The Palmers of Hythe part four – the Linguist

The founder of the ‘Hythe Reporter’, Edward Palmer (see The Palmers of Hythe part two – the Journalist)  had one son, Harold Edward Palmer. His was perhaps the most remarkable of the Palmer family stories.

He was born on 6 March 1877 in London.  In the early 1880s his father moved the family back to his home town of Hythe in Kent where he worked in the stationary shop opened by his own father and in 1890 launched his newspaper. 

Harold Palmer’s education began at local elementary schools, but he was withdrawn at the age of ten and tutored at home for three years. He spent two further years at a small private school run by the Winnifrith family in Prospect House, Hythe, before leaving for good in 1892 at the age of fifteen. Before this, he had made a few tentative steps into journalism, having a sketch of Hythe’s lifeboat published by the Daily Graphic and as a teenager contributing humorous pieces to the Hythe Reporter  under he name ‘Jobbins Z. Jobbins. He also spent six months on an exchange visit with a family in Boulogne before taking on the paper’s editorship for two years but then left Hythe to pursue a teaching career abroad.

One of Harold’s light-hearted pieces

By February 1902 Harold was teaching English in a language school in Verviers, Belgium. The following year he established his own school, later known as the Institut Palmer, which flourished and in time came to occupy two separate sites in the town. On 19 November 1904 he married a local woman, Elisabeth Purnode, and a daughter, Dorotheé, was born on 28 April 1905.

During his time in Verviers, Harold set out on a course of self-education. He became a member of the local société polyglotte and started writing language teaching materials. His first book, Méthode Palmer, an English course for French speakers, appeared in 1906. He joined the International Phonetic Association and in 1910 had the first of many contributions accepted by its journal Le Maître Phonétique.

This caught the attention of Britain’s leading twentieth-century phonetician, Daniel Jones of University College, London and the two met by chance on a cross-channel ferry in 1912. Two years later, the German army invaded Belgium and Harold found himself to be an enemy alien. After what he later described as ‘six weeks of nightmare’ he and his family crossed the border into Holland  and thence to England. After an attempt to start a school in Folkestone, Harold took up a post teaching French in a London grammar school. He contacted Daniel Jones, who invited him to deliver a series of extra-mural lectures at University College on methods of language teaching. The success of these led to a post in the University, teaching spoken English and organizing a year-long course in language teaching methodology, the first of its kind at university level in Britain. He stayed until 1921, publishing three academic works on language teaching. 

Daniel Jones

At the end of his time in London and after a gap of sixteen years, Harold and Elisabeth had another child, a son named Tristram

Harold at work

Having established himself at home, Harold moved on. He accepted a post as linguistic adviser to the Japanese ministry of education and in February 1922 left for Tokyo, where an Institute for Research in English Teaching was set up with Harold as its director. He taught, researched and continued to write, producing five more works, including one in conjunction with his daughter Dorothee.  He was also, for a year, English tutor to the Emperor’s second son, Prince Chichibu, who wanted to study in England and he experienced the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. 

 Harold and Elisabeth in Japan

Prince Chichibu, who studied at Magdalen College, Oxford

The family made a trip home in 1926, travelling overland through China, Siberia and Russia, a journey which provided plenty of anecdotes for the speaking tour which followed.  Early the next year, at St Andrew’s church in Tokyo, Dorothee was married to Basil Stanley Anderson. 

By 1936, now approaching sixty and with the international situation deteriorating, Harold decided to return to England and he left Japan with a DLitt from Tokyo Imperial University, a considerable achievement for a man whose formal education had finished at fifteen.  On their return the Palmers settled at Felbridge, on the Surrey–Sussex border, where Harold continued writing English language teaching materials, including The New Method Grammar (1938) for young learners, which used railways as a metaphor for grammar  – he even constructed a working model in his garden.

In July 1942 Tristram, the Palmers’ twenty-one-year-old son, a promising musician, was killed in action over the Netherlands while on a bombing mission.

The CWGC grave of Tristram Edward Leonard Palmer

Harold Palmer never fully recovered from the loss, falling victim to depression and ill health. He died at his home, Coopers Wood, Felbridge, from acute heart failure on 16 November 1949, and was buried at Folkestone cemetery. His work, however, lives on and Warwick University holds a unique archive of his publications. 

Harold is buried in the same grave as his father, Edward. (http://www.findagrave.com)

The Palmers of Hythe part two- the Journalist

Edward Palmer was the fifth child of another Edward Palmer, the founder of Hythe’s National School and its first head master (see The Palmers of Hythe part one – the School Teacher). He was born in Hythe in 1853 .  Edward senior encouraged all his children to follow in his profession and most did, including, for a while, Edward junior.   He qualified, obtaining a diploma in French, and for a few years taught in London.  In 1876 in Kensington, he married Minnie Frostick and they settled down in Kensington.  A son, Harold Edward, was born the next year.

