Rose Mary Howard Swain was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn on 2 December 1891 at its Isis-Urania temple in London. She chose the Latin motto ‘Non in
tenebris’. Two other people were
initiated at the same ceremony: Ada Alice, wife of A E Waite; and James Webber
or Webber Smith; though I’m not sure Rose Mary knew either of them before that
evening.
INTRODUCTION
This is one of my short biographies. As I have found with so many GD members, especially
the women, there isn’t much information specifically on Rose Mary’s life. However, there is quite a bit on her complex
family background - more, in fact, than I originally turned up. This is a rewrite of my original biography of
February 2016; made necessary, and easy to do, by Roger Mace, a descendant of
the Whitmore family from Rose Mary’s father’s side. In August 2016, Roger read my original work
on Rose Mary and contacted me to make several comments on it. Since then he has sent explanations,
speculations, copies of documents and a family tree. The section on the Swain family, is now a joint effort
between Roger Mace and me.
Sally Davis
November 2016
This is what Roger Mace and I have found on
ROSE MARY HOWARD SWAIN, married surname Robinson.
IN THE GD
Based on information I found at the
Theosophical Society - see the next section for more details - I’d say Rose
Mary Swain was invited to join the GD by one or other of its founders. This is pure speculation but I wonder whether
Rose Mary’s father and William Wynn Westcott had been acquainted as fellow
doctors.
Rose Mary did start to work her way through the
texts new initiates were encouraged to study as part of their progress towards
the GD’s inner, 2nd Order.
When she married in 1893, she did let the GD know her new surname so I
think she was still a fairly active member then. However, she and her husband went to live in
the London suburbs, and over the next few years had quite a large family. She let her GD membership lapse.
ANY OTHER ESOTERIC INTERESTS?
Yes.
About a year before her initiation as a GD member, Rose Mary had applied
to join the Theosophical Society. At
that time, all applicants had to be sponsored by two people who were already
members. Rose Mary’s sponsors were
William Wynn Westcott and his fellow GD founder Samuel Liddell Mathers and I’m
sure it must have been one or both of them who told Rose Mary about the GD’s
existence and asked if she’d like to be a member.
There was a period in the early 1890s when Rose
Mary was involved with both the TS and the GD.
In January 1892 she acted as a sponsor herself, when her teacher friend
Edith Lanchester applied to join the TS.
However, she resigned from the TS in March 1895. This might have been because she had a child
and a home to run by then; though she might - like many others - have felt
disgusted and despairing as factions in the TS
fought over who should lead it, and in what direction, now that Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky was dead.
Sources for TS membership:
Theosophical Society Membership Register
January 1889-September 1891 p158 application of Rose M H Swain.
Theosophical Society Membership Register
September 1891-January 1893 p45 January 1892 application of Edith Lanchester.
For more on the socialist and feminist Edith
Lanchester, see ODNB, wikipedia and www.workersliberty.org. In 1895 the
Lanchester family arranged for Edith to be detained under the 1890
Lunacy Act when she announced her intention of setting up home, unmarried, with
an Irish labourer, James Sullivan. The
case caused a national outcry; I hope Rose Mary did what she could to get her
friend released. Edith was let go after
a week, when doctors not selected by the Lanchesters declared her sane. She did set up home with Sullivan and they
stayed together until his death in 1945.
In 1897 Edith became secretary to Eleanor Marx.
Roger Mace in his emails of August 2016 told me
a bit more about the Lanchester family: first, that they owned the Lanchester
car-making firm; and secondly that the Bride of Frankenstein, Elsa Lanchester,
was a member of the family.
ANY OBITUARIES/BIOGRAPHIES?
No.
BIRTH/YOUTH/FAMILY BACKGROUND
Both Rose Mary’s parents’ families - the Swains
and the Rays - have their bewildering aspects.
Both families had a trend towards men and women dying young; and to
non-nuclear-family households with much coming and going of personnel. Both families contained people called by
exactly or more or less exactly the same name.
There are several men called ‘Isaac Swain’, and the name-set ‘Isaac
Howard Swain’ occurs many times in the extended family of Rose Mary’s
father. And on the other side, Rose
Mary’s grandmother and mother were both called ‘Rose’ and she herself then
named one of her own daughters ‘Rosemary’.
THE SWAIN CONNECTION
The Swains were one of a group of staunch
Non-Conformist families living in and around Stockport in Cheshire, in the late
18th century. Roger Mace has
found that the Swain, Willis, Wilson, Whitmore and Spensley families were
connected by marriages and by joint business ventures; and also by bankruptcy
and legal proceedings in the Chancery Courts, when things went wrong!
