Richard Jones Croxon, solicitor

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Halifax to Shropshire by the Cunard steamer Arabia, July 1862

Some covers arrive with a family story attached. This one arrived with almost nothing: no sender, no enclosure, no docketing, just an address, a stamp and three postmarks. But postmarks are evidence, and in this case they were enough to identify the ship that carried the letter across the Atlantic, and that ship turns out to have a story of her own, one that keeps returning to Nova Scotian waters.

The Cover

The envelope is addressed in a confident hand to R. Jones Croxon Esqre, Solicitor, Oswestry, England. It is franked with a single 12½-cent black Queen Victoria from the 1860 Cents issue, tied by a barred grid. A manuscript "Paid" sits at lower left, redundant with the stamp, but typical of the period.

The back carries the route:

• HALIFAX NOVA SCOTIA JY 10 1862 — the dispatching exchange office.

• CHESTER "A" JY 23 62 — a transit mark; Oswestry mail was routed through Chester.

• OSWESTRY — the arrival mark; its date numerals are not clearly legible, but it must follow Chester by a day or so at most.

The flap also carries a blind-embossed seal, the kind of stationery a business or professional correspondent would use, and a later collector's pencil notation "905".

The Rate

Nova Scotia abandoned pounds, shillings and pence for dollars and cents in 1860. The letter rate to the United Kingdom by British packet had been sixpence sterling, and the conversion produced one of the odder denominations in British North American philately. With the Nova Scotia dollar valued at five shillings currency, 12½ cents (one-eighth of a dollar) equalled 7½d currency, which in turn equalled 6d sterling. So the half-cent on the face of this stamp is not an oddity of design; it is exactly what the arithmetic of the old rate demanded.

Finding the Ship

The Halifax backstamp gave a date, and a date is a thread to pull. Cunard's printed timetable for 1862, issued in New York on 1 January 1862 over the signature of Edward Cunard, survives in digitized form. Its Boston line table lists a sailing from Boston for Liverpool on Wednesday, 9 July 1862, calling at Halifax and at Cork Harbour (Queenstown). The Boston steamers normally reached Halifax a day or so after leaving Boston, which fits a Halifax postmark of 10 July.

The timetable does not name the ship; the "Name of Vessel" column was left blank to be filled in as the season went on. The answer came from London. The Economist printed a weekly table of mails arrived, and its issue of 26 July 1862 records American mails landed on the 19th per steam ship Arabia, from Boston on the 9th and Halifax on the 11th.

So the Halifax office made up the mail on the 10th, the day the Arabia came in from Boston, and she sailed with it early on the 11th. The same volume of the Economist shows the Africa on the Boston sailing before hers, and Cunard's own advertisement in the Liverpool Daily Post of Monday 21 July 1862 lists the Europa leaving Boston on 23 July and the Asia on 6 August. The same advertisement explains why this letter went the way it did: "The BOSTON Ships calling at HALIFAX to land and receive Passengers and Her Majesty's Mails."

It also shows how hard the ships were worked. Barely a week after landing her mails, the Arabia was advertised to sail from Liverpool again for Halifax and Boston on Saturday 26 July.

Could another ship have carried it? The same Economist table lists the next two arrivals from North America: the Allan Line Anglo-Saxon, from Quebec on the 12th, which landed her mails at Londonderry on the 23rd, and the Inman Line City of Baltimore, from New York on the 12th, which arrived on the 24th. Neither fits. A letter postmarked at Halifax on 10 July could not have reached Quebec or New York in time for either sailing, the 12½-cent rate paid for the British packet made up at Halifax rather than for the Canadian or American services, and neither ship's mails could have been at Chester by the 23rd. The next Cunard sailing from Halifax was not until late July. The Arabia is the only candidate.

The Liverpool Daily Post of Monday 21 July 1862 gives the exact arrival: "The Arabia, Captain Stone, arrived in the Mersey at half-past five on Saturday evening."

