George Albert Thomas, by Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes, the great-nephew of the writer Lionel Britton, continues to throw light on his family history, this time concerning the Spanish Civil War.

George Albert Thomas was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, 25 Feb 1915, and was previously mentioned in this blog in an entry dated 17 November 2008, which described how his parents brought him to Saskatchewan, Canada.

His father was George Thomas, b. 1873 in Billancourt, Paris, to Samuel Thomas and his Belgian wife Marie-Antoinette (née Goffin).

His mother was Ethel May Thomas (née Morris), b. 1884 in Holt, Wiltshire, England, to Albert William Morris, a gardener on a big estate, and his wife Mary Ann (née Fisher).

Initially George and Ethel May went to Wolseley, where George’s brother Frank had already established himself as a nurseryman. Forestry was very big in the province at that time and Frank seems to have found employment planting trees, but George, the father of George Albert, seems to have been more of a mechanic, and eventually gravitated to the larger city of Saskatoon.

George Albert clearly joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and fought in the Civil War in Spain, where he died - details here.

Under the heading of ‘The Volunteers’ we can see there is only one George Thomas and that he is listed as Missing in Action, which in the context of that war meant he is almost bound to have been killed. (See any number of sources about the Spanish Civil War, which amply confirm that foreign ‘irregulars’ were not given Prisoner of War status, and therefore summararily executed.)

It is worth speculating about a radical streak in the Thomas family: in this guy it manifested itself in an urge to fight and die for a quixotic cause, and in the case of Lionel Britton a determination not to be sent out to die for any cause. (He was a conscientious objector in World War I.)

George Albert has a significant physical resemblance to his grandmother Marie-Antoinette, see photo below. Put him in drag and grey his hair and you would never know.


This lad will have gone to give his life for something he believed in, but to me as a cousin of his it seems a tragedy.

Lionel Britton, Cecil Thomas, and Adam Stanley Keith Make a Publishing Deal

The photo below shows Lionel Britton between his cousin Cecil Thomas and Adam Stanley Keith, both of Tweedsmuir Ave, Toronto, Canada. It was taken in London on 26 May 1964, on the occasion of the signing of a contract between the three men. The aim was to establish a publishing company - later known as the Park Group Ltd after Park House, 66 Tufnell Park Road, where Britton lived - to re-publish all of Britton's out of print works, and many of his unpublished ones. They all had great hopes that Britton's name would be written large on Broadway. Unfortunately, Britton insisted that his amplification of Bernard Shaw's play, Why She Would Not, be published first, but the other men obviously feared legal recriminations, as The Society of Authors refused to allow publication. And Britton had had a very long and bitter, almost insane, feud with the Society over this.

Cecil later adopted Adam as his son, and he became known as Justin Thomas. Justin had been abused by his parents, and although illiterate until well into his twenties, went on to gain a PhD in Psychology. He wrote an autobiography with the glorious title How I Overcame My Fear of Whores, Royalty, Gays, Teachers, Hippies, Psychiatrists, Athletes, Transvestites, Clergymen, Police, Children, Bullies, Politicians, Mothers, Fathers, Publishers, and Myself, which gives several pages of informaton on Britton's ancestors. Justin established Label Liberation and still lives in Canada. When I had a long telephone conversation with him last year, he told me of how Britton rode to the above occasion on a bicycle, and that he met Herbert Marshall and his wife in London shortly after Britton's death in 1971, when they were arranging to have all of Britton's literary effects shipped to Southen Illinois University, Carbondale, where Marshall was a professor.

Many thanks to Justin Thomas for ferreting about in wherever he had to ferret about to make this photo available, and to Robert Hughes for passing it on.

A Second Lionel Britton Bust, Fredda Brilliant, Ben Gelman, and Makanda, Illinois

In August 2007, on a second visit to Carbondale, Illinois, I spent several weeks at Southern Illinois University (SIU) researching Lionel Britton's unpublished manuscripts at the Special Collections Research Center. Professor Herbert Marshall, who was a good friend of Lionel Britton's and who worked at the university for a number of years in the the twentieth century, had all of Britton's unpublished work shipped to SIU on Britton's death in 1971. Marshall was married to the sculptor Fredda Brilliant, who is best known for the Mahatma Gandhi statue that once stood in Tavistock Square, London, England, and who created two busts of Britton. Yesterday I received the book Fredda Brilliant: Biographies in Bronze (New York: Shapolsky, 1986), which Britton's great-nephew Robert Hughes had very kindly sent me. It contains a wealth of detail about Brilliant's bronze sculptures, with not only biographical information on the subjects, but also autobiographical information by Brilliant about the circumstances behind the sittings.

