UPDATE MARCH 2022
Thanks are due to Elizabeth Abbott-Grasso who contacted me with new information about Alexander and Anne Carden’s son Henry, who went to America. Elizabeth is a descendant of Henry’s younger daughter Druda Carden Lattimore.
Alexander James Carden was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at its Isis-Urania temple in London, in March 1891, choosing the Latin motto ‘Fide’. His wife Anne Rule Carden was initiated in the same month; she opted for a motto in Italian - ‘Amore’. Both did the study, and passed the necessary exams, required of initiates if they wanted to join the GD’s inner, 2nd Order, and were initiated into it in March 1893. Then, however, things seem to have gone rather wrong: Alexander James Carden’s membership of the Order was in abeyance by June 1894; and his wife’s name was removed from the Roll of GD members, though the date of the removal isn’t clear.
In March 1892 the Cardens’ elder daughter Pamela Carden was initiated into the GD, also at the Isis-Urania temple, taking the Hebrew motto ‘Shemeber’. She was initiated into its 2nd Order in June 1893 and remained a GD member until 1903 when she helped found one of the GD’s daughter orders.
When the three Cardens became members of the GD they were all living at 32 Leinster Square in Bayswater, west London. Pamela moved away in 1894 when she married another GD member, Percy William Bullock.
Alexander James Carden came from a background of law, finance and news. His grandfather, a barrister, married a daughter of John Walter, the founder of the Times newspaper; their descendants inherited shares in the newspaper. Alexander James’ uncle, George Frederick Carden (1798-1874) also became a barrister. He was the main driving force behind the founding of Kensal Green Cemetery which opened for business in burials in 1833.
Alexander James’ father, Robert Walter Carden (1801-88) spent a few years in the army before setting up in business in the City of London as a stock-broker. In 1855 he was one of the founders of the City Bank, which had branches in London and its suburbs. He also was a director of the Royal Exchange Bank and the Canada Company. He was a member of the Cutlers’ Company and served as its Master three times. He was a City of London alderman; and served as Lord Mayor of London in 1857-58. He was elected an MP twice, for different constituencies. As a Conservative, and an Evangelical christian who funded schools for very poor children (before the passing of the 1870 Education Act, this would be) and even taught in them, he was rather an outsider in the City of London. He seems to have moved more in charity than in financial circles, and was a friend of the great supporter of causes, Angela Burdett-Coutts. He also gained royal and governmental recognition, being knighted in 1851 and made a baronet in 1887.
In 1827 Robert Walter Carden married Pamela, daughter of William Smith Andrews, a doctor who lived in Richmond. They had seven daughters, and three sons; though only five of their children survived into adulthood. Alexander James was the youngest son, born in 1839.
Alexander James Carden’s childhood was a privileged one, though as the family were Evangelicals there was likely to have been a touch of the hair-shirt about it. Robert Walter Carden’s main residence was at 64 Wimpole Street in Marylebone, but he and Pamela also had a country house, Mole Lodge at West Moulsey in Surrey, where the rest of the family would probably spend the summer while Robert Walter stayed on at Wimpole Street making the money that made this style of life possible. On the day of the 1841 census the family was not at either of those addresses - probably travelling abroad. In 1851, however, Robert Walter and Pamela were both at home in Wimpole Street with their eldest son, Frederick Walter; their daughter Edith; a butler, a footman and four women servants. I couldn’t find Alexander James anywhere in the UK on the day of the 1851 census; I suppose he had been sent abroad to school (I’m not sure where but Germany or France were likely destinations).
On the day of the 1861 census, Robert Walter and Pamela were at 64 Wimpole Street again, and again Edith was with them; also at home on that day was their other surviving daughter Clara; and Alexander James, now 21. Although there was money - or at least expenditure - in the family, all three sons were gainfully employed in 1861. Frederick Walter had joined the army; second son Robert was a Church of England vicar; and Alexander James told the census official that he was a stockbroker. I presume that means he was working for the family firm, in its offices at 3 Threadneedle Street in the City. The bank and the stock-broking firm must have been doing well - or needed to be assumed to be doing well - because the Cardens had increased the number of servants they employed to seven: butler, footman, cook, lady’s maid, two housemaids and a kitchen-maid.
