July 2015.  This file is a complete rewrite of my original biography, the result of being contacted by two members of the Boxer family and being handed more, and more accurate, information on Edward and his family.  Thanks are due to a descendent of one of Edward’s brothers; and to a descendent of William, a brother of the Rear-Admiral Edward Boxer I mention below.

 

Edward Boxer was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at its Isis-Urania temple in London, on 18 December 1894.  He chose the Latin motto ‘Nec temere nec timide’.  Two other men were initiated at the same ritual - Victor Toller and George Minson - and Edward might have known George Minson through their work, though he probably didn’t know Victor Toller.  Although Edward doesn’t seem to have resigned in so many words, he doesn’t seem to have followed up the initiation, either; he made no attempt to do the work necessary for progression into the GD’s inner, 2nd Order.

 

 

THE BOXERS

The Boxer family historians have traced their ancestors back to a Daniel Boxer who lived in 18th-century Dover.  He, poor man, ended up in the workhouse, but his male descendents went into the navy and there are records of them in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.  Edward’s grandfather and one of his many uncles made it to rear-admiral.  However, family members also succombed to the hazards of life in the navy.  Some had to retire before their time, and some died young. 

 

Perhaps the glory of the 19th-century Boxers was Edward’s grandfather, after whom the GD member was named.  Rear-Admiral Edward Boxer (1784-1855) died of cholera on board ship at Balaklava on 4 June 1855.  At the time he was blamed by officials who were no nearer to the war than London for the logistical disasters of the Crimea.  More recent accounts credit him with bringing some kind of order to the supply situation there.  He’d had a distinguished career before that, in Canada, the West Indies and the Mediterranean and had taken part (in 1840) in the capture of Acre. 

 

Edward was too young to know Rear-Admiral Edward but he did know Edward’s son Charles Richard Fox Boxer who served in China, the Pacific and North America before being invalided out with the rank of rear-admiral in 1884 after a tour of duty in the West Indies.  Rear-Admiral Charles died in 1887 but Edward was in touch with his family until his own death.

 

JAMES MICHAEL BOXER

Edward’s father, James Michael Boxer was born in 1816 when Rear-Admiral Edward and his wife Elizabeth were living in Deal.  He took the path followed by so many of his forebears and joined the navy aged only 11, in 1827.  He too served at Acre, on the Vesuvius, and as a result of his actions during the siege, was promoted to lieutenant in 1840.  However, he was unlucky: after spending three years based in Canada, he was either injured or became ill, and had to retire in 1844 on half-pay (which wasn’t much - in 1858 his total income was £91 per year).  He may have done one more tour of duty in the late 1840s; and he appeared in the Navy List as late as 1861; but was on half-pay in 1861 and had probably been so throughout the 1850s.

 

In 1839 James Michael had married Elizabeth Kingston.  Elizabeth, too, had been born in Deal and perhaps they had known each other from childhood.  They had four children, the first of them not born until they had been married nearly a decade: Harriet Elizabeth (1847); Charles (1850); Frederick Thomas (1852); and the GD’s Edward, born in 1856.  Harriet Elizabeth was born in Canada; but the three boys were all born in Kent, where James Michael and Elizabeth were living - sometimes in Deal and sometimes in Faversham - in the 1850s and 1860s.

 

The navy took care of its own, and ensured that James Michael’s children got a basic education.  In 1861 both Harriet Elizabeth and Frederick were being educated at the Navy’s expense: Harriet Elizabeth was at the Navy’s Royal Female School at Richmond Green; and Frederick was at the Royal Mathematical School Christ’s Hospital, at Hertford near Rochester, having followed oldest brother Charles there.  However, Edward did not follow his brothers there: instead, he was sent to the Royal Naval School at New Cross in south London; he was there on the day of the 1871 census.  Both the schools offered education to the sons of impoverished naval officers with the proviso that on leaving school, the boys should join the navy.

