Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny nee Dana (1820-1904) and her family in Australia

For the past three years my father and I have been working on the history of the  Dana and Champion de Crespigny families in Australia.

Charlotte Frances nee Dana (1820-1904), my third great grandmother, emigrated to Australia at the time of the gold rushes with her second husband Philip Robert Champion Crespigny (1817-1889).

This year is the two-hundredth anniversary of Charlotte’s birth, an appropriate time to recall and document her life and her family.

The book is published in three versions. Below is a link to the pdf version, free to download. Hardback and paperback editions will be available soon. 

C F C Crespigny nee Dana 2020 ISBN 978-0-6481917-4-2Download

Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny née Dana (1820 – 1904) photographed probably in the late 1850s

Introduction

A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted. For few persons will leave their families, connections, friends, and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going.

Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

Charlotte Frances Dana and her second husband Philip Robert Champion Crespigny came to Melbourne in 1852. Through their son Philip, who took the full surname of Champion de Crespigny, they were the founders of the Australian branch of the family.

In Champions from Normandy, published in 2017, Rafe de Crespigny discussed the history of the family, later known by the surname Champion de Crespigny, from the earliest records in France to their forced emigration as Huguenots in the seventeenth century and then the establishment in England during the eighteenth century. The present volume considers the experiences of the first generation in Australia. It is centred upon the life of Charlotte Frances, for she and her brother were central to the decision to emigrate, and she lived to see her first great-grandchildren in the new country and the new century.

Born in 1820, Charlotte died in 1904, and that period of eighty-four years was a time of enormous and dramatic change. She was first a subject of King George IV, former Prince Regent, and she lived through the reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria into the first years of Edward VII. Her voyage to Australia in 1851-52 lasted four months; fifty years later a steamship passage took only six weeks, less than half that time. When she arrived in Victoria, travel was by horse and cart, often no faster than seven miles a day; she would later take a train from the goldfields town of Beaufort and reach Melbourne in a matter of hours; while at the time of her death the Wright brothers in the United States were making their first powered flights at Kitty Hawk.

So it was a time of progress, but it was also an age of uncertainty. Health and medicine were both erratic, and diseases which are now quite easily treated were dangerous and could be fatal. Infant or child mortality was very high – to such a degree that many children were baptised with the name of an older sibling who had gone before them: Charlotte had two brothers christened Francis Richard Benjamin, three called Douglas and two more named William. And even those who grew to maturity could be crippled or killed by accident or sickness: one brother died in his thirties and another at the age of just forty; two young nephews died of scarlet fever and one of tetanus; and Charlotte’s son Constantine Trent Champion Crespigny and her sister-in-law Sophia nee Walsh both died of tuberculosis.

Such dangers applied still more to women of the time. Childbirth always carried a risk and stillbirth was by no means uncommon, while the absence of any practical means of contraception meant that pregnancy was often frequent: Charlotte had seven children, but she had twelve full and half-siblings, both her father and her mother had twelve brothers and sisters, and her mother’s father had sired ten more on another wife. Similarly, in her first marriage she experienced three pregnancies in three years, with one daughter who would live to maturity, a son who died in his very first year, and a third child which was still-born. With the vagaries of midwifery and the chances of infection, many women were weakened or simply worn out by such frequent fertility.

Apart from these physical matters, social and financial life could likewise be a question of fortune, good or ill. Charlotte’s family could fairly be described as gentlefolk: her grand-mother was the daughter of a Scottish baron; her grandfather came from a notable back-ground in the American colonies; one of her uncles was a general in the British army and owned a landed estate; two of her aunts married wealthy men; and in 1839 Charlotte herself was married to a prosperous solicitor in Gloucestershire.

Apparent security, however, could change very quickly. Soon after Charlotte’s wedding her father’s printing business failed, he was sent to prison for debt and was stripped of all property. The last years of his life were survived on a small pension in the home of his daughter and son-in-law.

Bankruptcy and indebtedness were indeed a constant threat: if a bank failed, its notes were worthless – and much of the currency in circulation was issued by private banks; the system of limited liability was not in common use, so the failure of a business could bring ruin to its owner; and a batch of unpaid bills could bring a cascade of misfortune.

The position was even more precarious for women. Until quite recent times, a married woman was identified with her husband, with no separate legal or financial existence, while unmarried women had limited opportunities for a meaningful career which might enable them to support themselves. Married, unmarried or widowed, most women were obliged to rely upon their families. When Charlotte Frances’ husband Philip Robert was taken ill, he was entitled to a pension, but after his death there was no further official or government support; and her unmarried daughters Ada and Viola were equally dependent upon the goodwill of their more prosperous kinfolk.

One question may always be raised of any Australian whose family arrived within the last 250 years: “Why did they come?” For convicts, it was compulsory; very often, notably in the years of gold rush, it was the hope of sudden fortune. For Charlotte’s brother Henry Edmund Dana, educated as a gentleman but with few opportunities at home, it was the hope of better prospects than could be expected in England – and for Charlotte and her second husband Philip Robert Champion Crespigny it was a means to escape the social and financial embarrassment of a dramatic and well-publicised divorce.

Regardless of such an erratic beginning, however, that second marriage was affectionate and companionable, and even after Philip Robert’s sad slow death Charlotte was able to enjoy the support of her daughters and the successes of her son Philip and her grandchildren. In a letter of 1858, her father-in-law wrote in praise of her patience and courage, and of her determination to make the best of everything.

Richard Rafe Champion de Crespigny
and Christine Anne Young nee Champion de Crespigny
December 2020

The Civil War window in the Church of St Chad at Farndon in Cheshire

AN ESSAY IN HISTORY AND HERALDRY

by Rafe de Crespigny June 2020

Photo © Mike Searle (cc-by-sa/2.0)

William Barnston (1592-1665) of Churton, a village some seven miles/twelve kilometres south of Chester, was among the royalist defenders of that city against the attacks of parliamentary forces and the final siege of 1645-1646.[1] He was imprisoned for a time after the Civil War and was obliged to pay a fine to the Interregnum government before he could return to his estates.[2] The area had suffered heavy damage during the war, but soon after the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 Barnston was able to rebuild his parish church of St Chad at nearby Farndon, and he added a chapel with a memorial panel to his experience of the war and a window commemorating his comrades of Chester.[3]

After general conflict in Cheshire between royalists and parliamentarians, the parliamentarian forces under Sir William Brereton (1604-1661) established supremacy in the county. Chester, held out as a royalist stronghold, however, and was important as an entry-port for troops from Wales and Ireland. After some early attacks in 1643 and 1644, full siege was laid in September 1645. The city held out for several months, repelling many assaults, but as supply lines were cut the people were faced with starvation, and the garrison surrendered in February of the following year.

After three and a half centuries it is not surprising that the Farndon window has suffered damage and decay: one panel at the top is missing and many details are blurred. By good fortune, however, a coloured copy was made in the early nineteenth century and an engraving of it was published in Ormerod’s History of Cheshire:[4]

In the Barnston chancel …[is] a curious historical subject, which was rescued from a state of extreme decay, and repaired at the expence of the late dean of Chester. It is represented in the attached engraving, on a scale reduced about two-thirds from a fac-simile drawing, which was executed under the inspection of the dean, when the glass was in his possession.

The Dean of Chester was Hugh Cholmondeley (1773-1815), who held that office at Chester Cathedral from 1806 until his death, four years before Ormerod published his History. In the engraving, the blank panel at the top is occupied by a title sheet with an attribution to his patronage.[5]

The engraving is presented on a two-page spread-sheet. It is certainly clearer than the photographs, and given that it was prepared under supervision we may accept it as a fair reproduction. A full copy appears at the end; details are used for comparison and clarification in this essay.

The window is divided into four registers, with four larger panels in the centre, four each across the top and bottom, and four each again in column on either side. Since the overall measurement is no more than 28 inches/72 centimetres high and 18 inches/46 centimetres wide, the twenty pictures are all quite small.

The four central panels have a display of arms, armour and other equipment, and the one in the upper left also shows an officer standing outside a tent and carrying a baton of command. From the shield part-hidden behind him: or, three mallets sable [yellow, with three black wooden hammers], he can be identified as Sir Francis Gammul (1606-1654). A former mayor of Chester, when King Charles raised his standard at Nottingham and issued a call to arms in August 1642 he raised troops in the city and brought a contingent to join him. He played a leading role in the defence of the city and was made a baronet in 1644.[6]

Sir Francis Gamull
central pictures, top left hand and on the right in the engraving from the Cholmondeley copy. The shield of Sir Francis, with a baronet’s insignia, is shown in the middle,
with a more detailed illustration of the insignia – a red [gules] left hand – below

Eight small pictures on either side of the window show figures of armoured infantrymen with muskets and pikes, and in four larger pictures across the base there are a pikeman, a junior officer bearing a flag, a flute-player and a drummer.[7] In his discussion of the window, Colonel Field notes that the figures are based upon contemporary drawings published in France by the engraver and water-colourist Abraham Bosse (c.1604-1676): styles were the same on both sides of the Channel.

