Cosmo, Jeannette and the James Gordon Bennetts

This site is devoted to the Bennett family that has been traced back to a small Catholic community living in Banffshire, in the north-east of Scotland, in the late 18th century. Its best known members are James Gordon Bennett, the founder-owner-editor of the New York Herald, and his son James Gordon Bennett Junior, in his time also owner-editor of the New York Herald and, later, founder, in Paris, of its European edition, renamed, some years after his death, the International Herald Tribune.

James Gordon Bennett senior had a younger brother Cosmo. His short and tragic life as a trainee priest in Aberdeenshire and Valladolid, Spain, also deserves to be rescued from its relative obscurity. The same could be said of Bennett junior’s sister Jeannette, who lived her long life between France, New York and London trying to escape from the shadows of her father and, particularly, of her notorious brother. For a while she bore the weight of the ill-fated Arctic exploration ship, “The Jeannette”, named after her by her brother. His colourful and sometimes scandalous life in New York, in Paris and on the Riviera – which made him the obvious model for the British-English expression of shock “Gordon Bennett!” – was all the more difficult for her to bear, having lost the support of her father and mother at an early age.

The Braes of Enzie, between Buckie and Keith in north-east Scotland.
[All images are copyright Geoff Hare unless otherwise stated.]

The Bennett/Reid family came from Banffshire, more precisely from the Enzie (pronounced locally ‘ingie’, as in Menzies Campbell). The Enzie is a moor rising up from the port of Buckie on the Moray Firth and descending steeply, 20 miles to the south, towards the village of New Mill and the market town of Keith, which was built in the valley of the river Isla. In the 18th century the Enzie was an important stronghold of Scottish Catholicism despite the ban and persecution of the religion in Scotland since the Reformation led by John Knox (from 1560) and then, from 1746, by the English armies of the “Butcher” Cumberland following the battle of Culloden, the final defeat of the second Jacobite Rebellion.

(With thanks to Keith Mitchell of the Moray Burial Ground Research Group for the photograph)

By the ‘Auld Brig’ across the Isla, in Keith, a fine granite memorial stone stands in the Auld Kirk burial ground in memory of James Bennett and his wife Janet Reid. It reads:

ERECTED BY
J. GORDON BENNETT
OF NEW YORK
IN MEMORY OF
HIS FATHER AND MOTHER
JAMES BENNETT
WHO DIED 28TH FEBY. 1824
AGED 83
JANET REID
WHO DIED 24TH JULY 1854
AGED 92.

The stone was erected – or at least ordered – by their eldest child, James Gordon Bennett on one of his visits to Europe – probably the one he made for the birth of his daughter Jeannette – whose mother was, at the time, living in Paris. Bennett may well have gone to New Mill [Newmill] in the hope of seeing his aged mother and his sisters Margaret and Ann, but his mother Janet had died during his trip. We know from the ship’s records that he left New York on 5th June 1854 aboard the Franklin for Le Havre, a journey of about 17 days then. His mother died in late July. If we assume Jeannette was conceived on Bennett’s usual winter trip, she would have been born perhaps in August at the earliest. He left Le Havre, calling at Cowes, and arrived back in New York on 17th November. That length of stay would have given enough time for him to learn of his mother’s death and to make a visit to Keith to erect the memorial. His wife Henrietta may or may not have felt it was too early to take the whole family from Paris to the north-east of Scotland, so soon after the birth.

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