 

Years later, in 1886, Edward and another ex-pupil, George Murray Rolland, had belongings stolen from them at the Royal Naval School, by Mark Oborn (17) and Robert Jones (15), presumably during a school reunion.  Edward’s missing possesssions were his hat, and his cigarette case; worth 10 shillings.  Oborn had worked at the school in the past; this was the third or fourth time he’d been caught, breaking and entering its buildings stealing from the residents.  He and Jones pawned most of the items they stole but it sounds as though Edward did get his cigarette case back - Jones seems to have had it on him when he was arrested.

 

The navy also took care of Edward’s mother Elizabeth Boxer.  By 1881 she had been allocated a naval almshouse, number 7 Royal Naval Cottages, on St John’s Road in Penge; her income came from an annuity which may have been something she had inherited, but was more likely to have been a naval pension.  She lived at the Royal Naval Cottages until her death 20 years later.

 

James Michael Boxer died in 1865; and his family dispersed.  His widow’s sister-in-law Mary Eliza Kingston died in 1870 and by census day 1871 Elizabeth Boxer had moved into 3 William Terrace Chiswick to keep house for her brother Thomas Kingston and be a mother to his children, the youngest of whom was only three.  Edward was at school.  Frederick had gone into the navy and was serving overseas.  Charles had started work in an accounts office and was living on his own in Hampton.  And Harriet Elizabeth had gone to live in Tenbury, Worcestershire, with a cousin, Mary K Woodward, whose husband - another naval officer - was also abroad.  In 1877 Harriet Elizabeth married a man whom she had met while living in Tenbury - Arthur Priestman Bloome who later added on another surname and became Bloome-Ansley. 

 

Of the three Boxer brothers, only Frederick stayed in the navy for more than the length of time they were all obliged to serve as a condition of their education at a charity school.  As the Navy Lists only deal with officers, I haven’t been able to ascertain when Edward joined, or when he left; but 1871 seems a likely date for his joining.  During his short period of service he was a crew-member on the frigate Phaeton and the family still has a photograph of him in his uniform.  Not for Edward the excitement - and the dangers - of sailing far-off seas like Frederick, who in 1874 went to the East Indies to join the crew of the Glasgow.  During the mid-1870s the Phaeton doesn’t seem to have left Chatham!  As soon as he was entitled to leave the navy, Edward did so.  His education at the navy’s expense stood him in good stead at this planned change of career, and he was able to get work in a bank.  He stayed as a bank employee until his retirement, probably staying at the same bank throughout and definitely being promoted several times, to end his working life as a departmental manager.  I do not know which bank this was: that’s not the sort of information that appears on a census form, unfortunately, and no one in the family can recall any mention of Edward’s employer. 

 

It was probably during Edward’s short term as a seaman that a big break with the past occurred in the family, with the death in April 1873 (at the age of 82) of Edward’s grandmother Elizabeth, Rear-Admiral Edward Boxer’s widow.  For some of her widowhood she had been living in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court Palace; but by the end of her life she had moved into town, to 3 Sumner Terrace, Onslow Square in South Kensington.  Her unmarried daughter Mary was probably living with her; Mary certainly inherited a lot of the memorabilia Elizabeth had collected during her long life.

 

EDWARD AND EDITH

On the strength of finding work that suited him, that he thought he could stick to, that Edward married in 1876.  His bride was Harriet Edith Mitchell (known as Edith, not Harriet), the daughter of Rev Thomas Mitchell and his wife Sarah.  The Rev Thomas led a peripatetic life as a Church of England clergyman, working in parishes in south London, Surrey, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and was vicar of Little Tew in Oxfordshire when Edith married.  Edith (born 1850 and so several years older than her husband) was born while her father was rector of Catmore near Newbury. 

 

On the day of the 1881 census Edward and Edith were living in Camberwell.  Their only child, Arthur Edward (named for his uncle Arthur Bloome-Ansley) was 4.  They were being cautious with money, I think, because on census day they were not employing even the basic live-in general servant; though I daresay they found the money to pay a woman to come in to clean by the day.  By 1891 they had moved to 39 Hurstbourne Road Lewisham.  Their financial situation had improved.  Arthur was 14 but was already working, as a clerk; possibly for the diamond merchant’s firm that employed him in 1901.  And Edward and Edith had one lodger, Arthur Pugh, a bank clerk who might have worked in Edward’s office.  So they could afford that one live-in servant that made all the difference to a middle-class woman’s view of her life. 

