Reginald

I keep going on about how family history research can turn up fascinating and unexpected things. My wife’s great-great-grandmother, who was widowed at 19, re-married a high official of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, 40 years her senior (23 and 63). We therefore find well-connected, upper-class cousins amongst the distant relatives. Many were odd, or potty, or both. One of my favourites is this splendid gentleman, John Reginald Rowallane Armytage Moore. He was born in County Cavan in 1876. 

Reginald lived in Ireland until his early twenties, and then moved to Vancouver as an estate agent. There, in 1909 aged 33, he met and married 22-year-old Amy (Maisie) Campbell-Johnston. Their story then becomes distinctly unusual. 

On paper it seemed a perfect match. He was high-born Anglo-Irish, and she was descended from the first Marquess of Montrose. But Maisie left after just a few months. She told one relative it was because Reginald was gay, but I am not so sure. You will have to make up your own mind. Not that it would matter much these days, but it did then. 

By 1911, Reginald is back in London alone, still an estate agent, while Maisie has gone to California to stay with a friend called George Mordecai. Soon afterwards, Reginald moved to Sydney, Australia, where a newspaper reports he had joined the rowing club, having previously won competitive rowing competitions in Canada. 

He remained in the southern hemisphere up to and through the First World War, serving with different forces in different countries. He spent a period in the Matabeleland Mounted Police in Southern Rhodesia, and then served in the forces in both New Zealand and Australia. One would have expected someone of his background and class to have been an officer, but it appears he was only an ordinary serviceman. He seems to have found it easy to move around. 

In New Zealand, he was one of the 23-strong relief force that sailed to Samoa in 1916 to replace part of the garrison there. New Zealand forces had been the first anywhere in the world to recapture land back from the Germans, i.e. Samoa, and the relief force was made up of men aged 40 and over to free up younger men to fight in Europe. 

He turns up in Australia early in 1918. He enlisted as a gunner in the 12th Field Artillery Brigade, which sailed for Europe in June that year. The photograph is from this period. They arrived too late for active service, but were engaged in post-Armistice duties in France. He was discharged in England in 1919. 

For the rest of his life, he lived in a flat in Earls Court Road from where he ran a dancing school, a highly unusual occupation for a man of his background and era. It does not seem to have been particularly successful. Although both his mother and his sister treated him more generously in their Wills than other siblings, excusing his debts, and setting up trusts to provide him with a good income, he left only £167 when he died in 1951. Surprisingly, he left this to Miss Kathleen Fricker, one of three unmarried sisters who lived in Wandsworth. Who was she? His Will had been made over 20 years earlier. 

This leaves a lot of gaps and questions. He apparently had a lady friend, but was also a man’s man and adventurer. How was he able to move easily between military postings, or was he forced to? And the school of dance? He sounds every bit as dashing as the photograph suggests. Ships’ passenger lists describe him as 6 feet tall, with dark complexion, brown hair and blue eyes. What could be more arresting than a handsome, six-foot Matabeleland Mounted Policeman? I bet he looked grand in the uniform. 

The South African Mounted Police in 1960 probably had a similar uniform

It is not clear what his relationship was with Kathleen Fricker, but had they wanted to marry, they would not have been able to, because he remained married to Maisie. And before blaming him for the shortness of that marriage, it is worth hearing a little more of Maisie’s story, which is even more bizarre. 

Maisie Armytage-Moore was a larger-than-life character who dressed in black, smoked cigars, and loved boxing and American Indians. Three years before marrying Reginald, while still a teenager, she became friends with a notorious American stagecoach robber, Bill Miner. He taught her to ride and built her a skating rink. Another friend was a North American Indian girl, Lena Vogt, who taught her about Indian ways and the outdoors. This was later very significant. Also around this time, she wanted to elope with a Christian preacher, the George Mordecai mentioned earlier. 

Three years after her short marriage, she went off to the USA with a man called Martin Joseph Murphy, a lumberjack and part-time boxer, with whom she managed a boxing troupe travelling around logging camps. She also worked for a union called International Workers of the World, which in 1919 was involved in a serious labour riot in Centralia, Washington, and she had to return to Canada. She had five children with her, presumably all born to Murphy. 

Around 1927, she began to work for a lawyer called Tom Hurley, an advocate for American Indian justice. Maisie also founded ‘The Native Voice’, a publication for and about first nation people. She was still known as Armytage-Moore, but was by now with Tom Hurley. She seems not to have divorced because of her Episcopalian faith, and could not have remarried because Hurley was Roman Catholic. Maisie only married Tom Hurley after Reginald died in 1951.  

Maisie became very well-known as a champion of First Nation people, and there is lots about her online. Many thought it subversive, and she and Tom were sent to prison at one point. It would certainly have appealed to Maisie’s non-conformist nature. She was clearly a headstrong woman, but also very odd. 

One story tells how she inherited a casket said to contain the preserved heart of her ancestor, the first Marquess of Montrose, who was executed in 1650. She had it sent out to Canada. Her grandchildren used to open the casket, take out the heart, and play with it. Imagine them daring each other to touch it, or chasing after their friends with it. One granddaughter remembers her horror when she took it out and it broke into two pieces. 

So, why did Maisie walk out of the marriage so quickly? Wild, dynamic, independent woman or ineffectual, possibly gay, dreamer? Six of one and half a dozen of the other is my guess. 

Maisie’s collection of Indian art and artefacts is in the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. The heart is in the Montrose museum in Scotland. 

