When Robert’s and Caroline’s wills arrived from the Probate Office they challenged and perplexed us from the first page. Caroline’s will began by identifying her executors as Henry Ulick Burke, of 1 Beaufort Road, Clifton, Bristol, in the County of Gloucester, ‘gentleman, nephew of the deceased’, and Robert John Howard of Newton Ferrers, Callington, Cornwall, ‘Commander Royal Navy’. The appointment of these nephews as executors seemed natural as representatives of the Bateman and Howard families. The difference in their prominence within the will, however, soon became clear.
Robert John Howard received no legacy beyond £100 for fulfilling the role of executor. Henry Ulick Burke was incontestably the prime beneficiary of the whole will. Section 2 read:
I devise all my share and interest in the freehold mansion house with gardens, lands and outbuildings thereto belonging called ‘Nunney Delamere’ near Frome aforesaid to my husband, Robert Bateman, for his life, and from after his decease to my said nephew Henry Ulick Burke absolutely.
Section 3 was equally explicit:
I give all my jewellery, clothes, and personal effects to my said husband, or if he shall predecease me, to my said nephew Henry Ulick Burke, for the purpose of distributing the same in accordance with the memorandum which I shall leave with my will, but I declare that such memorandum shall not form any legal part of my said will.
In other words, Caroline’s intention was that, after Robert’s death, all her property and personal possessions should pass into the custodianship of Henry Burke.
The next section is the most complex. In it Caroline gave all the residue of her estate (that is, after the earlier bequests) upon trust
to my said husband, Robert Bateman, during his lifetime and after his decease upon trust to pay the following legacies all free of duty.
These legacies are all simple money bequests and are comparatively impersonal. They convey no sense that Caroline was passing on beloved family treasures, such as her mother’s jewellery or the Dean’s beautifully bound books, to her Howard nephews and nieces for safekeeping in the future. After listing small bequests, she concluded by instructing that the net residue was to be paid ‘to my said nephew, Henry Ulick Burke absolutely’.
Brian and I were completely disorientated by the content and the intention behind the whole document. Why had Caroline so demonstrably wished to provide handsomely for an obscure nephew of Robert’s in preference to her own kith and kin? Why, particularly, was she prepared to place all her most intimate, personal belongings in his care, without any legally valid list of what they were or how they were to be dispersed?
When we turned to Robert’s will, it repeated the same instructions almost word for word. Since none of Robert’s art or paintings were identified, they must have formed part of the memorandum that remained private, and was to be enacted at Henry Burke’s discretion. The final paragraph, revoking all former wills and testamentary writings, ended poignantly with the date of 4 August 1922. It was clear that Robert had to make a new will four days after the heartbreak of losing Caroline, and seven days before his own death. The probate sheet dated 3 November 1922 recorded Robert and Caroline’s combined net wealth as £7,930-18s-4d (roughly the equivalent of £820,000 today).
So who was Henry Ulick Burke? How, after all this time following Robert and Caroline, had we scarcely heard the name of the person who played so central a role in their wills? What motivated them to leave their home and their most private possessions and the greater part of their wealth to him after their deaths? What did we actually know about him? Only that he was the son of Robert’s sister Katherine. We knew precisely nothing about her except that she had married an Irish lawyer, Ulick Ralph Burke, who had signed the register at Robert and Caroline’s wedding.
Henry Burke’s address on the probate sheet, 1 Beaufort Road, Clifton, Bristol, was no more than fifteen miles from Robert and Caroline’s home at Nunney. If their relationship with Henry had been sufficiently longstanding and close for them to leave him their house and personal belongings, was it to be near him that they had moved south from Benthall Hall in 1905? In these circumstances, Nunney would have represented the perfect location, with its river and pretty cottages, nestled around a historic castle – far enough from Bristol to be peaceful and retiring, but near enough to maintain an ongoing close relationship with their favourite nephew. At least, for the first time, the wills suggested a credible explanation for the move from Benthall to Nunney.
To discover more about the identity of Henry Ulick Burke we decided to try to find his birth certificate so we could build up the picture of his life story from there. However, no matter how often we checked and re-checked the spelling of his name, the computer steadfastly refused to acknowledge that such a person had ever been born in the British Isles. Eventually, in a last-ditch attempt to preserve our sanity, we moved to another approach. We realised that if Robert and Caroline’s reason for moving was to be near him, Henry would have to have been settled in Bristol by 1905–6, so we looked up the census returns for 1891 and 1901, but with no success. But when we checked the census returns for 1911, which had just been made public, Henry’s name came up. Within three minutes our information about him increased tenfold.
