1. Sarah Elizabeth OWEN-SMITH, daughter of John OWEN SMITH (1804-1871) and Elizabeth GILBERT (1809?-1893?), was baptised on 17 November 1833. She was born on 30 December 1839 in Cape of Good Hope, Port Elizabeth. She was born on 30 December 1839 in South Africa. She married Hopkins BADNALL on 27 February 1854 in St. Mary's Cathedral, Port Elizabeth. She died on 7 December 1903 in Kensington, London. She was buried on 12 December 1903 in Badnall Family Vault, Leek, Staffs..

Bishop's Diocesan School for Boys, founded by Hopkins Badnall, has a ladychapel dedicated to Sarah Badnall.

Her date of birth is quite possibly wrong, as there is a baptism recorded earlier than this, which is probably correct, and would make her marriage happen at the age of 15.

The Venerable Hopkins BADNALL, son of Richard Jnr. BADNALL (1797-1839) and Sarah HAND (1799-1886), was born on 12 September 1821 in Leek, Staffordshire. He was christened on 24 September 1822 in St. Edwards Leek, Staffs.. He was an Archdeacon of Cape Town, Vicar General of Capetown. He also founded Bishop's Diocesan School and was vice-chancellor of the University of the Cape of Good Hope. He appeared in the census. He was educated at Durham University, BA, MA1851, DD1870, He was Curate in Stockton-on-Tees in 1845. He accompanied Bishop Gray in 1847 in South Africa. He became Rector of Goldsborough in 1855. He became Rector of Cawthorne in 1857. He became Vicar of Fishlake in 1886. He died on 27 September 1892 in 19 Randolf Rd., Maida Vale, London. He was buried on 1 October 1892 in Family Vault, Leek, Staffs.. He and Sarah Elizabeth OWEN-SMITH had the following children:

4. Florence May BADNALL, daughter of The Venerable Hopkins BADNALL and Sarah Elizabeth OWEN-SMITH, was born on 8 February 1858 in Cawthorne, Yorks. She married Maurice Fitzgerald WILSON on 2 August 1884. She died on 31 January 1941. She was buried in February 1941.

Florence May was the third of nine children of Hopkins Badnall, and was brought up in South Africa where her father was Archdeacon of the Cape. She met her future husband whilst he was a very junior engineer serving his apprenticeship in Port Elizabeth. She was thought of affectionately by her two sons, but was reckoned to be physically rather lazy. In her youth she had a talent for drawing, and a booklet of cartoons of her family members still survives, entitled "The Book of Truth and Nonsense (Combined)" which clearly shows a great sense of humour.

Maurice Fitzgerald WILSON, son of Richard Bassett WILSON (1806-1867) and Anne FITZGERALD ( -1877), was born on 4 February 1858 in London. He was a Civil Engineer. He was confirmed on 20 October 1874. He died on 23 December 1945. He was buried in December 1945. He and Florence May BADNALL had the following children:

12. Captain Maurice Fiennes Fitzgerald WILSON DSO, RN (known as 'Fiennes', and also as [unnamed person]), son of Maurice Fitzgerald WILSON and Florence May BADNALL, was born on 22 June 1886 in 2 Talbot Villas, Old Dover Road, Gravesend, Kent. He was a Naval Officer. He married Catherine Gladys MURRAY on 4 August 1914 in St Judes, Portsea, Portsmouth, England. He died on 16 February 1975 in Watlington, Oxon. He was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery.

Fiennes, as he was known, had a career as a Naval Officer. His specialism was navigation. He was awarded the DSO for bravery in action during WW1, as well as the equally prestigious Dutch Order of Orange Nassau. (Listed in London Gazette of 25 November, 1947). Fiennes wrote a detailed diary of his WW1 experience - something officers were expressly forbidden to do. Some of that diary still exists, in particular his time aboard HMS Drake in 1914.

He tried, unsuccessfully (but only just) to get onto Scott's Antarctic Expedition, and correspondence about his efforts to be included still exist.

