The End of the Chinese Mission

Former Methodist School in Wuhan, giving some idea of the scope of projects,
the more successful and wealthy missionary organisations were able to initiate.

With anti-missionary sentiment spilling over, work in Wuhan was for a while suspended. In the meantime, Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell dealt with the matter of their indemnities, fully intending to return to Yichang and to Shashi once the political temperature had dropped, and their compensation received, or so the reports suggest.

The Bishop Boone Memorial School in Wuhan was re-opened, and with between fifty and sixty communicants now actively following the church in Shashi, it can be presumed that no-one wanted to see all the hard work go to waste. The episcopal records state that:

…the indemnity for the destruction of mission property at I-chang for which Bishop Boone had made claim just before his death was at this time paid; but the amount awarded was less than the Bishop's estimate called for. However, by the advice of the American minister and others the lesser sum was accepted. Reimbursement for Mr. Sowerby's personal losses had been made previously.

The records further note that however in 1894, Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell withdrew from the operation. No reason is given, but perhaps after the narrow escape Herbert had experienced, the couple decided finally that it might be time to take themselves and their children to safer climes. And thus their Chinese adventure came to a conclusion. 

Herbert Sowerby Is Assaulted

Wuhan Church of the Nativity. Herbert Sowerby was present when it was
consecrated.

It seems always to have somehow baffled the Western world that other cultures should be so stubbornly resistant to their self-evidently superior way of life. And yet any suffering or dangers the missionaries encountered in their work in any case simply mirrored the rejections suffered by their Lord and Saviour. To put this in contemporary terms, this put them in a ‘win-win’ position, in which both temporal success and failure were part of a divine destiny.

So, terrifying as it therefore might have been, the Mission was reasonably sanguine in recounting the destruction of the Yichang Mission House, and the assault  by a mob on Herbert Sowerby on his way from his home to the British Consulate. Herbert, it was reported, was stunned by the blows, and all his personal belongings were destroyed or lost. 

It is notable too that even in these more remote areas, consulates had been set up, and important to recognise that the missionaries were not merely harmless, naïve and unworldly eccentrics. They kept in touch with the politics of the day, their governments and their consular representatives. In this case, they lost no time in lobbying for support at the highest levels. Political pressure then produced the desired result:

The missionaries called attention to the remarkable fact that the proclamation of the emperor drawn forth by the riots recognized Christianity as one of the religions of the empire, and commanded all the officials to protect the native Christians. 

Such was the power of the British Empire and other colonialist operators at their height. The relationship between the government and the missionaries must have been an interesting one though. On the one hand, the missionaries opened up new spheres of influence, bringing with them those religious and civilizing values that the Victorians saw it as their mission to propagate. It was all well and good in principle at least that the politicians would deal with all the realpolitik of trade and diplomacy whilst the missionaries would win the hearts and minds of the local people, and convince them of the error of their ways through education, health services and Bible Classes. 


On the other hand, when those same missionaries succeeded in inflaming local sentiment, provoking riots, and otherwise destabilising relations with governments with whom the authorities were engaged in delicate discussions, then indeed the politicians would not have been human if their irritation had not been profound. Their relationship with the missionaries was thus, to put it politely, somewhat ambiguous. 

The Mission Proceeds

Herbert Sowerby - From The
Geni Website

On the surface, the Protestant Mission seemed to be satisfied with their progress. Admittedly, they had not yet evangelised China as a whole, but they were proud to report that at Yichang and Shashi, twenty-nine converts had been baptised and that fifty pupils were attending their Sunday schools and day schools. Furthermore, ‘an evangelist and catechist under Mr. Sowerby's guidance had reached out to six places within a few miles of I-chang (Yichang)’

1891 proceeded with even more promising projects proposed. Herbert Sowerby applied to the Mission for 600 US Dollars to complete the Yichang Mission House and Ann Fanny Wombwell put in her claim to the Woman’s Auxiliary for funds to put up a small building for her girls’ day school. Ten girls were attending her school already, and Ann Fanny’s pitch was that more space was needed to satisfy what was sure to be a growing demand for enlightenment.

The work at Yichang and Shashi carried on, Herbert assisted by a Chinese Deacon, ten catechists and teachers, and three volunteer bible women, as he travelled up and down the great river to supervise the projects. The mission report proudly stated that at the two stations:

 …forty-nine had been baptized, twenty-three confirmed, and after four years' work there were forty- five Chinese communicants. Four Sunday and day- schools and a night-school for workingmen had in all thirty pupils. 

These missionaries were if nothing else, incurably optimistic, convinced that from small things greater things would surely come. 

As it happens though, by no means all of their number were convinced that such figures represented a significant breakthrough.

First Signs of Trouble

Heading up the Yangtze River in 2011 towards the Three Gorges Dam near Yichang, and utterly oblivious
at the time to the fact that I was not the first member of my extended family to be paying a visit!

Herbert Sowerby did not arrive back in Shanghai until September 1888, and Ann Fanny Wombwell not until May the following year.  It was the expectation that Herbert would take charge of the more remote Sashi station. In October of that year, Herbert was present at the consecration of the new Church of the Nativity in Wuhan.

There were though in the Episcopal reports, signs that not all the
Chinese were seeing and appreciating the radiant light that the
missionaries were so generously shining down on them. In 1890,
the Mission documents report that: An attempt was made to stir up an anti-Christian demonstration in Wuchang and anonymous placards
attacking foreigners and their religion in the most blasphemous and repulsive manner were posted,
and hand-bills distributed all over the city. The members of the various missions joined in demanding
that the circulation of these papers should be stopped and the offenders be arrested and punished.
The Tao-tai (ruler of the district), after some days assured the missionaries that no further trouble
need be anticipated; everything quieted down, and there the matter rested.

