War and Peaceful Hythe

Henry James Schooles was born in Brussels, then part of the Netherlands, on 10 October 1815, one of the three children of Peter Schooles, a surgeon in the 81st Foot (Loyal Lincoln Volunteers) and his wife Eliza, nee Pipon. The regiment’s second battalion, of which Peter was a part, had been stationed there since Napoleon’s escape from Elba earlier that year. The regiment did not take part in the Battle of Waterloo, but it is likely that Peter was drafted in to deal with the aftermath of hundreds of injured soldiers.

Brussels in 1815, full of British soldiers

The family were moved the next year to Ireland, where another son, Philip Alexander and a daughter Louisa, were born and where Peter endowed a medical facility in Bray, Co. Wicklow. He died in 1818.

Eliza remarried the following year but was soon widowed again and lost her younger son, too. She took Henry, his sister and her daughter by her second marriage to live in Jersey, her birthplace and died herself on the island aged only 46.

Henry’s early education is a mystery, but he graduated from the University of Glasgow with an M.D. in 1837, and enlisted in the British Army on 29 June 1839, joining his father’s old regiment as an Assistant Surgeon. Army Surgeons were required not only on the field of battle, but were employed at British garrisons across the Empire to attend soldiers, their wives and families when they contracted everyday – or more exotic – diseases. Although the medical officer was commissioned and wore the uniform of his regiment, he held no military rank and was entirely under the command of the Colonel of his regiment. He had no trained staff, just a few men detailed to him from the regiment, who usually had no medical knowledge or training.

Henry served at first in Gibraltar, but the regiment was then sent to the West Indies where on 23 February 1843, he married Catherine Louisa Mordaunt Semper in St Kitts. She was the daughter of Hugh Riley Semper, a plantation owner and his wife Caroline nee Fahie. She was one of at least three sisters.

Four years later, Henry became a fully-fledged surgeon and transferred to the 1st/69th Regiment of Foot. On 12 December 1847, he and Catherine arrived in Malta. It was a challenging time to be there. There had been many cases of what was called Common Continued Fever among the men and there was great debate among the army surgeons as to whether this was, or was not, a form of cholera. Henry, who attended an autopsy of one of the dead soon after his arrival, was convinced that it was. The average strength of the garrison was 2,534 men and in 1847-8 there were 29 deaths and on average only 1,550 men were fit and available for garrison duty.

The situation worsened in Autumn 1848 and the regiment was evacuated from its quarters while the rooms were fumigated and whitewashed following deaths there.

Malta in the mid-nineteenth century

The epidemic had run its course by the next year, when Catherine gave birth to her first child, a boy called Henry Rawlins Pipon Schooles. The garrison was not a healthy place for a child: of 220 sick children admitted to the garrison hospital that year, 34 died.

But little Henry survived and the regiment left Malta in 1850 for Barbados and in December 1853, Henry transferred to the King’s Royal Rifles, an infantry regiment that fought at most of the British Empire’s significant engagements during the nineteenth century. Henry served with the second battalion, and was sent to South Africa, where another son, Frederick, and a daughter, Kate were born and then on to India.

Henry and Catherine arrived in Delhi in time for the Indian Mutiny – or First War of Independence as it is known in India, and by the end of the insurrection, Henry had been promoted Surgeon Major.

One representation of the 1857 mutiny

Then it was off to China where the regiment fought in the Second Opium Wars and assisted in the capture of the Taku (or Dagu) forts and the occupation of Peking (now Beijing).  The surgical work Henry would have done during these engagements would today be regarded as primitive. Without anaesthesia, surgeons could only amputate damaged limbs (which killed one in four patients), cut out embedded shrapnel, open skulls to remove blood clots, let blood (still popular as a ‘cure’) and splint fractures. Serious head, chest and abdominal injuries were untreatable.  If an injured man developed an infection in his wounds, it meant almost certain death.

China was followed by the more peaceful Canada, where Henry exchanged to the Staff and was appointed to the Rifle Battalion Depot in even more peaceful Winchester. In September 1864, he retired on half-pay with the honorary rank of Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals, and took the post of Medical Officer at the School of Musketry in Hythe – perhaps the ultimate in peacefulness.

