‘Duty before honour’: HMS Hood at Oran, Wednesday 3 July 1940

‘Duty before honour’: HMS Hood at Oran, Wednesday 3 July 1940

We have seen from our evocative post on 5 September that one of HMS Hood’s

last assignments before her loss in May 1941 was to destroy the French Fleet at

Oran in French Algeria. Despite Admiral François Darlan’s assurances that the

Axis* powers would never seize the Fleet, the British government were certain

that it would be deployed against the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean.

On 2 July James Somerville, commander of Taskforce H, was ordered to sail from

Gibraltar to the port of Mers-el-Kébir, with the flagship Hood, the battleships

Resolution and Valiant, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and an escort of cruisers

and destroyers.

The French commander Marcel-Bruno Gensoul refused to disarm or scuttle** the

Fleet, so Somerville opened fire at 5.55pm. Attacking from open water while the

French ships were trapped in the harbour, the taskforce fired 55 rounds; Hood

received two hits, causing minor shrapnel injuries.

The Swordfish*** aircraft launched from Ark Royal saw a ‘heavy and accurate’

French response, met with ‘steady and deliberate’ fire. The action ‘lasted for less

than 15 minutes, ... and the destruction ... was terrible’. The battleship Bretagne’s

magazine exploded, Gensoul’s flagship Dunkerque was hit four times, the

battleship Provence sank, and the destroyer Mogador had its stern blown off.

1297 French servicemen were killed and 350 injured; the taskforce lost two

crewmen and five aircraft. The battleship Strasbourg escaped to Toulon, but was

scuttled in November 1942.

An action against men and ships who were technically neutral and had worked

closely with Hood and her crew, though imperative, was felt to be contentious.

Somerville called it a ‘tragedy ... [of which] we all feel thoroughly ashamed’; he

wrote to his wife: ‘my heart wasn’t in it and you’re not allowed a heart in war.’

*The Axis powers allied against the UK were Germany, Italy and Japan.

**To scuttle a ship is to deliberately sink it.

***The Fairey Swordfish was a fabric-covered torpedo bomber biplane, looking

like a fragile dragon-fly but a key actor in the loss of Bismarck on 27 May 1941.

Thanks are due to The Daily Chronicles of World War II, ‘British Justify

Destruction of French Fleet at Mers-el-Kébir’, https://ww2days.com/royal-navy-

destroys-french-fleet.html; to the HMS Hood Association, for Sub-Lieutenant R.G.

Phillips’ account of the battle and Appendix No. 1 to Hood Report No. 0130, 5 July

1940, http://www.hmshood.org.uk/history/forceh/oran.htm; and to Thomas

Parker, ‘When Winston Churchill Bombed France: The Battle of Mers-el-Kébir’,

The National Interest 13 August 2016. Ronald Phillips was Paymaster on Hood

and died with Keith Peel when the ship was lost.

Skinner in Noordwijk

 

Jaren na de eerste bijdragen  over de leerlingen van de  in Noordwijk gevestigde Kostschool van de Jozeph de Veer in deze Blog Zijn er fondsen vrijgekomen om een gedegen onderzoek in te stellen naar de tijd dat hij als leerling zijn in  Noordwijk  genoten opleiding in zijn dagboek beschreef.

Years after the first contributions about the students of the Jozeph de Veer Boarding School in Noordwijk in this Blog, funds have been released to conduct a thorough investigation into the time when he described his education in Noordwijk in his diary. 

Violet Mona and Reginald Peel: An Indian Life and Afterwards

 Violet Mona and Reginald Peel: An Indian Life and Afterwards

We know Violet Peel as the second wife of Reginald Peel; their story exemplifies

the English families who lived, worked, and died under the British Raj (colonial

rule).

Violet’s expression on the blog* is resolute:, ready to cope with the climate, the

wildlife and the daily fear of malignant disease. Raj officers’ wives are now

parodied as ‘memsahibs’, flaunting their ‘white privilege’ but that, even if true,

was no defence against the privations of a posting to India, Malaya or some other

outpost of the empire.

