Bennett and Reid families

Bennett and Reid families

Overview

Life-Writing and Genealogy: the Gordon Bennetts

Originally a talk to genealogists, this article was first published in issue 19 (December 2021, pp.8-14, 33) of Connect (the Newsletter of AGI and ASGRA, the accrediting bodies for Irish and Scottish professional genealogists).

I am not a genealogist, but my contacts with ASGRA (Association of Scottish Genealogists and Researchers in Archives) suggest that in addition to searching for correct dates and places of births, marriages and deaths, confirming bloodlines or at least lines of inheritance, genealogists also do “life-writing”, but don’t often refer to it as such. Below, I discuss a few issues in life-writing in relation to my own biographical work of the James Gordon Bennett family. Firstly, I shall set out its genealogical backbone and secondly use the James Gordon Bennetts as life-writing case studies. (It will help readers if you refer to the family trees elsewhere in this site. The key records and data used for their construction are set out below.

The Gordon Bennetts

I owe much of the genealogical work for my research on the Bennetts to Alyson Kelman, and more generally to discussions with Janet Bishop, and also to members of ASGRA and AGI, and to the committee and members of ANESFHS (Aberdeen and North-East Scotland Family History Society).

For James Gordon Bennett Snr: Rathven OPR Baptisms show his mother Jannet Reid was baptised in Rathven parish 27 March 1762, and born in Letterfury. Her three younger brothers’ baptisms were all witnessed by members of the McHatty family of Loanhead. (Spellings were not standardized at that time. Today’s spellings are ‘Letterfourie’ and ‘MacHattie’ and ‘Bennett’ for this part of the family.)

From Rathven OPR Marriage records we learn “3 November 1792 James Bennet in Mains of Bucky and Jannet Reid in Rannachy were matrimonially contracted and, after the publication of their marriage Banns, they were married 20th of said Month.”

So, Jannet was 30, James 52/53. We are lacking other records to show whether this was James Bennett’s first or second marriage.

Janet REID [or BENNET(T)] died 24 July 1854, buried Keith. Sources are the MI in Auld Kirk burial ground Keith; a Keith lair book; Keith OPR Burials, and local newspapers. The only source I have for birth year of James Bennett is his age on the Monument in Keith Auld Kirk burial ground: age at death on 28 February 1824 is 83 years. The earliest lair-book extant in Keith does not mention he was buried there, but it did not start until some years after his death. His two daughters are named as buried there. Their ages are from census records. Thanks to Alison Kelman for these searches.

All the places mentioned above are in very close proximity in the Enzie, the area between Buckie and Keith, in what was then Banffshire. The Enzie was still a strongly Catholic area.

We have found no record, as yet, of birth or baptism of their first child James Gordon Bennett – there are conflicting sources for his birth date from 1792 to 1795. He appears to have claimed to be younger than he really was.

Monumental Inscriptions in New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery & in Herald Square give his death as June 1, 1872, age 77, implying his birth year to be c1795. His US passport application implies 1795, elsewhere the date is given as 1792 – the year of his parents’ wedding (Nov. 20). See also “Pre-1855 Death and Burial Records for the Parish of Keith”, as transcribed by Bruce Bishop, and local newspaper reports.

After working in a haberdasher’s in Elgin, Bennett Snr spent some years in business with an uncle in Aberdeen, from where he left on a whim for Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1819. He got into journalism in New York, eventually founded his own ‘penny daily’, the New York Herald in May 1835, and in its first five years he was on the way to making a fortune from it.

His brother Cosmo in the meantime had trained for the priesthood from the age of 11 in Aquhorties seminary, transferring aged 15 to the Scots College in Valladolid, Spain, was sent back to Aquhorties (by Inverurie, Aberdeenshire) in 1822 with a chest complaint, and died in the seminary on 10^th May 1825. He had completed his studies but, diagnosed with terminal pulmonary disease, probably tuberculosis, but was not physically strong enough to reach Edinburgh to be consecrated a priest before he died. James Gordon Bennett got to know about the fate of his brother only on his first journey back home to Scotland in the summer of 1838. His first biographer, Pray, used the content of letters that Bennett Snr sent back from Europe for publication in the Herald to recount his visit.

