Sincere thanks are owed to R.J.H. Griffiths for giving me permission to reproduce the article below

Please respect his copyright

The Banking Mortlocks

Laying the Foundations, 1453-1775

PART II

Mortlock and the Finch Connection

The Finches were a Cambridge family on the same rung as the Mortlocks, and deserve notice not only for that but for one of their Mortlock descendants being transported to Australia.

Frederick Cheetham Mortlock was born in 1784, the fourth surviving son of John Mortlock III, banker, mayor and sometime MP for Cambridge. In June 1807 he eloped to Gretna with Sarah Finch, a girl from a wealthy local dissenting ironfounder and ironmonger family connected with the Mortlock banking and political activities. This must have caused a not inconsiderable social rumpus. The background to this is that at Gretna Green, the first village one comes to in Scotland, a runway couple could be married without their parents’ consent. The ceremonies were conducted by the village blacksmith. Once so wed, the marriage was legally binding in England and the probably outraged parents had to learn to live with it.

William Finch, who died in 1732, leaving the staggering sum for its day of £150,000, and who has a gravestone at St Mary the Great, the chief church of Cambridge, came to Cambridge from Hampton St in Dudley in Staffordshire in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688, and started an iron foundry and ironmongery business. He was an Independent in religion - indeed "a rigid Presbyterian" - and one of the Trustees of the Downing Place chapel. His family were already in iron in Staffordshire, his father (also William, d.1713) having started up in that business in Dudley in the late 1600s. By 1720 the Cambridge business was prospering to the extent that William was able to buy the ruin of the Austin (Augustinian) Friars in Bene’t St from the University, tear it down, and build a "substantial mansion house" on the site. Cole, the antiquarian, lamented that Finch had "pulled down the good old gates".

William’s son and heir William jnr, who died in 1762, is commemorated by a plaque at the east end of the south aisle of St Mary’s. He acquired the manor of Little Shelford and restored and enlarged Shelford manor house (the Shelfords are about five miles south of Cambridge). In 1745 he was elected Treasurer of an Anti-Jacobite subscription, which marks him as a Tory (unlike his father); he subscribed £25 towards enlisting volunteers to face Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invading "army" (actually a rabble). In 1752 he was one of the Commissioners for Bridge Repairs in Cambridge. He died unmarried and the Lordship of the Manor of Little Shelford (but not the iron business) passed to his nephew, who there upon changed his name from William Finch Ingle - his father, Samuel Ingle, was a linen draper and Citizen of London - to William Finch Finch. In 1777 William Finch Finch married Anne Bettina Beevor; Mortlocks, Finches, Beevors, Lacons, Palmers and so forth were all connected in ways beyond what there is room to chronicle here; for instance in 1806 Juliana Bettina, daughter of Sir Thomas Beevor and great niece of William Finch Finch and Anne Bettina, married a Henry Hurrell, William Finch Finch being Sarah Mortlock’s third cousin.

Samuel Ingle had married Elizabeth, daughter of William Finch snr (1667-1731). Besides her brother William jnr she had two unmarried sisters, of whom Sara jumped out of a window and killed herself in 1753 aged 54. At that age one might suspect the cause to be the diagnosis of incurable illness but we shall never know.

The manor of Little Shelford remained in the Finch family until Rev. Henry Finch, who was Rector of Great Shelford - but he lived mostly in Cambridge - sold the Lordship in 1837, although he remained sequestrator of the Great Tithes until 1849. Henry was not the first Finch pluralist parson - Rev. Thomas Finch held the livings of Barrington and another parish in 1770 at a time when "church life in the parish steadily decayed" (VCH) while Rev. Thomas, like Rev Henry later, also lived mostly in Cambridge. It was of course just this sort of pluralist neglect that stoked the fires of Dissent - but by this time, as can be seen, some of the Finches had diverged to a more worldly life-view. In 1814 the Finch property in Great Eversden, which had come to them from the Days collaterally to the Days’ relationship to the Mortlocks, was bought out at enclosure by the Earl of Hardwicke, along with a moated site beside the High Street in Caxton.

Joshua Finch also came to Cambridge to settle, in about 1745, and it was to him that his cousin William left the iron business. Joshua prospered and became an alderman. His son Charles married a Sarah Smith whose uncle Mr Stanton was vicar of South Moulton, Northants and the couple had three daughters and a son, also Charles. In 1823 "Messrs Charles Finch and Son" subscribed £30 to the rebuilding of the Great Bridge at Cambridge. Charles snr was clearly one of the chief men of the town. With his brother Thomas Day Finch of Great Shelford, and John Mortlock and the rather grandly named Granado Piggott, he was among the trustees appointed under the 1797 Cambridge to Abington Road Act. In 1812 he sat with John Cheetham Mortlock and Frederick Cheetham Mortlock on a Grand Jury re Mr Walsh MP robbing Sir Thomas Planer of £22,000, a juicy local scandal we may be sure. Charles Finch snr and his Sarah were Dissenters (non-conformists) as were many tradesmen and shopkeepers in Cambridge at that time. This probably marks Charles as a Whig but he would not be the first man to hold different political views from his seniors. Of the daughters, Catherine married Swan Hurrell of Foxton, probably related to the William Hurrell who was Squire of Hauxton, and Elizabeth married Ebenezer Foster, whom we shall meet shortly. The melancholy memorial to Swann’s daughter Jane, who died aged only 19, can be seen in Great St Mary’s. The Sarah who eloped with Frederick Cheetham Mortlock was Charles snr’s second daughter, baptised on 3rd December 1788. The pair were second cousins via the Days of Great Eversden; Mary Day, John Mortlock III’s mother-in-law, was sister to Elizabeth Day (who died in 1813 aged 81), the wife of Joshua Finch. and to Esther (1720) who married in 1739 a Mr George Dunch, a connection of Oliver Cromwell. Another sister married the unfortunate Alderman Purchas who, after a bumpy ride as John Mortlock’s ally, committed suicide in 1833. One of Sarah Mortlock’s first cousins, the daughter, who died unmarried in 1809, of William Finch of Birmingham, was a granddaughter of Joseph Priestley by William’s marriage in 1786 to Joseph’s daughter Sarah.

Sarah (Finch) Mortlock had quarrelled with her sister Elizabeth and the now Mrs. Foster induced her husband to establish a Bank in opposition to the Mortlocks. The last named had the whole of the University business and a clientele of County and professional people. Fosters, on the other hand, sought commercial business and in volume of business soon outran the Mortlocks. He also prospered socially and was High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire in 1849. His grandson Charles Finch Foster sold the business of his Bank to the Capital & Counties and died about 1910 leaving over £700,000 in personalty in addition to large real estate. "Foster’s Bank", so recorded in stone over the front door, is now the main Cambridge branch of Lloyds. Charles Finch Foster was reputed a most objectionable fellow – dictatorial – rude - and rough in demeanour. On the principle of "compounding for sins one is inclined to, by damning those one has no mind to" he was a great patron of the religious sect to which he adhered. To show one aspect of his mind, one of the Rawlins met him and casually mentioned the distant (Mortlock) kinship between them, and was promptly forbidden ever to speak to him again. What a mind to remember the quarrel between his grandmother and her sister, and to visit upon the head of a descendant of the last named the sins (if any) of the two women.

The word "ironmonger" had a more literal meaning then than it has today; an eighteenth century ironmonger imported iron from which others would manufacture artefacts although perhaps he might also operate at retail. In the present case we may reasonably speculate that pigs and billets were brought up the Great Ouse and then the Cam in barges from Kings Lynn. A Cambridge ironmaster thus controlled supply to all the smithies in villages round about, and to towns like, perhaps, Newmarket, less well favoured by water transport.

Charles and Sarah Finch are buried at Great Eversden in a prestigious table-top tomb. The only son, Charles jnr, married, in 1809, Sarah Dunn of Barnwell, and eventually retired to the family base in Staffordshire. On his dying without issue in 1866 the Cambridge activity passed to Swann Hurrell jnr who it would appear had already been running the business for some time. Swann moved the enterprise from Bridge St to Market Hill, prospered, and served four terms as Mayor of Cambridge where he was known as the "Iron Duke". On his demise the business passed to his nephew Edmund Beale, who went bankrupt and sold out to Alexander Mackintosh under whom it continued for some years.

Finch memorials can be seen in St Mary’s and, as above, at Great Eversden. There are several Finches in DNB, and in Burke’s, some of whom have an educational or parliamentary connection with Cambridge. However they appear all to be from a separate flock of Finches, from Kent, and not related to those connected to the Mortlocks.

There seems to have been a reconciliation between the Finches and the Mortlocks over the elopement. Thomas Mortlock, operating both as older brother and family lawyer, engineered a financial settlement in which Finch put down £2,000, and Frederick added £1,500 and purchased annuities for £3,650 for Sarah should she survive him. Certainly Frederick made up in some sort with his father or he would not have been brought into, and then left, the banking business. The Gretna ceremony itself was sanctified in church at Long Melford, Suffolk on July 27th 1807, the couple having been pursued and retrieved by the enraged and embarrassed families. Sadly Frederick later became prematurely senile and ultimately the couple, who must have set out defiantly with such high hopes, and who had together produced nine children, separated. The last straw for Sarah was Frederick’s selling out to his brothers, and the couple eventually parted in 1830, after he had had to accept the halving of his annuity, but also after the loss of two of their daughters, which last may have destabilised Sarah. It is a sad commonplace of Alzheimer’s that the sufferers become quarrelsome, irritable and difficult to live with. In a world where few lived beyond forty the condition would have been little understood. It may have been that the early effect of this senility contributed to Frederick’s mishandling of the Bank’s affairs and thus to his brothers buying him out. Frederick died in 1838 but Sarah survived him into her nineties, and in the 1830s was living in Little Thurlow. Latterly she seems to have lived in Little Abington although she also appears to have finally lodged with her divorced daughter Elizabeth Sarah (ex-Rawlins) in lodgings in St Martin’s, London run by a Samuel Clark. It is difficult to be categorical about this because Sarah snr seems to have managed to get into the 1881 census twice. The tone of Frederick and Sarah’s marriage, while it lasted, is hidden from us but much can be inferred from their children’s careers and unions.

Sarah (Finch) Mortlock was clearly what today might be called a "wild child" and a strong believer in Girl Power. She was a petite and very pretty girl and was the toast of Cambridge; Lord Palmerston (the same that eventually expired in flagrante delicto on the billiard table at Broadlands) twice proposed to her. She boasted that all the Mortlock men were in love with her but it was she that chose Fred, who was a vigorous sporting man rather than a sober intellectual. Shortly after her marriage she appeared at the County Ball in a décolletage so low that one gentleman remarked that he had not seen anything like it since he was a babe in his mother’s arms. After the separation she settled in the Old House at Abington but her presence was clearly disturbing to the Mortlocks and it is said that when Abington Lodge became available, Thomas Mortlock snapped it up to prevent Sarah getting hold of it.

Believing herself (probably erroneously) related to the Earls of Winchilsea, she had no great opinion of the Mortlocks, whom she always described as country yeomen. She was not disposed to treat with tact and discretion her relations in law, who, she contended, had by chicanery dispossessed her, her husband, and her children, of their property and, moreover, she never forgot her social antecedents always including her maiden name in the subscription to her correspondence.

In addition she had the strongest will with which a woman can be gifted or otherwise. In fact she was the sun around which planets revolved and exacted implicit obedience from her children who naturally imbibed some of their ideas from her. When Elizabeth Sarah (Mortlock) Rawlins was herself an old woman her mother would still say to her "I would have you to know Elizabeth that I must be obeyed". However as an old lady she was always kind to her Rawlins great-grandchildren when they were guests in her house. Her faults were in a large measure due to her being a petted and spoilt beauty in her youth. She was an autocrat in her own home, and tobacco smoke was anathema to her. If, when visiting her, her Rawlins grandson wanted to smoke he had, when in the house, to do so with his head out of the window or go out into the grounds. She would never have a window closed however inclement the weather and the only artificial light she would allow were the old wax candles of her youth.

She despised her husband as a weakling and on one occasion chased him out of the house with her hunting crop. She disliked three classes of men viz. lawyers, clergymen, and doctors. The last named she would never have when her children were born and had little occasion to consult them at any time owing to her abundant good health. Clergymen she seemed to consider unnecessary. Lawyers were associated in her mind with her husband’s loss of Abington and the Bank; she saw them as denizens of Hades permitted by Satan to live on earth in order to afflict humanity. Despite her opinions she would make use of these minions of evil when, like Don Quixote, she wished to tilt at the Bank windmill with litigation as her lance.

To give Sarah her due, she was ready to pardon when the offender, even if the cause of the offence rested with her, made amende honorable. For years she did not speak to some of her children because they were too stiff-necked, and the only one who ever gave way to her consistently – except on one occasion – was Elizabeth Sarah (Mortlock) Rawlins. The one exception was when Elizabeth Sarah married DAD Rawlins instead of the man selected by her mother, who was Master of one of the Colleges and old enough to be his prospective bride’s grandfather. Rawlins was no favourite, on the one hand because he had married her daughter, and also because he told his mother-in-law, when she consulted him, that FCM had been quite rightfully deprived of all his interest in Abington and the Bank, and because, when she wanted to bring an action against the Duke of Manchester in respect to a large sum of money that nobleman received from the estate of Colonel Dunch (deceased) Rawlins told her she had no moral or legal right to the money.