Alexander James Carden got married in 1863. He never told any subsequent census that he was doing any paid work; in fact he made a point of telling the official that he did not need to follow a profession. He and his family lived modestly, at least when compared to his parents, and to eldest brother Frederick Walter. He is not on the list of people attending the funeral of Robert Walter Carden in 1888. These pieces of information may not be connected, but I believe they are. I think Alexander James was seen by his family to have made a bit of a mis-alliance when he married Anne Rule Clements, the daughter of a Deptford butcher.
John Thomas Clements, of the butcher’s shop, Deptford Broadway, married Jane Major, from another Deptford family, in 1840. Anne Rule Clements, born in October or November 1841, was their only child as far as I have been able to discover. Anne was given rather an odd second name, often mis-spelled ‘Raile’. I think she was named for a Jane Rule who was living with John Thomas and Jane Clements on the day of the 1841 census. Relationships between members of the household are not given in 1841; but Jane Rule was of an age to be the grandmother of John Thomas or of Jane.
Jane Rule died in 1844; and Jane Clements in 1845 at the age of 26. Anne doesn’t seem ever to have lived with her father again; and I haven’t been able to find out anything at all about the relations or friends she did grow up with. From 1845 to the day of her marriage, her life is a complete mystery to me.
About the marriage of Anne Rule Clements to Alexander James Carden: I checked to see if he had committed the ultimate middle-class crime of marrying one of the servants. I looked to see if Anne was actually employed in the Carden household: but she wasn’t, at least, not in 1861. Of course, she could have been a servant somewhere else! But I don’t think it’s likely. The Clement family were skilled working-class and small-business people. John Thomas doesn’t seem to have had any close relations but I was able to find Jane Clements’ brother George Henry Major, who was a gas-fitter. George Henry’s elder son was in the navy for a while before joining the coastguard service; the younger son was apprenticed to John Thomas as a butcher. They were respectable people, with a reputation to keep up in their own communities; unless times were very hard indeed their daughters didn’t go working as servants. But what Anne Rule Clements did do, where she lived and with whom, how or if she was educated and how she met the son of a banker/stockbroker, I can’t imagine.
Alexander James Carden and Anne Rule Clements were married at the old St Pancras parish church near King’s Cross station, on 12 April 1863. I found that much information on website familysearch, but the names of both parents are missing from its database and familysearch does not normally leave these details out. The lack could just be some rather sloppy record-keeping by the verger at old St Pancras, not making the proper entries in the marriage registration book. But it could also mean that neither set of parents were present. Both the newly-weds were over 21 and did not, in theory, need their parents’ consent. However...
Even if they did feel that their son had married beneath him, Robert Walter and Pamela did not leave Alexander James without any money at all, and some contact between the two families was kept up as well. Alexander James and Anne seem to have had an income that meant they could live comfortably without his having to work. On the day of the 1881 census their income was enough to pay three women servants: a cook, a nurse and a housemaid. Until the late 1880s they seem to have resisted the more lively but more expensive option of living in London, and spent most of their time in north Kent - perhaps that was where Anne Rule Carden had grown up. They spent the early 1870s living in France.
Alexander James and Anne Rule Carden had seven children: James William (1864); George Frederick, named after his uncle (1868); Pamela, named after her grandmother (1871); Henry (1872); Robert Walter, named after his grandfather (1875); Alexander (1877); and Rowena, named after her aunt-by-marriage, Frederick Walter’s wife (1880).
Though I doubt if it impinged much on her, Anne’s father married for a second time in 1865; Anne may hardly have known him or his bride. John Thomas Clements married Elizabeth Brown, a middle-aged woman who lived locally. George Henry Major had died in 1863, and John Thomas and Elizabeth took in two of his children, Edwin and Alice. John Thomas trained Edwin as a butcher; Alice was also involved with the butcher’s business and she and her husband Charles Deacon eventually inherited it.
