The Offley Family Society              Offley Newsflash No.2

 12 September 2005 

Smallpox

                                              “What is your fortune, my pretty maid?”

                                              “My face is my fortune, sir,” she said.

So said the dairymaid, who was probably one of the very few in the village whose face was not disfigured by pock marks.

Smallpox in Norwich was the title of an article in Newsletter No. 11, published in 1989. It showed the relationship between the Offley, Bohun and Wortley-Montagu families and their involvement with the prevention of smallpox by inoculation. Inoculation was the injection of live smallpox material and from it vaccination was developed by Edward Jenner, who experimented with cowpox; vaccination afterwards became the accepted form of prevention.

The following article is reproduced, by kind permission, from The Metropolitan of April 2004 and was written by Mrs. Lilian Gibbens, the Chairman of the London, Westminster and Middlesex Family History Society, and gives further details of the disease.

Copies of our Newsletter No. 11, mentioned above, are available, price £1.00 post free.

Great, great, grandfather had smallpox

At the church of St. Nicholas in Worth Matravers in Dorset you will find the following memorial inscription: SACRED/To the Memory/of/Benjm JESTY (of Downshay)/who departed this Life/April 16^th, 1816/aged 79 years/He was born at Yetminster in this/County, and was an upright honest/Man; particularly noted for having been the first Person (Known) that/introduced the Cow Pox/by Inoculation, and who from/his great strength of mind made the/Experiment from the [Cow] on/his Wife and two Sons in the Year 1774.

The first vaccinator against smallpox was a farmer, Benjamin JESTY, who anticipated Dr. Edward Jenner, by transferring pus from a cow’s udder, using a cobbler’s needle, into his wife and children. It wasn’t until May 1796, in the village below Berkeley Castle on the River Severn, that Jenner took pus from the cowpox-infested Sara Nelmes and scratched onto the arm of eight year old James Phipps. In July he scratched the boy with human smallpox pus – and nothing happened. He repeated the experiment some months later, but the child still remained free of small-pox. Of course, Lady Mary WORTLEY-MONTAGUE, a mere girl of eighteen, had already imported into England, in 1718, the Turkish idea of vaccination, when she inoculated her son. She conducted experiments in England on convicted criminals awaiting execution and also, as a control, used a Chinese technique of placing dried pustules up the nostrils of yet another criminal. Whatever the method, those inoculated escaped the smallpox and thus the gallows.

It is fairly certain that you will not find a description of the symptoms and course of the disease in a modern home medical reference book, as the World Health Organisation has now declared the disease to have been eradicated. I had to turn to a very old edition of Pears Cyclopaedia to find a simple description.

Smallpox attacked people of all ages. Most common in the tropics, it was carried by excreta and droplet infection, but especially by the dried scales of the skin of a convalescent patient. In England and New England in America, there were epidemics in the late seventeenth century, ravaging families. The diarist john EVELYN lost both his daughters in 1685 (Mary in March and Elizabeth in August). The four children of the Essex clergyman and diarist, Ralph Josselin – his sons John and Thomas, who came to London to be apprenticed, and his daughters, Ann and Elizabeth, who came as servant girls, all survived the disease, although generally migrant workers from the countryside usually fell prey to the disease, having no immunity whatsoever. Apprentices and smart lads seeking employment had to prove they had had smallpox, and so would not contract it and thus kill their masters; maidservants advertised their recovery from it. Public houses advertising that they were well aired and free from disease. Smallpox claimed one in five deaths and more or less everyone contracted it. In 1746 over 3000 Londoners died in an outbreak; victims were buried at night, in terror, carried to their graves on a farm cart driven by men well pickled in beer. The resultant pockmarks were useful when identifying criminals and runaway apprentices – or husbands. Both ladies and gentlemen disguised their pockmarks with patches, which led to a ‘fashion’ for patches. Tom Brown declared: ‘Some of them having scabbed or pimpled faces wear a thousand patches to hide them, and those that have none, scandalise their faces by a foolish imitation’. Bills of Mortality often lumped together the diseases of smallpox, chicken pox and measles because of the red rash: ‘Flox, small pox and measles . . . . . 1031’. Measles was a childhood disease and would have caused a large number of deaths.

