E.S.RADCLIFFE. 1798.
Last week, strictly as a stress-reducing measure, I did what anyone else would do and researched the life of a nineteenth-century pastor.
100% to blame for all the time I wasted, and the time you are currently wasting, is Adele Curness, who tweeted an image of a graffito from the choir stalls of Brasenose College Chapel. E.S. Radcliffe, who had expended such loving care inscribing his name there, was easy enough to find once I opted for Edmund over Edward: he turned out to be Edmund Stringfellow Radcliffe, who was born on February 23 1775 and died on January 20 1826. A Lancastrian from a prosperous background, he was typical of the intake to Brasenose College at this period in its history.
Entering the church, like many of his student contemporaries, Radcliffe lived a comfortable and uneventful life, to all appearances. He secured the living of Walton-le-Dale near Preston in 1803, and adding a Perpetual Curacy of Burnley in 1817. This was pluralism, the holding of multiple offices, but a comparatively benign example if Radcliffe was also able (unlike many of his clerical contemporaries) to serve the parish of Burnley, around 25 miles away. In 1810 he married Frances Ford (born 1789, seemingly of a similarly well-to-do family), and between then and Edmund’s death they had a large family, nine children (by my count) in total. It was these that I found myself, in an entirely unsystematic fashion, chasing through the census records this week.
Here they are:
1. Edmund Ford, born 1811, dies as an infant in January 1812;
2. Edmund Ford, born 1812;
3. Frances Emily, born 1813;
4. Sarah Ann, born 1815;
5. Dulcibella, born 1817;
6. Robert Parker, born 1819;
7. Charles Wilbraham, born 1821;
8. John Randle, born 1823;
9. George Travis, born 1825.
After Edmund Stringfellow Radcliffe’s death in 1826, his widow Frances moved from Lancashire to Rugby, where all her sons went to school. Rugby School was enjoying its heyday under the direction of Thomas Arnold, headmaster from 1828, and by settling in Rugby Frances was ensuring that her sons enjoyed the free education available to local boys or “foundationers”. A few years earlier the mother of William Webb Ellis, left all but destitute after her husband’s death in the Peninsular War, had moved to the town and secured the same for her son: the rest is very dubious history. Of Florence’s children I’ve spent most time this week reading about Charles Wilbraham Radcliffe (no. 7) and his violent fate, but the other children also illustrate in their way nineteeth-century English not-so-genteel lives.
Frances’ first surviving child, Edmund Ford Radcliffe, who had been given exactly the same name (memorialising his father and mother) as his dead brother, subsequently entered the the Civil Service in Bengal, and became a judge: at the time of the 1851 census three of his daughters, all born in the “East Indies”, are staying with grandmother at Elm Cottage, Church Walk, in Rugby: this house, now listed, I think. He died in 1864, his place of death given as Rugby, presumably in his mother’s house.
Frances Emily Radcliffe (No. 3) married the heir to the tea firm Richard Twining III at the family’s local church in Rugby in 1831, at the age of 17. She lived a very privileged life in the Twining family house on the Strand (she, her husband and three children are all there in the 1841 census), but she died in childbirth in 1847.
Neither Sarah Ann nor Dulcibella (nos. 4 and 5, the latter, I think, a family name on her mother’s side: a couple of her nieces certainly share it) marry. When Frances their mother dies in 1872 (she was 83), they live on at Elm Cottage, describing themselves in the 1881 census as “annuitants”. Sarah Ann dies in 1895, Dulcibella in 1901. Meanwhile Robert Parker Radcliffe (no. 6), whom we find visiting his mother in Rugby in the 1861 census, was an officer in the Royal Artillery: he lived until 1907. Leaving no. 7 (Charles Wilbraham Radcliffe) aside for a moment, John Randle Radcliffe (no. 8) followed his father into the church, the only one of Edmund’s children to do so. He is staying with his mother and sisters (and nieces) in Rugby in the 1851 and 1871 censuses, “Studying for the Church” in 1851, holding various curacies in the vicinity of Rugby before becoming vicar of Snitterfield, close to Stratford-upon-Avon and thus not far either from Rugby, in 1877. He served the parish until his death in 1898, never marrying.
