To have a large family in Georgian and Victorian times is something of a regular occurrence, but I should imagine that to have fathered two large families in succession, so that the births ran into the twenties would be somewhat unusual.  Such is the lot of my great great great grandfather, the Reverend Oliver Lodge.

The first family were all born in Ireland of Oliver’s second wife Anna Butler (his first wife Dorcas Crommie died childless shortly after marriage).  The second family were born to his third wife Anne Supple, and might well have been raised in Ireland had it not been for insecurity created by of the rising of 1798. 

My knowledge of Oliver’s first family is somewhat thin although some of them do appear in the English Census records, apparently following their father to England.  For the purposes of my story I shall start with Oliver’s second family.  Anne Supple and Oliver were married in Cashel in Ireland and enjoyed a brief time in Athy and Dublin, before deciding that Ireland was no longer a safe place to bring up a family.  Previously, Oliver had been curate of Kilcooly, Queen’s County, which sort of came with his

dowry in his first marriage to a wealthy landowner’s daughter, along with various lands and tenants.  The rebellion resulted in the murder of a neighbouring landowner, and Oliver was moved to allow the militia onto his land to find the perpetrators.  He, his family and his tenants were subject to much intimidation, and in the same rising, his brother was murdered by his father’s tenants. This caused the move to Athy and then to Dublin, but even then this was thought not to be secure enough for Oliver and his new bride.

He initially accepted a curacy in Deptford, before moving to Barking where he remained curate for many years.  It was here that many of the children of his second family were born.  What ever wealth Oliver had as the middle son of a wealthy farmer and landowner, and through his various marriages seems to have dissipated through his large family, and the pressure of living on the meagre means as a curate.  He tells a story remembering these times which is recorded at a parish meeting much later in life.

My own direct ancestor, Robert John Lodge was born in 1810 along with his twin Jeremiah as the second oldest in the family.  The first, Barton Lodge, was probably named after Joanna Barton, Oliver’s mother.  He also followed his father into the clergy, becoming in time rector of St Mary Magdalen Colchester.  From his record in Crockfords, he seems to have ranged as far away as Buenos Aires.  This kind of global roaming becomes a hallmark of the family, mirroring closely the fortunes of the British Empire.  It also provides the background from which my own branch of the family prospered. 

It seems the children were encouraged to make their own way in the world.  Robert John became involved with marine insurance becoming a secretary and later manager of the Marine Insurance Company in Broad Street.  His brother Jeremiah spent time as a Mathematics Master and became an Actuary, and continued in this profession even when he lost his sight in middle age.

It is known that Jeremiah was not the first child of this name born to Oliver Lodge.  Another Jeremiah died in infancy in the first family, so it appears that this was some kind of important family name.  Likewise the name Oliver was held onto tenaciously in a way that we would find strange today.  An Oliver died aged 22 in the Irish family, as well as

an infant first born of the second family.  Oliver senior’s twentieth child would also be called Oliver, and by way of justifying this dogged perseverance in the face of adversity, lived to some age in Staffordshire, himself fathering Oliver Joseph Lodge, perhaps the most famous descendent of this vast family.  Oliver Joseph was an academic, physicist, radio pioneer, inventor of the spark plug and founder of the society for Psychical research.

Older than the Staffordshire Oliver, but younger than their brothers Barton, Jeremiah and Robert John were the three brothers Francis Wilkins, Peter and Charles Lodge.  Peter, a mariner, died at sea according to tradition.  Francis Wilkins however continued the seafaring tradition as Captain of ships including the Eleanor Lancaster, assisting many Britons and Irish to emigrate to India, Australia and the Americas.  Indeed for a time he settled out there himself before returning to live in Manacan in Cornwall.  Charles was the medic of the family, studying for his MD at St Andrews University and becoming an MRCS.  He lived for some time in some comfort in the growing hamlet of Peckham before he too emigrated to New York and then Australia. 

A younger brother, Edward Thomas Lodge may well also have emigrated with his family sometime after the 1861 census as all are absent from the subsequent English records.  Whilst in Britain, he is down as a Stockbroker and Actuary.

