Jessie Louisa Horne was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn, at its Isis-Urania temple in London, in November 1891. She chose the Latin motto ‘Ave atque vale’ and it sums up her relationship with the GD rather well. The GD administrative records show that when she joined the Order, Jessie Louisa was living at 35 Henslowe Road East Dulwich. She seems to have begun work on the programme of study that new initiates were expected to follow, and as late as April 1892 was still borrowing from the GD’s library copies of lectures to read (probably given by William Wynn Westcott). However, she resigned from the Order after less than a year’s membership, in August 1892. Jessie Louisa Horne’s sister Agnes was married to GD member Sidney Coryn. Both Sidney Coryn and his brother Herbert Coryn were members of the Golden Dawn in the early 1890s.

JESSIE LOUISA’S FAMILY

I am sure of the identity of Jessie Louisa’s mother; less sure about that of her father, who got married, had four children and died, all between two census days.

Jessie Louisa Horne’s mother was Jessie Taylor. Jessie’s family lived in Walworth, south London, where her father John M Taylor was in business. I couldn’t read what his business was on the 1851 census - the census official had tried to pack too much detail into too little room - but I think I could see a note saying that John Taylor employed eight men, so it was quite a large one. Jessie Taylor hadn’t joined her father’s business, she had done an apprenticeship in the linen shop kept by Arabella Penprase at 101 St John’s Wood Terrace, in a well-to-do suburb of north London. The apprenticeship completed, Jessie continued to work in the linen shop, promoted to be Miss Penprase’s assistant and with a new apprentice working with her. I imagine that Jessie Taylor worked for Miss Penprase until she got married.

Jessie Taylor married a man called Frederick William Horne, in Walworth, in 1861. I have found a man called Frederick Horne on the 1861 census, lodging at 30 Harrington Street North, Regent’s Park, and working as a foreman in a cutlery-making factory. I am going to assume he is Jessie Louisa’s father.

Jessie Louisa was the eldest of four children; she was born in 1862. Her three younger siblings were Agnes Sophia (named after both Jessie Horne’s sisters and her mother) born 1864; Frederick James born 1867; and Percy Stuart, born early in 1869. But then Frederick William Horne died, in the summer of 1869.

Being widowed - particularly unexpectedly - with four children under 10, was a financial catastrophe for most women in the 1860s and I’ve no idea how Jessie Horne coped in the next few years because neither she nor her children are on the 1871 census. However, by the day of the 1881 census Jessie Horne was running her own business as a ladies’ outfitter and milliner. On that day, she and her children were living at 12a Acre Lane Stockwell, just down the road from the Coryn family; and I’m going to assume that they were living above the shop. Percy was still at school but Jessie Louisa, Agnes and Frederick were all working, so that the worst of Jessie Horne’s financial struggles (I am sure she had them) were probably over. Agnes was working as a pottery designer; Frederick was serving an apprenticeship; and Jessie Louisa had already begun in what was to be her career - she was teaching. Also in the household was 17-year-old Annie Southgate, who worked as Jessie Horne’s assistant (just noting that none of Jessie Horne’s children ever worked for their mother’s business).

According to the information Jessie Louisa Horne gave the Teachers’ Registration Council, she was first employed as a teacher in 1887. However, her mother had told the 1881 census official that Jessie Louisa was working as a governess. Earlier in the century, there would be no doubt that a governess was a woman who worked in a private house, teaching and looking after the young children of a wealthy family; either living in that house, or going to it as a place of employment each day she was required. However, I’ve seen other GD members describing themselves as governesses when they were clearly working in a school. As a term describing employment, ‘governess’ was gradually being replaced by the words ‘school mistress’ or ‘teacher’ as women moved to take advantage of the opportunities the 1870 Elementary Education Act opened up for them, particularly (according to my source on women teachers in London) women from the lower middle-classes - which I think is what Jessie Louisa Horne was, as the daughter of a shop-keeper.

