by Peter Badham

Based on a talk given to the 2005 conference, this is the story, as far as is currently known, of some members of a fairly extraordinary Badham family founded by a David Badham.

Figure 1 shows the Society database, Custodian in action. The central window headed “SQL¹ Record Selection” is asking Custodian to select index entries where the first name is like David and where the surname is Badham. In the window underneath you can see that at the time of the query in May 2005 there were 41,647 index records on this CD (issue No. 2). Interestingly, the number of Davids found by this SQL from the whole of the 41,647

records is only 35, whereas there are 1372 John entries and 845 Thomases. Even the 35 entries are divided into two areas where Davids are found: Glasbury, Boughrood and so on are in the Upper Wye valley over into Breconshire and Radnorshire where we would more expect to find the Welsh patron saint’s name. The David in which we are interested, however, was born in the middle of the 18th century and on the database there is a baptism at Callow, Herefordshire in 1745. There is still research to be done but the probability is that this is our founder because we know that the head of the family we are dealing with was married in St. Marylebone, London and we know that he died in 1806 and his will referred to his sister, Sarah, who had married John Bolter in Herefordshire. We can track down the nucleus of the Bolter family within a mile of Callow at Eaton Bishop.

Research in this geographical area is tricky because Callow is a tiny little parish and it is just on the edge of an area called the Haywood, which stretches south from Hereford city down to this parish and is an “extra-parochial” area. These areas, which do not belong to any parish, mostly came about when the king had his forests and various lands or other holdings that were restricted to his use. Within these areas nobody was allowed to have a church or do anything else which might impede the sovereign’s rights. Haywood was part of one of these royal forested areas and since the spiritual needs of people living in the area had to be met, they were able to use any church within reach that they chose. It was a kind of privilege but of course for family historians this is not terribly helpful. In one of the neighbouring parishes just round the corner, possibly a couple of miles from Callow, is a place called Clehonger and there were two burials of John Badams in the 18th century from “the Haywood.” Now, for a long time, I thought this meant from the Haywood area but in fact there is a large surviving farmstead which is also called the Haywood. So it is possible they were from there. There is more work to do, but the real story of this family begins with a jump to London. In Figure 2 we see David (1.2) the son of Thomas and

Mary, probably née Jones, who was baptised 3rd March 1744 at Callow and it seems almost certainly to be this David who married Mary Hall in St. Marylebone Parish Church in the county of Middlesex on 8th December 1776. Of course in those days Marylebone was separated from London, mostly an outlying village, although it was beginning to be built up, for example by the Duke of Devonshire. The marriage was by license from the Vicar General of the Diocese of Canterbury, an arrangement which was most accessible for people in the capital and who could afford the fees. Unusually, in my experience, it was sworn by Mary, the wife-to-be. Figure 3 shows the entry from the St. Marylebone Parish Register. The witnesses were Hannah, who may be her sister, and she makes her mark but Mary signs. I believe Ralph is her father, but could be a brother, and I can see on the original how she echoes his signature rather nicely, showing a family pattern of writing.

I first discovered David Badham, merchant, in an early 1808 London directory and the first entry records him at the Adelphi. Now, those of you who know central London will know the Strand and you might know where the Adelphi Theatre is. Across John Street from the theatre was the block shown in the figure, now sadly gone (Figure 4 taken from an old print) 

The church spire in the background is that of St. Martin’s in the Fields which you will see is the parish David belonged to at the time of his wedding to Mary, so it is possible that the Adelphi was his home by that time. It was built by Robert and John Adam between 1768 and 1774. It was not a terribly successful venture to start with and in fact parliament authorised a lottery for the Adam brothers to sell shares and make money in order to get themselves back on an even keel – perhaps David was a winner! It did work eventually and it was only demolished in 1936. There are some photographs of the interior at the London Metropolitan Archives showing magnificent Georgian interiors. It was newish at the time that David was there and it was built partly as residences but also very much as an active wharf and you can see arches on the river frontage and a laden boat at the wharf. If you follow those arches through, there was a maze of vaults used for merchants’ storage for the various people who leased one of the houses or some of these storage areas. These vaults went all the way underneath and were accessible to the whole block. Sadly, so far, I have not discovered what David was a merchant of. What is pretty certain is that he was very successful at it. David’s address was in John Street somewhere, so perhaps he thought an Adam development was the right place for a “b’Adam.” The Adelphi was, however, populated by some pretty influential people and was definitely a good address as a business base.

