A Stream of Lives

Historical biographies

Author: Angela Coulter

After a career in health research at the University of Oxford, the King's Fund and Picker Institute Europe, Angela Coulter stepped aside from writing academic papers and turned her attention to historical biography. This site details the stories she has uncovered.

Attempted Assassination of Queen Victoria: Edward Oxford’s Story

18 September 2024 / / 0 Comments
Edward Oxford tries to shoot Queen Victoria

Recent news of threats to kill Donald Trump put me in mind of the case of Edward Oxford who attempted to shoot Queen Victoria. John Birt Davies played a key role in his Old Bailey trial when he appeared as an expert medical witness.

Shots ring out

On 10th June 1840, four months after their wedding, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were travelling through Hyde Park in an open carriage waving at the crowds and enjoying the fresh air. The Queen was pregnant with her first baby. All of a sudden, their peace was disturbed by a young man who had been waiting for them with a pair of loaded pistols. He rushed forward to within three yards of the carriage, discharging both guns in a cloud of smoke. Luckily, both shots missed their target, and the Queen and Prince Albert were alarmed but unharmed.

The young man was seized by onlookers and quickly disarmed, all the while openly confessing to the crime. The police were called, he was arrested and charged with treason. Needless to say, this extraordinary event attracted huge coverage in the national press.

The would-be assassin was an unemployed eighteen-year-old ex-barman named Edward Oxford. He was living in Camberwell at the time of the crime, but he had been born and brought up in Birmingham. By a strange twist of fate, Birt Davies knew Oxford’s family, having been called to their home in 1824 to treat his father, who had poisoned himself with an overdose of laudanum. When Edward Oxford’s trial opened at the Old Bailey on 8th July numerous witnesses were called, including Birt Davies.

Oxford’s trial

Oxford’s defence focused on his allegedly unbalanced state of mind at the time of the offence. It was a common assumption that mental abnormalities could be inherited, so the court was keen to hear about Oxford’s family background.

Witnesses, including his mother, described a traumatic childhood with a violent father and a grandfather who had been placed in a straitjacket on account of his insanity. His father was frequently intoxicated, often threatening to kill himself, and he treated his wife with brutal violence in front of their seven children. Oxford senior died in 1829 when his son was aged just seven, but from a very young age Edward had displayed disturbed behaviour, often crying without apparent cause, falling into violent rages and threatening to beat up his siblings. He was said to be obsessed with firearms and gunpowder.

When Birt Davies was called to the witness stand, he was asked his opinion on the sanity or insanity of the prisoner. Birt Davies stated he believed Oxford to be insane, citing as evidence his abnormal reactions – he had made no attempt to conceal himself when apprehended, had spoken openly about the crime, and had no apparent motive for his attack on the Queen.

Further witnesses confirmed the view that he was of unsound mind. This opinion impressed the jury who, after deliberation, reached the verdict: ‘Not guilty, being insane. To be detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure.’ 

Required to serve an indeterminate period in a mental hospital, Oxford was committed to the Bethlem asylum in London where he spent several years, before being transferred to Broadmoor. When finally released after twenty-four years of incarceration, he went into exile in Australia, where he lived under an assumed name and died in Melbourne in 1900.

Queen Victoria, who was said to have been very dissatisfied with the not guilty verdict, survived eight assassination attempts during her long reign, of which this was the first. Her refusal to be cowed by these threats helped to earn her huge public respect. Will it be the same for Trump I wonder?

For more on this story and other cases, see my new book Probing Deaths, Saving Lives.





 

Letitia Logan: an Irishwoman’s Extraordinary Life in 19th Century Australia

19 June 2024 /

Now that my latest book, Probing Deaths, Saving Lives, a biography of John Birt Davies, Birmingham’s Victorian coroner, is with the publishers, I’ve started to research the next one. The plan is to focus on the extraordinary life of a privileged 19th century Irishwoman, Letitia Logan, who left her comfortable life in Sligo to spend five years in a remote penal colony in eastern Australia.

