I became aware of the manic depressive condition because of patterns of behaviour among some of my relatives. I encountered it again as a result of my genealogical researches into a seemingly unrelated family. When the condition is hereditary such patterns can be readily perceived among several members of the family. In broad terms there are two phases to the condition. In the manic phase there may be eccentricity, cheerfulness, self-confidence, creativity and so on. In the depressive phase there is sadness and self-doubt. Occasionally the result is suicide. This can be a pointer to affected individuals whose family situations are not known, as in the two final cases here. The manifestations vary greatly from person to person, indicating that although there can be an underlying hereditary element other hereditary and environmental elements have an effect. Because of the two phases the condition is sometimes known less explicitly and hence euphemistically as bipolar disorder.
The marked enterprise and creativity shown by some that have the condition suggest that it may have had a survival value for the human race as this emerged from its simian origins.
Thomas Tregaskis and his relatives.
Thomas Tregaskis, 1785-1871, a Cornishman, was a great uncle of my grandmother Grace Tregaskis Kent née Tank. As a youth he ran away to sea and misbehaved in New York. On his return his father set him up as a farmer and miller. He became religious and regretted his previous misconduct. He joined an eccentric Methodist break-away sect known as the Bible Christians which was located mainly in the south-west. He helped financially with the building of chapels and became a lay preacher. An extensive biography, the source of the portrait, appeared in twelve issues of the Bible Christian Magazine starting August 1872. My grandmother was only eight years old when he died but she remembered his kindly nature.
On one or more occasions when acting as a lay preacher he judged items of clothing worn by members of the congregation to be inappropriate and burnt them over the chapel candles.
His most noteworthy escapade was his attempt in 1845 to suppress the Padstow Hobby-horse celebration which takes place each year on May 1st. It involves drinking plenty of alcohol and, as a supporter of total abstinence, he disapproved of it. He was then living alongside the Camel estuary in St Issey which is close to Padstow. He displayed posters in Padstow promising that if the townsfolk gave up the celebration then, for the next seven years, he would provide a bullock so that they could replace the celebration by "the rational amusement of eating roast beef." Believing that his offer would be accepted he arrived in Padstow with the bullock at the end of April and, forewarned by the posters, the townsfolk drove both out. It is said that people with the condition may become so enthusiastic that they may fail to anticipate the outcome of their actions. This was evidently the case here.
It seems that the depressive phase in religiously-minded sufferers can take the form of a temporary loss of faith. John Henry Newman's poem Lead Kindly Light could well represent a manic-depressive cycle with the opening lines representing such a depressive phase. We shall meet another example below. According to his biography Thomas supposed that his periodic losses of faith were due to Satan tempting him, but his biographer, a Bible-Christian minister who had known him, supposed instead that they were due to something within his mind. This was perceptive, being before the manic-depressive condition was so-named and widely recognised.
Thomas had two sons, Samuel and Thomas jr, the latter known as Jack. Jack was notorious in the family for ill-treating his wife. According to my grandmother he "pinched" her. She and the children left him. He disappeared. He had once been rescued from drowning in the Camel. He may in fact have been attempting suicide and may have been successful on a second attempt, his body being washed out to sea.
Samuel by contrast seems to have been sound. My grandmother's father, his cousin, was a close friend. He died while my grandmother was a child and in his will, anticipating his early death, decreed that if her mother died while she was still a child then she should become a ward of Samuel. (Her mother survived.)
Some of my grandmother's cousins, likewise great nieces of Thomas Tregaskis, showed the condition though fortunately my grandmother did not. Two of these cousins were sisters, Jane and Grace Hearle. Jane was an out-going fun-loving young woman, to an exceptional degree it seems, and my grandmother, who was a little younger, adored her. By contrast Grace was morose to the point of being unbalanced. Doubtless Jane had her sadder moments and Grace her happier ones but together they show that some manic depressives are remembered for the manic phase and some for the depressive phase, even when closely related.
It was after learning from a radio programme that the condition could be hereditary and that its symptoms could be very different in closely related people that I realised that the sisters and some of their relatives were manic depressives.
