The General – part one

The Solly-Flood Family in Hythe 1892 – 1904

General Frederick Solly-Flood and his wife Constance arrived in Hythe in 1892, having bought the Old Manor House, which dated from the seventeenth century and lay a stone’s throw from St Leonard’s church. The general had paid £4000 for their new home. His life, and that of his family, had been peripatetic for the forty-plus years in which he had served in the British army and they must all have been grateful to put down roots at last.

The Old Manor House, Hythe

Frederick was born in 1829, one of the seven children of another Frederick Solly-Flood of Ballynaslaney House, Co. Wexford. His father practised law until gambling debts forced him to sell his practice and accept, in 1866, the post of Attorney-General in Gibraltar. This Frederick was, according to his descendants, a villain. His eldest son, Edward, on his 21^st birthday, inherited a substantial fortune from his maternal grandfather. Frederick senior deceived him into signing the whole lot over to him and then lost the lot gambling on the Derby, or so the family story goes. Others suggest that it It may not be true, but whatever the case, Edward was left in desperate straits and lived with his wife and children in Slaney Lodge, which his father had built and rented to him.

Frederick senior’s tenure in Gibraltar is remembered chiefly for one thing: the Marie Celeste mystery.  The American ship was discovered adrift and deserted off the Azores on December 4, 1872. She was brought into Gibraltar by a three-man salvage team who sought their salvage money. Frederick oversaw the legal hearings and decided, based on no evidence whatsoever, that salvage team had murdered the crew of the ship. They were eventually awarded only a fraction of what they might have expected. One historian has described Frederick senior as a man ‘whose arrogance and pomposity were inversely proportional to his IQ’ and as ‘… the sort of man who, once he had made up his mind about something, couldn’t be shifted.’

The Marie Celeste, a so-called ghost ship

Frederick junior was apparently his father’s favourite son. He was born on 19 March 1929 and at twenty years old was commissioned into the 53^rd Regiment of Foot. He was sent to India, where he would spend the next 18 years. He served first on the North-west Frontier, then in the Indian Campaign, a response to the Indian Mutiny, then helped relieve Lucknow and Cawnpore. While aide-de-camp to Sir William Mansfield during the course of several campaigns he was severely wounded. His last position in India was as Military Secretary to Lord Sandhurst, Commander-in-Chief in India. He had, by then, reached the rank of brevet-colonel.

His next posting was to Gibraltar, where his father still lived. He was Assistant Adjutant In 1884. He was then appointed Commandant of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, promoted Major General in 1885 and in 1886 sent back to India to Poona (Pune).

Sandhurst College Muster Roll, 1885, bearing Frederick’s name as Commandant

He had managed to find time to marry, in 1863 in Bombay (Mumbai), Constance Frere. Her family were resident in Bombay, where her father, a lawyer, was a Member of Council, but were originally from Breconshire.  They had four children together: Constance May (known as May), born in 1864; Frederick Frere (Fritz, Freddie or FF) in 1867; Arthur (Artie) in 1871 and Richard (Dick) in 1877. Another son, Claude, survived only a few weeks. Only May moved with her parents to Hythe. Artie and Fritz were already serving in the Army and Dick was at Eton.

After Poona, Frederick retired and he and Constance lived for a while in London before moving first to Folkestone, where they rented a house while looking for somewhere to buy. Frederick had family living in nearby Dover – his maiden sisters Adelaide (Tita) and Frances (Fanny) and another who was widowed, Mary Brewster.  There was also a large military establishment in the area, at Shorncliffe, and Frederick had many friends and acquaintances among the officers.  Among them was Dr John Coates, former Medical Officer at the School of Musketry in Hythe, but now ‘a sad invalid.’ A fellow-Irishman, his career had stretched from the Crimean War to Bermuda to India to Malta and Gibraltar – which is presumably where he met Frederick. He lingered in failing health until 1896 and is buried in Hythe’s St Leonard’s churchyard.

Almost as soon as they moved into the Old Manor House in February 1892, the callers started arriving. Among the first was Colonel Charles Slade, Commandant of the School of Musketry which had been established in the town in 1853. There were calls to be made, too. May was assiduous in cultivating mew contacts – networking, we might say today.  Within a couple of weeks of moving in, she had called on the Halls, the Dennes,  the Hackneys, the Osbornes, the Lovegroves, the Davises, the de Hoghtons, the Mackesons,  the Hutchinsons, and the Baldwins.

The School of Musketry in Hythe in the early 20th century

The Halls and the Dennes were near neighbours, the Halls at the vicarage and the Dennes at St Leonard’s Cottage. Thomas Guppy Hall had been Vicar of Hythe since 1873 having married his predecessor’s daughter, Charlotte Sangar. The Misses Denne were maiden ladies, aunt and niece. John Hackney was a medical man as were Drs Osborne, Lovegrove and Randall Davis. It seems that May might have been seeking out the best man to attend her mother, whose health was always delicate.

