NO IFS AND BUTS
Although apparently quiet and decorously rural, Wettenhall (the village where I grew up in Cheshire) had actually been the scene of a serious rift between those who followed the Anglican (‘C of E’) communion and those who were Methodists in the tradition of John Wesley. The 15-20 farming families were more or less split down the middle.
By the 1950s, the distinction was becoming little more than a curiosity. There were however still complications. When my sister decided to marry her otherwise eminently suitable beau from a neighbouring farm, there was consternation that, as the Hollinsheads were ‘Methodees”, we might be reduced to serving orange juice at the wedding reception.
Anyhow, this storm passed over. But my brother-in-law John faced a challenging situation some years later after he had become the tenant of Bankhouse Farm on the Cholmondely Estate. In the early 1980s Lord Cholmondeley faced a problem in the Estate Chapel (a beautiful example of a Puritan Chapel that is the sole remnant of a former Jacobean Mansion).
The problem as explained by his Lordship was that ‘the current Verger is a bit past it’. ‘John’, he said, ‘You are the man for the job’. ‘But Your Lordship’, he protested, ‘I am Methodist’. ‘Not too worry’ was the reply, ‘I have already talked it through with the Bishop’. So that was that. And that also was very much how the aristocracy got their way – no ifs and buts were allowed.
The Hugh Cholmondeley known to my family was the 6th Marquess of Cholmondeley (1919-1990). He was the son of George Cholmondeley, 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley and Sybil Sassoon, of the Sassoon and Rothschild family. Cholmondeley's acceded to his father's land, estates and title in 1968, and his inherited title became Marquess of Cholmondeley.
Cholmondeley served in British army, initially in the Grenadier Guards and later in the 1st Royal Dragoons. During the Second World War, he saw action in the Middle East, in Italy, in France and in Germany. In 1943, he was decorated with the award of Military Cross (MC). When Cholmondeley retired from the military in 1949, he had attained the rank of Major.
CHOLMONDELEY FAMILY HISTORY
The Cholmondeleys apparently trace their ancestry to William Le Belward, Baron of Malpas, who married Tanglust, the natural daughter of Hugh Kevelioc, Earl of Chester in the late 11th Century.
The family later prospered through its connections with the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy. In 1659, Robert Cholmondeley, 1st Viscount Cholmondeley succeeded to the estates of his uncle Lord Leinster and two years later he was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Viscount Cholmondeley, of Kells in the County of Meath.
Robert’s eldest son Hugh supported the claim of William and Mary to the English throne, and after their accession in 1689 he was rewarded when he was made Baron Cholmondeley, of Namptwich (Nantwich) in Cheshire, in the Peerage of England (which gave him a seat in the House of Lords).
At this time in history, the original Anglo-Irish (and generally Catholic) nobility was being replaced by ‘loyal’ Protestants and there were great fortunes and enormous estates to be won by those who played their cards right.
As Lord Cholmondeley, he was appointed Comptroller of the Household by Queen Anne in 1708. He held this post only until October of the same year, when he was made Treasurer of the Household. He was stripped of this office in 1713 but restored when George I became king in 1714. He died in 1725.
He was succeeded by his younger brother George, the second Earl. He was a prominent military commander and commanded the Horse Guards at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
In 1715, ten years before he succeeded his elder brother, he was raised to the Peerage of Ireland in his own right as Baron Newborough, of Newborough in the County of Wexford, and in 1716 he was made Baron Newburgh, in the Isle of Anglesey, in the Peerage of Great Britain.
On his death the titles passed to his son, the third Earl. He was a politician and held office as Lord Privy Seal and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
The current family is also directly descended from Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, (26 August 1676 – 18 March 1745), who is generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain.
A Whig (i.e. Liberal) who was first elected in 1701, Walpole served during the reigns of George I and George II. His tenure is normally dated from 1721 when he obtained the post of First Lord of the Treasury; others date it from 1730 when, with the retirement of Lord Townshend, he became the sole and undisputed leader of the Cabinet.
Walpole continued to govern until his resignation in 1742 prompted by the Battle of Cartagena disaster, making his administration the longest in British history. Because of his homely ways and strong Norfolk roots, he was often known to both friends and detractors as the Norfolk Squire.
On 30 July 1700, Walpole married Catherine Shorter (died 20 August 1737), with whom he later had two daughters and four sons. His second daughter Mary Walpole (c. 1705—2 January 1732) married the 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley on 14 September 1723 and had two sons.
The Fourth Earl was a successful career politician and courtier who became the Earl of Rocksavage and the Marquess of Cholmondeley in 1815.
THE KENYAN MOSES IN HAPPY VALLEY
The most notorious of the recent Cholmondeleys was Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere (28 April 1870 - 13 November 1931) who was one of the first and most influential British settlers in Kenya. In this he appears to have sought to emulate the successes of his ancestors in ‘settling’ Ireland.
Hugh Delamere (the son of Hugh Cholmondeley, 2nd Baron Delamere, and Augusta Emily Seymour) moved to Kenya in 1901. He was as famous for his tireless labours to establish a working agricultural economy in Africa as he was for childish antics among his European friends when he was at his leisure.
He made his first trip to Africa in 1891 to hunt lion in Somaliland, and returned yearly to resume the hunt. In 1894 he was severely mauled by an attacking lion, and was only saved when his Somali gunbearer Abdullah Ashur leaped on the lion, giving Delamere time to retrieve his rifle. As a result of the attack, Lord Delamere limped for the rest of his life; he also developed a healthy respect for Somalis (and presumably lions!).
It is believed that on one of these Somaliland hunting trips, Delamere coined the term “white hunter” – the term which came to describe the professional safari hunter in colonial East Africa.
