The House of Trumble

In assembling his The Golden Age of Cricket (1968) and The Trumble Family in Australia (1972) our first cousin twice removed, the musicologist Robert Trumble (son of the renowned Australian test-cricketing legend Hugh Trumble) was not yet able to benefit from the extraordinary resources that are now available on the internet: official records of every description, above all scanned or transcribed records of births, deaths, and marriages in many jurisdictions; shipping lists, and entire runs of nineteenth-century newspapers that are now keyword-searchable. Happily it is now possible therefore to augment his picture of our common ancestor, William Trumble (1828–1908).

With his brother Thomas Cornelius, William Trumble migrated from Ballymote, Co. Sligo, in 1841, aged fourteen. The Trumble boys’ father, John Trumble, was a freeholder, and their mother’s name was Ann (née Knott). John Trumble survives in the land records for two parishes in the neighborhood of Ballymote in Sligo. It seems he paid a church tithe or tax for arable and bottom land, and what is unsentimentally described as “reclaimed bog” at Feenaghroe in the parish of Toomour, to the tune of £1/10/10½. John Trumble leased from a Mr. Parke a property at Shancarriglen or Oldrock in Cloonoghil parish, which was presumably where he and his wife lived, and raised their family. This was in 1834 valued for taxation purposes at £30. In turn John Trumble let numerous small holdings, viz. 37 acres to Mary Feely, 22 to Michael Coughlan, 14 to Michael McDonough, 31 to Messrs. Gaffney, Gray, and McGettrick, 7 to Michael Dodd, and smaller, actually tiny parcels and plots of arable land to various others. The family also had connections to the little town of Castlerock, near Lough Foyle in Co. Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

Mrs. Trumble’s Knott relations lived near Ballymote in much the same way, though they were better off: James Knott, Esq., of Battlefield in the parish of Toomour, probably Mrs. Trumble’s father or brother, held more than 200 acres, which were in 1858 valued at £133.

Robert Trumble has shown that the Irish Trumbles were transplanted from Scotland in the seventeenth century, and their name was much prone to corruption. Variants include Trimble, Tremble, Trumbull, Turnbull, Turnebull, Turnebu, etc., but satisfactorily there is in Joseph Bain’s Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London (Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1881, Vol. 2: A.D. 1272–1307) a dated reference to one Ralph de Trumble (1295/96), so ours is obviously the correct, or canonical spelling.

In any event, in 1841 William and Thomas Trumble disembarked in Port Adelaide, South Australia, and found their way overland to Victoria. The brothers must have arrived in the vicinity of Sandhurst (Bendigo) well ahead of the first gold rushes in 1851, because one of them made it into this 1853 composite silver albumen group portrait photograph by “Bent” of 100 members of the Society of Old Bendigonians, which is today in the collection of the State Library of Victoria in Swanston Street, Melbourne. At this date the Trumble in this photograph practiced around Sandhurst as an apothecary.

William Trumble’s subsequent career is pretty well documented. Evidently the brothers did rather less well at prospecting for gold than supplying medicines to the neighborhood of Sandhurst before the Gold Rush, but William must have done at least well enough to justify describing himself on his marriage certificate in 1862 as “quartz miner.”

The following year William Trumble entered the Victorian government service, ultimately rising to the position of superintendent of the Willsmere Hospital, better and perhaps more accurately known as the Kew Lunatic Asylum. The Asylum was built between 1864 and 1872 to the design of architects in the Victorian Public Works Department—a gloomy, cut-price riff on Second Empire architectural opulence, initially standing in stark contrast to its function, but with each passing decade converging eerily with it. There is some comfort in the fact that our ancestor was put in charge of the asylum, and not admitted. The doors were thrown open to in-patients in 1871.

Thomas Cornelius Trumble, meanwhile, decided to continue on to New Zealand, and was never heard of again. I am told his descendants have prospered, to the extent that this is possible.

By 1862, William Trumble had moved from Bendigo to Melbourne. On December 3 of that year, at St. Stephen’s Church, Richmond, (“in [his] 30th year”) William married Elizabeth, spinster, of Richmond, formerly Edinburgh (“in [her] 27th year”; her rank or profession simply gives “with friends”). When their eldest son, our great-grandfather John William Trumble was born in 1863, William and Elizabeth Trumble were living in Sackville Street, East Collingwood, in inner Melbourne. The next three children were all born in the same house, but in 1872 the family was living in Ararat, in Central Victoria, where Thomas, the youngest, was born, i.e. the future permanent secretary of the federal war (defence) department throughout World War I. According to the electoral roll of 1903, William and Elizabeth Trumble were in that year retired, living quietly in Waterloo Street, Camberwell.

Hitherto William Trumble’s wife, Elizabeth, has been a shadowy figure. Her death notice appeared in the Argus on September 3, 1908, p. 1: “TRUMBLE—on the 31st. August, Elizabeth, beloved wife of William Trumble, of Auburn-road, Auburn, and mother of J[ohn]. W[illiam]., H[ugh]., and T[homas]. Trumble, aged 79 years. (Interred privately [at Kew].) William died suddenly in Mentone before the end of that year, and was given a colossal funeral. According to Great Uncle John Compson Trumble, “People came from everywhere.” William and Elizabeth were buried in the same plot, together with their only daughter, who died young.

Elizabeth Trumble was the daughter of Hugh Clark of Edinburgh (born in about 1796–98) and his wife Catherine (1799–1877). Hugh Clark is variously described at different times and in different places as “merchant,” “accountant,” “billiard keeper,” and “civil servant,” and it may be that at one time or another he filled all of these functions, but probably not all at once.

