Notes on the Blackley Family

PART THREE

Travers  Robert  (1601-1870)  from  whom  we  descend,  married  in  1825, Elizabeth, daughter of Colonel Lewery R.A. who had been captured during the Napoleonic War and was for a time a prisoner of war at Verdun.  Her brother, John Edmund Fortescue Lewery had been a student friend of his in Trinity.  They were inarried at the old Frotescue house in Clermont Park near Dundaik in the room to the right of the hall door and Elizabeth wore her riding habit for the ceremony.  After their marriage they went abroad posting  (as the  fashion then was)  to Paris,  Nice and Geneva. In Geneva they made a life-long friend of Mrs. Sumner, wife of the Bishop of Winchester.  Travers Robert had taken his degree in medicine and after their honeymoon, he and his wife stayed on in Paris so that he could continue his medical education.   In 1827 they returned to Dublin and in 1829 were living in Ely Place.  In 1830 he was appointed resident dctor at Dundalk Infirmary,  a post congenial  to him with Fortescue relations  living  on  their  estates  at  Corderry,  Stephenstown  and Miltowngrange.

In 1833 he met with an accident and had to have a knuckle removed which impaired his surgical powers.  He resigned the Dundalk post and again settled and practised in Dublin living at No. 139 Lower Leeson Street. In 1839 his wife's  failing health made it necessary to give up his profession and move his whole family down to Beech Hill, a country place near Armagh.  Elizabeth died on 17 March 1853.  He married as his second wife on 24 April 1855 his cousin, Jane Montgomery and the children were all devoted to her.  He died on 10 Nov. 1870 at 23 Upper Sackville Street (then the Friendly Brother House).  I cannot discover where he was buried.

I now pass to the next  generation.

Temperance (1827-1863), the eldest sister, married Matthew Weld O'Connor of Oldscastle.  He was one of the toughest of Irish landlords and got an unenviable reputation during the famine of 1847 which may not have been deserved.   At any rate he was not an absentee.  W.F.T. O'connor was at Charterhouse with my father and had a distinguished career in India ending as Resident in Nepal.

Of John  (1829-1894)  I can discover little.  He was educated with his two younger brothers on the Continent and all my father could tell me was that he was a most charming old gentleman.  He seems to have produced numerous daughters (none of whom I have met) and one son known to the family as 'London Travey'.  This son married young and went out to India as an engineer and was responsible for all electric lighting arrangements at the Durbars of 1902 and 1912.  His daughter Grace married Major Edward Seymour of Hudson's Horse.

William Lewery  (1830-1902)  was the only Blackley to achieve national distinction.  A brilliant linguist, he married Amelia,  the daughter of Dr. Friedlander, who had been his tutor in Germany and with him produced a German*English Dictionary (Blackley & Friedlander), which for a time was a standard work.   He entered the Church and held various livings in the diocese of Winchester of which his friend and the famous Dr. Sumner was Bishop and became an Honorary Canon of the Diocese.   I remember meeting  his  widow  ('Aunt  Mary')  who  lived  in  the Minster House at Winchester in the early 1920's.  She had published privately an account of his activities (Kegan Paul) and I remember it embodied a sermon on thrift preached by him in Westminster Abbey in 1879.  My  father,   as  a schoolboy,  used to stay with him while he was Rector of Whitechurch (Hants) and was impressed by his wit and by his eye for a horse.
Today he  is generally accepted as  the originator of the  scheme  for National Insurance.  For the last 13 years of his life he was Vicar of St. James-The-Less, Westminster.  He died at 75 St  George's Square on 25 July 1902 and is buried at Woking necropolis  (grave no.  143304). His daughter Hilda married the Rev. F.N.  Harvey who had been a friend of my father at Oxford and who kept wicket for Hampshire.