Sligo

The Mall, Sligo, where Letitia lived for a time after returning from Australia

Born Letitia Anne O’Beirne, she was descended from Irish landed gentry. Her father was Connell O’Beirne, a barrister from Sligo in the west of Ireland and her mother was Letitia Bingham, daughter of Henry Bingham of Newbrook in County Mayo and sister of Lord Clanmorris.

She met Scottish army officer Captain Patrick Logan when his regiment, the 57th Foot, was stationed in Galway. Letitia’s father had died when she was just ten years old so Patrick had to ask her uncle, William O’Beirne, for permission to marry his niece. This was eventually granted and they married on 5th Sept 1823 at the Anglican church of St John’s in Sligo. She was 24 and he was 31.

Their first child, Robert Abraham, was born one year later. When the baby was just five months old Patrick received orders to proceed with his family to Australia. Letitia invited her sister, Hannah Charlotte O’Beirne to accompany them on the long arduous journey. They departed from the Cove of Cork on 5th Jan 1825 on 460-ton merchant ship, the Hooghly, travelling via Rio de Janeiro before arriving at Port Jackson, New South Wales on 22nd April. Requisitioned as a convict ship, the Hooghly was carrying 195 male convicts guarded by 35 soldiers under Patrick’s command.

Moreton Bay

The Commandant’s Cottage at Moreton Bay

The Logan family spent eleven months in Sydney before Patrick was ordered to move north to Moreton Bay (modern-day Brisbane) to take charge of a newly developed penal colony. The convicts’ quarters and farm were in dire need of effective leadership to knock them into shape before a planned expansion could take place.  The remote base, inaccessible except by sea, housed the most difficult prisoners and re-offenders. The Logans lived in a wooden single-storey cottage, a complete contrast to Letitia’s comfortable home in Sligo.  

Their second child, a girl named Letitia Bingham, was born at the commandant’s cottage on 23rd July 1826. There the family remained until the tragic day in October 1830 when Patrick’s body was discovered in the bush a few miles from the colony. He had been brutally murdered. His devastated widow, her sister and the two small children proceeded by boat to Sydney for his funeral, a grand affair organised by the Governor of New South Wales, before embarking on their long sad journey back to Ireland.

Very little is known about Letitia’s character or how she coped with the distressing situation she found herself in. Occasional visitors who spent time at the Logan’s cottage in Moreton Bay gave favourable reports – Letitia was said to be friendly, kind, intelligent and good company. We know she was left short of funds after Patrick’s murder, but was required to pay her own passage home because the British government had refused her request for a pension. She continued to lobby for a widow’s pension after her return home and was eventually granted the paltry sum of £70 a year.  

She returned to Sligo with her children where they lived with her mother for a while. She also visited her husband’s relatives at Duns in the Scottish Borders, who took charge of her son Robert’s education. Some time after her mother’s death in 1850, she moved to Dun Laoghaire near Dublin. Letitia seems to have suffered from ill-health for many years – both in Australia and after she returned home – but she lived until 1872 when she died at Corrig Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, aged 73 .

The challenging task I’ve set myself is to fill the gaps in these bare bones of Letitia’s story. Patrick Logan’s history – how he developed the colony, his treatment of the convicts, and his explorations in the hinterland – has been recounted before, but very little is known about Letitia. She is a principal subject in Jessica Anderson’s novel, The Commandant, but that’s a work of fiction and unlikely to be a true account of her character.

I’d be really pleased to hear from anyone who can help shed light on Letitia’s history, or on what life for women like her would have been like in 19th century Ireland or Australia.

Redfern Davies and Sister Dora

20 December 2023 / / 0 Comments

Redfern Davies

Born in Birmingham in 1834, John Redfern Davies was the eldest son of John Birt Davies, the Birmingham coroner. A doctor, like his father, Redfern Davies was viewed by his contemporaries as one of the brightest and most able young British surgeons. After training in Birmingham, London and Paris he was keen to devote his skills to helping the poor. He accepted a post as resident surgeon at the Birmingham workhouse infirmary.

