The Woods, from whom I am descended, were for hundreds of years owners of Hareston Manor, Brixton, a small village near Plymouth. There is a record of a John a’ Wood living there in the eighth year of the reign of King Edward the Third, and in the north aisle of the church a ledger stone with coat of arms to John Wood, who died A.D. 1724. The Hareston Woods died out, but a younger branch settled at Tiverton, the head of which manufactured lace and serge, and to him was born and duly apprenticed as a lad, Matthew. He soon started in business on his own account, and eventually became a successful hop merchant, being chosen Lord Mayor of London in 1815 and 1816. He represented the City in nine successive Parliaments,[1] and was as fearless in defending the cause of Queen Caroline, which he warmly espoused, as he was in all matters aldermanic and magisterial. When Lord Mayor, he faced, practically alone, a riotous mob, whose leader was exhorting his followers to storm the Bank of England. Mr. Wood running out into the crowd, pulled the ringleader off his horse, and dragged him inside the Bank railings, a prisoner.
In 1819 the Alderman was sitting in his counting-house, when an agent of the Duke of Kent, calling late on Saturday afternoon, asked Matthew Wood for the loan of £10,000. The agent explained it was important for reasons of State that the expected baby[2] of the Duchess of Kent, who was then at Ostend, should be born in England, and that His Royal Highness the Duke could not cross over unless he received that sum of money to satisfy his more pressing creditors. Mr. Wood promised to reply on the Monday, after consulting his partners; the agent urged, however, that the state of the Duchess’s health admitted of no delay and that she ought to cross immediately, so my grandfather gave him the cheque.
Sir John Page Wood, my father, who was very popular in Essex, was aptly described in an Obituary notice in The Times.[3] My mother, the bravest woman I ever knew, and to whom I owe any good qualities I may possess, came of a race of Cornish squires. John Michell represented Truro in Parliament in the reign of Elizabeth. My uncle, Admiral Sir Frederick Michell, had a lease of a tin mine from the Crown, granted to Thomas Michell, gentleman, of Croft West,[4] dated more than three hundred years ago. The Michells were in comfortable circumstances till Thomas, my mother’s grandfather, formed, and maintained, the Four Barrow Hunt. This expense and the investment of £60,000 in tin mines resulted in the sale of the family estate. Sampson Michell, the son of Thomas, entering the Royal Navy, fought under Lord Howe. He joined the Portuguese Navy in 1783, and was in 1807 its Commander-in-Chief. The Government appointed his eldest son, Frederick, Lieutenant when he was eight years old!
When the French invaded Portugal, and Marshal Junot entered Lisbon with a small escort, the two Michell girls were playing in the garden, and to escape capture were hurried down to the river without a change of clothes, and put on board H.M.S. Lively, a frigate, which only reached Falmouth after a voyage of twenty-three days!
Sampson Michell, Admiral in the Portuguese Navy, died at the Brazils in 1809, leaving a widow and five children. From savings effected out of his pay he had bought a house at Truro, but Mrs. Michell had only £90 per annum on which to keep herself, two unmarried daughters, and Molly, a life-long servant. The income tax, then raised as a war tax, was at that time 10d. in the pound; bread sold at 14d. the quartern loaf, so life was difficult for the widow.
The Admiral left to his sons only a fine example, and sound advice: “Never get into debt; do your duty to God and to your country.” The elder, Frederick, had joined the Royal Navy six years earlier, and died in 1873, when eighty-four years of age, an Admiral, with eight wounds and eleven decorations; but he appears again in my story. The younger son, Charles, having joined the Royal Artillery from Woolwich, was attached to the Portuguese Army in 1810, and though only a Lieutenant in our Service, commanded a Battery with marked gallantry and ability up to the final engagement, in 1814, at Toulouse. While quartered there he eloped with an attractive but penniless French girl[5] from a convent school, and was soon after, on the reduction of the Army, placed on half pay, his income being a mere pittance. Seven years later, when still in France, with an increasing family, he received from a friend in England a cutting from the Times, in which the Government advertised for a teacher of “Fortification and Military Drawing” for Sandhurst College, which had been recently moved to its present position.
Charles was not only a good draughtsman but an engraver, having studied the art under Bartolozzi, and as specimens of his work he sent an engraving of a plan he had made of Passages, a little seaport in Guipuzcoa, Spain, and a sketch of Nantes, Brittany, where he lived.
Having obtained the appointment in this unconventional manner, he joined the Instructional Staff, at what is now known as Yorktown, Camberley, in 1824, and was promoted later to a similar but better paid post at Woolwich, whence he was sent in 1828 to the Cape of Good Hope as Surveyor-General, and remained there until he was invalided home in 1848. While holding this appointment he made locomotion possible for Europeans, constructing also lighthouses and sea-walls.
I was born at the Vicarage, Cressing, a village near Braintree, Essex, on the 9th of February 1838, the youngest son of John Page Wood, Clerk in Holy Orders, who was also Rector of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, in the City of London. My father,[6] educated at Winchester and Cambridge, visited as a lad the Field of Waterloo a few days after the 18th of June 1815, and brought back the small book[7] of a French soldier, killed in the battle. This book, which I still possess, has within its leaves a carnation, and belonged evidently to a Reservist who had been recalled to the Colours in “The Hundred Days.” He had served in the campaigns of 1812, 1813, and 1814, and had been discharged on Napoleon’s abdication, as is shown by his last pay settlement.
My father took his degree early in 1820, and was immediately appointed Chaplain and Private Secretary to Queen Caroline. In the following year he married Emma Carolina Michell, with whom he had been acquainted for some time; for he frequently accompanied his uncle, Benjamin Wood, to visit copper mines in Cornwall in which the Woods had an interest. Benjamin Wood was later for many years Member for Southwark.