Edward Walter Bonham

Edward Walter Bonham, E. M. Delafield’s great-grandfather, was born in High Canons, Shenley in Hertfordshire on 24 November 1809. He was the fourth son and arrived in the middle of the nine children of his parents Henry and Charlotte Bonham (see my post on the Bonhams for more about them). Throughout this post I’ll call him Edward Walter, to distinguish him clearly from his son Edward William.

Educated at Charterhouse School and at Harrow, with his older brother Henry he made a tour of Europe in 1826, improving his languages and his cultural education (much of my information comes again from Andrew George’s history of the Bonhams available on Ancestry); Henry Bonham senior was clearly bringing up his children in the style of a gentleman. But after his death in 1830 Edward Walter’s financial position was more difficult. His inheritance was principally a share of the funds settled on his mother, and not accessible to him until after her death. Edward Walter would need to get a job.

By 1831 he was working for Fairlie, Clarke and Co, a business with links to his father, and they sent him to Tabriz (then Persia, now in Iran) to supervise a group of copper miners, a demanding job for a relatively young man. Fairlie, Clarke & Co went bankrupt in 1833 and Edward Walter was back in England, living at Penge Place, Sydenham, considering his options. Henry Bonham junior’s offer of an army commission was not to his taste; instead, he borrowed money from his mother Charlotte and Henry to set himself up as a merchant in Persia. Between 1833 and 1837 he undertook demanding journeys to and within Persia and — despite cholera and political instability — set up a successful business. By 1837 he had been appointed the first ever consul in Tabriz, and moved into the former British Minister’s residence there; he could continue to trade on his own behalf as well as looking after British interests in a strategically important location. From letters from his colleague and friend Edward Burgess, we know that Edward Walter was amiable, interested in taxidermy, and kept English greyhounds for hunting (George pp2-10).

A portrait miniature of Edward Walter was sold in 2022. The image on the auction page shows a fairly young man with wavy red hair, a red moustache and sideburns. He has pale blue or grey eyes, a slightly turned-up nose and a firm chin. He’s wearing a black coat with a wide velvet collar and a high black cravat, pinned with some sort of gold jewellery. A red waistcoat peeks out between the coat and the cravat, and there’s a white collar showing above the cravat. From the invaluable Fashion History Timeline website this looks like menswear of the 1830s; this might have been a gift for his family back home, or possibly for Elizabeth Floyd, the woman he would go on to marry.

Consuls at the time were principally agents for the expansion of British trade, but also supported British nationals abroad, regulated British shipping through overseas ports, and - exceptionally - provided political intelligence to the British government. My main source for details of consular life is what seems to be the only significant history of the British consular service, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls Since 1825 by D. C. M. Platt (Gazelle, 1971). In the nineteenth century, consuls were appointed by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; speculative applications outnumbered available posts, and personal contacts and patronage were important (Platt 21-2). It seems likely that Edward Walter’s successful appointment was a mixture of being on the spot, and having built a good local network of contacts, and his own family background. His father’s posthumous influence might have been useful, as may the marriage of his eldest sister Charlotte to George Canning, first Baron Garvagh and a first cousin of the George Canning who would become Prime Minister; Charlotte’s husband was, in the 1820s, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and particularly interested in the reform of the consular service.

Consular life could be difficult and uncomfortable when it was not actually dangerous. There was no particular job description and nothing in the way of training until the mid-nineteenth century (Platt 26). Expenses were fixed for each posting and had to cover rent, furniture and staffing, so consulates were often rather spartan places, barely furnished and with minimal clerical support for the consul (Platt 36). Salaries were low and based on the expectation that consuls would have some private means (Platt 11). Consuls could engage in trade, and earn money through the fees paid by merchants and shipping, although the opportunities for earning in this way varied widely between postings (Platt 37-8). Pensions were generous and this is one of the reasons the job was so popular. However, postings to difficult environments often shortened the consul’s lifespan, so he could not benefit from his pension, and no provision was made for his dependents (Platt 44-7).

Consular life could also be isolated. Many postings were unsuitable for a wife and children to join them, and the month's leave allowed each year included travelling time, so some consuls never came home during far-flung postings (Platt 27) . As foreigners abroad, consuls could be viewed with suspicion by the local population and by consuls of other nations, even while they were an important, visible part of local society. Their dispatches to the Foreign Office were often received in silence, with no sense of whether the information they remitted was at all useful. Their relationships with the local Ambassadors, and with the wider Foreign Office, was governed by class difference. Consuls were generally drawn from the middle classes, while embassy staff came from the upper classes. This social distinction was marked formally, through such things as uniforms and orders of precedence, but also through perpetual under-resourcing of the consular service by the Foreign Office (Platt 2-3). This was usually a "practically unbridgeable" social gulf and promotions from the consular to the diplomatic service were exceptionally rare (Platt ix, 52).

In June 1843, Edward Walter was back in England and married Elizabeth Floyd (1822-44) who accompanied him back to Tabriz. Elizabeth was the daughter of Colonel Sir Henry Floyd, whose brother-in-law was Sir Robert Peel; the Floyds were neighbours of the Bonhams at one point and the wedding took place in St Andrew’s Church in Hove (George 10). Elizabeth Floyd’s brother Charles became a clergyman and would eventually marry Edward Walter’s granddaughter Anita Constance in 1897. Edward Walter gave up his trading business at this point, presumably because his wife brought money to the marriage. Katie Hickman's Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (Flamingo, 2011) emphasises the importance of the role of women, both as part of the social and ceremonial functions but also helping to run the embassy and undertake secretarial work (Hickman 53-5). While consuls would not undertake embassy-style entertaining, the support of a wife must have been hugely important in running a successful consulate and managing the isolation a consul could face. This was evidently true for Edward Walter, who took his wife Elizabeth to Persia with him. Hickman's account of embassy life suggests a rather intense, claustrophobic environment where all were under scrutiny and all power stemmed, patriarchally, from the Ambassador. Diplomatic life was highly regulated and extremely hierarchical, as well as intensely social; it also provided the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond, which could make the transition back to home or to other roles very difficult. Diplomatic wives had to subsume their ambitions into their husbands' jobs, but then this was the normal expectation of the nineteenth-century wife.