Like Sir Francis Gamull, the flag-bearer can be identified by the shield in the corner of his picture: the shield is black, with three white greyhounds, surrounded by a white border [sable, three greyhounds courant argent, within a bordure of the last]. This was the insignia of the Berington family of Cheshire, and the top of the shield has a “label of three points” – a bar with three pendants – indicating that he is an eldest son whose father is still living.

Ensign Hugh [?] Berington
Lowest register, third from left and to the right is the image from the Cholmondley copy. In the centre is the shield of Hugh Berington.

The senior lineage of the Berington family had held the estates of Bradwall and Moores-barrow, a short distance southeast of Middlewich in Cheshire, but they passed by marriage to the Oldfield family in the late sixteenth century. A cadet branch, however, still held property at Warmingham, some five kilometres/three miles south of Middlewich, and Hugh Berington was baptised there in 1626.[8] In 1644 Hugh would have been eighteen, and Ensign – equivalent to a second lieutenant at the present day – was an appropriate rank for a young gentleman.

Of the four larger pictures at the top of the window, the one on the left has been destroyed, and there is no way to tell whom or what it may have shown. The three remaining have images of Sir Richard Grosvenor, Sir William Mainwaring, and William Barnston the sponsor of the window itself.

The upper register of the window:
above: from a modern photograph of the original window [Photo © Mike Searle (cc-by-sa/2.0)];
below: from the Cholmondeley copy in volume II of Ormerod, History.
Flanked by armoured pikeman, the three officers are identified by their shields:

Richard Grosvenor              William Mainwaring     William Barnston

• The shield of the Grosvenor family, blue with a yellow sheaf of grain [azure, a garb or] is marked at the top by a label of three points, indicating that – like Ensign Berington above – Richard Grosvenor is the eldest son and his father is living.
• A label also appears on the shield of William Mainwaring. In his case, however, his father Edmund was a second son, so the family shield of two red bars on a white ground [argent, two bars gules] is also differenced by a crescent for cadency.
• The Barnston shield is complex: blue with an indented bar of speckled with black across the centre, and six complex yellow crosses [azure, a fess dancettée ermine between six cross-crosslets or (ermine is a formulaic rendering of the animal’s fur)]. It does not, however, have any marks of difference, so William Barnston was the head of his family.

The colours in the window have been affected by age and in several places they are uncertain. Where the Cholmondeley copy, for example, has sashes in differing colours and Gamull and Grosvenor with yellow coats, Field argues that all the sashes and the senior officers’ jackets were originally red.[9] With the handsome headgear, this was parade dress; Barnston, however, was wearing the long, close-fitting “buff coat” of heavy leather, often made from buffalo- or ox-hide, which gave basic protection in combat.            

As pictured in the side columns of the window, some pikemen bore half-armour of metal plate over the leather. Such corselets, however, were heavy to wear and were going out of use, while musketeers had sufficient problems with their weapons. Two shown in the side panels are holding “matchlocks,” dangerous and erratic and requiring a pole to rest upon, but even the new, lighter “firelocks” shown in the other pictures were awkward to manage. Horsemen, like William Mainwaring’s cousin Philip, carried pistols and swords and were often armoured, but the soldiers in the Farndon window were defending a city and had no use for cavalry.[10]

The upper right panel in the centre of the window displays some items of armour, and the photograph shows a suit of the period, thought to have been worn by Philip Mainwaring; it is now in his tomb chapel at the church of St Lawrence in Over Peover.
Photo © Mike Searle (cc-by-sa/2.0)

William Barnston, who had the Farndon window made in the early 1660s, has already been discussed, while nothing more is known of Ensign Berington – even his identification as the Hugh Berington baptised at Warmingham in 1626 is uncertain. We can, however, offer a brief account of the other officers shown in the window:

• Following the surrender of Chester in 1646, Sir Francis Gamull was able to compound for his estates, but in 1654 he joined a rising against the newly-established Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The rebellion was defeated and Francis Gamull was executed. He left no sons, and the baronetcy was extinguished.
• The Grosvenor family of Eaton Hall in Eccleston, just to the south of Chester, were leading gentry of the county. As a member of Parliament in the 1620s, Sir Richard Grosvenor (1585-1645) had been a strong supporter of the royal interest, and he had been made a baronet by King Charles in 1622. His son, also Richard Grosvenor (c.1604-1665) was High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1643 and raised troops in the royal cause.

Richard Grosvenor succeeded to the baronetcy at his father’s death in 1645, and later generations of the family became increasingly successful and prosperous. The present-day Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, one of the wealthiest men in England, is a direct descendant, and Eaton Hall in Cheshire is his country house.

• William Mainwaring (c.1616-1645) had been a Sergeant-Major of the troop brought by Sir Francis Gamull to join the king’s forces when he raised his standard at Nottingham in 1642. William took part in the campaign which led to the battle of Edgehill on 23 October, first engagement of the civil war, and he was knighted by the king at Oxford in January of the following year.

William’s father Edmund (1579-c.1650) was a younger son of Sir Randle Mainwaring of Over Peover (d.1612), some fifty kilometres/thirty miles east of Chester. While many gentlemen of the time determined their allegiance in the war through family interest and local alliances rather than by any political or religious conviction, the Mainwarings were divided. Philip Mainwaring of Over Peover, whose armour is shown above, was a son of Sir Randle and first cousin of William, but as William defended Chester for the king Philip was commanding a troop of cavalry in the parliamentary army.

Sir William Mainwaring was killed in October 1645, fighting on the walls of Chester. It was reported that he had been wounded by musket-shot under the arm and died on the following day. His widow Hester was left with two daughters and an infant son, who died a few months later. The elder daughter Hester had no children, but Judith married John Busby, who was knighted by Charles II in recognition of the service given by his father-in-law, and their daughter Hester married Thomas Egerton of Tatton Park near Knutsford in Cheshire; her descendants became barons and earls.

Engraved copy of the Civil War window prepared for the Very Reverend Hugh Cholmondeley, Dean of Chester, in the early nineteenth century; reproduced in Ormerod, History, volume II, between pages 408 and 409.

---

[1]       There is a general history of the war in Cheshire in The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester: compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county; incorporated with a republication of King’s Vale Royal, and Leycester’s Cheshire Antiquities, by George Ormerod (1785-1873), 3 volumes, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, London 1819 [archive.org] Ormerod, History I, xxxv-xxxviii, and a modern account in “Early Modern Chester 1550-1762: the civil war and interregnum, 1642-60,” 115-125; digitised by British History Online [BHO] from A History of the County of Chester, Volume 5 Part 1 “The City of Chester: General History and Topography,” published by Victoria County History, London 2003; online at british-history.ac.uk/vch/ches/vol5/pt1/pp115-125.

[2]       After the victory of Parliament in the civil war, gentlemen who had fought on the royalist side did not suffer a direct confiscation of their estates, but had to pay in order to keep them. The process was known as “compounding.”

[3]       The window is discussed, with photographs, at the following websites:

http://www.stchadschurchfarndon.org.uk/55.html;

https://vidimus.org/issues/issue-44/panel-of-the-month/;

              and https://vidimus.org/issues/issue-59/ feature/.

There is also an article on “Army Uniforms in a Stained Glass Window in Farndon Church, Cheshire – temp Charles I,” by Colonel C Field, in Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research V.22, 174-177 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/44227597].

There is an account of William Barnston at https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/ 2020/01/403-barnston-of-churton-hall-and-crewe.html.

I also acknowledge the most impressive and helpful site cheshire-heraldry.org.uk, described as “A web site dedicated to the art and science of heraldry in the County Palatine of Chester.” It provides a quantity of information, with excellent sources, and has impressive illustrations.

[4]       Ormerod, History II, page 408. This introductory paragraph is followed by another with a description of the contents, which has been drawn upon for some of the discussion which follows.

[5]       His dates of appointment are given by Ormerod, History I, 221. Reproductions from the engraving are referred to below as the Cholmondeley copy.

[6]       Ormerod notes disagreement whether Sir Francis received a baronetcy or only a knighthood, and the shield in the window is unclear, but the Cholmondeley copy shows the red hand, insignia of baronetcy, in the centre of his shield.

[7]       Field, “Army Uniforms,” 176.

[8]       https://www.findmypast.com.au/search/results?lastname=berington&keywordsplace_proximity+20& eventyear=1644&eventyear_offset=20&sourcecounty=england.