An interesting report, suggesting that the missionaries in China had considerable support and influence from their home countries and governments, which was certainly true to a large extent. More telling however, are the accusations levelled of blasphemy towards a people whose history, culture and traditions had the most minimal relationship with Christianity, and the demands, effectively, that the Chinese authorities censor the media of the day in line with the demands of the foreign powers, and adjust their judicial decision-making processes to suit. Although China, was notionally an independent country, the colonial imperative seemed to demand full freedom for the visiting missionaries to persuade the Chinese people to adopt the values of their own culture and religion. The die had been cast. 

Early Successes

This river cruise map shows Wuhan in the centre. The mission worked its way up to Shashi (now known as Jingzhou) and then to Yichang. The Sowerbys had commitments in all these places.

As the operation by the banks of the Yangtze grew, Ann Fanny Wombwell also played her part, opening a day school for girls, whilst her husband also taught Bible classes to the community. Slowly the mission was working its way up the river. A new station was opened at Shashi and later at Yichang, with Herbert overseeing the projects and reporting back on successes such as the four baptisms in Shashi. Ann Fanny meanwhile had taken over care of the Jane Bohlen Memorial School, which was was apparently doing well during the 1880s. It was reported that: 

 The woman's work and girls' school were in excellent condition. Mrs. Sowerby had been " the mainspring of it all," assisted in the teaching by the native Christian helpers. 

Ann Fanny Wombwell seems finally to have found herself a vocation in life. 

Herbert Sowerby and his family left China for an extended vacation on December 15th 1887, and reached London on  January 30th, 1888, where Ann Fanny may well have taken some time out to provide her father, George Wombwell junior, with some rather choice, pious, firmly theologically grounded, and likely thoroughly unwelcome advice, suggesting that there were reasons for George’s misfortunes that went way beyond his preferred notion of bad luck and which required a substantial reworking of his relationship with his higher power. The menagerist and his missionary daughter really had ended up at opposite extremes of the Victorian pole. 

Neither her income nor principles would have suggested to Ann Fanny that she should enlist the support of her husband or his family in bailing George junior out of his financial malaise. The superficial and transient sufferings of his daily life were merely signs to be heeded and understood, and acted upon accordingly. It was not this life that was the issue, but the next life. Not a message that George Wombwell junior would have necessarily appreciated.     

Ann Fanny Wombwell Heads For Wuhan

Marriage certificate of Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell (third cousin x2 removed of Hetty Jane Owen)

In 1893 a lengthy historical survey of the activities of the Protestant Episcopal Church in China was published, together with a number of other documents, providing a number of references to the Sowerbys and enabling us to get at least some limited insight into the strange and novel life they were now leading, as happily married, they proceeded in February 1882, up the Yangtze River to Wuhan.

On November 28th, Herbert was appointed to the Diaconate and two years later he was to be fully ordained as a priest. In the interim he was put in charge of the Bishop Boone Memorial School in Wuhan. By 1884, the school had thirty-two pupils, and Herbert had been given further responsibilities for two other day schools and for visiting in-ward patients. Their mission had begun.

The China Inland Mission

Hudson Taylor goes Chinese. He was in fact a
Yorkshireman, born in Barnsley in 1832.
He died in China in 1905

The 1881 Shanghai wedding certificate of Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell reveals that Herbert was at this time a missionary with the China Inland Mission. Their first child was born the following year in Wuhan. 

The China Inland Mission was founded by Hudson Taylor in 1865 in Britain, with the modest aims of prioritising remote inland provinces whilst 'seeking to evangelize the whole of China.' With this in mind, Taylor proposed a novel methodology in which the missionaries would identify with the Chinese 'by wearing Chinese dress and queue (pigtail), worshipping in Chinese houses'. This was to cause quite a stir in certain quarters. Taylor also insisted on strict fiscal policies. There was to be:

'No solicitation of finance, or indebtedness; looking to God alone; pooling support in life of corporate faith'

For Ann Fanny Wombwell, the daughter of the bankrupted and reckless ex-menagerist George Wombwell junior, such admonitions may just have held a certain romantic appeal.

The first group of China Inland Missionaries set off from England in 1866, numbering sixteen in all, not including Taylor and his family. In 1872, the China Inland Mission London Council was founded. In 1875 Taylor asked the Council for a further eighteen missionaries, and then in 1881, for another seventy. His operation seemed to be gathering strength.

For whatever reasons though, Herbert Sowerby did not find the approach of Hudson Taylor to the whole-scale conversion of the Chinese entirely satisfactory. In 1882, it is recorded in Gray and Sherman's 'The Story of The Church in China' that:

Mr. Herbert Sowerby and his wife joined the Mission Staff. They had been previously 
connected with another mission and had a valuable knowledge of the Chinese language and people and were able to be of immediate service in the needy field at Wuchang (Wuhan). Mr. Sowerby was placed in charge of Boone School and under his able management the school improved greatly.

The mission in question was the Protestant Episcopal Mission or Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and in switching missionary camps, Herbert and Ann Fanny had effectively transferred their allegiances from a British to an American missionary organisation. It would also seem from this report that the couple must have already been in China for quite a while, and may even have been part of Hudson Taylor's group of eighteen that arrived in China in 1875. 

Joseph de Carle Sowerby and The Reverend Herbert Sowerby

Joseph de Carle Sowerby (1829-1871) was a son of James de Carle Sowerby. He does not seem to have followed the family tradition, and in 1861 was working as a commercial clerk in Hackney, married to Grace Seguier, a school mistress. He later became a tax collector. Joseph and Grace had five children. One of their sons, Herbert Sowerby, who was born in 1856 in Dalton, Middlesex went into the church and was later to become the Reverend Herbert Sowerby. 

