The boys followed in their father’s footsteps and were committed to social, educational, and political reform throughout their lives.
The twins were the seventh and eighth of Stephen and Sarah Lushington’s children. They were so alike that even their closest friends found it difficult to tell them apart. A family story has it that, when at the Royal Opera House one night and confronted by his own reflection in a tall mirror at the turn of the great staircase, Vernon mistook it for his brother and exclaimed, “Hello Godfrey! I didn’t know I was to have the pleasure of seeing you here this evening.”1 William Rossetti, who knew both brothers well, but still struggled to distinguish one from the other, found a novel way of avoiding any embarrassment. He wrote “However it happened that Vernon, who had been in the navy in his early youth, had by accident, lost a finger: and a surreptitious glance at his hand was a useful precaution against such a blundering.”2 In fact, this did not happen in the navy, but on a shoot at West Horsley Place, Surrey, from which episode he was considered lucky to have escaped with his life.3
Both Maria Edgeworth and Joanna Baillie had remarked that none of the Lushington children were considered particularly attractive in their formative years [see page 31] and, when the twins were only a year old, their maternal grandmother wrote:
The dear children are as well as we can expect after Teething & a slight attack of Influenza. The babies are not in their full beauty, particularly Vernon, for you know how Sarah’s boys all fall back on weaning & when they first begin to cut their teeth.4
Following their mother’s death, the Lushington children were brought up under the watchful eye of Frances Carr (affectionately known as “Aunt Fanny”) who transferred the responsibilities of her earlier supervision of Ada Lovelace to her late sister’s family. Frances assumed the role of chatelaine of Stephen Lushington’s household at Ockham Park and remained a force to be reckoned with in the family until her death in 1880.5 She also nursed her brother-in-law during a debilitating illness in the 1850s and, later, when old age began to take its toll on him.
Cheam School
Vernon and Godfrey received their primary education at Cheam School, near Epsom, Surrey, a school that had been in existence for nearly two hundred years. The twins were considered bright pupils and, by the age of fourteen, they were “contributing excellent Latin elegiacs” as well as poetry, to the school journal.6 At Cheam, the boys were joined by their cousin Hugh Culling Eardley Childers, later First Lord of the Admiralty and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is a story that when the twins made their first visit to Cheam, one of them was hit on the head by a cricket ball and badly scarred.7
Cheam’s headmaster at this time was Charles Mayo, a man of advanced educational views who had traveled to Switzerland to gain first-hand experience of Johann Pestalozzi’s experimental school at Yverdun. This school had a similar ethos to that of another founded by the educationalist Emmanuel de Fellenberg, a man much admired by Lady Byron. Mayo was considered to be a great headmaster, “full of wit and power of conversation” and with “the gift of winning the affection of many devoted friends.”8 Mayo introduced the Pestalozzian method to Cheam when he took on the headship in 1826. His aim was that the school should provide a moral and religious educational foundation duly adapted to the principles of evangelical Christianity. However, whereas Pestalozzi sought to bring enlightenment to all, Mayo planned to start with an upper-class school and to spread the method to the masses from above. The school thrived under Mayo’s leadership and, by the early 1830s, there were between forty-five and fifty boys each of whom he made a point of knowing individually.
At Cheam, the Lushington boys experienced a regime that commenced with work and prayers from half-past six till eight o’clock interspersed with breaks and time for play and concluded with prayers at a quarter to eight. Corporal punishment was frowned upon and only permitted in special circumstances. Moreover, as a rule, punishments of all kinds were avoided. Instead, “timely advice and kind words” were considered preferable and ultimately more effective. Shortly before Mayo’s death in 1846, Henry Shepheard took over the headship. A good scholar and a man of upright character, he was, like his predecessor, a devout Christian of the rigorous sort.
In 1908, Susan Lushington, visiting Epsom, wrote to her father describing the place. He replied:
I quite agree with you as to the pretty old look of Epsom. I enjoy it every time I go there. But you, dear Sue, cannot have my primeval recollection of it—date about 1842 or 43 when my Father came there with Fanny & Alice & the horses, putting up at “Baker’s Coffeehouse” as it was called, & Godfrey & I came over from Cheam, dined with them, & walked back the next morning. It was September, for I remember the blackberries.9
However, Lushington’s memories of Cheam were not altogether happy and, faced with the prospect of being in the vicinity of his old school later his life, he recalled “Shepheard’s lank & gloomy vicarage” which produced:
a memory, which truly, is not full to me of pleasant recollections—the sight of those bricks & the 4 prison walls wd. I am sure it would be hateful to me now—For what a nursery system that was of ours—Codling puritanism; espionage, petty restrictions, incessant work & little play – my pride revolts even now as the bare thought of it all.10
A rare glimpse of Lushington’s boyhood is found in a letter written from Ockham Park by one of his siblings [probably Godfrey] to their sister Alice in 1846. The writer tells how he, together with Vernon, and their older brother William, had spent their holidays horse riding and in other activities on the estate:
Yesterday Vernon & I went out for a walk & bathed, but stopping to devour blackberries, were pressed for time. Accordingly, we made a dashing short cut over Mr Lambert’s carrot and potato field, broke through 3 nasty hedges, scaled the park wall, & ran home, just in time to wash our hands & go downstairs …Although the naval business is no longer a secret, for it is entirely settled, yet the little ones and the servants know nothing about it, in order that Papa may not hear it talked about. However, I imagine the subject does not vex him as it formerly did.11
The Naval Cadet
The “naval business” that was “no longer a secret” refers to the next phase of Lushington’s life when, despite his father’s disapproval, he went to sea as a cadet in October 1846. Such action displayed an early sense of independency in the young Lushington that ran contrary to his usual respect for his father but, in writing to one of his daughters in 1899, he reflected:
This day 53 years ago I joined H.M.S. Eurydice. The more fool I probably; at any rate it is an instance of a boy persistently longing to be what he is totally unfitted for. Why my good Father allowed me to go I cannot think.12
An event that took place during Lushington’s time at sea demonstrated an inherent sense of justice and fair play that he retained throughout his life. The episode was recounted to the art historian William Gaunt by Susan Lushington when he stayed with her to research his pioneering book on the Pre-Raphaelites.
Beginning life as a midshipman he [Vernon] was incensed at the bullying then practised; and finding one of the officers engaged in roasting a midshipman (over a fire, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), knocked him down. This piece of insubordination deserved and received praise, but also a nominal reprimand; the upshot was that he left the navy and went to Cambridge to study law.13
In December 1849 Stephen Lushington, concerned by this incident, wrote:
my thoughts . . . have been wholly occupied with Vernon—Capt. Gambier will soon save him if indeed he will be saved but I cannot expect he