Violet and her twin sister Flossy (Florence) May were born in October 1897 to

George Grant, an Army accountant, in the cantonment (barracks) in Coloba, one

of the seven islands in the Bombay Presidency.** Her other siblings were born

wherever her father was stationed – George, Gibralter (1893); Arthur,

Ahmednager in Maharashtra (1895); twins Henry and Albert, Ajmer in Rajasthan

(1903). Ajmer Junction was also an important railway hub, where Reginald Peel

worked and where his eldest son died.

Reginald’s life typified how India could both give and take away. He married

Frances Maude Vlieland in June 1906; his first son Francis was born in March

1907, and died in Ajmer that November at nine months old. Frances died of

malignant malaria, a condition of pregnancy, in Wellington Mansions, Fort

Bombay, in February 1914, aged just 29. There was no birth in 1912 or 1913, so

there may have been an unrecorded stillbirth or miscarriage.

Reginald’s was an ‘old’ Indian family. He was born in 1873 in Moradabad in

Bengal and (like his father Nathaniel) was a comptroller (auditor/accountant) on

the BB&CI.*** Headquartered in Churchgate in Bombay (now Mumbai), his work

could take him 500 miles away to Ajmer and Sirwi (now Sirui), where Barbara,

his third child, was born in November 1911. Reginald’s second son, Clifford, born

in December 1908 and never in India, was named after Reginald’s own younger

brother, who lived for only a month after his birth in Bengal in 1874.

Reginald would have shared social and professional circles with George Grant

and his family in Ajmer and Bombay. In June 1916, he came home to announce

his engagement to his parents-in-law, Charles and Alice Vlieland. Whether it

was a conciliatory or a bitter interview, while the marriage took place in Naini

Tal, Bengal, in September, Clifford and Barbara did not go with him.****

Reginald had five sons in his ‘second family’: Keith (b. 1917, who we have just

met on the blog), Clarence (b. 1919), John (b. 1923), Laurence (b. 1927) and

Michael (b. 1929). The eldest three sons were born in Bengal, so Reginald must

have been posted to the ABR or the EBR network; ***** the gap in births between

Clarence and John and John and Laurence may again mean infant deaths

Now the picture becomes less clear, and if any descendant families can help to

complete it, please contact the blog.

Violet and Reginald left India some time after John’s birth in 1923, settling in a

rural village in West Sussex, where Laurence and Michael were born. In 1937,

Violet took a lease on 19A Eaton Place, a beautiful John Nash-built terrace

running down to the sea in the ‘old India hand’ quarter of Brighton around

Eastern Road. Reginald died there aged 64 in January 1938, and Keith was

probably married from the flat later in the year.

Violet died in 1992 aged 94. She married Horace George Wood in 1945; he died

in 1957, so Violet was widowed again after 12 years of marriage. Her brothers

Henry died in 1964 and George in 1970, her sons Keith in 1941, John in 1985

and Clarence in 1986. John deserted from the Army and was imprisoned for

stealing when on the run in 1948, aged only 25, possibly triggered by Keith’s

death. We are still investigating the Surrey Assizes’ records, so may know more

later.

*14 August 2013.

**Violet and Flossy were born into a city suffering the worst outbreak of plague

in Mumbai’s history. We shall make a separate post on how the outbreak

changed the city and the lives of everyone who lived there.

***BB&CI = Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian Railway.

****One explanation is that Reginald did not want to burden the 19-year-old

Violet with a 4- and 7-year old stepchild and was happy to leave them with their

grandparents. The other is that Charles and Alice were totally opposed to

abandoning their grandchildren, and especially Clifford, to Violet’s care in India,

and Reginald acceded.

***** ABR = Assam Bengal Railway; EBR = Eastern Bengal Railway.

Death in Bombay

 Death in Bombay, 1897

We have seen that Violet and Flossy Grant were born in the army cantonments

in Coloba, one of the seven islands of the Bombay Presidency, at the height of one

of the worst outbreaks of bubonic plague known in the city.

