William Henry ELPHICK who was initiated into the
Golden Dawn in April 1896 and chose the motto ‘Gradation’. His address at that time was 2 Napier Road,
Amersham Vale, New Cross Gate south London.
Another
failure! Trying the census data for
1891, 1901 and 1911 I couldn’t find anyone that I thought might be him though I
did get the impression that ‘Elphick’ was a common surname in Kent so perhaps
that was where he grown up. I found two
pieces of information that might refer to him:
The
first I found in the British Library India Office family history section. A book listing men serving in the Indian
Medical Service had details of a Henry William Elphick who joined the service
in 1889 and died in 1906 (for full details see the end of this biography). IF this was the GD member it would certainly
explain why I couldn’t find the man on the UK census. He might have been offered GD membership
during one of those long home-leaves that you got when you served the imperial
government overseas. But I worried about
his forenames being the wrong way round.
The
second was a publication I found in the British Library catalogue: the Society
for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK - it had a big publishing
business) published a book by a man called
William Elphick (no Henry at all this time) called The Loveliness of
God: Some Meditations on the First and Greatest Commandment. But the publication date was 1946 - too late,
really, for someone old enough to join the GD in the 1890s; though it could
have been written by a son of such a man.
So I
decided that I couldn’t say that either reference was to William Henry Elphick
of the GD. That person remains a
mystery.
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.
The
India Office reference:
Roll
of the Indian Medical Service p1889 Henry William Elphick born 10 July 1865. University College London. Member Royal College of Surgeons 1888. Member Royal College of Physicians 1888. MB London University 1888. Surgeon Indian Medical Service 1889. Major September 1901. Put on half pay 1905 and died Rugby 20 May
1906.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
23
April 2012
