Today’s Untold Lives centres on horses rather than people.  By 1800 the East India Company was increasingly reliant on its army, and suitable horses were needed.  On 2 January 1801 the Court of Directors paid Company official James Coggan £400 to purchase a stallion for the use of the Company’s stud in India.  They agreed to pay for a ‘Proper Person’ to act as a groom and accompany the horse to Bengal.  Further sums were authorised for the purchase of two mares a few weeks later and it was agreed to send three or four thoroughbred stallions and seven strong hunting mares to improve the breeding stock in India.

On 16 March 1801 the Court set up a Stud Committee to look into the quality of horses available for the Company in India.  Whilst Asiatic horses were suitable for the native soldiers, they were not ideal for the heavier European men.  Stronger native horses bred for the harness were too thick in the shoulder to act as a charger.  Arabian stallions were too small for Company purposes.  It was decided to set up a stud farm in England to breed the ideal blood lines to send to the stud farms in India.

Elizabeth and colt, thoroughbreds belonging to the East India Company at its stud farm at Padnals near Romford, Essex, attributed to J Hardman  - British Library Foster 240

David Scott, Chairman of the Committee, offered to present the new venture with a fine grey Arabian stallion from his estate in Scotland.  The Court initially considered acquiring part of the Cannons estate at Little Stanmore Middlesex but this proved unsuitable.  In July 1802 agreement was reached with John Towgood to lease a farm of 130 acres at Padnals near Romford in Essex.  John H Manley was put in charge of the farm but his services were dispensed with in January 1803.  Samuel Yull was then appointed to manage the establishment as resident groom.  The Company’s equine shipping agent, William Moorcroft, a respected veterinary expert, was appointed Superintendent of the Stud a few months later.

Worthy a thoroughbred stallion belonging to the East India Company at its stud farm at Padnals near Romford, Essex, attributed to J Hardman - British Library Foster 239. Worthy’s brother Waxy won the Derby in 1793.

The stud farm was a success. Some income was obtained from hiring out the services of the Company’s two stallions. The accounts at 25 March 1806 show nearly £440 was made from the stallions performing their duty with mares brought in to them in that season. 

Racing Calendar 1806  

From 1801 to March 1809, the horses sent to India were: 7 stallions, 6 mares, 26 colts, and 7 fillies.  In August 1804 a special stable was constructed on the upper deck of the ship Lord Keith for a prize stallion.  The Company directors were dismayed when ‘young Comus, one of the most valuable horses that could be procured in this country for the purpose of improving the breed in India’ was lost by carelessness when being transferred to a country ship soon after his arrival at Bombay.

There were concerns about inadequate management of the stud farm at Pusa in Bengal, so William Moorcroft sailed to India late in 1807 to superintend affairs.  It appears that Padnals was maintained by the Company until 1817 when Samuel Yull was given a pension of £80 per annum, and William Holmes, who had care of the colts, £40 per annum. Assistant groom James Craggs returned to his job as labourer in the Company tea warehouses with a pension of 5s per week.  After Yull’s death in 1824, his widow Olivia continued to receive half his pension.

Georgina Green
Independent researcher

Further reading:
East India Company Stud Papers 1794-1851- IOR/L/MIL/5/459-467
Minutes of East India Company Court of Directors  - IOR/B
Padnals property transactions IOR/L/L/2/1 pp.844-849
Garry Alder, Beyond Bokhara. The Life of William Moorcroft, Asian Explorer and Pioneer Veterinary Surgeon 1767-1825 (London, 1985)
 

I have come across an intriguing 17th-century book titled Coryats Crudities, written by Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), and illustrated with satirical prints.  Coryate (also spelt as Coryat) was an entertainer to Henry, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King James I of England (James VI of Scotland).  In 1608 he undertook a five-month journey in continental Europe, and this book, published in 1611 and dedicated to the Prince, gives a detailed account of his travels.

Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities, printed by William Stansby for the author, London, 1611, shelfmark 152.f.19; frontispiece, engraving

The text on the frontispiece illustration informs the reader that Coryate visited France, the Duchy of Savoy, Italy, Switzerland, Rhaetia (the canton of Graubünden, now in Switzerland), Germany and the Netherlands.  It features the author’s portrait at the age of 35, engraved by William Hole, flanked by eleven amusing images of his adventures.  These included being sick on board of a ship (top left), being carried in a chair on poles upon the shoulders of two men in the French mountains (centre left), and a Venetian courtesan hurling eggs at him from a window as he passes by in a gondola (centre right).

Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities, printed by William Stansby for the author, London, 1611, shelfmark 152.f.19; Coryate’s shoes, woodcut, leaf k 4 recto

Even more unexpected is the second illustration: a pair of shoes, encircled by a laurel wreath.  Printed above and below are prose and a verse in Latin by Henry Peacham, commemorating Coryate and the iconic shoes he wore while walking for 900 miles of his 1,975-mile journey across Europe.  This type of ‘lachet’ shoe had two leather tongues with holes in them for shoelaces.  Coryat’s shoes were strengthened with pieces of horn, and he tells us in the book that he had them mended only once - in Zurich.  Humorous verses, printed at the start of the volume and written by numerous authors in response to Coryate’s request, mention his shoes 32 times!

After returning to his beloved home village, Odcombe in Somerset, Coryate asked for permission to display his shoes inside the local Church of St Peter and St Paul, as a sort of thanksgiving for his safe trip.  They hung there until 1702, went lost in the 1860s, but have been replaced by a replica pair, carved in stone.

The book was popular with contemporary readers, and the British Library holds four copies, with shelfmarks C.152.e.5., C.32.e.9., 152.f.19 and G.6750.  This last copy was presented by Coryate himself to Henry, Prince of Wales.

The ‘Odcombian Legge-stretcher’ (as he referred to himself) embarked on further travels in 1612, spending time in Turkey and the Holy Land.  In 1615 he travelled from Aleppo in Syria to India, walking over 3000 miles.  He kept recording his experiences during these journeys, periodically sending back manuscript notes to England.  He died of dysentery in Surat, Gujarat, India, in December 1617.  His surviving notes were published, providing a unique insight into the lives of people in these countries through the eyes of an early English traveller.

Marianne Yule
Curator of Prints & Drawings
British Library Western Heritage Collections

Further reading
Frederic George Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Division I. Political and Personal Satires. Vol. I. The Trustees, 1870, Satires No.75 and 77, pp. 39-42; shelfmark 1572/628
Biographical entry for Coryate, Thomas (1577?-1617), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Farah Karim-Cooper, Strangers in the city: the cosmopolitan nature of 16th-century Venice, 2016
Description of the Jewish Ghetto and the courtesans of Venice in Coryate's Crudities, 1611

 

This post is part of a series highlighting some of the British Library’s science collections as part of British Science Week 2020.

Have you ever wondered why animals often fight in ritualised ways, not killing each other outright even though they have the weapons to do so?  Just think of how easy it would be, with all the teeth, claws, horns and antlers.

If you currently visit the British Library’s Treasures Gallery, you’ll find a small exhibit of material from the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith’s archive.  In the 1970s, Maynard Smith gave one answer to the question above that proved highly influential and successful.  It even won him the Crafoord Prize, biology’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize.  And it made to number 61 of 87 in the Great British Innovation Vote, in which you were asked about ‘the most important innovation of the last 100 years’: evolutionary game theory.

John Maynard Smith. Sussex, 1989. Copyright © Anita Corbin and John O’Grady. Courtesy of the estate of John Maynard Smith.

In the exhibition, next to some of his very early work on animal flight, you’ll spot some line printer output with purple annotations.  This particular printout dates from 1972 and is part of a series showing the crucial computer simulations based on which Maynard Smith and his then collaborator George Price wrote “The logic of animal conflict”.  This paper, published in 1973, is the basis for evolutionary game theory.
 

Maynard Smith’s personal copy of ‘The Logic of Animal Conflict’, 1973. Courtesy of the estate of John Maynard Smith.

Maynard Smith, born in 1920 (died in 2004), would have turned 100 this year.  He was one of Britain’s leading evolutionary biologists, a “puzzle-solver” with mathematical intuition whose research career spans almost half a century.  The exhibited printout and others of the same series were sent back and forth between Maynard Smith at the University of Sussex and Price in London.  The two of them had met in 1970 and later started collaborating on what became evolutionary game theory: the application of game theory – which originated in economics – to evolutionary biology and animal behaviour in particular.