[9]       “Army Uniforms,” 175.  He suggests that five bars [Gamull and Grosvenor] may have indicated a colonel, four [Mainwaring] a lieutenant-colonel, and three [Barnston]

[10]      “… two men of Captain Mainwaring:” Alice Thornton, quoted in Roger Hudson [editor], The Grand Quarrel: from the Civil War memoirs of Mrs Lucy Hutchison; Mrs Alice Thornton; Ann, Lady Fanshawe; Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle; Anne, Lady Halkett, & the letters of Brilliana, Lady Harley, Folio Society, London 1993, page 92.

[11]      Summary accounts of weapons, armour and tactics at this time appear in Austin Woolrych, Battles of the English Civil War, published first by Batsford, London 1961, then by Pan 1966, at 100-101; and William Seymour, Battles in Britain and their political background, volume 2 (1642-1746), Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1975 and Book Club Associates 1976, at 26-27.

Related post:

• The Mainwaring Memorial in Chester Cathedral

Miniature portrait of Geoff de Crespigny by Olive A Chatfield

My father has a small collection of family portraits. One is a miniature of his father Richard Geoffrey “Geoff” Champion de Crespigny (1908 – 1966) as a child.

The portrait is signed  ‘O. A. Chatfield’. This was Olive Amy Chatfield (1880 – 1945).

Olive Chatfield was born in New Zealand, the fourth of eight children of an architect named William Charles Chatfield (1852 – 1930). Olive’s mother Mary Chatfield nee Hoggard (1853 – 1896) died when Olive was 15.

In November 1910 Olive Chatfield ‘of New Zealand’ was one of the artists in the 13th annual Federal Art Exhibition in Adelaide, a showing organised by the South Australian Society of Arts. I am not sure when Olive Chatfield came to Adelaide or why she was living there.

In March 1912 Miss Olive Chatfield donated a miniature portrait of Lady Bosanquet, wife of the South Australian Governor, to the Art Gallery of South Australia. Described as ‘gouache on ivory, 7.6 x 6.3 cm’, it remains in the Gallery’s collection,

In 1914 and 1915 Olive Chatfield is mentioned several times in Adelaide newspapers, usually under ‘social notes’.

On 3 April 1916 Olive Chatfield married Vyvyan Hughes (1888 – 1916), Geoff’s maternal uncle. Vyvyan Hughes died a few weeks later in a military hospital in Ceylon.

Vyvyan Hughes with Olive 1916

Olive Hughes did not re-marry, and in November 1916 returned to New Zealand, where under the name of Mrs Westbury Hughes she practiced as a professional artist specialising in miniature portraits. Some of her work was exhibited by the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts.

Photo of Olive Hughes accompanying an article in the Sydney Sun of 16 December 1923

ART AND HEREDITY (1923, December 16). The Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 – 1954), p. 1 (Women’s Supplement). Retrieved December 6, 2018, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article222682064

Olive Hughes died in Wellington, New Zealand on 10 July 1945.

There is a family resemblance down the generations between Geoff and his descendants.

Geoff de Crespigny

Geoff’s son

Geoff’s grandson

Geoff, his son, grandson, and great grandsons

Sources

• MARRIAGES. (1916, April 8). Chronicle (Adelaide, SA : 1895 – 1954), p. 32. Retrieved December 6, 2018, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87243826
• Family Notices (1916, May 18). The Register (Adelaide, SA : 1901 – 1929), p. 8. Retrieved December 6, 2018, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article59818703
• AUSTRALIAN ART. (1910, November 3). Evening Journal (Adelaide, SA : 1869 – 1912), p. 4. Retrieved December 5, 2018, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article207214665
• PERSONAL. (1912, March 23). Observer (Adelaide, SA : 1905 – 1931), p. 34. Retrieved December 6, 2018, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article164772419
• Art Gallery of South Australia Collection: item 0.634
• ART AND HEREDITY (1923, December 16). The Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 – 1954), p. 1 (Women’s Supplement). Retrieved December 6, 2018, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article222682064
• PapersPast: New Zealand digitised newspapers:
  • Notes for Women, New Zealand Times, Volume XLI, Issue 9507, 15 November 1916, page 5. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZTIM19161115.2.25
  • Notes for Women, New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9777, 28 September 1917, page 9. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZTIM19170928.2.59

• • At the Art Gallery, New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10271, 5 May 1919, page 3. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZTIM19190505.2.9
  • Sketch Exhibition, Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LIII, Issue 121, 23 May 1919, page 4. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NEM19190523.2.27
  • Social Gossip, Free Lance, Volume XIX, Issue 1006, 15 October 1919, page 22. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZFL19191015.2.34
  • Dispute over a miniature, Sun, Volume VII, Issue 2099, 5 November 1920, page 4. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/SUNCH19201105.2.16
  • Deaths, Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 9, 11 July 1945, page 1. Retrieved from https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19450711.2.4

Related post

• K is for Kanatte General Cemetery in Colombo

 

Gabriel Crespigny and Thomas Caulfeild

My 8th great uncle was Gabriel Crespigny, a Huguenot refugee from Normandy.

Born in 1666, he was sent to England by his parents when he was just twelve years old, and had joined the army in 1686 at the age of twenty. In 1691 he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the First Foot Guards – later the Grenadier Guards – with effective rank as a Captain. Serving in Flanders against the armies of King Louis XIV of France, he was wounded in 1695 during the successful assault on Namur in present-day Belgium.

A soldier of the 35th Foot in 1742; the basic style of uniform was little changed from the beginning of the century. Image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

In 1701 Gabriel transferred to be Captain in a newly formed regiment commanded by Arthur Chichester the Earl of Donegall. Raised at Belfast in Ireland and numbered as the 35th Foot, the regiment was a strongly Protestant unit and had authority from King William to bear orange facings on the uniform.

The Nine Years War against Louis XIV – essentially the War of the English Succession – had concluded with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, but conflict broke out again with the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702, and the Earl of Donegall’s Regiment was designated for “sea service” – amphibious attacks on enemy ports and shore positions. Following an unsuccessful raid on Cadiz in August, it was engaged in the West Indies but returned to Spain in 1704. In 1705 the regiment joined the garrison of Gibraltar under Spanish attack, and later that year it was engaged in the capture of Barcelona. On the following 9 April the Earl of Donegall was killed in the defence of that city; his place was taken by Sir Richard Lord Gorges, another Irish Peer, and the name of the regiment was changed accordingly.

Having taken part in the capture of the port of Alicante later that year, the regiment was brought into the main British-Portuguese field army, but in 1707 the allies were heavily defeated by the French-Spanish coalition at the battle of Almansa; Gorges’ Regiment lost its colours and many of its officers and men were killed or captured. The remnants were brought back to Ireland, where the regiment was re-formed; Captain Crespigny had escaped the debacle and was one of the officers in the new arrangement.

La Batalla de Almansa, Museo del Prado. The Battle of Almansa, 25 April 1707, landscape by Filippo Pallotta, figures by Buonaventura Ligli 

Forerunner of the present-day Army Board, the Board of General Officers of the British Army was established at the beginning of the eighteenth century, gathering men of that rank to deal with matters of discipline, disputes, recruitment and the provision of supplies.

At its meeting of 9 February 1708, however, a letter written by Captain Gabriel Crespigny had been presented in which he complained to Colonel Phineas Bowles, commander of another regiment, that, after the colonel of Gabriel Crespigny’s regiment,  Colonel Lord Donegall, was killed at Barcelona on 10 April 1706, Thomas Caulfeild, Viscount Charlemont, had appropriated a quantity of Donegall’s goods and papers. It appears that this matter had come to the notice of Lord Peterborough, leader of the English and Dutch armies in Spain, and was the initial reason for Charlemont bring summonsed to discuss his position. The minutes of the meeting then record that

After which all Persons being ordered to withdraw, as they were passing out, Mr Caulfeild, Son to the Lord Charlemont, gave Capt Crepigny several blows over the Face and Head with a Cane. Whereupon Mr Caulfeild was sent Prisoner to the Guard, to be kept there until Her Ma[jes]tys or the Princes Pleasure should be known.
The Disorder being then over….

At its meeting on 5 May 1708 the Board took official notice of the quarrel between two officers, Captains Gabriel Crespigny and Thomas Caulfeild. Captain Caulfeild had insulted Captain Crespigny, and the matter was considered extremely serious: the Prince Consort George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne, was advised that “to Repair so great an Injury and Affront to a Gentleman’s Honour,” Captain Caulfeild should be required

In the …Guard Chamber, during the [next] Sitting of the Board, on his knees, to ask pardon of Captain Crespigny, who is at the same time to have a Cane in his Hand, with Liberty to use it, as he please.

