Letters of a Victorian naval officer: Edmund Verney in British Columbia, 1862-65

Abstract

Among English country houses, Claydon House in Buckinghamshire has two special claims to fame : it contains eighteenth-century state rooms with magnificent rococo decoration, and it houses a great collection of Verney family papers, especially letters. The letters include some 30,000 from the seventeenth century, the most extensive English domestic correspondence in existence from that period, and for many years included 4,000 by Florence Nightingale, who was connected with the nineteenth-century Verneys and spent much of her time at Claydon. While these parts of the collection have long been famous, it has not been widely known that Claydon House also contains an interesting group of letters about British Columbia, written to his father by Lieutenant Edmund Hope Verney, when he served on this coast as commander of the gunboat H.M.S. Grappler between 1862 and 1865. An account of these letters is given here for the first time, with the permission of Sir Ralph Verney and the Claydon House Trust. Lieutenant (later Sir) Edmund Verney (1838-1910) was the eldest son and heir of Sir Harry Verney, second baronet, who had been born a Calvert but had taken the name Verney on inheriting Claydon. He was conscious of bearing a name famous in English history : an earlier Sir Edmund Verney, Standard Bearer to Charles I, had died nobly defending the standard at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. After a short period at Harrow, the nineteenth-century Edmund Verney entered the Royal Navy at the age of twelve years and ten months. Although only twenty-four when he arrived in British Columbia in 1862 to take command of the Grappler, he had already seen extensive service and had established a good reputation during the Crimean War and with a Naval Brigade in India at the time of the Mutiny. He had maintained Verney tradition also as a frequent and 1 My work has been facilitated by Mrs. Susan Ranson, archivist, and Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sandford, National Trust custodians, at Claydon House. Cataloguing of the manuscripts at Claydon is now in progress. 2 See Sir Harry Verney, The Verneys of Claydon (London: Robert Maxwell, 1968), and Major General G. L. Verney, The Devil's Wind: The Story of the Naval Bri-