A loose end. That narrows the puzzle at the British end without quite solving it. A ship that came up the Mersey at 5:30 on a Saturday evening would have had her mails landed and sorted that night or over a Sunday with a curtailed post. In practice, onward mail for a small Shropshire town would probably have moved on Monday 21 July. The Chester transit mark, which clearly reads JY 23, still puts the letter at Chester on the Wednesday, about two working days later than one might expect for a journey of a few dozen miles by rail. Nothing on the cover explains the rest: there is no missent mark and no sign that the letter was held. I would welcome any reader's thoughts.

Samuel Cunard of Halifax

The company that carried this letter was, in a real sense, a Nova Scotian enterprise. Samuel Cunard was born in Halifax on 21 November 1787, the second child of Abraham Cunard and Margaret Murphy. Both parents came to Nova Scotia with the Loyalist migration. Abraham, of Pennsylvania German Quaker descent, arrived at Halifax in 1783 and became master carpenter to the Royal Engineers. Margaret's family had come from Ireland to South Carolina before the Revolution. Samuel's own first job, in 1811–12, was as clerk at the Royal Engineers' lumber yard, at 7s. 6d. a day.

Around 1812, father and son set up as A. Cunard and Son, dealing in timber and the West India trade. Over the following decades Samuel built one of the widest-ranging businesses in British North America. He registered at least 76 sailing vessels at Halifax, sent ships whaling, co-founded the Halifax Banking Company in 1825, and held the East India Company's tea agency for Halifax and Saint John from 1825 until 1860. He also acted as agent for the General Mining Association's Nova Scotia coal mines, bought up large estates on Prince Edward Island, and had a family stake in the Miramichi timber trade of New Brunswick.

Much of his career was bound up with communications. From 1816 he was a commissioner of lighthouses on the Nova Scotia coast. Before steam, his firm held the contracts to carry the mails by sailing packet between Halifax and Boston and between Halifax and St. John's, Newfoundland. He was also a shareholder in the Royal William, launched at Quebec in 1831 to run between Quebec and Halifax. She was an early ocean steamer and a financial loss, largely because of the 1832 cholera quarantine, but it was a lesson in what steam might do.

That lesson paid off when the Admiralty called for tenders for a steam mail service to North America late in 1838. Cunard sailed for England and in February 1839 offered to carry the mails from England to Halifax and Boston twice a month for £55,000 a year. To build the ships he joined forces with the Glasgow engineer Robert Napier, and then with the shipowners George Burns and David MacIver, forming the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the formal name on the 1862 timetable. The first steamer, the Britannia, reached Halifax at two in the morning on 17 July 1840, with Cunard and his daughter Ann aboard.

The success was not smooth. By 1842 Cunard was so overextended that he slipped out of England ahead of a creditor's writ, and he was rescued by a large loan from the Bank of Nova Scotia, which was not fully repaid until 1850. The line survived and grew. Its ships served as transports in the Crimean War, the service for which Cunard was made a baronet in March 1859.

By the time our letter sailed in 1862, Sir Samuel lived mostly in England, while his son William and nephew James Bain Morrow ran the Halifax house. Under the 1858 mail contract, the Boston steamers still called at Halifax every fortnight, which is exactly the service the Arabia was on. It did not last much longer. Cunard died in London on 28 April 1865 and was buried at Brompton Cemetery, and after 1867 his line stopped calling at Halifax altogether. This cover belongs to the last few years when a Cunarder's mailbag could still be made up in the founder's home town.

Halifax has since reclaimed him. In 2006 a bronze statue of Cunard went up on the waterfront beside the Ocean Terminal piers long used by his company's liners, and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic gives a large part of its second floor to him and his ships. Collectors will also know that Canada Post honoured him with a stamp in 2004, which gives the founder of the line his own place in the album next to this cover.

The Arabia

The Arabia was built by Robert Steele & Co. at Greenock and launched on 21 June 1852, with side-lever engines of roughly 950 to 1,000 horsepower by Robert Napier of Glasgow driving paddle wheels 36 feet across. She measured about 285 feet by 41 and some 2,400 gross tons. Unusually for a Cunarder, she carried only two masts, with two funnels. She was the last wooden-hulled ship Cunard built for the Atlantic mail service; three years later the Persia would be built of iron.