Two deaths in the Carden family also occurred during the sequence and may have brought the survivors closer together. Robert Walter and Pamela’s second son Robert Augustus died aged 36 in 1873. Pamela Carden (senior) survived this latest death of a child by just over a year, dying in 1874.
A difference to Alexander James and Anne’s income may have been made in 1880 when Robert Walter Carden’s bank became a limited company. If their incomes were increased the Cardens were grateful for it because their children needed educating and despite the 1870 Education Act, the middle-classes were still expected, and preferred, to pay to have their children educated (with much more spent on the boys than on the girls). On the day of the 1881 census, Alexander James and Anne were living at 14 Bunch Road Northfleet in Kent. Pamela (now 10), Robert Walter, Alexander and Rowena were all at home but the older boys were boarding at schools in nearby Gravesend: Henry at a school with only a handful of young boy pupils - a prep school perhaps - and James and George Frederick at James Mallinson’s school at Park Place, a much bigger establishment with more than 50 teenage pupils and three teachers. Three sets of school fees weighed fairly heavily on the Cardens’ income, I should imagine. Later Alexander - though not, apparently, the other boys - was sent to Haileybury School for a couple of years.
After his wife’s death, Robert Walter Carden (senior) had continued to live in the family house in Wimpole Street, with his unmarried daughter Edith and a staff which was still large but rather less in number than in previous decades. There was an air of fin-de-siècle about the baronetcy he was awarded in 1887 and he died a few months later, on 1 January 1888. Quite what happened to the bank I’m not sure, because as I’ve made clear in the biography so far, none of Robert Walter Carden’s sons had been working at the bank since Alexander James had left it, probably in the early 1860s. Alexander James doesn’t seem to have become involved in its management after his father’s death, even though he was the only son with any City experience at all. Frederick Walter, as the eldest son, might have felt he had a right to succeed his father as its leader, but he would have needed someone to tell him what to do - possibly the George Mayor who was co-executor with him of Robert Walter Carden’s Will and who had probably been Robert Walter’s business partner as his address in the Probate Register is 3 Threadneedle Street, the headquarters of the bank. A long-term solution to the bank’s future was not arrived at for ten years and in the meantime something extraordinary happened to the personal effects at least of Robert Walter Carden: originally assessed for probate at over £100,000-worth; they were re-valued a year later at only £24000 or so. Where did the rest of it go? If it was a modern Will I’d suppose it had all been carefully slithered away into a series of off-shore accounts.
By 1891, Alexander and Anne Rule Carden had moved to London. I assume money or income inherited under Robert Walter Carden’s Will had put living in the capital within their means, but they may also have seen a period spent in the capital city of the British Empire as an investment: they had several sons and two daughters to establish and needed to widen their social circle.
Alexander James and Anne Carden, and their children, spent a period around 1870 living in France, and their children Pamela and Henry were both born there. Pamela Carden was born on 20 March 1871 at the village of St Servan on the north coast of Brittany, close to St Malo. Brittany was definitely off the beaten track for British people choosing to live abroad; but for that very reason it will have been within Alexander James’ financial means. The Cardens may only have returned to England when the time came to send their sons to school; but they were back by 1880 when Pamela’s sister Rowena was born, and didn’t live abroad as a family again. Pamela may have been able to speak French and even a smattering of Breton, but in all other respects her education - like that of most female middle-class members of the GD - is something I can only speculate about. Census officials wrote ‘scholar’ in the correct part of the census form to cover children of the correct age but it’s a word without any helpful information in it, it seems to cover every form of education from Eton to a charity school to a day-governess. The right of middle-class girls to receive the same education as middle-class boys was the subject of various campaigns by the time of Pamela Carden’s childhood but I have only found one GD member, and two GD members’ sister, who (for instance) attended university. There was a bias against it in parents, backed up by pronouncements by physicians about its dangers: a fear that too much education might make women un-marriageable. The prejudice was especially strong amongst Evangelicals, who were taught the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ - he for the world, she for the home. I shall assume Pamela Cardens parents felt the usual bias.
