Robert Elliott Steel was initiated into
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at its Horus Temple in Bradford, in May
1892, taking the Latin motto ‘Tuum cuique’.
It’s likely that Catherine Elizabeth Spink, Emily Douglas and Charles
Herbert Grason were initiated during the same ritual and that he knew at least
Miss Spink before that evening. However,
Robert Steel never really followed up his initiation and when he moved away
from Bradford - if not before - he lost contact with the GD entirely.
The vexed question of spellings: R A Gilbert in the Golden Dawn
companion has Robert’s surname spelled SteelE but all the sources I’ve come
across spell it Steel without the last ‘e’.
In my searches for Robert I’ve seen his middle name spelled EllioT and
EllioTT; but having researched his mother’s family, I think EllioTT is correct.
THE STEELs and the ELLIOTTs, A NORTHUMBERLAND CONNECTION
Both Robert Steel the GD member’s parents told various census officials
that were born in Northumberland. They
were born in villages quite near each other and probably knew each other - or
their families knew each other - from very young. The GD member’s father was also called Robert
Steel. He was born in Cowpen, a mining
district on the outskirts of the port of Blyth.
And Anna Eliza Elliott was born in Hartburn, a small village in the
hills behind Blyth. It hasn’t been easy
to identify either of them from the earliest censuses, but I think Robert Steel
may have been the son of a ship-owner, Thomas Steel, who was living with his
wife Jane in Blagdon Street Cowpen on the day of the 1841 census. Three of their children were still living at
home and not yet married. The eldest
son, John, had qualified as a master mariner though he was not at sea on that
day. Robert was the second son; he had
served an apprenticeship and had gone into business as a linen and woollen
draper, employing his younger brother Tindle and an apprentice, John Tulley or
possibly Tunney. With so many men in the family in work, Jane Steel was able to
employ one servant.
Anna Eliza Elliott was born around 1830, from what she told census
officials. I haven’t been able to
identify her for certain on any census before she was married. However, researching other people called
Elliott who told census officials that they were born in Hartburn, I believe
that she had at least two brothers or cousins, John and Henry, who both moved
south to act as managers of large estates, one in Bedfordshire and one in
Hertfordshire.
THE STEEL FAMILY IN MANCHESTER
I reach safe ground for the first time with these two families in
December 1851, when Robert Steel married Anna Eliza Elliott at Stannington,
another village near Blyth Northumberland.
Whether Robert had already left Northumberland for Lancashire I don’t
know. The birth of their son (the GD
member) Robert Elliott Steel happened early in 1853 in Tynemouth, the
registration district which included Blyth, Horton and Cowpen - but a woman
about to give birth to her first child might well choose to return to her
family even if she usually lived elsewhere.
Robert’s only sibling, Elizabeth Eleanor Steel, was born in Preston, in
1856. I suppose her parents were living
in Preston at the time, but within a few years the family had moved to
Manchester
On the day of the 1861 census, Robert and Anna Eliza were living with
Robert the younger (now 8) and Elizabeth (4) in semi-rural Levenshulme, at 5
Poplar Cottages on Stockport Road, the turnpike road from Stockport to
Manchester. Robert Steel told the census
official he worked in a warehouse; but if he is the person from the 1841
census, he wasn’t an employee moving stock around, he was the owner of the
business. If he was not at the school
already in 1861, Robert the GD member was about to delight his parents by
winning a place at Manchester Grammar School.
So far (July 2014) Robert is the only GD member I’ve come across who had
been at one of the old grammar schools; it meant that - possibly even including
members whose parents had paid for them to go to public school - he was one of
the most thoroughly educated members the GD ever had. There was no chance of Robert’s sister
getting a grammar school education, of course, even if she had been as clever
as her brother; but if I have identified her correctly, her parents had sent
Elizabeth to a good school too: on the day of the 1871 census, an Elizabeth
Steel aged 15 was one of the pupils at the school in Gateshead run by George
and Frances Higginbotham.
