200th birthday of Wentworth Cavenagh 1822 – 1895

My great great grandfather Wentworth Cavenagh (1822 – 1895) was born 200 years ago on 13 November 1822 at Hythe, Kent, England to James Gordon Cavenagh and Ann Cavenagh nee Coates, the fifth of their eight children. He was baptised on 12 March 1823 at St Leonard’s, Hythe.

Wentworth’s father James Gordon, born Irish, was a surgeon of the Royal Staff Corps, an army engineering corps with its headquarters in Hythe, responsible in part for supervising the construction of static defence measures including the Royal Military Canal against Napoleon’s threatened invasion.

After their marriage in March 1815, the Cavenaghs lived at Hythe. In 1825 Cavenagh retired on half pay.

The Cavenagh family returned to Wexford in Ireland in 1837 and lived at Castle House. Wentworth Cavenagh attended the Ferns Diocesan School. It is believed he began training as a pharmacist in Wexford, but after the potato famine struck in the 1840s the economy was so bad he realised there was no future for him in Ireland and emigrated.

Wentworth Cavenagh emigrated to Canada, hoping to become a farmer there. He later moved to Ceylon to take up coffee-planting, then to Calcutta where he unsuccessfully sought a Government appointment. In 1852 he sailed from Calcutta to Australia and joined the gold rush to Bendigo then moved to South Australia to farm at Peachey Belt some twenty miles north of Adelaide.

Map of Wentworth Cavenagh’s travels

In 1863 Cavenagh was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly for the District of Yatala. He served in the Legislature for nineteen years, including period as Commissioner of Crown Lands from 1868 to 1870 in the Strangways Ministry, and Commissioner of Public Works from 1872 to 1873 in the Administration formed by Sir Henry Ayers. At the time Darwin was surveyed in 1869 Cavenagh was Commissioner of Crown Lands; a main street is named after him.

In 1865 at the age of 42 he married Ellen Mainwaring, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. They had ten children.

Portrait of Wentworth Cavenagh, from the collection of a cousin

Wentworth Cavenagh returned to England in 1892. On his departure the Adelaide Evening Journal of 27 April 1892 published a brief biography:

PASSENGERS BY THE BALLAARAT.—The following. are the passengers booked to leave Adelaide by the Ballaarat to-day:—For London —Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Misses Eva, May, Kathleen, Helen, Queenie, and Gertrude, and Master Hugh Cavenagh-Mainwaring, and Misses Herring, Schomburgk, and Horn. For Albany—Messrs. Green, Richards, and Radcliffe.

THE HON. WENTWORTH CAVENAGH-MAINWARING.—This gentleman, accompanied by his wife, six daughters, and one son, leaves by the Ballarat to-day for England, where he is about, to take up his residence at Whitmore Hall. He is a son of James Gordon Cavenagh, who was army surgeon in the Royal Staff Corps. He served in the army for thirty-five years, and went all through the Peninsula War. while he was also present at the Battle of Waterloo and the taking of Paris. He was a brother of General Sir Orfeur Cavenagh, K.C.S.I., lately deceased, who served in India in various campaigns, and who, as Town Major of Fort William, is supposed to have saved Calcutta during the mutiny. He was afterwards for several years Governor of the Straits Settlements. Another brother, General Gordon Cavenagh, served in various actions in China and India. The Hon. Wentworth Cavenagh-Mainwaring was born at Hyde, Kent, on November 13, 1822. He was educated at Ferns Diocesan School, County Wexford, Ireland, and when eighteen years of age he left home for Canada, where he was engaged for some years farming. He subsequently relinquished this occupation and started coffee planting in Ceylon. Afterwards he tried to obtain a Government appointment at Calcutta, but was unsuccessful. Attracted by a Government advertisement he came to Australia, arriving in Melbourne in 1852. Thence he went to the Bendigo diggings, and from there he came to South Australia and started farming at Peachy Belt. He stopped there for several years, and in 1863 was elected to Parliament with the late Hon. L. Glyde for the District of Yatala. For nineteen years he remained in the Legislature without a break, and during that period he was Commissioner of Crown Lands in the Strangways Ministry, and Commissioner of Public Works in the Administration formed by Sir Henry Ayers. In the elections of 1881 he was rejected when the Hon. D. Murray and Mr. Gilbert (the present member) were elected On February 16, 1865, he married Ellen Jane, the eldest daughter of Gordon Mainwaring, an officer in the East Indian Civil Service, who was at one time Inspector of Police in the early days of South Australia, and on the death of his father, Admiral Mainwaring, he succeeded to the family estates in Staffordshire. On the death of her brothers without heirs Mrs. Cavenagh-Mainwaring became entitled to the estates and adopted the name and arms of Mainwaring.

