That We Shall Die

by Peter Hey

  And Alan, like all of us, was formed of two genetic halves. His unknown and absent father had no role in his upbringing, but what was the impact of DNA beside the physical: the height, the build, the colour of eyes, the shade of hair, its recession in age? Alan’s aunt had suggested his baldness had not come from his mother’s side, and indeed, there were images of his maternal grandfather in the photo album that seemed to support that assertion. So, Alan might have inherited his father’s hairline, but what of his personality traits, his instincts? It was the old nature versus nurture debate, an argument that had historically strayed beyond science into the political, with some in the old Eastern Bloc insisting on the equality of everyone being born as a blank slate. Jane knew the reality was more complex, an ongoing interaction of influences that was usually impossible to pin down. She had often wondered how much of her own character came from her father. He, of course, was a presence in her early years, before he chose to walk away. Whilst Jane lived with the scars of that abandonment, Alan seemed very relaxed about the gaping hole that was his paternity. He had agreed to do a DNA test, but Jane sensed no real hunger for answers on his part. To a large extent that made her job easier. She could not be sure what, if anything, she would be able to tell him. She got the impression he would be happy either way. But then, he seemed equally laid-back about what she might or might not find on his mother’s side. Jane suddenly found herself questioning why he had bothered to hire her. Was it really prompted by a TV programme, or did he have so much money from the sale of his business that he needed to find things to spend it on beyond holidays, or cars, or whatever toys or comforts were important to him? He had no children to pass it to, after all.

  Jane put these thoughts aside. Alan was paying her and she was earning her money by doing a good and thorough job. Her skills as a genealogist were continuing to strengthen, and Tommy’s insight made them an effective and professional team. They had successfully unearthed the story of Alan’s mother’s ancestry. It was one that could be split into two neat halves, two different family backgrounds, essentially two different classes, one slipping downwards whilst the other prospered until they crossed over and merged though the marriage of Alan’s grandparents.

  The Shaws: a flavour of empire

  Given that his father was a mystery, Alan Shaw’s upbringing was one with an unequivocally single set of grandparents. The numerical shortfall was perhaps compensated by the closeness of being raised under their roof, a house he still occupied along with the shadows of their memory.

  Alan’s surname was his grandfather’s and the Shaws considered themselves Irish, whether they were born on the island or not. Originally, however, they were descended from Protestant Scots who came over to Ulster during the plantations of the 17th century, colonisations intended to control, anglicise and ‘civilise’ the native population.

  The family did well from the move. They became firmly established as members of the landed gentry and included MPs for Dublin and Belfast, one of whom married the daughter of the Bishop of Limerick and went on to serve as the governor of Tobago. That appointment came to a premature end when he was killed returning from a social engagement and his gig tumbled down a 30-foot precipice. As well as politicians, the Shaws were also soldiers, with at least two generals in the wider family tree, waging Britain's wars across Europe, North America and Asia. The youngest son of the ultimately unfortunate governor of Tobago went to the subcontinent and fought in several battles during what was then called the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny. He made colonel then transferred to the political service, eventually to be appointed Consul-General for South Persia. A knighthood inevitably followed. His eldest brother, Alan’s direct ancestor, had a more modest career. Edmond Thomas Shaw rose no further than the rank of major, though it was a title he chose to use for the rest of his life.

  Major Edmond T Shaw, Alan’s great-great-grandfather, entered the world in January 1828. His army record said he was born in France, though it was not clear why his mother might have been on the Continent at the time. Jane’s instinctive reaction had been to think what a faraway world that was. Napoleon was defeated and dead, but his corpse still defied decay on St Helena and his ghost continued to haunt European politics. The future Queen Victoria was an eight-year-old girl subjugated to her mother’s ambition, whilst her uncle, profligate, unpopular George IV, sat heavily on the British throne. Jane had to remind herself of the closeness of the generational ties: nearly two centuries, yet Edmond was no more distant than being the grandfather of the man Alan had grown up with, his own grandfather.

  Edmond travelled extensively throughout his life, such that he left little trace in the usual UK genealogical records. Fortunately, as the son of an important family and an army officer, his name did appear with relative frequency in the newspapers of the time, and his service records also helped fill in some of the gaps. In addition, several of his children moved to England and the censuses gave their birthplaces, confirming their parents’ movements. That said, there was little to say where Edmond spent his own childhood. Jane could only assume his very earliest years were on the family estate of Shawcross in County Down and he was then sent away to school, perhaps in Dublin or Edinburgh, before entering the army aged 18.