By 1911, Jessie Louisa Horne was employed by the London County Council. The 1870 Act had set up a School Board for London to administer schools in the area already covered by the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW), taking over the schools already in that area which were run by the National Schools for Promoting Religious Education (NSPRE). Because a completely new bureaucracy had to be set up and a large number of new buildings constructed, the Act was rolled out in stages, so that teachers were hired gradually rather than all at once. The MBW was succeeded by the London County Council in 1889 but the School Board for London kept its independence until the Education (London) Act 1903, when it passed into the control of the LCC; so that teachers originally employed by the NSPRE or the School Board for London became LCC employees by default, Jessie Louisa being among them.

The only information I have about when Jessie Louisa Horne was taken on by the School Board for London is a Report issued by its Management Committee in 1900 which has her on its list of current employees. However, I think it’s likely that Jessie Louisa Horne applied to the School Board for London for a job in 1887 and was accepted because of the many years of experience she already had teaching young children. She was 25 in 1887; perhaps she had decided not to marry; or perhaps she would have liked to marry but was facing the possibility that she might not ever do so. Either way, she saw the School Board for London as offering more secure employment than any job with a family could do and with far better working conditions. The work might be more exacting and she would have to put up with regular inspections of her teaching; but as recompense for those, she would have clearly-defined working hours; the slim possibility of promotion; and a pension. The system was biased - men were felt to be worth more - and figures from 1912-13 show up to one-third of teachers earning less than £100 per year (that is, less than an averagely-paid male clerk in an office). However, it was still very well paid work when compared to the other kinds of work women did; and a few women earned over £200 per year - serious money for the lower-middle-classes. Jessie Louisa was not alone in opting to work in a school rather than a family. The 1870 Act saw a big expansion in job opportunities for women teachers in schools set up under the new national system: by 1900, 75% of teachers in the 1870 Act’s schools were women.

Given that in 1881 Jessie Louisa Horne was probably working as a governess in a family, where did she learn to teach? Nowhere, is one answer: paid work in a family home was all-but unregulated in the 19^th century and you could start out as governess with a family’s children with no experience and virtually no education, your moral outlook weighing with prospective employers as much as what you knew. However, it’s possible - IF Jessie Louisa had been a pupil at a NSPRE school - that she had learned at least the basics of teaching there. The National Society for the Promotion of Religious Education was a charity, founded (in 1811) to provide a basic education for poor children. Although the NSPRE was not run by the Church of England, the CofE’s doctrine was basic to what was taught in its schools, and in order to be a pupil your family had to attend the parish church regularly. To keep costs down, the NSPRE operated a ‘monitor’ system whereby selected older pupils taught the younger ones: so that Jessie Louisa, if chosen, would have undergone an apprenticeship of sorts, though she would not have been paid. Since 1833 the NSPRE had received grants from central government; but in the late 1860s its efforts were felt to be not enough for modern times. The 1870 Act eventually replaced the NSPRE with schools run by local authorities and paid for by the rates, under a central government Board of Education.

No records of the careers of individual teachers employed by the LCC and its predecessors exist any longer; so I can only talk in a general way about the working life Jessie Louisa is likely to have had as one of its teachers. I think it might be possible to work out what pay Jessie Louisa Horne received at different times in her working life, and how and when she was promoted; but this would involve looking through nearly 30 years of committee Minutes at the London Metropolitan Archive and I have decided not to do it.

Not only was the work of a woman School Board for London teacher more exacting than that of a governess; the chances are it was more boring too; and the teacher had less chance to build a personal relationship with any of her pupils, as classes were so large. The curriculum was based on the Victorian understanding of gender and class roles, particularly with regard to girls. It was assumed that they would - essentially - do housework all their lives, with some childcare; either helping their mothers or working as servants in another woman’s household until they married; and then working in the marital home and caring for their own children. Apart from lessons designed to achieve a very basic literacy for all pupils, Jessie Louisa Horne will have spent most of her time teaching sewing, washing and the care of clothes to the older girls; and it was her sewing-lessons that would be watched by the school inspectors. Cookery got onto the syllabus in 1882 but most schools had no kitchen facilities; imagine learning how to make a stew without ingredients or a cooking range! Jessie Louisa would have had to teach arithmetic as even girls were expected to know some; though in practice they were allowed to opt to do extra sewing instead. The teaching code issued in 1890 did not expect girls to learn geometry or algebra, so Jessie Louisa won’t have needed to teach those even if she had learned them (which seems unlikely). More emphasis would have been put by the school inspectors on women teachers making clear to their pupils (though perhaps not in so many words) the stereotypical virtues of womanhood that they were all meant to develop - being focused on home and family; being hard-working and dutiful; knowing their place in the hierarchy of the time (that is, at the bottom of it).

