Family papers reveal the story of a remarkable Victorian gentleman

The Corfield Papers in West Sussex Record Office: An Illustrated Catalogue and Family History has been published by Northgate Press in association with West Sussex Record Office at £40, available from Kim’s Bookshop, Chichester and Arundel.

Kim, aged 80, who lives in Felpham, explains: “My family never threw anything away! I inherited a vast collection of thousands of documents dating from the 18th century from my late grandfather, Dr Carruthers Corfield of Rustington (1873-1969) – letters, diaries, notebooks, jottings and scraps, leaflets, bills, tickets, in fact just about anything on paper, plus over a thousand family photographs dating from the 1850s.

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“His house in Sea Lane, now St Bridget’s Cheshire Home, was enormous, stuffed full of our family history, antique curios and memorabilia.

“Prehistoric fossils jostled for space with Ngoni tribal carvings and even a terrifyingly jagged piece of German shrapnel from the bomb that nearly killed him in his Rustington garden during the Second World War. As the book explains, my grandfather was an extraordinary man, his long life crammed with intense activity in a huge number of local and national spheres. Outside his field of surgery and medicine he took on a wide range of public duties, his most outstanding as chairman of the Church of England Children’s Society. One of his less onerous duties was as editor of the South London Harriers’ Gazette, founded in 1871 as one of the four oldest athletic clubs in the country. He acted as medical advisor to members running in the marathon trial for the 1908 Olympic Games, the club, he proudly wrote, entering more members to the British team than any other club in the country.

“His early life in late Victorian London he documented in extraordinary detail. He was a compulsive record keeper in diaries and letters. Some of his earliest medical experiences were in the slums of Whitechapel, notorious for its poverty, squalor and violence. Here he worked – not happily – as assistant and dispenser to Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the newsworthy surgeon who carried out the post-mortem on the first Jack the Ripper victim, murdered within yards of his surgery.

“Grandfather’s diaries document all his expenses in immense detail, for clothes, books and travel, the bodies he dissected as a medical student and even his daily, weekly, monthly and annual miles cycled, to the nearest quarter of a mile, before he bought his first car in 1912. ‘Essential’ said his father-in-law, ‘in creating the right image amongst your patients, a bicycle just won’t do!’

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“As I worked in the West Sussex Record Office as its education officer, it was natural that I made this home for such a wonderful collection of my grandfather’s where it’s now safely stored and preserved.

“It’s one of the largest family collections in the West Sussex Record Office. Sorting and cataloguing and now the production of this book has been one of my main interests since retirement some years ago.

“It’s not just about my family history and West Sussex. It’s far more than that, touching on much wider history. My ancestors have been involved in all sorts of milestone events throughout this country and even beyond.

“Surgeons and doctors abound in the family. Medical records graphically describe the typhoid and cholera epidemic in the 1830s and 40s in London’s East End. One Limehouse doctor emigrated to Australia in the 1850s, settling on the goldfields where he set up a hospital and waterworks company.

“His son, restless as a bank clerk, took up exploration. A graphic letter describes the perils of the Australian outback: poor diet – forced to eat owls and parrots, they even tried to kill a wongaroo – whilst his party suffered untreated fevers, roasting and steaming in the unrelenting climate of desert and swamp and facing bands of hostile natives banging on their shields with boomerangs. No wonder he died an early death, commemorated on his grave near Melbourne as Late Explorer.

“Yet another member of the family, one of my great aunts, ended up in New York in 1906 where she disastrously fell for an ex-cowpuncher from New Orleans who rode for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Through his familiarity with Teddy Roosevelt, the city’s police commissioner (and future U.S. president) he was appointed riding master to New York City Police, and was known as the Cowboy Cop.

“After a spell in prison for refusing to pay alimony to one of his divorced wives – he had three – he turned to local politics, the New York Tribune reporting that he ‘frequently shouted that the Capitol would run knee deep in blood if the people’s rights were trampled in the dust’. His life was as controversial as it was extraordinary. And what was so extraordinary for me was meeting this ex-cowboy’s son who came all the way to Felpham from Connecticut some forty years ago to share his stories about all their troubles.”

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