One day in December 1860 he was thrown from his horse while on his way home from the workhouse, suffering concussion and serious injuries to his head and spine. After about six weeks his condition seemed to improve and he felt able to return to work, but he was still suffering intense neuralgic pain. He worked on for another year, but eventually decided to take an extended break in an attempt to regain his former state of health.

He travelled to the United States where he volunteered his services as surgeon to the Federal forces engaged in the American Civil War. He spent four months working at a hospital in the city of Frederick, Maryland, where he treated soldiers wounded in the bloody civil war battles of South Mountain and Antietam. There he gained a great deal of experience in the treatment of gunshot wounds, publishing papers in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.

In 1863, he returned home and volunteered his services to Walsall Cottage Hospital. Walsall was a rough, dirty industrial town in the centre of the Black Country, about nine miles north of Birmingham. The small voluntary hospital specialised in treating workers in the hazardous heavy industries that had developed around the town. It was staffed by local doctors and resident nurses.  The nurses came from an Anglican order in north-east England. They had received little in the way of formal training, relying mainly on practical experience gained in a convalescent home.

Dorothy Pattison (Sister Dora)

Redfern Davies joined the Walsall hospital at about the same time as vicar’s daughter, Dorothy Pattison, arrived there to take up her first proper nursing post. Dorothy, her nine sisters and two brothers had suffered unhappy childhoods at the hands of an excessively controlling father and timid mother. Her brothers had managed to escape the oppressive family home, but the girls had to put up with their father’s black moods and his strange determination that they should never marry. By time Dorothy was twenty-nine years old, she had known little of life beyond the gloomy rectory.

She had a long-held ambition to become a nurse. The only way she could see to achieving this was to join a religious order, so she left her home to sign up as a novice at the Anglican Sisterhood of the Good Samaritan based at Coatham, near Redcar. There she underwent rudimentary training and gained some practical nursing experience.

In 1865, still only a novice in the sisterhood, Dorothy was sent to Walsall Cottage Hospital to replace a nursing sister who had fallen ill. She immediately threw herself into the role heart and soul, impressing everyone with her energy and commitment. Local people had been suspicious of the sisters, questioning their motives for coming to Walsall, but Dorothy’s evident commitment to their health and welfare won them over. Known to everyone in Walsall as Sister Dora, she soon took charge of the hospital, working all hours to care for the patients and improve the nursing standards.

Statue of Sister Dora in Walsall town centre

Novices in the religious order did not have to take vows of celibacy and were free to marry. When Dorothy and Redfern Davies met, they were immediately attracted to each other. She was fascinated by his accounts of travels in Europe and America, and he taught her a great deal about diagnosis, treatments, surgical procedures and techniques. Both were independent, highly intelligent, idealistic and deeply committed to their patients. Both also possessed gifts of charm and persuasiveness. Eventually they agreed to marry.

However, they disagreed on religion. She retained a deep religious faith, but he was a humanist, a follower of Darwin and Huxley, who did not share her faith. Dorothy dreaded the thought of giving up her nursing career, as she would have to when she married. Reluctantly, after much introspection, she decided to break off the engagement. Redfern Davies’s reaction to this decision is not recorded, but on 15th October 1866 he resigned from the Walsall Cottage Hospital and returned to Birmingham. They were never to meet again.

Redfern Davies died on 3rd March 1867. His death was attributed to complications of the earlier riding accident, leading to an aneurysm. The Lancet said of him that ‘very few surgeons have displayed in the early years a more thorough appreciation of scientific surgery’. He was remembered fondly in Walsall too. The local press reported that he had performed his duties at the hospital with credit, referring to ‘his kindly disposition and gentlemanly manner’ which had won him many friends among his colleagues and his patients.

Meanwhile Dorothy remained resolutely single, continuing to deliver outstanding nursing care in Walsall until her death from breast cancer in 1878. She had achieved virtual cult status in the town and is still revered as a local heroine.  Admired by Florence Nightingale and George Eliot, a friend of her brother, some believe she was the model for Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Eliot’s Middlemarch. She is commemorated in a statue in Walsall town centre – the first ever statue of a non-Royal female erected in England.