The British Raj (colonial) government wanted Bombay to be the first city of

India, second only to London, with its Gothic architecture and historic

monuments such as the Victoria Railway Terminus and St Thomas Cathedral in

the centre of the city.

But this was a façade, a showcase city built on a tiny cluster of low-lying islands

facing the sea. There was a small elite overclass and an impoverished working

population in the mills and the docks living in chawls (tenenents) built on badly

drained unpaved ground, often with stagnant water standing in the streets. The

plague infection, spread by flea-carrying rats in grain and other goods traded

from Hong Kong, arrived in Mandvi and Coloba in September 1896 and quickly

took hold throughout the city, with a death rate estimated at 61% by 1898.

George Grant, Reginald Peel’s father-in-law, would have been at the forefront

of the Army response, quarantining. disinfecting and segregating the lower-class

population, removing them to temporary hospitals and ‘plague camps’ and

razing the chawls to the ground in an attempt to cut off the rats’ breeding

grounds. This was in most cases an overkill response to an environmental

‘enemy’ that could not be beaten without an upgraded drainage and sewage

infrastructure, and since similar draconian measures were not applied in the

European districts, there was strong social discontent.

The government response was also hampered by religious tensions: the Jain

merchants and Muslim traders around the Mandvi port were opposed on

religious grounds to the killing of any animal, including rats, and eradication was

almost impossible in these districts.

George Grant’s wife Mary was pregnant from February to October 1897, while

also caring for the 4-year-old George, Jr and 2-year-old Arthur; although they and

Violet survived there is still a question mark over Flossy, who does not appear in

the photographs of the Grant family on the blog of 24 August 2013.

Acknowledgements are due to Cynthia Desmukh, Proceedings of the Indian

History Congress, 49, 1988, and Nadia Nooreyezdan, Atlas Obscura, 14 May 2020,

for some of the material in this post.

Hood and Resolution in Oran

6 juli 1940 | Nieuwe Leidsche Courant | pagina 2 Uit Algeciras wordt aan het D. N. B. ge meld, dat aan den overval op de Fransche oorlogsschepen in Oran hebben deelgenomen de Engelsche slagschepen Hood en Resolution, benevens .nog een linieschip en ... . Achter de Scharnhorst* en de Gneisenau waren de dreigende silhouetten van de Bismarck en Von Tirpitz verrezen.

July 6, 1940 | Nieuwe Leidsche Courant | page 2 From Algeciras it is reported to the D.N.B. that the English battleships Hood and Resolution took part in the raid on the French warships in Oran, in addition to another ship of the line and ... . Behind the Scharnhorst* and the Gneisenau the menacing silhouettes of the Bismarck and Von Tirpitz had risen.

the relationship between Jerome Nicholas Hollander and a Noordwijk skipper Jeroen Klaaszoon Vlieland

Al vele jaren gaat ons onderzoek naar de relatie tussen Jerome Nicholas Hollander en een Noordwijkse Schipper Jeroen Klaaszoon Vlieland, schipper op een bomschuit, die de veerdienst onderhield en zo in een regelmatige lijndienst, post en passagiers overbracht naar het aan overkant van de Noordzee liggende plaatsje Topsham (Verenigd Koninkrijk). Wie helpt ons aan de oplossing van dit vraagstuk. Duik in de Blog. Is het misschien uiteindelijk de uitgave van de rijke kostschool Puber John Skinner ........Wordt het een zaak voor "Opsporing Verzocht" of.......de (leef)tijd dringt. Help mee het onderzoek na meer dan 12 decennia definitief op te lossen.

For many years now, our research has been on the relationship between Jerome Nicholas Hollander and a Noordwijk skipper Jeroen Klaaszoon Vlieland, skipper on a bomb barge, who maintained the ferry service and thus transferred mail and passengers to the town on the other side of the North Sea in a regular service. Topsham (United Kingdom). Who will help us to solve this problem. Dives into the Blog. Is it perhaps ultimately the publication of the rich boarding school Adolescent John Skinner ........ Will it be a case for "Opsporing Verzocht" or ....... the (age) time is running out. Help solve the research after more than 12 decades.......

