Thomas Appleton Duncan was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn on 20 March 1892 at its Horus Temple in Bradford, and took the Latin motto ‘In limine non consistendum’.  At the time of his initiation he was living at 47 Belmont Drive Newsham Park Liverpool.  He didn’t ever follow up his initiation by taking any of the exams required of initiates; further down this file I suggest why this might have been so.

 

 

Thomas Appleton Duncan’s father, William Robert Duncan had been born in Scotland (in 1820) but was a priest in the Church of England.  After graduating from Edinburgh University he went to St Bees in Cumberland, a theological college founded specifically for men with a vocation but whose families couldn’t afford the high costs of sending their son to Oxford or Cambridge.  St Bees had been founded by a bishop of Chester, and subsequent bishops kept up the interest in the college: William Robert was ordained in 1845 by the bishop of Chester at that time.  It was part of the ordination that the bishop should find suitable work for the new priests, and William Robert Duncan was sent to be vicar of Matterthwaite, east of Keswick in Cumberland.  In 1849 he married Elizabeth Hannah Stephenson, daughter of Appleton Stephenson, a solicitor from Whitby.  Their family was a small one by mid-Victorian standards - two sons only.  Thomas Appleton Duncan was born in 1850 in Whitby; and his brother, another William Robert Duncan, in 1853.

 

In 1854 William Robert Duncan the elder accepted a job about as different from that of a remote rural parish as you could find: he became perpetual curate of St Peter’s Church Street, Liverpool, which was acting as the city’s cathedral church in the absence of a building more suited to its escalating population (living in some of the worst conditions in Britain which is really saying something in the mid-19th century), rapid expansion and Liverpool’s importance as a trading hub of the British empire.  He stayed in this demanding and high-profile post for 47 years, until his death in 1898.   So Liverpool was where Thomas Appleton Duncan grew up - not in the vicarage as I think it was occupied by another family, but in a series of rented houses in the new suburb of West Derby, to the north of the industrial and financial area of the city. 

 

I do not know where Thomas Appleton Duncan went to school.  The most well-known school in Liverpool at that time was Liverpool College, founded by the Liberal politician W E Gladstone and, from 1866 to 1900, run as headmaster by George Butler, husband of Josephine Butler the social campaigner.  However, I can’t find a list of its pupils on the web and it’s just as likely that the Duncans sent their sons away to school, perhaps in Scotland, or in Yorkshire near Elizabeth Hannah Duncan’s family.  Thomas Appleton Duncan went to Oxford University, perhaps fulfilling a cherished dream of his father.  He went to Keble College, as one of its first intake of students as it had only just been founded.  He was 20 when he went up, so I think his family even waited a couple of years for the right college to come along.  I imagine the expenses of students at the new college would be less than at one of the older ones with the long-established social diaries; but the choice of Keble may also indicate high-church leanings in the family.  Keble had been named for Rev John Keble, leader of the Oxford movement, and theological teachings based on anglo-catholic ideas are what Thomas Appleton Duncan will have heard there.  He graduated from Keble College in 1873.

 

I suppose Thomas Appleton Duncan’s parents had always intended him to become a priest; but - having investigated his career in the Church of England - I do wonder how much say he had in the choice of career.  The young men who later joined the Golden Dawn had less say about the kind of work they would do than you would suppose.  Thomas Appleton Duncan was ordained priest by the serving bishop of Chester, Rev William Jacobson, at Chester Cathedral in 1875.  His working life over the next 25 years, though, was rather fitful.  It began typically enough with Thomas being sent out to learn his trade through a series of short-term appointments as a curate.  His first was at Taporley, a village near Chester; he was there for just over a year, 1874-75.  Then he was sent to location which he knew well but which was likely to be more challenging: from 1875-76 he was curate at St Margaret Belmont Road Liverpool.  Belmont Road Liverpool L6 is a little way north of Onslow Road where the Duncan family lived in the 1880s.  St Margaret’s church was brand new - it was consecrated in 1873.  The architects were William and George Audsley, who designed many other buildings in Liverpool.  The church didn’t have anywhere for its clergyman to live, so Thomas Appleton continued to live with his parents until he was moved on, to work as curate to his great-uncle, in the village of Nafferton in Yorkshire.  The vicar of Nafferton was Rev James Davidson, who had married a Miss Boyes, the sister of Elizabeth Hannah Duncan’s mother Ann.  He had been the vicar of Nafferton from 1854.  Thomas Appleton Duncan arrived as his curate in 1876 and stayed until 1885; but Rev Davidson continued as the vicar throughout and was still in the job at his death in 1906. 