The youngest of the siblings, George Travis Radcliffe (d. 1904), is another India hand, rising to command the 7th (later called the 3rd) Madras Light Cavalry. As an officer in the Indian Army he was following in the footsteps of his older brother Charles Wilbraham Radcliffe, to whom I turn. Charles has left the fullest record out of all his siblings, for the worst reasons.
At the time of the so-called “Indian Mutiny”, the uprising against British rule in 1857, Capt. C. W. Radcliffe found himself in Lucknow, serving with a regiment of Bengal cavalry. When elements of it started to desert and the regiment was disbanded, Radcliffe took command of a unit of Volunteer Cavalry in actions against rebels near Lucknow, and then joined the rest of the British combatants and non-combatants (including his wife Emily and three children) as they took refuge in the Lucknow Residency, starting a siege that lasted from June until November 1857.
Many of the survivors of the siege, rapidly converted into a classic imperial story of triumph snatched from disaster, subsequently published diaries or memoirs, and we hear a lot both of Capt. Radcliffe and his wife and family. A prominent figure in the defence of the Residency, he was killed the night before the “first relief” (really a reinforcement) on September 25, 1857, when a British force fought its way through to the Residency, but were too depleted to attempt evacuating it. The siege would not be broken for another 61 days.
In the diaries of Lady Inglis (wife of the commanding officer for the first 87 days before the “first relief”, not published until 1892), we hear that Radcliffe was severely wounded, and needed his arm amputated. A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow, Written for the Perusal of Friends at Home by Mrs. James P. Harris, published in 1858 by John Murray (who had cornered the market with the Afghan War diaries of Lady Sale and Vincent Eyre a few years before), confirms that the injury was fatal:
September 25, Friday
The enemy made two attacks during the night. Captain Ratcliffe of the 7th Cavalry was mortally wounded at the Cawnpore battery by a round shot. He will be a terrible loss to his wife and a very large family.
Continued firing in the city all day.
Kaye in his History of the Sepoy War III.542 talks of “one of the very best of our officers … ever foremost in attack and defence, whose cheerfulness, under all depressing circumstances, had set a gallant example.” The conditions within the Residency during the siege were appalling, food in short supply and disease running rife, over and above the constant threat of snipers, artillery and mines. One of Radcliffe’s children, Ada Maud, had died of cholera during the first part of the siege.
We could hardly be further away from Edmund Radcliffe patiently carving his name during chapel services in Brasenose. But a much more recent Brasenose student, J. G. Farrell, based his Booker-winning novel The Siege of Krishnapur on the Siege of the Lucknow Residency. In it he shows the trappings of “civilisation” progressively falling away from the British defenders as the appalling siege drags on, and I couldn’t help thinking of that as a couple of internet searches took me from an Oxford college chapel to the unspeakable brutality (on both sides) of the “Indian Mutiny”. A church in rural Lancashire, a public school, the desperate privations of a beleaguered British outpost, some tea, is not an outrageous summation of the Victorian scene. I remain deeply intrigued by the contradictions of “the peculiar lives led by the British officer class in nineteenth-century India, privileged, violent and above all precarious.”
A couple of grandchildren to remind us that life goes on. Eva Mary Radcliffe, daughter of Charles, was born after her father’s death in 1858: her daughter Eva Mabel Radclife Freeth lived until 1960. William Scott Warley Radcliffe, son of Robert Parker Radcliffe (no. 6), like his father an army officer, died in 1954. Another Dulcibella, Dulcibella Eden Radcliffe, daughter of George (no. 9), married Charles Owen Hore in 1889, and died in 1946, longterm resident of a grace-and-favour apartment (formerly occupied by Lady Sale) within Hampton Court: take a look at this fascinating document, pp. 21 and 44.
Notes on a note
In the archives of Rhodes House, the home of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford, I came across a nondescript handwritten note.
It was in the student file of Justus Carl von Ruperti, a German World War II fatality (and Rhodes Scholar) who has an arrestingly unexpected memorial in Brasenose College chapel. I blogged about him a couple of months ago, but hadn’t at that stage seen his record at Rhodes House.
