Peter Le Neve-Foster & his Family

Peter Le Neve-Foster's son Peter is, apart from the duelling Oliver Le Neve, quite the most interesting member of the family. He was born at the White House, Lenwade, in 1809, and was educated at the Norwich Grammar School under Dr. Valpy, one of its most famous headmasters. From school he proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, but migrated to Trinity Hall where he graduated as 38th Wrangler in January 1830. He took his Master's degree in July 1833 and was elected a Fellow of his College on 28th November 1835. After graduating in 1830 he started reading law and was called to the Bar in the Middle Temple in 1836. I have before me his diary for that year and quote the following extracts:

"29th January, Friday
Arrived in Town, breakfasted with Roberts. Papers transferred to Temple for my call. Went to Camberwell in evening — a dinner party.

30th January, Saturday
Went to Town early, called to the Bar this evening and returned to Camberwell."

Later in the same year — 1836 — there are some more entries of interest:

"27th March, Palm Sunday
Went to Norwich in afternoon to stay with Chase for the Assize week.

28th March, Monday
In Court.

29th March, Tuesday
Mounted (?) my wig and gown for 1st time on joining circuit. Dined with the judges. Rec'd my 1st brief.

30th March, Wednesday
In court again. Dined at Chambers with my sisters. (Note: This means a cousin named Chambers, not a barrister's chambers.)

31st March, Thursday
In court again."

One guesses that Grace and Belle had come in from Lenwade to the Norwich Assize to hear their brother plead his first case.

This diary contains a number of entries about letters to and from Grace, but very little about Belle, from which one concludes that Grace must have been the favourite sister. At this time Lenwade Mill was let to a Mr. Dutt, but Peter evidently still had something to do with the property, as there is a diary entry about repairs to the water wheel. The mill was held on lease from the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford, from whom Peter also held the rectorial tithes of Great Witchingham and was bound to distribute amongst the poor of the parish ten bushels of peas annually on Ash Wednesday.

Peter's diary also contains a number of entries about visits to Mrs. Chevallier at Great Yarmouth, an oblique reference to the fact that he was courting Georgiana, one of her five daughters. The Chevalliers, like the Le Neves, were a distinguished East Anglian family and could trace their descent in a direct line from Joan Plantagenet, a daughter of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile. They were also closely connected with the Kitchener family as Georgiana Chevallier, the future Mrs. Peter Le Neve-Foster, was first cousin to Frances Chevallier, the future Mrs. Kitchener and mother of Herbert Horatio Kitchener, who was to become Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, the victor of Omdurman and Secretary of State for War from 1914 until his death when the Hampshire struck a mine en route for Russia in 1917.

Apart from his legal and mathematical interests, Peter was also on friendly terms with a number of artists including Horace Love, the famous Norwich miniaturist and Elizabeth Rigby (later Lady Eastlake), who both painted and sketched him. According to one family tradition, which may well be true, Elizabeth Rigby was Peter's first love and it was only after she had turned him down that he began to pay his attentions to Georgiana Chevallier. Whether or not this is true, it is certain that he was on friendly terms with Elizabeth some years before he began courting Georgiana, as Elizabeth did a portrait of him as early as 1834.

Love certainly stayed at Lenwade and Yarmouth, where he painted Georgiana's portrait in December 1836, perhaps as a wedding present, as Peter and Georgiana were married in Gorleston Church in 1837. There are also diary entries about dinner with J. B. Crome, the artist son of John Crome, the "Old Crome" of the Norwich School of Painting. Peter himself was a competent pencil sketcher about which I shall have more to say later.

The year 1837 was an important one for not only was it the year of his marriage, but it was also the year in which he was elected to membership of the Society of Arts, which was to prove one of the most important events in his life. His mother's family, the Osorios, had had Society of Arts connections for many years and his father had been a member. Peter himself was elected on the suggestion of his Osorio grandfather. Though by now a practising barrister, he found time to take an active part in the Society's affairs and by 1845 had become Chairman of the Committee of Accounts (the equivalent of the present-day Treasurer). As a committee chairman he became an ex officio member of the Council when it was formed in the same year and retained his seat on the Council until 1852, when he resigned in order to be able to apply for the Secretaryship of the Society. In 1853 he gave up his law practice on his appointment as Secretary of the Society of Arts, a post he retained until his death in 1879. His work in this connection is dealt with in greater detail further on.