In 1911 he was living in Bristol, but at a different address, 5 Belgrave Place, Clifton. He was a married man of thirty-seven with a wife called Rose, who was thirty-four, and two children, Katrina, aged seven and Richard, aged three. Henry and Rose had completed eight years of marriage, but had clearly been intrepid travellers: Katrina had been born in a place called Talara in Peru, and Richard in Liverpool in 1908.
The remaining information on Henry was intriguing. His ‘personal occupation’ was given as Tobacco Manufacturer, his ‘position’ as Factory Manager, and his ‘status’ as Employer. His nationality was given as British, but his birthplace was Lahore, India, which instantly explained our failure to locate his birth in the British Isles. Lahore had always been considered a dangerous, lawless area of India. It was not suited to pregnant women or young English children, so Henry’s experience must have been a fairly unusual one.
His time in Peru, as a young family man of about thirty, can only have been an altogether more intrepid and hazardous experience. South America, with its Spanish-speaking population and alien culture, was not part of the British Empire, so there were no reassuring cricket clubs, tennis parties or Anglican Church services to maintain the familiar ambiance of home. Henry must have been settled there, however, for his young English wife to be with him when she gave birth to their first child.
Henry was already emerging as an intriguing personality with a flamboyant story to tell. How that tale intertwined with Robert and Caroline, his ostensibly staid and respectable uncle and aunt, we could not imagine. To find out, we needed to know more about his childhood and early life with his mother, Robert’s sister, and her husband. The overarching difficulty was that the lives of Henry Burke’s family were unrecorded at a public level, except for his father, Ulick Ralph Burke (fig. 98), whose varied and colourful career merited an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Apart from naming his parents, however, the dictionary confines itself to a single sentence on his private life: ‘On 9th July 1868, he married Katherine (died 1933), daughter of James Bateman; they had a son and two daughters.’ Having dealt with the mundane family stuff, the entry dives off into infinitely more galvanising accounts of sewage and Spanish holidays: ‘A tour of Spain led Burke, on his return, to bring out in 1872 (the same year as his Handbook of Sewage Utilisation) an annotated collection of the proverbs of Don Quixote.’
Luckily we soon discovered a more productive source of information on the family. This took the form of a truly Herculean Victorian publication, in three ponderous volumes, entitled The Plantagenet Role of the Blood Royal (Exeter Volume) listing all the descendants of King Edward III (1312–77). By good fortune it had been updated and encompassed Katherine and Ulick Ralph Burke’s family:
Mabel Emma Burke: Born 1871. Married, 1901, to John Humphreys. Has issue (not named). Died 1954.
Henry Ulick Burke: Born 4 January 1874. Married, 1902, Rose Ellen Marian Antoinette Uvedale Parry-Okeden. Has issue. Died 2 December 1960.
Hope Katherine Burke: Born 1880. Unmarried. Died 29 June 1960.
Sybil Mary Burke: Born 1882. Married, 1912, Major Wyndham Persse Knatchbull. Has issue. Died 5 August 1957.
The ODNB made it clear that the most notable characteristic of Ulick Ralph Burke’s career was the relentless transience of his type and place of employment. He was evidently an intelligent, gifted man, a competent lawyer, who had been called to the bar in Dublin in 1870. However, by 1872, he had taken his extended trip through Spain. This enabled him to master the Spanish language and informed his fascination with Spanish culture. Between 1873 and 1878, he practised as a barrister in the High Court at Lahore. He returned to England, and unsuccessfully contested the parliamentary seat of Calne for the Conservatives. He travelled to Brazil in 1882 and published Business and Pleasure in Brazil about his experiences. From 1885 to 1889 he practised as a lawyer in Cyprus. In 1890 he returned to Dublin to take a post as Registrar of the Quarter Sessions, where he remained until 1895. He resigned as Registrar in Dublin when he was offered the post of Agent-General to the Peruvian Corporation, a potentially lucrative appointment. He embarked for Lima, but fell victim to dysentery on board ship, and died on 17 July 1895.
Our success with the 1911 census, which had illuminated Henry Ulick Burke as an individual, made us keen to revisit these records again to see if, by any chance, we could establish a link between Henry and Robert Bateman. We set about a diligent and systematic search using all the ten-year census returns from 1881 to 1911.
