You’ve seen this match result before. On board 5 we have Mr R Ganthony, a man with an unusual surname. It should be possible to find out more about him.

Unlike the other players we’ve seen, he was from Richmond, not Twickenham or Teddington, but there were three Mr R Ganthonys (Ganthonies?) of chess playing age in the household: Robert Davy Ganthony and his sons Robert junior and Richard.

A match the previous month, also against Acton, where he drew his game on board 3, gave his middle initial: Mr R D Ganthony, so that tells us it was the father who played chess for Twickenham.

If you come across an unusual surname you can do a one-name study. I’ve done a study of the surname Badby, for example. This name was relatively common in the Middle Ages but all but one branch died out, so if you have this name in your family tree at some point over the past 200 or 300 years you’re related to me!

It turns out that Robert Davy had a famous father and grandfather, as well as three famous children. Famous in their day, that is, but all (apart perhaps from his father) forgotten today.

The family were originally from Exeter (the earliest record available online dates back to 1662), but our branch moved to Bristol at the end of the 17th century.

The first important Ganthony was Joseph, born in Bristol in 1739, the son of Joseph and Susannah, a musician, whose work brought him to London in about 1766. He played the violin and double bass, and also composed popular songs, which would have been performed in the pleasure gardens of the day, and church music. When Hector Berlioz visited London in 1851 (did he also take the opportunity to visit the first international chess tournament while he was there?) he was moved to tears on hearing one of his hymn tunes. He was also a schoolmaster at St Giles’s Cripplegate School in the City of London. No death record has been found for him, but school records mentioning his name go up to 1785. You can read more about him – and even play one of his hymn tunes if you have a keyboard to hand – in the October 1 1903 issue of The Musical Times here.

Joseph married Elizabeth Davy in Bristol in 1762: they seem to have had a large family, although several of their children died in infancy. Our interest is in Richard Pinfold Ganthony, born in London in 1771.

Richard chose a different career, achieving fame and fortune as a manufacturer of clocks and watches. his pieces are very collectible today.

Here, for example, is a rosewood bracket clock, which sold for £2390 at Bonham’s in 2004. (Their information about the family, I believe, is incorrect: Richard Pinfold’s father was Joseph, not Richard, but it’s possible that Richard Pinfold’s son, another Richard, might have been apprenticed to him.)

This is a rare and beautiful clock barometer, made in about 1830. We’re told that Richard Pinfold Ganthony is listed in “Barometers Makers and Retailers 1660-1900 by Edwin Banfield: as a clock and chronometer maker at 63 Cheapside London between 1821 to 1845, he is considered as a good and important maker of his day…

This gold framed pocket chronometer manufactured in about 1815 (the frame has an 1814 hallmark) is described as a ‘very interesting timepiece’. Again, the source gets the two Richards confused, but we learn that he was apprenticed to Thomas Miles until 1794 and became a master in 1828. It fetched €4000 at a recent auction. We also learn that he moved from Lombard Street to nearby Cheapside at some point between 1815 and 1821.

Richard Pinfold Ganthony married twice, and seems to have had four children from each marriage. One of the sons of his first marriage, Richard Junior, may well have been apprenticed to him. He died in London in 1845, but a death record for Richard Junior doesn’t seem to be available.

His second marriage produced twin sons, Charles and Robert Davy. Charles disappeared after the 1841 census, but we know quite a lot about our man Robert Davy Ganthony.

In 1847 he married Caroline Henrietta Harvey in Paddington, and children were born there in 1849, 1851 and 1852. But in the 1851 census Robert is nowhere to be found. Caroline is unexpectedly in Caernarfon, on the North Wales coast, with 2-year-old Robert junior and baby Edith, described as an ‘artist’s wife (landscapes)’. Well, I guess there were a lot of good landscapes to paint there, with Snowdonia on one side and views across the Irish Sea to Anglesey on the other.

Marian was born back in London in 1852, but by the time of Emily’s arrival in 1854 (sadly she died the following year) they’d moved to Liverpool. The Liverpool Mercury of 3rd February featured an announcement from Mrs Brooks, widow of the late Mr John Brooks, that his practice would be taken over by ‘Mr Ganthony, a gentleman with great experience in every department of dental surgery, from London’. He’s no longer drawing landscapes (at least not professionally), but drawing teeth instead. Perhaps he’d studied dentistry in the 1840s, but took a break to work as an artist. A second son, named Richard after his grandfather, was born there in 1856, followed by Charles Alfred in 1859 and Kate in 1861.

