6950 - WIFE and DAUGHTERS OF GEORGE KING-HALL

OLGA KER - WIFE OF GEORGE KING-HALL

1866 - 1950

Olga Ker and George King-Hall were married on the 5^th April 1892 at St Pauls, Onslow Square, London. Readers, who are interested, can learn about their first meeting in Alexandria and their subsequent courtship in Egypt.

However the Ker family deserves further mention. They were a very remarkable family and the marriage between George and Olga provided the King-Halls with connections that would have been inconceivable to their weaver great grandfather.

Olga’s father’s family, the Kers, were originally a Scottish Border family from Ayrshire, In the 1560’s the family moved to Co Antrim in Ireland, where, during the next 200 years they grew prosperous in the linen trade. Then in the second half of the 18^th Century began the first step of a progress which saw the Kers rise from being a respectable merchant family to one of the largest landowners in Northern Ireland. In 1748 Olga’s great great grandfather, David (c.1710-1770), married an heiress bringing great wealth to an already prosperous family.

David¹ had two sons and a daughter. His eldest son was also called David² (1751-1811) and was the great grandfather of Olga. In 1774, as was to be expected for a young man of his position and wealth he went on a Grand Tour and while in Venice fell in love with a young Italian girl, reputedly aged only fourteen, called Madalena Guardi. After a dramatic chase led by the brothers of the young lady, David brought Madalena back to London.

Little is known of their life together in London or indeed about her occasional visits to County Down except that between 1779 and 1785 she had four children and that David did not marry her until two months before the birth of the fourth child. Madalena died shortly after this confinement on the 14^th July 1785.

Without a mother the four children were brought up by an aristocratic refugee from the French Revolution who not only fulfilled the role of a mother, but perhaps also that of a wife. Of the four children only two them are of our interest to our story. One is David³, the only son, who had been born in 1779 and therefore out of wedlock. The other was the youngest daughter, Madalena, born, as her mother was dying, in 1785.

David³ inherited the Ker estates when his father died in 1811. Three years later he married Lady Selina Stewart, the daughter of the 1^st Marquis of Londonderry, whose estates lay next to those of the Ker’s. Although primarily a love match, this was also a substantial social step up. Through it David³ became a brother-in-law of Lord Castlereagh, the great statesman, and was connected by marriage to the Marlboroughs, making Olga a second cousin of Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston Churchill.

Madalena’s marriage was less illustrious. In 1817 she married John Waring Maxwell, the owner of the Finnebrogue estate near Downpatrick. John Waring Maxwell was an ancestor of Patrick Perceval Maxwell, who married Magdalen King-Hall, the younger daughter of Olga Ker, and was the father of the editor of this website.

David³ and his wife Selina had five children. We are only interested in the youngest, who for reasons best known to his parents, had five Christian names. Born in 1822, he was christened Richard John Charles Rivers Gervas Ker and was the father of Olga. In 1843, on graduating from Oxford he followed in the footsteps of his famous uncle, Lord Castlereagh, and joined the Diplomatic service. His first two appointments were in Hanover and Paris. In 1847 he took a four year break from his diplomatic career to stand as the MP for the family controlled constituency of the Borough of Downpatrick.

RICHARD KER

Tiring of politics he rejoined the Diplomatic service and in March 1851 was posted to St Petersberg where he was still serving when the Crimean War broke out in March 1854. The embassy staff were evacuated to Copenhagen where Richard seems to have remained until the beginning of 1855. While he was in Copenhagen he met the father of Olga’s future husband, Captain William King-Hall who was in command of the Bulldog during the Baltic campaign. In early 1855 Richard was posted to Madrid.

Hostilities in the Crimean war ceased in February 1856 and a peace treaty was signed on 30^th March in Paris. The next day Richard married Rose Calvert, an exceptional beauty of twenty, in the British embassy in Paris. It seems reasonable to assume that his presence in Paris was connected with the treaty negotiations, particularly as his next post was to St Petersberg as 1^st Attache, where he took up his appointment in May.

Richard only remained in St Petersberg for a short time because in February 1857 he was elected MP for the borough of Downpatrick. The reasons for this sudden change of career are not known, but this change marked the end of what had appeared to be a very promising career in the Diplomatic Service. His second attempt at a political career was almost as equally brief as the first one. In 1859 he handed over his constituency to his elder brother, who had been defeated in the 1859 election for the county seat.

