by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Leafing through the pages of Mary Workman Dugan’s copy of “Loose Leaves from the Family Tree,” we continue sharing transcribed missives involving the Workman family in England and America, but with the trio here spaced out over a half century, all written in Clifton, a small town in the northern part of the former not far from the border with Scotland, and sent to Los Angeles.
The next letter in this series is not one that was in possession of a member of the “Los Angeles branch,” but, rather, was owned by Thomas Workman Temple II, who was long a historian of his family, as well as of the City of San Gabriel and its Mission. He built relationships with the Angel City Workmans over the years and this included providing them copies of documents he either had in his keeping or unearthed in his research.
The letter from Mary Workman to her older brother William, addressed to “La Puente, Los Angeles County, California,” is dated 21 January 1856 and began,
The letter containing the affecting intelligence of our dear brother David’s decease so far from his home, together with the account of the fatal accident, has safely come to hand. I had hopes from my late brother’s last letters that we would have seen his face once more again in England at his old paternal home, but that is denied us.
She recalled William’s visit some five years prior and referred to “the blessing received” from his stay “and the double interest we take in your affairs whether prosperous or adverse” which, Mary asserted, “make us actual sharers with you in [the] spirit of all that occurs.” She was sure to add “not that we could be indifferent to the fate of our late brother” because “the natural love of brethren is not extinguished in our hearts” and so “you must reckon us among the mourners.”
Having also been sent the lengthy description in the Los Angeles Star of 17 November 1855 of the funeral service at El Campo Santo Cemetery, where David remains at rest, although moved in 1921 from the cast-iron fenced family burial plot to the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum, Mary poured out her affection and appreciation for William for all that he did with David’s obsequies:
I claim you dear brother as the brother of my soul, the same hospitality and fine perceptions of right and wrong I love you for your publicly expressed thanks for the attentions, and attendance paid by your friends to our poor brother’s remains in and out of the Order of Masons . . . I have been a sharer dear brother amongst others of your extreme liberality—I should like to be a guest under your roof, but on a happier occasion, to feel in my own person your kindness and to see with mine own eyes the perfect harmony of all around you, your wife and family must harmonize with you, to dwell together in such amity.
The youngest of the Workman clan went on to muse over the actions of people in God’s image and grace and she remarked that “the master of a house cannot indulge having no pleasure in gross acts of vulgarity not arising so far as immorality only as affects our manners and behaviour to each other,” while also commenting on the sinfulness that affects manner in one’s home as a weight dragging those within it to a place in which they were unable to rise out of it.
Not surprisingly, Mary mentioned “I have a variety of moral pieces drawn from life now ready for the press,” though she observed that “I have never published any thing snice those little works during your short sojourn with us, with the exception of newspapers.” Her purpose in so doing was “for the uncorrupted reward” and “the desire of imparting good to my fellow man” and she added, “I am surprised that your clergy are jangling in the same way as ours,” this apparently being a reference to an article in the same issue of the Star that included the coverage of David’s funeral and which was penned by William Money, a self-appointed bishop of his own “Primitive Roman Catholic Church,” and who exhorted mainstream Catholic leaders to enact a “reform of abuse.”
Mary then noted,
I have one spiritual piece, or rather a work, it will contain a quantity of matter which I should like to dedicate to you, and if time is allowed me I will print it in letters with my own pen in a style I should wish it to be printed in type by you dear brother; if it could only reach your hands as well as your handsome portrait which I have not quite finished.
The missive ended with a request from her and their brother Thomas “to have your will and desire respecting the disposition of our property here in England . . . if you will do us the kindness.” In 1853, when visiting La Puente after his store was destroyed by a fire that consumed most of Sacramento, David deeded property to Mary left by their mother, Lucy Cook, in southern England, though it is not known what William’s wishes for his English inheritance until he had his will done in fall 1870. By then, Mary had been dead for two years and Thomas was his sole surviving sibling, so William left anything back home to his brother.
Mary concluded “with good will and desire for your prosperity and family to whom I beg to be kindly remembered.” Written three days later, but evidently included with Mary’s missive, was a letter from Thomas to William and that also expressed thanks for receiving the accounts of the funeral of David. He wrote that his late brother’s “soul I trust is at rest in Heaven,” while the news engendered by sorrow “for the melancholy termination of his existence,” but also
Joy for the noble and Brotherly Part you have acted towards him and his family during the whole of his eventful life, which I hope will have a Salutory effect upon his Family and the community at large.
Unlike Mary and her ruminations on life, death and other matters, Thomas abruptly to the Crimean War in which England was engaged with specific reference to the Siege of Sebastopol, which took place from October 1854 to September 1855, as well as British and French plans for a spring 1856 campaign to end the war “for the benefit of liberty and civilization.” The conflict, in fact, ended in February, though its conclusion is generally said to have been anything but a boon for those concepts.
Thomas then ended his piece of correspondence “with a sincere wish for you once more to return to your native country which would give me more pleasure than any earthly gratification.” It would be nearly two decades, however, before any family member went to England, this being William’s grandson, William Workman Temple, who went to London in 1874-1875, after earning a degree at Harvard Law School, to study at the Inns of Court. It is not known, however, if young Temple went north to visit his grandfather’s hometown.
This leads us to another letter that was written on 9 May 1878 by Mary A. Lewthwaite to William Workman concerning the situation with Thomas. We can assume there was at lease some occasional communication between Clifton and California in the intervening two decades and change, though, after 1855, there were just the three Workman siblings remaining. Mary died in 1868 and, as we’ll see, Thomas descended deeply into mental illness. As to William, he rose to the pinnacle of Los Angeles’ elite by his late years, in partnership with his son-in-law, F.P.F. Temple, as they became among the wealthiest of the small, but growing, city’s business figures.