But another interest behind this post is the inscription on the title-page that Brilliant made to Ben Gelman in 1986. Gelman was a writer and ornithologist, I discovered through Googling, who used to live with his wife Virginia in Makanda, Illinois. This brought back vivid memories: towards the end of my stay in Carbondale, my partner Penny joined me and we spent some days just exploring the area, driving across the Mississippi and Ohio rivers into Missouri and Kentucky. But we didn't have far to go to reach Makanda, which is just seven miles from Carbondale, although I could have done without the zigzag hairpin bends I had to negotiate to the bottom of the valley where this tiny hippie haven lies. There are just nine shops there, but we spent a few hours just pottering around and above all enjoyed visiting Dave Dardis's Secret Garden. When I woke up this morning, I remembered I hadn't mentioned Ben Gelman and Makanda to Penny. She fell into raptures and ferreted about in a drawer under the bed to shove two sealed bars of soap under my nose: 'Butt Naked' and 'Monkey Farts' from Smelly Hippie, Makanda. She'll never use them as she just finds the smell therapeutic, having a kind of Proustian effect that serves as a brief antidote to having to live in the blighted UK. With thanks to Mark Choate of the Special Collections Research Center, without whose suggestion I'd probably still be unaware of the place.

Some of the included sculptures are of: Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Rajendra Prasad, Pandit Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Morajii Desai, V. K. Krishna Menon, Dr Haru Krisna Mahtab, S. K. Patil, G. D. Birla, Dr Y. S. Parmar, The Maharaja of Baroda, Chief Justice Chagla, Sri Karmarkar, Anna Ornsholt, Mohammad Ali, President Kennedy, Professor R. Buckminster Fuller, Taras Shevchenko, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Andrey Voznesensky, Lionel Britton, Sir Maurice Bowra, Professor Herbert Marshall, Anton Slonimsky, Lord Elwyn Jones, Dr Delyte Morris, Dr Francis Warner, Bernard Ostrey, Sir Isaac Hayward, Max Meldrum, Nadia Nerina, Julian Carroll and Alban Barkley, Carl Albert, Meliyn Price, Terry Thomas, Willy Gallagher, Tom Mann, Kay Harrison, Francis Flaherty, Pera Attasheva, Professor hyman Levy, Duncan Grant, Galya Yevtushenko, Georgi Dimitrov, Joseph Wolfing, Pavel Morozov, and Sir John Rothenstein.

Robert Burns’s Schooldays

Robert Hughes posts a correction, and an apology:

Several sources are clear that Robert Burns, the Scottish Bard, went to school in Kirkoswald at 17 years of age, and as he was born in 1759, my previous post obviously was wrong on a vital date; so humble pie to be eaten and spank me if you can catch me.

Burns died at 37 years of age after a prodigiously (re)productive career: some accounts suggest that 'By the end of his short life he was to have fathered fourteen children, nine of them out of wedlock, by six different mothers'.

He also gave Scotland hundreds of poems and songs, interweaving traditional tunes, an original use of vernacular dialect, and his own colourful observations of nature; human, animal and social.

Was 'Rabbie' Burns a subversive or a social climber?

Did he make accessible the Scots dialect, or slaughter the English language?

Was he a virile perpetuator of his race and genes, or a vile wanton rake?

Did he deserve an Oscar or an ASBO?

Controversial however he may be, there is a more prosaic question: did he know my ancestors?

He was an almost exact contemporary of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Nimmo, who was born in the parish of Kirkoswald less than a year before Burns. It might be a stretch to suppose that Thomas could have attended school with Rabbie, but there were enough younger siblings to make it likely that at least one of them studied with him, and in any case it is impossible to believe he did not know of the Nimmos of Auchenblain, whatever may have been his opinion of them.
One Burns-related website tells of a Jean Kennedy, a ‘gentlewoman’ who was running a pub, and William Fergusson inherited Auchenblain by marrying a Jean Kennedy.

Henceforth there is a cascade of names which seems to resonate between the Burns story and that of my Nimmo ancestors, see The Burns Encyclopedia. This link handily indexes many of Burns’s friends and acquaintances.

There are many Fergussons, (and Fergusons), and then Erskines, and Miss Erskine Nimmo.

A rather striking record from the Scotland census of 1861 shows the following people at 9 Brisbane St, Greenock:

Robert Candlish, aged 16, born in St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh. (A James Candlish was a boyhood friend of Burns, and indeed a best friend.)

Elizabeth Mary Chalmers, aged 32. (This unfortunate woman was to die a month later, and it seems likely that the census achieved a snapshot of a gathering at her deathbed. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Smith, neé Nimmo.)

Richard Chalmers, also aged 32, born in St Cuthbert’s Edinburgh, who was an English teacher. (Four Chalmers are listed in the index, including a close Ayrshire friend of Burns.)