On 6^th June 1840, James Gordon Bennett married – in the Roman Catholic Church – Henrietta Agnes Crean, a recent Irish immigrant to New York. This was all over the local press, not least because of the age difference between the couple and the fact that he had made many enemies among his competitors and in high society.

A Dublin birth record for Henrietta Agnes Crean indicates she was born on 29 March 1818, to Ele[a]nor Lynch, wife of Andrew Crean. The birth record gives as witnesses Geo[rge] Stepheny and Henrietta Jane Smyth. Pray writes of Henrietta as “the daughter of highly respectable parents formerly of the West of Ireland, descending from the Warrens of Dublin on the one side, and from the Crean Lynch family on the other.” More work on records is needed for clarification.

Their children are James Gordon Bennett Jnr, two others Clementine and Cosmo Gordon who both died very young, and then Jeannette. Young Jamie was born a ‘celebrity’ and was never out of the news. His story will emerge below. However, the circumstances of Jeannette’s birth still need confirming by records. Her place of burial has only recently come into public knowledge thanks to the discovery of her horizontal gravestone in the Auld Kirk burial ground in Keith in the shadow of the Memorial to her father and grandfather, in the very lair of her grandmother Jannet and two great aunts.

Her story can be told as one of eventually finding her roots in Scotland having spent very little time there. She was born of an Irish mother in Paris, spending most of her first 18 years there, losing both her father and mother by the time she was 19, and married a New Yorker, Isaac Bell, at the age of 24, having three young children. However, fate struck her another blow when her husband died of typhoid after only 10 years of marriage, following four years as American Ambassador to Holland. Jeannette spent much of that time with him in the Hague. She never remarried. She stayed in New York society as if waiting for her in-laws to die. They had both died by the time her youngest child was 20, after which she spent her life – apparently ensuring her children should marry well – between Paris, New York and mainly London. (See chapters on Jeannette on this site.)

Life-writing

“Life-writing” is a recent term in academia. The idea is that writing biography and writing fiction (novels/short stories) have a great deal in common: a credible narrative, what was done by whom to whom, where and when it happened, and what it tells us about the protagonists – this also comes under what is sometimes called “narratology”, storytelling. The other part of life-writing is putting the individuals into a credible background, their social and cultural ‘context’, and noting how they interact – let’s call this ‘history’ – telling an individual’s story within their time and place, sometimes referred to as the ‘biographical method’ or ‘life-history method’. ‘Background’ may not be the right word, since for the person, the social and cultural context, for example religious conflicts, pandemic, famine, the ‘Clearances’, or rapid technological change, may be experienced very close up.

Life history involves interpretation of the interactions of individual and context. This was not invented in the 17th or 18th century with the novel, or even in the Iliad. Human beings are human because they are “story-telling organisms”: to understand ourselves, we tell ourselves stories, we construct a life as a narrative. We are all familiar with various forms of life-writing, e.g. the text of a eulogy at a funeral. First-person narratives, autobiography, diaries or journals, letters – even application forms and CVs – are forms of life-writing. Even if these genres have their different internal ‘rules’, they are all stories that we feel compelled to make hang together.

A genealogist’s life-writing must be based on archival evidence – to a more rigorous extent than any of the above. What is important is the “truth-value” that records supply. I have heard, however, that some clients look for a better storyline. The client would have preferred an ancestor who’d fought at Culloden, that they had worn a certain kilt, had links to aristocracy – even on the wrong side of the bed, perhaps even a link to a deported convict. It all adds a bit of colour.

My own life-writing takes the form of scholarly biography, which just means that, like genealogists, it has references to sources expressed as footnotes or endnotes and/or in a bibliography. My research began as an interest in James Gordon Bennett Jnr, after whom the phrase of surprise or shock was coined – the ‘scandalous’ Mr Bennett. The work aimed to correct some of the legendary stories, or to explain them, and to distinguish the son from his father. However, when I looked more into Bennett Snr I began to find him at least as interesting as the son. Biographical research on the Bennett family has thrown up particular difficulties, since the legend has outgrown historical fact, and both father and son invented public personae for themselves.