The Old Ship Hotel, HMS Hood and the Battle of the Denmark Strait

Thanks to Barbara for this contribution. The Old Ship Hotel, HMS Hood and the Battle of the Denmark Strait What connection could there be between the oldest hotel in Brighton, the British battlecruiser HMS Hood, and a naval engagement in May 1941? The connection is Reginald Keith Peel, who has deep family links in our Vlieland story. Named after his father but always called ‘Keith’, he was the eldest son of Reginald Peel by his second marriage, his first being to Frances Maude, eldest daughter of Charles James and Alice Edith Vlieland. HMS Hood was launched at John Brown & Co.’s shipyard on the river Clyde in Scotland on 22 August 1918. The largest in the world at the time, she was built for speed, but this sacrificed the protection of her armaments. In July 1940, she helped to destroy the French ships in the harbour of Mers-El-Kébir, to deny Germany the use of the fleet. She next deployed in Scapa Flow, off the Orkney Islands, escorting British merchant convoys bringing in vital supplies from America under German U-boat attack. By then over 20 years old, a refit to strengthen her decks and protect her vulnerable magazine (ammunition store) had to be cancelled in 1939. On 24 May 1941, she engaged with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. A 15- inch shell from Bismarck hit Hood’s magazine containing 100 tons of cordite explosive: she blew up, split in half and sank in 3 minutes, with the loss of 1418 crew, including Keith, Assistant Steward on the ship. Keith enlisted in October 1940 and joined Hood in February 1941. He is named on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial and in the Hood Chapel in St John the Baptist Church at Boldre in the New Forest, the family church of Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, who was also lost: Ted Briggs, one of only three of the crew to survive, had a last sight of Holland sitting in his chair in stunned dejection as his ship disintegrated around him The Old Ship Hotel on Brighton seafront was first recorded as The Shippe as early as 1559, and by the 1760s was the most fashionable venue in the town. Archie Graham (husband of Barbara Vlieland Peel), always took a room when he was playing the Theatre Royal. Keith joined the hotel at 18 in 1935, and learned the etiquette of the sommelier’s trade (how to choose wine and glasses and present them at the table), bringing up bottles from the cavernous cellars with their smugglers’ passages leading to the sea. On Hood, he would have been assigned to serve at table in the messroom or officers’ quarters and maintain ‘discipline’ in his onboard ‘hotel’. Although it is now lost, a brass plaque in the Old Ship’s foyer honoured all the hotel staff killed in the two World Wars, so Keith was remembered there as well. Some of the material in this post draws on that by Barbara Smith (Keith’s daughter) on 25 August 2013. Ted Briggs’ memories come from David Mearns and Rob White, Hood and Bismarck(2002)

The Bridge Inn in Topsham

Did Jeroen Aldertsz Vlieland and his crew drink in The Bridge Inn in Topsham. 

The Bridge Inn in Topsham, the port where we know that Jeroen Aldertsz Vlieland traded as a master mariner, has just had its heritage listing upgraded by Historic England because of its remarkable interior, including a stonefireplace, a salt cupboard, a hatch through which ale was served and a malthouseat the back to brew its own beer, with a large brewing chimney and the remainsof the stone floor where the hops were spread out to dry, just like William Millenwould have had at Syndale Farm. Standing on Bridge Hill, the building was mentioned in the Domesday Book, butflourished as public house especially after 1797, and Jeroen would certainly haveknown it. Built of local stone and cob (compacted clay and straw), it had its ownquay and salt refinery (see below). 

We know how important Topsham was in the wool and cloth trade, but the ships that brought back cod fish to the port fromNewfoundland from the 1640s until the early 1700s supported local work for carpenters, rope-makers, coopers (barrel-makers) and chandlers (candle-makers), all of which was lost during the conflicts with Spain and Holland and then the Napoleonic Wars.