On February 26, 1821, in Edinburgh, Hugh Clark married Catherine “Stuart,” the daughter of John “Stewart” and his wife Margaret (née Buchanan). By 1841, when the first Scottish census was taken, Hugh and Catherine Clark and their family of three surviving sons and four daughters (including the future Elizabeth Trumble) were residing in a modest house at 5 Duke Street, Edinburgh, together with “D. Skinner,” a writer (accountant); James Grant, a clerk, and Hannah Turnbull (“F[emale]. S[ervant].”), all three of whom were aged twenty. Apparently Mr. Clark worked from home, under rather cramped conditions.

By 1851, when the next census was taken in Scotland the family had vanished, and it has occasionally therefore been presumed that they migrated to Australia in the intervening decade. However, according to the Victorian death certificates of three of Mr. Clark’s children, including that of Elizabeth Trumble, which agree exactly on this point, those Clarks who came to Melbourne must have disembarked at Hobson’s Bay some time in 1853. The only record of the death in Melbourne of any remotely likely person called Hugh Clark seems to be the “crier of the Supreme Court,” who resided “at the back of the Royal-Terrace, Nicholson-street.” Exciting though this hint toward future Trumble involvement in the legal profession may be, this Hugh Clark died in January 1858, and was probably not Elizabeth’s father. It seems more likely that Mr. Clark died somewhat prematurely, and was buried in Edinburgh no earlier than 1841 and no later than 1853. This was presumably the prompt for his widow and her family to emigrate. In later official documents he is invariably referred to as “Hugh Clark of Edinburgh,” and never as a colonist.

Certainly, his widow Catherine Clark sailed to Melbourne, though she is hard to locate in any ship’s manifest. Old Mrs. Clark lived quietly in Church Street, Richmond, in the household of her youngest son (Elizabeth Trumble’s brother) David Stuart Clark (1838–1925), and their unmarried sister Catherine (1834–1903). Another sibling, Annie Christina, married at St. Kilda in 1870 a person who rejoiced in the name of John Herman Krom. Of the five children of this marriage, two daughters and a son predeceased Mrs. Krom, who died a widow in 1902, having been confined to the Austin Hospital with what, with leaden tact, a consulting physician described as a “rodent ulcer.” Mrs. Krom was survived by two Misses Krom, of whom the younger (also Annie) was still alive in 1936, and residing at 53 Mary Street, Kooyong.

William Trumble’s mother-in-law Catherine Clark died peacefully at her youngest son’s home in Richmond from natural causes: general “debility” and paralysis. She expired on January 4, 1877, aged seventy-eight.

Now, Catherine Clark was the youngest of the nine children of John “Stewart” (born 1756) of Balquhidder in Perthshire, Scotland, the place where Rob Roy died in 1734. Overshadowed by the dramatic mountain braes of Balquhidder, and more often than not enshrouded in ponderous mist, the eponymous village stands at the head of Loch Voil in the neighborhood of Stirling. John Stewart, also known locally as Ian mhor na Coille, or “Big John of Cuill,” was a redoubtable Gaelic-speaking Highland gentleman, for many years the schoolmaster at Strathyre and Callander. He was also clerk of sessions, and keeper of the local register of births, and marriages, including his own (on April 15, 1780) to Catherine’s mother, Margaret, the daughter of one Robert Buchanan and Janet, née Menteith.

John Stewart’s father, meanwhile (Catherine Clark’s paternal grandfather), was James McTavish McAlester Stewart (1725–1796), also known locally as Seumas na Coille, or “James of the Wood.” This elder Stewart of Balquhidder joined the infamous Duke of Cumberland in the battle fought by the Anglo-Dutch armies against the wicked French at Fontenoy (modern Belgium) during the so-called War of the Austrian Succession. Though defeated on that day (May 11), the 42nd Highland (Black Watch) Regiment, in which James Stewart fought, distinguished themselves by “their own way of fighting,” i.e. with scarcely imaginable ferocity, and, as if to underline the point, our ancestor’s own well-worn Andrea Ferrara broadsword is today in the collection of the Scottish United Services Museum in Edinburgh Castle. Five times great grandfather Stewart was probably not aware that one of our other sixty-three thankfully unrelated five times great grandfathers, Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill and Kilbride, third baronet (1723–1812) (an equally doughty Pearson ancestor), also fought at the Battle of Fontenoy, but in a rather sniffier cavalry regiment: the Scots Greys.

The defeat of the Anglo-Dutch armies at Fontenoy and in late September at Prestonpans (where James Stewart also distinguished himself) gave considerable momentum to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s expedient and dastardly Highland insurrection, the so-called second Jacobite rising, which took place in the autumn of 1745. James Stewart’s Black Watch regiment fought on the loyalist or Hanoverian side during that bitter and bloody campaign, the “Forty-Five,” which was far bitterer for that generation of the family of Stewart of Balquhidder because James’s two younger brothers John Stewart and Duncan Stewart fought on the opposite side, that of the Young Pretender, and lost.