 

On the surface, therefore, all was well with Edward and Edith Boxer in 1891.  However, under that surface things had probably gone wrong already and by 1901 they had separated.  When he joined the GD, Edward gave as his address Inverness House, Carshalton Grove Sutton.  I wondered if this was a boarding house and might indicate that Edward was on his own by 1894; but I haven’t been able to find anything about the house as yet (July 2015) so I can’t be sure.  If it’s just an ordinary house where any family might live, the Edward and Edith were probably living in it together still and their marriage had a few more years in which to stagger on. 

 

On the day of the 1901 census, Edith was living alone at 133 Upland Road Camberwell; when the census official asked her what was her marital status, her answer was so equivocal, that that box on the form is just a big blot.  Edward had moved to the north side of the river and was lodging with Mrs Jane Gatliff in Fulham; he gave his marital status as ‘married’.  And Arthur wasn’t living with either of his parents; he too was in lodgings, at 58 East Dulwich Grove, boarding with Mrs Clara Ansell and her daughters. 

 

Was Edward’s interest in theosophy one of the subjects on which he and Edith could not agree?  It might have been, though it might also have been something he took refuge in, as his relationship with his wife deteriorated.  Though the Theosophical Society did have members who managed to believe in both theosophy and Christianity, they found it a challenge to reconcile the two, and Edith might have considered Edward to be in danger of losing his faith; or of encouraging her to lose her own.  I don’t know, of course, whether theosophy widened the breach between husband and wife; but it wasn’t an interest they shared - Edith never joined the TS; but Edward did do so.  When I was going through the TS’s records, I missed his membership application, but he was definitely a member by 1891.  In December 1891 Edward was one of two TS members who sponsored the application of William Jameson.  Jameson’s other sponsor was Harold Levett.  Levett worked for the London Joint Stock Bank.  Perhaps Edward worked for it too.  Or perhaps they met at a TS meeting and found themselves with banking as well as theosophy in common.  They will have been able to meet quite a number of GD members at meetings of the TS, including its founders William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell Mathers; and Harold Levett followed Edward into the GD, being initiated in 1895.

 

More people joined the GD from the TS than from any other one source of recruits.  Most were initiated in the early 1890s; Edward and Harold Levett were a little behind the curve, waiting until 1894 and 1895.  During those years, the TS was in the throes of an internal dispute, essentially about the direction and leadership of the Society now that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had died.  The dispute got very bitter and eventually very public.  A lot of people let their membership lapse, did their study at home, and just met in informal groups if they met at all.  However, like most members of the GD who had come from the TS, Edward didn’t stay.  Theosophy and western esotericism could be seen as complementary, but both had a demanding programme of study; so that people who were working, especially, couldn’t really do justice to both at the same time.  Most theosophists opted to go with eastern philosophy rather than western magic, when presented with that problem, and dropped out of the GD as a result.  It looks like Edward was one of them and so, I think, was Harold Levett.

 

EDWARD ALONE

All the evidence is that Edward and Edith never lived together after they split up at some time during the 1890s.  At that time it was still an unusual step for a no-longer-consenting couple actually to go their separate ways; so whatever had been wrong between them must have been very wrong indeed.  They must both have been aware when they parted, that they could not afford either the financial or the social consequences of a divorce; even Edward’s career at the bank might have been blighted by such a thing.  And of course not being divorced would mean that even if they met somebody whom they cared for that much in the years ahead, they would not be able to marry them.  I daresay they reached an agreement whereby Edward continued to support Edith financially.  By 1901 Edward had been promoted to the position of cashier at his bank and perhaps had a little more money with which to fund a separate household for Edith.  But that - most unsatisfactorily - would have been that; until the death of one of the partners released the other.  Edith was the one that was released, in 1935; but it was a pyrrhic victory.  In his will, Edward left everything he had to leave to a woman Edith had probably never even heard of, Ellen Boyce Miller.

