Whelans

Good Lord. I haven't posted in over six months.

I have been hard at coping with life's strange and unwelcome barrage while trying to get some information on my great grandfather John Whelan, seaman of Newmarket-on-Fergus, Clare, Ireland. He married Johann Scully in Melbourne in 1875, I think, and had two children: Patrick and John. Just where did all the family photos go?

-destroyed I expect, by the harridan who married Patrick after he was widowed because he had some money. She isolated him from his friends, made him move suburbs, farmed her step-children out as slaves to her sister and when he died, then bolted, taking no pains to secure the house (which was plundered) nor even tell my grandfather, John Whelan, hairdresser, that his father had died. Patrick's daughter thought her brother had ignored the funeral and there arose a lifetime rift.

A little bit of bitch goes a long, long way.

My chances of finding any pictures, which are usually good, are zero.

Sparrows, Bridges, Smith and Morrises.

This week has seen me try to put into some sane form, all the information of the Sparrow tea family, the Bridges of London (the family, not the architectural river spanning wonders), the ever puzzling Smiths and the family of Mrs. Frederick Sparrow, Ann, whose family were the Morrises, who were connected with Christopher Smith, Lord Mayor of London.

Its still a mess in my head but I am getting there.

Robert Sparrow looks as if he is the front runner in the R.S.Smythe paternity search.

Stay tuned.

Doom, gloom, glamour and sleep

Of late, I have been extremely run-down to the point of immobility. The cause of this agonizing lassitude is over concentration upon one thing. This is never a good idea. So I have decided that I should take a long break, a kind of sabbatical, even though I am not sticking to the regimented seven years. I need a break. Smythes, Sparrows, solitude and the minor brands of despair have been a bit too much, for too long.

But I shall still check in and post material I already have compiled. I'm not jumping ship: just moving my bed out of the bridge.

Rob-a-bob-Robson

Once again the Robsons have been occupying my time, while I wait for correspondent various other material replies from the land of lords, muffins and pounds sterling. Courtesy of mundia (subject to strange machinations of available data: accessible sometimes, and at others, not), google books, two census sites, nineteenth century databases, smaller armada of rabbit holes, and a voo-doo hex, I have been putting together a picture of Charles Robson around whom forces of family swirled, and quite forceful they were too—very driven.

NOTE: as of 2021, the under weitten may refer to another family, and not the one belonging to the Robsons that include Charles and Christopher. I will add a [§] at the sentence end to indicate possible error. Since the Robsons of Kelso are more or less all related, this branch may be consanguineous.

Charles had been born in Kelso where his father, the solicitor Charles Robson  [§] of Bridge Street, Kelso, and of "Greenhill" had been in business with John Smith, a senior man of the bar. Charles Robson Senior, was also an esquire—he had property: not only his residence, but properties that paid returns. One of these properties in Kelso itself, he gave while still living, to three sons, George, William and Charles. The latter two were living in London, the former (George) stayed in Kelso. [§: there were two Christopher Robsons at law, hence the confusion. ]

The family seems to have be bifurcated along the tines of law and printing. Christopher Robson, the London based Barrister of Clifford's Inn, had followed his father into law and an earlier William ( perhaps an uncle) started in printing/lithography in London at the rousing dawn of the 1800s. Charles' boys became master-printers, while two of Christopher's boys went into law.

I wondered from whence came the money to support these enterprises: it seems that Charles Rosbon Senior may have had other brothers, also in Law or other descendant trades of pen-craft. When I dug a little deeper, I found that in 1860, there arrived in Roxburghshire, a James Robson who brought with him, sheep—special sheep—sheep sufficiently special to be featured heavily in agricultural history of the area.

James Robson (and his famous sheep) had come from Northamptonshire, crossbred (the sheep, not James) with local breeds, became a success, and raked in the shekels. Is this the source of the Robson's generational wealth and perpetual opportunity?

What is sure, despite my above musings, is that both Christopher and Charles left large families—large enough to warrant aspirin when trying to piece it together.

Christopher Robson (who was by the way, the barrister for George Levey, Charles' partner) married twice: first to Caroline Jenkins Griffiths (connected to Jenkins and Button, barristers of 5 Tavistock Street?) who died in 1851, and who, I assume, bore Christopher lots of little Robsons, though, if she did I haven't found them. He remarried later in 1852, while poor Caroline was barely warm in the box, to Emma Sarah Dove, from whom he certainly did obtain a brood. She was very much younger than him: twenty-five years younger! There is some evidence that Charles Robson Senior had done the same thing—that is, marrying twice. When Christopher died in 1867, his widow married a widower and solicitor, Harman Edgar Tidy, who acted as step-father to the brood, with the addition of his own children. One of Christopher's boys, Charles (another Charles) eventually married his step-sister, Ada.

Charles Robson, printer, Christopher's brother, married once (as far as I know) to Caroline Druitt in 1842. This was actually quite late to marry for Charles (born in about 1806), so he too, may have had an earlier wife—though no facts have surfaced.

Stay tuned: I have nearly finished an exploratory tree, which is my way of saying it is merely a report of what I have found, with question mark icons all over the place. I am happy to say that a picture is beginning to form.

