People

John Tilt and his royal patrons

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This little snippet, found by chance on-line, whetted my appetite.  I had to find out more about Jean or John Tilt, a Brighton lad, and his connection to France:

No. 425- By Order of the King who authorises John Tilt esq, born 28 September 1783 at Brighton in England, to make his domicile in France and there to enjoy the exercise of his civil rights for as long as he shall continue to reside there. (Paris, 12 November 1826) Source BnF/Gallica

Why would Charles X extend such hospitality to an Englishman?  And why, seven years later, would Louis-Philippe, King of the French, allow a pension of 1,000 francs to the same man? Tilt (Jean) was listed as a minster of the Anglican Church who had lost his fortune, that is to say, he had lost his ecclesiastical living.  Not the usual beneficiary of a Catholic king’s bounty.

Source BnF/Gallica

I’ll start by going back a generation.

Thomas Tilt, John’s father, was a native of Kidderminster. He arrived in Brighton in 1776.  In their mid-20s, he and his wife Mary already had three sons, four more children would be born in Brighton.  Thomas soon took over the running of the Castle Inn which stood on the Old Steine at the heart of Brighton. So very conveniently near the Marine (later Royal) Pavilion.  So far so English.  So far so Anglican.

The Castle Inn in 1801, the large building centre left of the engraving.  Image courtesy of the Society of Brighton Print Collectors / Regency Society of Brighton and Hove

All William and Mary’s sons seem to have had a good education. Of the Tilt brood, the eldest son William, born in 1773, was educated at Lewes Grammar School, then Eton and finally Trinity College, Cambridge.  He became an Anglican clergyman.

Second son Thomas followed in his father’s footsteps by renting out accommodation for visitors to the burgeoning tourist town that Brighton was becoming. The fourth child, Andrew, became a colonel in the army, serving in France, the West Indies and Canada.  Of the two girls, little is known: Sarah died aged 13, although Mary outlived them all.  She died in 1863, her 80th year.

Born in 1783, John / Jean Tilt was the couple’s the sixth child and fifth son.  He does not seem to have been physically adventurous like Andrew.  Nor was he conventional like brother William.  Nor was he a businessman like Thomas jnr. John was, however, perhaps the most interesting of the bunch.

John seemed restless.  He made a start on a career by becoming a schoolmaster in Southwick, near Brighton but in an advert he placed in the London Courrier and Evening Gazette, he tells prospective clients that he has “been several years in France”.  Later reports suggest that his stay of “several years” may not have been voluntary.  If it can be assumed that he went to France aged about 20, he would have found himself trapped in an enemy country.  Napoleon declared war against Britain in 1803.

Back in England, two major events happened in John’s life in 1809: he married Elizabeth Gates and he moved his school from Southwick to Bedford Square, at “the Western extremity of Brighton”. Not surprisingly, John’s school specialized in languages: “Latin, Greek, French and lastly Hebrew” (Sussex Advertiser  12 July 1819).  He also turned his hand to writing school books.  His first publication was rather expensive (at 5 shillings).  It advertised itself as:

Three sons were born to John and Elizabeth between 1813 and 1817. Less than two years after the birth of his youngest child, John decided that school-mastering was not for him, so he enrolled at St Alban Hall, an Oxford college.  Aged 34 and with three children under the age of seven, John Tilt became a clergyman – although it would appear he never attended lectures and maybe never set foot in “his” college.

John was now a fully fledged Reverend. The title Rev. may well have improved sales of his books.

Morning Post, Thursday 20 January 1820 ©The British Library Board

In 1823, he was given the curacy at All Hallows Church, Lombard Street in London.  Perhaps now was the time to settle down.  Instead, he found Catholicism – five years before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.  It was an audacious move.  The story is told in detail by La Quotidienne on 12 December 1824.  Here are the bare bones of the story as told by the newspaper:

One day, John Tilt, a good Anglican, heard that a Catholic priest, Prince Alex de Hohenlohe, had recently cured two nuns in Ireland of an unspecified illness.  This he had achieved through the medium of prayer, and remotely, from his monastery in Germany.  Tilt was initially skeptical of what the Catholic church considered miraculous.  First, he examined in detail this particular miracle.  Then he set about delving into the phenomenon in general.  When he learned that each century had famous examples of miracles, he came to the conclusion that l’église à laquelle il était attaché n’était point la vraie Église. [The Church to which he was attached was not the true Church.]

