Puzzles and Speculations

Bryan emailed yesterday reporting that next week at Andrew Lloyd Webber's annual festival he and Tim Rice are producing a musical--The Likes of Us-- commemorating the centenerary of Dr. Barnardo's death. The duo wrote it before they became famous. Some of their hits have been tried out first at the festival. Wonder if Webber or Rice have Barnardo connections. I'll do some poking around. I wrote the following reply to Bryan:

I've been entertaining a theory about our grandfather's disappearance. I think at heart he was probably a good man. Like many another before him, he made a mistake and fell from grace. Alfred John Gevaux and Annie Beatrice Jackson seemed to have everything going for them when they married in Bermuda in 1897, but in quick succession seven children were born to them in eight years and the young couple found themselves with nine mouths to feed.

Joseph, retired from the Royal Marines with testimonies that all spoke of his virtues--intelligent, honest, reliable, etc. The Prudential Insurance Company hired him and promoted him to their branch office in Guildford, a pretty little town in Surrey. Unfortunately, his salary of less than three pounds a week was inadeautate for his family's needs, and he began to place bets with customer's premiums. By the time his little game was discovered, he had stolen over eighty pounds. As a gambler he no doubt believed one big win would pay back the losses.

Perhaps he had no plans to desert his family when he went to London on that August Saturday morning nearly 100 years ago. Why? Because when he got there he visited his stepmother, Annie Ross. The papers I got from Barnardo's testify to that. I don't think he went to see her just to sit around and drink tea. I think hoped Annie would help him out of his serious trouble

Annie was his stepmother. They were not close. Soon after she became second wife of our great-grandfather, Joseph Alfred John joined the Royal Marines. She was much closer to her own children.

Joseph's father, Joseph Alfred Gevaux , had died a few years earlier, and couldn't be appealed to. Annie had her own draper's shop, and according to John Gevaux Ross, was successful at it but tight-fisted. If he did make an appeal to her and she turned him down, he may have felt he could not return to Guildford where a warrant was out for his arrest. Instead he felt compelled to leave England immediately and escape punishment. Our grandmother may have suffered even more if he had been sent to prison. It would have been intolerable for her to became known as a convict's wife. People were very cruel in those days.

Forces of destruction were overtaking him. Your mother said in her interview that he spoiled little Bert, and I have no doubt that he was attached to his other children. But with all those mouths to feed on three pounds a week, desperation may have led him into gambling away some of the firm's funds.

And how about that old story of the golden sovereigns he supposedly left on the kitchen table? I think it may have been apocryphal, or wishful thinking. If he didn't initially intend to leave his family, why would he leave them gold pieces? It's more likely that when he left he was almost penniless. A gambler with gold coins in his pocket would have been unable to resist throwing them into one last foolish gamble. According to the Barnardo papers, our grandmother was left with only ten shillings and sixpence.

These speculative questions can never be resolved unless somebody manages to find traces of our grandfather in archives not yet discovered.

Bryan responded to an email I wrote on the subject. He upholds the sovereign theory and provides the following argument which I must say holds water because his mother Joan had a good memory and a sound intelligence.

Your "Puzzles & Speculations" are interesting.

I follow your reasoning about our grandfather's character & possible motivation on that fateful morning when he disappeared. The visit to his stepmother is news to me, but it is plausible, including the possible reason for his visit. His frugal stepmother may well have refused to assist him. Indeed she may have criticized his actions resulting in his straitened circumstances. No doubt it was unforgiving world then! And he may well have felt it was impossible to return to Guildford where he was a wanted man.

Two items bother me.

ONE: If he left England for parts unknown, how did he get there with no money? Was he able to work his way to a faraway destination? Did he change his name & maybe his appearance? Do we have any old photos of him? I have always speculated that he may have rejoined the armed services in 1914 or shortly thereafter & been killed in action. Have you ever searched military death records? But where was he firm 1907 to 1914? With all your combined computer smarts between the two of you I am sure you would far more successful than I would be! The question still remains when, where & how did he die? I also wonder if there would be any chance of searching U.S., Australian or New Zealand death records. Or even South Africa.

TWO: Notwithstanding your hypothesis that the "gold sovereign story" is fictitious I cannot get away from the comment I heard from my mother more than once that she should "give this to your mother". I don't think she was the type of person to fabricate a comment like that. Furthermore, she you used to say it with a degree of venom in her voice. She never had much good to say about her father, but that story always sounded to me to be truthful. There is no doubt that throughout her life she continued to harbour illwill towards him, holding him in judgment for his abandonment of the family & consequent breakup of them. This was also probably a mirror image of he mother's opinion of him. Certainly, I cannot recall hearing Grandma ever saying anything, good or bad about her husband. Then again, I was probably considered to have been too young to know about such matters.

Sorry I cannot be of much positive help in resolving this void in our family history. Just to fill in the blanks would be very interesting & satisfying of our curiosity. Keep up the good work!

Another waif in the world.

