This
file continues the life-by-dates of Henry Pullen-Burry and his wife Rose
Pullen-Burry née Anwyl: it covers 1882 to 1898 and includes the period when
they were both members of the Order of the Golden Dawn.
17 MAY
1882
Henry
Pullen-Burry married Rose Anwyl at St Mary’s Balham.
Sources:
The Lancet 1882 p935 and Medical Times and Gazette 1882 p598.
Comment
by Sally Davis: I haven’t found any clue as to how Henry and Rose met. It’s just a hunch that they did not know each
other until they were in their 20s and Henry was living in London.
HENRY
AND ROSE TOGETHER
JUNE
1883
Henry
and Rose’s first child, Ethel Pullen-Burry, was born, in Baldock.
Source:
Familysearch England-ODM GS number 1537857 IT 2-5.
JANUARY
1884
Henry
went to Colchester to take an exam in military tactics. At that time, he was a Lieutenant in the
First Hertfordshire Royal Volunteers. He passed the exam and was awarded a
certificate the following April.
Source:
announcement in the Hertford Mercury and Reformer 12 April 1884, p2,
found online for me by my contact in Canberra.
Comment
by Sally Davis: other than his own spiritualist
anecdote, told many years later and without dates, this is the only source for
Henry in the volunteer force. I would think
that he didn’t join another regiment once he had moved away from
Hertfordshire.
1884,
PROBABLY AFTER APRIL THAT YEAR
Henry
was appointed to the medical staff of the Midhurst Poor Law Union in Sussex;
working in its Milland District. Henry and Rose moved to the small village
of Bramshott in Hampshire.
Sources:
For
the appointment: Lancet 1884 p807.
For
his working in general practice as well: Reports from Committees Session
1890 volume XI covering 11 February to 18 August 1890 in the House of Lords;
Paper 225. Together with the Proceedings
of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. GB House of Lords Select Committee on
Children’s Life Insurance Bill.
Published Eyre and Spottiswoode 1890, printed by Henry Hansard and
Son. Online version found by Roger
Wright in the outer reaches of archive.org.
Minutes of Evidence but especially pp23-24 for Henry’s
qualifications and experience.
1884
TO EARLY NOVEMBER
Charles
Webster Leadbeater was curate of Bramshott and Liphook.
Comment
by Sally Davis: thanks are due to Rose and Henry’s descendant Anwyl, who
emailed me in June 2017 to alert me to this curious coincidence. Rose and Henry were never in the Theosophical
Society but by the time they arrived in Liphook, C W Leadbeater was a member of
its London Lodge. Even if the Pullen
Burrys were not regular church-goers, they must have at least been introduced
to Leadbeater as a fellow resident of the villages of Liphook and Bramshott. Leadbeater had been ordained in the Church of
England, and given the job as curate, as the result of efforts made by his
mother’s brother-in-law, Rev William Wolfe Capes. Capes was rector of
Bramshott and Liphook from 1869 to 1901, but as he was often away, he needed a
curate to take care of the parish in his absence. Giving the job to Leadbeater also solved the
problem of finding an income for Charles and his widowed mother Emma. Early in November 1884, Leadbeater resigned
from the Church of England in order to go to India with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
and Colonel Olcott.
Sources:
see their wikipedia pages for information on Charles Webster Leadbeater and Rev
William Wolfe Capes. Capes was an historian; he published a series of works using
documents in the library at Hereford Cathedral; and some classical histories.
At
theosoph.ph/encyclo the entry for Charles Webster Leadbeater describes his very
sudden decision to abandon the CofE and follow Blavatsky. They sailed from England on 5 November 1884. Leadbeater became a Buddhist shortly after.
Evangelicalism
in the Church of England c 1790 to c 1890: A
Miscellany editors Mark Smith, Stephen Taylor. Woodbridge: Boydell 2004. In footnotes: p149 footnote 56: William Wolfe
Capes 1834-1914 was rector of Bramshott 1869-1901.
The
1881 census shows Charles and his mother Emma living at Hertford Cottage,
Headley Road in the hamlet of Liphook.
LATE
1884
Henry
and Rose’s only son, Henry, was born and registered with the confusing name
Henry Burry Burry.
Source:
freebmd. As an adult and in the
permanent absence of his father, the GD Henry’s son used the surname
Pullen-Burry.
AFTER
1884 BUT POSSIBLY QUITE SOON AFTER
Henry
was initiated into the freemasonry craft lodge Carnarvon Lodge 804. He then joined its Royal Arch Chapter. The lodge and chapter were based in Havant,
where they had their own masonic hall.
Comment
by Sally Davis: my information is about the Chapter rather than the lodge it
was attached to; but I think I’m OK in assuming that Henry joined the Chapter
as a member of the Carnarvon craft Lodge 804.
Source:
Generally
on freemasonry:
Freemasons’ Library at freemasonry.london.museum, which has a
searchable catalogue and access to digitised freemasons’ magazines to around
1900. In
August 2016 I searched the digitised magazines.
There were plenty of responses to the search term ‘Burry’; but all but
the one from 1896 (see below) turned out to refer to G C Burry - George Cook
Burry - Henry’s distant relation from the branch of the Burry family based in
Christchurch Hampshire.
Source
for Henry in Carnarvon Chapter 804:
The
Freemason’s Chronicle March 1896 p4: report
on that year’s installation meeting of the Carnarvon Royal Arch Chapter 804.
General
source for Carnarvon Lodge 804 and its Chapter:
Carnarvon
Lodge 804 Havant: By-Laws and History, prepared by W W B
Beach; J le Feuvre; and E Goble who are all members and were able to base their
account on the lodge’s Minute books, account books and a Manuscript lodge
history. Printed 1893. Particularly pp22-32. The lodge had been consecrated in 1860. As the lodge and chapter were in Havant,
Henry was unlikely to have known about them, or have been acquainted with any
of their members, until he went to work for the Midhurst Poor Law Board. Henry is not named in the account of the
lodge’s history. However, the history
does mention that a group of members left to found their own lodge, in the
early 1880s. Carnarvon Lodge 804 then
made a big effort to recruit new members, beginning in the mid-1880s just when
Henry and Rose arrived in Bramshott. Carnarvon
Lodge 804's Royal Arch Chapter had been consecrated in 1873. In 1879, one of its members was Eugene Edward
Street, who later joined the GD.
PROBABLY
BETWEEN 1884 AND 1897
Henry
was initiated as a Master Mark Mason, a group of freemasons independent of the
United Grand Lodge of England.
Source
for Henry being an MMM: Gerald Yorke Collection of GD and Crowley papers, now
at the Warburg Institute University of London.
Catalogue number NS73: letter sent by Frederick Leigh Gardner to Henry
on 30 September 1897.
General
sources for Master Mark Masonry: the Grand Lodge of Master Mark Masons has a
website at www.glmmm.com but
there’s not much on it about its history.
There’s a wiki on its history and www.markmastermasonscornwall.org.uk has a history page in preparation. I haven’t got access to the Mark Masonry
Grand Lodge in London so if there are any lodge/chapter histories there, I
can’t get at them.
1885-98
Henry
and Rose lived in Bramshott, where Henry worked as a GP in addition to doing
his workhouse duties. Yew Tree House, on
Station Road, was where they were living when they were in the GD. The GD only took its first initiates in 1888
and I don’t think Henry and Rose knew any of the early members; but later in
his life Henry mentioned that he and Rose were having spiritualist seances
before they joined the GD; sitting at the kitchen table, sometimes with guests
but sometimes with just the two of them.
When there were just the two of them, Rose acted as the medium using the
automatic writing technique.
Sources:
For
when they arrived in Bramshott: GMC Register 1885 p194.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Liphook was a small place and Bramshott even smaller but when
the Pullen Burrys lived there it did have one resident of note - the botanist
Mary Ann Robb who built Chitlee Place and its arboretum in 1880.
Source
for the seances: Unpublished set of typescripts at the Freemasons’ Library
catalogued as
SRIA1938m. Volume 3,
Science and Hermetic Philosophy Part 2: March 1920 Lecture 111 p665.
1886
Winifred
Margaret Pullen Burry was born, Henry and Rose’s last child.
