Engagingly affectionate and physically attractive (Ockham had dark curly hair, an olive skin, brilliant eyes and the muscular hands of a young blacksmith), the Lovelaces’ eldest child never had difficulty in winning friends. Rebellious and hard to teach though Ockham was (‘he is so slow that I do not suppose you could get more out of him,’ Charles Noel told Ada on 11 April 1849), Charles nevertheless doted upon his young lodger.
Here at Peckleton, although the Noels had two small daughters of their own, there was never any sense of sexual unease. Reunited with his family at Ashley Combe in the autumn of 1848, troubling ghosts of the past arose to haunt the present. A curious set of letters that passed between Ada and her mother reveal that both of them were haunted by the same fear: what if Ockham had inherited his grandfather’s troubling attraction to a female sibling? Byron was ‘never alone’ with Annabella, Ada reassured her mother, while stressing in the same letter of 6 November that there were indeed ‘many reasons to keep them apart’.
Unlike her husband, Ada became anxious even about allowing their oldest son to visit Ashley when little Annabella was also there. Lady Byron, while approving of her daughter’s concern, went further still, suggesting that Ralph should also be separated from his sister. Reluctantly, Ada agreed. She would see to it that Ralph was ‘never alone with Miss W[ächter] and Annabella at Horsley,’ she wrote back, ‘supposing that is your wish’.
Miss Wächter, who personally found Byron Ockham to be an irresistible little charmer, was baffled by this strange insistence upon separation between the siblings. The first effect of her elder brother’s charismatic personality upon Lady Annabella’s manners and ideas might prove disquieting, the governess conceded; nevertheless, ‘the real and more lasting effects’ of sisterly friendship with such a beguiling youth were surely ‘very valuable’.
Ada was torn. Evidently, she shared her mother’s uneasiness. And yet, she adored her firstborn son. (A letter written in July 1848 fondly described young Byron, just home from Brighton, as ‘brown as a nut, & looking more manly in face, and strikingly handsome’.) He, of Ada’s three children, had always been the most eager to canter out with his mother across Exmoor, to show an interest in her beloved pack of dogs (Sirius the swift Dalmation was his favourite, while his sister preferred Nelson, the big family dog) and to tease her, proposing that Papa’s grand tower room at Horsley would be ‘a capital place to have tea’. Ockham was always the first to sense his mother’s mood, the one who knew just how to make her laugh.
A solution to the concern about the children’s intimate relationships was already in place. Plans for Byron to go to sea had been made and advice was now taken from the Lushingtons and Greigs, both families being possessed of excellent naval connections. Ada dreaded his going. In the autumn of 1848, she began pleading with her mother to send Ralph home for a while, because of the long separation between the brothers – she sadly wrote that it might be one of ‘very many years’ – which lay ahead. Lady Byron remained nervous and obstinate. Ralph was only permitted to rejoin his own family in October 1849, when young Lord Ockham was safely away on the other side of the world. And still, Lady Byron dreaded repetitions of the past. Ralph must be tutored separately from his sister, she wrote. The children should at all times be watched.
Ada agreed.
The decision to book Ockham as a midshipman on to the Swift for this particular voyage across the world was equally strange, and strangely fortuitous. Both at Harrow and later, at university, William Lovelace and William Greig had studied alongside an exceptional man. Today, his statue occupies a position of honour on O’Connell Street in Dublin; back in July 1848, William Smith O’Brien was a charismatic leader of the Young Ireland movement, a man who had been arrested when he called for armed rebellion in the cause of Irish independence. O’Brien was the first Irish rebel who had been born into the landed gentry; with Queen Victoria embarrassingly due to pay a visit to Ireland within a few months of his conviction, the Irish rebel’s sentence was hastily commuted from hanging to being transported to Van Diemen’s Land, along with his three principal collaborators.
The Swift, then, was a convict ship with a difference. Here, in place of dark holds filled with sick children, pregnant women and desperate men, were four well-educated and elegantly dressed prisoners who strove to hold tedium at bay during a three-month voyage by playing backgammon and chess. And by chat.
Chat must surely have encompassed talking to a young man who bore the intriguing name of Byron Ockham and who turned out to be the son of O’Brien’s Trinity colleague, now married to Lord Byron’s daughter. The Swift’s crew consisted of only sixty-six men, and a midshipman’s duties would certainly have taken him to the deck where the four Irish prisoners passed much of their time. To Byron (who would later preach the virtues of the French Revolution to his younger brother), Smith O’Brien must have seemed a true hero, a man who had placed his convictions first and who – Byron Ockham was there to see him set ashore at Van Diemen’s Land on 27 October – honourably refused to accept the ‘ticket-of-leave’ which would have allowed the gallant prisoner parole and considerable freedom.
Byron’s experiences on board the Swift confirmed a road upon which – even at the tender age of thirteen – he was already firmly
