aren't half as interested in him as he is in them, and that the main problem is getting them to pay him any attention. In his log book for 24 May 1790, though, he writes: "On this day 2 of the natives passing by in their canoes nearer [?] than usual we made signs to [?] them on board, which by degrees they did." They were surprised to see a twelve-month-old girl on board, and started what Daniel heard as a "guttural moaning", after which they "also saw the mother of it (the first white woman I suppose they ever saw) which occasioned a second peal in which one would have thought they were [?] their lungs."

At the far end of his stay, Daniel's view of natives seems to have changed quite a bit - if not of the Australians themselves then at least of the inhabitants of Duke of York's island (now part of Papua New Guinea, I think?), where on 23 May 1791 he writes a long proto-ethnographic description. Here's the final part of it:

These people are for the most part of the middle size, and tho several were here seen that much exceeded it yet the numbers it is probably of those who come below it is the most considerable. They are robust and well set, the nose flattened but not so much as in other nations and their countenances open and agreeable enough and might probably be more so were they not addicted to that custom of chewing Betel and Chinam, so universally practised in all this quarter of the globe and which by making the teeth black and decay and staining the lips and mouth as of a gore of blood seems shocking, at least to an European, for with them it is reckoned very becoming and delightful.

Their hair is of a woolly texture and as I apprehend naturally black and inclined to be long although I never saw either of considerable length or that colour being almost always of a dingy whitish cast and often of a reddish as tho burnt, and this is likely the case for they constantly dust it with a kind of lime in appearance the same as the chinam, which when it rains or otherwise gets wet may burn the whole of their hair or wool, so worked up into a number of plaits or twisted in some way or other like the thrums of a mop and indeed (meaning no disparagement) has very much the appearance of that well known piece of domestic furniture. Many of their heads were absolutely white and none were darker than a singy browne.

Like most savages that are known they pierce the ears and nose for the reception of ornaments, the former with extra large orifices. The last mentioned feature had this peculiarity for not merely the middle cartilage but the nostril also were perforated and that with a particular taste [?] of ingenuity as I never before ever heard of, for the holes being bored I suppose of the proposed dimensions and big enough to receive a black-lead pencil of the usual sort were nicely bush’d [?],* if I may be allowed the expression, with a ring cut of a reed or tube and neatly let in and most likely never to be removed, intended it may be to prevent their natural tendency to collapse or else to defend them from the irritation or fretting which the ornament might otherwise occasion. These are of various sorts and worn perhaps only on certain occasions, for I saw several sometimes with and sometimes without them.

Their pendants were composed of shells and bones, teeth of animals and also small tubes or bits[?] of reed curiously ornamented with fanciful marks of variegated stains, I apprehend by burning, and 5 or 6 inches in length, which when thrust through the nose rather affected the sound of their voices in speaking. Their most superb adornment however I take to be the shell-work, in which they are very curious consisting of several rows of hanging round the neck and breast. Those thus attired appeared to be persons of distinction, and though in itself simple had really a graceful appearance.

* I'm guessing this is "bushed" as in OED v.1.2 "To protect (trees, etc.) with bushes or cut brushwood set round about; to support with bushes."

Okay, so they're still "savages", but here that seems a relatively neutral description, and with phrases such as "at least to an European" and "meaning no disparagement" he acknowledges that aesthetic canons are not universal and that these people deserve courtesy. But of course, I may be seeing here what I want to see, which would be an ethnographical arrogance of my own...

"I am no great hand at description, but still I flatter myself these little particulars would from me be acceptable."
Daniel Southwell, 4th June 1787, Santa Cruz

Very acceptable, Daniel. I'm going to devote this entry and the next, which will be my last on the British Library findings for now, to some of the little particulars that stood out for me, from the voyage and (next time) Australia itself.

( A Brief Gazetteer )

( Crossing the Line )

( So, What about the Convicts? )

( Signing Off )

I mentioned in my last that my researches had thrown up a new puzzle, and in this entry I'll explain what - or rather, who - that is.

