Is Du Cane Court Named After One of These Famous Du Canes?

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Is Du Cane Court Named After One of These Famous Du Canes?

Famous Du Canes: A Family Across the Centuries

The name above the entrance to Du Cane Court carries with it nearly three centuries of London and English history. The Du Cane family were French Protestants, Huguenots, who fled their homeland in the southern Low Countries during the persecutions carried out under the Duke of Alba in the reign of Elizabeth I, settling first in Canterbury before the second generation moved to London and acquired citizenship. From that beginning as refugees, they rose to become City merchants, Bank of England directors, colonial governors, military commanders, a celebrated artist, a pioneering naval engineer, and one of the most influential prison administrators in the history of the British state.

The family’s estate papers, transferred to the London Record Office at County Hall on 26 November 1959, ran to forty pages. What follows is an account of those members of the family who have left the most substantial mark on history.

Peter Du Cane, the Elder (17 March 1645 to 16 September 1714): The Founding Figure

Peter Du Cane the Elder is the patriarch from whom all subsequent Du Canes in London descend, and his story gives the family’s later achievements their proper foundation. He was the third English-born generation of his line, the family having originally crossed from Flanders and settled in Canterbury before his immediate forebears moved to London and acquired the rights of citizens. In London, Peter rose to become an Alderman of the City, a distinction he attained in 1666, the year of the Great Fire, and he served as an elder of the French Protestant Church in Threadneedle Street. That congregation, worshipping on the site now occupied by the Bank of England, had been the spiritual and communal heart of London’s Huguenot merchant community since the mid-sixteenth century, and his role as elder placed him at the centre of that world.

On 6 January 1675 he married Jane Booth, daughter of Richard Booth, grocer and Alderman of London, a match that consolidated the family’s position within the merchant elite of the City. Their son, Richard Du Cane, would carry the family’s ambitions into Parliament and the governance of the Bank of England. Peter Du Cane the Elder died on 16 September 1714, having lived long enough to see his son established in the world he had done so much to build.

Richard Du Cane (13 October 1681 to 3 October 1744): Politician and Banker

Richard Du Cane was the son of Peter Du Cane the Elder and his wife Jane Booth, and the first member of the family to achieve national prominence in public life. He was born into a community that had spent a century demonstrating its value to its adopted country, and his career reflected both the opportunities that loyalty and competence could earn and the Huguenot tradition of civic engagement.

On 17 August 1710 he married Anne Lyde, daughter of Nehemiah Lyde of Coggeshall in Essex, a union that brought considerable property near Colchester into the family and further cemented the Du Cane connection to Essex that would persist for generations. His career as a businessman in the City of London was distinguished enough to earn him a directorship at the Bank of England, which he held from 1710 to 1730: twenty years of oversight at an institution that was itself less than twenty years old when he joined its board, and whose establishment and early governance owed a significant debt to the Huguenot commercial networks of which the Du Cane family were a part.

In politics, Richard stood as a Whig and was elected Member of Parliament for Colchester in the general election of 1715, serving until 1722. During his time in Parliament he voted in favour of the Septennial Act and for the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, the latter a matter of particular significance to a family whose own history was rooted in the consequences of religious intolerance. Beyond Parliament and the Bank, he served as Governor of both Christ’s Hospital and Guy’s Hospital, and was a member of the Grand Committee of St Thomas’s, a record of charitable and civic commitment that runs through the family across successive generations.

He is also notable for his portrait by the Tyrolean painter Ignaz Stern (1679 to 1748), a work that remains a distinguished example of eighteenth-century portraiture and a rare visual record of the family during its first century in English public life.

Peter Du Cane (22 April 1713 to 28 March 1803): Merchant, Landowner and Patriarch of Braxted Park

Peter Du Cane, son of Richard the MP, was one of the most successful businessmen of his generation and the figure who established the Du Cane family in the particular corner of Essex that would carry their identity for two centuries. Born in 1713, he inherited his father’s aptitude for commerce and extended it into a range of ventures that made him very wealthy indeed: land, fund holdings and marine insurance were his principal instruments, and he deployed them with the patient acumen of a man who understood that the accumulation of capital was a long game.