During Jessie Louisa Horne’s working life there were some changes, of course. New subjects were introduced to the curriculum, so that by 1900 Jessie Louisa will have been teaching some history and geography, and possibly singing and physical education. And the poor health of men attempting to sign up for the Boer War led the Board of Education to order that more time be allocated in School Board schools to childcare and infant health care.

Restricted though the system was in its expectations of women teachers and girl pupils, the School Board for London/LCC was still a place where Jessie Louisa Horne prospered. By as early as 1890 it had enabled her to move, with her mother, to East Dulwich and then, in 1891, to more modern housing in Peckham Rye. On the day of the 1891 census Jessie Louisa was at home on her own in Peckham Rye, Jessie Horne having gone to stay with Frederick Horne, whose wife Kate had just given birth to Jessie Horne’s first grand-child, Jessie Louisa’s first nephew. By 1901 Jessie Louisa could afford to be on holiday abroad on the day of the census. And by 1911, now aged 49, she had been promoted to be a head teacher and had moved to Plumstead, where she spent the rest of her life. In 1911 she was living on her own in 42 Howarth Road, which may have been her own house - that is, she wasn’t renting, she was paying a mortgage. When Jessie Louisa died she was still living in the same road, possibly in the same house, renumbered. Meanwhile, Jessie Horne had decided to leave London, and had moved to Margate, where she died in 1919; Jessie Louisa was her executor.

Jessie Louisa Horne was still teaching in 1917, but would have been eligible to retire in 1927 (I think - see my Sources section below for why I’m not sure). Perhaps she used her increased leisure to pursue her studies of theosophy and yoga.

Jessie Louisa Horne joined the Theosophical Society (TS) in September 1890. At that time all prospective members had to have sponsors who were members already; one of Jessie Louisa’s sponsors was Herbert Coryn. I daresay the Horne and Coryn families had known one another since the Coryns arrived in London from Cornwall around 1876; and in 1888 Sidney Coryn had married Jessie Louisa’s sister Agnes. Although some TS members liked to go to the meetings held at the TS headquarters building in Regent’s Park, most preferred to join a lodge near their home or work, and Jessie Louisa joined Brixton Lodge, where Herbert Coryn was an active member. Jessie Louisa was never quite such an active theosophist as either of the Coryn brothers, but in 1892 she was elected Brixton Lodge’s secretary and became responsible for organising its programme of talks and its Friday-evening discussion group, where members struggled to make sense of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, probably guided by Herbert Coryn who had been able to ask Blavatsky about it in person. Jessie Louisa gave one talk herself at Brixton Lodge, on Yoga, on 6 September 1892; and gave it again a short distance away at Croydon Lodge a few days later. Sidney Coryn - Jessie Louisa’s brother-in-law - was Croydon Lodge’s president and William Dunn (another GD member) its secretary. In 1893 she did something neither of the Coryn brothers did, despite the range of their activities on the TS’s behalf: she gave money to one of its projects attempting to bring theosophy to London’s poor. She donated 16/6 to a kind-of youth club run by the women of the TS for working girls in Bow, in London’s East End. The girls who used the club were the type of girl Jessie Louisa taught every working day, now grown up a little and doing the type of low-paid, repetitive, future-less job that she had had to help them prepare for.

Update 28 March 2013: I had more or less finished this biography of Jessie Louisa Horne when I suddenly thought, “That’s odd” about her talks on Yoga. Digging round in my memory I couldn’t remember seeing anyone else in the TS in England give a talk on Yoga during the 1890s; and I also couldn’t remember more than one or two articles on the subject in any of the theosophy journals I looked at. So I’ve done a quick look-round to see what exactly she might have been talking about, and how much of a pioneer she was.