By 1871 the Steels had moved to Cheetham, another suburb of Manchester,
at this stage still largely a middle-class village. On the day of the 1871 census they were
living at 179 Elizabeth Street but by 1872 I think they had moved to 1 Mizpah
Terrace Waterloo Road. Robert the GD
member’s brilliant career in education was continuing: he had passed the
entrance exams to London University and was an undergraduate there in
1871. However (and again, if I’ve found
the right man) Robert Steel the elder’s wholesale and retail draper’s business
(at 11 Whittle Street Manchester) was in financial trouble. In the autumn of 1872 one of his creditors
could wait no longer and Robert Steel had to agree to liquidation proceedings. I couldn’t find any evidence that he actually
went bankrupt; so it sounds like he was able to pay his creditors, at least in
part, and may have been able to continue in business. However, by 1881 he was dead - probably: I
can’t pin down a death registration for him, but Anna Eliza told the 1881
census official that she was a widow.
ROBERT STEEL AT UNIVERSITY
It’s hard to know, of course, whether Robert the GD member would have
joined the family business if it and/or his father had survived. I think myself that his parents hoped that he
would educate himself out of the stigma (as mid-Victorians saw it) of earning a
livelihood from trade. In this respect,
perhaps it was a good thing that Robert and Anna Eliza had only two children
instead of the large brood that was typical of families at that time. Although they did not have to pay fees for
their son, other expenses were inevitable with a son at such a school, and many
families, even middle-class ones, could not have managed financially without
their sons starting work at the earliest opportunity rather than going to
university. For Elizabeth’s education,
Robert and Anna Eliza will have had to pay.
Their children’s education would have been one reason why Robert and
Anna Eliza had gone without things that their acquaintances would have considered
a necessity - for example, they didn’t have a live-in servant in 1861 or in
1871. Even so, Robert the elder’s
financial troubles meant that Robert the GD member could not continue his
course at London University, for which his parents will have had to find both
tuition fees and living expenses.
Instead, in 1872 he tried for a demyship (a particular kind of
scholarship) at Magdalen College Oxford - and got it. He graduated with a first in natural sciences
in 1876, and chose teaching as his career.
ROBERT IN BRADFORD
Robert’s first job was at a school similar to the one he had been a
pupil in: a grammar school for boys, founded in the 16th
century. He was appointed science master
at Bradford Grammar School, probably in 1876, and remained in that job until
1894. On the day of the 1881 census he
was living at 28 Blenheim Road Manningham and his mother Anna Eliza was keeping
house for him, with the help of one servant.
Elizabeth Eleanor was working as a teacher too. She was one of two resident teachers employed
at Susanna Armytage’s boarding school for girls at a house called Ivy Grove in
Middleham, Yorkshire.
As Robert gained experience as a teacher he was able to earn a little
extra money in the rapidly-expanding world of exam guides and text-books. In 1889 he compiled a set of reference exam
papers in inorganic chemistry for the publisher Bell. In 1890 and 1891 he wrote three books for
Methuen and Co: a book on practical chemistry to help pupils preparing to sit
the Science and Art Department’s exams; The World of Science; and A Class-Book
on Light. In his spare time Robert went
walking in the hills of Yorkshire. He
joined the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society and it’s quite likely
that Robert found his way to the GD through his interest in the wonders of
Yorkshire’s scenery. I haven’t found
that Robert was a member of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union, but it’s very
likely that he knew people who were; and one who was definitely a member of it
was Oliver Firth.
If Robert knew Oliver Firth, a route for him into the GD is clear. In the early 1890s and possibly for a couple
of years before that, Firth was one of the lynch-pins of that part of Bradford’s
social scene which took an interest in the occult. When the Bradford lodge of the Theosophical
Society was set up in the early 1890s Firth was one of its founding members;
and for the next three or four years he recruited energetically amongst his
acquaintances. In due course, a lot of
those Firth had sponsored into the TS went on to be initiated into the GD in
Bradford, probably because he recommended them.
Amongst the many people he sponsored into the TS were the three Spink
sisters - Catherine, Florence and Gertrude - daughters of a local wine
merchant. All three Spink sisters were initiated into the GD in due course,
Florence in 1891 just before she and Firth were married, and her sisters in
1892, the same year as Robert Steel.