Peter's Range of Interests

Like so many Victorians, Peter's range of interests was very wide. As well as being a mathematician and a barrister, he was a competent black and white artist (I have a number of his sketches and Joan Parkes has others, together with a copper engraving by him), a distinguished pioneer photographer, and a keen amateur scientist. He was one of the small group of men who organised the world's first public exhibition of photographs in 1852 and took a leading part in negotiating with Fox Talbot (whose processes are the basis of all modern photography) for the use of his patents by amateurs. Out of this arose the (Royal) Photographic Society, of which Peter was one of the founders and for many years a Council member. This aspect of his life is dealt with in greater detail later on. He was President of the Queckett Microscopical Society in 1869–70 (I have a copy of his valedictory address on giving up the Presidency) and from 1863 to 1866 he was on the Council of the British Association and, in addition, acted as Secretary to the Mechanical Section of that distinguished body for some thirteen years. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and of the Royal Horticultural Society (his Fellow's ticket for the R.H.S. for 1870 is still in existence). He was connected with the early plans for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and acted as Treasurer to the original committee. He was also connected with a number of other exhibitions in this and other countries.

Peter and the Royal Society of Arts

Mr. D. C. G. Allan, the Archivist and Curator-Librarian of the Royal Society of Arts, has given me the following account of Peter Le Neve-Foster's work for that remarkable and ancient Society:

The (Royal) Society of Arts is known today chiefly for its widespread system of external Examinations and for the special interest it takes in industrial design. At its commencement in the middle of the 18th century, its work was very different. Then it sought to guide the entire economic life of the nation through the distribution of medals and money prizes for "Inventions, Discoveries and Improvements" in Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. For half a century this method achieved great success but by 1837 when Peter Le Neve-Foster became a member, many competing organisations had been created and the Society had fallen into serious decline through shrunken funds and over ambitious aims. A reformation followed and in the 1840s when the constitution of the Society was established on the present-day basis of control by a governing Council, instead of the cumbersome imitation of parliamentary practice which had prevailed hitherto. Peter was among the first members of this newly formed Council to be appointed, as he had already served the government of the Society under the old constitution as Chairman of the Committee of Accounts. He was Honorary Treasurer from 1845 to 1852 — an office which was to be held by his great grandson a century later. The Secretaryship of the Society, which was a paid and permanent appointment, became vacant in 1853. Peter applied for the appointment and was interviewed with six other candidates at a meeting held on 11th June.

The following minutes have been preserved:

"The Council met this day at four o'clock. . . . The Council then proceeded to consider the applications of the several candidates for the Secretaryship, and carefully considered the letters and testimonials which had been received from them. . . the Council having fully discussed the qualifications of the respective candidates proceeded to ballot when the Chairman declared that Mr. Foster was unanimously selected."

The Society was founded in 1745, incorporated in 1847 and was granted the title "Royal" in 1908.

For the next twenty-five years he was to discharge the duties of this office with energy and enthusiasm. Amongst the most onerous was the production of a weekly Journal which contained all the papers read to meetings of the Society as well as a miscellany of information about artistic and industrial developments at home and abroad. The Journal served not only the members of the Society of Arts but a nationwide "Union" of educational institutions. As Secretary, Peter was in correspondence with these institutions and assisted them in the arrangement of the educational conferences and exhibitions which marked the 1850s and 1860s.

Following the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Society planned and to a large extent conducted the International Exhibition of 1862. Peter's Secretaryship also saw the Society active in a number of specific "causes": Patent Law amendment, postal reform and the prevention of food adulteration. It developed its special sections for specialised lectures — "Indian", "African" and "Chemical" — and, most significant of all perhaps, for the future, its examinations, which began in 1854, the year after Peter's appointment. To quote the words of his obituary in the Society's Journal of 28th February 1879:

"It would be impossible to particularise any portion of the Society's action with which he was more specially connected than with all the rest. It might almost be said that in every department of it he took an equal interest and, at any rate, to each one loyally devoted his powers and his time. How much of the success gained by the various movements of the Society was due to Mr. Foster can, indeed, never be known, for he was ever ready to do the work without seeking to obtain for himself the credit that was his due. His individual contributions to the Society's proceedings are to be found in every volume of the Journal."

