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Anne's Family History

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Anne's Family History

Category Archives: Staffordshire

Midshipman Rowland Mainwaring

20 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by Anne Young in Mainwaring, navy, Whitmore

≈ 6 Comments

In May 1795, at the age of twelve, Rowland Mainwaring (1782 – 1862), my fourth great grandfather, joined the Royal Navy as a ‘young gentleman’, an aspiring officer. He was under the patronage of Admiral Sir John Laforey. His first ship was the Jupiter, a 50-gun fourth-rate ship of the line commanded by Captain William Lechmere.

The Art Gallery of Ballarat has an 1885 painting of the Jupiter by the Norwegian artist Johan Bennetter. Disguised as an East Indiaman, the
Jupiter is being pursued by the French frigate Preneuse. The Jupiter has
fired into the French ship’s rigging, the first shot of their engagement.

In the same year he became a midshipman on the Scipio, a 64-gun third rater, serving on the West Indies Station. He also served for a short while on the Beaulieu, a 40-gun fifth-rate frigate, and on the Ganges a 74 gun third-rater. In just over a year Mainwaring had served in four ships, ranging in size from 40 to 74 guns. The Beaulieu had a notional complement of 320 officers and men and the Ganges 590 (naval vessels of the period were usually short-handed).

In 1796 Mainwaring transferred to HMS Majestic, a 74-gun third-rater under Captain George Blagdon Westcott. The Majestic was taking Admiral Sir John Laforey back to England from the Leeward Islands Station. In June 1796, John Laforey died of yellow fever aboard the Majestic on his return voyage to Portsmouth.

HMS Majestic under Westcott then joined the Channel Fleet, and was present at the Spithead Mutiny in April and May 1797. The mutiny at Spithead (an anchorage near Portsmouth) lasted from 16 April to 15 May 1797. It was one of two major mutinies in 1797. Sailors on 16 ships in the Channel Fleet protested against the living conditions aboard Royal Navy vessels and demanded a pay rise, better victualling, increased shore leave, and compensation for sickness and injury. During the mutiny the mutineers maintained regular naval routine and discipline aboard their ships (mostly with their regular officers), allowed some ships to leave for convoy escort duty or patrols, and promised to suspend the mutiny and go to sea immediately if French ships were spotted heading for English shores. Because of mistrust, especially over pardons for the mutineers, the negotiations broke down, and minor incidents broke out, with several unpopular officers sent to shore and others treated with signs of deliberate disrespect.

The mutiny ended with an agreement that saw a royal pardon for all crews, reassignment of some of the unpopular officers, a pay raise and abolition of the purser’s pound. Afterwards, the mutiny was to become nicknamed the “breeze at Spithead”.

HMS Majestic then joined the Fleet in the Mediterranean and assisted Rear-admiral Nelson in a search for for the French fleet.

The Battle of the Nile was fought from 1 to 3 August 1798 at Aboukir Bay, on the Nile Delta, 20 miles (32 km) northeast of Alexandria. The British fleet, led by Nelson, decisively defeated the French under Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers.

At this time Rowland Mainwaring was 15 years old. He never forgot the experience and frequently mentioned the anniversary in his diary entries. In later years he commissioned the marine artist Thomas Luny to paint the battle, himself sketching what he remembered of the scene, in particular the terrible moment when the flagship of the French Navy, L’Orient, was hit by a cannonball in her gunpowder magazine and exploded. The painting by Luny showing the battle at 10 p.m. on 1 August 1798 still hangs in Whitmore Hall.

The painting of the Battle of the Nile by Thomas Luny commissioned by Rowland Mainwaring still hangs at Whitmore Hall

Although it was late afternoon and the British fleet had no accurate charts of the bay, Nelson ordered an immediate attack on the French who were unprepared and unable to manoeuvre as the British split into two divisions and sailed down either side of the French line, capturing all five ships of the vanguard and engaging the French 120-gun flagship Orient in the centre. At 21:00, Orient caught fire and exploded, killing most of the crew and ending the main combat. Sporadic fighting continued for the next two days, until all of the French ships had been captured, destroyed or had fled; eleven French ships of the line and two frigates were eliminated.

 Map of ship positions and movements during the Battle of Aboukir Bay, August 1-2, 1798. British ships are red, French ships are blue. Intermediate ship positions are shown in pale red/blue. Based on a map from Intelligence in War, John Keegan, 2003 and retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. I have shown the positions of the Majestic with black stars.

Majestic was towards the rear of the British line, and did not come into action until late in the battle. Together with HMS Bellerophon, Majestic, passed by the melee and advanced on the so far unengaged French centre. In the darkness and smoke Majestic collided with the French ship Heureux and became entangled in her rigging. Majestic then came under heavy fire from the French ship Tonnant. Unable to stop in time, Westcott’s jib boom became entangled with Tonnant‘s shroud. Trapped for several minutes, Majestic suffered heavy casualties. The captain of the Majestic, George Westcott was hit by a musket ball in the throat and killed. Lieutenant Robert Cuthbert took command and was confirmed as acting captain by Nelson the day after the battle.

Tonnant under fire from HMS Majestic at the Battle of the Nile  by Louis Lebreton. In the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich.

The Battle of the Nile was a great defeat for the French. The Royal Navy lost 218 killed and 677 wounded; the French losses were 2,000–5,000 killed and wounded, 3,000–3,900 captured, 9 ships of the line captured, and two ships of the line and two frigates destroyed.

The strategic situation between the two nations’ forces in the Mediterranean was reversed, and the Royal Navy gained a dominant position that it retained for the rest of the war.

A medal was issued for those who took part in the Battle of the Nile. Rowland Mainwaring claimed his medal only in 1847 and received it in 1850 with a medal for the Siege of Copenhagen. I am not sure why he left it so late to claim these honours.

Great Britain. Battle of the Nile, Davison’s Medal 1798. Bronze, 47.5mm. By C.H. Küchler. Hope standing left on a rocky promontory, holding an oval medallion depicting Nelson, rev. The British Fleet assembled in Aboukir Bay preparing to engage the French: ALMIGHTY GOD HAS BLESSED HIS MAJESTY’S ARMS.; VICTORY OF THE NILE AUGUST 1. 1798. in ex. BHM 447, Eimer 890. Medals were given in gold to admirals and captains, silver to officers, gilt bronze to petty officers and bronze to all others. Image from spink.com

In 1826 the English poetess Mrs Felicia Hemans wrote her well-known ‘Casabianca‘, which begins:

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but him had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

The poem commemorates the young son of the commander of the French ship L’Orient who refused to desert his post without orders from his father.

“The Destruction of “L’Orient” at the Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798 by George Arnald. In the collection of the Royal Museums Greenwich (bhc0509)

(I will write separately about the rest of Rowland Mainwaring’s career.)

Parallels with the fictional Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey

Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey are fictional Royal Navy officers of the Napoleonic war years. Hornblower is the protagonist of a series of novels and stories by C. S. Forester published 1937 to 1967; Jack Aubrey is a fictional character in the Aubrey–Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian published 1969 to 2004. Hornblower and Aubrey are both a little older than Rowland Mainwaring.

In Forester’s novel ‘Mr. Midshipman Hornblower‘ his hero has that rank between 1794 and 1799. In his fictional career Hornblower served under the famous admiral Sir Edward Pellew; Mainwaring also served under Pellew, evidently with respect and admiration, for he christened his second son ‘Edward Pellew’.

In ‘Master and Commander‘ O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, at the time lieutenant on HMS Leander, earns a silver Nile medal. The medal is mentioned every time Aubrey puts on his dress uniform.

Sources and notes

  • O’Byrne, William R. A Naval Biographical Dictionary: Comprising the Life and Services of Every Living Officer in Her Majesty’s Navy, from the Rank of Admiral of the Fleet to that of Lieutenant, Inclusive. 1849. Page 711. Retrieved through archive.org.
  • Marshall, John. Royal Naval Biography : Or, Memoirs of the Services of All the Flag-officers, Superannuated Rear-admirals, Retired-captains, Post-captains, and Commanders, Whose Names Appeared on the Admiralty List of Sea Officers at the Commencement of the Present Year, Or who Have Since Been Promoted, Illustrated by a Series of Historical and Explanatory Notes … with Copious Addenda: Captains. Commanders. 1832. Pages 126 – 130. Retrieved through Google Books.
  • Bradford, Ernle. Nelson: The Essential Hero. Open Road Media, 2014. Retrieved through Google Books.
  • Cavenagh-Mainwaring, James Gordon. 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, with appendices, pedigrees and illustrations. 1934. Pages 104, 114, and 115. Retrieved through archive.org
  • Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Christine and Britton, Heather, (editor.) Whitmore Hall : from 1066 to Waltzing Matilda. Adelaide Peacock Publications, 2013. Page 82.