By 1863, he appears to have retired from dentistry and moved to Richmond, where Ada was born that year, followed by his youngest child, Harry, in 1866. In the 1871 census Robert, Caroline and their eight surviving children are all living in Eton Lodge, in the town centre, close to the parish church. Robert Davy Ganthony has reverted to being an artist. Caroline is once again an artist’s wife, Robert and Richard (only 14) are both involved in clerical work, no occupation is listed for the two older girls, while the younger children are all at school. Their two servants, Elizabeth Smith and Rebecca Bull, had both been with the family a long time. Rebecca was working for them twenty years earlier in Wales, and they were both in the household in Liverpool ten years earlier.

By 1881 not a lot had changed. Robert senior was still an artist, and still married to Caroline. Also at home were the four youngest children, along with Robert Junior, now an actor and author, and his wife. Their faithful servant Rebecca Bull was still there as well. It was this stage of his life that saw his brief career in competitive chess: from his position in the Twickenham team he must have been a reasonably proficient player, and must have played socially most of his life.

In 1891 he was still in Richmond, now an artist and sculptor, with his wife and four of his children: Marian, a schoolteacher, Charles, a clerk, Ada, an actress and Harry, a macramé mat maker. Rebecca Bull had by now retired to a nearby almshouse and had been replaced by a young servant.

Caroline died the following year, but Robert was still going strong. In 1901 he was living with his daughter Marian, his unmarried sister Maria, and, again, a teenage servant.

Robert Davy Ganthony kept active to the end of his life. He was always a keen cyclist, although it’s not entirely clear whether it was he or his oldest son who had been fined for riding a velocipede along a public footpath back in 1869.

And then, in 1905, this happened.

An extraordinary story: what a way to go, and what a man he must have been.

(It seems that the streets of England at that time were full of elderly gentlemen named Robert suffering tricycle accidents. In August 1899, round about the time of his 76th birthday, Robert Padbury was thrown from his tricycle in Cox Street, Coventry. Although he was still in a critical condition he was sent home from hospital a few days later. He died the following March: it’s not known whether or not the accident was responsible for his death. How do I know this? Robert was my great great grandfather, and his name was originally Badby.)

It’s worth a look at three of his children. We’ve seen that Robert junior was an actor, dramatist and society entertainer, and that his daughter Ada, whose stage name was Nellie Ganthony, was also an actress. They were both very popular performers in the days of Music Halls.

Robert was nothing if not versatile. He wrote and performed comic songs, sketches and monologues (The Man with the Single Hair) in the fashion of the times, wrote textbooks on ventriloquism and performed conjuring tricks.

You can find a pdf of his book Bunkum Entertainments, which gives you a flavour of his act and, more generally, with the type of entertainment popular in his day, here and some of his monologues here.

Nellie started off in a double act with her brother before branching out on her own with her songs and ‘humorous, musical, & emotional sketches’.  She spent some time in North America in the mid 1890s, where she had a brief marriage to a wealthy barrister who was still married to someone else. On her return to England she married again, and continued her career until 1913, dying in 1952 at the age of 88.

Robert and Nellie’s brother Richard was a successful playwright, spending much of his time in the United States. His best known play was the 1899 comedy A Message from Mars, which was filmed three times in the silent movie era. His wife’s sister was the film star Marie Dressler.

So that was Robert Davy Ganthony, a man with some famous relations. A dentist, artist, cyclist, and, for a brief time, a Twickenham chessist.

Come back soon for another Minor Piece from Twickenham Chess Club.

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Last time I wrote about Oliver Harcourt Labone. Further research has revealed more information about his mother and both his (probable) biological and step-fathers, along with further coincidences. No chess, this time, I’m afraid, but some great stories.

Let’s start with Richard Austwick Westbrook. He was a solicitor, born in 1815: his father, also Richard, would, on at least two occasions, hit financial problems. He married in 1841 and had four children, but his wife died in 1852.

At that point he employed Anne Topley, the daughter of a canal agent from Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, as a governess for his children, bought another house and instructed her to bring up the children there while also running it as a boarding house. At some point, Richard and Anne started an affair. On 20 May 1854, an Arthur Westbrook, son of Richard Austwick and ‘Annette’ was baptised at St Mary’s Paddington, but there’s no matching birth record and no further evidence of him. On 18 May 1855 they married clandestinely at St Paul’s Hammersmith, and two sons were born: Rowland Martin in 1857 and Oliver Harcourt in 1858.