Source:
freebmd; Winifred was registered in Wandsworth - perhaps born while Rose was
visiting her parents.
1887
or 1888
Henry
acquired a manuscript of mystical writings by a Kabbalist he later called ‘Heer
Rose’ or ‘Heer Rose of The Hague’.
Although he did not pay the writings any real attention for nearly 20
years, when he was older he saw his coming across them or being offered them as
a defining moment in his life. It
certainly was an important staging-post in his progress towards being the Adept
he considered himself to be, when preparing a set of lectures around 1920.
Source
for Henry’s acquisition of the manuscript and his attitudes towards it:
unpublished set of typescripts at the Freemasons’ Library catalogued as SRIA1938m. Volume 3, Science and Hermetic Philosophy
Part 1: February 1919 Lecture 60 p355; though by this time Henry couldn’t
remember exactly when Heer Rose’s works had come to his hand.
Comment
by Sally Davis on Heer Rose, 27 January 2016.
While I was working my way through the typescripts SRIA1938m, I was
never very sure I believed in Heer Rose’s existence. I could see how very useful it would be if
Henry invented such a person and efforts by me, Roger Wright and Adam P Forrest
of Portland Oregon failed to find anything more than a photo. Eventually I asked Susan Snell, archivist at
the Freemasons’ Library, if she had any contacts in
the
Willem
Nicolaas Rose was born in 1801 at Cheribon in the Dutch East Indies (now
Indonesia). From 1819 to 1822 he was a
pupil at the artillery school in Delft, training as an engineer/architect. He was employed by the city of Rotterdam from
1839 to 1855. His last project for the
city - a sewage and water purification system - brought him to national
attention, and in 1858 he accepted the job of chief architect to the Dutch
government in The Hague. He retired in
1867 and died in 1877. In 1824 he had
married Johanna Maria van Alphen, a member of another Dutch family with East
Indies connections. So far, so
respectable, but in his spare time Heer Rose was a spiritualist medium, using
the automatic writing technique to convey messages from the beyond which
described (amongst other things) great battles between angels and devils. It was the language in which Heer Rose wrote
these messages down - very Book of Revelations - that convinced some people who
attended seances with him that he was an Old Testament prophet updated, writing
down the exact words of God. His visions
were publicised in the Netherlands by the magazine Spiritistisch tijdschrift,
edited by Frederik Willem Roorda van Eysinga (1827-97) and published
intermittently between 1872 and 1881.
Many
thanks to Susan, and to Jac, for doing so much to bridge the gap between Heer
Rose and Henry Pullen-Burry. However,
there are still gaps left. It’s a
nuisance, but none of the Dutch information on Heer Rose mentions the
Kabbalistic writings that Henry Pullen Burry acquired: perhaps for the very
reason that he had acquired them and they had thus gone beyond the knowledge of
Dutch historians. And how did Henry get
to know about them? The way Henry spoke
of Heer Rose in his later lectures, I don’t think the two men ever met. Did someone take them to England, intending
to sell them there, after Heer Rose’s death?
Or did Henry come across them in the Netherlands somehow? There’s a small clue in Oliver Gee’s thesis
that at least in the early 1900s there was contact between spiritualists in
England and the Netherlands; but it’s all rather tenuous.
Sources
for Willem Nicolaas Rose (all in Dutch of course):
The
photo of Heer Rose found by Roger Wright can be seen at //media-kitlv.nl,
website of the Universiteit Leiden Digital Image Library, digital collection of
the University of Leiden.
Sources
found by Jan Piepenbrock:
There’s
a wiki on him at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Nicolaas_Rose, using
these sources:
C A A de Graaf in Rotterdaam jaarboekje 1954: 177-208
on the water purification works. The
wiki has a link to the article.
E M
Berens W N Rose 1801-77 published Rotterdam 2001; Stedenbouw civiele
techniek en architectur.
Entry
in www.stadsarchief.rotterdam.nl
Oliver
Gee’s thesis presented to the University of Amsterdam in 2011: Wolken met
Gouden Boorden. Google translated it
as: Clouds with Golden Edges. Its
subtitle in English is: the Last Two Historical Novels of H J Schimmel in the
Light of his Spiritualist Beliefs.
On p3
a note on the cover photos says that the one of H J Schimmel, probably taken in
1903, shows him reading a copy of Light, the magazine of the London
Spiritualist Alliance.
Information
on S F W Roorda van Eysinga: dates and early life - p7, p24. His support of the ideas of the French
spiritualist Allan Kardec (who believed in spiritualism and reincarnation) -
p24. Spiritistisch tijdschrift
and its publication of automatic writing by Heer Rose as medium - p33 footnote
34, p36 footnote 55. Roorda van
Eysinga’s client/guru relationship with Willem Nicolaas Rose - p36 and p36
footnotes 53, 55, 56.
The information on Roorda van Eysinga and Heer Rose is from letters
Roorda van Eysinga wrote between 1872 and 1886, with Rose’s influence
continuing after his death. The letters
are now at Harmonia, the Collection of the Dutch Association of Spiritualists.
That
Willem Nicolaas Rose was not a freemason although his father was: membership
lists for Dutch and Dutch-speaking freemasons’ lodges at
http://dare.uva.nl/cgi/arno/show.cgi?fid=343363
Simon
Hendrik Rose (1769-1823) was member of Lodge ‘La Vertueuse’ in Batavia
(Djakarta).
A
final comment: Spiritistisch tijdschrift is the only magazine to publish
any of Heer Rose’s spiritualist writings.
And if the Kabbalistic manuscript Henry Pullen Burry had in his
possession is still in existence, someone is keeping very quiet about it. It was probably thrown away decades ago - the
only evidence of Heer Rose as a scholar of the Kabbala.
Comment
by Sally Davis 16 March 2016 on Heer Rose and English spiritualism; based on
sources hunted out for me by my co-worker on Henry Pullen-Burry, Adam P Forrest
of Portland Oregon.
It was
always a puzzle to me when I was going through those typescripts as to how
Henry could have come across automatic writings made by Heer Rose as a
medium. Thanks to Adam, I now see that
Henry could have been aware of Heer Rose as early as 1872, though that seems
rather early for him. The spiritualist
newspaper The Medium and Daybreak reported in November 1872 on the visit
to the Netherlands of Mr Herne and Mr Williams, English spiritualists, who took
Katy King with them to act as medium at several seances organised by Dutch
spiritualist A J Riko of The Hague. Heer
Rose and Roorda van Eysinga attended one of those seances.
Henry’s
a bit more likely to have seen an extract from an article in The Herald of
Progress in 1881. The Herald of
Progress was published in Newcastle-upon-Tyne but was easily available in
London through E W Allen of 11 Ave Maria Lane EC. The article had originally been published in Revue
Spirite, Journal d’Études Psychologique, the French spiritualist monthly;
which was also relatively easy to gain access to in London - there was an
advert for it in the same edition of The Herald of Progress in which the
article appeared. The article in The
Herald of Progress was in English, a translation of what I suppose must have
been an original in French; and this explains something else I’ve wondered
about, with Henry and Heer Rose: surely Heer Rose’s writings must have been in
Dutch, which I’m quite sure Henry couldn’t understand. Now it seems some of them at least could be
read in French, the whole idea of Henry being so influenced by Heer Rose is
much more of a going concern. The
article as it appeared in The Herald of Progress was called Transitional Man. Even if Henry didn’t read the article in
1882, Heer Rose’s automatic writings on this species supposedly sitting between
Man and the Apes were in the papers Henry obtained in the late 1880s and had
with him even in his last years. See the
last file in this sequence for how important Henry thought Heer Rose’s idea of
a transitional species was; for him, they did away with the need for Darwin’s
theory of descent by natural selection - Henry hated the idea that Man was
descended from the apes.
The
final references Adam Forrest found were from the very time that Henry thought
he had obtained the manuscripts of Heer Rose’s writings. Two articles appeared in the English
spiritualist journal Light..., both attributed to a writer with the
writing name “1st M.B. (Lond)”.