Wentworth Cavenagh died at the age of 72 in Southsea. He was buried in Whitmore, Staffordshire.

Related posts

• N is for neighbours
• W is for Wexford
• E is for Eden Park, home of Wentworth Cavenagh
• 1892 journey on the ”Ballaarat”

Wikitree: Wentworth (Cavenagh) Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1822 – 1895)

My gunpowder-manufacturing Huguenot forebears

I have quite a number of Huguenot forebears, among them the Champion de Crespignys and Fonnereaus. Recently, pottering about in a different branch of the family, I came across several more, including a group of gunpowder manufacturers.

One of my 3rd great grandmothers was Charlotte Champion Crespigny née Dana. Her great grandfather was an Irish cleric, the Rev. Dr Grueber. Tracing his family led me to Huguenot refugees from Zurich to merchant bankers of Lyons, and from these to gunpowder manufacturers, with factories near London and in Ireland.

Thus through the Dana line, my eighth great grandfather was a Frenchman called Daniel Grueber, the son of Jean Henry Grueber (1585 – 1683), a merchant banker of Lyons and Anne Grueber née Theze. Jean Henry was the son of Jean Grueber, described as ‘Marchand banquier allemand à Lyon, Bourgeois de Zurich’, who married Jeanne Barrian in Lyons on 22 May 1576.

At Lyons on 3 December 1657 Daniel Grueber married Suzanne de Montginot. Their children, all born in Lyons, were:

• Francis Grueber 1658–1730
• Anne Grueber 1660–
• Suzanne Grueber 1661– 1737
• Daniel Grueber 1664–1670
• Jean Henry Grueber 1666–
• Francoise Grueber 1669–
• Marguerite Grueber 1669–
• Nicholas Grueber 1671–1743 (my seventh great grandfather)

On 21 November 1682 Daniel Grueber, Susanne his wife, their sons Francis, John Henry and Nicholas, and their daughters Susanna, Margarita and Frances, received formal letters of ‘denization‘, conferring on them the status of ‘denizen’. This was similar to present-day permanent residency. A denizen was neither a subject (with nationality) nor an alien, but had the important right to own land. On the same date Philip le Chenevix and his sister Magdaelena Chenevix also received letters of denization; Philip Chenevix married Suzanne Grueber in 1693.

From 1684 Daniel Grueber was leasing both gunpowder and leather mills along Faversham Creek in Kent, 48 miles east of London. Explosives had been manufactured at Faversham since at least the 1570s. There is a connection between gunpowder and leather: considerable quantities of leather were needed to protect the gunpowder from accidental detonation during its production, transportation and storage.

Stonebridge Pond Originally part of Faversham Creek, Stonebridge Pond became a mill pond for a flour mill which was later used in the gunpowder industry. Photograph from geograph.org.

Daniel had possibly gained experience in gunpowder manufacture in Lyons though his immediate relatives, including his father, seem to have been merchants and bankers, not manufacturers.

Daniel had a contract to provide gunpowder to the British government’s Board of Ordnance, in partnership with James Tiphaine, another Huguenot refugee. Besides those at Faversham, Daniel had mills at Ospringe and Preston, both places within a mile of Faversham.

Daniel Grueber was naturalised on 2 July 1685 together with his three sons. Daniel was described as born at Lyons in France, son of John Henry Grueber by Anna These, his wife. ‘Naturalisation’, requiring an act of parliament be passed, granted all the legal rights of English citizenship except political rights (for example, the right to hold political office).

Daniel Grueber died in 1692 and his will was probated 15 February 1693 by his sons Francis and Nicholas. Francis continued the gunpowder business in Kent. In 1745 his son went bankrupt and eventually the mills were purchased by the Ordnance Board in 1759.