There are many more multimedia records for this entry, which can be via through Flickr.com

At the age of 14, Fiennes was at a school in Greenwich, at 50 Chroun(?) Hill. There appeared to be but 10 pupils (13-15 years of age) and a headmaster and his wife. Interestingly, in the 1891 census, the family is at 27 Sloane Gardens, Chelsea, London. The two boys are there, aged 4 and 2, 5 servants including a "nurse" and "nursemaid", but no sign of either parent!

MFFW was awarded the DSO during the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1917.
This was a naval engagement in World War I. On 17 November 1917, German minesweepers clearing a path through the British minefield in the Heligoland Bight near the coast of Germany were intercepted by two British cruisers, HMS Calypso and HMS Caledon, performing counter-minesweeping duties. The German ships fled south toward the protection of the battleships SMS Kaiser and SMS Kaiserin, commanded by Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. The two cruisers engaged the German battleships, while their own screening force of the battlecruisers HMS Tiger, HMS Renown, HMS Repulse, HMS Courageous, and HMS Glorious of the First Battlecruiser Squadron, commanded by Admiral Sir Charles Napier, were coming up to assist.

All personnel on the bridge of HMS Calypso, including her captain, were killed by a 12-inch shell. HMS Repulse, Captain William Boyle, briefly engaged the German battleships, but the Germans made it back to the safety of their own minefields with the loss of only a torpedo boat.

You will find an account of the encounter in the Gazettes (www.gazettes-online.co.uk). I believe in the 24 June 19 gazette.

"British forces were Glorious, Courageous and eight light cruisers with four battlecruisers in support attemping to attack German minesweeping forces and whatever patrol forces they encountered. They hit upon four German light cruiser under Kontreadmiral von Reuter, which laid smoke and fell back toward two supporting German battleships. Glorious and Courageous fired an awful lot of shells and scored few hits. The worst damaged German ship was the light cruiser Königsberg, which took a 15-inch shell from Repulse."

From the Old Wykehamist

" Register: Wilson, Maurice Fiennes Fitzgerald (D, 1899³ - 1900³), born 22 June 1886, son of Maurice Fitzgerald Wilson, Bagenholt, Dover. Midshipman HMS Drake; Sub-Lieutenant.1906; Lieutenant-Commander HMS Calypso 1918; DSO.

His House annals record that Fiennes was in MP2 when he arrived at the school (being the ‘Middle Part’ of the school, this would demonstrate to me that he was particularly bright – at least he would have been in my day in the mid-60s!) and in MP3 when he left. The annals also state ‘left to cram for R.N, 5th into Britannia 1901’. [Junior Part lies below and Senior Part above (unsurprisingly!), with VIth Book at the peak of the academic streaming.]

Fiennes was only here for a year – in Kenny’s (aka Fearons or ‘D’)".

Fiennes was educated at Winchester College and made a successful career in the Navy, where he was known as one of its most talented navigators. He was awarded the DSO for courage during WW 1, during action on HMS Calypso where the Captain was killed and he was seriously injured, yet remained in charge to bring the ship to safety. Fiennes was also almost chosen to be part of Scott's fated Antartctic expedition, but was in the end left out due to politics: there was controversy about the expedition which centred around the issue of whether the expedition should at heart be a civil or naval venture. After WW 1 Fiennes worked for Admiral Kelly in the fledgling League of Nations. During WW 2 he returned to the Navy and was involved in convoy work , for which, by order of the Dutch monarch, he became a Commander of the Order of Orange Nassau. After WW 2 Fiennes involved himself in a number of occupations, including keeping chickens. He was interested in genealogy, book-binding and had a passion for driving an old Bentley car; this latter had a tragic consequence in his old age when he ran over and killed a young woman (who was known to him) in the village where he lived: he was driving in the dark and had not seen her. Fiennes was known for his quiet courage and great sense of humour.

