"Study the past if you would define the future" -- Confucius

In a world of dates, facts, and figures, it was nice to post something more personal yesterday. Take for example last week's probing of the military career of Arthur F. H. Mills: There are things to be learned from the dates, facts, and figures, but it only takes one so far.

The message I posted yesterday from Oriana, great-granddaughter of Col. Dudley Acland Mills, R.E., was a breath of fresh air, and I thank her profusely for it. We may not have learned anything that could really fit neatly into a time line of events, nothing packaged with indisputable numbers that could be shoe-horned into a sequence of events, but I do know I learned one thing quite clearly:

It was just a beautiful message about her family, written with love.

First of all, I was wrong about Dudley Mills having written a book. I actually ordered it from a bookseller in Australia and it turned out to be "British Diplomacy in Canada: The Ashburton Treaty" by Dudley A. Mills, an article from the journal United Empire, pp. 681-712, October 1911, that had been torn from the original periodical. That doesn't make it a bad thing. It's just not a book, as I had thought when I found it on amazon.com.

Apparently, that article and its maps are the Gold Standard regarding the issue, and one can easily find numerous references to it across the internet. Dudley was apparently a truly amazing man, and you can read about him in his London Times obituary from 26 February 1938 at the upper left of this entry [click to enlarge].

As far as fleshing out their branch of the family tree went, I had done pretty well, but Oriana's remarks really flesh out the people. It's hard to say how close the members of Dudley's family were with the family of Dudley's brother, Rev. Barton R. V. Mills, but telephone records show that Dudley Mills first got a London telephone in 1929 [pictured, right]—actually two phone numbers—under his name: "Mills Colonel Dudley A," one being listed at "29 Pembroke rd W.9" with the number "WEStern 5941," and the other listed at "24 Washington ho Basil st S.W.3" with the corresponding number "SLOane 6624."

London was a big place in 1929 and out of all of it, that Pembroke Road address in Kensington is about a mile west of the Hans Road address of Barton and family at the time, and the Washington House address would be less than 750 feet away from Barton's front door. Yes, Dudley was "in the neighborhood," although the next year he would drop the Washington House line from the directory and keep the Pembroke Road until it disappeared from the book after his death in 1938.

I didn't know much about Mordaunt Mills except that he was a wood worker who exhibited under the name "Algar." A brief article from the Montreal Gazette of 15 December 1931 [pictured, left] reads: "Mr. Mordaunt Mills, grandson of the late Sir Henry Joly de Lotbiniere, is showing under the trade name of "Algar" an interesting exhibit of his work in the utilization of various fine-grained woods for boxes and other articles at the handicrafts exhibition at the Horticultural Hall this week."

It makes sense that he ended up being involved as a patron of the arts, although I'm unsure of the connection to Malta. I've speculated, but not in any really informed way, that it may have had something to do with his uncle, George Mills, but that may be way off base!

All I really knew of Verity Mills was this tantalizing and incomplete snippet from Hawkeseye: The Early Life of Christopher Hawke by Diana Bonakis Webster: "Verity Mills, whose father, Colonel Dudley Mills, had a house on the further side of the Beaulieu River, was invited to tea one afternoon while Christopher and his father were staying, and she danced for them on the lawn." Hawkes was an British archaeologist and a professor of European prehistory at Oxford University.

Verity's wedding was covered in the London Times on 20 July 1934 [right], and we know she was a bridesmaid at the wedding of her cousin George Mills on 23 April 1925, which she attended with her sister, Ottilie [misspelled 'Othlie' in the actual Times article]. Interestingly, George and Vera Mills apparently did not attend Verity's nuptials. Verity also sat for a charcoal and pastel portrait by Lady Chalmers that was quite favorably reviewed in the 14 December 1933 edition [below, left] of the Times.

Of Ottile, I really only knew that she'd married Michael Heathorn Huxley, who I found was a scholarly fellow once described as a "soldier-diplomat."

Knowing some more about these people, their families, and their closeness as siblings, was something I simply wasn't used to in doing this research. Visualing the large painted portraits hanging in the living room, the elegant, colourful, crocheted scarves, the beautiful house and garden in Malta, and the flowing, elegant scarf amongst the dunes near St. Augustine all breathe some life into the entire Mills family, and its something that was unexpected, but quite wonderful for me.

I smiled when I read that Agnes and Violet Mills were "charming and very keen on the girl guides," but had to wonder who Brigadier Hallam Mills was. I looked him up quite easily, but still have no idea how he fits into the family tree.

Thank you, Oriana, for talking the time to share some of your mother's insights, as well as your own. Is there a book in all of this, you asked? I definitely think so.

