Casgliadau Arlein

Jane was born Jane Martha Hicks Beach, and not as is often reported Jane Martha Beach, an understandable mistake that came from the conditions of her maternal grandfather’s will. Jane was in fact the fourth daughter of Michael Hicks Beach 1760–1830[N1] and Henrietta Maria Hicks Beach 1760–1837, and she was born at Williamstrip Park, Coln St. Aldwyn, Gloucestershire, England, on 24 July 1801. (Src. Gloucestershire Records office file D2455/F3/3) It might be said that it was Jane’s good luck that this was a particularly wealthy family, primarily because her mother brought to the marriage an inheritance of substantial estates in Wiltshire, as well as the Williamstrip estate in Gloucestershire that had now become the Hicks Beach family home. In accepting the inheritance from his father-in-law William Beach, Michael Hicks agreed to take the name Beach as his own, so eleven years before Jane was born, in 1790, the name Hicks Beach came into being by Royal License. Jane’s life could well have been that of the spoilt younger child in a family of so many older brothers and sisters, but there would be bad luck to go with the good. By the time she was nine her three sisters and two of her brothers had died, and with just two remaining, Michael, 21 years her senior and married by the time Jane was nine,[N2] and her brother William, 18 years older to the day, as Jane was born on his birthday, then serving as an MP for Marlborough, she became in effect an only child. With her father about his business as MP for Cirencester and dealing with his affairs as a large landowner, young Jane's main occupation seems to have been that of companion to her mother. The result being that while she would always have servants to carry out the menial tasks she was never going to be the idling type, and when the desire in middle age to be able to take photos of places and people she loved took hold, the many difficulties that she might encounter as a woman in a man’s world, wouldn’t stop her. Oakley Hall, in Hampshire, was the home of William’s uncle, Wither Bramston. It was at the time a fairly modern mansion built in 1795 and surrounded by a few hundred acres of parkland, and it appears that the widowed Wither, then in his 70’s, in the knowledge that his nephew would eventually inherit the estate from him, had invited the newly married couple to make it their home as well. It was here that their three children were born, in 1826, 1828 and 1830. Sadly for William though, married life would be all too short, ending when Jane Henrietta died, in August 1831. According to the archive held at the Gloucestershire Records office Jane had rebuffed earlier proposals of marriage. Her reason for staying single was most likely motivated by a need to remain her mother's companion, particularly after the death of her father in 1830 when her mother was 70 years old. And then there was the loss of Jane’s good friend and cousin, Jane Henrietta Browne, her brother William’s wife, who had left him with three small infants to look after. Just a few months after the death of William’s wife, Uncle Wither would also die, as reported in Jacksons Oxford Journal for Saturday 31 March 1832, leaving William on his own as the new owner of the Oakley estate. His sister Jane would join him to keep house and help look after the children. It was probably after the death of their mother in October 1837 that she would leave the family home in Gloucestershire for the last time. In 1840 she is seen dealing with correspondence at Oakley from the artist Frederick Tatham on William’s behalf. In 1844/45 William took Jane and the children, now in their teens, on an extended holiday in Germany giving Jane her first experience of foreign travel, and perhaps sowing a seed that would culminate in a visit to Italy for Jane some years later. In 1846 she must have heard from her cousins in Glamorgan, the Mansel Talbot’s, about Kit Talbot’s trip to the Mediterranean, where he took calotype negatives to make pictures of some of the places he visited, something that just a handful of years earlier would have needed an artist with a sketch pad at least. Jane and Kit Mansel Talbot and his sisters had the same great-grandfather, Thomas Beach of Keevil Manor, but the family in Gloucestershire and the Mansel Talbot’s in Glamorgan were closer than that. When Christopher inherited the Margam and Penrice estates at the age of ten, an inheritance that in time would reputedly make him the wealthiest commoner in Britain, it was Jane’s brother William and her father Michael who were his appointed guardians. This most probably led to the occasional holiday in Wales for Jane, as indeed their young cousin W Henry Fox Talbot would also holiday there. And there could well have been visits to the big house at Williamstrip for the young Mansel Talbot’s. The letters of Agnes Porter, who had been governess to the Mansel Talbot girls, as well as to their mother before them, recounted by Joanna Martin in her book, A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter show that the two families were in regular contact, particularly over the upbringing of their girls. And Agnes’s sister Francis, had been governess to Jane’s sisters when the family lived in Wiltshire. Jane and some of the Mansel Talbot girls certainly became good friends as there seems to have been regular correspondence between them throughout their lives, and we know from the correspondence that survives and photos in Jane’s album, that Charlotte Louisa, Jane Harriet, and Emma Thomasina, all made visits to her home at Oakley Cottage later in their lives. While at Oakley Hall, Jane would get to know Edward William St. John, a neighbour and the only son of the Rev. Edward St. John and his wife Mary: leading to Jane and Edward being married on 24 February 1848 at the Hicks Beach family seat of Williamstrip when Jane was 47. Edward, fourteen years younger, must have seemed quite a catch to Jane, and perhaps this is evident from the number of times he is present in Jane's family photos. It was probably in 1848 that her brother William installed them in Oakley Cottage[N4] on his estate, but saw no need for any written agreement with his sister. It was only after his death on 22 November 1856 that a lease from his son, William Wither Bramston Beach, was signed with Edward St. John.[N5] In the intervening years cousin Emma Thomasina sent Jane copies of family photos taken by her husband, the pioneering photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn. When Jane acquired a camera of her own, sometime in the mid 1850s, she did the same and behaved as people have done ever since, using some of her photos as visual commentary by sending some of them to friends and family. Some can be seen in the album of her cousin Emma Thomasina's daughter, Emma Charlotte 1837–1929, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). In the late 1850s Jane started a family album of her own, a place both for her photos and those sent to her by the family in Wales and a few others. Also in the 1850’s Jane and Edward had set off equipped with a camera and maybe a prepared quantity of iodised paper on a journey to Italy, where more than one hundred times she positioned her camera to record the scenes that she liked most, starting at Genoa and then travelling south before turning north again to Como. (One hundred and five of these Italian views are now in the J. Paul Getty Museum.) In a family that had experienced so many premature deaths Jane was the exception and died at Oakley on 18 November 1882 aged 81. Her husband Edward St. John died four years later on 18 April 1886. They are both buried in St. Leonards Churchyard, Oakley, with clearly identifiable headstones. Keith Robinson, October 2013.