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COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research
On the last Saturday of 1899, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor married Jessie Sarah Fleetwood Walmisley in his parish church at Selhurst, near Croydon, England. The witnesses who signed the registration were his mentor Herbert Walters and the bride's father, Walter Milbanke Walmisley. This apparently normal arrangement followed some very tense months; Jessie's family had been vehemently opposed to the marriage and had done all in its power to prevent it. Finally, on the day before the ceremony, Mrs. Walmisley invited Coleridge-Taylor to the family home in nearby Wallington, where she and her husband shook his hand in a formal gesture of acceptance if not of warmth (Coleridge-Taylor 1943, 20, 26). To learn more about the young composer's home life, and the influences--musical and otherwise--that Jessie Walmisley brought to it, one must learn more about her family.
The Walmisleys were a large and somewhat successful family from Westminster, where Jessie's great-grandfather William Walmisley (1745-1819) had been clerk of papers to the House of Lords (Edwards 1917, 618). He retired to the small market town of Bromley in Kent, ten miles from London, where his daughter Mary had married a pharmacist named Baxter (Horsburgh 1929, 406). His five sons were choristers at Westminster School, a prestigious institution within the precincts of the abbey, proud of its alumni, who included Ben Jonson, Christopher Wren, and John Dryden (Weinreb and Hibbert 1983, 952). The youngest son, John Angus Walmisley (1791-1862), Jessie's grandfather, became a parliamentary clerk and was an official at the coronations of George IV (1821), William IV (1831), and Victoria (1838), "probably a unique event in the lifetime of any man" ("Death of Major Walmisley" 1915).
John Angus's brother Thomas Forbes Walmisley (1783-1866) entered the music profession, composing glees, teaching, and playing the organ at St. Martin-in-the-Fields for thirty years. One of his friends was Thomas Attwood, organist of Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral and once a pupil of Mozart. Thomas Forbes Walmisley's son Thomas Attwood Walmisley (1814-1856) also became a musician. At age sixteen, Thomas Attwood Walmisley was organist of Croydon's parish church in 1830; three years later, he was the organist at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1836 was appointed professor of music. A champion of Bach's music, but prone to depression, he died in 1856 just before his forty-second birthday. His brother Henry (1830-1857) was an organist in London; Frederick (1815-1875) was an artist, and Arthur (1819-1910) was an engineer. Another brother, Horatio Walmisley (1827-1905), became a clergyman and befriended his cousin Jessie Walmisley (Edwards 1917, 618-619; Legge 1917, 618; Scholes 1947, 658; Temperley 1980, 182-184; Walmisley 2000).
Jessie's side of the family showed no such public aptitude for music. Her grandfather, John Angus, had married Anne Marie Lambert, daughter of a colonel who had served in India ("Death of Major Walmisley" 1915). Their youngest son was Walter Milbanke Walmisley, Jessie's father and the reluctant witness to her wedding. Born in Westminster on January 26, 1832, he was a clerk to a broker by the age of nineteen. Three years later, in April 1854, Walter married Emma Burrows, who was four years older. Her father, James, was a coal merchant in Westminster, whose customers may have included Walter's parents.
Emma and Walter Walmisley set up home at 2 Hugh Street West, around the corner from her parents. Their first child, Emma Mary, was born in February 1855, and four more daughters followed. Their son Walter Burrows died at six weeks, just before Christmas 1863. Perhaps to escape the house of death, probably to move away from the nearby railroad terminus at Victoria that had opened in 1860, Walter and Emma Walmisley and their five daughters relocated to Bromley, where he had relatives.
In 1865, Walter Walmisley was an insurance agent, according to an advertisement in the Bromley Record ("Advertisement" 1865), which gave his address at 2 Grove Villas in Palace Grove. In August of that year, Herbert William was born in this house. By 1867, when another son, Walter Robert Geisin Fleetwood Walmisley, was born, the family had relocated a few doors away to Wilton House. Their ninth and final child, Jessie, was born at Wilton House on July 1, 1869. Her birth registration states that her father was an accountant.
An advertisement in the Bromley Record from 1869 reveals that Walter had yet a third career; it shows a bewhiskered and derby-hatted gentleman astride a bicycle: "The French Velocipede Company (Compagnie Imperiale Des Velocipedes) have specially appointed as their agent Mr. W. M. Walmisley, of Wilton House, Palace Grove, Bromley, Kent" ("Advertisement" 1869). The machine could be seen any evening and was priced at ten pounds (a well-paid workman might earn that sum in ten weeks). The insurance work took Walmisley all over the district, giving him the opportunity to sell bicycles and probably affording a practical demonstration as he pedaled to and fro. Commissions from sales would have helped the family budget, which had ten people and an appropriate number of servants to feed.
Like Croydon in the second part of the nineteenth century, Bromley was changing. The population doubled to 10,674 between 1861 and 1871 (Cherry and Pevsner 1983, 168; Thorne 1876, 60). The railroad to London took merchants to the city from their new villas on the edge of the old town, which still retained its ancient agricultural function, being an important market for produce, including hops, from Kent farms.
Walter Walmisley played cricket with his elder brother, John, and there were enough family members to field a team of eleven Walmisleys on occasion (Baxter n.d., 38-39). John and Walter were also members of the City of London Artillery, a volunteer regiment. Walter was now on the fringes of the banking world, which was centered in London. It is likely that he was the cricketing gentleman who was asked by a Bromley shop owner to employ his son as a bank clerk; Waiter's refusal to help the struggling Joe Wells, whose income from the High Street china shop was augmented by professional cricket, was a minor influence on the career of Joe's son, the future novelist H. G. Wells (MacKenzie and MacKenzie 1973, 3, 12, 16-17).
Around 1879, Walter Walmisley moved his family from Bromley to Tulse Hill in south London, where he conducted a bill broking and banking business, according to the 1881 census. He and his wife, with two servants, are listed at 7 Trinity Road (now Trinity Rise). A man of this standing sent his children to private schools, not crowded schools funded by charities, such as Coleridge-Taylor was soon to attend. Accordingly, the census reveals that Herbert Walmisley, age fifteen, was at Christ's Hospital, a centuries-old school near St. Paul's Cathedral, and that his brother Walter, age thirteen, was attending the aptly named Middle Class School in Beaconsfield, a large village west of London.
Jessie Walmisley was also at a boarding school with her sister Ada. Their older sister Edith Eliza was a teacher at this school, which had a fourth Walmisley girl, Leila, who was visiting on census day in 1881. Eden House Young Ladies School was in Edenbridge in western Kent. Twelve scholars, including some pairs of sisters, appear on the census return as boarders, but the school also must have taken day pupils from the area. The school was established in 1851 by William and Mary Golding, whose two daughters were running the school at this time ("Eden House School" 1997, 85). They no doubt would not have approved of Ada, whose "Ada W," scratched on the window glass, remains more than a century later,...
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