Afterword

This story has been an attempt to disentangle the contents of a single boxfile of old and fading family documents, elucidate on them using the vast array of digital resources now available and thereby record the family history of Hetty Jane Owen. Of course, many parts of the narrative, just like Henry Bradley’s handwriting could not be deciphered. The most intriguing of these missing stories is perhaps the story of when and why, Hetty’s great-great grandmother, Maria West left Downpatrick, made her way to London, and then what impelled her into a relationship with Richard Wombwell. The saga of the Irish lands of the Wests and Wombwells meanwhile takes the mystery further back to her cousin, Elizabeth Carson, and why Elizabeth too left the country that she was so clearly attached to, and crossed the sea to Bristol.

The Hanging of Thomas Russell in Downpatrick.

Unlike Maria however, Elizabeth’s heart and mind seemed to remain in Downpatrick. She passed on lands nearby for the building of a new Presbyterian Church and left an annual bequest for the poor of Downpatrick, irrespective of their religion. This last condition carried with it a real sense not just of charity, but the spirit of the failed United Irishmen movement and 1798 rebellion. Both Elizabeth and Maria were of this generation, and it is not inconceivable that they had connections with some of the players that participated in the drama as it unfolded. Even minor contacts of this type could at the time have proved to be very dangerous indeed.
The tragedy of the failure of the United Irishmen was that it was to prove too much for future generations to permanently accommodate each other in a united Ireland free of sectarian politics. This is one reason why France and the French revolution held such an appeal to the United Irishmen, and the allure of government from Westminster did not. It was the promise of a secular state in which religion was left to individual conscience and had no further influence. The hold of religion and the strength of its grip on the identity of the actors had not dissipated when the Owens made their way from Wales to London, carrying with them their Welsh Calvinist-Methodist traditions and language, and when George Wombwell junior’s daughter departed to spread the word on the banks of the Yangtze river.

The Owen and Eldridge family effectively evolved through a series of independent migrations down to London, not all of which we were able to identify in the research conducted. So, what eventually, they all had in common beyond being Welsh, Irish or English, was that they were all Londoners, part of a great cosmopolitan, multicultural trading centre, even in their day. To what extent they were able to hold on to their wider identities in this environment varied according to more mundane social factors. The Irish side lasted barely a generation, unsurprisingly, since Maria West was its sole representative. The Owens kept their own Welsh culture alive much longer, but then again they migrated as something of an extended clan, still not enough however for their traditions and outlook to be perpetuated in the lives of future generations.

Part of the compelling urge to record this family history, has been based on the belief that it is worth passing on the tales of these families, since the shaping of identity is just as much an individual and community matter, as it is a social or political issue. It is also a profoundly personal and even sometimes emotional way of exploring history, and a healthy counterbalancing activity to the way history is used ideologically and politically to try and selectively create a synthetic identity, as so hilariously exemplified by the current British Citizenship Test.

It is at the end of the day, not that important whether the future generations can recite the correct dates in Pavlovian fashion for the Battles of Agincourt, Trafalgar and Waterloo. But I would like them to know a little about their origins, and roots back - in our case in Downpatrick and Bala, and the lives their ancestors led as menagerists, missionaries, mariners and more, as well as appreciate the very different but equally fascinating tales of those they came into contact with from all around the British Isles, Europe and the world beyond.