Some time in the 1870s, probably, Herbert came into contact with Ann Fanny Wombwell, quite possibly through Mrs Wombwell, whose connections after all would have been wide and varied. It looks like Ann Fanny Wombwell now took to the church in a serious way, and joined the massed ranks of Victorian Christian idealists who saw around them a world in urgent need of redemption. And before long, both Herbert and Ann Fanny were on their way to China, to be married in Shanghai in 1881. Ann Fanny reported the profession of her father, George Wombwell junior as a musician. 

James de Carle Sowerby

James de Carle Sowerby from his Wikipedia entry

James de Carle Sowerby (1787-1871) continued his father’s work, completing the mineral conchology study, and finding time with a cousin to found the Royal Botanic Society and Gardens. He was a mineralogist and illustrator, and counted Michael Faraday amongst his friends. The Sowerbys were then part of the high-end elite of the Victorian scientific community.

James Sowerby

Portrait of James Sowerby from his Wikipedia entry

As already noted, the Wombwell menagerie attracted the attention of all types of people, and it is of no surprise that the Sowerby family with their interest in the natural world would have made contact with the Wombwell family. 

James Sowerby (1757 –1822) was an English naturalist and illustrator who spent much of his life engaged on two quite colossal projects, one a 36 volume study of the botany of Britain, and the second a 7 volume work on the mineral conchology of Britain. His descendants were to carry on his work, which hardly surprisingly, he was unable to complete in his lifetime.

The Departure of Ann Fanny Wombwell

It was often assumed that the Mrs Wombwell to whom George Wombwell senior left Menagerie Number One was George's wife. Indeed the 1909 obituary of George Wombwell junior makes precisely this presumption, referring to her as his widow. Since no marriage records have ever been located, a second theory is that she was probably his mistress, and simply adopted his name. It is easy to see where the confusion comes from as Mrs Wombwell had originally been married to a Henry Morgan. When Henry died, George Wombwell senior took her under his wing, and with her young daughter in tow took her out on the road and into the exotic world of his menagerie. Since she soon became known as Mrs Wombwell, it would have been a very fair conclusion that he had married her.

It would also have been the wrong conclusion, for Ann, to use her Christian name, was actually the daughter of George's elder brother, Samuel, and was hence George's niece, and her maiden name was Wombwell. After the death of Henry Morgan, she seems to have kept her married title but reverted to her maiden name, an unconventional move to be sure, but also understandable, for the menagerie was after all brand Wombwell, and George had enough of an intuitive understanding of marketing that he probably did not want the 'Morgan' name distracting from his logos and publicity. The idea that Anne was his wife was therefore something of a gentle deception, and one that he was likely more than happy to allow to be promoted. None of this, by the way, entirely disqualifies the theory that Anne may have been his mistress, but that is another matter.

Belsize Road, today: Copied from Zoopla. Probably, the type of accommodation where Ann Fanny Wombwell would have been living in 1871 with the retired Mrs Wombwell.

Ann Wombwell continued to manage Menagerie Number One until her retirement either in 1862 or 1865 to Hampstead. Living with her in 1871 was another widow, This was her second daughter, Amelia Ann Morgan, who married Edmund Bramston in 1837. Edmund was one of the executors of the will of George Wombwell senior and, it appears, one of his favourite business partners. He died in 1859.

It was with these two widows that Ann Fanny Wombwell, daughter of George Wombwell junior and Fanny Ann Kienlen now found herself living. With her mother having died young, and her father, a hopeless vagrant, remarried, and playing in the menagerie bands up north, it can be imagined that Ann and Amelia put some thought into the future of Ann Fanny Wombwell, very probably a future in which her father would be confined to a very limited role.

The exact time-scale of what happened over the next decade is not quite clear, and nor can it be ascertained as to what extent Ann Fanny’s next move was a reaction against her upbringing, the death of her mother, the all round unreliability of her father, or the matchmaking skills of Mrs Wombwell. 

The facts as they have come down to us are however explicit and straightforward enough. On the 4th April, 1881, Ann Fanny Wombwell married a certain Reverend Herbert Sowerby in, of all places, Shanghai, China.

For more on Ann Wombwell, see: The Enigmatic Mrs Ann Wombwell, wife of the Celebrated Menagerist, George Wombwell.

Mrs Wombwell Takes Charge

To review: By the time the 1851 census was held on 30th March, 1851, George Wombwell junior must have just come into possession of Menagerie Number Three. He was on the road and lodging in Ipswich along with his servant Thomas Burrows from Barbados, who was probably looking after the needs of the pregnant Fanny Eliza Kienlen, whilst himself recovering from being crushed by one of George's elephants.

It does not come as a surprise to record the absence of Thomas Burrows from the 1861 census record, the census in which George, now living at 1 Grove Cottage, Poplar, describes himself as a photographer and artist. Just two years later, Fanny Eliza died, and George was left in charge of Ann Fanny Wombwell, aged just twelve. 

By the time of the 1871 census, George had been reduced to blowing into his cornet in Stockton, Durham, and had married again, to a woman of half his age. Ann Fanny Wombwell, his daughter, was not attending to her father on that day of the 2nd April 1871. Instead, she was in the far more comfortable environs of Belsize Road, Hampstead: 

This record takes us right back into the mainstream of the original menagerie family. Having lost her mother in 1863, and with her father now up north with his new wife, the Wombwell aristocracy, in the person of Mrs Wombwell, partner of the original founder himself, had taken the nineteen-year-old Ann Fanny under their wing. If they had learned anything by now, it was that George junior could not be relied on for very little, least of all care of  elephants, wives, or daughters.

The Marriages of George Wombwell Junior

So, having established that George Wombwell junior was most likely a second cousin of Harriett Wombwell, and the nephew of Richard Wombwell and Maria West, we can resume his story, focusing this time more on his domestic arrangements.

