Vault no. 54

Thomas Mansell was born in Guernsey on 9 February 1777, the third son of Thomas Mansell and Martha Price. At about the time of his sixteenth birthday, in 1793, he joined the frigate ‘Crescent’ as a midshipman, serving under his fellow Guernseyman, James Saumarez. Thus began a distinguished twenty year career at sea, described in great detail in the Appendix to Jonathan Duncan’s ‘History of Guernsey’ (1841). The Google books version here lacks the final page, so I’ve photographed the full account – click on the thumbnails below to read it.

 

 

 

 

Following a long association with Captain (later Admiral) Saumarez, Mansell was given his own command – HMS ‘Rose’ – in the Baltic in 1808. Between 1808 and 1814, when he was promoted to Captain, Mansell took some 170 vessels as prizes, making a huge sum in prize money. He saw no further service after 1814, but was knighted in 1837 and promoted to Rear-Admiral, on the retired list, in October 1849.

In 1806 Mansell married Catherine Rabey Lukis, daughter of the merchant John Lukis (who is named on vault no. 52) and sister of F.C. Lukis (no. 53). A few years later – I suspect between about 1815 and 1820, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere – he, his brother-in-law and his father-in-law had built for them three vaults in the centre of the Brothers’ Cemetery. At the base of the east face of no. 54 is a brief inscription recording Thomas Mansell, Esquire, K.S., Captain in the Royal Navy – so the inscription at least must date after 1814. I was puzzled by the meaning of ‘K.S.’, but Dr Darryl Ogier at the Island Archives kindly supplied the explanation: it stands for Kungliga Svärdsorden, or the Royal Order of the Sword, granted to Mansell by King Charles XIII of Sweden in 1813.

Like his Lukis relatives, when Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Mansell died – on 22 April 1858, in his 82nd year – he was far too grand to make do with his humble Brothers’ Cemetery tomb. He is buried in the north-west corner of Candie Cemetery, in the vault shown here, with what is now the Priaulx Library in the background. His first wife, Catherine Lukis, had died in 1841 and both she and his second wife, Charlotte La Serre Wood, who died in 1868, are interred in this vault. There may well be no Mansells at all in the tomb in the Brothers’ Cemetery.