When reading Daniel Southwell's letters home I was puzzled to come across numerous references to a cousin of his on one of other First Fleet ships, HMS Prince of Wales, by the name of Daniel Butler. The various mentions of him, though mostly in passing, combine to give quite a vivid sense of this mysterious young man's character...

( Daniel on Daniel )

So, it appears I have not one but two ancestors in the First Fleet, but what do we know about young Daniel Butler? He's a kinsman of Southwell and well known both to his mother and to Uncle Weeden. He does not, however, appear on my family tree! The Australian historians have been busy, though, and are able to add a bit more. According to this site, he was born in 1772 and served as a ship's boy, both of which sound right from Southwell's references. On the other hand, they also claim that he was a clergyman's son, which I don't think can be true. I suspect that they're assuming he's Weeden's son, but a) I know all of Weeden's children, and he isn't one of them, and b) the way Weeden refers to him is affectionate rather than paternal ("Daniel Butler has now been transferred to another master"). There were no other clergymen among Weeden's brothers.

Drawing offers another line of enquiry. It seems that Surveyor General Alt was a good choice to keep an eye out for Dan Butler, because the boy was something of an artist, albeit not a very good one. Dan seems to have been a text-book example of being in the right place at the right time, however, and the fact that he was just about the first European to draw any indigenous Australian fish has earned him a place in the Dictionary of Australian Artists, and given unfortunate scholars the task of figuring out what on earth he was looking at. Here's an example of his work, complete with signature:

Definitely Some Sort of Fish

Actually they're fairly confident this one is a leatherjacket, but Dan's other efforts have left historians of ichthyic art scratching their heads. I think it's fair to say that this isn't bad for a 15/16 year old, and it's certainly better than I could do even now, but it's not really that good either. On the other hand, remember Cousin Southwell and the banana in the last entry: when you don't have the relevant schema to hand, your drawing will go awry, so let's cut Dan some slack.

I have two main theories about who Daniel Butler was...

( My theories )

What became of Dan? From 1793 he disappears from history, as far as I can see, and by this point the Australian historians have lost interest because he's no longer there. Probably he was magicked back to 1980 none the worse for his adventure, but another possibility is raised by Daniel Southwell's final letter to Weeden. When I was running out of time at the BL I skipped to the end of the volume, and the very last one, written after Southwell's return to England, ends with this bleak but tantalizing PS:

Does my enquiry about Dan. B. slip your memory or has any thing particular come to hand? I have left off to ask my mother, as possibly she might not like to inform me of any mishap but you Uncle need not be sway’d by any such reasons. We know “we’re born to die”. I was going to say particularly soldiers and sailors, and you yourself once did tell me or ask me, if “Botany Bay would not sound as well at the Day as Nicholas Lane or Chelsea.”* So also I imagine Africa, or the sea between it and us. (June 30th 1793, to Weeden - from Portsmouth)

* St Nicholas Lane off Cannon St was were Southwell's parents lived; Weeden lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

So perhaps to find Daniel Butler's mortal remains we must look to Africa. Or to the sea between it and us.

Well, that was so much fun!

I've just returned from a couple of days in the Manuscript Room at the British Library, where I finally started researching some family papers I've long known were held there but never got around to viewing before.

Basically, I've been looking at the papers of Daniel Southwell, who was the nephew of my great*4 grandfather, Weeden Butler (his sister Jane's son). Weeden's grandson Thomas (my great-great-grandfather), who worked for the British Museum, presented the papers to the library in 1846, and I'm glad that he did as I very much doubt they would have survived otherwise.

The interest (to people other than family) of the papers is that Daniel was a midshipman (later mate) on HMS Sirius, part of the First Fleet that set off to Australia in 1787, with an initial batch of convicts and a plan to found a colony. I've blogged about him before, but then I was taking material from the web (Australian historians have naturally had a good look at these papers before me). This time I got to see the papers in his hand. And of course, there were plenty of things there to interest me that were of no concern to the Australian historians.

There's a lot of material. His log books, and many lengthy letters to his mother and his uncle Weeden, as well as some from Weeden back to him, and various other bits and pieces - including descriptions of the landscape, inhabitants, animals, etc. I read at most a third of it over the two days, and no doubt missed a lot. But I went through everything involving the voyage itself, and the landfall in Australia, as well as some of the later letters, and very fascinating it was. It also gave me quite a bit of extra family information, and created one big new puzzle (which will have to wait till a later entry).