The first was published in 1888: How to be Happy. It used writings by Heer Rose as a guide to
achieving a happy life. The second - The
Object of History - was published in 1890 and subtitled Spirit Communications Through W N Rose. In
it, the author described how Heer Rose’s automatic writing explained history,
as “great events...arranged in due order, for the attainment of a definite
purpose”; and progress, as part of the Creator’s plan for His universe, moving
towards a “universal civilisation” based on virtue and wisdom. Like the Transitional Man species, Heer
Rose’s concept of where modern progress was heading, was fundamental to Henry’s
later understanding of the purpose and meaning of his own life.
Almost
I’m tempted to say that “1st M.B. (Lond)” was Henry Pullen-Burry
himself. I’ve decided to stop myself
from doing so, because he published so little: only one item that I know of, a
short book on the Kabbalah, and that right at the end of his life. Even the typescripts of Henry’s lectures to
his spiritualist group in Portland (late 1910s/early 1920s) were not published,
just circulated amongst occultists.
Sources
for the early references to Heer Rose in the English press:
The
Medium and Daybreak: A Weekly Journal Devoted to the History, Phenomena,
Philosophy and Teachings of Spiritualism. Published London, from offices in Southampton
Row WC and available through agents in most British cities; editor and
publisher is James Burns. Volume 3 number 139 issue of 29 November 1872 p465-66 and p470 for
the publishing details.
In the
1890s, A J Riko was editing a Dutch spiritualist magazine called Sphinx:
see Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult and Mystical Research,
published in London by the Eclectic Publishing Co Ltd of 2 Duke St
Adelphi. Volume 14 1894
number 710 issue of Saturday 18 August 1894 p386.
The
Herald of Progress: A Weekly Journal devoted to the philosophy and teachings of
spiritualism. Volume 2 1881.
Publication and distribution details p344; small ads p351 including
adverts for Revue Spirite and also The Theosophist. Volume
2 number 44 issue of Friday 13 May 1881 pp299-300 and volume 2 number 47 issue
of Friday 8 June 1881 pp340-41: The Transitional Man. At the end of the article was was a letter
from John Yarker, written after reading the first part of it. Yarker says that at seances that he’d been
present at in 1876 and 1877, the medium had seen creatures similar to those
described by Heer Rose: at the end of the short letter, brief synopses of what
the medium had desc at those sessions, w dates in 1876 and 1877. So the idea of a transitional species was not
just confined to Heer Rose in the late 1870s.
John Yarker was a freemason and a well-known figure in occult circles.
And
the two articles by “1st M.B. (Lond)”:
Light:
A Journal of Psychical, Occult and Mystical Research published in London by the Eclectic Publishing Co Ltd of 2 Duke
St Adelphi. Volume 8 1888 number 410
issue of Saturday 10 November 1888: pp550-51.
And volume 10 1890 number 481 issue of Saturday 22 March 1890 p139.
After
that long digression on Henry and Heer Rose of The Hague, back to the
life-by-dates:
EARLY
1889
Henry’s
mother Emily Burry (sic) died, aged only 57. IF she’s the person
referred to in the source below, on the evening of her funeral, her family held
a seance with her psychic son as the medium.
At that seance the recently-dead mother (possibly Emily Burry) spoke
through her psychic son to say that she had already seen the Saviour, who had
recognised her.
Sources:
For the death freebmd. I couldn’t find any newspaper coverage of the
funeral.
For
the seance and ?Emily’s communication with her son:
Unpublished
set of typescripts at the Freemasons’ Library catalogued as SRIA1938m. Volume 3, Science and Hermetic Philosophy
Part 1: December 1919 Lecture 102 p 607.
ALL
DAY ON 14TH APRIL 1890 AND AGAIN ON 16 APRIL
Henry
and other important figures in the parishes of Headley, Bramshott and Selborne
walked the boundaries between the parishes to reach agreement on exactly they
were.
Comment
by Sally Davis: with the Poor Law operating at parish level, this was not just
an interesting day out for antiquarians.
This beating of the bounds had been called for by the parish overseers
and financial and legal issues would be decided by the results of it. Despite the effort’s serious purpose,
everybody does seem to have had a good time, especially on the first of the two
days, when they were treated to lunch at Mr Whitaker’s house in Headley.
Source:
local history webpages at www.johnowensmith.co.uk/headley/bram1890.htm: Contemporary Account of the Perambulation of the Bounds of
Headley and Bramshott Parishes in the Year 1890.
Quick
comment by Sally Davis: just to say that at least in 1890, in outward appearance Henry was
still living as a middle-class professional and responsible member of a rural
community.
FRIDAY
27 JUNE 1890
Henry
gave was one of several doctors who gave evidence to the House of Lords Select
Committee in connection with a proposed Children’s Life Insurance Bill. He made allegations about patients he had had
in Arlesey in Hertfordshire that were very upsetting to the people of Arlesey;
most of which were challenged or even refuted by local officials.
Sources:
At hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1890/jun/16/second-reading
coverage originally in volume 345 pp961-91 of the Bill’s 2nd reading
in the House of Lords, on 16 June 1890.
Reports
from Committees Session 1890 volume XI
covering 11 February to 18 August 1890 in the House of Lords; Paper 225. Together with the Proceedings of the
Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix.
GB House of Lords Select Committee on Children’s Life Insurance
Bill. Published Eyre and Spottiswoode
1890, printed by Henry Hansard and Son.
Online version found by Roger Wright in the outer reaches of
archive.org. Minutes of Evidence but
especially pp23-26 for what Henry said.
Times Mon 30 June 1890 p9 Children’s Life Assurance: Select
Committee. There was no coverage of the
evidence heard, but the names of the Committee members and those who had given
evidence on 27 June 1890 were listed.
Comment
by Sally Davis: though he had been in general practice in Liphook for six years
by this time, Henry evidence was about his practice in Hertfordshire,
specifically about the patients he had in the village of Arlesey. He wanted to tell the Committee that he had
come across quite a few cases of suspicious deaths amongst infants of families
living in Arlesey, and thought that the children had been allowed to die - when
medical treatment could have saved them - so their parents could claim on the
child’s insurance policy. He said that
the practice was particularly widespread amongst the village’s most “wretched”
and “depraved” group of families, whose fathers drank and whose children were
nearly all illegitimate. Pressed by
several Committee members, he had to admit that his opinion was hearsay - based
on what was ‘common knowledge’ in the village; that he had never refused to
issue a death certificate, however suspicious he might have been as to the
circumstances; and that he did not know of any case where a parent had been
prosecuted as the result of a child’s death in Arlesey. Asked which insurance companies were
operating in the district, Henry referred to the Prudential by name, and
mentioned another firm though he couldn’t remember the name of that one.
In
justice to Henry, I will say that other witnesses giving evidence to the
Committee were saying the same things.
However, they seem to have been a bit more discreet about naming names
and places. The Bill had been sponsored
by the NSPCC, and was being guided through the House of Lords by the bishop of
Peterborough, Dr William Connor Magee, who had been made the Select Committee’s
chairman.
Source
for Dr Magee: see wikipedia.
16
JULY 1890
Letters
challenging Henry’s assertions about the residents of Arlesey were handed to
the Select Committee as part of the evidence of Thomas Charles Dewey, senior
manager at the Prudential Insurance Company.
Sources:
Reports
from Committees Session 1890 volume XI
covering 11 February to 18 August 1890 in the House of Lords; Paper 225. Together with the Proceedings of the
Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix.
GB House of Lords Select Committee on Children’s Life Insurance
Bill. Published Eyre and Spottiswoode
1890, printed by Henry Hansard and Son.
Online version found by Roger Wright in the outer reaches of
archive.org. Minutes of Evidence 16 July
1890 pp146-147 evidence of Thomas Charles Dewey.
Comment
by Sally Davis: the outraged Arlesey locals included the Medical Officer of the
Poor Law Union; the clerk to the local School Board, who sent statistics
showing the relatively low number of illegitimate children in the village; the
Registrar of births, marriages and deaths, stating how few of the death
certificates signed by Henry were of children who were insured; and the vicar
of Arlesey, saying how upset the villagers were and saying that most children’s
deaths could be attributed to ignorance of basic child and sick care, they weren’t
the result of wilful neglect.
17
JULY 1890
The
anger at Arlesey about Henry’s Select Committee evidence was mentioned in the
Times; and Henry was named as having caused it.
