Miscellaneous Mentions

The Walloping Window-blind

by Charles Edward Carryl
(1841 - 1920)

A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was The Walloping Window-blind ---
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the captain's mind.
The man at the wheel was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow,
And it often appeared, when the weather had cleared,
That he'd been in his bunk below.

The boatswain's mate was very sedate,
Yet fond of amusement, too;
And he played hop-scotch with the starboard watch,
While the captain tickled the crew.
And the gunner we had was apparently mad,
For he sat on the after-rail,
And fired salutes with the captain's boots
In the teeth of a booming gale.

The captain sat in a commodore's hat
And dined, in a royal way,
On toasted pigs and pickles and figs
And gummery bread, each day.
But the cook was Dutch, and behaved as such;
For the food that he gave the crew
Was a number of tons of hot-cross buns,
Chopped up with sugar and glue

And we all felt ill as mariners will,
On a diet that's cheap and rude;
And we shivered and shook as we dipped the cook
In a tub of his gluesome food.
Then nautical pride we laid aside,
And we cast the vessel ashore
On the Gulliby Isles, where Poohpooh smiles,
And the Anagazanders roar.

Composed of sand was that favoured land,
And trimmed with cinnamon straws;
And pink and blue was the pleasing hue
Of the Tickletoeteaser's claws.
And we sat on the edge of a sandy ledge
And shot at the whistling bee;
And the Binnacle-bats wore waterproof hats
As they danced in the sounding sea.

On rubagub bark, from dawn to dark,
We fed, till we all had grown
Uncommonly shrunk,---when a Chinese junk
Came by from the torriby zone.
She was stubby and square, but we didn't much care,
And we cheerily put to sea;
And we left the crew of the junk to chew
The bark of the rubagub tree.

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"Gomery of Montgomery: a family history"

A work of fiction written by Charles Ames Washburn (1822-1889), an American diplomat and author, in 1865.

Washburn went to California in 1849 for the goldrush, and eventually became editor of The Times. He was opposed to slavery and in 1854 he fought a duel with the pro-slavery Benjamin Franklin Washington, a relation of George Washington, who at the time worked for the Times and Transcript. Washington took offence to anti-slavery articles printed in the San Francisco Herald, and challenged Washburn, then the editor of the San Francisco Herald, to a duel with rifles at forty paces. Washington aimed to kill Washburn but his second shot went through the rim of Washburn's hat, and his third bullet struck Washburn in the shoulder, severely wounding him. The duel then ended, and Washburn survived.

In 1861 President Lincoln appointed him Minister Resident to Paraguay. He was in Paraguay during its' war with Brazil, Uruguay, and the Argentine Republic, and a gunship was sent to bring him and his family home. After his return to the U.S. he wrote a history of Paraguay, and two novels, "Philip Thraxter" and "Gomery of Montgomery: a family history".

Washburn invented an early typewriter, Washburn's Typeograph.

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Merriman Lyon aka Great-Uncle Merry aka Gummery

Great Uncle Merry aka Gummery is a character in the fictional, five book series, "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper. The main  characters of the novels are the three Drew children, Simon, Jane and Barney, their mysterious Great-Uncle Merry, a distinguished Celtic scholar. The stories were written for children and are fantasy, mystery, adventure stories set in England and Wales of the eternal fight between good and evil, the Light and the Dark, with Arthurian legend woven in. Gummery is, in reality, an Old One, an immortal who's responsibilty it is to defeat the Dark and save the world from its evil power. He has an imposing appearance with thick, white hair and deep, dark eyes, and is able to go backwards and forwards in time representing the force for good.

Susan Cooper was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England in 1935 and attended Oxford University graduating with a MA in English. She worked as a reporter and feature writer on the Sunday Times (her first boss was Ian Fleming), then in 1963 left England to marry an American. The Dark is Rising series began with "Over Sea, Under Stone" published in 1965; then "The Dark is Rising" published in 1973, "Greenwitch" published in 1974; "The Grey King" published in 1975; and the final book in the series "Silver on the Tree" was published in 1977.

To learn more about Susan Cooper and her books visit http://www.thelostland.com/welcome.htm

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Art Gummery - found on the internet October 2005 but since removed.

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If you have found any any unusual mentions of any of these surnames please email me .

URL=http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gomery/misc.html
Last revised: 6 September 2006
© Linda Hansen 2006