The circumstances of his unexpected death "in harness" were related in the same document:

"Though Mr. Foster had attained a good age — he was in his seventieth year when he died — none of his many friends had any anticipation that he would not, for some time yet, be able to continue the work at which he had so long been engaged. Since Christmas last he had been confined a few days by an attack of gout, but it was hoped that the illness had left him, for he was apparently quite restored to health, and he was able to resume his duties at the Society, which had been for a short time interrupted. However, on Thursday, the 20th instant, shortly after his return to his own house at Wandsworth, he was seized with a sudden attack of syncope, the result of fatty degeneration of the heart. There were no serious symptoms of anything seriously wrong, till a member of his family coming into the room where he had been sitting by himself for a few minutes reading the newspaper, found that he had fallen back in his chair, dead. So little expected was the attack, that he had finished his ordinary day's work at the office, and had even walked up from the railway station to his own house about an hour before his death. During the day, none of the friends who saw him noticed any alteration in his manner or appearance, nor was there the slightest warning of his so sudden end."

His successor as Secretary, Sir Truman Wood, wrote in 1913 of Peter's achievement in maintaining the second era of prosperity of the Society. From the vantage point of the 1960s we may add that the present-day Royal Society of Arts derives much of its character from the Secretaryship of Peter Le Neve-Foster.

Peter was a knight of the Tunisian Order of Iftikar and a member of the Italian Order of the Redemption. The insignia of the Tunisian Order has survived and is preserved in my house at Borley, together with the two large decorative glass jars, one bearing the Imperial arms, which were presented to Peter by the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria.

Though he occupied so many public offices and was honoured by foreign countries, Peter never received a State Honour in his own country. This is all the more surprising as his two immediate successors at the Royal Society of Arts, Sir Henry Truman Wood and G. K. Menzies, received a knighthood and a C.B.E. respectively.

Peter the Photographer

Apart from his large family and his work at the Society of Arts, Peter Le Neve-Foster's life seems to have been centred to a considerable extent on his hobby of photography and the following notes have been prepared by Mr. Arthur T. Gill, F.R.P.S., of the Royal Photographic Society.

I start by quoting from the "Recollections" of Reginald Le Neve-Foster, one of Peter's sons and himself a keen photographer.

"My father was one of the first amateurs to practise photography, working the old paper process. . ."

This relates to the Calotype or Talbotype process that Fox Talbot had patented in 1841. A piece of paper coated with potassium iodide was brushed with gallic acid and silver nitrate, placed in the camera either still moist or even dry, and exposed. It was developed by a further application of gallic acid and silver nitrate and fixed, originally in potassium bromide, but later "hypo" was used. The resulting paper negative, sometimes waxed to make it more translucent, was printed by the older photogenic drawing process of 1839.

I am not sure when Peter first became involved in photography but he was a member of a group, founded in 1847 by Peter Fry, who joined interest in taking Calotype pictures. Roger Fenton, another barrister, who later was to take photographs of the Crimean War, was also in this group. There is an album of Peter Le Neve-Foster's Calotype photographs, made while he was a member of this group, still preserved at the Royal Society of Arts.

Fox Talbot had placed considerable restrictions on photography by insisting on patent rights for almost all processes which, he claimed, stemmed from his own. Peter was one of the committee of six which tried to persuade him to relent, but the conditions put up were unacceptable and it was only after a letter from the Presidents of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy that Fox Talbot gave way in the late summer of 1852. The Calotype group then set about organising a photographic exhibition, the first in the country. Again Peter was involved. It was opened on 22nd December 1852 and was quickly followed by a meeting called by Fenton to form a Photographic Society. Peter by now had been appointed Secretary of the Society of Arts, a position he was to hold until his death, and brought to the meeting a resolution from that body. The Photographic Society (later to become the Royal Photographic Society) was formed and Peter became one of the first members of its Council, a post he held for many years. He took an active part in its meetings, taking the chair on a number of occasions. His contributions to discussions on a wide variety of subjects show him to have been a knowledgeable and practical photographer. One gathers too, an impression of a kindly, tolerant man. He forsook the Calotype process for the Wet Collodion process introduced by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. A camera he used for this process and a sensitising bath in which the collodion-coated plates were dipped just before exposure, are preserved in the Museum of Photography of the Royal Photographic Society.