One final aspect of this saga of life in the Highlands of Scotland is the tantalizing glimpse of vast wealth accumulated in America by a collateral branch, but inevitably (as has so often been the case) channeled elsewhere: William Trumble’s mother-in-law, Catherine Clark, had an older brother, Robert Stuart, who was born on February 19, 1785, and in 1807 migrated to the United States. By 1810 he was in New York City, where he became a partner in John Jacob Astor’s famous Pacific Fur Company. Thus furnished with an apparently inexhaustible supply of capital, Uncle Robert Stuart sailed via the Falkland Islands (where, in an altercation, he threatened to blow the captain’s brains out) then Cape Horn to Fort Astoria, the company’s principal trapping establishment and trading post on the mighty Columbia River in the territory of Oregon, hard by the encampment that in the winter of 1805–06 Lewis and Clark named Fort Clatsop. I have been there. Afterwards Robert Stuart undertook one of the most remarkable overland journeys in American history: carrying despatches to Mr. Astor in New York; he walked all the way back across the continent from west to east, a feat that is remembered as the discovery of the Oregon trail.

Afterwards Robert Stuart settled at Michilimacinac, Mich., where he was J. J. Astor’s agent for the American Fur Company until 1834, when he moved to Detroit. During this period the Company vigorously maintained a monopoly on western trade in pretty much everything by any and all available means, as ruthless and deadly as was considered expedient. Mr. Stuart continued in Detroit as Astor’s principal agent, and incidentally as an elder of the Presbyterian kirk, before retiring to Chicago, where until his death in 1848 he was Secretary to the Trustees of the Illinois and Michigan Canal Company. His fortune was considerable, though not nearly as enormous as John Jacob Astor’s. (Astor sank the profits earned from the sale of beaver pelts, etc., into what later turned into the limitless jackpot of Manhattan real estate.) Alas in Robert’s lengthy will there is no mention of his sister, the widowed Australian colonist Mrs. Clark, nor any reference to her sons, daughters, nor indeed above all her deserving Australian son-in-law, our pioneering great-great grandfather William Trumble, sometime superintendent of the Kew Lunatic Asylum.

John Mignan of Plymouth

The marriage in 1764 of our four times great grandparents Mr. and Mrs. Peter Travers deftly combined at least three substantial legacies carefully husbanded in Plymouth during the first half of the eighteenth century, and prudently bequeathed by one close-knit generation of Huguenot merchants to the next. Mr. Travers’s father was an industrious watchmaker. Mrs. Travers’s parents were Mr. Peter Paré and his wife Mary, the daughter of a M. Mignan, formerly Mignon, sometime comte de la Chaussée de Poitou. Mr. Paré accumulated a considerable amount of property in and around Plymouth anyway, but thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Paré’s unmarried brother, John Mignan, who died in 1754, Mrs. Travers and two of her female cousins shared in the residue of his considerable estate, although, by virtue of having been prematurely widowed, as a bonus Mrs. Paré’s older cousin Mrs. Pitman got the use for twenty-one years of Mr. Mignan’s brand new house “on Hardy’s Lands,” and the gift of his sedan chair; perhaps she was lame, or portly, or both. Mr. Mignan’s will survives in the probate records of the National Archives at Kew, and is of some interest. It identifies this gentleman as a religious “enthusiast” through his association with the famous “primitive” Calvinist Methodist divines George Whitefield and Howell Harris of Trevecka in Breconshire, Wales. Mr. Mignan was obviously practical, seeing fit to leave his clothes to a young unmarried manservant Samuel Price (plus £10!), but only if Samuel stayed at his post until the very end. But who were Ann Simon (£5), and Sarah Tippett (50s), and especially Charity Perdue to whom Mr. Mignan left his house, “courtilage,” and garden in Gascoin Street, Plymouth? (In property law a curtelage is the enclosed area of land surrounding a “dwelling-house.”) And where did this leave the current, indeed soon-to-be-previous occupant Elizabeth Barker? In the conventional manner of eighteenth-century legal drafting, the document is a colossal, relentlessly unpunctuated sentence written out in longhand. For ease of comprehension I have inserted punctuation.

“In the Name of God, Amen.