The spinster and the orphan

16 April 2023 / / 0 Comments

Adoption

Life could be tough for single women in the Victorian era, but Jane Kerr Davies was exceptionally self-assured. Eldest daughter of John Birt Davies, Jane never married, living at home with her parents until she was middle-aged. When her father died in 1878 she and her mother, Sarah, moved to a smaller house in Edgbaston. They lived there together until Sarah’s death four years later. She then took the remarkable step, for a single woman, of adopting a daughter.

Adoption was an informal business in those days. There were no legal requirements and abandoned or orphaned children were either looked after by relatives or fostered in baby farms, orphanages, charities or the workhouse.  Some of these children suffered neglect or worse. Philanthropists and social reformers took up the cause, setting up many charities whose mission was to help orphans.

The Infant Orphan Asylum at Wanstead was one of these charities. Queen Victoria was its patron and it gained the support of many eminent folk. Admissions were reserved for children of ‘respectable’ families. Unusual among Victorian orphanages, this establishment admitted babies as well as older children. There were always more candidates than places available. This painting by George Elgar Hicks shows relatives desperate to get places for children in a London orphanage when family bereavements left them caring for more children than they could cope with.  

An Infant Orphan Election at the London Tavern ‘Polling’ by George Elgar Hicks, 1865 [Museum of London]

Adoptee

One such child was Charlotte Rose Grabham, born on 22nd September 1882 and orphaned when she was just sixteen months old. Her parents, John Grabham, a professional singer, and his wife Louisa had been married for about eighteen years and had six living children at the time of Charlotte’s birth, but by January 1884 both parents were dead. There was no one who could look after the children so Charlotte and her elder sister, Adelaide, were admitted to the Wanstead orphanage.

How and why Jane Davies came to adopt this orphaned baby girl remains a mystery.  By 1884 she was living alone, having recently lost both her parents, three of her brothers and her youngest sister. She had inherited considerable wealth following these bereavements and may have wanted to put it to good use. No doubt she had given up any hope of marriage and maybe she was seeking companionship.

At any rate, Charlotte was taken into the comfortable surroundings of Jane’s Edgbaston home. It must have been a strange transition for the middle-aged spinster – Jane was about fifty at the time – to take on responsibility for a toddler. However, the arrangement seems to have worked well. Charlotte remained living with Jane into her mid-twenties when she married Jane’s nephew, Birt, son of Clement Davies.

Jane died on 17th September 1908, just seven months before Charlotte and Birt’s wedding. She left instructions that her body should be cremated at the Birmingham Crematorium without any religious ceremony and the ashes scattered in her garden. The bulk of her large estate was bequeathed to Charlotte, with the remainder to her nephews and nieces and to Birmingham University. Her will made it clear that if any one of her legatees became a Catholic or dabbled in ‘psychical purposes’, they would be dispossessed.

Pioneering athletes in Birmingham

8 August 2022 / / 0 Comments

Birmingham Athletic Club

Most spectators at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would have been unaware of the city’s lengthy role in promoting athletics competitions. The Birmingham Athletic Club (BAC), one of the first British multi-sport clubs, was established in 1866. And 155 years ago, just one year after its launch, the BAC hosted the National Olympian Games in Birmingham, a precursor of the international Olympic games.  

The German Gymnasium, London, 1866

The club’s success was due in large part to the energetic efforts of two outstanding local athletes, Clement Davies and Joseph Hubbard.  Clement Davies was the son of John Birt Davies, professor of forensic medicine at Queen’s College and the first coroner of Birmingham. Educated at King Edward’s grammar school and Cambridge university where he developed his athletic skills, Clement excelled at jumping. At a sports day organised by the Birmingham Rifle Volunteers in May 1865, Clement, aged 23, won first prizes for the highest standing jump, longest running jump, vaulting the bar, and the sack race. He was also a keen boxer.