Pamela was not at a boarding-school on the day of the 1881 census; nor were her parents employing a live-in governess to teach her. It’s possible that she did have a day-governess - that is, one who didn’t live with the family; or that she was sent away to school for a couple of years, later in the 1880s. Neither of those options would show up on the census. Another that wouldn’t is Alexander James and Anne teaching her themselves - he theosophy, she household-management on a limited budget. One thing Pamela does seem to have been taught somewhere by someone is to apply herself to study. I think the occult texts and exams demanded of GD members wanting to get into its 2nd Order defeated quite a few women initiates whose education had not prepared them for that kind of systematic effort. Pamela, on the other hand, did all the necessary study in 15 months - a considerable achievement, even if she had help from her parents and the man she was to marry.
Having given Pamela all the education they thought was suitable for a girl of her social class, Alexander James and Anne will have overseen her move into the adult world by introducing her to their friends and acquaintances. Pamela was probably the only one of the Cardens’ children to be on the social circuit in the late 1880s and early 1890s: some at least of Pamela’s brothers were training for professions; professions that they then seem not to have followed - saved from the daily grind by the Carden family’s money, I suppose. Pamela’s eldest brother James claimed even at his death to be a Church of England vicar, but never seems to have held any CofE post. George Frederick may have inherited money from his uncle, the Kensal Green Cemetery George Frederick; I did find one reference to his following his uncle into the law as well but if he did, he didn’t practice because his name never comes up on my usual law sources. Henry was livingin the USA by 1894. Robert Walter trained as an architectural surveyor but then went to Italy to study art. Anyway, while her brothers were dabbling in the professions, Pamela was being taken about by her parents to the social gatherings they regularly attended. Some of the circles in which they moved were quite radical: Jane Anna Davies, wife of the journalist and lapsed CofE vicar Charles Maurice Davies, was a friend of theirs. Jane Anna and Charles Maurice had been very dedicated believers in spiritualism in the 1860s and 1870s and had tried to set up a Christian-spiritualist church; both had rather lost their faith in the existence of a spirit world by the 1880s. Jane Anna was a good, though reluctant, spiritualist medium. Which leads us to the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society.
I’ve done quite a lot of research into the TS through its membership registers and it’s quite clear that it was a great recruiting centre for the GD, especially in the early 1890s. William Wynn Westcott, a senior member of the TS, invited quite a few TS members with an interest in the western esoteric tradition, to join his new Order of the Golden Dawn; and then they began to invite their friends. The Cardens buck this trend however: all three joined the GD first and the TS a few months later, so it’s not so clear to me, who thought they were suitable initiates for the GD - especially Alexander James Carden as he was the first to join each.
Alexander James Carden joined the TS formally in November 1891; Anne in June 1892; and Pamela in September 1893. But I’ve suggested in my biography of Percy William Bullock that they may have been involved with the TS for some years before - my investigation of the TS’s membership registers showed me that the TS only began to keep membership details in a systematic way in the late 1880s by which time it had been going in England for over a decade. When Alexander James applied to join, he was sponsored by W R Old, and Alice Gordon (Alice later joined the GD), two people who had known Helena Petrovna Blavatsky for many years. I’m assuming that Alexander James had known Old at least for several years - Alice Gordon perhaps not so long as she had only recently come to live in England after several decades spent in India with her husband. Anne’s application was sponsored by her husband; and Pamela’s by Percy William Bullock and F Hills.
It’s possible that Alexander James Carden began to move in theosophical circles as a result of an interest in, and study of, Sufism - the mystical aspect of Islam. That is, if he is the writer just identified as “AJC”, who had three articles published in the TS’s main magazine, Lucifer: A Sufi’s Mystical Apologue, and Commentary by Sadi of Shiraz both published in 1888; and A Vision Produced by Music, published in 1889. Some support for thinking that the writer ‘AJC’ is Alexander James comes from his daughter Pamela’s play, An Advent Mystery, published in 1923. She prints two quotes, both translations from Persian, one by Hafiz and one by Jalaluddin, better known as Rumi. Persian mystical poetry seems to have been an interest Alexander James and Pamela shared.
