Afflicted Widow and Mother

Returning to my interest in shadowy wives of the British Empire, on a recent visit to Bath Abbey, several memorial plaques on its walls spiked my curiosity and this one in particular “erected by [an] afflicted widow and mother” brought tears to my eyes. *

IN MEMORY OF BREVET LT. COLONEL JOSEPH MAYCOCK,
CAPTN. IN H.M. 53RD SHROPSHIRE REGT. OF FOOT,
WHO DIED AT SIMON’S TOWN, CAPE OF GOOD HOPE,
AUGUST 8TH 1860, AGED 41 YEARS,
FROM THE EFFECTS OF EXPOSURE DURING THE INDIAN MUTINY,
OF 1857, WHILE SERVING ON THE STAFF OF SIR HENRY HAVELOCK,
“THOUGH HE SLAY ME, YET WILL I TRUST IN HIM.” JOB III.15.

AND IN MEMORY OF HIS CHILDREN,
FRANCIS WILLIAM MELLOWES, WHO DIED AT KURRACHEE, SCINDE,
FEBY 19TH 1849, AGED 1 YEAR,
MABEL ROSS, WHO DIED AT SEA, MAY 17TH 1860, AGED 15 MONTHS,
MAUD MARY, WHO DIED AT SEA,
JUNE 14TH 1860, AGED 5 YEARS AND 4 MONTHS,
MABEL MAUD, WHO DIED AT MERTHER, CORNWALL,
NOVEMBER 30TH 1860, AGED 4 MONTHS,
“MINE OWN WILL I BRING AGAIN AS I DID SOMETIME FROM THE DEEP OF THE SEA.”  PSALM LXVIII.22.

THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY THE AFFLICTED WIDOW AND MOTHER.

Surviving officers of the 53rd Shropshire Regt on return to England in 1861 after the Mutiny
Shropshire Regimental Museum

I was staggered at the thought that this woman had not only lost her husband, but four children as well – three of them in the same year with two whose only grave is the sea. Plus, she had obviously been an army officer's wife in India at the time of the Mutiny and exposed to all the extra dangers and traumas that would have entailed. She suffered tragedy piled upon tragedy.

So who was the unamed wife of Joseph Maycock? Did she have any other surviving children? However did she cope afterwards?

Clearly, to afford a marble plaque in such a prestigious setting as Bath Abbey, she must have had financial means or others close to her, e.g. wealthy in-laws, helped to pay for it. A search of  various ancestral and genealogical websites reveals some of her story.

Elizabeth Mary Selina Brown was born on 15 November 1823 and christened on 17 July 1824 in Secunderabad, India.  Her father was Robert Brown, her mother, Ann. An elder sister, Selma, born the year before did not survive beyond the age of two. It is possible her father was associated with the army but having a common name he is not easy to trace.

On 14 January 1847 at Hingoli, aged 22, Elizabeth married Lt. Joseph Maycock, aged 27, of H.M. 22nd Regiment.  On the marriage register, Joseph’s father is shown as James Dobbin Dottin Maycock ^

From then on, Elizabeth seems to have moved frequently and been pregnant every second year.  Apart from the four children listed on the plaque, she had another two boys who did survive - Francis Mellowes Maycock, her second son born in Karachi in September, 1849 (just nine months after his elder brother died) and Stewart MacMurdo Maycock, born in Dagshai in 1851. Both men went on to serve in the army as well, both retiring in England as full Colonels.  Francis, too, suffered the loss of a child to India, with his only son, Gerald, dying there at the age of 3. Although married, Stewart does not appear to have left descendants.

Elizabeth received a widow's pension and it is likely that Captain Joseph Maycock's promotion to Brevet Lt. Colonel may have helped to secure a higher rate for her, but it is difficult to know how much income she would have had. In 1861, the Probate Registry shows that the Captain had effects of "less than £20" in England, with Elizabeth being resident at Westbury-upon-Trym, Gloucestershire, at the time.

In 1870, Elizabeth Maycock of Eldon Villa, Redland, Bristol, is shown as the beneficiary under letters of administration for Mabel Maud Maycock, Spinster, who died ten years before. Elizabeth received less than £300 from this estate. It does seem odd that a four month old baby should warrant letters of administration, but it was obviously some sort of inheritance that Elizabeth had to claim. 

The Census Returns indicate a peripatetic life for Elizabeth. In 1861, she was in Scotland as a "visitor" at Fingask House in Aberdeenshire.  In 1871, aged 46, she lives alone as a "lodger" at 320 Elton Road, Clevedon, North Somerset, and is described as an officer's widow on a pension. Strangely, there is no other individual listed at that address, not even a servant, so one has to wonder if she was perhaps just a temporary minder of the house for somebody else.  Elizabeth can't be traced in the UK 1881 Census and perhaps she was abroad somewhere, but in 1891 she is a "boarder" in a boarding house with other single women in their sixties, at 10 Leinster Square, Paddington.