At some point things started to go wrong. Richard moved into lodgings with Janette Cathrey while Anne took an interest in one of the lodgers in her boarding house: a Greek merchant named Nicholas Demetrio who had moved there in 1857. It’s possible, I suppose, that Nicholas rather than Richard was Oliver’s biological father.

The Demetrio family, it seems, had been running dodgy businesses for years. The company was started by Nicholas’s father and seemed to involve his brother Antonio, perhaps another brother, Gregory, and possibly another brother as well. They apparently had branches in Trieste and Cairo as well as London and Liverpool. Looking at passenger lists of ships coming into England, there are various Demetrios there, including a Demetrio Antonio Demetrio, who might have been either Antonio or their father, claiming various nationalities including Italian and Austrian. It’s quite possible, as we’ll see, that they were using various pseudonyms as well, perhaps including Labone.

In August 1859, however, Demetrius Antonio di Demetrio was declared bankrupt, ‘having carried on business as a merchant, in the Greek trade, under the title of Messrs. A. di Demetrio and Sons. It’s not at all clear to me exactly how many Demetrios there were.

Meanwhile, Nicholas encouraged Richard to move up to Liverpool to start a company there which would bear his name, but would actually be run by the Demetrios. While he was away, ‘intimacy took place’ between Nicholas and Anne, and in 1860 a son, Clement Leslie, was born, with the birth record giving false surnames for both parents.

And then, at the end of March 1860 there was an extraordinary court case held just down the road from me in Kingston. If you have access to online newspaper sites I’d encourage you to look up Whitmore and others, Assignees, v. Lloyd. The reports make hilarious reading. Basically, the Demetrios’ creditors were trying, unsuccessfully as it would turn out, to get their money back. It was claimed that Antonio and his brother Nicholas were setting up bogus companies in various names such as Lebous (not all that far from Labone), Dalgo (not all that far from Clement’s birth surname Dalba) and Lambe. Likewise, the company Richard Westbrook was setting up in Liverpool was equally fraudulent. Anne Westbrook was involved in all this, as was a friend of hers named Mary Anne Bridget Martin, both of whom gave evidence in the case. I can find nobody of that name in that area in the 1861 census or anywhere else, so she might also have been a fraud. We’ll meet her again later.

Neither Antonio nor Nicholas was present at the hearing: both had apparently disappeared without trace. Of course we now know that Nicholas was, by 1861, living in Glasgow under the name Labone.

Moving swiftly forward, we reach June 1861, when the divorce courts heard the case Westbrook v Westbrook and Demetrio. Richard was suing Anne for divorce because of her adultery with Nicholas. He, it was believed, had left the country (yes, he was in Scotland) and did not appear. As always in those days the court decided it was the woman’s fault and granted Richard a decree nisi. Nicholas’s name appears in court reports as ‘Nicolas Antonio di Demetrio’ which prompts the question of whether Nicholas and Antonio were the same person.

About this time Anne must have moved up to Glasgow with Rowland, Oliver and Clement to join Nicholas, where they lived as husband and wife. Anne was now calling herself Annie Mary Labone, and giving her maiden name as Copley rather than Topley. Nicholas set up business as a Professor of Languages, teaching French, German and Italian, and in 1862 their daughter, Flora, was born. Again, things didn’t work out: in November 1863 he was declared bankrupt, and worse was to come when their baby son Gregory, named after one of his possible brothers, was born prematurely and died after only 36 hours.

We find the family in the 1871 Scottish census, by which time Nicholas had joined Glasgow Chess Club and, apart from playing on a high board, was very much involved in the club’s administration. But at some point fairly soon afterwards they split up and, separately, moved down to the Liverpool and Manchester areas. At some point he might have resumed his chess career: a player named Demetrio represented Manchester against Liverpool in 1881 and 1883.

Annie now came up with a new idea to make money: for thirty years she would send begging letters to newspapers and magazines asking for charity for her elderly and infirm friend, Miss Mary Ann Bridget Martin – the friend from the 1861 court case – and selling various quack remedies. In 1879 she was running a seminary for young ladies in Birkenhead. A professor of languages at the school, one Charles M Grabmann, was accused of assaulting an elderly cook who had refused to make pea soup, but the case, predictably, was dismissed. I can’t find anything else about Grabmann, whoever he was. Perhaps yet another fraud. In 1882 she was declared bankrupt, described as a widow and former schoolmistress.