Edward Walter and Elizabeth’s son Edward William was born in Tabriz on 30 April 1844 and his christening was celebrated with a party. But very sadly, in December 1844 Elizabeth died of typhus. Edward Burgess recalls his friend’s emotional collapse after insisting on attending her burial, which had to be completed immediately because of the risk of contagion. Elizabeth was buried with an Eastern Orthodox service and Edward Burgess read the Church of England service over her grave. Edward Walter and his son returned to England in May 1845 (George 11-13).

A widowed Victorian gentleman with children and an income would generally be expected to marry again. Surprisingly, given that he had a young son to care for and a job in which a wife was a definite asset, Edward Walter did not marry a second time. In 1846 he was appointed Consul at Calais, a less challenging location than Tabriz although still of considerable strategic importance. During his time in Calais he was much involved with the plight of 3000 British lace workers in the Pas-de-Calais who had been put out of work following the 1848 revolution, supporting their petition to be allowed to emigrate to the colonies (George 13). Young children might well live with their parents at the consulate, if it was safe for them to do so, but older children would routinely be sent back to Britain for their education (Hickman 47). Edward William was probably educated at Charterhouse School too, and would have easily been able to join his father in Calais in the holidays.

In 1859 Edward Walter was offered a new appointment as Consul at Naples. Naples in the 1860s was a large city, in many ways prosperous due to its busy shipping port, with an emerging middle class and a high cultural standing reinforced by its position on the Grand Tour (My sources on Naples are Jordan Lancaster, In the shadow of Vesuvius: a cultural history of Naples (Tauris, 2005) and J. A. Davis, Italy in the nineteenth century, 1796-1900 (OUP, 2000)). However, it was also economically fragile and politically unstable as the results of Italian unification played out in the Naples economy (Davis 148). The new government of Italy had a limited understanding of the South (Davis 148); the population density in Naples was ten times that of Victorian London, sanitation was poor and there were repeated epidemics of cholera and typhoid (Lancaster 201); political factionalism and ineffective governance created ideal conditions for the birth of organised crime (Lancaster 205).

So Naples was a politically unstable city but a hugely important one both in terms of trade and strategic understanding of the Mediterranean region. Edward Walter's appointment as consul there in 1851 must have been an endorsement of his skills and his insight. He joined a well-established English colony centred around the Rivera di Chiaia, then an elegant street of villas facing south across the Bay. The Consulate, and the Bonhams’ home was a tall town house on the Rivera di Chiaia; this was also the site of the regular passeggiata, where Neapolitans paraded in their carriages to seen and be seen.

By 1862 he had been appointed Consul-General, an exceptional appointment made in part because of his long service (Platt 61). But there was also a political reason for Edward Walter's promotion; the fragile and labile political state of Naples after unification meant that the Foreign Office was willing to invest more to ensure the country was properly monitored. Edward Walter reported that the Italian South was in an "alarming state" in 1866, when Betty was born (see Wright, O. J. ‘British Representatives and the Surveillance of Italian Affairs, 1860-70’. The Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 669–87). Despite the local conditions, Edward Walter was able to have his family with him. His sister Harriet (1811-63) moved to Naples with him to act as his hostess, and his son Edward William joined the family firm as Vice-Consul, marrying Anne Sarah Bage (1846-70), a member of the Naples English community, in 1865. Their four children, Betty, Walter Floyd, Evelyn and Anita Constance were all born at the Consulate on Rivera di Chiaia between 1866 and 1870.

Riviera di Chiaia in the nineteenth century, by Georg Sommer.

In 1872 Edward Walter retired, settling in Penge, South London, on Anerley Road. In the 1881 census, he is living there with his grandchildren, their governess and nurse. I wonder if the portrait of the grandfather in Betty de la Pasture’s novel The Man from America (1905) is in some ways a tribute to Edward Walter. Although he seems to have been very different from the Franco-Irish Vicomte, the affectionate relationship between grandchildren and grandparent is strongly evoked. He died five years later in 1886, visiting Boulogne where his son was Consul. He is buried, slightly oddly, in Folkestone: perhaps because this was a convenient ferry journey from Boulogne, but possibly also because Edward William had a country house at Bramling near Canterbury, although this is not particularly near Folkestone.

His estate was valued at just over £5,000, a sizeable sum in 1886 (a clerk’s annual salary at this time would be around £50), but it makes me wonder what happened to his inheritance from his mother Charlotte’s settlement. She left effects of less than £3,000 when she died in 1877, but the settlement came from her late husband’s will rather than hers. As Charlotte probably couldn’t spend the capital, perhaps some investments failed, or perhaps the loan she gave Edward Walter to set up his business in Tabriz took a sizeable chunk out of his inheritance. At least he got fourteen years to enjoy his generous consular service pension.

The cover image shows the House of Hussein Khan, Tabriz, by Eugène Flandin, 1840.