After long discussions with eminent Catholics he made up his mind et fit son abjuration, le 29 juillet [he abjured on 29 July] in the chapel of St Mary’s, Moorfields in the City of London. His wife followed his example, despite also being an Anglican born and bred.

The newspaper was not slow to recognize that the couple had children and, henceforth, no income. This, it stated, would be a problem, but the Tilts were strong in their belief.  The couple were confirmed in their new faith by no less a person than William Poynter, who the newspaper called, inaccurately, Bishop of London.

Whether Elizabeth Tilt spoke French is not clear.  No matter! The family (John?) decided that Catholic France was a better place to live than their home country.  Almost immediately on his arrival in France, John was given a post as a senior librarian in the Sorbonne.  The Étoile newspaper reveals that the Ministre des affaires ecclésiastiques et de l’instruction publique [Minister for Church Affairs and Public Education] who appointed John Tilt was doing so, not out of charity but because

M. Tilt est un homme instruit, en état de rendre des services à l’église dans l’étude des langues anciennes et des matières de controverse. [Mr Tilt is an educated man and is in a position to be of service to the Church through his studies of ancient languages and polemics.]

Somewhat later, English newspapers told the story differently – and rather more pithily:

A jesuit (sic) got hold of him, and he being a man of unstable mind, perverted him to the Catholic faith.  He renounced Protestantism, and fled to Paris where he had the enviable distinction of being pointed out [appointed?] sub-librarian to some Bibliotheque there … and betook himself to the sophistry of Catholicism, which was more congenial to his elastic conscience and utter destitution of principle … The Age Sunday 07 February 1830

Strong words indeed. 

Perhaps John Tilt was not a good librarian.  The family’s affairs do not seem to have gone well. There is nothing to show when or why he left the Sorbonne, but in 1833, King Louis-Philippe was persuaded that the family needed financial support.  The King stepped in and awarded Jean Tilt a pension of 1,000 francs.

A series of letters in the Cambridgeshire archive reveal the extent to which Richard Huddleson, a wealthy Catholic of Sawston Hall near Cambridge, also supported the family financially.

This help appears to have started in 1837 as the result of an appeal sent to Huddelston from a friend of his, Kenelm Digby.  Tilt and Digby lived in the same street in the centre of Paris. Digby had been moved by the plight of the family.  He wrote to Huddleston and Huddleston must have sent funds immediately, for within three weeks Tilt had written his thanks to his benefactor in a letter dated 19 November 1837 from N0 48 rue de Grenelle. 

Alas, the situation did not improve for the family.  By 1841 matters had gone from bad to worse: Digby was asking for Huddleston’s help once again.

The family to whom you were so generous last year is reduced low indeed.  The father for some days was near losing his reason.  Absolute starvation was near being their end.  Mr Hunt is voucher for their honesty.  We are going to get one son apprenticed and to pay £30 for him.  £20 is wanting.  We are going to place one daughter in a convent school to get her education perfected… Young Tilt who was near dying of hunger in Paris last winter has just had an offer through us of being a Partner to a Surgeon apothecary of Southampton.  I have not yet received his answer to say whether he will be tempted by it to abandon his dear old Father and Mother in Paris. (Letter dated 27 August 1841 from Springfield House, Polygon, Southampton)

Two years later, John Tilt was dead leaving his wife, yet again, to rely on the charity of Richard Huddlestone.

…  Poor Mrs Tilt is residing with her son, the Doctor.  Their address is No 11 rue de la Paix. I shall say nothing to her about your last letter. & indeed I shall not probably see her, but as I have given you her address, I shall not have to reproach myself for your alms will be grateful to her.  Her own recovery is considered miraculous.  She is respected by all who know her and she has to struggle with poverty with her son. (Letter dated 6 June 1843 from Digby to Huddleston)

“Poor Mrs Tilt” may, in fact, have had a better life following the death of her husband.  Her three boys had been brought up in France and each was in a position to support her in her old age.