Visitor/lodger/boarder all seem to indicate a rather lonely wandering existence. Was she estranged from her sons, or did their army service (Stewart MacMurdo spent several years in Canada) mean that she rarely saw them?

We can only speculate as to the state of her mental health after all she had endured. One hopes she had support mechanisms - possibly religion - in that age when a stiff upper lip was mandatory. It also serves to remind those of us who live in modern western societies that we should be eternally grateful for the medical advances that led to inoculations and antibiotics that have almost guaranteed that no mother has to bury child after child or lose a husband at a relatively young age.

One irony is that 70 years after Elizabeth Maycock lived in Elton Road, Clevedon, Somerset, that same road was home to the Naval Laboratories where penicillin was developed.

Elizabeth died in 1892 in Reigate, Surrey, and where she is buried.

There is no image of Elizabeth to be found online, but this painting entitled "The Widow's Prayer" by Frederic Leighton seems to capture something of the all-encompassing grief she must have endured in her younger years.

Cecil French Bequest

 * It has also been recorded on the Gravestone Project website here

^ Who also has a plaque in Bath Abbey detailing his achievements in Barbados. See here

Wives in the Shadow (2) - the other Ladies Swettenham

Lady Swettenham #2 (second wife of Sir Frank) is another elusive woman. She was born Vera Seton Gordon in 1890. Her first husband, Captain John Neil Guthrie, was killed during WW1 and, after living with him for many years, she finally married Sir Frank in 1939.

The 40-year age difference must have been a challenge even if Sir Frank continued to be an active and "witty raconteur" well into old age. Given his treatment of Lady #1, he was no doubt extremely controlling too. With the exception of some fuzzy wedding photographs taken outside Caxton Hall at the time of her marriage, there is nothing easily accessible that shows what she looked like. (See Straits Times archives here.)

After her death in 1970, some of her fashionable beachwear found its way into the collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum (all images copyright V&A)

Was Lady Vera just a shallow society gal at heart, content to be an accessory to a rich and powerful husband - a lower-status Duchess of Windsor? Or was there more substance to her? With little on the public record, it is impossible to say.

The third Lady Swettenham was born Mary Emily Copeland at Kibblestone Hall in Staffordshire in 1875, a descendant of famous families connected with the potteries, her mother a Wedgewood.

She was the sister-in-law of the obnoxious Sir Frank, and again the much younger wife of Sir James Alexander Swettenham, a man who put his foot in it well and good when he was the Governor of Jamaica and caused a diplomatic incident in upsetting the Americans who had arrived on that island in the wake of a massive earthquake in 1907 with the intention of helping out. Described by an observer as "nervous, irascible, stubborn and prone to fly off on a tangent", Sir Alexander saw it as bad manners for them to barge in without being formally invited, or perhaps he thought it was an excuse for some form of invasion in disguise. In any case, he gave them a frosty reception and the Americans took umbrage. Sir Alexander was hauled over the diplomatic coals. [This extraordinary episode is detailed in my other blog Digging the Dust.]

Lady Mary, however, gained better attention by helping out with the injured and homeless after the massive earthquake and rated highly with the Americans compared to her husband.

Lincoln County Leader April 26, 1907

Sir Alexander retired shortly after this fracas and from what little there is to be found on him, for the rest of his life he flitted between England, the South of France and Jamaica where they continued to live for much of the time. He died in a clinic in Switzerland in 1933.

Although factual reports are hard to find, apparently Lady Mary continued to be involved in hospitals and nursing, especially during the First World War. She outlived her husband and died in 1953 in the world-famous Empress Hotel at Victoria, British Columbia where she had lived for some years. 

This report of their marriage 1905 in the Straits Times shows that Sir James changed the date to avoid a solar eclipse as perhaps he thought it would cast a shadow over their marriage! There are more photographs of Lady Mary Swettenham in the National PortraitGallery, but they are not available to view online.

As with Ladies #1 and #2, Lady #3 had no children. With the insanity case against Lady #1 being brought initially as a result of her getting pregnant to another man, one has to wonder if both men had a fertility problem or there is some other reason for their lack of progeny. 