When I did, I found what I’d found in his Brasenose record, details of his admission, the wonderfully brief comments that counted as termly reports in the 1930s, and nothing very illuminating until the note that someone, sometime had thought to slip into his file.
It is written by “R.” to “M.P.”, and carries no indication of a year, but it describes a visit by Juscar von Ruperti’s mother Irma to Rhodes House:
M.P
The mother of J. C. von Ruperti called 9 September. She was sorry that you were on holiday, as she would have liked to meet someone here who’d known him. She went round R. Hse, saw War Memorial, and departed with a grey booklet, which was the best I could offer after you.
R.
At the bottom is scribbled an answer from “M.P.”: “I can’t remember him as well as some of the nice German Rhodes R[hodes] S[cholar]s.”
I can never resist inadequately dated, initialled notes, and with the brilliant help of Melissa Downing, the archivist at Rhodes House, I now know that “M.P.” was Marjory Payne. Whenever it was that Irma von Ruperti visited, she wanted to meet someone who’d been there in 1933-35, when Juscar was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Marjory had been Assistant Secretary at Rhodes House from 1928 to 1936, and then the Warden’s Secretary from 1936 to 1957.
Actually, that also helps to date the note. If there was no one at Rhodes House who’d known Juscar when Irma visited, we must be after the retirement of Sir Carleton Allen, Warden 1931-52. Marjory Payne retired in 1957, and September 9 in 1956 was a Sunday. We must be between 1952 and 1955, or maybe in 1957, and since the memorial in Brasenose chapel was installed in 1954, my hunch is that Irma was in Oxford to see it, possibly even to attend its inauguration, if there ever was an inauguration. There is precious little reference to Von Ruperti’s plaque in the Brasenose record.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last two years researching and writing about Brasenose war dead. The most poignant thing, I suppose predictably, is also the least visible thing, the impact of war on the surviving family: what will always stay with me about Bob Brandt, for example, are the In Memoriam notices his mother placed in The Times every year without fail until shortly before her death.
Here again in the Rhodes House archives I was contemplating a grieving mother, and I find impossibly moving this record of Irma von Ruperti’s unrealised hope of speaking to someone who remembered her son. She had lost both her sons in the war, and had been a widow since 1945; she herself lived until 1980. She wasn’t just the mother of a war casualty, of course, but the mother of a man who had died fighting on the other side. I do wonder what it was like for such a person to visit Britain in the 1950s.
“R.” (whom I also hope to identify in time)** tells Marjory that s/he sent Irma off with a “grey booklet”. This was Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes House, a guidebook that explained the development of the Rhodes Trust as well as describing Rhodes House. In that booklet, if Irma read it, she would have learned that ‘the German Scholarships were created because “the German Emperor [Kaiser Wilhelm II] had made instruction in English compulsory in German schools”, and in the hope “that an understanding between the three strongest Powers [Britain, Germany and the United States] will render war impossible and educational relations make the strongest tie’,”‘ both quotations from a codicil to Cecil Rhodes’ sixth and final will in 1901, by which he established Rhodes Scholarships for Germany.
If Irma did see the Brasenose memorial on this visit, she will have seen her son’s name both in Brasenose and at Rhodes House: the war memorial there, containing the names of all Rhodes Scholars regardless of nationality killed in the First and Second World Wars, is inscribed below the dome of the Rotunda at the entrance from South Parks Road. (There’s a virtual tour of Rhodes House here, with the Rotunda at the top.)
**Thanks again to Melissa Downing, who has now discovered that Rosalind Wellstood worked as Assistant Secretary at Rhodes House from 1951 to 1953, and is probably the author of the note. It follows that Irma von Ruperti made her visit to Rhodes House on Wednesday 9th September, 1953. Just three weeks previously she will have marked the tenth anniversary of her son’s death in Russia.
Rednose College, Oxford
Testones be gone to Oxforde, god be their speede:
To studie in Brasennose there to proceede.
I’m calling this a Christmas blog, on the basis that it involves red noses, and that’s about as festive as I get. Anyhow, what we have here is an epigram by the Tudor writer John Heywood (1496/7-1578 or later), shared with me by Bea Groves (thank you!), and it joins my growing collection of theoretically amusing epigrams that aren’t necessarily terribly funny (cf. this one by Martial).