Salt was vital to preserve the Newfoundland catch while it was being transportedback to Devon in the ship’s hold and then to cure it before it, and local-caughtsalmon, were transported to up-country buyers. The marshlands around Topsham had been mined for salt from medieval times: in 1836, the town’s Saltworks was auctioned as a going concern at the Salutation Inn, along with 2 acres of land, the quay and ’two neat dwellings’.

 

The salty sea-water from themarsh land was collected in massive shallow iron pans and the liquid evaporated above a furnace so that the crystals were left as sediment, shovelled into woodenblocks by a ‘lumpman’, and then dried and raised to the first-floor warehouse bya ‘loftman’ for sale. Even as late as the 1950s in England you could go to agrocer’s shop and buy a slice off a salt block and grate it into grains at home. Salt was also a valuable trade item, taxed heavily by the government Board of Excise. For domestic use, it was so expensive that it was kept in a stone salt cupboard or hand-made wooden salt-box, often with a lock and key, and hung by the fire so the grains could be kept dry and free from mould, and just a tiny spoonful used for cooking or at meals. In wealthier households, the salt-spoons themselves were part of the family silver, made by firms such as Thomas Eustace of Exeter, with a scallop-shaped bowl and an engraved handle In New England states such as Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the settlers from England in the 1630s built ‘salt-box houses’, mimicking the shape of their salt-box from home, with one slope of the roof much lower than the other to protect the house from snow or extreme heat.

Thanks to Barbara for her lovely contribution 

A BIG VLIELAND CONNECTION

Ospringe: a small village in Kent with a big Vlieland connection Ospringe – originally known as ‘Ospringes’ because of the ‘water lane’ of springs that ran through it, was a hamlet named in The Domesday Book that, although both rural and remote, had surprisingly many connections to our Vlieland story. The next door-parish was Syndale, the estate farmed by William Millen and where Alice Edith Millen and her younger sister Bertha, grew up. Alice Edith, as we know, married Charles James Vlieland of Stalisfield, two miles away; Bertha married Herbert Samuel Shove of Queen’s Court, the mansion originally owned by Margaret, the wife of King Edward I, and the ‘big house’ in Ospringe. Until his early death at 35, in 1889, Herbert Samuel and William Millen were in partnership to work farms in nearby Plumford and Luddenham. In 1877, though still in his early 20s, Herbert helped to support the Vlieland children when Jerome Nicholas Vlieland died and his children and second wife Ann literally ‘lost their living’, as the vicarage passed to the new incumbent and they were turned out on the street. Bertha was born in 1865, married to the 31-year old Herbert in June 1885, and widowed four years later, a month after her mother Phoebe Millen’s own death. Alice Edith’ third daughter Phoebe was born at Queen’s Court in January 1888, and christened at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in the village. Why Phoebe was not born in Exeter, like her elder sisters Frances and Dorothy, is not clear, but maybe Alice came to help with Bertha’s young family – Herbert William b. July 1886 and Gerald Frank b. November 1887 – when Bertha was only 21 and 22. Her third son, Ralph Samuel, was born in May 1889, only a month before Herbert Samuel’s death. Herbert William Shove, Bertha’s eldest son, was the best man at the wedding of Frances Vlieland in Exeter in April 1906; we know from the blog that he was a decorated naval officer and later prominent in the ‘Flee to the Fields’ movement in 1918–39 that lobbied the government to create a land reform to give every smallholder farmer his own plot of land, not tied to a landowner as a ‘tenant slave’. Bertha and Herbert Samuel are both buried in the beautiful 13th-century church in Water Lane; in Victorian times a ‘hop garden’ lined the path to the church. Hop flowers (known as ‘cones’) are crucial for brewing beer. The hop plants climb 19- foot high chestnut-wood poles on strings of twine, trained on the frame by ‘monkeys’, men walking on stilts, as has been done since the 15th century. The harvest is picked by hand, and the hops added to the boiling process to add bitterness, flavour and stability to the brew. We know all about William Millen as a sheep farmer, but the family now farming at Syndale have records going back to his time as a hop-grower as well, so we may have a whole new story to tell. Thanks to BARBARA,