Bennett Snr invented a new journalism. It included active news-gathering (as opposed to just receiving news), new sales methods (newsboys selling on the street, instead of sale by subscriptions), new subjects (stock exchange prices, finance, sport, crime), and new genres, such as the interview. He defended fiercely the freedom of the press and its right to report court cases, debates in Congress, and goings-on in high society and its conspicuous consumption notably the reporting of the Brevoort Costume Ball in the winter of 1840 (see ‘The Diary of Philip Hone’, vol. 1 (1828-1851). Bennett sought scoops and therefore greater speed of transmission: he used pilot-boats meeting liners bearing the latest news from Europe, and later the new technology of the telegraph and Morse code. And, distinctively, his paper used sensationalism. It also made him enemies. But what was Bennett the man like?

‘Character’ or personality?

The notion of ‘character’ has a history, as Michael Saler (after Marjorie Garber) has explained. We, in the west, inherited from the ancient Greeks – particularly via the philosopher Heraclitus – the belief that a man’s character was his fate or destiny. From there on, through Shakespeare and Moliere, character was understood as the core of human identity, a set of traits expressing abilities and moral compass. If today, we use the words ‘personality’ or ‘temperament’, it tends to mean the same thing. If we hear the phrase “that was completely out of character, that’s not how I am” as an excuse or apology, or as a defence for racial abuse or sex-abuse, it suggests there exists “an enduring self from which the person has deviated”. The word ‘character’ derives from the ancient Greek for ‘engraving’, χαράσσειν, as on marble, so indelible. Other writers, like Pascal, the classical French philosopher, thought that by going habitually through the motions of a religious believer you could become one. Today’s concept of “re-education”, whether it be applied to Chinese Uighurs as has been reported, implies a belief that character or characteristics can be culturally acquired, by nurture as opposed to nature.

Garber sees this concept as reaching its apogee in Britain and America in the mid-19^th C., a secular age, when character was seen as “a useful replacement for soul”. “Character formation became the primary aim of the English public schools” – through playing team sports. However, others – she writes – amended this notion, claiming that individuals are able to fashion their own characters rather than submitting to external pressures. This encouraged use of the term ‘personality’, and indeed the cult of personality, à la Oscar Wilde, who “advocated perpetual self-creation – even at the expense of public morality” (see Michael Saler in TLS).

These ideas have bolstered my understanding of the Bennetts. If we take it further – because, in their day, the notion of character still had connotations of a relatively fixed moral centre – the notion of ‘personality’ became the preferred way to capture this new idea of self. Twentieth-century social scientists, instead of ‘character’, have preferred the term ‘personality’ – not for its exhibitionist connotations, but as an objective term, for its ‘value neutrality’ – equally, ‘personality trait’ has replaced the judgmental term ‘character type’.

The word ‘personality’ derives, as we know, from the Latin word ‘persona’ meaning ‘mask’, thus fitting this new “theatrical presentation of self” which emerged, asserts Saler, during the fin-de-siècle period. However, to me, it appears to fit Bennett Snr at a much earlier time – he can be seen as adopting a persona through most of his adult life, at least once he was in America and needing to promote his new newspaper the Herald, founded in 1835. He quickly made himself the centre of attention in his paper, for which he adopted a brash and populist ‘personality’. He was loved by some of his readers, hated by others. As an immigrant, removed from his family, he could more easily reinvent himself.

From the first issue, he set out his independent approach as founder and editor, implying the paper would reflect him, his opinions and values, challenging the establishment. The Herald became the most successful of the penny dailies, partly by arousing hostility among competitors, politicians and New York ‘society’, who accused him of bad taste, even obscenity, especially his early covering of the Helen Jewett case, murder of a prostitute told as if from the site of the attack, in all its gory detail.