Postscript

John Tilt’s eldest son became a Catholic priest.  When he died, aged just 47, in 1859 he had spent several years as Missionary Rector of the fledgling St Mary’s Catholic Chapel in Richmond as well as undertaking “religious instruction” of the pupils at St Mary’s Collegiate Catholic School.  When he had had to retire through ill health in 1859 his congregation gave him 105 guineas, much of the money coming from “the munificent donation of the French Royal Family at Claremont and Twickenham” – that is, the deposed Orléans family who had fled France after the 1848 revolution.

Second son, Edward John, graduated as a doctor in Paris in 1829.  He returned to England and became eminent in the realm of women’s health.  He had brough with him from France enlightened ideas about the menopause and gynaecology in general.  He did not die until 1893, at which time the British Medical Journal gave him a 20-line obituary and he appears at some length in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Third son, William Henry (aka Henri) Gates Tilt is more of a mystery. He lived most of his life in England and seemed to have private means from property.  His links with France, and in particular with the town of Rennes in Britanny, remained strong: two of his daughters were born in Rennes in the late 1850s; one of his twin sons married a woman who had been born and, much later, died in that same town; the other son married a woman from Saint-Brieux, just 60 miles from Rennes. 

J.E.C Bodley, spur to the Entente Cordiale?

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John Edward Courtenay Bodley moved into 24 Brunswick Terrace, Hove in 1904.   He must have liked Hove.  Within two years he had moved just 400 yards west, to 2 Adelaide Mansions, also on the seafront.

Oscar Wilde and JECBodley in 1875: Image from ‘Oscar Wilde’, by Richard Ellmann (1987)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By the time of his arrival in Hove, J. E. C. Bodley was  50 years old and a highly respected writer on France. When he died, exactly 100 years ago, on the 28th May 1925 the London Times said of him:

His magnum opus was his two volumed work on France, which in many ways paved the way for the sympathies necessary to the Entente [Cordiale of 1904], for he wrote at a time of great hostilities between the countries.

The first edition of the magnum opus in question had been published in 1898.   Since 1890 he had immersed himself in the politics, cultures and institutions of France.

So keen was his desire to get to know France that he explains in Part II of the introduction to the book:

I came to France in May 1890 and wrote the last lines of these volumes more than seven years later, having in the interval not spent seven weeks away from French soil.

We must remember that in the 1890s, following the Franco-Prussian war, Alsace and Lorraine had been lost to Germany and that Algeria was an integral part of France – not a colony but a fully fledged département.

Despite having started his professional career as a barrister, Bodley had already made friends in high places in France before 1890.  We could almost accuse him of name dropping when he lists such grandees of French literature and politics as Ernest Renan, Hyppolite Taine and Georges Clemenceau amongst his friends and acquaintances.

Bodley’s must have been pretty resilient physically.  In 1891 alone he lists staying in 16 different towns during his round-France travels – but then he was only in his late 30s and presumably quite fit.

1891 was to change his life.

After passing some months in Paris I set out again in 1891 returning to Lyons [sic] … Thence I went to Marseilles and stayed long enough to get a certain insight into the life of the composite population. Crossing to Algeria, during a long visit I was able to examine the peculiar system of administration … After a brief summer season in Paris, we …

“I” has changed to “we”.  In May 1891, 37 year old Bodley married Evelyn Frances Bell at Algiers “in the Republic of France” as it says on the marriage certificate.  The bride was just 21 years old. She was the daughter of a wealthy iron founder from Middlesborough.  Her family regularly spent the winter in Algiers and her father eventually became the British Consul General of that city.

