Place of worship: the French church in Threadneedle Street in the City of London was where the Huguenot Galhie family regularly returned, even after they retired to Croydon
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Thousands of refugees, fleeing torture and execution in their home country, were once welcomed in England, where they enjoyed religious freedoms and worked hard all their lives. DAVID MORGAN, pictured left, traces the family history of Stephen and Mary Galhie, Huguenots who retired to the rural idyll of Croydon
There was a time, a couple of centuries ago, when Croydon was a semi-rural place, a rural idyll close enough to London to be where the well-off chose to retire.
A horse-drawn coach journey which may have taken less than three hours to travel the 10 miles or so from Croydon could keep you in touch with events in the city.
Fresh country air with the River Wandle flowing through green fields at the foot of the North Downs created a much sought-after environment. At the end of your earthly days, you could choose to be buried in the glorious medieval parish church along with archbishops and other dignitaries. This was Croydon in the second half of the 18th Century.
Stephen Galhie and his wife Mary were one couple who decided that Croydon would be the ideal retirement location. They had spent the majority of their married life in Spitalfields, in the hustle and bustle, dirt and grime, of the rapidly expanding Georgian London.
Stephen was a surgeon as well as owning an apothecary shop, over which they lived in Steward Street.
Last record: Stephen Galhie’s memorial was lost in the Croydon Parish Church fire, and this is the last record of it
Stephen and Mary Galhie were both buried in Croydon Parish Church.
A black marble memorial was fixed on the nave wall to remember Stephen, who died, aged 70, on September 16, 1772. Mary died more than 20 years later, at 86, and was buried with her husband.
Their family story is a fascinating one.
The couple were married in the Temple Church in London on March 19, 1731. Stephen was part of the Galhie family who had originally lived in Picardy in northern France. They settled in England together with the large number of fellow Huguenots who sailed across the English Channel to escape religious persecution – what we would today called refugees.
Mary’s name was recorded in the marriage register as Marie Berthon. She was born in Lisbon in 1710 and at the time of her wedding was living with a relative, Isaac Berthon, in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
The first part of the Galhies’ married life was spent in Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, where the first five of their children were christened. By 1739, they had moved back to London and made their home in Spitalfields, the same neighbourhood as hundreds of other Huguenot families, the descendants of a second wave of arrivals from France in the 1680s.
Religious wars: the Huguenots suffered persecution, torture and ritualistic death in Catholic France
The Huguenots were protestants who fled France and Wallonia (southern Belgium) from the 16th to the 18th century due to persecution during the European Wars of Religion. After the English Reformation under Henry VIII and (some of) his heirs, England was seen as a safe place for protestant refugees.
The Huguenots were a fast-growing religious minority in France, where the Catholic church was a dominating power in the state, but 1-in-10 were protestants. Although initially tolerated by the French church and monarchy, the eventual persecution of the non-conformist Huguenots was notoriously vicious, even by the standards of the time.
The Huguenots were labelled as heretics, worthy only of death, which often followed torture and frequently involved the victim being burned alive.
On March 1, 1562, while 300 Huguenot worshipers were praying peacefully in a barn near a little village in Vassy, they were attacked by troops under Francis, Duke of Guise. More than 60 Huguenots, including women and children, were killed, more than 100 more were injured.
The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in August 1572 has gone down in infamy, when Catholic mob violence saw slaughter on the streets of Paris, including several targeted assassinations of leading Huguenot figures and noblemen. The attacks are thought to have been directed by the mother of France’s King Charles IX, Queen Catherine de Medici, and began a few days after the marriage of the king’s sister, Margaret, to the protestant King Henry III of Navarre. Many of the wealthiest Huguenots had gathered in Paris to attend the wedding.
Lasting several weeks, the massacre spread to the countryside and other towns and cities. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary, from 5,000 to 30,000.
Many Huguenot families fled to England. Their descendants who settled in east London were known for their hard work as skilled craftsmen, silversmiths, watchmakers and, in particular, weavers. There would have been tensions, though, between groups of Londoners who lived their lives differently.
William Hogarth, the artist and satririst, produced an etching in 1738 which poked fun at two differing groups of people. Entitled Noon, it showed the well-to-do congregation from the puritanical French Huguenot church in St-Giles-in-the-Field coming out into the street as their service ended, looking rather serious and stern-faced.
Noon: Hogarth’s engraving, showing the puritanical Huguenots leaving church and bypassing the lewd London tavern across the road
This contrasted with the group of Londoners frequenting the tavern opposite, who were rowdy and boisterous.
Stephen Galhie was listed in 1747 as a member of the Surgeons Company of London.
This group of practitioners was separate from those of Barber-Surgeons and they were exempt from “bearing arms” or serving on any parish or ward office.
Galhie was not only a surgeon at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, but in 1750 he was listed as a “governor for life”. He mixed with the very best surgeons and anatomists of his day, as in 1752 his name appears in the diary of the eminent physician William Hunter as being present in the room where Hunter was injecting mercury into a particular sensitive part of the male anatomy in order to better understand the function of the tubing in that area of the body.
In October 1764, Galhie was named as one of the sponsors for Pierre Dade, a man in his 60s, so that he could be treated at the French Hospital, a short distance from Spitalfields in the Golden Acre in Finsbury. Dade had turned up at the gates of the hospital begging to be admitted as he was no longer capable of looking after himself.
Sadly, there was little the hospital could do except to provide the man with some comfort in his last days. He died on November 11.
Other members of Galhie’s family were involved in the medical world, too. Galhie’s son Robert followed his father and became a surgeon, as well as running the apothecary shop. Robert lived at 36 Spital Square from 1761 onwards and the property still had family connections in 1819, when it is was occupied by “Galhie and Gayton, Surgeons”. Galhie’s son-in-law, James Auber, although a silk weaver by trade, became a director of the French Hospital.
Two of Galhie’s sons went into silk weaving. Peter Isaac and his brother Paul had premises in Steward Street which they insured for £1,950 with an additional £50 for weaving apparel.
Generous will: Stephen Galhie left the equivalent of more than £1m in his will for his eight children
When Stephen Galhie died, the bequests in his will reflected his wealth.
He left £800 – the equivalent of £150,000 today – for each of his surviving three sons, Peter, Robert and Paul, to help them in their businesses.
His three married daughters also got £800, Anne the wife of James Auber, Mary the wife of Isaac Auber and Elizabeth, the wife of Robert Smith.
His two unmarried daughters, Judith and Margaret, received £1,000 each. In total, Galhie left the equivalent of more than £1million in today’s money between his eight children.
His wife was bequeathed the shares in his two Exchequer annuities – undoubtedly providing a generous pension into her old age.
As he left no Croydon property in his will, we can assume that their house here was rented.
But there Stephen Galhie left more wealth, too.
One bequest of £50 – the equivalent of almost £10,000 today – was to be given to the poor people associated with the French Church in Threadneedle Street, which was the place where he worshipped with his family.
When Stephen’s widow Mary died in 1797, her bequests were very different. She left a gold watch for her granddaughter Ann Auber, and a diamond hoop ring to another granddaughter, Charlotte Auber. Mary’s daughters Judith, by now married, and Margaret received either items of their mother’s clothing or her china.
The Auber family were an important part of Stephen and Mary’s life and they also had a link with Croydon. Isaac Auber (the younger), their grandson, had lived in Croydon as revealed in a will published after his death in 1801.
Bequests: based on what he left in his will to his extended family and the church, refugee Stephen Galhie appears to have thrived while living in London
He, too, had qualified as a surgeon and he left all his surgical instruments “in an oak case” together with his anatomical preparations and his “skeleton case” to his uncle, Robert Galhie of Spital Square.
The fire in Croydon Parish Church in 1867 destroyed all the wall-mounted memorials, and the one to Stephen Galhie was never replaced. Although Mary Galhie was buried here, her name wasn’t added to her husband’s memorial.
There is, however, a wonderful symmetry to this tale. The choir and congregation would have sung a hymn Our blest Redeemer ere he breathed, which was popular in the late 19th Century and which was published in many different hymn books. This was the best known of the hymns written by the poet and hymnist, Harriet Auber. Born in Spitalfields in 1773, she was a great-granddaughter of Stephen and Mary. Her father, James, was a priest in the Church of England and who was a brother of Isaac the surgeon.
Would she have come to Croydon Parish Church for her great grandmother’s funeral in 1797?
Might she have visited Isaac?
Even if she never ever stepped inside Croydon Parish Church, the sounds of Harriet’s hymn echoing around the building where her great-grandparents were buried is a wonderful legacy to the Galhie and Auber families.
- David Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- Minster carvings recall ancient traditions of The Green Man
- The 550-year rise and fall of Croydon’s annual Walnut Fair
- A Dickensian tale which adds extra Phiz to its Croydon twist
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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