Category: History

Marine Private Billy Swift, HMS Africa

Private, Royal Marines, 1815
Private in Royal Marines, 1815 by S, C H (artist); Stadler, Joseph Constantine (engraver); DUPLICATE Colnaghi & Co – NMM PAF4247, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27324067

A bit of a breakthrough in tracing my great, great, great grandfather, ‘Billy’ Swift, who was present at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Thanks to a death notice in the Sheffield Telegraph, from November 1862, I now know that, as I suspected, he changed his name when he enlisted but not as I suggested in my previous post, his Christian name: he enlisted using his mother’s surname, Firth.

He served in the Royal Marines, so he was Army rather than Navy. As an infantryman, he wore a red uniform so he was a ‘Lobster’ in Navy slang.

HMS Africa was the smallest of Nelson’s ships of the line at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Separated from the rest of Nelson’s fleet, the Africa arrived late at the battle and sailed down the French and Spanish line exchanging broadsides with most of the vessels it passed.

It then joined the general melee.

HMS Conqueror towing HMS Africa off the shoals at Trafalgar, three days after the battle. By James Wilson Carmichael – https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2005/marine-paintings-l05135/lot.40.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?00curid=112440410

With it’s masts shot off the Africa drifted onto shoals during the storm that followed the battle. Two paintings by James Wilson Carmichael show the HMS Conquerer towing the Africa away.

DIED

On the 15th inst., Mr. William Swift, aged 78. Deceased had been in the employ of Messrs. Joseph Rodgers and Sons upwards of 20 years. He was at the battle of Trafalgar, on board the ship Africa, and was wounded in the leg, which wound annoyed him through life, and was the cause of death. He was discharged July, 1807, without pension, at the age of 23. He enlisted in the Marines, in his mother’s name, Firth, being then an apprentice.

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 November, 1862

HMS Africa plans
Body plan, sheer lines, and longitudinal half-breadth for building Africa (1781), a 64-gun Third Rate, two-decker at Deptford by Messrs Adams, Barnard & Co. The plan may also relate to Inflexible (1780) and Sceptre (1781). Signed by John Williams [Surveyor of the Navy, 1765-1784].
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
HMS Africa after the battle
Detail from HMS Conqueror towing Africa off the shoals at Trafalgar, three days after the battle.
By James Wilson Carmichael – Christie’s, LotFinder: entry 5794044, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111022409

The ship’s pay book records that he was discharged 3 November 1805 to Gibraltar Hospital, twelve days after the battle.

I assume received the Trafalgar Medal but I can’t find a record of him sharing in the prize money from captured vessels. As the death notice points out, he didn’t receive a pension when he was discharged in July, 1807. He worked in the cutlery industry in Sheffield.

Trafalgar Today

grave

‘Absolutely fascinating,’ said my niece, Karen on Facebook, ‘We visited Trafalgar cemetery in Gibraltar. There are only two graves there from the battle of Trafalgar. They both succumbed to their wounds some time after the battle and had been hospitalised in Gibraltar after the battle.’

The Lobster Red Uniform

At Deborah Lough Costumes, I learn that as a private my ancestor Billy would have worn a uniform dyed in rose madder, slightly to the orange side of red. Officers would wear a brighter red scarlet uniform.

Link

Deborah Lough Costumes

Landsman Swift, HMS Ajax

Watercolour of HMS Ajax, By Unknown author – National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7645510

Where was my Great, Great, Great Grandfather ‘Billy’ Swift 220 years ago today? Thanks to a Battle of Trafalgar records update on Find My Past, I now believe that he was on board the HMS Ajax, picking up survivors from a storm which followed the battle.

Searching the British Library Newspaper Archive in October 2013, I came across this notice from the births, deaths and marriages column of the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent dated 18 November 1862.

If he was aged 78 when he died in 1862, that makes his birth year 1784.

Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

Could my great great great grandfather really have been ‘present at the Battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805?

I’ve put in a request for the death certificate to check that this really is ‘our’ William Swift. We already knew that he’d worked at Joseph Rodgers from an obituary notice for his son, Samuel Burgin Swift, who followed in his footsteps there (as did his grandson).

My mum has the article, reprinted as a handbill;

Handbill

‘he [Samuel] was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father “Billy Swift”.