We do not know either what David’s father Thomas did. There is a sense from other records in surrounding parishes that they were reasonably prominent. The father of Mary née Jones, David’s mother, was probably a churchwarden at Madley just across the the valley. There are many Charleses in the descendants of David and Mary and the eldest of their children born in 1778 appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). This has recently been reissued in a revised form. The quality of the research is considerably improved in relation to the Baddam or Badhams in there. Charles was to become a prominent physician and was a classical scholar as well. He went to Edinburgh University and got his MD in 1802 with a dissertation that was something to do with stones in the bladder. He became an LRCP, a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, in 1803 and in 1806 he matriculated from Pembroke College Oxford with BA, MA, BM and DM. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1818 as well as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Education was a costly enterprise and must have been valued by Charles’ father, David. He started practising in London in 1803 and had a private practice but also worked in a more charitable clinic in Soho with a Dr. Crichton, who was quite famous too, and they jointly wrote things together. In the period while he was at Soho, he also became physician to the Duke of Sussex, one of the sons of George III. He must have been looked on medically as being pretty good and he obviously had influence to obtain such an appointment. It would be interesting to know who his patron was. He liked to travel and he seemed to have set this pattern up for his family too. He went abroad in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. He spent a couple of years travelling and he went to Naples, to lesser known parts of the Kingdom of Naples and around the Adriatic. He went to the Ionian Islands, to Albania and there he was consulted by Ali Pasha. He went over into Greece and, via Thessaly and Thermopylae, to Athens. In fact he spent an enormous amount of his time travelling, which he obviously preferred to do, rather than be settled in England or Scotland, and he made a living, to some extent, by acting as a doctor to other travellers. He published various papers and poetry which can still be found. Also, because of his classical education he printed, first of all some specimens of translations from Juvenal and then he did a translation or a rewrite in English of the Satires of Juvenal. However, they were criticised pretty severely by somebody who had also done translations and did not think his were any good. He was considered not to have entered into the author’s mind at all. In 1827 the chair of Physic at Glasgow became empty and his apparent friend, by then Sir Henry Halford, recommended him to the Duke of Montrose for that post. Although the Scots apparently were not too pleased to see an Englishman there, he actually did alright and they thought his lectures were pretty good. He seems to have settled into academic life and for a while spent a lot of time thoroughly devoting himself to the duties of his chair although he spent his vacations in travel.

I have to say the ODNB seems a little bit easy on him because in fact a man called Harry Rainey in 1832 obtained a substitute lectureship on the Theory of Physics on behalf of the absent valetudinarian professor of the Institutes of Medicine, Charles Badham, who was residing in the south of France. Charles kept his professorial stipend and took a quarter of the student fees and saved the price of keeping warm in Glasgow whilst Rainey did all the work for him. Now I mentioned that he went to Italy after Waterloo and a portrait of his first wife, Margaret née Campbell, was drawn in Rome in 1816. It is a drawing by the famous French artist, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was in Rome at the time. It is now in the Washington Museum of Art. Unfortunately we do not have permission to reproduce the drawing here but a copy of it can be viewed on the Gallery's website: www.nga.gov and will appear in the Society's forthcoming book. It is, apparently, typical of a number of portrait drawings of his in this period. There is a lot of care put in to the face and then the dress is hinted at in a freer style and there is some topographical detail sketched in the background. Ingres was a bit down on his luck at the time because he had been in Paris and had been patronised by the Bonaparte family but was now having to make a living from drawing the British tourists. Margaret Campbell was a first cousin to Thomas Campbell a well-known poet in that period. He became famous during his lifetime and actually has another claim to fame. Very much settled in London, he was active in starting a campaign for a university for London. He put much effort into it and the campaign was eventually picked up by others and University College London came about, largely as a result of those processes. He is sufficiently famous to be buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Trying to work out the nature of the cousinship is rather difficult because Margaret had the “misfortune” to have two Campbell parents. Thomas Campbell’s father imported tobacco from America and made quite a fortune which he then lost as a result of the American War of Independence and then had to recover from. Thomas Campbell’s mother was a Margaret as well, so there may have been some family naming going on. Clearly, even allowing for a degree of flattery she was something of a beauty and would have stood out in social gatherings. Given that her husband was a Court physician it may be her that is referred to in a Times Court Report for April 18th 1806, where it says the following: “Yesterday at about 2 o’clock, her Majesty came to St. James and held a drawing room” – sounds uncomfortable! – “it was attended by three of the princesses, their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and Cambridge, the Lord Chancellor, the Foreign Ambassador and a great number of the nobility and gentry, among whom we noticed” – that last phrase is a bit of journalese if ever there was. You can just see them taking the notes down very carefully. Just imagine how upset people would have been if they’d been missed off the list. Anyway there is a great long string of dukes and duchesses and marquises and viscounts, including Viscounts Castlereagh and Hereford, and then amongst the ladies is Lady C Badham. The guess is that this is Lady Charles Badham, included for presentation as wife of the physician to the Duke of Sussex. There is no other currently known C Badham who had any baronetcy or was the wife of a knight or anything of that level. This then, appears to be the wife of the son of David Badham from Callow Herefordshire.