Bennett, suffered violent attacks, verbal and physical. The more he was attacked, the more he featured himself on the front page. He had been called a “diseased, impotent, unnatural” bachelor that no self-respecting woman would have. (See O. Carlson, p.207.) So, when he did find such a woman, he put news of his engagement on the front page of the Herald in the first-person singular – in a Trumpian style of self-congratulation and hyperbole. His text was:

“Declaration of Love. — Caught at Last — Going to be married —New Movement in Civilisation [Headline]. I am going to be married in a few days to one of the most splendid women […] in intellect, in heart, in soul, in propriety, in person, in manners, that I have yet seen. Her fortune is her looks and her soul, mind and beauty.” (See J. L. Crouthamel p. 36; and O. Carlson, pp. 207-9.)

Bennett was building a brash personality, writing things seen by the Establishment as in bad taste, but not by those who disliked the Establishment.

Henrietta Crean, the 22-year-old recent immigrant from Dublin, still married the successful newspaper owner-editor twice her age. However, she could not easily escape the opprobrium that her husband’s work attracted. From quite soon after the wedding, the Herald’s competitors tried to get at the thick-skinned Bennett through attacks on his wife. Henrietta had to endure taunts that she was extravagant, haughty, a social climber, a daughter of ne’er-do-wells. The Star and the Sun were particularly abusive. The former insinuated that Bennett was not the father of her son Jamie– mentioning “imprudences [sic] with other men”. (See Carlson, p. 211.) Pray mentions the “most rash and inexcusable attack” on Mrs. Bennett and the plea of guilty by the perpetrator in June 1843 (p. 328). Bennett sued for libel and finally won the case in 1843.

More often, he was the one being sued. And he put all of these attacks and cases on his own front page. He was always the unsinkable victim bouncing back for more and making his enemies look ridiculous or at least unsuccessful in their attacks, even when he was physically beaten up. Social isolation and increasing anxiety about the atmosphere of violence surrounding her and the children led Henrietta to seek safety and respite from New York and finally set up home in Paris with her children – with her husband’s agreement. Each visited the other – generally once a year.

Personas and Bennett Jnr.

Young Jamie left Paris for New York with his father just before his 16th birthday. As a young man, he became a daring and competitive participant in yachting but also in all the activities of the young and wealthy of the gilded age: horse riding, gambling, drinking, chasing women. But yachting – whether competing or, later, living on yachts off shore, became his lifelong love and escape. He was seen as an international playboy, successor to his father as owner-editor of the Herald, looking for scoops, money no object, sending Stanley to find Livingstone in darkest Africa, and, more to the point, as legend has it, at his engagement party at his future in-laws, a Mr and Mrs May, he arrived very late and so drunk that he relieved himself into the front-room fireplace, which provoked a duel with his no-longer-to-be future brother-in-law. This led to his own social banishment from polite New York society, and thereafter to his spending the majority of his time in Paris or the French Riviera.

Many people at the time saw both Bennetts as of ‘bad character’, the father immoral, the son amoral. New York society, female dominated, led by Mrs Astor, never admitted them. Bennett Jnr, because of his yachting exploits and the great wealth he inherited, was nonetheless elected Commodore of the New York Yacht Club and helped set up the first defences of the America’s Cup, gaining a status in Europe other than simple notoriety. (See S. Jefferson, “The First Yacht Race across the Atlantic”).

Bennett Jnr’s behaviour in the second half of his life lends itself to an analysis from the point of view of ‘personas’. It was after the death of his father and mother and the broken engagement scandal and his intermittent exile in France, all within five years, that Bennett Jnr, I would argue, adopted a persona – but hiding behind a different mask to that of his father. He was never to be mentioned in his own newspapers, even when trophies he donated were named after him. The first association football cup in France, which he awarded, was referred in the New York Herald as the “Herald Trophy”. The amoral, extrovert ‘self’ retreated behind a mask partly to avoid too much public scrutiny and publicity – but also when he had to appear, the persona he projected was of an eccentric and unpredictable, if more likable, personality. Much more openly than his father, he declared to his staff that his newspaper was to reflect him or his wishes: “if I say that the main story today is to be black beetles, then black beetles it is”.