It can't be an ordinary book, a dry compendium of names and dates, or a time-line in paragraph form. Without much to go on regarding the personalities of actual characters we're studying here, I think the book will end up being more about my relationship with these people who, outside of and at times even within their families, have been largely forgotten.

I'm coming to an age myself where I wonder about how I may be remembered, or if I will have marched through the world destined to be anonymous after the passing of more time. I think it's what drives and has driven me here. In a sort of plea to the notion of 'paying it forward,' meaning that if, perhaps, I can save George Mills, et al, from being lost in the sands of time, perhaps someone will someday do the same for me.

Finally, part of the story here is how to research someone who's never been researched. There are no authorized or unauthorized biographies. There are no 'up close and personal' interviews, no sound bites, no film clips, and no one has ever sat down and attempted to put the lives we're examining here into the context of the times in which these people lived. There's an autobiography of Lady Dorothy Mills, but one must stretch the definition of autobiography to Twiggy-like thinness to consider it any kind of a personal recounting of her life.

There's quite a bit of "story" to be told here, and its scope surpasses simply the cataloging the identities, names, and dates of Monica Mills or E. M. Henshaw or Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay or Valerie Wiedemann.

Who knows? It's a book that may never end up being written, but it is a story that's being told just the same, bit by bit, right here. Thank you, Oriana, for helping me tell just a little bit more of it.

A Wonderful, Brief Glimpse into the Mills Family

It's Sunday afternoon here in Ocala and dark clouds are now relentlessly marching in, accompanied by intermittent thunder. It appears Janet and I got back from an overnight in St. Augustine, Florida [pictured, in an image taken in the heat of the afternoon from the cool,open balcony of the Acapulco restaurant], just in time.

I'm sunburned and lethargic after a weekend of pool, sangria, waves, margaritas, sand, and too much sun. I've had this message on the backburner for a couple of months now and with St. Augustine on my mind, you'll probably see why I think it's finally time to post it.

It may be as much as we'll ever know about the George Mills family personally. It just seems unlikely that, unless a cache of letters, photos, and ephemera were to suddenly surface, we will do much better than this oblique, tantalizingly slight contact with someone who'd actually met them all. Much of the family information to which she refers can be found in an entry I posted on 4 May that you can read by clicking here.

It seems there will not be any more information than this, so we may as well make the most of this, and be thankful for this lovely message! [I've added emphasis to names.]


Sent: Saturday, May 15, 2010 1:37 PM
Subject: Family of Dudley Mills

Hello Sam. I am one of Selma's daughters. My mother was delighted when I told her about your e-mail. (she is not computer literate so I act as her assistant in such matters. ) She has gone off to the funeral of a friend this weekend so I shall confirm what I can meanwhile.

Your research is correct. In fact, I learnt from it, as I did not know the names of Ottilie, Mordaunt and Verity's siblings who had died before Ottilie was born, which you said were Hubert and Jocelyn.

Yes, Dudley is my great-grandfather, and there is large painting of him in my mother's living room, as well as one of his father Sir Arthur Mills, MP (1816-1898). My mother has very happy memories of staying with Dudley and Ethel at their home near the Beaulieu River, "Drokes". As far as I knew, Dudley, a royal engineer (& Colonel) for the British army, only wrote an article on his 1886 journey through China. It was published in the March 1888 number of the Royal Engineers Journal: "A Journey through China". I do know that Dudley donated his wonderful map collection to the University of Manchester. You can find it on the web, under Mills and Booker map collections, The John Rylands University Library. Did he also write a book, then??

Dudley and Ethel had 3 children who grew to adulthood, as you already know. Ottilie did marry Michael (my grandparents), and had 3 children, Selma, Thomas and Henry. Ottilie went to a sort of alternative school called Bedales. She was always the first in our family to see art exhibitions, theatre productions, etc. She was a wonderful grandmother, too. Verity did marry Neil. Verity was a beautiful dancer, my mother always said, and later on in life she made elegant, colourful woolen crocheted shawls for us all. She and Neil had 2 children. And Mordaunt never married but was a lovely uncle and great uncle to us all. He had a factory that produced mostly wooden-handled cutlery in London, and later had a beautiful house and garden in Malta, where he became a sort of patron for the arts. His home became a place where arts were taught, and artists gathered. Ottilie, Verity and Mordaunt were all very close.

My mother does remember Barton and Edith, and has been in touch with Brigadier Hallam Mills, from Hampshire, relatively recently. She said Violet and Agnes were "charming and very keen on the girl guides".

I don't know if any of this is interesting to you. Are you writing a book?? Related somehow??

In fact, the only time we went to Florida (which I gather is where you teach) was with Ottilie. I can see her now amongst the dunes near St. Augustine, wearing a long flowing elegant scarf over her legs. We watched the first landing on the moon from the hotel there.