By pitting animals against each other as in a game, supplied with strategies like “probing” and “retaliating”, Maynard Smith and Price showed why animals fight in almost ritualised ways, without full use of their weapons: because it is evolutionarily beneficial.  To underline their idea, they ran a series of computer simulations, having two “animals” A and B “fight” round after round.  A and B had the options to escalate the fight or not to.  The simulations showed that the risk of retaliation is too great: if A escalates the fight, B may follow suit and injure, even kill, A.

(‘Hawks and Doves’) - Computer printout for 'B31 L – run 2'; 11 April 1972. (Add MS 86749). Copyright of the estate of John Maynard Smith.

As the purple annotations on the exhibited printout show, the computer simulations were useful but not necessarily straightforward.  Some results were ‘v[ery] puzzling’.  Once everything was resolved, the results were published, stimulating much research on animal behaviour.  In 1976, evolutionary game theory joined several other ideas forming the basis of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.  In fact, Dawkins credits Maynard Smith’s work as a ‘major stimulus that led me to […] write the whole book.’  If you would, please turn to Chapter 5, ‘Aggression: stability and the selfish machine’…

Anyway, that’s where you can read Dawkins’ description of evolutionary game theory – without any of the maths that was in the original paper of Maynard Smith and Price.

Helen Piel
Postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Deutsches Museum, working on the relationship between artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

The John Maynard Smith exhibition is on display at the British Library Treasures Gallery until April 5.

 

This post is part of a series highlighting some of the British Library’s science collections as part of British Science Week 2020.

Among the papers of the climate scientist Sir John Houghton, (Add MS 89409) is a record of one of the most significant moments in either Houghton’s career or the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body set up by the United Nations in order to observe and respond to changes in the world’s climate.  It is a transcript of a meeting in Madrid, in late 1995, of Working Group I, the IPCC’s division for assessing the ‘physical science of climate change’.

At the time, the IPCC was preparing its second major report.  The contribution of Working Group I already existed in draft form, but its summary still needed finalising.  Did its phrasing – especially in its central assertion, that human activity is affecting the climate – reflect the scientific evidence?  As co-Chairman, Houghton was to oversee this fine-tuning, and, if possible, to guide the meeting towards a consensus.  This could never come at the cost of scientific integrity, but it seemed within reach, and worth striving for.

Transcript of the IPCC discussion, Madrid 1995. (Add MS 89409/4/23), Copyright 2020 The British Library.

Houghton was prepared for robust debate, but admits that he had not anticipated the direction actually taken by the discussion, which the transcript records in a 238-page slab of twelve-point text (Add MS 89409/4/23).  On the first day, Houghton noticed a representative of the Global Climate Coalition, one of the invited non-governmental organisations, engaging certain delegates in conversation.  That this organisation was generally critical of the IPCC’s conclusions was not in itself a problem, but its being backed by ‘powerful parts of the US and international energy industry’ suggested certain non-scientific interests.  The next day, Houghton found that some of these delegates ‘wanted to weaken the statements about the extent of climate change’ and emphasise the ‘uncertainties about [its] causes’.

Houghton was frustrated because it was clear to him that their motives were political, not scientific.  Indeed, one main representative was not a scientist but a lawyer.  Time was ticking on, objections were now being raised over individual words, and he was being cast in the role of a political negotiator.  Could some concessions be made in exchange for others? ‘I’m keeping no score sheet,’ he insisted.  The science could not be bartered.

John Houghton speaking at a conference in High Wycombe, UK, 2005. Photo credit: Kaihsu Tai. Reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 3.0, (cropped and lightened).

The third afternoon wore on.  Time was running out.  The planned evening meal was abandoned; at 9 pm the translators left.  The meeting agreed to continue without them, and Houghton pressed on.  Only at twenty past midnight, minutes before the building closed, did they finish.  But a consensus, albeit sobering, had been reached: ‘The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate’.

Houghton has written that if it had not been for the last-minute success of this meeting, the major Kyoto Protocol climate treaty would not have been adopted two years afterwards.  He has also observed that all the opposition actually resulted in a better, stronger document.  ‘It was a stimulating and exciting time’, he reflected later, ‘but we had come within a hair’s breadth of failure’.