To summarise, born in Stoke Newington, probably around 1822 rather than 1817, as later reported by the Victorian press, George was adopted by his Uncle George at age ten, and joined Wombwell’s menagerie when it was in its heyday. 

When George senior died in 1850, he was a national celebrity, and his nephew and adopted son was by default, an eligible young bachelor in his late twenties, living in the reflected glory of the Wombwell phenomenon, and its visits to Windsor Castle. Just shortly before his famous uncle’s death, George married Fanny Eliza Kienlen:

1850 marriage certificate of George Wombwell junior. Maria West’s daughter, Sophia was a witness. The wedding took place at New Gravel Pit Meeting House, Paradise Fields, Hackney on the 7th October. The James Wombwell present was probably George’s younger brother. He later emigrated to the USA.

Present as witnesses were James Wombwell and none other than Harriett Wombwell’s elder sister, Sophia, now Sophia Wallace. The cousins from Stoke Newington had clearly kept in contact with each other down the years.

George and Fanny had one living child when Fanny died in 1863.

In 1869, his fortunes now fast fading, George remarried to Elizabeth Adella Cresey, in Yarmouth, Norfolk on the 22nd February. She died in 1897 in Shoreditch, and was the wife that The Daily Mail reported as being in an infirmary. She was just forty-eight years old at the time of her death. Again, one child survived.

George junior's daughters (third cousins twice removed of Hetty Jane Owen) were:

i. Ann Fanny Wombwell (1851-1923) (daughter of Fanny Eliza Kienlen).
ii. Amelia Gertrude Wombwell (1870-1958) (daughter of Elizabeth Adella Creasey).

George's wives, in short, seem to have fared only marginally better than his elephants.

Old St Mary's, Stoke Newington

The final journeys of Richard Wombwell and Maria West from Lordship Road  would not have taken long. It is no more than a slow ten-minute stroll from the Red Lion pub to the graveyard and church of Old St. Mary's Church, Stoke Newington. Turning right into the graveyard, and then immediately on the right is the gravestone of one William Wombwell. In the next grave but one another gravestone marks the resting place of Richard Wombwell, the gravestone barely decipherable and leaning against a larger brick-built tomb, which may conceivably belong to Maria West, concealing her Downpatrick origins right to the very end.

Lordship Road 2017

Lordship Road is still there, and so too is the Red Lion pub, rebuilt when Church Street was widened in 1924, and with not a hint of its venerable history on display. Outside however, in the small beer garden, a pair of large closed off gates hint at an entrance that could have been used long ago by horses and overseen by a certain Mr Webster, who was to inherit the livery stable business of Maria West after her death in 1846. A Red Lion pub has been on this site since since 1697, and by 1839 was reportedly a meeting place for 'respectable tradesmen'. Somewhere very close by were the homes of the Wombwells and the elephant house that Zachariah Wombwell was to convert into his living room.

Wombwell Relationships Explained

Richard Wombwell Senior seems to have been one of three recorded brothers, all born in Newport, Essex, as listed below:

Richard Wombwell 1736–
James Wombwell 1739–
Thomas Wombwell 1744–1768

The parents of the three children were John Wombwell (1712-1784) and Mary Hare (1712-1752), both of whom were born in Clavering, Essex, and who would be Hetty Jane Owen's x4 great-grandparents. 

The Wombwell heartlands in Essex

Richard's younger brother, James Wombwell meanwhile married Sarah Rogers in Braintree, Essex in 1760. They had nine children, of whom the two youngest were George (senior), born in 1777, who went on to found the famous menagerie, and Zacharias, born in 1780,  the father of George Wombwell junior, and Richard Wombwell and Maria West's next door neighbour in Stoke Newington.

All of this seems to add up quite logically, and it means that Richard Wombwell was a first cousin of George and Zacharias, and the uncle of George junior.

In concluding this journey back into the Wombwell past, it would seem that the parents of John Wombwell were:

John Wombwell (1686-1741), also of Clavering, and Elizabeth Twynne (1690-1714). 

John in turn was the son of Richard Wombwell (1660-1723) of Clavering, who married Mary Brown (1662-1737). 

These would be Hetty Jane Owen's x5 and x6 great-grandparents respectively. It would seem that as the generations rolled by, the Wombwells were simple farming folk of the Essex region, until as the eighteenth century drew to a close, one or more of their number began to look south towards London, and the opportunities that the great metropolis might have to offer them.

The Origins of Richard Wombwell

Most likely, Richard Wombwell was born in 1757 in Arkesden, Essex, the oldest of seven children of Richard Wombwell and Elizabeth Negus.

The seven children, including Richard himself were: 

Richard Wombwell 1757–1833
John Wombwell 1758–
James Wombwell 1761–1798
Elizabeth Wombwell 1763–
William Wombwell 1765–
Mary Wombwell 1768–
Dorcas Wombwell 1770–

His parents married in nearby Newport in 1756, and as their marriage certificate shows, both were illiterate:

Should this tree be correct, Richard Wombwell and Elizabeth Negus would be the x3 great-grandparents of Hetty Jane Owen.

The Death of Richard Wombwell

Maria West's husband, Richard Wombwell, died in 1833 and his burial was duly listed in the Stoke Newington, St. Mary burial records:

His age was given as sixty-eight, suggesting that he was born around 1765. As noted earlier though, such records can be treated as approximations at best. The problem with Richard Wombwell has always been placing him in the extended Wombwell family tree, and thereby establishing his exact relationship with George Wombwell senior and junior, respectively, and with his next door neighbour, Zacharias Wombwell, who, as we already know, was the younger brother of the older George Wombwell. The only available way to do this has been to find the baptism records of a Richard Wombwell in Essex, born in this period, and without an extant tree. The ancestors of Richard Wombwell are thus suggested by default, rather than by any direct, confirmatory evidence. On the positive side however, there would only appear to be one candidate for the position in the very well-researched Wombwell trees of Essex.