 

Thomas Appleton Duncan was 35 in 1885, when he left the job at Nafferton, still a curate not a vicar.  Perhaps he had been offered appointments as a vicar but had turned them down.  Perhaps he had never been offered a more permanent job.  Either way, it’s odd that nothing more permanent should have transpired from what was now over 10 years of experience.  However, the next decade is even odder: he had no official job in the Church of England from 1885 to 1895, into which ten years his membership of the Golden Dawn and of the Theosophical Society both fall.

 

The Theosophical Society was founded in the USA in 1875.  It took off in England after Helena Petrovna Blavatsky came to live in London in 1887.  In 1888 Blavatsky’s epic The Secret Doctrine was published, switching the focus of the TS from western occultism to eastern mysticism.  The TS in England expanded rapidly over the next few years.  It was organised rather like the freemasons were in England, with groups of people petitioning the TS headquarters in London to be granted permission to set up a new lodge.  Once permission was granted, each lodge organised its own agenda - lectures (often with speakers from London); talks where one lodge member would take the lead on a particular subject; and sessions in which members would discuss the principles of theosophy, in particular the meaning of The Secret Doctrine which most members seem to have found more or less impenetrable.

 

When I was going through the TS Membership Registers as part of my research on the Golden Dawn it was obvious very quickly how much cross-over there was, particularly in the early 1890s, with people belonging to the TS first (usually) and then being initiated into the GD afterwards.  This was particularly true with the GD’s Horus Temple in Bradford, which had one group of members living in the Bradford area and a second group living in Liverpool.  The actual nuts-and-bolts of how the members knew each other fascinates me but I haven’t been able to find out much about it: it needs someone who lives in or near Bradford or Liverpool to do work in the local archives and with the local papers.  I’m quite sure, though, that a lot of the members of Bradford GD knew one another through the TS branches in Bradford and Liverpool, which were all very active in the early 1890s; and that some members were acquaintances outside theosophy and magic, in the daily world.

 

You’ll have gathered from my outline above, that TS lodges were founded by groups of people who already knew each other through a shared interest in theosophy.  Unlike the GD, the TS was not a secret society - members gave public lectures advertised in the local press, and meetings of local groups were open to non-members.  The group that founded the Liverpool Lodge in 1892 may have come together in the previous year or so, following up a public lecture (let’s say) with a series of informal meetings; but there’s also the possibility that some at least of the lodge’s members had known one another much longer, perhaps since their schooldays.  That’s another thing I’d like to investigate but can’t do very easily from London. 

 

News of local TS lodges appeared in the monthly magazine Lucifer which was published by the TS in England at its headquarters in London’s Regent’s Park. The news item announcing the formation of the lodge in Liverpool listed the members who had been elected to its governing council.  They included Robert and Agnes Nisbet; Joseph Gardner; John Hill; Robert Sandham; William Ranstead; James W S Callie; Jean Gillison; and Thomas Appleton Duncan, who was the lodge’s first librarian.  In between July 1891 and March 1893, all of the people I’ve named were initiated into the GD at the Horus Temple (Liverpool never set up a temple of its own), Thomas Appleton Duncan’s initiation coming in the middle of the sequence.  None of them ever advanced far with the studies of occult literature that were expected of any GD member who hoped eventually to start doing practical magic; and I think their willingness to try out the GD may have been to do with concern about the TS’s future after Blavatsky’s death (in May 1891).  Once they were assured that the TS would continue, though without her guidance, they gave up on the GD.