“John Mignon of Plymouth in the County of Devon, merchant, being of sound and disposing mind, memory, and understanding, and calling to my Remembrance the great uncertainty of this Transitory life, do make, Publish, and declare this my last Will and Testament, humbly recommending my Soul to Almighty God, in hopes of mercy and forgiveness for all my Sins, and my Body commit to the Earth to be decently interred at the discretion of my Executors hereinafter named, and as for my Temporal estate, I dispose thereof in manner following, that is to say, I give and bequeath to my Kinsmen Stephen Mignan and Peter Paré both of Plymouth aforesaid two hundred Pounds in the Three percent Annuities of the year One thousand seven hundred and forty three In Trust to permit and suffer my Sister Susanna Boutet to receive the Interest or Dividends thereof during her Life, separate and apart from her Husband, and without being Subject to his Management or control, and, after her decease, In Trust to permit and Suffer her Daughter Magdalen Boutet to receive the Interest of the said two hundred pounds during her Life and after her Death In Trust to divide and pay the said Principal sum of two hundred pounds to and amongst my said Sister Susanna Boutet and such of her children as shall be then alive; I give and bequeath to my Neice Magdalen Pitman, Widow, All that my new Erected Dwelling house which now almost finished situate in Plymouth aforesaid on part of Hardy’s Lands which I lately purchased To hold to her and her Assigns for and during the term of Twenty-one years from the time of my death, and also I give her the Chair that I am now carried in; I give and bequeath to Charity Perdue all that my house, Curtilage and Garden with the appurtenances situate in Gascoin Street within the Borough of Plymouth now in the possession of Elizabeth Barker To hold to her and her Assigns for and during the term of her natural Life, and I also give her the sum of five pounds; I give and bequeath to my Brother in Law Isaac Chardavogne One hundred pounds; to my Brother Mignan five pounds; to Ann Simon five pounds; to the Reverend Mr. Bordier five pounds; to Mr. Philip Gibbs ten pounds, to the Reverend Mr. [George] Whit[e]field ten pounds, to Mr. Howell Harris of Trevecka in [Breckonshire] Wales ten pounds, and I further give to the said Messrs. Whit[e]field and Harris thirty pounds in trust for them to distribute at their own discretion amongst such of the Preachers and Teachers of the Gospel as they shall think fit; I give to Mr. John Stephens late of Plymouth and Mr. Thomas Adams now of London and Mr. Howell Harris’s Wife five pounds a-piece; to my servant Samuel Price if he is living with me at my death, and not otherwise, Ten Pounds and all my Wearing Apparel; To Sarah Tippett fifty shillings; I give devise and bequeath to my said Kinsman Stephen Mignan and Peter Paré and the Survivor of them his and their Heirs and Assigns All my Mossuages, Lands, and Tenements whatsoever In Trust nevertheless and to the End and purpose that they, the said Stephen Mignan and Peter Paré or the Survivor of them his and their Heirs and Assigns of such Survivor as soon as can be after my death, may sell and dispose of the Reversions and Inheritance of all and singular my said Messuages [i.e. dwelling-houses including outbuildings, orchards, curtilages, or court-yards and gardens], Lands, and Tenements for the most money that can be had for the same and, after all my Debts, Legacys, funeral Expenses, and other charges and Expences whatsoever are fully paid and discharged, for them, my said Trustees, to divide and distribute the neat proceeds of all my said Real Estate, as well as the residue of such Personal Estate as may dye Possessed of, in four equal parts, that is to say, to and amongst my said Nephew Stephen Mignon and my three Neices Mary Paré, Magdalen Pitman, and Lydia Sanford, share and share alike, and I do hereby constitute and appoint my said Kinsman Stephen Mignan and Peter Paré joint executors of this my last Will and Testament, desiring them to see the due Performance thereof and hereby I revoke all my former Wills whatsoever, In Testimony whereof I, the said John Mignan, have hereunto set my hand and seal the Twenty Fourth day of April in the Twenty second year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord George the second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain France and Ireland King Defender of the faith, and so forth, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and forty nine—[squiggle] The mark of John Mignan— Signed sealed and declared by the said Testator John Mignan as and for his last Will and Testament in the Presence of us who have Subscribed our names as Witnesses hereto in his presence and at his request

Sam. Brent, H. Brent, Edward Warren.

“This Will was proved at London the Eighth day of April in the year of our Lord One Thousand seven hundred and fifty four before the Right Honourable Sir George Lee, knight [illeg.], of Laws Master, Keeper or Commissary of the [Ecclesiastical] Prerogative Court of Canterbury, lawfully constituted by the Oaths of Stephen Mignan and Peter Paré, executors, named in the said Will, to whom administrators was Granted of all and singular the Goods Chattels and Credits of the deceased being first sworn by Commission duly to administer.”

The Huguenot families of Paré and Mignon

In 1764, our ingenious four times great grandfather Peter Travers, physician to His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Hospital at Lisbon, married Mary (1741–1815), the daughter of Peter Paré, a merchant of Plymouth, and his wife Mary Mignon (d. 1775), in turn the daughter of a Huguenot refugee who, settling in Devonshire at the close of the seventeenth century, no doubt spent the evening of his life (when not engaging in the novel profession of “merchant”) by reflecting wistfully upon the splendor of his title: comte de la Chaussée de Poitou. But, though ancient and noble, the family of Mignon was in fact originally English.

According to a discursive entry in John Burke and John Bernard Burke’s Heraldic Illustrations, Comprising the Armorial Bearings of the Principal Families of the Empire (London: E. Churton, Vol. 2, 1845, pl. CIII) “The family of Mignon...deduces its paternal descent from Sir William de la More, the ancestral chief of the ancient house of that name [i.e. More and Moore, not in any way related to Sir Thomas More, whose ancestry is obscure], who possessed More Hall and Bank Hall, both in the county palatine of Lancaster, for a long series of generations. Sir William accompanied Edward III. [1312–1377] to France, fought at the battle of Cressy [Crécy] in 1346 [August 26], and was advanced to the highest military order in the days of chivalry, that of a Knight Banneret, on the field of Poitiers [1356]. About a century afterwards, the successors of this Sir William de la More raised a corps of archers, and hastened to the relief of Louis XI. [1423–1483] King of France, when besieged by Charles Duke of Burgundy [at Beauvais, 1472], and on their being presented at court, His Majesty observing their handsome and martial appearance, exclaimed—“Ce ne sont pas la des Mores, mais des Mignons;” from which the surname of “Mignon” has remained to them.

“In the 16th century, during the reign of Charles IX. [1550–1574] when civil war broke out between the Catholic and Protestant parties, Mignon’s lineal descendant adopted the latter faith, and was one of the most distinguished chiefs of the Huguenots, and took a conspicuous part in the numerous victories of his party, between the years 1580 and 1586, in conjunction with the celebrated Duke [Maximilien de Béthune, duc] de Sully [1560–1641]. At the battle of Coutras in Guienne [October 20, 1587], Mignon was chief Commandant of Artillery, and to his exertions was the King of Navarre, (afterwards Henry IV. [1553–1610]) principally indebted for that brilliant victory: for his services on this occasion Henry IV. sent him the baton of a Marshal of France, the highest military honour which could be paid to a Protestant nobleman, but he was killed soon after at the seige of Nonan Court [Nonancourt, 1590]. His son and successor became page to Henry IV. on that monarch’s accession, and was (as his father had likewise been) the confidential friend of the Duke de Sully. The family continued in undisturbed enjoyment of their estates, until the revocation of the edict of Nantz [sic, 1685], when the representative of this ancient and noble family was compelled to fly his native country, and arriving at Plymouth, settled himself there as a merchant.

