Day Thirty Six

Chatting online with my neice Julia who now now lives in Northern France I was told that she has two swords that belonged to Fitzmaurice Creighton, my great grandfather.  This started me off on another series of enquiries.  I decided to Google Fitzmaurice deVere Creighton, his son, also a military man

I had previously researched him, on Day Seven of the Chronicles,  but this search turned up new insights.  This excerpt from The London Gazette reveals not only that deVere had been ADC to the Sultan of Johore but more intriguingly that his full name was Fitzmaurice deVere Pennefather Creighton.  A check of the UK Birth Deaths and Marriages records confirmed that this was in fact his full name.  But why "Pennefather"?.  An unusual name and perhaps a clue to who Fitzmaurice's mother was.  Could it be that Fitzmaurice gave his first son the names of his mother's family.  Is there any record of a Pennefather or a deVere Pennefather or even better a Fitzmaurice deVere Pennefather?

Another search produced even more surprising results. Which I will post tomorrow.

Day Thirty Five

New Informatiuon coming soon on William Abraham Creighton of Creightons Creek, Victoria in Australia.  1849

Day Thirty Four

Information coming soon on Thomas Cordingley

Day Thirty Three

Time flies  and I have been remiss in recording the history of my family.  It is time now to return to the quest.

Jen Creighton, my mother, was born one hundred years ago today, September 4, 1911 in Alligator Creek, North Queensland.  Her father Harold Havindon Cordingley was at that time a proprietor of the North Queensland Meat Export Company, a company established by his father Thomas Cordingley in 1896.  The sale in 1913 of this company to the American company, Swifts,  financed the purchase of the grazing property, Mihi, in New England.

The illustration, shows the meat-works at Alligator Creek and is from the recently published history of Thomas Cordingley, written by Gweneth Cordingley.  The book gives a detailed account of the life of my great grandfather, who arrived in Australia in 1866 to work as a "technologist" at  Charles Tindall's Ramornie meatworks and of his significant role in the establishment of the Australian meat industry.

Day Thirty Two

Writing the post about Mary Hervey got me in the mind to explore more about the women in my family.  Although I have tended to concemtrate on my father's line, the patrilineage , I decided to explore the matrineage.  My mother's  grandmother was Emily Frances Windsor and I still carry that Windsor name. It was clearly felt to be important. So I kept exploring

Emily's brother , Richard Other Windsor, discovered in 1903 that he had inherited the title Earl of Plymouth.  So he trotted off to London but decided that as he was just a lawyer he really didn,t have the financial resources to take on the responsibilities of being an Earl. Apparently he did a deal where it seems he got a bit of a "payout" and the title then went to the Windsor-Clive branch of the family. They are still the Earls of Plymouth.

I decided to go online and hunt out the Other Windsor ancestors.  The Other Windsor family line is easy to trace and goes straight back to 1004 AD in England. And that is when it gets really interesting. Until 1004 the family was known simply as Windsor, an ancient Anglo Saxon family who controlled the fortified hill where Windsor Castle now stands. They had probably been based there since the days of the Roman Empire; this was a crucial strategic position.  But as the new millenium approached the Windsor line was in danger of extinction.  There was no male heir.  There was however a formidable Windsor woman running the show.  A marriage was needed to continue the line.  And the solution would come from Italy

Other Gheradini, who was the nineteenth Duke of Tuscany, born in Florence in 967AD, married the Windsor matriarch in 1004.  He took up the name Windsor and their children became the Other Windsors.  The next generation of Other Windsors teamed up with William the Conqueror after the Norman Conquest in 1066.  William eventually assumed ownership of the fortified hill building a castle there, whilst the Other Windsors moved a few miles down the road to Stanwell, where members of the family still lived almost a thousand years later when Emily's brother, living in Toorak in Melbourne inherited the title Earl of Plymouth.  The Gheradini family, Dukes of Tuscany, from whence came the Other part of his name, claim descent from Helen of Troy.  Now that is a matrilineage.

Day Thirty One

The details regarding the birth of my great-great grandfather Abraham Creighton have long been shrouded in secrecy and controversy.  One of those secrets has been the identity of his mother; yet another scandal wiped from the official records, yet another story that dared not reveal itself.

