remembered the glowing picture which on a former occasion the chairman drew of the vast quantities of Crowley’s Alton ale which would be conveyed to London by this proposed line, and he remembered how he trembled for the London brewers with such a dismal prospect before them [laughter]; but he never heard of any other traffic they were likely to get besides the Alton ale. Would they get a single passenger more by extending the line from Farnham to Alton?50
The plan eventually passed, with a gala on Monday, July 26, 1852, as a train ran from London to Farnham, then continued the nine miles on to Alton for the first time. Thereafter, as In Praise of Ale noted, the London and South Western Railway shipped large quantities of Alton ale to London.51
In October 1854, in his sixty-sixth year, Edward Crowley delivered an address to the Clapham Athenæum, The Age We Live In: High Art No Evidence of a High State of Civilization. A reflection on the great civilizations of the past that have crumbled, Edward Crowley cautioned that, without God, modern civilization is subject to the same fate; particularly worrisome trends included smoking, drinking, gambling, cursing, slavery, socialism, spiritualism, labor strikes, women’s rights, women’s bonnets, dancing saloons, and children referring to their parents as “governor.”52 A little over a year later—on February 16. 1856—Edward Crowley died at his house in Lavender Hill, Surrey, appointing as his executors his sons Jonathan Sparrow and Edward, his son-in-law John Thrupp, and his friend Joseph Prestwick.53
When Charles Sedgefield Crowley, the last of his four brothers, died in 1868, he left his nephews—Abraham Crowley’s four sons, Abraham, Alfred, Frederick, and Philip, all co-owners of the family brewery and executors of his will—£48,000, his shares in the Great Western Railway, and his mines in Mexico. His remaining nieces and nephews—including Aleister’s father, Edward—divided the rest of his estate. Charles’s cellar of over two hundred cases of wine—old sherry, port, champagne, and the like—was auctioned off on May 1, 1868.54 Shortly thereafter, Aleister’s grandmother, Mary, succumbed to liver disease after twenty years and died on May 29, 1868, at age eighty.55
Jonathan Sparrow Crowley, a civil engineer, entered the railway business following a November 1, 1852, collision on the Brighton railway managed by his father, Edward Crowley.56 Jonathan was at the railway’s London terminal when he learned that an express passenger train had crashed with a freight train. Rumors of horrible injuries stoked fears for his father’s welfare, until a telegram assured him that Edward Crowley was safe at dinner (and no other serious injuries had resulted from the crash). To ensure that such accidents never happened again, Jonathan quickly invented “Crowley’s Safety Switch and Self-acting Railway Signals.” On November 8—a week after the accident—he received provisional protection for his “improvements in the means of, or apparatus for, working the signals and switches on railways.”57 He became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers,58 and a fellow of both the Ethnological Society of London and the Royal Geographical Society of London.59 Jonathan Sparrow Crowley married Agnes Pope of Marylebone on May 14, 185360 and had three children: Jonathan Edward (b. 1854, died in infancy), Agnes (1856–1916), and Claude Edmund (1865–1937).61 Their mother died of tuberculosis in 1869 at age forty-three,62 leaving him with a three-year-old son and thirteen-year-old daughter. Within three years, he married the children’s governess, Anne Higginbotham (1840–1921), on April 4, 1872.63
Of Edward and Mary’s second child, Mary Elizabeth, Aleister Crowley makes no mention. Born around 1828, she married Charles Ebeneezer Burgess (c. 1833–1890) in 1869, and lived in Leamington, Warwickshire, until her death in 1880.64 Given that she lived near Aleister Crowley’s childhood home, it is likely that he knew this aunt.65
However, Aleister Crowley would never meet his aunt Sarah, who died around age twenty-seven, nearly two decades before he was born. She was the third child of Edward Crowley senior, marrying the widower John Thrupp (1817–1870) on September 21, 185466 and, tragically, dying within seventeen months.67 Thrupp was a solicitor and writer who began practicing in 1838, and in the early 1840s published a series of historical law tracts; he evidently remained cordial with the Crowleys despite remarrying: he was an executor of his father-in-law’s will, and—in partnership with Robert Dixon—represented the Crowley family in 1865.68
Edward Crowley (c. 1830–1887), father of Aleister Crowley. (photo credit 1.4)
Although Edward Crowley Jr. is described in the 1851 census as an engineer like his older brother Jonathan, Aleister Crowley noted that his father “was educated as an engineer, but never practised his profession.”69 Indeed, one wonders if he ever worked at all: Edward Crowley appears in postal directories and membership lists as “esquire,” indicating that he was upper gentry. The 1861 census lists his occupation/social status as “freeholder, householder,” while in 1881 he was “receiving income from houses and dividends.”70