Frederick Cheetham Mortlock had been, in 1821, effectively banished to Rutland where he occupied a house belonging to Sir Gerard Noel Bt, father of the 1st Earl of Gainsborough. He spent much of his time abroad, in Paris, Brussels and Boulogne, towards the end of his life, but, returning, came home to Cambridge. Later, reduced to relying on charity, he was admitted as a brother of the Charterhouse. He died in Sir John Cheetham’s home in London and was buried in Chelsea. DAD Rawlins said he was one of the most charming of men, but the victim of his own good nature and the weaknesses with which nature had afflicted him.

Frederick Cheetham’s son and heir John Frederick was born in 1809. One of his early memories was of Blucher’s visit to Cambridge after the Battle of Waterloo, when Blucher did Frederick Cheetham the honour of walking arm-in-arm with him the while he (Blucher) hugged and kissed all the pretty girl groupies who clustered round him. In Rutland, where seems to have been let run wild, John Frederick nearly brought this story to an early end by tumbling on some spikes and impaling himself, mercifully only through his left arm, while climbing.

John Frederick was a scapegrace who, as an adolescent, sent to Peterborough Grammar School, absconded. One can only speculate whether that establishment’s experience with him had anything to do with his younger brother Charles being translated from thence to Catterick to finish his education. In his own memoirs John Frederick persistently refers to Charterhouse although he is only credited with one year there (1820). Following Peterborough John Frederick was then sacked by two private tutors. The first, a curate in Croxton called Holmes, got rid of him because he could not stick John Frederick’s girl-chasing. A place in a Cambridge college was found for John Frederick but never taken up, he displaying no vocation for the church. He had some affinity and ability for mathematics but this never fruited, all his school time being, to his view, frittered away on dead languages. In desperation a commission was found - effectively bought - for John Frederick in HEIC’s Bengal Army, and off to India he set from Gravesend in 1821, aboard the large Indiaman Earl of Balcarras. His own account shows him as, at nineteen, 5'8" and weighing eleven stone four pounds.

John Frederick enjoyed the trip out, particularly revelling in the young female company on board to whom he showed off - he was always athletic - by shimmying up the mast faster than the midshipmen. Disembarking in the Hooghly, he amused himself by shooting game on his way up to Calcutta, using a gun bought from a Scots solicitor on the journey out. Unfortunately an elderly native got in the way and the resulting pellet penetration had to be balmed by an application of rupees. In August, making his leisurely way up the Ganges to a regiment at Cawnpore, John Frederick weathered watching a bathing companion being taken by a crocodile. Besides his athleticism John Frederick was a truly excellent shot.

He appears to have avoided much military duty and to have spent his time tiger-hunting. Scrapes continued: several near-drownings and an encounter with a tiger which, fortunately for John Frederick, had lately gorged on a hapless native. Pleading ill-health, after two years John Frederick chucked his expensive commission, coming home in March 1830 to find himself somewhat unwelcome. He made another trip to India, on the return voyage from which, becalmed, his ship was within a whisker of being taken by pirates. In India and on a subsequent tour of Europe - John Frederick was an inveterate and extremely inquisitive tourist - he maintained himself by winning money at billiards, and by doles from friends and his somewhat reluctant relations. In 1835 John Frederick spent six weeks picketing the Bank with an apple-stall placarded with pamphlets regarding the handling of his supposed inheritance. This must have been more of a nuisance than one might suppose; a glance at Bene’t St shows that there is not much room for the Bank’s customers if there is an apple-stall blocking the road. The stall was something of a local spectacle, with John Frederick in a magnificent velvet-lined coat collecting sovereigns and half-sovereigns from the Bank’s customers in a silver salver set before him, presumably calumniating his senior relatives the while.

This and his other activities ensured a permanent want of welcome from his uncles, escalating from breaking the Bank’s windows to (probably) torching part of Rectory Farm at Pampisford, which was a Mortlock property but let to William Scruby, a distant relative by marriage who was also a brewer (on the site now used by the firm of Sealmaster), Pampisford being locally notorious for its beer consumption. There was another unexplained conflagration which set fire to Thomas Mortlock’s dwelling in Great Abington while Thomas was in it - no culprit was traced although John Frederick had been seen in the vicinity. In March 1837 John Frederick was tried for this but acquitted. His uncle Charles Finch, MP for Walsall, put up £250 bail for him on this occasion.

On a third trip to India, in 1838 John Frederick learned through the Times that his father had died six weeks after John Frederick’s sailing - a letter from home telling him of this, sent overland, did not catch up with him until he had reached Bengal. So far from his uncles taking no notice of him, John Frederick himself acknowledges that he was armed with a letter of introduction written to the Governor General by a nobleman at the behest of his uncle Edmund. However this - perhaps our hero was all too well known - produced no useful result and after three months he set off for home, determined to claim his inheritance.

He seems to have been in denial over the change of regime at the Bank being permanent, although his father’s expulsion had occurred long before he was grown-up. He seems to have convinced himself that he would take his seat as head of the bank and take over Abington Hall. He called at the bank, his solicitor brother-in-law DAD Rawlins accompanying him at his request. Explanations were given but he would not accept them and after a stormy interview, both were bowed out by the Reverend Edmund Mortlock and Thomas Mortlock.

Rawlins advised John Frederick that both sides had originally employed eminent lawyers and that, however hard a bargain had been driven, everything was legally in order. Of course John Frederick would not see the matter in that light. Rawlins posted home. Some days afterwards it appears John Frederick wrote to Rawlins asking him to again go to Cambridge but the letter was not delivered.

Some weeks later Rawlins received a letter from John Frederick, addressed from the prison in Cambridge, telling him that he need not trouble to travel and giving him an account of what had occurred since they were last together.

Guerrilla warfare getting him nowhere, John Frederick had eventually come to the conclusion that the best way to settle the matter was a duel. Forgetful of the convention against men in Holy Orders shedding blood, he took his duelling pistols and proceeded to the College, and forced his way into the room in which the Reverend Edmund was sitting. He explained to his astonished uncle that the best way to settle the matter in dispute was an appeal to arms, although, by that time, the law was beginning to look with disfavour on that method of settling disputes. John Frederick offered his Uncle one of the pistols, which he would not accept, preferring (John Frederick said) to hide behind the furniture. This want of courage, as he assumed it to be, angered John Frederick, and he told his Uncle that if he would not fight at least he should die for the sins he had committed against his father, mother and himself.

The nub of John Frederick’s quarrel was that the other brothers had taken in to the Bank property which was only Frederick Cheetham’s in Trust and which was not therefore his to pledge, and that this had denied Frederick’s children their lawful inheritance. Eventually John Frederick’s sister Catherine Lamprell, perhaps spurred on by the recent demise of her husband, instituted a suit in Chancery about this, but lost it in 1868, John Frederick blaming this on her solicitor’s incompetence. Rawlins would not of course take the case and the country lawyer eventually engaged, from Clare or Haverhill, perhaps did not impress anyway. John Frederick’s views about the rights and wrongs of the issue can be read in his own hand in the Cambridgeshire County Records Office, filed among the Mortlock papers.

As to the probity of the brothers’ actions when they bought out the disastrous Frederick to prevent him bringing the Bank down around all their ears, four further points in their favour might not come amiss at this juncture. First, Frederick Cheetham in his will written shortly after his separation from Sarah, in 1830, left all his property whatsoever to his brothers Thomas and Edmund Davy as trustees for his children. They were given absolute discretion, including, interestingly, as to the apportionment of the proceeds between the heirs. Thus no one child had any particular title to anything and each was entirely dependent on Thomas and Edmund Davy’s goodwill, a point rather missed by John Frederick. Secondly, in 1830 Frederick allowed his £1000 annuity to be halved so that his brother Thomas could settle some of the Bank’s remaining debt, liabilities for which Frederick had failed to make proper disclosure. Thirdly, DAD Rawlins personally went into the matter and advised Frederick Cheetham’s wife and his son, John Frederick, that everything that had happened was perfectly in order. The fourth point is that the father-in-law of Edmund John Mortlock, to whom Thomas eventually left the Bank, was Britain’s foremost Chancery lawyer. He would hardly have allowed his daughter to marry a man whose entire fortune was exposed to legal challenge.

The facts of the assault, as handed down in the family, were as follows. One evening in November 1842 the Reverend Edmund Davy Mortlock was sitting in his rooms in Christ’s talking to Mr Mitchell, the landlord of the Eagle and Child. Suddenly the door burst open and in dashed John Frederick, armed with a dagger and two pistols. "Give me back my property!" he cried, discharging one of the pistols. Mercifully only the cap exploded. Edmund seized a chair and Mitchell the poker, the former saying quietly and calmly "John, I have none of your property." John Frederick, dropping the dagger, then lowered the other pistol - which he had held pointing at his uncle’s head - and fired. Mr Cartmel, the Tutor of the college, who lived in the room below, rushed up the stairs, wresting the poker from the terrified Mitchell who was escaping in the other direction, and arrived just in time to see the flash of the discharge of the second pistol. "He’s killed me, he’s killed me" cried Edmund as he staggered down the stairs followed by Mr Cartmel. The alarm was raised; the porter slammed shut the college gates. A surgeon was hastily summoned, and when Edmund dropped his trousers to have the wound examined, a bullet dropped out! There was a hole in both his trousers and his shirt, just a little blood, and an abrasion just below the navel about the size of a sixpence. The surgeon later testified that the bullet must have been fired obliquely and that had it been fired directly the consequences would have been fatal.

Cartmel returned to Edmund’s room to find it empty, the dagger on the floor, and two riding whips, knotted together, hanging out of the window. Escaping, John Frederick was observed by one George Harris who kept the sluice at Bait’s Bite and young Neal who lived at the pub opposite. Pursued to Ditton, John Frederick turned and fired at twelve yards, hitting Neal in the leg. He then gave himself up.

John Frederick was tried at Cambridge Assizes on 24th March 1843. Before the trial the sympathies of the public were with him because it was considered he and his family had been harshly dealt with. This was partly because of the decent reticence with which the uncles had always avoided discussing this essentially family affair in public, so only John Frederick’s case had ever been put, and indeed is still being put today. No doubt his fine features – instinct with intelligence – and his debonair bearing, carried weight as they had done elsewhere. In all circles, in all parts, he had been popular, and the generosity of his disposition was beyond cavil.

He refused Rawlins’s offer to defend him and conducted his own defence. His speech was regarded by Bench and Bar as a model of eloquence, but with the fatal defect that of course he could not prove that an attempt to kill was a legitimate remedy for civil wrongs – or supposed civil wrongs – of which he alleged the Reverend Edmund was the source. The result of the trial was inevitable, the facts not being in dispute; a petition got up in his favour, for political reasons, by a notorious Radical called Wagstaff, availed John Frederick nothing - indeed may have been counter-productive.

Although described at his trial (by the Cambridge Advertiser) as "fagged and dejected" it was also allowed that, at thirty-two, he was "of a fine, open countenance, with a remarkably handsome profile, about five feet and a half in height and of an easy, gentlemanly appearance."

John Frederick’s defence to the immediate criminal charge was that there was only a small powder charge in the pistol, merely meant to frighten, as demonstrated by the fact that Edmund’s abdomen had only been bruised by the ball and not penetrated; but, as above, it was in fact providential that it was a grazing shot. His eloquence moved many of the spectators in the crowded courtroom - some had queued for their places since 7 a.m. - to tears, but not the judge, nor the jury. At the time destitute, when the sentence of transportation for twenty-one years was announced John Frederick’s calm reply to the judge was only "My Lord, it will save me from starvation."

John Frederick was undoubtedly clever but was one of those people who cannot see otherwise than that they are right and that everybody else is wrong. However he was also clearly resilient and resourceful. His first stop while awaiting passage was onboard the hulked 90-gun Trafalgar veteran Leviathan alongside at Portsmouth, where his confrères included a number of comparatively well-born "white-collar" criminals. Fettered and half-starved he was put to work in the dockyard, where the convicts from our maritime gulag, hobbling in their four-pound leg-irons, were a sight for flocks of amused spectators. John Frederick recognised in the crowd a Cambridge chum whom only weeks before he had been cheering on at a Leicestershire steeplechase. After eighteen weeks aboard Leviathan, in August 1843 he was transferred for passage to the ex-Indiaman Maitland. That one of his cousins was destined to marry a Maitland was a piquant irony. The Maitland took departure from Plymouth on 1st September 1843 and arrived in Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in January 1844.

Imagine what transportation to Botany Bay in New South Wales meant to a man gently born. Herded on a ship carrying – from the modern point of view – ten times the number it should have done, locked up in a space about the size of a coffin with hardly any elbow room, and surrounded by the dregs of the population and at the mercy of low born warders who – class conscious – welcomed the opportunity of insulting any gentleman whom fate placed at their mercy. Then imagine the prospect of fourteen years of manual work - John Frederick can have had no certain foreknowledge that he would betimes be otherwise employed - which his birth and upbringing would have made more than the labours of Hercules, and imagine how distant he must have felt from the common criminals who were now his only companions. The only leaven was the company of not a few better-educated men and others who, like John Frederick, had overstrained the patience of their well-born familial seniors.

Mercifully never flogged himself, on Norfolk Island, where he was sent to start his sentence, he was sickened by the daily thrashing of his companions on the "triangle". On licence in Tasmania he successfully maintained himself variously as a children’s tutor, schoolmaster - arbitrarily thrashing any boys whose parents had come out as free settlers ("This refreshed and consoled me") - and as a pedlar in the bush.