His adopted a Brian-Clough style of management in terms of keeping his staff on their toes and always confounding their expectations: Like Clough, he knew ‘eccentricity’ was expected of him and he played up to it. (See R. O’Connor, “The Scandalous Mr. Bennett”, pp. 244-45.) He sacked any staff deemed “indispensable” and promoted staff apparently on a whim.

A typical legendary anecdote that circulated relates to his habit of turning up unexpectedly to inspect the Herald’s staff and their new editorial offices and print works in New York. One day the men in the print room, in the basement, had a couple of minutes to react when they heard he was in the building. They had been sustaining themselves by drinking beer and hurriedly moved all the empty bottles to the part of the room where the youngest member of the Print Room, Billy Bishop, was working. Bennett came in and walked around with his general manager and asked: “Bishop, are all these bottles yours.” Bishop hesitated and no doubt feeling he had better not be disloyal to his fellow workers, replied: “I guess they are, sir”. Bennett asked: “How much do we pay you?”. He told him and Bennett said loudly to the managing editor. “This man can’t even afford his bar bill on what we pay him. Double his wages immediately!” (See A. Laney, “Paris Herald…”, p. 35).

Bennett Jnr has been accused of a lack of empathy. A common story is that entering Maxim’s Restaurant in Paris he would pull away the tablecloths from diners’ tables, scattering plates, glasses and food all over the place. When diners complained, he would more than pay for another dinner. He was rich enough to be fabulously generous: One afternoon in Monte Carlo, he was reputed to have bought a restaurant that would no longer let him – or any customers – eat out on the terrace. He gave the bill of sale to the head-chef, telling him “Now you own the place. Get those luncheon tables back on the terrace and go cook me a chop.” It became one of the great restaurants of the Riviera, Ciro’s. (See Laney p. 40; O’Connor p. 261.) He also supported good causes, sponsoring soup kitchens for the New York poor through the famous Delmonico’s restaurant and, in 1882, establishing a fund for relief of distress in Ireland.

Bennett Jnr has been called a controlled alcoholic sociopath (D. Wallace, “The Bonehunters' Revenge”.) It is true that he would say the outrageous or the unexpected, to keep people guessing and construct an air of mystery and authority around himself. I would take issue with the biographer, Crockett, who summed him up as his own worst enemy: “Bennett [was] a creature of unrestrained desires... If impulse called, he obeyed, and no rule existed but to be broken.” (See S. Crockett, p. 10.) Nearer the truth is, in this case, to look at the ‘personas’ people adopt to present themselves to the world. In this respect both Gordon Bennetts, father and son, in their different ways, saw their own character as fictional; they knew the ‘self’ each projected to the public was self-invented. They also had a desire to become legendary or at least a celebrity (in the modern sense of the term), to gain or regain status in society, particularly the son (and also – arguably – his sister Jeannette). Any stories invented by others were – to father and son – welcome additions to the legend.

Bennett Jnr, in particular, it has been argued, invented ‘celebrity journalism’ avant la lettre, building his second major newspaper around notions of celebrity. The European Edition of the New York Herald, founded in Paris in 1887 (renamed the International Herald Tribune – after his death) was aimed at an audience interested in the life-style, fashions, tastes and opinions of a new mobile, leisure-rich, cosmopolitan social class moving between America and Europe in transatlantic liners, luxury steam yachts and Pullman railway trains to holiday hotels for the rich and famous. (See Dauncey & Hare, “Cosmopolitanism…”, pp. 38–53).

Bennett Jnr, himself a representative of this growing class of affluent expatriates in Europe, shared their cosmopolitanism and leisure interests (such as tennis, polo and modern team sports) and particularly the developing technologies of travel and communications, which came together in his founding of the annual Gordon Bennett International Automobile Trophy race, the direct forerunner of Formula One, the most memorable race being the one run in Ireland in 1903. (See B. Lynch, “The Irish Gordon Bennett Cup Race 1903”.)

These concepts of ‘character’ and their application to the two extraordinary ‘characters’ above may – or may not – be of help to genealogists and others to whom it falls – for love or money – to elucidate the human ‘characteristics’ of someone or other through life-writing. May it give you as much pleasure as it has for me.

NOTES & SOURCES

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