WHAT JOHN GREENE HALL DID NEXT

What John Greene Hall did next:

 We know that in 1867 John designed Aucher Villas, the almshouses where Sarah Ann Vlieland spent the last 25 years of her life. It was his first big commission, as he had become Canterbury city surveyor the year before, aged only 31. John was born in Hampshire in 1835 and apprenticed to his father Thomas as a cabinet maker. He studied for his RIBA1 examinations and rose to be managing clerk of Colsons, architects of the major restoration of Winchester Cathedral in the early 1860s: the influence of the Cathedral’s turrets and flat-faced gables is all over hislater work on Hammond’s Bank (see below). In his 20 years in Canterbury, he transformed the city streetscape and, in 1882, built a narrow, brick-banded office for himself at no. 4 St Margaret’s Street. In 1887, he was commissioned to rebuild no. 51, Hammond & Co., the Canterbury Bank, founded in 1788 (now Lloyds Bank). Although he died before it was finished, it is his finest work, and if you know Aucher Villas you can clearly see his ‘hand’, even if the bank is more ‘civic’ and less Art & Crafts-inspired. The bank’s red ‘Bracknell’ brick2 and pale stone frontage has the same oriel windows, quatrefoil cutouts on the lintels and a whole course of ‘gothic’ gables, and the ‘AD’ and ‘1887’ date stones are entwined with stylisedfruit and foliage. The turreted chimney stacks also reference St Alban’s Court in Nonington, the nearby ancestral home of the Hammond family, directors of the bank since the 1800s, but they make the frontage look cramped and cluttered compared to the simple outlines of Aucher Villas. St Alban’s Court was originally a convent dedicated to the first English martyr, killed under Roman rule and buried in St Albans Abbey outside London. One can see its ‘Romanesque’ features in The London and County Bank (now NatWest Bank) that John built in 1885 at no. 11 The Parade, a beautiful rag3 and Bath stone ‘palazzo’ with broad flat window lintels and heavy rounded ‘aedicule’ columns.4 Was this a quiet doffing of the cap to his patron that got him the Hammond’s Bank commission 2 years’ later? 1 Royal Institute of British Architects. 2 The ‘TLB’ trademark stamped on the high-end bricks John used stood for ‘Thomas Lawrence of Bracknell’, whose bricks were also used in Westminster Cathedral and the Royal Albert Hall, machine-made for standard walls and hand-pressed (with their own number in the brick) for an individual design. In Hammond’s they were laid in the ‘English Bond’ pattern, with one course or row of bricks laid on their side (stretchers) and the one below end-on (headers). 3 Rag stone is a blue-grey limestone, quarried in Maidstone, 30 miles from Canterbury. 4 ‘Romanesque’ architecture flourished between 900 and 1200, using massive stone arches and arcades. An ‘aedicule’ was originally a niche in a wall holding a saint’s statue; at no. 11 they are small top-floor windows,sharing the fashion after the 1860s for commercial premises to look like an Italian ‘palace’. Thanks are due to The Victorian Web for their post on the restoration of Winchester Cathedral under John Colson (2009); the Canterbury Historical and Archeological Society for information on Hall’s background and work in Canterbury (2015); John Harrison for his information on Thomas Lawrence; and particularly Martyn Fretwellhttps://ukbricks.blogspot.com for the ‘Bracknell’ brick and other help. I am also indebted to SherbanCantacuzino’s Canterbury (Studio Vista, 1970). Very many thanks are also due for the picture of Hammond’s Bank to the two friends of the blog who photographed the graves of Jerome Nicholas and Sarah Vlieland in 2010. Sent from my iPad

 Thanks to Barbara 

intriguing suggestion  we like to learn more about :

 Another ship called L’Espérance

We know that Jeroen Aldertz Vlieland ran the Rotterdam to Topsham and Rotterdam to Perth trips on his ship, L’Espérance (Hope), but an even more famous ship bore that name before her.

