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Issue
no 50 : May / June 2009 |
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MAY I SAY NOTHING? |
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<< ‘And I, my Lord? May I say nothing?’ >> |
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_____ |
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ESSAYS; RESPONSES TO REVIEWS; ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS |
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We renamed this section, in
September 2008, streamlining it from its previous version And I? May I Say
Nothing? Work published here is
original work submitted to us. We also
offer this section as an open platform for early publication of articles from
MA or doctoral candidates that reflect their work, and if these reach a certain
level of competence, they will not be peer-reviewed unless at the author’s
request. In time to come we will
publish, in different sections, (a) submissions that have passed double blind
peer review; (b) undergraduate writing. |
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A Wilde Goose Chase: The Strange Affair of
Oscar Wade Wilde The Importance of Being a Hellenist.
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Alan Hart |
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The Reverend Oscar Wade Wilde, vicar of All
Saints, St Ives in Cambridgeshire from 1899 until 1931, claimed to be a
distant cousin of Oscar Wilde the writer. His name and his claimed
relationship to his contemporary, Oscar Wills Wilde, became part of the
persona which this Anglo-Catholic priest invented for himself, in addition to
a definite and impressive ecclesiastical ‘lineage’ amongst some of the more
flamboyant characters of the late 19th century Anglo-Catholic Ritualist
movement. The curiosity of Oscar Wade Wilde is the number of parallels and
coincidences which allowed him to pull off what was essentially an
intellectual fraud, whilst sailing very close indeed not only to his
namesake’s circle but also in the face of hostile public opinion following
Oscar Wilde’s conviction in 1895. It is also a fascinating example of both
emulation, and of ‘social mobility, which placed him on a par with the fictional
Jack Worthing in assuming different personas in different places. |
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The
family of Oscar Wade Wilde |
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The family of Oscar Wade Wilde can be traced
back with certainty to late 18th century Hertfordshire and the parish of
Rickmansworth. Census records, wills in the collections of the National
Archives, and at least one birth certificate demonstrate consistently that
the only two members of the family to spell their names as Wilde were Oscar
Wade himself and his younger brother Leonard, from the late 19th century
onwards. The common spelling was Wild, with occasional blunders by census
collectors resulting in Wyld or Walde. |
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The
National Archives on-line collections contain a number of wills which relate
to the family beginning with an abstract of the will of Thomas Wild the elder
of Rickmansworth dated November 21st, 1808. (1) Presumably this was the patriarch of the
extensive family, and the father of Oscar Wade Wilde’s own grandfather, also
Thomas Wild. Records dating from the 1841 census mention for the parish of
Rickmansworth, “All that part of the Parish of Rickmansworth
known as Chorley Wood Common, and such part as extends
from thence in a North Easterly direction to
the Boundary near Sarratt Mill from which boundary including all such part of
the Parish as extends |
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The
second entry for Thomas Wild’s family in the 1841 census concerns one son and
three daughters who had already moved away from the farm, and settled in Eton
High Street. The head of the household was the twenty year old Alfred Wild, a
“currier” (4). Amongst the sisters
who lived with Alfred was Mary Wild, whose marriage was announced in ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’ in 1853 (5),
to John Leonard of Kingston upon Thames (who owned Hoggs Mill and employed
nine men at the time of the 1861 census). The family would therefore seem to
have had a certain social standing, or at least aspired to one, by the
mid-19th century. |
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By
the time of the 1851 census, the bachelor Alfred and one of his sisters were
still living together at 71 Peascod Street in New Windsor with Dedworth.
Alfred’s affairs were flourishing, and the thirty year old currier had
expanded his professional activities, and is recorded in the census as “Tanner, currier, and shoemaker employing
51 men”. Shortly afterwards, he married a local Eton girl by the name of
Mary Anne Wigginton. Alfred, Mary and their family moved to Upton by 1861,
before moving again Osborne Villas in Clewer, New Windsor, by 1871, where the
household included not only two domestic servants but also a governess. |
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Alfred
and Mary Wild had six children: Alfred Ernest Wild born c.1855, Oscar Wade
Wilde born c.1859, Edward Harry Wild born c.1862, Mary Maud Wild born c.1864,
and Leonard born in 1865. By chance, the second son happened to be named
Oscar, which together with his year of birth, was the first basis for
claiming a family proximity which did not exist. |
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By
1881, Alfred Wild and his family had come full circle, and returned to Mill
End in Rickmansworth, presumably returning to one of several Wild family
farms. Mary Anne Wilde was recorded in the census as “wife of Tanner and contractor”, and her son Alfred was rather
grandly recorded as “Manager Partner of
Business”, whilst Oscar Wade Wilde was “Undergraduate Oxford”. The younger children had to make do with
being recorded rather less graciously as “tanner’s
son” or daughter! Alfred Wild himself was recorded as a “farmer”, but boarding in Hammersmith
when the census was taken. (His landlady gave her profession as a “curative mesmerist”!). |
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Alfred
Wild’s professional affairs had flourished, and the enterprise at the basis
of the family fortune was recorded in trade directories for Windsor from 1868
until at least 1885 (6). The eldest son, Alfred (the “partner of business”), followed his father into the business as
an “army and general boot and shoe
manufacturer”, (rather more socially acceptable than the humble term of
tanner), but his final years were spent in sad but splendid circumstances.