Of the others, the de Hoghtons were a military family and James de Hoghton heir to a baronetcy; the Mackesons owned the town’s brewery. and the Hutchinsons and Baldwins had no need for any profession or trade – they were people of independent means.

All these folk lived in Hillside Street, a few yards from the Old Manor House, but May and her father soon cast their net wider (Constance rarely paid calls). By summer they had visited or left cards with Mrs Deedes at Saltwood Castle, with the Brockmans at Beachborough and with the Porters of Moyle Tower.  Frederick attended a garden party at Beachborough and another at Dover Castle to welcome the new Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Frederick liked to mix with titled people and always mentioned the encounters in his diary.  By September, the family felt confident enough to throw two small garden parties of their own, with croquet matches part of the entertainment.

The triple-barrelled Lord Warden

Sometimes, however, visitors were not wholeheartedly welcome. In July ‘May stayed at home to receive the Fitzclarences who had invited themselves to tea by telegraph’. The Hon. George Fitzclarence was a son of the Earl of Munster and descended from William IV and his mistress Dorothea Jordan. His wife, Lady Maria, was also an earl’s daughter. Refusing them would have been unthinkable, however bad their manners. Then In October, Frederick returned home from a walk and was ‘appalled by this room full of visitors.’

Similarly, paying calls could be tiresome, In 1893 he records ‘C & I had to dine at the vicarage to meet General & Mrs Trent-Stoughton’.

Walking was something Frederick took seriously. He walked nearly every day, whatever the weather, at least once, often twice. These were not short strolls. His morning walks were often eight miles long and he sometimes walked to Lyminge and back, a distance of about ten miles, with steep climbs. On one occasion he noted ‘walked to Folkestone Town Hall 1h 5 minutes and back in 1h 9 minutes.’ This is a distance of just over 4 miles each way with another steep climb. He was then in his seventies.  He also had a daily exercise routine.

Sometimes he was accompanied by May and often by a dog or two, of which there were a succession. They were never kept on a leash with the resultant fights with other dogs, killing of chickens (for which Frederick had to pay compensation) and running away – but always returned by kind townspeople. He did not like all pets, however, and bought Fritz an air rifle so he could ‘practice shooting at obnoxious cats’.

Gardening was another passion and one in which May joined him, though Frederick also employed a jobbing gardener, Valentine Hobday. He planted a rose garden and visited the American Garden in Saltwood in May each year to admire the rhododendrons and azaleas

The American Garden in Saltwood, still blooming today

Although Constance was often confined to her bed, Frederick seems to have enjoyed robust good health, though he did suffer periodically from ‘my old enemy, weak action of the heart.’ He consulted a doctor who told him there was nothing wrong with his heart but that he was suffering from a ‘disarrangement of the nervous system’. This set him worrying that his mind was going (it was not).

The Old Manor House was very conveniently placed for attending church services. Frederick always went on Sunday morning and often again in the evening. He also sat on the Parochial Church Council. In summer he regularly complained that the church was packed with visitors at the 11 am service, despite there now being an additional 9.30 am service for the military. On one occasion, he was caught unawares by the annual Civic Sunday event, when the mayor and councillors ousted him from his usual pew.

The whole family found the holidaymakers irksome. As well as packing the pews in church, they ‘stop the residents getting on trams & buses’ and on one occasion Constance ‘tried to go to Folkestone by tram but was too disturbed by noisy trippers’.

Frederick was quite dismissive of the town council and Hythe town life in general. The mayor in 1892 was Mr Scott – ‘a builder apparently’. One December he remarked of a torchlit procession in the town: ‘the meaning of it, if it has one, I don’t know, except an evening diversion for the lower orders it being early closing day’. (There was, in fact, no ‘meaning’: torchlight processions were briefly in vogue in the 1890s).  He wrote of the annual illuminated tableaux on the Royal Military Canal that ’they are pleased to call it a Venetian Fete’. Mrs Herbert Deedes, of Saltwood Castle ‘poses as the great lady’, he wrote. His snobbery was based not on wealth – the Deedes family were very well off – but on class and pedigree. He himself was far from rich, but his wife had been presented at court, whereas Rose Deedes had not.

To be continued…

The above is taken from the diaries of Frederick Solly-Flood, kindly lent to me by Robert Melrose of Eastbridge House, supplemented by local research and by  Bob Solly, Solly-Flood Family Notes November 1999 edition of Soul Search, the Journal of The Sole Society