THE MYSTERIOUS
DISAPPEARANCE OF
EDMUND MARTIN GELDART
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN
The Norwich born ‘Evangelist’ Edmund Martin
Geldart (1844-1885) will be familiar to admirers of the poet G. M. Hopkins as
they were good friends at Oxford
and Hopkins
mentions him several times in his correspondence. As a child, Geldart, born on
20th January 1844 (he was Christened late in life on 26th
January 1859 at Bowden in Cheshire), was so pale he came to be known as
‘ghost’; he had the usual boyhood, delighting in cruelty and enjoyed trapping
frogs in flower pots before skewering them with a pointed stick until his older
brother, William (1842-1858) came and cut them in half with his hatchet (‘A Son
of Belial’. 1882. p. 8); he lived a sort of church and chapel existence with
his parents Thomas Geldart (1809-1877) and Hannah Ransome Geldart nee Martin
(1820-1861); Edmund was the second born child to the Geldarts after William,
and other siblings were: Henrietta Maria (1846-1847), Ernest (1848-1929), Mary
Constance (1850-1925), Emma Agnes Helen (1852-1874) and Francis (1857-1932).
The family were living in Greenwich until they moved to Waterfield Terrace in
Blackheath where they stayed two years before moving to Reigate in Surrey, a
place young Edmund came to love and call ‘home’ where they had a ‘doll’s
cemetery in the garden’ and where he symbolically executed his Governess, Miss
Atkinson, known as ‘mad Atky’ by beheading an effigy of her – apparently she
witnessed it and took it all in good spirits!
At Reigate he attended
an Independent chapel while harbouring a deep ‘fear of hell’ yet, ‘no love of
God’ and ‘no sorrow for sin’ (‘A Son of Belial’. p. 53). Edmund attended the
Merchant Taylor’s School in London
when he was eleven before leaving London
for Manchester,
or Altrincham to be precise, where he became a great enthusiast of bug hunting
and ancient Greek as opposed to Latin. He won a scholarship to Balliol College,
Oxford in 1863 matriculating on 26th March at the age of 19 and
there are some marvellous descriptions of life at Balliol, or Belial, as he
insists on calling it in his veiled autobiographical sketch, ‘A Son of Belial’
published in 1882 by Nitram Tradleg, which backwards reveals the author’s name,
Martin Geldart, and portraits of his friends and masters alike, such as the
great Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), Professor of Greek and Master of Balliol, to
whom he gives the name Professor Jewell – many of the stories of Jowett are
familiar to those who have read wide on such subjects connected to Balliol and
its scholars; there are also sketches of the theologian Canon Henry Parry
Liddon (1829-1890), referred to as Canon Parry, and Vincent Stuckey Stratton
Coles (1845-1929), the scholar, librarian and Anglican priest, Principle of
Pusey House, Oxford from 1897-1909, given the name Vicentius Staccato, and of
course Geldart’s ‘ritualistic friend’, Gerard Manley Hopkins known as Gerontius
Manley – Hopkins rather unkindly described the ‘hagard hideousness’ of Geldart
in a letter to his mother dated 22nd April 1863 as having ‘grey
goggle eyes’ a ‘shuddering gait or shuffle’ and a ‘pinched face’ and famously
added that he ‘would not have had twenty Balliol scholarships to change places
with him’, but despite this they became intimate friends (Hopkins spent time at
Geldart’s family home in the summer of 1865 and was quite taken by Edmund’s
younger brother, Ernest, born 1848, saying in a letter that he was ‘looking at
temptations, esp, at E. Geldart naked’, see Robert Bernard Martin’s ‘Gerard
Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life’. 1991. p. 114)
Geldart, who regarded
himself as an Evangelical, graduated from Balliol with his B.A. in 1867 (M.A.
1873) and took a teaching role at Manchester Grammar School and he seems to
have suffered in 1868 some sort of nervous breakdown and so he went to
recuperate in Corfu and spent three months in Athens. The account described in
‘A Son of Belial’ reveals something of Geldart’s mind at the time: ‘I had
forgotten for the time that the British schoolboy regards his schoolmaster as
his natural enemy; that he only respects the man who can and will thrash him;
that it is war to the knife, or at least to the cane, in the majority of cases,
until one or other is worsted. As I utterly and solemnly abjured the use of any
hostile weapon, and was, moreover, of an exceedingly sensitive and nervous
temperament, it is not, perhaps, much to be wondered at that in three days from
my assuming office I was utterly and completely unhinged and broken down. The
fiend like faces of my little tormentors (who meant no harm, God forgive them!)
danced before my eyes.’ (p. 193-194) Geldart goes on to tell us that he spent
three months undergoing the ‘torture of hydropathic treatment’ at Malvern. By
New Year he was feeling well enough to travel back home to Bowdon, Cheshire, before
embarking, in February, on the ‘Sidon’
for Corfu, where he suffered the ‘fear of
getting drowned, and a few hours’ sea-sickness in the Bay
of Biscay’ (p. 194). Strangely, Geldart was the only passenger
onboard the Sidon
on his fifteen day voyage in which he ‘learnt what solitude meant’, while
‘standing alone upon the deck, when the crew were partly asleep and partly
withdrawn to the distance, out of sight of the man and officer on watch, and
face to face with the winds and the waves.’ (p. 194-195) His sea-sickness began
on the third day of the voyage, and ‘thanks to a glass of porter, I was soon
myself again, having paid my tribute to Neptune
for the first and only time in my life’. (p. 195-196). The next day he was
fully recovered.