Amongst the family wills available in the National Archives on-line
collections are three for Alfred Ernest Wilde, dating from 1881 and 1888, one
of which refers to the younger Alfred as a contractor, and the others
referring to shoe manufacturing.(7). Unfortunately what these wills also
reveal is that the younger Alfred became one of the earliest inmates of the
grandiose Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane at Virginia Water, built in
palatial style as the pair to the Royal Holloway & Bedford College
building, and run on the lines of an English country house in order to try
and calm the nerves of the inmates. (8) |
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By
1891, both Alfred senior and junior had died. Edward and Maud Wild are
difficult to trace in the same census, and Mary Ann Wild appears with Oscar
Wade under the name of Walde, living in Ebury Street, Pimlico, with the young
Leonard Wild, by now a doctor trained at St Thomas’ Hospital, living only a
few streets away also in Pimlico. However, by 1891, Leonard had switched to
spelling his name as Wilde, although this was probably as a result, and in
support of, his brother’s invented persona and their purported relationship
with the talk of the town. Later in life, Leonard (who became a surgeon and
pathologist), like Oscar Wade, maintained the Wilde spelling of their family
name. |
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The
career of Oscar Wade Wilde |
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Alfred
Wilde came from what appears to have been a ‘good’ farming background, and
like so many of his contemporaries, by his family’s collective industrious
entrepreneurship, he rose in fortune and social standing through “the purple of commerce”. However when
inventing his own persona, Oscar Wade Wilde may well have considered that the
humble origins of his parents as a social hindrance to the self-conscious
Oxford undergraduate. The 1851 census records for his mother’s family, the
Wiggintons of Eton, show that the family included boot makers (no doubt the origin
of the Alfred and Mary’s romance), but also watermen and bricklayers. On the
Wild side, his grandfather and his uncles and cousins were reasonably
prosperous farmer, brewers and tanners, but nothing more. Faced with a
university full of old Etonians who may well have bought their shoes from his
father’s Eton or Windsor stores, or whose own fathers may have had their
boots mended by his maternal Wigginton grandfather, it is would be easy to
understand that Oscar Wade Wilde may have felt insecure, and even
unacceptable. |
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Oscar
Wade Wilde was a member of St John’s College, Oxford, matriculated in October
1879, and was awarded his BA in 1882. After graduation there is a gap of
three years of which nothing is known at present, except the final outcome.
Presumably the period was spent at one of the new theological colleges (many
of which were founded as a result of Anglo-Catholic initiatives) in
preparation for his ordination in 1885, to serve as the curate of the
controversial Ritualist stronghold of St Barnabas’, Pimlico. Oscar Wade Wilde’s conversion to Anglican
Catholicism possibly began when the family lived in Clewer in or about the
early 1870s. Clewer was a bastion of Anglo-Catholicism under the vicar, Canon
Carter, one of the early leaders of the original Oxford or Tractarian
Movement. It was also the site of one of earliest expressions of
Anglo-Catholic monasticism, with the convent of the Sisters of Mercy, to
which belonged, coincidentally, two of Oscar Wilde’s Maturin cousins. Letters
of introduction from Canon Carter would certainly have ensured that some of
the best ecclesiastical doors were opened wide for Oscar Wade, and not simply
in Oxford. |
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Oscar Wade’s first parish in London had been
notorious from its first inception. It was the first church built to embody
the principles and practices of the Oxford Movement, and had seen of riots in
the 1840s, and been the subject of court cases ever since. Oscar Wade’s vicar
was the Reverend Alfred Gurney, a scion of a distinguished clerical family
linked to the Oxford Movement since the very earliest days (one of Gurney’s
brothers, born in 1833, the year when the Oxford Movement began, was even
named John Henry, possibly in honour of Newman). Prior to taking up the
living in Pimlico, Gurney had served as curate of St Paul’s, Brighton,
one of the many grandiose ‘High
Temples of High Churchery’ constructed by the immensely wealthy, eccentric
and fanatical Father Wagner as the pillars of what is often now dismissed as
“South Coast religion”. Appropriately enough Gurney himself was also known as
an authority on (appropriately, but coincidentally) Wagnerian opera, as well
as being a poet, religious author, and friend and correspondent of the
Rossettis amongst others. |
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Amongst Alfred Gurney’s protégés in Brighton
were the Beardsley family, including Aubrey Beardsley, who became a regular
member of the congregation of St Barnabas’, Pimlico, when he moved to London.