It seems to me unlikely that a young man from landlocked Sheffield would have served in the Battle of Trafalgar but Geoffrey Tweedale, author of A Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers, 1742-2010, tells me; ‘Being at Trafalgar is not so strange — he lived a long life and his earlier career could have included military service. I’ve come across at least a couple of cutlers/silver platers who saw action during the Napoleonic War.’

That “Billy Swift” in quotes misled me. The only William Swift that I could find at Trafalgar was Irish, serving on the HMS Temeraire, but the new records include one more Swift serving at the Battle of Trafalgar: Samuel Swift, a Landsman, born in 1784 in Nottingham.

He would have been 21 years old at the time of Battle of Trafalgar, so just the right age for our “Billy Swift”. Samuel is a name which comes up in the Swift family tree, for instance ‘Billy’s’ son Samuel Burgin Swift.

Time to find out more about Samuel Swift (1784 – 1862) from Nottinghamshire, as I feel that he’s a likely match for my ancestor.

Update

At last I’ve tracked down my ancestor William Swift at the Battle of Trafalgar: he did change his name, but not to Samuel Swift.

Jane Bagshawe, Robert Bell

Robert Bell, I don’t have a photograph of Jane from that time.
St. Judes, architect’s drawing by T. J. Flockton and Abbott, August, 1865.

St Jude’s, Eldon Street, stood ten minutes walk from Sheffield city centre. On Sunday, 22 June, 1902, Robert and Jane – my grandad and grandma made there way there from nearby Fitzwilliam Street.

Jane & Robert

signatures

It’s good to have Robert’s and Jane’s signatures on the Marriage Certificate. At the time Robert, then aged 24, was a conductor on the Sheffield Trams. When he’d started work, the trams were still horse-drawn. In the previous year, at the time of the 1901 census, he’d been employed as a groom at Bawtry Hall, 25 miles east of the city.

Jane, 19, lists no occupation on the wedding certificate. In the previous year she was working as a cook in a household somewhere in Sheffield. In the census returns the only likely match that I’ve found is a Jeannie Bagshawe, aged 22.

signatures

Jane and her relatives who act as witnesses spell their surname with an ‘e’ at the end, in every other document I’ve come across it’s down as Bagshaw without the ‘e’.

Frederick was an older brother, Ruth as younger sister.

the fathers' occupations

Her father was William Bagshawe, a maltster.

We recently visited Blako Hill Farm, Mattersey, where Robert’s father, John, worked as a gardener.

The Rev. George Wakefield Turner

George Wakefield Turner
Image from Sheffield and District Who’s Who (W. C. Leng and Co., 1905) (page 74) (Sheffield Local Studies Library: 920.04274 SST). Enhanced and colourised by me in Photoshop.

The Rev. George Wakefield Turner (1850 – 1932), M.A., Vicar of St. Jude’s, performed the ceremony. The Rev. Turner had been a member of the Sheffield Education Committee since its inception.

Turner’s Watercolour Box

watercolour box

At the current Harewood House exhibition Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter I got a close look at this watercolour box that belonged to Turner, dating from around 1842, so possibly a set he used on one of his visits to Harewood.

watercolours

As in so many watercolour boxes, it’s the darker earth colours that have been neglected and he’s gone for the reds, blues and yellows.

Watercolour cakes were something new but I’m wondering what the three white trays – two of them all but empty – are made of. In a modern box they’d be plastic but these don’t look to me like ceramics or enamel.

Fred and Constance Bell, 1926

wedding photo
original photo
The original.

I’m fascinated to see this photograph of my Uncle Fred’s 1920s wedding.

My thanks to my cousin Kathleen for looking out this record of the 1926 marriage of her parents Fred and Constance Bell, which I’ve restored and colourised in Adobe Photoshop.

Fred and Constance

The cheeky eight-year in the foreground is my dad, Robert Douglas Bell. I don’t have many – if any – photographs of him as a child, so I’m pleased that this one has turned up.

Robert Douglas Bell

Fred was the oldest, my dad the youngest and in between was my Aunt Norah.

