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Page 0 THE SEDBERGH HISTORIAN ---------oOo--------- The Annual Journal of the SEDBERGH AND DISTRICT HISTORY SOCIETY Vol. VII No. 3 ISSN 1356 - 8183 Summer 2020 Contents The Carlisles of Sedbergh: An Odyssey to Africa John Carlisle 2 The role of the Rev. Professor Adam Sedgwick in Kendal Natural History Society. Judith Robinson 15 Some Willan Family Letters from Dent to Upper Canada, continued: Who was James Mason? Maureen Street 23 Wartime Sedbergh – The Final Months 1945 Karen Bruce Lockhart 35 The Westmorland Society: A Northern Presence in London 1746 -1914 Diane Elphick 43 Page 1 The Carlisles of Sedbergh: An Odyssey to Africa John Carlisle Background On July 19th in 1826, John Carlisle, an 1820 Settler to the Cape, South Africa, married Catherine Philipps, the daughter of Thomas Philipps, 1820 Settler. When John first asked for Catherine’s hand Thomas Philipps told John that, as the Philipps’ had a long and honourable lineage he would need to check the Carlisle’s. The Philipps origins were auspicious - on his father's side he was descended from the chieftains of one of the lost tribes of the ancient Welsh house of Cilsant. In the collection of Thomas Philipps’ letters [1] Philipps describes the moment when John Carlisle’s bona fides arrived from England. “Carlisle received the long wished for letters .... he wrote to me enclosing his letters, begging to know if he could see me.” The news was good, almost too good. Thomas Philipps discovered that the Carlisles were a very ancient family indeed, descending from Sir Hildred de Carliell, the first Sheriff of Cumberland in 1154, living in Kirkbampton just west of Carlisle. His great grandson, Adam, accompanied Lord de Brus to Annandale in South West Scotland in 1170 and there the Carlyle family took root. The first William Carlyle, Lord of Luce, married Margaret, sister of Robert the Bruce. He died in a battle against the English in 1333. But the family lived on, achieving at their pinnacle the elevation to the peerage by King James the Third: John, First Lord Carlyle of Totherwald, taking his seat in the Parliament at Edinburgh on the 6th of May, 1471. Thomas Philipps somewhat abashed, agreed with the wife of the magistrate, Major Dundas, writing in his letters that he indeed felt “truly happy that our Daughter was being united with so estimable a young man, so Superior a Marriage to any that had taken place here....” Scotland Carlyles to the Sedbergh Carlisles Patriarch John Carlyle arrived in Sedbergh in 1690 aged five from Scotland. His father, Adam, was probably escaping the political, social and environmental turbulence around Dumfries, especially the murderous cattle theft forays of the Border Reivers. They caused havoc with their stock raids across the border of England and Scotland, and the plunder of vulnerable homesteads, was accompanied by merciless killing. The Fourth Lord Carlyle was slain in a Reiver raid in 1579. To add to these vicissitudes, the Carlyles also suffered the misfortune of losing the material benefits of being a Carlyle to the Douglas family when Lord Michael Carlyle’s heir, Elizabeth Carlyle, married Sir James Douglas around 1581. Elizabeth, with her grandfather’s connivance, contested the line with her uncle, Michael, and ended up with the spoils, but not the title, in 1594. The Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth the First gave the following account to Lord Burghley (preserved in the British Museum): Howses decayed “Carlile, - Carlill – The male heirs are decayed. There is a daughter of Lord Carlile’s maryed to James Douglas, of the Parkhead, who has the living, but not the honors.”[2] 1 A. Keppel-Jones, Philipps, 1820 Settler, Pietermaritzburg:Shuter&Shooter, 1960 2 N. Carlisle, Collections for a History of the Ancient Family Carlisle, London, 1822 Page 2 The living was considerable! By a Charter from King James V in 1529 it included “the lands of Kynmund, with Tower and Fortalice of Kelhead, Locherwood, Muirhouse, Cummertrees, Bridekirk and Dalebank, with the fishings, Dornock with the fishings and the mill, part of the lands of Torduff, Middleby, Lus, Kirkconnel, Robbinhead, Kindalhead, Holmeschaw, Cogre, Todalmuir, Righeads, Marjoribank, Owlecotis and Belhorst with the mills .. and the place castle and fortalice of Torthorwald”, inter alia [3]. In other words, a sizeable portion of southwest Dumfriesshire from Dumfries to Locherbie and Gretna – and all the coast of the Solway coast below – was overseen by the family. However, within a hundred years these possessions were a mere remnant of what they had been fifty years before. The Carlyles appeared to have a penchant for profligacy and bad political choices, like many of the aristocracy, so the loss of this living was a big blow to their