Dominic Newman
Manuscripts Cataloguer

The Papers of John Houghton were gifted to the British Library in 2015.  At present a single series ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’ consisting of correspondence, notes, offprints and published material, is available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 89409/4.

The British Library would like to thank the American Institute of Physics (AIP) for their generous support in enabling the cataloguing of this material.

Further reading:
John Houghton, ‘Madrid 1995: Diagnosing climate change’, Nature, 455 (2008), 737-738
John Houghton et al. (eds.), 'Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
John Houghton, with Gill Tavner, In the Eye of the Storm: the autobiography of Sir John Houghton. (Oxford, Lion, 2013)

This post is part of a series highlighting some of the British Library’s science collections as part of British Science Week 2020. 

A reasonable claim could be made to the idea that Donald Michie (1923-2007) is the father of British research into artificial intelligence (AI).  Following a successful early career as a mammalian geneticist, Michie devoted his life to the development of computers which could perform complex, human-like tasks.

His initial interest was sparked during his wartime service as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park where he forged a friendship with Alan Turing, playing chess, discussing the potential of computers, and even (unsuccessfully) attempting to locate Turing’s hidden stockpiles of silver after the war.  The two gave considerable consideration to developing early computer programmes which could play chess.

Donald Michie c. 1940s (Add MS 89072/1/5). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

Michie’s interest in building machines capable of learning continued after the war.  In 1960, he developed a computer programme which could learn to play a perfect game of noughts and crosses.  Lacking a computer to test the programme, MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine) was built from matchboxes and coloured beads which corresponded to all potential possibilities in a game, winning Michie a bet in the process.

In 1965, Michie established the forerunner to the University of Edinburgh’s Department for Artificial Intelligence and was at the forefront of international research into the field for decades thereafter.  Working at Edinburgh, Michie and his team developed and built a pair of machines, affectionately known as Freddy I and Freddy II.  These machines were capable of learning to identify the parts of and assemble model toys, such as a car or a boat, integrating perception and action into one machine.

Michie’s importance was most evident from his prominent role in the Lighthill Report and Debate in 1972-73.  James Lighthill’s 1972 Report for the Science Research Council suggested that research into AI had overpromised and underdelivered on its capabilities to that point.  A televised debate in 1973 saw Lighthill opposite Michie and two fellow researchers into AI: James McCarthy and Richard Gregory.

Michie, McCarthy and Gregory were not successful.  The outcome of Lighthill’s intervention became known as the AI Winter.  Funding for research into AI was slashed across the UK (and, shortly after, in the USA).  However, Edinburgh retained its research into AI, albeit with a departmental restructure in 1974.  Michie continued his research at the University for a further decade before moving on to co-found the Turing Institute in Glasgow as Director of Research.

Following his retirement from university teaching, Michie dedicated his work to developing a chat-bot to beat the Turing Test: could a computer programme convince a human it was a human?  He named his chat-bot Sophie, complete with humorous backstory and familial relations (apparently ‘Southern California Trash’ was an apt accent for her given her personality).

Donald Michie c. 1980s (Add MS 88958/5/4). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprise three separate tranches of material gifted to the library in 2004 and 2008.  They consist of correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 88958, Add MS 88975 and Add MS 89072.

Matt Wright
PhD student at the University of Leeds and the British Library. He is on an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership researching the Donald Michie Archive, exploring his work as a geneticist and artificial intelligence researcher in post-war Britain.

Further Reading:
Michie, D., Donald Michie on Machine Intelligence, Biology and more, ed. by Ashwin Srinivasan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
van Emden, M., ‘I Remember Donald Michie (1923 – 2007)’, A Programmer’s Place, 2009.

A longer version of this post can be found on our Science blog.

 

This is the final blog of a series on internment, highlighting the experiences of both civilians and military personnel detained across the globe in the Second World War.

The following experience took place in the only part of the British Isles occupied by Germany during the Second World War: the Channel Islands.  The present account has been revealed from a letter dating from 1954, almost a decade after the conclusion of the War.  It was sent from Vyvyan MacLeod Ferrers, a retired HM Consul, who was 65 years old when he was incarcerated.  He was sentenced and imprisoned in France, before being moved to Germany.

