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"PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS" BY SIR JOHN SIMON, K.C.B. 1816 - 1904 Printed 10th October 1894. Both of my Grandfathers were Frenchmen, but each of them, having emigrated to England, was married here to an Englishwoman. My father’s father, LOUIS ANTOINE SIMON, originally of Montargis, seems to have settled in London about the beginning of the last quarter of last century; he died here suddenly (fencing at the French Embassy) on November 10th, 1803. For a good many years before his death he resided, and carried on business as a hatter, on the west side of Vere Street, Oxford Street, at premises now absorbed in the holding of Messrs. Marshall & Snelgrove, and previously he had resided, and I believe had carried on the like business, at a house which still stands (No.11) on the west side of South Molton Street. In or before 1781 he had become the husband of an English wife, who died, more than 33 years after him, on January 17th, 1837; and my father, born April 7th 1782, was their only child. On the other side, my mother, born November 10th 11787, was the third and youngest daughter of one Nonnet ( I think Louis Nonnet) of Le Blanc on the Creuse, who was for many years settled as a fancy jeweller in Milsom Street, Bath, but who, after his English wife’s death in 1814, returned to France, and died there at Bordeaux, September 15th, 1831. Of the two grand-parents who survived into my lifetime, I doubt whether my mother’s father (M. Nonnet) was ever seen by me, but my father’s mother (Mrs. Simon) dwelt near us till her death, when I was more than twenty years old. Of her long-deceased husband from Montargis, I often heard my father speak with the respect which is due to gifts of intellect and character. From among the very few books of his which remained to us, I respectfully retain two, which, at the time when he possessed them, were certainly unusual English books for a young Frenchman of his class, if even of any class, to study, viz: a copy (edition 1764) of David Hume’s ESSAYS, and a copy (edition 1793) of Adam Smith’s WEALTH OF NATIONS. Also I retain as his, dated from September 1798 to January 1799, a bound manuscript copy of ROUSSEAU’s CONTRACT SOCIAL, a copy, which at his desire, had been made by my father, then under seventeen years of age, as an exercise in handwriting. With equal respect, though concerning other lines of thought, I also preserve an old-fashioned silver gravy-spoon which was his, and which reminds me how he had the habit of welcoming as freely as he could to his Sunday dinner-table the needy exiled compatriots of his last fifteen years of life. Of my own parents, happily for us their children, the lives were unusually prolonged. Dearly they had loved and been loved by us, and they had lavished on us all care and tenderness. My father, who in his early life had been a shipbroker, but who, when times of peace arrived, became a member of the Stock Exchange, and was for many years a leading member of the Committee of that body, died at the age of 97 years and eight months, on the 7th December 1879, when I was more than 63 years of age; and my mother died nearly three years later, 5th November 1882, seventy years after her marriage to him, and within five days of completing the 95th year of her age. My father had been twice married. His first wedlock, which was to M. Nonnet’s eldest daughter, Marianne, was cut short by the wife’s death in August 1810, when it had lasted little more than four and a half years, and the second, which was to that wife’s younger sister, Matilda, had continued from October 17th, 1812, till his death more than sixty-seven years afterwards. The intermediate daughter of the Nonnet family was Louisa, Mrs. Henry Hoffham, who died in 1860 at the age of about 75 years. Of 14 children whom my father had had, 9 died during his life-time, namely, 4 in infancy or early childhood, and 5 as adults, the latter including an unmarried daughter, Louisa, who died in 1844 at the age of 23, and unmarried twin son, Frank, who died in 1847, aged 24, and three married daughters – Fanny, Annette and Mary-Kate, who were the wives respectively of Francis Macnamara Faulkner, John Carey and Charles William Chaldecott, and who died respectively in 1853, 1856 and 1865 in their 35th, 25th and 36th years of age, all of them leaving children. Of the five of us who survived our parents, two have since died, namely, in 1883, my elder sister Ellen, the wife of Samuel Herman de Zoete, and in 1888, aged 78, my elder brother George, both of them leaving children and grandchildren. There still remain myself, born October 1816, my brother Maximilian, born March 29th 1823, who has children and grandchildren, and my unmarried sister, Emma, born August 6th 1826. Of our brothers-in-law, Frank Faulkner died in 1868, John Carey in 1880, and Herman de Zoete in 1884. My father during his first marriage had resided with his wife wholly at his place of business in London, and during the earlier years of his second marriage, he had only so far parted from that plan as to have family-lodgings for a portion of the year at Blackheath. This had been their practice till after my birth, and I, having been born in town, was christened (like the children of the first marriage) at the Church of St. Olave’s Hart Street. But town-living showed itself so disastrous in the loss of three out of four of the elder children, that, between the last of those deaths, which happened at the end of 1817, and the birth of the next child in October 1819, they resolved to have their home wholly at Blackheath. First, for a few years, they lived at No. 1 Park Terrace, where my recollections of life begin, and then, in 1823, they moved to No. 10, The Paragon, where they remained for the rest of their life-time, and which my sister vacated only in 1883, six months after our mother’s death. The portraits which we possess of our parents and grand-parents are divided among us. I have an admirable oil-portrait of my father as a schoolboy of the age of eleven or twelve, painted by J.W. Chandler a year or two after the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds (under whom Chandler had had the habit of working) and strikingly in Sir Joshua’s style. I also possess an oil-portrait of my mother at the age of 18, painted by Miss Drummond of Bath. Excellent oil-portraits of my father’s parents (I am not certain whether also by Chandler) went at my mother’s death to my brother George, and are now with his widow. My sister Emma holds the other portraits, notably a miniature of our maternal grand-father, M. Nonnet, and an early miniature of our father, as also an oil-portrait of the latter, painted by Spindler in 1835. …………..oOo…………. |