If you look back to Figure 2 you will see that Charles (1.2.1) had a brother David (1.2.2). Although not involved in the professions this David had a substantial house at Bulmer in Essex called The Cedars, which still stands at present though at some point it became the Dower house. His Will refers to the pictures, the plate, the carriages, the horses, plural. More than one carriage and these accoutrements were left to the daughters. Incidentally this David was married to Rebecca Pung and when I first saw this surname I wondered if it was a transcript error but it is a very localised Essex and Suffolk name. There is a local district history society called the Foxearth Society² who have posted a lot of information from the Bury and Norwich Post and the extracts for 1865 have some interesting information. The Foxearth Society have included a summary of main events in the news for that year so that for example: “On 25th July 1865 Dr. James Barry, surgeon in the British Army is found upon death to be a woman.” Another interesting one which I include somewhat deliberately in view of our Australian visitors:³ “In October 1865 parliament abolished the practice of transporting criminals to the colonies. Palmerston died. The city of Manchester death rate reached 38 in 1,000 in a year and Edinburgh was found to have appalling sanitary conditions. Race riots in Jamaica were crushed and the governor was recalled for tyranny.” However, in the 21st November edition is the notice of death for David Badham: “Died at The Cedars, Bulmer, Essex, aged 82,” confirming his birth of about 1783, “David Badham, one of her Majesty’s deputy lieutenants for the county, and for nearly 60 years a magistrate for Essex and Suffolk.” That means he was a JP by the age of 22 or 23 and you did not become a JP at that sort of age unless you had estates, influence or something. So somewhere there is a story to be dug out about where this money or influence came from. Whether this was David senior’s activities at the Adelphi, what it was he was importing and how much it was worth on the streets of London, is anybody’s guess. There is some possibility that they were in the wool trade but otherwise I do not have any clues at all.

There is another story also in the paper relating to the family estate. David’s older son was George David Badham (1.2.2.3) and in 28th November issue 1865 is this following story: “A ploughman named Parker in the employ of Mr. G. D. Badham of Bulmer was ploughing with a pair of horses, one of them an entire (that is, not gelded) when he took them to bait at Upper Barn. They were drinking out of the pond and when they came out of the pond, Parker was trying to catch the leading rein of the horse when it made three snatches at his arm, the last time catching him by the wrist with its mouth, and pulled him off his horse. Two other ploughmen with him went to his assistance but were unable to release him, the horse’s teeth being fast in the man’s wrist. They got a plough scraper, forced his mouth open but such was the force with which the horse seized his arm that it was broken and he was trampled on with the horse’s forefeet. The arm was set by Mr. Lynch, surgeon, the man is doing well, the horse was shot next morning,” so did not do so well.

Whilst we are considering one son of David of Bulmer, we should perhaps mention the younger called Charles (1.2.2.4). He was one of a number of this generation to enter the church and was for many years Vicar of All Saints Church, Sudbury, Suffolk of which he wrote a history. He is buried in Bulmer parish churchyard near the vault of David Badham.