 

From 1892 to 1894 Liverpool Lodge held meetings every Thursday evening in rooms at 62 Dale Street, in the business centre of the city near the docks.  Thomas Appleton Duncan attended these regularly, and in 1893 he led a discussion on ‘theosophy and Christianity’.  A series of articles by him appeared in Lucifer in 1893 and 1894:

-           The Christian Tradition in Relation to The Secret Doctrine

-           Esoteric Teachings of the New Testament

-           Some Cogent Reasons for Embracing Theosophy

-           and the two-part article The Brotherhood and the Service of Man.

 

It’s clear from the titles of these writings that Thomas Appleton Duncan was well-read in the basic texts of theosophy; even in The Secret Doctrine.  He also seems to have read some texts by Christian writers who were also occultists.  I think he was looking for common ground between Christianity and theosophy.  However, in the last of the articles, he went a great deal further than that, declaring that it was the task of Eastern philosophy to complete the work begun by Christianity to bring about a brotherhood of all mankind.

 

One of the common themes I’ve found amongst Golden Dawn members was a searching after a philosophy of life that made sense in the era of Darwin, Lyall and increasing scepticism about the belief that the Bible was divinely inspired - that it was literally the work of God, channelled through certain privileged men.  But Thomas Appleton Duncan was pushing at the boundaries of what a Church of England cleric should believe, and it was no wonder he didn’t have, and didn’t seem to want to have, a job in the profession he had been trained for.  It would be interesting to hear Thomas Appleton Duncan’s views on the Soul - that is to say, on the possiblity of reincarnation, a subject which caused members of the TS a great deal of anxiety - what exactly were Blavatsky’s teachings on the issue? - especially amongst those who had been brought up as Christian church-goers.

 

Thomas Appleton Duncan’s article on the brotherhood of Man was his last for Lucifer.  I think he was overtaken by events that challenged him to make up his mind in a way he might have wanted to avoid.  Firstly, the TS was torn apart by the bitter arguments over W Q Judge’s claims to have received messages from the Mahatmas who had only ever contacted Blavatsky before.  The question divided lodges and friends within the TS.  Members of Liverpool Lodge actually set up a committee to give support to Judge in the debate, and when Judge was censured at the TS European convention (in July 1894) many TS members resigned including all the members of Liverpool’s pro-Judge committee and others who had been very active in Liverpool Lodge.  So much for the brotherhood of Man.  As I didn’t find his membership details I don’t know whether Thomas Appleton Duncan was one of those who left the TS at this point.  As you might imagine, Lucifer didn’t list the names!, though many years later, most of those who had resigned had a note to that effect written against their names in the TS’s Membership Registers.  Just as worrying to Thomas Appleton Duncan at this turbulent time may have been a paragraph in Lucifer’s edition of April 1894: the Church of England in New Zealand was taking disciplinary action against a clergyman in Auckland on the grounds that he was a TS member.

 

The uproar within the TS caused Thomas Appleton Duncan to go back to the Church of England, at least for the next few years: in 1895 he took another appointment as a curate, at Saints Peter and Paul Steeple Aston, south of Banbury in Oxfordshire.  During his two or three years there he may have come across Rev William Alexander Ayton, vicar of Chacombe to the north-east of Banbury.  The Rev Ayton was a classical scholar, an occultist, and an alchemist with a laboratory in the vicarage basement.  He had been a member of the Golden Dawn since 1888; but was terribly afraid of being found out by his bishop (the bishop of Oxford who was also Rev Duncan’s immediate boss at this time) and Thomas Appleton Duncan may have been acquainted with Rev Ayton without being aware that they had interests and GD membership in common.   