THE GATLIFF FAMILY

On census day 1901, Edward was living with the Gatliffs at 10 Burnfoot Avenue, All Saints, Fulham; near where Allen and Norris (see my other history work on our web-page: The Life and Times of Henry George Norris) were building new houses in Fulham borough.  Jane Gatliff had been widowed in 1894.  Her husband, William Goodman Gatliff, had been a civil servant and they had been comfortably off while he’d been alive; but his death made Jane decide she would take in lodgers, and her daughter Maude decide that she would go out to work - by 1901 she had trained as a typist.  Also in the household was Jane’s son Ralph, who worked as a broker; probably in offices in the City of London. 

 

Edward stayed as a lodger with the Gatliff family for many years; perhaps to as late as 1919.  Certainly he was Maude’s lodger on census day 1911, while Jane and Ralph were out of the country.  Maude (listed as head of household) had rented Huntley Cottage in East Malling, Kent.

 

By the first world war, the Gatliffs were living at 13 Dealtry Road Putney; presumably they moved in when Jane came back from wherever she was in April 1911.  Isobel Rebecca Gatliff (a cousin whose parents were in India) may have been living with them by the outbreak of World War 1; and I think, so still was Edward Boxer.  Jane Gatliff died in July 1916; and Isobel married Frederick Marshall Cowan in 1918; but Maude was still living at 13 Dealtry Road when she too died, in March 1919.  Isobel Cowan and Edward Boxer were Maud’s executors.

 

Isobel’s marriage and Maude’s death (at only 51) meant the end of Edward’s association with the family, if he hadn’t left the household already.  But the 1911 stay in East Malling had had lasting results: Edward probably remembered the area well, from his childhood, and he decided that he would move there when he retired.  When Maude died he was still working; but by 1925 he had retired.  By 1929 he was living at More Cottages, East Malling; and Ellen Boyce Miller was almost certainly living there with him - she, not he, was the holder of the cottage’s lease.

 

ELLEN BOYCE MILLER

Edith and Arthur supposed that Ellen Boyce Miller was Edward Boxer’s housekeeper; and that, consequently, was the tale that went down through the generations.  However, when I did my usual ‘family history’ searches on Ellen, I soon began to doubt that view (though I could quite see how it had arisen).  My opinion now is that although Ellen might have kept house, she was not being paid to be Edward’s housekeeper.  She was not of the social class from which servants tended to be drawn; and in any case, the census information indicates that she did very different work.

 

Ellen Boyce Miller was born in 1873, the youngest child of William Miller, who worked as an actuary for a savings bank in Sherborne, Dorset.  He had died by 1891 and had left his family not especially well off; so that his widow Emily, and all her daughters except the eldest, were working; though none as a servant.  Ellen and her older sister Emma were working at home making gloves, but Ellen clearly had ambitions above the long hours and poor pay of such work.  By 1901 she had left home, moved to London, and got herself qualified as a typist.  On the day of the 1901 census Ellen and three other working women were all living together at 31 Arvon Road Highbury, about five minutes’ walk from where I live in north London.  The other women in the household were Annie Smith and Mary Archer, who both worked as clerks in the offices of an engineering firm; and Marianne Shaw, another typist, whom the census official wrote down as head of the household, as she (at 40) was the eldest.  Marianne and Ellen were still living together on the day of the 1911 census though they had moved a few streets, to 23 Corsica Street.  Smith and Archer had left the household, but Ellen’s sister Emily had joined it, working as an accounts clerk.  Both Marianne and Ellen were keeping up with the rapidly-moving technology and expectations of office work: they had both learned shorthand and were working as shorthand typists.  The way they both filled in the census form suggests that by this time they might have been running their own typing and shorthand bureau: they both described themselves as ‘employer’, not employee.

 

Ellen, then, was an independent woman with very saleable skills, working in offices and later, possibly, as a partner in a business: a middle-class woman.  She and Edward might have met through leisure interests they had in common or people they were both acquainted with (Maude Gatliff, for example); but they could also have met in a way that had hardly been possible before the end of the 19th century - through work.  Perhaps, at some time, Ellen had worked in Edward’s bank.