Mildred Cable, Intrepid Explorer and Author of The Gobi Desert

Friday, June 17, 2005

A few words about Mildred Cable, the intrepid missionary and explorer and author of a classic work of travel literature, The Gobi Desert, in which she wrote brilliantly about her adventures in the wildest and remotest places in Central Asia no Europeans had ever reached before. Today anyone stumbling across a copy of her book at a garage sale or in a used books shop will find it to be addictive reading. It's hard to put down.

Mildred's parents were Christian evangelicals and her father, John Cable, was a leader in the Baptist Church in Guildford, a lovely ancient town in Surrey. He was also the prosperous owner of a "gentlemen's outfitters and haberdashery store" in Guildford and, as a local justice of the peace, he once found himself in a position to help my grandmother in a time of trouble.

I learned of John Cable's connection to my family's history from papers I recently acquired from the archives of Dr. Barnardo's Homes in London, England.My grandmother, Annie Beatrice Gevaux, was a member of the Guildford Baptist Church. Her children took Sunday School lessons from John's other daughter and one August day in 1906, my aunt Florence, a little girl of 7, confided in her teacher. Florence told her that her father, a branch manager for Prudential Insurance, had deserted the family, abandoning 7 children under the age of 8.

John Cable came to my grandmother's rescue and was instrumental in getting the four youngest Gevaux children (my mother was one of them) admitted to Dr. Barnardo's Homes, Britain's famous institution for abandoned children, headquartered in London. The three eldest stayed with my grandmother who took in boarders and became a washerwoman in order to support her family. I have a copy of Cable's signed application to Barnardo's in my files in which he testified that Grandma was a respectable, god-fearing woman deserving of assistance.

Alice Mildred Cable was born in Guildford in 1878 into a passionately evangelical Christian family who believed in spreading Christianity to the farthest ends of the earth. As a child she yearned to grow up and become a missionary, and rebelled against her family's plans for her to become a typically bourgeois young lady. Instead, when she reached 18, she insisted on studying in London where she learned basic medical practices and prepared for missionary work in China.

On arrival in Huozhou, Shanxi, China in 1902, Mildred met two English sisters--Evangeline and Francesca French. The trio established a mission station and a girls' school there, together with a church, a dispensary, and a refuge where opium adicts could receive treatment. They also established an itinerant mission for Muslim women and traveled across the Gobi desert, taking medical and educational supplies with them to aid nomadic Muslim families. They loaded their little horse and cart with a small portable organ, pamphlets, and song books written in a Chinese phonetic script that they taught to many people along the way. It's a poignant and intriguing image that comes to mind of the three English women holding sing-alongs for nomadic Muslim peasants somewhere in the middle of the vast and normally silent desert.

Mildred, Eva and Francesca made three separate journeys across the Gobi over a ten year period. They gazed at cave walls covered in Muslim paintings, they met military generals, princes, and prostitutes, and they soldiered on through duststorms and scorpion attacks, finding refuge in a desert castle, protected by a Muslim military unit. In her book Mildred describes in vivid detail the strange tundra, flora and fauna never seen by Europeans before. She evokes the people and places of a culture now eradicated, and she seems more interested in the exotic men and women she met in the Gobi rather than converting them. She describes their homes, their children, the way they dressed, ate, grew food--all of which she herself took part in--as well as the harsh and strange features of the landscape, the vegetation, and animal life. The Gobi was like a separate planet.

The women's success was based partly on immediately abandoning western dress and adopting local clothing, plus immersing themselves in the local language. They boarded in the humble homes of the people they met, living as they did, sleeping on earth floors. They went completely native and showed no fear when faced with threatening warlords and bandits. They literally charmed them like birds out of the trees.

During their travels, they adopted a little 7 year old beggar girl and eventually took her home to England when they were forced to return to England in 1937 after political turmoil in China forced them to leave.The three women were heaped with honors after reaching home. Mildred's book, The Gobi Desert (1940), was widely read and admired, and The Royal Scottish Geographical Society awarded them jointly the Livingstone medal. Mildred received the Lawrence memorial medal from the Royal Central Asian Society, and she served as Vice President for the British and Foreign Bible Society until her death in London in 1952.

My mother and her siblings never knew the story of John Cable and his actions in their behalf. Even Florence may have forgotten her own role in the story. It's doubtful that any of them knew of Mildred or ever read her book. However, a cousin of mine, Hilary (Gevaux) Hield, does recall her mother reading The Gobi Desert to her as a child. Much later, as an adult, Hilary flew over the Gobi and looking down over the great wasteland, she felt a flash of nostalgia for those childhood readings. Hilary's mother married Frank, one of the 7 children who were assisted by John Cable.

Mildred's books are scarce. She also wrote Through Jade Gate and Central Asia: An Account of Journeys in Kansu, Turkestan and the Gobi Desert but it's out of print. The original editiion of The Gobi Desert has been long out of print, but Virago Press issued a reprint in the 1980s and that is available on Amazon.com.

Bibliography:

Linda Benson, "Muslims, Missionaries and Warlords in Northwesern China," Oakland University Journal (Fall 2001), p. 9-21.

William James Platt, Three Women: Mildred Cable, Francesca French, Evangeline French. The Authorised Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964). [Out of print].

Ricci Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China (Online).