This came to a tragic end in early 1876, when their Temple and Workman bank failed after borrowing large sums to keep the institution open after a financial panic burst forth. In May, drowning in despair, William took his life and was buried in the family plot at El Campo Santo Cemetery a couple hundred yards or so from his home of 35 years where he was interred near his brother David, buried there two decades prior.
The news, obviously, did not make it to little Clifton, thousands of miles away, so, when Lewthwaite wrote to him, almost two years after his death, she was hoping to inform him of what happened to the last remaining member of the family. There was a Mary Ann Lewthwaite, around 40 years of age, living in her hometown of Askham, about 3.5 miles from Clifton, and it appears it is she who penned the missive that appears to have been in the possession of Thomas W. Temple II, who typed a transcription. The letter began,
Dear Sir, it is with much sorrow that I write to you about your brother Mr. Thomas Workman. Mr. Farrier has I’m aware, told you of his removal to Garthlands Asylum, so there is no necessity for my writing, only I thought you might like to hear an account of your brother from me. I am the only person who has seen after him since the death of your sister, (Mary in 1868) and until lately I could manage him very nicely. I was used to him, and never thought he would be taken away.
Lewthwaite continued that Thomas was sick for a couple of weeks at the end of 1877 and, though he improved, he was changed, including his keeping of hours, sleeping habits, but, also, his declarations that “government orders” were issued to him to go to the residences of neighbors, sometimes at all hours and generally on Sundays. She added, “he was always nice in the house and always kind to me” and that “it was a great shock to me when he was taken away.”
When that time come, Lewthwaite remarked, “he was very quiet . . . and knew what they were taking him for,” while requesting that she “stay in the house till he came back.” When she assured him she would, he replied, “that’s all right then” and then “walked quietly to the carriage which the police officers had waiting for him at the door.” The missive concluded, “I am still looking after the house. I have not heard anything rom Mr. Workman since he went but am to have a full account at the end of the Quarter,” meaning the end of June. Lewthwaite remained in the area until her death in 1905, while Garthlands, or Garlands, which opened in 1862, became part of the National Health Service in the late 1940s and closed in 1999, with part of the administration building surviving as apartments.
Christopher Fairer was a solicitor, or lawyer, in Penrith, a couple of miles to the north of Clifton, and was, with a partner, the administrator of the Workman estate from 1861. After Thomas died in 1884, it was likely the attorney who contacted the Los Angeles Workmans, with Elijah, the eldest surviving of David’s sons, who made the trip to England to settle the estate. Two decades later, when William H. Workman, Jr. visited while on an around-the-world tour, and wrote his father, William, Sr., about meeting with Fairer, who shared information about the family and estate. The elder Workman made the trip in 1912 and Fairer was still living then, as well.
In a 5 May 1904 letter to his father, William, Jr. added that a copy of the will of Thomas Workman, the pater familias, was transmitted to Elijah in 1869, and Fairer added that Mary was a “bright and quiet little lady,” while Thomas was “rough and blurting” and showing signs of mental illness from the time he became co-administrator. It was added that “once during Mary’s lifetime he frightened some of his neighbors and they had him put in an asylum but Mary never rested until she got him out again.”
The siblings lived together on a modest income from renting the other part of the family house and some small farmland and, when Mary died, Elijah inherited the real property. Meanwhile, “Thomas lived on in the old place growing more and more erratic all the time,” and “there was one old lady in Clifton,” presumably Lewthwaite, “whom he allowed to go into the house every day to sort of look after him.”
Fairer and his partner handled the finances, but, “once in a while [Thomas] would get out and run amok and one occasion when his guardians weren’t looking his neighbors had him put in the asylum again,” though the attorneys situated him in a paid part of Garthlands, or Garlands, where he remained until his death.
Notably, William, Jr. learned that, after Mary died, Elijah tried to have the residue of the Workman estate, some 330 pounds, transferred to him, but this, obviously, could not be done while Thomas was living. After the latter passed away, however, and Elijah traveled to Clifton to claim the estate, he pocketed the proceeds from the sale of real property, as British law allowed under primogeniture for the eldest surviving male, but also took the remaining funds, which was to be shared with William, Sr., along with any personal property, a certain amount of which the latter was given by Elijah.
William, Jr. was also taken out by Fairer to the St. Cuthbert’s Church burial ground to see the tombstone the lawyer arranged for the graves of Mary and Thomas and near that William Workman had made for the remainder of the family. He also visited the family house, where two women lived almost since Thomas’ death and this included fruit trees in the yard from seeds sent by William Workman decades before. Also of note was that “a bunch of about ten or 12 daguerrotype [sic] photographs” were given to William, Jr. for him to take back to Los Angeles.
These missives, far apart as they are in time, share a common feature in that they reflect some of the family dynamics and elements to which most of us can relate, dealing with the grief following the death of loved ones and the tragedies which mental illness can entail. Like the other letters in this series and in those shared under the “Reading Between the Lines” banner on this blog, they also help us better understand and appreciate the diverse aspects of the members of the Workman and Temple family.
As noted in this post, the family affairs and cross-ocean interactions revealed in their correspondence among the Workman siblings, can readily be related to many people – including ourselves.
There is little doubt that the youngest, Mary, played a pivotal role, working tirelessly to maintain communication between family members in America and those in Britain. Sadly, apart from Mary, Thomas was actually the only family member remaining in Clifton, and he suffered from serious mental illness.
There is a Chinese old saying, “Distant relatives are less helpful than close neighbors” (遠親不如近鄰), a sentiment that holds true across countries and generations alike, and was also evidently reflected in the Workman family’s letters.