 

EDWARD AND ELLEN

I don’t know when and how Edward and Ellen got together.  Their relationship was complicated, obviously, by marriage being out of the question; but get together in some sense - possibly even the sexual sense - they definitely did.  Perhaps the big step was taken when Edward retired: in a new place, where no one really knew them, they could live together, perhaps telling everyone they were brother and sister, or calling themselves Mr and Mrs Boxer - though I note that Ellen used her usual name on the lease and that was how she was referred to in Edward’s Will.

 

EDWARD AND THE BOXERS

It’s hard to tell how Edward and Edith’s separation went down with their families though I imagine none of the Mitchells had anything to do with Edward ever again.  On Edward’s side of the argument, the Boxer family historians mentioned to me that their older relations couldn’t remember having met Edith; though they knew Arthur and his son.  One person who did find it very difficult to come to terms with the breakdown of the marriage was Edward’s mother Elizabeth, who was still alive when the separation took place.  When she died, in February 1901, Elizabeth’s Will named her son Frederick Thomas, and her son-in-law Arthur Bloome-Ansley, as executors.  Edward may have been a witness of course (I haven’t read the Will) but that would have meant he wouldn’t be inheriting anything from her - a Will’s witnesses can’t inherit - so either way it does seem like a snub, especially when so many other people thought Edward would be a good executor.  Nor did his brother Frederick Thomas Boxer get Edward involved when he died in 1908: Frederick’s Will had one executor, his wife Agnes (he had married Agnes Pope in 1890).

 

Deaths, weddings and births: tricky times when you no longer live with your spouse.  Arthur married Ada White in 1903.  I presume Edith was at the wedding but Edward was not and it’s not clear, even to family members, how much contact Edward had with Arthur and Ada, though their son was named Edward Vincent (Teds), keeping to the family tradition.  The Boxer family know that Arthur took over the diamond business he was working for in 1901 or launched a rival business of his own; but it didn’t do particularly well - dragged down by the depression of the 1930s, perhaps - and he set up a wireless business with his son. 

 

Edward continued to have good relationships with his cousins, the children of Admiral Charles R F Boxer.   Charles had married Harline Kimber, a member of a prominent French-Canadian family, in 1874 when he was stationed in Canada.  They had five children before Charles died.  As a widow Harline was very well off indeed; so well off that I wonder if the money hadn’t been hers to start with; because the rest of the 19th-century Boxers were genteel, but noticeably not wealthy.  In the 1890s Harline and her children were living in Upper Norwood, so Edward and Edith probably saw them quite often.  By 1901, they had moved into town, to 8 Lancaster Gate; still easy to visit.  I presume that Edward would have been invited when Harline’s daughter Eveline married Cyril Longhurst at St George’s Hanover Square in 1906.  From 1901 to 1904 Cyril had worked for Sir Clements Markham at the National Antarctic Expedition, which launched the short but eye-catching career of Robert Falcon Scott.  During the later part of the first World War he was private secretary to Lord Curzon. 

 

By 1911, with only daughters Cecile and Violet still living at home, Harline had decided to leave London.  On the day of the 1911 census she was living at the house that’s still called ‘Firwood’, on Burnaby Road, Alum Chine, in Bournemouth.  She died there in 1933 and Cecile was still living there in 1961. 

 

Edward’s relationship with his maiden aunt Mary Fox Boxer (sister of Lt James Michael Boxer and Admiral Charles R F Boxer), can only have been intermittent, at least before the first World War.  She seems to have lived abroad a great deal (I can’t find her on the censuses of 1891, 1901 or 1911); though by the 1920s she had moved into a flat in York Mansions, Earl’s Court Road.  When she died in 1925, Edward and Cyril Longhurst were her executors.  Mary Fox Boxer had inherited a lot of Boxer family memorabilia, and she left Edward his choice of her pictures, specifically including portraits of Rear-Admiral Edward Boxer and his wife (another Elizabeth); and a painting of HMS Pique, the ship that Rear-Admiral Edward had commanded from 1837 to 1839 in the north Atlantic and the West Indies.  Eveline was left Mary’s emerald bracelet; and Cecile got Rear-Admiral Edward’s Turkish Order of the Medjidie for her lifetime before being required to pass it on to her brother Hugh.