In 1857 John Frederick, quite illegally - he refused to recognise the limitations of his licence - returned to England in the Swiftsure, Captain Pryce. It is a sad reflection on his saintly and forgiving uncle Alderman William Mortlock that it was news of a small legacy from William that triggered this return and hence its consequences. Apprised that this £46 was due to him, John Frederick counted up his various savings, which came to £240 and took ship as above; however the £46 did not reach Tasmania until well after John Frederick was back in England. Landing at Dartmouth, John Frederick made his way to London via sightseeing - ever the tourist - in Exeter, Bath and Oxford. In London he lodged at his customary headquarters, the Craven Hotel near Northumberland House. Trafalgar Square was new to him, as was the Crystal Palace.

But Cambridgeshire beckoned. After a pilgrimage to his sister’s grave at Westley he repaired to his mother’s for the night. The next morning he was arrested. A long and nugatory correspondence with his Uncle Edmund followed. In March 1858 John Frederick was sentenced to a year in gaol at home to be followed by re-transportation, this time to Western Australia, to serve the five-year remainder of his original sentence. An uncovenanted benefit for us is the police description of John Frederick published at the time of his illegal return, which shows him as 5'9" tall, of square, thickset and powerful build, with light hair but a darker moustache. At the end of his time John Frederick came back to London where he lived in relative obscurity and poverty, in a boarding house in Craven Street (which runs off the Strand next to Charing Cross Station), kept by one Todd, an ex-servant of his mother’s, until his death in 1882.

In the middle of his succession of fruitless lawsuits John Frederick managed to write a peculiarly acute and somewhat Puseyite religious tract. His last publication was a monograph on Sir Robert Walpole.

Even in old age John Frederick’s clear-cut features and charm of manner were noted, and, although his memory began to fail somewhat towards the end, his wide range of knowledge, painfully acquired, was still remarked. In his will he left the town of Cambridge a vast but wholly imaginary fortune. He left the rest of us a most important legacy in the shape of a literate account of the (his title) "Experiences of a Convict". He is sometimes represented as a Cambridge graduate, but although entered for the university there is scant chance that he ever attended any sort of instruction. He did, however, write an elegant copperplate hand. At least one of his sisters stuck up for him, and his mother loved him, but that must have been easier in absentia. In later life he was an acquaintance of Charles Dickens and is said to have been the model for Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860). However Magwitch is entirely unsympathetic and totally lacks John Frederick’s undoubted personal charm. It is, though, unlikely that a craftsman like Dickens would have passed up the chance to use John Frederick as a source for circumstantial detail relating to the hulks and prisoners and their fetters and so forth, although he removed the scene to the eerie mudflats of his native Kent. Conversely, Great Expectations is a good source for any modern reader who wants to understand more of John Frederick’s interlude in the hulks before he was transported. In about 1890 he posthumously re-appeared, thinly disguised, in an article entitled "John Frederick Lockmore - Monomaniac or No" in Cassell’s Sunday Journal .

John Frederick at one point asked Dickens’ advice about finding a publisher for his memoirs but received a dusty answer to the effect that the libels would have to come out first.

Frederick Cheetham had other sons. John Frederick averred that his wicked Mortlock uncles had purposely placed them all in those climates most injurious to health. Frederick William was buried in the Jamaica Customs for twenty-five years, an appointment obtained for him by his Uncle Edmund via Lord Harrowby, Edmund’s erstwhile pupil’s brother-in-law (later Lord Privy Seal). Frederick William died in Jamaica in 1878 in his late sixties. He and DAD Rawlins were great friends and he attended Rawlins’ wedding. He used to send the Rawlins Jamaica products such as barrels of tamarinds, guava jelly, planters’ rum, mulligatawny powder, and mango chutney. A small mystery attends his sending home to school in Bristol (via the agency of one of Rawlins’ sons), from Jamaica, some Misses Mortlock. One may have finished up in London as a painter of miniatures [but this may be a confusion with Ethel the portrait painter].

Frederick William Mortlock married a Miss Amy Williams of Montego Bay and they had two sons (widowed, Amy remarried, to a James Rosser). William, the younger, did not marry and enlisted locally as a seaman in the Royal Navy, serving in the Jamaica guardship HMS Urgent, and rising no further than Leading Seaman. Frederick, the older brother, inherited the family Bible and a Finch family tree - possibly the parchment "Tree going back to Noah" mentioned by John Frederick in his convict memoirs. Frederick had three sons and a daughter, Maude, who married a Dr Isaacs although their son Dereck changed his surname back to Mortlock. Of the three sons, Frederick had no legal issue and was described as a "wild, queer fellow" who apparently lost touch with the rest of his family. Percival Finch Mortlock died in 1951 unmarried; but Stanley Cheetham, 1879-1956, married Cornelia Berry of New Jersey, and by their son David Henry born in Aruba in 1917 were grandparents to David Henry junior, a banker in Hong Kong and Singapore, whose son David Henry Mortlock III is the only heir of John Mortlock III in unbroken male line, a situation confirmed by Alfred, the last male heir of Captain Charles Mortlock. In this way Frederick Cheetham Mortlock has the last laugh on his brothers. In fact David Henry Mortlock III is the only descendant in unbroken male line of Rowland Mortlock of Pampisford who was born in 1645.

Frederick Cheetham’s third son, Charles, was ordained, but his apparently expensive life caused him to be excoriated in his mother’s will. However let us remember that she was a fairly tempestuous lady. He went up to Caius in 1835 but appears not to have proceeded to a degree. After a short period as a naval Instructor at Portsmouth he went out to Belize as a missionary in 1839. He then came home and was ordained and became a curate at Newton Heath, Manchester in 1841 but returned to Leicester and a year’s curacy there, following a bout of smallpox. In Leicester in 1844 he married Mary Ann, daughter of Thomas Ingram, a Market Harborough solicitor and County Court Registrar, and his wife Mary Horspool, a grand-daughter of John Ingram and Mary Phipps who had been married in 1776. He returned to Belize and later Jamaica in 1844 and Turk’s Island, Bahamas (1845). He returned home to become vicar, first of Leicester (1848-51) where he held two livings in plurality (All Saints and St Leonard’s) and then of Pennington in Lancashire where he was inducted on New Year’s Day 1852. The main reason he had come home was the loss of two sons in the West Indies, one stillborn and the other at two years. His third son Charles Frederick, after education at Derby Grammar School and at Heversham, Lancs, was Hastings and Rigge exhibitioner at Queen’s, Oxford, although he also won a scholarship to Cambridge which he did not take up. After curacies at Ospringe and Boughton in the Blean in Kent he became vicar of South Bersted, Sussex in 1889. Charles Frederick’s mother installed herself nearby at Bognor with her unmarried daughter Sarah Emily. Mary Ann (Ingram) had apparently separated from her husband, who seems, in 1876, to have been inhibited and to have put in the first of a succession of curates at Pennington. He retired to London where he died in Marlborough Road, Bedford Park, Chiswick in 1905. He seems to have been rather a cross-patch and when Frederick Rawlins, hearing that his great-uncle wished that he would call, did so, all he got for his pains was "And pray, Fred, to what may I attribute the honour of this visit?". The exercise was swiftly terminated and not repeated. Mary Ann died in 1904 and in 1909 Charles Frederick retired to a house, later called "Abington", which he had inherited (so that he eventually left £37,000) from his uncle Thomas Ingram, at Wigton, a southerly suburb of Leicester. He and his wife Lucy Elizabeth Sherwood Dawes, whom he married at Herne Hill in 1888 and who was the daughter of Sir Edwyn Sandys Dawes KCMG and his wife Lucy Emily Bagnall, do not appear to have had any children. One of Charles Frederick’s sisters had married a railway porter which event must have caused quite a stir in Pennington.

Frederick Cheetham’s final son, William, his mother Sarah’s Benjamin, enlisted as a dragoon, lost half his sword hand cut off at the battle of Chillianwallah in the 2nd Sikh War. Invalided, he subsisted on his mother’s charity until he died unmarried aged 40. He is buried at Great Eversden where there was family property inherited from the Days as previously related. His mother, who loved him very deeply, is buried next to him at her particular request.

Of Frederick Cheetham’s three daughters who survived infancy (two, Maggy [Mary] and another, did not, and were buried at Aldeburgh where Frederick and Sarah seem to have been residing in the late 1820s), Emily (John Frederick’s ‘favourite sister’) and Catherine both married parsons - the Rev. Thomas Halstead and Rev. Charles W Lamprell. Elizabeth Sarah married, at St Margaret’s Westminster, a Leicester solicitor, DAD Rawlins, by whom she had five children of whom two sons and two daughters survived. Rawlins’ father was an army officer who had lost his life in the Napoleonic Wars. However DAD Rawlins maltreated Sarah and knocked her about and in 1865 she divorced him and later reverted to using the surname Mortlock. The report in The Times of Rawlins burning his wife with a hot poker and denying her the necessaries of life makes embarrassing reading. Their sons Percy Lionel and Arthur where solicitors and active as officers in the Leicestershire Militia, perhaps getting some keenness for soldiering from their Rawlins grandfather. However Percy Lionel seems to have taken his time settling down and was articled to his father’s firm only after abortive medical studies at Caius and Addenbrooke’s, and a considerable drama in which he married a housemaid whom he had made pregnant, he taking his tune from his father in the matter of relationships with the female servants. This scandal was enough to get Percy and indeed his brother Arthur sacked from the militia but they seem to have been allowed back in, after a cooling-off period, under the name of Smith, which subterfuge would have been transparent locally but opaque in London. Percy’s proficiency as a musketry instructor may have oiled the wheels of his reinstatement. Two of Percy’s children eventually emigrated to Australia, perhaps to be free of the problems caused by their anomalous position in the English class system which was then at its apogee, and that branch of the (Mortlock, Finch, Rawlins) family is still traceable in Queensland.

References for Frederick Cheetham Mortlock, his descendants, and the family of Finch:

Finch, RN & ES "Our Finch Family and Others" private ms 1993 in CCRO

Gaskoin, CJB "Some Cambridge Kindred"

Ingle, Arthur "An Ingle Family History" Canberra 1998 [copy in CCRO]

Mortlock Papers #130, will of William Finch [CCRO]

Marriage Settlement etc, FC Mortlock & Sarah Finch [West Sussex CRO, Chichester ref 46860]

Parish, WD "List of Carthusians" Lewes 1879

"Experiences of a Convict" JF Mortlock repub. Sydney University Press 1965 (ed. GA Wilkes & AG Mitchell)

1881 Census S Bersted [WSRO]; do. Royal Navy [Portsmouth library]; other do. incl London & Cambridgeshire

Parish Register S Bersted [WSRO]

M/s notes by John Frederick Mortlock in CCRO

WM Thackeray "The Newcomes" (for a contemporary description of Charterhouse school)

Hodson, VCH "List of Officers in the Bengal Army"

Rawlins, Frederick, letter to his cousin Cornelia 10.1.1935 supplied by Percy Rawlins

The Times, 16.2.1865 (Rawlins vs Rawlins)

Army Lists, various (re Rawlins/ Leicestershire Militia)

Navy Lists, various (re HMS Urgent)

A Cambridge Saint

Henry Mortlock 1789-1837

(and Edmund John Mortlock, 1833-1902, and his descendants)

Henry Mortlock, quite unlike most of the rest of his clan, was a saintly creature possessed of a deep religious faith. Given the character of his father John Mortlock III and that of some of Henry’s brothers - but not his junior and last brother William, who, although the author was not on oath, is described on his memorial in St Edward’s as "a person of sincere piety and rare benevolence" - one can suppose that this sheds some light on a certain sweetness of personality in Henry’s mother, Elizabeth Mary Harrison. Like his brothers Frederick and William, but unlike John Cheetham and Thomas and probably Edmund, Henry was quite without personal ambition.

After Bury St Edmunds Grammar School (with his brother Edmund Davy Mortlock) and Charterhouse, which he attended 1802-7 and where he was followed, albeit with less happy result, by his errant nephew John Frederick in 1820, Henry obtained entry to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The availability of a Madras Writership with the Hon. East India Company, and "a change in the family circumstances" then intervened. His father John, strapped for cash, determined that Henry - who, although not the youngest, was surely John’s Benjamin - must go to India. This decision was ultimately Henry’s death warrant. Henry although deeply disappointed - he was a natural academic - obediently and dutifully complied, saying "it is my Father’s wish and that is sufficient". The financial crisis may have been connected with the need to find a substantial sum to fund Henry’s senior brother Charles’ first command of an Indiaman, the Charlton, and Charles’ marriage, and to finance the cargo speculation for the Charlton’s voyage. As it was this cargo investment was almost certainly a dead loss, amounting to thousands of pounds in specie and return goods, because of Charlton’s being taken by the French in November 1809. This came hard on the heels of the loss of John Mortlock’s share in the cargo investment in the Streatham which had been taken by the French in May of the same year. On the other hand, the going rate for facilitating a Writership - unless presented gratis due to family or social obligations - was two thousand guineas.

The story has got ahead of itself. Following his appointment in 1807, Henry sailed for Madras in 1808, arriving on 29th October. Before his son’s departure John Mortlock gave to Henry’s fiancée, Elizabeth Thomas, Edridge’s portrait of Henry, with a delightful inscription on its back in John’s own hand that "he [Henry] never caused his father a sigh except when he left him", which testament in later life Henry - through both natural modesty and perhaps embarrassment - kept pasted over. The chronology is important because it shows already by 1808 a cordial and familiar relationship between John Mortlock and his rather older peer and business partner, Elizabeth’s father Captain James Thomas, as further illustrated by Captain Charles’ marriage to Elizabeth’s sister Emelia before setting out in the Charlton. The Edridge painting shows Henry in King’s College walk with King’s chapel and Clare Hall in the background.