In the early 1980's I spent some periods of time with my much-loved aunt Joey in London and she told me of what she knew about these events.  She told me also of a visit she had herself made to  the National Portrait Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. She had gone there to find a portrait of some personal significance.  But before she had located the portrait an elderly attendant walked up to her, smiling and stated emphatically  "You'd be from Erne then".  My aunt apparently had replied that in a way, "Yes, you could say that."  My aunt Joey  then inquired why had he asked.  The attendant said nothing and lead my aunt to a room containing the very portrait she had come to Dublin to see, the portrait of "Mary, Countess of Erne". The attendant winked saying, "There would be no mistaking you, would there then?  It's those eyes, I'd be thinking."

Mary, Countess of Erne, was born Mary Hervey, daughter of Frederick Augustus Hervey,  Earl of Bristol and became the second wife of the much older John Creighton, the first Earl of Erne in 1778.  It was not a happy marriage.  The couple did officially  produce one daughter,  Caroline Creighton, but in 1781 Mary left her husband never to return to Ireland.   My aunt's great grandfather, Abraham Creighton, whose portrait she had been given by her father and which now is here with me in Australia,  was born later that year, most likely in Bath. And the cover-ups began.  

Did John Creighton, the old Earl, suspect that his beautiful young wife Mary had given birth to a son, and that the father of her child was none other than his own young son from his first marriage, Abraham? We will never know.  All that we do know is that before too long John Creighton would declare his son Abraham insane, that Abraham would be incarcerated for forty years in Brooke House, London, and that the official records would show that Abraham Creighton, second Earl of Erne, died without offspring.

Midwinter's Night

Michael Creighton circa 1971

It is the longest night of the year,  midwinter in Australia and I wait for the sun to rise, far from the land of my ancestors.  It snowed today as I was driven up here from Sydney,  determined to be back home on my mountain to see this dawn.

It is midwinter's night in Australia but far from here it is midsummer's day.  Forty years ago for me too on this day it was midsummer.  On another mountain top, in another time and another place. It was June 21, 1971 and I was on the Spanish island of Ibiza.   Not yet twenty years old I danced on that day with the last of the hippies at the end of their long trail, dancing in the dawn amongst the ruins of a temple to a god whose name I never knew.

And I thought on that day of another midsummer's day; a day of which my father had spoken often - June 21, 1921. The day on which the man whose name I bear had died, his plane smashed into the sands of the Egyptian desert as the sun rose above the pyramids. They buried him at Heliopolis, ancient city of the sun.  Each year for many years now on this day I have thought for a moment about that young man, Michael Coombs; and I, like my father before me, have shed a tear or two.  And then the sun rises and the seasons roll on.

Day Twenty Nine

Tonight I went on the hunt for information about Fitzmaurice Creighton, my great grandfather.  I discovered a United Kingdom Census record on Ancestry.com showing that in 1901 he is living in All Saints Hampshire, with his second wife Hilda.   But where is All Saints, Hampshire ? It is not a town that I could find.  However there is a church near Winchester of that name, not far from Kings Somborne where my grandfather John Henry David Creighton was Vicar.  That sounded promising, so I dived online again,  google searching.

I discovered that All Saints church is in the estate village of East Stratton. The East Stratton state is the property of the Baring family, one of the most influential banking families in the history of banking. I discovered that in 1901 the head of the Baring family was Thomas George Baring, Earl of Northcliffe.  And then came the "A-ha" moment, that now-familiar blast of cold air that comes barreling out the past and smacks you in the face when another moment of your own history reveals itself.  I saw that Baring's  daughter, Emma Jane,  had married Henry George Louis Crichton, younger brother of the fourth Earl of Erne, John Crichton.  And I had been told many years ago by my aunt in London that the fourth Earl of Erne was at that time supporting my grandfather and his family in a manner which a mere Vicar's stipend could never do.