Oscar Wade had by now fully adopted the Wilde spelling of his name, which
must have left Beardsley somewhat perplexed at the idea of Oscar Wilde
celebrating Sunday mass! Moreover, Beardsley may have informed the Irish
Oscar of his clerical namesake. Another similarity between the two Oscars,
therefore, may also have been a certain taste for provocation. |
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Having reinvented his name, and after making a
place for himself in society, Oscar Wade Wilde, the Oxford-educated
clerically-well-connected-curate and apparent-cousin of the famous
playwright, had also become an ideal husband in the eyes of certain sections
of Victorian society. Mrs Augusta Hamilton-Bell, the widow of an army
officer, certainly appears to have approved. Interestingly but perhaps just
coincidentally once again, Mrs Bell was born in Windsor in about 1836,
although she later moved to Kent where her principal family associations and
homes were in the garrison port of Dover. However at the time of the 1891
census, Mrs Bell was living in Eccleston Square close to St Barnabas’ Church,
where the marriage took place in the same year (duly conducted by Alfred
Gurney and witnessed by Leonard Wilde) between Oscar Wade Wilde and Mrs
Bell’s daughter, Cecilia. |
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Oscar Wade Wilde was curate of St Barnabas’,
Pimlico from 1885 until 1892. For Anglican clergy, several long curacies were
far from uncommon well into the early 20th century, with a plentiful supply
of clergy waiting for a good living to full vacant. Curiously the two Oscar
Wildes thus trod the streets of Pimlico simultaneously, but for very
different purposes. From 1893 until 1894, Oscar Wade left Pimlico to serve as
the curate to the Reverend Frederick Ponsonby, the aristocratic and wealthy
vicar of another great Anglo-Catholic slum parish, St Mary Magdalene’s,
Munster Square, close to Euston Station. Ponsonby was descended from the
Earls of Bessborough and related to Queen Victoria’s private secretary, Henry
Ponsonby. He poured his wealth into beautifying an already architecturally
exquisite church, which like St Barnabas’, Pimlico, had always been in the
forefront of the Anglo-Catholic Ritualist movement and controversy. Following
Ponsonby’s retirement in 1894, Oscar Wade returned to Pimlico, as the curate
of another Anglo-Catholic church (there are four adjoining Anglo-Catholic
parishes in total), St Saviour’s, Pimlico, where he served as curate from
1895 until 1899. One of his successors there, from 1912, was the father of
Laurence Olivier. Finally in 1899, Oscar Wade Wilde accepted the living of
All Saints, St Ives, a rural Anglo-Catholic stronghold beautifully remodelled
by Sir Ninian Comper, and to which he personally contributed several
important additions during his long incumbency. |
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At St Ives, Oscar, his wife and his
mother-in-law maintained a refined lifestyle, and a lengthy memoir of one of
his former servants at the vicarage before World War One recalls Mrs Wilde
and Mrs Hamilton-Bell as “real gentry”,
changing into full evening dress every evening for dinner.(9) |
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Riding
out the storm |
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It is difficult to imagine what must have been
the personal impact upon Oscar Wade Wilde, his genteel wife and
mother-in-law, his clerical colleagues, and his Pimlico parishioners when the
storm broke in 1895 as the Wilde trials followed inexorably one upon another.