The direct line of descent of Rose Mary’s
father from Swain family members living in Stockport begins with the man Roger
and Sally will call Isaac Swain 1. Isaac
Swain 1 was born in 1716 and married Sarah Willis. A son of theirs, Isaac Swain 2 (born 1755)
made a fortune as a pawnbroker and cotton waste spinner, and from property and
other investments in Stockport. He
married a woman called Jane Howard, usually known as Jenny, and her surname was
taken up by their descendants as a forename.
Isaac Swain 2 and Jane had eight children, five of whom survived infancy. They included a son, born in 1803, who was
the first to be named Isaac Howard Swain.
We’ll call him 3/1 - third ‘isaac swain’, first ‘isaac howard swain’. The four surviving daughters were: Sarah
Willis, who married a Whitmore; Jenny, who married a Spensley; Hannah; and Mary
Ann, who married a Wilson. The
sons-in-law were involved in a variety of businesses: pawnbroking;
auctioneering; silk manufacture; silk trading and newspaper ownership. The businesses were not always successful and
Whitmore went bankrupt in 1843 when the Illustrated Weekly Times
failed. Through these marriages, the
name-set ‘isaac howard swain’ passed into the Whitmore family and the
forename-set ‘isaac howard’ passed into the Spensley family. And Isaac Howard Swain 3/1 (Rose Mary’s
grandfather) passed the forename-set on through his family.
Isaac Swain 2 died in February 1837, and his
widow in 1839. His Will was disputed,
and legal cases concerning it were still continuing in 1852; a lot of the money
and property that Isaac Swain 2 had amassed, was lost in the process.
Isaac Howard Swain 3/1 married Mary Ann Blake
at St Mary Stockport, in September 1837.
They are Rose Mary’s grandparents on her father’s side. They had two sons. The first, Isaac Howard Swain 4/2, was born
in 1838/9. No official record of the
death of Rose Mary’s grandfather Isaac Howard Swain 3/1 has been traced. However, Roger Mace has found a manuscript
note written by his Whitmore brother-in-law (Sarah Willis Swain’s husband) in a
book of memoranda relating to the death of Jenny Swain. According to that note, Isaac Howard Swain
3/1 died in Dieppe, France, on 8 February 1841.
A court case was in progress against him at that time, by a judgement
creditor. The 1841 census shows his
widow, Mary Swain aged 20, living in Macclesfield with her son “Isaac Swain” -
that is, Isaac Howard Swain 4/2, Rose Mary’s father - aged 2. On census day, Mary Ann was pregnant for a
second time. Her son John Wilson Swain
was christened in Stockport on 15 November 1841, but died the following year.
The widowed Mary Ann Swain may have spent the
next few years living with her relations-by-marriage, the Wilson family. In 1848 she married again, in Kendal
Westmoreland. Her son Isaac Howard Swain
4/2 went with her and her new husband, to London.
Mary Ann Swain’s second husband was Rev Alfred
Povah, born in 1824 and thus six years her junior. Legal documents from the 1840s suggest that
he had been a friend of the family for many years. At the time of the marriage he was curate of
St James Westminster. In the 1850s he
ran a school in Southwark. By the early
1860s he’d been appointed vicar of St Olave Hart Street in the City of London. He remained in post there for many years and
later wrote a book about the parish.
Rose Mary’s father, Isaac Howard Swain 4/2, grew up living with the
Povah family and had at least two half-brothers, Alfred and John Povah.
Isaac Howard Swain 4/2 studied medicine at St
Andrew’s University and Guy’s Hospital in London. On the day of the 1861 census the Povahs were
abroad so Isaac, doing a spell on the wards at Guy’s, was staying at 280 Tudor
Road Battersea, with his aunt Mary Ann (daughter of Isaac Swain 2) and her
husband John Hewetson Wilson. Wilson,
who had been born in Knutsford in Cheshire, didn’t need to work but lived off
the income from property in Sussex, Westmorland and Stockport, and from shares
in the Kendal and Windermere Railway. He
wasn’t an extravagant man - he and Mary Ann had
were employing only two women servants, a cook and a general
servant. However, a coachman was also
living in on that census day. At the
back of the Wilsons’ house must have been some stables, with the groom or grooms
sleeping above the horses. Keeping a
carriage was an expensive business - this was a wealthy household.
