In November 1885, after the deposition of King Thibaw at the end of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, British forces moved into the palace at Mandalay, where they found ‘a small royal white elephant’ in the menagerie, with another regular elephant kept as its companion.

Minute paper regarding the discovery of the white elephant in the palace at Mandalay - IOR/L/PJ/6/192, File 27

In the era of the Konbaung dynasty, to which Thibaw belonged, the possession of a white elephant was required in order to assume the title of Hsinbyushin or Hysinbyumyashin - Lord of the White Elephants - and legitimise one’s position as ruler.  Owning a white elephant signified royalty and status but most importantly, wealth, since housing and keeping these creatures was an expensive endeavour - as the British would soon find out.  Indeed, in English the term ‘white elephant’ now means something that is a financial burden, with little to no benefit.

Note by Sir Ashley Eden of the India Office making reference to white elephants as ‘an emblem of royalty’ and recommending that the animal should not be sent out of Burma - IOR/L/PJ/6/192, File 27

In a series of letters between the Chief Commissioner of British Burma and the Foreign Department in Simla (Shimla), the question of what to do with these two young elephants - and the financial and political concerns involved - was posited back and forth, with three eventual solutions being proposed:

• The white elephant could be presented to the King of Siam as a gift
• It could be transported to the Royal Zoological Society in London
• It could be kept in the Phayre Gardens at Rangoon (now Yangon).

In these letters, the Secretary for Upper Burma to the Chief Commissioner, Herbert Thirkell White, referred to the ‘uselessness’ of the two elephants, and the ‘inconvenient arrangement’ of paying 140 Burmese rupees a month for their care.  On 14 April 1886 the animals were handed over to the Transport Department, despite not being old enough to serve as beasts of burden.

In the interest of avoiding a political incident, the decision was made not to gift the animals to the King of Siam.  As a letter to the Chief Commissioner explained, presenting a Burmese royal white elephant to the King ‘would be regarded as a humiliation in the eyes of the Siamese’.

A series of letters between Burma, India and Siam discussing the white elephant - IOR/L/PJ/6/192, File 27

Despite concerns about the white elephant being acquired by ‘pretenders to the throne’ should it be sold within Burma, there was a similar political risk involved in removing the animal from the country.  The Secretary of State for India, Viscount Cross, wrote in a letter to the Governor General of India: ‘... it has been suggested to me that the removal of the animal to this country may produce an unfavourable effect upon the minds of some portion of the natives of Burma, and that it might on that account be more advisable to keep it in the Phayre Gardens at Rangoon’.

Copy of a letter from Viscount Cross, Secretary of State for India, to the Governor General of India, 3 February 1887 - IOR/L/PJ/6/192, File 27

Copy of a letter from the Chief Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Burma to the Foreign Department in Simla dated 25 May 1887, reporting the decision to transport the white elephant to the Phayre Gardens in Rangoon IOR/L/PJ/6/206, File 1208

Although we have found no record of what happened to its companion, the white elephant’s story has a happy ending, and it was eventually moved to the Phayre Gardens.  In 1901, the Gardens were commissioned as a memorial to Queen Victoria and reopened in 1906 as the Victoria Memorial Park and Zoological Gardens, where the white elephant was touted as the central attraction.

Ely Nott
Library, Information and Archives Services Apprentice

Further reading:
IOR/L/PJ/6/192, File 27 Disposal of a white elephant found in the palace at Mandalay, 14 December 1886-3 February 1887.
IOR/L/PJ/6/206, File 1208 The white elephant found in the palace at Mandalay to be lodged in the Phayre Gardens at Rangoon, 17 June 1887.

 

From 1801, John Fenwick worked as a journalist and newspaper editor.  Noted as either purchasing or editing the radical newspaper the Albion in 1801, when its proprietor Allan MacLeod was in Newgate, and the Plow in 1802.  For the latter, Fenwick wanted to develop a network of regional correspondents.  The extent to which he was successful, or harnessed a news communications network to political purposes, is not known. In the years that followed, he occasionally travelled from London for work.

Report of a political meeting in Nottingham by an ‘able pen’, Statesman 31 May 1810 British Newspaper Archive

From April 1810, if not before, Fenwick likely worked on the radical daily newspaper the Statesman which continued to print while its proprietor and publisher Daniel Lovell was in Newgate in 1810-15.  Other than a letter from Charles Lamb to Barron Field in 1817, direct evidence that Fenwick edited the Statesman is scant.  Political meetings were occasionally reported by an unnamed ‘able pen’.  In October 1810, the Statesman published a warmly appreciative theatre review which focused exclusively on the Covent Garden debut of Eliza Ann Fenwick, John and Eliza Fenwick’s daughter.

Theatre review on the Covent Garden debut of Eliza Ann Fenwick, John and Eliza Fenwick’s daughter, Statesman 6 October 1810 - British Newspaper Archive

John Fenwick’s family relied partly on Eliza Fenwick’s income as a children’s writer, and neither parent had guaranteed earnings.  Fenwick was briefly subject to the rules of Fleet prison as a debtor.  The creditors named alongside his discharge in April 1808 confirmed that his unpaid bills comprised those of the school master Samuel Boucher Allen, who may have taught their son Orlando Fenwick; and the apothecary surgeon James Moss, of Somers Town where the Godwins lived, who might have prescribed for or been called to attend any member of the Fenwick family.  A John Fenwick published a well reviewed A new elementary grammar of the English language (1811), shortly after William Hazlitt completed A new and improved grammar of the English tongue (1810) for Godwin’s Juvenile Library.

