Published by the Author,
at Ye Sign of Twa Corbies,
Athabasca, Alberta, Canada,
of whom further copies may be had.
MMVI
Introduction
Welcome to what I hope will be the comprehensive Jean Louis Bazalgette website. This is just the beginning!
I have been researching my ancestor for many years, and fully intended to publish the information that I had been so jealously guarding in a printed book.
However, there are several reasons why this is more than I wish to do.
1, The project has to reach a certain level of completeness before one can publish, and this never seems to be achieved.
2, A book is a frozen object and is out of date before it is published, and for ever afterwards.
3, There is the cost and effort of printing, binding, selling and distribution, which is never recouped.
4, I hope that with feedback and sharing of information the project can go forward as long as the website can be maintained.
If you wish to contact me by email, please do so xbazalgette@telus.net. (Remove the ‘x’ before mailing – this is to reduce spam)
Contents
Background to this research project – see below
The website is intended additionally to contain:
A brief biography, without references, which will always be WORK IN PROGRESS. Latest change: 10 April, 2008.
A detailed chronology – this mostly exists but needs to be tidied and made intelligible. It is currently over seventy pages in length.
References, bibliography and acknowledgements.
An annotated genealogy of the Bazalgette family and other related families. This also exists but needs to be put into web format and have the annotations added.
The family tree can now be found at Bazalgette.com
Images of documents. While these are in many cases in the public domain I shall have to get permission to publish some of them. It will also require more webspace than I have available at the moment.
Residences of the Bazalgette family – detailed information which is too cumbersome to place elsewhere. His most important house, Eastwick Park in Great Bookham, was demolished in the 1950’s and a school now occupied the site. The librarian of the school has set up a site with some historical detail and pictures - http://www.eastwick-jun.surrey.sch.uk/history.htm
Links
I was very pleased to have heard
from my 5th cousin, Simon Bazalgette, who has set up a more general Bazalgette
family website – Bazalgette.com
This features some of the items in
the Contents list above, in particular the family tree and a guestbook, and I
am relieved to be able to share some of this work, as well as contributing
whatever information I can.
Background to research
I am the latest, but hopefully not the last,
of several family history researchers who have attempted to investigate and
record the life of Jean Louis Bazalgette, the French-born patriarch of the
English branch of the Bazalgette family, and grandfather of the
now-again-famous civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. This webpage/e-book is
the result of the work of many such researchers. I was tempted to use the word
'culmination' which is usually employed in this context, but that implies that
an apex has been reached, whereas we are only part of the way up a slope of
unknown altitude.
Even though Jean Louis died over 180 years
ago, there will always be some further facts that can be discovered about him.
I hope that publishing the existing facts will stimulate interest and reveal
more of the information which I am sure is out there. Are there diaries somewhere that mention Louis? None have so far
been found. Where are the family portraits, which must surely exist somewhere?
Jean Louis, whom I will call
Louis from here on, since that was what he called himself for the greater part
of his life, did not leave a particularly helpful paper trail, or rather, being
a punctilious man, he very probably did so (note, for example, how he
painstakingly recorded information in his family Bible), but families are
notorious for destroying records of the past, for a great number of reasons. We
always hope that some documents survive and that a treasure trove may some day
come to light, but it is a fond hope. Louis was a very shrewd, discreet and
even perhaps a secretive man, who did not act in such a way that he came very
much to the attention of the newspapers or of contemporary writers. Although
his achievements were enormous, being born the son of a village tailor in an
obscure region of France and becoming by his own efforts a very wealthy English
milord, he was not famous, or even, it seems, much talked about in his
time.