The newspaper, Le Temps, makes a very revealing, perhaps very Gallic, comment on why this marriage might have taken place:

M. Bodley avait, jusqu’alors, voyagé seul. Cette solitude nuisait à son enquête, parce que un célibataire étranger n’est point admis facilement dans l’intimité de nos demeures, et que les familles françaises – même celles où il y a des jeunes filles à marier – sont entourées par un amoncellement de fortifications qu’on ne peut pas renverser si l’on n’est pas aidé, dans cet assaut, par une frêle main de femme. [Up to that point, Mr Bodley had travelled alone. His single state was hindering his research, for an unmarried foreigner is not easily admitted into our homes and French families – even those with marriageable daughters – are surrounded by many a battlement which cannot be overrun without the help of a wife’s delicate hand.]

Once wed, the Bodleys criss-crossed France as Bodley had done before their marriage. Following another summer break in Paris, the couple visited Le Mans, Angers, Vannes, the Morbihan region, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, “several Pyrenean towns”, Lourdes, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Limoges. “Then we drove through George Sand’s country, lingering in many a forgotten town and village in the Creuse and the Indre”.

The word “drove” presents a conundrum.  Motor cars were in their very earliest days and unreliable on long journeys.  One of the Bodleys’ journeys was made by river, down the Rhone valley.  Le Temps, on 21 July 1901, maintained that M. Bodley se servit de nos chemins de fer, choisissant volontiers les trains omnibus qui déposent, en des localités peu connues, les voyageurs curieux.  [Mr Bodley readily uses our railways, choosing slow trains which leave the inquisitive traveller in little-known places.]  Bodley was known to dislike modern roads “filled with automobiles” (in the 1890s!).   I’m sure that any train journey they made would have been in a first class carriage.

With wonderful masculine understatement, Bodley continues: “The circumstances of my life now made prolonged journeys somewhat difficult.”  This was an oblique reference to the fact that Evelyn had given birth, in Paris, to their first child, Ronald, on 3 March 1892.  The travels did not stop.  The couple’s second son Josselin was born 17 months later at Vaux in the Hautes-Alpes.

The list of the Bodleys’ travels over the next two years makes exhausting reading.  However, by 1896 the couple had settled briefly in the chateau of Sucy-en-Brie, just 11 miles south-east of Paris.  It was in the chateau that their third child, Yveline Courtney Bodley was born.

Birth certificate of Yveline Bodley 1895. Transcript below.

Du treize décembre mil huit cent quatre vingt quinze, à midi, Acte de naissance de Bodley Yveline Courtenay du sexe féminin, née hier, douze, à dix heures dix minutes du soir au château de Sucy, domicile de ses père et mère, en cette Commune, fille légitime de Bodley John Edward Courtenay, sans profession, âgé de quarante deux ans, et de Bell Evelyn Frances, son épouse, sans profession, âgée de vingt six ans, tous deux demeurant au château de Sucy en cette Commune. Les témoins  ont été …  [On 13th December 1895, at midday, birth certificate of Bodley Yveline Courtenay (sic), girl, born yesterday, 12th at 6.10 in the evening at the chateau of Sucy, residence of her father and mother, in this district, legitimate daughter of Bodley John Edward Courtenay, of no profession, aged 42 and of Bell Evelyn Frances, his wife, of no profession, aged 26, both residing at the chateau of Sucy in this district.  The witnesses were …]

As with most of their temporary homes, the couple were renting – in this case from Henry Bruce Meux, heir to the English Meux brewing company.  Meux had inherited the chateau from his aristocratic mother, but never lived in it.

Le château de Sucy-en-Brie Image: Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;

When living in Sucy, Bodley was proud to reveal that “Ludovic Halévy … was my neighbour for two pleasant summers.”

Plan of Sucy-en-Brie. Image: Roland45, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons (Adapted)

Ludovic Halévy was famed as the joint librettist for most of Offenbach’s operettas and of Bizet’s Carmen.  He lived just a few yards from the chateau in a vast house called Haute Maison. Writing to his cousin, Bizet’s widow, in late August 1895, Halévy gives us a glimpse of Eveline Bodley just a few months before she gave birth to her daughter:

Sucy est plus calme , et peut-être, je crois, trop calme à notre jolie voisine, Madame Bodley. Elle a été fort surprise quand Louise lui a dit que tout dormait vers dix heures du soir … [Sucy is quieter, and perhaps, I think, too quiet for our pretty neighbour, Mrs Bodley.  She was very surprised when Louise told her that everyone was in bed by about ten in the evening …]

This portrait of Madame Bodley by Léon Bonnat  hung in the salon of the chateau in Sucy-en-Brie.

