THE LIFE, TIMES & MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF JOSIAH HENRY HARRIS
Cousins & co-researchers Ann Crichton-harris and John Pollard investigate haunting unanswered questions about their kinsman
Collaborating cousins Ann Crichtonharris and John Pollard have put the past 18 months of lockdown to very good use, investigating the life, times and horrific death of much-respected author and journalist Josiah H. Harris, uncovering numerous surprises as they pieced together his story. Some questions remain unanswered, however …
On 17 April 1917 the much-respected Cornish author, Josiah Henry Harris, took his own life at his home at Portmellon just to the west of Mevagissey. There was no question as to Josiah’s intention: he had pinned a note to his jacket stating:
Carbolic, self-administered, is all the trouble. If you find me in a comatose state pray don’t worry. Bunkered. -- J. H Harris.
An inquest was held at which Josiah’s doctor, family friend and neighbour, Dr Grier, Josiah’s wife Lydia, and one other friend* were examined, none of whom was able, or perhaps prepared, to enlighten the proceedings. Given the seriousness of the event, the investigation could only be summed up as ‘cursory’. Josiah’s wide family connections in the village either knew nothing or effectively closed ranks, so that the unhappy episode was never discussed. The next generation invariably referred kindly and deferentially to ‘Uncle Joe’ and ‘Aunt Lyd’. Sadly, Lydia sold her marital home some two years after Josiah’s death and moved to Plymouth where her circumstances rapidly declined, leading to her death in an almshouse in 1930. That in itself is a mystery as she was not left unprovided for when inheriting an estate of over £2,000.
Unanswerable questions?
Nothing transpired over the following century to cast light on the events of that time, specifically what exactly had happened to prompt Josiah’s drastic and painful course of action? What might he have done to induce such a frame of mind? Was it despair, regret, or guilt over events unknown? Was he being threatened or blackmailed over something in his past?
* Note: it is possible that Lydia was ‘hard of hearing’ so brought her neighbour Mrs Williams to help her at the inquest (the inquest report indicates this to be the case)
These are questions which might be considered unanswerable as the initial event recedes well beyond the memory of the present generation. However,
with the advent of digitisation of family records and newspaper archives, the authors, both of whom share a common ancestor with Josiah in William and Jane Harris (1792 - 1841 and 1793 - 1849 respectively), felt that something might just turn up. Indeed, it has, although perhaps nothing like that which was initially anticipated, while questions still remain.
Establishing Josiah’s early life
Josiah Henry had a good start in life. He was born in 1847 in Plymouth, the first son of Josiah Harris and Elizabeth Jane (née Tippet). Josiah senior was a Mevagissey man, whose Harris family relatives in the village were involved in the grocery and drapery trades, shipping and the fishing industry. Josiah, though, branched out into the literary field becoming a political writer, journalist and newspaper editor. It was that work that led to Josiah Henry’s birth in Plymouth and subsequent peregrinations as a child to Cambridge, Exeter and Bath. As a young adult, he followed in his father’s footsteps, setting out on a journalistic career, although with what newspaper we cannot be sure.
The first revelations
It was as a young man that the records provide the first revelation. As far as our previous family history goes, he didn’t marry until fairly late in life. On the contrary, he was very soon off the mark, and in no common or garden way.
Before he was yet 18, on 6 April 1865, we find him in the British Embassy in Paris marrying Elizabeth Ann Treglown (see left). Elizabeth was some four years older than Josiah and hailed from Camborne at the time of marriage. Her father was an engineer, whether mining or industrial is not certain. It is also unclear whether this was an elopement, more on the side of the boy than the girl given their respective ages. Certainly Paris was a long way from Mevagissey and parental oversight.
The next record we find is one that again confounds the Harris family tradition that Josiah Henry died childless. For, on 4 February 1867, little Martha Annie Harris’s birth certificate confirms Josiah and Elizabeth Ann Harris as father and mother (see above).
Marry in haste, repent at leisure
At the time of Martha’s birth, Josiah Henry was already embarked on his journalistic career and was living in the Clifton area of Bristol. However, it would seem events soon took a turn for the worse, it becoming a case of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”. For at the next sighting of the couple they are warring in a Bristol courtroom with Elizabeth claiming that Josiah was behaving in an exceedingly ungentlemanly manner by failing to support her, to the extent she and her child had become chargeable to the Clifton Union.
The date has moved on by a mere three months to early May 1867 when local newspapers were headlining their stories with “A Literary Character in Trouble” and “Neglecting to Maintain a Wife”. It is quite clear where the court’s and the reporters’ sympathies lay.