Knitted

I am constantly amazed by what some bloggers make in wool and fabrics. They have spent a lifetime on crafts I would not know how to begin. But it does not stop me from writing a post about knitting. 

The village of Upper Denby not far from where we live has a knitting and crafts group that has been busy creating a display on the village green for Remembrance Day, this weekend. Here are some of the things they have made. All are either knitted or crocheted. 

Meanwhile, Mrs D is busy knitting little Santas and Snowmen to sell and provide raffle prizes for the school Christmas Fair. 

I sometimes think there are satisfactions in life us blokes miss out on. Surely I could knit a rat. 

Stiff Upper Lip

The phrase “stiff upper lip” has cropped up in blogs and comments recently. For example, behind the seemingly idyllic 1930s village childhood of my last two posts lay unmentionable death, disease, and hardship. And, all too soon, those children would have to face conflict and events in distant lands. They just got on with life, and made the best they could of it. 

I recently came across this BBC archive clip which captures the phrase perfectly. It is 7 minutes long, but I can almost guarantee you will watch spellbound from beginning to end. It is very powerful: an eyewitness account of the loss of the Titanic in 1912. 

Frank Prentice was an assistant storekeeper on the ship. As it began to sink, he helped lower and load the lifeboats, and then, when he could do no more, took refuge high on the stern. He jumped into the water at the last moment. On the point of freezing to death, he was fortunate to be pulled into one of the lifeboats. 

He was 23 at the time of the disaster. Soon afterwards, he would have had to face the First World War, in which he was awarded the Military Cross as a Major in the Royal Tank Regiment. The film was made in 1979 when he was 90. There is a Wikipedia page.

Stiff upper lip: we will need a lot more of it if the world takes a turn for the worse. Shirkers, moaners, and preening attention-seekers should take note. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to read this. 

Warp Land

The flatland where the River Humber branches into tributaries was once an expanse of permanent marsh. It dried out gradually over the centuries with the construction of river banks and drainage ditches, making agriculture possible. Some areas were improved by a process known as warping.

In warping, river waters are diverted into the fields to deposit layers of fine, fertile silt. It is carried out by building low embankments around the fields and filling them through a breach or sluice in the river bank. The water flows into the fields at high tide, and after being allowed to settle, is drained back as the tide goes out, leaving silt behind. When carried out regularly over two or three years, three feet of silt might be laid down. 

I remember my uncle, the farmer (see Aunty Bina’s Farm), explaining why he preferred certain fields for crops, and others for his “be-asts”. Potatoes, sugar beet, and wheat grew best on warp land, whereas the cattle grazed on pasture. 

I may be mistaken, but looking now on Streetview, I fancy that the line of the low bank around the field followed the line of the lane. The fields were for crops, while the cows grazed behind the house. 

But thinking about it now, it puzzled me. The buildings in the far distance are on the other side of a railway line, and there is a canal beyond that, with the river at the other side of the canal. How could the river water have been diverted into the fields? 

Perhaps the water came from a different river. The River Aire is around two miles to the North behind the camera, and the River Ouse about three miles to the East, but I think these would have been too far, and several main roads, the villages of Rawcliffe and Airmyn, and the town of Goole were in the way. My guess is that the warp water must have come from the river beyond the railway, canal, and buildings - the Dutch River (or River Don). 

Wikipedia provides an answer: “The first reliable report of warping seems to come in the 1730s from Rawcliffe, which is near the confluences of the Ouse with the Aire and the Don, where a small farmer called Barker used the technique.” Neither the railway nor the canal would have been there then. The Knottingley and Goole Canal was opened in 1826, and the Wakefield, Pontefract and Goole section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1846. The warping must have been done before these dates. Some of the brick outhouses at the farm could easily have dated from that time, and knowledge of the warping would have been passed down by word of mouth. 

The railway, canal, and Dutch River can be seen running parallel in the lower left quarter of this 1962 map (pre-motorway). The oddly straight Dutch River is clearly another man-made feature. It was constructed in the 1630s by Dutch engineers, who diverted the River Don to drain the moors of Hatfield Chase, hence the name “The Dutch River”. The River Don originally flowed further East into the River Trent. Warping of my uncle’s land must have used water from the diverted river Don. 

More extensive warping schemes were carried out in the Nineteenth Century along the original course of the Don, as far East as Adlingfleet on the Trent, and as far South as Crowle. One large area is served by the enormous Swinefleet Warping Drain (centre bottom of map) which runs for 5.6 miles (9 km) and has a permanent sluice into the River Ouse. The drain and much of the network of drainage ditches are deep and wide. Some are stocked with fish for anglers, and all provide habitats for frogs, sticklebacks, water voles, and other wildlife. It is astonishing to think it was all dug out by hand. But, we do not only alter our landscape. Families with Dutch names still live in the area, and the local name for drainage ditches is dykes. 

Swinefleet Warping Drain

Swinefleet Sluice where the warping drain enters the Ouse

Two areas of unreclaimed land remain just to the South: Thorne and Hatfield Moors, which together form the largest expanse of lowland peat bog in the country. Even the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding’s Geograph project has not much ventured there.  

One last piece of trivia. In the film “The Dam Busters” (1955), the aeroplanes are shown flying along a Dutch canal. It was actually filmed flying East along the Dutch River. The Goole shipyard cranes can be seen as the planes approach the River Ouse and then bank left over the town. Please don’t tell the East Riding Council. It will give them ideas about what to do with the place. 

Dave Northsider is now trying to work out how he can divert river water into his polytunnel.