Ideology, metastasized

Some years ago, I was interrupted while reading, on a tram, on my way to Hawthorn. The agent of this uninvited disturbance was a Hare-Krishna devotee (out among the illusional masses) who, in employment of his obvious training, sat down, and asked me what I thought the biggest problem was in the world. I don't quite know what he expected me to say, but I had replied: The mishandling of thought, and the subservience to glamour (my standard method of arresting the dumpling-brains in their tracks and kindling the curious minded into life).

Well, I don't think that was in his manual so, he fell back on his training and asked me if I did not think that the biggest problem was not, in fact, ignorance (obviously this was the reply he wanted). I replied: That I thought that was what I just said. There followed a garbled stream of nonsense that is always ejected from the brain when ideology meets mentation: the collision of the what-to-think with the how-to-think.

The ability to parse information and the skill of relating the gathered facts and forming some sort of relationships the basis of all reasoning; a truth of any kind is the offspring of the proof of a relationship between two real 'things'. This basic model of observation in on its last legs.

The above anecdote brings me to my point; that in our present culture there is such a profound emphasis, to the point of religious like mechanics, on memorizing 'what is so' without any recognition of the evils that flow from isolated single investments. I notice this, particularly among the young, who, are so glamorized (by which I mean the investing of the emotions in a set of lexicon like opinions, beliefs and conceptions, bypassing the natural watchtower tendency of the mind) by the media narrated world as it is presented; they react, without consideration, believing themselves to have been astute in those thoughts they hold to be truths of the world, when in fact they are merely trained well, like Pavlov's dog to respond to the ringing of the bell; they are active, believing themselves to be taking part in the moral husbandry of the world when in fact they are behaving as programmed, and they opine, believing their thoughts are original, correct and in no way corrupted, when they are in fact reinforcing lies. They have  proved their training, acted out their roles, and parroted the propaganda of a sinister financial elite who have planned this all from day one, for control, profit and the hobby of tyranny.

I was trained in advertising; I was trained in the science of colour and how that alters mood and disposition, I was trained in words and how to change advertising copy to alter buyers behaviour, I was trained on how to tailor the same message depending on the demographics. I was trained to manipulate people into behaviour that they thought was their own. This was in the 1980s.

The military-narrative-industrial complex that is the world wide media employees designers, psychologists, research companies, wordsmiths, imagery, associative memetics, all to make you think that such and such, is so and so. It works—brilliantly.

I am constantly surprised by the amount of people that cannot conceive that those in power, whose budgets of industry soar into the billions, are incapable of wishing any vice upon their fellow man. By means of some invisible assumption the fools at the botttom believe that: politics cannot be fixed or owned; democracy is the free from greed and interference; capitalism is bad and the cause of all injustice; that 'science says' is equal in weight to what used to be 'God revealed to me' and that wind-farms will save us from global warming and overpopulation.

Upon examination, it is found that the reverse is true on all these things. This disease of ideology is virulent more in the left wing that the right. The left wing have examples in history of their philosophies gone too far; the left have not yet had that pleasure and so never examine their principles; nor indeed take examination on if they possess them or not. Socrates was right - relentless uncomfortable questions are more important than answers.

It is sad beyond any metric. If you failed to investigate any opinion that you hold, particularly one by which you navigate your life, then your 'ownership' of that opinion by an act of theft, for it is was never yours by right of understanding. To repeat another's opinion without understanding it, is to steal.

Octavia Hamilton, A struggle for contentment

Octavia Hamilton is one of those anorexic footnotes in Australian musical history who despite efforts to feed her citation starves in written memory. She was, most sources tell, the principal contralto in the Philharmonic society and that is usually all one receives in the way of revelation, except in more weighty academic ventures into music of the nineteenth century in Australia, where, you may see mention of the scandalous Mrs. Moon (as she was in married life) and the numerous children associated with her behavior. To further sketch the picture in a way that Cruickshank may have drawn it, there is the tough and bitter husband, Augustus Graham Moon. It was venomous, public and contumelious. 

As with all minor satellites of domestic tragedy, there is usually some kind of knotted psychological mess, and there appears to have been, in Octavia’s case, just such a knot. Positively Gordian. It reaches back into her family’s past, and let me say right here that I am supposing greatly, but making sure my suppositions drift magnetically along the natural currents of likelihood.

She was born Eliza Octavia Scrivenor, eighth child and daughter of John Walter Scrivenor, solicitor of London who suffered intermittent success in his field, being bankrupt on more than one occasion and dissolving at least one professional partnership that is known. His father in turn (Eliza Octavia’s Grandfather) Harry G. Scrivenor - a Surrey man - had married a minor, one Elizabeth Craiston and had a respectable number of children, one of whom became Sir Harry Scrivenor, who made his name, a title and many pounds sterling in mercantile pursuit of Iron, and, who married into the Bayes-Cotton family. The Bayes-Cotton family were a wealthy Victorian family with ministers peppered upon every branch of the family and the hard fog of religious adherence wrapped around all. Some of Sir Harry’s children even emigrated to Australia, including his son, Octavius Scrivernor. Sir Harry did well. John, his solicitor brother , rather struggled (He eventually came out to Australia as well).