Josiah Henry was described as a respectably-dressed young man working at the time on the Merthyr Telegraph but, despite evidence of courtship at Elizabeth’s parents’ then home in Redruth and the Paris ceremony, his counsel questioned the validity of the marriage
The court was unimpressed by his claim against Elizabeth, described in the comparatively restrained terms of Victorian newspapers as ‘a very pretty and lady-like woman’, and unsurprisingly found in her favour.
Josiah Henry agreed to provide maintenance, and the court suspended action against him for a month to see whether he was as good as his word. It was also indicated that proceedings to set aside the marriage would be taken in another court.
Whether the marriage was set aside is unknown. No subsequent reports of such have been discovered, while the cost of so doing in that era would no doubt have proved prohibitive.
So far, so disappointing
So far, so disappointing: a sad tale of a failed marriage, a mother left to fend for herself and her little girl, and a father who had acted dishonourably.
As family researchers, we thought it should be a relatively simple task to discover the various fates of our protagonists through the subsequent Censuses and BMD records. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Elizabeth fell completely from the radar, even taking account of the possibility that she might have reverted to her maiden Treglown family name. Little Martha Annie, the totally blameless victim of events, does, however, make a fleeting appearance in the 1871 Census of Wales where we find her living with her grandparents and Elizabeth’s twin brothers, William and Richard, in Merthyr Tydfil. Clearly the attractions of the thriving coal and iron industries had encouraged a move for the three engineers in the family. Maybe, even, Josiah’s early connection with Merthyr and its newspaper had encouraged the move, not that there was likely to be any fellow feeling remaining by that time. Elizabeth also had two sisters, Ellen and Mary, who had been described in the court case as keeping a school in Clifton. Ellen did appear in 1871 as a milliner remaining in Bristol. Sadly, she died at the age of just 31 some five years later. However,
Mary, the youngest sister is, like Elizabeth, nowhere to be found, while the twins too vanish from view. The obvious thought was emigration but, apart from a brief spell for the twins in the United States prior to 1871, that too proved a blind alley. (An, as yet, unchecked possibility is their later emigration to Australia, the W and R Treglown/tregloan names appearing on various shipping registers in the 1880s and 1890s.)
What of Josiah?
What of Josiah? He, too, did not trouble the official record keepers for many years. An expectation that he would be found at least somewhere in the UK in the 1871 Census proved groundless, and it wasn’t until the end of that decade that the Electoral Registers pick him up living in south London at Penge. The following 1881 Census confirms the Penge address and identifies him as a parliamentary reporter. This was no surprise as Josiah Henry’s work in London and association with parliament was a source of pride to the Harris family passed down through the years. What was a surprise was his claim to be married, and not to Elizabeth Ann, but to ‘L. C. Harris’.
This marriage did not in fact take place for another 19 years when he and Lydia Charlotte (née Smith) regularised their relationship in 1900 at Paddington, when Josiah Henry declared himself to be a widower no doubt with fingers firmly crossed! At least Lydia was a spinster, born in Bedminster, Bristol on the Somerset side of the Avon in 1851. It is not known how far back the relationship extended, but one wonders whether it is significant that Lydia is also absent from the 1871 Census, while the 1911 Census claims 37 years of marriage taking us back to 1874. It raises the question as to whether they had met very early in their lives in Bristol rather than later in London.
An admirable step up
London though was the location Josiah Henry first made his family reputation as a man with a superior intellect, exercising a profession as a journalist in the capital city; a relative who had made it ‘up the line’, and was to be admired. It is not clear whether Josiah Henry worked freelance or was employed by one of the newspapers. According to a family letter he was at one time employed by the Central News Agency, created in 1879 by William Sanders, who had previously set up the Western Morning News in Plymouth.
In the London directories of the late 1880s he was describing himself as a shorthand writer working from offices in Chancery Lane in the heart of the City of London. The premises were shared with deed box makers, law stationers, record searchers,
draughtsmen and other shorthand writers. It is likely that Josiah Henry was employing his skills both in journalism and the chancery courts. He continued to live in south London, moving from Penge to Cold Harbour Lane, Lambeth.
So, the picture we have at the time is one of a successful professional man, commuting daily by train, probably to London Bridge station, and walking across the bridge to access his office in Chancery Lane. Whilst Parliament was sitting, he was to be found amongst his fellow reporters in ‘The Gallery’. His evening commute takes him back to Lydia, to a comfortable and apparently conventional middleclass home with sufficient income to employ a servant. His youthful indiscretions seemingly lie well in the past.