“One of the chief ancestors of the different branches of the family of Mignon which flourished in France in the reign of Philip [VI] of Valois [1293–1350], acquired the lands of Mignonville near Nantes. William de Landes, Lord of Mignonville, was upwards of a hundred years old when he died. His son allied himself with the noble and ancient House of De la Chaussée of Poitou, which held the Government of Poitiers in 1635. This family also intermarried with the illustrious house of Breçonnet of Tours. Francis Breçonnet, the second of his name, Lord of Leveville, &c., was father of William Breçonnet, by his wife, Anne de Landes, Countess of Mignonville. He was President of the Council and d. in 1674; by his marriage with Margaret, dau. of John Amelot and Cathérine de Creil [of the exceedingly ancient and noble house of Creil], he had several children, of whom one only survived, John, Lord [sieur] of Mignonville, who d. 25 Dec. 1698, leaving an only son, Count de la Chaussée, who came into Devonshire, as already stated, and had issue—1. John, a merchant, who d. at Plymouth, Feb. 1754. 2. Stephen, who m. 11 March 1746, Mary, eldest dau. of the Rev. Thomas Bishop of Barnstaple, grand-dau. of Sir John Davie, fifth Bart. of Creedy, and had,—with two elder sons both d. young, and two daus. viz. Mary, m. John Innes, Esq., and Elizabeth Mussell, m. to Joseph May, Esq. of Plymouth,—an only surviving son, George Mignon, Col. in the army, who served with great distinction in the campaigns in India under Generals Goddard and Abercrombie, and Lords Cornwallis and Harris. At the assault at Seringapatam [Srirangapatna, May 4, 1799], he led the whole flank companies of the Bombay Army, and obtained immediately after the battle a divisional command through the recommendation of the Duke of Wellington (then Sir Arthur Wellesley)... 3. Mary, m. to Peter Paré, Esq. the lineal descendant of the celebrated Ambroise Paré, Surgeon to Francis I., and Henry II., Kings of France…”

Now, as regards our five times great grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Paré, all this is useful but slightly misleading. Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–1590) has indeed been referred to as “père de la chirurgie française,” but of his ten children by two marriages only three daughters survived infancy. Nevertheless, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as antiquarian interest in le chirurgien formidable Paré intensified—he is credited with discovering the antiseptic properties of turpentine in the treatment of hideous battlefield injuries; for the ligature instead of the cauterization of arteries prior to amputating limbs, as well as certain modest advances in obstetrics—there existed a scattering of ancient spinster ladies called Paré who lived not far from the village of Bourg-Hersent near Laval (Mayenne) where Ambroise Paré was known to have been born, as well as numerous Huguenot families with the name of Paré who likewise claimed direct descent from this illustrious man. All members of the latter fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and a number settled in Amsterdam, where one displayed a sign prominently over his front door: “Habitation des descendants d’Ambroise Paré.” (The whole story is set out in great detail by Paule Dumaître in her fine article “Des descendants retrouvés d’Ambroise Paré, a famille d’hier, sa famille d’aujourd’hui,” in Histoire des sciences médicales, Vol. 33, 1999, pp. 243–54, though unfortunately the trail goes cold in Amsterdam.)

Presumably the Plymouth branch of the family of Paré cherished the same tradition, and it may be that all, including our Mrs. Travers, were remote collateral descendants of Ambroise’s father, who was a valet de chambre and barbier attached to the household of the comte de Laval, or else Ambroise’s brother Jean, who was also a hairdresser.

None of this explains our dear late father’s strong attachment to unreliable French automobiles.

Peter Travers at Lisbon

Our four times great grandfather Peter Travers was for over forty years surgeon to the English forces in Portugal; physician to His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Hospital at Lisbon, and eventually also to the Court of Dom José I and Dom Pedro III. He took up his appointment in the immediate aftermath of the terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755. His reputation (such as it was) seems to have rested for many years on a sensational case of modern clinical practice that was reported to a meeting of the Fellows of the Royal Society in London on January 27, 1757. According to that paper, “An Instance of the Gut Ileum, Cut Thro’ by a Knife, Successfully Treated by Mr. Peter Travers, Surgeon, at Lisbon,” (Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 50, 1757, pp. 35–37), young Travers successfully treated Señor Antonia Josée da Costa, one of the King’s messengers, thus proving that vicious, deep stab wounds to the lower abdomen, perforating both the peritoneum and small intestines, were not inevitably fatal, as had previously been assumed. Still, at first it was touch and go.

According to his report, upon being summoned to the bedside of his unfortunate patient, Mr. Travers thoroughly explored the wound with his index finger, and, concluding that matters were serious, drained and cleaned it as best he could. Obviously without the aid of anesthetic, he repaired the intestines; “reduced,” reattached, and put them back into the patient’s tummy; sewed up the external incision with a needle and thread, and administered an enema consisting of olive oil, the yolk of an egg—the constituents, incidentally, of mayonnaise—and warm water.