Travers Robert (1833-1888) my grandfather, like his two elder brothers was educated on the Continent, and was a good linguist and until he died kept a house in Paris.  He had a commission as Major in the Royal Longford Rifles but I do not think his duties were exacting.  For some years after his marriage he and his wife lived with her parents at Rutland Square, Dublin.  About 1873 some friends suggested that he should come to Belfast and put money into some business there.  He bought a house called Park Lodge about five miles out of Belfast and would have left his family much better off if he had not tried his hand at business.  He died at the early age of 55 and is buried in the City Cemetery, Belfast.  On his death my grandmother was left with the task of bringing up five children varying in age from my father aged 21 down to Humphrey aged 2, on an income of £500 per annum.  She was the most remarkable woman I ever knew.  Left in what might have appeared to others as financial straits she sent her son Fred to Haileybury and Humphrey to Berkhamsted and both to Trinity College,  Dublin, where they took their degrees in Medicine while her daughters went to the Alexsndra College.   She used to take a house by the sea for the children's summer holidays and never owed a penny in her life.  How she did all this was ever been a mystery to  her  admiring  descendents.   Though  obviously  possessed  of  unusual financial  acumen,  she  used  to  say  in  all  sincerity  that  she  never understood money.   Born eight years before the death of the Duke of Wellington she grew old gracefully, never criticizing the manners of the day, which was a legacy of the war, but retaining all the attractiveness of a great Victorian.  That decay was never observed in her house for we all instinctively reached up to the standard which she set.   In the earlier days of her widowhood, and when I first knew, her she lived at 26 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin.  A feature of the Earlsfort Terrace house was the  china  (including bedroom utensils)  bearing the family crest. Two specimens are now in my possession.  Both then and at 27 Clyde Road, to which she moved in 1912, she held firmly the reins of family Government, and until her death in 1934 her house and letters formed the point of contact  and  clearing agency  for  news.   She  lived  to  see  her  great grandchildren born and will always remain for her descendants a shining example of a long life, well lived.  From about 1900 she was always known to us as Gaggie.
   
With her lived her sister Fanny Gibson. A painter of considerable merit she exhibited regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy.  As a thinker she was in advance of her time and a passionate sympathy for the underdog made her a champion of unpopular causes.  She was suspected of pro-Boer sympathies  during  the  South African War and shocked her conventional family by Supporting the Redmondites and the Irish Nationalist Cause. By  some  of  us  she was  regarded  as  eccentric  but her kindness  and generosity to diverse charities there is no question.  One story told of her, illustrates her dislike to publicity.  At some missionary meeting she appeared to be putting two pence into the plate: and a sovereign slipped out from between them.  Gaggie (d. 29 Sep. 1934) Aunt Fanny Cd.14 Feb. 1932) their brother Captain John Lewis Gibson, 15th Regt.  (d. 26 Feb. 1872) and their father John Gibson (d.1l Jan. 1873) are buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery Dublin (plot C4171-135).

To return to the Blackleys,  my great-aunt Elizabeth Marie  (1837-1900) was beautiful, clever and talented and apparently did not lack chances of marrying for numerous eligibles are known to have sought her hand, including Lord Rayleigh, the artist.  Why she never accepted any of them is now known.

My father was born in a house in Upper Fitzwilliam St., Dublin, on 6th Jan. 1867.  He went to Charterhouse in September 1880, passing into the Middle Shell.  I remember seeing his first letter from there announcing with pride,  'there are boys bigger then me in the Lower Shell'.  He left in December 1883 and went to a crammer in Somerset to prepare him for entry to Oxford.  His school career was undistinguished and a suspected weak heart prevented him from playing games.  He was spare man for the shooting VIII which his grandson captained seventy years later.  He went up to Exeter College, his three years at Oxford, captained his college at Association Football and played sometimes for the Corinthians then in their heyday.  After going down he learned land agency in Co. Antrim, a profession at that time much sought after by "walking" gentry" who had no  land  of  their  own.   He  was, for  a  time, assistant agent  to Lord Massereene and Ferrard and in 1895 became agent to the Farnham estate in Cavan, an appointment which he led for the next 27 years.

My father took his work seriously but found plenty of time to live the pleasant country house existence of those days, with the shooting and other amusements which it brought.

His game book, which was lost during the troubles of 1922, was a useful index of the places at which he was a visitor, including Shane's Castle the house of the O'Neills which like many other Irish houses was burnt in 1921.  He was a good diner out and knew intimately all the great characters of the North and had a fund of stories about them in which the famous Colonel Jimmy McCalmont and a certain John Harrison usually figured.  Colonel McCalmont was returned unopposed as a member of one of the Antrim constituencies for 30 years and during the whole of his parliamentary career he never opened his mouth.  His much enduring and very lovable wife was a close friend of my grandmother.   I  remember meeting her  at  the Naze Races  in  1920.