 

Edward also acted as executor when his brother-in-law Arthur Bloome-Ansley died in 1929; with sister Harriet as co-executor.  Though he wasn’t called on when Harline Fox Boxer died in 1933.

 

Edward seems to have got on particularly well with his cousin Cecile.  Cecile had been born in 1875, the eldest of Harline’s children.  Perhaps she seemed like a daughter to Edward.  In late 1924 Cecile was inspired to enter the National Festival of Community Drama - maybe Edward was amongst those encouraging her to do so.  Her one-act play The Call won its local heat, and was broadcast on BBC radio on 23 January 1925 with ‘Cuckoo’ Savelli and Jim Crawford in the leading roles; but only in the Bournemouth area, so while Edward and Ellen must have read Cecile’s script, they may not have been able to hear it broadcast.  It was published in 1929.  Cecile’s two novels weren’t published until 1953; but perhaps she was already writing fiction pieces while Edward was alive.

 

The Boxer family historians suggest that Edward was visiting Cecile when he began to suffer from his last illness.  I wonder if Ellen was with him?  When Edward was given a grim prognosis on the illness, it was certainly Ellen he worried about - as his Significant Other, but with no automatic entitlement to his estate.  His Will in her favour was signed on 16 August and he died two weeks later.  Edith and Arthur were outraged when they found out.  They challenged the Will on grounds of ‘undue influence’ but Edward had had Cecile Boxer’s help in making sure its credentials were impeccable.  Cecile witnessed the Will herself; with Archibald Langworthy (a local businessman who was not a relation either of the Boxers or of Ellen).  Though Edith’s legal challenge delayed the granting of probate by nearly a year, it did fail; and Ellen inherited an estate worth £7313, including (presumably) the pictures left to Edward by his aunt Mary.

 

Edward died on 2 September 1935 and was buried at Brompton Cemetery.  There’s no account of the funeral - it would be interesting to know who attended it.  After the question of Edward’s Will was settled, Ellen Boyce Miller left East Malling and moved to Reculver Lodge, Beltinge, Herne Bay.  She died in 1943, and sister Emily was her executor, probably inheriting everything as well.  Emily died in Sherborne in 1951. 

 

Edith Boxer died, probably still rather bitter, in 1941.  Arthur died in 1960 and Teds in 1992.  Teds never married, so Edward has no known descendents. 

 

Cecile Boxer died in 1961.  In 1953 she had had two novels published.  In the wake of her death, the Boxer family memorabilia were sold at auction and sent all over the world; it is a dreadful shame.

 

 

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.  I have recently (July 2014) discovered that some records of the Horus Temple at Bradford have survived, though most have not; however those that have survived are not yet accessible to the public.

 

For the history of the GD during the 1890s I usually use Ellic Howe’s The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923.  Published Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972.  Foreword by Gerald Yorke.  Howe is a historian of printing rather than of magic; he also makes no claims to be a magician himself, or even an occultist.  He has no axe to grind.

 

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.

 

Useful source for business and legal information: London Gazette and its Scottish counterpart Edinburgh Gazette.  Now easy to find (with the right search information) on the web.

 

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.

 

 

SOURCES FOR EDWARD BOXER

 

INFORMATION FROM THE BOXER FAMILY HISTORIANS sent in emails during June 2015: including the text of Wills and details of the executors; family trees and explanations of how everyone was related; details of naval careers; letters about Arthur and Teds; and lots of stories that only family members would know.  Included was a transcript of James Michael Boxer’s petition of 1858 for a place for Charles Edward Boxer at the Royal Mathematical School; which quoted his current income.  They also gave me more information on Edward’s eldest brother Charles Edward; one of the family historians is working (July 2015) on an article on him, so in this biography I shall only say that he died in 1884.  Once again, thanks to you both.

 

IN THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Theosophical Society Membership Register for September 1891 to January 1893 p44 application of William Jameson of Essex, December 1891.

Kelly’s Royal Blue Book Court and Palace Guide 1911 edition p239 Harold J Levett was by then manager of the London Joint Stock Bank’s branch on the corner of Gloucester Terrace in Bayswater.