It turns out that rather more was known about Yoga in 1890s Britain than I had supposed (see the Sources section). Some excellent sources on the web showed me that 1) the outlines of this complex and ancient subject were known to people in the West who had an interest in Eastern philosophy; and 2) that the Theosophical Society was an important agent in bringing Yoga to Western attention. All the sources I looked at made it clear that in the 1890s, the split between the physical and the meditational side of Yoga hadn’t happened yet; both the two were seen as necessary to the practice of it, the aim being to use both of them as means of achieving unity with the Divine.

The first Indian to lecture on the subject in the USA and Europe did not arrive in England until 1895; so in giving her talk in 1892, Jessie Louisa was well ahead of the field. It’s likely that she got her knowledge of Yoga as you would expect her to have done, from what I’ve written above - from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in person (Blavatsky had only just died when Jessie Louisa gave her talks) and from Blavatsky’s books and articles. As a result, I’m not sure how well she understood the physical exercises you do; I wonder if anyone was demonstrating them at the TS in London before 1895? At the website www.blavatsky.net I found the gist of articles on yoga by Blavatsky published in 1880-81. In them Blavatsky makes a distinction between Raja Yoga, and Hatha Yoga, the physical discipline without which Raja Yoga cannot even be attempted. Jessie Louisa may have been daunted by Blavatsky’s belief that to achieve that unity with the Divine you had to have practised Yoga from your youth - which effectively debarred all Westerners. However, she may have found, as people do, that the exercises and techniques of meditation brought great benefits in themselves - helping you relax and concentrate, and focus on the end in view while being surrounded by noisy irrelevance. In addition, other articles on Yoga published by Blavatsky at different times show that Blavatsky did see Yoga as a technique of the Occult. In them, she mentions magic, elementals and astral bodies; so it’s not surprising Jessie Louisa Horne was brought to wonder if the kind of work being done by the GD might suit and interest her.

28 March 2013: back into the original text before my Yoga insert:

Jessie Louisa remained a member of the TS until 1895 when - together with the Coryn brothers and their sister Frances - she resigned from it, having sided with the loser in the dispute between Annie Besant and William Quan Judge over who should lead the TS and in what direction, now that Blavatsky was dead.

Herbert and Sidney Coryn, and their friends William Dunn and Herbert Crooke, became the most prominent English supporters of Katherine Tingley, who succeeded William Quan Judge as leader of theosophy in the United States with the rallying cry ‘universal brotherhood’. They helped organise and promote Tingley’s visit to England in 1896 and all but Crooke later emigrated to live in or near Tingley’s theosophical community at Point Loma California. Universal brotherhood became the official policy of the TS in America and the name of the organisation was changed to acknowledge this; at the same time, Mrs Tingley became its leader-for-life. The Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society of America had a branch in Britain, run by the Coryns’ friend Herbert Crooke. Unfortunately, no records of it exist so that I can’t tell who its members were. So I can’t tell whether Jessie Louisa Horne was excited by the ‘universal brotherhood’ idea; or - if she was - how practically involved with it she became. She didn’t emigrate, that’s for sure. Perhaps she just continued to pursue her interest in Yoga on her own, or with friends. Yoga did begin to de-couple itself from the TS in the early 1900s. The Yoga timeline source I found mentioned that in 1910 there was a Yoga Society advertising in the Times, which Jessie Louisa could have been a member of but which was not connected to the TS.

Sidney and Agnes Coryn went to California in 1902. Jessie Louisa did have three nephews, possibly more, but she seems to have been particularly close to her only niece, Marjorie Stella Coryn. It will have been difficult time-wise, as well as expensive, for Jessie Louisa to go and visit the Coryns in the USA, the journey taking several weeks each way; so she may not have seen her sister and niece for a couple of decades, until the first World War brought Marjorie Stella to Europe in 1917; and Agnes also returned, probably in 1921 after Sidney’s death. Marjorie Stella found work in Paris after the war was over; perhaps Jessie Louisa visited her there. Marjorie Stella’s brother Frederick Sidney also returned to Europe, in 1916 or 1917, to fight. Many of Jessie Louisa’s ex-pupils will also have gone to war and a lot will not have returned. Frederick Sidney returned, but he’d been gassed during 1918 and died young, in England. Agnes was living in France with Marjorie Stella during the 1920s and 1930s so that Jessie Louisa was Frederick Sidney’s closest relation during his last years; if he was not in a hospital, his care may have fallen on her.