On the maternal side the truancy of success made itself well known. Octavia’s maternal grandmother, Caroline Medkaff had been born in about 1768 and was the illegitimate but recognized daughter of Henry Herbert, the badly-behaved, horse-loving, one-tenth-of-an-adventurer, 10th Earl of Pembroke, whom Horace Walpole found intolerable and regular fodder for wit. The poor daughter (the second illegitimate child) Caroline had been the offspring of the libidinous Earl and some poor woman whom he had whisked off, and bedded, on her wedding day to some poor unfortunate groom in Venice. The Pembroke papers do not mention who this unfortunate husband was, nor the name of the woman, nor how or where the pregnancy was carried. But be that as it may, Eliza Octavia was still the great-grand daughter of a peer although I am sure the details were lost on purpose and the nobility part thoroughly elevated and glazed.

Her choice of professional name perhaps may possibly be explained as follows:- her great grandfather John Hoadley Scrivenor had a daughter Ann (thus Aunt to Octavia's father) who married Baron Charles Hamilton, from the family that were on the bloody field at Culloden. The Baron and Ann had a son James who was born in Hamilton in Scotland, and who emigrated in 1839 as a young adventurer to New Zealand and died there in 1844. There is evidence to suggest Octavia and her cousin James were close.

So, Eliza Octavia lived in a family that had a compulsion to achievement,  religious durability on the left and the faded, ‘don’t-ask-too-many-questions’ end of noblesse on the right. John Walter Scrivenor’s family was in the middle. No pressure then.

Augustus Moon then enters the picture, the nephew of Sir Francis Moon, Lord Mayor of London who apart from whatever else he did, managed to receive a portrait in the Illustrated London News (Francis, not Augustus, alas). Augustus enters the scene of Frances’ life as a boarder, living with the Scrivenors in Islington, where he marries her while she was still under age. A little calculation of the marriage entry and the census entry for 1851 shows that hanky was being very definitely panked while Augustus was a guest under John Scrivenor’s roof. That’s not very gentlemanly and rather takes the protective varnish off Augustus’ later hard-done-by husband image he threw into the press. 

After marriage Augustus and Eliza Moon, emigrated to Australia where Augustus had a post with the General Steam Screw Navigation Company but the Crimean war put a stop to whatever venture that had guaranteed and he found himself working in the Post Office in its correspondence branch. Mr. Moon, who looked like he was going to court great success soon settled down to the hard upward climb in a land at least three months sail from England where his choice of station may have fared better.

At some point Eliza Octavia, after giving birth to ‘some’ children to him, takes up with wine merchant Thomas Holme Davis (a music lover and secretary of the Philharmonic in 1860 where he no doubt began some kind of association with her) with whom she brought the total of children issued to fourteen. 

Thomas Holme Davis was the son of a woolstapler and came to Australia as an emigrant starting as a wool dealer, no doubt helped by connections back home. At some point he moved into the import and export of wine. He was the successful self made man that John Walter Scrivenor tried to be, and that Augustus Moon promised to be. What is more - he loved music and was the secretary of the Philharmonic Society where Octavia Hamilton was principal contralto. Mr. Moon was never comfortable with France’s public display of singing, being of that same cast of opinion that reminds me of Armes Beaumont’s father who refused to acknowledge him even in the street because he sang Opera as a profession. Thomas obviously had no such low opinion of  singing.

At some point either side of 1860 Frances Octavia, Madame Augustus G. Moon, moved in with him above his wine store and there seems to have been a genuine rapport between them for in 1874 he sells up and they both move back to England with child number fourteen, Beatrice Connaught Davis, leaving the freshest trail. Thomas and Eliza appeared to have stayed together until death. The descendants of Augustus Moon know little about her, and several told me their impressions were that the parents had been told all manner of wickedness about her and that she was persona non grata.

Whatever the truth, her first marriage cannot have been the choice of the wise and wizened regardless of Frances‘ wishes as a ‘young woman’.  The result was an unhappy one and Augustus Moon’s public outbursts seem to hint at an anger fueled by an indignant spirit. The second ‘marriage’ with T. H. Davis looked to be a match born of music, the bottle and other private sport.

What happened to George?

Robert, Frederic, Eliza and Edward Smith had a brother named George, who after marrying in the 1850s left for Australia with his wife, Mary Victoria née Crump (daughter of Sleath John Crump). I have even got my hands on the shipping entry. They both arrived.

In Robert's will of 1917 there is no mention or bequest to any member of George's family that I am familiar with although there are plenty of names whose connections I have not made, although he never calls any of these spare persons 'nephew.' So either George had died or was persona non grata.

A family genealogist on Ancestry holds details for a Mary Victoria Crump and her sons, accounts for her whereabouts in the censuses but never mentions any further details on the sons, nor the husband, George. If this claimant be in possession of what is true then Mary V. Smith returned to England and is variously listed as a widow.

So what happened to George?