If AJC is Alexander James Carden, then he had departed radically from the Evangelical Christianity he had been brought up in, to the extent of looking at some interesting alternatives to it - even if it was only study and he never even considered becoming a convert. The works of Sa’adi were known in translation in the 19th-century - Ralph Waldo Emerson read them and that may have been how ‘AJC’ came across them. However, as I’m not sure of the identification, I won’t comment any more except to say that IF the three articles were by Alexander James Carden they are his only published works. There was nothing in the British Library catalogue by him, for example - and neither Anne Carden nor Pamela Carden had any articles published in a theosophical magazine, nor any larger theosophical work catalogued in its own right by the BL. None of the Cardens wrote anything about magic, as far as I can see.
Some members of the GD recommended a large number of their friends as suitable initiates but - apart from each other - the Carden family only brought one person into the GD: their friend Jane Anna Davies. Both Alexander James and Pamela, however, were willing to offer their time to the GD by taking on some of the administration of the Order. Alexander James took over from Percy William Bullock as Isis-Urania temple’s cancellarius in mid-1892 and did the job - which involved organising meetings amongst other things - until March 1894. Pamela did the same job for Isis-Urania from 1896 to 1898.
1894 was a year of changes in the Carden family. Three of Alexander James and Anne’s children got married. On 2 June, Pamela Carden married GD and TS member Percy William Bullock. I cover the rest of her life in Percy Bullock’s biography. A couple of weeks later James Carden married Cornelia Charlotte Turner. And later in the year - but in Cook County Illinois, with none of his family present - Henry Carden married Winina Tronson. However, I speculate that Alexander James’ resignation as cancellarius in March of that year indicated the beginning of something sadder. Only three months after he stepped down as cancellarius, his membership was noted down by William Wynn Westcott as in abeyance - a wording that I’ve come to see as an indication of crisis in the member’s life. And in the autumn of 1895, Alexander James, Anne and Pamela all resigned from the TS aswell; though this decision may have been dictated as much by the TS’s inner turmoil at that time, as by trouble in the Carden family.
If you want to skip straight to the rest of Pamela Bullock’s life you need to go to the Bullock biographies by following the link HERE.
I think that Alexander James began to be ill in 1894. It’s fairly speculative on my part to suggest he was ill at all, so I shan’t try to put a name to the illness I’m not even completely sure he suffered. I can say that either financial considerations, or a wish to be near good medical advice, meant that the Cardens didn’t leave Britain in search of a warmer climate - often a treatment recommended to those who could afford it, by doctors who saw the end coming and could do nothing but try to delay it. They stayed living at 32 Leinster Square.
Although there’s no date to identify when Anne Carden dropped out of the GD, she wasn’t involved at all in the events surrounding the resignation of William Wynn Westcott, early in 1897; so it had happened by then. It’s clear that Anne found some of the the requirements of practical magic difficult: a letter from Samuel Liddell Mathers, written in 1896 but referring to events several years earlier, describes her as having a “want of self-control” when attempting to summon spirits, putting herself at risk of invoking negative energies rather than positive. Jane Anna Davies - who I guess was Anne’s friend in particular though she knew all the Cardens - had left the GD quite soon after being initiated; perhaps it was harder for Anne to go on without her, and if I’m right about her husband being ill after 1894, she now had nursing, and family burdens she hadn’t had to shoulder falling on her; and worry.
In 1895 Alexander James (if he was able) and Anne attended another wedding: their second son George Frederick married Katherine Mannix. This was the last family event before Alexander James Carden died, at 32 Leinster Square, on 23 July 1897.
The merger, in 1898, of the bank founded by Robert Walter Carden (senior) with the London City and Midland Bank might have affected Anne Carden if her husband had had shares in his father’s firm. I would suppose that he did have some, and that the income from the dividends was an important part of the family’s income. If Alexander James had been a shareholder in City Bank, Anne would have been allocated shares in the merged bank to replace them. The merged bank was called London City and Midland Bank, later renamed as just the ‘Midland Bank’. Whether Alexander James also had shares in the Times I don’t know. Whatever the extent of her income as a widow, Anne was able to continue to live at 32 Leinster Square at least until 1900. In 1900, however, another death struck the family.