The School of Musketry in Hythe, 1853-1968

He and Catherine lived with Kate in Stade Street in the town. In 1868, Henry created something of a stir by refusing to pay a pavement rate of eleven shillings and sixpence to the Town Council, because, he said, his road was not drained and had never since he had lived there, been watered either (to keep down the dust). He was summoned to appear before the local magistrates who were not sympathetic and ordered him to pay up, with costs.

Presumably he did, and he also moved the family to the more salubrious Marine Parade, where he died suddenly on 12 May 1878.

Catherine remained in Hythe for some years after his death, but later moved to Kensington to live with a widowed sister. It was there that she died in 1907.

Henry James Schooles M.D/ surgeon general/born 10th October1815/died 12th May 1878
In loving memory of/Katherine Louisa Mordaunt

Peace perfect peace

The inscription on their grave is perhaps telling of how the years of warfare took their toll.

Their children prospered. Henry junior became a barrister, married and went to his mother’s home, the West Indies. There he became Attorney General first of the Leeward Islands and later of British Honduras, before returning to Europe He was knighted in 1905 and served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Gibraltar until his death in 1913..

Frederick was educated at a small private school in Chepstow and later joined the army.  In 1884, when a captain, he created a minor scandal by eloping with his Colonel’s wife. They were married after she had been divorced. After her death in 1902, Frederick married again and moved with his new wife to Hythe, which he remembered from his parent’s time there. They lived in Brockhill Road until at least 1939.

Kate married a few months after her father’s death to Walter Rupert Kenyon-Slaney in St Leonard’s church in Hythe. He was a lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade.  The younger brother of a well-known MP, he had a distinguished military career  before retiring to Berkshire. As a widow, Kate  also moved to Hythe before her death in 1944. Her only son, Neville, died unmarried in 1963.

 

 

‘A Very Excellent Grocer’

 

                                                                                       Dan West, in later years

 

Daniel John West was born in Iden, near Rye in Sussex, the second child of Thomas West, a baker and Caroline West, in 1846. He had an older and a younger sister. The family moved to Wittersham, where Thomas farmed 21 acres at Peening Quarter.  As a young man, Daniel worked as an assistant in a grocer’s shop in Tenterden High Street, owned by Thomas Winser. In Tenterden he met Alice Jemima Garnham, the fifth child of Benjamin and Frances Garnham. She was born in Lewes, Sussex, and baptised there on 9 March 1853. Her father became the landlord of the Woolpack Inn in Tenterden High Street.

The Woolpack Inn in Tenterden, where Dan wooed Alice

Daniel and Alice married in 1874. It was time for Daniel to set up on his own account.

They moved to Hythe, where he established his own grocery business at 149 (now 11 & 13) High Street. He remained there for the rest of his life, though he soon acquired a second shop in the High Street at no. 37 (now no. 80). The second shop carried some grocery lines, but specialised in wines, spirits and bottled beers. According to the author Ford Madox Ford,  Daniel – or Dan as he was universally known – was ‘a very excellent grocer – I wish I knew his equal elsewhere’. Ford often visited his friend, Joseph Conrad in Postling and the pair would stop in Hythe en route to call on H.G.Wells in Sandgate.

Ford Madox Ford, one of Dan’s customers

Once established, Dan found time for other activities. He became a fireman – and used his grocery assistants as callers-up when the rest of the Brigade needed rousing. The Brigade was then composed of volunteers and in common with most towns, the Hythe men suffered from the indifference of the Town Council. They had no protective clothing or uniforms until 1881; the brass helmets, the Victorian equivalent of the hard hat, did not arrive until 1891. The town’s water supply was routinely turned off at night, because so much was lost through the leaking mains. There was a key to turn it on, but the key-holder lived outside the town. Despite these disadvantages, the Brigade dealt successfully with several blazes during the eighteen eighties.

Daniel became a churchwarden and worked with the Vicar, T G Hall and his fellow-churchwarden Henry Bean Mackeson, to achieve the transformation of the interior of St Leonard’s church, a huge undertaking. He was a town councillor, too, and Mayor in 1889 & 1891. As a town councillor, he was influential in securing a proper water supply for the Fire Brigade, and in 1891, his wife, as Lady Mayoress, opened the Black Rock spring (off Horn Street) with a Guard of Honour of Hythe firemen.