In 1881 we found Katherine, his mother, staying at a grand establishment near Chester as a guest of the Swettenham family. She was travelling with two of her children, Henry, aged seven, and Hope, a baby of one, accompanied by a nursemaid. The same census showed Robert Bateman at Biddulph Old Hall and Caroline, newly widowed, in her own establishment at 14 Upper Berkeley Street, London. Ten years later, in 1891, we were unable to trace Henry or a single member of his family.
Fig. 98. Ulick Ralph Burke, Robert’s Irish brother-in-law.
The return for 1901 was a little perplexing. Ulick Ralph had died six years earlier, Henry was nowhere to be found and Hope Burke had begun a career as a nurse at St Mary’s Children’s Hospital in West Ham, London. The shock came from the discovery that Katherine and her youngest child Sybil, who was by then eighteen, were living at 4 High Street, Long Melford. This proved to be a tiny workman’s cottage, part of a terrace of three alongside a pub, the Hare Inn. Although Katherine retained a cook and a maid-of-all-work, none of her neighbours on either side along the road had any servants; they were bricklayers or mat weavers, interspersed here and there by unskilled agricultural labourers. The final strange twist was that Katherine had a visitor on the day of the census, shown as Rose Okeden, the girl whom Henry was to marry the following year, in 1902.
We did not regard this as strange until we followed up the census return for Rose’s own family. Her home, Turnworth House, was a fully fledged country mansion at the heart of a landscaped park, just outside Blandford Forum. In addition to gamekeepers, gardeners and coachmen, the household numbered ten full-time indoor servants. The house, when we got an image of it, was a massive, playfully castellated confection, with elegant gothic bay windows. The evening of the census, seven of her family were at home, dining in splendour, waited on by their butler, while Rose was aggravating the crush in the workman’s cottage by the Hare Inn at Long Melford.
This snapshot was startling. Clearly Katherine’s fortunes had fallen on grindingly hard times, presumably as a result of her widowhood six years earlier. This raised so many puzzling questions. Where was Henry? As a man of twenty-seven, was there nothing he could do to rescue his mother and sister from an ignominious descent into poverty? And what about Robert and Caroline, complacently playing the country squire and his lady in their Jacobean country house? If, twenty years later, they were so close to Henry that they were prepared to leave him all their personal belongings, were they not fond enough of his mother, Robert’s widowed sister, to provide safe sanctuary for her, away from the alien ambience of the bricklayers, farm labourers and the menacing patrons of the ale house?
This inconsistency between Robert and Caroline’s boundless generosity to Henry in their wills, and the complete failure even to refer to his mother or any of his three sisters, was something that had begun to perplex us. While they left Henry most of what they possessed, the wills did not even acknowledge the existence of Katherine, Mabel Emma, Hope or Sybil Burke.
As we pondered all this, one last coincidence caught our attention. Now that we had located Rose Parry-Okeden’s family home, Turnworth House, we realised it was no more than fifteen miles away from Nunney. So, in effect, a few years after Henry’s marriage in 1902, Robert and Caroline had left Benthall Hall and bought a house midway between Bristol and Turnworth. Of course, we knew that Henry and Rose had been on the other side of the world in Peru in 1904 when Katrina was born, but in the light of Robert and Caroline’s wills it seemed uncanny that, in 1906, they should have selected a new house so central to the future workplace of their chosen beneficiary, and his wife’s family home.
We felt that we needed to get a clearer picture of Henry’s childhood in India, so we set out again to find his birth certificate. We had hoped this would supply an address that might allow us to begin to place him, and his family, in the teeming humanity of nineteenth-century Lahore. We expected that there would be a codified procedure for registering births that we would be able to consult, provided we were sufficiently patient and diligent. So we were surprised, when we consulted the official Indian Archives, to be met by the blank statement that ‘There was no compulsory Registration of Births in British India. Hence there is no general availability of Birth Certificates for people born there.’
We felt as if our attempt to discover even the most basic facts about the early life of Henry Burke had vanished into the impenetrable recesses of Imperial India. Then a piece of symmetry in the wider Bateman family story struck us. Lahore had appeared on the periphery of our investigation when, for background information on Robert’s family, we had followed his brother Rowland’s career from Brighton College, through Oxford and ordination in Durham Cathedral, to his appointment by the Church Missionary Society as an itinerant missionary based at their Lahore station. It seemed probable that the selection of the post of barrister in Lahore by Ulick Ralph Burke would have been influenced by the presence there of Rowland Bateman.