To the poem in a second, but Heywood first: a pioneering English-language playwright and poet/epigrammatist, and a well-connected and successful man, although his Catholic faith became more and more of a liability the older he got, and he died in impoverished exile in the Low Countries. He was married to a niece of Sir Thomas More, which hints both at the advantages he enjoyed and the obstacles he faced; and his grandson was John Donne. Not the least of Heywood’s achievements was his popularization, through his poetry, of proverbial turns of expression. We still find ourselves saying (something like) “An ill winde that bloweth no man to good”, “a dog hath a day”, “Rome was not built in one day,” “eate your cake and have your cake”, to name just a few of Heywood’s proverbs, though it’s a cause of deep regret to me that we seem to have lost “Hungry dogges will eate durty puddings” and “to bring haddock to paddock”. Heywood owed a lot of these proverbs to Erasmus, whose collection of thousands of Latin and Greek sayings, the Adages, was one of the most influential pieces of writing ever composed. Anyone interested in the evidence for that claim, see here.
Now, our poem is just a common-or-garden epigram, not a proverb, and it’s actually concerned with an issue very specific to Tudor England, the debasement of the coinage. We might conclude also that it illustrates Heywood’s limited poetic talents, and how poorly humour travels across centuries, but I leave that judgment to my readers.
A teston is a coin, a shilling, minted by Henry VIII, and as this blog explains the financial pressures Henry faced had led to a drastic watering down of the silver content of a coin whose bullion value was supposed to be equal to its face value. I’m pretty certain the economic consequences of the so-called “Great Debasement” weren’t as straightforward as that blog suggests, and it’s actually an interesting question how much the general user of coinage knows about any reduction in precious metal content. When the same thing happened in third-century AD Rome, there’s an appealing theory that no one was much bothered about it until the reforming emperor Aurelian made the mistake of being upfront and honest about the debasement. That was the point at which confidence crashed and inflation took off, whereas up until then, so the thinking goes, most people had faith in the faces on the coinage: if its value was backed by the authority of the emperor, that was enough to maintain most people’s confidence in the currency.
It’s an intriguing situation if so, since it would be a case of “commodity money”, money worth what it’s worth by virtue of the precious metal it contains, functioning as “fiat money”, possessing value essentially because the government says so.
There’s evidence that the same might have been true of Henry’s debased shillings, and that they managed to retain their face value even as their bullion content plummeted, but the truth of what had happened to the silver coinage clearly did over time become widely known. An unfortunate consequence for Henry was a mocking nickname he received, “Old Coppernose”. On raised parts of the coin image, such as the tip of the king’s nose, the silver wash designed to maintain the appearance of an authentically silver coin would be rubbed off, exposing its essentially copper composition.
Here is an image of a debased teston which I’ve borrowed from the Royal Mint blog:
The joke of Heywood’s epigram is to relate these “coppernose” testons to a college at Oxford University, mine as it happens, called Brasenose or Brazen Nose. We don’t know how the college got its name (one theory traces it to an old word for brewery), but we’re very proud of it and our symbol is a nose. The debased coins, Heywood says, have upped sticks and gone to get a degree at an educational establishment that suits their character, Brazen nose College.
I’m pretty confident that isn’t funny. But it’s interesting that Heywood is implying that debasement is a past practice, now entirely abandoned: the debased testons are leaving the economic scene for Oxford, seems to be his point. This poem and the one that follows it on the same theme come from Heywood’s publication A fourth hundred of Epygrams, from 1560 (epigrams 63 and 64). By this time Elizabeth is on the throne and ostentatiously marking the new age by restoring the bullion content of the coinage: I do wonder how many people were really aware of the debasement until Elizabeth made a big noise about correcting it.
So the poem seems to be a bit of schmoozing directed at Elizabeth from a poet who had got on perhaps a little too well with Queen Mary. But it wasn’t much help in the long run: enforcement of Elizabeth’s religious settlement at the start of her reign made the position of Catholics like Heywood very difficult indeed, and in 1564 he left the country for good, with precious few shillings to his name.