 

In 1897 Thomas Appleton Duncan moved to his last job as a curate, at Henbury, now swallowed by Bristol but then a village just outside it.  Shortly after he arrived there, a year of deaths changed his future.

 

1898 began with the death of Rev William Robert Duncan, in February.  He was 78, so although the death must have been distressing, it won’t have been all that surprising.  But in the summer of 1898 not only did Thomas Appleton Duncan’s brother William Robert die (in his 40s) but so did William Robert the younger’s son - the only grandchild - at the age of a few months.  Then just before Christmas, a woman called Sarah Booth Hulme died just outside Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.  Six months later, in 1899, Thomas Appleton Duncan married Sarah Booth Hulme’s daughter.

 

It was a not particularly pleasant fact of Victorian middle-class life that the young, or even the middle-aged, often had to wait for the old to die before they could afford to marry or were free to choose their own life-paths.  

 

ELIZABETH HULME

 

I have tried to figure out how Thomas Appleton Duncan met Elizabeth Hulme, but I haven’t come up with an answer.  The Rev Duncan was never a curate in the Potteries area; Elizabeth Hulme spent her whole life until her marriage living in the few miles between Leek and Stoke-on-Trent.  I have to fall back on the ‘through mutual friends’ explanation and I’ve no idea who those mutual friends might have been.  The networks of relationships and acquaintanceships through which one person might meet another in Victorian England are fascinating but difficult to disentangle from this distance in time.

 

When Thomas Hulme married Sarah Booth, in Tunstall in 1849, they linked two families who had probably inter-married many times before, two families with branches all over the north midlands.  Their family was a more typical one of its time than the Duncans’ family was: they had eight children, with Elizabeth being the eldest, born in 1851.  On the day of the 1871 census the Hulmes were living at Endon Bank Staffordshire.  Thomas Hulme told the census official that he was a landowner and farmer; he employed 8 men and 2 boys.  However, one source I’ve found on the pottery industry in Staffordshire says that he also owned a part-stake in a pottery and I think this must be true, because I don’t see how the owner of a mere 272 acres could finance Dunwood Hall at Longsdon, which Thomas Hulme had built, next to the old Dunwood Lodge farmhouse, between 1871 and 1874.  Dunwood Hall was designed by Robert Scrivener of Hanley to an L-shaped plan and in the Gothic revival style, with a three-storey entrance tower, big windows, lavish use of granite and wrought-iron, and a hallway laid with Minton tiles.  Thomas Hulme’s son Joseph Booth Hulme told the 1881 census official that he was the manager of a pottery; and in the 1890s he was a partner in the Sutherland Pottery at Fenton, on the south side of Stoke-on-Trent; going through several partners before retiring from the business in 1900.  I think this pottery must be where Thomas Hulme was a partner, in the firm originally called Thomas Forester Son and Co.

 

In 1881 the Hulmes were living at Dunwood Hall, but the family seem to have moved out after Thomas Hulme’s death, which occurred late in 1884.  Sarah Booth Hulme had been left comfortably off - in 1891 she employed a cook and a housemaid - but she had moved to Lord Street in Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, which was nearer Joseph’s work.  Joseph and Elizabeth, both still unmarried, were the only members of the family still living with Sarah Hulme on the day of the 1891 census.  To Elizabeth’s lot had fallen the task of caring for her mother.  She would be expected by the rest of the family and by society at large, to do that task until her mother died; by which time she might be elderly herself.  Whether the carer had been left enough money to live an independent life was irrelevant.