It is important to mention
those people whose research contributed to our present knowledge. Apart from
Louis himself, who recorded in his second family Bible the treatments that were
vainly employed to try to cure his young son Evelyn's paralysed arm, the first
family historian of whom I am aware was the Reverend Evelyn Bazalgette. Evelyn
entered many family births, marriages and deaths in his family Bible and copies
of these invaluable notes fortunately survive. He no doubt had a wealth of
family stories as well, but only fragments of these have come down to us, to my
great regret. These include the allusion to Fanny's red flamingo boa, the
tumbrils rattling past the Paris convent where Louis's daughter Louisa was a
pupil during the Terror and other such tantalising snippets, which later
historians have struggled to put into context.
A Bazalgette family tree may
have been started by Evelyn, but if not it would certainly have been created by
the next notable family genealogist, my father's cousin Tom Norman Bazalgette.
He undoubtedly collected a great deal of information, which I hope found its
way to other family members - I have various documents and letters written
in his hand. I met Tom on one occasion, but I was still a teenager and not
greatly interested in the family's history at that time. If I had been, I might
have managed to gather from him many more family stories, which, accurate or
otherwise, can do so much to add foliage to a family tree. At Tom's death, his
house was apparently piled high with dusty papers, but as I understand his
beneficiary was a Scottish nephew, whom I have not tracked down, it is not
clear how much of this material survived.
In more recent times the main repository of
family records has been the late Rear Admiral Derek Bazalgette, who kindly
allowed us to have copies of all of his files as well as permitting us to
photograph many of the family heirlooms he held, such as Louis's family Bible.
Derek collected most of the documents that actually came down through the
family, including those from the sources I have already mentioned. He did not,
it seems, do a great deal of first-hand research himself, but through being a
public figure he acted as a magnet for many additional articles or documents which
emerged, and for which the finder was looking for a home. Derek was friendly
with a gentleman called Colin Glover, who, like others before and since, became
fascinated with the Louis story. Mr Glover carried out a considerable amount of
what I would call more modern research, including detailed searches in
archives, and his notes show that he was wrestling in Herculean style with the
problems of how to reconcile Louis's movements based on the existing known
facts with all of the exploits which have been attributed to him in fact and
fiction. As it happens I began my own research and had made considerable
progress before I saw Mr Glover's detailed notes. They matched my own findings
in many cases and of course filled in a lot of gaps, so we owe him a great debt
of gratitude. Sadly, Mr Glover died before much more progress could be made,
but I want to give him full credit for his painstaking work, and to ensure that
it was not done in vain.
The late Jack Bazalgette
carried out a considerable amount of family history research, though mostly in
his own branch of the family. The English Bazalgettes have two surviving
branches - one, my own, descended from Louis' eldest surviving son Captain
Joseph William, R.N., and the other, descended from Louis' son John, which is
Jack's branch. Jack and his wife Jo retired to the Cevennes, and used to hold
gatherings [or 'Jamborees'] there, to which all family members were invited.
Regrettably I never managed to attend one of these. Jack computerized the
Bazalgette family tree at about the time I was unwittingly doing the same
thing. In connection with Jack I cannot omit reference to the journalist Jean
Bazalgette, who used the nom de plume of Jean Bazal, one of the French
Bazalgettes who was descended from Louis' elder brother Georges. Using some
facts supplied by Jack and others he wrote what he termed a roman about
Louis which is almost entirely fictitious. It nevertheless has caused much
confusion because it contains names and dates to give his version of the story
credibility. Where known facts are included they are invariably incorrectly
stated or occur at the wrong times. Jean Bazal' s other claimed dates, names
and places have so far been shown under scrutiny to be false in every
case. When asked about his sources, Jean
Bazal would merely shrug and say enigmatically: “Je suis journaliste”. The fanciful stories about Louis as a
privateer, fur trader etc are family myths which must have some basis,
even if, as I suspect, they are merely based on speculation about how he managed
to accumulate so much wealth and to own property in Jamaica and other places. I
remember my father telling me when I was a child that Louis was a 'French
pirate'.