  This was a time when wealthy men could buy their commissions: an infantry captain might pay today’s equivalent of £160,000 for his status, and it would be considerably more for a fashionable cavalry or guards regiment. The system helped preserve the social exclusivity of the officer class, though its deficiencies were highlighted by debacles of incompetent leadership such as the Light Brigade’s near-suicidal cavalry charge into Russian cannon during the Battle of Balaclava. Alan’s great-great-grandfather appeared, however, to have progressed through the officer ranks ‘without purchase’. In the 66th Regiment of Foot, he was made ensign in 1847, lieutenant in 1848 – a position having become available due to his predecessor’s death – and captain in 1854. He left the regiment in 1855, aged 27, having ‘Retired by sale of commission’. His period of service mostly fell in the long peace between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the start of the Crimean War in 1853, and there was no evidence he ever led men into any kind of conflict. His record included no awards for valour and he was never injured or wounded. His first posting was to Gibraltar, followed by the West Indies and then Canada. His time in the tropics was marred by a serious outbreak of yellow fever which took the lives of over 90 British officers and men. It also led to the vacancy which afforded him early promotion to lieutenant.

  The empire had emancipated its slaves when Edmond was still a boy. Nonetheless, many people would now see his presence in the Caribbean simply as an act of colonial occupation and oppression. But he was a soldier who went where queen and country sent him, and Jane felt it was unreasonable to judge him through the prism of modern values.

  On his travels, Edmond acquired a wife and child. He married Mary Acton, herself the daughter of a serving army surgeon, on St Kitts in 1851, and their first daughter was born in Quebec three years later.

  1851 was a significant date in the young officer’s life for another reason. On a different West Indian island, his governor father died when his carriage fell on top of him. Edmond was now heir to the Shawcross estate, comprising a large manor house, 5,000 acres of land and tenancies of a local village and farms. But he did not come home, and the estate was sold in 1853. After some digging around, Jane found that Shawcross had been prepared for auction as early as 1850. It was listed by the ‘Encumbered Estates Court’, a body set up to force the sale of property in the aftermath of the Great Famine that devastated Ireland in the latter half of the 1840s. Many landed estates, especially those which were already mortgaged, became insolvent through the inability of tenants to pay their rents. But the north of Ireland was less affected than the south and west, and why might Edmond’s inheritance have been mortgaged so heavily? Jane could only conjecture as to the reason, though she did find his father’s name associated with a s
peculative railway company calling itself the Great Eastern and Western and hoping to build a coast-to-coast route from Norfolk to South Wales. It was the period known as Railway Mania, a frenzy fuelled by the success of the early lines, but the financial bubble burst around the same time the potato blight was causing such suffering in Ireland. Perhaps Shaw the elder had literally bet the house on the new transport revolution, and the collapse of the company had thrown him into debt. Members of Parliament were unsalaried at the time, so it might also explain why he had chosen to take well-paid employment as a colonial governor. Sadly, the shortness of his tenure would not have allowed sufficient time to redress any shortfall in the Shaw finances. No doubt some of his tenant families endured far more devastating ruin.

  The bulk of Shawcross was bought by a cousin, but Edmond appeared to retain a modest house overlooking Carlingford Lough. Whilst his regiment, the 66th Foot, was never sent to the Crimea, it was posted to India in 1857 to help suppress the rebellion against British rule. By that time, the young soldier had left but had managed to acquire his major’s commission, albeit not in the regular army. He had finally returned home to join the Royal Tyrone Fusiliers, a force of reserves re-constituted during time of war. As a county militia regiment, it was not expected to serve outside the British Isles but was promptly despatched to northern England in case civil disobedience tested local sympathies within its ranks.

  Tommy had found a history of the Tyrone Fusiliers, written by an old quartermaster, which provided the following crucial snippet of information: ‘On the 20th of December 1855, the regiment removed from Sheffield to Sunderland as its headquarters where seven companies were stationed, the remaining three companies being then sent on detachment to Tynemouth under the command of Major Shaw.’ This explained why Edmond’s only son, Alan’s great-grandfather Thomas Laughton Shaw, was born in a bleak castle barracks overlooking the windswept coast of north-east England on the last day of 1855.

  The regiment saw action putting out a Sunderland theatre fire the following March, only to be disembodied again a few months later. In 1860 the Shaws had their second daughter, born back in Ireland. But their travels had not ceased. In January 1861, the Belfast News-Letter reported that Major Shaw, ‘late of the 66th Regiment and of the Tyrone Fusiliers’, had been appointed Barrack-Master in Bermuda. Another daughter was born in 1866, this time in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. In the 1870s, her father reappeared in the records as a deputy commissary and then full commissary in a Whitehall department with administrative responsibility for army supplies, transport and logistics. Still titling himself Major, Edmond Thomas Shaw, ‘late of the 66th Foot and the Commissariat’, died aged 60 in 1889, his address then being a somewhat humble terraced house in south London. His will left everything to his wife, and the probate calendar suggested she would have been a comfortable but far from wealthy widow.