Times: 17 July 1890 p12 Child Life Assurance. The report was short and only the vicar of
Arlesey’s letter of objection was mentioned.
No details were given of all the facts collected by local officials to
challenge Henry’s allegations. Perhaps
the Times reporter agreed with Henry’s point of view, despite the
evidence.
For a
modern assessment of whether Henry and his medical colleagues were justified, see www.tandfonline.com/doi: article by Daniel J R
Grey: Liable to Very Great Abuse. The
article’s purport is that there was no good evidence of widespread child murder
for the sake of collecting on the dead child’s life insurance; and the lack was
widely acknowledged as early as 1914.
The attitudes of witnesses like Henry Pullen-Burry was indicative of a
middle-class hostility towards working-class lifestyles which came out in more
than just allegations about wilful child neglect. The 1890 Bill was sponsored by the NSPCC,
which had recently been founded.
Final
comment by Sally Davis, 5 January 2017: thanks are due to two people for
galvanising me to produce this new section on Henry’s evidence to the House of
Lords, and its consequences: Henry’s great-great-grand-daughter who asked if I
could find a copy of the Select Committee evidence, after the House of Lords
had lost theirs; and Roger Wright, who found one in the further reaches of
archive.org after I’d been defeated, trying to pin it down in the British
Library catalogue.
18
NOVEMBER 1890
Henry
(but not Rose) attended one of the London Spiritualist Alliance’s regular
evening meetings, held at their headquarters, 2 Duke Street Adelphi, London
WC. The main speaker that evening was
Alice Gordon, whose talk was about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s powers of
telekinesis. Mrs Gordon was already a
member of the GD - she was initiated in December 1889. So it’s possible that Henry first found out
about the GD’s existence, through Alice Gordon.
Source: Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult and
Mystical Research published in London by the Eclectic Publishing Co Ltd of
2 Duke Street Adelphi. Light...
was a major spiritualist weekly, published from 1880 into the 1930s. Volume 10 number 517, issue
of Saturday 29 November 1890 p575.
Comment
by Sally Davis: as well as checking out 1890, I also looked at the volume of Light...
published in 1895. I only found the one
reference to Henry, so he wasn’t a very active member of the London
Spiritualist Alliance; but then, he lived out of town.
5
MARCH 1891
Henry’s
father John Pullen Burry died. IF it’s
his father Henry is talking about, in the SRIA 1938m source below, John’s ghost
wandered around the market garden for a couple of weeks after he’d died,
unwilling to let the business go; and then made a last appearance in front of
one of his sons who lived quite a long way off (possibly Henry himself). On a more down-to-earth note, John’s
executors were his son Horace, his daughter Emily, and Ernest Henry Blaker. He left a personal
estate of £7337.
Sources:
freebmd and Probate Registry 1891.
Unpublished
set of typescripts at the Freemasons’ Library catalogued as SRIA1938m. Volume 3, Science and Hermetic Philosophy
Part 1: December 1919 Lecture 101 p 606 though not all the details Henry gives
seem to fit John Pullen as the subject of the anecdote.
Comment
on strife in the Pullen-Burry family, by Sally Davis: my contact in Canberra
sent me a transcript of quite a long report on the funeral of John Pullen
Burry, published in the Sussex Agricultural Express 10 March 1891
p3. Three of his children didn’t attend:
Louisa, who had died; Hubert, who was probably in New Zealand; and Henry, with
less excuse. I’ve suggested that Henry
Pullen-Burry and his father didn’t get on; the absence of Henry and Rose at
this crisis tends to confirm my guess.
Though it might have been Henry’s siblings that he wanted to avoid,
there’s something about the tone of the report, that makes me wonder whether
John Pullen Burry was a respected man, but not one who was well liked. Amongst the other mourners were George Cook
Burry, of the branch of the Burry family that was now based in Hampshire; and
Ernest Henry Blaker, as the family solicitor.
John Pullen Burry was buried in Sompting churchyard, near his Burry
ancestors.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Ernest Henry Blaker was based in Chichester. Source: The Law Journal volume 85 1938
p115 an obituary of him, as solicitor and for 30 years the Registrar of
Chichester County Court.
John
Pullen Burry’s sons Horace John and Arthur took over the business; and his
daughter Emily may also have played an active role in it though one less
acknowledged in the sources I found.
Sources:
At www.familychest.co.uk a Conveyance of October
1893 was up for sale; to which Horace John, Emily and Ernest Henry Blaker were
signatories, as they tidied up John Pullen’s estate.
The
Gardener’s Chronicle 1913: by this time the
firm is known as H and A Pullen-Burry.
Municipal
Yearbook and Public Utilities Directory 1924
p220 shows Arthur Pullen-Burry living at
Rectory
House, Sompting.
At www.roll-of-honour.com/Sussex/Sompting, there’s a photo of the Sompting war memorial. Hilary, son of Horace John and Alma; and
Cyril son of Arthur; were both killed in World War 1.
APRIL
1891 - not long after the funeral
On
census day 1891 Henry and Rose Pullen-Burry were still living at Yew Tree
House, Station Road, Bramshott, with Ethel (6), Henry (5) and Winifred
(3). They employed two live-in servants
- their tasks aren’t specified but they were probably a skivvy and a housemaid,
or a skivvy and a nurse. As this was a
rural household, they also employed a groom to look after either a horse or
(depending on how prosperous Henry was) a carriage, for Henry to use to visit
patients.
Less
than a month after their father’s death, Henry’s sisters Mary and Emily, and
his brothers Arthur and Walter were all still living at Rectory House Sompting;
employing a cook and a housemaid. Horace
and his wife Alma were living at West Cottage Sompting with their daughter
Dorothy and two servants. Henry’s brother
Hubert wasn’t on the census; he had probably already gone to New Zealand. Bessie, who always seems to have lived a life
completely apart from the rest of the family, was staying in a boarding house
at 20 Old Steyne, Brighton.
Source:
1891 census.
Further
on Hubert by Sally Davis: website www.thepeerage.com which uses Burke’s Peerage as its source, says that Hubert
Pullen-Burry married Marion Hariette Olivia Cooke in 1896; she was the daughter
of a civil engineer, Charles Edward Cooke.
1931 edition of Debretts says Hubert and Marion were living in
Auckland NZ at that time. See www.geni.com and familysearch for
him having died in Wellington NZ in 1956.
EARLY
1890s
Henry
was elected as an officer in the Carnarvon Royal Arch Chapter 804.
Comment
by Sally Davis: any freemasons’ lodge or chapter has a hierarchy of officers
which administer the lodge and carry out its rituals. Anyone willing to be an officer is first
elected at a low level. They then spend
one year at each higher level, ending with a year in the top post - Worshipful
Master in a craft lodge.
Source
for Henry in the hierarchy of Carnarvon R A Chapter
804:
The
Freemason’s Chronicle March 1896 p4 Ryl
Arch. Rpt of the
quarterly mtg of Carnarvon Chapter 804, Tues 18th ult; no venue gvn. It was the installn mtg: “H B Pullen Burry”
was one of the officers f cmg year: “N”.
He’s 2 down from the chapter’s WM-equiv.
After the mtg, the banquet but again no venue gvn.
NOVEMBER
1892
Henry’s initiation into the Golden Dawn’s outer order.
Source:
RAG p150.
14
MARCH 1894
Henry
was initiated into the GD’s 2nd Order. Once in the 2nd Order you were
allowed to do practical magic. All
members of the 2nd Order had a second motto. Henry chose the Latin phrase ‘Deus et lex’.
Sources:
For
the date of the initiation: RAG p150.
For Henry’s 2nd Order motto. The records of the
Isis-Urania temple’s 2nd Order have not survived and as a result
hardly any 2nd Order mottos are known. However, Henry used his in a series of
letters to Paul Foster Case in the early 1920s.
The letters have not been published but in March 2010 Jim Eshelman
posted extracts from them onto the Temple of Thelema website at www.heruraha.net. Thanks to Adam Forrest of Portland Oregon for
sending the extracts to me.
AFTER
14 MARCH 1894 TO END 1895
Henry
served as the GD’s sub-cancellarius.
Source:
RAG p32, and p50-51 for the work of the cancellarius and sub-cancellarius.