The camera takes half-plate (6¾ in. × 4¾ in.) pictures and many of the pictures in his album are of this size. It was made by G. Hare and is a "de luxe" type of their Universal Camera first advertised in 1866.

Peter Le Neve-Foster had two lenses he used it with: a Grubb landscape lens — a simple achromatic lens of 8½ in. focus whose serial number 879 shows it to be quite an early lens — and a Voigtlander of the Rapid Rectilinear type with a focus of 10 in., dating from after 1866, when this type was introduced. The camera has both swing and tilt back so that architectural subjects would present vertical uprights. Possession of dry-plate apparatus before 1879 shows that even up to the last year of his life Peter's active interest in photography was maintained.

A further sign that he was a keen photographer to the end is his photograph of Cleopatra's Needle being erected. This event took place in 1878, only a few months before he died. The interesting method of raising the obelisk horizontally between wooden trestles before lowering it on to its plinth is evident in the photograph.

One wonders how this great interest in photography began. Peter was on terms of close friendship with a number of artists, including Love, J. B. Crome and Elizabeth Rigby in Norwich, and later with Sir Charles Eastlake, P.R.A. (Elizabeth Rigby's husband) in London. Many of the very early photographers were artists who looked upon "sun pictures" as an extension of drawing. Perhaps it was as an amateur artist that Peter was first attracted to photography.

Photography section contributed by Mr. Arthur T. Gill, F.R.P.S., of the Royal Photographic Society. RSA section draws on notes by Mr. D. C. G. Allan, Archivist and Curator-Librarian of the Royal Society of Arts.

I now turn to more intimate family matters, of which there are two of interest after Peter's marriage in 1837. The first is the Rush Murder of 1848 and the second is the sale of most of the Lenwade properties in 1853.

A great many of the present and immediately preceding generations have been brought up to regard the Rush Murder as "The Family Murder". I am sorry to disappoint many family readers but the Le Neve-Foster connection with this unpleasant affair is only a connection by marriage with one of the victims. The murder itself is one of the most sensational crimes ever perpetrated in Norfolk and ranks with the "Murder of Maria Martin in the Red Barn" at Polstead, in Suffolk, in the annals of East Anglian crime.

The Rush Murder

The details of the murder and the events leading up to it are the subject of a book of some 270 pages in the Notable British Trial series and I can only summarise them here. John Blomfield Rush was the illegitimate son of a gentleman farmer near Wymondham, in Norfolk, and became steward and agent for the Rev. George Preston, the owner-occupier of Stanfield Hall, about two miles from this little market town. Preston's title to the property was a matter of dispute with some relatives, the Jermy family, and when Preston's son, Isaac, inherited Stanfield Hall he immediately petitioned Queen Victoria and the Earl Marshal for permission to adopt the name and arms of Jermy. The petition was granted and though Isaac Preston now became Isaac Jermy, his change of name did not end the disputed title to Stanfield. Isaac, however, together with his son, Jermy Jermy and his daughter-in-law (née Sophia Jane Chevallier) continued to live there.

Isaac Jermy had not the same confidence in J. B. Rush as his father had had. A quarrel ensued and Rush ceased to be steward, though he did continue to occupy Potash Farm about a mile away from Stanfield. Rush now got into financial difficulties and proceeded to forge documents and add forged signatures to others which, if the Jermys were out of the way, might well put him into the position of a very favoured tenant of the other branch of the family, which would be likely to inherit.

The position on 28th November 1848 — the date of the murder — was briefly this:

• Rush was in financial difficulties.
• He possessed forged documents which would ease his precarious position if the Jermys were out of the way.
• He detested the elder Jermy as a result of losing his job as steward.