  By that time their son, Thomas, had begun a career in medicine, influenced no doubt by his mother’s family background. Mary Shaw’s own father was a doctor, albeit an army surgeon of some 45 years’ service and a veteran of Waterloo. Mary was born in modern-day Sri Lanka, her siblings entering the world in India, Ireland, Corfu and the West Indies, as her father’s career took him around the imperial pink of the Victorian map. He retired with the impressive rank of inspector-general of army hospitals. Jane allowed herself to wonder if he had ever met Florence Nightingale, before realising his travels meant their paths were unlikely to have crossed. The Lady with the Lamp campaigned against poor sanitary conditions, and Mary’s father could have been a crusty opponent or perhaps a convert to her reforms. Either way, his was a time of crude and painful treatments including amputation without the relief of anaesthetic. An army surgeon would need, among other things, a strong nerve and a steady, quick hand. This particular medic might also have had charm and looks as he seemed to have married well. Mary’s mother, Sarah Sophia Laughton, was descended from the second sons of aristocracy, and it was through her the tenuous link to Alfred the Great could be traced.

  The inspector-general of army hospitals’ final posting was to Quebec, and there he retired and lived out his last years. Just before his death in 1871, he completed a census return and included in his household a 14-year-old Protestant Irish boy named Thomas Shaw. Was this the grandson who would follow him into the medical profession? The Canadian bureaucrats chose not to record family relationships, but Jane decided that it had to be. The age was one year out and the boy’s birthplace was incorrect – Nova Scotia, not north-east England – but the old surgeon could easily have been confused, given his and his daughter’s peripatetic military lives.

  There was nothing to contradict that supposition given the dearth of other evidence as to Thomas Laughton Shaw’s early life. The letters after his name said that he had received his medical training and qualifications at the University of Dublin, and on the 1891 census he appeared in England as assistant to an Irish general practitioner in a small Cotswolds market town. Ten years later, he had his own practice 50 miles away in Solihull. He also had a wife and two sons under three, though Alan’s grandfather, John, had yet to be born.

  By 1911, Thomas L Shaw, surgeon and physician, was living with his wife and three new children, including John, plus a cook, children’s maid and two housemaids. Also resident was a young assistant surgeon. The two eldest Shaw sons were, however, by this time boarding at a private school in the remote Warwickshire countryside.

  The medical directories showed Dr Thomas L Shaw remaining in Solihull until 1925, when he had a new address in Southsea, his wife’s hometown on England’s south coast, adjacent to the major naval base of Portsmouth. He had presumably ceased to practice, purchasing a large property as a source of retirement income.

  Shawcross Mansions was a five-storey, double-fronted mansion block on the seafront overlooking the pier. Jane studied the online maps and street-level images and could see that, from the upper windows at least, there would be clear views across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, taking in two of Palmerstone’s Victorian sea forts, sinister islands of concrete built to dissuade the French from sailing their ironclads into Portsmouth Harbour itself. The house was already standing on a map of 1898 but must have been renamed when Dr and Mrs Shaw acquired it. The 1939 census showed it to be comprised of ten apartments, three of which were occupied by members of the Shaw family. The doctor had lived there for the last 11 years of his life, but by the start of the Second World War, his widow shared one flat with a nurse companion. Two of the Shaw sons, both estate agents, were also under the same roof.

  The other son, Alan’s grandfather, John Foster Shaw, had married in Southsea but had decided to return to Solihull, again to sell properties and land. For some reason, none of the Shaw children had chosen medicine as a career. It could have been because of the financial success enjoyed by the first brother. By 1939, he was only 41 but described himself as retired. His father had worked to the age of 70.

  Alan’s great-grandmother, born Isabel Laura Foster, outlived her doctor husband by 12 years. She came originally from London, and her father owned an umbrella factory in the East End before selling up and relocating to Southsea. In Alan’s photo album there was one picture of her, looking every inch the Edwardian lady, wearing a long, elaborately decorated dress and with her hair lifted and carefully arranged. The image wasn’t dated, but Jane guessed Isabel would have been just into her forties. She was an attractive woman and Jane read into her face a calm intelligence and authority.

  But who was she really? She raised five children, ran a household of several servants and presumably enjoyed some status as a doctor’s wife in a small Midlands town. Alan’s aunt had said something about her being a suffragette. That was not an occupation one would find on a census return, but Tommy dug around in the newspaper databases and was rewarded with a letter to The Times written in 1913.

  It was signed by several ladies, including Isabel Laura Shaw of Solihull, and wrong-footed Jane in that it spoke in supp
ort of a woman’s right to vote, yet strongly criticised the militancy of others in their movement.

  Jane knew the stories of women chaining themselves to railings and being imprisoned for seemingly minor offences, like holding a public meeting outside the Houses of Parliament. Smashing a window might result in several months’ hard labour. Once incarcerated, many were cruelly force-fed with rubber tubes jammed down their throats when they continued their resistance by hunger strike. Most hauntingly, Jane had seen the jerky film footage of Emily Davidson’s fatal protest at the 1913 Epsom Derby, where she ducked under the guardrail and deliberately stepped into the path of the king’s horse. The actions had been desperate but ultimately successful. After the First World War, women had finally been given the vote, at least for those over 30. Their younger sisters had to wait another decade before the voting age was dropped to 21, the same as for men.