Nicholas Grueber emigrated to Ireland and had arrived by Michaelmas 1698 when he became a Freeman of Dublin under the terms of the 1661 Act of Parliament to encourage Protestants to settle in Ireland.

Nicholas Grueber’s occupation on his arrival was merchant. However, in 1717 he was awarded a 21-year contract to supply gunpowder to the government. In 1719 he established Dublin’s first large-scale gunpowder manufacturing business at Corkagh in south Dublin.

On 19 May 1703 Nicholas Grueber (the record has ‘Grubert’) married Marguerite Moore at L’Eglise Française de St Patrick (part of St Patrick’s Cathedral set aside for the use of Huguenots).

Nicholas was a merchant, son of Mr. Grubert and Madle Monginot, Marguerite was the daughter of the Reverend Moore, a minister of the English church.

Nicholas Grueber and his wife Marguerite had six children baptised at the Nouvelle Église de Ste Marie:

• Nicholas Grueber 1704–1705
• Elizabeth Grueber 1706–
• Susana Maria Grueber 1707–
• Nicholas Francis Grueber 1709–
• Arthur Grueber 1713–1802 (my 6th great grandfather)
• William Grueber 1720–

Of the four sons of Nicholas, one died in infancy, one followed him into business and the other two attended university and became clergymen in the Protestant Church of Ireland.

My sixth great grandfather Arthur Grueber was a pupil of the Anglican divine Thomas Sheridan, one of Jonathan Swift’s friends. Grueber studied at Trinity College, Dublin, gaining his MA in 1737 and DD in 1757. He was ordained as a deacon in 1736.

In 1754 Dr Arthur Grueber was appointed headmaster of the Royal School Armagh. The school flourished under his administration, becoming one of the finest schools in Ireland. A notable pupil was the Irish cleric and astronomer James Archibald Hamilton (1747 – 1815).

Grueber later abandoned teaching to become a bookseller and publisher, in this meeting with less success: by 1793 he was bankrupt. Arthur Grueber died in 1802.

Portrait of Rev. Arthur Grueber,  my sixth great grandfather. The miniature, owned by my father, has been handed down through the Dana family.

Sources

• Shaw, William Arthur, editor. Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland. 1 1603-1700, Huguenot Society, 1911, pages 158-9  archive.org/details/lettersofdenizat01shaw/page/158/mode/2up and page 170 archive.org/details/lettersofdenizat01shaw/page/170/mode/2up
• Gennerat, Roland. “The protestants of Lyon in the XVIIth century (Genealogy data).” Huguenots De France, Le Site Portail De La Genealogie Protestante En France, 2001, huguenots-france.org/english/lyon/lyon17/dat13.htm#0.
• Wilkinson, Paul. “The Historical Development of the Port of Faversham, Kent 1580-1780.” Kent Archaeological Field School in Faversham, Kent, 2006, www.kafs.co.uk/pdf/port.pdf.
• Ancient Freemen of Dublin: Admitted: Midsummer Midsummer, 1698. Name: Nicholas Gruber merchant, Admitted by Act of Parliament and Fine from databases.dublincity.ie
• The Historical Register. United Kingdom, H.B. Meere, 1724. Page 135. Retrieved through Google Books.
• Bunbury, Turtle. “Nicholas Grueber & Corkagh’s First Gunpowder Mill.” Turtle Bunbury Histories, 2018, www.turtlebunbury.com/history/history_family/hist_family_grueber.html.
• Church records from https://churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/
• Registers of the French Conformed Churches of St. Patrick and St. Mary, Dublin. Ireland, Huguenot Society of London, 1893. Retrieved from Google Books.
• Alumni Dublienses entry for Arthur Grueber. Retrieved from FindMyPast.
• Fasti Ecclesiae Hibernicae The Succession of the Prelates and Members of the Cathedral Bodies in Ireland · Volume 1 By Henry Cotton · 1851 page 198 from Google Books.
• “Royal School History.” The Royal School Armagh, 8 Dec. 2020, royalschool.com/about/royal-school-history/.
• Kennedy, Máire. “Book Mad: The Sale of Books by Auction in Eighteenth-Century Dublin.” Dublin Historical Record, vol. 54, no. 1, 2001, pp. 48–71. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30101837. 
• Newspaper articles retrieved through FindMyPast.com.au

East to Kent

On Saturday 25 May we drove east from Lewes to Hastings and on to Kent.

