From botanic gardens, to 'killing fields'
The story of the life, career, and death of Charles Frederick Ball, a native of Loughborough, is told in a new book, "Charles Frederick Ball: from Dublin's Botanic Gardens to the Killing fields of Gallipoli", by author Brian Willan. This is a fascinating account of early promise, a flourishing career, and early death, and I could not put the book down, reading it in one sitting!
I was so taken with this story of a son of Loughborough, that I asked the author to pen a few words in a guest blog post, and what you read below is Brian's account of his connection to Charles Frederick Ball, and Loughborough. Thank you, Brian.
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| C.F. Ball, portrait by F. Newton Neild, Loughborough, courtesy of the IWM |
Three years ago the name ‘Charles Frederick Ball’ meant very little to me. I knew he had been my grandmother Alice’s first husband, that he had been a horticulturist in Ireland, and that he was killed during the first world war, at Gallipoli. My mother mentioned his name a few times, as did my aunt Eileen – my godmother – who told me she had once met him. She must have been about 6 or 7 years old at the time.
But it was not until after my mother died in 2018 that I began to piece the story together in any kind of detail, intrigued by the discovery of a box of letters – love letters, many of them - which he had written to Alice between 1911 and 1914. She had kept these letters, along with some photographs and a variety of other mementos, and then my mother kept them safe too. When I read them for the first time I decided to investigate further. It was the beginning of a rather longer – and more rewarding – journey than I imagined – and it was intriguing to discover just how much of a name Charles Frederick Ball had made for himself after he took up a job at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin in 1906.
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| A letter to Alice from C.F. Ball, dated 20 November 1914 |
This journey of discovery also took me, among other places, to Loughborough because this is where Fred – as he was known to his family and friends – was born and where he spent his early years.
Fred Ball was born in Loughborough on 13 October 1879. His parents, Alfred and Mary, lived at 14 High Street, and the family lived over the shop. Fred’s father, like his father before him, was a pharmacist. It was a well-established business, and census returns indicate that they had an apprentice living with them too.
Fred was their third son, coming after Alfred Kirby Ball and John Bramley Ball. After Fred, there was a gap until Herbert in 1883, George Wilfred in 1884, and lastly a sister, Constance (or ‘Connie’) in 1886.
Everything changed for the family in 1886 when Fred’s father had a stroke, incapacitating him until his death three years later. In between, the business (but not the premises) was sold and the family moved to a new home – at no 86 Park Road.
The Ball family were Methodists, all the children being baptized in the Leicester Road Wesleyan Methodist church where they must have worshipped. That did not prevent the boys attending, when they were old enough, Loughborough Grammar School, where the religion was Church of England.
I was fortunate to have been able to make contact with John Weitzel, the school’s archivist, who dug out and passed on information to me about the records they had relating to Fred’s time at the school. I am also indebted to him for some splendid photos, along with details of Fred’s academic performance during his time at the school (1893-5).
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| Quad at LGS, 1895 |
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| View across the LGS quad, from the tower, 2021 |
My favourite is the photo of the football team – Fred is standing in the back row, second from left, next to the three teachers who also played in the team (things were a bit different then). I was also interested to discover that the boy sitting in the front row, Harry Linacre, second from left, later went on to play for Nottingham Forest and England.
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| LGS football team, 1894-5 (see notes, below) |
Fred did well academically, especially in maths and languages, during the two years he spent at the school. No science was taught at this time. In spite of this (or because of it?), Fred developed a passion for botany and resolved to make horticulture his career. Possibly an uncle or other relative may have played a part in this but it is clear he had to make his own way – he was certainly not following in his father’s profession.
His career began with an apprenticeship at the well-known firm of William Barron & Sons, at Elvaston, near Borrowash, in Derbyshire, 16 miles from Loughborough. An elaborate apprenticeship agreement, preserved among the family papers, sets out the terms and conditions, including the requirement that he should not play cards nor ‘haunt Taverns or Playhouses nor absent himself from his Master’s service unlawfully’ (it sounds as though it could date from Elizabethan times!)
So Fred then left home in April 1896, finding lodgings near to his employer, and served the three years of his apprenticeship. Six months after its term ended he left for another job in horticulture – with Peter Barr &Sons in Long Ditton, Surrey, where the firm had a large nursery. He left with a glowing reference: ‘We have always found him very industrious and attentive to his duties and anxious to learn’, wrote John Barron, and wished him well in his desire to ‘better himself elsewhere’.
The place to go if you really wanted to get on in horticulture was the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, just a short distance, as it happens, from Peter Barr & Sons in Surrey. After a year with them he applied to Kew and was accepted, telling them that he had been ‘trying to prepare himself for some time’. He was three months short of his 21st birthday.
Kew Gardens laid the foundations of Fred’s career. He worked first in the Temperate House, then at the rock garden, and he made the most of his opportunities. He was clearly one of the most able, and most motivated, of his contemporaries there. He gained a number of qualifications, became secretary of the British Botany Society and the Kew Mutual Improvement Society, and one year was the winner of the prestigious Joseph Hooker Prize for the best essay (on ‘Hardy Conifers’).
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| Temperate House, Kew Gardens, 1902 (colour) |
At the end of three years (the period that student gardeners usually spent at Kew) he decided to join his younger brother Wilfred in setting up a nursery and market garden in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire. His two best friends at Kew, by way of contrast, joined the Colonial Service and ended up in Uganda and Malaya respectively.
The family partnership did not prosper, however, and 3 years later – in 1906 –it was dissolved. Fred, in need of employment, returned briefly to Kew before being offered a job as outside foreman at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin.
This is where Fred made his name and reputation. He was promoted after 6 months to the position of Assistant Keeper and in 1911 was appointed editor of the monthly journal Irish Gardening. This put him at the centre of a horticulture network that was part of a strong drive to strengthen agriculture in Ireland more generally. He was also a skilled plant breeder, remembered particularly for creating some Escallonia hybrids – most notably the one that would be named after him, Escallonia ‘C.F. Ball’. This can be found in gardens and nurseries to this day and several have been planted in his memory. There is one at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge, Dublin, and another is in front of the Carillon Tower in Loughborough.
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| Escallonia 'C.F. Ball', Kilmacurragh, Co. Wicklow |
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| Escallonia 'C.F. Ball' to the rear of Loughborough's Carillon, May 2022 |
A regular theme in the reports about Fred at Glasnevin is not only how good he was at his job but how well-liked he was. Whilst modest and quite quiet, he seems to have had a gift for friendship and he made a good impression on everybody he came into contact with.
From 1911 a more personal picture emerges for this was when he started to write to Alice Lane – these are the letters I inherited when my mother died. Alice was the youngest daughter of a well-to-do Anglo-Irish family in Dublin. The letters tell the story of their courtship, or at least his side of it (since it is only his letters to her that have been preserved), and their ups and downs, culminating – after at least one postponement – in their marriage in Dublin in December 1914.
The letters also tell us a lot about relations with his own family. It is obvious that he had a close relationship with his mother Mary, but he was close to his other siblings too, particularly his sister Constance (Connie) who had left Loughborough after marrying her husband Arthur Ohlson in 1911. We also learn of the death of his favourite brother Herbert, from tuberculosis – he had been a professional photographer and had his studio at 14 High Street where the family pharmacy once was.
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| Charles Frederick Ball, taken by his brother, Herbert, c.1904 |
When war broke out in August 1914 Fred decided to enlist, as a private, in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He could have returned to England to enlist in a regiment there – like his brother Wilfred who joined the 9th Lancers and then the Leicestershire Yeomanry. But it is obvious that his loyalties now lay in Ireland so Dublin’s local regiment was a natural choice – and of course, it enabled him to see Alice when he had leave or was granted a pass when they were based in Dublin.
Fred was in training with the Fusiliers in Ireland until the end of April 1915, when his battalion – the 7th – joined the 10th (Irish) division for further training in Basingstoke, Hampshire. On at least one occasion he must have returned to Loughborough (though his mother and siblings had all moved away) because a photograph of him, in uniform, was taken by F. Newton Neild, whose business now had the studio at 14 High Street once used by his late brother Herbert. The photo has survived because it was sent by Fred’s mother Mary to the Imperial War Museum in 1917 - and can be seen today on their website.
Fred’s battalion was sent to Gallipoli in August 1915. It was a disastrous campaign. There were many thousands of casualties, and Fred was one of them – killed by Turkish shellfire on 13 September 1915. He was 35 years old (though his gravestone in the Lala Baba cemetery, Suvla Bay, has this as 36).
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| Headstone at Lala Baba cemetery, Sulva Bay, Gallipoli |
Residents of Loughborough read of his death in the Loughborough Echo on 8 October in an obituary that appeared under the headline ‘Old Loughburian killed in the Dardanelles’. It looks to me, from the information it conveys, as though it was written by his mother, or was at least based on information supplied by her.
Others who were with him in Gallipoli told of his fascination with the plants and flowers he found around him, amidst all the horrors of war, and of the acts of bravery they witnessed. ‘Letters from soldiers in the same detachment received since his death’, wrote Sir Frederick Moore, Keeper of the Botanic Gardens in Dublin, ‘give instances of bravery and self-sacrifice unostentatiously performed, and of which no hint is given in his own letters’.
In the newspaper obituaries in Ireland there was also a keen awareness of the nature of his contribution to horticulture – he was, the Irish Times said, after reviewing his accomplishments, ‘One of the best-known botanists and horticulturists in Ireland’. It is gratifying that his memory, and details of his life and career, have been preserved in the splendid Loughborough war memorial, roll of honour.
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| C.F. Ball commemorated in the first column on the Loughborough Carillon and War Memorial |
As for Alice, my grandmother: she stayed on in their home in Dublin and in 1918, after learning how to drive, joined the Women’s Royal Air Force. She was based at Tallaght aerodrome, just outside Dublin, before being demobilized in 1919. It must have been around this time that she met my grandfather, Major Robert Kinghan, who had served with the Royal Irish Fusiliers on the western front, and remained in the army, based in Dublin, during the turbulent period of the Irish war of independence. They were married in London in 1922 and they decided to make their home in England rather than Ireland. Which I suppose is why I ended up a British and not an Irish citizen.
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| Major Robert Kinghan, MC, portrait, c.1917 |
Brian Willan
2 July 2022
If you would like to know more, I have told Fred Ball’s story in more detail – and with over 100 photographs - in my book, Charles Frederick Ball: from Dublin’s Botanic Gardens to the Killing Fields of Gallipoli (Liffey Press, May 2022).
It is available from bookshops and online sellers like Amazon
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About Brian Willan
Brian Willan is a grandson of Alice Ball by her second marriage. A former publisher, he has written and edited a number of books in the field of South African history and holds honorary fellowships at several South African universities. He lives in Devon, England.
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Notes by lynneaboutloughborough
The photograph of the LGS football team 1894-5 includes Mr Woodward, about whom I have written previously, and the two Eddowes boys I would assume to be the sons of Dr Arthur Benjamin Jackson Eddowes - probably Arthur, seated, and John Henry, standing.
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Thank you for reading this blog. You are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:
Lynne
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