Nobody knows this. To the world, she was Lotus Thompson but she began life as Lotus May Fellows on 26 August, 1904. Unmarried, her mother, Sarah, gave birth to a daughter while she decided what to do about a surname. On page number 8021, the father was listed as simply “Fellows”.

However many months or years later, on page 25,950, the birth certificate was updated with the father’s details and his name: Archibald Gordon Thompson. His full name was actually much longer – it was Archibald Denzil Bertram Gordon Thompson.

Perhaps secret names ran in the family. Archie’s grandmother was born into the ancient Rowden family of Fovant, Wiltshire. She was the last child of eight, and an orphan before her first birthday. Catherine was raised by older siblings and working as a governess in London when she found herself ‘with child’. Taken in eventually by her older brother, Herbert, a clerk, she gave birth to an illegitimate son in the winter of 1844. Like other respectable women, Catherine Grace lied on the record, calling herself Mrs Catherine Touchet.

As to the father of the child, he was a ‘gentleman’. Just as I have done with Lotus, I have pored over just about every website, database, DNA site, and repository and declare my findings. I have narrowed it down to two possibilities. Despite the first, a lazy alcoholic whose brother was the Baron Audley, and another, Oxford educated, with a considerable fortune and a predilection for scandals with married women, neither, obviously were gentlemen. The law decreed that every child was to be registered before they were six months of age, failure to do so would result in a fine, so the day before her baby turned six months old, Catherine registered his birth, and his name…

His name was ‘John Herbert Grace Touchet’. I went to Hell and back in my search for this child, and what a name it was. Touchet indeed! This is further verified by the presence of Catherine’s cousin, widow Deborah (nee Rowden) Blackadder, who baptised both of her children at the same time. Her little girl had the rather unforgettable name of Henrietta Tuliallen Blackadder, and the records of St Pancras Old Church confirm this.

St Pancras Old Church, Middlesex, London, the oldest site of Christian worship in England, the site dating back to the early 300s.

Somewhere between 1844 and the census of 1851, little John’s surname was changed to Thompson for reasons we will probably never know. It’s all the more strange when Catherine, who was a spinster, married Colin Junor in 1847 and could have easily given the lad, who was only three years old, his stepfather’s surname. Instead he was known forever more as Herbert J Thompson who immigrated to the goldfields of Victoria, Australia, where he fathered four Thompsons, one of whom, Archie, would be the father of Lotus Thompson.

Throughout her life, Lotus donned other names – she became Lotus Wilder-Churchill when she married Napan ranch owner, Edward, in a New York registry office after meeting on the set of The Wilderness in 1929. A divorce followed as did another marriage when she became Lotus May Robinson, marrying Stanley Robinson in a ceremony in Ti Juana, Mexico in 1937. Stanley had three sons and a daughter but did not have any children with Lotus.

The last name change was a hindrance when searching for records of what hapened to Lotus in her later life. She was finally found in Vault 5 of the Chapel of the Pines vaults with private access only. On the outside of the box, it simply says Lotus Robinson.

Her death certificate is difficult to read but it calls her Lotus Thompson-Robinson, a woman who had many names in a short but very eventful life.

For more information on St Pancras Old Church, read https://www.gasholder.london/2020/07/22/curious-story-st-pancras-old-church/