The journey to Australia was made in four stages, with stops at Santa Cruz in Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope. Daniel gives his impressions of all these places, but for now, seeing as I'm tired and the huntsmen are up in America (as it were), I will just share something from his stopover in Santa Cruz that I found quite charming. In 1787 Southwell was about 23 years old, and this was his first time in Tenerife. While he was there, he saw many things that were strange to him, including some peculiar fruit called "bananas" and "plantains". This is his attempt to describe them to his mother (4th June 1787):

The two former species of fruit [i.e. bananas and plantain] are extremely alike, but, I am told, are essentially different in some respects, and chiefly in that the banana is the most luscious. The shape of both, externally, very nearly resembles a Windsor bean, but within, the case or pod is entirely filled with fruitage of a very agreeable taste, which when not too ripe, looks dry and pithy upon the outside shell’s being peeled off; and still retains the original form as it exactly supplies the cavity of the pod. It is not so flat as the bean, but in other respects very like it to look at. The plantain only differs from the banana in not being so mellow. It is rather pithy and inferior in flavour, yet is the taste sufficiently similar to make us conclude it to be of the same family. The plantain, however, has one most excellent quality, for, though not so agreeable as a fruit, yet when green it affords a capital succedaneum for bread. This I have not as yet tried myself, but have it on good authority that upon being roasted and eaten with butter it has much the flavour of bread newly-baked.

In case you don't know (and I didn't) the Windsor bean is a broad bean - the comparison is to the pod, presumably. I'm definitely going to try cooking plantain that way, to see if I too can find a resemblance new-baked bread. The whole description reminded me of Gombrich's notion of schemata in Art and Illusion, and the way that people see the world in terms of the categories with which they are already familiar. Is a banana very like a broad bean to look at? Can we squeeze our minds into a shape where we can see a banana skin as a "case or pod", or even a "shell"? It's not easy - but this is something Southwell will have to grapple with repeatedly as he ventures into unknown regions. Even here on Tenerife he comes up against a similar problem when he sees the Teide volcano, which again he has to parse by reference to familiar objects:

As yet I have not fed my curiosity with a sight of the famous Pick or Pike or Peak of Teneriffe, for since our arrival that stupendous object has been constantly enveloped in the clouds. And, by the way, this puts me in mind of the humble print that used to hang over the parlour mantle piece, and by us most decisively termed “The Peak”, though I must think erroneously, as I believe the print in question was really meant as the representation of an Egyptian pyramid.

In 1787, as

chilperic mentioned to me last night (he and

fjm very kindly put me up), Britain was going through one of its rare phases of not being at war with anyone, and the visit to Santa Cruz was a friendly one. Ten years later, Southwell would return with Lord Nelson to try to take the city, only to die of the wounds he received there, which lends his happy account of his first visit a melancholy retrospective cast. But all that's a long way off as yet. And so, for now, goodnight.

This is tangential to my genealogical quest, but I was struck by this reminiscence amongst my grandfather's papers:

She was a vegetarian from the date of our marriage. It was her own wish. She said that she had never felt better in her life, but she was still trying to get used to her artificial teeth, all her own having been extracted.

I'll probably have more to say about the vegetarianism at a later date, but I was certainly struck by the casual way he refers to his 25-year-old bride's toothlessness. Then I thought of Albert and Lil in The Wasteland, where it seems taken for granted that artificial teeth are going to be superior to natural ones. Finally (because I'm slow like that) I thought of my own mother, who was admittedly 38 when I was born - a good age for a mother in 1963 - but who promptly had her remaining teeth extracted, my uterine greediness for calcium having apparently reduced her molars to carious shells.