I haven’t been able to find out what if any profession Alexander James and Anne’s youngest son, Alexander, was pursuing in the 1890s. Whatever he was doing, when the Boer War broke out, he gave it up to volunteer. He went to South Africa as a Private in the London City Imperial Volunteers. In July 1900 he died, not gloriously in military action, but squalidly, of enteric fever, in the camp at Germiston. He is buried in the Primrose Cemetery there, with a headstone the Cardens had made for his grave.
On the day of the 1901 census, Anne and Rowena - the only child Anne still had living at home - were not in England. I imagine they were travelling, probably in Europe but perhaps in South Africa, arranging for that headstone. They must have returned shortly after census day, however, to be at the wedding of Anne’s son Robert Walter (the younger) to Ethel May Johns that spring. Anne did not return to live in 32 Leinster Square; she and Rowena moved into to a more modest house, 29 Sinclair Gardens, in Shepherd’s Bush. Inflation may have eaten into Anne Carden’s income during her long widowhood but in 1911 she was still able to employ two servants - she did not specify what tasks her servants did, when she completed the census form, but I’d say Anne had a cook and a housemaid - the same two servants that her daughter Pamela Bullock was employing on census day 1911.
I believe Anne and Rowena continued to be live in Sinclair Gardens until the 1920s, but by the time Anne died they had moved out of London. Anne Rule Carden died on 6 July 1924 at Rowan Wood, her house in Southwell Road, South Benfleet Essex.
A BIT MORE ON ALEXANDER JAMES AND ANNE’S CHILDREN, PAMELA BULLOCK’S SIBLINGS
JAMES is the eldest, ordained as a Church of England priest but apparently never in charge of a parish. On 19 June 1894 he married Cornelia Charlotte daughter of Cornelius Turner. Their only child, Cornelia, was born in South Africa in 1895 - what James and family were doing there I have yet to discover. By 1901 they were back in England and were - according to the census form, living off private means. On the day of the 1901 census, they were living in Truro. They were not on the 1911 census, probably living abroad again. I know nothing of James, really, between census day 1901 and 6 January 1946 when he died at 36 Niagara Avenue Ealing west London. His wife Cornelia died in 1941. His daughter Cornelia was living with him at the time of his death; she died unmarried in 1954.
GEORGE FREDERICK was named after his Kensal Green cemetery-founding uncle and may have inherited money from him - the uncle died a bachelor. I can’t find any evidence that the younger George Frederick ever followed a profession; he and his wife must have had other financial means. I didn’t find them on the 1901 or 1911 censuses so I guess they were living abroad. Katherine Carden died in 1935 and George Frederick in 1952; they had no children.
PAMELA married Percy William Bullock so see his biography for her. She and Percy William had no children.
HENRY was married twice, each time in the USA. His first wife was Marta Vinineda Trondsen, another recent immigrant to the US, the daughter of a Norwegian ship’s captain. They had two daughters, Florence, and Druda. Marta Vinineda died in 1918 and the following year Henry married Mildred Kedge. He died in 1948 in New Orleans. Florence married Francisco Rabia Muñóz; they had no children. Druda (1898-1925) married Daniel Pinckney Lattimore of North Carolina; they had two sons, and have descendants in the US.
ROBERT WALTER was working as a self-employed architect’s surveyor on the day of the census in 1901. On that day he was a boarder at Martha Shepherd’s lodging house at 141 Millbrook Road, Shirley Southampton, presumably while he was working on a contract. Three months later her married Ethel May Johns, whose father, Lemuel Johns, lived in New Zealand. Although their elder son, Derick, was born in Southampton, they then went to live in Italy for several years. Their younger son Ronald was born in San Remo and I think they must also have spent time living in Genoa. During this period abroad, Ethel May kept a journal - which I saw for sale in May 2013 on the web - and Robert Walter worked on these books:
Ornamental Details of the Italian Renaissance; by George A T Middleton and R W Carden. London: B T Batsford 1900
The City of Genoa by R W Carden. Methuen and Co 1908
The Life of Giorgio Vasari by R W Carden. Warner 1910
Michelangelo, by R W Carden; a book of translations of the artist’s letters and other papers. London: Constable 1913.