Returning to the family of Professor of Medicine Charles Badham, his eldest son by Margaret née Campbell was Charles David Badham (1.2.1.1), whom I suspect was known as David, a pattern of forename usage which continued for several generations. It would be nice to be able to establish a direct contact with the painter John Constable but, as we shall see, familiarity with some of his family, his birthplace and river will have to suffice. Charles David became a doctor like his uncle but unfortunately suffered from ill health and as a result decided to become a priest, finishing up as curate at John Constable’s birthplace, East Bergholt. Unfortunately if you look at Constable’s dates, he was dead by the time Charles arrived so we cannot claim a direct link. As curate he would almost certainly have known the family, because they remained in East Bergholt and John Constable’s wife, Maria Bicknell, was a daughter of the Rector. Charles was educated at Westminster School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He graduated as an MD in 1833 at Pembroke Oxford and was sufficiently senior in his medical speciality to be appointed a Radcliffe travelling Fellow for the University. That was a Fellowship which allowed people to study their subject on the continent, so he was abroad for some time while possibly meeting up with his uncle or cousins. It was when he got back in 1845 that he had to give up his practice because of these health reasons and at that point entered the church and in fact was ordained at Norwich Cathedral in 1845 with either his cousin Charles, later Vicar of Sudbury, or with his brother Charles. Perhaps as compensation for his illness Charles David became a naturalist and was a keen fisherman, so perhaps we begin to see the attraction of being a curate and living on the banks of Constable’s River Stour, with which we are familiar from such paintings as The Hay Wain (1821) and Dedham Mill (1820). He obviously did not have much to do as a curate and wrote a number of books, one of which was called Prose Halieutics. Now I did not know what that meant at first but you might enjoy this definition that Janine found from a dialogue on the web:

Peter Bowler: “Halieutics. It sounds like an abstruse branch of non-parametric statistics, doesn’t it? Perhaps you could mention it if you were being interviewed for a job as a deputy statistician, you could say that you had many years of experience in halieutics. What it really means of course, is fishing.”

The alternative title was Ancient and Modern Fish Tattle. I think it was an excuse for pushing together anything he could think of into a book that was to do with fish and I hope you will enjoy the following extract which begins the book: “Fish being more distinguished for the size of their heads than the amount of their brains lodged in them,” and then his medical bit breaks through straightaway and he puts an asterisk with a little footnote that says, “The proportion of weight of brain to body in the shark is as one to two thousand five hundred, in the stupid tunny only as one to three thousand seven hundred and even in the comparatively well-endowed pike but as one to one thousand three hundred.” Whether this knowledge was gained at the expense of kitchen table autopsies in the curates residence is unknown! After the asterisk he continues, “and affording consequently an easier capture than either beasts or birds, fell early victims to the crafts and assaults of their arch enemy, man…”

In the year of his ordination Charles David married Anna Hume in April 1847. She was the daughter of another person who has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, James Deacon Hume. He was a civil servant and a customs official, following in his father’s footsteps. He was a customs clerk in 1791 but he reached the grade of controller by 1821 at which point he was earning £1,000 a year, which was a very considerable salary. In 1822, however, he conceived the idea of at one time in India and had a son, Basil, who consolidating customs law and this is what made him famous because he consolidated some 1,500 Acts of Parliament going back to the time of Edward I and managed to reduce them to ten. His new Acts all went through parliament by 1825 and it was considered to be a masterpiece of legislative skill. Charles David also wrote a biography of his father-in-law. Charles and Anna had a son, Charles Hume Badham who also became a priest, as is known to have been in the Army in South Africa in 1912. Charles David seems also to have been fond of his food and combined this with his naturalist interests and with a charitable interest in free food for the poor, to write another book called A Treatise on Esculent (Edible..!) Funguses of England which is said to have had considerable influence and you can see an engraving (Figure 5) of a field mushroom taken from the first edition published in 1847. Bearing in mind we are talking about only the grandson of the David that left Herefordshire and you can begin to see the influence of money and education on the lifestyle and social position.

