At the edge of Birdforth churchyard is a simple headstone with indistinct lettering and a liberal covering of ivy, which keeps coming back no matter how often it is removed. It's a memorial for my great great uncle, George Herbert Wailes, eldest son of George and Emma Wailes, who are buried nearby (and have recently been disturbed by a fallen tree after Storm Arwen, but that's another story.)
Uncle Herbert was, to say the least, an enigma. Auntie Marjorie, my great aunt who lived at Beacon Banks and then in Rose Cottage, would talk about him along with his brother Uncle Billy, mainly telling us about having to care for her seemingly irascible uncles in their old age when they were all living together at Beacon Banks. My cousin Anthea refers to him as 'that whiskery old gentleman'. But I really knew nothing more about him, other than he didn't follow a traditional path either in the family engineering company or in farming.
At the beginning of lockdown I finally sorted through some random family papers, which had come from my father. I found a small photo of a couple with a dog by a river/stretch of water and a boat in the background. On the back it reads Boontown 1911, and a pencil note written by me many years back saying it was probably George Herbert Wailes and his wife Mary Jane. (I went through a phase when visiting Auntie Marjorie when I labelled every photo and artefact I could find). I also found a copy of a short story, a rather odd one, entitled 'The Mechanical Wife', and it appeared to be a copy of a story sent to Freya Stark, the traveller, at her home in Florence. Curiouser and curiouser.
Born in 1862, George Herbert had always been something of an adventurer. As a child he ran away to sea, made fireworks and cannons, and walked through long railway tunnels. He made a trip to America when he was about 20 which must have given him a taste for travelling.
In 1902 George Herbert left the family engineering firm in London for good. According to a letter from Auntie Marjorie he sold his 'very good library' and headed to Canada. He would have just turned 40. He went first to Quatsino, a hamlet on North Vancouver Island, living off land and the sea, and there met Mary Jane Page (who was originally from Cape Town), and they married in Oregon in 1903. They came back to England around 1905 for about four years, doing 'microscopic work' (which no doubt furnished the content of several books published later), before moving back to British Columbia and building a house for him and his wife to live in on Cortez Island, appropriately enough in Whaletown. They later moved back to Vancouver, due to her ill health, though George Herbert often worked out at the fishing station of Naniamo back on Vancouver island as he did not like city life. He owned a tug and was chief engineer onboard. From later correspondence with Walter Draycot, a noted Canadian naturalist, collector and journalist, it seems that that was the time he or indeed they took various adventurous sea voyages around the islands.
He became an expert in marine biology, and wrote various books on that subject. Angela Ovenston has found a reference to a George Herbert Wailes in the 1911 census as visiting Clare Island off the coast of County Mayo - perhaps the Boontown of the photo was there rather than Oregon or British Columbia. During the war he (and Mary Jane, as far as I know) returned to Yorkshire where he worked as an Armaments Inspector in Sheffield for Lloyd George's newly created Ministry of Munitions, before returning to Canada in 1919.
Here's where the short story might come in, given that a ranch near where they or at least he lived in Creston, British Columbia was adjacent to one owned by Freya Stark's father. This is also likely where he become good friends with Walter Draycot, who was later to write his obituary.
After 1919 the next 15 years are still a bit of a blank. He might well have been writing up his research or indeed farming on the ranch, though by then he was well into his 60s.
He came back to England, alone, aged 71, in October 1935, following up an interest in a molybdenum mine (molybdenum is a relatively rare mineral element used at one time in armour plating and steel manufacture) and I do remember Auntie Marjorie telling me he came to Beacon Banks to stay with his sister Annie Beatrice and family then, for three weeks, and stayed ten years, until he died in December of 1945. But for the war it is likely he would have returned to Canada.
I am still on the trail of Mary Jane. There is a brief obituary for a Mary Jane Wailes in a Vancouver paper of 1944. The notice was posted by a 'Herbert Welles'. It must have been George. They seemed to have been such an intrepid and unusual couple, and I would love to find out more about them.
Martha Wailes Jan 2022