Map of 1896 Surrey with Edith’s family homes in 1. Guildford, 2. Old Woking and 3. Warren Farm
Henry had grown up on the outskirts of Old Woking, on the 58-acre Warren Farm, which is today a Woodland Trust property. The farm had been purchased by his father John, who had moved his young family to the property in 1846, a year after Henry’s birth. Warren Farm lies just off a track from Warren Lane, which leads to a pretty little lock house at the weir on Wey Canal. Across this river lived a young local girl, Charlotte Sarah Edmunds, known as Lottie, whom Henry would marry in 1866.
In later years, their children would visit their grandparents at Warren Farm and go swimming at the lock where their parents had first met. The lock keeper would throw his lock keeper’s bar into the weir to see which of the children could dive to fetch it from a depth of ten feet or more.
Warren Farm in 1928: home of Henry Harms
If building was his business, bees were Henry’s passion.
‘There had always been a hive, sometimes two, in his garden,’ recalled Edith.
I’m watching my own newly acquired bees hanging off the front of their hive as the temperature exceeds 40 degrees Celsius. With the anxious care of a rank amateur, I water the ground around them, put up an umbrella. The bees maintain their constant thrum, oblivious to my concern. The hive is one of those new designs with plastic honeycomb sheets that crack in half to release the honey from a tap. Honey extraction suddenly became a lot less work, less disturbing for the bees. The old guard was sceptical.
‘People have been keeping bees since Roman times – if there was a better way to do it, they would have found it,’ declared a friend, who has done everything before.
I think about the long and constantly evolving history of beekeeping and wonder what kind of hive Henry Harms used. Was he a traditionalist, sticking to the old woven skep baskets, or was he an earlier adopter of framed hives, like the Sussex Shallow? I have a vague image of rounded beehives hanging from trees like a wasp nest, falling on people’s heads. I’ve never seen honeybees make hives like that in the wild. In Australia, feral honeybees nest in hollows, filling them with their dripping yellow combs. But Edith had a swarm of bees build a hive that hung naked from a tree in her garden.
Maybe that traditional image comes from a woven skep beehive. Did they hang them in trees? But then I realise the picture comes from Winnie the Pooh, from the Hundred Acre Wood, eighty kilometres south of Edith’s hometown. In A. A. Milne’s original book the bees emerge from a tree hollow. It was the Disney cartoonists who turned the beehive into a hornets’ nest, confounding generations of children with their own inability to tell the difference between a wasp and a bee.
Whichever hives Henry Harms kept his bees in, it wasn’t in a hornets’ nest.
Surely Edith’s father would have pointed out the tiny bee orchids (Ophrys apifera) of English grasslands, with their bold black and yellow markings like a bumblebee? Or the tiny fly orchid (Ophrys insectifera) which seems, at first glance, to have a fly resting in its midst, wings folded, antennae upright. I remember finding my first British orchid, an early purple (Orchis mascula) tucked among the Scottish heath: unmistakable in form, its bright pink tongue protruding in spotted glory. I must have taken it home to identify, surprised to find such delicate exoticism in the wild heaths of the Outer Hebrides. Twenty-five years later, I retrieve my guide to British wildlife from the bookshelf to refresh my memory and a tiny pressed flower falls from the orchid page, yellowed and indistinguishable: testimony to a long-forgotten fascination.
The history of Edith’s mother’s family is less documented than that of her father’s. Lottie’s mother, Maria Kaye, died shortly after the birth of Lottie’s younger brother George in 1847. The two children seem to have been farmed out by their father Richard Edmunds, when he remarried in 1850. George was listed as a ‘nurse child’ while Lottie lived with Maria’s sister, Jane Bonsey.
It was an inauspicious start. In the 1850s there was only a 50 per cent chance that the motherless and abandoned Lottie would even be literate, let alone inspire her own children with a lifelong love of fine English literature and flowers.
The maternal line is repeatedly snapped and realigned by marriage and name. Wealth, property, title, occupation, interests – all are assumed to flow along paternal lines. The flow of maternal influence sweeps unseen through the generations.
Biographical research must travel forwards as much as it travels backwards. When I started this project I did not know if Edith had any living descendants. It took time to confirm the names of her two daughters. In the archives at the Australian Academy of Science I discovered, to some considerable surprise and relief, that her second daughter Gladys had married Donald Thomson and had two sons. Relief because here was a name I recognised – a pioneering anthropologist whose collections and works feature prominently in the Museum of Victoria, about whom much is written and documented. A well-known, well-recorded figure in whose shadow I might hope to find traces of his first wife. And sons, John and Peter, whose surnames will not change through their life.
But Thomson, like Harms, like Coleman, is a fairly common name. It is not easy to find the right John Thomson and Peter Thomson. They will be in their eighties now, but they
