A man whose name R A Gilbert transcribed as Mahomet Eusouf was initiated into
the Order of the Golden Dawn at its Isis-Urania temple in London in March
1890. The motto he chose was
transliterated in the GD records as ‘Amaidwar’.
My Eastern cultures and languages expert Roger Wright cautiously
suggests that ‘amaidwar’ was a Hindustani word, (Hindustani is the ancestor of
modern Hindi). At the time of his
initiation he was living at 3 Vernon Chambers, Southampton Row London WC1. Mahomet Eusuof did none of the work that GD
initiates were required to do to make progress understanding western
esotericism, and was no longer a member of the GD by September 1890.
When I began my work on the GD members, I decided that I would not try
to find out who Mahomet Eusouf was, particularly as he was a member for such a
short time. The words ‘mahomet eusouf’
were obviously a rendering into English of a language from India or the Middle
East. Without making any effort I could
think of five other ways of spelling ‘mahomet’, and Eusouf too has plenty of
other spellings. I doubted that I would
be able to identify the man for certain.
However, when Roger Wright began work putting my GD biographies onto our
website, he got intrigued by Mahomet Eusouf.
He started hunting the web himself for a likely candidate and prodded me
to make more of an effort. As a result,
we came up with two men whose name could be transliterated as Mahomet
Eusouf. They were both born in India but
had connections with Britain.
The one Roger Wright found did sound the most promising: the nawab Sir
Mohammed (I’ve also seen it spelled Muhammad - this is the sort of problem that
put me off looking) Yusuf of Jaunpur, who was an important political figure in
the United Provinces of India (now Uttar Pradesh) and the Muslim League in the
1930s. However, he turned out to have
been born in 1890; so no way was he the GD member.
We fell back on the man that I’d found.
I’m still uncomfortable about the identification, but we couldn’t find
anyone else who fitted the necessary criteria, so I give a short biography of
him below.
My candidate is the man whose name was written down as Mohammad Yusuf
when he registered as a bar student at the Middle Temple in October 1889. At that time he was 18 years old. He was Indian and was from Patna (in Bihar)
where his father, Maulvi Jelaluddin (another source gives the name as Mouline
Jelaluddin), was a land-owner and a Pleader in the local courts. An official source from much later in his
life says that he was born a British citizen; and he must have been a Christian
too - or was he? - as he was baptised as Maurice Yusuf though he was always
called Mohammad.
Maurice or Mohammad Yusuf (I’m going to stick with Mohammad) was
registered as a Middle Temple student again in 1891; and a third time in
1905. He never completed the bar
formalities that are required to be called to the bar; but that was because he
never had any intention of working as a barrister.
I suppose it must have been while he was doing his first session
studying at the Middle Temple that Mohammad Yusuf moved into Vernon Chambers
Southampton Row - very convenient for all the Inns of Court - and met someone
who was a member of the Golden Dawn. I’ve
tried to think who this GD member must be; but I can’t come up with any
names. Several barristers did become GD
members, but I think that none of them were initiated this early. Like my questions about much of his life -
his religion, for example, though I suppose he started out as a Muslim - it I
fear it will remain unanswered.
During the years around 1891 that he was in England, Mohammad Yusuf also
spent some time taking courses at Emmanuel College Cambridge University. He didn’t finish a degree there, but this
wasn’t necessary for the career he was going to follow, and I assume it was
never intended that he should do the full three years and graduate. He was in England to try to get into the
Indian Civil Service (ICS); entry was based on your passing a series of
exams. In June 1892 he won one of two
prizes (worth £20 each) awarded to ICS students at Cambridge University. And in that July he took and passed the final
ICS exams, winning two more prizes for his papers in Hindustani and
Arabic. Soon afterwards, he began his
ICS career by being sent to work in Burma.
There’s some discrepancy between the different sources as to the date of
his first day at work, but he was probably in Burma by mid-1893.
Employees of the Indian Civil Service appeared in the India Office
List. Like a British GPO directory, the
List was issued each year with details of ICS employees’ past and current
postings and a place in the seniority list indicating when they might hope to
be promoted. The name of the man I’ve
cautiously identified was spelled in the List in two different ways: for nearly
all his appearances it was spelled as Muhammad Yusuf; but the last time he
appeared it was spelled as Mohammad Yusuf.
I’m going to spell it the first way, the Middle Temple way.
Given that he was a native Indian rather than a member of the British
ruling class in India, I think Mohammad Yusuf managed quite a glittering
career. He was officially offered a job
with the ICS as early as 1890. He worked
in Burma for four years, as an assistant magistrate and collector of taxes,
before being moved on to do the same work in Bengal in January 1896; this was a
promotion but being moved on was a fact of ICS life anyway. He was promoted and moved on again in October
1903, and spent three years as a district and sessions judge in Assam before
being moved back to Bengal again.
In 1905 Mohammad Yusuf spent a few months in England, studying at the
Middle Temple again in order to do the bar exams in constitutional law and
(English) legal history. He passed those
in June 1905 and returned to India to join the judicial department of the high
court in Calcutta. He continued to work
in Calcutta’s high court for the rest of his career, being sent back to England
once more, in 1913, back to the Middle Temple to take the exams in criminal law
and procedure, and Roman law and jurisprudence.
