A Titanic Memorial in Hythe

In dear memory of Edward Pomeroy Colley/ Born 15 April 1875, Entered into Eternal/Life 15 April 1912 through the sinking/of the Steamship “Titanic”/Whoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it

Hythe Civic Society Elizabeth Bowen (writer) lived here 1965-1973

Two memorials, two names: Edward Colley and Elizabeth Bowen, one inside St Leonard’s church, Hythe, the other just yards away on the wall of a house on Church Hill. What is the connection?

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen was born on 7 June 1899 in Dublin, the daughter of barrister Henry Bowen and his wife Florence nee Colley. Both families were part of the extensive network of Irish gentry and her father owned Bowen Court in County Cork, where Elizabeth spent her summers.  Her father became mentally ill in 1907 and her mother took her to live in England. They lived for a while in Lyminge, near the church, but eventually settled in ‘Clyne House’, in North Road, Hythe.

Florence Isabella Bowen nee Colley

They were probably the first tenants after the house had been ravaged by fire in January 1911. The owner, Frederick Butler, was called away from a Town Council meeting when a candle in the nursery set the curtains on fire.  Mrs Butler rescued the children, but the roof and top storey were destroyed.

Cline House after the fire….

… and in its later years

Florence already had family living in England and one sister, Constance, had become a medical doctor there. However, Constance became ill, probably with TB and in 1911 was in a sanatorium in Henley. By 1912, about the time that Florence and Elizabeth moved to Hythe, Constance was in Folkestone, possibly for the sea air. If so, it was ineffective, and she died in the town on 15 February 1912. She was buried in Folkestone (Cheriton Road) cemetery.

Dr Constance Colley’s grave in Folkestone

On 6 April that year, the youngest brother of Constance and Florence, Edward Pomeroy Colley, visited ‘Clyne House’.  A university-educated civil servant in his mid-thirties, he had, during the Klondike Gold Rush, opened a successful mining brokerage firm in Vancouver. Now he had business interests on both sides of the Atlantic and frequently travelled between Dublin and a home in Vancouver.  He had been in Ireland for Christmas 1911, and was planning to return to Canada to work as a consultant to the industrialist and politician James Dunsmuir.

Edward Pomeroy Colley

After a short stay in Hythe, he travelled to London and from there to Southampton, where he boarded the Titanic. He died on his thirty-seventh birthday.

More tragedy was to follow. In September 1912, Florence Bowen died of cancer aged forty-eight at ‘Clyne House’.  She is buried in Saltwood churchyard.

Florence Bowen’s grave, the stone identical to that of her sister

Elizabeth went to live in Harpenden with her aunt Laura Colley, who was housekeeper to her brother, the Rev’d. Wingfield Colley, curate in charge of St John’s Church in the town.

Elizabeth’s career as a novelist is well documented elsewhere as are her mariage blanc and her lovers. Later in life, now widowed, she returned to Hythe. On the face of it, it was an odd decision. Her short time in the town as a child must have been associated with the loss of her mother, aunt and uncle and she chose to live in a house, ‘Carbery’, only a stone’s throw from ‘Clyne House’, just around the corner.  Her old home was then still standing, though it was later demolished and replaced by a block of flats.

Elizabeth Bowen

It was in Hythe that Elizabeth wrote her last novel, ‘Eva Trout’, published in 1969. The protagonist experiences, as Elizabeth did as a child, the shock of relocation from Ireland to the Kent seaside, although she settles in Broadstairs rather than Hythe. But the flat, windswept hinterland of Thanet is not dissimilar to the Romney Marsh and the estate agent who sells Eva Trout her house is Mr Denge. It is a name with a local flavour:  Denge Marsh lies between Lydd and Dungeness.

Elizabeth also arranged for the brass wall plaque in St Leonard’s in memory of her uncle. He has another in the church at Harpenden, where Elizabeth passed her teenage years.

In 1972, Elizabeth spent Christmas in Ireland with friends, but became unwell and was hospitalised on her return. She was diagnosed with lung cancer and died at University College Hospital on 22 February 1973, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in St Colman’s churchyard in Farahy, near the site of Bowen’s Court, which had been demolished in 1960. 

Elizabeth is buried with her husband, Alan Charles Cameron

Thanks to Iris Pearce for the information about Clyne House and to Rita Weisz for finding Florence Bowen’s grave

Police and Politics

                                                  A sketch of John Bennett Tunbridge in 1894

John Bennett Tunbridge did not have an advantageous start in life. He was born in New Romney on 17 November 1850, the illegitimate son of a servant, Mary Tunbridge.  He spent his early years with her, his grandparents and their seven other children, until his mother’s marriage to William Apps, a groom.  By the age of ten, he was working as a butcher’s boy, though he must have combined this with school, as so many children did.  He could not possibly have imagined that he would one day travel to South America on the trail of a wanted man or catch the eye of the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

He had received enough education to join the Metropolitan Police in December 1867, though he had initial doubts and resigned three months later. He then re-joined in September 1869. By 1871 he was a police constable.

He was also able enough to be promoted sergeant only two years later. On 17 November 1877 in Harrow, he married Ellen Maria Hatch, an Irishwoman and the daughter of a Royal Irish Constabulary officer. She was exactly three years younger – they shared a birthday and married on that date, too.  John was promoted inspector the next year.  From 1881 he served in the detective branch, working in the commissioner’s office from 1887. It was during this period that he and his family (a daughter, Milly Norah, had been born in 1882) started visiting Hythe, where in 1886 he intervened when a man tried to eject two boys from a boat on the canal, hitting one of them with an oar. The other man came off worse.

Boating on the Royal Military Canal was – and still is – a popular summer pastime

Professionally, he was involved in the capture of Thomas Neill Cream, the ‘Lambeth Poisoner’ who murdered women sex workers with strychnine.