This is not the way of dentistry today. It represents the combination of two early-mid twentieth century predispositions that we have largely turned from: a) better artificial than natural (cf. formula vs. breast milk) and b) better out than in (cf. circumcision on medical grounds). The change is partly ideological, a preference for the natural having replaced our former shining faith in science and modernity; although it's too seldom acknowledged that the luxury to exercise that preference is itself largely the result of scientific and technical development (e.g. antibiotics that make it safe to keep what we might otherwise have extracted as a sensible precaution).

Anyway, I'd be interested in any reports of past attitudes to teeth (or other body parts) and the importance of keeping/discarding them. Are there significant international differences here? I'm thinking particularly of the American stereotype of the British as having bad teeth, although this seems to centre on cosmetic work rather than basic dental health.

I'm beginning to sort through the family papers...

The good news: my grandfather, Montagu Christie Butler, was an organized man, who clearly anticipated the requirements of future biographers, and against that day put his affairs in order to the extent of typing out documents of interest and sorting them into stout manilla envelopes, divided year by year and in some cases by month by month. At the moment, I'm looking at the material leading up to his marriage to my grandmother Amy in August 1911.

The bad news: most of these documents, including their love letters, are in Esperanto. I may have to make another effort at learning it.

The good news, Part II: Google Translate is certainly good enough to get across the gist, and MCB helpfully glosses some of the letters in red type.

One serious problem early in their relationship appears to have been the class difference - or at least, the usual in-law tensions seem to have found a focus there. Amy's family was not well off. Her father, John Ferguson, had been a printer from Glasgow, who moved to London and married Alice Cook, the daughter of a wheelwright. Unfortunately John died young, and while Amy's brothers took on fairly low paid clerical jobs, she and her mother and sisters turned to dressmaking to make ends meet. She and MCB were already engaged when, in October 1910, her older brother Wally died of typhoid, in the wake of which her mother broke down, dying a month later. (At that point Amy was 25.) A niece followed within weeks, and her younger brother Charlie early the next year. So, in the spring and summer of 1911, I can see why she might have been feeling vulnerable, not least in the area of family.

It was at this point that MCB's brother Guido made some ill-judged remarks, the exact nature of which I'm still trying to determine. Either he "swanked" about the Butlers himself (MCB's word), or else he accused them of swanking. Whatever he said, it put Amy right off meeting MCB's extended family. MCB's immediate relations weren't very imposing: his father, Thomas Robinson Butler (whose school memoirs I've written up in this LJ), was a humble curate, and their means were modest - but there were rumours of grander Butlers around every corner, all of them ready to look down their collective nose at poor Amy.

The first sign of trouble came when MCB's aunt Annie Robina died in March 1911, and Amy stayed away from the funeral for fear of humiliation. After that, with the wedding just months away, there was increasing pressure to meet the relatives, and MCB took it on himself to persuade his fiancee that she'd got the wrong end of the stick. Here's an effort dated 7th June, which an older MCB has ominously glossed "A little rift within the lute"...

( In Esperanto )

( Being English'd )

While I sympathize with MCB, caught in the middle between his fiancée and his family, I'm not sure that his strategy of telling Amy the problem is all in her head is really a winner. He was still having to work hard in a letter of 20th July, just weeks before the wedding, to persuade her to visit his rich relatives in Reigate. In this one he has changed tack slightly and is assuring her that true gentility lies in behaviour rather than birth. That perhaps proved a more fruitful line of argument, since the visit duly took place, and according to the older MCB at least, "we both spent a very happy day with Gerard and all the cousins (Bella, Dick, etc) in woods around Reigate".

The Reigate relatives were Gerard Weeden Butler (a cousin of MCB's father) and his family. I've barely mentioned Gerard before (just once, in fact), largely because I don't know much about him, but I'm going to have to remedy that, since my desultory googling has revealed that he is in fact a classic Butler, if we take Butlerism in the sense in which I have previously defined it, as that of becoming expert in two apparently unrelated subjects and then finding ways to combine them.