I think it’s likely that Robert Steel and Oliver Firth got to know each
other in the late 1880s if not sooner, through their interest in geology. So keen was Firth to draw people into the TS
and GD that I can’t suppose he missed the opportunity to try to recruit Robert
to them. However, Robert never joined
the TS and although his curiosity was aroused by the GD for a time, it turned
out that he didn’t share Firth’s interest in magic either. Perhaps Robert was too practical and too
rational a man; or thought himself to be too modern a man to study magic. It probably didn’t help advance the GD’s cause
with him that although there were several professional chemists and an
alchemist amongst its members, they were all based in London: William Crookes
was a chemist whose researches had led him to investigate spiritualism and
chemistry’s borders with physics; the Rev William Alexander Ayton was not a
chemist by training but he had decades of experience as an alchemist; Julian
Levett Baker and George Cecil Jones worked as chemists, but they also had an
interest in the alchemical origins of their profession. Robert might have found conversations with
those four men very interesting.
However, it seems very unlikely that he ever met any of them. From the mid-1890s Julian Baker and Robert
Steel were both members of the Chemical Society (Robert was elected a member in
1885) and the Society of Chemical Industry; so it’s likely that they had at
least seen each other’s names on members’ lists; but I’m sure neither would
have known that the other was in the GD as well.
The Steels had left Manningham by 1885 and had moved to Spring Cliffe
House, Heaton Road. This move from a
house to rooms in a block possibly happened because Elizabeth Steel was no
longer working; I can’t believe that it had been any part of Robert the elder
and Anna Eliza’s plan for their children, that their daughter should have to
work. Perhaps by the mid-1880s with ten
years’ teaching behind him, Robert’s salary was enough for Elizabeth to give up
her job and be the stay-at-home middle-class sister and daughter her parents
had meant her to be until she married.
By census day 1891 Robert, Elizabeth and Anna Eliza had moved again and
were living in an apartment in Hawthorn House at 1 Ladderbanks Lane
Baildon. (A few months later the
newly-married Oliver and Florence Firth would also rent rooms there.) Robert’s wages were enough to cover the wages
of one live-in servant.
ROBERT IN NORTHAMPTON
Robert was known at Bradford Grammar School for his flair as a teacher,
and in 1891 had 15 years’ experience.
However, it took another four years for a job to come up that was the
right kind of next step in his professional career. In 1894 he was appointed headmaster of the
Northampton and County School. It was on
the strength of this promotion that he was able to marry Annie Caroline Elliott
in 1895. I believe that Annie Caroline
and Robert were cousins, possibly even first-cousins.
Annie Caroline Elliott was born in 1856, third child of Henry Elliott
and his wife Caroline. She had two older
brothers, Robert and William; and a younger sister Emily who died in 1873 aged
14. Annie Caroline was born at Haynes
(also called Hawnes) Park near Ampthill in Bedfordshire, but her father told a
succession of census officials that he had been born in Hartburn,
Northumberland - the same village that Robert Elliott Steel’s mother Anna Eliza
had been born in. I haven’t found
conclusive proof to back up my belief, but I do think Henry Elliott and Anna
Eliza were related; the relatively rare surname and their place of birth just
seem too much of a coincidence.
Henry Elliott had moved south to take a job as an estate manager and he
may have been employed by the Haynes Park estate. Its owner, the Rev Lord John Thynne, lived
there only when he was able to spare the time from his job as canon and
sub-dean of Westminster Abbey. Lord John
had inherited Haynes Park from an uncle in 1849; and perhaps Henry Elliott had
been appointed to run the estate in that year.
Lord John died a few weeks before the day of the 1881 census, but Henry
Elliott seems to have continued in his job during the 1880s and early 1890s
when Haynes Park was owned by Lord John’s eldest son. After her mother died in 1875, Annie Caroline
kept house for her father, firstly at The Dairy, Haynes, and later at Park Farm
Ampthill.
Robert Elliott Steel and Annie Caroline Elliott may have been engaged to
be married for several years before Robert got his job in Northampton, and even
then they waited another year for the Steels to get settled in the house that
came with his job, before getting married.
Preparations for the wedding were probably well in-hand in June 1895
when Annie Caroline’s father Henry died, presenting everyone with a
dilemma. Bereavement usually caused the
weddings of the dead person’s closest relatives to be put off for about a year
while the Victorian mourning rituals were observed. However, as Henry Elliott’s house had also
gone with his job, his death had left Annie Caroline with no income (she had
never worked for wages) and nowhere to live.