The background of Gabriel’s opponent was very different. Thomas Caulfeild was the second son of William, second Viscount Charlemont in the peerage of Ireland. A strong supporter of William of Orange against James II, in 1701 the Viscount was rewarded with command of a newly-formed regiment – later to be known as the 36th Foot. Like the Earl of Donegall’s Regiment, Viscount Charlemont’s was sent on sea service, and the two units took part in an attack on Cadiz and the campaign in the West Indies in 1702 and 1703.

Born in 1685, and thus twenty years younger than Gabriel Crespigny, at the age of sixteen Thomas Caulfeild had been commissioned as an Ensign in his father’s regiment at the time of its first formation in 1701. He took part in the attack on Cadiz, but received permission, with his father, not to join the enterprise in the West Indies. Rejoining the regiment on its return to Ireland in 1704, he accompanied it to Spain in 1705, where it took part in the siege and capture of Barcelona alongside the Earl of Donegall’s unit. When the city was attacked by a Franco-Spanish force in April 1706, Charlemont’s Regiment formed part of the relief force.

Viscount Charlemont had been made a Brigadier-General in 1704, but in May 1706 he was replaced as Colonel by Thomas Allnutt, and the name of the regiment was duly changed.

This gave cause for controversy. During an assault on Fort Montjuȉc at Barcelona, several men of Charlemont’s regiment had taken to flight, though he himself maintained the attack and did his utmost to bring them back to order. The fort was captured, and the Earl of Peterborough, commander of operations in eastern Spain, congratulated him on the success. Later, however, a document appeared, said to have come from Queen Anne herself, which ordered his dismissal, and Peterborough compelled him to relinquish his command. Charlemont subsequently appealed to the Board of General Officers, which found that he had properly carried out his duties and that the Earl of Peterborough had been deceived by a forgery and made a mistake – an elegant compromise. Charlemont was soon afterwards promoted Major-General, but the regiment remained under Allnutt’s command.

In the following year the two regiments – the 35th Foot commanded by Lord Gorges with Gabriel Crespigny serving as a Captain, and the 36th commanded by Thomas Allnutt with Thomas Caulfeild probably serving as a Captain – were part of the main field army which suffered defeat at Almansa on 25 April 1707. Like Gorges’ Regiment, Allnutt’s was all but destroyed, and Colonel Allnutt himself was wounded and taken prisoner. Released on exchange in September, he was commissioned to rebuild the regiment; enlistment, however, was no longer in Ireland but was based upon Cheshire.

Since their regiments were rebuilding separately, the 35th in Ireland and the 36th in England, one must assume that the quarrel between Thomas Caulfeild and Gabriel Crespigny had arisen while they were together on campaign in Spain. Though we have at this time no details, it was very likely related to some aspect of the defeat at Almansa, and the most obvious accusation which one officer could levy against another was that of cowardice.

One may wonder why the insult was not followed up by a duel between the two men: though duelling was formally outlawed, it was common at this time, particularly – as might be expected – among military men. Again, it is possible Caulfeild refused the challenge.

Caulfeild may have refused to regard Crespigny as a gentleman of appropriate rank: though both were commissioned officers, Caulfeild was of noble birth and Crespigny was foreign born and of uncertain heritage (Gabriel Crespigny and his brothers Pierre and Thomas had had their gentry lineage and pedigree certified by the College of Arms ten years earlier, but this may not have been enough for all whom they encountered in British society).

Alternatively, if Caulfeild was convinced his opponent was a coward, he may have refused to meet such a fellow on equal terms. Men of lower rank were unworthy of swords or pistols, and should be dealt with by the horsewhip or a cane.

In any event, the Board of General Officers found Thomas Caulfeild’s accusations and his conduct of the quarrel to have been quite unjustified – and the reference to his potential punishment with a cane makes one suspect the second explanation is most likely.

Prince George died in October 1708 and it seems that without his support the direction lapsed. Perhaps the humiliation of Caulfeild was held to be sufficient without Gabriel Crespigny actually using the cane. The minutes of the Board of 26 October 1708 record

Capt Crepigny [was] called in on his Petition for Satisfaction from Mr Caulfeild, and [was] told that Lt-Gen Seymour not being at the Board, who presided when the matter was first under Consideration, and had attended the Prince. Therefore the Pet[itioner] could not be then informed what Directions His Royal Highness had given therein.

Lieutenant-General William Seymour was Colonel of The Queen’s Regiment of Foot, now
part of the Royal Marines. He had presided at the Board Meeting of 5 May, but later joined his regiment in Spain; in September he and his men had taken part in the capture of the Mediterranean island of Minorca. Since there had been no written reply from the prince, nor any report of what he might have said, the matter was left to lie.

We may note that at this time Captain Crespigny was forty-two years old and had been on active service for more than twenty years. Captain Caulfeild was twenty-five; he had seen combat at Cadiz in 1702, followed by two years in Spain and the defeat at Almansa.

It does not appear that the two men had any further dealings, and their subsequent careers were very different.

Gabriel Crespigny returned to his duties with Gorges’ Regiment, but three years later he was wounded in a riot when engaged on recruitment at Wigan, north of Liverpool. With any system of regular conscription, recruitment – either voluntary or forced – was essential for any unit of the army, but it was often resented by the civilian population, and especially by friends of those who were tricked or compelled to join the colours. Gabriel was so seriously injured that he was obliged to leave the army, selling his commission to pay his debts, and was eventually granted a pension at half-pay. He died in Ireland in 1722.

For one reason or another, perhaps associated with the Crespigny affair, Thomas Caulfeild transferred his commission to the marines; since his original regiment had been involved in sea service, the change was not inappropriate. In 1710 his new unit, numbering four hundred men, was sent to America to militia regiments from the colonies of New England in an attack on the French base at Port-Royal in Nova Scotia. Having distinguished himself in the campaign, Thomas Caulfeild was named Lieutenant-Governor of the newly-acquired province of Nova Scotia, and had charge of the territory until his death there in 1717 at the age of thirty-two.

Sources

• de Crespigny, Rafe Champions from Normandy: An Essay on the Early History of the Champion de Crespigny Family 1350-1800 AD, 2017, pp. 127-136.
• Scouller, R. E  The armies of Queen Anne. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1966, p.48
• The National Archives of the UK WO 71/1 (Proceedings of the Board of General Officers )

Publishing a family history in Australia – my experience

My father has recently written an essay on the early history of the Champion de Crespigny family. It was an update of an earlier essay written in 1988. The essay includes a bibliography, footnotes, index and colour illustrations and maps.

Paperback version of Champions from Normandy

 

The essay was composed and edited using Microsoft Word and came to 221 A4 pages. My father exported the manuscript to PDF thereby ensuring the formatting and pagination stayed constant.

While downloading a PDF may suit some family members we were conscious that others might like a printed version.

My father arranged for ten copies to be printed and bound in hardcover. The cost was just under $50 for printing double-sided in colour and $54 to bind in good quality thesis style or just over $100 per copy. In addition involved arranging drop off of the manuscript to the bookbinders and collection from the bookbinders and distribution to family members and libraries by hand.

I thought it would be easier if family members could purchase their own copy and we could outsource the printing, payment and shipping.

Our decision as to which printer to use was determined by our desire to retain the A4 size of the publication. We did not wish to reformat and or compile the index again.

There are several print on demand suppliers but IngramSpark  (http://www.ingramspark.com/ ) seemed to be the only firm that could print a coloured manuscript in A4. Books printed by IngramSpark can be ordered through Amazon.com and other distributors.

Reviews of the quality of printing by IngramSpark were favourable.

My father has written a number of books and was familiar with the steps in the publishing process.

We had to purchase ISBNs. “ISBN” stands for “International Standard Book Number”. The ISBN identifies a book or other book-like product (such as an audiobook) in a specific format and edition as well as who published it.

ISBNs used to be distributed for free by the National Library of Australia but the process has been outsourced to Thorpe-Bowker ( https://www.myidentifiers.com.au ). We bought ten ISBNs for $88. A single ISBN is $44 and you need a separate ISBN for each format. In addition there was a “new publisher set-up fee” of $55.

We needed to assign three of the numbers to this book for the three different formats: hardback, paperback and PDF to be downloaded.

Next we submitted cataloguing-in-publication information to the National Library of Australia. Cataloguing-in-Publication (CiP) is a free service offered to publishers by the National Library of Australia to provide a catalogue record for publications that have not yet been published. You can apply at https://www.nla.gov.au/cip.

The book was listed on Trove, the National Library of Australia’s online portal. The capitalisation of the title was not as we submitted it but the Library advised that would be corrected once the deposit copy was received. However, three weeks after the deposit copy was handed personally to the library, the catalogue is not yet updated, still stating the deposit copy has not yet been received.

For IngramSpark to print the book we needed to upload two files, a PDF file of the contents and a separate file for the cover.

IngramSpark emailed a template of the cover with the exact dimensions based on the number of pages, and the weight of the paper we chose. A bar code with our ISBN was included. We elected not to have the price coded in the barcode.

