Four Years on the Great Lakes, 1813-1816. Don Bamford
INTRODUCTION
The Source of the David Wingfield Journal
David Wingfield claims to have been born at Windsor, in Berkshire County, England. The date is most likely 1792.1
He entered the navy in 1806, at the age of fourteen, but the official details of his early years there are particularly sparse. His service period with the Royal Navy included his time in the Lake Service in Upper Canada in the midst of the hostilities of the War of 1812, where his role and that of his colleagues was to protect that colony from aggressive attacks by the American neighbours.
Our story about David Wingfield has been developed from a thorough review of his journal of notes, made following his time in Canada, during his early retirement years back in Stroud, in Gloucester, in southwest England. He wrote his memoirs in 1828. His recollections are vivid, and are detailed and complete. He has obviously worked from field notes of some sort, probably kept as a form of diary during his time with the Lake Service.
We would not have been able to tell most of his story in the absence of his journal. David Wingfield would largely have disappeared from accounts of Canadian history if it had not been for the thoughtful consideration of one of his descendants. A certain Miss Wingfield determined that a relic document in her possession, carefully retained and passed along by her antecedents, should be placed in the then Public Archives of Canada collection in Ottawa. She contacted the Canadian Government Trade Commissioner in Bristol, Douglas S. Cole, whose office arranged the transfer of the document. A December 28, 1932, note that accompanied the handwritten journal, reported that Miss Wingfield had delivered the diary that day to Cole, and that “Miss Wingfield is the daughter of the late Commander David Wingfield.”2 The original manuscript was stamped as received in Canada, January 19, 1933. Over the years several requests have been made to publish the diary, according to Timothy Dubé, Military Archivist, Library and Archives Canada, but he has never seen a finished work. He, along with Bruce County historian Patrick Folkes indicate that an extract was published in the Dalhousie Review as “David Wingfield and Sacketts Harbour.”3
According to Jocelyn Wingfield, a key family historian: “The Wing-field Family Society has a pencil pedigree of this Stroud & Painswick, Gloucester Branch made up mainly from information gathered about thirty years ago and from that recently derived from Lee Preston, another family genealogist.”4 Jocelyn suggests that Miss Wingfield would have been a spinster who had inherited the David Wingfield diary, by 1932 was not expecting to marry, and would be the last Wingfield of her immediate line. He offered two possible theories about how the diary came to Ottawa. The first he has discarded as unlikely, but both versions are presented as a matter of interest:
“I further postulate,” he says, in the first and now discounted instance, “that David Wingfield, RN, likely left his precious diary, not to his eldest son John, Tailor & Draper (1832–75), or to Thomas, Fireman, but to son number three, Henry Eggleton Wingfield, Fleet Engineer, Royal Navy.”5 He continues:
It is possible that he may have held Henry’s naval position in higher esteem than the sons in the merchant naval service. Henry was surely dead by 1933 and his son Arthur Eggleton Wingfield, (1887–92) predeceased him. This left several daughters: Gladys (b. ca. 1889, m. 1908, living or lived, admittedly, in London (Wand-sworth), but no longer ‘Miss Wingfield’, and Amelia Bradley Wingfield (b.1895) who lived in Bristol. This leaves Edith Maude Wingfield (b.1892) and Dorothy Seymour Wingfield (b.1894). In 1932, Edith Maude would have been 40 and Dorothy Seymour — both spinsters — would have been 38.6
Edith and Dorothy were both born, incidentally, at Portsea, according to Wingfield Family Society records, on Portsmouth Harbour’s edge, a big naval base. If either were still alive in 1932, one would need to know the Christian name, but in those days the senior, elderly spinster of the family would have been called “Miss Wingfield” by all and sundry; no first name would be used.
In 1932, at the time of the donation of the diary, had they survived, David Wingfield’s daughters would have reached the ages of: Sarah, 97; Emma Lawson, 96; Louisa Ann, 91; Ellen Jane, 87; and Christiana (Christina/Christa) Mary, 78.
“There was a Norman Edward Wingfield in the RAF, born in 1899 at Stonehouse or Stroud, but he died in 1918, so possibly he had no descendants. If, however, he is the same line as Edward Wingfield one might be able to proceed further,” suggests Jocelyn.7
Without further detail about the elusive Miss Wingfield, her exact status and relationship as a descendant of David remain uncertain.
However, with further research, and consideration of more genealogical evidence, Jocelyn Wingfield has revised his declarations about the arrival of the journal notes in Ottawa. He writes, “In Kelly’s 1902 Directory of Bristol, on page 328, a Miss C.M. and a Miss S.W. Wing-field were listed as mistresses/teachers at the Ladies School at 6 Belgrave Place, Bristol.”8
Jocelyn purports that they simply have to be Sarah W. Wingfield (b.1836, d.1903), and her sister Christiana (Christina/Christa) Mary Wingfield (b.1855). In the 1901 Census they were living together in Bristol. In the June quarter of 1902, Christiana Mary was married in Stroud, Gloucester. Since Sarah Wingfield of Bristol died in 1903, the mystery inheritor of the diary and its donor to Canada simply has to be Chris-tiana Wingfield, David’s youngest daughter. He suggests:
Maybe — if it is worked through — one will see that the daughters kept returning to David’s old home where they were raised in Stroud in the 1840s–60s when David was alive. Sarah, and her sister, Ellen Jane W. (d.1885) both died in Winchcombe, to the north of Stroud, where their sister Louisa Ann Shill lived, they presumably lodged with the Shills, or at least died at their house. Such speculation might be able to be confirmed by combing through the census records in some additional detail.9
Looking Down One of the Steep Streets of Stroud, sketch by Hugh Thomson, 1919. This would be one area surely frequented by David Wingfield and his family members during their residence there. From Highways and Byways in Gloucestershire, by Edward Hutton. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1932.
When David Wingfield died in 1864, sons John and Thomas had already fled the nest. Living at the old family home in Stroud would be David’s second wife, Penelope, presumably all the daughters, and Henry, born 1850, the future fleet engineer, RN, according to Jocelyn. Strange the diary was not actually left to Henry in view of the naval connection, and, regardless of the ownership route or location of the diary, Jocelyn Wingfield currently concludes, “I presume Henry was dead before 1933.”
One final wrinkle in this mystery is the existence of other family descendants with the first name Christiana or known as Christa. Chris-tiana, David’s granddaughter, daughter of eldest son John, or even one of his second son Thomas’s children might have been our Miss Wingfield. David’s daughter would have been seventy-eight, and John’s Christiana, sixty-seven, in 1932. Perhaps it could have been either. The pencilled note on the actual document, by Trade Commissioner Cole, however, suggests that the donor of the actual document was indeed the daughter of David Wingfield.
Unless additional information is forthcoming about the acquisition of the original artifact, the correct transmission route will never be known with absolute certainty.
Leaving for Canada
In any event, according to his journal, David Wingfield sailed on the Woolwich, out of Plymouth, on March 31, 1813. He arrived at Quebec on the evening of May 5. On board with him were Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo, four Royal Navy captains, eight lieutenants, twenty other warrant officers, and 450 seamen. He returned to England from Canada three years later, on September 30, 1816. We know little about his life after that date. However, his journal provides a vivid documentary of his adventures in that three-year period.
The original hand-written manuscript and our additional notes cover five periods in history and his life:
1.