In the ensuing three days the patient experienced extreme abdominal pains; continuous and powerfully odiferous vomiting; diarrhea; high fever, and a fast, irregular pulse. So Mr. Travers regularly bled him. He administered further enemas consisting this time of a decoction of wormwood and camomile. He also prescribed by the tablespoon every two hours “an anodyne mixture” of mint-water, liquid laudanum, sugar, three ounces of syrup of rhubarb, and an ounce of “the fresh-drawn oil of sweet almonds.” And to this medicine he added “Dr. Huxham’s tincture of the bark; which was taken, a tea-spoonful, six times a day, in a little mint water; which indeed greatly relieved him.” After three days, showing no signs of deterioration, but very few of improvement (other than that his pulse was slow and weak—Mr. Travers took this to be an improvement) he administered by mouth “absorbent powders” bound in rice water: one drachm each of crabs’ eyes and ground red coral, and two grains of crude opium.

The following day Señor Da Costa slowly began to improve; his pulse strengthened but stayed calm; his diarrhoea, vomiting, fever, and the agonizing pains in his tummy gradually abated. The loose threads came adrift from his wound, which steadily healed over, and thereafter “he was kept seven and twenty days on chicken-broth, and never admitted [allowed] to use any solids during that time: afterwards he was indulged with young chickens, &c.,” at which point he was discharged, and made a complete recovery.

A notable aspect of this remarkable case anticipates by 250 years the uneasy interrelationship that now exists between members of the medical profession and drug companies. Huxham’s “tincture of bark,” more properly known as tincture of Peruvian or red cinchona bark, contains “bitter orange peel,” serpentary (or Virginia snakeroot), saffron, and cochineal, mixed in 20 fluid ounces of diluted alcohol. It was invented by the physician John Huxham, M.D., of Totnes (1692–1768), a son-in-law of the celebrated Captain Thomas Coram of the Foundling Hospital.

Peter Travers privately addressed his original report about Señor Da Costa to John Huxham on August 3, 1756, clearly believing that Dr. Huxham’s tincture had made a vital contribution to the complete recovery of his patient. And it was Huxham, since 1739 a Fellow of the Royal Society, who decided to go public with the case, and read the paper himself. No doubt he was motivated by genuine scientific curiosity, and possibly also a determination to give credit where credit was due to a young colleague working abroad under challenging conditions. Still, the paper attracted much gratifying attention to Dr. Huxham’s “tincture of the bark.” Admiring reports and paraphrases of the paper appeared in The London Magazine, or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (Vol. 27, 1758, p. 396); The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle (Vol. 28, 1758, p. 265), and elsewhere. Indeed the remarkable case of Señor Da Costa’s gut was still regularly cropping up in medical literature of the mid-nineteenth century, almost a century after Huxham’s death in 1768, and more than fifty years after Peter Travers’s on February 18, 1797, by which time he had clocked up more than forty years of continuous service in His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Hospital at Lisbon.

As far as I can ascertain, only one of his direct descendants ever followed Peter Travers into the medical profession: his five times great granddaughter Dr. Sybil Borthwick, our excellent first cousin once removed, though I doubt if she has ever seen fit to prescribe Huxham’s tincture of the bark.

Secrets

The dangerous and rather melancholy aspect of making careful historical inquiries about pioneering ancestors is that you eventually discover their secrets.

Our great-great-grandfather, the Hon. William Pearson, M.L.C. (1818–1893) spent fifteen years from September 1841 clearing and taking possession of an enormous pastoral run of what eventually amounted to 17,274 acres at the confluence of the Thomson and La Trobe Rivers, stretching much of the fifteen miles between Rosedale and Sale in East Gippsland; it was the largest freehold property in Victoria. He named it Kilmany Park, after the parish in Fifeshire where he was born. In the same period he joined the sinister conspiracy of Scots settlers led by Angus McMillan to rid the entire region of its Aboriginal population, the blameless Kurnai people. In 1849 William was tried in Melbourne before Judge à Beckett; defended by Redmond Barry, but unfortunately found guilty by a jury of his peers of horsewhipping a Catholic neighbor, Mr. Desailly, after an altercation during a race meeting in which both men rode rather fiercely and for high stakes at Green Wattle Hill. Having thus asserted his presence locally, in about 1857 William Pearson sailed back to England to find himself a bride.

According to the entry for “Pearson of Kippenross” in Sir Bernard Burke’s A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Colonial Gentry, the young woman he selected was Eliza Laura (1837–1896), the daughter of Henry Thomas Travers, late of the Hon. East India Company’s Bengal Civil Service. Laura, as she was known, and her sister Henrietta came to East Gippsland and were both married soon afterwards: Laura to William at Grassdale, near Sale, on August 4, 1859 (just before her twenty-second birthday; he was forty-one), and Henrietta to William’s Gippsland crony Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye on January 26, 1860. The latter ceremony took place at Kilmany Park.

Henry Thomas Travers was the son of Peter Travers, physician to the English forces in Portugal and eventually also to the Court of Dom Pedro III at Lisbon. Peter Travers was in turn the son of a Devon watchmaker, and the grandson of a Huguenot refugee who like so many others settled in England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Peter Travers married Mary (1741–1815), the daughter of Peter Paré of Plymouth, another Huguenot gentleman. Peter and Mary Travers had at least five sons and two daughters, all of whom were baptized at the Embassy in Lisbon, including our four times great-grandfather Henry Thomas Travers (June 15, 1779).

Peter Travers’s younger brother John Travers (who died an extremely wealthy man in 1809) was an elder brother of Trinity House, and formerly a captain in the Hon. East India Company’s Navy. In 1786 (the year before Warren Hastings’s impeachment), in 1791, 1796, 1801, and again in 1806, John Travers was elected to the powerful H.E.I.C. Court of Directors. Through his uncle’s influence (actually no other mechanism existed), Henry Thomas Travers and three of his brothers, Peter Paré, John Benward, and George Francis, entered the East India Company’s Civil Service as cadets: Peter and John in 1791, and George and Henry in 1794. Henry was fifteen. By 1800 all four young men were en poste in India: Peter in Bombay; John and George at Fort St. George (Madras), and Henry in Calcutta.