Once in India, Henry applied himself diligently to scholarship. He was quite as clever as his Wrangler brothers, and within a year of arriving in India had passed both Hindustani and Sanskrit examinations with Distinctions. He not only became an interpreter in oriental languages but received prizes of £800 and £400 from the Company for the excellence of his performance. In April 1811 he was formally appointed Deputy Persian Translator to the Madras Government. He was also holding down a regular job as Deputy Register to the Court of Saddr and Fouzdary Adawlat, the chief court of the HEIC’s Madras Presidency.

The Indian climate was a disaster for Henry. In June 1815 his brother Charles’ Indiaman Lowther Castle opportunely arrived in Madras on its way to China. Henry shipped aboard in the hope that the sea voyage would recruit his health, but in January 1816 he was given leave to return home, conveniently still aboard his brother’s ship. In the English Channel on Friday May 10th 1816 the ship was met by the pilot boat bearing newspapers - and the brothers thus learned of their father’s death only three days earlier. That of their mother followed in April 1817.

The resulting settlements enabled Henry, in September 1817, to marry Elizabeth, in St Mary’s Newington, a church used by the Thomas’s as convenient to the family home at 16, Dover Place, New Kent Road, Southwark. In 1818 Henry and Elizabeth set out together in the private ship Coldstream, Captain Coxwell, for Henry to return to his duties in India, this time as cashier of the Government Bank of Madras, to which post he was appointed on 13th October, the ship having arrived on 1st September. James Thomas, visiting in Portsmouth before departure, reported pleasant company on board for Henry and Elizabeth. Once in India again Henry resumed his Persian (Parsee, now Farsi) translation duties and was raised from Deputy to Translator eleven months later, effective 11th September 1819. In January 1820 he escaped from the Bank to his old job with the Court, ironically with his equally gifted cousin John Fryer Thomas as his assistant; and Henry also became Secretary to the Board of the College of Fort St George. At his home in Madras he kept open house for newly-arriving missionaries and their families, having as many as thirteen individuals enjoying his hospitality at a time.

His mind was already turning to service to a higher Master; nevertheless Elizabeth and Henry stuck it out in Madras until Henry was almost at death’s door in 1822, when they sailed for home. Two daughters had been born in India, Eliza on 15th September 1819 and Mary Ann on 2nd August 1821. Eliza was to lived on into the next century, dying at Clevedon, Somerset - when she settled there, a "lovely little village", not at all the sprawling resort it later became - in April 1901; she had lived there at least twenty years, as lodger or perhaps "paying guest" at Tivoli Lodge, Hill Road. Mary Ann (Minnie) had a shorter lease, dying in London before she was properly into her teens.

Once home, Henry was ordained, in 1824, preaching his first sermon at Tunbridge Wells. His brother-in-law Henry Phillips, the husband of his wife’s next sister Frances, who was rector of Mildenhall, then took Henry on as a curate. Henry was laborious and painstaking and was ultimately successful in improving moral standards in West Row, the poorest part of Mildenhall. Henry and Elizabeth seem to have already moved in with the Phillips as another daughter, Harriett, was baptised there in 1823. Harriett survived as a spinster at Ivy Lodge, Abington, later the property of Henry’s Clark-Kennedy descendants, until 1899. She is remembered in Great Abington church by a rather touching and highly apposite window on the theme of "Suffer Little Children" above the Sunday tinies’ crèche. Also in 1824 Henry was admitted as a sizar at St John’s College, Cambridge, as a "ten-year" man, a dispensation whereby mature, and more pertinently, married, students could study at the University. He did not, however, take a degree, deciding that his time would be better spent in ministering rather than in studying.

In 1825 the family seems to have been briefly in Northumberland for a daughter Caroline was born there in Seaton in that year. Henry then obtained, presumably, however much it was against his principles, via the family Manners interest, a curacy at Morcott in Rutland where he remained nine years, lifting the local population from a state of some degradation to a rather higher plane of living and religious observance. He "found it rude and ignorant and left it civilised and enlightened - vice and sin were put to shame", something discovered to her cost when an unrepentant fallen woman was summarily banned from the clothing club. Any child with a dirty face would be given a penny to buy soap - the penny wrapped in a suitable religious tract. Henry was deeply appreciated locally and his parishioners, who had persuaded an incoming Rector to withdraw so that they could retain Henry’s curacy services, subscribed a silver coffee-pot for him on his eventual departure.

To support his growing and "sickly" family Henry took up tutoring. However an assistant was hired for this so that Henry could concentrate on teaching Oriental languages to intending missionaries. These were however boarded out so as not to be corrupted by the more plentiful table that had to be offered to the paying pupils. This suggests that in India the other-worldly and ailing Henry had not shaken the pagoda tree as others did, and that in spite of his junior share in the Mortlock inheritance (£1000 in his father’s will), and twice that sum in 1831 on the demise of James Thomas who had retired to nearby South Luffenham, Henry was a man of modest means, particularly as he and Elizabeth went on to have nine children in all. Nevertheless Henry turned down a lucrative offer of a professorship of Gentoo at Haileybury because taking it up would have meant giving up his ministry. That Henry only had half of the £2000 bequests his father left to each of the other brothers may be due to John having expended other sums on Henry’s education and placement.

Henry’s otherworldliness, piety and dedication come down through a number of stories, such as reproving his wife (poor thing!) for singing on the Sabbath - "We must remember Whose day this is". On another occasion when a young pupil had stepped over the traces, he came to order not via any reproof but through the shame of inadvertently hearing Henry praying for him. The young man became entirely reformed and was later highly commended by the Bishop of Madras for the attitudes Henry had inculcated in him through sheer example. This example included Henry as a Good Samaritan. Going out in London to buy a scent bottle for his Minnie when she lay dying, Henry was completely sidetracked by an old woman in need whom he came across in the street.

Henry abhorred violence. As a young man he had with a few quiet words shamed two fighting street-arabs in Huntingdon into patching up their differences. This was in an age when any other Englishman would merely have stopped to watch and place bets on the outcome. There were at least two further examples of such peace-making in Brighton later on.

In 1828 one of his Mortlock brothers-in-law, Bishop Kaye, obtained for Henry the Rectorship of Farthingstone in Northamptonshire. Deeply embarrassed by the thought of nepotism, Henry tried to get himself appointed Chaplain at St Helena instead. However he was sensibly dissuaded from this. Henry did not remove to Farthingstone as no house went with the living. Instead he put in a curate and with that and the parish expenses always generously met he finished up out of pocket on this well-meant appointment.

Also in 1828 Henry was finally admitted to an East India Company pension. Never really well, he had made annual visits to the seaside, to Brighton, Aberystwyth, Cromer and Bridlington where he would go down to the beach and read the Scriptures to the fishermen in their boats. He also took holidays in Ledbury and sought recuperation in the spa towns of Malvern and Matlock. This inventory of places is interesting because of the incidence of Brighton, Malvern and Bridlington elsewhere in the Mortlock story. Ledbury of course was on his mother-in-law’s Woodhouse turf.

Finally in 1835 he retired to 30, Oriental Place, Brighton, where he again took pupils. He was soon appointed, at £100 a year, Chaplain to the Brighton Workhouse, which appointment occasioned an immediate political storm, although it was made clear that this was in no way animated by any personal reflection on Henry, whose sincere application to the duties of that post excited considerable respect. Typically of Henry, he ended up doing the job but without the salary.

In 1836 scarlet fever swept into Henry’s household, attacking six of his eight surviving children, of whom it carried off one daughter, two servants and the woman who came to nurse them. It was all too much for Henry who died in Brighton, after "much bodily suffering", on 13th February 1837 and was buried at the old parish church in Hove. Elizabeth died in Malvern, where she lived in "Tibberton Villa", in 1875 after nearly 40 years of widowhood, three years after her son Henry jnr who had already died there, a 42-year-old bachelor of whom little is recorded, in 1872. Malvern may seem an incongruous choice of abode but it was close to Elizabeth’s Woodhouse relations in Herefordshire. As to Brighton, it must have held some pleasant memories, for Henry’s spinster daughter Caroline was visiting there when the census taker went his rounds in 1881.

Of the children who survived infancy, only Edmund John, born in Morcott in June 1833, comes vividly to notice. Inheriting from his bachelor uncles after his cousin Charles had blotted his copybook, he was a partner in the Mortlock Bank which he eventually sold out to Barclays, becoming one of their Local Directors for Cambridge. He ended his days in December 1902. By that time he was a Justice of the Peace, Deputy Lieutenant for Cambridgeshire, and the last Mortlock Lord of the Manor of Great Abington (although whether there was a Lordship, and whether he was the Lord, was a matter of some discreet contention). An 1862 conviction for assault at Pampisford, when he was fined £2, was long forgotten. How unlike his father! How like his grandfather! A Trinity man (BA 1854, MA 1857), he married in 1859 Mary Jane Hall, daughter of Sir Charles Hall, a chancery lawyer (and so successful in that practice that he refused to take silk) who was the last Vice-Chancellor of England. His wife was the niece of Lewis Duval, scion of a family of Swiss immigrants, the "Great Conveyancer" and the national authority on property law, who was also solicitor to Mortlock’s Bank. Hall’s and Duval’s careers are recorded at greater length in the Dictionary of National Biography. Mary-Jane’s brother (and, eventually, executor) was Sir Charles Hall KCMG MP, Recorder of London. The Hall relationship gives interesting collateral to the validity of Thomas Mortlock’s deal with his brother Frederick regarding the Bank, now passed on to Edmund John. It seems hardly conceivable that Sir Charles, with his unmatchable specialist knowledge, would have allowed his daughter to marry someone whose entire fortune was open to challenge at law.

Edmund John was a keen shot, keen cricketer and a keen fisherman - even for trout in the Granta, but you would be lucky to see one there now, for water extraction has taken its toll. In the 1860s when our Country felt itself threatened by that preposterous would-be tyrant Napoleon III, Edmund John commanded the local Volunteers as had his uncle Sir John over half a century before, after serving at their foundation as their Treasurer. He took a great interest in its collateral organisation, the National Rifle Association, and set up a miniature range in the old barn at Abington Lodge. As a man of business he later dealt with the estates of his unmarried sisters and his cousin. He was also a mason, a situation always helpful to a public man and man of business, taking degrees in that craft in 1879 and 1888; and his membership of the Garrick Club bespeaks a liberal and artistic side to his personality. Having sold the Bank, Edmund John was the complete hunting, shooting and fishing country gentleman. Latterly Abington Lodge was served by four principal servants: Gatland the butler; Mrs Hymus the cook, an ample "Mrs Bridges" figure; old Parrish the coachman, carriage and pair ready at the door; and Farnechon the French gardener.

Edmund John and Mary Jane had four daughters. The youngest, Bertha Elizabeth, married Rev. AE Clark-Kennedy, a Gunnery Officer in the Navy, and veteran of the Ashantee War, who was later ordained and became Vicar of Pampisford. Here his naval technical expertise showed through when he enlivened the village fête with an electrified bowl of water full of pennies, and a "railway trapeze" which sounds suspiciously like a Commando death-slide. He had courted Bertha from his midshipman days when she sent him a small plain notebook with delightful flower paintings executed by herself. He returned it with elegant sketches of ships and naval scenes. Her love was then sorely tested when he set about making an exact and elegant model of his ship, HMS Rodney. He executed it all in minute and accurate detail but when it came to the sails he sent home for Bertha to make them. When her product eventually arrived out in China he sent it back commanding that it be done again with the stitches made smaller! For love she complied. Bertha became the mother of Dr AE Clark-Kennedy, Dean of the London Medical School, who in 1983 wrote a family history (chiefly the story of the errant John Frederick Mortlock), and of three daughters Bertha, Aletta and Gladys, an artist who married Rev. Tom Going and went on to have two sons and a daughter and by them seven grandchildren and at least eight great-grandchildren. Dr Clark-Kennedy’s son Alec (Alexander Charles), served in the Navy during the war and was lucky to escape from the sinking of HMS Mashona after the Bismark chase - the loss of life was much increased by the deliberate refusal of the Irish government to allow lifesaving from their shores. Later, like his father, he was made a Fellow of Corpus Christi college, Cambridge.

Edmund John’s other daughters all, also, married parsons. Mary Blanche (1863-1942) wed Rev. John James Lias (known in the family as the Holy Joja) who had been a schoolmaster in Malaya and ended up as Anglican Chaplain in San Remo; Alice, once separated from Rev. JP Farler, reverted to the name of Mortlock and went home to Abington Lodge to look after her father. She provided the last reference to the Mortlocks of Cambridge in pedigree books such as Walfords’. At Abington she was joined after the Kaiser’s War by her then widowed sister Mrs Lias, whose eldest son, Ronald, had been killed in action in 1915. In happier days Ronald had held the family record for bicycling from great St Mary’s Church to Abington Lodge - thirty-four minutes. Blanche Lias’ daughter Bea had married well, to Sir Leonard Reynolds KCSI KCIE. In 1951 she gave the Lodge to Corpus Christi college, subject to a 60-year lease to Alec Clark-Kennedy and his sister Gillian.