Another affected cousin was Nellie Lake. Some manic depressives have recourse to alcohol or drugs to relieve depression and in Nellie's case it was laudanum, an opium preparation then readily available. She became addicted and borrowed extensively to pay for it. She believed that a man who had emigrated to British Columbia wished to marry her. She followed him there for the purpose, only to find that he was already married. My grandmother heard nothing more of her. This again shows how the condition can lead people to do things without regard to the possible consequences.
The descendants of Blanch Hendra.
My studies of the Cornish Trethewy family drew my attention to Blanch Hendra, 1734-1775, who was married to two Trethewys. Some of the descendants by each showed the condition. The two Trethewys were only distantly related and there is no indication of the condition elsewhere in their families. Blanch was clearly the source of the condition. Those involved were members of the minor gentry and account may be taken of this when considering some of the behaviour.
Blanch married Humphrey Betty Trethewy in 1751. (He was named after an apparently admired member called Humphrey of an unrelated local Betty family.) Their son Thomas, 1758-1812, became a Methodist minister which did not accord well with the family's social standing. He retired at the age of about 40 due to "great bodily infirmity," unspecified. He had four children three of them born while he was infirm.
One of them, Humphrey Beattie Trethewey, became a Methodist minister and had a son Thomas, of whom more later. For some reason another son Bartholomew, ca 1799-1857 did not become a minister but instead a Methodist "town missionary" in Leeds, over 250 miles from the family home in Cornwall. He died of "chronic brain disorder." This vague Victorian diagnosis is not very revealing. He may have died of Alzheimer's disease or he may have had a long-standing non-fatal mental problem and died for some physical reason.
Bartholomew's spinster sisters Elizabeth and Catherine followed him to Leeds. Presumably they considered that he needed to be looked after. When there they kept a "dame school." Quite out of keeping with the religious and social background of the family one of them had an illegitimate daughter Catherine. We cannot tell which because the mother discreetly went to Dublin for the birth, relevant documents probably being destroyed in the Easter uprising.
The younger Catherine and her cousin the aforementioned Thomas were married in Leeds in 1857. An informant told me that Thomas had mental problems but did not disclose how he was affected. Their eldest child Thomas Pearse Trethewy abandoned Methodism and became a Congregational minister. He evidently had problems for he once disappeared and his friends found him in Calais. (It is not related how they knew that they should look there.) In November 1894 at the age of 36 he drowned himself in Lake Windermere, leaving a wife. The reason apparently was a minor financial problem. He was descended from Blanch Hendra on two lines and was four generations down. Did this double descent increase the probability of suicide?
An obituary of Humphrey and Blanch's daughter Jane, 1764-1846, written by her nephew Humphrey Beattie Trethewey, appeared in the Methodist Magazine in 1849. It quotes her diary. She had a bout of depression when she was aged 18 because of her concept of sin. This was relieved when she became a Methodist like her brother. She married beneath herself, her husband Thomas Trethewy, a distant relative, being a shoemaker. The couple established a Methodist mission in the Cornish parish of Roche. There is some indication in the obituary of further problems but their nature is not indicated. Nothing untoward is known to have happened among their descendants until a woman drowned herself in the sea off New Zealand in the mid-twentieth century. She was five generations down from Blanch Hendra.
Blanch Hendra's second husband was Samuel Trethewy whom she married 21 January 1772. Their only child Samuel was born 3 August of that year and so he was probably conceived out of wedlock despite his mother's strong religious beliefs. His only sign of eccentricity was to spell his name Trethewie. It is said that this was due to a family row. If so it could have been with Blanch's first family which used the spelling Trethewy and later Trethewey. Three of his children were clearly manic depressives.
His daughter Elizabeth, 1807-1883 left a sort of diary in which she made occasional entries, mostly concerning her periods of depression. As with Thomas Tregaskis and possibly Newman these were characterised by a loss of religious faith and anticipation of recovery. They occurred at frequent intervals. Several of her children died in infancy but her accounts of this suggest sadness rather than depression. She has a descendant living at the present time whose periods of depression are so bad that her husband has had to leave her even though he is highly religious.