If Jessie Louisa Horne retired at 65, she will have enjoyed 20 years of retirement in Plumstead, with trips to France and perhaps as far afield as South Africa, before her death. Around 1937, Agnes and Marjorie Stella Coryn came back from France and settled either very near Jessie Louisa or actually in the same house (I haven’t got any evidence which it was). Eventually, Jessie Louisa’s health declined, and she died on 12 February 1948, in Manna Mead Nursing Home in Blackheath. Marjorie Stella Coryn - who must have made Jessie Louisa so proud, becoming a well-known historian and novelist - was her executor.

JESSIE LOUISA’S BROTHERS

In 1891, Frederick James Horne was working as a private secretary; and I imagine that he was already employed by the joint stock company he said was his employer in later censuses. In 1890 he married Kate Elizabeth Turner. They had three sons: Douglas Percy; Roy; and Kenneth. All three of their children were born in south London but by 1901 Frederick and Kate had moved to Prittlewell in Essex. Some of the Coryn family had moved to nearby Billericay; perhaps this wasn’t a coincidence. Frederick and Kate were comfortably off, being able to employ a nurse as well as the basic general servant. By 1911 Frederick Horne had been promoted to company secretary, and he and Kate had moved again, to a 10-roomed house on Drowsett Avenue, Prittlewell where they could afford a cook and a parlourmaid. Douglas was working for a stockbroking firm, and Roy was at university. I haven’t been able to identify Frederick Horne for certain after 1911 so I’m not sure when he died.

Percy Horne went to South Africa. I can’t find him on any census after 1881 so he may have emigrated as early as the 1880s. In the 1920s he was working as secretary to the South African Garden Cities Trust, which built Pinelands, the first planned township in South Africa. He died in the late 1960s in Cape Town and left money to provide grants for students at Cape Town university. I couldn’t find any evidence that he married in England; if he married at all, it was in South Africa.

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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 JESSIE LOUISA HORNE

JESSIE LOUISA AND THE GOLDEN DAWN

Freemasons’ Library Golden Dawn collection reference GBR GD2/2/8a: Receipts for items borrowed by Jessie Louisa from William Wynn Westcott’s personal library during the period 1891-1892

JESSIE AS A SCHOOL TEACHER

See wikipedia for details of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, including the curriculum and how the Act was to be implemented through elected local school boards - women were eligible to stand for places on them.

Records (lack of) at London County Council:

London Metropolitan Archive is where the surviving records of the London County Council and all its works are held; also the School Board for London. There don’t appear to be any records of people who were employed during Jessie’s time: at www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/.../archives.../london-metropolitan-archive, LMA’s LMA Information Leaflet 27: An Outline of Sources for the History of Education in London Metropolitan Archive: some details of the bureaucracy of Jessie Louisa’s successive employers. It’s clear from the list of archives held currently by the LMA that all that has been kept is the admin/bureaucracy stuff - Minutes of the LCC Education Committee 1904-65 are the basis of it but most of the rest is records of LCC departments dealing with schools and schooling.

Records that do survive:

Report of the School Management Committee issued by the School Board for London for year-ended Lady day 1900: plxi begins a list of all current staff. Jessie Louisa Horne is on p127.

At website findmypast: records of the Teachers’ Registration Council. Set up as part of the Education Act of 1899. First attempt to make it work began 1902 but was abandoned as teachers refused to cooperate with it. TRC was set up a second time in 1912 and registration began again in 1914. The TRC got more cooperation this time BUT 1) registration was voluntary; 2) neither the Board of Education nor any local authorities used the registration list when deciding who to promote. Registration, therefore, was patchy. Each TRC record gives two dates: year of first paid position; and year of registration with TRC; the two dates often differ by several decades, and do in Jessie Louisa’s case. Jessie Louisa’s first teaching position = 1887; year of registration with the TRC = 1917 (so she was still teaching at that date).