Delamere employed a professional hunter named Alan Black and a native Somali hunter to lead the safari. As the story goes, in order to avoid confusion, the Somali was referred to as the "black hunter," and Black was called the "white hunter."
In 1896, Delamere, with a retinue including a doctor, taxidermist, photographer, and 200 camels, set out to cross the deserts of southern Somaliland, intending to enter British East Africa from the north. In 1897, he arrived in the lush green highlands of what is now central Kenya.
In 1899, Delamere married Lady Florence Anne Cole, daughter of Lowry Egerton Cole, 4th Earl of Enniskillen. The couple soon sought to relocate to the Kenya highlands.
Around 1903, he received a 99-year lease on 100,000 acres (400 km2) of land that would be named “Equator Ranch,” requiring him to pay a £200 annual rent and to spend £5000 on the land over the first five years of occupancy.
In 1906, he acquired a large farm, which would eventually include more than 200,000 acres (800 km²), located between the Molo River and Njoro town. This ranch he named Soysambu. Together, these vast possessions made Delamere one of Kenya's "largemen" - the local name for the handful of colonists with the most substantial land holdings.
In 1905, Delamere was a pioneer of the East African dairy industry but most of his imported animals succumbed to diseases such as foot and mouth and Red water disease. Eventually, Delamere decided to grow wheat but this too, was plagued by disease, specifically rust.
By 1909, Delamere was out of money, resting his last hopes on a 1,200-acre (4.9 km2) wheat crop that eventually failed. He was quoted by author Elspeth Huxley as commenting drily, “I started to grow wheat in East Africa to prove that though I lived on the equator, I was not in an equatorial country.”
To supplement his income, he even tried raising ostriches for their feathers, importing incubators from Europe; this venture also failed with the advent on the motor car and the decline in fashion of feathered hats.
Delamere was active in recruiting settlers to East Africa, promising new colonists 640 acres (2.6 km2), with 200 people eventually responding. He persuaded some of his friends among the English landed gentry to buy large estates like his own and take up life in Kenya.
He is credited with helping to found the so-called Happy Valley set, a clique of well-off British colonials whose pleasure-seeking habits eventually degenerated into drug-taking and wife-swapping.
The story is often told of Delamere riding his horse into the dining room of Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel and jumping over the tables. He was also known to knock golf balls onto the roof of the Muthaiga Club, the pink stucco gathering-place for Nairobi's white elite, and then climb up to retrieve them.
"The extension of European civilization was in itself a desirable thing," he wrote in 1927. "The British race... was superior to heterogeneous African races only now emerging from centuries of relative barbarism... the opening up of new areas by means of genuine colonisation was to the advantage to the world."
And a contemporary and former colonist said: “His ascendancy over the settlers of Kenya has been enjoyed long enough for him to expect all men – and women – to do his bidding, and do it promptly. He is their Moses. For 25 years he has been their guide.”
Delamere died in November 1931 at age 61, leaving unpaid bank loans totaling £500,000 (£15-20 million in today’s terms).
THE NEW ZEALAND SAINT
The Venerable George James Cholomondeley, sometime Archdeacon of Christchurch and Vicar of Opawa, belonged to a branch of one of the oldest and noblest families of England; he was closely related to the Marquis of Cholomondeley, and was a cousin of the present Lord Delamere. The history of these families dates back to the eleventh century.
The late Archdeacon's estate at Port Levy is named after the old family seat, “Vale Royal,” the residence of the present Lord Delamere. He was born at Peel, Isle of Man, in 1833, and came to New Zealand in the early 1850s. He was temporarily located as curate at St. Michael's, Christchurch, and afterwards became vicar of the pastoral cure of the Waimakariri.
In 1862 he was appointed to the parish of Heathcote, where he remained until 1875. He was Diocesan Secretary from 1887 to 1890, and became vicar of Opawa in 1875, a canon of the Christchurch Cathedral in 1882, and Archdeacon of Christchurch in 1890.
During his lifetime Archdeacon Cholmondeley published many valuable works on religious subjects, notably, “Retrospect and Prospect,” and “Church Work,” together with other single sermons.
In 1876 he wrote a reply to the tract, “Does the Church of England Sanction Auricular Confession,” and in 1885 he published a pamphlet, entitled, “Clergy Pensions.”
Archdeacon Cholmondeley was a member of the Historical Committee of the Canterbury Natives' Association, and the very complete work, containing the names of the Canterbury pioneers who arrived in the ships of the Canterbury Association, was compiled mainly by him.
After a long life spent in the service of the Church, Archdeacon Cholmondeley died at the vicarage of Opawa, on the 11th of December, 1901, deeply regretted by all classes and denominations.
He left behind the Cholmondeley Home which is still open.
‘Located down Cholmondeley Lane, overlooking the sea, Cholmondeley is a house full of love, warmth and hope. We support the children of Canterbury when their parents cannot. Our children are aged between 3 and 12 years. They come from families with issues including severe illness, substance abuse and addiction, or the death of a parent. Cholmondeley has been supporting the children of Canterbury for 85 years and we are very proud of the quality of care we provide.
Apart from the first impression of the grand old house overlooking the sea, you're also likely to be greeted by the wafts of home baking from the kitchen. At any one time, around 28 children stay at Cholmondeley for an average of 10 days. Regardless of the duration of their stay each child gets love, support, structure, nutrition and care of the highest possible quality'.
[Many thanks to my fellow NZ Blogger Sandy for the tip-off about the NZ connection.
I recommend Sandy's Blog:
RANDOM MEANDERINGS: My Taphophiliac, genealogy, heritage and hobby interests]
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