Note: Although the birthdate of my fourth great grandfather Rowland Mainwaring is usually given as 31 December 1783, he was baptised at St George, Hanover Square London on 18 January 1783 and thus his date of birth is actually 31 December 1782. [City of Westminster Archives Centre; London, England; Westminster Church of England Parish Registers; Reference: SJSS/PR/5/16 retrieved through ancestry.com]

Travelling north with lunch at Whitmore

23 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by Anne Young in Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Gloucestershire, portrait, UK trip 2019, Vaux, Whitmore

≈ 5 Comments

On Wednesday 8 May we drove north from Bath, calling in at the village of Whitmore in Staffordshire, near Stoke-on-Trent, to visit some of my cousins. On the way we stopped at Tewkesbury, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, to look at the abbey there. From Whitmore we went on to West Didsbury near Manchester, our next base.

One of my fifteenth great grandfathers, William Vaux (1435 – 1471), who fought in the War of the Roses for the Red Rose of Lancaster, was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471. He is said to have been buried at the Abbey, but I have been unable to find any record of this in the Abbey archives, and the list of inscriptions in the Tewkesbury Abbey church does not mention his name. This didn’t matter, for if you had an untraceable ancestor said to have been buried somewhere you couldn’t do better than not have him in Tewkesbury. It’s a lovely old church, said to be the one of the finest Norman abbeys in England.

 

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We drove on to Whitmore and had lunch and an edifying chat with my cousins about Brexit, which turns out to be a plot to deprive England of its sovereignty, like 1066. At least one Australian present was reminded of the joke about a headline in an English newspaper that read, ‘Fog in Channel. Continent cut off’. On the other hand, the German car we had hired was showing unmistakable signs of having been designed and assembled by a committee of bureaucrats in Brussels, so who knows?

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Eureka flag at Whitmore

The Eureka flag was flying, a present we had sent to England some time previously. There is a family connection other than cousins from Ballarat; a Cudmore cousin fought at Eureka (on the Government side).

Lunch was served on the family’s Minton china, commissioned by my great uncle Rafe Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1906 – 1995), a copy of a setting that his great great grandfather (my fourth great grandfather) Rowland Mainwaring (1783 – 1862) had ordered. Time moves slowly in the pottery towns, and Minton apparently still had the records from the first commission to run up a second one. When you got to the bottom of your plate, there was the family crest, an ass’s head on a crown. The motto is ‘Devant si je puis’ [Forward if I Can], a useful reminder to wait for the next course.

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We had a tour of the house and stables and saw many family portraits. The house, now listed with Historic Houses, is open to the public. Our guide seemed very knowledgeable on the family history. In one or two places a section of the modern wall had been removed to expose the original structure. This had an interesting consequence. Breaching the wall had allowed a ghostly lady from an earlier era playing ghostly old music to wander into the present. There has been a house on the same site for over 900 years and it has belonged to the same family since the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, so I suppose you’d expect an apparition or two.

 

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My fourth great grandfather Rowland Mainwaring kept a diary, now stored and displayed in an upstairs sitting room. Several volumes have been stolen unfortunately, probably souvenired by visitors. While we were at Whitmore my son Peter photographed some pages of the diary for me, including, sadly, the last entry, written by Rowland Mainwaring on the day he died.

 

 

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Before we left we visited the churchyard and some family graves.

 

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Related post

  • D is for Domesday

D is for Domesday

04 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by Anne Young in A to Z 2019, Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Mainwaring, Whitmore

≈ 8 Comments

It’s hard to answer the question `Where is your family from?’. People move, which part of the family are we talking about?, and how far back do you want to go?

However, one line of my descent that goes back a long way very definitely has had an enduring association with a particular place for many centuries. The place is Whitmore, a Staffordshire manor. Where am I from? I can say that my family is from Whitmore.

Whitmore watercolour from St Barbary

A watercolour painting of Whitmore Hall which was probably owned by Kathleen Cudmore nee Cavenagh-Mainwaring, my great grandmother. My father now has the picture.

My paternal grandmother’s mother’s side of the family have lived at Whitmore for nearly a thousand years. The estate has remained in the family since the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, in the reign of William the Conqueror. The inheritance has sometimes passed through the female line, most recently to my great great grandmother Ellen Cavenagh nee Mainwaring (1845 – 1920). My father’s first cousin is now the 34th Hereditary Lord of Whitmore. Thirty-four generations have inherited Whitmore since a Saxon called Ulfac owned Whitmore and was usurped after the Battle of Hastings by a Norman knight who had supported William.

The Domesday Book was a survey of England answering the questions:

How many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land belonged to the
king himself and what stock upon the land? What dues did the king have
by the year from the shire?

Domesday Staffordshire page 10

Whitmore is the second entry of Staffordshire page 10. The tenant in chief was Richard the forester.

The Open Domesday Project has transcribed the information about Whitmore:

Whitmore Domesday

  • Hundred: Pirehill
  • County: Staffordshire
  • Total population: 5 households (very small).
  • Total tax assessed: 0.5 geld units (dry small).
  • Taxable units: Taxable value 0.5 geld units.
  • Value: Value to lord in 1086 £0.5.
  • Households: 3 villagers. 2 smallholders.
  • Ploughland: 3 ploughlands (land for). 1 lord’s plough teams. 1 men’s plough teams.
  • Other resources: Meadow 1 acres. Woodland 1 * 0.5 leagues.
  • Lord in 1066: Ulfac or alternatively spelt  Wulfheah.
  • Lord in 1086: Nigel (of Stafford).
  • Tenant-in-chief in 1086: Richard the forester.
  • Phillimore reference: 13,2

The name Richard the forester, the tenant in chief was associated with no places before the Conquest and 21 after the Conquest. There may have been more than one man who bore that title but all the places associated with the name are either in Staffordshire or neighbouring Warwickshire.

In 1212 during the reign of King John there was a Great Inquest of Service. Randolph de Knutton held Whitmore with other land and paid £4. 11s. 6d. of “antient right”, that is, from the Conquest of England. It is thought that Ralph de Knutton was the lineal heir or co-heir of Richard the forester.

In the 1930s my great great uncle James Gordon Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1865-1938) wrote a family history of Whitmore, supported by the citations of original deeds and documents. These he later deposited in the Staffordshire archives

  • Reference: D 1743
  • Description: Staffs (Whitmore, Biddulph, etc) deeds, family and estate papers
  • Date: 13th cent-20th cent
  • Held by: Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Archive Service: Staffordshire 
    County Record Office
  • NRA catalogue reference: NRA 25297 Cavenagh-Mainwaring

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My much read copy of “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. ” This copy had been owned by my grandmother. The book was written by her uncle James Gordon Cavenagh-Mainwaring and published about 1935.

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Whitmore is one of very few properties in England that have not been sold in the last 933 years. One of my cousins wrote to me, “I was told some time ago that there are only nine estates in the same family since the Domesday book, that have never been sold. I read since then that one of them had been sold, so I suppose there are only eight.”

I look forward to visiting Whitmore again in May and seeing my cousins there.

Related posts

  • Burke’s family records can be wrong
  • Trove Tuesday: Obituary for Admiral Mainwaring
  • A shipboard romance aboard the SS Ballaarat
  • N is for Naval husbands
  • A quiet wedding in Staffordshire
  • Family stories

Sources

  • Cavenagh-Mainwaring, James Gordon 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
  • Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Christine and Britton, Heather, (editor.) Whitmore Hall : from 1066 to Waltzing Matilda. Adelaide Peacock Publications, 2013.
  • https://opendomesday.org/place/SJ8140/whitmore/

Kathleen Cudmore: a Memoir

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Anne Young in Adelaide, Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Champion de Crespigny, Cudmore, dogs, golf, Kathleen, Rafe de Crespigny, riding, sport, Symes, Whitmore, World War 2

≈ 4 Comments

Kathleen Cudmore: a Memoir

by Rafe de Crespigny

Kathleen Cavenagh née Cudmore was born on 27 June 1908, the second daughter and second child of Arthur Murray Cudmore (1870-1951) and his wife Kathleen Mary née Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1874-1951). Her sister Rosemary had been born in 1904.