I first became interested in
genealogy some fifteen years ago. I knew there was a Bazalgette family tree of
sorts, and believing as I did that most of the Bazalgette work had already been
done I preferred to seek out new pastures. I therefore concentrated on my
mother's family, the Bonhams, who had hardly been traced at all. This was a fascinating
study and was an excellent project on which to cut my genealogical teeth. I was
a year or two into this, and proceeding somewhat slowly and haphazardly, when
my wife Trish appeared on the scene - in fact it was though a shared interest
in family history that we first came into contact. Trish is highly qualified
for this type of work, possessing master's degrees in History as well as in
Library and Information Science. Compared to these qualifications, what pass
for my academic achievements pale into insignificance. Trish researched with me and for me,
encouraged me and, as her crowning achievement, organized and filed all of the
families' data in a most efficient way. Without all of this assistance there is
no chance that this project would have even got off the starting blocks. Since
the history of the Bonhams and other related families was with this help
completed as far as required within a year or so, it was then possible for us
to return to looking at the Bazalgettes again in earnest.
My intention was not at the outset to write
Louis' story. Having discovered that the Bazalgette tree contained its share of
errors we then set out to check all that we could of the necessary parish
records, wills and other BMD documents to confirm or refute each family
member's details, retaining copies of these documents for the files wherever
possible. During this correction process more documents emerged, as they tend
to do. Mere genealogy palls with us quite quickly - we have to add foliage, an
analogy I am not ashamed to use again.
As the files got fatter, Trish
started to create chronology documents for the main Bazalgette lines. Once I
started on Louis in earnest, his chronology grew ever larger, and eventually
became the basis for this e-book. By this time we had moved to Alberta, Canada,
Trish's home province, where as it happens my own father was also born. Once
Trish had started a business, her spare time for family research diminished
considerably. My opportunities for research, since I had a job that involved
being connected to the internet for many hours each day, did not decrease so
much in this way – in fact progress has been much better than I would have
expected. During the last five years the amount of data available on the
Internet has grown exponentially, especially with the recent digitization of
many books and records, and the onlining of archive indexes. I have also found
that it is cheaper and less time-consuming to employ researchers to search
remote archives for me than to do it myself. Even when we were living in
England, the cost involved in taking a day off, plus rail fares or fuel, to
gather some few documents in a distant record office was prohibitive, where
employing a local researcher is in many cases a much better option, not least because
they are familiar with their local archive. Apart from missing the fun of
rummaging through archives, I have not suffered measurably from being unable
for geographical reasons to visit them myself.
In fact, many libraries are more inclined to take pity on the poor
enquirer who contacts them from the back of beyond, and will perform small
searches for a minimal charge, or often no charge at all, except for
photocopying and postage, a service which they are often less willing to
perform for those who could travel there in person.
Having contacted all members
of the Bazalgette family who had documents and other information, we were able
to compile the fullest files that exist all in one place. There then followed
many visits to archives and record offices to check sources, to try to confirm
all the information, and of course to expand upon it. For example, we were
aware that others had looked at Louis' and his family's bank ledgers at Coutts'
Bank. With the indulgence and help of
Coutts' archivist, Tracey Earl, we were able not only to look at these but also
to photograph them, both in the bank's vault at the Strand and in their
repository in Docklands. This information has been invaluable in building up a
list of Louis' associates and tracking his daily doings. At about this time I
found a researcher in Paris who searched various national and city archives for
mentions of Louis, with a degree of success. I also employed a genealogist in
the south of France, Frederick Deleuze, to search the Actes in the
Archives Departementales in Mende for previous generations of Louis' family,
and the quality of the work done was excellent, and well worth while, as this
had not to my knowledge been done before. I also employed a researcher in
Jamaica, Patricia Jackson, who did some excellent work, and who almost by
chance discovered the key to the ‘Jamaica question’.
There will of course be
further acknowledgements and credits given to those many kind people who have
contributed information which helped to build the (still far from complete)
picture of Louis Bazalgette’s life.
© Charles
Bazalgette, 2008