Issues with Records

It would have been on Sunday 6th June, 1841, when the enumerators made their way down Lordship Road, armed with the forms on which for the very first time in history, the names and details of all household residents in the United Kingdom were to be recorded. For latter day researchers, the census returns can be a trifle frustrating. First of all, the ages of respondents were to be rounded down to the nearest multiple of five, and secondly, they were not asked where they came from, but simply whether or not they came from the county where the census was being taken, in this case, Middlesex.

In those days of course, and in the face of this new and unique intrusion into privacy, in a relatively record-free age, the enumerators were faced with the task of uncovering facts that the respondents may not have wished to advance, or were not even sure of themselves, such as their original year of birth. In such cases, they would have told the enumerators very broadly what they believed or liked to believe to be the case.

Thus Maria West chose not to mention her Downpatrick origins and went down into the census records, as a woman of Middlesex, aged sixty. This was fanciful indeed, since her baptism took place in Downpatrick in 1765. With the help of the 'rounding down' system, Maria thus succeeded in trimming sixteen years of her real age. In short, she lied on two counts, firstly to conceal her Irish origins, possibly out of political caution, and secondly, possibly out of vanity, to appear as young as she could possibly manage. 

Record of burial for Maria West, St. Mary, Stoke Newington, 1846. Note how her age has increased since the 1841 census! Nonetheless, the age given is still an underestimate. She must have been at least eighty.

Other records of the time can be equally problematic. Both surnames and first names change according to the taste of the bearer. As we trawl back into the parish records, we thus find 
‘Wombwell’, ‘Womell’ and even ‘Ummel’ to name just three variations used by the family. Dates also change – birth and baptism dates get confused, and ages at death when provided are more than likely to be mere estimates provided by the parties involved. As noted, in this era, it will have been not uncommon for people not even to have known their own birthdate and age, let alone those of their deceased relatives. 


With the digitilisation of records and the proliferation of family history research, data can easily get further polluted – by mistranscriptions, false turnings, wishful thinking, and the replication of one researcher’s errors by the next. 

All this is very hard to avoid, and in tracing the Wombwell line, no-one need be too surprised if the data that emerges is not entirely factually accurate, or is contradicted by other versions. Due to the fame of the menagerie founder himself, the original George Wombwell, many distant and not-so-distant cousins have sought to establish connections with him, and this also has contributed to a multiplication of not entirely consistent, but nonetheless very lengthy and informative family trees. 

Maria West Leaves a Painting

Pondering her will, and contemplating the end of her days, Maria West took one more look at the framed painting hanging in her Lordship Road living room, and decided that on balance it could go straight back to where it presumably came from in the first place - George Wombwell senior. 

At any rate, this, as it turned out, may have been no minor bequest, and not the least of Maria’s erratic life choices. In 2005, a painting of a Bengal tiger, sold at auction at Christies for 11,400 pounds. The painting was the work of William Huggins (1820-1884) and was dated 1838. A much admired Victorian artist, often compared to Stubbs for his portraits of animals, Huggins was a frequent visitor to Wombwell’s menagerie and would follow the show in order to have live models for his work. 

By William Huggins (1820–1884) - Christie's, LotFinder: entry 4617011, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10529985. This portrait, or one very similar probably occupied pride of place in Maria West’s living room in Stoke Newington.

It is not inconceivable that the painting that was sold off at Christies is the very same one that occupied pride of place in Maria West’s sitting room in Lordship Street, Stoke Newington, nearly two centuries earlier, or at least was part of the same series. 

It is a salutary reminder also that the menagerie and thereby the family attracted the attentions of people from all reaches of society, from royalty to artists to naturalists, to journalists and more. 

Maria West Adds a Codicil

When Maria added a codicil to her will shortly before her death in 1846, she chose, for whatever reason, to remove George Wombwell senior as her executor, and made a number of other alterations in her dispensations. 

Maria may have had sound reasons for this. George senior was not getting any younger, and was still living an itinerant life on the road. Furthermore, both her daughters were now married, and the family was by in possession of a very reasonable independent income from their lands in County Down, Ireland. In this context, who was there left who would want to take on the all the highly demanding animal husbandry responsibilities generated by the Wombwell menagerie?   

In an abrupt turn-around, Maria decided to pass on many of the items in the livery stable business, such as the harnesses Hetty Jane Owen's direct ancestors with the menagerie business.and saddles, to John Webster, the proprietor of the Red Lion public house nearby. And that was the end of the involvement of Hetty Jane Owen's direct ancestors with the menagerie business.  

The Red  Lion

Stoke Newington, 1841

1841 marks the date of the very first full UK census, and although George Wombwell junior is not to be found in Stoke Newington, or indeed anywhere else to date, his mother was still there. Mary Wombwell, was recorded in that census as a cow-keeper living on Lordship Road. She was the widow of George’s father, Zacharias (or Zachariah) Wombwell, who had died some years earlier. 

Next door, in the very next census entry, lived another widow, this time listed as a livery stablekeeper. This was Maria West, by now the owner of a lucrative portfolio of Irish fee-farm grants, and the wife of the deceased Richard Wombwell. 

The will of Zacharias Wombwell has survived. Proven in 1834, it names two children as beneficiaries, but not George Wombwell junior, who, after all, had been adopted by his uncle. It is also clear from the will that Zacharias was illiterate. Given that George junior was taken on the road by his uncle at around the age of ten, the case for the ‘Peto the elephant letter’ not being in George junior's own hand becomes more compelling still. 

It seems reasonable as well to suggest that the Richard Wombwell next door, a relative obviously, cannot have come from such a very different background to Zacharias.  On every inspection therefore, the relationship and marriage between Maria West of Downpatrick, County Down and Richard Wombwell seems more and more unlikely. 