Given that Lady #3 was around 30 when she married a stuff-shirt man twice her age it was hardly likely to be a passionate love match and one can speculate as to her motivations. It was not at all unusual for middle-aged prominent men to marry in order to disguise sexual orientation or for women to go into such arrangements as a guarantee of future financial security for themselves. As her husband's British Probate astonishingly shows a measly five hundred odd pounds left to her in his Estate, one wonders if Lady Mary had to rely on her potteries family resources to get by for the next twenty years of her life.

Since my previous post on Lady Swettenham #1, I have found this interesting article - with a hitherto unseen photo - about her in another American newspaper of August 12, 1903. 

Note she is described as a "clever Englishwoman" and there is nothing in the slightest to give any hint of her impending insanity in the report .

Enhanced reading here

Wives in the shadow (1). The Lady of the Lake.

This will be the first in a new series of posts about some of the women who were connected to the administrators or other prominent men instrumental in the running of the British Empire. Often, these men remain famous and are still commemorated in statues, geographical features, books, etc. or remembered in other ways, but the women in their lives are for the most part shadowy figures and all but forgotten.

The Lady of the Lake (Lady Swettenham #1). 

Sydney Lake, Kuala Lumpur

Port Swettenham was a name familiar to me as a child from several pages in my father’s stamp collection headed “Straits Settlements”. In what is now Malaysia, the port is now Port Klang but it was originally named after the first Resident-General and later Governor of the Straits Settlement, Sir Frank Athelstane Swettenham, a man said to rank in importance in the region with Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore.  Frank’s brother, Sir James Alexander Swettenham, also had links to the region.

In May 1938, divorce on the grounds of incurable insanity was allowed for the first time in the British court system. One of the first petitions brought was by Sir Frank Swettenham against his wife Lady Constance Sydney Swettenham. Frank had married her sixty years earlier in 1878 when she was only 19, a daughter of Cecil Frederick Holmes, housemaster at Harrow School. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives only a little information about her:

Her inherited tendency towards manic depression was exacerbated by Swettenham's treatment of her; the marriage blighted his personal life for sixty years

and

In 1894 Swettenham's wife returned to Perak from the most serious of several mental breakdowns, pregnant by another man. Swettenham dispatched her in semi-public ignominy to Britain, where her son was described as stillborn. Swettenham's own personal life was far from blameless; a misdemeanour formed the basis for blackmail, to which he was subjected from about 1890 until his retirement in 1904.

While Swettenham certainly was a highly accomplished administrator on behalf of the Empire, he clearly wasn’t good husband material, or he simply chose the wrong woman. Was Sydney (she seems to have preferred this name to Constance) already on the edge when she married Frank and what exactly was it in his treatment of her that tipped her over? What were the real circumstances of her pregnancy? Without knowing Sydney’s side of the story and only that of Sir Frank on the record, it has to remain conjecture.

The imperious man of empire as seen
 by John Singer Sargent

Frank first tried to rid himself of Sydney in England in 1904, bringing a petition for divorce and accusing her of adultery with a man called Ernest Henry Mander. The paperwork for this divorce petition has just recently been released under the 100 year rule and makes for interesting reading. 

The judge believed Sydney when she said she wanted a reconciliation with her husband and so he threw out Frank’s petition. This indicates that the judge considered the adultery charges to be false, and it tends to raise more questions as to other motives behind Frank wanting a divorce. It seems that Sydney was abandoned to her own devices for months and years at a time, yet Frank still expected her to undertake wifely imperial duties as and when he insisted on them. As the ODNB is so vague on the circumstances of Sydney’s pregnancy and stillborn child, it seems rather too convenient that the baby didn’t survive and it could be there was a cover-up to avoid further embarrassment. Perhaps he did survive and was quietly set up for private adoption as was often the case with upper class “mistakes” during this era.

Whatever the real facts, poor Sydney Swettenham seems to have had a blighted life at the hands of an overbearing and arrogant husband who was rather typical of such men of his time, but she continued to insist she was sane when the second divorce petition was brought in May, 1938. 

In June 1939, Sir Frank, then aged almost 90, married his long-time live-in lover (Lady Swettenham #2). Sydney died a year after Frank, in 1947.

Malaysian playwright and actor Sabera Shaik was intrigued by this sad story and recently wrote and acted in a play called Lady Swettenham about Sydney that has been presented in India and a number of other Asian countries.

This only accessible photo is alleged to be Constance Sidney [sic]  (unable to confirm as Harrow Photos website currently unavailable) but from the feathers in her hair this suggests this would have been her in debutante dress rather than her wedding.

Copyright ? Harrow Photos

The old Port Swettenham has long gone from the map, but at least some small vestige of Sydney lives on in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, and Sydney Lake is the centrepiece of the Lake Gardens.

Several images of Sir Frank taken by Gertrude Bell can be found at the Newcastle University Library