On November 25 of that year, aged twenty-one, Henry married Miss Eliza Finch. That union was noted in the following year’s Asiatic Annual Register. Young Mrs. Travers produced a daughter (1803) and at least two sons, of whom the elder died in infancy at Calcutta, and was buried in the South Park Street Burial Ground—“Here lies the infant son of H. T. Travers, Esq. / Obit. 21st February 1805”—but John George (born 1807) survived. Mrs. Travers did not. She died the usual colonial death of dysentery or fever in about 1812.

After an appropriate period of restrained mourning, Mr. Travers married for the second time, at Kishnaghur on June 2, 1814, this time to Amelia Martha (née Grimes), the widow of the Rev. Dr. Henry Peter Stacy, D.D. For her first husband Mrs. Stacy produced two sons and two daughters, but for Henry Thomas Travers she produced a further son and two daughters (at least). For a while the second Mrs. Travers proved more robust than the first, nevertheless she too expired, on December 10, 1826, at Banjetty near Moorshedabad, from something virulent or exotic, probably both.

In 1804 Mr. Travers first appeared in the East-India Register and Directory as Resident Assistant Surgeon at Hurriaul, Bengal, with apparently minimal training. The following year he doubled as the local Commercial Resident, and remained there until at least 1806. From 1810 Mr. Travers was Collector of Midnapore, and in 1816 moved to the more lucrative mercantile position of Collector of Moorshedabad (Murshidabad on the banks of the River Bhagirathi, a tributory of the Ganges in West Bengal). He occupied that post without interruption from 1816 until his retirement in 1832, and lived with his family and a small army of servants in a large, pretty house and garden in Durrumtollah Street, Calcutta.

Mr. Travers’s brother Peter began his career as First Assistant to the Treasurers at Bombay (1802), to which responsibilities were in 1804 added an assistantship to the Custom Master. This apprenticeship led him in due course to take over as Custom Master and Reporter-General of External Commerce (1808). The following year he was made a Justice of the Peace. Eventually he retired to Fairfield Lodge, Exeter (1825).

George started off as Collector of Trichinopoly (Tiruchirappalli) (1810), but soon assumed the position of Judge and Magistrate of Ganjam (until 1816), evidently knowing as little about the law as Henry ever knew about medicine. Nevertheless, life on the bench must have suited George, because he soon rose to the third Judgeship of the Provincial Court of Appeal and Circuit for the northern division (1816 to 1820). He, too, retired comparatively early, in 1821.

Meanwhile, having begun as Collector of Ongole and Nellore (1808 to 1809), John Benward Travers joined his brother George as second Judge on the same Court of Appeal (1814 to 1820), an arrangement that seems to have been as harmonious as it was cosy. In upholding the awesome majesty of the law, their Lordships relied in part upon the administrative and military support of a rapidly multiplying tribe of John Travers’s other relations: sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins in every branch of the Company’s civil service and various regiments of the Indian Army, in which several of our Borthwick ancestors were by then also serving with distinction.

On May 1, 1832, aged fifty-three, presumably mindful of the needs of his young family, and satisfied that by then his eldest surviving son John George was safely ensconced in the Company’s service (after a stint at the East India Company College, i.e. Haileybury), Henry Thomas Travers retired on the Civil Fund annuity of £400 per annum; cashed in his Indian investments; sailed back to England via the Cape on board the Northumberland, and settled in St. Peter’s Terrace, Hammersmith, where, according to the 1841 census, his household consisted of at least one daughter, Sarah Campbell Travers, aged 20; Mary Grimes, aged 25, presumably a relation of the second Mrs. Travers, and Elizabeth Savage, aged 20, none of whom were born in England.

On June 12 of that same year, 1841, at St. Peter’s Church, Hammersmith, Sarah Campbell Travers married a chemist, Anthony Michael, the son of Michael Anthony Reboul, physician. Mr. Travers, Miss Grimes, and Miss Savage were all witnesses. Other members of this slightly unconventional household were Mary Whate, aged 20 (apparently not a Travers relation), and a number of servants, including a Scottish couple, Alexander and Elizabeth Macdonald, both aged 25, who, together with his housekeeper Mary Gregg, Mr. Travers remembered in his will with considerable generosity.

By 1844 Henry, his brother George, and an unmarried sister who lived with George, each owned not less than £1,000 pounds in East-India stock. This entitled them to three votes at the Company’s general election of that year; from Christ Church College, Oxford, the young John Ruskin controlled only two. Mr. Travers’s death on February 22, 1848, aged 68, at 26 Notting Hill Terrace, Kensington, was noted in The Gentleman’s Magazine and Allen’s Indian Mail and Register of Intelligence.

You are perhaps beginning to see into the dark heart of the problem. The young sisters whom great-great grandfather William Pearson recruited in London in about 1857/58 were born at Mr. Travers’s residence at 26 Notting Hill Terrace on March 27, 1835 (Henrietta) and on September 25, 1837 ([Eliza] Laura, our great-great grandmother), but in those years Mr. Travers was a wealthy widower, belonging to the once raffish but now increasingly quaint H.E.I.C. circle of retired Regency nabobs. He never re-married.