Kathleen with her older sister Rosemary about 1910

Arthur Cudmore, second son of James Francis Cudmore (1837-1912) and his wife Margaret née Budge (1845-1912), was born on 11 June 1870 at Paringa Station on the Murray near Renmark in South Australia. Arthur’s grandfather, Daniel Michael Paul Cudmore (1811-1891), had emigrated from Ireland in 1835 and after a period in Tasmania arrived in South Australia early in 1837, a few weeks after its proclamation on 28 December 1836. His wife Mary née Nihill came from Hobart to join him later that year, and James Francis was born at sea on the ship Siren off Kangaroo Island on 11 October 1837.

Daniel Michael Paul first worked as a labourer in South Australia, but then founded a brewery, and from the late 1840s he began to acquire pastoral land and took up a large number of properties. His son James Francis continued the policy, extending his interests into Queensland in partnership with Robert Barr Smith and Thomas Elder, and by the 1870s he was one of the wealthiest men in Australia, controlling hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle; his great house, “Paringa Hall” near Glenelg, built in the early 1880s, is a monument to his success. In the late 1880s, however, the arrival of rabbits had devastating effect upon the various stations, and James Francis was in serious financial trouble. He transferred some property and arranged to compound his debts, and though he was still in difficulty at the time of his death in 1912 a life insurance policy and the sale of Paringa Hall after Margaret’s death a few months later more than covered his obligations. They were still comparatively wealthy, but James Francis and Margaret left eleven children, and the inheritance was divided.

Though Arthur Cudmore maintained the family connection to the land, his profession was medicine. Graduating from Adelaide University in 1894, he travelled to England for further training and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1900. His future wife Kathleen Mary née Cavenagh-Mainwaring was also born in Adelaide, and her brother Wentworth (1869-1933) was a friend and colleague, but Kathleen Mary was four years younger than Arthur, and the couple became closely acquainted only while they were in England during the late 1890s. Kathleen Mary had hoped to remain there, but Arthur insisted on returning to Australia, and they were married in Melbourne in 1901.

The Cavenagh-Mainwaring family had a long connection with Whitmore Hall in Staffordshire, which is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1087, and which has passed by inheritance ever since. Kathleen Mary’s mother Ellen Jane née Mainwaring (1845-1920) inherited the estate in 1891, and the family then travelled to England. Ellen Jane’s husband Wentworth Cavenagh (1822-1895) had been a minister in the South Australian government, and in 1892 the couple took the combined surname of Cavenagh-Mainwaring. Whitmore Hall itself was leased out, and it was not until 1928 that their son James Gordon (1865-1938) took up residence, with his son Rafe Gordon Dutton (1906-1995) as manager of the estate.

Kathleen Cudmore’s family was well established in South Australia, with many connections by marriage; she would later claim to have ninety-two cousins, but that her mother quarrelled with all of them; the figure was actually closer to fifty. Besides any inherited money, Arthur Cudmore developed a substantial practice; there were few doctors with such high qualifications, and he became Honorary Surgeon at the Adelaide Hospital in 1904. In 1910, when Kathleen was two years old, he moved into a large house at 64 Pennington Terrace in North Adelaide, directly opposite the parklands. Beside the house itself, there were a number of small cottages on the property, most of them demolished to allow for gardens and a tennis court, while a few were adapted to form a large garage. Arthur had one of the first cars in Adelaide, and when registration was introduced in 1906, he took number SA 4; it was later transferred to Kathleen and remained in the family for a hundred years.

In 1915 Arthur went to the Middle East with the Third Australian Hospital and was stationed on Lemnos, base for Gallipoli. He was invalided home with typhoid in the following year, but went back to serve in France from 1918 to 1919.

Kathleen had limited formal schooling. One of the small buildings at Pennington Terrace was known as the “Schoolroom,” and it appears that her early education was at home. She was a boarder at The Hermitage in Geelong for a few weeks in 1922, but became extremely ill and left. From 1923 to 1924 she was a pupil at Allenswood, a “finishing school” in Wimbledon, England, where students were taught and spoke entirely in French, and in 1926, aged eighteen, she was at Creveen, a small private day-school in North Adelaide. Despite this varied experience Kathleen wrote well, with a strong hand, became a skilled typist, and always enjoyed reading. [There is a small notepad containing a hand-written newsletter from 1919. Entitled Stuffed Notes, it is written by eleven-year-old Kathleen in the persona of a nurse caring for her toy animals and dolls during the influenza epidemic.]

Kathleen about 1914 photographed in Southsea, England

It seems fairly clear that while Kathleen Mary Cavenagh-Mainwaring had been prepared to return to Adelaide with Arthur Cudmore, she did obtain an agreement that they would return frequently to England, which she referred to all her life as “home” – not uncommon among colonials of her generation. The family were in England before the First World War and young Kathleen’s diary of 1924 describes how she was at Beaulieu near Nice in the south of France on 1 January, returning to Allenswood later that month. She stayed there, taking holidays with her parents in London and at Broadstairs in Kent, until the family left to return to Australia in July. This was one of many such visits to England and Europe, and Kathleen remarked in 1960 that she had been through the Suez Canal at least twenty-five times. In addition, there were a number of trips to Ceylon/Sri Lanka: it was an agreeable custom to take passage on a liner bound for England, disembark at Colombo and take the next liner back home; the effect was the same as a modern cruise.

Kathleen was always most attached to her father, who was a considerable sportsman: he played Australian football as a young man at league club level, his family background made him a good horseman and a good shot, and he was a talented golfer. Kathleen played golf from an early age, rode horses in competition, and also learnt fencing and played hockey. She remarked in a later interview that when she was young she would often play golf in the morning and go riding in the afternoon – or riding in the morning and golf in the afternoon. From this alone one may judge she had a privileged life: there were always maids and other servants to keep things tidy at home, she played regularly with the professional, Willie Harvey, at Royal Adelaide Golf Club, and she had her own car to get to her various engagements – her father was President of the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia and she herself got her driving licence at the age of sixteen; she held it until she was over ninety.

Horse-riding was based on the stables owned and run by Miss Roach in Prospect, where there was comparatively open country north of Adelaide; she was a good friend and Kathleen gave lessons for her to those more junior or less experienced. Her favourite horse was Black Opal, and among other events she won a blue ribbon at the Royal Adelaide Show of 1929. Her main achievements, however, were in golf: she won the Associates competition at Royal Adelaide in 1931, and she was Ladies Champion of South Australia in 1934.

The Woman’s Realm (1929, September 14). The Mail (Adelaide, SA : 1912 – 1954), p. 21. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article63432788

Kathleen was a good-looking young woman: blue eyes, brown hair and a fine complexion. A popular satirical newspaper, the Melbourne Truth, described her as “Adelaide’s pastel,” which was somewhat of an exaggeration, but the fashions of the 1920s and the opportunities for outdoor exercise suited her, and she remained active and kept a trim figure all her life.

Despite an air of “flapper” frivolity, Kathleen was a tough competitor in any sport, particularly at golf. She once told her daughter-in-law that you should never concede a putt; there was always a chance your opponent might drop dead. To win her South Australian Championship in 1934 she sank two long putts on the last two holes in wind and driving rain.

The Advertiser TUESDAY. JUNE 19. 1934 (1934, June 19). The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1931 – 1954), p. 16. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article35114240

At the same time, Kathleen was very conscientious and always agreeable. She had a charming smile and, although she was shy, that characteristic made her all the more attractive. She never spoke unkindly of her friends, she did not gossip, and if anything she preferred not to discuss or to remember things which had angered or upset her – she did not hold grudges. Loyal and reliable, people trusted her, and she held leading positions in several different institutions.