The two sisters were likened to the Red and White Queens in Alice Through the Looking-Glass; Blanche, the "White", quiet and predictable - Alice, the "Red", always vigorous and active. Late in life she took up badminton with her nephews and nieces. The tie beams in the old stables interfered. The gardener was instantly ordered to saw them through. The walls started to lean outwards - and then stopped, and the building did not fall down, perhaps because it did not dare to. During the second German War, which had been forecast by Alice, a very knowledgeable historian, at the time of Versailles, a stick of bombs swept across the village. One blew up the "humpetty" bridge across the Granta, hard by the front gates of the Lodge - the only British bridge the Germans ever did hit during the whole of the War, and that by accident as the pilot must have been trying for Duxford. The other bomb flew over Abington Lodge and exploded just beyond the ha-ha. "It was an enormous bomb" said the White Queen. "Don’t be absurd", retorted the Red Queen, "it was only a tiny one." But Abington was now really in the War; that mightily pleased Alice. One would jib at correcting her. "You like cream, don’t you?" she said rhetorically to a visiting missionary from darkest Africa, as she poured salad cream all over his gooseberry pie. Alice was a considerable musician - violin and viola - and started an Abington village orchestra. The third sister, Ellen Duval Mortlock became a Mrs Ludovic Robinson; she had two daughters and three sons of whom one, Gordon, was killed in the Second World War (Ludovic was ostracised in Cambridge because he was said to have gained the Mastership of St Cath’s by voting for himself). The bridge itself is not hump-backed any more, as after the War there was neither water nor business for the old boat traffic and a level replacement was more suited to the motor-car.

Unto him that hath; Edmund John seems to have inherited most of the Downman portraits. Most stayed at Abington and ended up with Mrs Alice Mortlock but the real charmer, of the infant John Cheetham pulling his mother’s hair, went to Mrs Lias. Edmund John was keen on cricket and encouraged it at Abington. In his will he left generous legacies to the Cambridge Asylum and to Addenbrooke’s. In the thirties his daughter Alice bought the customary cricket ground there and presented it to the village. She died there, the last Mortlock of Abington, in 1951.

References for Henry Mortlock and his family:

Parish, WD "List of Carthusians" Lewes 1879

(In Brighton public library:)

"Brighton Pamphlets" vol.31 p.39, Sermon on the death of Rev. Henry Mortlock, by the Rev. Henry Venn Elliot, with biographical memoir

"Brighton Sermons" vol.4, Sermon on the death of Rev.Hy Mortlock, J.Sortain, pub. J Taylor, N.St, Brighton 1837

(In the India and Oriental Studies section of the British Library:)

Dodwell & Miles "Madras Civil Servants 1780-1839" Longmans 1839

Madras Almanac, various years

Madras Baptisms

Indiaman

My great-great-grandmother Frances Griffiths was born in 1815 in Southwark, the fourth child of Captain Charles Mortlock of HEIC’s Maritime Service. He was the third surviving son of John Mortlock III, land owner, banker, and political master of the town of Cambridge.

Charles was born in the parish of "St Bennett’s", Cambridge, but baptised in St Edward’s on the 21st October 1782. There is no evidence of any seafaring in his forebears - farmers, surgeons, bankers, grocers, drapers - but in 1796, aged 13, he shipped as an East India Company’s midshipman in the Taunton Castle (Captain Edward Studd). It rather follows that his formal education was pretty limited, except that he would have had a thorough drubbing in the mathematics necessary for ocean navigation. Taunton Castle sailed for India from Portsmouth on 12th April, in company, for mutual protection, with four others of the 1795-season China Fleet, in a convoy under the orders of Admiral Pringle.

Taunton Castle was a purpose-built merchantman, and was, like other Indiamen, owned by an independent "ship’s husband" (in her case, Peter Esdaile - Esdailes were banking associates of John Mortlock) typically fronting a syndicate of investors holding sixteenth or thirty-second shares in the ship, but built to East India Company standards and chartered to the Hon. Company for her working life of maybe six (some made 12) round-trip voyages to the Orient. She was 182' long, 42' in the beam, 1246 tons, square sterned and carried 26 six- and twelve-pounder guns, had a complement of 140 hands, and had been built on the Thames in 1790. She was the size of a ship of the line, and, with her (albeit smaller) broadside guns, and typical Nelsonic chequerboard paint scheme, easily mistaken for one. Whether Charles had a true vocation for the sea is difficult to assess; his father’s financial stake in the ship, and a sudden opportunity to settle whichever of his sons happened to be handy and was at the appropriate age (or could be so presented), may have had more to do with the selection of a career for Charles.

However the realities of an 18th century seafaring life were not slow in making their appearance. Off Bali on 29th January 1797 the Fleet had a close call when they were surprised by a 6-ship squadron of French frigates. Taunton Castle ran out her guns, including some wooden dummies, and paraded on deck, in their red coats, the St Helena regiment that was taking passage from China, in the hope that the French would take them for marines. Commodore Lennox in the Woodford had the Indiamen hoist the White Ensign and the French sheered off. Another close shave was in store; on 10th February Taunton Castle grounded in Cajeli Bay, at Buru in the Moluccas - where she had no business to be, and which episode brought disgrace on the Captain. It is to be hoped that young Mortlock observed and learned from this.

Sir Alan Villiers (who should know) ranks the East India Company’s Commanders as the élite of sailing ship Masters. He ascribes this to HEIC’s apprenticeship system. Although Commanders had to pay a high premium for their posts (as much as £5000) all had to start as midshipmen ("Guinea-pigs") and work their way up.

One return in February 1798 Charles received his first promotion, to 5th Mate - skipping an intervening two-year tour as 6th Mate. At 15 he was an Officer, and had charge of men. Still in Taunton Castle he sailed again to India under Captain Bond with the 1798 fleet, taking departure from Portsmouth on the last day of the year and returning to moorings in the Thames at the end of June 1800.

He was now promoted 4th Mate and appointed to the 1200-ton Ocean (Captain Patton), which sailed for Canton on her maiden voyage in January 1801, returning in June 1802. Her eventual fate epitomised the risk of casual shipwreck that was never far away - she was lost with all hands, on her fifth voyage, in the China Seas in September 1810.

As Third Mate in the 1200-ton Elphinstone in 1802, Charles now stood his own watch. Off-watch he was the equivalent of the "Sub of the Gunroom" in a later RN ship, messing with the junior Mates and the midshipmen. Cabin space was too valuable to be wasted on junior officers. Charles would have had the management of their mess and which also accommodated those passengers who had not paid maybe £1000 to join the Captain’s table. The profit from mess-management would have been a useful supplement to Charles’ modest pay of £3 10s per month, hardly more than the £2 5s allowed to a Midshipman. However all East India Company Maritime Service officers traded on their own account, and, being mostly gentry or even of noble stock would in the junior ranks probably have had an allowance from their families. Commanders were allowed fifty-six tons of private cargo, as well as first call on any space not taken up by the Company, and might make £10,000 on a round trip (one made £30,000), as well as clearing perhaps another £10,000 on passage money, cabin rental and table fees from the more affluent passengers. Charles’ captain, Milliken Craig, had lost his previous ship the Queen by fire in the Bay of Bahia in July 1800; another reminder of the perils Charles was facing which were not shared by his land-lubber brothers. The violence of the enemy is by tradition a trivial addition to the danger of the sea. For instance, in 1809 eight Indiamen were lost at sea, four of them in one hurricane of Mauritius.

An additional ever-present hazard was disease. India was notorious as a place where a man might be bright as a button at breakfast and dead as a door-nail by dinner-time. The Hugh Inglis (Captain Fairfax) came out in the same convoy as the Elphinstone. In Calcutta in December 1803 her First Mate died, her Second Mate was made up to First, and her Third hand would have moved up to Second, but he was already ill and also died, twelve days after his senior. Charles got his chance; he was transferred from Elphinstone and promoted Acting Second Mate, and another officer was brought in as Third. Not the least attraction of this move was the chance of a cabin, which he would have shared with the surgeon. As it happened, the Fourth Mate, who had not had a share in the promotions - perhaps thought not quite ready to take his own independent watch - died at sea ten months later and the Fifth and Sixth each received a step for the last few months of the voyage.

But there was a worm in the apple - or, more specifically, in the woodwork. There had already been concern aboard the Inglis, regarding leaks, in Calcutta. Arriving at Penang in April it was clear that the ship’s leaky state was past ignoring. A formal Survey found leaks in the bands just above the coppering, caused by teredo worm. At this point several Lascar (Goanese) crewmen jumped ship; clearly in their (experienced) opinion the ship was unsafe. On 4th May there was a crisis. The carpenter, probing for leaks, poked a stick into a hole near the keelson, and water poured in. Pumping became continuous. Landing of the cargo had already commenced, much into an English prize of the French privateer Fortune which prize had been recaptured, by the Inglis, en route off the Laccadives while Inglis was on a side-trip to Bombay a month earlier. The boats were landed and the guns swung out into another Indiaman in the harbour. By 20th it was discovered that the worm had eaten right through the planking at a place where the copper sheathing had come adrift. The ship was hove down to work on this but, the ship righted on 22nd after repair work, by 26th May she was settling fast. Three of the four cables to which she was riding were peremptorily cut so that the ship swung over a sandbank with only sixteen feet of water over it. Boats were sent to all the ships around to borrow as many pumps as could be cadged or loaned.

It took until 14th June to replace all the bad planks, the carpenter and his crew working, it will be understood, in the dark, in a listed ship, on a surface that was mostly under water. A week later it was discovered that the mainmast was sprung in two places, presumably because of the strain of hauling down and days spent heeled over; it was 4th July before the mast was successfully fished. All this time the landed stores and cargo were being brought back aboard; on 25th in came the guns. Finally on 8th August, after over four unproductive months at Penang, the Hugh Inglis sailed for England. The ship was still somewhat leaky and this was aggravated when pitching in a head sea. Other troubles loomed. In October the fresh water began to run short because of leaks from the butts - Woodford, in company, had the same problem, which is when Inglis, sounding her butts, found she was unable to help. However, a month later Inglis was able to send Woodford ten gallons of lime juice to alleviate the "deplorable" state of scurvy on board the latter. After over four months at sea Inglis made St Helena on 16th December. A tough trip; but good experience.

Hugh Inglis (and Elphinstone) arrived back at moorings in February 1805. Charles was then appointed in May to the 861-ton Streatham as Second Mate, a step funded by James Thomas’ mortgaging his share in the Streatham. The ship sailed from Cork on 31st August 1805 on his fifth two-year round trip, this time to Madras, returning in April 1807. After Charles had left her, Streatham, still under Charles’ old Captain, John Dale, and in spite of her thirty 18-pounders, was taken by the French homeward bound on 31st May 1809, although she was successfully re-taken in one of the many British raids on Mauritius later in the same year. A problem for Dale had been that his Chinese and Portuguese crewmen could not be kept to their quarters in action; only the "European" seaman would stand to the guns. This problem must have been general for Indiamen when up against a professional enemy, although their discipline was enforced in the same way as in the Royal Navy of that time, namely by the lash.

England was at war for most of this period and Charles must have had a stimulating boyhood under the Red Ensign, which in 1801 displaced HEIC’s 13-striped red and white ensign (with the Union, which had in 1707 replaced St George, in the top canton next the hoist) which had been worn by Indiamen since 1660. Besides the French, any Indies-bound merchantman might have to contend with well-found and well-manned pirates in the South Atlantic between St Helena and Ascension, and Malay and Chinese pirates in the Straits of Malacca or further East. Against these an Indiaman could give a good account of herself. There was no nonsense then about only being allowed to use fire hoses.

At the age of 26, after "Using the Sea" thirteen years, over 10 years’ accredited seatime, five round trip voyages to India and China and a period in Bengal waters, and after conveniently adding a year to his age, Charles was appointed to his first command, the 26-gun Charlton, built in Liverpool by Humble and Hardy in 1798. She would have cost in the region of £40,000. Little did I know, when I set out for Singapore as a Midshipman, 160 years later, how I was following in his wake.

On 27th April 1809, supported as witnesses by his two next brothers, John Cheetham and Thomas, and by the bride’s two next sisters Mary Ann and Eliza, Charles had married Emelia Ann, the twenty-year-old eldest child of his father’s business partner, Captain James Thomas and his wife Ann of 16 Dover Place, New Kent Road, Southwark. Smart work you might think. The couple’s first child, Anne Elizabeth, was born almost exactly nine months later, on 26th January 1810, born with her father far away at sea although her mother had the comfort of the company of her own mother and sisters

As a Commander, Charles had status. On arrival in India he would be greeted with a 13-gun salute; the guard would be turned out whenever he entered or left the Hon. Company’s Fort. Over his buff breeches and waistcoat he would wear a "fine" blue coat with black Genoa velvet collar and cuffs, his gilt buttons bearing the Hon. Company’s arms. Over the coat he could wear a black velvet panteen cape. At the main meal of the day, dinner, served in wartime at 2 pm so that the ship could be darkened at twilight, Charles would preside from the centre of an athwartships table in the cuddy.

The War with France coloured Charles’ early service. In 1798 Nelson, by his brilliant and total victory in Aboukir Bay, dashed Napoleon’s hopes of a land conquest of India. Successively the French were reduced, but not eliminated. The Marquis of Wellesley and his brother Arthur (later Duke of Wellington) at Seringapatam and at Assaye and elsewhere successfully removed French influence on land in India. In 1805 Nelson went further and at Trafalgar destroyed the main maritime force of France. However there always remained maritime jackals, snapping at stragglers on the fringes of what was now the greatest empire the world had seen. Guerre de Course was always the weapon of the weaker power (that’s why it has a French name) but, though little short of piracy, it could still be uncomfortable for its victims. Even in the Channel, Indiamen were not safe. Marryat, who draws from the life, in "Poor Jack" has a spirited engagement between a returning Indiaman and a French lugger operating as a privateer which he dates to 1800.