Why was he interned?  Apparently, he was guilty of stirring up an insurrection.  Furthermore, he admits that he had been helping and would continue to help the ‘Resistance’.  More detail is given in a book he wrote while in prison, The Brigadier.  He refused to believe in the fall of Singapore, and repeatedly told others ‘Do not be believing them: it is all lies together’.  Therefore, he was deemed ‘a man so dangerous that the Court dare not let me run loose’.  He would not do so until VE day, when he was liberated by the US Army.

The first page of the letter from Vyvyan MacLeod Ferrers  – Add MS 89060.

Unlike other accounts which reflect on hardship in captivity, Ferrers writes little of the conditions, instead emphasising his thoughts on the German people.  He comments that the common man had little power but to go along with the machinations of the state, stating that ‘After a phase of indiscriminate indignation I found it possible to confine my resentment to the real ruffians, and to feel some sympathy with the decent man, of whom there were plenty, who could hardly do otherwise than play into their hands’.

Instead, he lays the blame firmly on the Gestapo.  Ferrers does not disguise his scorn for them, arguing that ‘The Gestapo was a stench in the nostrils of every decent man: and among the Germans there were as many decent men as anywhere else’.  He writes that the group ‘hardly concealed its contempt’ for the German courts, manned as they were by the common people.  Throughout the short four-page letter, Ferrers repeatedly emphasises how ordinary citizens were effectively powerless, ‘Called up, willy-nilly, from their own affairs, they were compelled to do what they much disliked’.  Rather than blaming them for his years of imprisonment, as many understandably would, he sympathises with them.

The final page of the letter from Vyvyan MacLeod Ferrers  – Add MS 89060.

This empathetic outlook (written while Britain still had rationing because of the War!) is an uncommon find.  Indeed, Ferrers finishes the letter noting how he has been ‘surprised to find how many people are surprised at my point of view’.  While recent understandings of Nazi Germany have emphasised the normality of life for the common people in the fascist regime, Ferrers already understood this, despite his experiences.  He argued that the German people were not the real enemy – but Hitler and the Gestapo.

Ferrars died less than a year after sending this letter, on 6 March 1955 in Brighton.

Jack Taylor
Doctoral researcher at the Open University.  His CHASE-funded research explores sexual violence between men in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Further Reading:
Add MS 89060 - Letter from V. M. Ferrers to Sir Amberson [Barrington Marten].
Gilly Card, Vyvyan Macleod Ferrers
Vyvyan Ferrers, The Brigadier (London: Art & Educational Publishers Ltd, 1948).

 

Libraries are renowned for being quiet places but you should have heard the excited cries of 'Housey Housey!' when we recently acquired a copy of the Saint Albans Chronicle printed in London by Wykyn de Worde in 1520.  Its acquisition means the British Library can now, uniquely, provide access to the complete sequence of printed editions of this English Chronicle.

The distinctive Printer’s Device used by Wynkyn de Worde on the last printed leaf of the Descrypcyon of Englande bound before his 1520 edition of The English Chronicle.
British Library shelfmark: C.194.b.430.

Originally Anglo-Norman, the ‘Brut chronicle’ refers to a collection of medieval works on the history of England that incorporate the mythological founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy. It became the most popular vernacular historical chronicle and its wide circulation in manuscript made it an obvious contender for the early printing press.  It saw thirteen editions between 1480 and 1528, the first by William Caxton, and the last by Wynkyn de Worde.
 

'Here come Normans'! The book’s decorative start to the Norman conquest in the 1520 edition of The Chronicle.

Just as its many scribal forms were embellished and supplemented, the English Chronicle’s printed versions were treated to additions also.  In just the two years between Caxton’s first and second editions the vocabulary of the text was modernized and punctuation increased.  Spacing was improved and the breaking of words was avoided (i.e. gen- | till became Gentille; des ||| turbaunce became dysturbbauce).  Caxton introduced additions using ‘many dyverse paunflettis and bookys’ he had at his disposal and so the Brut was brought up to the times of Edward IV.  Caxton also responded to the growing interest in geography amongst ordinary readers by printing a Description of Britain but his information was lifted from Ralph Higden’s Polychronicon, a 14th-century text badly in need of updating.  The Chronicle and the Description became frequently bound together or printed together in later editions.