But the exhilarating moment of revelation fractured into yet more questions and doubt.  What the hell was going on here as the Victorian era was drawing to a close, a new century was dawning and the old feudal order was about to fade forever.  Why was the Earl of Erne supporting my grandfather, the Vicar of King Somborne?  Why was my great-grandfather, a retired Colonel in the Royal Marines now in his late-sixties, living on the estate of the Earl of Erne's brother-in-law with his new young wife, still in her early twenties and with a daughter aged five.  And why did my grandfather, then in his forties, living only twenty miles from East Stratton have absolutely no idea of his father's young wife nor of the daughter she had born?   Will we ever know what was going on within the complexities of these lives, lives that I felt even more strongly now were still somehow bound together by those events in Ireland that had lead to Fitzmaurice Creighton's grandfather Abraham Creighton, the second Earl of Erne,  being locked away for forty years in Brooke House Asylum? Lives somehow bound together by those events that lead the Earls of Erne to change the spelling of the name from Creighton to Crichton? Events that had lead my grandfather to make his children swear never to return to Crom Castle, as his father had made him swear?

Day Twenty Eight

The popular website Ancestry.com is proving to be quite an adventure, as I dive down increasingly unexpected rabbit-holes of my family history and usually end up resurfacing somewhere on Wikipedia where I find another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that leaves me wide-eyed in wonder at the perils of researching too deeply into the past.

A recent online adventure started with searching the records for Fitzmaurice Creighton,  my great grandfather, a colonel in the Royal Marines, born in Lymington, Hampshire in 1834, an outstanding horseman and with an eye for women that would eventually lead, so I had been told, to yet another scandal in the family.  The records on Ancestry.com at first sight seemed unexceptional.  Then I noticed something intriguing.  The Census Records of 1851 and 1881  show that he was born in 1834 or 1835, nothing too odd in that discrepancy, I thought.  But the Record for 1901 shows that he has mysteriously lost seven years and was born in 1841.  They also show that he now has a wife called Hilda B Hyde and one child, Vera.   In fact Fitzmaurice had another wife, Jane, who is not mentioned in that record and a number of children from that marriage including my grandfather John Henry David Creighton.

Fitzmaurice had married Hilda B. Hyde in 1895, at the age of sixty and had fathered Vera shortly after.  Hilda was only twenty-two.  It appears that Fitzmaurice may have conveniently shed a few years, perhaps telling the young Hilda that he was in his early fifties.  He was apparently very fit, very handsome and quite capable of getting away with this minor deception.  Quite endearing really.  The problem was that he had neglected to tell Hilda of his first wife Jane, who of course is my great grandmother and of the seven children he had fathered with her. Fitzmaurice was in fact a bigamist. And that was to have repercussions when the truth came out upon his death in 1913.  But that story is for another day.  In the meantime I decided to research further into Fitzmaurice's activities in Hampshire and the New Forest at the turn of the century.

Day Twenty Seven

Brooke House Asylum, London where  Abraham Creighton,  the second Earl of Erne was incarcerated for forty years.

The committal for insanity of Abraham Creighton by his father John, the First Earl of Erne, and his subsequent lifelong incarceration in Brooke House, London,  had ramifications for the title and the Crom Estates, including Crom Castle.  Abraham assumed the title in 1828 upon the death of his father, but the terms of his committal specified that neither the title nor the Crom estate would pass to his offspring. Both were passed to his nephew,John Creighton in 1842.  Abraham officially died without offspring.

In 1799 when the Stuart-Wortley family enquired as to the causes of Abraham Creighton's insanity, concerned that their son, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, 1st Baron Wharncliffe, was to marry Caroline Creighton, daughter of John Creighton first Earl of Erne and Mary Hervey, daughter of the Frederick Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol , they were told by the Creighton family that Abraham's  insanity was not of the hereditary kind but had been caused "by immersion in a bath of mercury".

The Public Records Office of Ireland in The Erne Papers notes that  "Since the insanity was apparently not of an hereditary kind, it had the advantage to the Creighton family that, during the period 1828-1842 when the 2nd Earl held the title, his financial requirements were extremely modest (a maintenance allowance of c. £780 per annum in the 1830s), as indeed the 1st Earl's must also have been in the period 1785-1828. Because of the 2nd Earl's incapacity, a whole generation of marriage settlement charges was skipped. The money saved was used for purchases of land which were made from 1810 onwards and, eventually, for the building of the new Crom Castle. Somewhat surprisingly, the 2nd Earl died worth over £52,500 and was allowed to dispose of this large sum of money by will, which he did by leaving almost all of it to junior branches of his family. Earlier, his heir, the future 3rd Earl, had tried unsuccessfully to apply it to Crom Castle."

http://www.proni.gov.uk/introduction_erne_d1939.pdf  refer page 19