A creative retreat
Another quieter life awaited him following the exertions of London living, and one that was to build his reputation and legacy as an author of some repute. He had purchased the site of ‘Colona’ overlooking the sea and cove of Portmellon in 1893 while still living in London, by that time in Clapham Common. His and Lydia’s substantial retirement home was built over the following year or so. Perhaps retirement is hardly the word, for much of his time in the last decade of the Victorian era and continuing throughout Edwardian times was spent writing.
While most of his novels might no longer be suited to a modern readership, they provide a superb insight not only into Josiah’s intellectual abilities and command of the English language, but also his compassion and social awareness in his later life. In particular, he displays his empathy with Cornish customs and characters, and his vivid descriptions provide a wonderful repository of behaviour and dialect largely long vanished.
The story, as established so far
Thus far we had established Josiah Henry’s life, learning of his first marriage and the birth of his child, the subsequent abandonment of both, and pushing back his relationship with Lydia to many years before previously acknowledged.
All fascinating revelations, but the bombshell was still to come.
The bombshell
It burst early in 2020 when an unknown family tree appeared at the top of an Ancestry search for ‘Josiah Henry Harris’. Details of Josiah’s family were remarkably correct, as was the collapse of his marriage. The tree then claimed that Martha Annie Harris became known as Marie Connor following remarriage of Elizabeth Ann to a James Connor. A parallel Wikipedia account proceeded to meticulously detail Marie Connor’s life as a celebrated novelist. Despite trying, we never succeeded in contacting the writer who we believe was a John Cosgrave.
Our view was highly sceptical but, no, amazingly the entire bizarre story checked out – receipt of a marriage certificate for Elizabeth Ann Harris clearly stating William Treglown as her father, was the clincher (see top left, facing page).
Elizabeth’s (bigamous) marriage
Elizabeth Ann had remarried as early as 1869, bigamously almost certainly. Perhaps she decided there was no point in waiting for Josiah to be a husband and father. She claimed widowhood when she married James who, himself, had been married before. Initially, it had been in Bristol in 1857 to Eliza Jones the daughter of James Allan Jones and his wife Charlotte Lucy. The appearance of two contemporaneous Eliza Connor death records in Clifton in 1864 would suggest a tragic death in childbirth of both mother and daughter. So, it would seem that one at least of the partners was widowed!
The Bristol connection indicates the likelihood of Elizabeth Ann’s and James Connor’s paths crossing in that city. However, no marriage could possibly be risked in Bristol particularly as James Allan was a solicitor and thus almost certain to know of the publicity surrounding Elizabeth Ann’s history in the city. Marriage was safer in the anonymity
of London where the 1869 marriage was conducted at Kensington.
What of Martha Annie?
We know from the Census of Wales that Martha Annie was not with her new family from the beginning. When she left Wales is not known. She was educated for a time in France, and subsequently in Kent, all presumably under her new name of Marie. Although she would have been part of the Connor family by 1881, she was not enumerated in that Census. There were, however, two additions to the family who were living in Marylebone at that time: Elizabeth’s sister, Mary, who had renounced her Treglown family name in favour of the more upmarket or aristocratic name of Trelawney, and Valentine, a half-brother for Marie born in 1876. Valentine was actually the third child born to James and Elizabeth, but the first two boys of similar name both died as infants. Valentine eventually emigrated to Canada.
So like her father
Martha/marie was something of a literary prodigy. By the age of 17 she had cooperated with Henry Prager to write the lyrics to “Called Back” complementing his musical score. Novels quickly followed, the first being Beauty’s Queen (1884) for which John Bull, (9 Aug.) comments negatively on its style, plot and morality finishing with “A first attempt … … … hope will be last”. The Morning Post (27 Aug. 1884) and The Graphic (4 Oct.) were similarly unimpressed. Regardless, her output was prodigious, including A Morganatic Marriage (1885), Two Black Pearls (1886), Sweet Magdalen (1887), Husband and Wife (1888) and The Triumph of Manhood (1889). Reviews of these early books can universally be described as between discouraging and grim: see, for example, The Graphic,2 Apr. 1887, 11 July 1887 and 7 Dec. 1889; The Queen, 30 Nov. 1889. However, snobbish contempt plays its part as in The Graphic’s description of Sweet Magdalen as “… peculiar … we have no doubt that its demerits will secure it a considerable measure of popularity in influential circles”, or The Birmingham Mail of 23 March 1887 describing Sweet Magdalen as “A trifle maudlin … … The book is likely to please those who are fond of this kind of fiction”.