Isaac Howard Swain 4/2 gained his license to
practice surgery, medicine and midwifery in 1862. John Hewetson Wilson died in August of that
year. Amongst many other bequests, he
left £1000 to Mary Ann Povah; and £1000 to Isaac Howard Swain 4/2 which -
unlike the bequests left to the other beneficiaries - was in cash with no
strings attached. Isaac Howard Swain 4/2
used the inheritance to move to Shaftesbury, Dorset and start up a practice as
a GP. In 1866 he was appointed deputy
coroner there, to cover the usual coroner’s illnesses and absence. The appointment might have led to Isaac
Howard Swain 4/2 becoming the coroner for Shaftesbury himself in due course. However, he chose instead to move to
Cheshire, nearer to where his extended family - many of them still comfortably
off despite the trouble over Isaac Swain 2's Will - could bring him more
patients. By the mid-1870s he was in
practice in the village of Brindley Ford, a few miles south of Congleton. And then, like his father, he died young - in
February 1875 aged only 36 - and his widow moved to London.
THE RAY FAMILY, ROSE MARY’S MOTHER
Rose Mary’s mother was also from a medical
family. Rose Stammers Ray (born 1841)
was the eldest child of Edward Ray and his wife Rose, née Mann, who had married
in 1840. Edward Ray was a surgeon and GP
with a practice in Dulwich; as was his eldest son Edward Reynolds Ray who
probably inherited his father’s patients.
Rose Ray grew up in a wealthier household than that
of Isaac Howard Swain 4/2's step-father, Rev Povah: on the day of the 1851
census, her parents were employing a cook, a housemaid, two nurses, a groom;
and possibly a governess although the census entry is a bit vague on that
point. The two nurses had the care of
Rose Stammers Ray and her six siblings - Edward Reynolds, Alice, Charles,
Herbert, Julia and Katherine. Rose
Stammers Ray’s father Edward died in 1868, when his wife was in her late 40s.
ROSE MARY’S PARENTS
Isaac Howard Swain 4/2 and Rose Stammers Ray
were married in 1863. Rose Mary Howard
Swain was the eldest of their three children, born on 1 December 1864 in
Shaftesbury. She had a sister, Florence
Emily Howard Swain, born 1866 (also in Shaftesbury); and a brother, Isaac
Howard Swain the 5th and 3rd (and I think the last, in
this line of descent), born in 1867 in Stockport, after the family had moved to
Cheshire.
By 1871, Rose Mary’s parents were at their last
address together, 45 Brindley Ford. With
Isaac Howard Swain 4/2 still in the process of building up his practice, their
household on census day 1871 was a very modest one, with no live-in servants,
not even one (a groom or an apprentice) helping Isaac with his work as a
GP. The household was also lacking one
of its family members on census day: Florence Swain, the younger daughter, was
already living with her uncle Edward Reynolds Ray and his wife Alice, in
Dulwich.
THE HOUSEHOLD OF WIDOWS
After the death of Rose Mary’s father Isaac
Howard Swain 4/2 - probably very soon after - Rose Stammers Swain returned to
London, to live with her mother, Rose Ray.
The two widows, mother and daughter, stayed living together until the
mid-1890s. Rose Mary the GD member lived
with them until her marriage. The other
two permanent members of the household for that long period were also women:
Rose Ray’s daughter Julia, who never married; and Rose Ray’s grand-daughter
Alice Ray Simon, the only surviving child of her daughter Alice, who had died
two days after the birth. Other family
members came and went: George John Simon, the widower father of Alice Ray
Simon, had lived with his mother-in-law in the 1870s; Rose Mary’s brother Isaac
Howard Swain 5/3 lived with the two widows during the school holidays and until
he went to work in the East; on census day 1881 the household had a lodger,
Blanche Eagle, a 14-year-old schoolgirl; and by 1891 Rose Ray’s youngest
daughter Katherine Hazeldine had come to live with them after she too had been
widowed. One person who didn’t ever live
in the household as far as I can see was Rose Mary’s sister Florence: she
continued to live with her uncle and aunt and their daughter Eliza Ray, until
she married.
In the 1870s Rose Ray had been living in
Brixton but by 1881 she and her daughter had moved to
9 The Grange, Shepherd’s Bush. I haven’t been able to identify this street
and by 1891 the Post Office might have given it a new name - 45 Shepherd’s Bush
Green. Whether or not it was the same
house as in 1881, 45 Shepherd’s Bush Green was where Rose Mary Swain and her relations
were living on the day of the 1891 census.
