“On one occasion when the Scotch officers who caroused in their prisoner’s house, had given their usual toast King James, and the host on request had followed with his, and undauntedly proposed King George, some rose, and touched their swords; but a senior officer exclaimed, ‘He has drunk our Prince, why should we not drink his? Here’s to the Elector of Hanover.’”[[8]]

During the disturbed time, when any one bearing the appearance of a messenger would assuredly have been seized with the papers which he carried, the difficulty of transmitting information was met by the employment at night of two greyhounds trained for the service. The documents were fastened to the animals and thus carried safely to the adherent’s house, from which as opportunity offered they could be passed on. The greyhounds, having been well fed as a reward and encouragement to future good behaviour, were started off on their return journey. In the present day this plan of transmission would very soon be discovered, but in those times the nature of the country, the nocturnal hours chosen, and also the deeply-rooted superstitions of the district, all helped to make the four-footed messengers very trusty carriers.

In 1755 Thomas Johnson served as Sheriff of Lancashire. He died in 1763, leaving a widow (who survived him until 1798), one son, and three daughters—the only survivors of a family of eleven children, of whom seven died in infancy, three on the day of their birth. Of the four children who reached maturity, Elizabeth, the second daughter (plate III.) married my grandfather, George Ormerod of Bury, at the Collegiate Church, Manchester, on the 18th of October, 1784. He died in 1785, a fortnight before the birth of my father, who was the sole issue of this marriage.

My father, George Ormerod (plate [II].), heir to his grandfather, was born October 20, 1785. He was co-heir of, and successor to the estates of his maternal uncle in 1823, and sole heir to his surviving maternal aunt in 1839. He was D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., and a magistrate for the counties of Cheshire, Gloucester, and Monmouth. On August 2, 1808, he married my mother, Sarah, eldest daughter of John Latham, Bradwall Hall, Cheshire, Fellow and sometime President of the Royal College of Physicians, Harley Street, London.[[9]]

My grandfather in the female line, John Latham, M.D., F.R.S. (plate [IV].), the eldest son of the Rev. John Latham, came of an old family stock, and was born in 1761 in the rectory house at Gawsworth, Cheshire. He was educated first at Manchester Grammar School, and thence proceeded (with the view of studying for orders) to Brasenose College, Oxford, but the strong bent of his own wishes towards the medical profession induced him to alter his plans, and he took his degree of M.D. on October 10, 1788. “His first professional years were passed at Manchester and Oxford, where he was physician to the respective infirmaries. In 1788 he removed to London, was admitted Fellow of the College of Physicians, and elected successively physician to the Middlesex, the Magdalen, and St. Bartholomew Hospitals. In 1795 he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to the Prince of Wales, and reappointed to the same office on the Prince’s accession to the throne as George IV. In 1813 Dr. Latham was elected President of the College of Physicians; in 1816, founded the Medical Benevolent Society; and in 1829 finally left London, retiring to his estate at Bradwall Hall, where he died on April 20, 1843, in the eighty-second year of his age.”

He indulged in the practical pleasures of country life, and maintained a home farm, on which he kept a dairy of sixty cows. He was a man of great force of character and of decisive action. On one occasion a man who had been told that if he returned he would be summarily ejected, came back to crave an audience. On being reminded of the fact he pleaded, “Oh! doctor, you do not really mean it.” “Yes, I do,” was the prompt reply as an order was given to the butler to turn the intruder out.

PLATE IV.
John Latham, Esq., M.D., F.R.S., Physician Extraordinary to George IV., maternal grandfather of Miss Ormerod, in his robes as President of the Royal College of Physicians, 1813 to 1819.

Dr. Latham married, in 1784, Mary, eldest daughter and co-heiress of the Rev. Peter Mayer, Vicar of Prestbury, Cheshire, by whom he had numerous children, of whom three sons and two daughters lived to maturity. My mother, his eldest daughter, survived him, as did also her brothers. Of these the second son, Peter Mere Latham, M.D., of Grosvenor-street, Westminster, one of Her Majesty’s Physicians Extraordinary, was long well known as an eminent consulting physician regarding diseases of the chest, until his own severe sufferings from asthma obliged him to retire to Torquay, where he died on July 20, 1875.

From our being related to John Latham and his wife, Mary Mayer (although in point of rank the difference was so enormous between the head from whom we could trace and ourselves), it is permissible to allude to our connection with the family of Arderne of Alvanley, and consequent descent from King Edward the First and his wife, Eleanor of Castile. This gave us our claim of “founder’s kin” in the election to the “Port Fellowship” of Brasenose College, to which distinction in my time my brother— Rev. John Arderne Ormerod—was elected. He was the last Port Fellow on the above foundation. The record of each generation will be found in the genealogical table of “Arderne” in my father’s “Parentalia,” and also on reference to the pedigrees of the many families of which members are named in the “History of Cheshire.”