Modifying the template was beyond my capabilities. I did not have the right software and despite spending some time Googling for help and watching YouTube videos I felt no closer to mastering this task. I Googled for help and found the site UpWork.com. I was able to

• describe the task
• find 5 candidates who were able to take on the task
• select and brief an experienced designer who had produced covers for IngramSpark previously
• agree a fee and pay the money into Escrow using PayPal
• provide the designed with the files forwarded by IngramSpark and image of the design my father wanted
• the work was completed in less than half an hour and the files forwarded to me
• I released the payment and rated the work done (5 stars as prompt and conforming exactly to my brief)
• Cost was $US30.83

IngramSpark requires you as a publisher to set a retail price for the book for each of the main countries it can be printed in. You are given the information about printing costs. I was required to budget for a wholesaler discount. I chose the minimum and did not allow for returns. I am not trying to place the book in bookshops and do not expect anyone other than family members to be interested.

Once we uploaded the files IngramSpark charged $US49 setup fee.

It took several days for IngramSpark to process the files as I submitted on the weekend and I believe they are reviewed by a person.  The proof was available to download on Wednesday morning. I reviewed the electronic copy and ordered a hard copy for review. I could delay anybody else ordering until I have reviewed the hardcopy but have decided to allow anybody who wishes to order a copy.

The cost of the hardcopy was the actual printing cost $Au11.74 plus $Au2.20 handling fee, economy shipping of $Au9.25, Tax (GST?) $Au2.32 for a total of $25.51.

On Thursday morning, 24 hours after enabling production on IngramSpark, the book was listed on Amazon.com, Angus and Robertson and booko.com.au. No price was given and the book was listed as “not in stock”. However I was able to place alerts to be notified when the book is available for sale.The National Library would appear to have also been notified by IngramSpark as the entry on Trove included an image of the cover that could have only come from IngramSpark.

A summary of the cost of getting the book to publication in Australian dollars:

• ISBN purchase and setup $Au 143
• Cover designer $US 30.83 = $Au 41.95
• IngramSpark set up fee $US 49 = $Au 66.69
• Single printed copy to review $25.51

Total $Au 277.15

It took three weeks for the review copy to arrive. IngramSpark’s service standard was ten business days and they printed on the tenth business day. Postage took six days. In hindsight, because I was eager to see a copy quickly, I should have ordered the express printing which would have taken only two to three days to print.

The quality of the printing is good, the only comment being that the colour for some of the illustrations is less vivid than the initial individual printing my father had arranged.

Pages from the paperback version printed by IngramSpark

 

Pages from the hardback version showing that the colours were slightly more vivid than the printing by IngramSpark

 

The book is now available for sale through various outlets including Amazon and Book Depository. These firms acquire the book at the “wholesale” price. When setting the price on IngramSpark I had to set a wholesale discount of at least 30%. There was a calculator which helped me to ensure the wholesale price covered the printing cost.

The book can be bought from

• Book depository https://www.bookdepository.com/Champions-from-Normandy-Rafe-de-Crespigny/9780648191728 $Au 29.09 with free delivery worldwide
• Amazon in the US https://www.amazon.com/Champions-Normandy-Champion-Crespigny-1350-1800/dp/0648191729/ $US20 plus postage
• Amazon in Australia https://www.amazon.com.au/Champions-Normandy-Champion-Crespigny-1350-1800/dp/0648191729/ $Au32.52 with free delivery to Australia

Prices may vary slightly from time to time with exchange rate variations.

The PDF version of the book is free to download from this link: Champions from Normandy 2017.

 

Champions from Normandy

Announcing the publication of Champions from Normandy: An essay on the early history of the Champion de Crespigny family 1350-1800 AD by Rafe de Crespigny.

The Champion de Crespigny family of Normandy were Huguenot refugees who settled in England following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This is the story of a long-lived but essentially minor family in France, just within the fringes of the gentry, whose lineage can be traced in the male line back to the mid-fourteenth century, who prospered from their Huguenot connection but acquired their greatest good fortune when they were forced into exile in England.

Champions from Normandy 2017 :PDF version available for download

Cover of the PDF version of Champions from Normandy

ISBN

• 9780648191704 (hardback) Deposit copy held by the National Library of Australia
• 9780648191728 (paperback)
• 9780648191711 (ebook) Can be downloaded through this link: Champions from Normandy 2017

Libraries Australia ID 61026835

Kathleen Cudmore: a Memoir

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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• Largs Bay Hotel
• Trove Tuesday: Ready for the ring
• Trove Tuesday: home movies in 1933
• Trove Tuesday: S. A. Women’s Golf Championship
• Outdoor Christmas in True Australian Style 4 December 1937

Trove Tuesday: shipwrecked

No title (1987, October 7). The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 – 1995), p. 14. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article122105700

In 2013 I wrote about the launching of our little boat Titania in 1987.  She was a Sprite dinghy a  class first designed in 1934.

My mother, Greg and I launch our new dinghy.

Not long after the launching, Greg and my father, Rafe, took Titania for a sail on Lake Burley Griffin. The wind came up and they discovered what an unseaworthy little tub she was.

It was blowing a gale. Titania was reluctant to head into an 80 kph wind and, when she was forced to try, the tiller snapped. Rafe and Greg were blown downwind the length of the lake and shipwrecked on Aspen Island.

They were obliged to walk back to the car and trailer several kilometres away. In their absence a Canberra Times photographer took this dramatic picture.

When a neighbour casually mentioned the picture of a boat in the newspaper a few days later, Greg had a look at the image proofs. He remembered furling the sails carefully; in the photograph the sail is ‘whipping from side to side’.

The photographer had freed the jib and main to create a more lively and interesting picture.

A search for the arms of the Dana family

A Search for the Arms of the Dana Family

by Rafe de Crespigny

May 2014

Introduction:

The Dana family is noted in American history, and has members and kinfolk around the world. The coat of arms, however, potentially an insignia of identity and relationship, has been a source of confusion; enhanced by contradictory and essentially spurious accounts of the family origin.

Burke’s Encyclopaedia of Heraldry lists the armigerous families of Britain in alphabetical order, but this comprehensive work contains no mention of any family of the Dana surname.¹

Bolton’s American Armory, however, offers four different forms of arms:²

• One, ascribed to Richard Dana (1700-1772) and based on the frame of his portrait, has a silver shield with a blue chevron engrailed [see below] between three “stags:” these last, however, will be discussed further. The crest is a fox and the motto Cavendo tutus.
• The second, based on the bookplate of Richard’s son Francis Dana (1743-1811), is described with a red chevron rather than a blue one, again with the crest of a fox and the motto Cavendo tutus.³ A note adds that Francis’ son Richard Henry Dana Senior (1787-1879) had a gold shield, and unicorns instead of stags.
• A third, based on the bookplate of Charles L Dana, has “On a bend [see below] three chevrons [or chevronels];” no colours are specified. The crest is described as an ox’s head cabossed (facing the viewer); no motto is given. There were several men named Charles Dana with the middle initial L, but this one is probably Charles Loomis Dana (1852-1935), a noted physician.
• And the fourth, from the bookplate of Charles A Dana, has a shield divided horizontally into six bars, with three lions rampant [see below] wearing crowns; again, no colours are specified. Here too the crest is an ox’s head, and there is no motto. Again, there have been many Charles Danas with the middle initial A, but this one is probably Charles Anderson Dana (1881-1975), lawyer, businessman and philanthropist; another Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897) was a well-known journalist associated with General Ulysses S Grant during the American Civil War, but the lawyer appears more likely to have used a coat of arms. 

All these variants are discussed further below, and I argue that Bolton’s is incorrect in a number of details, but the two used by Richard and his son Francis are the earliest recorded and appear the most significant.

A number of different designs, each purporting to be the arms of the Dana family, may also be found on internet websites:

• “Arms and Badges” at http://www.armsandbadges.com/browse.aspx?List=3f80a37c-4a73-4b95-bd3c-e7a36871d7a4; accessed May 2014. This shows a white/silver shield with a red chevron and three stags, similar to Bolton’s description of that used by Francis Dana above. There is an eagle’s head above the shield, looking like a crest, but Arms and Badges applies the eagle’s head to all its presentations; it is not specific to any family. 
• “Heraldry WS” at http://www.heraldry.ws/html/dana.html; accessed May 2014. This is the shield which Bolton’s ascribes to Charles L Dana above, with the colours shown as a black shield, a white bend and green chevrons. 
• “House of Names,” which is associated with “The Red Thread,” presents two versions at http://the-red-thread.net/genealogy/dana.html; accessed May 2014.
• An “English” version has a gold shield, with a red-and-white checked chevron between three silver trefoils – similar to shamrocks, as below; this is heraldically incorrect, for silver should not be placed upon gold.
• An “Italian” version has vertical bars of gold and blue.
• “4crests” at http://www.4crests.com/dana-coat-of-arms.html; accessed May 2014. This design is similar to the English version of House of Names, but the trefoils are green, which is heraldically acceptable.