Comment
by Sally Davis: the job title ‘cancellarius’ or ‘sub-cancellarius’ sounds
impressive but on a daily basis it involved helping to manage the Order’s
budget, by way of sending out reminders of yearly subscriptions due; notifiying
members of the dates and places of rituals and other formal meetings; supervise
the exams initiates needed to take to progress to the 2nd Order; and
keeping track of members’ addresses (no easy task when people moved house so
often). Just noting that RAG p32 doesn’t
give an exact date for when Henry became sub-cancellarius, the date of after 14
March is mine; I don’t think that - given the requirement to supervise exams -
the job would have been thought appropriate for someone not in the 2nd
Order.
20
MARCH 1894
Rose Pullen-Burry’s GD initiation.
Source:
RAG p152.
PROBABLY
1895 though possibly as early as 1893
Two GD
Flying Rolls were compiled to which Henry contributed: numbers 8, and 33.
Sources
for the texts:
RAG The GD Companion p115, p117 but neither are
dated.
Try
also: Francis King’s Ritual Magic in England 1887 to Present Day
published Spearman 1970; or his Magic, The Western
Tradition published Thames and
The
dates of both flying rolls are uncertain.
In
their The Chronology of the Golden Dawn Mary K Greer and Darcy Kuntz
give a specific date for Flying Roll 8 of 25 February 1893 (p24); they assign
Flying Roll 33 to some time in 1895 (p27).
Holmes Publishing Group, Postal
However,
Adam P Forrest is not so sure about Flying Roll 8:
Argument
for an 1895 date for Flying Roll 8, by Adam P Forrest, using R A Gilbert’s transcription of Westcott’s Catalogue of the
Flying Rolls: Flying Roll VIII was originally "Enoch Suggestions",
and the original issue date was 25 February 1893. "Enoch Suggestions"
was later erased, and replaced with "Geometric Pentagram." According
to R A Gilbert, the date was changed to 1895 when the
name of the Roll was replaced. If you're
interested, William Wynn Westcott was apparently willing to have the Roll
copied for a fee, and the price was 1 shilling.
A bit
more on Flying Roll 8, including some information which might indicate a date,
by Sally Davis:
Flying
Roll 8 is A Geometrical Way to Draw a Pentagram. All Henry’s own work. Assuming that you must be in the 2nd
Order to take part in building the flying roll library of rituals, Flying Roll
8 must be from after March 1894. The
Gerald Yorke Collection of GD and Crowley papers, now at the Warburg Institute
University of London: Catalogue Number NS57 is a notebook of uncertain origin,
bought by Gerald Yorke in 1950 at Sothebys.
On its p63 someone has written out Flying Roll VIII; and on p64 they’ve
drawn the pentagram according to its instructions, in red and black ink and
with some annotations as to the meaning of the pentagram’s points. You need a pair of compasses to get the
pentagram right.
Adam P
Forrest agrees with Greer and Kuntz about Flying Roll 33:
Flying
Roll 23, by Adam P Forrest, again using R A Gilbert’s
transcription of Westcott’s Catalogue of Flying Rolls: Flying Roll XXXIII had
originally been "New Regulations," which NOM had erased and replaced
with "Enoch Visions" on his catalogue list. Unfortunately, he had
stopped dating the Rolls in his catalogue entirely by then. The last dated Roll
was number XXIX, issued November 3, 1894, so the Enochian Visions was probably
issued in 1895. As it was a long Roll, the price for copying it was listed as
5/6.
Some
more information on Flying Roll 23, and a hint at a date of after mid-1894, by
Sally Davis:
Flying
Roll 33 is Seven Visions of Squares upon the Enochian Tablets, to which 5
people contributed: Helen Rand (visions 1 and 2); Annie Horniman (vision 3);
Henry (vision 4); Pamela Bullock (visions 5 and 6); and Edward William Berridge
(vision 7). . As Pamela Bullock’s
married name is used rather than Carden, her maiden name, Flying Roll 33 must
be later than June 1894, the month she married Percy Bullock.
16
MARCH 1895
Rose
Pullen-Burry’s father Thomas Anwyl died.
Sources:
freebmd; probate registry records.
Comment
by Sally Davis: I think, from what happened to Rose’s mother and sisters after
her father’s death, that he had not left them much money.
EARLY
1895
Henry
did his best to prevent Alice Isabel Simpson from being initiated into the
GD. Many year
later he said of Mrs Simpson: “I knew the woman well, and protected in words as
well as in action as Cancellarius against her advancement” before being over-ruled by Mathers.
Sources and comments by Sally Davis. The source is Henry, writing to Paul Foster Case; date unknown but
in a sequence of letters written between January and July 1921; that is to say,
over 25 years after the events he’s mentioning.
See a long extract from the letter at website www.heruraha.net. It’s interesting that Henry knew Alice Isabel
before she joined the GD, but perhaps he didn’t; perhaps his involvement was as
one of those chosen to investigate whether she was a suitable candidate - a
process of enquiry which took place with virtually every potential recruit (see
1897/98 below for an account of the process from the receiving end, by Arthur
Conan Doyle). Why the subject of Alice
Isabel Simpson came up in Henry’s letter: Paul Foster Case’s 2nd
Order motto was Perseverantia - see www.golden-dawn.org/biocase.html; he was a
member of the Alpha et Omega Order’s New York-based
Source
for initiation and motto of Alice Isabel Simpson on 12 July 1895: RAG
p155. She was initiated into the 2nd
Order on 27 May 1899. If he’d been
around, Henry would probably have tried to stop this second initiation but by
then, he was long gone to the Klondike and couldn’t have done anything about it
even if he’d known it was going to happen.
Alice Isabel and her daughter Elaine Mary did take an active part in
Aleister Crowley’s attempt to take over the GD on Mathers’ behalf, in April
1900, and were expelled from the Order as a result; but again, Henry was either
still in northern Canada, or in the USA, in April 1900 and couldn’t have done
anything to help or hinder them.
An
easy-to-read account of what happened in April 1900: Ellic Howe chapter 15
pp219-232.
ALL OF
1896 AND 1897; and possibly EARLY 1898
Henry
must have done a good job as sub-cancellarius: at the beginning of 1896 he was
promoted to cancellarius when the previous holder of the post, Percy Bullock,
became sub-imperator. The cancellarius’ duties included
producing some yearly accounts for the Order’s hierarchy to consider; and a
list of current members and their progress as magicians - a kind of end-of-term
report.
Source:
RAG p32.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Henry will have prepared the accounts for 1896 and 1897; but
probably not those of 1898 and that might have been the point at which the GD
members began to wonder where he was.
MARCH
1896
In
Carnarvon Royal Arch Chapter 804, Henry reached the level of ‘N’ - Nehemiah; a
few levels down from the Chapter’s top job of First Principal.
Source:
The
Freemason’s Chronicle March 1896 p4.
Comment
by Sally Davis: if things had followed their usual plan - which they didn’t -
Henry should have served his year as the Chapter’s First Principal around
1899/1900.
LATE
AUGUST 1896
GD
member in Glasgow and active Scottish freemason Edward Macbean wrote to Henry
as one of the GD’s experts on the Kabbalah; asking how two particular Hebrew
words should be transcribed. A copy of
Henry’s reply has survived: he signed it ‘fraternally yours’ but he also ticked
Macbean off on two counts: because Henry had had to pay excess postage on
Macbean’s letter, which hadn’t had enough stamps on it; and because Macbean had
signed with his own name, rather than his GD motto.
Source:
Freemasons’ Library GD collection item GD 2/5/5/1, undated but with a pencil
note saying “Rec’d 25/8/96".
Comment
by Sally Davis: no doubt Henry thought that, as an official of the GD, he
should strive to maintain standards; but the letter is short and abrupt, he
comes over as unnecessarily officious and surely the excess postage he’d had to
pay can’t have been a great deal.
Perhaps the letter played upon worries he had about money on quite other
counts.
WINTER
1896-97
Henry
staved off trouble in the GD’s Isis-Urania temple.
Source:
Henry, writing to Paul Foster Case; date unknown but in a sequence of letters
dated January to July 1921. See a long
extract from the letter at website www.heruraha.net.