Portrait of Madame Bodely
Léon Bonnat, “Portrait d’Evelyn Frances Bodley”, 1895 (huile sur toile / H. 81,6 cm ; l. 65,4 cm / numéro d’inventaire : CM 859 / © Bayonne, musée Bonnat-Helleu / cliché A. Vaquero)

From late 1900 until 1904, the couple spent most of their time at the Château Bellefontaine in Biarritz, where on one notable occasion in April 1902, according to the New York Herald “the King honoured Mr Bodley, the author of ‘France’ and Mrs Bodley with his company at breakfast on Sunday.”  This may well have been the day on which Edward VII, as yet uncrowned, asked Bodley to write The Coronation of Edward the Seventh: A Chapter of European and Imperial History (published  in 1903)

Château Bellefontaine, Biarritz. Built in 1880. Image: Remi.touja Creative Commons 4.0

There are no clues to the circumstances which brought Bodley to Hove in 1904.  This was a turbulent time in his life.  His fourth child had died, aged just 2, that September while the couple were staying at the Château Bellefontaine; in the same year, Bodley and his wife sought, acrimoniously, a divorce which was not granted.  The couple separated and by 1908, they had managed to divorce.  Their 15 year old daughter seems to have sided with her father.  The 1911 census lists Alix Yveline Ava Courtney Bodley as living at 2 Adelaide Mansions with her father and two servants.

La Folie Boulart, formerly Château Bellefontaine, now a private hotel. The house at Adelaide Mansions was extremely modest by comparison. © La Folie Boulart / M. Pierre Delalonde

2 Adelaide Mansions was advertised for sale by Maple and Co. in 1903.  It is possible that Bodley bought the house at this time, or perhaps he rented it from the purchaser.  Either way, it was a stunning property:

… the exceedingly attractive and commanding MARINE MANSION, known as 2 ADELAIDE MANSIONS, HOVE, replete with every comfort and upon which large amounts have been lavishly expended on the internal appointments and decorations which are of a most handsome and costly description. The Mansion occupies a very choice position, directly facing the sea, in the most fashionable part of Hove, opposite the private lawns to which there is right of access, is of imposing elevation and in perfect order.  It contains 11 bedrooms, large bathroom with tiled walls and floor, and Roman bath (hot and cold), and sea water supplies, wide stone staircase and secondary ditto, exceedingly elegant drawing room, 48ft. 2in. by 24ft., handsome oak-panelled dining room, 27ft. 4in. by 17ft. 7in., morning room, smoking room, very pretty winter garden,… vestibule entrance hall, lavatory, kitchen, butler’s pantry and bed room, servants’ hall and usual offices, dinner lift, electric light, gas, electric bells and speaking tubes are fitted to the mansion.

Adelaide Mansions are numbered 1 to 4 from right to left.

Why would Bodley want to live in such a large house?    Firstly, he was used to living in chateaux, staying in embassies and occupying other grand residences.  Compared to his homes in Sucy-en-Brie and in Biarritz, he was downsizing.  Secondly, it is possible that, having been a guest in so many notable French homes, he was obliged to do a great deal of reciprocal entertaining.  Alix Bodley, later Viscountess Waverly, became a society hostess admired, amongst many others, by Winston Churchill. Her skills may have been honed in Adelaide Mansions.

During his time in Hove, Bodley continued writing: 20,000 words on France for the 10th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; numerous introductions to books by other writers; a two-part lecture on “The Church in France” given to the Royal Institution in 1906; L’Age Mécanique et le Déclin de l’idéalisme en France  (published in 1913) and much, much more.  Soon after the end of WW1, at about the time he left Hove, Bodley published the curiously titled “The Romance of the Battle-Line in France”.

The aim of the book was worthy.  Soldiers who had fought and suffered in France might come to be curious about the places in which they had suffered.  Those who had lost friends and family might want to know more about the place in which their loved ones had died. To some extent, Bodley was cashing in on nostalgia.