Outline sketches of the various charges mentioned above are provided here:

Just as the heraldry is confused, so too accounts of the origins of the surname on the websites are varied, vague and unreliable. There are prosaic explanations, including the obvious one that it referred to a Dane or – in contrast – from House of Names, that it is an Anglo-Saxon name, taken from the word dann, meaning “valley,” an early site of settlement. House of Names also finds an Italian origin in Piedmont, implying some connection to the royal house of Savoy, future kings of Italy. Another suggestion cites the personal name Daniel while, still further afield, The Red Thread offers a theory that the Danas may be connected to Dan, one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. 4crests even refers to the mythical princess Danae, who was imprisoned in a tower by her father but was seduced by the Greek god Zeus, manifested as a shower of gold, and gave birth to the hero Perseus. It’s good fun, but it’s not useful.⁴

In fact, the origins of the Dana family are quite obscure, and their heraldry is erratic. By the use of library resources, however, including material which has been placed on the internet, and various items of physical evidence, it is possible to trace some history and to recreate the earliest coat of arms.

The family in Massachusetts: 

There are two very useful books on the history of the family: The Dana Saga: three centuries of the Dana family, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana (1881-1950), published by The Cambridge Historical Society in 1941,⁵ and The Dana Family in America, by Elizabeth Ellery Dana (1846-1939), published at Cambridge in 1956.⁶ The Dana Family is a work of almost seven hundred pages; it was begun by Elizabeth Ellery, continued after her death by her nephew Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, and was finally edited and published by members of the family forming the Dana Genealogical Committee; it contains a most detailed genealogy up to the middle of the twentieth century. In contrast, The Dana Saga has fewer than seventy pages, and was evidently prepared as a preliminary pamphlet while Henry Dana was working on the materials left by his aunt. Besides these, a Memoranda of Some of the Descendants of Richard Dana, compiled by John Jay Dana (1811-1899), was published at Boston in 1865;⁷ and the Personal Papers of Elizabeth Dana have been published by the National Parks Service in 2001.⁸

In her Introduction to The Dana Family, Elizabeth Ellery Dana discusses the possible origins of the family, and concludes that the only likely connection is with Manchester in England, where a Richard Dana was baptised on 31 October 1617. His name is not mentioned again in English records, and it is probable this is the same person as first appears at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1640s. Elizabeth Ellery notes that she has explored the possibility of a French origin, including any connection to the Huguenot exile community in England, but can find no references; and she dismisses the theory of migration from Italy. Amongst other arguments against a non-English origin, Richard Dana held substantial official positions in Massachusetts, and it is most unlikely that a foreigner would have received such appointments in a British colony. The Dana Family notes also that Richard Dana was the only person of that surname to come to America for the next two hundred years, and he is the sole ancestor of the main family.

About 1647 Richard Dana was awarded a land grant on the southern bank of the Charles River. He continued to acquire property, he was an early donor to Harvard College, and he held several important local offices. He died of a fall in 1690.

Richard Dana’s youngest son Daniel (1664-1749) had a successful life without great distinction, but his son Richard (1700-1772), first of the family to attend Harvard, became a magistrate and a leading figure in agitation against the British imperial government. Dressed in full legal regalia, his portrait was painted in 1765 by the celebrated artist John Singleton Copley.⁹

Richard’s son Francis (1743-1811) had a still more impressive career, on a national scale. A leading lawyer and a close associate of George Washington, he was a member of the Constitutional Congresses of 1777, signed the Articles of Confederation in 1778, and was sent as Ambassador to Russia in 1780; the future President John Adams served as his secretary. Again a member of Congress in 1784 and a leader of the Federalist Party, he later joined the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and was Chief Justice from 1791 to 1806. His son and grandson, Richard Henry Sr and Jr, were both lawyers; Richard Henry Sr (1787- 1879) being also a well-known poet and literary critic, while Richard Henry Jr (1815-1882) was the author of Two Years Before the Mast.

The English coat of arms:

Francis Dana was the third son of Richard: the eldest, Edmund, was born in 1739; a second son, Henry, was born in 1741 but died in 1761. Edmund had graduated from Harvard in 1759, and he left America for England about 1760; it does not appear that he ever returned.

Edmund took holy orders in the Church of England, spent time in London, and then held a series of livings, ending as Vicar of Wroxeter in Shropshire. It was not a notable career, in no way comparable to that of his brother Francis, but he did become well connected: in 1765 he married Helen, daughter of Charles the sixth Baron Kinnaird; her mother Barbara was a daughter of the baronet Sir James Johnstone.¹⁰ It was probably through Edmund’s agency that the Dana family first acquired a coat of arms, though it came by a most roundabout route and is of very uncertain authority.

In 1569, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Alderman William Dane of London became Sheriff of that city and was granted a coat of arms by the English College of Heralds. Originally from Stortford in Hertfordshire, he became a member of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers and was Master of the Company in 1570 and in 1573, in which year he died.

A monument set up by his fellow guildsmen describes the shield: ” Or, a chevron engrailed azure, between three hinds gules;” in modern English, that is a golden/yellow shield, with a blue chevron with scalloped edges, surrounded by three female deer coloured red.¹¹ The effect is gaudy, but Tudor heraldry could look like that:

There is some resemblance to the shield of the Ironmongers Company, which I show alongside. It has a silver shield with a chevron surrounded by three objects, in that case they are described as “gads” (wedge-shaped bars) of steel; the chevron, moreover, has three golden swivels, ironwork designed to assist a chain to flow freely; the supporters are lizards but surely represent salamanders, which operate in extreme heat.¹²

So William Dane adapted the shield of his Company but created several points of difference, reversing the colours and even varying the edge of the chevron. It is important to note, however, that the animals on his shield were hinds – female deer – and not stags. The badge of Sir Christopher Hatton (1540-1591), future Lord Chancellor and already a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, was a hind, and it is probable that William Dane was showing respect to a current or potential patron. In similar fashion, when Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world from 1577 to 1580 he named his ship Golden Hind.

William Dane was survived by his wife Margaret nee Kempe, but the couple had only one son, who died young, probably before his father, so there was no-one to inherit the coat of arms.

There is no reason to believe there was any family connection between William Dane of Hertfordshire and London and the Dana family, probably from Manchester, two hundred years later; not even the name is the same, and it is unlikely that the final e was ever sounded. For some reason or other, however, members of the Dana family in the latter eighteenth century persuaded themselves that the shield of William Dane could reasonably be used for their own insignia.¹³

The person responsible for the appropriation was most probably the Reverend Edmund Dana. There is no way to tell how he found out about the grant of arms in 1569, but after his arrival in England in the early 1760s he would have had opportunity to make enquiries, and he may have simply asked at the College of Heralds when he was in London.

One particular reason for Edmund Dana to seek a form of arms would be his marriage to Helen Kinnaird in 1765. Regardless of personal affection, as the daughter of a lord she and her family could expect her to marry a gentleman of coat armour, and Edmund might well have found it desirable to acquire such insignia; since we are told that the couple were wed at Leith in Scotland, where heraldry is governed by Lord Lyon King at Arms independent of the English establishment, there were probably no questions asked.

This being done – and we know that Edmund Dana’s family in England used a version of the shield of William Dane¹⁴ – it is not difficult to accept that he advised his father and his brother Francis of the newly-claimed arms. Their use was never registered by the English College of Heralds and so was formally unlawful in that country, and few American colonists had been granted arms. Edmund Dana was evidently not concerned, however, and his father Richard and brother Francis were certainly not deterred; they appear to have been making use of the insignia by the mid-1760s.

The arms in America: Richard Dana’s portrait frame and Francis Dana’s bookplate:

We have noted that Richard Dana had his portrait painted by John Singleton Copley in 1765. The portrait survives and is presented within a gilded frame, probably of the same date or very close to it, which has at the top a shield and a crest. The picture and frame are privately owned by a member of the family, but it was lent for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during 1992, and a descriptive catalogue was published as American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament.¹⁵ Unfortunately, though there is a large photograph of the portrait and its ornate frame, the design at the top does not come out well and cannot be reproduced here. The charges can nonetheless be identified as a blue chevron and three animals, and the crest is a walking fox. In contradiction to the entry in Bolton’s Armory, however, it is clear that the background of the shield is gold. It is not possible to ascertain whether there is a motto.