She was meant to be fast, and in smooth water she was, capable of around 15 knots, but her fine bow, wooden hull and powerful engines made for a hard ride in heavy weather. Her vibration became part of her reputation; one account has it that her machinery shook her to pieces. Contemporary newspapers praised her fittings, and later writers credit her with a stained-glass saloon dome, crimson velvet sofas, steam heating, and a nursery for children, reportedly a first on an ocean liner.

A Rough Start: Halifax, January 1853

The Arabia's first crossing did not go to plan, and it brought her to Halifax. She sailed from Liverpool for New York on 1 January 1853 under Captain C. H. E. Judkins. Strong headwinds burned through her coal, and she had to put into Halifax to take on more, losing some nineteen hours there. She reached New York on 16 January, about fifteen days out.

This mattered, because the Arabia had been built to answer the American Collins Line, whose big wooden steamers were beating Cunard on speed. Scientific American's Liverpool correspondent pointed out that the Collins steamer Baltic, which left three days before her, had made the same crossing in thirteen days without stopping for coal. His verdict on the Arabia as a challenger to Collins was blunt: "a dead failure." Her homeward run told a kinder story, New York to Liverpool in ten days and three and a half hours in good weather, and later in 1853 she made the eastbound passage in 9 days 17 hours. Cunard's real answer to Collins, though, was already on the stocks in iron.

Nova Scotia and Newfoundland Waters

The Arabia went onto the Liverpool–Halifax–Boston service in January 1854, spent time as a Crimean War transport, and returned to the Atlantic. Two of her recorded mishaps happened close to home for this blog:

• August 1856: outbound from Boston for Liverpool, she ran aground on Blonde Rock, off the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia near Seal Island, and was damaged.

• 1858: she collided with her fleet-mate Europa off Cape Race, Newfoundland; both ships were damaged, though the Arabia continued her voyage.

Summer 1862

By the time this letter went aboard, the Arabia was ten years old and outclassed by Cunard's iron ships. Her commander was Captain James Stone. He is named in Cunard's January 1862 timetable, and the Liverpool Daily Post's report of her arrival confirms it: "The Arabia, Captain Stone."

It was also a tense season on the North Atlantic. Barely eight months earlier the Trent Affair had brought Britain and the United States close to war, and Halifax was a garrison and naval port watching the American Civil War from next door. The same newspaper column shows what else the Arabia carried in her mailbags: news from New York and Boston of the bombardment of Vicksburg, McClellan's army on the James River, and talk of a draft in the North. It also carried a detail that will amuse any postal historian. With coins disappearing from circulation, the New York report noted that "some journals advocate the use of postage stamps for small change." Indeed, on 17 July 1862, while the Arabia was still at sea, Congress passed an act making postage stamps receivable for small debts, the origin of the Union's postage currency.

Fellow travellers. The Liverpool Daily Post also printed the Arabia's passenger list, and it holds a surprise. Among the passengers from Boston were "H.R.H. the Comte de Paris, H.R.H. the Duke de Chartres" and "H.R.H. the Prince de Joinville," the exiled princes of the French house of Orléans. The two young brothers, grandsons of King Louis-Philippe, had served as volunteer aides-de-camp on General McClellan's staff in the Army of the Potomac, with their uncle Joinville along as an observer. They had been through the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days' battles only weeks before. The Duc de Chartres is usually said to have resigned from the Union army on 15 July 1862, but this list puts him at sea by then, so the date may be when his resignation took effect rather than when he left.

The Halifax passengers were more local. They included "Hon. R. B. Dickey," almost certainly Robert Barry Dickey of Amherst, then a member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Council and later one of the Fathers of Confederation. Also listed were "Mr. J. Starr, Miss Starr," "Mr. C. S. Silver," "R. Doull," a Rev. C. Churchill with three daughters, and a Colonel Mundy. So the same ship that carried a letter to a Shropshire solicitor also carried French royalty home from the American war and a future Canadian senator to England. Nothing connects any of them to this cover, of course. They were simply aboard for the same crossing.