At another military sports display a few months later, participants were astonished to see a muscular young man push through the crowd of spectators into the arena. Uninvited, he proceeded to perform a series of elegant exercises on the horizontal bar, the like of which no one had seen before. The crowd, hugely impressed, demanded to know who the interloper was. His name was Joseph Hubbard, an employee of a local manufacturing firm, who had taught himself to perform astonishing athletic feats. Members of the BAC committee were so impressed that they sent him off to the German Gymnasium in London for training.

These two young men took the lead in getting the nascent athletics society off the ground. With Clement Davies as honorary secretary and Joseph Hubbard as chief trainer, or ‘professor’, the BAC organised its first gymnastics display in July 1866, drawing on advice from Ernst Ravenstein of the German Gymnastics Society.

Held at their makeshift gymnasium at Bingley Hall, the performances included running, leaping, vaulting and sack races, and exercises on the parallel bars. The club leased premises at Portland Road and the Kent Street baths, and other sports were added to their repertoire, including boxing, swimming and foxhunting. They recruited 250 members in their first year, as well as organising private classes for women and special sessions for schoolchildren.

The BAC was affiliated to the National Olympian Association (NOA), enabling members to compete in national contests. When the association was looking for a venue to hold its second national games, they were delighted to receive an offer from Birmingham. Clement Davies was appointed secretary of the NOA alongside his role at the BAC, with responsibility for organising the national competition.  Held over three days in June 1867, the NOA’s festival of sport began with a procession and ended with a grand ball. Competitors came from London, Manchester, Norwich, Derby, Newcastle, Leeds and elsewhere.

Various prizes were on offer, including ‘tilting at the ring’, in which horse riders galloped towards a cross-bar on which hung two small rings that they had to carry away on the end of a pointed lance. There were also running and jumping contests, wrestling and boxing, athletics, cricket, gymnastics and swimming. The event was considered a huge success and Clement Davies was commended for his ‘indefatigable energy’ in directing the proceedings.

Joseph Hubbard’s long career as an athlete and ‘professor of muscular science’ was still going strong in 1888. On the horizontal bar, parallel bars, and on horseback he was said to be ‘wonderfully good and no professional trapeze performer has been able to teach him anything’, so said the Birmingham Mail.

Clement Davies, my great grandfather, was too busy running his hardware factory to continue competing at a high level, but he remained actively involved in the BAC, being elected its vice-president and then president, a post he held until 1886. His interests expanded to include more sedentary activities, such as the card game whist, on which he published a book, but his support for the athletics club continued. He was a familiar figure at the annual gymastics displays at Birmingham Town Hall until the end of his life in May 1911.

Civil Service athletics at Beaufort House 1869
An athletics competition

Birmingham heritage

11 February 2022 / / 0 Comments

Just back from a trip to Birmingham to do more research for my forthcoming biography of John Birt Davies, Birmingham’s first coroner. The Wolfson Centre archives at Birmingham Central Library yielded some fascinating material, including microfilms of the register kept by Davies of the 30,000 inquests he presided over from 1839-1875.

I hadn’t been to the new library before. It’s extraordinary on the outside with its grey and gold layers covered in metal filigree rings – not my taste I have to say – but inside it’s stunning, with a circular design spanning ten levels. And almost every study space in the huge library was occupied, mainly by students, so it’s obviously providing a really useful service for young Brummies.

Tracing the coroner’s footsteps was more difficult. He arrived in Birmingham in 1822 after completing his medical training at Edinburgh University. He set up his first medical practice at 19 New Street, but no trace of the original building remains in this central shopping street. After his marriage to Sarah Redfern, the family home and medical practice moved to 25 Newhall Street where they lived until his retirement. Disappointingly few buildings from that era remain. Their last home was at 280 Hagley Road, Edgbaston, but that building has gone too.

Birmingham suffered greatly from bombing during WW2, but much of the destruction has happened since the 1960s. Those responsible for the mid-twentieth century developments favoured motor cars over pedestrians, but there’s been a change of heart since. Redevelopments at New Street Station and the Bullring are more successful, and the pedestrianisation of Centenary Square will be a triumph if it’s ever finished.

