Page 112 - QDG 2023

110 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards
RSM Thomas Barlow’s grave
A lot has been written about our famous RSM from Waterloo. But whilst we know a little about his KDG career, we know nothing really about his life after he left the Regiment.
In 1818, he transferred to the 23rd Light Dragoons as a Captain, on half pay. In 1819, he became adjutant of the Prince Regent’s 2nd Regiment of Cheshire Yeomanry, an appointment which he held until his retirement in 1833. Just before then, in 1830, his wife, Elizabeth Wagstaff, who was the daughter of the KDG Quartermaster William Wagstaff, died of unknown causes. Three years later, he received a commuted allowance for his commission and on 12 August 1833, he married Sarah Dorrington, at St. John's, Manchester, Lancashire.
He became a full time Methodist preacher and for some years lived at Pickmere, Cheshire. But thereafter, we have no further information. Nor did we know where he was buried.
Enter Jill Birtwistle.
Jill was born in Ilkley, a small town perched on the edge of West Yorkshire. Her father joined the Cheshire regiment in 1939 and was sent to India in 1942 as an NCO. He was commissioned into the 17th Dogras with whom he served until demobilisation as a Captain in 1946. Her mother was a British record holding field athlete who represented Britain in the subsequently named ‘Austerity Olympics’ of 1948. Jill met and married an Australian and has been living there for forty years.
When she first became interested in her family history, she had no idea of Thomas Barlow’s existence nor anything about his descendants. Her mother, Margaret Jean Lucas, was from Surrey and her father had never much talked about his own relations. Jill traced her family back four generations to Margaret Rose Barlow, the youngest of Thomas’s five children. She married John Wesley Barritt and their daughter married William Lucas, Jill’s maternal grandfather.
What she found particularly fascinating was how Thomas’s life was very much connected to places she knew well, both in England and Australia. Her brother lived for some years in Brussels, and on
one visit, long before she knew about Thomas, she took a tour of Waterloo.
Jill decided to research her family tree which, by her own admission, was quite a learning process, not only of the military history of the Napoleonic Wars, and the war against the Japanese in WWII, but also of Christian Evangelical movements in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the growth of the industrial revo- lution in the North of England.
A search of the Australian National Library’s database ‘Trove’ revealed news- paper articles about Thomas’s time in the Colony, including his funeral notice. Thus, Jill managed to track down his death certificate which revealed where he was buried.
When she visited the UK in 2017, she came to our museum in Cardiff to research Thomas and that was where we made contact.
Enter Peter Jones.
Pete joined the regiment in Wimbish from Junior Leaders. He served in Wolfenbuttel, Tidworth, Sennelager and Catterick with operational tours in the Gulf and Bosnia. He emigrated to Australia on leaving the regiment in 1999. There, he set up his own business and married Eliza- beth who lived in Melbourne too. They now have three sons and a daughter.
In November 2023, he received an email out of the blue from Howard Smith, who asked for his help in tracking down Thomas Barlow’s grave. Pete contacted a friend of his in the public records office who put him in touch with the Melbourne General Cemetery (MGC) where he was purportedly buried. The MGC was extremely helpful and located reems of ancient documents and plans. After many days spent thumbing through old records with a magnifying glass, Pete discovered Barlow’s grave site. Or so he thought!
Armed with a sketchy and somewhat inaccurate 160-year-old map, he went in search of Barlow in an old graveyard that stretches over 110 acres. The site is seldom visited, very neglected and so overgrown that it is almost impossible to navigate. He requested assistance from the authorities to help clear years
of undergrowth. This enabled him to narrow the site down to a large palm tree grove where there were multiple crum- bling gravestones. In true recce style, he hacked his way through the under- growth until he reached Barlow’s grave. In his excitement, he managed to knock it over! Returning to the MGC to check the maps again so that he could mark it for posterity, he discovered it wasn’t even Barlow’s grave he had desecrated, but some other poor old pioneer of early Melbourne!
With assistance from the authorities who spent nearly a month of their own sleuthing, Pete finally found Thomas Barlow...approximately four meters from the grave he had knocked over! Sadly, the plot was empty. There is no longer a gravestone or anything else in memory of Thomas nor his wife Sarah, who is buried with him.
The MGC informed Pete that, if we wished to erect a memorial, he needed permission from the owner of the plot. Under Australian law, a plot is owned by the descendants of the deceased. Pete contacted Howard who told him about Jill and so he contacted the museum to ask for her contact details. But sadly no one at the museum had taken them down when she visited.
So, Pete called his wife’s aunt, Trudy, who is a whizz at genealogy. Trudy spent three weeks searching her sources and tracked down Jill to Queensland, even finding her email address. Pete sent an email with a detailed explanation of who he was and that the regiment were inter- ested in erecting a memorial. He received