Alice Ray Simon was away that day, perhaps staying with her father in
Essex. I’m not sure what income Julia
Ray had - possibly none at all until her mother died - but the widow’s portions
of Rose Ray, Rose Stammers Swain and Katherine Hazeldine enabled them to employ
the same number of servants that Rose Ray had been able to afford in the early
1870s: a cook, housemaid and parlourmaid.
None of the older women ever did any paid work and would probably have
thought it beneath them; but Rose Mary was working in the early 1890s.
Between 1891 and 1893, the household moved out
of Shepherd’s Bush to a house nearer to Hammersmith, in Girdlers Road; and it
was from there that Rose Mary was married.
Sources for this family section:
Information and copies of original documents
sent me by Roger Mace, a descendant of the Whitmore family; from - inter
alia - documents he has inherited relating to the Whitmores, Swains and
other families living in 18th-century Stockport. They included a neat summary of the Will of
Isaac Swain of Stockport - Rose Mary’s great-grandfather - whose death in
February 1837 unleashed so many legal cases.
In the Will Rose Mary’s grandfather (Isaac Howard Swain 3/2) was left
his father’s silk mill and the property surrounding it.
Familysearch England-VR GS film number 1751723
had a baptism record for Rose Mary’s father Isaac Howard Swain II though he was
not baptised with the name ‘howard’.
1839 at Stockport Cheshire.
Father Isaac Howard Swain ((3/2)).
Mother Mary Ann.
Death of Isaac Howard Swain ((3/2)):
handwritten memorandum written by his brother-in-law Whitmore in a book of
items relating to the death of Jane Howard Swain. Copy sent by Roger Mace, by email September
2016.
Problems caused by the early death of Isaac
Howard Swain 3/2: The Jurist volume 5 1842 p886 mentions a case being
brought against the infant Isaac Howard Swain (that’s 4/3, Rose Mary’s father)
by his father’s creditors.
Second marriage of Mary Ann Swain: Gentleman’s
Magazine 1848 p423.
Rev Alfred Povah:
Calendar of King’s College London issue of 1850 p215 Povah is in a list of
graduates in classics; 1847.
Census 1851, 1861
The Annals of the Parishes of St Olave Hart
Street and Allhallows Staining in the City of London published London: Blades East and Blades
1894. Seen at archive.org.
Probate Registry 1901.
Announcement of Isaac Howard Swain 4/3’s
licence to practice medicine: Lancet 1862 part 1 January to June p559
issue of 24 May 1862 I H Swain. His address
is given as St Olive’s Rectory Hart Street, in the Mark Lane district of the
City of London.
For Isaac Howard Swain 4/3's inheritance from
his uncle: Will and probate grant of John Hewetson Wilson who died 9 August
1862; obtained from the Public Record Office by Roger Mace September 2016.
GMC Registers for 1862 to 1875.
His appointment as a deputy coroner: Dorset
Quarter Sessions Order Book.
Confirmation of Isaac Howard Swain’s appointment, to cover when
necessary for the coroner’s illness and absence. Issued by the coroner, William Henry Rennie
Bennett 25 August 1866. Copy of this
item sent by Roger Mace; email August 2016.
Death announcement: Lancet 1875 part 1
January-June p357 issue of 6 March 1875.
There was no obituary.
Birth of Rose Mary Howard Swain (though she
isn’t named): via genesreunited Dorset County Chronicle issue of 7 December 1864.
Rose Mary’s baptism (by her step-grandfather
Rev Alfred Povah) at St Olave in London on 18 January 1865: Familysearch
England-ODM GS film number 55703.
Florence Emily Howard Swain: Familysearch
England-ODM GS film number 55703.
Florence was also baptised at St Olave, on 11 May 1866; she was born 6
January 1866.
Rose Ray’s households of widows and orphans:
census 1871, 1881, 1891.
Isaac Howard Swain 5/4, Rose Mary’s brother:
Epsom College Register from October 1855 to
July 1905. Published London: Richard Clay and Sons 1905:
pxi, pxii, p108, p121. He played
football and cricket for the school; and left it in 1883.
His employment with the Bombay and Burmah
Trading Corporation: probate registry entry 1896 for Rose Stammers Swain. See wikipedia for the Corporation; and also
other websites as the company still exists, as a member of the Wadia Group. BBTC was founded in 1863 to manage the tea plantations
of William Wallace; but moved into Burma and Thailand in the 1870s in search of
teak. That’s where Isaac Howard Swain
III comes in: in the probate register 1896 he’s described as a “forester”.