In December 1930 Kathleen became engaged to Richard Geoffrey Champion de Crespigny (1907-1966), eldest son of Dr Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny (1882-1952) and his wife Beatrix née Hughes (1885-1943). The de Crespignys were essentially a Victorian family – Constantine Trent’s father had been General Manager of the Bank of Victoria, he himself had taken his degrees at the University of Melbourne, and his son Geoff was born at Glenthompson south of Ararat. Constantine Trent moved to seek better opportunity in Adelaide, and indeed became the leading pathologist there. Geoff was first educated at the Queen’s School, but then went to Geelong Grammar School and also took his medical degrees at Melbourne. While at university he rowed for Trinity College and was in the university eight for three years, being a member of the winning crew for the inter-university Oxford and Cambridge Cup of 1929. Kathleen was amused by the fact that while she was described as a promising young golfer, he was a “veteran oarsman.”

After graduating in 1930, Geoff returned to Adelaide to spend the compulsory year as Resident Medical Officer at the Adelaide Hospital [renamed the Royal Adelaide Hospital in 1939]. Given his time at Geelong and Melbourne, it is uncertain how much he and Kathleen had seen of one another before, but both fathers were leaders of their profession and had worked together on a number of cases. One major contact was between Kathleen and Geoff’s sister Nancy (1910-2003): though they were two years apart, and Nancy had a degree in archaeology – her husband Hallam Movius would become a professor at Harvard – the two were close friends and remained so until Nancy’s death. For his part, Geoff said later that he fell in love with Kathleen from the first, and never thought of anyone else.

In 1932 both Kathleen and Geoff were in England, Kathleen spending time with her sister Rosemary, who was now married to her cousin Rafe Cavenagh-Mainwaring, and Geoff studying in London. Geoff was a frequent visitor to Whitmore, and served as cameraman for the amateur film A Run for his Money, which was set in Whitmore and had Kathleen as the beleaguered heroine with fluttering eyelashes: Rafe played her plutocrat father and Rosemary was a conniving vamp: there were elements of casting to type.

Still from A Run for his Money showing Kathleen as the beleaguered heroine

On 10 June 1933, Kathleen and Geoff were married in Adelaide Cathedral. It was a grand formal wedding: the bride wore a long white gown and a lace veil, the groom was in morning suit, and local newspapers celebrated the union of two distinguished medical families.

Kathleen on her wedding day 10 June 1933

Geoff had joined a partnership in Walkerville as a general practitioner, and he and Kathleen were living there when their son Richard Rafe was born in 1936; they had no other children. In that same year Kathleen’s parents built a house by the sea in the suburb of Tennyson, a mile north of the Grange jetty, and the land and title were later transferred to Kathleen. Soon afterwards, Geoff became a member of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and established his own practice at 260 Main North Road, on the border of Prospect and Enfield. It was almost frontier territory at that time – the terminus of the Enfield tram was some hundred yards to the north, with fields beyond – but Geoff and Kathleen had a fine two-storey house, with a large garden and a tennis court, consulting rooms and quarters for servants. (The site of the house and all its land is now part of the Northpark Shopping Centre.)

As a young married woman, Kathleen led an active social life in Adelaide. She continued to play golf, and after her success in 1934 she was defeated in the final of the South Australian Championship in 1935. Following Rafe’s birth in 1936 she continued to play in competitions, but did not reach that level again. Otherwise, she was a member of the Queen Adelaide Club, had some overseas travel, and was involved in charities, including her mother’s interest in the Missions to Seamen and her father’s in the Friends of the State Library – which was suffering from a lack of government funding due to the Depression – and the usual concerns of a new household and a new child.

In 1937 Kathleen’s sister Rosemary and her husband Rafe visited Australia for some months, returning to England in January 1938. Their son Guy, born in 1934, had come with them but then stayed behind in the care of his Cudmore grandparents, and early in 1939 Kathleen took Guy back. She was away for several months, returning through Boston in the United States to visit Nancy Movius.

Kathleen and Rafe in 1940. This photo was damaged by a bomb blast in Tobruk.

When the Second World War broke out at the beginning of September 1939, Geoff felt obliged to join the army. While some doctors would stay behind to care for civilians in Australia, both Geoff’s father and his father-in-law had served in the previous war and still held reserve commissions, so family tradition and his position in society made the decision all but inevitable. Geoff enlisted in November, and a few days later he left for Melbourne and was stationed at Puckapunyal near Seymour in Victoria for further training. The practice was contracted out, and as the new incumbent took up residence in the house on Main North Road Kathleen was left without a place of her own. For the time being, she stayed at the beach house near Grange, with visits to her parents’ house in North Adelaide, but the situation was difficult and money was tight. (Handwritten calculations by Geoff at this time indicate that he expected a net income of £725 per annum from the rent of the practice together with his own pay as a Captain in the army, while estimated expenses were £750 “probably reducible to £700”. ) She was able to come with Rafe to join Geoff in Melbourne and for a few weeks in Sydney, so the family had some time together before Geoff sailed for the Middle East on 15 April. He was three years overseas, including nine months under siege in Tobruk from January to October 1941, and Kathleen did not see him again until the beginning of April 1943.

Returning to Adelaide, Kathleen found accommodation in an apartment in the complex at Prospect House in North Adelaide, on the junction of Pennington Terrace and Palmer Place by Montefiore Hill, a short distance up the hill from her parents’ house.

The war brought more charity work, first with the Cheer-Up Hut, a hospitality centre for servicemen near the Adelaide Railway Station: Kathleen’s mother had been involved in the organisation during the First World War, and Kathleen joined her in the revival, while both continued with the Mission to Seamen. In 1942 she took a course in motor mechanics at the School of Mines, explaining that she wanted to be ready for auxiliary service. Always good with her hands, she had a second diploma in carpentry, possibly acquired also about this time. And in that year she had her portrait painted by Ernest Milston – it is still in the possession of her family. (Ernest Milston (1893-1968), born Arnost Mühlstein in Czechoslovakia, was of Jewish background and escaped to Australia in 1939. A distinguished architect in Europe, he later designed the 1939-45 forecourt of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Portrait-painting was presumably one way of establishing himself in the new country.)

Kathleen’s portrait painted in 1942 by Ernest Milston. The portrait is mentioned in SEES ART FUTURE FOR AUSTRALIA (1946, March 30). News (Adelaide, SA : 1923 – 1954), p. 3. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article128344371

After Geoff’s return from the Middle East in 1943, he was stationed for a time in Sydney, where Kathleen and Rafe went to join him for a few weeks, and then in central and Western Australia. Kathleen was able to spend six months with him in Perth, and she joined a program there for the rehabilitation of wounded and disabled soldiers, assisting them to sew toys and stuffed animals; she was later a member of a committee in Adelaide which checked on the suitability of manufactured toys for children, including such problems as lead-based paint and sharp edges. Geoff later served in New Guinea, but was invalided out with malaria and thereafter held appointments in Australia, though not in Adelaide, which he visited only on leave, notably when his mother Beatrix died in November of 1943.

Also in 1943, with encouragement from Beatrix, Kathleen became a member of the committee of the Mothers and Babies Health Association, and began a long association with that organisation. She succeeded her mother-in-law as Honorary Treasurer, and was senior Vice-President from 1955.

The MBHA had been founded by Dr Helen Mayo in 1909 with the object of assisting mothers to care for their infant children, and so reduce the rate of infant mortality. The basic concept was comparatively simple: all new mothers were encouraged to bring their children at regular intervals to MBHA clinics, which were staffed by trained mother-craft nurses. Each child was weighed, its general progress was checked, and the nurse would offer such advice, assistance or referral as might be needed. Visits to the clinics were something of a social event, babies were admired and their weights were compared, while it also meant that the vast majority of children in South Australia were under regular medical inspection.

At the beginning of the century infant mortality in South Australia had been 100 per thousand, but by the late 1930s it was 30 per thousand and it fell below 20 per thousand in the 1960s; it is now less than 5 per thousand. Much of this development was a matter of improved medical technique, inoculating against many infectious diseases, and general advances in hygiene, and while the MBHA took credit, some modern historians claim that its role was marginal at best, arguing that it was a conservative and authoritarian organisation. On the other hand, it seems difficult to suggest that a regular check of babies’ health was actually a disadvantage, and many mothers were certainly glad to have some support and guidance in what was a new and often rather frightening experience. The MBHA is surely best seen as part of a broad program of public health which was effective and well-regarded in its time.

