CADHAS Notes & Queries Campden & District Historical and Archæological Society Regd. Charity No. 1034379 NOTES & QUERIES NOTES & QUERIES Volume VI: No. 2 Gratis Spring 2009 ISSN 1351-2153 Contents Page From the Editor 21 Letters to the Editor 22 A Canadian’s Journey to a Narrow Valley with fields Al Shoemaker 23 Extract from Memoir of the life of Guy Desmond Griffiths 26 Percy Hobart, Major-General to Lance-Corporal Dennis Granger 27 Post Office Accounts and Notebook Monica Bedding 28 The Noel Family’s Shakespeare Connections – Part 1 John Taplin 29 From The Editor As I am editing this second issue of Volume VI, Campden is deep in snow and of course looks very pretty. We are so lucky to be able to communicate and work with email and computers these days, rather than being totally cut off, as we would have been in earlier times. A previous contributor from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, John Taplin, gives us the benefit of more of his researches, while one of this year’s Archive Room visitors sends a story of the hunt for his Stanley family. Dennis Granger poses an interesting question about an important military man, Monica Bedding draws for us a small picture from the Archives of the Post Office work at the turn of the last century and a further short extract from the Griffiths’s Memoir throws light on two school masters of the late 1800s. We are also glad to receive comment on some recent issues of Notes & Queries now available on our website www.chippingcampdenhistory.org.uk. Thank you all for sending such interesting and valuable contributions to Notes & Queries and please keep them coming! Editor: C.Jackson, CADHAS Archive Room, Old Police Station, High St, Chipping Campden, Glos. GL55 6HB 21 Letters to the Editor In September 2008 we heard from Steven Avery of New York, who had read in N. & Q. Vol. V No.3 Autumn 2006 the article by Diana Evans on Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester who died in 1624 and a seemingly incorrect story in a book claiming he had walked out of a sermon in Chipping Campden and had gone to the pub because he was bored! Steven Avery requested more information as he was investigating another 'quote', which he considered to be doubtfully attributed to Miles Smith about Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and organiser of the King James Bible of 1611. Steven felt that the Ven. John Tiller's (author of the DNB entry on Miles Smith) comments quoted in the CADHAS article show that this story is attributed to the wrong Miles Smith. Moreover, he mentions 'Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church' by Kenneth Fincham, which shows that Miles Smith (bishop) 'was involved in setting up standards for ministers and included standards e.g. no rowdy stuff like drinking'. It would there appear highly unlikely that the story given in 'The Power and the Glory' by Adam Nicolson had any basis in fact. Michael Baron from the Lorton & Derwent Fells Local History Society wrote last autumn having enjoyed reading the piece on George Macaulay Trevelyan’s quote on “The Finest Street” in N & Q Vol. VI No.1 Autumn 2008. “I wanted to tell you that GMT had retired as Master of Trinity before I went up to Cambridge, but one weekend some vulgar American friends of my parents turned up to visit me. Arthur Neufeld was his name from Chicago. He had read GMT's English Social History and knowing that he lived in Cambridge, insisted on meeting him. So somehow or other I was dragooned into visiting GMT with these ghastly Yanks at his home on the other side of the Backs. Did we have tea? Was it served in a silver teapot - and, being Cambridge, was there “honey still for tea?” Did the great man sign a book? What did they talk about? Was the admiration slavish or nuanced? 58 years on I am annoyed that I did not make notes nor keep a diary. I think I quickly fell into cringe mode and tried to give the impression that I had been forced into this thing! I recall that it was the summer of 1951 and GMT was kind and gentlemanly, even though this fan and wife interrupted his routines and disturbed the Sunday afternoon repose of an aged historian. One can almost hear the conversation back in Chicago over the dinner table - that far off time before Michelle Obama was born - 'Honey, do you know whom we met in little old Cambridge England, an absolutely darling old man called George Trevelyan - Artie said he’s such a good historian … and so nice… and shall I tell you about the bathroom there …’.” Following N. & Q. Vol. V No.4 Spring 2007, which contained an extract from the Emily Hale papers, describing a gentleman living ‘in the last of a row of humble cottages with a thatched