And published much later:
North Italian Painting of the Quattrocentro; Robert Walter’s translation of the Italian original by Adolfo Venturi. Pegasus Press 1930
In 1908 Robert Walter and his family returned to England. By 1911 they were living near Anne and Rowena Carden, at 16 Brook Green Hammersmith. Robert Walter died in 1943.
ROWENA lived with her mother until Anne’s death. Then - it would appear - she went travelling. I have no idea how she might have met him, but in 1927, she married Daniel Hall, a businessman without any English ancestors, despite his surname. His father, Moritz Hall, was born in Cracow; he went to east Africa as a Protestant missionary in the 1860s and married a woman generally known as Katarina, a member of the Ethiopian aristocracy. They had a large family; the actor Peter Ustinov was descended from Magdalena, their eldest daughter. Moritz and Katarina left Ethiopia in the late 1860s and eventually settled in Jaffa, where Moritz ran various businesses which his sons carried on after his death. Daniel Hall was born in Jaffa in 1870. When Rowena married him, he was a widower, with businesses based in Ethiopia; but at the time of his death, in 1943, they were living in Famagusta, Cyprus - probably driven out of Ethiopia when the Italians invaded it. Though Daniel actually died in Tanganyika - what is now Tanzania. Rowena died in 1967.
One last comment: despite having seven children, Alexander James and Anne have relatively few descendants. George Frederick, Pamela and Rowena all had no children. James and Henry had one daughter each and James’s died unmarried. I don’t know how to find out whether Henry’s daughter had children. Robert Walter’s sons both married; their children are the only descendants of Alexander James and Anne that I know about.
BASIC SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.
Membership of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888 and 1914. The list is based on the Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden. Please note, though, that the records of the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh were destroyed in 1900/01. As far as I know, the records of the Horus Temple at Bradford have not survived either.
Family history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.
Famous-people sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Who Was Who. Times Digital Archive.
Catalogues: British Library; Freemasons’ Library.
Wikipedia; Google; Google Books - my three best resources. I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.
SOURCES FOR THE CARDENs
In May 2013 I came across a blog for Carden family history: //cardenhistory.blogspot.co.uk
I used www.thepeerage.com which in turn uses Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage 107th edition 2003.
Alexander James’ uncle GEORGE FREDERICK CARDEN 1798-1874: see www.kensalgreen.co.uk for information on his part in the founding of the cemetery. http://www.londongardensonline.org.uk
London Gazette 26 January 1875 legal notice issued 20 January 1875 by Shum, Crossman and Crossman of 3 King’s Road Bedford Row, solicitors for the Administrators of the estate of George Frederick Carden who’d died 18 November 1884. G F Carden had two houses: 2 Sussex Gardens; and The Grove Hendon. He was unmarried.
Alexander James’ father ROBERT WALTER CARDEN
The best account I found is at www.london-city-history.org.uk/biography, which is based on an obituary in City Press 21 January 1888 which summed him up as “frosty but kindly”.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography volume 10 p20 had a bit more on his family background but also used the City Press obituary as its main source.
Wikipedia has a short page on him with a bit more about what happened to the bank after he was dead.
Times Friday 27 January 1888 p6 had a short report on the funeral, but no obituary, presumably because the Carden family didn’t want one published. It also didn’t print any details of the main provisions of his Will - it would usually do so for a Will leaving so much money.
CURIOUS CAREERS OF PAMELA’S BROTHERS
Among the sources I checked for sightings of them were Crockford’s Clerical Directory 1900 and Hart’s Annual Army List 1900 p803 for the active list; and p832 for the retired list. Also Oxford and Cambridge lists of graduates; Who Was Who, Boase’s obituaries.
Details of the death of Alexander Carden in 1900 from www.haileybury.com/ the site’s section on honours by ex-pupils.
PAMELA’S FULL DATE OF BIRTH AND DATE OF MARRIAGE FROM
General and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire Burke’s Peerage Ltd 1914 p339.
ROBERT WALTER CARDEN’S PUBLICATIONS details from the British Library catalogue.