It was a substantial enterprise, with hundreds of branches and buildings all over the state, heavy costs and investment in the local centres and their attending nurses, and a headquarters and training centre in Adelaide. There were also “Baby Health Trains” – carriages set up and transported by South Australian Railways, which took the service to outlying places where it was impracticable to establish permanent offices. Formally a charitable organisation, it was nonetheless heavily subsidised by the state and local governments, so that in 1952, when Kathleen was Honorary Treasurer, almost £20,000 of a total income of £38,000 came from official sources, with the bulk of the balance made up of donations, subscriptions and other fund-raising; total turnover was close to $3 million in 2013 values. In 1978 the MBHA was incorporated into the South Australian Department of Health, and Kathleen’s work is now carried on by a senior civil servant.

In the New Year honours of 1945 Arthur Cudmore was made a knight bachelor, and later that year Geoff came back from the war. As the family returned to 260 Main North Road, Kathleen continued her charity work, and she also became a member of the committee of the Queen Adelaide Club and was President from 1950 to 1952. The Club was formally a registered company, with a board of directors who had hitherto been all men, but when Kathleen retired as President she was appointed to the Board and became its Chairman in 1980. Although an amateur, she was now an experienced administrator, and in later years she held leading positions in many different organisations. Beside the MBHA, she was Chairman of the local Victoria League and – as below – she became strongly involved with the RSPCA.

One part of charity work was the annual badge day, when organisations took it in turn each week to raise money in the city. Basically rather shy in unstructured situations, Kathleen did not particularly enjoy standing on street-corners by the hour seeking support from passers-by on a Friday morning. On one occasion at least a kindly man stopped to purchase one of the most expensive that was for sale, remarking that she looked so woebegone she reminded him of his cocker-spaniel, and he felt he had to encourage her.

Kathleen on button day 1941

Her social life was largely based on such social and charitable activities, and the people she met and worked with were commonly from the same families and background as herself. She did have some special and different friends, notably Hannes and Marlis Thiersch, who came from German background and arrived in Australia during the 1930s. Hannes was a member of the Medical and Veterinary Research Institute, founded by Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny, and was later involved in development of the contraceptive pill in the United States; Marlis later took a doctorate and became a lecturer in drama at the University of New South Wales. Other friends included the future Chief Justice John Bray and the lawyer Norman Tucker; Jack Smart, who was professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide and later at the Australian National University; Archer Kyffin “Tiddy” Thomas who was editor of The News in Adelaide and later of the Melbourne Herald, and his wife Judy; and, from the early 1950s, Edith and Eric von Schramek, who had come as migrants from Czechoslovakia: Eric became a noted architect. Neither Kathleen nor Geoff were strongly artistic, but they regularly attended concerts, ballet and films, they were good ballroom dancers, they were early sponsors of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, first held in 1960, and Kathleen was an enthusiast for the theatre all her life.

Kathleen and Rafe with Bernard the Pekinese in 1954

Kathleen’s parents had always had servants in the house, and Kathleen and Geoff also had assistance; at first a cook and housekeeper, later only a housekeeper, and eventually no live-in help. Kathleen’s mother had insisted she should learn to clean and sew and cook, but her cooking was basic: “peas in the pot, potatoes in the pot, meat in the oven.” In an interview about her work at the Cheer-Up Hut during the war, she remarked that

… I’ve never been very fond of food, giving it or eating it myself, so I started making beds in the Cheer-up Hut, and I became an expert bed-maker…

Omelettes were always useful, and she was enthusiastic about stew, being fairly simple – the stew was occasionally enhanced and made exotic by the addition of bay-leaves. Desserts were a little more interesting: she was good on chocolate mousse and on hot chocolate sauce for ice cream, she made excellent short-bread biscuits, and she used her influence at the Queen Adelaide Club to acquire their special recipe for barley-water. There was also a very good Club Cocktail: a quarter gin, a quarter sweet vermouth, half dry vermouth and a splash of lime juice; lime juice concealed the full effect of the other ingredients.

Geoff’s practice in Prospect and Enfield began to develop as new houses were built in the area and settlement expanded to the north. In 1948 Kathleen’s sister Rosemary and her son Guy came from England for a year, and in 1950 she and Geoff made a long visit to Europe, spending time at Whitmore in England, with Geoff’s sister Margaret (1919-1989), now married to Cornelius in’t Veld and living in Holland, and with Nancy and Hallam Movius in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After Rosemary and Guy had visited once more in 1953, there were a series of extensive overseas trips: in 1954 Kathleen accompanied Rafe to England as he entered Cambridge University; in 1956 she went with Geoff to Europe; and in 1957 she went again to Europe, returning with Rafe as he left Cambridge.

Kathleen and Rafe in Munich in 1954

In 1953 Geoff became a Fellow of the College of Physicians. He had an increasing interest in pediatrics and children’s health – presumably in part influenced by the involvement of his mother and of Kathleen in the Mothers and Babies Health Association, and he became a founder of the Pediatrics & Child Health Division in the College. During the visit to Europe in 1956 he attended the International Congress of Pediatrics in Copenhagen, and that was followed by similar meetings in Portugal and Indonesia. In 1965, when he and Kathleen went to the Congress in Japan, the family received letters from each of them, written at the same time on board ship: Geoff wrote with delight about sailing into the Inland Sea with the loudspeaker playing “Colonel Bogey” [theme song of the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai]; Kathleen complained that it had been a long and boring voyage.

Between the occasions of overseas travel, there had been major changes to life in Adelaide. Kathleen’s parents both died in early 1951, within a few days of one another, and she and Geoff moved into their former house on Pennington Terrace in North Adelaide. Geoff’s father died in October 1952, and Geoff transferred his practice to rooms in the city. In 1955, however, they left North Adelaide and went to live in the house by the beach at Grange; remodelled and slightly enlarged, it was Kathleen’s home for the next fifty years.

In 1960 Geoff was President of the South Australian Branch of the Australian Medical Association, and he largely retired from private practice to become the Medical Director of the Mothers and Babies Health Association.

Kathleen always had her own car. During the 1950s there was a series of soft-topped Singer roadsters, and then French Simcas, while Geoff drove Jaguars. In the 1960s she too transferred to a Jaguar, initially with less success, for she found it heavy and clumsy, and the automatic gearing system which was just being introduced was not always reliable. As she was stalled at a traffic light on one occasion, the taxi-driver next to her called, “Better get a Holden next time,” to which Kathleen agreed. In fact, in 1964 she transferred to a Daimler sports car, also with difficult gearing; fifty years later the car is maintained by her grandson Mark, while Kathleen eventually had a long-term relationship with a Mazda 323: simple, automatic, and bright-green in colour “so you could find it in any car-park.”

Kathleen with a family car in 1926

Kathleen’s family always had animals, and soon after their marriage she and Geoff had a dachshund, Max, and a Pekingese named Bubbles or Buds. Both died of distemper during the war, and the first replacement, Fritz or Chips, was run over on Pennington Terrace; his sister Antonia – better known as “Mrs Tone,” came to take his place. An elegant but temperamental brown dachshund, she lived into the mid-1950s, and she was joined in 1946 by another Pekingese, called Bernard from the second name of Hannes Thiersch who had given him. Son Rafe was very fond of cats, and the appropriately-named Biffer was an equally long-lived contemporary of Mrs Tone.

When Rafe turned sixteen in 1952 he was allowed to obtain a driving licence, and as Geoff was giving him a lesson on a country road just outside Adelaide he saw trap-pigeon shooting in a field nearby. In this system, pigeons were caught alive, then placed into cages with springs at the base, and on command the spring was released and the bird was thrown into the air as a target for shot-guns. “Clay-pigeons” perform the same function, but it was considered better entertainment if the birds were alive.

Geoff mentioned the incident to Kathleen, who was furious and resolved to do something about it. She joined the RSPCA and embarked on a campaign to have the practice forbidden. It was not easy, for the long-serving government of Thomas Playford had many country supporters who saw trap-shooting as a sport, but at the end of 1954 a private member’s bill introduced by the Labor member for Prospect passed both houses of state parliament.

Kathleen was by that time a member of the general committee of the RSPCA and she continued her involvement with that organisation and others associated to it. Chairman of the RSPCA from 1965 to 1975, she was then President until 1990, and when she retired from that position she became Vice-Patron, second to the Governor of South Australia.

Kathleen and Geoff about 1960

Following Cambridge, Rafe went to study Chinese in Canberra, and in 1959 he married a fellow student Christa Boltz; their first child Anne was born at the end of that year.