Around 1853, the brothers Edward and Jonathan partnered with Robert White, a zinc oxide manufacturer of King William Street, to form the company Crowley, White & Crowley. According to a notice in the Times, Robert White’s business partner, Langston Scott, had a patented process for manufacturing zinc oxide, which was a safe and economical substitute for white lead in the manufacture of paint; on his retirement on October 13, 1853, Scott vested the rights with Crowley, White & Crowley.71 Despite having won prizes at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 and securing the prestigious patronage of the Admiralty and the French government, the partnership dissolved in 1855.72 It is possible that Aleister Crowley alluded to his father’s business venture when he wrote in his commentary on The Book of the Law, “ ‘white’ is ‘what champaks, zinc oxide, sugar, etc., report to our eyesight.’ ”73
Shortly after dissolving this partnership, Edward Crowley, aged twenty-six, retired to devote himself to religion. He had been a devout Quaker from childhood, the dying utterance of the family’s servant Anne—“Lost, lost, lost”—demonstrating to him the fate of those souls not saved by Jesus.74 Breaking from his family’s traditional Quaker roots, he became an Anglican clergyman,75 but eventually converted to the fundamentalist evangelical sect known as the Plymouth Brethren or Darbyists.76 By April 1861, he authored the tracts Letters Stating Sundry Reasons for Not Returning to the Church of England and Cease to Do Evil, Learn to Do Well. These were but the first of over one hundred that Edward Crowley would publish over the years as a preacher for the Brethren, earning him a mention in Knapp’s 1932 History of the Brethren.
Notorious for frequent internal schisms, the Brethren movement ironically began with one man’s protest against denominationalism. Edward Cronin (d. 1882), a Roman Catholic, moved to Dublin in 1825 and declined to affiliate with the local Anglican Church of Ireland. At a time when society judged men by their congregational membership, Cronin found himself ostracized by his neighbors. Citing Matthew 18:20 (“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”), Cronin claimed anyone could celebrate the Lord’s supper, and thus began breaking bread with other religious outcasts. He claimed clerics, ministers, and priests were not only superfluous but also contrary to the will of God, since Matthew 18:20 clearly instructed worshipers to gather in the name of God, not of a priest.
Within two years (1827), his meetings attracted a follower in John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), who became so influential that his name was synonymous with the movement. In 1830, Darby left the Anglican priesthood to devote himself to the group, and his tract “The Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ” helped spread their message. In 1832, B. W. Newton invited Darby to organize his assembly in Plymouth and share its ministry. This he did, and Plymouth quickly became the movement’s center.
While Darby spent much of his time traveling to support the Brethren, Plymouth attracted 1,200 members by 1845, including generals and admirals, scholars and linguists, and even English lords and other nobility—including a cousin of Queen Victoria. When he returned to Plymouth in 1845, Darby discovered Newton attem
pting to establish an independent church with himself as pastor. This contradicted the nondenominational and nonclerical ethos of the Brethren, and ultimately, Darby excommunicated Newton and his followers.
Within two years, the Brethren split into two factions: the Open Brethren, who broke bread with good people of other faiths, and the Exclusive Brethren, led by Darby, who shunned all non-Brethren as sinners. It was but the first of a series of schisms that led the Exclusive Brethren to refuse friendship with adherents of other Brethren variants, earning them the distinction of being “the narrowest and most bigoted sect on earth.”77 In 1879, the Exclusive Brethren went so far as to excommunicate their founder, Edward Cronin. Today, various branches are known by the names Darbyites, Newtonites, Mullerites, Grantites, Kellyites, Stuartites, Ravenites, Taylorites, etc.78
The Brethren believed the Bible—particularly the translation made by Darby—was divinely inspired and literally true. The faith was also pretribulational and premillenial: believers expected Jesus to return at any moment to rescue the faithful from the period of darkness about to begin. Long-term plans—including retirement and life insurance—disclosed lack of faith in Jesus’ imminent arrival. All answers lurked within the Bible, the inevitable “It is written” or “Thus saith the Lord” with which they settled disputes, earning the Brethren the sarcastic designation of “walking Bibles.”
