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| Isaac Gulliver |
It was to the Dorset smugglers, at last, that I turned my attention this afternoon, and although I had heard of the infamous Isaac Gulliver before, I was fully captivated today by this supposedly lovable character, mainly because of one particular myth, or embellishment, that is linked to him in every account. When Gulliver lived in Kinson, there was an incident in which he was only one step ahead of the excise men one time, and when he got home, he covered his face in chalk, and faked his own death by lying in a coffin, with his wife weeping mournfully over him when the men came knocking on the door.
This is just too close to the one handed down in our family to be a coincidence. Could our "Captain Hyde" have been one of Gulliver's gang members, and the tale got twisted in the telling? Or could the same ruse have been tried out successfully on some different revenue men by our storied relative? I strongly suspect we will never know the answer.
Gulliver had connections to Cranborne and Cranborne Chase, which, along with the New Forest, were the main hiding-and-dividing grounds (redistribution centers) of contraband for the coastal smugglers. So, if the Captain Hyde of lore is one of the Cranborne Caroline Hyde's family, then there is a possible point of intersection there. Gulliver died in 1822, so whoever our
Captain Hyde was, he would have to have
lived around the same time if we are to
assume that these men are connected.
Another nice little tidbit is that Gulliver habitually used Branksome Chine as a place through which to move his landed goods from the beach at Poole, then up through Pugs Hole in Talbot Woods.
For those family members reading this
that don't know about Pugs Hole, now
a public foot path, I must tell you that
it runs along the perimeter of Talbot
Heath School - that fine and famous
alma mater of dear old Mum - and a beautiful little spot it is too. And, it's
only a few blocks away from where
A.R. lives now.
The one overarching frustrating fact of all this family history business is that nobody kept any handed down written records through the ages. For the last five or six generations at the very least, family members have been literate, so what happened to all the letters, diaries, records of their lives? The same as everyone else's, I suppose: lost, destroyed, not considered worth keeping. Same old, same old.
Heh heh. My dogs both wag their tails in their sleep.
http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2011/12/bidding-for-success/
http://www.smugglers2010.co.uk/smuggling-in-bournemouth
http://www.smuggling.co.uk/gazetteer_s_13.html#fnB88
http://dorset-ancestors.com/?p=912
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dorset/content/articles/2008/04/04/kinson_smugglers_feature.shtml
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