This copy of Caxton’s second edition (1482) has a lovely feature of intervention by a past reader; 35 cuts from the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles have been inserted in the margins at an early date. British Library shelfmark C.10.b.4.

In 1486 the work was edited and expanded by the so-called ‘Schoolmaster of St Albans’.  It was given a new prologue, a summary of the lives of the Popes (pre-Reformation of course and destined, as with the newly acquired copy to have occurrences of the word ‘Pope’ censored and scored through) and was generally made more readable.  It also saw the introduction of woodcut illustrations; Biblical and topographical: Tower of Babel, Rome and London.  In 1497 the St Albans text was selected by Wynkyn de Worde for a new edition.  Using more popular illustrations like battle scenes, Kings, and mythological curiosities such as the fabled wrestling match between the giants Gogmagog and Coryn, de Worde published five editions of the Chronicle.  Another London printer, Julian Notary, introduced eye-catching illustrations of Adam and Eve, Noah, and Abraham in his 1504 and 1515 editions.  These illustrate developments in how books were becoming tailored for a wider, more popular audience.  Yet no more than a dozen copies of this 1520 edition survive.  The copy acquired comes with noteworthy English provenance having been in the Library of the Earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire since the 17th century.
 

'How Brute arryued at Totnesse in the yle of Albyon / And of the / bataylle that was bitwene Coryn / and Gogmagog.'  This battle is believed to have took place on Plymouth Hoe (where commemorative figures of the two giants were cut into the turf up to medieval times). Coryn defeated Gogmagog by tossing him upon the rocks below.

For library workers it is an especial pleasure to be able to provide readers with examples of the entire printed representation of a particular work - all in one place under one roof – a ‘Full House’ so to speak in Library Bingo lingo!
 

A glorious woodcut illustration depicting violence and ships, both of which feature prominently in the English Chronicle!  Printed by Julian Notary, in 1504. British Library shelfmark: G.5994

'Eyes down for a full house!' All thirteen printed editions of the Brut chronicle held at the British Library.

 

Christian Algar
Curator, Printed Heritage Collections

 

Early on the morning of Tuesday 1 March 1892, a Thames waterman named Holeyman was in his boat at St George’s Stairs Horselydown when he saw the body of a young man floating in the river.  He attached a rope to the body and brought it on shore. 

Southwark Bridge on the Thames from David Hughson, London; being an accurate history and description of the British metropolis (London, c.1825)

The dead man’s clothes were searched at the mortuary by Mr Upton, the coroner’s officer, and Police Constable Longman.  They found a copy of a newspaper from Monday evening in a pocket, indicating that the body had not been long in the water.  There were also several bunches of keys and a Leap Year proposal of marriage from a girl.

From the letter, it appeared that the young man’s last name was Baths.  He was described in newspaper reports as being ‘of gentlemanly appearance, aged about twenty-five, with dark hair and eyes’.  As he was carrying 43 keys, the press speculated that he had held a responsible position in a City office.

The young man was later identified as Edward Walter Batho.  He was a collector for the Automatic Cigarette Company.  Presumably the keys opened vending machines?  An inquest was held by Mr Langham and the jury returned an open verdict.  I have been unable to discover any more about the circumstances of this sad death. 

Edward Walter Batho was born in Deptford 1868, the son of Robert, a butcher, and his wife Elizabeth.  Edward had a large number of siblings.  His father died in 1879 and Elizabeth supported her youngest children by working as a sextoness in a church in the City of London.  She died in 1890. 

In the 1891 census, 23-year-old Edward was living in Abchurch Lane in the City as head of a household with his sister Amy aged 19 and brother Henry, 17.  Edward was described as a ‘Railway Collector’.  Less than a year later, Edward was dead. 

So we are left to wonder - who was the girl who wrote the marriage proposal?  Can a reader shed any light on this mystery?

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading:
British Newspaper Archive e.g. Coventry Evening Telegraph 2 March 1892; Aberdeen Press and Journal 9 March 1892; Illustrated Police News 12 March 1892