Catherine Gladys MURRAY (known as 'Gladys'), daughter of Colonel Pulteney Henry MURRAY (1849-1912) and Mary Leaycraft INGHAM (1848-1890), was born on 18 January 1886 in Oswestry (registered). She was born on 18 January 1886 in Oswestry. She died on 12 April 1958. She and Maurice Fiennes Fitzgerald WILSON had the following children:

13. Bassett Fitzgerald WILSON, son of Maurice Fitzgerald WILSON and Florence May BADNALL, was born on 1 September 1888 in St. Ives, Cornwall. He was a Soldier, artist. He married Muriel Gertrude SAMUELSON on 24 April 1915. He was buried circa 1941. He died circa May 1972.

Rugby School entry: Wilson, Bassett Fitzgerald, only son of Maurice Fitzgerald Wilson, Esq., Castle Avenue, Dover, aged 14, September 1. Stallard

Bassett studied at Trinity College, Cambridge where he read Law. Took up painting after being injured in the First World War. In 1917 held an exhibition of Western Front work at Walker's Galleries. During the 1920's with his wife Muriel Wilson established his reputation as a painter. Exhibited together in an exhibition in 1921 at Walker's Galleries, then in 1925 in a group show with John Cosmo Clark and Roland Vivian Pitchforth at Goupil Gallery. Bassett held a one man show in 1927 at the Fine Art Society in Bond Street. Were drawn into the modern movement in the 1930's after they moved to Paris and made friends with artists such as Andre Lhote, in whose studio they both worked from time to time. In 1930 showed at Knoedler's in New York and Chicago. Exhibited with his wife at Reid and Lefevre Gallery in London; Darlington Municipal Art Gallery - Bassett's watercolour was purchased by the town's permanent collection, at Salon des Tuileries and Galerie Gerbo in Paris (where Bassett's Stacked Chairs was selected for particular mention in Sud) and with Rhyma Grop at Helsingfors in Finland ( the two Wilsons and Lhote were invited to represent the best and most modern in European art) in 1934. In 1935-37 showed in a number of exhibitions in Paris. Bassett joined the British Expeditionary Force in his old rank of Captain for the duration of the Second World War. In 1946 Bassett held a large retrospective at Galerie du Bac, Paris from which National Museum of Modern Art, Paris purchased one work from his Chairs series - the Chairs of Luxembourg Gardens. Patrick Seale held a show of Wilson's work in 1981.

Early in May 1972, in the national obituary columns, appeared the name of Brigadier Bassett F. G. Wilson OBE. MC. Croix de Guerre, who had just died in London, aged 83. The paragraph following told of his service with the King's Royal Rifle Corps and the 4th American Corps in World War 1; of his service on Montgomery's staff and as Provost Marshal of the 21st Army Group in World War II; of his subsequent chairmanship of the RMP Association. Then, as an after-thought "artist who held exhibitions of paintings under name, Bassett."

When the Brigadier's widow, Muriel, died in October 1977, her obituary made no mention at all of the fact that she too, had been an artist. Yet in the 1930's Bassett and Muriel, to give them the names by which they chiefly signed their work at that time, had been accounted among the foremost of European painters.

Both were virtually self-taught. Bassett, after school at Rugby where he was an almost exact contemporary of Rupert Brooke, though not in the same house, went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Law. After graduation he had a short period as a very junior diplomat, then joined a flourishing law practice in London, before becoming a soldier in 1914 at the outbreak of War.

Severely wounded in France, he was advised by the M.O. to take up sketching in convalescence, as a way of improving the impaired co-ordination between eye and hand. He found he had a natural aptitude for drawing and painting, which he put to such good use when he returned to active service that he was able, in 1917, to mount an exhibition of Drawings and Watercolours of the Western Front at Walker's Galleries in Bond Street. As a serving officer he could not exhibit under his own name; and therefore chose the nom de pinceau Basfi du Bleu (significantly French, one may think, in the light of his later artistic development).