We did not visit the battlefield of 1066, because, said Charlotte, “It wasn’t National Trust, and there would have been an entrance fee”. My reasons were different. We had already been to a few battlefields on this trip. They make me sad, and anyway, just visiting the scene of the carnage doesn’t help me to understand its place in history.

We went to Hastings‘s seaside promenade instead, parking opposite a villa with a blue plaque which commemorated Thomas Carlyle’s stay there in 1864. At the time he was working on his twenty-two volume life of Frederick the Great, and doubtless his walks along the seafront aided his reflections. Or perhaps not. His biography has been called a “mythopoeic effort”, which I guess means he strayed from the facts; maybe he was distracted by the ladies in their bathing machines.

 

Carlyle lived here

From Hastings we went on to Rye and Rye Harbour, once important sea-ports but silted up over the centuries by strong tidal flows. In the north-west of Western Australia we have ten-metre tides and there’s not a medieval harbour in sight. Without suitable local ports an Australian prime minister named Robert Menzies was obliged to get himself appointed Lord Warden of the English Cinque Ports.

After Rye we visited the church of St Mary in the Marsh near New Romney. The author Edith Nesbit, whose children’s books I greatly enjoyed as a girl, is buried there.

Romney Marsh

Edith Nesbitt’s grave marker

En route to Hythe we stopped to walk on the sea wall near Dymchurch. There has been a sea wall there since Roman times but the new sea defences were built in 2011.

In Hythe after a bit of searching we found Hay House, where my 3rd great grandfather James Gordon Cavenagh (1770-1844) lived for ten years or so from 1830. He seems to have had quite a temper. There was a gate in the fence between his house and the Royal Staff Corps Barracks next door. In 1830 the Royal Staff Corps decided to remove the gate and close up the fence. Cavenagh took exception to this, and drawing his sword, threatened the men removing the gate. “I’ll run the first man through the body that attempts to touch the palings”. There was a brawl but eventually a fence was erected and the gate removed. When the matter went to court a jury found against Cavenagh and awarded 10 pounds damages. The barracks has since gone and Hay House is all that remains of the site. Now subdivided into flats, it looks a bit run down.

We attempted to visit the local parish church of St Leonard where my great great grandfather Wentworth Cavenagh and his siblings were baptised, but a wedding was about to begin and we couldn’t get in.  It seems to have been a fashionable occasion and the narrow lanes and Einbahnstraßen around the church were choked with well-dressed Poms in Range Rovers trying to find a place to park. We somehow got caught up in the tangle, our fat black Mercedes further disrupting the traffic and Anglo-German relations, until we finally shot out of the mess and promptly got lost. Being lost feels better than knowing where you are and not wanting to be there.

Lunch we had in the garden of the Riverside Inn at Ashford. Low clouds threatening rain made it a dismal meal. Charlotte had scampi and Peter had a burger; the cider was warm, flat, and sour but not unpleasant. The inn had a few forlorn gum trees, a reminder of home. You had to imagine the strong bright sunshine and cold beer.

cider on tap

gum trees far from home

We spent the afternoon at Sissinghurst, where the gardens were just as beautiful as we remembered them from our 1989 visit. Greg had predicted that the intervening thirty years of tourism would have ruined Sissinghurst. I’m glad to say he was quite wrong.

Lewes: navigating that twitten again – no paint lost thanks to warnings

Related posts

• H is for Hastings
• N is for neighbours

N is for neighbours

My 3rd great grandfather was James Gordon Cavenagh (1770-1844), an army surgeon who was with the Royal Staff Corps at Waterloo.

Cavenagh obtained his diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1795-6 he first saw active service, with the 83rd Foot in the so-called ‘Maroon War’ in Jamaica. On 21 February 1800 he transferred to the Royal Staff Corps. The Royal Staff Corps was a corps of the British Army responsible for military engineering which was founded in about 1800 and disbanded in about 1837.