At this stage, we knew almost nothing about Rowland, but we began to wonder if he had played a formative part in Henry’s early life. We found an obscure biography by R. Maconachie, Rowland Bateman – Nineteenth Century Apostle, published in 1917 by the Church Missionary Society. Sadly, when we searched the index, we found it did not list Henry Ulick Burke, Robert Bateman or Caroline Howard. There was a single entry for Mr Ulick Burke (Ralph) and two for Burke, Mrs Ulick (Katherine). The biography makes clear that Rowland Bateman was already an established figure who had been in the Punjab since 1868, and in Lahore itself since 1870 (fig. 97), when Ulick Ralph and Katherine arrived in 1873.
On 20 December 1871, Rowland began to keep a diary which he maintained regularly until February 1874. Although it has not survived in his archive, it allowed his biographer to give a vivid picture of life in Lahore by quoting extensively from it. Rowland’s own words, simple and direct, vividly conveyed the relationship with Christ he experienced through prayer, contemplation, Bible study and interaction with others which was the defining and animating reality of his daily existence. No one was too wretched, ill or poor, no one too hostile or self-important, not to be worth pursuing through burning heat, mockery and physical intimidation if they expressed a flicker of response to his message.
The fact that this fervour was expressed in the simplest terms of overcoming practical difficulties, often with a mischievous sense of humour, made it all the more striking. Rowland described his initial forays into the streets under the leadership of Bishop French:
Fig. 99. Rowland Bateman, the dedicated missionary.
Mr French was always our leader and example. How he did strive for souls! When they jeered at him and pelted him, he would kneel down in the dust and pray for them, when they shouted him down he evinced no resentment, but only a yearning desire that they would listen not to him, but to God.
Rowland’s own attempts at street preaching give a sense of the courage and commitment it took to submit himself to this ordeal:
27 December: Out early, preached for two hours. Had some good opportunities and much opposition, which was growing and intensifying when I left. After breakfast, to bazaar again, much opposition, and some enquiry. Some boys from the Musjad hooted us out of town, being evidently sent to insult us.
The skills and knowledge needed to engage in this riotous form of religious debate meant that endless hours of dedicated labour had to be spent becoming completely fluent in all the languages and dialects of the Punjab.
Nothing had prepared us for the dynamic conviction of these Victorian clergymen. Far from lugubriously dispensing well-bred Anglican certainties to a respectful congregation of compliant underlings, they were forced to endure ridicule, abuse, humiliation and intimidating threats, day after day.
Maconachie makes a special point of drawing attention to Rowland’s compassion and devotion to the Eurasian population – the despised offspring of casual Anglo-Indian relationships. These people were almost universally illegitimate and shunned by both communities, so they frequently were not able to obtain work, and lapsed into alcoholism and poverty. Rowland’s journal for 4 February 1872 records an instance of going to such a case, who had been effectively left to die:
Engaged to preach for Davies (railway chaplain). Just sitting down to prepare when a man came from Shandara to call me to the deathbed-side of a poor Eurasian. Drink had ruined him. He was too far gone to do much for him. His wife was confined yesterday in the next room, and his eldest daughter was attending either parent alternatively – poor child – aged about 5 years.
People exposed to this level of human tragedy on a routine basis could not long remain prudish, and Maconachie acknowledges Rowland’s impartial caring for these ‘monuments to the moral laxity of Englishmen’.
This, then, was the place in which Rowland Bateman’s journal recorded the arrival of Ulick Ralph Burke and his wife Katherine in September 1873. How invaluable must Rowland’s knowledge of the language and customs have been as they tried to make sense of clashing cultures and competing gods, of gaudy splendour and squalid death, baked in the ferocious Punjab sun. If this was the world into which Henry Burke was born and lived for the next five years, surely it, and his charismatic Uncle Rowland, would have left an indelible imprint on his memory and personality which would have lasted the rest of his life.
Since Rowland’s biography was written about a missionary, and published by the Church Missionary Society, its prime focus was upon his evangelical work. Ulick and Katherine’s arrival in Lahore, in the last week of September 1873, was covered between accounts of his missionary work at Narawal and Madhopur:
He stayed a few hours with us [Maconachie and his family] in Gurdaspur on the way. But taking as it were only one long cool breath at Dalhousie, he ‘rushed through to Lahore’ to meet his only sister and help her to settle in her new home there with her husband Mr Ulick Burke, a barrister.
The dates in Rowland’s journal place this meeting in the last week of September 1873. Surprisingly, this is is only three months before Henry’s birth on 6 January 1874. Katherine was presumably accompanied by Mabel Emma, her first child, who by then would have been three. It seems surprising that Katherine would have risked undertaking the perilous journey to one of the hottest, most inhospitable areas of India while heavily pregnant and caring for a young child.