Having passed those exams he returned to the Calcutta high court and by
1918 was third in seniority there, behind two British-born ICS employees. They both retired in the early 1920s so that
in his last India Office List entry as an ICS official he was the most senior
employee in the Calcutta high court system.
Then, in 1927, he too retired.
Mohammad Yusuf did not stay in India after his retirement; in fact there’s
good evidence he might actually have left the country for good - taking leave
that was due to him, possibly - before the official retirement date. He came to live in England; because he had
married an English woman and their son was already living here.
In March 1893, Mohammad Yusuf married Lizzie Grace Cargill (who may have
been known as Grace rather than Lizzie) at Brighton registry office. Two family history websites (see the Sources
section for details) both give details of the marriage and more information on
both families. Though they each spell
his ‘yusuf’ name slightly differently!
One of the two ICS officers who were senior to Mohammad Yusuf in the
India Office Lists during his time in Calcutta was a James Dudley Cargill;
Lizzie Grace was his elder sister. Their
parents were Richard Cargill and his wife Eliza, née Pasley. Richard Cargill was originally from Southwell
in Nottinghamshire, and Eliza was born in London. They had moved to Brighton where Richard
Cargill ran a pharmacy business at 32 Marine Parade, though he had retired by
census day 1891 and had moved to 63 Middle Street. James Dudley Cargill was at Emmanuel College
Cambridge, doing his ICS exam work, in 1889 and 1890, when Mohammad Yusuf was
also a student there; despite the enormous differences in their backgrounds
they became friends; James Dudley invited Mohammad Yusuf to meet his
family... Their working lives as ICS
officers ran in parallel - Cargill always slightly ahead on grounds of being a
little older and English - though Cargill was never in Burma, only in Bengal
and Assam.
Mohammad Yusuf, Lizzie Grace’s son Zain Maurice Yusuf was born in 1894
in Basein Burma but was living in England by 1919. They had joined him in England by 25 August
1926, when all three of them changed their surname by deed poll, from Yusuf to
Dean. In addition, Mohammad Yusuf
swapped his surname so that it became his first name: after the deed poll he
was known as Yusuf Maurice Dean. Why ‘dean’ I have no idea, but the decision to
change the surname from ‘yusuf’ to something unmemorably English may have been
to help their son and his wife (Zain had married an Englishwoman in 1919). Zain Maurice Dean had recently qualified, in
England, as a doctor and surgeon. He was
still living in England and registered with the General Medical Council in
1957.
The newly renamed Yusuf Maurice Dean died in a sanatorium in Linford,
Hampshire on 3 May 1928. Lizzie Grace
Dean died in 1946.
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. As far as I know, the records of the Horus
Temple at Bradford have not survived either.
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 MOHAMMAD YUSUF
EARLY LIFE/ICS TRAINING
Via the web to hosted.law.wisc.edu a list of South Asians at the
Inns: Middle Temple, posting information reproduced from the Middle Temple
members’ list known as Sturgess volume II; posted on web July 2010. Mohammad Yusuf appears in Sturgess volume II
p674. Whereas most barristers in this
list have an address in England, there isn’t one for Mohammad Yusuf.
Training at the Middle Temple and at Cambridge University: Times
issues of 20 June 1892; 25 August 1892; 21 June 1905; 13 January 1913; 2 April
1913.
For general information on the training of barristers, see website www.middletemple.org.uk, , its document The
Role of the Inns of Court in the Provision of Education and Training for the
Bar; though it’s a modern document, not a history of the subject, so there’s
nothing specific about courses taken by those training for the ICS.
ICS CAREER
India Office Lists for 1913; 1918; 1926, 1928.
MOHAMMAD YUSUF AND LIZZIE GRACE CARGILL
Website archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com has details posted in 2003 by
Jonathan Gentry of Toronto who is a descendant of Lizzie Grace’s cousin.
Website freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com is the page for the
Pasley family of London, Sheffield and Nottinghamshire; information posted by
Kit Withers who I think is a descendant of Mohammad Yusuf and Lizzie
Grace. Withers says that Zain Maurice
Yusuf married Elizabeth Mary Clarke in 1919; and that James Dudley Cargill
married Albina Benvenuta Comba in Calcutta in 1893.
THE CHANGE OF NAME BY DEED POLL
London Gazette 27 August 1926 p5679 for Zain Maurice Yusuf, from now
on Zain Maurice Dean. And p5680 for the
man baptised Maurice Yusuf but generally known as Mohammad (sic) Yusuf. He will in future be known as Yusuf Maurice
Dean. Both changes of name by deed poll
are dated 25 August 1926.
GD MEMBER’S SON ZAIN MAURICE DEAN
General Medical Council Registers issue of 1931: Dean, Zain Maurice
formerly Yusuf, now of 9 Stanstead Grove, Stanstead Road Catford SE6. 1st registered with the GMC May
1925. MRCS 1924. LRCP 1924.
Medical Register part 1 issued by GMC 1957 p525 he’s still in the
list.
Copywright SALLY DAVIS
19 October 2013
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