 

Elizabeth Hulme waited only six months after her mother’s death, before she married and left the district.  This may have been out of financial necessity.  I am not suggesting that she married for money, or for the status that being a married woman brought you; though many women living in a patriarchy do so.  I am suggesting that she may, however temporarily, have had no source of income immediately after her mother died.  After spending so many years looking after her mother would not have guaranteed that Elizabeth would be left anything to live on after her death, and when I looked in the Probate Registry I found that Sarah Booth Hulme’s estate and effects were not finally settled until 1902 anyway - rather too long to be waiting on the expectation, with no money coming in in the meantime.  So Elizabeth (aged 48) married Thomas Appleton Duncan (aged 49) without completing the expected one year of full mourning.  On the day of the 1901 census, the Duncans were living at Annisfield House in Henbury; they had enough income to employ one servant who lived in.  Thomas Appleton Duncan’s mother, Elizabeth Hannah Duncan, had left Liverpool and was living next door to them, in the household of Thomas Horse at Rose Bank.  This seems to have been just a temporary measure while the Duncans looked for a house where they could all live together.  They moved to Laurel House, Langford in Somerset, a seven-bedroom ex-farmhouse with 2.5 acres of paddocks and gardens (as I was writing this little biography the house was up for sale), recently modernised when they moved in.

 

In 1906, Thomas Appleton Duncan’s curacy came to an end and he took a post which was a kind of semi-retirement.  He was given a license to preach when required in the dioceses of Bristol and Bath and Wells, but he was no longer required to do any parish duties.  Elizabeth Hannah Duncan died at Laurel House in 1909 and by 1911 Thomas Appleton Duncan had retired completely.  He was 60 by now, but many clergymen continued to work until they were much older, or died still at their posts.  Had his mother’s death finally released Thomas Appleton from the family need for him to work for the Christian church?  He had put even Somerset behind him - he and Elizabeth were living in East Looe, Cornwall, on the day of the 1911 census - and he was free to investigate the borderlands where Christianity met theosophy (if he still wanted to) without the burden of family expectation.  The Duncans moved at least once more, to Paignton in Devon, leasing the house called Wharncliffe, on Stafford Road, where Thomas Appleton Duncan died on 16 September 1922.

 

 

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 THOMAS APPLETON DUNCAN

 

WILLIAM ROBERT DUNCAN, Thomas Appleton Duncan’s father

 

At archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com a posting dated 2001 by Eunice Smith of Edinburgh who was researching members of the Duncan family.  She gives W R Duncan senior’s dates as 2 May 1820 to 11 February 1898. 

 

Crockford’s Clerical Directory edition of 1860 p177 William Robert Duncan of St Peter’s Parsonage Liverpool.  University of Edinburgho.  St Bees Theololgical College.  Deacon 1844; priest 1845 both by bishop of Chester.  Became senior curate at St Peter’s 1854; previously vicar of Matterdale in Cumberland.  Crockford’s Clerical Directory edition of 1900 volume 1 A-M p401 William Robert Duncan isn’t in it.

 

St Bees Theological College: there’s a short article at wikipedia.

 

Why wasn’t William Robert Duncan ever vicar of Liverpool, only a curate?  See www.archerfamily.org for the career of the Rev Canon Alexander Stewart reproduced from the Liverpool Courier of 31 March 1916.  For most of the 19th century, Stewart’s family owned the advowsons on three important rectories in the city of Liverpool: that is, the right to appoint and to pay the vicar or rector of the parish.  In William Robert Duncan’s time, the three rectories all had priests who were members of the Stewart family, the most senior and the most active being Rev Alexander Stewart, rector of Liverpool.  Elsewhere at www.archerfamily.org there are details of Rev Stewart’s career as a bureaucrat in the Church of England and the Poor Law.  Essentially, Rev W R Duncan did the parish duties at St Peter’s while the actual Rector was busy with other things and paying Rev Duncan an agreed but fixed salary.

 

At paperspast.natlib.govt.nz the New Zealand Herald volume XXI issue 6972, 22 March 1884 p1 column 3 adverts include one for the services as a music teacher of a Mr Pooley, now living in New Zealand after a spell as organist and choir master at St Peter’s Liverpool.  A series of testimonials includes one from Rev Alexander Stewart, rector of Liverpool and Canon of Liverpool Cathedral, and one from Rev William Robert Duncan, “Senior Curate of Liverpool”.