Having given up both his diplomatic and political career Richard and Rose decided to change their lifestyle dramatically and in the early 1860s went to live in Italy where they joined that country’s expatriate bohemian community.

From what little evidence we have they appear to have led a very eccentric existence with Rose making very little attempt to bring up her family of six young children of four sons and two daughters who had been born between 1858 and 1871. Their early years where largely spent in Florence and Rome, but in the late 70s they moved to Venice.

NINI and OLGA

In Venice they moved in a circle that included the poet Robert Browning and the American painter James Whistler. According to George King-Hall Olga earned the latter’s disapproval when she asked him why he wore a bootlace for a tie, but earned his approval when she accompanied him to the theatre so she could translate the Venetian dialect in which the play was being performed.

While in Venice the family lived for a time in both the Palazzo Barbero and Palazzo Dario, on the Grand Canal.

PALAZZO BARBERO

By the end of the 1880s it appears that Richard and Rose had separated, the former returning to England where he died in 1890. Rose went to Egypt where her story merges with that of George King-Hall.

LOUISE KING-HALL - ELDER DAUGHTER

1897 - 1983

Louise, or Lou as she was generally called, was born in Southsea on the 22 February 1897. Her childhood, governed by her father's naval appointments, was spent in Malta, Ireland, England and Australia.

At the outbreak of the 1st World War she was 17 and undertook war work, both on farms and at a nursing home for convalescent wounded at Quinton Castle in Co Down. This castle was owned by an aunt, her mother's eldest sister Nini. She and her younger sister Magdalen inherited this castle when Nini died in 1922.

In 1930 Lou married Alastair MacLeod. She had met him while he was teaching at her Uncle Baldwin's preparatory school at Emsworth. Alastair was a well known sportsman in Hampshire, playing cricket for the county and later becoming secretary of the county cricket club.

Between the wars Lou wrote several light-hearted novels, but as far as we are concerned her most important work was Sea Saga, published in 1935. This was an edited version of the diaries of James Hall, William, George and Stephen King-Hall. As the diaries of James and William no longer exist, it is no exaggeration to say that this website would not have been possible in its present form if this book had not been written. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my cousins Fiona and Ken for their permission to use their mother's invaluable and talented work so extensively.

MAGDALEN KING-HALL - YOUNGER DAUGHTER

1904 - 1971

Magdalen, or Madge as she was generally called, was born in Chelsea on the 22 July 1904. Her childhood was spent in Ireland, Australia and, and after her father retired, in Hove England.

Like her elder sister she soon showed a talent for writing and in 1925 she suddenly found herself, what would now be described as a mini-celeb having written a book called Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion 1764-5. The reason for her celebrity was that her publisher had produced the book in such a way that many of the 'experts' assumed it was a genuine diary and reviewers were even comparing The Young Lady to Pepys. After a time doubts began to arise and the next mystery was the identity of the author. This was disclosed on the front pages of the Daily Express and New York Times. The authoress was the very unassuming and demure 21 year old daughter of an Admiral.

MAGDALEN KING-HALL

Following this success Madge spent the next few years working as a journalist for a number of papers.

In 1929 Madge married a distant cousin, Patrick (Paddy) Perceval Maxwell, who was working for the Sudan Cotton Plantation Syndicate near Khartoum. For the next three years she spent the winter in the Sudan and the summer (wives were not allowed to be in Sudan during the hot season) in London, where she continued her journalism. It was during this period that the editor of this website was born.

In 1932 Paddy returned to England and the family first lived in Chelsea a few streets away from the home of George King-Hall. In 1938 they moved to Co Down in the North of Ireland to a farm near the family home of the Perceval Maxwell family. In 1953 they moved to Co Waterford to a house overlooking the junction of the rivers Blackwater and Bride.

During the 1930s Madge had written only a few books, but after moving to Ireland she took up her writing career more actively. In the next 20 years she wrote fifteen books many with an Irish background. Her greatest success was the Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton which was made into the film The Wicked Lady with James Mason and Margaret Lockwood. A second production of this film was made in 1983 and a play based on the book was performed in 2009 at the New Vic Theatre at Newcastle-under-Lyme.