The Charlton sailed from Portsmouth on 7th July 1809 for Madeira and Bengal. Alas, on 18th November, homeward bound in company with the Windham and the United Kingdom, off the Nicobar Islands (of whose familial significance I had no inkling when I stopped briefly at Car Nicobar in 1957), she fell in with hostile sail, the French frigates Vénus (44 guns) and Manche, and a corvette, the Créole. After initially, a stiff fight (described by the French as "très-opiniâtre") by the Windham, the heavily out-gunned Indiamen were taken, and escorted in prize towards Mauritius. On the way all six ships ran into a hurricane, which dismasted the Vénus and enabled the Windham to escape (she was taken again in another fight in July 1810 .. and recaptured later that year). On 2nd January Charlton arrived at Port Louis, to be recovered by British forces later.

However Charlton’s and the United Kingdom’s officers and passengers had earlier been dumped by the French at Visagapatam after adverse winds prevented them being landed at Penang. A family story suggests that this decision was expedited by Charles greeting his captor with a masonic handshake. At any rate they were in Calcutta by Christmas. A report of the action was published in Cambridge in June 1810, copied from American sources. Charles himself was home in July, repatriated in an Indiaman, HEICS Metcalfe, which was owned by his father-in-law. Charles and Emelia’s next child, Amelia, was born in May 1811, in No.17 next to her parents, which modest house had been bought for them by James Thomas. In 1820 the Thomases moved to Clapham and the Mortlocks seem to have joined them until Charles left the sea and was able to settle down. James Thomas had been in business partnership with John Mortlock for some years and the Thomas’s and Mortlocks were familiar to each other, as was further demonstrated by Emelia’s sister Elizabeth’s betrothal to Charles’ brother Henry in 1808, whom she married in 1817. From the conjunction of Charles’ marriage and Henry’s betrothal one might infer some direct arrangement between the Mortlock and Thomas fathers, perhaps prompted by Charles’ brother Frederick’s elopement to Gretna the previous year.

Charles does not seem to have suffered professionally from the Charlton débacle, although he may have lost his pay; freight in merchant shipping - i.e. safe delivery - is the mother of wages; no freight, no pay. However this may not have been the HEIC rule; various payments to Charlton’s crew survive in her account book kept by Charles long after the event. It would seem that the investment in private cargo was not his own but his father-in-law’s; Charles owed him his position and in some ways went to sea as his agent. No good for the family; the return cargo and specie, aimed to turn a profit of £10,000, would have been forfeit to the French.

In December 1810 Charles was, at East India House, sworn in to the command of the 738-ton Cambridge, putting in his first appearance on board on 11th February. There were many fingers in the Cambridge ownership pie besides Charles’ father and father-in-law; Robert Downie of Calcutta was listed as a co-owner - the Cambridge had been built in Calcutta in 1799. Originally the Porcher, her name had been changed when bought by the Mortlock interest in 1810. Square-sterned and with a figurehead she bore 80 men, with a cutlass and some form of small arm for each, and twenty 6- and 12-pounder guns backed by 13½ barrels of powder, thirty rounds of great shot and a hundredweight of small. She was victualled for ten months, carried three anchors with seven cables for them, three suits of sails and a ton of spare cordage.

The Cambridge sailed from Torbay for Bengal and Amboyna that May, under Letters of Marque. Too much should not be read into that; the practice was general among Indiamen during the War; but it did give legal authority to snapping up any minor French trifle that might happen by. Lestock Wilson and JH Palmer, James Thomas’ regular business partners, put up the associated £1500 bond. This was required in case of legal action if the Lettered ship overstepped her authority to act against the property of the French Republic and its subjects "except only within Harbours or roads within shot of cannon of princes and States in Amity with His Majesty". The capability and manning of the ship was carefully guaranteed by the applicant to prove to the High Court of Admiralty that she was at least nominally fit for the service proposed.

The ship returned to moorings in July 1812 and in June 1813 Charles took command of his old ship the Streatham. His appointments reflect his father and father-in-law’s investments in all three ships - Charlton, Cambridge, Streatham - and in their cargoes. His move from the Cambridge reflects the fact that she was not "taken up" by the HEIC for the 1812-13 season and so as an HEIC Commander it would be appropriate to move to another HEIC ship. On the Streatham’s return he transferred to command of the 26-gun Lowther Castle, as it happened for four round-trip voyages. New into service in 1811, she was a large ship of 1507 tons and therefore a prestigious and presumably lucrative command. She embodied the straight sides that had replaced the traditional tumble-home that had spelt doom for too many Indiamen when large seas came inboard in heavy weather. She would have been smart as paint in spite of the livestock - goats for milking, chickens, all sorts - which cluttered the upper deck at the start of any voyage, until eaten in the great cabin, or perhaps washed overboard. Her husband was John Wordsworth, very probably a relation of the poet whose brother John had been lost in command of an Indiaman wrecked by its pilot off Portland Bill in February 1805.

Charles remained Lowther Castle’s Commander until 1822, when, after over twenty-six years at sea, two-thirds of them in wartime, he swallowed the anchor and retired to shore. By this time, by seniority, he was commodore of the HEIC fleet. His retirement may have been connected with a grumpy complaint he made to the Court about being ordered to sail for China out of season, or possibly to growing weary of the rough and tumble of life in command. At the time Charles was on his way home on his second Lowther Castle trip; James Thomas was bullish about the expected financial returns writing that he hoped Charles would be able to pay off all his debts - the inference is that after all those wearing years at sea Charles was only barely solvent in his own right. The year before James Thomas had been writing that Charles "appears in the eyes of the World a man of great credit and property accounted against him at the Jerusalem Coffee House" [the venue for business between all the East India shipping people - Commanders, owners and insurers etc.]. However James Thomas also writes, in the same letter "I have been overdrawn by Charles".

Throughout his service Charles was employed on long-haul round trips to Bombay, Madras or Calcutta, and on to Whampoa, Batavia or Amboyna - the Netherlands having become Napoleonic property, we had taken over the Dutch colonies in the East Indies (to the immense relief of the natives). Calls en route might be made at Madeira, Ascension, St Helena, the Cape, the Comoros or, when it was safely British, Mauritius, and Ceylon. The passage to or from the East might take a year, although eight months was more usual. The frigate Medusa once made it home from Bengal to Portsmouth in only 12 weeks.

There were always more Indiamen than required and each trip had to be pleaded (and bribed?) for. For instance, the 1818 Bombay and China trip for Charles and Lowther Castle was only achieved because James Thomas successfully intrigued with one of the Twinings - an old India name - to get the nomination of Jacob Bosanquet, an HEIC Director and ex-Chairman of the Hon. Company.

Charles’ voyages are recorded, in intimate navigational and management detail, in his logs - often in his own hand - in the India and Oriental Studies section of the British Library in London. For a double voyage the Lowther Castle, besides her 154 officers and ratings, might have on board a military draft of up to three hundred of all ranks from a variety of King’s and HEIC European regiments, including maybe three dozen authorised female and infant dependants; a half dozen or so HEIC Civilians or other British gentry or merchants and their families; and perhaps 50 Chinese or Indians being repatriated for whatever reason. Most would disembark at the first port of call in India but there would be others sent aboard for the Oriental legs of the journey, for instance a squad of convicts for the new Prince of Wales Island colony at Penang. (Did Charles perhaps meet the Carnegy or Anderson grandparents of his future Griffiths granddaughter-in-law? I wonder..) The ship would carry mails and an outward cargo of coal and manufactures and European stores and would similarly return but with tea, Chinese porcelain, silks and cottons, jute and indigo, tropical hardwoods and spices, gems and ivories, Trichinopoly silver, oriental lacquer ware and oriental objets d’art (apes and peacocks even). A Captain could turn many pennies trading on his own account, as we have seen, and there was keen competition to be the first of the new year’s Fleet to land European goods in India, and after a smart passage to sell off any surplus European victuals. He would also be expected to execute commissions for all his numerous relations. We know, for instance, that Charles commissioned and brought home a complete service of Chinese porcelain for Emelia’s sister Frances Phillips, very probably a wedding present.

Ships’ Husbands, investors, Commanders, officers and passengers might well be business partners or blood relations. In 1815 at Madras, still outward bound to Whampoa, Charles embarked his brother Henry who was hoping to recover his health via a sea trip. In the event this did not happen and, granted leave in January 1816, Henry remained on board for the passage home. A painting of Lowther Castle with St Helena as a backdrop, probably by a local artist, may date from this trip; either bought by Henry or presented to him by Charles, and still owned by Henry’s family. During this trip there was some unexplained trouble over Charles’ purser but as he was a Wordsworth this was all handled sub rosa and there may have been some unrecovered financial loss to Charles.

In the Channel the pilot, as was customary, brought off the latest newspapers. They carried the story of John Mortlock’s death in Cambridge three days before. Charles’ mother did not long survive her titan of a husband and died in April 1817 what time Charles was again away, this time outward bound for Bombay and again to China.

It is clear that in many respects Charles was not his own master, but an agent for the collective Mortlock-Thomas interests. John Mortlock and James Thomas had lost heavily over the taking of the Charlton and the Streatham, and later by a débacle over a private voyage by the Cambridge, and looked to Charles’ turning in £10,000 a trip to bale out them, and also Emelia and Elizabeth and their sisters, whose jointures had been placed on the line presumably to hold off external creditors. There was nothing unfair in this; Charles’ positions in Command would have been bought at great expense and were in a sense family investments.

After ineffectually trying to ban it, John Company capitulated over Private Trade and settled for regulating it rather than forbidding it, shrewdly presuming that if allowances were laid down per rank, at least seniors would stop juniors overdoing their entitlement. In early nineteenth century regulations even the midshipmen were allowed a ton of private freight each. Third Mates got three tons, Seconds six, the Chief Mate eight, and the commander, as above, a mighty fifty-six tons of space on shipboard to stow what would fetch a mighty profit at the end of a voyage. There was some restriction on types of goods to protect Company monopolies, but ample scope within that to allow a wide selection of merchandise. This was just one aspect of very detailed regulation which had grown up out of experience, over the years, to govern what went on in HEIC ships. For instance there were penalties on Commanders for carrying undisclosed or disapproved-of passengers, and limits on how much HEIC’s and Government’s own servants might be dunned for messing en route, and detailed list and scales of stores to be on board and who was to sign for them.

We shall now look in more detail at the four voyages that Charles made in command of the Lowther Castle.

For Charles’ first voyage in the Lowther Castle he had a John Wordsworth as Midshipman and Coxswain - presumably a sprig of the Wordsworth East India dynasty. During the voyage the Second Mate died at sea and also the Master at Arms; people were made up to fill the vacancies, as later when Charles lost his Gunner. His specialists typically included a baker, a poulterer and so forth. A surgeon en route to a shore appointment in Madras was on board with his family; somewhere in the South Atlantic his wife died, leaving him to face a new life in India with a brood of children and no helpmeet.

The 34th Foot was remarked on elsewhere as "wild Irish lads drawn from Ireland’s teeming gaols" who were dreaded as much for their savagery as for the disease they brought on board. Charles was lucky in that although he had a draft for the 34th they seem mostly to have been English; his sick lists were modest, initially one and a half dozen each of soldiers and seamen and later maybe only one or two hands. Perhaps it was fortunate that the numbers for the 34th were diluted with men for the 56th.

Charles went on board at the end of January and the ship dropped down to St Helens to await convoy. On 11th February Charles went on board HMS Acbar to receive his sailing instructions and on 16th weighed. The anchor broke its ring, and in spite of trying to weigh it with its buoy rope, was lost, so there was a delay while a replacement was obtained from the Portsmouth dockyard. Lowther Castle soon lost, or gave the slip to, Acbar, and was early in Funchal Roads where she lay waiting for the convoy to concentrate again, and presumably had first bite at an onward cargo of Madeira wine. As a reward Lowther Castle was caught by a gale, and had to cut her cable and stand out to sea, and beat on and off until the rather exposed anchorage could again be used.

It is to be presumed that the hands amplified their grog ration with surreptitious supplies from bum-boats. Out of the bag came the cat (that’s where the phrase comes from); two dozen for a seaman - William Mellish - for insolence and mutinous conduct "it being the opinion of the Captain and Officers that he deserved the same". In disciplinary matters and also in severe weather Charles would consult with his officers, bringing them on-side in a very modern manner and also helping his case in the log should the Company be challenged, or seek to challenge him; quite a different style from the heaven-born autocracy of a Captain RN. Shortly after this incident one Michael Ford was given two dozen for theft. Ford was plainly a skate and six weeks later earned three dozen for another theft and for "secreting himself in the hold". Oddly this miscreant was not among the eighteen men pressed by HMS Minden as soon as Lowther Castle arrived in Madras in July, where Metcalfe and Streatham were already lying. Boredom was a problem; the hands were set to making up junk when the Boatswain had no other tasks for them; for the Chinese on board the real treat was to sit picking oakum day after day.