It is unquestionable though that the Stoke Newington homes on Lordship Road were more than just family residences. They must rather have been a central part of the Wombwell menagerie supply chain, where animals were kept and fed, and the horses that pulled the wagons tended. We already know from George junior's own account that Zachariah converted an elephant house into the family living room, possibly deeming with a wisdom that his son evidently lacked that life in general would be vastly easier if their accommodation was not shared with the largest land mammals on the planet. 

When Zacharias died in around 1833, he left to his wife, Mary Webb, his cows, goats, horses, and other animals.

As for Maria West, just next door, she had taken over the stables, and in residence with her on census day, 1841, were both her daughter, Sophia Wallace, and a grandson, Charles Robinson, son of Harriett Wombwell.

Menagerie Number Three

The story of George Wombwell junior's ill-fated menagerie has been summarised by Clin Keeling. This short article confirms that Menagerie Number Three was the smallest of the three menageries, employing twenty staff and at the height of its success enjoyed takings of around two hundred pounds a night. This did not last long however.

In early 1851, not long after he had inherited the menagerie, Thomas Burrows, one of the Wombwell staff was crushed by an elephant. Burrows recovered from his injuries and was living with George and his wife as their servant in Ipswich when the 1851 census was taken, most likely still recuperating from the assault. It would have been of little comfort to Burrows, who was from Barbados, to know that he was to by far the last victim of George's incapacity to control his elephants. 

1851 Census, 80 Corn Hill, Ipswich.

George himself meanwhile was attacked by one of his black panthers, which he managed to beat off with a broom-handle. Otherwise the story is much as reported in the 1897 Daily Mail Profile. Early in 1855, gales blew over six of his wagons near Edinburgh. Shortly after, he did his very best to burn Peebles to the ground, losing twelve of his horses when the horse-tents were somehow set on fire. Heading down to the Pennines, his elephant wagon got caught in the snow between Manchester and Huddersfield. Much as they struggled and failed to extract the wagon, they could not manage, and after twelve days the elephant died. On reaching London, the remaining stock was decimated by disease, and the rest, as we know, was auctioned off in Novia Scotia Gardens in April 1855. By the time, George headed off to Paris in 1866 to collect Peto, all involved might well have been assuming that George had actually learned something from his experiences. In this, they proved to be sadly mistaken. 

The Reverend Thomas Horne

Rev. Thomas Horne. From the
Sheffield University Fairgrounds Site.

When E.H. Bostock decided to lend a helping hand to the elderly George Wombwell junior, and provide the funds to settle him in a home, he employed the services of Reverend Thomas Horne.

The Rev. Horne in truth must have been well used to picking up the pieces of the lives of indigent showmen, and knew better than most the perils of the business. He himself came from fairground stock and first appeared on a show-front at the age of three. He was a partner in a ghost illusion show before turning his talents to a not dissimilar career in the church.

Horne was a tireless advocate of the rights of the showmen, and in particular campaigned against the Moveable Dwelling Act proposed in 1889 by George Smith, becoming Chaplain to the United Kingdom Van Dwellers' Association, later to become The Showmen's Guild. He died in 1918.

The Moveable Dwelling Act was not George Smith's first foray into the world of the travellers. In the 1870s, he had been heavily involved in proposing legislation that would ensure the registration of the Victorian canal dwellers with local authorities and ensuring that their children received an education, and that the sanitary conditions of their dwellings were also regulated and inspected. The Moveable Dwelling Act proposed applying the same principles to dry-land travellers, including circus, menageries and the like.

One might have thought that a man of the church like the Rev. Horne would have had some sympathy for such ambitions. Far from it. Horne and the showmen fought indefatigably to keep the authorities out of their lives, and to maintain the nomadic lifestyle they had chosen to adopt. The campaign succeeded and the act was dropped. For the showmen though, it must have been an early signal that their traditional way of life was not going to last forever.

Charles Waterton

Charles Waterton was born in 1782. A devout Catholic throughout his life, he is said to have been a descendant of Aelric, the thane of Edward the Confessor, the name Aelric, oddly being an Anglo-Saxon version of the current Eldridge surname.   

He travelled widely in South America, and wrote about his experiences in accounts that are credited as being an inspiration to both Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin. Indeed, having passed his skills as a taxidermist onto one of his uncle's slaves, John Edmonstone, it was Edmonstone, freed, and practising taxidermy in Edinburgh, who in turn taught the art to Charles Darwin.

Jenny's transformation into Martin Luther was just one of many eccentric creations through which Waterton chose to comment on the world around him:

One tableau he created (now lost) consisted of reptiles dressed as famous English Protestants and entitled "The English Reformation Zoologically Demonstrated". Another specimen was the bottom of a howler monkey which he turned into an almost human face and simply labelled "The Nondescript". 

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Waterton)

 

He died in 1865, a passionate conservationist to the last, and, as far as one can guess, no great admirer of the Wombwell menagerie enterprise.

George Wombwell Junior is innocent.

The obituary of George Wombwell places the sale of the menagerie in April 1855. If Jenny the Gorilla was in the care of George junior therefore, she must have died earlier in the year. 

In point of fact, Waterton, a keen naturalist and conservationist had taken a keen interest in Jenny, visiting her four times whilst the menagerie was based in Scarborough. Once he had acquired Jenny's corpse however, he indulged himself in one of his stranger hobbies, the art of political taxidermy. In time, the result made its way from Alston Hall to Wakefield museum, where it remains today, on loan from Stonyhurst College.

From: The Wakefield Museum Website. The museum places Jenny with Mrs Wombwell, so it may be that this was an an animal fatality for which George junior was actually blameless.