In Gerard Weeden's case, the two subjects were cycling and geology. Or perhaps we should say that he was a cycling geologist's companion, that person being Grenville Arthur James Cole, who in 1894 published The Gypsy Road, his account of a journey of geological discovery from Krakow to Coblentz, which he undertook with Butler the previous year. The journey, of some 1,055 miles, was completed in 38 days - a feat that is more impressive when you remember that Gerard Weeden did it on a penny-farthing, without gears. (Cole was on a tricycle.) I've yet to read the book, but according to this account, "Butler is named throughout the narrative as the 'Intellectual Observer', and comes across as being a man of quiet wit and perception," although "little is known" of him except that he enjoyed painting and may have been a mathematician. Surely we can do better than that?

Unfortunately, amongst all my grandfather's photographs, there is none of Gerard Weeden. We have his father, and his children, but so far the only picture I have of Gerard Weeden himself is this illustration from The Gypsy Road, as he powers his penny-farthing through the Hungarian alluvial plains.

I don't think I'd be able to pick him out from a crowd.

Yesterday I drove to Rugeley and back, which is a long way for me. I was returning to my Aunt Naomi's house (now being cleared by her children), in order to pick up the family archive, of which she'd been the unofficial custodian in her generation. That role, by mutual consent among my various cousins, has now passed to me - more by default perhaps than by acclamation, as I seem to be the one in whom the flame of genealogical nerdishness burns brightest.

I have many boxes of papers to sort through, and photographs, and intriguing objects as well, and over the coming months I'll post anything that I think might be of more general interest here. Amongst other things, I now have in my possession the two books I blogged about here with sadly out-of-focus pictures: I hope to remedy that. But also quite unexpected things, like a wonderful picture that my uncle Dan took of my grandfather in 1957, having his ear bitten by a sparrow.

At least, I think it's a sparrow - any correction gratefully received.

( Isn't this pretty? )

Ooh, I so want this copy of Dr Dodd's Thoughts in Prison (3rd ed., 1789). It's the copy that belonged to my great*4 grandfather Weeden Butler, and it appears to have been passed down for a while through the eldest sons - not just Weeden's son Weeden (my great*3 grandfather) but his son Weeden and his children (of whom Gerard Weeden Butler, who's written in the book in pencil, was one). I've never mentioned the third Weeden here, I think, mainly because I really don't know much about him except that he became a vicar in Wickham Market, Suffolk. Nor do I know when this book left the family's possession, but I suspect it was in the 1980s, after the death of Gerard's son Richard Weeden (an eye surgeon): I've seen a couple of books with his name plate floating around.

Anyway, back to the book. It's a lengthy poem, written by the fashionable, profligate, and (as it turned out) doomed preacher, Dr William Dodd,* after his conviction in a sensational trial for forging the Earl of Chesterfield's signature on a bond. Despite a public campaign for mercy in which Samuel Johnson played a prominent part, Dodd was publicly hanged at Tyburn in 1777.

In some ways, Dodd's downfall was the catalyst for the first Weeden's rise. Weeden had been Dodd's amanuensis since 1764, and amongst many other tasks revised the rough copy and corrected the proofs of Thoughts in Prison. There he would have found the following anguished eulogy to himself:

But I am lost! A criminal adjudged!
A guilty miscreant! Canst thou think, my friend,
Oh Butler,--'midst a million faithful found,
Oh canst thou think, who knowst, who long has known
My inmost soul, etc etc.

Be that as it may, Weeden was well placed to take over some of the more lucrative aspects of Dodd's professional work. For example, Dodd had been morning preacher at the fashionable Charlotte St Chapel in Pimlico (where the eponymous queen rented four capacious pews until her death in 1818), with Weeden serving as his reader. On Dodd's fall, Weeden was swiftly preferred to the position, which he eked out with various other posts. And it was, I assume, in part on the proceeds that he was able to found the school at 6 Cheyne Walk some nine years later, where the family would be based for another two generations.

As so often, success seems to have been a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time. (Or is it the other way round?)

* Unless it was in fact written by Samuel Johnson? Boswell has Johnson complaining after Dodd's death that the disgraced cleric never acknowledged his part in composing his prison poem. But then, what do you expect from a forger?

As part of my ongoing-yet-desultory family researches, I took receipt today (via ABEbooks) of a book about the time of Henry Montagu Butler as Master of Trinity, Cambridge from 1886-1918. It was written by one of his sons, and published in 1925. (In case you're wondering, HMB was first cousin of my great-great-grandfather Thomas.)

