CAPTAIN CHARLES McLAUGHLIN (1842-1928) had the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy (captain was a courtesy title). He married Louisa Jane (right). She was born in India in 1842 to Lieutenant-Colonel John Finnis (1804-57), of the 11th Bengal Native Infantry, and Sarah Bridgetta Dorothea née Roche (1818-90).

John Finnis was the first European officer killed in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the same year that his brother Thomas Quested Finnis became Lord Mayor of London.

At the age of 28 Charles was a lieutenant aboard the 319-ton wooden brig HMS Sealark (pictured at the bottom of the page) sailing off Plymouth. The photograph below left was taken about that time.

In 1881 he had risen in rank to commander, but he was on on half pay in charge of Boraston Rectory, his widowed mother having just died in London. His sister, Mrs. Fanny Clark, came to help him at the rectory, leaving her stockbroker husband, aged 44, to be cared for in their London mansion by just one servant, a 24-year-old Welsh housemaid.

It was later in 1881 that Charles married. A decade later he had retired to Kingston Vale with Louisa, her widowed sister-in-law Emily Finnis, and Emily's two small children. After that the couple took a house where they lived by themselves in Ashley Place, near Buckingham Palace.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
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