 

At www.lan-opc.org.uk, which is the website of Lancashire Online Parish, a picture of the church that Rev W R Duncan worked in.  St Peter’s had been a parish since 1699 when it separated from Walton parish.  The church was built for the new parish 1699-1704.  The last service was held in the church in 1919 and the building was demolished in 1922.

 

Via www.medialinkuk.co.uk to a page showing inscriptions and some photos of monuments in Toxteth Park cemetery Liverpool.  There’s a monument for the Duncan family: M46 Duncan (C.K.451); the monument is decorated with a Celtic cross.  William Robert Duncan senior’s dates are given on it, confirming the dates I found via the web: born 22 May 1820; died 12 February 1898.  Also in the grave is his wife Elizabeth, who died on 3 November 1909 aged 78.  There are two more burials in the grave:

1 = Robert Charteris Duncan b November 1897 died Sep 1898, only child of W R Duncan (Thomas Appleton’s brother) and E M Duncan.

2 = William Robert Duncan junior, who is described as an “Author” although I have not found any examples of his writing, looking on the web and in the British Library catalogue.  Dates of birth and death are month and year only, the day of each is not given: born July 1855; died August 1898.

 

Thomas Appleton Duncan and his wife Elizabeth are not buried in this grave; I presume they were buried in Devon.  Further elucidation of the people who are in the grave, from freebmd: Robert William Duncan married Elizabeth M Greenlaw in Kensington in 1896.  Their son Robert Charteris Duncan was born in 1897 and died within a year.

 

STEPHENSON FAMILY OF WHITBY

At www.gravestonephotos.com number GPR246866, a photo of the Stephenson grave monument at St Mary the Virgin Whitby.  In the grave are members of Elizabeth Hannah Stephenson’s family:

            Ann Clifton Stephenson 1825-30

Appleton Stephenson, father of Ann Clifton Stephenson; 1806-76.  He must be Elizabeth Hannah Stephenson’s father.

Ann Stephenson, Ann Clifton Stephenson’s mother (actually she’s her step-mother); 1803-73; Elizabeth’s mother.

John Boyes Stephenson, Ann Clifton Stephenson’s son (he must be Ann Stephenson’s son; thus Elizabeth’s brother); 1837-79

 

At genforum.genealogy.com a posting December 2002 by a descendant of the Boyes family who lived in Whitby in the 18th and 19th cents: Appleton Stephenson married Ann Boyes on 26 February 1829 in Whitby; he was a widower, she had not been married before.    

 

THOMAS APPLETON DUNCAN IN CHURCH OF ENGLAND

 

Alumni Oxoniensis Members of the University of Oxford 1715-1886 Volume 1.  Kraus Reprint Ltd 1965 editor Joseph Foster.  On p394 Rev Thomas Appleton Duncan, elder son of William Robert Duncan of Whitby.  Keble College.  Matriculated 18 October 1870 at age 20.  Graduated BA 1873.

 

Wikipedia on Keble College. 

 

Ecclesiastical Gazette 1874 p56 a list of those ordained priest at Chester Cathedral on “Sunday, September 19" [1874] by the bishop of Chester; including Thomas Appleton Duncan of Keble College.

 

Crockford’s Clerical Directory edition of 1900 volume 1 A-M p401 Thomas Appleton Duncan was currently curate of Henbury Bristol, to which he had been officially appointed in 1898.  Keble College Oxford.  BA 1873.  Ordained deacon 1874; priest 1875 both by bishop of Chester.  Curate of: Tarporley Cheshire 1874-75; St Margaret Belmont Road Liverpool 1875-76; Nafferton Yorks 1876-85.  At that point there was the 10-year gap before he was appointed curate of Steeple Aston Oxfordshire 1895-98.  I got the name of the relevant bishop of Chester from the list in wikipedia: William Jacobson, appointed 1865, died in office 1884.