Born in Berlin in 1939, Christa spent the war years in Germany and came to Australia at the age of ten. Her father Hans, a geological cartographer, was brought out by the government to assist in the exploration for minerals, and he became chief cartographer in the Bureau of Mineral Resources. Canberra was a very small town, and neither Christa nor her mother Charlotte found it easy to adjust, but after their marriage Christa and Rafe spent university vacations – almost half the year – in Adelaide. Christa speaks of the extraordinary contrast from Canberra to Adelaide, where she was introduced to clubs and parties, played golf and tennis and watched the cricket, and was treated by Kathleen and Geoff as if she were their daughter. It made no difference that Geoff had been engaged in the war with Germany: the two families were always friendly; Christa’s young sister Margaret came to stay in Adelaide; and Christa found a way of life with Kathleen and a role-model to admire.

Rafe and Christa’s second child Mark was born in May of 1963, and when Rafe gained appointment as Lecturer at the Australian National University Kathleen and Geoff bought them a house in Canberra. They continued to visit Adelaide each year, but at Christmas 1965 Geoff was taken ill with the effects of a brain tumour. He died in February 1966 at the age of 58.

In the latter part of 1966 Kathleen travelled with her friends the Thomases, visiting Geoff’s sister Nancy Movius in Boston and Rosemary Cavenagh-Mainwaring at Whitmore. On 30 March 1967, at a small ceremony in Box Hill, Melbourne, she married George Symes.

George Symes in 1941

George William Symes (1896-1980) was a retired Major-General of the British Army. During the First World War he was commissioned as a Captain in the York and Lancashire Regiment, served in the Machine-Gun Corps in France and in Italy, and was awarded the Military Cross and Bar. During the 1920s and 1930s he remained a professional soldier, and at the outbreak of the Second World War he received rapid promotion, being appointed Major-General in command of the 70th Division in Africa and then in India. By very ill luck, however, the 70th Division was transferred to form part of the “Chindit” Special Force under Orde Wingate, designed to operate behind the Japanese lines in Burma. George became deputy, but was stationed at New Delhi, and when Wingate was killed in an air crash in 1944 George was passed over for a closer associate and his active career was at an end. He held command of Lines-of-Communications divisions in France and later in Burma, and after the war he was commander of the South-West District in England, but in 1949 he resigned his commission and came to Australia.

George’s first wife Katherine née Lucas came from an Adelaide family. He had met her on a visit to Australia, and they were married in Bombay in 1939. Katherine died in 1961, and they had no children.

A strong, tall man, George was a skilled yachtsman, a good cricketer, and played excellent golf. He became active in the Royal Adelaide Golf Club, was a founder of the National Trust of South Australia and was heavily involved in Cottage Homes, a charity for the elderly. From 1956 to 1964 he was Private Secretary to the Governor of South Australia. Besides his pension as a retired general, in 1946 George had received a large inheritance from an unmarried friend of his mother, Eva Kennedy, daughter of a British merchant in the far east who had held property in Shanghai, and in 1955 he was a founding Director of Santos Ltd [South Australia and Northern Territory Oil Search], which became one of the largest mining companies in Australia. George left the Board in 1978, but continued to hold a substantial number of shares.

George and Katherine were friends of Kathleen and Geoff: George and Geoff were partners at bridge in the Adelaide Club, and after Katherine died George came often to their house for dinner on Sundays.

Soon after Geoff’s death, Kathleen resigned from the committee of the Mothers and Babies, explaining that she felt it would not be right or fair to be involved with and possibly comment upon the work of his successor as Medical Director. In 1963, however, she had become a member of the Board of Management of the Adelaide Children’s Hospital [now the Women’s and Children’s Hospital], and she held that position until 1979. She was also on the committee of the state branch of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, and was President from 1971 to 1973.

Twelve years the elder, George was a man of traditional style, and while she maintained many of her own interests Kathleen was quite prepared to share his. With his encouragement, she took up golf again, though not at the same level as before, and they were both active members of the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia. Kathleen also shared George’s involvement in the National Trust: in 1964 she had been one of the organisers of an exhibition of “Gold and Glass;” the display included five Melbourne Cups and two Caulfield Cups which had been won by South Australian horses, accompanied by the owners’ colours, and it attracted visitors who might otherwise have had little interest in the work of the Trust.

One concern she did not share, however, was religion. George was a committed member of the Anglican Church and a lay member of Synod, and Geoff had also been a strong Christian; but though Kathleen had been confirmed when she was in England in 1924 she became an atheist and remained so all her life. She was nonetheless tolerant, and would attend Christmas services without complaint; on regular Sundays, however, she would drive George to the church in Adelaide and then go on to visit Geoff’s younger brother Adrian (1919-1993), who had been injured at birth and was permanently in a mental hostel.

Despite differences, the marriage was happy and successful. Kathleen remarked on the importance of mutual tolerance, but it seems clear that she found George to have some attributes of her father, and she was quite prepared to support and assist him, notably in later years by driving him to appointments and then waiting for him in the car. For his part, he was always generous and agreeable to Rafe and Christa, his step-son and daughter-in-law: when the family played golf together he was generally paired with Christa, as it was felt that her presence and his natural courtesy would restrain him from expressing his full indignation when a stroke went astray; he had at one time scored a hole in one, and he was an extremely good putter, though annoyingly less accurate as he grew older. He also became very fond of Rafe and Christa’s son Mark, who would travel to Adelaide by himself to spend holiday time with Kathleen and George.

George and Kathleen made some journeys overseas, notably in 1978 when they went on an extended tour to visit old friends of George in England, some of whom he had not seen since the First World War. After their return, however, George suffered from increasing medical problems, and he died on 26 August 1980; despite his illness, at the time of his death he was preparing a paper for the Geographical Society on the life of Charles Todd, director of the Overland Telegraph in the 1870s– it was presented posthumously.

George left the bulk of his property to Kathleen, with some special bequests to charities and sporting associations with which he had been connected, and a large sum to the Regimental Chapel for the York and Lancashire in Sheffield Cathedral, England. His military orders, decorations and other insignia went to Kathleen’s grandson Mark.

Kathleen did not marry again, but she continued to live at Tennyson for another twenty years. She made a number of trips overseas, once to China in 1981, with Rafe and Christa and their daughter Anne, followed by some months stay with Nancy Movius in Boston. She visited the United States several more times for similar lengthy visits, and was also in France, where Hallam Movius had a major archeological site at Les Eyzies in the Dordogne and where a museum was established in his honour. Kathleen also travelled many times to England to see the theatre in London, and to stay with Rosemary and Rafe at Whitmore.

Kathleen in 1983 with her dog Sam

In Australia, Kathleen played bridge and did crosswords, and she continued to have dogs and a cat – the dogs tended to come from the RSPCA or the Lost Dogs Home, and were rather large and more than she could easily handle: there were several discussions with local Council officers about activities on the beach, but none had long-term effect.

Sunday lunch became important, always at the golf club, where Kathleen was now a life member, and always accompanied by one or more friends from the neighbours at Tennyson. The same honest and generous nature that had encouraged people to give her affection and responsibility in her various organisations now found her close companionship in the small local community of Tennyson, and she gained a great deal of social and practical support.

Kathleen on her 90th birthday with her great grandson Peter and a conflagration of 90 candles
In 1996 Kathleen was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for her public service (click to enlarge)

By 2000, however, as Kathleen was in her nineties, life became increasingly difficult. The house was old and needed repairs, and she was less able to organise it. Worse still, after almost eighty years she no longer held a driving licence, and though many neighbours took her shopping and on other expeditions, and she could travel to Adelaide by train, she was a good deal more restricted than before. In 2004 she asked to come to Batemans Bay to be near to Rafe and Christa, and she took residence in a nursing home, Edgewood Park; at first she was in her own apartment, with her dog Josephine, but later moved to high care. She enjoyed the social life – far more than anyone had expected – she gained many new friends among the other residents, and she was very well treated by the staff.

Kathleen on her 100th birthday with a book we made for her

Kathleen celebrated her hundredth birthday in 2008, with Rafe and Christa, Anne and her husband Greg Young, Mark and his wife Kim, and five great-grandchildren: Peter and Charlotte Young; Nicholas, Alex and Sophia de Crespigny. The following years, however, were for the most part spent asleep, with little memory and increasing physical weakness. She died on 11 June 2013, a few days before her 105th birthday.

