James Lawrie (Laurie) Monfries

James Lawrie (Laurie) Monfries

We know James as the second husband of Charlotte Chamberlain and father of Charlotte Laura and Ann Monfries, but his career has great interest in its own right.

According to the page dedicated to him in The Western Mail of 13 January 1871, 

reporting his ‘awfully sudden’ death two days before, leaving ‘a numerous family, some of whom are very young’, he had for the previous five years been Superintendent of the Pwill-y-Pant mine in Caerphilly, South Wales, owned by Lord Bute, from where stone had been sent to build the new Penarth Dock that opened in 1865. We have another Cory/Monfries connection here, as it was Corys who saw that a new dock on the Ely tidal harbour would be ‘advantageous to shipowners’ and ‘lucrative to merchants’. They put money into the project and the steamer ‘The William Cory’ was the first ship the pass through the dock gates on the opening day, as cannon were fired and the crowd cheered. G. H. Andrews painted two beautiful water colour pictures in the same year, showing ships at anchor below Penarth Head Hill.

James’ career before that point is less certain. The Western Mail obituary has him employed, presumably also as Superintendent, at the ‘Duke of Somersetshire’s quarries in Devon’. These were the Bourton Hall and Afton Tor mines on the duke’s estate at Berry Pomeroy, near Totnes: unlike the stone quarries at Pwill-y-Pant, the Devonian limestone deposits were prized for architectural use, such as the cream and coral-banded stone in the Afton Red Rift mine or the pale and black-banded marble from Bourton Hall used for the floor in Exeter Cathedral. James must have worked there for only about two years, however, as we know he went to Pwill-y-Pant around 1866 and his youngest child Margaret was born in 1864 when he was still in the Channel Islands. The Western Mail says he had ‘for many years held an appointment on the Government Works’ in Guernsey, and we know that all his children (apart from his eldest son, James Alexander, who was born in Cherbourg) were born there over the previous nine years. He could have been employed to oversee work in the granite mines on the island, which grew significantly with the building boom in London in the 1860s and 1870s: Guernsey granite was used to build London Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Embankment and Strand in the capital. But ‘Government Works’ implies that he was working in the Engineers Department on the repair and upkeep of the extensive defences  – forts, gun batteries and coastal fortifications at Castle Cornet, the Clarence Battery and Fort Le Marchant – that had been erected during  the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to repel any invasion from France.

We know James, born of an old Scottish Family in Musselburgh outside Edinburgh in 1818, as ‘James Lawrie’, but his headstone in the ancient chapel of  St Martin in Caerphilly has ‘James Laurie’. On the assumption that Charlotte Laura, born in 1857, was the eldest surviving child, Charlotte Hall and James must have been married about 1855–1856; James would have been in his late 30s so might also have been a widower, or just deferred marriage until he was settled in his profession. The records showing his marriage in Calcutta may be an confusion with that of their daughter (Charlotte Laura) who certainly did marry Ernest Hall in India in 1880. We also do not know how their eldest son, James Alexander, came to die as a teenager in Cardiff in 1875; his death is recorded on his father’s headstone in Caerphilly. We do know that, like Richard Morgan, ‘he had a large heart, a generous disposition, and was universally esteemed by both his employers and the men over whom he exercised control’.

Thanks are due to The Western Mail of 13 January 1871, that gave us the skeleton from which we could build a life.

Thanks to Barbara for all this information!