Comment
by Sally Davis: 1897 was a turbulent year and perhaps Henry did more behind the
scenes to guide the GD through it than is evident from the sources that have
survived. However, he was not able to
make Mathers change his mind about Annie Horniman; nor was he able to prevent
the disturbance caused by two major withdrawals of committed members of the
Isis-Urania temple later in 1897: William Wynn Westcott and Frederick Leigh
Gardner. I think that Henry is making himself out to be more influential in the
GD in the late 1890s than in fact he was, to impress Foster Case, a rising star
in the occult in America.
?3
DECEMBER 1896
Samuel
Liddell Mathers expelled Annie Horniman from the GD. Rose and Annie were good friends. Through Annie’s visits to Yew Tree House to
go astral travelling with Henry, the two women had, of course, known each other
since before Rose had been initiated into the GD; perhaps Annie had helped
persuade Rose to join. So Rose was as
outraged as many other GD members by the injustice of Mathers’ action, which
had everything to do with his personal finances and very little to do with
magic. A petition was quickly circulated,
organised by Frederick Leigh Gardner; begging Mathers to reinstate Annie.
Mathers chose to make the issue one of command and obedience and, in the end,
all the petition’s signatories knuckled under to him, Rose included. Annie remained in exile from the GD, though
still friends with many members, until Mathers in his turn was expelled, in
April 1900.
Sources:
Gerald Yorke Collection of GD and
Catalogue
number NS73 letter from William Wynn Westcott to Frederick Leigh Gardner gives
the date of Annie’s expulsion as 3 December [1896] though Westcott admits that
Mathers hasn’t told him it had happened, as yet, he’d found out from Percy and
Pamela Bullock.
Catalogue
number NS73: a number of letters all dated December 1896 or January 1897, from
various GD members to Frederick Leigh Gardner; most of them
signing the petition to reinstate Annie Horniman; though some explaining
why the writer felt they couldn’t sign. Including the one from Rose Pullen-Burry, but not one from Henry.
And
see also Ellic Howe who describes exactly how Annie Horniman came to be
expelled, with quotations from letters that passed between her and Mathers
during autumn 1896; and gives an account of the petition and Mathers’ hostile
reaction: pp126-144.
BY 22
DECEMBER 1896
Henry
had gone to Paris to see Mathers. He
stayed with Samuel Liddell Mathers and his wife Mina for about a fortnight, ample time for him to study Mathers with a
physician’s eye and reach the conclusion that Mathers had become mentally
disturbed by “unbalanced Mars work”.
Source:
Gerald Yorke Collection of GD and Crowley papers, now at the Warburg Institute
University of London: letter from Rose Pullen-Burry written at Liphook 22
December 1896 in response to one from Frederick Leigh Gardner wanting her to
sign the petition to reinstate Annie Horniman.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Rose apologises that Henry is not at home to sign the petition;
and does seem to be implying that Henry’s trip to Paris was on Annie Horniman’s
behalf. For certain causes, Henry seems
to have been willing to abandon his patients (and the income that some of them
represented) to rush off on GD affairs; or had he been going to visit the
Mathers in any case?
Source for Mathers’ mental state: Henry himself, writing to Paul
Foster Case BUT many years later. The date of the letter is unknown but it’s
one of a sequence of letters Henry wrote to Foster Case between January and
July 1921; that is to say, over 25 years after the events he’s mentioning. See a long extract from the letter at www.heruraha.net the Temple of Thelema
website.
MARCH
1897
Someone
wrote a letter to William Wynn Westcott’s employers telling them he was a
prominent member of a rather dubious society.
As a result, Westcott felt obliged to resign as an officer of the
GD. Florence Farr took over as the most
senior GD member resident in the UK but power in the Order passed to Samuel
Liddell Mathers in Paris.
Source:
Gerald Yorke Collection of GD and Crowley papers, now at the Warburg Institute
University of London. Catalogue number NS73: two letters from Westcott to
Frederick Leigh Gardner, dated 17 March 1897 and 18
March 1897. The first letter makes it
clear that this occasion was not the first time information about Westcott’s
occult activities had been drawn to his employers’ attention.
Comment
by Sally Davis: it’s generally assumed by historians of the GD that the
anonymous letter was sent by Mathers. I
must say that the change of personnel at the top in England was a blow to
historians: record-keeping in the GD went downhill badly after Westcott had to
give up doing it!
SEPTEMBER
1897
Frederick
Leigh Gardner was declared persona non grata at the GD’s Isis-Urania temple
after a series of complaints about his behaviour, particularly towards the
women members, and particularly as organiser of its rituals. Gardner resigned from the GD as a whole on hearing that a
recent Isis-Urania members’ meeting had declined to hear his side of it. When it became clear to Gardner that Henry
had supported the meeting’s decision, he wrote a very angry letter to Henry as
a fellow Mark mason, reminding him of the obligations imposed on freemasons to
support each other; pointing out that Henry had often enjoyed hospitality at
Gardner’s house; and declaring him not fit for the company of “moral and
upright men”. Henry wrote back,
resenting Gardner’s “abuse”; and their acquaintance-ship ceased.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Gardner sent a copy of his abusive letter to William Wynn
Westcott, who wrote back dismayed that Gardner had made “such a slashing
onslaught on the poor man”; and advising Gardner just to let the matter go
(rather than upset anybody else, presumably).
See
Ellic Howe for why and how Gardner came to be expelled: pp175-186.
Source:
Gerald Yorke Collection of GD and Crowley papers, now at the Warburg Institute
University of London. Catalogue number
NS73: set of 3 letters Frederick Leigh Gardner sent to Henry, dated 22
September 1897, 28 September 1897 and 30 September 1897; plus Henry’s reply to
the last one, also dated 30 September 1897; and one letter from Westcott to
Frederick Leigh Gardner dated 1 October 1897.
UNCERTAIN
DATE but not later than mid-1898
Writing
in 1923 or 1924, Conan Doyle gives “1898" but for reasons I outline below,
it’s more likely to have been 1897
Henry
paved the way for Arthur Conan Doyle to join the GD. But Conan Doyle declined the offer of
membership.
Source:
Any
paperwork connected with people being considered as possible GD initiates has
not survived as far as I know.
Particularly with people who declined membership, I imagine that all
letters and memoranda about them were thrown away at the time. Conan Doyle’s own recollection of what
happened is the only source that I know of for his being offered GD
membership. He published it in an
article, long after the event: Pearson’s Magazine volume 57 January-June
1924, issue of March 1924. Article by
Arthur Conan Doyle: My Adventures in the Spirit World: pp203-09; in which Henry
is named, but the other GD member that Conan Doyle met is not.
Comment
by Sally Davis, based on Conan Doyle’s article and at some length because it
sheds some light on what happened to you if you were being considered for GD
membership:
Conan
Doyle and Henry Pullen-Burry got to know one another in the late 1880s when
they were both general practitioners in Hampshire. As personal information on GD members and
their habits are rare, I give Conan Doyle’s description of Henry here:
according to Conan Doyle, Henry was “a small doctor...small in stature, and
also, I fear, in practice”; he smoked a pipe; and shared Conan Doyle’s interest
in spiritualism and theosophy. In the
article Conan Doyle portrays himself as reading widely on the occult at this
time, but as far more wary of it than Henry was, though he was swayed by the
belief expressed in spiritualism by two scientists he admired, William Crookes
the chemist (who was a GD member though Conan Doyle won’t have known that) and
Alfred Russell Wallace the traveller and evolutionary biologist. Conan Doyle was intrigued to discover that
Henry had a room in his house “reserved for mystic and philosophic purposes”,
which no one but himself was allowed to go in (I wonder where Rose did her
magic, in that case? Actually, having a room set aside for occult purposes was
not so unusual amongst GD members - those who could afford a house big enough,
that is.) Although Conan Doyle gave up
his practice at Southsea, took some extra training, and set up as an
ophthalmologist in London, he and Henry must have kept in touch and in due
course Henry recommended Conan Doyle to the GD hierarchy as a future
member. Did Henry have one eye on
gaining the kudos of having brought on board the creator of Sherlock
Holmes? Probably. The usual discreet enquiries were made; Conan
Doyle was judged a suitable candidate; and Henry was authorised approached to
him with an invitation to join. Conan
Doyle seems to have interviewed Henry (not the other way round). He wanted to know exactly what he might be
getting into if he accepted; and on what it would do for him. Henry told him that he would gain “powers
which people would call supernatural ...knowledge of deeper forces of
nature”. This sounded good to Conan
Doyle, he asked to join, and
few mornings later he awoke with a sense of having had some kind
of psychic exam during the night, which he took to be his suitability being
checked out by GD members. Conan Doyle
still wasn’t sure though: he checked out what would be expected of him as an
initiate, and began to worry about the level of commitment Henry said would be
required - after all, he had his medical work and Sherlock Holmes to attend
to. After thinking it over further, he
decided not to be initiated.