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Trove Tuesday: Obituary for Admiral Mainwaring

17 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by Anne Young in obituary, Trove Tuesday, Whitmore

≈ 4 Comments

Rowland Mainwaring (1783 – 1862) was my fourth great grandfather.  In 1840 his son Gordon (1817 – 1872) was sent from England to live in Australia.

Rowland Mainwaring in 1861 from 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.

 
Gordon was the third son, not expected to inherit the estate. Gordon Mainwaring had a problem with alcohol. He drank too much, and after a time in the army in India arrived in South Australia in January 1840, banished there by his family, who paid for him to stay away. He is known in the family as the remittance man. This term meant an emigrant, often sent to a British colony, supported or assisted by payments of money from his family.

The South Australian Register of 17 June 1862 reproduced a lengthy obituary of Gordon’s father, Admiral Rowland Mainwaring,  first published in the Illustrated London News on 26 April 1862.  Gordon’s older brothers had died and Gordon, to everyone’s surprise, perhaps including his own, was now the heir to the Whitmore estate.

THE LATE ADMIRAL MAINWARING. (1862, June 17). South Australian Register (Adelaide, SA : 1839 – 1900), p. 3. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50172924

The original article from the Illustrated London News is slightly easier to read:

“Obituary of Eminent Persons.” Illustrated London News [London, England] 26 Apr. 1862: 425. The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003. Retrieved through Gale News Vault via the National Library of Australia

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A shipboard romance aboard the SS Ballaarat

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Anne Young in Cavenagh-Mainwaring, navy, Whitmore

≈ 2 Comments

After my great great grandmother Ellen Jane Cavenagh-Mainwaring, formerly Cavenagh, née Mainwaring, inherited the family property of  Whitmore in Staffordshire  in 1891, the Cavenagh-Mainwaring family sailed for England in 1892 on the SS Ballaarat to take possession of the inheritance. The family surname had been changed in 1891 to assume the name and arms of Mainwaring in addition to Cavenagh in acknowledgement of the inheritance. Of the nine surviving children, the six daughters and the youngest son, Hugh, travelled with their parents. The oldest daughter, Eva, was 24. The youngest, Gertrude, known as Kiddie, was 10.

SS Ballaarat

The Ballaarat arrived in London on 8 June 1892.  Mr and Mrs Cavenagh-Mainwaring and their children were on the passenger list. The ages on the list are mostly wrong.

from Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and successors: Inwards Passenger Lists. Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives of the UK (TNA). Series BT26. Class: BT26; Piece: 32; Item: 17 Month: 06. Retrieved through ancestry.com.au.

Wentworth Cavenagh-Mainwaring was born in 1822. On arrival he was 69 not 43 as stated. His wife, born in 1845, was 46 not 39. Eva was 24 not 19. May (Mabel) was 23 not 15. Kathleen, my great grandmother, was 18 not 14.

On 4 October 1892 the eldest Cavenagh-Mainwaring daughter, Eva, married Herbert James Gedge, a naval officer.

Eva Gedge née Cavenagh (1867 – 1941) in about 1907

The wedding was reported in Australian newspapers, including the Adelaide Advertiser of 7 November 1892, the South Australian Chronicle of 12 November 1892, and 26 November 1892,  the Melbourne Punch of 17 November 1892, the Adelaide Express and Telegraph of 19 November 1892, Melbourne’s Table Talk of 25 November 1892, and  the Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser of 10 December 1892.

Family Notices. (1892, November 25). Table Talk (Melbourne, Vic. : 1885 – 1939), p. 19. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article145710099

Herbert James Gedge (1859-1913), the son of a clergyman, entered the navy at the age of 12. He graduated from the Royal Naval College in 1879.  On 15 February 1882 Gedge was promoted to Lieutenant. In the mid 1880s Gedge was posted to the Australia Station, the British naval command responsible for waters around the Australian colonies. The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser in their report of the 1892 wedding mentioned that Lieutenant Gedge had been on the Australian Station for five or six years, serving as Lieutenant of HMS Nelson and Dart.

I think for most of his posting Lieutenant Gedge was stationed in Sydney.  I checked the passenger list of the Ballaarat for his name. He was a passenger from Sydney together with five other Lieutenants in the Royal Navy, two naval doctors, and two other naval officers.

from Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department and successors: Inwards Passenger Lists. Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives of the UK (TNA). Series BT26. Class: BT26; Piece: 32; Item: 17 Month: 06. Retrieved through ancestry.com.au.

I assume Herbert Gedge and Eva Cavenagh-Mainwaring met aboard the Ballaarat on the trip to England in 1892. I have found no evidence their paths crossed earlier.

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  • 1892 journey on the Ballaarat
  • N is for Naval husbands

1892 journey on the Ballaarat

10 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by Anne Young in Bendigo, Canada, Cavenagh, Cavenagh-Mainwaring, India, Ireland, Mainwaring, medicine, Napoleonic wars, Trove, Whitmore

≈ 4 Comments

 

 

Portrait of Wentworth Cavenagh, Commissioner of Public Works of South Australia from 4 March 1872 to 22 July 1873 from the State Library of South Australia

Browsing the National Library of Australia’s ‘Trove’ digitised newspaper collection recently, I came across a shipping departure notice which gives a succinct family history of my Cavenagh and Mainwaring great great and great great great grandparents. The Cavenagh-Mainwaring family were about to sail for England on the Ballaarat.

The Ballaarat was a P & O ship of 4752 tons built in 1882, designed for service between the United Kingdom and Australia. The P&O history site remarks that “Her dining saloon was considered particularly fine, and patent iron beds replaced bunks for her first class passengers.”

Ballaarat – 1882 Greenock retrieved from http://www.findboatpics.com.au/sppo2.html

 

Latest News. (1892, April 27). Evening Journal (Adelaide, SA : 1869 – 1912), p. 2 Edition: SECOND EDITION. Retrieved  from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article204477375

Lots of information to follow up and facts to check.

Until I came across this information I did not know that James Gordon Cavenagh, my great great great grandfather, an army surgeon with the Royal Staff Corps, was at Waterloo. He is listed on page 20 in the list of officers as a surgeon in the Royal Staff Corps in John Booth’s 1816 book of The Battle of Waterloo. He is also listed in The Bloody Fields of Waterloo: Medical Support at Wellington’s Greatest Battle by Michael Crumplin published in 2013.

I also didn’t know very much about his son, my great great grandfather, Wentworth Cavenagh. It appears that he was educated at Ferns Diocesan School in Wexford, Ireland. When he was 18 years old he went to Canada, Ceylon, and Calcutta and from there to the Bendigo diggings.

J is for Jacobite rebellion

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Anne Young in A to Z 2014, Mainwaring, Scotland, Whitmore

≈ 1 Comment

My sixth great grandfather was Edward Mainwaring (1709-1795),  who lived at Whitmore in Staffordshire.

Edward Mainwaring is mentioned in A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Enjoying Territorial Possessions Or High Official Rank: But Uninvested with Heritable Honours, Volume 3, 1836 by John Burke republished as an ebook by Google at http://books.google.com.au/books?id=qf4GAAAAQAAJ.

Edward Mainwaring inherited, together with the possessions, the principles of his protestant ancestors, and signalized himself by his great zeal in repelling the invasion of Charles Edward in 1745, against whom he marched to Derby, at the head of his tenantry.  … (page 592)

The invasion of Charles Edward in 1745 is better known today as the Jacobite rising of 1745, or “The ‘Forty-Five”. It was the attempt by Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie, to regain the British throne for the exiled House of Stuart.

My great grand uncle James Gordon Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1865 – 1938) wrote a history of the Mainwaring family back to the entry of Whitmore estate in the Domesday Book of 1068. (Cavenagh-Mainwaring, James Gordon 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.) He says of Edward:

In the Scottish Rebellion of 1745, Edward Mainwaring showed great activity and marched at the head of his tenantry against the invaders. Ward in his “History of Stoke-upon-Trent” quotes a contemporary writer, who, in a letter to a friend in London, stated “I was at Whitmore with Squire Mainwaring, the day before Christmas Day, and he told me we had taken about a hundred of them and killed about thirty, and they had killed about ten of ours; and we look every day when the Duke overtakes the whole body of them.” (page 87) 

The history to which Gordon refers is probably John Ward History of the Borough of Stoke on Trent, Simpkin Marshall, London, 1838. There was also an edition published in 1843.

portrait of Edward Mainwaring (1709-1794) from The Mainwarings of Whitmore, opposite page 87

The Jacobites entered England on 8 November. They besieged Carlisle for two days until they surrendered on 15 November. On 23 November the defence of Manchester was abandoned. The Jacobites reached Derby on 4 December. Derby is over 170 miles south from the Scottish border and less than 40 miles east of Whitmore. More importantly Derby is only 127 miles from London.