Norah

The guests aren’t arranged in strict family order and Constance’s mum didn’t hold with new-fangled inventions like photography, so she doesn’t appear at all, so the guests, as identified by my cousin Kathleen are:

Back row: Robert Bell (my grandad); Lena, his sister; the best man, a friend of Fred’s; Fred Bell; Constance; Edwin, her brother; Jack, husband of May on the front row; Nellie Ogden; Tilly Ogden.

Front row: May, married to Jack; Norah Bell; Robert Douglas Bell; Helen, sister of Constance (died 1942, aged 47); Jane Bell (nee Bagshaw) my grandma – did she end up seated here, diagonally opposite her husband Robert when Constance’s mum refused to be on the photograph?

Educating Horbury

Educating Horbury

My thanks and congratulations to Helen Bickerdike and the Horbury People’s Museum team for putting together the latest exhibit in the display cases in Horbury Library.

St Peter's School staff

It features the surprising number of educational institutions associated with the town over the years, including St Peter’s Church of England primary school, where I was lucky enough to have a series of remarkable form teachers between 1958 and 1962:

  • Miss Andrassy, who was so keen on art
  • Mr Harker who took us rambling and Youth Hostelling
  • ex-professional footballer Mr Thompson who was a terrific storyteller (even when he was really supposed to be teaching us whatever the curriculum was at that time)
  • Mr Lindley who encouraged us in drama, puppet shows and giving short talks to the whole class in the regular Friday-afternoon Storyteller’s Club
  • keen fell-walker Mr Douglas, the perfect example of a pipe-smoking headmaster with a voice like Gandalf with a Yorkshire accent.
junior artowrk
Clay head from my third year in Mr Thompson’s class, booklets and painting of the rebuilding of Golden Square, Horbury, from my fourth and final year at St Peter’s in Mr Lindley’s class (called 4D rather than 4L, we might not have been the perfect class, but we weren’t that bad).

Link

The Horbury Tapestry

Blaco Hill Cottages

Blaco Hill Cottages (car and phone lines removed in Photoshop).

On Monday my sister Linda and cousin Kathleen joined Barbara and I on a short tour of some of our Bell family history locations north of Retford around Sutton-cum-Lound, North Nottinghamshire.

John Bell

Blaco Hill Cottages, between Lound and Mattersey, was the home of our great grandfather John Bell, a gardener, born 1842, and his wife, our great grandmother, Helena, nee Whitehead, born 1845.

Helena Bell

It was the birthplace of my grandfather, Robert Bell, and several of his siblings.

Our thanks to Victoria of Blaco Hill Farm for giving us a guided tour.

Linda, Barbara, Kathleen and I at Blaco Hill Farm, photograph by Victoria.

The Grade II listed farm house is currently being renovated. During re-roofing they found straw, a form of insulation, stuffed beneath the slates.

Blaco Hill Farm

Victoria sent me a photograph of an oil-on-canvas painting of the farm.

Continue reading Blaco Hill Cottages

Homecoming Cake, 1946

Betty and John

My mother-in-law Betty Ellis didn’t feel much like celebrating on VE Day, eighty years ago. Her husband Bill was still in Italy, south of the River Po, and would soon be posted to North Africa and later to Northern Italy, close to the border with Yugoslavia.

The celebrations came a year later, as Betty and Bill recall in this short extract from a 45 minute cassette tape, which I recorded at the time of the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995.

There are a few comments from me and my mum in the background.

Betty lived on Gervaise Road, Horbury. Hagenbach’s baker’s was on the High Street, in the shop which is now the Darling Reads bookshop.

Bill returned to Westgate Station, Wakefield.

My thanks to George Senior, one of her great-grandsons, for restoring the sound quality on this recording.

My sketch of Betty baking in her kitchen at Manorfields Drive, Horbury, in the 1980s.

Cauliflowers

cauliflowers

Cauliflowers are ideal subjects for me to practice drawing as I attempt to get my right hand back in full working order.

cauliflowers

These, drawn in Adobe Fresco on my iPad, were some that I photographed at a greengrocers in Les Halles, when we visited Paris last month.

cauliflowers at Les Halles

Cauliflowers featured in Léon Lhermitte’s monumental painting of the market at Les Halles, on display at Le Petit Palais.

My drawing of cauliflowers at Les Halles from Léon Lhermitte’s painting.