Henry
wasn’t that easily put off, however. A
couple of months after apparently having accepted Conan Doyle’s change of mind,
he called on him bringing another GD member with him, someone Conan Doyle knew
of as “famous and much-travelled”. A letter
written by William Wynn Westcott confirms that the second caller was Robert
William Felkin, (future founder of Stella Matutina) a well-known authority on
the treatment of tropical diseases, having spent time in east Africa as a
medical missionary before qualifying fully as a doctor. The two GD members proceeded to have a
conversation about astral travelling that put Conan Doyle right off. Looking back from 1924 he remembered having
“brushed against something strange, which I am not sorry that I avoided”. He worried that people willing to develop
these powers might - in the process - lose their sense of Christian
ethics.
Henry’s
original idea of bringing to see Conan Doyle a GD member he knew of and would
be impressed by was a good one. But that
conversation about astral travelling: not so clever. Reading Conan Doyle’s account in a copy of Pearson’s
Magazine sent to him by Frederick Leigh Gardner, Westcott commented that
both Henry and Felkin “appear to have spoken in a wild manner” - reflecting,
perhaps, on the Famous Initiate That Got Away.
Source
for Westcott’s comment: Gerald Yorke Collection catalogue number NS73: letter
written 17 April 1924 by Westcott, to Gardner.
Sources
for Conan Doyle: wikipedia; and GMC Registers.
1898
Henry
set out for the Klondike.
Sources
for his getting at least as far as a boat on the Yukon River (though without
dates):
Unpublished
set of typescripts at the Freemasons’ Library catalogued as SRIA1938m. Volume 3, Science and Hermetic Philosophy
Part 1: November 1918 Lecture 47 p282 and December 1918 Lecture 51 p301.
What
on earth was he doing? Comment by Sally
Davis:
People
had been finding small deposits of gold in the Klondike River valley in
north-west Canada for a while; but the big strike was made in August 1896 by
George Carmack, his Indian wife Shaaw Tháa and her family. IF Henry had been a reader of the Times
newspaper with enough spare time to peer into its smallest news items, he might
have noticed a reference to “wonderful discoveries of gold” being reported to
members of a Royal Geographical Society expedition stationed at Fort Cudahy, in
February 1897. But the news didn’t
really break in the USA until 16 June 1897, with the arrival at San Francisco
of an American steamer from Alaska; and in Britain not until the end of July
1897, with published confirmation in the Times including advice issued by the
Canadian Emigrants’ Information Office and warnings of the dangers of this
isolated place with six-month-long frozen winters. Amongst the instructions was the advice to
leave setting out for the Klondike until next spring - that is, spring
1898. If Henry was struck by gold fever
in July 1897 he seems to have paid attention to the advice; but huge numbers
did not. Result: sky-rocketing prices
for even basic groceries; frostbite; and places which had been tiny settlements
with no real infrastructure of roads or sewers, suddenly having to accommodate
thousands of new, ill-equipped, exhausted and fractious arrivals.
Sources:
wikipedia, which focuses on the
American experience of the gold rush.
Times Friday 23 October 1896 p10 review of Warburton Pike’s Through
the Subarctic Forest published Arnold 1896.
Times 23 February 1897 p5.
Times 5 April 1897 p8 - the British government hadn’t yet been able to
confirm that the rumours are true.
The
Times Thursday 29 July 1897 p11 article: The Yukon Goldfields.
15
JANUARY 1898
Henry
made a passport application.
Source:
Index to the Register of Passport Applications 1898, seen at findmypast:
applicant H B P Burry.
SPRING
1898
Henry
left England, headed for the Klondike River.
Possible
source for the Atlantic crossing but not the exact date: findmypast passenger
lists show one male H Burry travelling by ship from Liverpool to Halifax Nova
Scotia at some point during 1898. It
might not be the GD’s Henry, of course.
Comment
by Sally Davis on the date Henry sloped off.
As soon as the news reached the USA’s East Coast, Harper’s Weekly
magazine sent their reporter Tappan Adney to the Klondike as their man on the
spot. He left New York on 28 July 1897
and went by the recently-opened Canadian Pacific Railway to British Columbia;
stopped off to get well kitted-out at Victoria British Columbia and again at
the Fort Selkirk trading post; and reached Dawson City by boat along the Yukon
River on 23 October 1897, 92 days after he set out. Perhaps other people, not bothering to get so
well-prepared (there were plenty of those) might have made the journey more
quickly; but on the other hand, Henry had to cross the Atlantic before he could
get to the start. For reasons I give
below, I think Henry must have set out not later than mid-1898 and probably
earlier than that.
There’s
some doubt about whether Henry meant to come back.
Comment
by Sally Davis: this is all rather speculative, based on the addresses he and
Rose gave for 1898 to 1901. For most of
that time both the General Medical Council and the GD thought that both Henry
and Rose Pullen-Burry could be reached at 185 Victoria Street in London, care
of a Mrs Wreford. The entry for Henry in
the GD’s address book was “Away at Klondike” as if the writer fully expected
Henry to come back. However, for 1901
and after there’s no known address for Rose; and in 1901 the GMC had an address
for Henry in Thornton Heath. It’s hard
to reach a conclusion but I’ll make two suggestions: either that originally,
Henry did mean to return to Britain eventually, but changed his mind; or that
he never intended to return but didn’t want to say so, especially to Rose.
Sources:
RAG
p150 and p152, with details taken from the GD address book.
GMC Register 1898 p277 and GMC
Register 1899 p288.
Kelly’s Directory 1898 street directory
p745.
Kelly’s Directory 1901 street directory
p818.
GMC Register 1901 p295.
ROSE
AFTER HENRY LEFT
Rose
and the two daughters, at least, moved to London, to rooms at 185 Victoria
Street; they lived there until 1901.
Comment
by Sally Davis: the Kelly’s Directory entries for 185 Victoria Street suggest
that in 1898, there were people living in the rooms above a tailor’s business
which occupied the street level. But the
1901 issue has the building occupied solely by business tenants. So it’s likely that by 1901 Rose and her
daughters had to go and live elsewhere.
I expect they were glad of it: although there was a temperance hotel
right next door which would have been quiet enough, next door to that was the
entrance to Victoria Station.
At
some point Rose realised that her husband was not going to come back. She and her three children were left with
very little money. Annie Horniman stepped in to help.
Sources:
Gerald Yorke Collection catalogue number NS73: letters from William Wynn
Westcott to Frederick Leigh Gardner, written 12 November 1921, 6 January 1922
and 17 April 1924. Although the letters
were written long after the event, Westcott had met up with Annie Horniman
shortly before leaving England for South Africa in mid-1921. He’d probably got the information from her -
asking after old friends. However,
though he says that Annie Horniman had helped Rose and her family, he doesn’t
give details. By 1924 he had also
received a letter from Henry Pullen-Burry; I suppose he Henry could have told
him how Annie had helped, but somehow I doubt it. I’m still looking, but so far I haven’t found
any other sources for the help Annie gave to Rose and her children: that is,
sources saying what the help was (school fees?
Rent?) And how long it went
on for.
Comment
by Sally Davis: who knows how long it took Rose to realise that her husband was
gone for good. Perhaps he sent her a
letter. Or perhaps she eventually had to
admit it to herself after many months of gradually diminishing hope. Her predicament was a grim one. I presume that like most young women of her
age and class, Rose Pullen Burry had had the kind of education that prepared
her for marriage and motherhood, not for work, in any field. There’s no evidence that she ever had a job,
even after her husband left her. Annie
Horniman had inherited a fortune from her grandfather, the founder of the
Hornimans tea importing firm. Before
Rose was left with no income, Annie had already been very generous with money
towards Mina (and thus Samuel) Mathers.