So the wedding went ahead, perhaps with less celebration than in happier
circumstances, on 14 August 1895.
On their wedding day, Robert was 42 and Annie Caroline 39; so it’s
perhaps not surprising that they only had one child, Caroline Eliza Steel, born
in 1896. Annie Caroline however, gained
a kind-of extended family at Northampton and County School: on the day of the
1901 census, her household at 37-38 East Parade consisted of Robert and herself
and Caroline; plus one of the other teachers at the school, George
Charlesworth; a staff of cook, parlourmaid, nurse, laundry maid and housemaid;
and 13 boy boarders between the ages of 14 and 18. At Northampton and again at the last job
Robert Steel held, Annie Caroline was a surrogate mother to several generations
of boys away from home. The arrival of
Annie Caroline had freed Anna Eliza from household management and she was not
in the UK on census day 1901. Perhaps she
was travelling with her daughter and son-in-law: in 1898 Elizabeth Steel had
married either John Stuart Woodhall or William Handley (for why I am not sure
which, see the Sources section!)
THE MOVE TO SHERBORNE
I haven’t been able to find out much about Northampton and County
School, though I do get the impression that it had been founded relatively
recently - since the 1870 Education Act - and specialised in science. In some ways it was an ideal job for Robert
Steel but after a few years in the post, he began to get frustrated, both with
the control of the curriculum being exercised by the authorities, and the
results of that control. The trend that
was being dictated by the education authorities was towards ever more
specialisation in a narrower range of subjects.
Science specialist he may have been, but Robert was a firm believer in
the importance of science pupils learning the classics - as he had done at his
grammar school. He began to look about
him for a job where both disciplines were still taught to all pupils. Eventually a vacancy came up that was in some
ways a demotion, but in others a really plum appointment. In 1907, he moved to Sherborne School as
science master and curator of the school museum. He almost certainly knew the museum by repute
already; it had an excellent geological collection which included specimens
found by an ex-pupil, the ammonite expert Sydney Savory Buckman; Sydney’s
sister Katherine Julia Buckman was a member of the GD in London.
THE SHERBORNE BONE
In 1911 Robert became involved in a curious incident, a kind-of dress
rehearsal for the more famous Piltdown Man discovery of 1912. Sherborne School is near what is now known as
the Jurassic Coast and one of Robert’s duties and pleasures as curator of the
school museum was going out into the countryside looking for geological
specimens and fossils. A favourite site
for investigation was Major Wingfield Digby’s quarry on the outskirts of town,
where Robert had found a layer of deposits from the Pleistocene period. He encouraged pupils who seemed keen, to go
specimen-hunting on their own and after one such expedition to the quarry,
pupils Cortesi and Groves showed Robert a piece of bone which looked like it
had a drawing cut into it. How Robert
reacted at the time to this possible evidence of ancient art isn’t certain any
longer: the memory of everyone involved in the incident was coloured by what
happened later. However, it is clear
that Robert was sufficiently hopeful that the bone and the drawing were
genuinely ancient to send the evidence to be examined by Arthur Smith Woodward
at the Geological Society of London.
Woodward was rather busy at the time assembling the pieces of Piltdown
Man’s skull: he and Charles Dawson presented the find at the Geological Society’s
meeting of December 1912. It wasn’t
until 1914 that Woodward published an article on the Sherborne Bone, saying
that it was a genuine piece of Palaeolithic art. His conclusion generated a lot of discussion
in the geological community - not everyone was convinced - but the war then
intervened, and it was not until the 1920s that any further investigation of
the find was possible. In 1923, Robert
and Arthur Smith Woodward revisited the site where the two pupils said they had
come across the bone. They didn’t find
anything of interest, from the Pleistocene or any other period; but whatever
doubts Robert had about the bone, he kept to himself for several more
years. In 1926, however, articles were
published in Nature stating that the bone was a fake, embarrassing
Robert, Woodward, Cortesi (Groves had been killed in the war) and even Charles
Bayzard, who in 1911 had been working for Robert at Sherborne School
museum. But if it was a fake, who
created it? - and who was it intended to make a fool of?