His being in British Columbia in 1910. Familysearch British Columbia Marriage
Registrations GS film number 1983703: marriage of Isaac Howard Swain to
Winnifred Mary Gunson in Vancouver BC on 30 November 1910.
Isaac Howard Swain’s wife had also been born in
England and they came back to live in London eventually. Isaac Howard Swain died in March 1949 in
Hampstead.
Death of Isaac Howard Swain 5/4: probate
registry 1949.
Alice Ray Simon:
Freebmd and see www.geni.com pages on the Ingham family, managed
by Ronald Goose and with a photo (in old age) of Alice Ray’s daughter. Alice Ray Simon married Charles Patrick
Ingham in 1896. Her daughter Rose Mary
Julia Ingham was born in 1900.
Back to Rose Mary Howard Swain:
EDUCATION
A complete unknown. No governess was ever listed on census day in
any household Rose Mary lived in while she was growing up; though one might
have been employed who came each day to give lessons. Another possibility was that there was money
enough in the Ray and Swain families to pay for Rose Mary to go to a private
day school: that wouldn’t show up on the census and it seems to be in the
nature of such schools that their records are not on the web. It’s just possible that she went to a
National school; but these were looked down on by the middle-classes who
preferred to pay for their children’s education if they could afford it (or let
the girls do more or less without if they couldn’t).
WORK/PROFESSION
Rose Mary did have a job in the early 1890s -
the 1891 census official was told that she was
working as a day-governess: that is, she was
employed to give lessons in other households while still living at home. She was not working in a school; which
probably meant that she had no teaching qualifications. Rose Mary’s employers will all have had to be
wealthy enough to afford to pay her to teach their daughters. There will have been plenty of those in the
Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith area.
ANY PUBLICATIONS?
No.
ANY PUBLIC LIFE/EVIDENCE FOR LEISURE TIME? Bearing
in mind, of course, that most leisure activities leave no trace behind
them.
Apart from the TS, no.
ADDRESSES
Born: Shaftesbury Dorset
?1871-75: 45 Brindley Ford, Wedgewood
1881: 9 The Grange Hammersmith; which might be
the same house as
1890, 1891: 45 Shepherd’s Bush Green
1893: 13 Girdlers Road Kensington which is just
round the corner from Blythe Road where the GD’s 2nd Order had its
offices and ritual room in the late 1890s.
Immediately after her marriage, to at least
early 1895: Greenway Bank, 32 London Road, Chalk Hill Bushey
By 1901 and still in 1913: Aysgarth, Upton Road
Watford.
At death 1937: Darbys, Church Road Cookham
Berkshire.
ROSE MARY’S HUSBAND
Rose Mary married a solicitor, Alfred
Robinson. Alfred was born around 1860 in
Croydon. He qualified as a solicitor in
1880 and may always have worked for Jesse Hind.
He was taken into partnership by Jesse Hind in 1897, and they continued
in business as Hind and Robinson, with offices at 8 Stone Buildings Lincoln’s
Inn, 6 Bishopsgate in the City of London, and in Nottingham, until Hind’s
retirement around 1905. It was probably
at this point that the offices in Bishopsgate and Nottingham were let go and
there were a couple of years in which Alfred Robinson was the only partner. By 1908 Alfred had taken Henry George Barrett
into partnership, and that partnership continued, at 8 Stone Buildings only,
until Alfred’s own death in 1913.
I couldn’t find any direct evidence that Alfred
Robinson had been at London University but he did have a law degree and in 1891
he was one of the boarders at University Hall Gordon Square, a lodging house
where young professional men could have board and lodging in return for giving
lessons to working people in the evenings.
The Hall had been founded by dissenters and was closely associated with
University College.
Sources for Alfred Robinson as a solicitor:
Law Lists: 1897 p538; 1904 p548; 1905 p522; 1906 p560; 1908 p393 and p570; 1913
p605; 1914 p625 though with Barrett as the only partner; and 1918 p463 when the
partnership doesn’t appear at all.
At mss-cat.nottingham.ac.uk items catalogued as
Pl E12/6/8/8/13-83 all dated 1898-99 show Hind and Robinson involved in a
conveyance of land at Clipstone Nottinghamshire. Jesse Hind died in Nottingham in 1906 and had
probably come from there originally.
University Hall: 1891 census and
www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project
page on University Hall and the Passmore Edwards Settlement.