About the same time Richard Dana’s son Francis had a bookplate prepared, also showing a coat of arms. The work was engraved by the distinguished silversmith Nathaniel Hurd, and a copy appears facing page 30 of The Dana Saga. This contains the full achievement, and the illustration has a commentary by the author Henry Dana, including a blazon [description] of the whole achievement: “Argent, a chevron engrailed azure, between three stags trippant gules.” The crest is a fox, and the motto is Cavendo tutus: Safe [tutus] by being cautious [cavendo].

Henry Dana adds that “This was the Coat-of-Arms granted in 1569 to John Dana [sic, not William Dane], from whom Francis Dana at one time imagined he was descended.”

In fact, despite Henry Dana’s kindly note, there is no reason to believe that Francis Dana was under any illusions about the descent, and there are a number of problems and doubts about the description of the shield:

Firstly, though engraved metal can have no direct colouring, colour can be indicated by a system of “hatching:” whereas argent or silver is plain, dots are used to show or, the heraldic term for gold, Downward lines indicate gules red, sideways show azure blue, and the lines for vert green are diagonal from top left to bottom right. In the illustration, therefore, dots are discernable on the background of the shield, and so it should in fact be described as or gold, not as argent silver; that is the way William Dana had it in 1569.

Second, while the chevron is indeed engrailed, the hatching is unclear. It is possible that the chevron is red rather than blue, a variation from William Dana’s, but more probable that Francis followed the some blue colour scheme as on the frame of his father’s portraits.

Thirdly, however, though the blazon given by Henry Dana describes the animals as stags, they do not appear to have horns, and are more likely to be the original hinds of William Dana. In that regard, the design proposed by Arms and Badges above, with deer surrounding a red chevron, is comparatively close, but the animals are female without horns, not stags with antlers, and the background of the shield is gold and not silver.

Bolton’s American Armory, as discussed in the Introduction, says that Francis Dana’s son Richard Henry Sr had a bookplate with a gold shield but with unicorns instead of deer. I suspect this is a misreading of the design, and that in fact the animals were correctly hinds.

We may note also that, writing in the 1860s, J J Dana states at page 6 of his Memoranda that “The first known proofs of [the shield’s use are soon after the Revolutionary War.” The evidence of Richard Dana’s portrait frame and the bookplate of Francis Dana would indicate that he is mistaken.

In general, while shields are supposed to be more or less permanently attached to a particular family, subject to slight variations to identify individuals or cadet branches, crests can be changed more readily and mottos can be adopted almost at will. Most families, however, maintain the same tradition from one generation to the next.

The motto adopted by Richard and Francis is shared with other families, sometimes accompanied by the crest or charge of a snake, though it is also used by the Dukes of Devonshire, whose surname is Cavendish which goes quite well with cavendo. For the Danas, though the crest of the fox has no earlier authority, it makes a nice combination with the motto: female deer should be careful when there are foxes about.

The Dana arms in England and Australia: Charlotte Frances Dana’s box:

When I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during September 1999, my aunt Nancy Movius nee Champion de Crespigny showed me a small camphorwood box with a silver plaque engraved with a shield and a motto. The box is a family heirloom which has since been passed to Nancy Movius’ grand-daughter, but at that time its provenance was not known, and she asked me to try to find out what the shield related to and where the box might have come from. I was able to offer her some conclusions, which I have now been able to confirm.

The shield and motto on the plaque are accompanied by neither crest nor supporters, while the smaller figures on the shield are difficult to make out and their colours cannot be identified. In heraldic terms, however, the shield would be blazoned:

Per pale:
dexter: quarterly, 1 and 4, vert an eagle displayed; 2 and 3, argent a lion rampant; sinister: or, a chevron engrailed gules between three hinds.

Translated from the formal language, we have a shield divided in two down the middle. The left-hand part of the shield is again divided into four parts, of which both the top left and bottom right have a green background with a spread-winged eagle; while the top right and bottom left have a white or silver background with a lion rampant.

The motto below the shield is in English: “In God Alone I Trust.”

From the discussion above, we know that the right-hand half is a version of the Dana shield, based upon that of William Dane, but with one significant difference both from William Dane’s shield and from that used by Richard and Francis Dana in America: whereas the background is or gold, and the three animals are female deer, the chevron is engraved with vertical hatching, indicating gules red. It appears that Edmund Dana in England varied William Dane’s shield, but his father and his brother preferred to keep the original colours.

The left-hand half of the shield is not difficult to identify. There are several books which index the charges on shields and the family or organisation which holds them, and one of the most comprehensive is Papworth’s Ordinary of British Armorials, compiled in the nineteenth century and revised in the mid-twentieth.¹⁶ This work ascribes the arms of an eagle on a green ground quartered with a lion rampant on a silver ground to Sherborne “of the Tower of London.” Papworth, moreover, describes the lions as vert green and the eagles as argent white/silver, so each quarter reverses the colours of its neighbour.¹⁷

The reference to the Tower is unusual: most families are described as coming from a particular county and not from a building, even a royal one. Shaw’s Knights of England, however, records that Edward Sherburne, clerk of Ordnance at the Tower, was created a knight bachelor in January 1682 (the beginning of 1683 by modern calculation – New Year at that time was in March).¹⁸ These are presumably the arms that he bore and that his descendants continued to hold, though they may have had no further connection to the Tower.

This shield, moreover, is close to that recorded for the Sherborne family of Lancashire, the main difference being that the (original?) Lancashire branch has the quarters in opposite order, so the lion is in the first and fourth, and the eagle in the second and third. Burke’s Encyclopedia of Heraldry also lists the two families, but adds that the crest of the Lancashire family is a unicorn head, silver, with a horn of gold, while Sherborne of the Tower of London has a green lion rampant guardant [i.e. looking towards the viewer].¹⁹

A shield divided into two relates to a married man whose wife has brothers. When a woman marries, her husband is entitled to “impale” the arms of his father-in-law. If, however, the wife has no brothers, she is a “heraldic heiress:” her husband places her family arms on a small shield in the middle of his own, and their descendants can show the combined arms as “quarterings” thereafter.

On such a shield, the arms on the left hand side are those of the husband’s family and those on the right the wife’s. [Left and right in this case are described as from the observer’s point of view, but in heraldry they are considered from that of the wearer: hence dexter [Latin: right] is on the observer’s left, but is a position of greater honour than sinister [left] which is on the observer’s right.]

So the small shield engraved on the box relates to a married couple, the husband being a man of the Sherborne surname and the wife being born Dana. Fortunately it is comparatively easy to identify them.

The genealogy in The Dana Family lists the children of the Reverend Edmund Dana.²⁰ The first three were daughters: Frances Johnstone, who was born on 8 May 1766 and died on 7 May 1767; Elizabeth Caroline (1767-1844) who had many children; and Frances Johnstone, born on 3 September 1768 and named after her dead sister – a common custom of the time.²¹ In 1793 this second Frances Johnstone Dana married Joseph Sherburne [or Sherborne], and the union was symbolised by the shield which combined their families’ arms.

I have in my possession a family Bible, which came to me from my grandfather Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny. An inscription in the front describes how it was passed to him by the will of his grandmother Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny nee Dana (1820- 1904). The inscription before that reads:

The Gift of Mrs Frances Johnstone Sherborne to her niece and God daughter Charlotte Frances Dana by her will – 

Charlotte Frances Champion Crespigny nee Dana was eighth child of William Pulteney Dana (1776-1861), who was born at Wroxeter as the seventh child and second son of the Reverend Edmund Dana. Frances Johnstone Sherborne nee Dana, William Pulteney’s elder sister, was the aunt of Charlotte Frances and also her godmother.

In order for the box to come into the possession of my aunt Nancy Movius, daughter of Constantine Trent Champion de Crespigny, it must have been owned by her great- grandmother Charlotte Frances nee Dana, who came to Australia with her husband Philip Robert Champion Crespigny in 1852. Like the Bible, it was presumably a gift, and the date when it was given may be indicated by the motto on the plaque: “In God Alone I Trust.” The motto is not associated with either the Sherborne or the Dana families,²² but it would be most suitable for a present from a godmother, and I believe the box may have been given to the infant Charlotte Frances at the time of her christening in 1820.

In any event, the box and its plaque demonstrate that the Dana family in England used the shield with a red chevron between three hinds on a gold background. Two of Charlotte Frances’ brothers, Henry Edmund Pulteney Dana (1817-1852) and William Augustus Dana (1826-1866), also came to Australia: Henry became the founder and head of the Native Police Corps – armed Aborigines mounted on horses – and William was second in command; there are still members of the family in Australia.²³

So the shield of the Dana family in England and Australia, descended from the Reverend Edmund, was gold with a red chevron and three red hinds, while the family in America, descended from Edmund’s father Richard and his younger brother Francis, followed the original sixteenth-century pattern borne by William Dane, with a blue chevron. It is probable that both sides of the family used the crest of a fox and the motto Cavendo tutus.

