Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 35

a builder, which is noted in the Mortlake parish records. A son, John Cooper Ward, was born a year later, a daughter, Eliza Frances Ward, the future Mrs Wainewright, appeared in the summer of August 1796.

Cooper Ward was not long for this life, dying a few years later, leaving Frances in her twenties with two tiny children, but she soon married again, this time to an army officer, Lieut. John Bateman Abercromby. By him she had two further daughters, the first, Helen Frances Phoebe Abercromby, born in 1809, was to meet her untimely end in the Wainewright household under very strange circumstances. In 1810 she had a sister, burdened with the name Madalina Rosa Hibernia Burdett Abercromby, the Hibernia no doubt being imposed by her father who spent long periods in Ireland.

Lieut. Abercromby held his commission in the Royal Artillery Drivers, a small corps of the Royal Artillery which deployed gun carriages on the field of battle, for the army needed hundreds of horses to drag around the batteries of six-pound and three-pound guns.

It was not a sought-after section of the army in which to serve, for the Drivers had a dire reputation. Their antecedents were the scoundrel private contractors who had supplied horses to the artillery on the field of battle before the corps was founded in 1806, and who were known as being more likely to drive their charges away from the sound of gunfire as towards it.

Even after the Drivers became part of the army, military authorities of the time talked of them as being more interested in plunder than in their

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

35