He joined the Snowball Minstrels, a concert party, soon after his arrival in the town. At Annual Dinners and Smoking Concerts he could often be heard, his favourite songs being ‘Tantivy’, ‘Hurrah for the Loom and the Lathe,’ both songs now lost to us, and ‘Up with the Lark in the Morning’,  a music hall favourite whose chorus runs:

For I never drink hard it don’t suit me,
Nor toast my friend with a one, two, three,
Merry and wise is the motto for me,
And up with the lark in the morning.

Indeed, he must have been up with the lark every morning to achieve everything he did and to run a grocery which would have opened at 7 or 8 in the morning and closed its doors at about 10pm.

His wife, Alice, would also be up with the lark, or at least with the baby, every morning, as in the eleven years of her marriage she gave birth to six children: daughters Alice, Mildred, Frances and Florence and two sons, Guy and Gordon. Gordon was born just nine months before her death on 8 October 1885 of ‘a prolonged illness’. She was only thirty-two.

Earlier that year, Dan had caused a stir in the town by having his two shops connected by telephone, a sensible business move, but so radical that the Town Council only permitted it after four hours discussion and insisted it must be ‘at his own risk’. The safety, or otherwise, of telephone wires was imperfectly understood by laymen.

After a year as a widower, Dan married again, to Elizabeth Thompson, the second daughter of Robert Thompson, a GPO civil servant, and his wife Mary. She had worked as a dressmaker before her marriage. The couple had a daughter, Olive.

Dan West as Mayor of Hythe

In 1890, as Mayor, Dan called a public meeting to discuss a programme of band music and a sea regatta. Someone – possibly Edward Palmer, the editor of the Hythe Reporter – put forward the idea of a procession of decorated boats on the Royal Military Canal. Dan approved the idea and the inevitable committee was formed. The first-ever Venetian Fete was on Wednesday, 27th August and the event was a great success. The boats were illuminated, as were the bridges and the day ended with a two-hour firework display. With some intermissions, the fete has continued to this day.

A twenty-first century Venetian Fete

The 1898 fete included land-based decorated tents on the banks of the canal. Dan rigged his up to resemble a famous advertisement for Mazawattee tea (which he stocked), persuading one of his sons and a friend to dress up as old ladies enjoying a nice cup of tea together. He had, he said, intended to launch a balloon in the shape of an elephant – full-sized – but it suffered a last minute puncture.

The advertisement Dan copied in his tent. He even had a blue cloth and tea caddy

 

Dan’s approach to publicity was never discreet. Instead of large advertisements in the local papers, he arranged with the editors to have his name inserted at the end of several short news items on a page, making it impossible for the reader to ignore him. In one column, one might read:

Dan West for Wines and Spirits
Dan West for Bottled Beers
Dan West for Whitbread’s Ale
Dan West for Butter and Cream
Dan West for New Strawberry Jam
Dan West for Lemon Squash
Dan West for Bacon and Hams

Dan’s ads were sometimes incongruously placed

He even used his roof to advertise. On the back of the chimney and roof, facing away from the High Street where shoppers could see the window and down Mount Street, where they could not, the words: ‘West For Bottled Beer’, with an advertising sign beneath.

Dan West’s shop from Mount Street…

… and the same view today

Dan seems to have lived quietly during the early days of the twentieth century, perhaps building up his property portfolio. He had invested in the new builds on the Sandling Estate, as well as buying smaller houses in Hythe and ‘a country dwelling with a parcel of land’ at Bilsington. He owned nineteen buildings at the time of his death. Elsewhere, he had plenty to keep him occupied. He was also, as well as an alderman, a trustee of St Bartholmew’s Hospital (an alms-house) and an active member of the Freemasons and of the Folkestone, Hythe and Sandgate Grocers’ Association.

He comes to attention again in 1911 during the festivities to celebrate the coronation of George V in June. There was the customary torchlit parade in the evening – though by now there were as many motor vehicles as horse-drawn carts and horses taking part. Dan chose to ride, dressed, of all things, as Buffalo Bill. As he was by now a portly man in his mid-sixties, this sounds like a joke at his own expense – or perhaps to amuse his grandchildren.