Under the terms of the will Mr. Travers drafted in 1846 (National Archives, Kew), inter alia generous legacies were distributed among Mr. Travers’s surviving siblings, his adult children, nieces and nephews, and his servants, but the bulk of that enormously long document concerns the provisions of a trust, administered by his sister Elizabeth Susannah, Mrs. Henry Butts Owen; his brother George, and two other executors who are difficult to place, for the benefit of two “natural” daughters: Henrietta and [Eliza] Laura “Fossey otherwise Travers,” and the gentlemen who it was fervently hoped would in due course marry them and assume legal control of their legacies. Much of the small print deals with what would happen to the money if one or either of the girls did not reach the age of twenty-one, or if both died before marrying, or if either one or both never married at all.

According to the baptismal register at Christ Church, St. Marylebone, the girls’ mother was one Lucy Fossey, and that is the sum total of everything that we know about her. Beyond the comparatively generous provisions in his will, in both cases the ruttish Henry Thomas Travers had the decency at least to record his name as the girls’ father (occupation: “Gent.”), which almost certainly means that Lucy was unmarried. She was probably a servant girl, but in 1841 she was no longer living in Henry Thomas Travers’s household in St. Peter’s Terrace, Hammersmith, and nor were Henrietta and Laura.

One possibility is that Mr. Travers maintained not one household, nor two, but at least three, all in London. This practice was not uncommon, and is further suggested by the fact that in 1844 Mr. Travers supplied to the East India Company Register an address different again from St. Peter’s Terrace, Hammersmith (where he is documented in 1841), and 26 Notting Hill Terrace, Kensington (where he is likewise documented in 1835, 1837, 1846, 1848, i.e. at the time of his death), namely “Connaught-terrace, Edgeware-road.” It may be that his third family of Fossey lived in either one of these last two houses.

However, the 1841 census records “Henrieta Travers [aged 6]” and “Laura D[itt]o [aged 4]” in a forlornly large cluster of young girls then residing with a handful of pathetically young schoolmistresses, governesses, and an unmarried clergyman at Albion House, a boarding school in St. Peter’s Square, not too far away from Mr. Travers’s residence in Hammersmith. That ad hoc educational establishment was set up in 1813 by a Mr. Maxwell in what one nearly contemporary source pluckily described as “a spacious mansion, built in that style of architecture which prevailed at the commencement of the reign of James I.” No doubt it was creaking, cold, dark and damp—ghastly.

We do not know how William Pearson found the nineteen- or twenty-year-old Laura Travers in London and successfully paid court, but it seems likely that it was through one of her trustees. A doughty self-made colonist such as William provided not only an ideal solution to the problem of “Fossey otherwise Travers,” but the added bonus of permanently erasing it from an Early Victorian London in which such residual peccadilloes were increasingly regarded as inconvenient, embarrassing, or actually harmful in the prospective marriage stakes of otherwise untainted half-siblings and their progeny.

Nor do we know if, from the point of view of Kilmany Park near Sale in East Gippsland, Gran’s father ever learned his mother’s secret à la Magwitch. In the 1870s and 1880s innocent questions may have been asked about his (at best) shadowy English maternal grandmother. They were either unsatisfactorily evaded, or else handled with that chilly, firm, pursed-lip, shutter-clattering bluntness that Gran and our late mother ultimately inherited also: a vital component, it seems, of our mitochondrial DNA.

It is certainly tempting to see this matter as ample justification for the large investment our pioneering great-great grandfather made in the pedigree that was painstakingly assembled by a team of Edinburgh genealogists for inclusion in Burke’s Colonial Gentry (1891), which incidentally awarded him the slightly bombastic title of “head” pro tempore of “the old Scottish family of PERSON of LOCHLANDS, PIERSON of the barony of BALMADIES, Forfarshire, and PEARSON of the barony of KIPPENROSS, Dunblane, Perthshire,”which remains slightly shrill in its unremitting claims to distinction and respectability. Certainly, at nine pages with fifteen footnotes, it is by far the longest pedigree of any Victorian colonist listed in Burke’s Colonial Gentry, and connoisseurs of that neglected work have learned to treat the such elaborate entries with much circumspection, if not caution.

It is not clear what if any of her father’s inheritance Laura “Travers” brought with her to East Gippsland. However, in the fourteen years between 1860 and 1874 she also produced for William five sons and two daughters. Henry Travers Pearson (1861–1880) and John Benward Pearson (1866–1925) were named after her father and his elder brother respectively, so to that extent the recollection of her nabob legacy was at the very least appreciated, if only gingerly. Certainly William Pearson’s own mother Helen put up the cash to buy the initial freehold of Kilmany Park. In about 1860 she sailed from Scotland and took up residence there. Thenceforth to Laura fell the burden not merely of caring for four infants under five, but looking after an elderly mother-in-law whom she had never met before. Certainly by 1879, Laura Pearson owned the freehold of 8,132 acres contiguous with Kilmany, and in 1896 when probate was granted she left estate valued at £8,319, more than ten times larger than any other estate listed in the Argus, not just on that day (November 13) but all through the month. When she died Laura Pearson was by any measure a wealthy widow.

Through the 1860s and 1870s Laura’s sister Henrietta produced at least eight children for Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye. Neither sister ever saw their mother again (even if they ever knew her at all), or indeed any of their father’s wealthy London relations. Indeed, at first the only people they knew upon arriving in colonial East Gippsland were Laura’s bridegroom, William Pearson, and the family of Peck, with whom the sisters apparently sailed aboard the Florine in May, June, and July 1858, and resided temporarily in Sale until Laura’s wedding day. It must have been wholly terrifying, but I suppose no worse than being packed off to a boarding school for motherless young women in St. Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, aged three or four.

Peter Campbell Trumble