Edward Crowley was a devout Exclusive Brother and a fiery, articulate clergyman. He distributed thousands of copies of his tracts through the mail and on the streets. He routinely took walking tours throughout England, where he would preach to the masses and draw large crowds for whom, at the time, proselytizing was a respected fad. At other times, he would simply stop unsuspecting fellows on the street and ask what they were doing; after they answered, he would reply, “and then?” This question would repeat until the other inevitably answered with something like, “Well, I suppose I shall die.” This was the opening Crowley waited for, when he would interject the phrase he was known for: “Then you’d better get right with God!”79 He would then add the wretched soul’s name and address to his book and for years afterward send religious literature. Edward Crowley traveled so extensively that he could tell a person’s hometown from his accent.
Eventually, he sold his shares in both the railway and the family brewery, reinvesting them in Amsterdam’s waterworks. This move was evidently prompted by his religious convictions: Aleister Crowley reported that “my father would refuse to buy railway shares because railways were not mentioned in the Bible”80 and later quoted his father as quipping sardonically that “he had been an abstainer for nineteen years, during which he had shares in a brewery. He had now ceased to abstain for some time, but all his money was invested in a waterworks.”81 The specific waterworks investments are unknown, but a likely contender is the highly successful Amsterdam Water Works Company, founded by English businessmen in 1865 and whose 1872 expansion drew thousands of workers to the company.
His new investment interests were quite likely what first brought him to the baths, spas, and waterworks of Leamington.
Emily Bertha Crowley, née Bishop (1848–1917). (photo credit 1.5)
To Emily Bertha Bishop (1848–1917), life must have felt like a fantasy. The youngest daughter of farmer John Bishop (c. 1793–1854) and his second wife Elizabeth Cole (1808–1896), Emily had gone from working in 1871 as governess for Kensington brewer Alexander Gordon to marrying, on November 19, 1874, the devout and independently wealthy Edward Crowley. The marriage took place at the register office in Kensington, witnessed by her brother Tom Bond and her half-sister Anne, along with the families of Edward’s two siblings (Jonathan came with his daughter Agnes and second wife, Anne, while Mary came with her husband, Charles).82 Because of her slight form and vaguely Asian appearance, she was dubbed “the little Chinese girl” at school. She had a talent with watercolors but, despite academic training, never pursued art as a career. Now she was joining her husband to raise a family in the beautiful and affluent health resort town of Leamington Spa. Warwickshire’s spa on the river Leam was at the peak of a growth spurt that had transformed a sleepy little borough of just over five hundred into a newly incorporated town of 26,000 in 1875. Visitors flocked to its artesian wells and saline springs, which were advertised to relieve the symptoms of gout, rheumatism, “stiffness of tendons,” and “other paralytic conditions.” The gardens outside the Jephson and Royal Pump Rooms were likewise botanical spectacles. Emily was already into her third trimester of pregnancy late that summer when she moved to 30 Clarendon Square, about four blocks from the Leam.
Within six weeks, a sudden gale turned her idyll into a nightmare. On the Saturday morning of October 8, 1875, a violent storm struck Warwickshire, uprooting trees, breaking telegraph lines, and blocking roads. Flash floods turned fields into lakes, inundated the baths and gardens, and spewed a two-foot-deep river into the town’s Great Western railroad station. The flood damaged crops, killed large numbers of livestock, and drowned two people. While it is unknown whether Emily was among those forced to flee in boats, it is doubtful her property escaped flood damage.83
When the storm abated and the flood slowly began to recede, she went into labor. On Tuesday, October 12, 1875, between the hours of eleven and midnight, Emily Crowley delivered a son to her husband. They dubbed him Edward, after his father and the father before him, with the middle name taken from his father’s friend Alexander. Edward Alexander Crowley would not change his name to Aleister until adulthood, and to his family the child was simply known as Alick. He was tongue-tied, and within the first few days of his birth, a doctor cut the frenum that connected his tongue to the bottom of his mouth. Despite the intervention, he would never pronounce the letter r correctly. Within his first three months of life, he was baptized into the Plymouth faith.
