The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  Arthur Weightman worked as a ‘chemical agent’. He had an office in the City of London, in St Mary Axe, off Leadenhall Street. The 1911 census is more specific; there he is described as an ‘agent for a lead manufacturer’. He spent his working life trading, mostly with Europe.

  James and Philippa, Amy’s grandchildren, have helped to fill in some details of the Weightman family. James is a retired actuary living in Cirencester. He is the owner by inheritance of several Charles Digby Harrod treasures, including his portrait, his Bible and the presentation items from Morebath.

  Philippa has documented the Weightman ancestors back through many centuries, and has produced a beautifully illustrated scroll to show this. Her history of the Weightman family can be traced through fifteen generations to about 1500. A branch of the family goes back to Richard de Rodvile, living in the time of William the Conqueror in the eleventh century – a total of more than twenty-four generations. All the families involved originated in that area of the Midlands situated along the present A5 road, on the Leicestershire/Warwickshire border, near the towns of Nuneaton and Hinckley.

  After their marriage, Arthur and his wife lived south of London, and moved to the definitive family home at ‘Allerford’, Silver Lane, Purley. Presumably the house was named after the same Allerford in Somerset; it obviously held happy memories for them all.

  Arthur and Amy Weightman had three children: Digby born in 1908, John in 1911 and Mary in 1913. Arthur Weightman died in Purley, Surrey, in 1925, aged 61, as the result of a road traffic accident. Amy Caroline remained at Allerford House and died seventeen years later in 1942, aged 67.

  Digby Milward Weightman, their eldest son, uniquely carried the names of both his paternal and his maternal great-grandmothers. He became a solicitor. He married Lavender Maureen Leck in 1940, at Purley, and from 1950 spent over twenty years in Foxley Lane, Purley, the same road that some of the Conders had lived in thirty years earlier. Digby Weightman was Charter Mayor of Croydon between 1970 and 1971, and was created a Freeman of the Borough in 1977. Apart from my father and my Uncle Michael, Beatrice’s son, he was the only other one of his generation, the grandchildren of Charles Digby Harrod, to whom I have managed to talk personally.

  BEATRICE MARTHA HARROD

  Beatrice Martha Harrod, my grandmother, was Charles Digby and Caroline’s fifth daughter. She was known to the family as Bea or Bee.

  I did not know her at all. What has been learnt about her has been, of necessity, second or third hand, and has certainly not produced a favourable impression of her. She was pretty well universally disliked by most of her relatives.

  On the Harrod side of the family, Natalie Oliver, a great-granddaughter of Charles Digby and grand-niece of Beatrice, was not too fond of Aunt Bea: ‘She seemed rather pompous towards my father’s family.’ She never forgave Beatrice for the aloofness she displayed and her lack of contact during the illnesses and deaths of Natalie’s grandparents, Rennie and Fanny Conder. She blamed it on Beatrice’s delusions of grandeur. She told me:

  Michael [Uncle Michael, Bea’s son] was invited at the beginning of 1939 to Windsor Castle as a young officer to mix with the two princesses and Aunt Bea was invited once to dinner there. But I really couldn’t forgive her in totally ignoring Granny in her old age – no letters, or visits.

  Apparently the lack of contact was despite Rennie contacting Beatrice Martha about his wife’s terminal state. They felt that Bea owed them some attention after the help they had given her earlier in her life.

  Jean Pitt, another granddaughter of Rennie and Fanny, thought she was ‘snooty’. Natalie Oliver wrote in 1989, ‘Great Aunt Bea ran away from home and stayed with my grandparents [Fanny and Eustace Reynolds Conder], who were married and much older. I’m afraid I never enquired why she ran away.’ Another letter from Natalie to Jean, also from around 1989 and written soon after the death of their Aunt Katherine, confirms the story about Bea living with her sister Fanny for a spell. She says that she remembers her grandfather Rennie talking, at the time his wife went into a nursing home, when he had had no contact with Bea, ‘she had run away from home and stayed with them.’