In 1745 he purchased the Braxted Park estate near Witham in Essex and assumed the lordship of the manor, establishing the family home that would remain the Du Cane seat for the rest of the century and well into the next. He had married the wealthy heiress Mary Norris, daughter of the businessman Henry Norris, and the combined resources of the two families made Braxted Park one of the grander private establishments in the county. He served as High Sheriff of Essex in 1744 to 1745, and held directorships at both the Bank of England and the East India Company, the two institutional pillars of British commercial power in the eighteenth century. He was also Vice-President of the London Infirmary, sustaining the family’s tradition of engagement with the medical charities of the capital.

Several portraits of Peter Du Cane exist. One was painted by the Austrian artist Anton von Maron (1731 to 1808) during one of Peter’s travels in Italy, and is held by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Another, and far more intimate, image is the group painting known as the Du Cane Triptych, executed by Arthur Devis in 1747 and depicting the Du Cane family in the grounds of Braxted Park. Devis was among the finest painters of the English conversation piece, and the triptych captures the family at a particular moment of arrival: prosperous, landed, settled, and thoroughly at home in the English countryside that their Flemish forebears had crossed the Channel to reach.

Sir Charles Du Cane (5 December 1825 to 25 February 1889): Governor of Tasmania and Cricketer

Sir Charles Du Cane represents the Victorian flowering of the family’s public ambitions, carrying the Du Cane name from the Essex estates onto the cricket fields of Lord’s, into the House of Commons, and ultimately to the other side of the world as Governor of the Australian colony of Tasmania. He is also the father of Ella Du Cane, the watercolourist who would become the most internationally celebrated artist the family produced.

He was educated at Charterhouse and Exeter College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1847. Between 1848 and 1855 he played first-class cricket for the Marylebone Cricket Club and the Gentlemen of England, appearing alongside his younger brother Alfred and establishing the Du Canes as one of the small number of Victorian families to produce two first-class cricketers in the same generation. His political career began problematically: elected Conservative member for Maldon in Essex in 1852, his return was declared void after it emerged that his agents had been engaged in bribery, though the inquiry established that Du Cane himself had been entirely ignorant of the corruption. He subsequently represented North Essex as MP from 1857 to 1868, and served as a Civil Lord of the Admiralty in 1866 to 1868.

In 1868 he was appointed Governor of Tasmania, being sworn in at Hobart Town on 15 January 1869. His six-year tenure coincided with a period of economic growth in the colony, driven by industrial and resources activity and improved communications with the Australian mainland and England. He navigated a minor constitutional crisis with steady hands when the Premier threatened resignation over a defeated taxation proposal, and left Hobart in November 1874 to a colony in better health than he had found it. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George the following year.

It was in Hobart, on 1 June 1874, that his daughter Ella was born. Charles Du Cane died at Braxted Park on 25 February 1889, the family estate that he had known since childhood passing to the next generation. His life spanned the full arc of Victorian public service, from the cricket grounds of the 1840s to the Australian administration of the 1870s, and his daughter’s subsequent career gave his tenure in Tasmania an unexpected artistic afterlife.

Alfred du Cane (2 April 1835 to 19 October 1882): Cricketer and Clergyman

Alfred Richard du Cane was the fourth son of a Royal Navy officer and the younger brother of Charles, and his is one of the more modest lives in the family’s history: a career divided between two quintessentially Victorian callings, the cricket field and the Anglican pulpit. He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and appeared in first-class cricket for Cambridge University in 1854 and 1855, principally as a bowler. He represented Cambridge in the University Match against Oxford in 1854, taking three wickets in a game that Oxford won by an innings. He did not return to first-class cricket after the 1855 season.

Ordained as a Church of England deacon in 1858 and priest the following year, he served in parishes in Staffordshire, Cheshire, Sussex and Warwickshire before becoming vicar of Willingale Doe in Essex in 1874, a position he held until his death in 1882 at the age of forty-seven. The return to Essex, the county the family had called home for two centuries, was characteristic. He is a minor figure in the Du Cane story, but one whose combination of sporting accomplishment and pastoral ministry captures something genuine about the texture of Victorian educated life among the landed gentry.