Thomas C. Chalmers, aged 14, a ‘scholar’, born in St Cuthbert’s Edinburgh, described as a ‘brother’, so possibly a young brother of Richard.

Elizabeth Smith, ‘factor’s wife’, aged 62. (My great-great-great-grandmother. She was born Elizabeth Nimmo in 1796, and the little porkie-pie about her age was typical of ladies in her day. On her marriage in 1825 she was approaching 30, and it would have been natural to shave off three years or so. Her daughter and her sister were both called Catherine Erskine, and her grandson Arthur Britton gave Harding as a middle name to his own son. There is no other known candidate to be Elizabeth Nimmo at the relevant time.)

A Catherine Saw and an Agnes Saw were servants in the household.

Apart from Catherine and Agnes Saw, all the others had surnames which figure in the Robert Burns story.

Elizabeth Nimmo of course was a Smith by marriage: to my great-great-great-grandfather James Smith, born in Birmingham. Researching someone of that name is a bit like looking for the third nematode on the left in the Jurassic ooze.

However, another very great friend of Robert Burns was James Smith, a linen draper, and although this guy died young in Jamaica, it is perfectly possible that other family members later appeared in Birmingham.

James Smith of Birmingham was normally described as a ‘factor’, and I would welcome an exact estimation of what that signified at the era in question, but his son Frederick Sutherland Smith is in the 1871 census as a ‘factor and agent in cloth trade’. At the time he was occupying Wickhamford Manor with his own large family, and that property is still notable today as a large country hotel; so he was either going through a purple patch in the cloth trade or doing a nifty line in house-sitting.

Where did Elizabeth Nimmo meet James Smith? I doubt she was down in Birmingham to bask in the bright lights. Her daughter Elizabeth Mary, (whom I have mentioned as suffering an untimely death in Greenock), was first married to Robert Nimmo Nicholson, the son of a farmer near Greenock and his wife Abigail McRae…yes you’ve got it, Nimmo!

They liked to keep it in the family these people, and that is why it seems so probable that James Smith was actually of a Scottish family himself, and perhaps the same family as the James Smith of Robert Burns’s acquaintance. Certainly the trade seems to be the same.

(A small aside: Lionel Britton, who was Elizabeth Nimmo’s great-grandson, wrote Hunger and Love, which could be seen as a tirade against trade; yet not only was James Smith unquestionably in trade, (cloth or not), but another of Lionel’s great-grandfathers – James Britton, also of Birmingham – was in trade, the only doubt being whether he was a leathercutter, an ironmonger or both; and yet another great-grandfather – Samuel Thomas Senior of Redditch – had needed sixteen bodyguards to protect him from stonethrowing townspeople after he had industrialised the needle-manufacturing process there. Trade, trade, trade…it wasn’t about what other people were doing, it was about what his own people were doing.)

Was there a circle involved with Robert Burns who still cohered, (hung out together, if you prefer,) nearly seventy years after the Bard’s death? Or is it just a coincidence that all these names crop up together, and that the common thread of Ayrshire seems to link them?

Robert Burns experts to the rescue here please!

Robert Hughes on Just a Few Things to Be Done Brittonwise: Is Anyone Out There?

I can't think of any more things to add to Robert Hughes's list here:

'Loose ends that I want to follow up, and where you would have thought the internet would help, include:

Newton Thomas, youngest known child of Samuel and Marie–Antoinette Thomas; b. 1883, and died presumably in New Zealand in his eighties or later, but when and where exactly?

Samuel Thomas, b. 1900, elder child of Frank and Gertrude Thomas (née Morris). Said to have married the daughter of a pig farmer, presumably in Canada. Were there any children?

Samuel Thomas, b. Billancourt, Paris, c. 1872: later known by the family as George, he married Ethel May Morris in 1906 and emigrated to Canada, said to have been Saskatoon. May, as she was known, made several visits to England, but George seems not to have done. They appear to have had no children, but is this correct? When and where did he die?

The Thomas Millions: a huge fortune is said to be tied up in Chancery because someone lost a birth certificate. Great-great-aunt Flossie had her chauffeur drive her around Wales looking at tombstones in the hope that she could unlock the Millions. Any truth in this family legend? (A five-pound Wrapit voucher for anyone who gives us the answer, and we'll add interest from today's date!)

Mary Quarterly, b. Devonport 1808: this family is heavily concentrated in the Devon and Exmoor area, but otherwise it is not a very common name. Does anyone have a Quarterly family tree which would give us a clue about Mary?

Thomas Nimmo, apothecary of Greenock: he was born at some time in the mid-Eighteenth Century, and is almost certainly the father of Elizabeth Nimmo, the [maternal] great-grandmother of Lionel Britton. Is there any way to access records about his medical training, and can he be the link to the Earls of Mar which the family later claimed to have?