Muriel, one of the three children of Sir Francis Samuelson, 3rd Baronet, and his Canadian wife, Fanny Isabel Merritt Wright, had the usual upbringing of a girl or her time and place in Society. She too was found to have an aptitude for painting, chiefly watercolour landscapes and flower pieces. Her first recorded exhibition was a joint one with Bassett, again at Walker's Galleries, in 1921. No press cuttings survive, but it would seem to have been a success, since each had at least one watercolour reproduced in art magazines "Muriel's Violets in Bowl in "Drawing and Design¡", Bassett's Red Roofs and Poppies in "Colour".
In the 1920's both consolidated their position as good traditional English painters, with submissions to a group show at the Goupil Gallery in 1925 (where their fellow exhibitors included future R.A.'s Cosmo Clark and Vivian Pitchforth); Bassett in 1927 with a one-man show at the Fine Art Society in Bond Street of Watercolours of Italy, Spain and London which earned him the good opinion of the critics ("An amateur artist of exceptional talent, he can give points to many fulltime professional painters"); Muriel in 1929 by inclusion in Lord Duveen's British Artists' Exhibition at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool, and with a major show at Alex. Reid and Lefevre in London, which elicited high praise in the Sunday Times from the critic and historian of the Modern Movement, RH Wilenski, and from which a flower piece was bought by the Contemporary Art Society and presented to Leicester City Art Gallery, where it remains in the permanent collection.

This then was their situation at the end of the decade. Muriel, a Society painter of professional standard, was gaining renown for her decorative flower pieces. Bassett, a successful lawyer, was a Sunday and holiday painter, specialising in landscape watercolours and drawings. They lived in a fine small Town house in Knightsbridge, carrying on an easy and agreeable existence with their only son, Paul. Yet encouraged by good reviews "the praises of such as Wilenski, PG Konody of the Observer, Rom Landau of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the connoisseur/collector Dr. GC Williamson" and most of all by an overwhelming and passionate love of painting, they relinquished all these seeming advantages, sent Paul to boarding-school, and removed to Paris.

Their arrival at 23, rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse marks their transition from above-average amateurs to superb professionals of the then unequalled Ecole de Paris. Not, of course that the change took place overnight. But the new environment resulted in an immediate lifting and liberation of the spirit. I know from my own experience, twenty years later, of the difference between London and Paris for a practitioner of the arts.

A guest at a dinner party in London, introduced as a writer, a musician, a painter, invariably faces the question, often enunciated, always implied "Yes, but what do you really do for a living?". In Paris "the Muse must be protected". This was said to the present writer not by some great patron of the arts, but by the keeper of a now defunct flea-bitten rooming house in the rue Monsieur-le-Prince as he transferred me, at no extra charge, from a noisy uncomfortable room on the street to the best his establishment could offer, an inner courtyard room with a window overlooking the minute garden.

Even more so was the Muse respected and protected in the Paris of the 1930's. And quickly the Wilsons made friends with their fellows in the Quarter "with André Lhote, in whose studio both worked from time to time; with the author Henri Heraut; with the photographer Marrc Vaux; and with Man Ray, under whose guidance Muriel became an expert creative photographer.

Naturally in such an environment, and able all day and every day to draw and paint uninterruptedly, their work flourished. In Spring 1930 they crossed to the USA for exhibitions at Knoedler's in New York and Chicago, in the catalogue foreword to which RH Wilensky advises collectors "buy them now, and be accounted men of foresight when the Wilson become more famous in a few years time."

In 1934 began the long sequence of exhibitions which were to give body to that prediction. In January at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery in London; in March at the Darlington Municipal Art Gallery, where their "modern" work caused uproar, and from which a Bassett watercolour of the Dordogne in the old style was bought for the town's permanent collection where it is still to be seen. In May both exhibited in the Salon des Tuileries in Paris, where Bassett was compared favourably with Jacques Villon by the French critic of the Gazette des Beaux Arts; in June at the Galerie Gerbo in Paris, where Bassett's Stacked Chairs, of which there is a later version in the present exhibition, was selected for particular mention in Sud; in July in a group show of English and American artists in Paris at L'Association Florence Blumenthal; in November with the Rhyma Group at Helsingfors in Finland.