Art mirroring life
Most revealing, however, in terms of our family history search is a review of ‘Husband and Wife’ in Sporting Gazette, 24 Nov. 1888, which includes the following: “By far the best parts of Miss Connor’s latest novel are those which describe the life of the
As the marriage record shows that Josiah and Lydia married in 1900, and the photograph seemed to date from perhaps the 1870s, the expert photodating analysis of Jayne Shrimpton was sought, who deduced that the photo dates from c.1876-1882.
The proximity of this date to the inferred marriage date of 1874 (see the 1911 Census entry for Josiah and Lydia) only serves to thicken the plot. To read more about Jayne’s analysis of the photograph, please see: http://familytr.ee/ lydia
miners in the village of Troedyrhiw, near Merthyr Tydvil. ‘Tai Bach’ … is the name of two long rows of miners’ cottages standing about a quarter of a mile from the aforesaid village, and it is in the largest of these cottages that poor blind Mrs. Galbraith takes refuge with her little daughter Theo after her cruel and base desertion by her worthless husband”.
And where did Marie (as Martha Annie) live in Merthyr in 1871 as a 4-year old, but 16 Taibach, Pentrebach which lies just to the north of Troedyrhiw.
This raises a number of questions including: the length of time she spent at her grandparents’ Taibach home; how perceptive a child she was; whether she made a return visit at some stage to her Treglown family; and even perhaps whether Mrs. Galbraith was modelled on her grandmother.
As for ‘desertion by her worthless husband’, this is not the only case of a worthless father or husband making an appearance in her novels, and thus whether her jaundiced view is a reflection of her own experience.
Mrs Robert Leighton
The year following publication of
Husband and Wife, Josiah’s forsaken daughter Martha/marie underwent her final transformation into Marie Leighton. This followed her marriage in 1889 to Robert Leighton, another author, this time of Scottish extraction. So it is that the Leightons children – Josiah’s grandchildren – come into focus. And they were no ordinary children!
Roland the eldest son found posthumous fame following his death aged 19 at Louvencourt on the Somme, and previously, as the fiancé of Vera Brittain whose book Testament of Youth was made into a film of the same name. While Roland’s younger brother distinguished himself in the Royal Navy, his sister, Clare Connor Leighton gained recognition following family tradition in her writing, including Tempestuous Petticoat the biography of her mother which provides such an insight into Martha/marie and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Ann.
How does all this help solve the puzzle?
The ultimate question is: Does this help solve the puzzle of Josiah’s fate? It might.
Josiah may have seen his reputation about to unravel if someone knew of his past, and was threatening to reveal all. The potential shame of desertion of wife and daughter, with or without allegations of bigamy, would have weighed heavily, especially for someone who expressed strong empathy in his writings. He may have longed to make contact with his renowned daughter, a writer in his own image. Josiah wrote many books based on Cornwall and Devon. Only one of his geographically-based novels was set outside Cornwall and Devon: East Ho! published in 1902. It followed a stay at Gorleston, just north of Lowestoft, the town that the Leighton family used as their summer residence. Was the intention to meet, or catch sight of, his Martha? It would be a rare person, knowing of a child out there somewhere, and then learning this child was famous, would just put the image in their back pocket. He must surely have been consumed with curiosity. Did they meet, and was he rejected?
Then, much later, he would have been unable to recognise an heroic grandson killed on the Somme just over a year previously. There is a mountain of sadness and regret in that scenario alone. Would it in combination with all other circumstances be enough to incite suicide? Without knowing the man or his times, it’s difficult to judge whether there is sufficient here to turn his mind, or prove sufficient grounds for blackmail.
Could something still unknown have troubled him? A complex man, he had seemingly redeemed his early misadventures over the years, but did the notion of being found out one day sit like a cloud over his otherwise pleasant life?
Can you help?
So, in no way does our search answer all the questions. We feel it time to reach out to the Cornish diaspora for help, from anyone descended from the Harris folk, their neighbours and friends. Someone knew something, but did they record it in letters, diaries, even rumours passed down? We append some names of those who knew and interacted with the Harris family over the generations: Allen, Ball, Behenna, Body, Carveth, Cloke, Dowrick, Grier, Grylls, Jenkin, Kitto, Organ, Pollard, Read, Roberts, Teague, Treglown, Trelawney, Truscott, Varcoe, Williams … and, of course, Lydia’s Smith family. Any clues would be extremely welcome.
About the authors
Ann Crichton-harris has been interested in family history for decades. She has written two books: one featuring her grandfather’s life as a surgeon in WWI in Africa, the other a medical history of her great-uncle’s work in Sudan. As a lockdown project she threw out a challenge to her Cornish cousin, to collaborate and solve a family mystery.
John Pollard is a former University geography lecturer. His intermittent interest in family history has only taken on a serious bent since retirement, much encouraged by his Canadian cousin!