Samuel's eldest son was also Samuel, ca 1798-1878. In March 1841 when he was in his 40s he "had to marry" his housemaid who was some 25 years his junior, the child being born in July. Being the eldest son he was a wealthy owner of mines and other properties. After his marriage he sold up and emigrated with his family to Ohio. His wife disliked something, either him or the place, and almost immediately returned to her parents in Cornwall with the child and with one as yet unborn. Samuel claimed that he gave her half his fortune before she left but census returns and her probate record show that she was far from wealthy. Samuel frittered away his fortune, making charitable gifts to fellow farmers who were in trouble and he died in poverty, ignored by those he had helped.
His brother John was transported to Tasmania for seven years for stealing a pig. As he was a member of a well-to-do family this may have been an act of bravado. When his term was over he returned to Cornwall to collect his wife and family and take them to Tasmania. According to his sister's diary he distressed his mother immediately before leaving, no details given. (She died a few days later.) Back in Tasmania John became a prosperous and wealthy farmer, helping to establish Methodist chapels.
A possible link.
Blanch was a member of a family of Hendras several of whom were called Christopher and she had an uncle of that name. The name was not common in other Cornish families. Thomas Tregaskis was the great grandson of Christopher Tregascus whose mother was Margery Hendra, so that she had evidently given him a family name. This implies that she and Blanch were members of the same broad family despite being a century apart in time. Margery was born in the Civil War - Commonwealth period when records were not well kept, so we cannot determine her immediate ancestry. She was married in Kea, presumably her home parish, while Blanch came from Feock, only 3 miles away. It is thus possible that Thomas's condition and that of Blanch's descendants had a common origin in the Hendras. (Phillimore's Cornwall Marriages, vol. 22, wrongly gives the place of marriage as Kenwyn.)
Frank Dudley Foster.
Dudley Foster, 1924-1973, and I went to the same school, a boarding school in East Yorkshire, starting in the same year when we were both aged 9. I did not then like him because of his wildness though I got used to it and we became reasonably good friends. The wildness did not abate as he grew older. There was an outdoor swimming bath at the school. Once when we were standing outside in our swimming costumes waiting for a prefect to come and open up a bird dropped something unpleasant on Foster's shoulder. He wiped it off with his finger and smeared it on the shoulder of a boy he did not like. He was then aged 16 or 17. When he was a prefect he would break bounds at night to visit a girlfriend in the town. (He was caught and I was made a prefect in his place.) Once when he was a senior I saw him sitting quietly with a sad far-away look on his face. This seemed inconsistent with his wildness, as to some extent did the fact that he eventually hanged himself. When I became aware of the details of the manic-depressive condition it seemed that these inconsistencies could be the result of it. I cannot recall his showing any sign of the depressive phase when he was a junior. Did it first appear with adolescence?
(Foster became a public figure as a television actor. I used to watch the plays he was in because I had known him personally, but I did not rate him highly as an actor for he was always the Dudley Foster that I had known at school, with the same appearance, voice and mannerisms.)
George Hands.
George Hands was the manager of the weekly-paid staff at the chemical factory where I became employed a few years after the war. He was remarkable for his considerable initiative both in the forces and as a civilian. He joined the RAF before the war as a ranker and was demobilised as a wing commander. The reason for his promotion was his working successfully with the underground in wartime Yugoslavia, doubtless a dangerous job that relied heavily on his own decisions. After the war the factory was short of men to operate the production plants. The high level of unemployment in southern Italy was well known. Hands therefore went to Naples and recruited the required number. (The toilets for men and women in the factory had to be appropriately marked in Italian!) Eventually he became a toper, perhaps to relieve depression, and this interfered with his work. Finally he was dismissed after having been found drunk and incapable in a public place when he should have been at work. He then found a job which probably involved travelling by car. While in this job he was apprehended for drunken driving and, with the certainty of being disqualified from driving, he shot himself. He had illegally retained his service revolver and ammunition, perhaps foreseeing that he might wish to use them.