On the evening of the 28th November Rush went to Stanfield Hall armed, as was afterwards discovered, with a blunderbuss. He shot and killed the elder Jermy on the front porch and his son in the passage outside the library. He then shot at young Mrs. Jermy and wounded her so badly that she subsequently had to have her arm amputated. After that he shot at the housemaid, Eliza Chastney, who ran to help her mistress, and wounded her in the thigh. The housemaid recovered sufficiently to give evidence at Rush's trial but Mrs. Jermy was not called as a witness.

Rush was arrested at Potash Farm next day, charged with murder and tried at the Norwich Assize, the trial lasting from 28th March to 6th April 1849. Rush refused to be represented by counsel and conducted his own defence, but after the Judge's summing up the jury was only absent for ten minutes before bringing in a verdict of "Guilty".

Rush was publicly executed outside Norwich Castle on 21st April 1849 before a crowd of some 13,000 people, including a woman who rose from her bed within an hour and a half of giving birth to a child and walked six miles so as not to miss the event. A further addition to the crowd travelled from London on a special train, but the police stopped the train at Attleborough and turned its occupants back.

The family connection with these exciting but unpleasant events is through young Mrs. Jermy, the lady who lost her arm, who was Sophia Jane Chevallier and a sister of Georgiana Chevallier, Peter Le Neve-Foster's wife.

It would appear that the Jermy and Le Neve-Foster families knew each other very well. The elder Jermy was a barrister and became Recorder of Norwich in 1831, so that a friendship with Peter Le Neve-Foster, a barrister pleading in the Norwich courts, would not be surprising. A further sidelight is that when the murder took place a telegram was sent to the Le Neve-Fosters who were then living in Camberwell. Peter immediately set off for Norfolk but before leaving is reputed to have said, "I will write down the name of the man who has done this" and wrote the name of J. B. Rush whom he had apparently always distrusted.

Mrs. Jermy subsequently remarried and became Lady Beevor. Rush's death mask is preserved in the Castle Museum in Norwich and there is a wax effigy of him in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. History does not relate what happened to Eliza Chastney, the housemaid who was shot in the thigh, but one hopes that Lady Beevor made sure that she wanted for nothing. So much for the "Family murder".

Sale of the Lenwade Properties

To turn to more domestic matters, Peter was not particularly well off, especially as he had ten children to educate. Under the terms of his father's will Peter was to inherit the White House after his mother's death, when he was to become responsible for paying certain legacies to his sisters Grace and Belle. When his mother died in 1835 and the estate was settled it turned out that there was not enough money to pay the legacies in full and Peter had this financial millstone round his neck for the rest of his life. Even though Grace and her husband were quite well off they insisted on the letter of their financial rights to the considerable embarrassment of Peter and his large family, who nicknamed John Nunes "Uncle Glue", presumably because he stuck to the money. Even after Peter's death in 1879 his widow had to continue making payments to Grace and in order to make ends meet she had to work as a translator, and amongst other things made a French translation of Herbert Spencer's philosophical works. She was well fitted for this kind of work as her father was the Rev. C. Chevallier, Fellow and Tutor of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a Chancellor's Medallist. Georgiana herself was both a French and a Latin scholar. She was helped in her French translation work by two of the children, Oliver and Mary.

After his mother's death in 1835, Peter let the White House to his aunt, Mrs. Leeds (née Eliza Le Neve-Foster) but in 1853 most of the property, including the White House itself, was sold. The freehold and leaseholds which were sold were:

• Lenwade Water corn mill.
• 215 acres of arable land with farm buildings.
• The White House.
• Six cottages.
• Lenwade Bridge Inn.

The mill is described as "a water corn mill" driving nine pairs of four-foot stones — a fair sized mill for the time. There are marginal notes of some of the prices fetched: for example, the Bridge Inn went to Bullards, the Norwich brewers, for £655.

The sale of 1853 was not quite the end of the family connection with Lenwade as I have details of another sale of some further property in 1885. I think this second sale must have been in connection with Georgiana's estate, as she died in that year. The property sold on this second occasion consisted of a dwelling house, a blacksmith's shop, a well and two water closets. Knowing the domestic drainage system of rural East Anglia even in 1966, I tremble to think what may have seeped into the Lenwade well in 1885.