After three and a half weeks at Madras, Lowther Castle sailed for China via Penang and Malacca. At the former at least and probably elsewhere Charles embarked "private trade". The ship had two months in China and then sailed via a stop in the East Indies in the Sunda Strait near Krakatoa, more conspicuous then than now. Usually the ship was in company with the rest of the East Indies fleet of that year and, with a war on or possible, the watch was always cautious when a strange sail was sighted. A British warship encountered would board; and the log meticulously records exchanges of coded signals using the Company’s numerical flag codes.

On 9th May after nearly 15 months away the Lizard was in sight; the pilot boarded off Dungeness at 2 p.m. the next day, so they had a smart run up-Channel - not always the case. It was two more months before the ship was snug in Blackwall and then Charles had a 6-month stand-off with his family before sailing for China again, this time via Bombay.

For this next trip young Wordsworth was made up to 4th Mate. Aft there were only five passengers - a financial blow for Charles - but they included a parson to take Divine Service and perhaps to write to the Company and complain if Charles did not facilitate this. Forward, crammed between decks, were nearly a hundred men of the 47th - including quite a few Irishmen - with 12 of their women and 15 children.

In January 1817, still in northern latitudes, the ship was in a severe gale and her rigging was badly shaken. In March the ship put into Table Bay for water. The troops were being served a pint of tea each morning - an expensive luxury but necessary to make the ship’s water even barely palatable. In August, still on the run out to Whampoa, the ship made a presumably lucrative call at Penang where Charles’ cousin Edward Woodhouse, a Lieutenant in the Company’s army, joined the ship for the trip home, which he will have enjoyed since it included a long visit to China from September to January.

James Thomas held a high opinion of his son-in-law, and had high hopes for him this trip, writing on 7th August: "There is not his equal in the service having commanded four different ships and five voyages Captain, to give him his due if he returns as poor as he went out it is not his own fault either by extravagance or want of execution. Dame Fortune has never smiled on him yet - it will be more than ill luck if he does not make at least 8 or 10,000£".

In any ship an undetected thief corrodes all relationships between decks. On the run home one of the Quartermasters was caught in this and disrated and given three dozen with the cat. By March 1818 the ship was again in Table Bay and four months later, home.

For the next voyage, as above again to Bombay and China, instead of King’s troops there was a draft of sixty recruits for the company’s European regiments, and twenty "Marine Boys" for Bombay, presumably products of Jonas Hanway’s Marine Society. The boys were destined for the Bombay Marine, the Company’s private Navy and the ancestor of the RIN. The recruits were new to discipline but behaved better after a Private, soon after sailing, was given "only" 1 dozen for striking his corporal. Reading between the lines the officers perhaps persuaded Charles that there was some mitigation. However the spell wore off and in March a Private dared a show of insolence to Charles after refusing to go on sentry duty. In a surprising act of clemency the man was merely put in irons for two days and had his grog (which had probably caused the problem) stopped for two weeks. A month later, at the end of April, a soldier was caught stealing a pair of shoes and for this and other thefts he was given two dozen in front of the other soldiers who were paraded to witness the punishment.

The sailors had already needed their own lesson in discipline. In March a seaman had been insolent and disobedient to the 6th Mate, probably an experienced youth. Charles awarded two dozen. At this the seaman came aft in a body and "insisted" on the man’s not being punished. This would not do; Charles and his officers armed themselves and had all hands turned up to witness the punishment. To rub home who was running the ship the soldiers were then turned out and exercised with muskets. After landing the soldiery at Bombay there was more trouble and a Quartermaster was disrated for drunkenness.

By the end of November 1819 the ship was snug in China. Coming home there was trouble with an Irishman who was ordered to be confined for insolence to Charles and to Wordsworth, still shipping as 4th Mate. Below, the man set the Master at Arms a conundrum by seizing the irons and throwing them overboard. This sort of thing contained potential embarrassment, as in China for the trip home Charles had embarked Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, whose importance to the Mortlock/Thomas interest could not be better illustrated than by his eponymous status to James Thomas’ ship. The importance of this gentleman, a member of HEIC’s Select Committee, is clear from the eleven-gun salute he received from the Company’s fort at St Helena.

The isolation of life in an Indiaman is brought home by a log entry for 11th March 1820. Lowther Castle speaks the brig Broughton, twenty-one days out from Hull, and learns of the deaths of the King (George III) and of his son the Duke of Kent, the bad father of the baby future Queen Victoria. On 9th April the pilot boarded off Dover and took over the ship for her passage to Blackwall Reach.

There is comparatively little foul weather in the logs. This is because of the way the voyages were scheduled. Much of the journey was in relatively sheltered water, up the east coast of Africa via the Mozambique Channel (where, however, sea states can still get pretty high) and then to Johanna in the Comoros for instance, and a fairly long haul down the Malacca Straits. Enough was known to avoid the typhoon season - that is the reason there was anxiety if the Hoppo of Canton delayed giving his chop (clearance) for the return trip from Whampoa.

In the New Year of 1821 the Lowther Castle was at Blackwall preparing for her next China trip, this time via Bengal. Captain Mortlock came on board 13th January and the ship dropped down to the Downs. On 23rd she sailed having embarked her passengers - 38 civilians including a parson, large drafts for three King’s regiments under only two officers, a colonel and a cornet, and twenty Chinese from other ships whom the company was obliged to repatriate from England. The military draft would, as usual, have made the ship pretty crowded forward but mercifully the soldiers seemed to have been mostly English. Poor Charles! He was leaving behind his new born son and heir, Charles junior, who was born on the day the ship sailed. This was doubly poignant for him because an earlier Charles born in April 1817 had not survived.

The outward voyage was initially expeditious and uneventful. There were no intermediate calls outward bound to relieve the monotony. Divine Service was held regularly on board, possibly conducted by the parson, Rev. Dr Parish (true!) although Charles does not say so. In inclement weather it was held in the cuddy, which rather suggests that religious observance was conducted for the benefit of the afterguard and not for the edification and salvation of the foremast hands. Only occasionally was Divine Service cancelled due to bad weather and if so, that was logged. When there was no parson on board Charles officiated according to the custom of the sea, and indeed the instructions of the Company that Divine Service should be regularly held. It would fall to Charles to conduct the burial services - deaths through sickness, or falls from aloft. He also baptised several babies born to the soldiers’ women, usually with Lowther as a second Christian name. On one voyage however a baptism was held over to await a proper parson, and a child brought on board at the Cape was christened by a clergyman who embarked at St Helena.

The first hint of trouble came on 31st March when a seaman, Henry Horton, jumped overboard (in light airs an Indiaman sailed but slowly), compounded this by disobedience, and aggravated that by using "disrespectful language" to his Captain. Mortlock jumped smartly on this and Horton received four dozen lashes after which the cat was not further required on the voyage. On 4th April a comet was remarked; so also was malicious damage to several ropes in the rigging. Mortlock offered a hundred dollars reward for information or for catching anyone in the act; no information resulted, but neither was there further damage, as the bait was clearly sufficient to make the miscreant think he would be given away if he tried anything like that again.

All was then quiet for a while until on 11th May four hands came aft and addressed the Chief Officer in a "most mutinous manner" and refused, when ordered, to go forward again. Mortlock had them confined and they appear to have remained so until the ship reached Bengal, where she anchored in soundings on 22nd and berthed up-river several days later. Over a few days from 15th June a dozen or so seaman, including the named malcontents, were discharged to shore and there was no more trouble. Peace having broken out, there was no Press, and therefore little opportunity to skiff troublemakers into a King’s ship where they would learn manners the hard way.

On 10th June Charles had written home to his father-in-law that he had had a VERY SERIOUS mutiny on board, but gave no details. James Thomas was miffed at not being fully put in the picture but, in a letter to Charles’ brother Thomas Mortlock, wrote that he had an account from one of the passengers. It is not clear from the passenger list who this might have been. The account in the log sounds pretty minor but that was written for review by Company management back in London at the end of the voyage. There is no indication of what the seamen’s grievance was but then even a heavily manned Indiaman was a merchant ship. While aping Royal Navy ceremonial and other practices, there is no indication that the paternalism of Kempenfelt’s Divisional system, whereby officers took specific responsibility for the welfare of groups of men, was in any way in place. The Merchant way is that hands are paid to do a job and would they kindly get on with it. However it was the custom to muster the hands every Sunday forenoon which was presumably an opportunity for some Officer contact.

There was the odd happy event - on 16th May one of the soldiers’ wives was delivered of a baby girl, presumably with the assistance of the ship’s surgeon and women belonging to other soldiers on board.

The ship returned to moorings at Blackwall on 17th August 1822. On 17th January 1823 the court wrote to Madras, copy to Mortlock, that the Lowther Castle would be one of the ships taken up for the China round that season. But she sailed under a Captain Baker; Charles Mortlock had swallowed the anchor for full due. The timing of the Company’s letter is curious, as they already had to hand his own of 28th November in the previous year in which he stated that it was "not his wish to continue in command of Lowther Castle". His seniority as a Commander is given as 21.4.1809. Lowther Castle for her part sailed on, eventually being sold in 1833, for £13,950, to the shipowner Joseph Somes.

James Thomas wrote that Charles had "a happy knack of meeting misfortunes half way". In an earlier letter Thomas had written of Charles’ "many miseries and narrow escapes". But as they say in the Navy, if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t sign on. Two escapes - from the French as a Midshipman and later as a Commander - two mutinies and a grounding, and a twelve-thousand mile voyage home in an unsound ship have been touched on. However James Thomas survived just as much, if not more, during his own career. The miseries remain obscure, as does Charles’ character; he is a well-recorded person but little personality comes through although one is often tantalised into reading between the lines. I am reinforced in this impression by a throwaway in a letter written by his niece Louisa Leathes Mortlock, relating to Christmas 1840 which Charles and three of his sons and three of his daughters spent in London with the family of Louisa’s father, Sir John Cheetham Mortlock, Charles’ senior brother. Louisa writes "My cousins .. actually danced! so did my uncle Charles!! Wonders will never cease."

An Indiaman’s large crew (clippers could round the Horn with twelve on deck) was needed to serve the guns as well as to handle her sail, and was allowed at the rate of roughly one man for every ten tons burthen. There would be the odd desertion in harbour, and losses at sea: deaths (in spite of Mortlock’s typically small sick lists) and drownings, and fatal falls from aloft. Her men might be pressed into the King’s service if she fell in with a British warship. This last may have been a powerful disciplinary resource for her Commander (although some were cat-happy psychopaths) as no well-paid merchant Seaman would ordinarily wish to be selected for the Press. His Majesty however would at least get a trained man, and any malcontent off-loaded by a merchantman would soon be straightened out by a warship’s more generous application of the lash. But being left short-handed was a permanent problem and in 1810 the Company at last reached an understanding to control pressing in Indian waters.

Each voyage lasted between a year and eighteen months, with a period of a few months’ storing and preparation at home beforehand, for which Charles did not personally have to be present on board, at the East India Docks, Blackwall. It took a few days on return to prove his log and close his account book, and then Charles was free until his next trip. This gave him, say, six months at home every two years. He had no base outside England. The discomfort of shipboard life, not to mention the dangers of the sea, and let alone the risks of War, discouraged most wives from accompanying their husbands in the Cuddy, even when not (like Charles’ spouse) rapidly beset by small children.

The pattern of Charles’ spells at home can be traced in the births of his first seven children, in order Anne Elizabeth, Amelia, Caroline, Frances, Charles (who, as above, died in infancy, a sadness for his sisters who, according to their Thomas grandfather were "not a little proud of a brother"), and Mary Ann, born at Dover Place, Southwark between 1809 and 1819; and the replacement Charles born in 1821 in the new suburb of Clapham, "London’s original stockbroker belt", to which James Thomas had removed in 1820.

Further sons, John and Edward Thomas were baptised in Pampisford in 1823 and 1826, what time Charles and Emelia were lodging at the family seat of Great Abington. John went out to India to join the Madras Army and died at Dharwar in March 1845 as a Lieutenant in the 35th Madras Native Infantry, a sorry blow for Charles. Charles’ second daughter Amelia also went out to India, presumably to look for a husband as part of what was later unkindly known as the "fishing fleet", and died there while still young.

Charles’ third daughter Caroline was married, by her uncle Edmund Davy Mortlock, from Great Abington in 1834, to John Benward Travers, the son of John Benward Travers snr of Fitzroy Square, a scion of another "East India" dynasty. JBT snr made at least one homeward-bound trip, in 1816, in the Mortlock/Thomas Streatham. JBT jnr was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, graduating as a Senior Optime. In 1840 he became vicar of Mumby, Lincolnshire, and stayed in that post until he died there in January 1887. In a parallel university post he had been tutor to Caroline’s baby brother Edward Thomas Mortlock. Caroline and JBT junior were ultimately grandparents, by Walter Benward Travers, to Sir Walter Lancelot Travers KCIE, who married his second cousin Caroline, daughter of Henry Mortlock, youngest son of Charles junior. One of Walter Benward’s sisters, Isabella - there were nine siblings in all - also married a (second) cousin, Robert Phillips, doubly related through his grandparents Henry Mortlock and Elizabeth Thomas, and went out to India where her husband, a tea and coffee planter, was to manage a plantation for a Thomas connection, George Arbuthnot. The couple had three children, Harry who became a Superintendent in the Madras Police, but the description of his wife Daisy as the daughter of an Indian doctor leaves one wondering what the surrounding memsahibs whispered behind their fans, and two daughters, of whom May, widowed of one Indian Army captain, married another. One of Isabella’s sisters married a Gilliatt, (see below). Charles jnr’s Henry, earlier of Stanford Bridge, Worcestershire, was educated at Repton (as was his brother Herbert) and Peterhouse, where he graduated in Mathematics as 16th Junior Optime, that is to say near the bottom of his year. He was a Captain in the Herefordshire Rifle Volunteers and in the Great War served as a Captain in the Herefordshire Regiment; by the time of his daughter’s marriage in 1922 he was living at Cornwallis House, Hastings. Caroline was the only fruit of his first marriage, his wife, Caroline Gilliatt, dying shortly after the birth; a second marriage was childless and short; he then had four children by his third wife, Emily Blackburn, none of whom left issue and of whom Alfred (1910-1977) was the last descendant of Captain Charles in a male line.