A flurry of letters followed from those involved, sent to each other and
to the press. Cortesi wrote to Sherborne
School’s headmaster, asserting that the bone and the art were genuine. Cortesi’s school-friend E A Ross Jefferson,
wrote to back up Cortesi - it had been he who in 1911 had suggested Cortesi
show the find to Robert. Bayzard wrote
to Nature saying that he’d suspected a hoax at the time the bone was
found, and that the joke had been on Robert.
Robert then wrote to Nature saying that if the bone was a hoax,
it was intended to deceive Bayzard; and that if it was so obviously a fake, why
had no one at the Geological Society said so years before?
Piltdown Man was revealed as a hoax in 1953. Not having got quite that level of publicity,
and being rather more difficult to date with any certainty, the Sherborne Bone
was not definitively proved to be modern until 1995, but dating techniques not
available during Robert’s lifetime have confirmed that it was not a piece of
Palaeolithic art, it was a hoax. Groves,
Cortesi, Ross Jefferson and their fellow pupils have to be the most likely
hoaxers; attempting to pull the legs of the staff. When they also fooled several more eminent
geologists they must have been delighted.
By 1926 Robert no longer had to face being quizzed about the Sherborne
Bone every day in school. He had retired
in 1923 and of course that involved leaving Cameron House, The Avenue,
Sherborne where he had lived while he had been working. His mother Anna Eliza had died in 1915, at
the remarkable age of 89, so it was just Robert, Annie Caroline and daughter
Caroline Eliza who moved a few miles out of Sherborne to The Thatch, a house on
Gold Street in the village of Stalbridge.
Though she was slightly the younger, Annie Caroline died first, in
December 1931. Robert Elliott Steel died
in October 1933; he had been ill for some time.
Caroline Eliza never married.
After the death of her parents she moved to Charminster, where she died
in 1942.
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.
Useful source for business and legal information: London Gazette and its
Scottish counterpart Edinburgh Gazette.
Now easy to find (with the right search information) on the web.
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 ROBERT ELLIOTT STEEL
ROBERT STEEL father of the GD member:
At www.visionofbritain.org.uk a short account of Horton and
villages close by, using as its source John Marius Wilson’s Imperial
Gazetteer of England and Wales, published 1870-72.
I found very little good evidence about the Steel family of Horton, but
I did find a query posted April 2010 at boards.ancestry.co.uk posted April 2010
on John Tunney and John Steel who were 1st cousins whose parents had
been born in Horton. Mary Steel had married John Tunney.
That Robert Steel the father may have been in business as a draper in
Manchester: London Gazette 30 August 1872 p3874 proceedings under the
Bankruptcy Act of 1869.
THE ELLIOTT FAMILY of Harburn Northumberland:
At www.curiousfox.com, an enquiry mentioning a John Elliott born
Hartburn 1818, who was living at Bell Bar Hertfordshire by 1851. There was no mention by the enquirer of an
Anna Eliza Elliott, just a possible brother Robert.
Website www.brookmans.com on Brookman’s Park, serialisation of Peter
Kingsford’s A Modern History of Brookman’s Park. Chapter 2 covers 1816-80.
1851 census which shows a John Elliott born in Hartburn living at Bell
Bar in a house right next to the gates to the Brookman’s Park entrance. He has a visitor, Robert Elliott aged 23.
John descs himself as “bailiff”; it’s a good guess that he’s working at the
Brookman’s Park estate.
Familysearch England-ODM GS film numbers 252497 and 252498: marriage of
Robert Steel and Anna Eliza Elliott.
ROBERT ELLIOTT STEEL
EDUCATION
Journal of the Chemical Society 1934 part 1 p565 obituary
written by E. Hope.
MANCHESTER GRAMMAR SCHOOL see wikipedia.
LONDON UNIVERSITY
At www.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/resources/CopyofExaminationRegisters.pdf Robert Elliott
(sic) Steel is on a list of examinees June 1870.
MAGDALEN COLLEGE AND ITS DEMYSHIPS: see wikipedia for an explanation.
At www.magd.ox.ac.uk, a catalogue of the library at Magdalen College
Oxford, their ref MC: P233/3C1 is a scrapbook of letters to (and some from)
Edward Chapman, sent/received between 1866 and 1901. The list of correspondents includes Robert
Elliot Steel described in the catalogue as holding one of the demyships from
1872 to 1876.