The name that he had adopted changed overnight from a byword for genius to
the worst incarnation of a pariah preying on society, as the star to which
Oscar Wade had linked his own social ascent plunged into the deepest
obscurity. Oscar Wilde and Pimlico became bywords for practices which society
could neither tolerate nor mention. And yet, somehow, Oscar Wade Wilde did
manage to ride out the storm, as a clerical Dr Jekyll to his ‘cousin’s’ Mr
Hyde. |
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Even if he did revert to the original spelling
of his surname during the worst of the controversy, the taint attached to
Oscar Wilde lingered for many years. The first revival of ‘The Importance of
being Earnest’ did not take place in London until 1913, and was considered
risqué even then. Wilde’s friends fled for cover during the trials, and even
Oscar Wade’s former clerical neighbour when he was at Munster Square, the
radical Anglo-Catholic priest, Charles Latimer Marson, broke with his close
friend of Stewart Headlam when he publicly supported Oscar Wilde, declaring,
“I am all for building the new
Jerusalem, but not for wading through Sodom and Gomorrah first.” In
Oxford, the council of the Apollo Lodge solemnly erased Oscar Wilde’s name
from their records (10), and more generally Oscar Wilde was erased by society
as a whole from ‘the Book of Life’, and sentenced, at least in the
short-term, to oblivion. |
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But whilst every effort was carefully made to
erase the very name of the miscreant, the compilers of the Clergy List for
Kelly’s Directories were confronted with a rather surprising conundrum in
1906, the entry for Oscar Wade Wilde, who clung steadfastly to his adopted
name. |
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What’s
in a Wilde? |
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Why go to so much bother to conceal and
transform your identity? Why bother to make outlandish claims? And faced with
other possibilities for inventing renowned contemporary relations, why choose
Oscar Wills Wilde? |
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In a sense, the answer to the first question
almost confirms the appropriateness of Oscar Wade Wilde’s invention. The
practice of identity deception and the concealment of lowly family origins
are Wildean literary motifs. The Wilds of Rickmansworth were a successful and
respected family from a rural back-water, but there was nothing of which
Oscar Wade need have been ashamed, with the possible exception of his elder
brother’s rather sad demise. Even that was ‘in the best possible taste’ in
the majestic surroundings of Virginia Water. Moreover, his brother’s illness
appears to have begun after Oscar Wade’s Oxford days. |
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The answer to the second question is probably
linked to the insecurity which Oscar Wade felt, faced by the massed ranks of
the Public Schools at Oxford. The 1891 directory of Oxford graduates was
compiled from the matriculation registers of the university, and the entry
for Oscar Wade Wilde, the curate of Pimlico, (11) follows on directly from
the entry for Oscar Wills Wilde, “professor
of aesthetics and art critic”. If Oscar Wilde did consult that directory,
he would thus definitely have been aware of the existence of Oscar Wade
Wilde, but not necessarily of his claims to kinship. When Oscar Wade Wilde
matriculated in 1879, using the revised spelling of his surname, the real
Oscar Wilde was in the first flourish of his success, the winner of the
Newdigate Prize and an ideal hero for an innocent Fresher who would only have
known of the success, and not of the gossip, which was attached to Wilde’s
name when he left Oxford. |
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Did Oscar Wade and his younger brother choose
the Wilde family professions of medicine and the church simply to cover their
tracks? Certainly not. Did Oscar Wade plan to serve in Pimlico, in the shadow
of Oscar Wilde, and including one of Wilde’s own friends as one of his
parishioners? Most probably not. It was simply one of those amazing
coincidences which allowed Oscar Wade to further develop his own personal
myth (one can almost hear Oscar Wade regaling his guests over sherry in later
life: “I remember Beardsley saying me
to one Sunday after Mass …”). The mental illness of Oscar Wade’s brother
does beg the question of a streak of family mental instability of one form or
another; but on the other hand, the determined and systematic nature of the
deception over so many years, in the face of serious controversy and social
adversity, and with the collusion of his own family, suggests that Oscar Wade
remained largely the master of his own game. Moreover, Oscar Wade’s
assertions place him firmly within the tradition of the glorious eccentrics
who populated the Anglo-Catholic Ritualist world, but also helped him to
stand out from this same crowd. A cousin of Oscar Wilde had rather more
cachet than a country boy who became a country vicar. |
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The third question, ‘Why choose Oscar Wilde?’,
may have a number of answers, ranging from the awe and insecurity of a new
undergraduate at Oxford, a love of literature and particularly poetry which
Oscar Wilde was producing during Oscar Wade’s Oxford years, or the
paradoxical desire ‘to fit in by standing out from the crowd’. However in his
search for an invented family relationship, Oscar Wade’s religious beliefs
may have ruled out an ‘aspiration’ to the other prominent Wilde family. |
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Whilst the Wildes of Dublin, and of Pimlico,
made the professions of the Established Church and Medicine their preferred
family careers, another family of Wildes was already distinguished in the
