A Lost Boy

Alice Penrhyn Blakiston was the schoolteacher daughter of another schoolteacher turned civil servant, William Collins Blakiston. He retired to Hythe and brought with him his three unmarried daughters. He had bought property in the town and the women could live where they chose. The older two, Clara and Maria, lived together in Castle Road, Their younger half-sister, Alice, lived on the seafront, in West Parade.

She is shown there on the 1901 census with a servant and, a little surprisingly for a single woman,  an adopted son, Edgar Tacchella, aged nine and born in Derby. Alice had been an infants school teacher – perhaps  this was an orphaned child she had met at school and taken under her wing. The  truth is rather stranger.

West Parade in about 1906

Edgar William Hollinshead Tacchella was the son of Benjamin Tacchella and his wife Kate nee Hollinshead. He was born in 1892 in Derby where his father, an Italian by birth, was a language master at Derby School (he taught French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Latin and Greek).  He had two older sisters and a brother though three other brothers died as babies. The first three children of the family were born in Chiswick, where Benjamin was a freelance language tutor. At the same time, Alice Blakiston was working as an infants school teacher in Chiswick, so presumably they became acquainted there and continued the friendship when the Tacchellas moved to Derby in about 1887. The couple’s first daughter was named Madleen Alice, perhaps for their family friend, and Alice later said she was godmother to Edgar

At some point in the next nine years, Edgar became Alice’s adopted son. The adoption would have been unofficial, but such arrangements were far from uncommon. The question is why? Benjamin and Kate had already lost two baby sons, in 1886 and 1890. They would lose a third in 1899. Why were they persuaded that Edgar would be better off with Alice? Alice seems never to have worked again after the adoption, but is shown on census returns as living on her own means. Perhaps the Tacchellas made a contribution to Edgar’s upbringing.

Edgar later claimed that as a young man he had started a Merchant Navy apprenticeship. If this was true, he did not finish it. In early 1907 he travelled to Liverpool and embarked, alone and aged just 15, on the RMS Lucania, bound for New York. He had US$50 in his pocket. He travelled as Edgar H. Blakiston and told the authorities at Ellis Island that he was there to visit his uncle Duncan Blakiston, an artist who lived in New York and who had been born in 1868.

 

Apart from the fact that there was no actual blood relationship, was Duncan Blakiston real? The answer is yes, and he was born in 1869 in London. The relationship to the Hythe Blakistons was that Duncan was the grandson of William Collins Blakiston’s brother Arthur. That is, he was William’s great nephew, so a second cousin of Alice. He had emigrated in 1888 and may well have started out in New York, but soon moved to California, where he prospered as a portrait painter, illustrator and photographer.

Queuing at Ellis Island c. 1911

Edgar made his way somehow to Duncan’s home in San Francisco’s fashionable Haight-Ashbury district and is recorded as living there in 1908, now under his birth name of Tacchella. His ‘uncle’ can hardly have had much notice of his arrival, but acted quickly when he arrived and in June 1907  Alice was herself en route from Hythe to the USA.

Victorian houses in Haight-Ashbury

This was no easy journey. She was nearly 50 and travelling alone. As far as we know she had never been further than Derby before, but now she sailed across the Atlantic and then travelled another 3000 miles to a city where, only a year before, thousands of people had been killed in a dreadful earthquake. She must have been quite devoted to Edgar.

San Francisco after the quake

Once in San Francisco, she made the acquaintance of a fellow ex-patriate Englishman, Ernest Andrews, who  worked for the Canadian Bank of Commerce in the city. Edgar was found work in the San Francisco branch as a teller. It seems that on the strength of this, Edgar moved to Vancouver in 1909 and took Canadian citizenship.

He served in the local militia there, but in 1913 went back to England. His stay was short: In July he sailed from Southampton to Cape Town to join the British South African Police. He attested in August 1913 and left the force on 1 September 1917.

The paramiltary force was founded in 1889 by Cecil Rhodes and served as the police force for what was then Rhodesia (Zimbabwe since 1980). The officers were trained as both policemen and soldiers. During World War 1, the force fought in German East Africa. Perhaps it was there that Edgar was, as Alice later reported, badly wounded.

Men of the BSAP

While he was away, his father died in January 1914. Benjamín specifically excluded Edgar from his will, stating that Alice had adopted him and that he would receive nothing unless Alice died and did not leave him her estate. He went further and said that Edgar would receive nothing on his mother’s death either unless Alice had by then died and left him nothing.

Edgar went back to England and to Alice. In 1921 they were living together for the first time in fifteen-odd years in Barnes, West London. This time around, under ‘relationship’ Alice wrote ‘none’ on the census form.  Edgar had found employment as a clerk at the Ministry of Health in Acton. It must have seemed tame after his adventures, but  perhaps tame was what he was seeking.

He also seems to have been seeking regular oblivion and drank heavily, not unusual among soldiers returning from the horrors of World War 1. He cannot have been easy to live with.

That said, he was a valued employee at the Ministry of Health and after nearly ten years as a ‘temporary’ clerk was taken onto the establishment in 1929. He enjoyed the social life offered and particularly the swimming club.

In February 1934 he took a few days leave, but did not return to work on the appointed day. Enquiries revealed that he had been admitted to hospital. He died the next day. A post mortem showed that he had extensive haemorrhaging throughout his lower intestine caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

The Ministry of Health sent a couple of officials to the funeral with ‘a handsome floral tribute’ but there is no record of any family members attending. Edgar’s remains were cremated at Golders Green cemetery. This in itself was quite unusual for the time, when fewer than 5% of bodies were disposed of in this way. Golders Green is a fair distance from Barnes, so it is likely that Edgar had made known his preference, though he left no will that we know of.

Alice was now alone in the world. Her father, step-mother and all her siblings had pre-deceased her. She died herself nine months after Edgar.  Apart from a few bequests of jewellery to friends, Edgar was to have received  the £700+ that she left. In the event, it went to her nephew, son of her only brother Arthur, who lived in Norwich.

One of the executors of her will was Ernest Andrews, who had helped her nearly thirty years earlier.  He had returned from San Francisco to England in 1910 to work for the London branch of the Canadian Bank of Commerce.  Alice refers to him in her will as ‘my friend’.