Sir Edmund Frederick Du Cane (23 March 1830 to 7 June 1903): Architect of Wormwood Scrubs and Reformer of the Victorian Prison

Edmund Du Cane is among the most historically significant members of the family, and one of the most complex. A Royal Engineers officer, an accomplished watercolourist, an early colonial administrator in Western Australia, and ultimately the most powerful figure in Victorian prison administration, he gave his name to the road that runs alongside London’s most notorious prison and drove the legislation that placed the entire British prison system under central government control for the first time.

His career at Du Cane Court is treated in full in a dedicated post. What can be said here is that the contrast his legacy creates within the family’s London story is one worth holding in mind: the Du Canes of Balham gave their name to the “Aristocrat of Apartment Houses,” while their cousin Edmund gave his name to the address of Wormwood Scrubs. Few families have stamped themselves on London’s built environment in quite such contrasting registers.

Read more: Sir Edmund Frederick Du Cane: Architect of Wormwood Scrubs

Major General Sir John Philip Du Cane, GCB (5 May 1865 to 1947): A Distinguished British Army Officer in World War I

John Philip Du Cane pursued the military career that the family had maintained across several generations, and brought it to its highest point in the crisis of the First World War. Commissioned into the Royal Artillery as a lieutenant in February 1884, he served in the Second Boer War as a staff officer for lines of communication in South Africa from September 1900, earning a mention in despatches and a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel in June 1902.

His First World War service carried him through a series of increasingly critical appointments. As Brigadier General on the General Staff of III Corps, then as Major General Royal Artillery and Artillery Adviser at General Headquarters from 1915, he played a significant role in the organisational work behind the massive expansion of British Expeditionary Force artillery across the war years. He commanded XV Corps from 1916 and was involved in the planning of Operation Hush, the projected coastal landing in Belgium. In April 1918, at the moment of the German “Georgette” Offensive and the urgent need for French reinforcements, he was appointed as liaison officer between Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and the Allied Generalissimo, Marshal Foch: a role of singular diplomatic and strategic delicacy at one of the war’s most dangerous junctures.

After the war he served as Master-General of the Ordnance from 1920 and Commander-in-Chief for Western Command from 1923, then as Commander-in-Chief for the British Army of the Rhine until 1927, when he became Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Malta. He served as Aide-de-Camp General to the King from 1926 to 1930, retiring in 1931.

Ella Du Cane (1 June 1874 to 1943): Watercolourist and the Woman Who Brought Japan to Britain

Ella Du Cane was the most internationally celebrated artist the family produced, a watercolourist of exceptional gifts whose work helped introduce the aesthetics of the Japanese garden to the British reading public at the turn of the twentieth century. Born in Hobart during her father Charles’s governorship of Tasmania, and raised at Braxted Park, she pursued her art without formal institutional training, yet achieved a level of recognition that formally educated contemporaries rarely matched. Queen Victoria acquired twenty-six of her works.

Her connection to Du Cane Court’s own celebrated Japanese garden, and the remarkable coincidence of her family’s land hosting one of the finest Japanese garden designs in South London, makes her a figure of particular resonance for this project.

Read more: Ella Du Cane: Watercolourist and Champion of the Japanese Garden

Peter Du Cane CBE (1901 to 31 October 1984): Builder of the Bluebird and Architect of D-Day’s Fleet

Peter Du Cane was the last of the family’s great public figures, and in some ways the most modern: a naval officer turned engineer who built the boat that broke the world water speed record, designed the torpedo craft that equipped the Royal Navy through the Second World War, and whose father’s decision to sell a parcel of Essex family land to a London developer made possible the building that carries the family name on Balham High Road.

His is a story of speed, precision and wartime invention, and it is told in full in a dedicated post.

Read more: Peter Du Cane CBE: Builder of the Bluebird and Architect of D-Day’s Fleet

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