The chief benefit of using the family reconstitution method when researching family histories is that you get a much wider angled lens on a family group than you would if you focused in on the individuals. This is a story that has been told in fragments across many different sources (not least, by me on twitter) but only makes proper sense as an intergenerational story.
This is a story that starts with a rich man, Henry Moses, a Jewish wholesaler in Tower Hill, who set up a trading link with Australia in the 1830s and made a fortune. Among his many children was a daughter, Rachel Adelaide, born in approximately 1834.
Like all Henry’s children, Rachel made a good marriage. She married John Davis, a wealthy Jewish trader, in London in 1856. A year later, when Rachel was either heavily pregnant or recently postnatal, John died. He left her a small fortune, and she took her baby boy, John Mortimer Davis, to Brighton to recover from her bereavement.
There, she met a French sculptor named Louis Nicolas Adolphe Mégret. Louis converted to Judaism to marry Rachel in 1862, and then kept her solidly pregnant for the next seven years. In 1867, he persuaded her to move to France. While suffering postnatal depression in 1870, she consented to go and stay in an asylum in Paris.
And Louis left her there. He did not visit. He did not write. He did not respond to the letters she sent. Instead, he took all the children, including John Mortimer to England, where he set about redirecting the Davis trust fund into his own coffers. The trustees believed his story about Rachel being insane – why wouldn’t they? – and Louis had custody of John Mortimer, who had a great deal of money settled on him in his own right. John’s uncle Alfred had died childless in January 1870, settling another vast sum on the adolescent boy. This may have been the reason Louis engineered Rachel’s confinement.
Rachel was fully recovered from her illness by the end of 1871, but Louis continued to ignore her. He recanted his Jewish faith and returned to Roman Catholicism, had their children baptised and put all his efforts into getting John Mortimer to convert. He employed a woman to look after the children, who subsequently married John Mortimer, despite being twenty-two years his senior and John being a teenager and unable to marry without parental consent.* Louis sold Rachel’s jewels, furniture and clothing..
Finally, in 1876, Rachel convinced the asylum directors that she was sane, and was released. She promptly applied for a separation from her husband, but the French court said no and ordered her to go back to living with Louis. Louis kept her a prisoner in their home for the next few months, locking her in when he left the house. Then he had her incarcerated in Charenton Asylum near Paris.
This time, Rachel managed to get word to her English solicitors who arranged her release, and she subsequently escaped to England. John Mortimer, then on the cusp of turning twenty and still an ‘infant’ in English law, brought a court case against his stepfather to reinstate his mother’s inheritance.
The court found in Rachel’s favour. Her money was reinstated and Louis was ordered to pay back the funds he had misappropriated. Rachel did not seek a divorce, presumably because Louis would take all her assets.
And that is mostly the end of Rachel’s story. She does not appear on the 1881 or 1891 census, and may have been living in France. She died in Ticehurst House Asylum after a two month admission, in 1899. Louis was still alive when she died, but his death is untraceable. Their seven children lived in both London and Paris.
John Mortimer Davis’ story does not end here though. Rachel had an older brother – Samuel Henry Beddington.** Samuel had married Zillah Simon and they had four beautiful, Bohemian daughters who became quite famous in their social circle, being friends of Oscar Wilde and Proust, and one was the lover of Puccini. Their second daughter, Evelyn Kate Beddington, eloped with John Mortimer in 1888. Her parents opposed the match, possibly because they were cousins, possibly because of the scandal associated with John’ s mother, possibly because they knew he had been married before. John was a wealthy man, and a barrister, so it’s unlikely they opposed the marriage on practical grounds.
The marriage was miserable. They lived in Hyde Park, without children, while Evelyn was incessantly unfaithful. John tired of being cheated on, and filed for divorce in April 1892 against Evelyn and her lover, Sidney Starr.
The divorce was never completed. John shot himself in Edinburgh on 1st October 1892. The inquest was broadly kept out of the newspapers, and blamed their marital issues. It probably also quietly alluded to his mother’s time in asylums.
John was thirty five. had been deprived of a father around the time he was born. His mother was forcibly absent from his life throughout his adolescence, while his stepfather did his best to mould him into a pliant Roman Catholic. He was (probably) seduced into an ill-advised marriage with a much older woman, which was then either dissolved or hidden under the carpet. The court case he was forced to open to reinstate his inheritance was reported salaciously across the country. His in-laws, his own aunt and uncle, didn’t want him to marry their daughter. His wife was repeatedly unfaithful, and divorce was stigmatised. He had no children and little contact with his younger siblings. The only thing he did have was money, and lots of it. His estate on his death was worth £93,510, somewhere between forty and seventy million pounds today. He left the bulk of the money to a woman named Nellie Kauffmann, who he perhaps planned to marry, and to his siblings, Henry, Anita, Blanche and Constance Mégret .
Evelyn remarried in 1894. Her second husband was Walter Eugene Behrens, and they spent their married life in France. Evelyn died in 1910, aged 46. One of her biographers hinted that she may have died of syphilis. Walter Behrens died in 1922. They had twin sons.
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* This marriage was either dissolved or ignored when it came to John’s second wife.
** This branch of the Moses family changed their surname to Beddington in approximately 1866.
Sophie Michell 