A Stray Scrap of Paper and a Poignant Story From a Famous Family
When Bridget McAuslan and her husband Andrew moved into their Victorian house in Wortham, they brought with them an unusual and beautiful antique lacquered travelling toilet case.
“We’re a Suffolk family, and the case had stood in the corner of a sequence of our family houses all through my life. I was told we’d inherited it from an ancestor who was a domestic servant to a prominent individual, but I never gave it much thought.”
Twenty-three years later, as the Chair of The Friends of Wortham Church, Bridget is launching an appeal to raise £200,000 to repair the roof of nearby St Mary’s, her parish church, made famous in the Victorian era by its rector, Reverend Richard Cobbold.
“Our Wortham home was originally built by Richard Cobbold. It would have been the hub of his activities as he recorded most of the village buildings and their occupants in his paintings and writings,” says Bridget.
After the appeal launch in September 2023 by her Wortham neighbour, BBC broadcaster Martha Kearney, Bridget opened the vanity case and showed it to her appeal committee colleagues.
“The case is large with a top tier of beautifully decorated small boxes. Underneath is a generous space which we suspect once held a wig. Each small box and the case itself are emblazoned with the crest of Admiral Page. I was always told the that it may have been on Nelson’s flagship at some time in history.”
But inside one of the otherwise empty compartments was a folded slip of white paper, and investigating what it said rewrote the history of the case and showed that it had returned home after more than a hundred and seventy years of travels.
The paper, dated 1847, seems to dedicate the otherwise empty toilet case to Spencer Cobbold Page, in memory of his uncle Thomas Spencer Cobbold. But does it?
Both men inscribed on the paper are direct descendants both of the brewer Thomas Cobbold, founder of the Cobbold dynasty of Ipswich and grandfather of the renowned Reverend Richard Cobbold of Wortham.
They’re also direct descendants of another famed Ipswich man, Admiral Benjamin Page R.N. who carried the announcement of the Napoleonic Wars in his frigate HMS Caroline to the East Indies in 1803, and was a veteran of many naval campaigns and three wars.
“The paper proves that the case had belonged to the Reverend Luke Flood Page, rector of Woolpit, who was the nephew of Admiral Page. At first we thought the paper showed that the box itself was a gift from Reverend Page to his son Spencer Cobbold Page, but a closer look at family records suggests otherwise.”
At first it seemed that the paper referred to a Thomas Spencer Cobbold, son of the famous Rector of Wortham, who was a distinguished virologist with connections both to Wortham and Palgrave, where he married. But he died in 1886 and the paper was clearly dated 1847.
It turned out that there was a previous Thomas Spencer Cobbold, who’d died in 1827 aged 27. He was educated at Rugby School and at Clare College Cambridge and when he died was a priest in Norwich. This was the brother of Spencer Cobbold’s mother Elizabeth and Spencer’s uncle.
The paper probably came with a small souvenir, perhaps a bible, given to Spencer when he was 14 years old.
Lieutenant Spencer Cobbold Page died tragically young in army service in the West Indies, and there’s a monument to his memory in Woolpit church. He seems to have acted heroically in an outbreak of deadly yellow fever, but been killed accidentally only a few years later. He was 34.
The souvenir of his uncle and the paper returned to his family and was kept in the toilet case. How the case left the family of the Reverend Luke Flood Page, who had six surviving children, remains a mystery.
As for Admiral Page, he came from Ipswich and commanded many Royal Navy fighting ships including HMS Inflexible, attached to Nelson’s Mediterranean fleet, and HMS Suffolk. Every compartment in the toilet case is emblazoned with his crest. Was the case one element of the rewards given to Admiral Page for safely escorting merchant ships through hostile waters during his long service in the East Indies?
“At the heart of our funding appeal is the message that the ancient church is our collective memory. With the extraordinary discovery inside the vanity case, and its extraordinary timing, which now comes back to a home built by the Cobbolds themselves, I sense that connectedness more than ever.”
The appeal is for funds to repair St Mary’s decaying roof and commissioning an investigation into the church’s remarkable round tower, the largest in the country. £40,000 has already been raised.
“Any experts on oriental lacquerware who can help us identify the origins of the Admiral’s toilet case are welcome to contact us through our Wortham Church Appeal website at www.worthamchurchappeal.org”