Stanley Muttlebury - Canadian Connections

Canadian Connections

While Muttlebury's grandfather perished of cholera early in his Canadian sojourn, and his father had left Toronto by 1851 (an inconvenient absence for his articled clerk as recorded in the Statutes of the Province of Canada, 1852, p. 254), the rest of the 1832 emigrant couples' eleven children appear to have made their mark in North America, primarily in Canada.

One uncle, Captain William Muttlebury, was, along with Captain James Perrier, one of the first white men to assist in the formation of a voluntary black militia in the Windsor area of Upper Canada during the 1838 rebellion. (Ontario Historical Society, Papers and Records, vol. XXVII, 1931, pp. 381–3).

Another uncle, the eldest brother of the subject's father, Rutherford Muttlebury, was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge almost a year before the family emigrated from England, but Venn's brief entry reveals that he did not fulfil the academic requirement to live in college, and he quite likely did not attend the university at all, given the later evidence as to his movements, viz.:

Rutherford. Muttlebury. Admitted sizar at TRINITY, May 18, 1831. Did not reside.

Instead, aged 18, with his father, Dr Muttlebury, and one brother, Augustus, 13, he sailed from Portsmouth, England to New York City, early in 1832, arriving in that port on 9 April. Thence the small family party travelled to Upper Canada, arriving in York (now Toronto) on 7 May 1832. Following his father's untimely death that August, his mother, 6 remaining brothers, and 3 sisters, also left England for Upper Canada the same year, after landing in the same port on 19 November 1832.

In 1844, Rutherford Muttlebury married Hannah Foster Ellah, in St James's Church of England cathedral, Toronto. Also a barrister, he died in 1849, when still relatively young, leaving a daughter, Charlotte Amy Rutherford Muttlebury, later wife of Toronto attorney, George St John Hallen, whose son, George Muttlebury Hallen (1882–1958), also a lawyer, eventually settled in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Descendants remain in Neepawa and other parts of that province. Rutherford Muttlebury's son, George Augustus Muttlebury, born 1 December 1847, in Toronto, also went West to Winnipeg, where he was practising as a barrister when he returned to Toronto for his 20 Jan. 1881 marriage to marry Fannie Lucretia Wynne Gillespie, of that city, in the same church where his parents had married in 1844. He eventually retired to Vancouver, British Columbia where he died, aged 89, in 1936. His son, Charles Robert Muttlebury, of Winnipeg, San Diego and Los Angeles, California, and latterly, of Victoria, British Columbia on Vancouver Island (where he died, aged 77, on 10 September 1961), was married in 1914 to Scottish-born Clyna Elizabeth Wood Hogg (1888–1962), and had a son, George John Muttlebury, born 21 July 1918 in Winnipeg, who was, like his earlier kinsman at Cambridge, a varsity sportsman. In 1938, George Muttlebury was undefeated heavyweight boxer of Montreal's own McGill University Boxing, Wrestling and Fencing Club. When he died on 19 November 1993, his death, aged 74, was reported by the Royal Canadian Legion's Trafalgar branch, of Victoria, British Columbia in their magazine, The Last Post. As of 1973, he had never married. He had two married sisters, Elizabeth Anne Muttlebury (born 1 August 1915), and Barbara Jean Muttlebury (born 8 September 1920), but no brothers.