Waterton left his own account of his last meeting with Jenny. This is reported in a study of gorillas by James Newman, and reads as follows:

Newman states that Jenny lived seven months in captivity with the Wombwell menagerie and died in February 1856. If correct, this is confirmation that Jenny was never part of the doomed menagerie of George Wombwell junior, but the menagerie of his late uncle and namesake, inherited by Mrs Wombwell.

George Wombwell Junior: His Obituary

The final George Wombwell junior clipping from the Harold Eldridge family boxfile is his obituary, published on March 3rd 1909, and summarizing his somewhat chequered career:

Mr George Wombwell was found dead in bed on Friday at his residence in Edmonton. Mr Wombwell was the son of Zacharias Wombwell, and was born about 1817. When ten years old he went to live with his uncle, the founder of the famous traveling menagerie.

The original Wombwell died in 1850, and was then the owner of three menageries. One, dispersed in 1872, was left to his widow; another to his niece, afterwards Mrs Edmonds, whose sister was the mother of E.H. Bostock, proprietor of the Scottish Zoo and Glasgow Hippodrome; and the third to his nephew, whose experiences as a showman on his own account were short. His stock was decimated by disease; and from a paragraph in The Times of April 30, 1855, it is clear that what was known as “George Wombwell’s Show” was sold by auction on Friday, April 27, at the Nova Scotia gardens, Hackney – the last place where it was exhibited. Then there were only five vans, and the stock consisted of a jaguar, a leopard and leopardess, a nylgau, a hyena, a jackal, six monkeys, an Alpino wolf, a raccoon, baboon, civet cat, some birds, a Russian bear, and two dogs. Including tilts, banners, paintings and usual paraphernalia, the sale did not realize 200 pounds. Some fear was entertained by Mrs Wombwell and her friends lest her menagerie, with which she was then traveling in Devonshire, should be confounded with that of her nephew, and a letter from “A Son-in-law of Mr Wombwell”, stating the facts of the case, appeared in our issue of May 2, 1855.

In other words, not only did George’s career as an independent menagerist last a mere five years, his companion menagerists and relatives felt compelled to publicly disassociate themselves from his enterprise.

The obituary concludes:

It is generally believed that Mr. George Wombwell exhibited the first gorilla known to have been brought alive to this country as a black chimpanzee. This belief is supported by a categorical statement of Waterton, into whose possession the body undoubtedly passed. Another account makes Mrs. Wombwell the owner of this animal, the skin of which, mounted by Waterton as a grotesque monster, is now at Alston Hall, near Preston. After the dispersal of his stock Mr Wombwell ceased to be a showman, and gained his living as a bandsman till illness and age compelled him to seek the refuge of the infirmary. When his unfortunate case was made public, he was placed in a home by the kindness of Mr E.H. Bostock, whose wishes were carried out by the Rev. T. Horne, chaplain to the Showman’s Guild.

Representation of Jenny the Gorilla. The young gorilla briefly travelled with Wombwell's menagerie.
The gorilla was not kept with the other animals but dressed in
human clothes and had a 'governess' rather than a keeper. This was in 1855.
The life of the extraordinary taxidermist Charles Waterton,
who mounted the gorilla is another tale in itself.
The Rev. T.Horne was an ex-showman himself,
turned priest, who maintained his contacts with the showmen fraternity. 

It is on this melancholy note that the life of George Wombwell junior comes to a ignominious close, dependent finally on family charity through his Bostock relatives, by then running what had become known as the Bostock and Wombwell Travelling Menagerie. 

Peto the Elephant: The Alternative Version

Happier Outcomes: Salt and Pepper from the Bostock and
Wombwell menagerie
 bathing in Wales in 1888.

When Mrs Wombwell finally arrived in London, looking forward to adding a newly acquired elephant to her menagerie, she may have experienced some difficulties in extracting out of George a straightforward explanation as to why she was now in receipt of some rather large bills for an ex-elephant whose skin and bones were now in the possession of a London naturalist. Should she ever have succeeded in uncovering the details, she might have learned, not very much to her pleasure, that the sequence of unfortunate events that had unfolded in this year of 1866 seems to have proceeded as follows:

i. George fails to board an uncooperative Peto the elephant, and an irritated captain sails off and leaves George and team kicking their heels in Paris and running up expense accounts for accommodation, food and drink for a full fortnight.
ii. George’s team, having then hired twelve horses and had a custom-made cage constructed, succeed in driving the cage into a hole in the road, upturning Peto the elephant, smashing the cage, and immediately having to pay premium price for a replacement to be hastily assembled.
iii. Nobody having thought to assess the space available on deck for the elephant, the captain now more irate than irritated, has to remove both a mast and a pump before they can set sail. More charges are no doubt added to the bill.
iv. On arriving in London. The chains supposed to lift the cage prove not to be strong enough. The cage is dropped with Peto inside and crashes through the deck of the steamer. The captain graduates from irate to incandescent.
v. His mood is not improved when George tests out Einstein’s theorem of stupidity regarding trying out the same experiment and expecting different results. The second set of chains break, and more damage is inflicted on the hapless steamer ‘Esther’.
vi. Leaving the fuming captain behind to total up his bill for damages incurred, George decides to accommodate Peto the elephant in an East London gateway. The unattended elephant lazily proceeds to pull up what is now at least a third set of chains, and gently but persistently begins to demolish the house above him. A sleeping couple are aroused from their slumbers by the sound of the floorboards beneath them being raised, and very possibly at the sight of an elephant’s trunk circling around their bed. Compensation for damage to private property and a generous pay-off to avoid further action seems likely.
vii. The elephant is marched on post haste to Cremorne Gardens. By this time the original French keeper has seen enough. The only thing in his mind is to get back to Paris, and put maximum distance between himself and George Wombwell junior. He no doubt exacts his own price for travel expenses, delays and psychological trauma.
viii. Peto then takes some limited but possibly satisfying revenge on the team by re-arranging Mr Hendy's rib cage. Hospital bills are now added to the growing list of expenses.
ix. Peto gets feverish, for which George blames Mr Smith's failure to keep the the elephant's quarters clean. George and the team remain at a loss to explain Peto's continuing foul temper. 
x. Since Peto remains uncooperative, they put him down, and sell off his skin and bones to Mr Rice, and thus complete the project assigned at a more than handsome loss.
xi. The team then settles down and awaits the arrival of Mrs Wombwell and her menagerie, and presumably work over various versions of stories that might account for their Clouseauish buffoonery, and mollify the out-of-pocket and astounded menagerie owner.

