In an earlier blog post I profiled the life of my 3G-grandfather, William James Douglas. This time, I’ll look at the lives of his children.
William James Douglas had enlisted in the 10th Regiment of Foot in Ireland in 1822. He and Mary Augusta Smith likely married there, about 1823, being that Mary’s father, Daniel Smith, was a sergeant in the same regiment. William and Mary subsequently had six children that I have been able to identify, born in various parts of the world, based on the Regiment’s movements: in Ireland, Europe (likely Portugal), the Ionian Islands (Greece), England and India.
Soldiers, teachers and musicians
Three common threads wove through the lives of William and Mary, their children and several of their 33 grandchildren: military service, education and music.
Like their father, William and Mary’s three oldest sons were career soldiers and both of their daughters married into the army.
William, as the Regiment’s schoolmaster sergeant, was responsible for the education of both young soldiers and their children. One of his sons spent his final years in the Regiment as instructor of musketry, and he and a brother were employed as school board officers in post-army life.
Music played a significant role in the family, with all three sons undertaking stints as band sergeant and drum major in the 10th Regiment as well as subsequent musical endeavours in civilian life. And at least four of their grandsons were musicians. Even Mary’s father was a musician, a trumpeter.
Daniel Douglas 1824–1875
William and Mary’s first child, Daniel, was born about 1824 in Fermoy, Cork, Ireland, where the 10th Regiment was then stationed. Daniel joined the Regiment on 18 Sep 1838, a 14-year-old boy soldier, at Templemore, Tipperary, Ireland. Infantry regiments were permitted to enlist up to 50 boys for each battalion and a significant proportion of them, like Daniel, likely had fathers in the army. Many were drummers and band boys, and they were required to attend school in preparation for ultimately becoming non-commissioned officers.
On coming of age in 1842, Daniel attained the rank of Private before being promoted to Corporal in 1845 and then Sergeant in 1852. He was discharged to pension in 1863 with 21 years’ service, including 16.5 years in the East Indies where he was awarded several medals for various campaigns in the Indian Mutiny and Punjab war.
After leaving the army, Daniel settled in Glasgow, Scotland, where, at age 41, he married Margaret Ritchie, a cotton factory worker about 20 years his junior, in 1866. The marriage record lists Daniel’s occupation as “musician.”
Daniel and Margaret had five children: William (1867), Catherine (1869), Mary Jane (1871), Margaret (1873) and Richard (1875). But Daniel did not live to see his children grow up, dying of dropsy on 7 Oct 1875 at the age of 51, a mere month after Margaret had given birth to Richard. Three-month-old Richard then succumbed to bronchitis in December.
Left to support four young children on her own, Margaret returned to work in the cotton mill. She had another child in 1878, registered as “Annie Ritchie or Douglas.” Although illegitimate and obviously not the child of Daniel Douglas, Annie used the Douglas surname throughout her life.
Margaret died in 1914, age 70, due to a fracture of the base of the skull, presumably the result of a fall or some other accident, but no further details can be found as to the circumstances of her death.
Mary Jane Douglas 1827–?
Mary Jane was born in Europe according to her 1843 marriage record which showed her to be then age 16, putting her birth at about 1827. She was likely born in Portugal as the 10th Regiment had left Ireland for Portugal in late December 1826 and remained there for the next 15 months.
Mary Jane’s husband was 25-year-old Thomas Lewis, a Corporal in the 3rd Battalion, Artillery, residing in Dum Dum, Bengal, India.
A baptism record shows the couple had a son named Thomas on 13 Nov 1844 in Dum Dum.
While nothing further has been found on the life of his parents, the younger Thomas was married in Bristol, England, in 1882, to Caroline Esther Sweet and fathered two children, Caroline Esther (1884) and Thomas Henry (1886). A newspaper report provides details of the young Caroline’s tragic death from burns at the age of five when her clothes caught fire.
William Douglas 1829–1905
On leaving Portugal in early 1828, the 10th Regiment embarked for the Ionian Islands, located off the southwest mainland of Greece. The Islands were a British protectorate from 1814 to 1864, when they became part of Greece. One of those islands, Zante, had become the headquarters of the 10th Regiment of Foot by the summer of 1829.