The two Wilsons and Lhote were invited to represent the best and most modern in European art by a large group of Finnish artists. Matti Waren, secretary of the group, wrote after the show: "We are sure that your beautiful pictures, which you have so kindly sent to us to make our exhibition a great event in our art life, will have a stimulating effect on our painting ... The work of a pioneer is not a grateful one, if you consider the economical result, but its significance cannot be overestimated."
In the following year an even more important invitation was extended to Bassett and Muriel. A committee of French artists organised the first Salon du Temps Présent, the avowed aim of which was "to wage war on the revival of academicism". The Wilsons were the only English artists invited to submit work for consideration by the all-French artist jury. Both had work selected by that jury for exhibition alongside Dufy, Friesz, Miro, Bores, Kisling, Delaunay and Matisse. Their acceptance as full members of the School of Paris was complete.

In the following two years (1936/7) they were again both selected for the 2nd and 3rd Salons du Temps Présent (the latter being mounted in Durand-Ruel¡'s famous gallery). They showed also at the Paris Salons d'Art Mural and des Indépendants; at the Office of Spanish Tourism, and at the Galerie Katia Granoff. It was at this time that Bassett began the systematic use of collage, initially as a means of working out his compositions, but developing it into a full-blown medium as shown in Salzburg and Passage Interdit, collages in the present exhibition, and much later (in the 1960's) often incorporating some of Muriel's photographic prints of the 1930's.

Muriel for her part, joined on each of his school holidays by Paul, became enraptured by the celebrated Paris circuses, where she made photographs which she used as aide-memoires for the creation of such paintings as the masterly Cirque d'Hiver I and II in the present show. Each long vacation too, Paul himself, showing some aptitude for drawing and painting, joined his parents in a journey to some hitherto unexplored part of Europe - Italy, the Adriatic Coast, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and once, Russia (the chief outcome of which was Bassett's massive Allegorical Ikon, not in the present show).

The 1939 war put an end to all this activity. Bassett, though two days beyond his 51st birthday, and unlike some of his Paris-based compatriots who took the first boat-train out of France to America, and were not seen again on this side of the Atlantic until 1946, joined the British Expeditionary Force in his old rank of Captain. Muriel at first organized refugee reception in France, and after Dunkirk, worked with the Motor Transport Corps in England. Paul joined the army, in the fullness of time becoming a Commando Captain.

World War II brought much misery to many, and to the Wilsons perhaps more than their share. Almost all their paintings of 1938 and 1939, conserved in their Paris studio, were looted or destroyed in the Occupation. In the last days of the war in Europe Paul Bassett-Wilson MC, leading No.3 Troop of the 9th Commando, was killed in Italy.
For a decade and more the grieving Muriel painted not at all. Late in 1946 Bassett accepted an invitation to mount a large retrospective at the Left Bank Galerie du Back, from which the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris bought one of his Chair series "the Chairs" in the Luxembourg Gardens. Again, Wilenski wrote the catalogue introduction, and concluded of Bassett what might with equal reason apply to Muriel "If Bassett's English Muse, afraid of seeming dry and Puritan and stay-at-home, occasionally dons gold and scarlet, emerald and russet skirts, peacock bodices, mantillas and high combs to challenge her adventurous sisters of the Ecole de Paris, we must not reproach her for conduct unbecoming an English lady, but rather applaud her enterprise and courage."

Max Wykes-Joyce
Member international Association of Art Critics
London Art Critic, International Herald Tribune

There are many more multimedia records for this entry, which can be via through Flickr.com.

Muriel Gertrude SAMUELSON, daughter of Francis Arthur Edward SAMUELSON Bart. (1861-1946) and Fanny Isabel WRIGHT ( - ), was an Artist. She died in October 1977. She and Bassett Fitzgerald WILSON had the following children: