Frank Dodd, was definitely a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn but was a special case.  In September 1896, Samuel Liddell Mathers allowed Frank to join the Order despite the fact that Frank had gone to live in Brazil.

 

UPDATE MARCH 2014

In February 2014 I was contacted by Juanita Barral Dodd Farah, one of Frank Dodd’s grandchildren, giving me lots of extra information, particularly about his early life, his wife and family, and the years of his retirement.  As a result I’ve been able to make a big revision to this biography, based on the information she supplied.  Many thanks are due to Juanita; and to her cousins.

 

 

One of the reasons that I started this research was because I wondered who had recruited whom to the GD.  In most members’ cases, I haven’t been able to find out.  However, in Frank Dodd’s case I know exactly who recommended him as a possible initiate: writing to the GD high command from Rio de Janeiro in April 1896, Frank mentioned that his “friend Mr H C Morris” had written to him to tell him he had been accepted for initiation. H C Morris is Herbert Crossley Morris, who had been initiated into the GD in March 1893.  Frank Dodd and Herbert Morris were about the same age and both were bank clerks working in London; though they may not have worked for the same bank (I don’t know which bank Herbert Morris worked for).  No doubt when Frank left for Brazil, he and Herbert hoped to meet again some day, but they probably never did: Herbert Morris died in 1898.

 

Frank Dodd never went through the GD’s initiation ritual.  Instead he signed and returned a written undertaking to keep the Order’s rules.  He chose the Latin motto ‘Magna est veritas et praevalebit’.  Mathers’ left a note in the GD administration files that Frank could do his GD learning and exams by post - distance learning - but there’s no evidence that Frank ever did so.

 

Identifying the correct Frank Dodd was a bit tricky but his grand-daughter has confirmed my guess.  This is the right man: a Frank Dodd born in Wootton Bassett Wiltshire in 1871.  His father was Edward Dodd, who had married Mary Jessop in 1868.  Edward and Mary’s family was astonishingly small by mid-Victorian standards: just Frank, and his elder brother Herbert.  In 1871, they were living on the High Street in Wootton Bassett in the house next to the Royal Oak Hotel.  Edward Dodd was working as the senior clerk to a firm of solicitors.  Because Edward and Mary Dodd had such a small family, they could afford to invest more in their sons’ education.  This involved sending them away to school, so that on the day of the 1881 census Herbert and Frank were in Bristol, at the school at Redland Green (within walking distance of where I grew up) run by the Rev Henry Rudge and his sisters Caroline and Mary: quite a big school, employing two teachers other than Rudge himself, and having 23 pupils all aged between 9 and 15.  Later in 1881, Herbert and Frank moved on from Rev Rudge’s school to All Saints’ School Bloxham, just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire.  This school had been founded, in 1860, by the Rev Philip Reginald Egerton, who had seen a gap in the educational market: a lack of schools for the sons of the up and coming middle-classes.  It was founded as a high church Anglican school, with the support of Oxford Movement grandees like bishop Wilberforce.  From 1885, pupils at the school took the exams set by the newly-founded Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board; they were the best education available at the time, short of going to university.  Frank did particularly well in those exams, and laid the ground-work for his subsequent career.  The school’s influence on him came out in other ways as well: its emphasis on the importance of doing your religious and civic duty stayed with him throughout his life; and he acquired an interest in the history of the Christian religion. 

 

I’ve suggested that Edward Dodd could afford to pay for a good education for his two sons but they may also have been sent away because their mother was ill.  Mary Dodd died in 1882 at the age of 38.  Harriet Kirkland, the “companion” that was living with Edward and Mary on the day of the 1881 census may just have been keeping Mary company; but she may also have been nursing her.

 

Edward Dodd continued to live on the High Street in Wootton Bassett until he died in 1905 at the age of 79.  Immediately after his wife died, his unmarried sister Eleanor moved in to keep house for him but by 1901 she had died as well and Edward Dodd was living alone but for one servant.  By the day of the 1891 census he had left the job at the solicitors and was working for himself as an accountant; during the 1890s he also became the local registrar of births, marriages and deaths.

 

Herbert and Frank both went to London to work in offices when they left school.  Late Victorian London had an insatiable need for clerks as companies and government bureaucracy expanded.  On the day of the 1891 census both brothers were living as lodgers in a boarding house; though not the same boarding house.  Herbert was living in Hammersmith, and Frank Dodd was one of three clerks (all male) boarding in the household of sisters Mary, Alice and Ellen Smith at 16 Elliott Road Lambeth.  Herbert and Frank Dodd had both followed their father into the accounts side of office bureaucracy.  Herbert was working as a book keeper; the census official didn’t ask where he was working.  Frank was working as a bank clerk; he too was not asked for any more details of his employment.

 

Was Frank already working for the British Bank of South America?  Probably.  The late 20th century work pattern was to change employers in search of promotion and more pay; but when Frank Dodd started work the typical work pattern was to remain with one employer for your full working life.  If Frank had had any choice about which job he took, when he first started work, he might have chosen the British Bank of South America because it offered more chance of early responsibility and promotion - provided you didn’t mind going to live in a country outside the British Empire.  In 1895 an opportunity arose in Rio de Janeiro and Frank accepted it; a defining moment of his life.  He arrived in Brasil on 11 August 1895.

 

 

THE BRITISH BANK OF SOUTH AMERICA

Firstly a quick history of its early years, from details at the website of University College London’s archives, where its records now are.  The bank had been founded in 1862 as the Brazilian and Portuguese Bank, changing its name to the English Bank of Rio de Janeiro in 1863.  In 1891, at the end of a very profitable period, it changed its name again to one that indicated that its directors now had bigger ambitions: it became the British Bank of South America.  It began to expand its operations into Uruguay and Argentina; and to open new branches in all three countries.  The Bank’s own records show that it was not quite so profitable after this period of  expansion as it had been in its first decades - these were tougher times.  I should say, perhaps, that the Bank’s head office throughout its existence was not in South America, it was in the City of London.

 

The offer to Frank Dodd of work in Brasil was part of the Bank’s expansion in the 1890s.  Though Frank was not offered in 1895/96 the managership of any of the Bank’s new branches (he was still only in his 20s), it was clear to him that he might expect promotion to that level at least, and soon, if he went.  So he did.

 

BRASIL WHEN FRANK ARRIVED THERE

Ah, Brasil: coffee, the 1970 World Cup winning team (Pelé, Tostâo, Jairzinho, Rivelino and the others), samba, Copacabana, The Girl from Ipanema...

 

Although Charles William Miller had laid out the first football pitch and refereed the first game, at the Sâo Paulo Athletic Club in 1894, the only one of what I think of as the quintessentials of Brazil that Frank Dodd is likely to have known about, even at the end of his life, is the coffee.

 

Brazil had been a republic for seven years when Frank arrived: the monarchy had been overthrown in 1889.  When the Portuguese royal family had fled to Brazil from the threat of being deposed by Napoleon, they had set up their court in Rio de Janeiro and Rio continued as the capital of the republic until Brasilia was finished, so during Frank’s working life the city was where all foreign diplomats lived and worked.  Rio was also more important in Frank’s time than it is now as a business centre - that role has been taken over by Sâo Paulo.

 

When Frank moved there, Brazil’s economy was still based on agricultural produce, like it had been from its foundation as a colony of Portugal, but coffee had taken over from cotton and sugar as its main export, with most being grown in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Sâo Paulo, using the labour of recent immigrants (from Portugal and Italy for example) rather than slaves.  In addition Brazil was growing tobacco and cocoa, and from shortly after Frank arrived in Brazil, rubber as well.  There was some light industry, based on these agricultural products: textiles, clothes, food processing; and gems had been mined in the state of Minas Gerais for several centuries.  Both agriculture and industry were concentrated in the south of Brazil.  The north-east, where the original, colonial, plantations had been, was turning into a semi-desert and the vast country’s interior was all but unexplored and not at all developed.  Everywhere, infrastructure was almost entirely lacking.

 

The British Bank of South America (not called by that name yet, but I’m trying to keep this simple) had not been founded to lend money to Brazilian business, its purpose was to invest in and otherwise help British companies working in Brazil: coffee exporters in particular but also textile companies and railway companies including the company that built the all-important railway between Sâo Paulo and its nearest port, Santos.  Later it moved more into the financing of city infrastructure, making loans to the companies constructing Sâo Paulo’s water and sewage network (all British companies, I think).   Like its rival British banks in South America, its senior employees and most of its junior employees were British.  When Frank Dodd arrived he almost certainly spoke no Portuguese at all but that will not have hampered him during the working day: all business at the Bank was conducted in English; and the Bank’s records are in English. 

 

Because of political alliances between Portugal and Britain going back to Charles II and Catharine of Bragança, the British presence in Rio de Janeiro was well-established by the 1890s.  An Anglican church had been founded in 1819 in Botafogo, the district between the Sugarloaf and the Corcovado; and the first person was interred in the Gamboa English cemetery in 1811.  There were English-speaking schools and clubs for ex pat British residents.  However, the diplomatic and business communities were from different classes; in the 19th century that really mattered, and the two groups didn’t really mix.  It was not until the years after World War I that efforts were made to get them to talk to each other.

 

Frank Dodd took up a post at one of the Bank’s two branches in Rio de Janeiro.  The Bank’s programme of opening new branches was racing ahead of the number of experienced employees and by 1899 Frank was signing-off a set of accounts issued by the Bank at Rio de Janeiro, acting as “pro Manager” - that is, doing the branch manager’s job in the absence of someone more senior; the other man signing off these accounts was also acting up, as “pro Accountant”.  Soon after this (I haven’t been able to find out exactly when, but before 1910) he was appointed manager of the Bank’s branch at Sâo Paulo; where (I think) he met and married his wife Anna.  This important promotion duly acted as a springboard from which Frank went on to even greater things: by November 1910 he had been recalled to the head office (then at 2a Moorgate in the City of London) and was chairing the annual meeting of one of the companies the British Bank of South America had invested in - the Cartagena (Colombia) Railway Company.  The move back to London was probably in preparation for the retirement, at the end of 1911, of the Bank’s senior manager in charge of its branches.  Frank’s immediate boss was promoted to take the retired man’s job; and Frank took his boss’s job and became company secretary.  This job wasn’t quite as far up the scale as it sounds - in a list of senior employees issued in March 1912, there were three men senior to Frank; however, it was the latest rung in a rapid rise for a man who was only 40.

 

Over the last 20 years or so the British Bank of South America had been comfortably profitable without requiring its shareholders to dig into their pockets to find more capital.  In March 1912, however, Frank was called on to oversee a new share issue, to double the Bank’s working capital to £2 million by inviting people to invest in 25000 new shares at £20 each.  That year (and presumably other years until he took up a new post) he also presided over the paying out of dividends on shares in another of the Bank’s pet companies, the Mogyana (Railway) Company.  The new share issue was all taken up by keen investors; and in March 1913, the Bank moved into a grand new headquarters building at 4 Moorgate; the English Heritage website has some photographs of it. 

 

Though it won’t have seemed like it at the time, the move to the new building turned out to be the pinnacle of the Bank’s history: the following year World War I stopped the programme of expansion and all City firms lost employees to volunteering and call-up.  Because of restrictions on the number of pages allowed to newspapers, I haven’t been able to follow Frank’s working life during the first world war.  I suppose he continued to work as Company Secretary.  He was certainly in London in June 1919 when the president of Brazil, Dr Epitacio Pessôa, paid an official visit to Britain.  Frank was amongst the many guests at the Mansion House when President Pessôa and his wife went to lunch with the Lord Mayor. 

 

Underneath the glitter of that presidential lunch, all was not well at the British Bank of South America; and in February 1920 it was taken over by the Anglo-South American Bank.  Anglo-South had been founded in Chile in 1889, as the Bank of Tarapacá, by John Thomas North.  Most of its assets were in Chilean nitrates and it had done particularly well out of World War I when saltpeter was needed for munitions.  Now flush with cash, it was expanding its operations in South America, not as Frank’s employer had done by opening new branches but by swallowing other banks.  Agreement between the two boards of directors was reached in three weeks, and agreed by Anglo-South’s shareholders in not much longer.  Although the two banks continued to keep separate accounts, and have separate boards, the British Bank of South America moved out of its still-new headquarters building to less fancy offices in Broad Street; two men from Anglo-South joined its board and one of them soon became chairman; and employees from Anglo-South started to outrank their British Bank of South America counterparts.  The take-over ended any hopes of further promotion that Frank Dodd might have been cherishing.  He returned to Brasil, where his first task under the new regime was to accompany Anglo-South’s Mr L H Klek on a fact-finding tour of the British Bank of South America’s branches in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil’s southern-most state, Rio Grande do Sul.  I’m not sure, because I haven’t found any good information on it, but I think Frank spent his last years at British Bank of South America back at its branches in Rio de Janeiro, probably as the Bank’s most senior employee in South America.

 

Being taken-over by the Anglo-South American Bank was one of those things that looked like a good idea at the time; but even in 1920, the days of making profits from nitrates in Chile were numbered.  The Haber process of converting atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia had first been demonstrated in Germany in 1909; the process was bought by BASF and went into mass-production in 1913.  The circumstances of the first world war had hidden this development from British eyes but they should, perhaps, have been alerted to it by Haber’s Nobel Prize, awarded in 1918.  Neither British Bank of South America nor Anglo-South American Bank seem to have understood the implications of the Haber process; but during the 1920s the count-down was on for both of them.

 

If Frank Dodd was still working in London during World War I he will not have taken any active part in the founding of the British Chamber of Commerce in Rio de Janeiro in 1916.  Back in Brazil in 1920, however, he was elected to serve as its second president; and spent two years as an active leader of it, expanding its sphere of influence amongst the business community (who hadn’t all been enthusiastic about it at the start) and trying to build bridges towards the British diplomatic community.  Times were hard.  Brazil’s economy had suffered badly during World War I and British businesses in Brazil had inevitably felt the effects.  When  Frank made his president’s speech at the Chamber of Commerce’s AGM on 3 February 1921 he tried his best to be positive, but he still worried about taxes and the threat of Communism.  His efforts with British diplomats had had results: the Consul-General, Mr Errol MacDonell, attended the meeting, and so did several Embassy employees on the commercial side.  In February 1922 even the ambassador, Sir John Tilley, was at the meeting and dinner at which Frank handed the presidency on to his successor.  Tilley made a speech in which he mentioned how grateful he had been for Frank’s help and advice when he had first arrived in Brazil to take up his appointment.  Frank didn’t serve as the Chamber of Commerce’s president again but probably was a member of several of its sub-committees over the next few years: there was one on banking and finance which I imagine he was chairman of.

 

I can’t find out when Frank Dodd retired.  He reached the age of 65 in the early months of 1936.  Despite the great financial crash of 1929 and the very difficult years after it, the British Bank of South America was still making a small profit.  At its AGM in London in May 1936, the shareholders were promised a dividend of 2%.  Time was passing, though: two long-serving directors had died since the last annual meeting.  If Frank thought it was time to go, he judged correctly.  There was no indication of anything wrong at British Bank of South America at this AGM, but there was big trouble at Anglo-South.

 

In 1931, with demand for Chilean nitrates in rapid decline, other banks had had to step in and prop up Anglo-South to the tune of £8½ million.  (I know the figures are tiny in comparison, but does this sound familiar to anyone? - bank over-reaching itself by borrowing money to buy out other banks? Then all but going bankrupt?  Plus c’est la même chose.  Bankers never learn.)  The  £8½ million was the value placed by the proppers-up on the nitrate assets of Anglo-South, on the assumption that nitrate prices would go up eventually.  The bailers-out had forced a new chairman on Anglo-South, with a brief to get the Bank out of trouble by whatever means; but economic circumstances had been against him.  By mid-1936 it was understood that the price of nitrates from Chile would never recover.  Unfavourable exchange rates had made Anglo-South’s situation worse and at a meeting on 17 July 1936, its shareholders voted to allow the bank to be taken over by yet another South American specialist bank, the Bank of London and South America; the alternative was to allow Anglo-South to go bankrupt.  As British Bank of South America was part of Anglo-South, it was forced to take part in the process of voluntary liquidation that followed: in August 1936, meetings of the shareholders of British Bank of South America and Anglo-South American Bank took place one after the other and voted to hand each Bank’s assets to Bank of London and South America of 6-8 Tokenhouse Yard.  British Bank of South America had always had a pension scheme for its employees, so Frank’s pension was probably safe; but the end of his working life was coloured by the failure of his employer.

 

It must have been around the time of Frank’s retirement that he made his longest-lasting contribution towards friendly relations between Britain and Brasil.  In 1934, he helped to found the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Inglesa (Brazilian Society for English Culture).  This still exists and has two modern functions: teaching English as a second language; and helping to arrange the visits of British artists and musicians to Brasil. 

 

Most British people working abroad for a British company expected and planned for a return to Britain when they retired.  Frank Dodd stayed in Brasil and began on a project he must have been planning and researching for many years: his book An Introduction to the Study of Christianity which was published, in English and in England, in 1938.  In his preface, Frank made no great claims as a theologian and said that in any case, he hadn’t wanted to write another theological tract.  He wanted to write an introduction to Christian theology, for a very modern readership - the large group of adults who perhaps wanted to believe (or return to believing) but objected to most of the available works on the subject, as either too unquestioning of their subject-matter, or too hostile to it. Frank intended to persuade this group that such failures were due not to any fundamental flaw in Christ’s message; but to the “imperfection” (as he called it) of all-too-many writers on theology. Frank was anxious to reach this group because as parents they would have an important influence on subsequent generations, through the choices they made about their children’s education.  As a man still a committed member of the Anglican community in Rio, but living in a country which was exuberantly Catholic with pagan-animist undertones, he was very-placed to advise them.  He and his wife were very even-handed when it came to their own children, at least as far as baptisms went - all the children were baptised as Protestants and as Catholics.  

 

The main body of the book was a history of Christianity, which Frank saw as having reached a peak of power and influence during the 13th century; from which it had been going downhill ever since, as a result of inappropriate priorities, and challenges to dogma which it had failed to counter adequately.  The book’s appendices were an interesting set and showed the breadth of Frank’s reading.  There was a set of short extracts from the Bhagavad Gita (for the purpose of comparing its dogma with Christianity’s); and discussions on suffering and shame in spiritual development, the theology of the Albigensian heresy, and the Portuguese expeditions to the new world.

 

Summing up his argument at the end of the book, Frank still held that despite all the criticisms that could be levelled at the Christian faith, the essence of the story of Jesus and His message still held good.  Frank then offered a religious theory for his times - the only one he thought harmonised with modern science: that God had chosen one human, who “on account of his superlative merits became the vehicle of the Christ Spirit” in a union between God and Man; thus facilitating other such unions.  Frank ended by hoping not that he had convinced his readers to believe, but that he had convinced them to investigate the subject and reach their own conclusions.

 

The book suggests that Frank had had his own period of doubt as regards his religious faith.  Perhaps it had come during the 1890s.  Perhaps he had discussed religion and belief with his friend Herbert Crossley Morris, and had accepted the offer to join the Golden Dawn while looking for alternatives to Christianity.  His book’s inclusion of pieces from the Bhagavad Gita shows another alternative he looked at - not Hinduism, probably, but theosophy.  As part of his book’s summing up, Frank printed a long quote from Rudolf Steiner’s essay ‘Human Conscience’, showing that his reading had taken in theosophy’s descendant anthroposophy as well.  However, in the end, none of the alternatives convinced him and he remained true to Anglican Christianity.

He and his family were important members of the congregation of Christ Church Botafogo in Rio, and later in life he was a friend of Daniel Ivor Evans (1900-62) whose Church of England bishopric included Argentina, Brasil and the Falkland Islands.

 

FRANK’S FAMILY

In 1904 Frank Dodd married Anna Cotching da Fonseca, to give his wife her full, formal Brazilian name which includes both parents’ surnames.  She was the daughter of an Englishman, William Mackrell Cotching, and his Brasilian wife Gertrudes da Fonseca.  William Mackrell Cotching’s family were from Bedfordshire just north of London, and were Wesleyan Methodists.  William’s father (James Walter Cotching) and his business partner had run a firm making and selling straw hats, in the 1850s; but in 1863 the firm had gone bankrupt and as a result William and his siblings had had to make their own way in the world.  William Mackrell Cotching, like Frank Dodd, had made the decision to move outside the British empire in the search for work.  He arrived in Brasil in 1875 and by 1892 was in Sâo Paulo, working as company secretary of an English firm which did plumbing and gas fitting with equipment imported from Britain and the USA. 

William Mackrell Cotching married into the Brasilian landed class.  Gertrudes da Fonseca’s family owned the Fazenda Cachoeira do Jica, an estate near Itu in the state of Sâo Paulo and their daughters Anna and Victoria grew up there.  They went to a local school run by nuns, the Colégio Nossa Senhora do Patrocinio, in Itu.

 

Frank and Anna had four children: Mary; another Edward; Gertrude, known as Pippa; and Sylvia, the youngest.  The three eldest were born in Brazil; Sylvia was born in south London, in 1913.

 

I found on the web a few references to Mary Jessop Dodd who married Gilberto Ferrez, a Brazilian historian who made use of amateur watercolours and photographs to chart the development of Rio de Janeiro during the 19th century. 

 

I found one item on Frank’s son Edward, in the London Gazette: Edward William Cotching da Fonseca Dodd, who had worked for a telephone company in Brazil.  He died, in the family home at Rio de Janeiro, in July 1960.

 

Frank’s daughter Pippa married an English diplomat, an Eton-and-Oxbridge man - a real step up the social ladder.  Frank and Anna were so pleased about this that they put a notice about it in the Times.  Anthony Haigh and Gertrude Dodd were married in 1935.  They had four children but were divorced in 1971.

 

Frank’s last years, and those of his wife Anna, were coloured by illness and the need for constant nursing care.  Frank had a stroke, which robbed him of the ability to speak.  His daughter Sylvia

had married Martin Barral López, a Spanish-born sculptor.  They and their three children moved in with him. 

 

Frank Dodd died at his home, Rua Barâo de Mesquita 539 Rio de Janeiro, on 26 September 1955. 

 

 

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. 

 

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.

 

SOURCES FOR FRANK DODD

 

FAMILY HISTORY INFORMATION on Frank’s early life and his last years; on the family of his wife Anna Cotching da Fonseca; and the existence of Frank’s book (which I didn’t know about before).  Sent to me in a series of emails February and March 2014 by Frank Dodd’s grand-daughter Juanita Barral Dodd Farah, eldest daughter of Sylvia Dodd de Barral (1913-1979).  Sylvia married Martin Barral López (1889-1982) in Rio de Janeiro.  He had been born in Sepulveda Spain.  Their three children are Juanita, Vivian Mary Barral Dodd Rumjaneck and Frank Anthony Barral Dodd.

 

ALL SAINTS’ SCHOOL BLOXHAM and its founder Rev P R Egerton:

See wikipedia.

Frank and his brother Herbert at school: "Old Bloxhamist Society” details sent by registrar@bloxhamschool to Juanita Farah.

 

About the Cambridge University exams taken by Frank Dodd at school.  All I could find was at archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com, posted 2005 a reference to a pdf file on the history of the Oxford and Cambridge Examinations Board from when it was established, in 1885.

 

Frank’s initiation into the Golden Dawn; and confirmation of his employer:

FML GD Colln GBR 1991 GD2/3/1/17 is a letter dated 19 April 1896 from Dodd to the “Chiefs of the Order of the Golden Dawn in the Outer”.  The address for any reply is: “c/o the British Bank of South America” at Rio de Janeiro Brazil.  The letter is annotated with a note in red by Mathers saying that he’d already had this problem crop up in the Paris temple the GD member Emile Adrianyi of Budapest.  Mathers’ note approved the sending of various documents to Dodd for him to sign and copy.    Dodd could also do the exam work long distance.

 

FRANK’S ARRIVAL IN SOUTH AMERICA

Retrieved from the Serviço de Registro de Estrangeiros by Juanita Farah: he was on board the Danube, which reached Rio de Janeiro on 11 August 1895.

 

THE BRITISH BANK OF SOUTH AMERICA

Some of the Bank’s records are at University College London though I should say, here and now, that I have not looked at them in search of Frank Dodd; I think I’ve got enough for this short biography via the sources I mention below.  At www.aim25.ac.uk there are details of what’s held in UCL’s archives collection.  It covers the period 1863 to 1927, not quite the full history of the Bank though it probably covers most of Frank Dodd’s working life.  There are three boxes and material includes letter books as well as accounts.  All records are in English. 

There’s also information on the history of the Bank at

www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/special-coll;.

And in Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil by Richard Graham.  1972.  P96 and p117.

A history of the Anglo-South American Bank can be found via archiveshub.ac.uk.  Its records are also at University College London. 

Brazil in the late 19th century:

Some dates from www.facts-about.org.uk

At Wikipedia an economic history of Brazil written, I think, by Americans.

My own memories of my degree course in Latin American history; and my geography A level.

God is Brazilian: Charles Miller, the Man who brought Football to Brazil by Josh Lacey 2005.

BBSA

Via google to memoria.bn.br and related website memoria.org.br, which are newspaper/journal sites for publications in English covering 19th and 20th cent Brasil: Rio News; and Wileman’s Brazilian Review (whose first issue was not until 1908 and so didn’t cover the earlier part of Frank’s career).

And the Times, always good for business news during the Golden Dawn period.

 

See the swanky new headquarters building at www.englishheritagearchives.org.uk.  All photographs were taken in 1912, just before the workers moved in.

The Bankers’ Magazine volume 93 1912 p289 news from the British Bank of South America that its sub-manager at head office, Henry Kimber Gregory, was retiring of nearly 39 years with the bank.  William Herbert Hollis, currently Company Secretary, would take Gregory’s job as sub-manager.  Frank Dodd, currently “manager of the Sâo Paulo branch” would take Hollis’ job as Company Secretary.

The Bankers’ Magazine volume 93 1912 p635 states that Frank Dodd was manager of the British Bank of South America’s branch at Sâo Paulo when on 31 Dec 1911 he was promoted to become Company Secretary.

Coverage of 1920s, but not before, from Brazilian American.

The demise of Anglo-South and British Bank of South America is covered well by the Times.

For the Haber Process and its effects on the trade in Chilean nitrates: wikipedia.  And for the chemistry, my partner Roger Wright’s copy of A Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry by J R Partington, p543.  Published Macmillan and Co Ltd 1926 and given to Roger by his father.

 

THE DODDS and FRANK’S CHILDREN

Edward Dodd:

Frank’s father Edward Dodd had been born in Lincoln but the Dodd family was a Wiltshire one: at www.gravestonephotos.com, there’s a photo of GPR grave number 154514 in the municipal cemetery at Wootton Bassett.  The grave has these people in it:

-           Harriet Anne Dodd probably born 1828 died 1879

-           Mary Dodd died 1882 aged 38, Harriet’s sister-in-law

-           Edward Dodd probably born 1826 died 1905, Harriet’s brother

-           Catherine Adelaide Dodd probably born 1831 died 1924, Harriet’s sister

It does NOT have these people in it: Eleanor, sister of Harriet, Edward and Catherine; and Frank’s brother Herbert.

 

THE COTCHING and DA FONSECA FAMILIES IN BRASIL

Fazenda Cachoeira do Jica, the da Fonseca family estate, at Indaiatuba, near Itu in the state of Sâo Paulo.  It now has a Brasilian equivalent to ‘listed’ status as "patrimonio cultural de Indaiatuba".

 

Anna’s father was William Mackrell Cotching.  That he was a member of a British mission to Brasil in March 1875 was mentioned in Gazeta de Noticias March 23, 1924; information sent by Juanita Farah.

 

Anna’s brother Dr Eduardo Cotching da Fonseca: via google to www.srb.org.br in Portuguese, it’s the website of Sociedade Rural Brasileira.  He was one of its founders.  Plenty of mentions on the web of the avenida in Sâo Paulo which is named after him.

 

Coffee and Transformation in Sâo Paulo Brasil by Mauricio A Font 2010 p342 the bibliography refers to a book Defesa Permanente do Café by Dr Eduardo da Fonseca Cotching, published in 1921.

 

ANNA COTCHING

Education: Thesis of Maria Iza Gerth da Cunha at website "Educaç\u0101o Feminina numa instituiç\u0101o total confessional católica Colégio Nossa Senhora do Patrocinio" sent to Juanita Farah by email by Clarice Caires, a researcher based in Sâo Paulo.  The thesis’ Anexo 1 is a list of the pupils at the school 1859-1909.

I

Marriage of Frank Dodd and Anna Cotching da Fonseca took place in Sâo Paulo on 2 May 1904.  Information sent by Juanita Farah.

 

Frank and Anna’s eldest daughter Mary Jessop Dodd: 

A Guide to the History of Brazil 1500-1822 by Francis A Dutra.  Published by ABC-Clio 1980 p605 has entries for Gilberto Ferrez and Mary Jessop Dodd Ferrez.

The Origins of the Carioca belle époque by Jeffrey David Needell.  Stanford University Press 1982 pvii in the acknowledgements a reference to information and hospitality given to Needell by Gilberto Ferrez and his wife.

Pioneer Photographers of Brazil 1840-1920 by Gilberto Ferrez and Weston J Naef.  Published by the Center for Inter-American Relations 1976.

Franz Frühbeck’s Brazilian Journey by Robert C Smith and Gilberto Ferrez published 1960.

And at Amazon I found Aquarelas de Richard Bate (watercolours) with an introduction by Gilberto Ferrez and an English language version by Mary Jessop Dodd Ferrez.  Rio: Galeria Brasiliana 1965.  At pt.wikipedia.org, in Port, I found a little about Bate: Richard Bate 1775-1856 was a businessman and artist.  He went to Rio in 1807.  The wikipedia article refers to Gilberto Ferrez as “historiador”.

 

The reference to Frank Dodd’s son Edward:

London Gazette 30 Dec 1966 p14189 is a series of legal notices about people who had recently died.  Edward William Cotching da Fonseca Dodd’s address was 539 Rua Barso de Mesquita Rio de Janeiro.

 

Pippa Dodd’s husband Anthony Haigh.  That he was known as Anthony rather than Austin is: personal communication from Anthony Haigh’s son Geoffrey, sent via Juanita Farah February 2014.

Times 16 Oct 1935 p1a marriage notices: on 27 September 1935 at Christ Church Rio de Janeiro, Austin Anthony Francis Haigh to Gertrude (known as Pippa), 2nd daughter of Mr and Mrs Frank Dodd of 539 Rua  Barrâo de Mesquita Rio de Janeiro. 

Snippet of Foreign Office List edition of 1963 p230: Anthony Haigh.  Born 1907.  Educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge.  Joined Foreign Office 1932.  Posted to Rio de Janeiro in January 1934.  His next posting was to Tokyo, 1936; so Pippa went with him there.

On the end of his career: Who Was Who edition of 1986.  Anthony Haigh retired after serving as Director of Education and Cultural and Scientific Affairs at the Council of Europe from 1962 to 1968.  He was a son of P B Haigh of the Indian Civil Service.  He and Gertrude were divorced in 1971 and he remarried, also in 1971.

 

FRANK’S RETIREMENT

Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Inglesa.  See wikipedia.  That Frank was one of its founders: email from Frank’s grand-daughter.

 

DANIEL IVOR EVANS

Who Was Who volume VI 1961-70: p355.  Just noting that Evans’ headquarters as bishop of eastern South America was Buenos Aires, not Rio de Janeiro.

 

FRANK DODD’S BOOK: An Introduction to the Study of Christianity London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd 1938. 

 

Frank’s death:

Times 28 Sep 1955 p1 death notice for Frank Dodd, husband of Anna; father of Mary, Edward, Pippa and Sylvia; and with 14 grandchildren.  He’d been living in Brazil for 60 years.

 

Probate Registry: Frank Dodd of Rua Barâo de Mesquita 539 Rio de Janeiro died on 26 September 1955.  Probate granted in London 9 May 1956 to Midland Bank Executor and Trustee Company Ltd.  Personal effects £13144/16/6 in England.

 

 

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

Original text 28 November 2012

Update 17 March 2014