It also seems odd that Rowland does not record his first meeting with his little niece, who had been born since his departure for India. The journal entry for 10 December 1873 indicates that he was returning from Narawal to Lahore for Christmas, where he remained until 11 February. It is clear that Rowland was keeping his journal right through the crucial weeks before and after Henry Burke’s birth on 6 January.
If he recorded these happy family events, Maconachie must have edited them out, although it is hard to see why he should have chosen to do so. Over the next five years, the biography does not once refer to either Henry or Mabel Emma, even though Rowland Bateman must have played a key part in their schooling and education in Lahore, since this was another central preoccupation of his ministry.
The biography covers Rowland’s personal life and conveys his reaction to all the important events in his own family, such as his marriage in 1879 to Helen Melvill, and the birth of his three children. The tragic loss of his youngest child is sensitively handled in the form of quotations from letters to trusted friends that demonstrated his wretchedness:
Our dear little Robin is gone and Oh, what a far reaching blank he has left! Alas, the poor mother, worn with three or four weeks incessant nursing, and now one little life that shared her home has left it. I confess I feel very much crushed, till I look up and try to realise what the welcome is like, which he has already received. Oh dear, I do want help! The natives have found out my loss and come and sit, poor things, with the idea of comforting me, and I can find no words to use that do not choke me in the utterance . . . My dear mother’s death a few weeks ago was a sore trouble, and this on top of it shows me that what I took for iron within me is clay.
When his wife died the following year, Rowland described his numb state of mind with haunting simplicity: ‘I am walking along on deeply shaded ground, and do not yet know, the least, what is before me.’ Rowland was evidently prepared and able to express an emotional response to events in his personal life. His biographer considered it important to include them in the narrative of his life story, to give a true portrait of the man. Therefore it seems odd that the birth of the first male child to any of his siblings, arriving in the centre of his world in Lahore, when he was still a bachelor in January 1874, was not sufficiently significant to prompt any written reaction from him then, or at any point in the next five years.
His silence on the subject seemed so unnatural that we began to wonder if Katherine had succeeded in settling down after the birth, or whether she had returned to England with the two children, leaving Ulick Ralph to serve out his term at the High Court in Lahore on his own. The biography makes clear that Rowland and Katherine were close and fond of each other, which adds to the mystery of their failure to interact during her time in India. After his return from the Punjab in 1902, Rowland became rector of a country parish just outside Henley and, as the biography put it, ‘his sister, Mrs Burke, was going to share the house with him at Fawley – a great convenience, as she was an excellent manager, whereas R.B. was never a “housekeeper” in any conventional sense.’ Katherine’s presence at Fawley Rectory may have been presented as a convenience for Rowland, but the evidence of the previous year’s census suggests that he had come to her rescue, providing a substantial home for her to live in rather than the workman’s cottage in Long Melford.
Rowland’s biography presented us with another puzzle. The letters written to his lifelong companions, after his cancer was pronounced incurable, were addressed from Nunney. We realised that he had ended his life in the care of Robert and Caroline, but great trouble had been taken to avoid using their names:
Later in the year, further advice was taken in Bath, and after consultation held by competent authorities, he was informed that his disease was incurable; malignant trouble had asserted itself and nothing more could be done in a medical way. Removal was advised, as soon as possible, to a permanent resting place for the remaining days of the way-worn but undaunted pilgrim, and this haven of rest was found at the home of his brother, who, with his wife, urged their right to have him with them to the end. Hence, then, in almost ideal surroundings of English scenery, English home life, and the love of his own English folk, did the tireless worker, who had spent so many years under the sun of India, amidst dust and heat, and strange and often unsympathetic neighbours, slowly sink to his rest.
This was a haunting evocation of the peace and serenity of Robert and Caroline’s loving home. The author, writing only a year after Rowland’s death, had experienced the pervasive atmosphere of loving security that surrounded his friend in the last months of his life, and seemed to be deeply affected by it. It seems strange, then, that he should go to such lengths not to identify Robert or Caroline when expressing the gratitude he obviously felt for the kindness they showed to his friend through his slow, painful decline. It was sadly characteristic of their elusive, secret story that Robert and Caroline should remain ignored and unlisted, even as they willingly extended their mutual devotion to encompass their sick brother.
Fig. 100. Rowland Bateman at Nunney near the end of his life.
Fig. 101. Henry in India, aged about two, with his bearer, Goolameissei.