He was still active when war broke out in 1914, but suffered a bad fall not long afterwards. He declined to take part in the rifle shooting classes ordered by the Town Council for all able-bodied men. Referring to his now great bulk, he said that ‘should any Huns appear in the High Street, I’ll fall on them: that should be sufficient.’ He was now said to weigh twenty-six stone and conducted his business sitting on a barrel in the middle of his shop.

He died in January 1917, and his funeral was attended by members of the Town Council, the Hythe Fire Brigade (in full uniform) and the local Lodge of Freemasons. He was remembered for years afterwards with affection for his good nature and as a successful businessman. As late as 1932, a local newspaper referred to him as the ‘leading grocer of the area’. Daniel was buried with Alice, his first wife.

Elizabeth, his widow, carried on living above the shop in the High Street until a year before her death in 1930, when her health was failing. She went on holiday in hope of a cure, but did not return. She is buried with Daniel.

Guy, as the elder son, took on the business, as ‘Dan West and Son.’. He had never known any other career, having worked as an assistant to his father until the latter’s death. Gordon,  meanwhile, went to work for a butcher before joining the South African Police in 1905.  Guy married Gertrude Agnes Banfield in Leyton, Essex, in October 1907 and brought her back to Hythe, where doubtless she, too worked in the business, although it may not have been her ideal occupation – her obituary describes her as ‘rather retiring’.  She had been born in Exeter, the daughter of Edwin Banfield, an accountant, and his wife Eliza.   The couple had a son, Dan, and a daughter, Nora. At least during the early days of their marriage, they lived in Twiss Road, Hythe.

Guy was excused service during the first World War as he was, at first, indispensable to his father and, after 1917, running the business single-handed. He did, however, serve in the Motor Volunteers and as a Special Constable. He seems otherwise to have taken little interest in town life. Perhaps he suffered from always being called, even in his wife’s obituary  ‘the son of Dan West, an Alderman and mayor’ – and this sixteen years after Dan’s death.

Gertrude died in 1933, after a two-year illness. Guy sold the business in 1937 and died himself in 1939. All Dan’s daughters had married and moved away from the town and Gordon did not return from South Africa.  There was to be no dynasty.

The West family plot in St Leonard’s churchyard, Hythe

Illegible memory/of/Alice J West/the beloved wife of D. J. West/who departed the 8th day of October 1885/in her 33rd year/after a prolonged illness
Also in loving memory of/Daniel John West/for many years churchwarden/of this parish/who died/12th January 1917/aged 71 years
There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God
Elizabeth West/died June 6th 1930/aged 80 years
To the memory of/Guy West/died 23 June 1939/aged 60 years
In loving memory/Gertrude A West/died Dec 18th 1933 /aged 59 years
Illegible Thomas
Illegible
In the midst of life we are in death.

 

Death on the Beach

Inscription:  Sacred to the memory of Lieutenant George Dyer of the Royal Navy son of the late Major General Dyer/of the Royal Marines and grandson of Rear Admiral Alexander Innes/while zealously engaged in … of his duty…near here… the six men under … the 12th of April … remainder illegible
In memory of Eliza widow of Lieutenant George Dyer/who died illegible/on the 22th of illegible 1852… remainder illegible

George Dyer was born on 23 October 1791 in Stoke Damarel, Devon and baptised in March the next year at Charles the Martyr church in Plymouth. He came from a distinguished military family. His father, another George was at the time of his son’s birth a captain in the marines, soon to become the Royal Marines. Most unusually, he had also been painted as a young man by a leading portraitist, James Northcote, a pupil of Joshua Reynolds. The picture was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1781 and is now owned by the Royal Navy museum.

George Dyer senior, at the age of twenty-two. 

He married Susannah Innes on 14 Oct 1789 at Devonport. She was the daughter of Rear Admiral Alexander Innes who, when he had died in 1786, was commander in chief of the Jamaica Station, a place noted for the ill-health of its personnel. In 1805 George fought with Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. He was seemingly a very religious man, evidenced by the inscription on his gravestone, which records that ‘religion was his guide through life’ and by the anecdote that he preached sermons to the crews of his vessels in the absence of a chaplain, apparently preferring this method of character improvement to the more usual one of corporal punishment.

