St Albans and "Bluebell" Toulmin's Mystery Saint |
The Toulmin family were well known in St. Albans, having first settled there in 1854 when Henry Hayman Toulmin bought The Childwickbury Estate. His Son Henry Joseph stayed in St. Albans and had nine children, almost all girls. One of these, Isobel (Bluebell) featured in The Herts Advertiser for Friday February 1st 1974, which contained the following investigation by Ronald Riggs, one of their reporters.
It was
entitled "In Search of The ‘Saint’ of Pré House".
Victoria was firmly on the throne when a shining vision appeared to a young girl romping in the gardens of The Pré , St. Albans. Now, full of years, Isobel Toulmin is to return there to recapture the memory of an idyllic childhood. She may also help to solve a mystery. For besides the appearance of "The Saint" there have been stories of a "shadow child "making a baffling addition to pictures of wedding groups taken in the grounds. Miss Toulmin thinks the child could be a projection of her earlier self –"Something that living people can sometimes achieve." Here we tell the story of the "Saint of Pré House."When a figure in white, a with a golden light streaming from its head and shoulders, appeared to a little girl on the Redbourne road she guessed that she was seeing ‘The Saint’. She had run into the garden of the Pré to chase away a cat that had disturbed her ailing sister. It was a clear summer’s night and she glanced up to see, beyond the tall hedge around the Pre, a shining figure about twice the height of a man.
Miss Isobel Toulmin, daughter of Henry Toulmin, one-time Mayor of St. Albans, said: "It was quite motionless and perfectly lovely. It stayed absolutely still for about three minutes and then, as I turned to call to another sister who had followed me into the garden, it vanished. "All the time I watched it the figure seemed to be in a shimmering robe of white. It was the vision of a man with the golden radiance about his head and shoulders, and this gradually enveloped the entire figure."
Isobel Toulmin described her sighting of ‘The Saint’ as we talked in the sitting room of St. John’s Cottage, the house built by her father on the Veralum Road.
Her father, Henry Toulmin, was born in 1837. He married a beautiful 18 year-old girl and there were 14 children, Isobel was the thirteenth child of a family of 11 girls and three boys.
"How did you know that what you had seen was ‘The Saint’?" I asked. Miss Toulmin gently motioned me to a de Wint size watercolour on the wall. "Apart from the artist you are one of only a few people to have seen this picture." She said. "Look into it and you will see a tiny cottage that was a heap of rubble when I was a child." "It was called Rats Cottage and it was in a meadow on the left hand side of Veralum Road, leaving St. Albans behind. Only then it was called the Dunstable Road. The monks used it a lot when they came into St. Albans from the Priory."
"Late in the last century the vision passed over Rats Cottage and was seen by four people – the old woman who lived there, my eldest brother, Henry, his friend from Cambridge, and "Bo-Bo", who was passing along the road at the time.
"The old woman who lived there was a Miss Skeggs. She moved, later, to Jones Yard, and when we visited her there, she would tell us that she had once seen ‘The Saint’ with a glory round its head.
"Miss Skeggs was so dazzled by the vision that ever after she had to wear a shade over her eyes. We never saw her without it.
"I was born at the Pré and it was there, as a young girl, that I saw ‘The Saint’. I have since discovered that the vision has appeared at rare intervals throughout the history of St. Albans.
"I was only 16 on that wonderful night, and I kept very quiet because of my sister, who was sick. I feared that it might be interpreted as an omen.
But, later, I wrote to our brother, Henry, in America, and he replied, telling me that he, too, had seen it. He enclosed a drawing of ‘The Saint’ as it had appeared to him.
"When I looked at it I had the sensation that, once again, I was close to that radiant figure on the Veralum Road.
"I kept the picture for years and then I gave it to the Veralum Museum, hoping they would find it of interest."
It may be that the only portrait made from ‘life’ of ‘The Saint’ is lost for ever, because although a search has been made for Miss Toulmin’s picture it has not yet been found.
The article contains photographs of Isobel, aged about 16, and "Bo-Bo", (see later) the latter with the note that "Mr. Bolton ("Bo-Bo"), butler to the Toulmin family when they lived at Childwickbury and then The Pre. He later became the Mace Bearer to the Mayor of St. Albans. Mr Bolton saw "The Saint" when it appeared near Rats Cottage in the last century".