We are still not finished, however, even with the family members that warrant an entry in the ODNB. This time we are considering plain Charles (1.2.1.7) the youngest son of Professor Charles Badham and Margaret Campbell and full brother of the Charles David we have just been considering. Figure 6 is an engraving taken from an oil painting at the University of Sydney and appears in a book of his lectures given in Australia which was published in 1890. He was born in July 1813 in Ludlow, Shropshire, just north of Herefordshire, and we do not know why this was. It is indicative of his father’s interest in things continental and in education that he was sent off to be educated under Pestalozzi, the very famous Italian-Swiss educationalist at Yverdun in Switzerland. Perhaps his father sensed his unusually strong intellect, for he was to became a very good linguist as well as classical scholar. His mother is said also to be a relation of Lewis Campbell, a Greek scholar, and to be one of his obituarists. He narrates a rather nice story about his early educational experience, which obviously had a lot of influence on him, because he became famous for his educational innovation. He describes Pestalozzi encouraging him to use his brain and saying, “Tink Badham, tink.” Thinking does not always endear you to those with power or influence and can lead to an independence of spirit not always producing good results. For example, he did not do too well at Oxford where he only gained a 3rd Class Honours and the ODNB says the family believe the teaching did not suit his temperament, so he would be in company with people like Churchill, myself and others in my family! However, he was to be well regarded on the continent being given an honorary doctorate at Leiden University where he was a great friend of an eminent Professor of Greek studies, G. C. Cobet. Although he took Holy Orders in 1846-8, aiming for a College fellowship at Peterhouse, he got married in 1848 to his first wife, Julia Smith, daughter of John Smith, Stationer, from Dulwich Common. His marriage immediately blocked the possibility of a Fellowship since at that time you had to be celibate if you were a Fellow. What he finished up doing was becoming a headmaster, first in Southampton, then up in Louth, Lincolnshire and finally he finished up at a place called The Propriety School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, which was rather unusual. It was set up like a share system. If you were a parent you bought a share and this allowed you to send your child to the school. They did not believe in corporal punishment, which would have been advanced in the 1930s, let alone the 1830s or 1840s. Also the school combined a classical and a commercial education, which was very rare for its period. Charles was part of a University graduates’ club in Birmingham. Among his friends were well-known figures like R. W. Dale who had various parts of Birmingham named after him. He was the senior pastor in the congregational ministries in Birmingham and also in the group was Cardinal Henry Newman, the famous Roman Catholic, and in fact it was a reference from Cardinal Newman which supported his application eventually to become Professor of Classics and Logics in Sydney which he achieved in 1867. Julia died in 1856 and Charles married his second wife in December 1857 at St. Mark’s, Jersey. The move to Australia ten years later saw him migrate with Charles, Herbert and Edith from his marriage with Julia and the first five of his children by Georgiana, the first of whom, a girl, was called Julia. After Julia junior there were three boys and a girl born before he became Professor in Sydney and a boy and girl born in Sydney, the last of whom, Mary, was born on 10th January 1875 when he was 61. A flourishing group of families evolved from his children, many of whom remain in Sydney. Professor Charles Badham set up one of the first, possibly the first ever outreach education system from a University and people in the outback could study through him, using the post and coming to occasional meetings, rather like the English Open University. He was very well thought of and streets have been named after him. When he died in 1884 government offices were closed for the day of his funeral which was attended by the Governor and “many leading colonists."⁴ We still have a major branch of this family to consider as Charles’ father, the Professor of Medicine, also married twice. Margaret née Campbell died rather young in 1818 and he married again in 1833. His new wife was Caroline, the daughter of Vice Admiral Edward James Foote by his first wife Nina Herries. He divorced her which was very rare in those days and could only be done by an Act of Parliament. The chart (Figure 7) shows the family outline and if you continued it there

would be a number of existing families some of which have members in the Badham One Name Society. Now the 21st October 2005 was the 2nd centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar, so that those Badhams with Foote ancestry will be thinking of their famous member of the British Navy who was involved with the wars with Napoleon’s France. The painting, (Figure 8) is reproduced by courtesy of the National Maritime Museum,

Figure 8 - Foote's Frigate

Greenwich, London and shows Captain Foote’s 38 gun frigate, the Seahorse, capturing the French 36 gun Sensible off the coast of Sicily, 26th June 1798. The French tricolour can be seen hanging in the stern of the left-hand vessel and the British Ensign from the Seahorse on the right. This was quite an important capture, as the Sensible was carrying the French General Baraguay d’Hilliers and his staff. Later on in those various campaigns, Foote was involved in a contretemps in the Bay of Naples in June 1799 when he took the capitulation of Forts Uovo and Nuovo. When Nelson arrived two days later he said it was invalid and did not carry it out. There was something of a scandal about what happened to the Italians that were involved in this as a result. Although during his lifetime Foote kept in with Nelson, his grandson Francis Prichett Badham actually wrote a defence of his grandfather for this action and there is a copy of that book in the British Library.

This article attempts to outline the fascinating history of a few of the descendants of a Herefordshire Badham family. The Sydney families descended from Professor Charles (Junior) Badham put together a family book at the time of the centenary of his death but there is much more that could be said of the wider family. If, as the family deserves, one of its members were to compile a full history it would show that here we have seen only some of the trunk of this particular tree.

1. Standard Query Language = a way of asking questions of a database.
2. www.foxearth.org.uk/1865BuryNorwichPost.html
3. Jim and Bev Badham from Bli Bli, Queensland, present at the 2005 Annual Conference
4. Times Obituaries April 10th, 1884