In March 1815 Cavenagh married Anne Coates. They lived at Hythe, Kent, where the Corps was headquartered and had eight children.

View at Hythe; illustration to Ayton’s ‘Voyage round Great Britain‘, vol. VII. 1823.  Print maker, draughtsman and publisher  William Daniell. In the collection of the British Museum retrieved through watercolourworld.org https://www.watercolourworld.org/painting/hythe-tww00a352

Engraving of “The Barracks and Town of Hythe, Kent” from Ireland’s History of Kent, Vol. 4, 1831. It appears between pages 224 and 225. Drawn by G. Sheppard, engraved by C. Bedford. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

On 25 June 1825 Cavenagh retired on half pay, afterwards continuing to live at Hythe.

In 1830 he leased a house next to the Royal Staff Corps Barracks, which earlier had been connected with it. There was a gate in the fence between the house and the barracks and the Royal Staff Corps decided to remove the gate and close up the fence. Cavenagh took exception to the this, and threatened the men removing the gate with drawn sword, saying, “I’ll run the first man through the body that attempts to touch the palings”. There was a brawl but eventually the fence was erected. When the matter went to court a jury found against Cavenagh and awarded 10 pounds damages. [The amount, hard to express in today’s money, would come to somewhere between £500 and £10,000.]

Hull Packet 17 August 1830 page 2 digitised by the British Library Board and retrieved through FindMyPast

In 1834 Cavenagh became the mayor of Hythe and was still living there in 1837. He died at Castle House, Wexford, Ireland in 1844 and is buried in Wexford in the family vault in St Patrick’s Abbey.

The Royal Staff Corps Barracks has gone, with the site from 1968 occupied by a Sainsburys supermarket and carpark. The only surviving part of the barracks complex is Hay House on Sir John Moore Avenue. It was built in 1809 and became the Commandant’s House. It is now subdivided into 6 flats.

It would seem that Hay House is the house that J. G. Cavenagh rented. The Mainwarings of Whitmore family history states

During the short peace between the Peninsular war and Waterloo James Cavenagh was quartered with this corps at Hythe, where he met and married his wife. On the termination of the campaign he returned with this regiment to Hythe, and when it was disbanded he remained there for some years, living in the Commandant’s house which he rented from the Authorities and in which all his children were born.

Hay House, Sir John Moore Avenue, Hythe, glimpsed from the entrance to the Sainsbury’s Loading Dock. Image from Google Street View May 2009 https://goo.gl/maps/BsWaHM8Kzxk

Sources

• The Mainwarings of Whitmore and Biddulph in the County of Stafford. An account of the family, and its connections by marriage and descent; with special reference to the Manor of Whitmore. J.G. Cavenagh-Mainwaring, about 1935
• John Booth (1816). The Battle of Waterloo: containing the series of accounts published by authority, British and foreign, with circumstantial details, relative to the battle, from a variety of authentic and original sources, with connected official documents, forming an historical record of the operations in the campaign of the Netherlands, 1815 : to which is added the names alphabetically arranged, of the officers killed and wounded, from 15th to 26th June, 1815, and the total loss of each regiment, with an enumeration of the Waterloo honours and privileges, conferred upon the men and officers, and lists of regiments, &c. entitled thereto : illustrated by a panoramic sketch of the field of battle, and a plan of the positions at Waterloo, at different periods, with a general plan of the campaign. Printed for John Booth …, T. Egerton … and J. Fairbairn … (Edinburgh). p. 20.
• Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London (1816). Medico-Chirurgical Transactions. Longmans, Green and Company. p. 108.
• “No. 18174“. The London Gazette. 10 September 1825. p. 1649.
• Hull Packet 17 August 1830, page 2 digitised by the British Library Board and retrieved through FindMyPast

• Dover Telegraph and Cinque Ports General Advertiser 8 February 1834, page 8 digitised by the British Library Board and retrieved through FindMyPast

• Paton, David. “Hythe’s Guides Town Walks (p. 38).” Hythe Life Magazine Spring Edition Issue 12, Hythe Life Magazine, Mar. 2017, issuu.com/hythelifemagazine/docs/hythe_life_magazine_-.
• Hay House.” Historic England, historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1068931.