ROSE MARY ROBINSON
Rose Mary Howard Swain married Alfred Robinson
at St James Norlands in Kensington on 12 August 1893. They moved out of town almost at once, to
Bushey in Hertfordshire, and had a large family. All the children were given the name ‘howard’
amongst their others and I do wonder about the Swain family’s continual
insistence on it. Were they claiming a
relationship - either by blood or even by clientage - to the great Howard
families, earls of Carlisle and dukes of Norfolk? Rose Mary’s children were: Beatrice Howard
Robinson born 1894; Rosemary Howard Robinson born 1896; Jessica Howard Robinson
born 1897; Dorothea Howard Robinson born 1899; and the obviously longed-for son
Edward Howard Robinson born late in 1900, after which there were no more
children.
The household that Rose Mary had grown up in
was wiped out by the deaths of its three senior members around the time of the
birth of Rose Mary’s second daughter.
Rose Ray died in December 1895; Rose Stammers Swain died in January
1896; and Julia Ray died in June 1896, just before Alice Ray Simon was due to
get married. Rose Mary’s grandmother
Mary Ann Povah also died, about four days after Rose Ray. A hard time for both Rose Mary and
Alice. Alice’s marriage did go ahead,
though.
On census day 1901 the Robinsons were living at
the house called Aysgarth, on Upton Road in Watford; with a nurse and two other
servants (probably a cook and a housemaid) to help run a household with so many
small children. The family were all
still there on the day of the 1911 census.
The children were all at school so the nurse had been dispensed with;
though the Robinsons could still afford the cook and housemaid. They had visitors on census day - Rose Mary’s
sister Florence Winser (she had married Frederick Winser in 1899) and her
daughter Florence Frederika, aged 10.
It seems to have been the fate of women in Rose
Mary’s family to be left widowed at a relatively young age. Alfred Robinson died in March 1913, perhaps
rather suddenly (he died in central London rather than nearer home); Rose Mary
was 49.
Sources: freebmd for births of Rose Mary’s
children; marriage of Alice Ray Simon; marriage of Florence Emily Howard Swain
and birth of Florence Frederika Winser.
Probate Registry entries 1896 for Rose Ray, Rose Stammers Swain and
Julia Maria Ray; 1913 for Alfred Robinson.
Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica published Hamilton Adams and Co 1917; p193 for
the death of Mary Ann Povah.
DEATH
Rose Mary Howard Robinson died early in 1937 in
a nursing home in Marlow, though her normal address was Darbys, a five-bedroom
detached house on Church Road Cookham.
Of course I can’t tell whether she was living at Darbys on her own or
with one of her children.
Sources: probate registry entries 1937; and
zoopla February 2016.
DESCENDANTS? AND WHAT (IF ANYTHING)
HAPPENED NEXT.
Rose Mary’s son Edward Howard Robinson became
an electrical engineer. After working
for Radio Communications Company Ltd he started his own company, Edward Howard
Ltd, in the late 1930s. He owned several
patents. I haven’t looked to see whether
he married and had descendants. I think
he died after 1966 - there’s no entry for him in the probate registries on
Ancestry.
Dorothea Howard Robinson qualified as a
secretary and was personal assistant to the deans of St Thomas’s Hospital from
1941 to her retirement in 1961. She then
went to live with her sisters Beatrice and Rosemary.
Beatrice Howard Robinson and Rosemary Howard
Robinson were living together at 13a Osmond Gardens Hove in the mid-1960s;
Dorothea had joined them there in 1961.
In a partial repeat of what had happened to their great-grandmother and
grandmother, they all died within 18 months of each other: Beatrice in April
1965, Dorothea in March 1966; and Rosemary in the autumn of 1966. None of them had married.
Rose Mary’s youngest daughter Jessica was the
odd one out. She went to university,
studying chemistry at Bedford College London.
She graduated in 1920 and married 2nd Lieutenant Leslie Grayburn
Barry of the Army Service Corps. I think
Jessica may have had a daughter, Cynthia Grayburn Field. Jessica Barry bucked the general trend of her
family by living until she was nearly 100: she died in 1994. She was always known as Poppy.
Sources:
Patent website www.patentmaps.com
and via google to Official Gazette of the US Patent Office volume 627
1949 p401 patent number 2,484,120.
St Thomas’s Hospital Gazette volume 64 1966 p80.
Probate registry entries 1965, 1966.
University of London Calendar issue of 1920 p498.
At https://library.leeds.ac.uk, item catalogued
as LIDDLEWW1/009 which has Jessica Howard Robinson’s name on it and some
information on her life; though the contents seem mostly to be records of her
husband’s family, the Barrys.
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. 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.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
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
***