The Addressee

Richard Jones Croxon was born in Oswestry on 14 December 1804, the son of Richard and Frances Croxon, and was baptised at St Oswald's four days later. He trained as a solicitor, and by about 1840 he was also a landowner in his own right. The tithe apportionment for Maesbrook Issa, in the parish of Kinnerley a few miles south of the town, lists "Croxon Richard Jones Esqr." as owner of a farm of more than 184 acres. He kept a plantation in hand and let the rest to a tenant, George Bright: a farmhouse with its folds, orchard and shrubbery, and fields with names like Pigeon House Field, Holly Croft and the Welsh Cae Mawr, "big field."

The 1851 census, where he is indexed under the misreading "Croyon," finds him at 5 Church Street, Oswestry. He was unmarried and living in the household of his widowed mother, Frances, then 80 and described as a "Proprietor of Houses." Three unmarried sisters shared the house (Alice, Elizabeth and Sarah), along with four live-in servants. It was a comfortable household, with property on the mother's side and a professional practice on the son's.

The practice was substantial enough to train others. The Law Society's examination lists record each candidate with the solicitor to whom he was articled, and "Rd. Jones Croxon, Oswestry" appears several times, among them for John Christopher Bull.

Twenty years later nothing much had changed. In 1871 Croxon was head of the household on Church Street, still unmarried and now described as "Solicitor, Landowner." Four unmarried sisters lived with him, and the household had grown to five servants. One of them, the groom Thomas Williams, born at Kinnerley, had been a servant in the house in 1851 as well. The Owen family of wine merchants lived next door in both censuses. Taken together, these make it very likely that the Croxons never moved and that this letter was delivered in 1862 to the same house on Church Street. Richard Jones Croxon was buried at St Oswald's on 16 September 1875, aged 70, in the church where he had been baptised.

Neither census mentions the town clerkship that some sources attribute to him, and I have not yet confirmed it from a primary record.

Why someone in Nova Scotia wrote to him is unknown. A letter to a country solicitor who was also a landowner most often meant legal business, such as an estate, an inheritance, or family property left behind by someone who had emigrated. The embossed seal on the flap points to a professional sender. Without the contents, though, that remains a reasonable guess rather than a finding.

After Cunard

The Arabia did not last much longer in Cunard's fleet. The sources disagree on the details: one has her sold in 1864, converted to a sailing ship and broken up; another has her sold in 1865, resold in 1866 to a London company operating to Egypt, and scrapped in May 1867. Either way, within five years of carrying this letter she was gone.

It is a pleasing symmetry. The Arabia's first crossing ended in an unplanned stop at Halifax, and a decade later, near the end of her career, she carried a small envelope from Halifax to a solicitor in Shropshire, still bearing the stamp and postmarks that let us put her name to it.

Sources

• British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Co., Proposed Sailings…, 1862 (New York, 1 January 1862). Canadiana.

• The Economist, 26 July 1862, "Mails Arrived," and bullion reports July–September 1862. HathiTrust.

• "The Arabia, and Cunard Steamships," Scientific American 8:25 (5 March 1853), p. 194. Scientific American.

• Norway Heritage, "Arabia (2), Cunard Line," citing the Illustrated London News, 8 January 1853, and Parker & Bowen, Mail and Passenger Steamships of the Nineteenth Century (1926). norwayheritage.com.

• Phyllis R. Blakeley, "Cunard, Sir Samuel," Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9. biographi.ca.

• "Prince Robert, Duke of Chartres" and "Robert Barry Dickey," Wikipedia. Wikipedia.

• "Samuel Cunard" and "Cunard baronets," Wikipedia (burial, baronetcy, Halifax memorials, 2004 stamp). Wikipedia.

• "SS Arabia (1852)," Wikipedia, citing Nick Robins, The Coming of the Comet (2012), and contemporary newspaper reports. Wikipedia.

• British and North American Royal Mail Steamships, advertisement, Liverpool Daily Post, Monday 21 July 1862, p. 6; and "America: Arrival of the Arabia," same issue, p. 7, including the passenger list (British Newspaper Archive).

• Walter Hubbard and Richard F. Winter, North Atlantic Mail Sailings 1840–75 (U.S. Philatelic Classics Society, 1988), the standard reference for confirming the sailing.