Excerpts from the recollections of Sophia Lonsdale
1:
My dear Uncle Henry was very unlike his eldest brother, but they were very brotherly in their attachment. Uncle Henry was fond of horses and outdoor things, as was his wife, a Miss Heywood. He hunted a good deal and I have heard his later condition was supposed to have come from a fall out hunting, having injured his spine. He had not my father’s scholarly tastes, nor his natural dignity. I remember how he loved to chaff us and liked us to give a saucy answer back, a thing we should never have dreamed of doing to my father. He was very kind to me and when he found I was to wait for the gold watch my father gave us each at a certain age (thirteen or fourteen I think) because I was neither tidy nor careful, he got me one like my sister’s without waiting for my parents.
He loved small jokes even at inappropriate times, such as would make his servants turn their backs or run out of the room while waiting at table. “James, do you think Charles has committed suicide?” Charles being an enormously fat and jovial looking coachman, who had not returned home quite as soon as expected. He bore his helplessness most cheerily and bravely and even merrily. With his wheelchair he would pretend to come after us to wheel over our toes. He used to be helped up to his pulpit in St Mary’s Lichfield before the services began, and said he had an advantage in having to sit instead of stand to preach. He had a quiet cob and he used to ride up and down the stable yard after dusk for exercise, carriage lamps being hung up. Then he had a very small pony on which he would get to ride into his school and examine the children. I have seen him ride round his dining room on this pony. He was very hospitable and certainly did not make himself a slave to his furniture. I think there was less care for pretty insides of houses and much more hospitality in those days.
We used to come “en famille” to stay with him at Lynncroft near Lichfield and he used to say “You must stop long enough to eat meals enough to pay for your journies”. Certainly nursery meals were plain enough (dry bread and lots of milk) but I think there was plenty of rather good living in the dining room and many guests and a great many animals of all sorts kept. Lynncroft was a shirt mile from Lichfield. It was one of my treats as a child to ride on a pony before breakfast beside the coachman for the letters. (I dare say now there are three deliveries at Lynncroft). One morning I stopped to buy “pop” at the turnpike. Uncle Henry said “I heard James say “she is a rum ‘un” but I pretended not to hear him. I am sure I was both rum and naughty at Lynncroft and led the cousins into mischief. The children were at daggers drawn with the outdoor men. Uncle Henry was the father of Margaret (Gordon), Netty (Brooskbank), Mary who died of consumption like her mother, Henry, Lilly (Fell), Arthur whom I remember as a dark-eyed boy like a Murillo.
I don’t think I can make anybody realise what Uncle Henry was. He had a sort of boyish mischievous fun and loved to put people in a predicament. My mother told me he had brought some things from the Continent and she advised him to shew them to his evening guests who admired and thanked him. “Oh you need not thank me, it was my sister-in-law who thought of them and said they would do to entertain stupid people!”. Yet he had a way with him that made people enjoy his comical rudeness when they would have been offended at the same thing from anybody else. As he drove through Lichfield many were the hats taken off. It bothered him to return the salutations. He said “I’ll come once a year into the Market Place without a hat, and you can all take off yours and then that will do for the year”.
Footnotes
[1] F_Unknown_SophiaLonsdale_Reminiscences.pdf
1791 - 1851 (60 years)
[1] 