Could it just be that the Peto the elephant story remained so vividly in George's memory because it was his last great animal project, before being relegated to the back row of the menagerie band to blow into his cornet,  and be kept well, well, well away from the animals, and, particularly, elephants? 

Probably Not Worthy of Insertion

George Wombwell junior signed off this account of Peto the elephant as follows:

Should you esteem this worthy of insertion I will occasionally forward you incidents of wild animals which have occurred in my experience.

Yours obediently;
George Wombwell,
Nephew of the late George Wombwell

It was the peculiar fate of this letter to be passed down the generations until it came to rest in the family box-file kept by Harold Eldridge along with other family-related documents of his mother, Hetty Jane Owen. 

If the letter ever reached the desks of potential publishers, which seems doubtful, they may not have been too impressed by the blundering sequence of events recounted. By the time, George dictated his memories to his relatives, Queen Victoria had become, in 1876, Empress of India, and the Raj was in full glorious, imperial flow. Times had changed. By the 1890s, the death of one understandably bad-tempered elephant somewhere near Cremorne Gardens was probably neither here nor there to the great Victorian public. 

The Death of Peto the Elephant

It did not take too long for the final denouement to unfold for the unfortunate Peto the elephant. As usual, finding others to blame for the calamities that he had played such a central role in engineering, George recorded that:

After some weeks finding that he was too vicious and dangerous for the menagerie it was decided to destroy him and he was sold to Mr C Rice the naturalist for his skin and bones.

Mr Rice was preparing to have him destroyed but Mr Smith would not allow it on his premises and bought it himself believing he could tame him by kindness – but to no purpose. I told Mr Smith that unless the den was kept constantly clean the animal would have fever in the feet and die – it so happened and this was the end of the Indian elephant “Peto”, the old companion of the now giant African elephant Jumbo.

Mr Rice was probably Charles Rice, recorded as a competitor of Jamrach's in the Victorian animal import business, so the purchase was most likely for commercial rather than scientific purposes. It is interesting also that George manages to provide two different versions of Peto's demise in two successive paragraphs, firstly suggesting that Peto had to be put down as a menace to society, and immediately after, managing to put the blame squarely on Mr Smith for allowing Peto to develop 'foot fever', an accusation for which for once he might possibly have had some justification. 

We may comfortably assume that the price paid by Charles Rice for the corpse of Peto the elephant can hardly have compensated Mrs Wombwell for her investment in bringing Peto to England, nor for her familial loyalty in entrusting George with the task of bringing her a new elephant. Skipping forward five years from George's dating of the Peto the Elephant saga to 1866, the 1871 census finds George in Stockton, Durham:



Passing over the fact that George's age varies quite wildly between records, presumably thanks to a liberal dose of imaginative self-reporting, he has now become a 'musician'. Barely fifty years of age, he has - just as he reported to the Daily Mail - been reduced to playing his cornet in the circus and menagerie bands. Anything to keep him away from the animals.

An Unexpected Visitor Appears Through the Floorboards

It was only a decade since East London had witnessed a Bengal Tiger strolling up the Ratcliffe Road. Now, late night revellers stumbling and swaying out of the local hostelries would again be rubbing their eyes, as Peto the elephant was marched not entirely willingly towards Beth or, more likely, Bett street, probably that very same street where Charles Jamrach held court over his own supply of exotic animals. George however at this point had the more pressing concern of how to accommodate Peto: 

At night when all was quiet “Peto” was walked to Beth Street, Ratcliff Highway and lodged in a gateway – crowbars were driven into the ground and “Peto” was chained to them – he had a good bed of straw and plenty of food and was left to himself.

Leaving Peto to himself was to prove to be another error of judgement: 

However about 4 o’clock in the morning there was a great cry of “Murder” and “Police” – on myself and keepers going to the scene we found that “Peto” had amused himself by tearing down the plaster ceiling over the gateway and knocking up the floorboards where a man, his wife and family were sleeping in happy ignorance of the elephant lodger below them and of course were much frightened. 

Arrangements were then made with Mr E T Smith and “Peto” was removed to Cremorne Gardens to await the arrival of the menagerie from the north of England.

The moving of Peto to Cremorne Gardens must have brought back some memories to George though. It was from here, back in June 1855, that he had been invited to step down from his wagon and accompany the authorities to Whitecross prison to await bankruptcy proceedings. 

George's 1866 visit to Cremorne Gardens, this time in the company of Peto the elephant, must indeed have been starting to look as if it would end in a similar outcome:

Cremorne Gardens, 1864 by Phoebus Levin
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=540257

After much difficulty he was got there – a strong den was made and he was secured – the French keeper however desired to return to Paris and left. From that time “Peto” fretted and began to shew his temper and would strike with his trunk at all who went near him – several keepers experienced with elephants tried to control him but failed and one, Edward Hendy, who thought he had mastered him was struck and had his ribs broken.

One cannot help but to be curious as to whether Mrs Wombwell was ever presented with a properly itemized expenses bill for the procurement of Peto, and had the opportunity to absorb the sheer trail of destruction that George Wombwell junior seemed to leave behind him as he proceeded on his merry way. One thing seems for sure though - Peto's French keeper had seen enough of les Anglais, and, more specifically of les Wombwells.