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.