TEACHERS AND TEACHING IN JESSIE LOUISA’S LIFETIME

PRE-1870 NATIONAL SCHOOLS:

For how the National Schools for Promoting Religious Education were run, see wikipedia.

At www.barnes113.karoo.net/History/bromley_national_school.htm there’s an account of Bromley’s NSPRE, based on its surviving records, which gave me more daily details especially of the ‘monitor’ system.

SCHOOL BOARD FOR LONDON AND ITS SUCCESSORS

London’s Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism 1870-1930 by Dina M Copelman. London and New York: Routledge 1996. Based on government reports and statistics; good on teacher training and the bigger picture.

For what the typical woman teacher would be teaching and what the elementary school girl pupils would be learning: History of Education volume 17 number 1, which was a special issue on Women and Schooling, published March 1988. London, New York, Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis. Edited by Roy Lowe. Article on pp71-82: The Education and Employment of Working-Class Girls 1870-1914, by Pamela Horn.

JESSIE LOUISA’S RETIREMENT

I haven’t been able to find a definite statement - at least, not on the web - as to when Jessie Louisa would have been able to retire. The best I could come up with is The County Council: What it is and What it does by H Samuels. Fabian Tract number 218 with a date stamp on it saying “May 11 1946". Published London: Fabian Publications Ltd. The Tract seems to be saying that the retirement age for both sexes was 65 or after 40 years’ service, whichever was the sooner; but I couldn’t see what dates the information was referring to, and in any case, in the early days of the LCC none of its employees could have amassed 40 years’ service, there must have been some other provision for the earliest teachers.

JESSIE LOUISA AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Theosophical Society Membership Register January 1889-September 1891 P175 entry f Jessie L Horne. Application 19 September 1890: diploma (given on being accepted as a member) 21 September 1890. Subscriptions paid 1892-95 then “W Q Judge”. Addresses during membership:

37 Henslowe Road East Dulwich

58 Gowlett Road Peckham

Branch = Brixton. Sponsors: Herbert Coryn, R Hill.

SOME APPEARANCES IN LUCIFER, the magazine published by the TS from its worldwide headquarters at Regent’s Park London during the 1890s:

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine Volume XI covering September 1892 to February 1893; sole editor, Annie Besant. Published Theosophical Publishing Society of 7 Duke Street Adelphi. Volume XI number 62 issued 15 October 1892. As part of news section p169 report on recent talks given at Croydon Lodge: on 6 September [1892] Jessie Horne had given “an interesting lecture on Yoga”. On the same page, a short report on Brixton Lodge, sent in by Jessie Horne (that’s Jessie Louisa, not her mother who isn’t a TS member), as lodge secretary: a talk on yoga and been given at the lodge on 2 September [1892]. I think Jessie Louisa’ being too modest here - the name of the person who talked about Yoga isn’t given. On Fridays when there was no lecture scheduled, a group met to study The Secret Doctrine.

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine Volume XII covers March-August 1893, editor, Annie Besant. Published by Theosophical Publishing Society of 7 Duke Street Adelphi. Volume VII number 71 issued 15 July 1893 p523 an article on the finances of the TS-sponsored Bow Club, which was attempting to raise money by asking 70 people to subscribe £5 each; on p524 there was a list of donations so far, including 16/6 given by J Horne.

YOGA

For introduction to its arrival in the West, see wikipedia and the Timeline website I list below.

Blavatsky’s articles on Yoga: www.blavatsky.net full text of set of three articles published November 1880 and January, April 1881 though it doesn’t say where, probably in the American magazine The Theosophist: The Yoga Philosophy. In the articles Blavatsky describes yoga as a breathing technique; she also associates yoga more with Buddhism than with Hinduism. She sttates that unless “its philosophy is well understood and is practised from youth” no practitioner will reach the level of skill shown by any Indian Yogi.