  Anna, the wife of Uncle Michael and daughter-in-law of Beatrice Martha, has no fond memories of her either. Bea was opposed to her marriage to her son and proved difficult throughout their married life, relenting only when she was near death and needed Anna to be with her. Peter Conder, another grandson of Fanny, said, ‘Bea and the two daughters were about the most toffee-nosed people I knew and certainly made me feel a poor relation.’

  Her husband’s family also disliked her and were opposed to her marriage to their son.

  In trying to understand why Beatrice may have been as described, reasons can be found in her story that would have been likely to make her feel bitter and twisted about how things turned out for her. She had a privileged upbringing and started life, like all her siblings, in a comfortable, loving and financially secure family. Was her temperament in her nature, or did circumstances cause the problem? We can never know without first-hand accounts of her earlier life, but my bet is that her later life had played the major part. This story, as suggested earlier, is told elsewhere.

  Beatrice was born in April 1877, soon after the family had moved to their splendid new home of Armitage Lodge in Sydenham. Charles Digby would have been in his pomp, with things going well for him in business and at home. Indeed, Great Britain was also doing very well at the time. On 1 January that year Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India; in February, there was the first cricket test match between Australia and England in Melbourne – Australia won by 45 runs (I have no doubt Charles Digby, a keen fan, may occasionally have been distracted by the scores in the newspapers of the day); on 12 April, Britain annexed the South African Republic and this same year Edison invented the microphone and the phonograph.

  Beatrice lived in Sydenham until she was 12 years old, when the family moved to the West Country. Her daughter-in-law, Anna, remembers that Beatrice was an accomplished pianist, an avid ‘smocker’, and that she spoke fluent French. These were attributes learnt, presumably, during these early years. The latter ability, the speaking of French, is the subject of some conjecture in her own story. It has previously been mentioned that Beatrice, along with the other three of the four youngest sisters and her mother and father, were missing from the 1901 census. They were all probably abroad then, and Beatrice also spent further time abroad in the following decade, so perhaps she learnt her French at that time.

  Further details of her before the age of 30 were very hard to find. More recent research has filled some of those gaps. Beatrice had moved with her parents to Allerford, and later Morebath at the end of the nineteenth century. Her father, Charles Digby, died suddenly in 1905 and afterwards she followed her mother to the Red House in Tunbridge Wells in 1906, and lived there until 1909.

  OLIVE MARY HARROD

  She was born in 1880 in Lewisham, and was the sixth daughter and seventh child of Charles and Caroline. She caused some confusion during research as she is listed in error as Alice M. Harrod in the 1881 census. In 1901, she is missing from the census, like her other young sisters. There are very few details available about her and no photographs have been found.

  She was well liked by her nephews and nieces. Jean Pitt wrote:

  I think mother’s [Margery Caroline Conder] favourite Aunt was Olive, there was only eight years between them [in fact ten years], they seemed to go on holiday together before mother married and I have a book of postcards given by Olive to Mother in memory of a holiday all over Exmoor.

  Olive travelled in 1934, on her own from Liverpool to Montreal on board the Duchess of Bedford, and returned two months later. Her address is given in the ship’s manifest as South Park, 11 Lansdowne Road, Wimbledon, SW20, and she was still at this address, according to the telephone directory, in 1937.

  She died in 1951, aged 70 in Eastbourne. She left a modest estate with several individual bequests to charities, and the
rest to her sisters and brother.

  EVA MARGUERITA HARROD AND THE RODGERS

  She was the seventh daughter and the last child, and was born in Sydenham in 1881. Charles may have decided to give up hope of another boy after Eva; Caroline was now 41 years old and this may have been the end of the line, both literally and metaphorically.

  I have had a lot of contact with her granddaughters so have accumulated information and photographs about Eva and her descendants. Penny Blyth in Canada told me that Eva went to finishing school in Paris, so one presumes she must have been aged about 20 then, so it would have been in about 1901. Perhaps the members of the family who were missing in 1901 were on a trip which included either seeing Eva in France or taking her there. Perhaps the other daughters had done the same.