From Derby the Jacobites retreated. It was probably not due to Mainwaring’s intervention. Prince Charles and his advisors decided to return to Scotland because of rumours that they were about to face a huge Government army.The Jacobites had good reason to be afraid of an English offensive.

Carlisle was besieged from 21 to 30 December and the Jacobites lost control of the city.

The Jacobites were finally defeatedby the Duke of Cumberland, the son of George II, at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746.

I don’t know if Edward Mainwaring fought against the Jacobites after their retreat from Derby.

Family stories

05 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by Anne Young in author, Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Champion de Crespigny, Chauncy, Cherry Stones, Cudmore, Dana, family history, Hughes, Johnstone, Rafe de Crespigny, Whitmore

≈ 3 Comments

LIn the fifth week of Shauna Hicks’s series of blog posts about genealogical records the topic is family stories.

Before we had computer databases, family history was largely passed down by stories.  For example, my mother-in-law had a very clear idea of who her forebears were for several generations and was able to give brief outlines of their lives for ancestors back to the early nineteenth century from the top of her head. I have been able to verify the family history with records, and what she set out for me from memory was remarkably accurate.

On my side of the family, several relations have written family history books thereby preserving many family stories.

My father wrote Champions of Normandy which covers the early history of the Champion de Crespigny family to the time they migrated to England at the end of the seventeenth century.  Among other documents, it is based on a number of manuscripts held by different family members, as well as the registration of the family with the College of Arms in 1697. (de Crespigny, Rafe Champions in Normandy: being some remarks on the early history of the Champion de Crespigny family. R. de Crespigny, Canberra, 1988.)

My third cousin twice removed, Stephen de Crespigny, has gathered an enormous amount of family history. He collected information, documents and stories, but also had drawn up a comprehensive family tree in the early 1990s.

One of the three sheets of the Champion de Crespigny family tree compiled by Stephen de Crespigny

 

Helen Hudson née  Hughes (1915 – 2005) my first cousin twice removed, was an enthusiastic family historian.  She compiled a book, Cherry Stones,  covering her forebears (which coincide with my father’s father’s mother’s family). I have found it a useful resource and am very pleased she wrote it.  It was published in 1985 and is an amazing effort considering she too had no computer database or access to the material we now have through the internet.  Helen’s father Reginald Hawkins Hughes (1886 – 1971), brother of my great grandmother, had collected papers and paraphernalia of his ancestors and kept it in what she called a “tin trunk” which Helen inherited.  The book has much original material such as transcriptions of early letters. (Hudson, Helen Lesley Cherry stones : adventures in genealogy of Taylor, Hutcheson, Hawkins of Scotland, Plaisted, Green, Hughes of England and Wales … who immigrated to Australia between 1822 and 1850. H.L. Hudson, [Berwick] Vic, 1985.)

My great great great grandfather Philip Chauncy wrote  memoirs of his sister and his second wife.  These were republished in 1976. (Chauncy, Philip Lamothe Snell Memoirs of Mrs Poole and Mrs Chauncy. Lowden, Kilmore, Vic, 1976.) The State Library of Victoria also holds a manuscript of his journal of his trip to Australia and other family history and biographical notes he made.

My Great grand uncle James Gordon Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1865 – 1938) wrote a history of the Mainwaring family back to the entry of Whitmore estate in the Domesday Book of 1068. (Cavenagh-Mainwaring, James Gordon 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.) The estate of Whitmore where my cousins now live has never been sold since the entry in the Domesday book but always been transferred through inheritance, albeit sometimes through the female line.

More recently the wife of my father’s cousin, Christine Cavenagh-Mainwaring, has produced an updated  history of Whitmore and the family. (Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Christine and Britton, Heather, (editor.) Whitmore Hall : from 1066 to Waltzing Matilda. Adelaide Peacock Publications, 2013. ) I was very pleased to be given a copy of the book by Guy and Christine when I saw them in Adelaide last month.

Christine provides an update on what happened to Gerald Mainwaring (1854 – ?) though she also has not been able to trace what happened to him eventually.  My blog entry deals with him being tried for murder but he was not hanged as the jury effectively cast a ballot to decide his fate. His sentence was commuted to penal servitude. Apparently he was released on licence on May 16, 1894. The family story is that Gerald made his way to Whitmore where his brother Percy (1857 – 1927), the Rector of Whitmore, would not let him into the house, gave him a five pound note and an overcoat and sent him away.  Perhaps Gerald changed his name and returned to Canada. There seems no record of him after that time.

There are lots of other family stories in Christine’s book to follow up on and to research further.

In the 1990s James Kenneth Cudmore (1926 – 2013), my second cousin once removed, of Quirindi New South Wales, commissioned Elsie Ritchie to write the Cudmore family history. The work built on the family history efforts of many family members.  It was published in 2000.  It is a very large and comprehensive work and includes many many Cudmore family stories. (Ritchie, Elsie B. (Elsie Barbara) For the love of the land: the history of the Cudmore family. E. Ritchie, [Ermington, N.S.W.], 2000.)

A collection of family history books.

 

Emma Rothschild, a Professor of History at Harvard University, has studied the Johnstone family in a scholarly history of the eighteenth century in order to gain an insight into the development of the British Empire.  Barbara Johnstone (1723 – 1765) was my sixth great grandmother and it is she and her siblings who are the subject of this book. The source material included the oldest brother’s letter book which was in an Edinburgh library. (Rothschild, Emma The inner life of empires : an eighteenth-century history. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock, 2011.  Book review: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-inner-life-of-empires-by-emma-rothschild-2347490.html)

Among other stories, I learned from the book that in 1759 Barbara separated from her husband Charles Kinnaird (1723 – 1767). He had succeeded to the barony in the peerage of Scotland as 6th Lord Kinnaird in 1758. Barbara awarded £130 per year and £100 pounds for furniture. She did not have access to her children. Her husband stated she had committed no crime other than ill nature.

Barbara, Baroness Kinnaird by Allan Ramsay, 1748 portrait retrieved from http://thepeerage.com/p3036.htm . Barbara Johnstone was the daughter of Sir James Johnstone, 3rd Bt. and Barbara Murray. She married Charles Kinnaird, 6th Baron Kinnaird, son of George Kinnaird and Lady Helen Gordon. She died on 21 October 1765

It is a bit intimidating when so much family history has been written to attempt one’s own study.  However, I have found plenty more family history to research while enjoying the stories published by others.

 

Trove Tuesday: home movies in 1933

13 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by Anne Young in Cavenagh-Mainwaring, Cudmore, Jerusalem, Kathleen, Trove Tuesday, Whitmore

≈ 1 Comment

Social Doings Of The Week. (1933, March 16). Chronicle (Adelaide, SA : 1895 – 1954), p. 53. Retrieved January 14, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article90895435

We still have those home movies and I remember being shown them by my grandmother, Kathleen.  My brother has had them copied to DVD.

Some stills of scenes that would have been viewed that evening in March 1933:

HMS Effingham arriving Colombo Harbour
Aden from the Salt Works

Aden from the Salt Works (another scene)
Mount of Olives, Jerusalem
Wailing Wall, Jerusalem
Rhodes
Rhodes shipping
Constantinople
Athens Acropolis
Versailles
Stratford
Trooping the Colour – 1932
Hendon Air Show – 1932
Hendon Air Show

The film of Hendon Air Show I found particularly fascinating.

Hendon Air Show – Westland-Hill Pterodactyl flying wing – probably version iv, an experimental tailless aircraft
Hendon Air Show – gyrocopter?

The pictures of Whitmore would seem to be those that were the backdrop for a comedy film called “A Run for his Money”. Unfortunately I am not able to capture any meaningful stills of Whitmore – the village and lake featured in the film as well as the grounds of Whitmore.

Kathleen played the heroine Elsie Oozegold
Rafe Cavenagh-Mainwaring played the heroine’s father Isaac Oozegold, a Steel Magnet (sic 😉 )
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