A Plot Both Great and Grand

I walked past the plot where my great-great-grandfather lies buried, the Masonic plot at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, established in 1883 by Brother John Ross Robertson to provide for the internment of indigent Masons . . . my great-great-grandfather, the indigent who in 1894, had arrived in style at the Queen’s Hotel, who’d once sung lead tenor in the “Messiah” at Massey Hall, taught at the College of Music, and seen his brief tenure here end at the Home for the Incurables.
     No stone then for Thomas James Burley, so I stomped around long enough to be pretty sure I’d made contact.

Image: Cold Shoulder by Shawn Jurek.

Kirby Misperton

For some time I’d felt I’d been born with all the snobbery of the rich, but none of their money. My mother would give me hints of wealthy ancestors and unspeakable scandals, of squandered fortunes and unscrupulous relations come to pick over the remains, but I could only wonder at how they’d spent it all so quickly and before I’d even had a chance to touch it. Near as I can tell, one day they all simply stopped doing the thing that had made them rich and settled into just being rich, until soon they weren’t rich any more.

My Great-Great-Great-Grandfather, Richard Harris Tindall, for instance, was the last manager of the Scarborough shipyard before the harbour silted up and they closed the place down. He had a house in town—a sizeable pile named Paradise House just down the hill from the Castle—where he could oversee the whole operation. Four generations of Tindalls had called it home, but by 1918, long before I could have any say in the matter, it was simply another asset to be liquidated. Now, it’s just flats, where for a mere £139,500 I could, if I wanted, reclaim two-bedrooms’ worth of my legacy.

My irresponsible ancestors also owned a sprawling estate consisting of eleven farms on 1,791 acres, including the manse—Kirby Misperton Hall—located among 50 acres of pleasure grounds, gardens, and lakes. This had once been the seat of the Rev. F. N. Blomberg, Chaplain to King George IV, prebendary at St. Paul’s, and rumoured son of George III; but by 1863, the Tindalls had moved in. My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother’s brother, Robert, was Lord of the Manor, as were his sons to follow, until 1903, when they basically had to sell the whole spread. Today it’s a theme park called Flamingo Land.

Photo by Discover Yorkshire Coast on Flickr. Scarborough Castle is on the top of the hill. Paradise House is the first white mansion on the left.

Thomas James Burley

I don’t pretend to understand how things once worked among the Yorkshire gentry, but I’d like to think that all this began at a party, perhaps thrown to honour the accomplished vocalist Thomas James Burley who appeared there in Scarborough in 1872. He’d trained in Italy and sung at La Scala, but his eyes settled that evening on the lovely Priscilla Harris Tindall, heiress to the Tindall shipbuilding fortune, and by June they were married. Two of their children died prematurely, but the third would survive to become my great-grandfather, thus ensuring my children would have music on both sides.

The last I’d looked at my family tree was back in school when we all had to do it for our grade-nine history class. One girl discovered J. M. Barrie, the novelist, among her relations; and another found Mackenzie King, the tenth Prime Minister of Canada, who had actually mentioned seeing her mother as an infant in his famous diaries. I was desperate for a story worth telling, but while my mother and grandmother whispered together of a scandalous divorce long ago among the Tindalls, they’d only tell me those bits of the family history they had first carefully pruned.

It took the great-great-grandson of Thomas Burley’s brother (my fourth cousin, according to those who track such things) to blow the lid off our big family secret. My great-great-grandfather, the opera singer, was a wife-beating drunk, who carried on affairs with the servants, and drove my great-great-grandmother to the exceptional step in 1879 of divorcing the bastard, paying him off, and reclaiming her family name . . . which really could’ve been an empowering story to hear as a teenager were it not clear from the record that I am in fact descended from a long line of unfaithful husbands and failed marriages.

Photo of Thomas James Burley (AKA Senor Burleigh Tesseman)
from A Souvenir of Musical Toronto, 1898. You can read the sad end to his story here.

Major Marmaduke Lockhart Tindall

My mother gave me a photo of her grandfather to scan for a project my cousin was putting together: Major Marmaduke Lockhart Tindall in what looks, to my civilian eyes at least, like a pretty well turned-out uniform . . . except for the belt. The major might have been fifty or so when he posed for this, perhaps a young-looking sixty, but I’d bet that with every new uniform, from his time as private, he had kept the same belt. Five holes it has, and he’s on the last, but you can still see that each was used well in its time.