Ethel Carden’s diary seen May 2013 at www.worthpoint.com: Journal of an English Lady in Italy 1904 by Ethel May Carden, née Johns.
ROWENA’s exotic in-laws: via google to portal.svt.ntnu.no, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, held in Trondheim 2009. Article in English by Toby Berger Holtz: The Hall Family and Ethiopia: A Century of Involvement.
Mention of a previous marriage - apparently in 1902 - for Daniel Hall: The Foreign Politics of Lag Iyasu 1915/16 by Wolbert G C Smid. I searched freebmd and familysearch but couldn’t find evidence of it.
Times Saturday 26 April 1943 p1a death notices: Daniel Hall, normally of Famagusta Cyprus had died on 6 April 1943 at Tanga Hospital, Tanganyika, aged 72; “dearly loved husband of Rowena (née Carden)”.
Cyprus in World War II: Politics and Conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean by Anastasia Yianghou. London/NY: I B Tauris and Co Ltd 2010. In section 3.1: Cyprus was not invaded during World War II.
HENRY CARDEN
Information on his wife Marta Vinineda Trondsen; and on their children, from descendant Elizabeth Abbott-Grasso by email March 2022. From original documents.
ALEXANDER, ANN AND PAMELA BUT NO OTHER OF THEIR CHILD ARE IN THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
Theosophical Society Membership Register September 1891-January 1893 p35 entry for “Alex J Carden”. Application dated 24 November 1891; sponsors W R Old and Alice Gordon. Subscriptions paid 1891-95 then “Resigned 8/10/95". Address 32 Leinster Square Bayswater. Member of Blavatsky Lodge. On p107 entry for “Annie R Carden”. Application 10 June 1892; sponsor A J Carden. Subscription paid 1892-94 then “Resigned 11/10/95". Address 32 Leinster Square Bayswater. Branch = Adelphi Lodge.
Theosophical Society Membership Register June 1893 to March 1895 p34 the entry for Pamela Carden. Application 4 September 1893; sponsors P W Bullock and F Hills. Subscription paid 1893, 1894 then “Lapsed”. Address 32 Leinster Square Bayswater. Branch = Adelphi Lodge.
ARTICLES BY ‘AJC’ WHO COULD BE ALEXANDER JAMES CARDENhttp://www.companydirectorcheck.com
Just noting that I haven’t read these in Lucifer. I found the article titles and supposed author via www.austheos.org.au/indices/LUCIFER; a very useful resource when I was studying the GD members who were in the TS as well:
Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine
volumer for 1888 July p390 A Sufi’s Mystical Apologue
July p391 Commentary by Sadi of Shiraz
volume for 1889 Jan p405 A Vision Produced by Music.
CARDENS IN THE GOLDEN DAWN
The Magicians of the GD: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923 by Ellic Howe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972. His sources had all been published already; see his pxxiii for a list of them. When his Ms was finished he was given access to documents kept by A E Waite, mostly from the late 1890s and later; he made some alterations based on them. P98 and p100 where Howe mentions Alexander James and Anne attending a talk by William Wynn Westcott; also there were Florence Farr, Cecilia Macrae, Edward Berridge and Minnie Langridge. The meeting was at 3pm on 25 July 1893 and Howe makes the point that people who worked office hours couldn’t attend meetings like this. Westcott was in full-time employment but he was a Coroner; if he wasn’t actually holding an inquest his time was to a certain extent his own to organise.
The Golden Dawn Scrapbook: the Rise and Fall of a Magical Order R A Gilber 1997 York Beach Maine: Samuel Weister Inc. Alexander James doesn’t figure at all in this volume but the quote about Anne Carden’s problems with invocations was on p135: Mathers mentioned them in a letter 8 January 1896 to Annie Horniman.
R A Gilbert The Golden Dawn Companion p32 for Alexander James’ period as Isis-Urania cancellarius; and for Pamela’s period doing the same job.
PAMELA POST 1894 - SEE PERCY BULLOCK
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Copyright SALLY DAVIS
28 March 2020
Find the web pages of Roger Wright and Sally Davis, including my list of people initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn between 1888 and 1901, at:
www.wrightanddavis.co.uk
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