Another paragraph, entitled POACHERS FACED A SOFT-HEARTED JP, read,
"In a red uniform, with shining sword, Henry Toulmin would ride at the head of his soldiers – the Hatfield troop of the Herts Yeomanry.
And that may have accounted for Miss Toulmin’s love for the army. Miss Toulmin said, "We longed for a lawless mob to assemble in St. Albans, that we might hear him read the Riot Act".
Henry Toulmin was a magistrate who also had a soft spot for poachers – perhaps from a sporting instinct, for he was a crack shot. Besides being father to a big family, Mr. Toulmin was mayor of St. Albans four times, and in 1896 he was presented with the freedom of the city.
TODAY Isobel Toulmin, slim, upright and very much a soldier’s daughter, looks back on a long life with one regret – that she had not been born a boy. "I so much wanted to be a soldier, " she confessed. "I went through the first world war with the Red Cross, and in the last war, I was a warden in Civil Defence – and I loved that. So I’ve managed to spend a few years of my life in uniform, and that’s the nearest I’ve ever got to being a soldier. My other home, at Normandy, near Aldershot, is called Mariner’s House and I am happy when I am there for eight months in the year, because I am within sound of the Army ranges. I love to hear the sound of the guns banging away, and so I shall for the rest of my life. Mariners is a spacious, Georgian house on the old road from London to Portsmouth and in byegone days, naval officers would stop there for rest and refreshment."
NO ONE has seen The Saint floating around the Pré recently, although the old house still keeps faith with the past. The leafy drive opens up the sort of view that could be seen in any Victorian scrapbook – an English house in the country, strongly Georgian in character. Today, it is the Pré Hotel, and the proprietor, Mr. Reg Fitzpatrick, told me he had read Constance Toulmin’s book, Happy Memories, written in 1960. I see the house through her eyes," he told me. "My wife and I love the pictures she creates of the beautiful setting of her childhood home. The appearance of The Saint is only one unusual episode in the history of The Pré – I must tell you about the Shadow Child. Hundreds of wedding groups have been photographed in a favourite spot in the gardens. Once or twice, the photographs have included the mysterious shadow of a child. It first appeared in a picture of a bride and a groom standing together, and was seen by a member of our staff, Mrs. Eileen Beale." We went in to the dining room where Mrs Beale pointed through the window towards the spot where the "shadow child" had been photographed. Mrs Beale told me: "The young couple had posed on the lawn just below room 15, and when the photograph was developed, there was this extraordinary outline of a small child. No one could explain It. There were no children in the wedding party or among the guests at the hotel" Mr. Fitzpatrick said he had heard of it appearing on several occasions, and always in the picture of the bride and groom standing together, and usually during the month of August. Another member of the Pré staff, Mrs. Sally McMorrow, told me that occupants of a certain room in the house had spoken about mysterious tapings on the door and quick footsteps up and down the passage.
Mr. Fitzpatrick said neither he nor his wife had experienced the supernatural – "But I do know this house had terrific atmosphere," he told me. Miss Toulmin had the immediate answer to the mystery of the shadow child. "Of course it is me," she said. "I never liked strangers on the lawn and I would always chase them off. If there is a powerful affection for a place, I am sure that a living person can project a ghost of their earlier self, and that is exactly what is happening. I am the shadow child in those wedding pictures".
Daniel "Bolton" (known as "Bo-Bo" to Isobel) is worthy of mention in a little more detail. His real family name was Bottom. He first came into the Toulmin family as a "House Servant" at age 15 in 1851 when Henry Hayman’s family were living at Bower House, close to Navestock, where Daniel was born in 1836. HHT took Daniel to St. Albans when he moved the family there, and soon after Daniel married, and had four children. The 1861 census shows Daniel living in one of the cottages at Childwick Green, near the main house. By 1865 he had become a footman and trusted servant as he witnessed HHT’s will. His sister Mary Ann was taken on as a nurse by HHT’s son Frederick and his wife, for daughter Alfreda. It was the practice for most domestic staff to be known by their surnames, and consequently Mary seems to have taken the more seemly name of Bolton, as did her father when he became the family butler, following the death or retirement of his predecessor. His daughter Esther also later joined the family as a nurse, but when Henry Joseph (the then head of the family) had to move back to the Pré to economize, Daniel appears not to have gone with the family as butler, probably then getting the job as Town Hall Caretaker, and Mace Bearer, in which he may have been helped by Henry Joseph’s influence locally.