Although previous biographers have portrayed Aleister Crowley’s childhood as marred by religious intolerance, physical frailty, and the British school system, Crowley’s accounts reveal a happy boyhood through age ten, and he enjoyed the privileges of wealth throughout childhood. Granted, marriage required his mother to convert; and despite the Bishop family being evangelical Christians, the Crowleys in true Exclusive form only associated with other Brethren. This estranged Emily from her two siblings, Tom Bond (1839–1920) and Ada Jane (1842–1896), and—from her father’s first marriage—three half-siblings, John (1821–1900), William (b. 1822), and Anne (1824–1890). Likewise, Aleister recalled that “My father’s religious opinions had tended to alienate him from his family.”84 Thus, Aleister Crowley’s childhood recollections—primarily from his Confessions and his indictment of Victorian society, The World’s Tragedy—are largely populated by his parents, the family servants, and other Brethren, such as his first governess, Mary Arkell (1838–1892), “a grey-haired lady with traces of beard upon her large flat face and a black dress”; Mary Carey (born c. 1813), the “orange-coloured old lady … who used to bring him oranges”; Emma (born c. 1829) and Susan Cowper (born c. 1838), “Plymouth sister old maids” whom he never particularly liked; and portly Sister Musty, who had delayed a prayer meeting for an hour by politely eating the food that Alick kept offering her.85
As the son of Exclusive Brethren, his was a Spartan childhood. The Crowleys did not celebrate the pagan festival of Christmas. Likewise, Brethren prohibitions forbade toys. When he learned to read at age four, Alick’s primary text was the Bible. Recalling his father’s sermon on the word but, Alick once read through the book, circling every occurrence of the word.86 He idolized his father. Although they shared little sympathy or understanding, Alick would grow up to be more like him than he would ever realize.
Although he described Emily Crowley as “the best of all possible mothers,”87 he was normally aloof toward her, regarding her as just another one of the servants.
Servants were but one of the luxuries Alick enjoyed as a child. Although most middle-class families in Victorian England had a servant—at the very least a “
step girl” who scrubbed the front steps on Saturday mornings as a display of affluence for the neighbors—doctors, lawyers, and other professionals kept staffs of at least three: a cook, a parlor maid, and a house maid.88 The Crowley household had four servants, identified in census records as Mary Gough (age thirty-one), Elizabeth Hanad (age twenty-six), Fanny Maples (age twenty-two), and William Soden (age seventeen).89 This fourth servant would have filled the typical role of manservant to the household. While landed gentry and larger household estates boasted up to twenty servants, the Crowleys’ employment of more servants than there were household members reveals their affluence.
Likewise, Crowley’s accounts of his various residences, private tutors and boarding schools gives away the luxuries to which he was privy. Indeed his entire childhood is set among some of Britain’s most notable locales. The family lived for five years in the resort town of Leamington Spa, stayed a while in Surrey near the Thames, then moved between various residences in and around London. Meanwhile, young Crowley attended boarding schools in places like Cambridge and Tonbridge (where he almost certainly attended the Tonbridge Schools, one of England’s top educational institutions). While not at boarding school, he stayed with private tutors in locales like that international haven for the rich and famous, Torquay, in the English Riviera. Similarly, his teens were full of vacations climbing the hills, cliffs, and mountains of the Isle of Skye (Scotland), Beachy Head (England), Tyrol (Austria), and the Swiss Alps.
Crowley was unreservedly upbeat about his first decade of life. He fondly recalled the landmarks around Leamington Spa and Warwick such as Guy’s Cliffe and Warwick Castle; memories of the weir, or dam, on the Leam river remained especially fond, so that weirs forever after took him home again. Crowley particularly recalled walks with his father down main street and through the green fields. On one occasion, his father warned him away from a clump of stinging nettles. “Will you take my word for it, or would you rather learn by experience?” the patriarch cautioned his boy. The exuberant child retorted, “I would rather learn by experience,” and dove headlong into the nettles. This pattern of chasing blindly after whatever captured his interest also typified much of his adult life.
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