This was a French scow (fully rigged wide-beamed sailing dinghy) of the Rhône class of the French navy, launched in August 1781 and reclassified as a frigate (noted for speed and quick movement) 10 years later. Built in Toulon in 1780, her original name was Durance (Durability), and she served as a troop ship in the squadron of the Compte de Grasse until, in December 1782, she  joined a convoy to the West Indies, part of an unsuccessful plan to capture Jamaica and the British colony of the Windward Islands.

L’Espérance is next heard of  in September 1791 when, under Captain Huon de Kermadec, she sailed from Brest to New Caledonia  to search for Jean-François de la Pérouse, an explorer sponsored by King Louis XVI to emulate (and outdo) Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery. Pérouse’s two ships were last seen in the area of Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia, but then vanished without trace, although some wreckage was found in 1826.

In October 1793, L’Espérance was anchored off Surabaya in Indonesia when she was captured by the Dutch. She was returned to France in February 1794; in September, she was sold to Holland and in October decommissioned and broken up for scrap.

Did Jeroen name his ship after this famous ancestor?

Thanks are due to Military Wiki for some of the information in this post.

In search of L’Espérance (Hope) that failed to reach Jamaica

Thanks to Barbara 

intriguing suggestion  we like to learn more about :

 Another ship called L’Espérance

We know that Jeroen Aldertz Vlieland ran the Rotterdam to Topsham and Rotterdam to Perth trips on his ship, L’Espérance (Hope), but an even more famous ship bore that name before her.

This was a French scow (fully rigged wide-beamed sailing dinghy) of the Rhône class of the French navy, launched in August 1781 and reclassified as a frigate (noted for speed and quick movement) 10 years later. Built in Toulon in 1780, her original name was Durance (Durability), and she served as a troop ship in the squadron of the Compte de Grasse until, in December 1782, she  joined a convoy to the West Indies, part of an unsuccessful plan to capture Jamaica and the British colony of the Windward Islands.

L’Espérance is next heard of  in September 1791 when, under Captain Huon de Kermadec, she sailed from Brest to New Caledonia  to search for Jean-François de la Pérouse, an explorer sponsored by King Louis XVI to emulate (and outdo) Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery. Pérouse’s two ships were last seen in the area of Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia, but then vanished without trace, although some wreckage was found in 1826.

In October 1793, L’Espérance was anchored off Surabaya in Indonesia when she was captured by the Dutch. She was returned to France in February 1794; in September, she was sold to Holland and in October decommissioned and broken up for scrap.

Did Jeroen name his ship after this famous ancestor?

Thanks are due to Military Wiki for some of the information in this post.

AN EARLY ROOF TILES CONNECTION

It is an article recently published in "Het Leidsche Dagblad" and the lovely shape of the roof tiles  showed  that intriges .

#VVDW: rare Oegstgeester roof tiles

Rare scale-shaped roof tiles found during the demolition of a cafe in Oud Ade. These are so-called Oegstgeester roof tiles from ca. 1868. A machine product made between 1852 and 1907 by a roof tile factory from Oegstgeest. The archives of both Oegstgeest and Leiden contain documents about this roof tile factory along the Rhine.

The text NIJVERHEID OEGSTGEEST is stamped on one of the roof tiles, a reference to the manufacturer. Roof tile factory 'De Nijverheid'  ( * "The Industry)  made such roof tiles between 1852 and 1907, on the current Wernink site on the Rhine. At the time, that was still part of Oegstgeest. The archives of both Oegstgeest and Leiden contain documents about this roof tile factory, including some hitherto unknown photos. The Oegstgeest archive has been with Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken since 1 January

 #VVDW: zeldzame Oegstgeester dakpannen

Zeldzame schubvormige dakpannen gevonden bij sloop van een café in Oud Ade. Het gaat om zogenaamde Oegstgeester dakpannen uit ca. 1868. Een machinaal product gemaakt tussen 1852 en 1907 door een dakpannenfabriek uit Oegstgeest. De archieven van zowel Oegstgeest als Leiden bevatten stukken over deze dakpannenfabriek langs de Rijn.