 

Crockford’s Clerical Directory edition of 1910 p432 Thomas Appleton Duncans’ address is now Laurel House Langford Somerset.  He had been curate of Henbury from 1897 to 1906.  In 1906 made a Licensed Preacher able to preach in the dioceses of Bristol, and Bath and Wells. 

 

Places Thomas Appleton Duncan was curate:

 

Via the web, //streetsofliverpool.co.uk/lost-churches-2/ has a picture of St Margaret Belmont Road, consecrated 1873, destroyed by fire 1961 and replaced with the current building.

 

Village website www.nafferton.net/our-village/history says that Rev James Davidson (Thomas Appleton Duncan’s great-uncle) was vicar there from 1854 to 1906.  His Christmas time Ship Teas were famous.

 

Steeple Aston is north of Oxford and south of Banbury.  Saints Peter and Paul has important bells and a long tradition of bell-ringing.  At the time Thomas Appleton Duncan was curate, there was a 14th piece of embroidery in the church; it’s now in the Victoria & Albert Museum.  Chacombe, where Ayton was vicar, is north-east of Banbury.  Both parishes were the responsibility of the bishop of Oxford. might have met.

 

29 Nov 2012 I’m ra bothered as to the exact significance of the term “Licensed Preacher”.  At US website www.learnthebible.org which is NOT CofE, such a license is n commonly issued now.  It’s a license to preach und certain restrictions usually abt where.  It’s LESS than ordination which the website sees as a v serious commitment to do whatever and go wherever God requires.

At universalministries.com mention of it in conn w small, indep churches wh such a license is often issued to volunteers ra than those paid by the church.

Cldn’t see anything abt licensed preachers in the CofE.

 

Where he lived when he was retd:

 

As at 3 Dec 2012 Laurel House Langford Somerset happens to be f sale w Debbie Fortune estate agents: from her website, it is c 1900, stone built w stone fireplaces and some bay windows.  Gardens, paddock - 2.5 acres altog.  At www.zoopla.co.uk it’s on Bath Road Langton; 7 beds 2 recep, ex-farmhouse.  Needs some work.

 

THOMAS APPLETON DUNCAN IN THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

 

The TS Membership Registers are at the TS headquarters building on Gloucester Place London.  I looked at the registers which cover 1888 to 1900 and so missed some GD members who had joined the TS in its earliest years.

 

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine published London: Theosophical Publishing Society of 7 Duke Street Adelphi.  Volume XI covering September 1892 to February 1893.  Volume XI no 66 issued 15 February 1893, in news section p517 a report on Liverpool Lodge, sent in by its assistant secretary, Gustave E Sigley, who was never a member of the GD; John Hill was the Lodge secretary but worked as a travelling salesmen and was out of town a great deal.  Recently the Lodge had had visits from TS member William Williams of Bradford Lodge; and Sydney Coryn (who is from London; both these men were initiated into the GD). 

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine Volume XII covers March-August 1893, sole editor is Annie Besant.  Published by the Theosophical Publishing Society of 7 Duke Street Adelphi.  Volume VII no 67 issued 15 March 1893 p78 news section incl item on Liverpool Lodge sent in by its assist sec, Gustave E Sigley. 

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine published London: Theosophical Publishing Society of 7 Duke Street Adelphi.  Volume XIII covers September 1893 to February 1894; again Annie Besant is the editor.  P460-467 is Part I of a series by T A Duncan BA: The Brotherhood and Service of Man; seeing it p461 as the task of eastern philosophy to complete what Christianity had begun, by bringing about a brotherhood of Man. 

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine published London: Theosophical Publishing Society of 7 Duke Street Adelphi.  Volume XIV covers March to August 1894.  Volume XIV no 79 issued 15 March 1894 p 63-69 article by T A Duncan BA: Part II of The Brotherhood and the Service of Man.