Although I haven’t found any evidence specifically saying that Annie’s
help was financial in Rose’s case, money was what Rose will have been most in
need of, however embarrassed and humiliated she might have felt by needing to
accept it from her wealthy friend.
Rose’s daughters were educated for work - they were both teachers - and
fees for them to get the necessary qualifications would have been something
Annie could offer and Rose would be glad to accept. Probably Annie paid the fares for Ethel and
later Winifred to travel to South Africa, where they both found jobs. In one of the biographies of Annie Horniman
she’s mentioned as taking Helen Pullen-Burry on holiday with her in Europe.
The
theatre group:
Collected Letters of W B Yeats
Volume IV 1905-1907. Editors John Kelly and
Ronald Schuchard. Published
The
holiday in Europe: this is a tricky one.
I read the information in Annie H: A Pioneer
in the Theatre by Sheila Gooddie.
Methuen 1990: p89. In the notes
for the information, on p199 footnote 17, the source is given as “Helen
Pullen-Burry’s unpublished reminiscences; Horniman Collections, John Rylands
University Library of Manchester”. What
worries me is that I haven’t come across anyone called Helen Pullen-Burry in my
other reading; she certainly wasn’t a child of Henry and Rose.
Rose
may have changed her name from ‘pullen-burry’ to Burry.
Comment
by Sally Davis: though it may just be the way Annie Horniman had always thought
of her.
Source
for the change of name, if it is one: Collected Letters of W B Yeats
Volume IV 1905-1907, editors John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Published
Rose
may have got married a second time, to a man called Wreford.
Source
for a remarriage of Rose to someone called Wreford is:
Collected Letters of W B Yeats
Volume IV 1905-1907 editors John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Published Oxford
Univerisity Press 2005; footnote 10 p430 in connection with Annie Horniman’s
letter of 27 June 1906, p430.
Comment
by Sally Davis: I don’t think Rose married a second time, though I can see how
the idea arose that she did: “Address as Mrs Wreford” does make it sound as
though Rose has remarried someone else.
But I haven’t found evidence of a divorce; or a marriage registration -
at least, not in England - and the evidence from Annie Horniman in 1906 and
William Wynn Westcott in the 1920s suggests that she remained Mrs Burry or
Pullen-Burry. I can think of two
possible reasons for the appearance in Rose and Henry’s lives of a ‘mrs wreford’. The
first is that Rose was using an assumed name - which leads me to wonder whether
she and Henry were hiding from creditors.
The second is that Mrs Wreford was Rose’s landlady at the Victoria
Street address, a woman running a boarding house and taking in post for her
lodgers. I have to say that I haven’t
been able to confirm either of these theories: I don’t know how I could confirm
the first without a court case involving Rose masquerading as Mrs Wreford;
Kelly’s Directory for 1898 lists only the business on the ground floor, not the
residents of the rooms above. I haven’t
got lucky trying to find Mrs Wreford on the 1901 census; I can’t see Rose or
her daughters either - perhaps they were abroad with Annie Horniman.
Further
comment by Sally Davis 6 January 2017: I am now in contact with the
great-grand-daughter of Ethel Bauristhene, née Pullen-Burry, and there’s been
no mention of a second marriage for Rose.
Rose’s
son, the younger Henry Pullen-Burry, went to live in the USA.
Thanks
to Adam P Forrest for finding him there.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Henry Pullen-Burry the younger was the only member of the
family I could find on the 1901 census: he was working as a stable-man on a
stud farm in Orpington Kent, and lodging with his boss, Tom Olliver, and Tom’s
wife Alice at 1 Gray’s Cottages Cudham.
Perhaps he had chosen the work; but it’s just as likely that his future
had been thrown into chaos when his father joined the gold rush and didn’t come
back. By 1911 he had left England for
North America. He fought in the first World War as a soldier with the Canadian Expeditionary
Force. The US census of 1930 has him
living with his wife Mayna and their three sons at Hennepin Minnesota.
Sources:
At //livesofthefirstworldwar.org details of the members of the
Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Via Familysearch to US Federal Census 1930.
Update
January 2017: Ethel’s great-grand-daughter has sent me a very detailed family
tree compiled by one of Henry’s American descendants.
Rose
went to live in South Africa. ?probably before 1911. And finally, having qualified as a sports and
medical masseur,Winifred went to
Ethel
and Winifred both married in South Africa, and they
both have descendants.
Sources:
ETHEL
to South Africa:
findmypast passenger lists: Miss E
Pullen-Burry travelled from Southampton to
Collected Letters of W B Yeats
Volume IV 1905-1907 editors John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Published Oxford
University Press 2005; footnote 10 p430 in connection with Annie Horniman’s
letter of 27 June 1906; and p524 footnote 10 which mentions a ‘thank you’
letter Annie Horniman wrote to Yeats in November 1906, after he had sent her a
presentation copy of his Poems 1899-1905. Annie told him that she’d already bought
several copies and sent one to “Ethel Burry in Natal”.
WINIFRED
to South Africa:
On the
day of the 1911 census, Winifred was one of the students at the Physical
Training College in Dartford.
Source
for Winifred going to South Africa: findmypast passenger lists have a Miss
Pullen-Burry, aged 29, going from London to Durban on the Union Castle line’s
Walmer Castle, leaving 19 February 1916.
Winifred’s
profession:
Seen at google, the 1936 issue of Directory of Masseuses and
Masseurs covering July 1920 to June 1936. Published
ROSE
to South Africa:
Source:
I couldn’t find an obvious candidate on findmypast. The most likely one was a woman called Rose
Burry, date of birth unknown, who sailed from London on 14 June 1909 on the
John T Rennie and Son’s ship Inchanga, bound for Durban; though the marital
status of this woman was given as “Single”.
I couldn’t find Rose on the 1911 census, so perhaps she’d left the
country by then.
ETHEL
AND WINIFRED AS CO-MASONS
Unlike
the freemasonry that most people know of, co-masonry allows women. When she first contacted me, in December
2016, Ethel’s great-grand-daughter sent me a photo which she asked me to
identify, saying that both Ethel and Winifred Pullen-Burry were in it, but that
that was all she knew about what was going on.
Roger Wright managed to find on the web a website selling official
co-masonry regalia; and to identify some of the items being worn or held by
people in the photo. I’m now fairly
comfortable with the idea of the photo as showing the men and women members of
a co-masons lodge, possibly at the end of a lodge meeting. Ethel is sitting on an ornate chair in the
middle of the front row, and I think she is the current Worshipful Master of
the lodge. Winifred is sitting to her
right (as you look at the photo) one of two women and one man carrying a rod of
office; I would guess she is one of the other lodge officials for the
year. As at 6 January 2017, the lodge
name and number, and the date of the photograph, are still a mystery.
ETHEL
AND WINIFRED’S MARRIAGES AND DESCENDANTS are on the family tree sent me by
Ethel’s great-grand-daughter.
Rose
was living in Johannesburg in 1921.
Source:
Gerald Yorke Collection catalogue number NS73: letter from William Wynn
Westcott to Frederick Leigh Gardner written 6 January 1922. Though he does not say so, I believe Westcott
got the information from Annie Horniman, whom he met up with in England in 1921
before leaving to live in Durban. Just
as Westcott was living in South Africa with his daughter (Lilian Gee), Rose must
have been living with one of her daughters.
Rose
died in South Africa, in 1922.
Source
though without a specific date: Gerald Yorke Collection catalogue number NS73:
letter from William Wynn Westcott to Frederick Leigh Gardner, 17 April 1924 in
which Westcott calls Rose “Mrs Pullen-Burry” and says she died about 18 months
ago. He doesn’t say where he had come by
the news; but I note that he had received (after years of silence) a letter
from Henry Pullen-Burry during 1923; perhaps Henry knew that his wife had died.
For
what happened to Henry after 1898 you’ll need to go to the third file in this
life-by-dates sequence.
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.
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.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
6
January 2017
Email me at:
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
***