Dr. Sidney Percival Joseph: “So Excellent a Man”
This dashing
military-style portrait is of Sidney Percival Joseph (1873 -
1934) who was one of 15 children of Arthur Francis Joseph's younger brother Eugene
(1839-1915) and his wife, Georgiana Jemima (nee Ohlmus) (1848-1906).
Sidney would thus have been a nephew of Arthur Francis Joseph ("AFJ")
and Eugenia, and a first cousin of Lawrence Joseph and his brothers. As the two
cousins were almost exactly the same age, Sidney and Lawrence were
probably childhood friends and remained so after Lawrence Joseph (later
Joseph Lawrence) moved permanently to Scotland in the early 1890s.
This photograph has been with the Canadian
branch of the Lawrence family for several generations - Hugh Lawrence's brother
Brian, who lives in Kelowna, south-central British Columbia, Canada, recently
unearthed it in his collection. Still visible in dark blue ink against the
dark brown backing to this photograph are the neatly handwritten words:
"With Love
Siddie
London
9th August 1902
Coronation Day".
For years no-one in the Lawrence family in Canada or Scotland
knew for certain who "Siddie" was.
An obituary published in the JDBU of 1934
describes Dr. Sidney Percival Joseph L.R.C.P. & S.
(Edinburgh) and L.F.P. & S. (Glasgow) as "so useful a citizen, so
excellent a man". When he retired from Government service to settle down
in Colombo, he had served 27 continuous years in Ceylon's scattered outstations
as a Medical Officer / Provincial Surgeon working for the Medical department.
According to Who's Who of Ceylon 1918-20 his postings included
Maskeliya and Trincomalee, and he was promoted to Grade 1 in May 1918, at which
time he was living in Balapitiya.
Note the uniform that the young Dr. Sidney Percival
Joseph ("Siddie") is wearing in this photo. He joined the volunteer
militia body known as the Ceylon Light Infantry (CLI) in 1890, at
age 17, and was posted to Bearer Company as a Private. His presence (aged 29)
in London in 1902 was due to his being a member of the CLI contingent that
attended the coronation of King Edward VII that year. At the time, Sidney was a
L. / Sgt. in the CLI. In 1911 he went on to be a member of the Ceylon
Volunteer Medical Corps (CMC) when it became a separate unit. He was
commissioned as a Lt. in the CMC in 1920, and on October 2, 1925 received the
Colonial Auxiliary Forces Officers’ Medal when he was a Lt. in the CMC. (This
allowed him to put the initials “V.D.” after his name, short for Voluntary
Decoration, the medal awarded to commissioned officers in the Colonial
Auxiliary Forces). He was a Captain-Major in the CMC between 1927-33, at which
date he was posted to Reserve (aged 60) before passing away the next year.
A much later
photograph shown below, the original of which is in the possession of Shelagh
Gunawardene, shows Dr. Sidney Joseph wearing three medals:
Shelagh Goonewardene is one of the grand-daughters of
Dr. Sidney Percival Joseph; her mother is the little girl, born in 1906 and
named Georgiana, perched on the small table in the 1909 Joseph family portrait
included below. (Three other children followed: Sidney Eugene Edward Ohlmus
(called Eddie), born 1910, who died in Australia; Louis William Abraham Ohlmus,
born 1912, who died in Colombo in the 1950s; and Victor Christian de Meuron
Ohlmus (called Vickie), born 1916, who died in Australia in 1971). Shelagh’s
father was Lt. Col. T. R. Jansen, OBE, ED (also of the CMC, and one-time
Commander of the volunteer corps).
Shelagh and her family now live in Australia. Her sister,
Suzette, also emigrated from Sri Lanka to Australia. According to Shelagh, the
family once had a large photograph portrait of Sidney in uniform and sporting a
military-style moustache, along with a companion portrait of his wife, known to
the family as Noble, both probably taken around the time of their engagement a
few years after the 1902 photograph was taken in London. Sadly these two
photographs both vanished in mysterious, indeed tragic, circumstances. As
Shelagh tells it, before emigrating in 1988 Suzette had entrusted them to the
care of the Dutch (Burgher) Museum in Colombo, for exhibition purposes. Shelagh
and Suzette suspect that they may have fallen victim to the civil war in Sri
Lanka, in that – tragically – their custodian, the lady librarian at the
Museum, was killed in 1996 when a terrorist bomb exploded at the Central Bank
in Colombo where she worked. It takes little imagination to picture the joy
that Shelagh, Suzette and their brother Roger must now feel at being able to
see these portraits of both their beloved Joseph grandparents that have finally
emerged into the light of day in the care of long-lost cousins in far-off
Canada.
Sidney’s much older relative, Abraham Orlando
Joseph (son of Gerardus Petrus, another of the sons
of the founding patriarch, Abraham Joseph from
Alsace-Lorraine) was a leading proctor, freemason and among the first
complement of officers of the “Ceylon Light
Infantry Volunteers”. "AOJ" was the father of Ernest
Henley Joseph (b. 1868) another outstanding cricketer, who rose to
high position as a Lt.-Col in the Ceylon Garrison Artillery (CGA) and
thus also held the V.D. designation. "EHJ" was in turn the father of
Lt. Col. Ernest Mervyn Corbet Joseph (b.1890) also of the
CGA who was commander
of the Galle Face Battery and Chief Recruiting Officer, Ceylon during WW2.