But she wasn’t a widow at all: Nicholas was still alive and well. He was living in Barrow-in-Furness, where, also in 1882, he married a teenage girl named Ellen or Helen Bowkett. (In those days Ellen and Helen were interchangeable, which reminds me of another Minor Piece I intend to write at some point.) He’d also changed his name again, to Demet, a shortened version of his real surname. Shortly after the marriage they moved to Manchester. According to the birth records they had four sons between 1885 and 1891, followed  by a daughter in 1897. The 1891 census lists an older son, Broderick, born in about 1883 but there’s no birth or any other record for him. He claims to be aged 53 (he was certainly several years older), a Professor of Languages and born in Versailles (who knows?). He was still there and still in the same occupation in 1901, but by 1911 he wasn’t at home. Helen was there, claiming to be married rather than widowed, and telling us they’d had six children, all of whom were still alive, but there’s no sign of Nicholas and no death record has yet been found. Anne, meanwhile, had died in Liverpool in 1899.

Returning to London and the year 1861, just a few weeks after the divorce, Richard, during an argument at the kitchen table following a visit to the opera, threw a table knife at Janette Cathrey, ‘an extremely portly woman’ with ‘a protruding belly’, who may or may not have been his mistress, hitting her in the abdomen and causing a fatal injury. A first trial found him guilty of manslaughter, but a second trial cleared him. Just a year later he married again, to Emma Louise Shipman, who was more than twenty years his junior. Richard and Emma had two sons, Henry and Alexander.

In 1881, Henry was a law student: it must have been intended that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but he would eventually choose several very different careers. By 1891 he’d moved to, guess where?, Leicester, where he and Alexander were running a pub. Alexander had married and had three young children. In 1901 Henry was still in Leicester, but now working as a printer’s clerk. He’d married a widow with two young children, but Alexander and his family are nowhere to be found. Perhaps they were abroad.

By 1911 Alexander and his family were in Brixton. He was now working as a Variety Agent, with his son helping him and his two daughters employed as dancers. They were doing well enough to afford two domestic servants. Henry was still in Leicester, and in the same business as his brother. He was described as a Music Hall Manager, and was living with his wife, his step-daughter and his widowed mother.

If you check his address, he was just half a mile, or thereabouts, away from Oliver Harcourt Labone, his presumed (assuming Richard was indeed his father) half-brother. Quite a coincidence. I presume neither of them had any idea. If either of them had walked a mile or so to the south, they could have visited the Victorian terraces of Sheridan Street, the home of Tom Harry James. He was a house painter living with the five youngest surviving children of his first wife (there were 12 in total). He’d just remarried and would go on to have another six children, the youngest of whom, Howard, was my father.

And there’s more. Henry Westbrook’s first wife died in 1913, and in 1920 he married another widow, Matilda Manger, who had been born Matilda Cort in Market Harborough. Now Cort has always been a common surname in the Leicester and Market Harborough areas, and there are many in my family tree. One particularly interesting branch, related to me by marriage, for example, goes back to Benjamin Cort who was born in nearby Great Bowden in 1644. Now Matilda was the daughter of Charles Cort, who was in turn the son of Robert. At the moment I can’t take this back any further as there were several Robert Corts born in Market Harborough at about the same time. But it’s reasonable to assume that Matilda was from the same family as the Corts who married into my family at various points. So perhaps I can claim a connection, via a couple of marriages or so, to Henry Westbrook, and therefore also to Oliver Harcourt Labone.

It’s quite a story, isn’t it? All three of them, Richard, Anne and Nicholas, seemed to be crooks, fraudsters, con artists, liars and more, and all regularly in financial trouble. You really couldn’t make it up. It’s hardly surprising that Oliver had so many problems in his life.

Nicholas, for all his faults, was clearly a highly intelligent and well educated man, fluent in several languages and also a reasonably proficient chess player. Perhaps it required the skills of a chess player to set up the elaborate fraud upon which his first business was based. Anne seemed to have a knack of falling for unsuitable men. Richard was, among other things, a violent, if unintentional, killer.

You’ll meet my grandfather’s family again another time, but for now it really is time to return to Twickenham, and perhaps some more chess.

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