Bodley continued to live in Adelaide Mansions until about 1919.  His daughter, now known as Ava, married in February 1925, exactly three months before her father’s death… and four years after her father had married Phyllis Helen Lomax who was some 30 years Bodley’s junior.

Bodley did not live to know the grief of losing his own two youngest sons by his marriage to Phyllis: both men were in their early twenties, both were killed within six weeks of each other in 1944, John in Italy, Thomas in Belgium.  Their mother  lived until 1968 in Cuckfield, Sussex,  where her husband, John Edward Courtney Bodley, had died 43 years earlier.

Chargois et Burluraux à Brighton

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I don’t know whether Pierre Chargois and Jean Nicolas Burluraux left Rupt-en-Woëvre in north-east France together in 1850, or even if they left at much the same time. They were both in their mid-twenties. Their small home town had a population of just 665. They may well have been related. The population was slowly declining and the two young men were part of that decline. The movement away from the countryside to the towns had begun. Pierre and Jean Nicolas had decided that they would go further than the nearest big town, Verdun.

Pierre’s father, Richard, was a merchant and had already crossed the Channel with his merchant father, Jean who was a frequent visitor to England. The two young men would sell high quality basket ware. It is likely that Jean Nicloas was a skilled basket weaver as one of the main crops in the very water-rich Rupt valley was osier or willow cane.

Osier Cutting by H. R. Robertson. Source: Life on the Upper Thames. Credit: the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive https://victorianweb.org/history/work/22.html

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The marquis de Conflans and a pub in Hove

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When you next pass The Poets’ Corner pub in Montgomery Road, Hove, look up. At roof level you will see two effigies of racehorses. The one below is Eclipse.

The Poets' Corner pub and Eclipse

Eclipse was one of the greatest horses of the latter years of the 18th century, both as a racer and at stud. He started his racing career aged five in 1769, but was retired young, after a mere 18 races, because not only was he undefeated, but he won his races by such a large margin that no other owners would enter their horses against him. The only time he won a race in Sussex was at the Lewes course in July 1769.

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Louis Victor Lacroix – Brighton Police Fire Brigade Superintendent

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What brought Edouard Victor Lacroix and his French wife, Mary, from Jersey to settle in Brighton? In Jersey, Edouard had been a locksmith and then a tin smith.  Mary dealt in local produce.  When the couple arrived in Brighton in the very early 1860s, the town was burgeoning.  There must have been plenty of work for a man with Edouard’s skills, and yet by the end of the decade he had adopted his wife’s trade and settled with her and their expanding brood of children at 12 Bartholomews.

BARTHOLOMEWS

12, Bartholomews (middle house) now vanished under the north side of the Leonardo Hotel. Image courtesy of the Regency Society (James Gray Collection) JG_09_047

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Le Sidaner and the Brighton Art Critic

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Henri Le Sidaner, a French “intimiste” painter, first came to the attention of the British public when a handful of his paintings were shown at the Goupil Galleries in London in 1903.  He had just turned 40 and was already established in France. British art critics, especially the Scots, were enthusiastic about what they saw: “The whole is delicate and mystical” (Dundee Courier), “the delicate refinement of the vision” (Country Life).  There was one note of disappointment, from the pen of N.H.C., art correspondent of the Brighton Gazette.

Le Sidaner Twilight Henri Le Sidaner « La Place » 1902 Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Donated by Henri Eugene Le Sidaner (1908)

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French Cinema in Brighton (3) : 1914 to 1928

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In the first weeks of the Great War, the Bioscope journal noted:

“There are very few signs of the terrible struggle in which the country is engaged to be noted at Brighton.  The panic of the first week, of course, had a very bad effect, but things soon resumed their normal course.  The picture theatres are doing a brisk business, and the patriotic and war films which are the order of the day are proving a great draw.” The Bioscope,10 September 1914

It was indeed the case that in Brighton and Hove, residents (and many visitors) continued to amuse themselves as well as busying themselves with their contributions to war work and fund raising.

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