profession of the Law, and were centre-stage in the latter half of the 19th
century in the British political and religious controversies. Thomas Wilde
(1782-1858), later the 1st Lord Truro, made his name early in the 19th
century by defending Queen Caroline, the unfortunate and undesired wife of
George IV. After entering Parliament, he became Attorney-General, then Solicitor-General,
and finally Lord Chancellor from 1850 until |
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What precisely Oscar Wills Wilde would have, or
even did, make of Oscar Wade Wilde, is a matter of pure speculation. In one
important sense, Oscar Wills was hardly in a position to criticize or
complain. As the son of a noted family fantasist, a scion of the ‘Speranza’
dynasty which apparently had sprung from Dante, prone to ‘adapting’
incidental personal details such as one’s date of birth, his reactions might
have been measured on a scale which ran from mild amusement to admiration for
a consummate performer. Despite the random appearance of another Wade Wilde
in a family of Yorkshire wool weavers exiled in Lancashire in the mid-19th
century, there is nothing to support the idea that a member of the Wills
Wilde branch of the family wandered south from County Durham, lost an ‘e’ on
the end of his surname en route, and left the building trade to successfully
enter the worlds of farming, tanning and brewing in Rickmansworth at the end
of the 18th century, whilst continuing to pass on a tradition of family
history which allowed Oscar Wade Wilde to identify a genealogical link to the
Irish Wildes. Ultimately, however, Oscar Wills Wilde would probably have been
delighted by the emulation and deceit practised by his clerical namesake:
after all, if nothing else, it proved conclusively, ‘the vital importance of
being Oscar.’ |
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Note
1: See link |
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Abstract of Will of Thomas Wild the
elder of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire November 21 1808 IR 26/382 |
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Note
2: See http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cendexes/0438EDs.html
from the 1841 census |
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ED 7
Folios 16-27 Pages 1-23 560 persons Parish of
Rickmansworth (part of) PDF page 206 of 361 |
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Note
3: The Wilds were noted brewers, and owned or ran up
to ten pubs in and around Rickmansworth until 1900 when they sold their
brewing business. The brewery tap was at Mill End, the hamlet where Thomas
Wild, and later his son Alfred Wild and his family, lived. See Brewers in Hertfordshire
- Page 176. Allan Whitaker - 2006 - 304 pages |
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Note
4:
Source, wikipedia: “A currier
is a specialist in the leather processing industry. After the tanning
process, the currier applies techniques of dressing, finishing and colouring
to the tanned hide to make it strong, flexible and waterproof. The leather is
stretched and burnished to produce a uniform thickness and suppleness, and
dyeing and other chemical finishes give the leather its desired colour. After currying, the leather is then ready
to pass to the fashioning trades such as saddlery, bridlery, shoemaking and
glovemaking.” |
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Note
5: See The Gentleman's magazine - Page 647 1853 |
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At Rickmansworth, Herts,
John, youngest son of Thomas Leonard, esq. of Kingston-mi -Thames, to Mary,
third dau. of Thomas Wild, esq. of Rickmansworth |
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Note
6: See the following, |
Edward Cassey & Co.'s
History, Gazetteer and Directory of Berkshire and ... - Page 233
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Edward Cassey & Co,
Cassey Edward and co, Edward Cassey (Firm) - 1868 - 278 pages |
Kelly's Directory of the Leather
Trades - Page 123 1880
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Kelly's Directory of the Leather
Trades 1885
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Note
7: See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/A2A/records.aspx?cat=005-desb&cid=-1&Gsm=2008-06-18#-1 |
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Wills of Alfred Ernest Wild of
Rickmansworth, Herts, army and general boot and shoe manufacturer (1881), and
residing at Holloway's Sanatorium, Virginia Water, Surrey, 1888. D/ESB B175/1-2 1881,
1888 1 bdl, and Will of Alfred
Ernest Wild of Watford, Herts, contractor. D/ESB B176 1888
1 doc |
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Note
8: For details of the Holloway Sanatorium, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holloway_Sanatorium |
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Note
9: See http://homepage.ntlworld.com/philipg/saintives/memories.html |
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Note
10: See http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/beresiner8.html |
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Note
11: See Alumni Oxonienses: the members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886
... - Page 1553. University of Oxford, Joseph
Foster - 1891 |
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Wilde, Rev. Oscar Wade, 23. Alfred, of Windsor, gent. NoN-C'OLL.,
matric. n Oct. 1879, aged 21 ; a commoner ST. JOHN'S COLL. 1880, BA 1882. |
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Note 12: For details of Lord Truro and Lord Penzance,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wilde,_1st_Baron_Truro
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wilde,_1st_Baron_Penzance |
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