SOCIETY OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
Chemical News and the Journal of Industrial Science volume 51
1885. It’s a weekly journal, published
on Fridays, and its founder and current editor is GD member William
Crookes. Issue of 27 February 1885 p101
report of the meeting of the Chemical Society held Thursday 19 February 1885:
Robert Elliott Steel was amongst those elected a member at that meeting.
Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry volume 11 1892 pxxii members’
list.
British Library catalogue for the textbooks:
1889 Natural Science Exam Papers; as
compiler. In the School Examination
Series, editor A M M Stedman. Published
Bell. On the web I saw a few references
to this book as a Part 1 - Inorganic.
But I couldn’t find any references at all, at the British Library or via
google, to a Part 2 which ought to have been Organic.
1890 Practical Chemistry for the Elementary Stage
of the Science and Art Department’s Examinations. London: Methuen and Co.
1891 The World of Science. London: Methuen and Co.
1891 A Class-Book on Light. London: Methuen and Co.
ELIZABETH ELEANOR STEEL’S MARRIAGE
The marriage of Elizabeth Eleanor Steel was registered at Durham in the
autumn of 1898. That much is clear from
freebmd. However, it wasn’t possible
from freebmd to work out who she married.
I needed information from elsewhere to see whether her husband was John
Stuart M Woodhall or William Handley.
When this happens - it’s quite common with my GD research - my first
port of call is Ancestry.co.uk. But with
Elizabeth Steel I couldn’t find her, or either of the men she might have married, on 1901 or 1911. So I tried google, but nothing came up either
for her with either surname, or for either of her supposed husbands. So I have no information about her at all,
from the date of the marriage. Stumped!
BRADFORD
For the grammar school see www.bradfordgrammar.com and wikipedia.
At pygs.lyellcollection.org Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological
and Polytechnic Society volume 11 1890 members’ list pp498-504.
Transactions of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union parts 17-22
published by the Union 1892.
SHERBORNE
Wikipedia: good account of the school’s history.
THE BONE HOAX
FOR PILTDOWN MAN see wikipedia and a lot of other websites.
Definitive proof that the bone was modern not Palaeolithic - see
SOS-veleia1.wdfiles.com/local-files/start/Sherborn.pdf which reproduces Journal
of Archaeogical Science volume 25 1998: 777-787: AMS Dating and Microscopic
Analysis of the Sherborne Bone by F D’Errico of France’s Institut de
Quaternaire; C T Williams Department of Mineralogy Natural History Museum; and
C B Stringer Department of Palaeontology Natural History Museum. On p787 is a reference to an earlier article
on the subject, Stringer et al in Nature volume 378 1995 p452.
See some of the letters written in 1926 at
www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/map_report_finds/horse_head.html, website of Clark’s
University. Bayzard’s letters appeared
in Nature 16 January 1926 and Nature 13 February 1926 p233. Robert Elliott Steel’s reply was in Nature
18 February 1926.
HENRY ELLIOTT and ANNIE CAROLINE ELLIOTT
For Haynes or Hawnes Park see www.british-history.ac.uk which uses information from
the Victoria County History’s A History of the County of Bedfordshire
volume 2 pp338-344 published 1908.
For the ownership of Haynes Park by the Thynne family: a wiki at
wikipedia.
For Lord John Thynne:
Information on him at www.westminster-abbey.org, and www.thepeerage.com which uses Burke’s
Peerage.
While searching with google I saw some references to a W B Greenfield
who farmed the Haynes Park estate in the 1900s; but he seems to have been dead
by 1912.
At www.waymaking.com some details about the house and its history
after Greenfield’s death.
See www.haynesparkprogramme.org, the house is now owned by
the Radha Soami Satsang Beas which runs it as a Science of the Soul study
centre. The RSSB’s headquarters is in
India.
Later owner of Haynes Park W B Greenfield: using google I saw several
references to him, particularly as a blood-stock breeder; but nothing involving
Haynes Park before the 1900s and he seems to be dead by 1912.
THE THATCH STALBRIDGE
It’s listed, see www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk,
Copyright SALLY DAVIS
29 July 2014
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:
http:www.wrightanddavis.co.uk
***