Yours,
Oriana

Gen. Hallam, Col. Dudley, and the Ten Missing Pages

Mail's in!

I've received parcels from England and Australia in the last couple of days, but they haven't quite lived up to the excitement of the arrival of the 1933 edition of Meredith and Co. last week.

A real disappointment came from Australia, whence I received a a partial copy of Col. Dudley A. Mills's significant publication, British Diplomacy in Canada: The Ashburton Treaty. It was published, not as a stand-alone piece of literature, but in United Empire: The Royal Colonial Institute Journal, New Series 2 (Oct 1911) on pages 681-712, and included the apparently definitive 'Mitchell Maps' [above, left].

Unfortunately, I've received only pages 681-702.

Dudley Mills is the uncle of George Mills, and spent his career traveling the world with the Corps of Royal Engineers. A brief biographical sketch on-line describes him in this way [my emphasis]:

"Dudley Acland Mills was born at Eastbourne in 1859. He appears on the 1861 census staying at Killerton House at Broadclist in Devon, the home of his grandfather Sir Thomas Dyke Acland. His parents were Agnes Lucy (née Acland) and Arthur Mills, the M.P. for Taunton from 1857 to 1865 and the M.P. for Exeter from 1873 to 1880.

Dudley Acland Mills joined the Royal Engineers as a Lieutenant in 1878, rising to the rank of Captain in 1889 and Major in 1897. In 1896 he married Ethel Joly de Lotbinière. They had one son and two daughters. Colonel Dudley Acland Mills died on 22 February 1938. According to his obituary in The Times (26 February 1938), he was 'an authority on things Chinese and early maps and a man of all-round culture and knowledge.'"

Researching the Ashburton Treaty is on my big "to do" list of all things Mills, but the journal United Empire itself describes Mills's well-researched document full of painstakingly reconstructed maps as "a valuable step towards clearing away misapprehensions which, in the past, have sometimes clouded the relations between Canadians and their Mother-land."

I'd like to think I could report on the entire article, but may only be able to survey through page 702, depending on the reply I receive from Serendipity Books in West Leederville WA, Australia, about the missing pages.

I also received printed material from Alton, Hants in the U.K.: A brand-new, apparently self- or privately-published edition of An Account of Stewardship: 1979-1984 by Major General Giles Hallam Mills, Resident Governor and Keeper of the Jewel House, Her Majesty's Tower of London [title page, right]. It has been implied that General Mills [not to be confused with the American cereal company] is a relative of George Mills and family, but I've been unable to verify that independently.

It's a thin, 41-page text, hand bound by E. A. Weeks and Son, London, and is comprised of nicely reproduced photocopies of typewritten pages, probably "pica" if I'm correctly recalling the days before word processors when a "font" was better known as a reservoir than as a typeface. It promises to be a very factual read.

How Hallam Mills is related to the Mills family of our interest isn't quite known, but I'll read the volume anyway. At least it arrived with all of the 41 pages intact.

Meanwhile, wish me luck in my quest to receive the missing pages 703 to 712!

It's a gorgeous, sunny, hot morning here in Florida, and I'm still basking in the glow of pitcher Roy Halladay's perfect game for my beloved Philadelphia Phillies last night in Miami [left]. It was only the 20th perfect game in the history of baseball, and the second this year. The last time there were two perfectos in a season was 1880, accomplished by pitchers from the Providence Grays and the Worcester Red Rubys—the first two perfect games ever thrown.

I'm not sure exactly how a perfect game might translate to cricket, but I have read exciting passages in the books of George Mills about bowlers striving for "hat tricks." My cricket knowledge is obviously not exactly what it should be.

I recently read about the triple-centuries in Test cricket, accomplished by only 20 different players since 1930. Would this be a similarly rare accomplishment?

Some Questions for a Sunday Morning in May...

Right now, my side project is working on researching the life and myriad of accomplishments of Col. Dudley Acland Mills [pictured, left, as a youth in the 1860s] and his family. In trying to gain insight into Col. Mills, I hope to find helpful connections to the family of his brother, Rev. Barton R. V. Mills. I can't even begin to tell you how exciting for me it would be to gather more information that would be useful in fleshing out the lives of Mills family members of our interest here!

Right now, I'm still creating a "Dudley Mills Time Line and Genealogy" that will enable me to order his life story and family, and help generate research questions for me to pursue. Meanwhile, here are some questions about the Mills family that remain unanswered. Perhaps we may soon be able to shed some light on them:


Arthur Mills, M.P.:

What happened to any letters, papers, family photgraphs, etc., of Arthur Mills after his death? Were they given to the British Library, a university, or are they somewhere?

What kind of man was he known to be? The only reference I can find to him personally is extremely scathing, but his friends included J. S. Mill and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.