There must also have been some other property as Peter's youngest daughter, Mary Le Neve-Foster ("Aunt Mary") sold a small house in Lenwade in 1918.

Peter Le Neve-Foster's large family consisted of ten children, eight boys and two girls and of the boys six either became engineers or were connected with engineering. The elder children were born at Champion Grove, Camberwell, except for Peter, the eldest, who made an early and unexpected arrival into the world while his parents were on a visit to Hertford. The younger children were born at East Hill, Wandsworth, to which the family moved in 1853. Some of the boys had very interesting careers, which I will describe in detail, but before doing so here is a "thumb nail" sketch of the family:

Peter Le Neve-Foster III

The following details of "Uncle Peter" are taken from the Richmond Herald dated 25th May 1894, from Reginald Le Neve-Foster's "Recollections" (printed privately in 1918) and from my own recollections of a conversation with the late Mrs. Mabel Le Neve Westall ("Aunt Mabel") shortly before her death in 1962. Uncle Peter was educated at the Collège Communal, Boulogne. He was afterwards apprenticed in the shipyard of John Scott Russell during the construction of the Great Eastern — the "great iron ship" designed by Brunel in 1854. This ship, with a tonnage of 22,500, was five times the size of any other vessel afloat at the time. She was designed to carry 4,000 passengers, almost twice as many as the Queen Mary launched three-quarters of a century later, and her twenty-four foot propeller was the largest ever fitted to any ship before or since. Not until the launching of the Lusitania in 1906 was the Great Eastern exceeded or even matched in size.

She was launched in 1858 — the famous launch when she stuck on the slipway and had to be coaxed and jacked into the London River, foot by foot. According to family tradition, Uncle Peter as senior apprentice "gave the signal for the launch". There is no doubt that he was subsequently attached to Brunel for some months during the protracted operations which eventually got the monster ship into the water.

After completing his apprenticeship, Uncle Peter was employed on the main drainage of London, first in Surrey and later on the northern outfall at Barking Creek. He then went to Italy to work on the Cavour Canal and after that on railway construction between Turin and Savona. Next he built a railway in Sicily and went from there to Transylvania, still on railway construction. His next job was as resident engineer on the Quinto Salla Canal and in recognition of his work King Victor Emmanuel conferred on him the distinction of Chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1872.

Uncle Peter also spent time in the United States working on parts of the Union Pacific Railroad, mining in the Rocky Mountains and surveying sites for new towns in California. He was married twice — first to the Contessa Jacinta, and after her death to Guilia, the daughter of a Dr. Cancino of Milan. He eventually retired to Nice, where Uncle Peter died in 1921.

I can just remember Uncle Peter when he came to stay with his brother Reginald (my grandfather) during his last visit to England in 1914 (or 1915?). He was a very courtly old gentleman with snow-white hair and manners of a Southern European. But I shall always carry with me the memory of a very charming old gentleman who was not too old or too grand to talk to a little boy of eleven.

Arthur Le Neve-Foster

"Uncle Arthur" became a well-known and successful engineer associated with the manufacture of cut-thread metal screws in brass and steel. He played an important part in steps for the standardisation of metal threads and in the development of the manufacture of metal screws on automatic lathes. In 1898 his firm, Davis and Timmins, of which he was managing director, was successfully floated to the public. Uncle Arthur died in 1903, but the family connection with Davis and Timmins continued until the company was taken over by the Delta Metal Company in 1961.

Herbert Le Neve-Foster

"Uncle Herbert", though always referred to as "an engineer" was in fact a metallurgist specialising in steel. In the 1880s, when the Bessemer process was being popularised, he was employed by several important firms on the Clyde and on the Tees. Later, about 1890, he became general manager of the Round Oak Steel Works at Dudley. He was also one of the pioneers in the manufacture of refractory material from magnesia limestone (Dolomite) for lining furnaces. He died prematurely at the age of fifty-one in 1904.

Reginald Le Neve-Foster, J.P., F.G.S.

