Introduction
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INTRODUCTION Family background Many years ago my grandmother Annie Lucy Shirley (née Hammond) sent me her family tree. I was born and brought up in England whereas my grandmother was born in Brisbane in 1883 and spent her married life in Sydney. I met her only during the course of a working holiday in Australia when I was a student in mid-1964. She died in Sydney in 1980. The family tree showed that my grandmother’s grandmother was another Lucy Hammond, born in 1804. It went on to show that the earlier Lucy’s parents were Henry Kaines and Ann Clarke; that Henry and Ann lived at Manston; that Henry had two sisters called Elizabeth and Lucy; and that, apart from Lucy, Henry and Ann had eight children. The family tree has turned out to be substantially accurate and complete - although Henry Kaines (HK) spelt his wife’s family name Clark and her name is spelt Anne in Manston church. For many years I have known that my grandmother’s parents, Edward and Dora Hammond, initially called their house in Queensland ‘Gaer Hill’ and that later they changed its name to ‘Manston.’ My grandmother’s grandmother Lucy Hammond (née Kaines) died at the parsonage in the tiny Somerset hamlet of Gaer Hill in 1871 and she is buried in the beautiful churchyard there. Edward Hammond’s youngest brother Rev. Baldwin Hammond was the curate at Gaer Hill at the time. Following a visit to Queensland by Baldwin, Edward changed the name to ‘Manston’ in honour of their mother’s birthplace. My grandmother told me that the Manston in question was in Dorset rather than Kent and I knew that she was very proud of her Dorset roots. Despite having lived in England since I was born in 1943 I had never been to Gaer Hill or Manston before Friday 6 August 1999, when I visited both places with my sister Suzanne May and my wife Ruth. My sister and I had been doing family research, and knew (or thought we knew) that Henry and Anne Kaines lived at Manston House. The three of us visited the house and the adjoining church, and I wrote to the then owner of Manston House, Ben Harrison, to enquire whether he knew anything of its history. In due course he kindly sent me a copy of a history which had been commissioned from Alan Comrie-Smith in 1998. It referred to the ownership of the house by ‘Henry Kaines, farmer and diarist (covering the period of the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and beyond - late 18th century until well on into the 19th).’ Given this intriguing clue, my sister contacted the Dorset Record Office (now the Dorset History Centre) and quickly obtained a copy of the journal. We ascertained that, so far as was known at that office, it had never been transcribed and, having read it, I decided to undertake the task of transcription and annotation of the journal of the person who I now know to be my great great great grandfather. Henry Kaines, farmer and diarist HK’s date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 31 March 1768 at Child Okeford. His parents, Henry Kaines and Mary Cockram, had been married there on 24 April 1767. There were six children of the marriage, and HK was the firstborn. Although HK included in the journal much information about the education and careers of his children, and about their marriages and the births of many of his grandchildren, he omitted to 1 mention the date of his own marriage (4 October 1798) and the dates of birth of his own children. It is probable that HK had a family bible in which he entered these personal details. As parents, he and his wife were forward-thinking; all the children, girls as well as boys, were inoculated against smallpox and well educated. He invariably referred to his wife as Mrs Kaines and for the most part when referring to his children he included the surname Kaines. The journal includes much material of direct relevance to HK as a farmer (and therefore to students of agriculture and meteorology), but fortunately for the general reader his interests went much wider than farming and he lived in turbulent times. The journal starts with the Gordon Riots and has mentions of many other riots - mostly concerned with the agitations for reform of the Parliamentary franchise and for the right to establish trade unions. HK reports the severe punishments handed down by the regular or special assizes without comment - and also the not infrequent reduction of those sentences. HK lived through and commented on the loss of the American colonies, the establishment of penal stations in New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania), the French Revolution and the various phases of the wars which stemmed from it, the turnpiking of country roads, the enclosure of commons and, at the end of his life, the arrival of the railways and the introduction of the penny post. The Kaines family undoubtedly suffered a severe financial setback on 6 April 1810, when HK was about 42. After just 12 months’ notice, and with no compensation, HK was deprived of possession of most of the farmlands which had provided his family with its security for over 200 years. The consequences of that fateful day reverberate through the journal. Pensions and retirement were more or less unknown at that time, but in practice HK’s involvement in the business of farming slowly but surely diminished from the middle of the 1820s. On 21 January 1823 a notice appeared in the London Gazette that ‘Henry Kaines, now or late of Manstone, in the County of Dorset, Cattle and Horse-Dealer, .....being declared a Bankrupt’ was required to attend meetings with his creditors on 5 and 12 July and 2 August at 10 a.m. at the Wheat-Sheaves Inn, Frome. Understandably, there is no mention of this second traumatic event in the journal. HK was fortunate that he was entitled, as a merchant, to avail himself of the law of bankruptcy, which was administered in the courts of chancery; in 1823 the common law remedy for insolvent debtors who were not merchants was confinement in a debtors’ prison until the debts were paid. There was an auction of six lots of property (including Manston House as lot 3) at Shaftesbury on Tuesday 30 September 1823 for the benefit of the creditors. A further notice in the London Gazette of 20 January 1824 stated that the commissioners acting in his case proposed to allow and confirm the certificate of conformity on 10 February 1824 ‘unless cause be shown to the contrary.’ It seems that the certificate (a statement that the bankrupt had satisfied all the legal requirements) was duly issued. We do not know who petitioned for the bankruptcy or how the indebtedness was incurred - although the fact that HK records that he never visited the livestock market at Smithfield after 16 April 1822 is probably instructive. It seems from the journal that HK never again involved himself in trading activities after this point - presumably either because his credit was no longer good or because he felt that he could not take the risk of a recurrence. There was a third traumatic event on 27 August 1828 when, at the age of about 60, HK had to quit Manston House. He had continued to occupy the house despite the bankruptcy auction – presumably paying rent to whoever had bought it on that occasion. What, if anything, was left to HK of his capital after he had settled with his trade creditors we can never know but clearly his circumstances must have been severely reduced. After 1828 2 HK and his wife spent the remaining 12 years of their life together as tenants rather than as homeowners. For all but those embarking on the Grand Tour, holidays as we know them were also unknown. HK and his wife are recorded as making just one trip away from home together - and that was a few days in Salisbury and Southampton visiting their daughters only a year before HK’s death. As a result of the visit to Southampton we know what HK looked like - on 20 March 1839 a ‘likeness’ of him was ‘taken off’ in pencil and white crayon, and photographs of the original are in the possession of several of his descendants. HK faithfully reflected the stratification of his society. Thus the nobility were given their proper titles; commoners whom HK regarded as his superior were referred to as Esqr.; his equals he referred to as Mr.; and for the rest he simply used first and family names. As part of an old Dorset family holding both land and quite a fine house, HK would have stood near to the top of his own class. He was socially acceptable to local notables such as Henry Seymer of Hanford, Ned Portman of Bryanston and Rev. William Chafin of Cranborne Chase. Although not a gentleman of leisure like Henry Seymer, able to devote his time to collecting and painting, HK was musical (he owned a violin and a cello) and apparently artistic (he went to Hambledon Hill and made a sketch for Sir Richard Hoare of Stourhead). He had a very good memory, and his children all seem to have been intelligent and to have benefited from their education. His wife Anne also seems to have been an accomplished woman. HK had a continuing interest in the law and its practitioners.