 

OTHER SOURCES OF BOXER FAMILY HISTORY

EDWARD’S GRANDFATHER REAR-ADMIRAL EDWARD BOXER

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography volume 7 p8.   Beware however: it says that the Rear-Admiral’s wife Elizabeth died in 1826.  Thanks to the Boxer family historians for drawing my attention to this error and giving me the proper date of death.

 

EDWARD’S FATHER JAMES MICHAEL BOXER

Birth at Deal in May 1816: Familysearch England-EASy GS film number 1786327.

At en.wikisource.org is a Naval Biographical Dictionary.  Author, William Richard O’Byrne.

Evidence of where James Michael Boxer was living from 1838 to 1855: Familysearch had set of records, I’m not quite sure what they represented, probably men eligible to vote.

Navy List 1860 p44

Navy List 1861 p19.

ADMIRAL CHARLES RICHARD FOX BOXER

At www.pdavis.nl a short account of career of Charles Richard Fox Boxer (1833-87).

HARLINE KIMBER FOX-BOXER

Pierre Berthelet and his Family by Édouard Fabre Surveyor.  Printed for the Royal Society of Canada 1943.  On p67 Harline Kimber married Charles Richard Fox Boxer on 28 November 1874.

CECILE BOXER’S PUBLICATIONS:

1929    The Call.  Published in London and New York in the French’s Acting Edition series.

1953    Light in Darkness.  London: Hutchinson

            Little Girl with a Bell.  Also London but Frederick Muller.

EVELINE BOXER’S HUSBAND CYRIL LONGHURST 1879-1948; Eveline’s dates are 1879-1952

I thought I’d include some further reading for Longhurst’s interesting career.

At the National Antarctic Expedition 1901-04, where his immediate boss was Sir Clements R Markham 1830-1916; see wikipedia for Markham, Secretary to the Royal Geographical Society 1863-88..

The Voyage of the Discovery by Robert F Scott.  London: Smith Elder 1905 p35.

The Lands of Silence: A History of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration by Clements R Markham.  Cambridge University Press 1921 p467.

The Life of Sir Clements R Markham by Albert Hastings Markham.  London: John Murray 1917.  In his introduction, A H Markham describes Longhurst as a friend of Sir Clements, not just an employee.  Longhurst had helped A H Markham by compiling the book’s index.

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination by Francis Spufford, who suggests on p406 that Longhurst may have been Sir Clement’s lover.  London: Faber and Faber 1996.

The Voyages of the Discovery by Ann Savours.  London: Chatham 2001.

And later as private secretary to Marquis Curzon during the first World War:

Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East by John Fisher.  London: Cass 1999 p65 footnote 94 referring particularly to September 1917.

 

HARRIET EDITH MITCHELL daughter of Rev Thomas Mitchell (1819-79) and his wife Sarah née Trevett (1818-1905).  See also collins-family-site.

At www.connectedhistories.org a newspaper announcement of Rev Thomas’s appointment to the rectory of Catmore; which was in gift of the dean and chapter of Windsor.

Crockford’s Clerical Directory 1872 p596.

Crockford’s Clerical Directory 1880.  From 1877 until his death Rev Thomas Mitchell was vicar of Great Tew, Enstone, Oxfords, in the gift of M T W Boulton.

 

FREDERICK THOMAS BOXER AND EDWARD BOXER IN THE NAVY

Navy List 1860-61 p172 for more details of the Phaeton.

Navy List January 1874 p469 only has Charles R F Boxer; and Frederick Thomas Boxer who gets in because he has reached the rank of  “navigating Midshipman”.  Whereabouts of the frigate Phaeton.  Frederick en route to the far East: p469, as navigating sub-Lieutenant.

 

ELLEN BOYCE MILLER

Information on Ellen’s early life: see colinmiller.com.

London Gazette 24 September 1929, a notice issued by the Land Registry of properties whose title is about to be registered.

 

DEATH and notice of funeral OF EDWARD BOXER

Times Thursday 5 September 1935 p1.

 

 

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

22 July 2015

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Find the web pages of Roger Wright and Sally Davis, including my list of people initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn between 1888 and 1901, at:

www.wrightanddavis.co.uk

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