My grandfather was educated at Dr. Pinche's Academy until 1862, when he left to spend two years on the Continent. He returned to England in 1864 and worked for a year with Prices Patent Candle Company before being sent, in 1865, as a "Pupil Assistant" to Dr. Frederick Crace Calvert, an eminent Manchester analytical chemist.

Dr. Calvert invented the first commercially practicable method of producing phenol (carbolic acid) and set up F. C. Calvert & Co. on the eastern outskirts of Manchester to exploit his discovery. At the early age of twenty-three my grandfather became resident chemist and works manager of the factory in Gibbon Street, Bradford, Manchester, an appointment he retained until his death in 1917. The most successful product was "Calvert's Carbolic Tooth Powder" which, at one period about 1906, had the largest sale of any dentifrice in the world.

The company remained in existence as an independent chemical manufacturer until 1965, when it was taken over by Unilever. Reginald Le Neve-Foster died in Torquay towards the end of 1917. His wife, the former Annie Abigail Lightbownd, had been killed in a motor accident in 1908.

Bernard Le Neve-Foster, J.P.

"Uncle Bernard" was educated in France at the Lycée Impériale in St. Quentin and trained as what today would be called an illuminating engineer. Like his brother Reginald, his first job was with Prices Patent Candle Company. In 1888 he married Emma Elizabeth Fletcher Bennett and retired to Sennow Hall, near Guist, in Norfolk, where he was appointed a Justice of the Peace. Like his famous ancestor, Oliver Le Neve of Great Witchingham, he was a very go-ahead farmer — one of the first farmers in Norfolk to own and use a self-binder, and a pioneer motorist who owned one of the first motor cars in Norfolk. Like his father and his elder brother Reginald, he was a keen photographer. He died in 1915.

Ernest Le Neve-Foster

Like several of his brothers, "Uncle Ernest" was trained as an engineer (he studied at the School of Mines in Freiburg, Germany) and emigrated to the United States, where he took up U.S. citizenship and became a successful mining engineer in Colorado. He was for a time geologist to the State Government in Denver. His main interest outside mining was Freemasonry, in which he went through 32 degrees of the Scottish Rite and was awarded an honorary 33rd degree. He died in 1925.

I can just remember Uncle Ernest when he visited my grandfather at Wilmslow, Manchester in 1908 or 1909 — playing with me on the lawn, trying to explain the rudiments of baseball and telling me about "Sitting Bull" the famous Red Indian chief who was, I think, still alive at that time and appearing in Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" show.

Sir Clement Le Neve-Foster, D.Sc., F.R.S.

Clement Le Neve-Foster — "Uncle Clement" — was born in Camberwell on 23rd March 1841. At the early age of seventeen he took a Bachelor of Science degree in the University of France. Returning to England, he attended the School of Mines where he obtained the Associateship in Mining and Geology, the Duke of Cornwall's Scholarship and the Edward Fores Medal. In 1860 he obtained an appointment with the Geological Survey of England and Wales, where he and a colleague, William Topley, published a memoir on the origins of river systems that had far-reaching results on geological study worldwide.

In 1873 he returned to Cornwall as an Inspector of Mines and reduced the incidence of deaths in Cornish tin mines from 2 to 1.3 per thousand. There was a very serious accident in the Snaefell Lead Mine in the Isle of Man in 1897 and Uncle Clement personally led an exploring party to seek the cause of the explosion. A jammed cage led to the exploring party being cut off, and though being slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide and, as he thought, with no hope of rescue, Uncle Clement had the presence of mind — to say nothing of courage and devotion to science — to make a series of notes of his reactions to carbon monoxide poisoning for the benefit of science after his death. The pocket book containing these notes is still in existence in the possession of his grandson Commander W. G. Hornby, R.N. In fact he was rescued, though he sustained permanent injury to his heart.

His public services were recognised by the Legion of Honour in France in 1889, election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1892 and a Knighthood in 1903. He married Sophia Chevallier Thompson of Belton in Suffolk and had a son, Vivian, and two daughters, Olga and Helen (the latter was my godmother). He died in 1904.

Source: leneve.plus.com/chapter9.htm. Family history website maintained by a descendant of the Le Neve-Foster family, writing from Borley.