History Mystery

 

This is a post prompted by a holiday. Sometimes a seemingly straightforward question opens up an intriguing puzzle that can raise more questions than it answers.

Recently we were in Cornwall, and while out for a coastal stroll, we happened on the parish church at St.Levan. I have a huge soft spot for graveyards and an indulgent wife. So we stopped for a look. Gravestones, graveyards and memorials are always interesting ( but that’s for another post) and St.Levan was no exception. The one that that stood out most was a substantial headstone erected in memory of Richard Maddern to which was appended the epitaph of his son. Richard Oliver Maddern “died on board HMS Rattler in 1863 on his passage from Nagasaki to Yokohama” when he was only 23.

I had to read this a couple of times. At first, I assumed he was a sailor, not an unreasonable assumption in a coastal Cornish village.  But when I checked the listing for Cornish Naval deaths 1730-1960 (available at www.opc-cornwall.org), neither Richard nor his ship HMS Rattler was listed. He is not listed on any other naval records that are available online (and during the COVID era these are all we have). So it appears he didn’t enlist in the Royal Navy.

 A reread of the inscription suggest he was a passenger; it says “on his passage”, if it were referring to the ship it would say “on her passage” from Nagasaki to Yokohama.  Why would a young man from a small village be a passenger on a naval vessel on the other side of the world?

To try to answer this, I took a step back to try to find out more about the family.  Richard Maddern senior’s inscribed headstone is a substantial monument. Such a thing was not cheap and suggests that at the very least, the family was not poverty-stricken. Costs for memorial headstones vary depending on the material, the inscription and the locality. Burgess tells us that according to Kelke’s Churchyard Manual of 1851, the price of erecting a memorial stone would have been around £5- £7. A not inconsiderable sum when an ordinary fishing deckhand would earn less than £1 per week.

So who were the Madderns, and can they shed any light on the life and death of Richard Oliver Maddern?  The census and parish records reveal that on marriage Richard Maddern Snr was an agricultural labourer, his wife Sarah was a servant.  When their son Richard Oliver was baptised, Richard Snr still gave his occupation as a labourer. The 1851 census shows that Madderns went on to have another five children and that Richard senior was working as an agricultural labourer.  This makes the substantial headstone more unusual, as an agricultural labourer would have earned even less than a fisherman; about 10s per week.   I wondered then whether the stone had been erected much later by Richard’s descendants. However, looking at it, the two engravings are subtly different. If the stone was put up later, after both deaths had occurred, it is more likely that the font and style would be the same for both men.

Richard Maddern could have been a member of a burial club which would have helped with the cost of his funeral but pay payouts from those were generally not large enough to cover

My last supposition was criminal activity as a source of funds, wrecking and smuggling are part of Cornish folklore; however, that activity predates the Madderns by some 100 years.  No online records support the idea of the Madderns appearing in any courtroom for any reason, so we have to assume that they were just another family of poor workers.  So there is no evidence of money to fund the memorial.

There is a possible sighting of Richard Oliver Maddern Jnr in 1861, but he like his father is working as an agricultural labourer, in the nearby parish of Hayle.  But that is the last sight of him in any records. His death is not recorded in the English civil records. Deaths abroad and or in service should have been reported and recorded, but that did not always happen. So how did he go from being a labourer in Cornwall in 1861 to dying off the coast of Japan in 1863?

My next search was a trawl through the naval records for HMS Rattler.    HMS Rattler was a sloop launched in 1862 which seems to have spent its short existence patrolling the seas around China and Japan working on hydrographic surveys.  Unfortunately, there is little information about HMS Rattler’s activities available online, the surviving records appear to be only available  in the ships logs held at the Hydrographic Office Archive in Taunton, not somewhere I visit on a regular basis. 

My final thought was that perhaps Richard Jnr had decided to become a missionary. The Church Mission Society was an evangelical Christian society, and they seemed like the obvious place to start as they sent people all over the world, including Japan.  However,  Japan was still a closed society in the 1860s, and their first mission in Japan was only established in 1869. 

So at this time, I have no idea why Richard Oliver Maddern died off the coast of Japan on a British naval ship in 1863. I do not know how an ordinary family managed to afford such a substantial memorial to his father and him. At this point, it is a history mystery, but there may be clues out there in physical archives, that will provide more information.  In the meantime, it was an interesting investigation, taking in Japanese history, Naval History, Victorian death practices and the challenges that family history can throw up.  

 

Further Reading

How To Read a Graveyard Peter Stanford

English Churchyard Memorials Fredrick Burgess

Cornwall Online Parish Clerks https://www.opc-cornwall.org/