James Barraclough was initiated into the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at its Horus Temple in Bradford in March
1894, choosing the motto ‘Speranza’. At
the time he was living at 83 Sydenham Place Bradford. He never seems to have pursued the interest
that led him to accept the offer of membership.
James
Barraclough is one of my failures: I haven’t been able to identify him. I could probably have done a much better job
of it if I lived in the Bradford area myself - I could at least have found out
a bit more about him by pursuing the address he gave the GD - 83 Sydenham Place
- through local directories and electoral registers. I did wonder if I could get lucky and find
him on the 1891 census. But Barraclough
is a common surname in the Bradford area; and on the day of the 1891 census
tthere were 92 men and boys living in the city.
No
one called James Barraclough was a member of the Theosophical Society; and the
Freemasons’ Library catalogue has no reference to a freemason with that
name. Theosophy and freemasonry were two
fruitful recruiting grounds for the Golden Dawn. If he isn’t involved in either of those, and
I don’t even know his age...
I
make one suggestion and it’s a long shot: James Barraclough might have been a
member of the Barraclough family of clock and watch-makers. John Barraclough is the best known of them,
largely because of the clock he made for the Brontë family which is still in
the parsonage at Howarth. As
clock-makers, they would have been known to T H Pattinson, the owner of a clock
and jewellery business in the centre of the city and one of the most
influential members of the GD in Bradford.
John Barraclough had a son James; but this James Barraclough was born in
1825 which makes him older than all but two of the GD members I’ve
identified. A grandson of John - born
around 1850, say - would be a more likely GD member. I couldn’t find such a person, so I have given
up.
See
archiver.rootsweb.com for the descendants of John Barraclough, the Howarth
clock-maker. John Barraclough had several descendants with the name ‘James’. The GD member might be one of these; I only
suggest it because T H Pattinson, senior figure in the GD at Bradford, was a
watch-maker and jeweller and would have known the Barraclough family.
Watchmakers
and Clockmakers of the World volume 2 p14 has some information on the Barraclough
clock-making family. There is also some
information on the web, mostly on the John Barraclough I’ve mentioned above.
BASIC
SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.
Membership
of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the
names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888
and 1914. The list is based on the
Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of
parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by
Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of
England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden. Please note, though, that the records of the
Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh were destroyed in 1900/01. The records of the Horus Temple at Bradford
have not survived beyond 1896 either, but there’s a history of the TS in
Bradford on the web (though originally written in 1941) at www.ts-bradford.org.uk/theosoc/btshisto.htm
in which a lot of the same people who joined the GD are mentioned. After surviving some difficult times in the
1890s, Bradford TS still seems to be going strong (as at December 2012). In April 2012 the History page was updated
with the names of all the members at least up to 1941.
The
members of the GD at its Horus Temple were rather a bolshy lot, and needed a
lot of careful management!
Family
history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk;
familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial
Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.
Famous-people
sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female
members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Who Was Who. Times
Digital Archive.
Catalogues:
British Library; Freemasons’ Library.
Wikipedia;
Google; Google Books - my three best resources.
I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the
historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
6
February 2013
