In memory/of/George William Wallace/D’Arcy Evans/who died on Sept 8th 1906/aged 46 year
A simple gravestone, no indication of family, or expressions of regret or piety, but it conceals a story which stretches from Ireland to England to South Africa and Canada.
George William Wallace D’Arcy Evans was born on 4 October 1860 at Knockaderry House, County Limerick. He was the second son of John D’Arcy Evans and Marion Evans nee Wallace, perhaps best described as minor Anglo-Irish landed gentry.
Knockaderry House
As befits a second son who had no great expectations, he joined the army as a young man, but it seems there was not even enough money to buy him a commission, as he joined as a trooper and served for three years in the ranks of the South Wales Borderers. He was finally commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Irish Rifles in 1886. He was promoted to Captain in 1894, and exchanged into the 20th Hussars in 1895 and the Bedfordshire Regiment in 1896. He then served for some years as Superintendent of Gymnasia in Colchester.
He had exchanged regiments, literally swapping with another officer of the same rank, because the regiments with which he was serving were being sent to India. George was now a married man with a family and presumably wanted to stay with them in England, or perhaps his wife was reluctant to travel. He had married Harriette George Marion Gledstanes Richards on 18 July 1889 at Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin. She came from a similar background to George and was the daughter of Captain George Gledstanes Richards of Macmine Castle, County Wexford. She was born on 11 August 1869.
Macmine Castle – not really a castle, but a country house
In the first five years of their marriage, four children were born, although one died in infancy. George seems to have found his niche in the army in writing textbooks. These included Field Training Made Easy in Accordance with the Revised Syllabus Contained in the New Infantry Drill and The Non-Commissioned Officer’s Guide to Promotion in the Infantry. The Army & Navy Gazette praised them for their clarity and usefulness. Harriette also wrote a book, In Mermaidland, and Other Stories, which the Gazette dismissed as ‘a very slight production for children.’ The Liverpool Mercury, however said that they were four beautiful stories and that the humour pervading the book made it very enjoyable.
But in December 1897, Harriette admitted to her husband that she had been unfaithful to him. They separated, but in 1900, on learning that she had given birth to a child in 1898, George took her back. The child seems to have been accepted by George as his own, and given Evans family names: Hardress Waller Eyre D’Arcy Evans. George told Harriette that she had ‘a clear, fresh start’ and that he would protect her against anybody. The family lived for a while together at 34 St Leonard’s Avenue, Bedford.
However, the next year, Harriette started a new liaison with a man she met on a bus, Charles Abbott. He was, in fact, the conductor of the station omnibus, which ran from the George Hotel in Bedford. Charles was already married, a fact which, Harriette said later, he did not share with her immediately. He was also, at nineteen, very much younger than her, although he may not have told her that immediately either. He had lied about his age at his marriage to Edith Bainbridge only the year before, saying that he was twenty-one, whereas his Canadian death record shows his date of birth as 22 May 1882. Since by the time he died there was no need for subterfuge, this is likely to be correct. He was the son of William Abbott, a shepherd, and his wife Martha.
The George Hotel, Bedford, on the left of the picture
The couple corresponded. He called her ‘my dearest darling’, she wrote him ‘hysterical’ letters. Harriette was confronted by Edith in the street, but refused to give up her lover. She wrote to Charles suggesting that they elope to Canada, where they could live on her small private income of £200 a year.
He agreed. On 1 June 1901, while George was out riding, Harriette escaped from the house and met Charles at Bedford station. They took a train to Liverpool where they stayed at a hotel under the names Mr and Mrs Brown, and under those names they sailed for Canada.
George had run out of patience, and divorced Harriette the next year, though he was by then in South Africa, fighting the Boers. He was adjutant of the 36th Battalion Imperial Yeomanry during the Boer War. Charles was divorced by Edith in 1905. She had heard nothing at all from him since his elopement.
George relinquished his South African post in 1903 and rejoined the Bedfordshire Regiment. It is unclear why he was in Hythe when he died, although he may have had business with the School of Musketry in the town.
Meanwhile, Charles and Harriette either married in Canada or cohabited under the name of Abbott-Brown, a good compromise. They had a son together, born in 1912 in Saskatchewan, and christened with the names Charles John Loftus Totenham Garner Abbott-Brown. The names Loftus Totenham Garner were often used by another gentry family of Co. Wexford with whom Harriette presumably had some connection.
Charles and Harriette died in British Columbia within months of each other, he on 20 February 1960, she on 30 September that year. Their son, who had become a truck driver, predeceased them, having been killed in a house fire in 1955.
The grave marker for Harriette and Charles. Their son had died before them, but this stone is inscribed ‘Mother’ and ‘Dad’, so perhaps there were other children.
Harriette was air-brushed from her first family’s history. When her youngest son by George, Hardress Waller Eyre D’Arcy Evans, a Commander in the Royal Navy, announced his engagement in 1934, only his father was mentioned as a parent. Burke’s Peerage gives Harriette’s date of death, but no details of her second family. Did the Canadian truck driver ever meet the Anglo-Irish Commander? Probably not.