I've not had a chance to look at it properly yet, but when I opened it I noticed on the first page a large signature, in pencil, reading "Monty Butler".

Montagu is a common family name (my grandfather was yet another), so I assume that this book belonged to a relation of mine - and besides, who else would want to read it? Looking through my family tree, however, the only Montagu I can find of the right date (apart from my grandfather, who always went by Christie) is HMB's nephew, Montagu Sherard Dawes Butler, whom I could show you looking slightly less weird but can't resist displaying in his full regalia as President of the Bombay Legislature (1921-22):

Montagu (or Monty?) Sherard Dawes Butler is known today, if for anything, as the father of R. A. Butler, the Conservative politician. To be honest, he doesn't look like the kind of unbuttoned person who would sign his books in pencil. Is there another Montagu I've missed? Was this a way of signalling his lack of interest in Uncle Henry's achievements? Or did the book belong, after all, to some quite unrelated Butler? If I find any further clues within, I shall post them here.

In yesterday's instalment we left my grandfather, along with five other men (plus three corpses), adrift in a winter storm in the North Atlantic, in a lifeboat with no food or water, a bad leak, no rudder and just one oar. It looks bad, but if I've learned one thing from my time aboard the St Cuthbert it's that sailors are remarkably resourceful people...

( Part 4 of 4 )

( ADDENDUM )

In yesterday's episode, my grandfather had some trouble with stowaways, loose cargo and heavy seas. However, things were about to get a whole lot worse...

( Part 3 of 4 )

In yesterday's episode, we saw my grandfather, Percy Bowman, preparing to sail into the stormy winter Atlantic of 1908 in a ship carrying a cargo of fusel oil, benzine, rags, flamingos and matches. What could possibly go wrong...?

( Part 2 of 4 )

I seem to be in a transcribing family papers mood, and what with all the talk of the Titanic, it's about time I turned to to my grandfather's account of the destruction in February 1908 of the St Cuthbert, on which he served as Fourth Officer. As far as I know, no other account of this disaster has ever been published, beyond the newspaper reports at the time.

My mother's father was no man of letters, and this account is written in a fairly plain style, but the events it relates are more than dramatic enough to compensate. He wrote it in the 1930s, some twenty plus years after the event, at a time when he was bankrupt and thought that the story might be saleable, but seems never to have found a publisher. Then, in the 1970s my mother revived the publication idea, and the young Steepholm typed out the manuscript for her (by far my grandest typing accomplishment at that date). But she didn't pursue it either, and in those days there was no Lulu.com to make self-publishing a viable option.

So, here it is - "The Destruction of the St Cuthbert". I'll do it in four parts, to save my fingers, over the coming days. The really dramatic action doesn't start till part 3, but I think the first two parts are interesting too, at least if you want to know about life on an Atlantic cargo ship in the early years of the last century. It's about as far from the gleaming Titanic as you can get.

By the way, between my grandfather's not-entirely-legible handwriting and my own poor teenage typing, I'm sure there are some mistakes here (and in the parts to come), especially when it comes to proper names and nautical jargon. Any suggested corrections are welcome. For example, I can't find any mention of the Cape de Neige Islands through Google...

( Part One of Four )

Palmistry

A Post without a Theme

"A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone, A piece of glass abraded by the beach"

Wellington and Beyond...

Ludwig Zamenhof's Apostle to Surrey

Fire and Fleet

(no subject)

Southwell goes South, Part IV: He Just Smiled, and Gave Me a Vegemite Sandwich

Southwell goes South, Part III: "The Lad Means Well Enough Too."

Southwell goes South, Part II: Danny Boy

Southwell goes South

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set

Of In-laws and Bike Tours

"Wonderful Things!"

A Garden of Weedens

The Full Monty

The Destruction of the St Cuthbert, Part 4: The End of the Cuthbert

The Destruction of the St Cuthbert, Part 3: Lifeboat

Destruction of the Cuthbert, Part 2: Stowaways and Storms

Four Years Before the Titanic - was the St Cuthbert

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