The Clergy tradition was continued in the last of the sons, Samuel, who came to Lincolnshire as a curate teaching at the Grammar School in Louth and becoming Headmaster to the Grammar School in Horncastle.  He spent many years as Rector of Scrivelsby, and there wrote a history of his patrons the Dymokes, the Queen’s Champions.  He was also prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral.

The academic concerns of the family appear to have been significant.  The Revd. Oliver Lodge promoted Sunday schools within Barking as well as becoming headmaster of Barking School.  In time his labours as curate did not go unheeded and his parishioners wrote, recommending him for a benefice in his own right:

When we look back to the state in which our Parish was when our Reverend friend first came among us, in the vigour of his life, and contrast therewith its present condition, and in particular when we recollect that to his exertions in promoting religious education to the poor, the extraordinary increase in the number of children receiving gratuitous instruction in our Parish , from 40 to nearly 400, is mainly attributable, we cannot but regret, now that he is leaving us in his honourable old age, that we have not the means of alleviating the cares of his declining years, enhanced as we fear they must be by the claims of his numerous family.

Eventually he was installed as Rector of Elsworth, a rural parish in Cambridgeshire not far from Papworth.  It is here in 1841 as the census records begin that we at last find Oliver with his third wife Anne and their fifteen year old daughter Theodosia Louisa F (known as Fanny).

At the time of the 1841 census, many of the members of Oliver’s second family are well established in their own right.  The eldest, Barton was now 33 as a curate in Theydon Bois in Essex, married to Louisa Smee who was born in Bombay in India.  They are without children, and it appears that they remained this way.  Crockford’s tells us that in the next year he takes up a chaplaincy in Buenos Aires, from which he returns to appear in the census of 1851 as curate of St Mary Magdalen in Colchester.   At that time, he and his wife have a “protégé” Frederick Lewis Lodge aged 6 born in Buenos Aires.  I have yet to trace the story here, but Frederick seems to prosper, and by the time of the 1901 census he is a retired stock farmer living in Bedford with his own wife and three children, born in Uruguay.

The next eldest of Oliver’s children were the twins Jeremiah and my Great Great grandfather Robert John, born in 1810. In 1841 Jeremiah Lodge is unmarried, living in Greenwich up Royal Hill whereas Robert Lodge is living in Tredegar Square Stepney with his growing family.  This location would not be far from his work in the city as secretary to the Marine Insurance Company and close to the commercial centre of the Pool of London, where some £70,000,000 worth of merchandise were shipped and unshipped, making it very much the mercantile capital of the world at that time. 

Robert’s wife, Mary Ann was of the Soutter family who were ship owners in Shadwell and whose fortunes are interconnected with that of the Lodge family.  We can get some impression of Robert Lodge’s work from the entry in Boase’s Modern English Biography:

With further research it seems that the salvage of both the named ships involved gold.  The Royal Charter came to grief on its way back to Liverpool from the Australian goldfields in 1859.  Passengers who tried to jump into the sea with pockets filled with gold soon found that this was no aid to buoyancy and that they would have to relinquish their treasure or else follow it to the bottom. 

Likewise the Alphonso XII was a Spanish ship which sunk in 1885 off Grand Canary.   The recovery of the cargo of gold was more difficult, and the diver Alexander Lambert set a record for the depth of his dives, performing something of a superhuman effort in his work.

For 1841 and 1851 the next youngest brother Francis Wilkins Lodge is not to be found in the English census record.  At this period he was in the prime of his rather colourful maritime career.  It is particularly at this point that one should acknowledge the stirling efforts of family researchers whose families emigrated to the New World.  It is their accounts that shed the most light on this episode in the Lodge family. It would be useful here to pause my own account and insert unabridged the work that appears from the internet.

http://www.playford.info/playfordmain.html

Evidently this rather spectacularly unfortunate event did not curtail Francis Wilkins Lodge’s maritime career as the next record, again from the internet, shows him once more in the same trade.