Most museums and galleries were shut at the time of our visit (Feb 2022), including the main museum in Chamberlain Square that I had very much wanted to see. It was undergoing renovation and there were signs of frantic activity to get everything ready in time for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, due to open in Birmingham on July 28th.

In Victorian times coroner’s inquests were held in pubs, often with the dead body present. I had hoped to find some of the old pubs still standing, particularly the Grand Turk in Ludgate Hill where many inquests took place, but sadly most have disappeared. I found just one where Davies had presided – the George and Dragon on the corner of Albion Street and Carver Street, now lovingly restored and renamed the Pig and Tail.

Old George and Dragon, now Pig and Tail
Pub where inquests used to be held

Despite the wanton destruction of Birmingham’s heritage, I did make a few more exciting finds. The Davies family tomb in Edgbaston Old Church, with memorials to my great great grandfather, great grandfather and father is still there, as is the tomb of Clement and Ann Cotterill, my fourth great grandparents, in the graveyard of St Philip’s Cathedral.

And it was great to see once again the clocktower erected in honour of John Birt Davies still standing by the Five Ways roundabout. The clock had stopped, though, and it was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Birmingham City Council – please wake up!

Victorian clock
Memorial to John Birt Davies at Five Ways, Birmingham

Murder of Patrick Logan

10 December 2021 / / 0 Comments

Explorer

In 1830, Captain Patrick Logan, explorer and commandant of the Moreton Bay penal colony, was waiting to join his regiment in India. Keen to complete the maps he had been working on, he decided to go exploring once more. On 9th October, accompanied by his batman and five prisoners, all good bushmen, the party set off into the outback with some bullocks to carry their packs.

Patrick Logan of Moreton Bay
Captain Patrick Logan

Along the way they were threatened by a large group of about 200 aborigines. The group followed them for a day or two before disappearing. A week later Logan went off alone on horseback to explore a creek, returning to the camp in the evening.

The next morning, he told his companions to prepare for the return home while he went off alone once more to follow a trail he had spotted. He did not return that evening, so the men set off to find him, but without success. They concluded that he must have returned to base alone, so decided to follow him back.

On their return, however, there was no sign of him. The alarm was raised and a search party went into the bush once again, retracing their steps to an earlier camping place. There they found Logan’s saddle with the stirrups cut off, but nothing else.

Returning the following day they discovered his waistcoat, covered in blood, his compass and part of his notebook. Further searches revealed his dead horse and, finally, his body, naked and half buried in a shallow grave, with clear signs that he had been murdered.

The subsequent investigation concluded that Logan had been surprised by aborigines when he camped for the night alone, probably because he had been unable to reach his colleagues. With no time to saddle his horse he had leapt on it bareback, with his attackers in pursuit. The horse had apparently stumbled and fallen into the creek. Logan was killed by native spears while trying to extricate it.

Patrick Logan explorer
Memorial to the explorer

Logan’s body was carried down to Sydney where he was buried in a state funeral with full military honours. The colonial governor, Sir Ralph Darling, gave a fulsome tribute. Logan’s widow, Letitia, and her two small children then sailed back to England. She had to pay for the passage out of her own pocket, as the government provided no financial help.

After returning to her home in Ireland, Letitia petitioned the British government for a colonial pension, even writing to Queen Victoria to seek her support. Her efforts to gain compensation continued for more than 30 years. Eventually, and most reluctantly, the government awarded her a pension of £70 per year.

The Jacobites of Lanrick

6 November 2021 / / 8 Comments

Lanrick estate

On a trip to Scotland in October 2021 we decided to see if we could find the Lanrick estate, once the home of my paternal ancestors. I knew it was in Perthshire, somewhere between Doune and Callander, but finding the actual spot was a challenge. After several false turns we came across a long low wall stretching for miles across the deeply rural landscape. We followed this round until we spotted a lodge and a large gate. Now a holiday rental, the family staying at the lodge confirmed that it was indeed the entrance to Lanrick.

Encouraged by the ‘right to roam’ that persists in Scotland, we decided to explore. We wandered down a long lane bordered by mature trees in stunning autumn colours and eventually found the sparkling River Teith that runs through the estate. No one was about, so we strolled along the banks of the gorgeous river, musing as we went on the lives of Jacobite family who had lived there.

