|
 |
|
Charles
Leon Leleux
©
Mervyn Kennaway |
|
Bruce Humphrey begins:
"Charles Leon Leleux and Jessie Stentiford were married at St. Paul's,
East Stonehouse on 28th January 1884. He was a corporal in the Royal
Engineers 2nd Telegraph Battalion (previously the Postal Telegraph
Company, not actually C Troop). A mathematical instrument maker by
trade, he enlisted in London in 1876 and served two terms, being
discharged in 1897 in Plymouth by which time he was Company Sergeant
Major. He appears to have served most of his time in Plymouth, with only
four months overseas, in Suakin (in the Sudan but then technically a
province of Egypt) in 1886. This was more than a year after the death of
General Gordon in Khartoum, and long before Kitchener's expedition, so
this was, essentially, a "garrison" posting.
|
 |
|
The
death of General Gordon
Khartoum
- 26 January 1885 |
|
No campaign medal was issued for the period in which
Charles Leleux was in Suakin, the Suakin Bar for the Egyptian (Gordon)
Campaign being only issued for service between 1884 and 1885.
Apart from that posting to the Sudan (from 24 March 1886 to 28 July
1886) and the long stay in Plymouth, there is a clue to a brief
posting to Portsmouth in the birth of Charles' daughter Ada Adelaide in
Portsea in November 1887." |
 |
|
Suakin
in 1905*
Courtesy
of the Sudan Archive, University of Durham |
| Bruce continues:
"Of our G G Grandfather (Charles' father) Auguste Pierre
Joseph Leleux, little is directly known. The bald facts are that he
married Catherine Josephine Grandjean in 1855 in St. James, Westminster.
The
marriage was according to the rites of the Roman Catholic church in the
Royal Bavarian Chapel, a church originally established by and for
foreign embassies.
However, no children to that couple have been traced. Charles' mother
(and the mother of his recorded brothers and sisters) was Julia Jane
Piguet, who certainly called herself Julia Jane Leleux on certificates."
|
|
John Humphrey comments:
Catholic marriages in England were publicly
proscribed until the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act some 26 years before
this marriage. The Chapel attached to the Bavarian Embassy was deemed to
be on foreign soil and apparently served as a discreet
"private" location for such rituals. It seems likely that
Catherine Grandjean and her father Michael were the Catholics, not the
Leleux family. What happened consequently to Catherine is still unclear.
The potential second marriage of Auguste, to Julia
Jane Piguet, which lasted from at least 1857 (the birth year of Charles
Leon) until her death in 1870, linked him with a family with staunch
Swiss Lutheran roots." |
|
More from Bruce:
"We know that Julia Jane Piguet was the daughter of Abraam Elizee
Piguet and Elizabeth Stannard, and that she was christened at St.
Martins in the Fields on 9 September 1832 - a fact which is also
recorded in Pallot's Index.**
Abraam Piguet was almost certainly Swiss (Canton de Vaud) on naming
patterns alone and that family is recorded for many generations past.
Julia died in December 1870 after the birth of Charles'
brother Frederick. The death is indexed in the GRO Index in the name of "Julia Lelexy"
- another
illustration of the ease with which errors creep in;
it is clearly a misreading of "Leleux". Charles was then just
13; as far as we know his young brothers Peter (5 years old), Henry (4),
Joseph (nearly 2) and Frederick (5 months) were living at the time,
although his sister Adelaide (b 1859) and brothers Augustus (1861) and
Julius (1863) had fallen victim to the child mortality of the time."
|
| *Without knowing any connection to his
great grandfather, Bruce Humphrey spent four years in the Sudan in the
seventies and visited Suakin three or four times. He describes it as a
wonderful old, traditional, Arab port on the Red Sea, picturesque in the
extreme. |
| ** Sometimes spelt PALLOTT. A collection
of marriage entries for England covering 1780 to 1837. Only parts of
that period are covered in many areas but nonetheless, it is a useful
tool for family historians. |
Click here to
continue
|
