Most South Africans surnamed Laurie (and also a fair number with Laurie among their forenames) trace their ancestry back to an individual named Robert Naylor Laurie.
The traditional story handed down from one generation of Lauries to the next was published in Pama’s book on Afrikaans family names, published by Human and Rousseau in 1983.
Robert Naylor Laurie was a ship’s captain who between 1840 and 1850 regularly visited the Cape with his ship. Married 9.12.1850 in Wynberg (Cape) to Coenradina Wilhelmina Magdalena Albertyn, b.1829, d.1895. They moved to New Zealand, where Robert died. The mother returned to South Africa with 4 children, and on the voyage another child was born at sea. This family is Afrikaans-speaking.
Thanks to the efforts of Jane Hofmeyr (b2c4d2e1) we now know that Robert was the eldest son of John Laurie and Julia Susan Laurie (ne้ Pilford). And thanks to Kitty Watkins, a descendant of John’s brother William, we can trace the Laurie line back to the time (but not the family) of the legendary Annie Laurie.
John Laurie (25.7.1794–1860) was a great-grandson of William Laurie (1681–1780), a merchant of Dumfries in Scotland; a grandson of Robert Laurie (1725–1774), a chirurgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London; and a son of John Laurie (16.7.1756–17.2.1830), an instrument and truss maker at the same hospital.
Although William was a wealthy man and active in public life as a baillie, there is no reason to suppose that he was a close relative of Sir Robert Laurie, baronet of Maxwelton and brother of Annie Laurie. John’s brother Robert (1806–1882), a professional herald, who as Clarenceux King of Arms from 1859 to his death had the responsibility of investigating claims to noble birth, would certainly have found such a relationship if one existed.
John was an officer in the Royal Artillery, promoted to Captain in 1818 and stationed until 1837 in Bombay. At that stage he retired from active service and settled in London.
En route to England the Laurie family spent the best part of a year in the Cape. Their daughter Victoria Louise was born there, but died at the age of a mere seven months. Her christening and death were both reported in the Commercial Advertiser.
Shortly before leaving India, John was promoted to Major. He must have had a staff appointment in the Army or War Office in London, since at his death his rank was Lieutenant-Colonel. In 1843, though, when his son Charles Frederick Newnham Guise was born in Coblenz, Prussia, he was still only a Major. It is very unlikely that a gravid Julia would have travelled so far for a mere holiday, and we must suppose that John’s commission took him to Prussia for an extented period.
In 1847 he was a comfortably situated man who kept five servants, according to the testimony of one of them who was accused of stealing two dresses belonging to John’s daughter, convicted, and sent to prison for nine months.
John’s mother Frances was an illegitimate daughter of Sir John Guise (1733–1794), baronet of Highnam Court. Sir John caused eyebrows to rise by leaving substantial legacies to Frances and her full sister Charlotte even though his own wife was still living. He must have acknowledged them openly as daughters in his life, since Charlotte married Sir George Naylor (also Nayler, 1764-1831), who was Clarenceux King of Arms for a short period before becoming Garter King of Arms, the most powerful position in English heraldry.
Julia Susan Pilford (6.9.1806–1886) was the daughter of Capt. Alexander Pilford (died 28.3.1821), paymaster of the 67th regiment of the British Army. We do not know his date of birth with certainty, but someone by that name was christened on 24 June 1770 in London. There is no further evidence until 1804, when Alexander Pilford of the 67th purchased a commission as Lieutenant-Captain, implying that he was not a callow youth then and his family not a poor one.
Capt. Pilford arrived in 1812 in India accompanied by his five-year old daughter Julia and her younger brother Alexander. There is no mention of his wife, indicating that she was probably already deceased.
Capt. John Laurie married Julia on 18.10.1821 in Bombay. He was 27 years old, she an orphan of 15, her father having died in March of the same year. One must presume that she had spent her childhood in India: only sons were sent back to school in England.
The Lauries had eight children in India, three of which are reported as having died in infancy. One more is not heard of again after her birth. Their very first child, a daughter who died in 1822 at the age of only 12 days, is nameless since she was never christened. They had two sons after returning to England.