Op een van de dakpannen staat de tekst NIJVERHEID OEGSTGEEST gestempeld, een verwijzing naar de producent. Dakpannenfabriek ‘De Nijverheid’ maakte dergelijke dakpannen tussen 1852 en 1907, op het huidige Werninkterrein aan de Rijn. Dat hoorde destijds nog bij Oegstgeest. De archieven van zowel Oegstgeest als Leiden bevatten stukken over deze dakpannenfabriek, waaronder enkele tot nu toe onbekende foto’s. Het archief van Oegstgeest bevindt zich sinds 1 januari bij Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken.

Dutch bricks and Serge cloth, blue flax and cheese.

 Jeroen Aldertszoon Vlieland and the Rotterdam to Topsham trade

Dutch bricks and serge cloth, blue flax and cheese

Dear Barbara, a lot of thanks for inform the J.N.Vlieland BLOG  by inform us about this article as well"Thanks are due to David Cornforth for information on Exeter’s woollen industry, © Exeter Memories 24 January 2013.

We know that Jeroen Vlieland (stepfather of Jerome Nicholas Vlieland the elder) was one of the foremost sailing masters on the Rotterdam to Topsham crossing, until he was made a prisoner of war in 1811, when his ship L’Esperance was sold and his family settled in Great Yarmouth. But what drove such shipmasters to brave the trip from the delta of the  Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt rivers into the North Sea, through the Straits of Dover and a further 250 miles along the English Channel to South Devon and the sheltered harbour at Topsham?

 

The answer from the Devon end of the trade was woollen cloth. Originally, this was kersey, a coarse lower-grade material used to make clothing for servants and the poor, but after about 1615 a finer-quality serge cloth began to be produced from the long-fibre fleeces of Devon and Somerset sheep. The woollen merchants of Exeter, members of the Guild of Fullers, Tuckers and Shearmen, controlled the purchasing of fleeces at local markets, sending them for carding and combing, spinning into yarn and then weaving into cloth. We know that ‘rackfields’ were set up in the back alleys of the town, where the finished serge was hung out to dry on ‘tenterhooks’, reaching from attic to attic across the street. It was said that ‘mixed serges’ from both Exeter and Tiverton, 15 miles inland, ‘clothed the people of the Low Countries’ until the fashion for lighter cloth and the growth of textile-making in Holland itself caused the trade to fail.

 

When the French imposed punitive import tariffs in the 1680s, Devon merchants began shipping their goods by Rotterdam masters. What came back to Devon on  Jeroen’s ship, The Topsham Post, was common and fine cheese, scrap iron and wooden hoops, possibly for use in cooperage. A bill of lading from Alexander Paul’s wharf on the North Shore at Perth shows that he also carried the unspun fibres of the blue flax plant, in ’20 heads’ or bundles, so he clearly made another a regular run up the North Sea to the River Tay, where weaving fine-spun linen from flax was a centuries-old craft.  When L’Esperance was sold in Rotterdam in 1811, her cargo included French salt, cyder, brandy and aquafortis – nitric acid, used in explosives, dyes and inks.

 

Especially on the trip to Devon, when the cargo might be lightweight, Jeroen’s ship would have had ‘Dutch bricks’ as ballast to stop it keeling over in high winds. These were hard, light-coloured clay, dug from the banks of the Waal, Rhine and IJssel rivers, mixed with sand, and finally shaped into ‘raw stones’ that were then oven-fired. Several houses on the Strand in Topsham along the Exe estuary are made of these bricks, with shapely curved and hipped klokgevels (clock gables) on their roofs, showing how deep the ‘Dutch connection’ was.

 

We have now found more about Jeroen as a shipping master, since our original post on 19 October 2009; our post on the Exeter rackfields was on 21 June 2016.

Thanks are due to David Cornforth for information on Exeter’s woollen industry, © Exeter Memories 24 January 2013.