A peace-time proctor and later Colombo’s senior magistrate, he is mentioned
with credit in Noel Crusz' published (2000) account of the wartime Cocos Islands Mutiny.
The JDBU obituary testifies to his three main
interests at the time of his retirement: the Dutch Burgher Union (of which he
was Treasurer "at a time of difficulty"); the Dutch Reformed Church
(of which he was a Deacon, Consistory Scriba, Sunday School teacher
and - latterly - Wolvendaal Church Sub-Warden); and the Colts Cricket
Club in which Josephs had been active since its founding in 1873, the year of
his birth. Obviously a methodical man, he spent his all-too-short retirement
arranging and indexing the Wolvendaal old registers and archives. Kind-hearted
to a marked degree, he worked among the poor - "who were especially dear
to him and who will miss him sorely" - paying pensioners their grants,
visiting them in their homes, and above all taking a personal interest in them.
"In fact it was this personal touch that constituted his peculiar charm
and caused him to be beloved by all." (Shades of his much older first
cousin, Dr. Louis Joseph, a son of "AFJ" who died prematurely at a
roughly similar age, in Newfoundland around 1900 after years of dedicated
medical work in remote outstations such as the Shetland islands and northern
Newfoundland).
When Treasurer of the DBU, Dr. Sidney set about
indexing particulars of births, deaths, baptisms and marriages from the old
records, in order to prevent unnecessary delays in dealing with applications
for admission into the Union. Most tellingly, the anonymous obituarist pays
tribute to his having "ignored all the prejudices and divisions which are
so destructive to the well-being of all communities in the Island".
Dr. Sidney was elected a Colts Cricket Club member in
March 1892, just after his 19th birthday. He remained an enthusiastic member
for 42 years until his death. A distinguished cricketer, he played in all the
local test matches against European teams until 1900. On his retirement and
return to Colombo, he took up the Honorary Secretaryship of the Club at a time
when its cricketing prominence was sliding. His keen interest in Club
activities and enthusiasm with which he inspired the members, were greatly
missed after his death. As mentioned above, Josephs had been active with the
Club since its inception in 1873 as Ceylon's first-ever cricket club; Sidney's
distant cousin Ernest Henley Joseph (b. 1868) - see above -
had been a Colts team player since 1883 (when he was 15!) and had played in a
Ceylonese eleven against a European eleven. "EHJ" inter alia
went on to become a well-known tennis player and Vice-Chairman of the Colombo
Association Football League.
On September 4, 1905 at Wolvendaal Dutch Reformed
Church, Colombo, Dr Sidney Joseph married Anne Noble Ohlmus
(1878-1949). As mentioned earlier, they had four children born between 1906 and
1916, the youngest of whom, in honour of the Swiss regimental connection
through old Great-Grandfather Abraham, was resplendently named Victor
Christian de Meuron Ohlmus Joseph.
(Another Joseph family member with the de Meuron name
is Darian Egerton de Meuron Joseph, born Feb 21, 1944 in
Colombo and a descendant of Wilhelmus Arnoldus Joseph (born
1813), another son of the founder of the Ceylon Joseph clan who has been in
touch with me by e-mail recently. Darian Joseph of Sri Lanka and his distant
cousin Hugh Lawrence of Canada (born April 3, 1944) are therefore almost exact
contemporaries, having been born only 5 or 6 weeks apart. Hopefully
one day they will meet, perhaps when Hugh and Fiona take that retirement trip
to Sri Lanka in a couple of years' time)!
To round off our look at the dashing Dr. Sidney
Percival Joseph, below is a family group photograph dated 1909 that
has come down to Hugh Lawrence through his father and grandfather, Lawrence
Joseph who became Joseph Lawrence. On the back is handwritten:
"With love from Cousins at Lothringen,
Maskeliya, 15/9/09".
Comparing the features of the man in both the 1902
and the 1909 photographs, bearing in mind the close connection and age
similarity between Sidney and his first cousin Lawrence, remembering that
Sidney once served at Maskeliya as a government medical officer - presumably
dealing much with the Tamil plantation workers of that hill country station,
surely a congenial role for one so clearly devoted to the welfare of the poor
and disenfranchised - and recalling from his obituary that Dr. Sidney was a
keen student of Burgher family history, hence the naming of his home after
the part of 18th century Franco-German Europe that his great-grandfather
Abraham had sprung from...even before making contact with Shelagh Goonewardene
in late August 2001 it seemed safe to assume that this 1909 photograph was of
Dr. Sidney Percival Joseph and his wife Anne Noble Joseph, and their first-born
child, Noble Georgiana Frances Ohlmus Joseph, born June 25, 1906,
therefore aged 3 in the photograph. Thanks to Shelagh, we now know this is definitely
the case. It will be most interesting to see what other information the
now-reconnected branches of the Joseph / Lawrence families in Australia and
Canada will be able to exchange in the future. Sidney and Lawrence Joseph,
childhood companion and close contemporaries, would have thoroughly approved!
“Cousins” at Maskeliya,
Ceylon, 1909.
Dr. Sidney Percival Joseph
in his later years.
(Note the three medals referred to above)
Above article submitted by Joe Simpson of BC, Canada
& Richmond College, Galle, teacher 1973-74
otesaga@shaw.ca