At a certain point after her return to England, Julia decided that her maiden name should be spelt Pilfold, not Pilford. For example, her eldest grandson was baptized John Albertyn Pilfold Laurie. In those days, small deviations in spelling of names were not unusual. There is in fact a birth record of Alexander Pilfold on 25 May 1772 in Surrey. It is conceivable that once back in London, Julia sought out her relatives and was influenced by them. However, in no military source is her father’s name ever other than Pilford.
The family tradition among Julia’s descendants in England has been put on paper by her grandson, F.W.R. Garnett, son of the famous author Frederick Brooksbank Garnett, in two issues of the uniquely British journal Notes and Queries. The best way to describe the journal, and Garnett himself, is to quote these contributions.
In Series 10, Number 7, he wrote:
My maternal grandfather, the late Col. Sir John Laurie, R.A., eighth Baronet of Maxwelton, creation 1685 Nova Scotia, was considered to have a claim to the earldom; and there was a transference of lands in Dumfriesshire from the Earl of Glencairn to the grandfather of the first Laurie baronet in the middle of the sixteenth century, which territory to this day has not been alienated.
And in Series 11, Number 6:
My maternal grandmother, Lady Laurie, was Miss Julia Pilfold, the daughter of Capt. Alexander Pilfold. 67th Hampshire Regiment, and the granddaughter of Capt. Pilfold, R.N., who commanded H.M.S. Ajax at the Battle of the Nile. She was first cousin to Percy Bysshe Shelley the poet, whose mother, Lady Shelley, was the daughter of Charles Pilfold of Effingham, in Surrey.
It is understood that the Pilfolds are related to Richard Penderil, who hid with his Majesty King Charles II. in an oak tree at Boscobel.
It is hard to imagine from whom other than his grandmother these stories could have come, whether directly or via his mother, uncles and aunts. Unfortunately both claims are false.
The claim that John Laurie was a baronet of Maxwelton was made in 1899, a few years before Garnett wrote his contributions, by Julia’s youngest son Henry Alfred (1845–1921), being part of his own claim to the vacant title. But we have already seen that his uncle, the herald, never made any such claim. Even though the claim was rejected, Henry never relinquished it until the day of his death, describing himself as “tenth Baronet of Maxwelton” in his will. That would make his brother Charles, who died in 1894, the ninth. Robert Naylor was not part of Henry’s claim, having died when the sixth baronet was still living.
It is also impossible that Alexander could have been a son of the celebrated Capt. John Pilfold (1768–1834). Distant cousin, maybe; son, no. Even in a time when people married young, no man born in 1768 could be the father of someone old enough to become a lieutenant-captain in 1804.
Julia herself is reported in the 1841 census and again in 1861 as having been born in Ireland. In 1851 (when John did the talking?) her place of birth is reported as Middlesex.
It is hard to censure Julia for her fantasies. At age 5 she had no mother and was raised by ayahs and governesses. At 14 she had no father either, and hardly out of her puberty, she was married. The marriage to John may have been one of convenience: at 27 he had not yet found a wife, and she was left with no other option but an early marriage. However that may be, she certainly never had a protected childhood in which she could listen to tales of princes and princesses at her mother’s knee. Having heard that her husband had Sir John Guise among his ancestors, albeit on the wrong side of the blanket, and Sir George Naylor as uncle by marriage, she must have felt that she was not to be outdone.
If not at Julia’s insistence, then at least with her full approval, the names Naylor, Guise and Pilfold were given to her children and grandchildren. Individuals with those forenames still live in South Africa today.
In Robert’s case, the fact that the elderly Sir George had four daughters but no sons must have been an important consideration when deciding to name his nephew’s son after him.
Robert Naylor Laurie (9.8.1823–1859) was born at Ahmednagar, 200km east of Bombay, where Capt. John Laurie was stationed at the time. He went to school (probably from 1835 onwards) in London. There would in those days not have been vacation trips to his parents in India, and he probably did not see them again before 1838.
Someone else who attended the same school described it thus:
It was decided that we should go to a great preparatory school of those days for the military colleges of the Queen’s and East India Company’s services, kept by Messrs. Stoton and Mayor at Wimbledon. The school was a large one, and would be thought a rough one now. The only washing-place was a room on the ground floor, with sinks and leaden basins in them, to which we came down in the morning to wash our hands and faces. There was very little taught but mathematics for the army boys, and classics for those destined for Haileybury, the East India Company’s college for the Indian Civil Service.
