James Peter PATTLE

  General Notes:

http://gbnf.com/genealog3/maclaren/html/d0484/I17824.HTM

http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/blackheath/geneal0.htm

"Old blazer Pattle", The Nestor of the East India Company's Covenanted Service (commentary in list of inscriptions on tombstones... Ceylon for Julia Margaret Cameron).

From: http://www.ancestryresearchservice.com/genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I533&tree=cameron1
One of Virginia's forebears has become entertainingly notorious, James Pattle (1775-1845). ([9]) In noting what happened to Pattle after he died, Virginia Woolf-Stephen helped to firm a tradition of citation which has been less than helpful in widening the curiosities of researchers in family history. (broken link? - http://members.madasafish.com/~mqofs - on Pattle genealogy) One tale on Pattle is bizarre and deserves to be commented liberally. James Pattle, judge of a High Court Appeal in India, died 1845 at Calcutta, was born 31 December, 1775, at Beauleah, Bengal, the son of a director of the East India Company 1787-1795, Thomas Pattle, and his first wife, Sarah Hasleby. James married a Frenchwoman, Adeline De l'ETang. James Pattle was known as "a drunkard and a liar", renowned for extravagant wickedness, known as "King of Liars", or "Jim Blazes". By repute, he drank himself to death by 1845. ([10]) As Virginia Woolf wrote, James Pattle wished to be buried "for family reasons" beside his mother at Camberwell in London. The story goes, his body was sealed in a cask of rum for transport to London. ([11]) He wished to be buried besides his mother.
James Pattle's father applied for a Bengal cadet writership for him in 1791, after his education by Daniel Duff, writer (lawyer), MA of Battersea. Pattle became a senior member in India of the Board of Revenue and a judge of the Court of Appeal at Mursedabad. He began his service in 1792 in Bengal, where he'd been born, as a writer before moving to other legal posts.
With 53 years' service, Pattle became "one of the longest-serving East India Company men". At one time he lived in Garden Reach overlooking the Hooghly River. ([12]).


"VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE CASK OF RUM"
(A talk by Prof. Joan Stevens, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.) (Copyright restricted)
"In my last talk, I traced the connections between Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of Gibbon Wakefield, and various families who had served with the old East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. One of these was the family to which his mother belonged, Pattle. Jerningham Wakefield's grandfather was Thomas Charles Pattle. Now Thomas had a brother, James, who had seven beautiful daughters. James Pattle had married a French girl, daughter of the Chevalier de
ntblNovelist William Makepace Thackeray.
l'Etang, one of Queen Marie Antoinette's pages. After the Queen's execution, he and his young wife were banished. They went to British India, where their one daughter married James Pattle. All the family became friends of the Thackerays, with whom there remained ties for the rest of their lives. As a young man in London in the 1830s and 1840s, the novelist William Thackeray was constantly in Pattle company, while he and his parents when in France kept up with old Madame de l'Etang in her widowhood, as well as with her daughter Mrs. James Pattle. As for the Pattle daughters, "they possessed", as a descendant, wrote "great beauty and vivid personality".
However, before I tell you tales of the seven beautiful daughters, I must say more about their father. James Pattle, nicknamed Jim Blazes.
Let me quote, first, the words of his great grandchild Virginia Woolf. "He was a gentleman of marked, but doubtful reputation who, after living a riotous life and earning the title of "the biggest liar in India", finally drank himself to death and was consigned to a cask of rum to await shipment to England." Here I interpolate, that the reason for the cask of rum was a bet. The cask story is best told in the breathless prose of young Kate Stanley, later to be the mother of Bertrand Russell, in a letter of 1860, where she repeats what she was just heard at Mrs. Carlyle's. As both accounts are needed to give you the picture, I shall thread them together. Here is young Kate, then. "Mr. Pattle once made a bet with a man that he would be buried in England - he lived in India - it was for £100, and this man said he would never live to go back to England. Mr. Pattle did die in India but, in his will, he said he only left his fortune to his wife on condition he was buried in England in the Churchyard he named -- so though it was very inconvenient -- Mrs. Pattle was obliged to go to the trouble and expense of doing it or else she could not have the fortune, so Mr. Pattle was put in a cask with spirits to preserve him and embalmed.
Here I must pause, to return to Virginia Woolf's narrative. She, at least, uses commas... "The cask was stood outside the widow's bedroom door", she writes, "In the middle of the night, Mrs. Pattle heard a violent explosion, rushed out; and found her husband, having burst the lid of his coffin, bolt upright, menacing her in death as he had menaced her in life." They put the cask on a ship for England but, when the sailors found out what was in it, says Kate Stanley, they "positively refused to go on with it and said they would throw it overboard or come back to Calcutta; so, as the Captain thought Mrs. Pattle would rather not have it thrown overboard, he had brought it back to her."
Mrs. Pattle then chartered a ship herself, but this too returned, baffled by a "great storm of thunder and lightning". Next, she put the cask inside a large wooden case and tried a third time. Ill with nervous strain, quite understandably, she then went to the seaside for a holiday. I quote young Kate Stanley again. "When she had been there two days, a frightful storm arose. Wind and rain and thunder, and the sea was in a great state; and a ship near the shore was in great distress. It struck and was quite wrecked, and every soul on board perished. What next morning, among the debris, should Mrs. Pattle find washed on shore to the foot of her house but a large case at once recognized as Mr. Pattle's tomb. So the cask was again taken out and put in a spare room in their house. Soon after, in the middle of the night, a great noise was heard as if the roof was coming down. Mrs. Pattle, running upstairs with the key of the room where Mr. Pattle was kept, opened it; and what should she see but the cask lid off and Mr. Pattle sitting up in the cask half out like a jack-in-the-box. She was so frightened, she fell ill and they gave up sending Mr. Pattle to England. The gas had generated and burst the cask."
Well, it's a wonderful story, you'll agree. Virginia Woolf summed it all up by reporting "That Pattle had been such a scamp, the devil wouldn't let him go out of India." If James Pattle brought a liar's imagination and unconquerable vitality to the marriage, his French wife brought great beauty, which all the daughters but one inherited. Let me now tell you more about them. Remember, they are the cousins of Eliza Pattle, the wife of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The eldest was Mia, who married Dr. John Jackson. Her daughter, Julia Jackson, married Herbert Duckworth, publisher. He died, however, and she married again, taking as her second husband the author, Leslie Stephen. For Stephen, too, it was a second marriage; his first being to Harriet, younger daughter of William Thackeray; their child, little Laura Stephen, died young -- or what would she have done with her inheritance?
Stephen's second marriage, however, to Mrs. Julia Duckworth, grandchild of James Pattle, produced its own brand of genius. For there were four children, all noted in their day. The most brilliant, Virginia, married Leonard Woolf, and is known to you all as Virginia Woolf. If you've been able to keep my family tree in your head, you'll have worked it out that Virginia Woolf's mother, Julia Jackson-Duckworth-Stephen, and Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of Gibbon Wakefield by Eliza Pattle, were second cousins. The next of James Pattle's lovely daughters, Sarah, married Henry Prinsep, a wealthy Indian merchant who returned to London in 1843. Her house was always open to Thackeray, who was a constant visitor. His letters and diaries record many delightful meetings there with the Pattle girls, as he called them.
Then there was Julia Pattle, who married Charles Cameron, an important Indian official; she was the only plain sister, but she made up for it by her picturesque behaviour, especially in middle life, when she became one of the pioneers of portrait photography. Together with Mrs. Prinsep who, by the 1860s, had the painters, Watts and Burne Jones, and who knows others besides, living in her menage at Little Holland House in London. Julia netted for her camera most of the celebrities of the day. Julia Cameron's story, which is delightful, I cannot cover here; but you will find it in all its vitality in her volume, called Victorian Photographs, which has the introduction by her niece, Virginia Woolf, from which I have been quoting. If you still believe that the Victorians were conventional, have a look at this book.
Then there was the youngest Pattle girl, Virginia, Thackeray's favourite, who was so strikingly beautiful that she used to be mobbed in the London streets. All through the 1840s, Thackeray commented on her loveliness, whenever he met her at the Prinseps or elsewhere. His admiration culminated in an article in Punch, "On a good looking young lady", in 1850. Her wedding to Charles, Viscount Eastnor, later 3^rd Earl Somers, in October 1850, was one of the brilliant occasions of the time. "She looked beautiful" wrote Thackeray "and has taken possession of Eastnor Castle and her rank as Princess, and reigns to the delight of everybody."
* * *
The above tales, with their mentions of various people who remained in association for family reasons if no other, could well be cross-referenced, as follows. It was presumably the case from 1787, that Thomas, Judge James Pattle's father, as an East India Company director had views on the opening up of the Pacific Ocean to British shipping by virtue of the establishment of a convict colony at Sydney. From 1787, an increasingly influential Company investor was the banker Francis Baring, who as chairman of the Company in the early 1790s took a dim view of London-based whalers operating in the Pacific, perhaps engaging in trade illicit from the Company point of view. Too little is known of Baring's view here, or the views of his associates. ([13]) In 1789 the Directors of the East India Company were: ([14])< /p>