When I started researching William Strahan, prisoner number 1 at Woking Convict Invalid Prison, I hadn’t quite anticipated the wild romp through history such a course would take me: a journey which would range from crimes in London, deaths in Italy and archaeological digs in Ashtead. What started as an impersonal quest to render correctly a historical record of another’s life, ended up far, far closer to home.
As with all our convicts, the first place we start is with the prison logs, lovingly transcribed from findmypast.com. These documents are the Holy Grail for any intrepid genealogist and provide a whole host of information regarding the age, crimes, next of kin, previous convictions and even, in some cases, physical descriptions of the inmates at a given prison.
Having deciphered the antiquated and often untidy writing, we had William’s age, 48, placing his birth at or around 1811, his religious denomination (protestant), and the colour of his eyes (hazel). One of the things that struck me most was what a curious figure he cut on the logbook page, with his entry preceding that of murderers, zoophiles and rapists.
From the first look, it was clear William was a man of some distinction. Not only listed as a banker with 9 children and a townhouse in London, but his crime, in three parts, was one pertaining to fraud: that is the using of bonds entrusted to him, for his own personal gain for which he received 14 years transportation. A sentence curiously, it must be noted, commuted to 4 years. Perhaps he had had a word in the right ear…or left.
I inwardly smiled; this was going to be easy. From previous research projects I knew that any man or woman worth their salt in Victorian England would have had an abundance of information written about them. Typically, there would be mentions in Burke’s peerage, home office records or any of the tattler type rags which plagued 19th century society, filled with fashion styles and the latest gossip: I knew there was bound to be something. And I was right, up to a point, but back to the Woking log books.
Further research into Woking’s logbooks yielded that William Strahan, along with a menagerie of able-bodied convicts, were brought in to help build Woking Prison and were not in their own right expected to be housed there. They were typically young, strong and skilled: curiously everything William was not.
Having pinned him down to Woking Prison, the next step was a cursory search on google to see what initial, extraneous information could be found.
The results were mind-blowing, yielding a whole host of information about Strahan but I knew from previous experience that it paid to be circumspect. It seemed, from a gleaning of the first few pages, that indeed William came from a long line of Strahans (often also named William). While in his own right he might be classed as one of the 19th century’s most interesting characters, there was a great-great grandfather who was the king’s printer and friend of Benjamin Franklin. Further complicating things, his firstborn was also named William. Fine toothed comb out, I began to sort.
***To note, one of the most important tools in the genealogist’s kit is to use google effectively – more on how to become a google grandmaster here***
Sort completed and I was utterly taken aback.
William was father to two peerless scientists, Aubrey President of the Geological Society of London and George inventor and engineer who spent much of his life in India. He was also head of one of the largest and oldest banks in the Victorian period and came from a long line of distinguished bankers. Before I knew it, I was inundated with articles about his faultless conduct pre-crime, his subscription to every charity going and a beautiful rendering of his marriage to Elizabeth Anne Dorothea Fisher in the Blackwood’s Lady’s Magazine and Gazette of the Fashionable World.
There were, however, mistakes made. My mistakes.
One of the most telling aberrations was that I could find no mention of him pre-1830 which was strange to say the least: it was almost as if he wasn’t born, but burst from the ground as a full blown banker or fell from a money plant. But the signs were there. The firm William worked for was originally called Snow, Paul and Bates. William’s brother, a famous cricketer in his own right, was Robert Snow. The family lived on Snow hill in London. The penny dropped, fine, the wad of tenners dropped: William Strahan was William Snow.
I had previously encountered, when researching denizens of the past, people misspelling their first names or swapping out their middle names with forenames but men changing surnames was something of a rarity. As it turns out, William’s father was a Snow and his mother was a Strahan and so on her great uncle dying, he bequeathed to William his estates and riches but on the proviso that he change his surname. Unsurprisingly, he did.
Fully equipped with this new knowledge, I was able to dig up his school records in the Alumni Cantabrigienses (a Biographical List of All Known Students up until 1900): not only was William fabulously wealthy but he was instrumental in instigating the first Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Minutes from meetings at the student’s union showed William to be incredibly pedantic almost to the point of being pitiable and while this did not extricate him from wrongdoing in later life, it enabled him to see more of the person he was and less of a record.
This was where things got strange… stranger. One of the properties William inherited from his relative was High Ashurst in Ashtead. It had had a coloured history, having been owned by various well to do Victorians in the 19th century and then spent its twilight years as an all girl’s school, then a base for Anzac troops before finally being torn down.
I didn’t need to research this to know that, I had dug there. In 2006, I was invited to take part in a dig at High Ashurst as part of Surry County Council’s archaeological outreach scheme. Amidst the hum of swarming midges and beneath the beat of the summer heat, I trowelled, spaded, and picked at the dirt. Bits of NAAFI plates and pots and plaster were carefully sifted from the ground, inch by removed until I had reached original floor. Parquet… parquet flooring which had once echoed the footsteps of William Strahan, banker, fraudster and Victorian villain. Strange.
Forgive the photograph, it was taken on a potato back in 2008
The last part of the puzzle of his life was his death. Removed to Sidmouth, rejected by society at large, William made one last, and final move sometime around 1871 to Perugia in Italy. William would have been in his sixties by this point and, no doubt drawn by the warmer climes, sought to end his final days in repose. William died in 1886, the same year as his eponymous son.
Crimes committed by an individual impact upon the whole and whilst by no means the most heinous, William’s actions directly led to thousands of people being out of pocket, money they might’ve sorely needed. William had never wanted for anything, born into a rich family, inheriting more and later living off the ill-gotten gains of stolen bonds; he was punished for only 4 years out of a total of 15. It can be hard to not become attached to the prisoners we’re researching and, let’s be honest, bankers aren’t high on my list of favourite professions, but when you begin to flesh out their lives, their loves, their losses they cease to be subjects of study and become real people. William died as a person, a human and not as a criminal.
Written by Daniel Shepherd – Co-Director (2019)