William and Mary’s third child, my great-great-grandfather William, was born on Zante on 27 Nov 1829.
On 5 Apr 1842, when he was just 12, William joined the 10th Regiment as a boy soldier. In August 1846, he was officially deemed of full age to be a soldier, his service record showing that he had turned 18—although, in actual fact, he was then only 16. Eventually rising to the rank of band sergeant, William served 21 years in the 10th Regiment including nearly 17 years in India.
From 1863 he was in the band and then spent several months in 1864–5 at Kneller Hall, a mansion in London that housed the Royal Military School of Music, a school for army bandsmen. Prior to the founding of the music school, army bands were not accustomed to playing with those of other regiments—an attempt by 20 bands to play the national anthem together at a parade in honour of Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1854 produced a jarring cacophony at different tempos and in different keys. The head of the army subsequently started the new school in order to train all army musicians to the same standard.
At Kneller Hall, William earned a certificate of proficiency for clarinet playing. In 1865 he was loaned to the 1st Middlesex Militia, where he had charge of the band, and subsequently to the Cumberland Militia as drum major.
William’s music career continued after his discharge from the army in 1867. According to his obituary, he “conducted and trained other bands, and as a musician had a great reputation in West Cumberland … For many years he was the clarionette player in the Whitehaven Theatre Orchestra.”
William married Mary Ann May in Plymouth, Devon, England, on 15 Aug 1859. Mary Ann’s father, like William’s, had been a schoolmaster sergeant in the army. Over the next 21 years, Mary Ann gave birth to 13 children (eight daughters and five sons). The first five were born in various locales based on William’s army postings: William Arthur (1860) and Julia (1861) in Plymouth, England; Helena (1863) in Ireland; and Elizabeth (1864) and my great-grandmother Clara (1866) both in London. Following William’s retirement from the military, the family settled in Whitehaven, Cumberland, where the remaining children were born: Jessie (1868), Charles (1870), Alfred (1871), Percy (1874), Beatrice (1875), Frederick (1878), Ellen (1880) and Eveline (1881). Percy and Ellen both died in infancy. William and Mary Ann’s 11 surviving children eventually gave them 58 grandchildren!
In 1877 William was appointed school attendance and enquiry officer responsible for Whitehaven’s rural district, a post he held for 25 years. From 1894 until his death in 1905, he was also Whitehaven’s mace bearer. The mace was a large ornamented sceptre carried in ceremonial processions as a symbol of the authority of the mayor and council. William’s obituary describes how well-suited he was for the role: “Being tall, well proportioned, and erect—every inch a soldier to the last—he made a striking figure at the head of the civic procession, and in this respect his place will be hard to fill. He was greatly respected and admired by the members of the Corporation and the townspeople generally.”
William’s wife, Mary Ann, was an invalid the last 15 years of her life, ultimately succumbing to uterine disease on 21 Apr 1897.
Mary Ann’s obituary speaks to the impact of her loss on the community: “the tidings of her demise has [sic] cast quite a gloom over a large circle of friends and acquaintances, by whom she was highly respected through life, and in death will be sadly missed, deeply mourned and much regretted.”
Her family, together for her funeral, posed for a wonderful group portrait—unfortunately, no photo of Mary Ann herself seems to exist.
Back row, l-r: Frederick, Clara, Charles, William Arthur, Elizabeth, Alfred
Front row, l-r: Eveline, Jessie, father William, Julia Madeline, Helena, Beatrice
William Douglas was surprisingly tall for the time, standing 5’11” according to his army discharge papers (his brothers, Daniel and Richard, by comparison, were 5’6” and 5’7” respectively). From this photo, it would appear most of his children inherited his height—with the exception of Clara, the very short one in the back row, who was my great-grandmother. Clara’s son Alfred, my grandfather, reached a height of just 5’3”.
Only six months after Mary Ann’s death, William remarried. His new bride, Alice Maud Instone, was more than 30 years his junior, a former housekeeper originally from Staffordshire.
William died suddenly of mitral heart disease eight years later, at the age of 75, on 30 Sep 1905, and is buried in Moresby Churchyard, Whitehaven.