Lanrick lodge and gateway

In 1817, William Brown, my third great grandfather, married Jane Wilsone, a descendent of two landed families, the Wilsones and the Haldanes. Jane’s father, Charles, was one of Glasgow’s most eminent surgeons, a founding board member of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and a leading light in the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons. A tall portly man of engaging, easy manners, he was popular with both his colleagues and his patients.

Charles’s father, William Wilsone of Murrayshall, was a Writer to the Signet (the Scottish name for a solicitor), but being an Episcopalian, a Jacobite supporter, and a nonjuror, the Hanoverian government barred him from legal practice after the Jacobite rising of 1745. He was forced to leave his family estate at Sands and move to Murrayshall, where he became factor and land steward to his wife’s cousin, the Laird of Polmaise and Touchadam. Charles’s mother was Lilias Haldane, daughter of John Haldane of Lanrick Castle.   

Lanrick Castle by Jane Anne Wright [The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum]

Jacobites

The Haldanes of Lanrick were staunch Jacobites. John Haldane participated in the ’45 rising in support of Charles Edward Stuart, the Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie), as did his son, Alexander. Following the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden in April 1746, John Haldane fled to France and remained there in exile for twenty years, while Alexander Haldane went to England where he lived under an assumed name, unable to return to Scotland.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s two novels, Kidnapped and Catriona, are set in the period after Culloden, giving a vivid account of how various Jacobites, including Alan Breck Stewart and his kinsman, James Stewart of the Glen, evaded capture by the government forces. Based on real people of the same name, James Stewart, wrongfully accused and hanged for the murder of Colin Roy ‘The Red Fox’ Campbell, was half-brother to Charles Stewart of Ardshiel, husband of Lilias Haldane’s sister, Isobel. Charles Stewart also fought at Culloden and fled to France afterwards.

A canny Scot, John Haldane had settled his estate on his children before his exile, so Lanrick was not confiscated, unlike many other Jacobite estates. John Haldane was eventually able to return to Lanrick, where he died in 1764 aged 87. His two sons had died before him, so the estate was inherited by his six daughters, one of whom was Lilias, mother of Charles. They sold the Lanrick estate to Sir John Murray Macgregor for £14,000.

River on Lanrick estate
River running through the Lanrick estate

It was sold again subsequently and remained standing until 2002, when its owner, unable or unwilling to pay for its upkeep, decided to demolish it without first obtaining listed building consent. He was admonished by the local authority and ordered to pay a fine of £1,000, a paltry sum for the destruction of such a fine historic building.

Charles Wilsone had twelve brothers and sisters. Perhaps not surprisingly, in view of their ancestor’s link to King James and his Queen, William Wilsone’s thirteen children were also Jacobite supporters, like their father. Because of their refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the King, his sons were barred from entering traditional upper-class professions such as the army, navy or the church, so Charles became a doctor.

Charles’s three unmarried sisters, Miss Marion, Miss Jenny and Miss Lily, lived at Murrayshall all their lives. Known as the Jacobite ladies of Murrayshall, they took every opportunity to demonstrate their disapproval of the Hanoverian monarchy. Generous hosts to friends and family of all political persuasions, when Jacobite sympathisers were invited to dinner, the toast was always ‘to him over the water’, a reference to James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, exiled in Continental Europe.

In the eighteenth century all Scottish churches were required to say prayers for King George, under threat of closure if they did not. This included the Episcopalian church attended by the Wilsone sisters of Murrayshall. When prayers were said for the Royal family, they would cough and sniff, shut their prayer books with a slam, rise from their knees and yawn audibly.

The family connection to Lanrick had ended when the estate was sold, but these eighteenth century Jacobite ancestors were memorialised by my great grandparents, Charles and Jessie Wilsone Broun. When they married in 1894 and moved to Rugeley in Staffordshire, they named their family home Lanrick House.

Lanrick House, Rugeley

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

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