Young George was the eldest of three children and the only son. Expectations that he would serve in the Army or Navy must have been high, and probably inescapable. He duly joined the Navy, and was based in Plymouth near his home, which he visited often. By 1815, he was a lieutenant on HMS Imogen, a 16-gun brig-sloop.

He was then twenty-four, and his father decided to seek preferment for him. The system for advancement in the navy was based not on merit, but on having a powerful patron. George senior was well-connected and wrote frequent letters to men of influence to try to find his son a suitable ship and possibly promotion. Lord Melville, a former Secretary for War could not help. Nor could Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Buller, even though young George was sent to visit him. He was next despatched to wait on Admiral Sir John Duckworth, who promised to pull strings. He did, and on 22 August, young George received an order to proceed to Portsmouth by the Severn frigate as there was a likelihood of a vacancy for a lieutenant on HMS Havannah, a frigate.

                                             Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who declined to help George…..

                                                             …..as did Sir Edward Buller

Before he left, George senior took his son shopping – to a book sale. There George junior bought, among others, two volumes of Ovid’s poetry, a History of Greece and one of Rome, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, and Du Fresnoy’s Cartographies of Time. He was clearly a serious-minded young man.

The vacancy on the Havannah did not materialise, but George was appointed to another frigate, the aged Pique. His father died two years later, but left nothing to George, bequeathing everything to the young man’s sisters, Anne and Susannah. This was, he said, because George had inherited from his grandfather and he was ‘not to think that I hold him in any less affection than his sisters’.

The next eleven years of his naval career are a blank, until he surfaces in Hythe in 1826, still a lieutenant, as commanding officer of the Coastguard at Fort Twiss. The Coastguard had been set up in 1822 as an anti-smuggling operation, and its instructions also stipulated that when a wreck took place the Coast Guard was responsible for taking all possible action to save lives, taking charge of the vessel and protecting property.

George had married, on 4 January 1816 in the Isle of Wight, seventeen-year-old Eliza Osmond. His father had died the following year, as had his patron, Sir John Duckworth. One possible explanation for the posting to Hythe may have been the presence in the town of his maternal uncle, Colonel John Innes. Now without influential support, did George turn to his uncle to act as his patron?

Admiral Sir John Duckworth

In the early hours of Wednesday 5 April, the station received reports of smugglers in the area. George went down to the beach, where he met the captain of HMS Ramilies and some of his men. Ramilies was engaged on the coastal blockade. Patrolling the beach, they heard gunfire coming from the direction of Shorncliffe, followed by a round of fire close by. This had been fired by John Lemon, a Ramilies seaman and it killed George Dyer outright. Coastguard rules were clear that a man should not open fire unless ordered to do so or unless violence had been offered to him. Since in this case, neither had happened, Lemon was charged with manslaughter and court martialled.

He was found guilty, but received a reduced sentence of 14 days at the request of George’s wife Eliza, who stated she believed it was an accident. George was buried with military honours, including a firing party of 103 men, who marched in procession from Fort Twiss to St Leonard’s church.

Eliza, whose origins remain a mystery, married again in 1829, to George Elgar, a surgeon, though perhaps not a very successful one. In 1851, the couple were lodging in a carpenter’s house in Maidstone and George is described as ‘surgeon, not practising’. Eliza died on 8 March 1852 at Romney Place, Maidstone and was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard there. Less than three weeks after her death, her widower petitioned the Admiralty for the eight pounds and ten shillings that was owing from her widow’s pension. Did he spend some of the cash having her name inscribed on the tombstone of her first husband? It would have been an economic way of remembering her, if funds did not stretch to a tombstone of her own, and a large space had been left on George Dyer’s tomb to add her name when the time came.

 

The inscription for Eliza on George Dyer’s tomb. 

George Elgar married again the year after Eliza’s death and had three children, went bankrupt in 1861 and died in 1867

Col. John Innes died in Hythe in 1836 and is buried a stone’s throw away from his nephew’s grave.

The gravestone of John Innes and his wife