Elizabeth Harding, wife to the above: where did this family come from? As no record can be found in Scotland or England for the marriage of Thomas and Elizabeth, there is a strong possibility that they were at some point in the colonies or in Ireland.

When and where did Elizabeth Smith die, and similarly her husband James Smith, for whom I can find no record?

A note about the Britton family tree was found written on the back of a picture by John Britton, in Nova Scotia, who tragically has been incapacited by a stroke for some years and cannot communicate.
This note refers to "Sherry Hales" 1665, and "Chusburne".

While "Chusburne" is totally cryptic, it is reasonable to suppose that 'Sherry Hales' was a corruption of Sheriffhales, a village near Shifnal in Staffordshire. Does the Britton family have an origin there?

John James Britton went to live at Vire in Normandy, shortly after Catherine his first wife died in 1879. He may have been there for less than two years, but we know that his younger son by Catherine was enrolled in a college there.

When he remarried in April 1882, one of the witnesses was Thomas Perkins, (1842–1907), who wrote numerous books about church architecture, especially that of Normandy. Did the acquaintanceship with Thomas arise from the sojourn in Normandy or predate it?

Thomas Perkins married John James's eldest daughter Ethel Alice in 1891, and the officiating minister was J. Townroe Coward, "Vicar of St Leonards", of whom I can find no trace on census or any other records. There is much mystery surrounding the Coward family, but it would be useful to discover more about them in order to shed light on how John James came to marry Maud May Coward, (c. 1857–1946), a girl young enough to be his daughter.

The remarkable John Britton, (1771–1857), was not only a notable writer about church architecture in Normandy and elsewhere, but also about a variety of other topics, including many works of topography (illustrated by himself), and commentary on the political and philosophical scene of the day.

John Britton of Nova Scotia thought it highly likely that the grandfather of John James was called John. Is it possible that this was John Britton the writer himself?'

Robert

Lionel Britton's Distinctive Signature

Lionel Britton inscribed the above on the f.e.p. of his Spacetime Inn (1932) to his niece, Flora Britton (later Hughes), when she was 13 years old. She is the first daughter of Reginald Percy Leopold Britton, a younger brother of Lionel's. As a science fiction play, Spacetime Inn is highly unusual. And as this is a space where Eve (of Adam and Eve), the Queen of Sheba, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Napoleon, Karl Marx, Bernard Shaw, and two interchangeable members of the working classes of the 1930s all converse with each other, the content is also a little out of the ordinary.

The quotation is from page 96 of Spacetime Inn. After learning that Bill and Jim have lost their money, Eve says ‘Is it so wonderful? What can be more than the delight which breathes through all the world? There is a thrill which quickens every limb, there is a yearning answered through the eyes watching the light of other eyes wake softly like a happy day as we come near them, there is a music underneath a word which kisses the ear of one who listens for it coming from those we love. These things make life wonderful, as sun and moon colour the day and night. Let me give you these!’

Flora's son Robert Hughes comments: 'The full quotation makes a deal of sense in the context of my mother's life, for most of which she either had no regular income at all, or had to work damn hard to produce one. The philosophy behind those few lines helped her through it all and she was certainly a light to us.'


The image on the right shows Harry Peter Smolka's stamp on the first prelim, with another inscription by Lionel Britton (1). Lionel Britton's first play, Brain (1930), concerns the building of a giant brain in the Sahara Desert. This too is a science fiction play, and frequently cited as one of the first plays in which a computer is represented. From Smolka, this book passed to Flora Hughes.

(1) Harry Peter Smolka was born in Austria in 1912 but educated in England. He later became a British citizen and changed his name to Smollet. In 1937 (still as Smolka) he published Forty Thousand Men against the Arctic: Russia's Polar Empire (London: Hutchinson).

Again, many thanks to Robert Hughes for providing me with these images.

The Literary Gene in the Britton Family

Robert Hughes (aka Snatch), the great-nephew of Lionel Britton, seems a little disgruntled – or possibly perversely proud – that there have been so many published writers in his family, but not himself: the first known one was John James Britton, who was an amateur journalist at a very young age, later developing into a poet of some note, and also writing a novel. His son Herbert Eyres Britton published three works of poetry, and Herbert's nephew Lionel Britton of course published a colossal novel and three plays. There may well be other published Brittons of whom I'm unaware, but certainly Robert Hughes's mother Flora (née Britton) published some poetic works. Robert too appears to be asserting his literary credentials, because he has sent me the following rhyming couplet via email (pace John Hegley):

'Unlike every other Britton
There isn't anything I have written.'

I may well use this in my biography: it certainly shows promise, but it is above all indicative of the literary gene in the Britton family.