fortunes. Torthorwald, the prize, passed to the Douglas line when Sir James was murdered in 1608 (to the great relief of Elizabeth, to whom he had been abusive.) His son, James was awarded the estates and the title, Lord Tothorwald, by James VI in 1612. The honours remained with the Carlyle male heir, the second son, Michael, after this mighty tussle with his niece, Elizabeth. It can be assumed that many of the now-impoverished Carlyles became farmers or even tenant farmers to survive. The political upheavals and catastrophic weather in the second half of the century might have been the final spur to emigrate to England. There were the three, mainly weather-induced, famines that led to destitution and migration, especially the “Thirteen Drifty Days” in February and March 1674, when entire herds froze. Mortality levels more than doubled in Dumfries in 1675, ten years before the birth of John Carlyle. There are three mysteries about “Sedbergh” Carlisles. The first is, which family of Carlyles did Adam descend from? There are two possibilities, both from the parish of Annan in Dumfriesshire: the villages of Brydekirk and Limekilns are about three miles north of the town of Annan and about two miles apart. Limekilns, which now is only a farmhouse, is the most likely as it has succession directly from Michael, 4th Lord Carlisle, the instigator of Elizabeth Carlyle’s destructive challenge. The third son, Edward, was left with one and half acres of farmland, getting novo damus from his father, Adam, in 1637. This could not possibly support his great grandson, Adam, even though he was the eldest son in the family. Thus, it seems probable that an impoverished Adam and his eldest or only son, John, crossed the border to Sedbergh as there is an Adam Carlyle who was buried there in 1714 in his seventies However, the Scottish records are very muddled and it remains speculative, e.g. there is no sign of a wife. This brings us to the second mystery: why Sedbergh? Given that Annan was in the heart of the border region of England and Scotland, which by then had suffered 300 years of border skirmishes of one sort or another and Carlisle, another border city in England was just 15 miles away as the crow flies, why did Adam Carlyle go to Sedbergh? Sedbergh was 60 miles away in unknown country. That would have been a long trek, especially while driving livestock along the winding drover roads, as they most likely were doing. Although there is no further mention of Adam, John Carlyle was for ten years a tenant farmer at Ashbeckgill in Sedbergh from about 1709, by which time he had changed his name to the English version – Carlisle [4]. He then moved to Kilnbeck farm two miles to the south east where he spent the rest of his long life, dying at about 90 in 3 Douglas Peerage, vol 1. pp. 307, 464. Reg. Mag. Sig. L. Xxiii. No 106 4 K. J., Lancaster, Asshes, Ashbeckgill and Stonehall in Soolbank Part Two , Sedbergh Historian, Vol VI, No. 1, 2010 Page 3 1776 (see below). He married Elizabeth Lewis in 1709 and they had nine children, all of whom survived infancy, which was most unusual for that era. Their grandson, William, born in 1762 to son William, became the patriarch of the South African Carlisle line. He was the father of John and Frederick who emigrated to the Cape in 1820. A number of threads run through the history that follows. The first is the liberating impact of education at that time, exemplified by the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI in Sedbergh, which was originally founded as a chantry school in 1525 by Roger Lupton, the Provost of Eton College, who wished to match the high levels of scholarship found at Eton. The education was based on Latin grammar within a religious context. It has produced scholars and clerics over the 500 years of its existence, as well as politicians and a Lord Chief Justice, and a succession of international rugby players. The second thread is that of farming. Sedbergh is a small town in the centre of an ancient farming community, mainly sheep, and farming was the main occupation of the Carlisles in South Africa up to the 1930s. The third thread is that it lies along the path of the “drover roads” where in the 1600s thousands of cattle were driven to the rich markets of England from the less well cultivated pastures of Scotland. It was along one these that Adam Carlyle walked with his few head of cattle and a five year old boy, John, to arrive at Ashbeckgill farm. The fourth thread is the tremendous resilience of the migrants, both to England, and even more so in the Cape. Ashbeckgill (now Ghyll Farm) as Adam Carlyle would have seen it from the drove road William was educated at the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI in Sedbergh, following in the footsteps of his elder stepbrother, John, in the period 1760-1770.