Captain Charles’ will leaves £1,000 to each son, to put them on a par with the daughters who had already been dowered on a commensurate scale. It also tries to put right the careless omission (or was it more?) whereby Anne Elizabeth, now wife of Alexander William Phillips, had been left out of the appointments made against Charles and Emelia’s marriage settlement.

AW Phillips was born on 6 April 1819, the son of a Scotsman, William Edward Phillips, Governor of Prince of Wales Island (Penang) and Janet Bannerman whom he had married in Penang in June 1818. AWP went to Haileybury in 1837 and came "out" as a Madras Writer in 1839. He rose through various judicial appointments to become the Acting Civil and Special Judge of Ootacamund in 1864. He is recorded as being on furlough 1850-3 which is presumably when he married. It must have been one of the Thomas brothers who pointed him towards Anne Mortlock. He was sent home from on sick leave - it would appear that retreating to the hills to obtain respite from the heat was something usually open only to the memsahibs, Anne Elizabeth taking a bungalow at Coonor during the hot season - from June 1862 to October 1863 and was granted three months’ special leave in 1866. He and his wife came home with Anne Elizabeth's Indian Civil Service uncle Edward Brown Thomas and mutual cousin Jane Phillips, by steamer to Suez and across the desert by rail to Alexandria. There after a couple of days to rest and explore the city the party took a steamer to Marseilles and so overland across Europe. It had been arranged to visit Naples, Florence and Rome but the "elderly" (Jane’s word) Phillips "took fright at the fever in Rome" and whiled away three weeks at Geneva and Lausanne in order to avoid arriving (unacclimatised) in England before June. Continuing in England, AWP resigned the Indian Civil Service and was awarded a pension in April 1869. The couple had no children. AWP was quite an artist; prints of four paintings he made of an Indian boar hunt were published in London in 1851 - they are somewhat grisly to the modern more humane taste. Latterly, after initially retiring to Guildford, the couple lived at Burton Rough, Petworth, a site later absorbed by the (now defunct) St Michael’s girls’ school. At the close of his life AWP moved to Richmond House, Ryde. He died 26 February 1883 at Cambridge House, Clarence Parade, Southsea. Annie’s nephew Charles Mortlock II was one of his executors; the others his brothers Major-General AC and the barrister Charles Palmer Phillips.

Captain Charles’ removal to Great Abington is also evidenced by his subscribing to an anti-slavery petition there in 1826. However, by 1839, when Charles junior was being entered for a Madras cadetship, the family was at 14, Northwick Terrace, St John’s Wood, and were still there in 1841, except that at census time Emelia was away, leaving Charles alone with two female servants in their twenties. Mary Ann was married off in 1837 to Mr W Blyth, Rector of Fincham, Norfolk.

Young Charles received a "Classical and Mathematical" education at High Wycombe, and was entered at St John’s, Cambridge in 1839. Then, almost immediately, he embarked on an Indian military career, but only soldiered (as an officer of 23rd Madras Native Infantry) until he came home in 1842 to resume his place at St John’s, formally resigning from the Madras Army in 1843. He was taken on in the Bank by his uncles, but some "unfortunate incident" led to him being sacked. Otherwise he, rather than Henry’s Edmund John, might have succeeded to it. Whatever that happenstance was, though, it did not prevent Charles jnr making a later modest success of a career as a banker outside the family envelope. He settled as a landowner at Denton Lodge in Norfolk (now in Suffolk) where he and his wife Hannah (née Webster, previously widowed of a Mr Allott) produced six children. Alice (1855) married Dr Marmaduke Prickett and had three children of whom Charles Henry became a Brigadier and won the DSO. Ernest (1859) went out to Canada, to Winnipeg, and, his wife (an Allott) dying there, then came home to Ireland in poor health where he died in 1935. This may have been a result of war service; there is a tale that at 54 he shaved off his moustache and enlisted in the Canadian forces (King Edward’s Horse) giving his age as 35. Henry (1865), whom we have met, like Herbert (1854) followed Charles jnr to Cambridge. Herbert was later described as a tutor, and died unmarried in London in 1884. Charles III (1862), a surgeon, we shall meet shortly. By 1871 Charles II had retired to South Crescent Villa, Filey, Yorkshire - his wife was from Morley in that county - where he became a JP. He and Hannah both died at their London home in Ladbroke Gardens on the same day, 17th April 1893; Hannah of pneumonia and Charles "suddenly". Charles III, as executor to his brother and parents then had to tidy up estates worth together over £37,000 - three and a half million in late twentieth-century terms.

Edward Thomas Mortlock went to Uppingham (where he was followed by his nephew Herbert, and, much later, by a descendant of Captain Charles’ brother Henry) and Caius. After curacies in Manners and then Kaye territory (Rutland and Lincolnshire) he became vicar of North Frodingham, Yorkshire 1854-6 and then of Rudston near Bridlington 1857-75. Edward Thomas was then Rector of Snailwell from 1878 to 1895 and died in retirement at St Leonard’s on Sea in 1908. He married Jane King who died in 1883. They had two children, Edward, and Annie Gertrude, who married Judge Francis Roxburgh and had a son who also became a judge and who was knighted in 1946. Edward (1859-1945), after Haileybury (an HEIC foundation) and Trinity, Cambridge, became a Canon of Chichester Cathedral, where he has the odd distinction of being immortalised as a corbel (5th from the West above the great window of the south transept). In 1900 he married Katherine Daniell Cuddy; she died in 1939; the marriage was childless. Edward Thomas’ second wife, Gertrude Lydia, widow of Robert Openshaw, died in 1886 and Edward Thomas remarried to Charlotte Mary, widow of Rev. CF Rich. She survived Edward Thomas and died in Chailey, Sussex in 1920, leaving a daughter Mary who had married Rev. Alfred Allen.

Captain Charles had yet to find a husband for the rather plain Frances, still a spinster at 28 when my great-great-grandfather John Griffiths appeared on the Sussex social scene, Charles having retired to 18, Montpelier Road, Brighton in the early 1840s, the railway having come to that town at the start of that decade. John, two years’ Frances’ senior, a Christ Church (and therefore Oxford) man, had only recently been inducted as Rector of Barcombe after coming home invalided from working as a missionary in Cochin. A package was rapidly wrapped up in which Charles put up a bond (presumably accounted as Frances’ marriage settlement) in which he was supported by Alexander Nairne, a fellow HEIC Commander; an HEIC chaplaincy was found for John, and the happy pair were safely packed off to India.

In spite of the opportunities to amass wealth that his career had apparently offered, Charles seems to have become no sort of Nabob and can safely be described as middle class, living in comfort among professional people but in a household boasting only two living-in servants. He had been left only two thousand pounds in his banker father’s will, his appointment to the Lowther Castle being described elsewhere as "a certain fortune for a prudent man". To his father, Charles must have been out of sight and out of mind while younger siblings were growing at home. Charles was clearly expected to shift for himself once his father had put up the money to install him in a command. Even after he had left the sea there were nasty surprises, such as a £500 award against him in favour of the widow (ironically, a Mrs Steward) of his late purser. Whether he was indeed prudent, or a good investor, is moot; his estate was ultimately marked as "less than £5,000" but that may of course have been some Mortlockian fiddle. The indications are that most of his dispositions to his heirs were done by assignment of Trusts that are invisible to us. There is an occasional financial glimpse; for instance in 1845 Charles was listed among owners of East India stock.

In quiet retirement in 1851 Captain Charles described himself as a "landholder"; by this time he and Emelia were on their own. He died in 1864, three days after his 82nd birthday. His executors were his sons Charles jnr and Edward Thomas. Emelia survived him, dying at 15, German Place, Brighton where she had lodged some years with a family that included seven teenagers - which for an octogenarian must have been something of a strain - on 30th October 1873, supported by her young lady’s maid Selina Dawson.

Charles Mortlock III was, as above, born at Denton in 1862 but was brought up at Filey. On 13th October 1881 he entered the medical school of St George’s Hospital, then at Hyde Park Corner. He took his MRCS in late 1886, from his family’s London home at 9 Ladbroke Gardens, passing his LRCP in the same year.

After service as Assistant Medical Registrar at St George’s he, still based at Ladbroke Gardens, obtained a position as House Physician and House Surgeon at the Great North Central Hospital. By 1891 his career had taken an obstetric path and he was Resident Medical Officer at the Chelsea Hospital for Women.

By 1897 he was living at 27, Oxford Square, Hyde Park. He had his Fellowship of the Obstetric Society and was anaesthetist at the Samaritan Free Hospital, combining this with being District Surgeon for the Royal Maternity Charity, whose royal patronage probably owed something to Queen Victoria’s renowned distaste for childbirth. By 1917 Charles Mortlock III had retired to Bunsen. House, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire. He died, unmarried, in 1943.

It fell to Frances to be ancestress to the only three of Charles’ descendants to "Use the Sea".

Sources and Selected References:

(not already cited generally for the Mortlock family)

London Metropolitan Record Office microfilm X39/11 p527 CM=Emelia Ann THOMAS

Mortlock Papers esp items 38, 69, 83, 86, 130, 158 [CCRO]

"London Coffee Houses" Bryant & Lillywhite, Allen & Unwin 1963

Sale Book ref 296/B 807.1 ref CM jnr [CCRO]

PRO HCA/25/177 Letters of Marque, ship Cambridge 4.3.1811

PRO HO107/678 bk 10 ff17-79, 1841 census, 14 Northwick Terrace, St John’s Wood

PRO HO107/1646 ff342 et seq, 1851 census, 18 Montpelier Rd Brighton

[Montpelier Rd & surrounding area missing from official microfilm of 1861 census]

RG10/1074 ED15, 1871 census, 15 German Place Brighton

Kelly’s/Post Office directories Brighton/Sussex esp 1845, 1847, 1855, 1862, 1872, 1874

Gentleman’s Magazine 1844 pt1 p309 (Griffiths-Mortlock)

Cambridge Chronicle 22.6.1810, 21.12.1810

The Times, 26.5.1908 (Edward Thomas Mortlock)

Medical Directory 1886 (CM III)

Letter, Royal College of Surgeons (re CM III)

Burke’s Peerage (Metcalfe) & Burke’s Landed Gentry (Prickett)

Who Was Who 1937 (Travers) 1945 (Mortlock) 1958(Prickett) 1981(Roxburgh)

Correspondence and many other contributions, Mrs Clark-Kennedy, including a copy of the tree drawn up by

Alfred Mortlock

Copy letter by Louisa Leathes Mortlock 14.1.1840, supplied by Captain RB Mortlock RN

Cotton, Evan, ed. Fawcett C "East Indiamen" Batchworth 1949

Grant, Elizabeth, ed. Tod A "Memoirs of a Highland Lady" vol ii pp212-222 & 282-313, Canongate Classics 1988

James "Naval History of Great Britain" vols i & v London 1868

Keay, John "The Hon. Company" Harper collins 1991

Lubbock, Basil "Blackwall Frigates" Glasgow 1922

Marryat, Capt.Frederick "Poor Jack"

Parkinson CN "Trade in the Eastern Seas" CUP 1937

do. "War in the Eastern Seas" Allen & Unwin 1954

Schomberg, Isaac "Naval Chronology" vol ii London 1815

Sutton, Jean "Lords of the East" Conway 1981

Troude O "Battailles Navales de France" vol iv pp75-6 Paris 1868

British Library, India & Oriental Studies section

L/MAR/C/660 p198 "Commanders and Mates of the Season 1807"

L/MAR/C/669 pt6 ff1028 CM’s affidavit of age

Ship’s logs: L/MAR/B/107 B-D, Taunton Castle 14.1.1796-7.1800

L/MAR/B/222 H, Ocean 24.10.1800-29.7.02

[Elphinstone not found]

L/MAR/B/231 B, Hugh Inglis

L/MAR/B/185 A, Streatham 17.4.1805-12.6.07

L/MAR/B/301 K, Charlton (a/c book only)

L/MAR/B/66 A, Cambridge 25.1.1811-29.9.12

L/MAR/B/185 D, Streatham 15.2.1813-31.12.14

L/MAR/B/50 D-G, Lowther Castle 16.12.1814-20.9.22

Hardy’s Register of Ships 1760-1833

Madras Almanac var & esp. 1811 p.301

E/4/927 Madras Despatches xlvi/541, l/251, liv/557, lviii/329, lxi/842, lxiv/527

L/MIL/9/192 pp 416-419 CM jnr

Z/0/1/2 Bonds, no3704 John Griffiths

Madras Burials N2 V47 p179 (Frances Griffiths)

East India List 1845 (Lt J Mortlock 35th MNI casualty)

©2000 RJH Griffiths

5 Towers Garden, Havant, Hants PO9 1RZ, England

(0/44) 23 9248 2516

Return to Mortlock Family Tree page