It was a constant terror during the eighteenth century and existed in epidemics until the mid-nineteenth century. The early transportees to Australia carried the disease with them and it decimated the aboriginal population. If you read local newspapers, you will find reports of small outbreaks until well into the twentieth century. Indeed, the writer was involved in an outbreak in Fleet Street during the 1960s, when a staff member from a newspaper returned from the East and developed the disease. He was sent to an Isolation Hospital and all the staff members ­– and their families – had to be vaccinated as a precaution.

Similar to chicken pox in many ways, smallpox (variola) began with shivering, headache, backache and a raised temperature. On the third day a rash of red spots appeared on the forehead, spreading to the scalp and then downwards over the body and perhaps internally; the rash later turned into blisters (vesicles), which then filled with pus. It caused blindness or death through suffocation if the membranes in the mouth swelled up and obstructed breathing. If the patient managed to survive, in 12 days the blisters dried up and dropped off. A really effective drug was not discovered until the late 1960s.

One Robert SUTTON and his son, Daniel, advertised commodious inoculation houses around London, where individuals could suffer the inevitable mild attack, until they became safe to mix with others, after the scabs had dropped. The Suttons offered their clients full board with a more than adequate daily menu, offering fish, poultry, and mutton, and wine to wash it down with at two guineas a week. Tea was not offered as this was too expensive. They treated over 30,000 patients, and suffered only a four per cent mortality. Not unnaturally, their neighbours were outraged and the Royal College of Physicians were furiously angry because Daniel was not qualified.

It must be remembered that only the rich were able to afford vaccination and a great number of people died from the small pox. It was not until 1840 that free vaccination was introduced for all infants; in 1853 such vaccination became compulsory. This triggered off the usual fight for personal ‘rights’ and in 1867 the Anti-Vaccination League was formed. An Act of 1899 allowed conscientious objection to vaccination and in 1948 the compulsory vaccination of infants ceased. In 1977 smallpox was eradicated. And so ended the disease which Macauley said ’turned the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered and made the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover’.                                                    LG

Royal Descendants

Correspondence in the Daily Telegraph in March 2005 referred to illegitimate descendants of Henry I and Henry II.  However, legitimate descent may be claimed by the progeny of Margaret Offley who married Stephen Kirton in the 16th century.  According to a posting on the Rainsford Genealogical Forum Stephen Kirton’s ancestry is as follows:

John Kirton born 1450 and Margaret White.
Margaret Gainsford and Knight Robert White born 1456.
John White (Whyte) and Eleanor Hungerford.
Robert Hungerford born 1409 and Margaret De Beautreaux.
Lord William De Beautreaux III born 1388 and Elizabeth Beaumont.
John Beaumont 4th Lord born 1361 and Katherine Everingham.
Henry Beaumont 3rd Lord born 1340 and Margaret De Vere.
John Beaumont 2nd Lord born 1318 and Alianor of Lancaster born 1311.
Henry of Lancaster 3rd Earl born 1281 and Maude De Chaworth.
Edmund of Lancaster (Earl) born 1244 and Blanche D'Artrois.
King Henry III of England born 1207 and Eleanor De Provence born 1217.

Can any member corroborate this?

Paul Delaney [STA C XV], who recently resigned from the Society, would thus be able to claim Royal descent. Brice Clagett [STA E15], also a former member, who was himself descended from a sister of Margaret Offley, married his 14th cousin, Virginia Lawrence Parker [STA C2 XV], another possible descendant of Henry III. Can any other Member claim Royal descent?

Additions to Archives

John M Offley has been looking at the British Library website and has found a print of  Possingworth, in Waldron, formerly the seat of Thomas Offley.  This has now been included in Section 16 of the Offley Archives.

For Sale

The Offley Family in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire  £1.50.  The Offilers of Nottingham  £1.50.

The Offley Family Society Millennium Cookbook  £2.50.  Wychnor Park, by Roger Hailwood  £5.25.

The Offley Family Society Pens  £1.00 - buy two get one free!

Please add an additional sum for postage.  Order from 2 The Green, Codicote, Hitchin.  SG4 8UR.