There was nothing by Thomas Appleton Duncan in any subsequent issue of Lucifer.  Lucifer ceased publication in about 1898.

 

 

THE HULME FAMILY OF LEEK STAFFS

On Dunwood Hall:

At www.british-history.ac.uk which is the website of British History Online, some info taken from the Victoria County History for Staffs, volume 7, on Dunwood Hall.  Thomas Hulme, previously of Bank House Endon, bought Dunwood Lodge Farm in 1870 and built Dunwood Hall next to the farmhouse in 1871.  It was designed (Gothic revival style) by Robert Scrivener of Hanley.  The house still exists and is Grade II listed, retaining many of its original features including a central hall laid with Minton tiles.

 

Website //thecastlelady.wordpress.com has info on a lot of houses in Staffordshire and pictures of some of them but not of Dunwood Hall, unfortunately.  Dunwood Hall is on the A53.  Built to an L-shaped plan with a 3-storey entrance tower.  The hall has a floor of Minton tiles; a granite and stone fireplace; and cast iron balustrades.  There are gardens.  This site is the only one that says that Elizabeth’s father Thomas Hulme owned a pottery business.  However, there’s evidence that Joseph B Hulme owned one:

 

London Gazette 13 Jan 1893 p226 a list of dissolved partnerships includes that between Thomas Forester and J B Hulme.  They had traded as earthenware manufacturers, at the Sutherland Pottery in Fenton (that’s south-east of Stoke-on-Trent).  Their partnership was dissolved on 31 Dec 1892.  The debts of the partnership would be paid by J B Hulme.

 

London Gazette 4 Jan 1901 p117 another list of dissolved partnerships includes that of Joseph Booth Hulme and John J Christie.  They had been trading as Hulme and Christie, earthenware manufacturers of Fenton.  Their partnership was dissolved by consent on 30 June 1900.  Christie would be carrying on the business, in partnership with Francis William Beardmore; as Christie and Beardmore.

 

The info above is confirmed by www.thepotteries.org which is an A-Z of Stoke-on-Trent pottery firms.  The info on the website on the Sutherland Pottery Fenton was taken from Ceramic Art of Great Britain 1800-1900 by Llewellyn Frederick William Jewitt and Geoffrey A Godden.  Published Barrie and Jenkins 1972; info from p51:

            1884-?1888     as Thomas Forester Son and Co

            1887-93           as Forester and Hulme

            1893-1902       as Hulme and Christie

            1902-03           as Christie and Beardmore

            1903-14           as Frank Beardmore and Co.  Nothing after that date.

The firm originally produced china and earthenware: dinner, tea, dessert and toilet sets.   When I was searching for details of the firm I found quite a lot of their products for sale on the web, with pictures.

 

Wikipedia has an article on T E Hulme (Thomas Ernest) the critic and modernist poet: 1883-1917, born at Gratton Hall Endon Staffordshire, a son of Thomas Hulme and his wife Mary.  I presume his parents are Elizabeth Hulme’s brother Thomas and his wife, so that T E Hulme is Elizabeth Duncan’s nephew.  Apparently, beginning in about 1907, T E Hulme began a process of translating works by Henri Bergson; Henri Bergson’s sister was Mina, wife of the GD’s Samuel Liddell Mathers.

 

The Short, Sharp Life of T E Hulme by Robert Ferguson 2002 p3 says of Thomas Hulme (presumably T E Hulme’s father, not his grandfather) that he was a staunch Liberal; and that he went to church, at St Luke’s, as a social duty not out of pious necessity. 

 

I searched freebmd from 1922 to 1932 for the registration of Elizabeth Hulme Duncan’s death but couldn’t identify one I was sure was her.  There were none that looked right in Devon during those years, so she may have moved away after her husband died.

 

 

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

4 December 2012