 

John Tonbridge               and    Thomas Cream

Photographed at the time of the latter’s arrest*

 

He was then sent to Argentina to bring home  Jabez Balfour, a corrupt financier who had left thousands of investors penniless and then fled the country.

A ‘Vanity Fair’ caricature of Jabez Balfour

John set off on 27 January 1894 and sailed from Southampton to Buenos Airies for what turned out to be a rough and unpleasant month-long voyage. On arrival, he checked into the Grand Hotel. Balfour had already been arrested, and the press confidently expected he would be back on British soil by the end of March. This was wishful thinking.  Balfour employed lawyers to fight his extradition, then, through pleading ill-health, managed to get himself released from prison. In April, matters were no further forward, but John received the news that he had been promoted to Chief Inspector.  Balfour appealed to the Supreme Court. In August he was rumoured to have been surrendered to the British authorities (ie John), but this was untrue: he had merely been re-imprisoned.  In November, the extradition was confirmed by the Supreme Court, but Balfour was then charged with other offences, which took precedence and his removal was delayed – again.

John took action. Unable, as a police officer, to communicate his misgivings directly to the British press,  he wrote in January 1895, to a friend who shared his letter with journalists. In it John complained that he had given up hope of any extradition within the next four-and-a-half  years. The ploy worked and in February a replacement was sent out to relieve him. As if to spite him, Balfour was finally removed from Argentina in April. He was subsequently sentenced to fourteen years penal servitude.

John decided to call it a day. He retired  in September 1895 with an ‘exemplary’ certificate and a substantial  pension, and the family moved permanently (or so it seemed) to Hythe, where John had acquired property in Park Road.  The local paper, the Hythe Reporter, suggested that his experience would make him a very useful town councillor. It was not to be, or not yet.

On the other side of the world, the New Zealand Police Force was in need of a man to clean up its corruption-ridden operation. Premier Richard Seddon, visiting London,  asked the advice of Sir Edward Bradford, chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and John Tunbridge’s name was mentioned. Perhaps, in his mid-forties, John felt too young to retire and he agreed to go to New Zealand, sailing from Plymouth to  Wellington (first class) in 1897 to become Police Commissioner for the country.  Ellen and Milly accompanied him.

                                                Richard Seddon, Prime Minister of New Zealand 1892-1906.

The next year he travelled round the country with the Royal Commission on Police, learning about the work of his police force and contributing ideas on reform.  After the Commission reported, along lines which accorded with his own views, he had a mandate for sweeping changes and the government gave him a free hand.  He began improvements at once, focusing on the crucial role of non-commissioned officers – the ‘backbone’ of the organisation.  He established a training college in Wellington, created a pension scheme for policemen and introduced merit-based promotions and increased pay.

He was, of course, subject to criticism. Some said his newly-efficient police force imposed a ‘reign of terror’; others thought he was too lax in internal discipline, especially with regard to drunkenness. In April 1902,  the government  overturned his lenient treatment of Nelson police who had been accused of inefficiency, immorality and corruption. John believed their offences to be minor, but the government apparently made its decision on the basis of information provided privately. What should have been an internal police matter had led to public political censure of the commissioner.

John, in protest,gave in his notice in January 1903 – which led to widespread condemnation of the government’s actions, but to no avail. John, Ellen and Milly  sailed for England and retired once more to Hythe, where they lived in North Road.

That he would become a councillor was inevitable, and in 1904 he made his first foray into local affairs by suggesting that unemployed men should be used to build homes for the working classes on council-owned land.  In November 1905 he was elected to serve on the council, but was not immediately popular with his colleagues, especially with John James Jeal, a builder who had been violently opposed to John’s home-building plan.  The feud continued for years and neither man lost an opportunity to undermine the other.

John’s background meant that he was used to giving orders and used to being obeyed.  As a councillor, he was often accused of being domineering and intolerant of faults in others, however trivial. He was much criticised for his action when two children stole apples from his garden: they were on a three weeks’ holiday in Hythe arranged by the Jewish Open-Air Fund Association, and he had them sent home immediately. In 1906, he  took particular exception to a travelling show: ‘…. on the stage outside, a lady kicked her legs about and showed a superabundance of rather unclean lace. Many people think there is too much of this going on, but no doubt it is a very great attraction to a certain part of the neighbourhood.’ Another letter to the local paper next week remarked that  ‘this apparently self-appointed censor of the public morals of our town’ had been singularly unobservant: the dancer with the frilly petticoats was, in fact, a boy.

In 1907 he found himself on the wrong side of the law when he struck ex-Councillor Frank White in the face at a meeting of the Hythe Ratepayers’ Association after White called him a liar. White brought an action for assault; John pleaded guilty, claiming provocation and was fined £1 with 9/- costs.

Despite the criticisms, John was re-elected year after year and continued as a councillor and JP for the rest of his life, serving as mayor in 1909.  He took a particular interest in beautifying Hythe by planting trees and shrubs and in providing allotments and decent housing for working men and always insisted on value for money in the Council’s activities. When war broke out, he volunteered to serve as a Special Constable, an experience which must have been strange after a gap of over forty years.

John Tunbridge as Mayor of Hythe

He died at home on 6 October 1928 after only a few days illness and was buried in Saltwood churchyard. He died only a few miles from his New Romney birthplace, but his journey had encompassed the whole globe.

John’s grave in Saltwood churchyard. He is buried with Ellen

(Paul Dennis)

In 1907 , His daughter, Milly Norah had  married, in Saltwood church, Innes Harold Stranger, a lawyer who went on to become a King’s Counsel.

Ellen died, also in Hythe, in 1934.

* With thanks to Colin Garrow