  Eva’s future husband, Dr Frederick Millar Rodgers, proposed to her on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Though spelt ‘Miller’ on his birth records, Millar was the correct spelling of the family name. They married in 1912, like her sister Amy at St Paul’s Church, Rusthall.

  Frederick was born in 1876 in Clayton-Le-Moors, near Blackburn. He was the youngest of three sons of the Reverend Thomas Rodgers and Jane Millar. Thomas was a Wesleyan minister, like his brother Isaac. So Eva was the third daughter to marry a son of a Nonconformist minister.

  The Rodgers family have been traced back to Frederick’s great-grandfather, Thomas Rodgers, who was born in about 1770 in Ecclesfield, Yorkshire, a village close to Sheffield and Rotherham.

  Frederick qualified in Manchester and practised initially in Hull, where his parents were living. Prior to his marriage he had decided on a career in what today would be called mental health, but was in those days much more to do with mental illness, variously dubbed madness, feeble-mindedness, insanity or lunacy. He became one of the physicians at Winwick Hospital, Warrington, which was the County Lunatic Asylum for Lancashire, and by 1919 he was a consultant psychiatrist.

  Psychiatry was in its infancy, and patients were admitted to hospital for lengthy periods with not just the full range of mental illnesses recognised today but sadly also for many social reasons, including illegitimate pregnancy. Admission was often at the request of relatives, mostly fathers or husbands, who judged the patient difficult to manage. Some of the hospital inmates were drunkards or vagrants. These hospitals were crowded and hopeless places for people who should never have been there in the first place. Treatment, as we know it today, was primitive and included psychoanalytical therapy (Freud had been in full flow for some years), malaria-induced fever, insulin-induced comas, lobotomy and primitive forms of electroshock therapy. The general opinion of much of the remaining, supposedly sane, population was that they should just be shut up away from society forever.

  These institutions were vast establishments like small villages, with large numbers of buildings and their own small farms, catering and laundry facilities. They were almost completely self-sufficient. In 1911, Winwick Hospital held about 2,200 patients, tellingly all identified in the census by initials only. There were about 300 members of staff, including maintenance staff of all sorts, assistants and nurses, with just four doctors and a medical superintendent.

  When I was a medical student in the mid 1960s, I was able to see a similar institution myself when I was studying for a short while at Claybury Hospital in Essex. Although it was nearing the end of its days, it had probably changed little in the previous fifty years. By chance, I have visited Winwick myself during the 1990s when, as a general practitioner, I went there to undertake a course on hypnotherapy in the psychiatric department. It was a typical, grim, Victorian asylum building. It finally closed in 1998.

  Penny Blyth said that she was told that the three children of Frederick and Eva were born in the house in the grounds of the hospital. She said, ‘There was a tunnel connecting the house to the hospital – the only one with a key to the gate in the tunnel was my grandfather. My mother remembers being allowed to ride bikes in it on rainy days.’

  Sometime in the late 1930s Frederick retired and, together with Eva, they built and moved to a house in Bexhill, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Jean Pitt remembers, ‘my brother John was evacuated to Eva in Bexhill for a short time in WWII.’ During the Second World War Eva’s daughter Jean had to teach her mother to cook as she had never done so previously!

  Frederick and Eva are remembered fondly by their grandchildren. Frederick was known as ‘Pop’ and Eva as ‘Granny’ or ‘Mop’. Jocelyn Broughton, another granddaughter, recalls Eva as being both ‘lovely’ and yet ‘formidable’. Helen Yarwood recounts that her grandmother was rather strict, ‘on one occasion she threatened to serve up my dinner for breakfast if I didn’t eat it all. I didn’t, she did!’