Note the mathematics!
In 1840 Robert was accepted as a cadet by a military college, possibly Woolwich or Sandhurst. A year later he was posted to India. At the end of 1841 he was a passenger on the Zenobia (by a coincidence, also the name of the wife of a great-grandson) from Bombay to Karachi, but soon returned to the Bombay region, in fact, to his birthplace. Shortly after being transferred to the new 29th Native Infantry, he resigned from the Army and sailed on 19 July 1847 on the Semiramis to Suez. There was no canal in those days, and he would have had to travel by horse-drawn cart to Cairo, and down the Nile by a river boat to Alexandria, where he could have boarded a ship to England.
One cannot imagine the interview with his father, the Major, to be other than strained. The word “deserter” may have been uttered. But Robert’s instinctive feeling that anything would be better than India was correct. There were battles, true, but worse, there were cholera epidemics. In Indian soil lay a brother and two or three sisters that had died in infancy, as well as his uncle Charles, who perished at the age of 32, six years after marrying Julia’s sister Caroline Emma, and the infant son of Charles and Caroline. His own brother Medwin George, who ironically joined the Indian Army at almost the same time that Robert resigned, died four years later.
Major John and his family managed to get Robert a place as a Byrne immigrant to Natal. He was allocated a farm of 45 acres, and was reported as a new immigrant in the Natal Witness by name and occupation “surveyor”.
When the Sovereign eventually landed in March 1850 after 120 days at sea, the authorities were not yet ready for the new immigrants. Over 500 people were housed in barracks, huts and tents, and it took three months before they received their land. The farms were bigger by 25 acres than promised, but Robert was no longer there to receive his. Maybe his patience wore thin, or the heat, humidity, hostile natives and plantations reminded him too much of India.
He was already in the Cape on 15 June 1850. On that day he borrowed 10 pounds from Benjamin Norden, who together with his brother Abraham has been described by a descendant as “great philanthropists”. Norden took Robert to court in 1851, earning our thanks because that is how the receipt for the loan came to be preserved for us to see.
It is clear that the story given by Pama is a romantic fabrication, rather in the style of Julia’s fantasies about herself and her husband. Robert was not a sailor, let alone a captain.
The marriage date and the name of his wife, though, are correct. Six months to woo and wed a bride may seem fast work, but a quick wedding was necessary. Their first son was born on 5 August 1851, 35 weeks after the wedding. No time to summon John and Julia by surface mail! In fact, they did well to be in time for little John’s christening on 14 September.
Another three or four children were born in the Cape. Baptismal records exist for Henry Guise (1853), Gertrude Annie (1855), also known as Geertruida Anna, and Christoffel Robert (1857), and a family tradition of a marriage between Robert Naylor junior and Cornelia Wiese. Given that his sister had English and Afrikaans versions of their names, there may have been only one Robert. At any rate, there are no records of either Robert having children. The married Robert must have died not too long after the marriage, since Cornelia was surnamed Kirsten at the time of her death.
Robert’s mathematical training equipped him for the profession of surveyor, and his first job in the Cape was Superintendent of Roads. In 1854 he was still in the Civil Engineer’s Office, but looking for another job. By 1856, he had joined his brother-in-law Christoffel Francois Albertyn as a Ranger of the Lands, but here he blotted his copybook by cutting and selling wood for his own benefit. When this was discovered, he was forced to resign. He travelled to England again but clearly found no sympathy, since early in 1858 he was back in the Cape and applying for work, any work, in Government employment. Alas, his offence was still remembered and held against him.
At this stage he took his family to New Zealand, where soon he died from a stomach disease. His widow returned with the children, as stated by Pama, but the youngest son’s death notice says “born in New Zealand”. She married a certain Visser and settled in the Piketberg district. She died in 1886 (Pama has that wrong too).
One can understand that Wilhelmina (her first name does not appear on her death notice) was unwilling to tell the full truth about their father to her children, and Julia must have approved of the cover story.
Robert’s mathematical ability has survived: despite the fact that his sons were all farmers, his later descendants in the male line contain a high number of engineers, actuaries, accountants, scientists and mathematicians.