Barton Reginald Vaughan Mills:

Under what circumstances did Barton's first wife, Lady Catherine Hobart-Hampden, pass away? Why did Barton leave his vicarage upon her death and live with his father for three years?

Why did he and his young family (children aged 14, 5, and 2) leave Cornwall and a secure rectory on Bude for London to become assistant chaplain of the Chapel Royal (Queen's Chapel) of the Savoy? And why did he leave there in 1908?

Is there any reason that Barton Mills would have been quickly and almost forgotten by the Ramsay side of the family, the kin of his wife, Elizabeth Edith Ramsay? Why was she forgotten as well?

When did Edith pass away, under what circumstances, and how did it impact the children?

How long did the family live at 7 Manson Place, London, after the 1920 death of Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay, with whom they resided? When did they move there?

What kind of man was Barton Mills? What was Edith like? What were they like as a couple and as parents?

How was Barton making a living after he left the Savoy in 1908?

Did he leave any letters, papers, research, or memorabilia behind? Are there any photographs of him or his family?



Arthur Frederick Hobart Mills [Barton's elder son];

Concerning Lady Catherine's death, how did his mother's passing affect young Arthur, as a youngster and as a man?

Was Arthur close to his family, as a youth, as a young man, and later in life?

What sort of fellow was Arthur? What was his relationship with his father? His stepmother?

What was Arthur's wedding to Lady Dorthy Walpole like? Was the wedding ring really made from the bullet that was removed from his ankle in the First World War?

What were the circumstances of Lady Dorothy's car accident returning from Ascot, and what was the reaction of the Mills family? Did they help care for her?

Did Arthur end up living in Hampshire because he had relatives there?

How did Arthur's marriage to Lady Dorothy affect him and the family? Was she close to the Mills family?

Did Arthur's profession—crime, adventure, and romance writer—bother his family at all?

At age 52, Arthur joined the war effort for 8 days in 1939, then relinquished his commission. Under what circumstances did he leave the military (health, age, etc.)?

Why did Arthur fail to write a book from 1940 to 1947 anfter writing at least one book per year from 1920 to 1940 (health, the war, etc.)?

I hate to ask, but what were the circumstances of his divorce in 1932-33?

To whom did the copyrights to his books go?



George Ramsay Acland Mills:

What sort of fellow was George? What was his relationship with Barton?

What was his relationship with his sisters?

Was there any special interest put into George's schooling?

Under what circumstances did George become a schoolmaster?

Is there any reason George moved from school to school—even to Switzerland to teach—during the late 1920s and early 1930s? Did Vera go with him to every locale?

Under what circumstances did he meet his wife, Vera Louise Beauclerk, who had been born in China?

How posh was his wedding and reception?

What were George and Vera like as a couple?

Was George involved in the General Strike in 1926?

What was George's reaction to his father's passing in 1932?

What was the family's reaction to the publication of his first book, Meredith and Co., in 1933?

What was George doing between 1933 and 1938, the years between his first and second books?

Why, suddenly, did George publish three books in two years (King Willow, Minor and Major, St. Thomas of Canterbury)? Why did he then never again publish a book?

What were the circumstances of him returning to the armed forces in 1940 as a paymaster?

What were the circumstances of Vera's death in 1942? What was George's reaction to it?

Under what circumstances did George leave the armed forces due to "ill health" in 1942? Did this have anything to do with the passing of Vera?

Where was George during the war, and where did he live and what did he do from 1943 through his arrival at "Grey Friars, Budleigh Salterton, Devon," where he presumably passed away?

How did he come to work at Ladycross Catholic Boys' Preparatory School in Seaford, Sussex, for a term in 1956? Did he live nearby?

Did he live with or near Agnes and Violet Mills in Devon?

What were the circumstances of his death in 1972?

To whom did the copyrights to his books go?



Agnes and Violet Mills:

What sort of girls were they? Were they devoted to their mother? Their father? Both?

Had they opportunities to marry? What was it like for young women, daughters of a clergyman, in London during the years between the World Wars?

Where were they schooled?

How were they involved in the Girl Guides?

In 1938, they were living in "Cadogen Gardens, S.W." London with "Barbara Mills". When did they relocate there? Who is Barbara Mills?

In 1947, they donate the papers of the late Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay, their grandfather, to the British Library. Under what circumstances was this made, and where were the girls living when they made the donation?

When did the girls move to Devon? Did they live with George or nearby? What was their relationship with him as youths and as they aged?

What were the circumstances of their passing in Devon in 1977?

What happened to any papers, letters, memorabilia, ephemera, and/or family photographs they may have been holding?

If they held any family copyrights (Barton, Arthur F. H., George) to whom did those rights go after the death of Agnes and Violet?


General Question:

How is Brig. Gen. Giles Hallam Mills related to this family?