  Frederick died when Penny Blyth was very young but she remembers, ‘he had lovely hands – healing hands I think you would call them.’ Later Granny used to buy Penny’s riding clothes for her in Harrods when Penny stayed with her in the summer. Granny had obviously begun to lose it, as they had Christmas crackers every day with their breakfast!

  Frederick died in 1955 in Bexhill, when he was aged 78. Eva lived until 1964.

  There are interesting stories about the three children of Frederick and Eva. Not only are some of the family quite exotic, but the history I have uncovered shows that family myths are not always absolutely true. Charles Thomas Rodgers was the eldest child and was born in 1913. He joined the army between the wars becoming a 2nd lieutenant in 1934. He had two marriages.

  His first marriage was to the excitingly named Vaudine Louise Agassiz. The marriage as a whole seems to have been odd, and a rather dark period of his life. Vaudine, according to the records, was born in 1912 in Patrington, East Yorkshire. Patrington is just not an exotic place at all; it is a small hamlet on the very flat land between Hull and the North Sea coast named Holderness. There is a small creek connected to the River Humber.

  Jeanann, the only daughter of Charles and Vaudine, thought her mother had been born in Whitby, about 65 miles further north, although it may be that the family were based there during her childhood. Though the Agassiz name is relatively rare, they were an active lot and there are an awful lot of them to be found in the records. Usually an uncommon name aids the family history researcher, but although the records show that Vaudine was a name often used in the family none of the Vaudines identified were the one I was trying to find. No Agassiz family were found in the 1911 census in east Yorkshire, they were all in London and environs, or Hampshire.

  Jeanann was given to understand that Vaudine’s father was a submarine captain, killed during the First World War. He was Thomas Roland Agassiz, born in 1870 at Gosport, Hampshire. His ancestors were a military part of the clan. His father was Lieutenant Roland Lewis Agassiz, a Royal Marines officer born in Cologne, Germany, and his grandfather, Lewis Agassiz, was also a Royal Marine. So the story seemed reasonable.

  Thomas Roland Agassiz’s career was in the Merchant Navy and then in the RNR. He obtained his Board of Trade Certificate as a mariner in 1897 and rose through the ranks during the following ten years. Late in 1913, just before the First World War started, he was commissioned as a commander and served on a series of mine-sweeping vessels in that role. Most of these were armed, commandeered trawlers or motor yachts. They acted both as mine sweepers and patrol and protection vessels for merchant shipping. He had two spells in command of the armed admiralty motor yacht,Conqueror II. She had been built in Hull, east Yorkshire, in 1889, for the Vanderbilt family in New York, so presumably was a smart boat.

  During Agassiz’s second spell of service in September 1916, the Conqueror II, together with HM Trawler Sarah Alice, was in the process of trying to investigate an unidentified merchant steamer north of the Fair Isle when they were attacked by the German submarine U-52, commanded by Kapitän Hans Walther. Between July 1916 and September 1917, Hans Walther and his boat sank thirty-two and damaged a further four ships of various nationalities. The total tonnage sunk by him was 89,000 tons and he d
amaged 13,700 tons.

  During this engagement, both naval boats were sunk and nineteen minutes later the merchant steamer was sunk. This turned out to be the 2,788 ton St Gothard. Seventeen lives were lost on the Conqueror II, including the commander, and sixteen on the Sarah Alice. The crew of the St Gothard were saved. The crew of Conqueror II, including Commander Agassiz, are commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.

  So, Thomas Roland Agassiz was Vaudine’s father, but who was her mother? The only marriage listed for Thomas Agassiz was at the end of 1914, when he married Winifred Ann Smith in Portsmouth. This was two years after Vaudine’s birth, but of course does not mean Winifred was not her mother, and there are no other candidates.

  Nothing much more is known about Vaudine’s early life. There is a record in the passenger lists at the National Archives, of a journey from London to Mombasa in Kenya in May 1920, undertaken by Vaudine and her mother. Her mother is recorded as a dressmaker, aged 39, and Vaudine, aged 7. Later events suggest this was a one-way journey, and no return journey has been found.