Richard Douglas 1831–1888
Richard was born on the Ionian island of Corfu about 1831. Like his two older brothers, boy soldier Richard joined the 10th Regiment at age 14 in 1845, moving up the ranks to Sergeant by 1864. He was appointed drum major in 1865 and instructor of musketry four years later. Discharged to pension in 1871, Richard had seen the majority of his 21 years’ service abroad including over 13 years in India, three and a half years in South Africa and three years in Japan, and was awarded several good conduct badges and campaign medals.
Richard married Elizabeth Worth in Plymouth, Devon, England, on 5 Mar 1860. Elizabeth would give birth to 13 children over the span of the next 24 years in England, Ireland, South Africa, and Japan: William Frederick (1860), Henry Edwin (1862), Arthur Percy (1866), Minnie Agnes (1867), Elizabeth Louisa (1869), Charles John (1870), Richard Worth (1871), Julia Rose (1873), Albert Ernest (1874), Francis Daniel (1876), Walter Thomas (1877), Archibald (1879) and Cecil Stuart (1884). Amazingly for the time, all lived to adulthood, and they produced at least 39 grandchildren.
After his military retirement, Richard was employed as a school board officer in Salford, Lancashire, England. He died there in 1888, age 57; his youngest child was then only four years old. Elizabeth outlived her husband by nearly 30 years, passing away in Salford in 1917.
Elizabeth Douglas 1839–1859
After 10 years in the Ionian Islands, the 10th Regiment returned to Ireland for a year and a half before subsequently embarking for Lancashire, England, where William and Mary’s second daughter, Elizabeth, was born in Blackburn on 17 Oct 1839. The eight-year gap between Richard and Elizabeth raises the question as to whether there were possibly other children born in that timeframe (who perhaps were stillborn or died in infancy) but no records have been found.
Like her sister, Mary Jane, Elizabeth wed at just 16, marrying John Lewis (no relation that I can find to Mary Jane’s husband, Thomas Lewis), a 30-year-old drum major in the 10th Regiment, on 19 Feb 1856 in Dinapore, Bengal, India.
Elizabeth and John had a daughter, Sarah Jane, in India on 1 Dec 1856, who died of acute dysentry two days before her first birthday. She is buried in Dum Dum, Bengal.
Just over two years later, the 10th Regiment returned to England. Elizabeth was pregnant on the voyage and gave birth to Charles William on 22 Jul 1859 in Plymouth, Devon. But he lived only seven months, having hydrocephalus from birth, and was buried in Stoke Damerel, Devon, on 23 Feb 1860.
Elizabeth had predeceased her baby boy, dying 1 Dec 1859, age 20, in Devon. She is also buried in Stoke Damerel. Her burial record shows date of death as 20 Nov 1859, which is probably an error, as there was unlikely to have been a two-week delay before burial.
John Lewis remarried in 1862 in Dover, Kent, England, the Regiment then being stationed at the nearby Shorncliffe army camp. John and his new wife, Bridget Prendiville, ultimately settled in Lancashire, England, and had 10 children.
Charles Douglas 1843–1844
The Regiment embarked for India in March 1842 and the youngest Douglas child, Charles, arrived in Fort William, Bengal, on 15 Dec 1843. Sadly, he did not survive his first year, dying in October 1844 at the age of 10 months. His mother, Mary, had passed away less than five months earlier. Both were buried in Chinsurah, Bengal.
A lot of descendants!
To date I have been able to identify 745 direct descendants, covering seven generations, of William James Douglas and Mary Augusta Smith. While a large proportion remained in the United Kingdom, migration has spread the family tree far and wide—to Canada, the US, Australia, Mexico and Switzerland. I am in contact with a number of Douglas cousins around the world who share my excitement at the latest research find or family story.
Sources:
The Army Schoolmaster and the Development of Elementary Education in the Army, 1812–1920; Elaine Ann Smith, PhD thesis, Institute of Education, University of London; p. 171, Education of the boy soldier
Military bands of the United Kingdom
Kneller Hall; The Twickenham Museum
Historical Record of the Tenth, or the North Lincolnshire, Regiment of Foot
Very interesting!
A wonderful piece of research which makes fascinating reading and explains so much about the life of our shared GGGrandfather William. A superb resource for future generations. If Im ever in St James church Whitehaven again I’ll be thinking about him marrying there 120 plus years ago.