Masthead for The London Moderator and National Adviser 14 October 1818 printed and published by Thomas James Fenwick - British Newspaper Archive

In March 1812, John Fenwick’s brother Thomas James Fenwick (1768-1850), a draper and slop seller in Limehouse, started a weekly newspaper The London Moderator and National Adviser which continued to print until 1823. Eliza Fenwick noted that

My brother has offered to pay me, if I will write, by the sheet, as I advance. He has bought printing premises types etc for a newspaper he has started, and as he must keep a certain number of men he wishes to purchase manuscripts to print.

It is likely that John Fenwick edited this weekly newspaper from 1812, and he may have continued to do so until 1823.  On the masthead, John Fenwick appeared as the proprietor of this newspaper in December 1818, before the paper was purchased in January 1819 by a John Twigg.

Masthead for The London Moderator and National Adviser 30 December 1818 printed and published by John Fenwick -  British Newspaper Archive

Fenwick briefly employed Charles Lamb to write for the Albion in the Summer of 1801.  Two decades later, in 1820, Charles Lamb lampooned his former employer as the ‘excellent tosspot’ Ralph Bigod, an impecunious republican newspaper editor.  And so commenced the laughable legend, which led the academic Lissa Paul to bluntly reinvent the hard to research John Fenwick as ‘a deadbeat’, in her 2019 biography of the novelist and children’s writer Eliza Fenwick.

CC-BY
Dr Charlotte MacKenzie
Independent researcher
@HistoryCornwall

Creative Commons Attribution licence

Further reading:
British Newspaper Archive - much free content, including The London Moderator and National Adviser and Statesman

John Fenwick political radical and writer (1)

 

This post shares new research about the political radical and writer John Fenwick (1757-1823).

John Fenwick lived in Newcastle upon Tyne as a child.  He was the son of the Methodist preacher John Fenwick (d. 1787), who left the itinerancy and traded in 1756-77, after marrying Priscilla Mackaris (1735-71).  The younger Fenwick likely attended Newcastle Free School when Hugh Moises was schoolmaster.

Copper token with a cat issued by Thomas Spence, inscribed MY FREEDOM I AMONG SLAVES ENJOY, London 1796 - image courtesy of the British Museum

Fenwick was a contemporary of the working class radical Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who first promulgated his plans for ‘democratic parishes’ at the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775.  Before moving to London in the late 1780s, where Spence became well known as a radical bookseller, and later produced the meme like cat token here.  Charles Lamb noted to the Parliamentary clerk John Rickman that Fenwick ‘in youth conversed with the philosophers’.

Lieutenant George Belson, Corps of Marines, outside the Guard Room of the Marine Barracks, Chatham, 1780. Image courtesy of the National Army Museum.

Fenwick was described by others as an Army officer in his youth.  The only ‘J. Fenwick’ listed as an Army officer in 1773-87 was a second lieutenant of the British Marine Corps on half pay.  First listed in 1773 (when John Fenwick was aged 16), then as a second lieutenant in 1775, 1777-78, and 1784-87.  He might have been assigned without a commission in the intervening war years.  In 1793, Fenwick downplayed the extent of his military experience in a letter to General Miranda of the French republican army.

Aged 31, Fenwick sprang fully formed onto the pages of William Godwin’s diary in August 1788.  When he, Godwin, and Thomas Holcroft dined together at the White Hart in London.  He was proposed and accepted as a member of the Society of Constitutional Information in 1792.  He probably attended the Philomathean Society, at which Godwin, Holcroft and others met to debate, with a maximum 21 members.

Fenwick was a republican.  He travelled to France in 1793, and earned his living partly as a translator from French to English.  In 1796-7, payments were made to Committee members who produced The Moral and Political Magazine of the London Corresponding Society, among whom the ‘Fenwick’ who offered to complete these tasks without payment for two months, in December 1796, probably was John Fenwick.

Satirical print entitled 'Promenade in the State Side of Newgate', London 1793. The figures are identified at the bottom of the page. Image courtesy of the British Museum.

Fenwick was closely associated with some men convicted of sedition in the 1790s.  The London Corresponding Society made donations to support the family of Joseph Gerrald (pictured here with a newspaper) after he was transported following the ‘British Convention’ in Edinburgh.  His daughter Fanny Gerrald (b. 1791) stayed with John and Eliza Fenwick and their two children in 1798-9.

At that time, Fenwick also attended the trial and execution of the priest James Coigly, was entrusted to edit and publish Coigly’s papers, and separately published his own pamphlet on the trial.  Soon after, Fenwick travelled to Dublin, in February 1799, where he remained until late April.

As the millenium turned, Fenwick looked for new ways to further radical politics and earn a living.  His short biography of Godwin appeared in the second volume of Richard Phillips’ Public Characters (October, 1799).  He wrote a stage comedy The Indian: a farce, derived from the pre-revolutionary French opera Arlequin sauvage, which opened in London in October 1800 and was not a success.  From 1801, John Fenwick sought to earn his living as a journalist, which is the subject of our next post.

CC-BY
Dr Charlotte MacKenzie
Independent researcher
@HistoryCornwall

Creative Commons Attribution licence

John Fenwick political radical and writer (2)