What the heck was Annie Campbell doing in Dover, Kent in 1900? There are many unanswered questions in our family history, but few are as intriguing as the mystery of why my grandfather Richard Campbell was born in that port on England’s southeast coast.
I have vivid memories of my grandfather, although he passed away in 1974, when I was only a teenager. I was living in Canada then, and saw him perhaps just a dozen times and exchanged fewer than a dozen letters. Yet the strength of his personality, the vividness of his stories (and the stories others told of him) and the perspectives of his worldview are fresh in my mind still.
He was a working class renaissance man, an opinionated self-taught romantic intellectual with a powerful sense of justice and honour. Leaving school at 12, he satisfied his hunger for education through a lifetime of self-learning, reading Shakespeare and teaching himself geometry and mathematics in his 20s; learning to play the violin and joining an orchestra in his 30s; and qualifying as a City and Guilds carpenter in his 40s.
An incurable romantic, Richard revelled in his memories of India in the early 1920s. These were the very best days of his life, days of excitement and adventure, of vibrant colour and raw passion, and he felt strongly the contrast with all the dreary and bleak days that came after.
He delighted in the role he had played as a soldier in the grand epic tale of the British Empire: riding to the relief of the beleaguered British forces in Amritsar after the massacre of protesting Indians in that city in 1919; driving a gun carriage up the Khyber Pass on the North West Frontier during the Third Afghan War; chasing Mahatma Gandhi through the alleys and streets of Agra.
Richard never again experienced that heart-pounding excitement. He returned to a cold, economically depressed England of poverty, inadequate housing and poor health care, where he struggled to find meaningful work. His family - his wife Elsie and his children, Elsie, Richard and Margaret - became the biggest part of his life. He would do anything for them, often scheming elaborate plans to acquire the presents he believed they deserved.
He was a dreamer. Like “Pop” Larkin, the hero of The Darling Buds of May, he always had something on the go: fiddling money at the pub where he worked, or on his milk route; growing tobacco in his back garden and curing it in his kitchen; opening a used electrical goods store; starting a mail order foreign postage stamp company; loan sharking money to Elsie’s coworkers; keeping rubbish bins of home-brewed beer in his hall cupboard; the schemes never seemed to end.
And he dreamed of escaping from England. To Australia, perhaps, or to Canada. He never left, but all his children did. He found it hard to see his family move so far away, but he encouraged them to create their lives somewhere better.
Elsie left him too, in 1953, struck down by a sudden and devastating stroke. He grieved for a year.
Richard was a man of his time, a chain-smoking borderline alcoholic who believed it was his wife’s job to prepare Sunday dinner while he was at the pub. He had an opinion on everything, but his strongest opinions were reserved for foreigners. He didn’t think much of them, or to be more precise, he didn’t think much of them being in London, taking jobs from him and his mates. His most passionate diatribes were reserved for the Irish. They were lazy, hard drinking and undeserving. They belonged back in Ireland. So how ironic that after he died we discovered that he wasn’t English after all. He was, well, Irish.
We were told that Richard’s father had run away from home to join the army, and been disowned by his family (who either ran a pub or owned a construction company). Richard’s mother had died giving birth in the family home while his father was serving in the cavalry in South Africa in the Second Boer War. Richard had then been raised by foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hollywell, in Woolwich, London and had seen little of his father while he was young.
From Richard’s birth certificate we learned he had been born in Dover, his mother’s name was Annie Conroy, and she couldn’t have died in childbirth, because she was the one who had registered the birth. After much fruitless searching back in pre-Internet days, we gave up looking for a record of a marriage of Annie Conroy and Richard Campbell in England.
We had a breakthrough in 1996, when we discovered a marriage in Ireland of a Richard Campbell and a Mary Anne Conroy, which had taken place exactly 100 years earlier.
Here’s what we’ve now pieced together:
Richard’s father arrived in Lucknow in India in 1889, where he was posted to a cavalry regiment called the 17th Lancers. Most of his military career is a mystery, because his documents are missing from “WO97 Chelsea” as the records at The National Archives of 19th century British soldiers are known.
The 17th Lancers returned to England in 1890. Richard was recorded being with the regiment at Shorncliffe Camp in Kent in the 1891 census, although confusingly he gives his place of birth as Lancaster, Lancashire.
The regiment was based in Leeds in 1896, when Richard and Annie were married. Richard gave a Dublin address and listed his occupation as “Servant,” even though he must have still been in the army.
The 17th Lancers were posted to Ireland in 1897, where they stayed until they were sent to South Africa in January 1900 to reinforce the British army fighting the Boers. They sailed for South Africa from Liverpool and London. When Richard was born in July 1900, his father was rounding up the remnants of the Boer army after their defeat at the Battle of Diamond Hill.
Annie took Richard to Dublin where she died three months after Richard was born. When the 1901 census was taken on March 31st, he was being cared for by Annie’s parents, Thomas and Mary.
Richard’s father returned from South Africa in 1902. He retired from the army sometime between then and 1905, when the 17th Lancers were posted to India.
Sometime between 1901 and 1911 Richard returned from Dublin and lived for at least some of the time with foster parents Bill and Margaret Hollywell. Bill had served in the 17th Lancers until 1894, where he must have met Richard’s father. Richard loved them like his own parents, even naming his second daughter after his surrogate mum. By the time of the 1911 census, father and son were united and living in Plumstead, near Woolwich.
Margaret lived with Richard and his family in the 1930s after Bill died. Richard’s own father became an in-pensioner at the Chelsea Hospital, a retirement home for former soldiers and lived there until he died in 1937.
So many open questions.
How did Richard’s father and mother meet? Why did his father claim his occupation to be a servant on his marriage certificate when he was actually serving in the army? Why did he list his place of birth on the 1891 census as Lancashire when all other documents point to Dublin?
What was the reason for Annie to be in Dover, Kent in July 1900? The 17th Lancers had been in Ireland before they left for South Africa and they’d not been anywhere near Dover. Why did Annie go back to Dublin after Richard was born?
Why did Richard’s father settle in Woolwich and not in Ireland after he left the army? What brought him to travel to Dublin to take custody of the toddler he’d never known? How did he have the courage to be a single father at a time when this was almost unheard of?
And why did Richard take in Margaret Hollywell after Bill died, and yet was content to see his own father go to the Chelsea Hospital?
What kind of relationship did Richard's parents have? Were they living a love story? Will we ever know?