The little family moved to Islington in 1882, where Edward earned extra by providing French classes for adults.  However, he seems to have decided that teaching was not his true vocation, and in 1883, the family moved back to Hythe. When Edward senior had retired from teaching in 1875, he had set up a stationer’s and bookseller’s business on the corner of High Street and Great Conduit Street, and his son joined him there.  In 1886 young Edward became the Hythe agent for the Folkestone News  handling correspondence, reports and advertisements, and he was soon established as a reporter.

The High Street premises of the Palmers’ stationery shop & HQ of the Hythe Reporter

That first issue consisted of four pages:  as was then the practice, the front page comprised advertisements only. In his introductory column, the editor promised full and fair reporting of all Hythe events.  On municipal affairs, he said, the paper   would advocate ‘economy with efficiency’:  appropriately, this was the policy of the Hythe Ratepayers’ Association, whose supporters had elected him to the Town Council the previous year.

It was perhaps odd that he agreed to represent the group at the Town Hall, as he apparently disliked public appearances. A rival newspaper reported of him: ‘Mr. Palmer’s forte is not speaking, and as pale and trembling, with faltering speech, he addressed the noisy meeting, he must have passed through moments of intense agony.’ Perhaps this is why he abandoned teaching.

Edward & some of the Hythe Reporter’s staff

Without the backing of the family business, the Hythe Reporter could not have survived those early years.    In 1892 it was enlarged; four years later it doubled its size – and its price.  By the end of the decade it had taken over the Hythe and Sandgate Echo.  Harold joined the paper as a journalist, but eventually decided that his future lay in teaching English as a foreign language and moved to Belgium.

Outside journalism, Edward’s family doubled in size when a daughter, Dorothy, was born in 1889. A couple of years later, he helped make news himself, when in November 1891 a severe storm  wrecked the cargo ship Benvenue off Sandgate, and the Hythe lifeboat,  Mayer de Rothschild, going to her rescue,  overturned two hundred yards off shore, flinging its crew into the sea. Edward was there to report on the event and with other townsmen he waded into the surging sea and helped drag ashore two of the lifeboatmen; he had caught hold of a third when a heavy wave knocked him off his feet, and he went under water with the lifeboatman on top of him.  He experienced a few moments of sheer terror before someone seized the two of them and pulled them to safety.   Eventually, twenty-seven of the Benvenue’s crew of thirty-two were saved; one Hythe lifeboatman was drowned.  Among the onlookers was Edward’s son, Harold, aged fourteen.  His sketch of the launching of the Mayer de Rothschild was published next day in the Daily Graphic.

An artist’s impression of the wreck of the Benvenue

The following year, a suggestion made by Edward at a public meeting led to the first Venetian Fete on the Royal Military Canal at Hythe. Although it got off to a rocky start because of lack of funding, it eventually became a biennial event , comprising floating tableaux and, after dark, illuminations and fireworks.  It continues to this day (though currently, Covid-19 has put it on hold).

 

A twenty-first century Venetian Fete float

In 1916, Edward conceived the second event which still survives.  Canadian soldiers were a common sight in Hythe during the First World War. On arrival in the UK they were accommodated at one of the many camps which ringed Hythe until they were shipped to France. Many came back injured and many of these did not recover. They were buried a Shorncliffe cemetery, just outside the Hythe boundary. Each grave had its uniform wooden cross bearing name and regiment, Edward wrote in the Hythe Reporter but the men’s relations thousands of miles away were denied the consolation of visiting these graves.  He would like to see a day set apart for the placing of flowers on each grave, ‘and who is more fitted to this than the children who wave flags and salute the flag on Empire Day? So Canadian Flower Day was born.

In the early evening of Wednesday, 13th July, 1,500 schoolchildren assembled on the sloping ground of the cemetery.  Nearly all had walked there.  To the music of the Band of the Canadian Artillery, they and the adult visitors sang ‘The Maple Leaf’ and the National Anthem.  Then the children walked quietly among the graves with their bouquets and posies, until every grave was a mass of flowers.  Many Canadian soldiers were present, and it was noted that afterwards a number picked a few flowers to send to relations in Canada. This became, until 1939, and annual event and was reinstated in 1952.

The first Canadian Flower Day

During the war, Edward also volunteered for the Hythe Volunteer Fencibles, a sort of proto- Home Guard.

Edward in uniform

After the war, Edward interested himself in maintaining and developing the entente cordiale with France, organising cultural, sporting and educational exchanges. In 1924, he was awarded the Palmes Academique for services to the Republic of France.  By now, he and his wife had moved to Folkestone, where they lived in Audley Road.

Edward died on 7 October 1927, having been ill since the beginning of the year, though he had continued during his time to submit historical articles to his newspaper.  One obituary said of him that he had three great beliefs – in Hythe, in international friendship and in decency.

And the Hythe Reporter was published until the paper shortages of World War Two led to its demise.

To be continued