During 1869 he
was ordained deacon in the Anglican priesthood by the Bishop of Manchester, James
Prince Lee (1804-1869) and became curate of All Saints, Manchester and in 1871 curate of St. George’s, Everton, Liverpool (he became a Unitarian the following year).
Geldart wrote much on Greek and religious matters publishing such books as: The
Modern Greek Language in its relation to Ancient Greek’ (1870) and ‘A Guide to
Modern Greek’ (1883) and married Charlotte Frederika Sophia Andler (1841-1923)
on 26th June 1868 at Thorpe-Next-Norwich, Norfolk but she doesn’t
get a mention by name in the volume, just the casual fact that he got married
(they had three children: William Martin 1870-1922, Mary Charlotte 1872-1940
and Edmund Thomas, born 1873 who sadly did not live past his first year).
Geldart, whose socialistic-style sermons disagreed with his congregation, was
asked to resign from his position as minister of the Free Christian Church in
Croydon and in a nervous state of health once more, he decided to go to France
to stay with an old friend but was reported missing from the night boat to
Dieppe, assumed drowned after committing suicide on Friday 10th
April 1885, he was 41 years old, the same age that his own mother, Hannah had
died in 1861, in fact, on her 41st birthday, on 29th
September after a mental and physical breakdown, suffering epileptic fits.
Edmund was no stranger to death, he saw his younger sister, Henrietta, born in
1846 die in 1847 and his older brother William, born in 1842, whither away and
die in 1858; three years later his mother departed in 1861, not to mention his
own son, Edmund Thomas who died in 1873.
‘I suppose it was suicide’, writes Hopkins to
his friend Alexander W. M. Baillee (1843-1921) on 24th April 1885,
saying that ‘his mind, for he was a self tormentor, having been unhinged, as it
had been once or twice before, by a struggle he had gone through.’ Hopkins, who
heard of Geldart’s death in the 20th April edition of the Pall Mall
Gazette, is referring to Geldart’s previous nervous breakdown of 1868; Hopkins also
suffered from his own ‘struggles’ and thoughts of suicide, and he thought ‘A
Son of Belial’ an ‘amusing and sad book’ and perhaps it is no coincidence that
his darker poems such as ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’ were
composed during this period, but for Geldart, the struggles ended just three
years after ‘A Son of Belial’ was published which makes it all the more
poignant for the reader.
Many of the newspapers
carried the news of Geldart’s ‘Mysterious Disappearance’ such as ‘The
Manchester Weekly Times’, on page six of its Saturday 25th April
1885 edition which reports that the ‘Rev. Edward Martin Geldart, M.A. oxon, who
was until a fortnight ago the minister in charge of the Free Christian Church,
Wellesley Road, Croydon’ and who ‘formerly held a curacy in Liverpool – as an
English Churchman, but entertained broad views, he went over to the Unitarians,
and at the close of 1883 became the pastor of the above mentioned church.’ The
article goes on to say that ‘his opinions on many subjects were regarded as
strictly socialistic, and on many occasions he expounded those principles both
in lectures and in the columns of the local newspapers. In consequence of the
tone of his discourses he recently incurred the displeasure of his congregation
and was allowed by the committee to resign. This is said to have preyed on his
mind and owing to his depressed condition he was persuaded by his relations to
go on the Continent for a while.’ Geldart had decided on a Mediterranean
journey to visit Constantinople, ‘but his wife
was averse to his going so far.’ And so Geldart made his mind up to go and
visit a friend in France, M. Reiman who had been twenty tears a French Master
in various colleges in Croydon. On the evening of Friday 10th April,
Geldart left home and travelled to East Croydon
station and purchased a single ticket to Paris.
He was ‘very unwell’ and his wife Charlotte
accompanied him to the station and placed him in a carriage, asking a kindly
gentleman who was travelling in the same carriage to accompany Geldart to the
station. He travelled on the 8.19
p.m. boat train to Newhaven (which left London Bridge
at 8 p.m.). At Newhaven
Geldart gave up the first portion of his ticket. The following day, Saturday 11th
April, a telegram arrived at Geldart’s home in Croydon to say that a
gentleman’s luggage (a portmanteau, umbrella, and walking stick) had been found
on the tidal boat at Dieppe
– these items left by Geldart show that he embarked on the boat at Newhaven and
certainly did not arrive at Dieppe.
On Wednesday 15th
April Mrs Geldart set out on a search of the various places around the
south-coast to look for her husband but to no avail. She reported the
circumstances to Scotland Yard and on Friday 17th April she
travelled to Dieppe
(the Brighton Railway gave her a free first-class pass). The article goes on to
say that ‘Mrs Geldart has two sons, both promising scholars at Whitgift College. He himself was Balliol
scholar.’ The description of Geldart given by Scotland Yard reads: ‘Edmund
Martin Geldart, age 41 years; height 5ft, 7 in, complexion fair, hair curly
light brown, turning grey. Whiskers full and reddish; wears spectacles;
clerical dress, soft felt hat, side-spring boots, flannel shirt, had in his
possession a large gold watch, and black leather portmanteau, containing
wearing apparel.’
On the afternoon of
Saturday 18th April Mrs Geldart returned to Croydon from Dieppe by the mid-day
train. ‘She was painfully distressed and feared that the worst had happened.
She brought with her her husband’s luggage including his walking stick and
umbrella.’
And so the
disappearance of Edmund Martin Geldart will continue to remain a mystery.
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