A Sanskrit-English Dictionary by Sir Monier Monier-Williams. Published Oxford University Press BUT NOT UNTIL 1899. Monier-Williams describes Yoga as “a kind of...abstract meditation...performed with self-torture, such as standing on one leg, holding up the arms”. Yoga teaches the means by which the human spirit “may attain complete union” with Isvara/the Supreme Spirit - this is the union of soul with matter. He also specifically states that yoga’s closest connection is with Buddhism not Hinduism.

Via googlebooks I also found a book by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky: Raja Yoga or Occultism. Published Bombay: Theosophy Co. It wasn’t published until 1931 but the British Library catalogue confirms it’s a compilation of articles previously published elsewhere. Chapter headings were very interesting, including: Practical Occultism; Occultism vs the Occult Arts; Lodges of Magic; Psychic and Noetic Action; Thoughts on Elementals. Some other chapter headings contain references to astral bodies and hypnotism.

The Theosophist is an American theosophical magazine so Jessie Louisa may not have known about these:

* in volume covering October 1890 to April 1891, issue of October 1890 had 2 articles on aspects of yoga: Jiai Yoga; and Practice of Pranoyama Yoga.

* in volumes published in 1892-93 seen via google plenty of references to YogI but not to YogA.

Roger Paul Wright found for me the website //modernyogaresearch.org’s timeline of Modern Yoga in Britain, taken from Suzanne Newcombe’s Cambridge University PhD thesis 2008: A Social History of Yoga and Ayurveda in Britain 1950-95. The earliest reference to something that might be Yoga in this Timeline is 1619. Newcombe believes that the first work to describe in English the physical exercises used in Yoga, was S Sundaram’s Yogic Physical Culture or The Secret of Happiness, which was published in 1928. NB that the article by Blavatsky that I found at the Blavatsky website is NOT mentioned in this timeline though the TS is often mentioned.

UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD

KATHERINE TINGLEY’S 1896 TOUR OF BRITAIN

At www.scribd.com, Theosophy volume XI number 2 May-December 1896 pp130-34 gives an account of the short tour of England taken by Mrs Tingley’s Crusaders’ group in the summer of 1896. The group arrived from New York on 21 June 1896 and spent three weeks in Britain, visiting a number of British cities but also spending several days at events organised for them in London. On Friday 3 July 1896 the Crusaders spoke at a public meeting at Queen’s Hall Regent Street. Herbert Coryn delivered a farewell address to the Crusaders during the meeting. The Crusaders then went on a tour of other English cities and Scotland before going on to Europe.

Website www.scribd.com also has the full text of the magazine Theosophical Path, edited by Katherine Tingley and produced at the theosophical community of Point Loma California. These volumes make it clear that there was a branch of the US-based Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society in Britain, from about 1898 at least until the late 1920s. Jessie Louisa could have decided to join it; but I haven’t found any list of its members so I can’t be sure.

INFORMATION ON FREDERICK HORNE all from Ancestry and freebmd.

PERCY STUART HORNE WENT TO SOUTH AFRICA

Searched freebmd 1881-1910 and familysearch: couldn’t see a marriage of Percy Stuart Horne.

At archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/SOUTH-AFRICA-IMMIGRANTS-BRITISH/200-06/1024657909, transcribed June 2012 by Heather McAlister: part 3 of City Club Members of Cape Town includes Horne, Percy Stuart with the date 1919, probably the date he was elected a member, though the transcription isn’t clear on this.

At

www.bradclin.com/pinelands/pinelands_history.htm there’s a history of the Pinelands housing development, the first planned township in South Africa, built in the 1920s in the Cape Colony. Percy Stuart Horne was the first ever Secretary of the (South African) Garden Cities Trust, which built Pinelands. The Trust was founded in 1919 to address South Africa’s serious housing crisis; it got government funding for its work. On this website, P S Horne is credited with giving the name ‘Pinelands’ to the new development.

Probate Registry: nothing for Percy S Horne. However, it looks as though he died in S Africa:

via google to University of Cape Town Calendar for 1969. On p169 under the heading “P. S. Horne grants”: Percy Stuart Horne’s Will had established a number of grants at the University; those wanting further details of them were to apply to the City Hall.

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

25 March 2013