In footnote 57 on page 29 of The Dana Saga, Henry Dana remarks that Elizabeth Ellery Dana disapproved of any claim to heraldic honours: “the Dana family, with their humble origin, had no right to bear this Coat-of-Arms.” Henry supports her opinion, and particularly objects to the fox crest and to the motto: “The Danas were rarely safe and never cautious.” Richard, Francis and their kinfolk, however, were and are entitled to disagree.

The other Dana arms:

We have noted in the Introduction above that Bolton’s American Armory lists two other sets of arms used by members of the Dana family, both based on bookplates: Charles L[oomis] Dana had a shield with a bend bearing three chevrons; no colours are given, but the footnote to page 29 of The Dana Saga describes the shield as black, with a white bend and three green chevrons: this is the same as that presented by the website of Heraldry WS.

Charles A[nderson] Dana had a shield divided horizontally with six bars, with three lions rampant wearing crowns, but there is no source for any of the colours; presumably the bookplate did not provide any hatchings. I have provided random colouring in order to show the nature of the background and the charges.

Bolton’s American Armory has the crest as an ox’s head cabossed (facing the viewer); it is described by Washbourne as a bull’s head affrontée, which is the same design. Again, no colour is given, and there is no reference to a motto.²⁴

In his footnote to page 29 of The Dana Saga, following his unfavourable view of the arms claimed by Richard and Francis Dana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana remarks that the black shield with a white bend and three green chevrons, accompanied by the crest of a bull’s head crest “is, if possible, even more spurious.” He makes no comment about the shield with bars and three crowned lions rampant, but would no doubt have been even more scathing.

His strictures, however, are not entirely justified. It is clear from Bolton’s American Armory that the two achievements were used, and by different branches of the family:

• While Richard Dana (1700-1772) and Francis were the son and grandson of Daniel (1664-1749), who was the seventh and youngest son of Richard (1617-1690), founder of the family in America;
• Charles Loomis Dana was descended from Caleb (1697-1769), also a son of Daniel but elder brother of the second Richard;
• and Charles Anderson Dana was descended from Benjamin (1659/60-1738), sixth son of the first Richard.

By the early twentieth century, therefore, when Charles Loomis Dana (1852-1935) and Charles Anderson Dana (1881-1975) were making use of their bookplates, the connection was very distant. Strictly speaking, they should perhaps have used some variant of the earlier coat of arms, but given the distance of the relationship and the lapse of time it was reasonable for them to have chosen insignia of their own, and their descendants are free to follow their models.

Finally, we may note once more that while Bolton’s American Armory lists shields and arms for the Dana family, neither Papworth’s Ordinary nor Burke’s Encyclopaedia record any of the forms. Those latter compilations deal only with the heraldry of Britain, where the lineage of William Dane was long extinct; though members of the Dana family made use of his chevron and hinds in England and elsewhere, they never sought to register them.

Conclusion:

There are three sets of arms which can be ascribed to one branch or another of the Dana family. Those connected to Charles Anderson Dana, in the line of Benjamin the sixth son of the found Richard Dana, may like to use the shield with six bars and three crowned lions – and may presumably choose whichever combination of colours seems appropriate.

For those related to Charles Loomis Dana, descended from Caleb son of Daniel and grandson of the first Richard, there is his black shield with a white bend and three green chevrons.

And those of the second Richard’s lineage can claim the tradition of a chevron on a gold shield, with three red hinds or does; the colour of the chevron may vary between blue, for members of the family in the United States, to red for those of English or Australian background.

So there is a broad choice, and individuals may vary colours and shapes to distinguish themselves from their cousins. One notable point, however, is that of the designs found on internet websites, only that shown by Heraldry WS has actually been used by a noted member of the family. The version provided by Arms and Badges has some relation to the initial accession by Richard, Edmund and Francis Dana, taken from the shield of William Dane, but is mistaken as to colour and has stags rather than hinds. All others must be regarded as fictitious and without authority.

……….

Notes:
 
<sup>1. John Burke and John Bernard Burke, Encyclopaedia of Heraldry or General Armory of England, Scotland and Ireland, comprising a registry of all armorial bearings from the earliest to the present time, including the late grants by the College of Arms, London 1844. ↩
2. Charles Knowles Bolton, Bolton’s American Armory: a record of coats of arms which have been of use within the present bounds of the United States, first published Boston 1927 with later editions; most recently revised by Jina Bolton, The Genealogical Publishing Company, 2009, and available on the internet at http://books.google.com.au/books?id=YH5LJSlAsoUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q= Dana &f=false; accessed May 2014. The Dana arms are described on page 45. ↩
3. The colours of the shield and of the chevron are discussed further below. ↩
4. The suggested origins are discussed in similar terms in a footnote at page 2 of The Dana Saga as below. ↩
5. At http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89062874821;view=1up;seq=11; accessed May 2014. Both The Dana Saga and The Dana Family in America, below, have been scanned from a copy held by the University of Wisconsin. ↩
6. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89062875265;view=1up;seq=7; accessed May 2014. ↩
7. E.g. https://archive.org/stream/memorandaofsomeo1865dana/memorandaofsomeo1865dana_djvu.txt; accessed May 2014. ↩
8. http://www.nps.gov/long/historyculture/upload/EED%20Finding%20Aid.pdf; accessed May 2014. ↩
9. The picture – and notably its frame – are discussed further below. ↩
10. Details of the marriage and immediate descent of Edmund Dana appear as Genealogy item 581 at pages 484 to 486 of The Dana Family in America. Edmund and Helen’s first three children, all daughters, were born in London between 1766 and 1768: see below. Page 20 of The Dana Saga tells how in April 1775, just before the outbreak of fighting at Concord and Lexington, Francis Dana was sent as an envoy to England with letters to Benjamin Franklin. In fact Franklin returned to America early in May of that year; their ships probably passed one another in mid-Atlantic. It is also said that while he was in England, Francis sought to persuade his brother’s connections to sympathy with the colonists’ cause; we are not told whether he had any notable effect. ↩
11. See http://www.forgottenbooks.org/readbook_text/Some_ Account_ of_ the_ Worshipful_ Company_ of_ Ironmongers_1000832814/561; accessed May 2014. ↩
12. John Bromley and Heather Child, The Armorial Bearings of the Guilds of London, London 1960, 148-151, with plate facing 134. ↩
13. At pages 6 and 7 of his Memoranda, J J Dana expresses his doubts on the connection to William Dane, and confirms that there is no evidence the name Dana has any connection that that of Dane, and that it has always been a word of two syllables. ↩
14. On the use of arms by Edmund Dana’s family, see the account of the camphorwood box below. ↩
15. Morrison H. Heckscher, American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament, New York 1992; accessed May 2014 at http://books.google.com.au/books?id=0Iqxqguoy BkC&print sec = frontcover&redir_esc= y#v =onepage&q&f=false. The portrait and its frame are illustrated at page 141, with discussion at 142. ↩
16. John Woody Papworth, An Alphabetical Dictionary of Coats of Arms belonging to Families in Great Britain and Ireland: forming an extensive ordinary of British armorials; edited from page 696 by Alfred W. Morant; reprinted from the original 1874 edition with introductions by G D Squibb and A R Wagner, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, Baltimore 1965. ↩
17. Papworth, page 304. The surname appears in different texts as Sherborne, Sherburne and Sherbourne. There is no doubt, however, that it is the same family. ↩
18. William A Shaw, The Knights of England: a complete record from the earliest time to the present day of the knights of all the orders of chivalry in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of knights bachelors; incorporating a complete list of knights bachelors dubbed in Ireland, compiled by G. D. Burtchaell, London 1906, volume II, page 258. ↩
19. John Burke and John Bernard Burke, Encyclopaedia of Heraldry, London 1844. ↩
20. The Dana Family, page 485. ↩
21. Johnstone was the maiden name of Helen nee Kinnaird’s mother, the child’s grandmother. ↩
22. See, for example, Henry Washbourne, The Book of Family Crests, London 1882, which includes “A Dictionary of Mottos.” ↩
23. There is an entry for Henry Edward Pulteney Dana compiled by Marilynn I. Norman in The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Canberra 1966: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dana-henry-edward-pulteney-1952/text2327; accessed May 2014. The year of his birth is given as 1820, but The Dana Family has 1817, which would be correct: Charlotte Frances was born in March 1820, and she was not Henry’s twin. Further details are provided by Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True: the Aboriginal police of the Port Phillip district 1837-1853, Melbourne University Press 1988; pages 44-49 discuss the family background. ↩
24. Washbourne, Family Crests, volume I, page 131. ↩
25. This is the shield presented by Heraldry WS; the present design is taken from that website at http://www.heraldry.ws/html/dana.html; accessed May 2014. ↩</sup>

Family stories

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.