roof facing the vicar’s garden and opposite a pump’, Diana Evans brought to my attention a Jesse Taylor photo she had found of Benfield Cottage in Leyesbourne, pointing out that it had a thatched roof. Jesse Taylor took photographs of Campden between c.1897 and 1938, so she suggests that with these dates the Emily Hale's written cottage description fits Benfield Cottage. CADHAS Notes & Queries A Canadian’s Journey to a ‘Narrow Valley With Fields’ Al Shoemaker In the late 20th century, when I started this genealogical hunt, I had a hand-drawn copy of a Stanley family tree prepared in about 1947 by cousins Emily and Edie Stanley of Charles Town, West Virginia. This family tree had hung in my mother's home in Guelph, Ontario, Canada for decades. When her house was broken up in 1992, I inherited the tree, knowing no more than that this family came from England sometime in the 19th century. I had no indication of specific locations; the only dates were those recorded on the family treei and none of my contemporary relatives had additional information. My first clue came from a marker in Woodlawn Cemetery in Guelph, where my family had always planted and watered flowers. I knew that this plot contained the remains of my maternal Great-Grandmother. The inscription on the stone recorded that "Alice Abbey Stanley" (1837-1891) was a "Native of Prestbury, Gloucester, England". The Stanley family tree told me that Alice Morris was the wife of John Lichfield Stanley (1837-aft.1901). This Morris surname made sense, since I had a contemporary uncle Morris (Alfred Morris Smith, 1899-1995) who was a grandson of Alice Abbey Stanley (neé Morris). His mother, Alice Abbey Smith, (neé Stanley, 1866-1939), was the only daughter of Alice Abbey and John Lichfield Stanley. In addition, some of the older surviving pictures in the Smith family album were captioned ‘Uncle Morris’ by my aunt, Violet Faith Smith (1902-1995). This man turned out to be William Morris Stanley (1864-1932), latterly of Charles Town, West Virginia, one of the three sons of John Lichfield Stanley, and the father of Emily (1900-1980) and Edith (1904-1986) Stanley. However, there were a number of problems: there was no civil death certificate for Great-Grandmother Alice Stanley, or her husband John, in the province of Ontario. However, using microfilmed Canadian census records, I found that her family, although living in Guelph in 1881, was not in the area in 1891. In addition, I also discovered that John L. Stanley was not interred in any cemetery in Guelph, nor indeed, was there any record on-line of his internment in a cemetery in the province of Ontario. Reasoning that Great-Grandmother Alice must have been buried from an Anglican church (probably in Guelph), I discovered that the parish records of the Diocese of Niagara were stored at the library of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. A visit to that archive verified that Alice Stanley's funeral service was recorded at Guelph's St. George's Church in December 1891. I also discovered that the recorder had started to write out a cause of death in the parish records, but had then stroked it out. Later, I was to find that my aunt, Violet Faith Smith, had written a letter explaining that Great-Grandmother Alice had died of cancer. Additionally, it became evident that the Guelph Public Library held microfilms of some surviving area newspapersii from the era. Fortunately, the issues for December 1891 still existed and I learned that the family of Alice and John Stanley were living in Parkdale, Ontario (a current section of Metropolitan Toronto) at her death. So I then decided to discover something about our roots in Britain. I finally found Prestbury in a British road atlas index and reasoned that the Gloucester on my Great- Grandmother's cemetery marker, although an English city, was probably Gloucestershire, the county, which, although still less urbanized than other parts of Britain, was of a fair size, both in geography and populationiii. 23 CADHAS Notes & Queries My next clue came when I was looking for the historical roots of the Stanley family name. I discovered, in a book on the ethnography of English surnames, that it arose out of the Germanic Anglo-Saxon words, "Ston" (stone) and "Leigh" (meadow). This book also indicated that there were a number of "shires" in "Angle Land" that had Stanley families in their history. But "Gloucestershire", with its town of "Stoneleigh", jumped out and I continued to narrow my search. I had a distant memory of seeing as a teenager, (some four decades before), a green slip recording the baptism of my Grandmother Smith (neé Stanley), at a place called "Halford" or "Alford".