On 6 Jul 1722 the following entry appeared in the London Daily Post: Lost at Hampton-Court on Thursday the 28th last, a large white and brown spaniel bitch, with a large head, long ears, pretty rough long hair about her legs, and a small yellow spot above each eye, with a long neck coming out of her shoulders, loose made. Whoever brings this bitch to John Blackett at Hampton Court, or to Christopher Blackett on Bread Street Hill, London, shall have Two Guineas reward, and reasonable Charges.

Two guineas was all that some domestic servants earned in a year, but John and Christopher could well afford so handsome a reward as they were respectively the 4th and 3rd surviving sons of Sir Edward Blackett (1649-1718).

It is not known if the spaniel was recovered.

Blackett Crater is a lunar impact crater. It has a diameter of 141km and lies beyond the outer ring of the Mare Orientale basin. It was named in honour of Lord Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett (1897-1974), the British physicist and Nobel laureate. Unfortunately it is on the far side of the moon, and cannot therefore be seen from the Blackett Observatory.

The observatory stands in the grounds of Marlborough College in Wiltshire. It is named after Sir Basil Phillott Blackett KCB, a past President of the Old Malburian Club, and houses the largest telescope in full time use in any school in the UK. It was opened in 1935, shortly after Sir Basil was killed in a car crash in Belgium. He was an eminent authority on international finance, a proponent of the “sterling area” (a phrase which he popularised), and a director of the Bank of England. There is a memorial window to him in the North Transept of Durham Cathedral.

In New South Wales, Australia is the town of Blackett, now a residential suburb of Sydney. It was named after George Forster Blackett, who was Superintendant of the Government Cattle Station at neighbouring Rooty Hill from 1820 to 1830. And in the centre of Sydney stands the luxurious Blacket hotel, formerly a bank designed by Edmund Thomas Blacket (see Famous Blacketts). The interior of the hotel, which opened in 2001, is contemporary in style but Blacket’s neo-classical exterior design has been retained.

On a more modest scale, Blackett’s general store and post office was opened by Henry Blackett in Rangiora, New Zealand shortly after Henry’s arrival from England in 1858. In 1878 Henry became the first Mayor of Rangiora. The store was demolished in 1910 but there is a Blackett Street close to where it stood.

The Blackett Arms stands in Nelson Street in central Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. In the 18th century the site would have been within the grounds of Anderson Place, the magnificent town house of Sir William Blackett (1657-1705).

When Arthur Ransome wrote his famous “Swallows and Amazons”, published in 1930, he decided to name his best known character, the skipper of the Amazon, Nancy Blackett.

What prompted him to use the Blackett name is not known, but Ransome drew his inspiration for the story from his beloved Lake District, close to where several branches of Blacketts have lived since at least the 17th century. After the success of his book, Ransome bought a sailing cutter and renamed her" Nancy Blackett". The boat has been restored and is owned and operated by the Nancy Blackett Trust.

On 21 March 2008 Lee Blackett, a rugby union football player for Leeds Carnegie, scored the fastest try in Guiness Premiership history, taking just eight seconds to breach the defence of Newcastle Falcons. None of the opposing team touched the ball. Leeds won the game by 16-15.

Lee Blackett is not the only Blackett with connections to Rugby Football Union. His Honour Judge Jeff Blackett, (who is also Judge Advocate General of the British armed forces and a circuit judge), is Disciplinary Officer of the RFU and conducted the 2008 enquiry into the behaviour of the England squad on their New Zealand tour.

In addition to Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands (see “Naval Blacketts” in the Famous Blacketts section), there is a Mount Blackett in Rift Valley, Kenya, a Blackett’s Ridge near Tucson, Arizona, a Blackett’s Lake in Cape Breton County, Nova Scotia (formed in 1902 when the Sydney River was dammed) and a Blackett Lake in the Lac La Biche region of Alberta.

In 1776 Trinity House agreed to allow a Mr. J. Blackett to build at his own expense two lighthouses off the Northumberland coast, one at Farne Island and the other on Staples Island, not far from where in 1838 Grace Darling and her father rowed out to save nine survivors from the SS Forfarshire. The Staples Island light was blown down in 1784 and rebuilt, but by 1809 both towers were decaying. In 1825 the Blackett family sold the lease of the Farne Island site to Trinity House for £36,484.

John Blackett (1818-1893), after following his father as an engineer (see Railway Blacketts), emigrated to New Zealand and became Engineer-in-Chief for New Zealand. He was responsible for the building of 14 lighthouses around the New Zealand coast. His daughter, Isabel Mary Houston, established the John Blackett Prize for outstanding engineering students. It is still awarded to this day.

Around 1820 Patience Wise Blackett Izard, granddaughter of John Erasmus Blackett and niece of Sarah, the wife of Admiral Lord Cuthbert Collingwood, planted an avenue of oak trees along the drive of Tomotley Plantation, near Charleston, South Carolina, where she was living with her parents. It is not known whether she was inspired to do so by the example of Lord Collingwood, who regularly sowed acorns in his walks in the country to ensure that there would always be a supply of timber for the Royal Navy’s ships, or whether she was Patience by nature as well as name. The avenue is still there.

When Sir William Blackett (1689-1728) married Lady Barbara Villiers in 1725 he laid on so much alcoholic refreshment for the inhabitants of Newcastle and surrounding areas that much of the county was drunk for several days. The Devil’s Punchbowl, a natural basin in a rock at the highest point of Shaftoe Crag, was enlarged, before being filled with wine for the celebrations. As can be seen from the adjoining photograph, it does not seem the safest of places for imbibing large quantities of wine, but there is no record of any fatalities marring the celebrations.

Many members of the family have served in the armed forces, and several became prisoners of war.

In 1942 Sir Charles Douglas Blackett, then a Major in The Queen’s Bays, was serving in the North African desert. On 25 January he was captured during a counter-attack against tanks of Rommel’s Afrika Corps.

Wentworth Hubert Charles Beaumont, the 3rd Viscount Allendale, and a descendant of Sir Thomas Wentworth Blackett, enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1940 and flew 71 Spitfire missions before being shot down in 1942 while attacking a ship off Valchesen in northern Holland, suffering a severe leg injury. He was captured and sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia, the setting for what was to be made famous in the film “The Great Escape”. Unable, due to his injury, to join the 80 prisoners in the escape party, he was a member of the map-making team supporting the escape committee. He was commissioned a Flight Lieutenant while in the camp, where he spent the rest of the war.

Ernald Freeman Chell, the son of Frederick Chell and Catherine Blackett of Frankton, Hamilton, New Zealand and a private in the New Zealand 21st regiment was captured in North Africa. On Monday 17 August 1942 he was one of 3,000 prisoners of war on the Italian troop ship Nino Bixio. Between Libya and Sicily the ship was torpedoed by the submarine HMS Turbulent and Ernald, along with more than 100 other prisoners, was killed.

Selwyn Beattie Blacket also died at sea as a prisoner of war on 12 September 1944. He was a private in the 8th Division, Australian Army Service Corps.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Lewis Hodges, who married Elisabeth Blackett in 1950, was a POW for only a short time. In September 1940, returning with 49 Squadron from a bomber raid on Stettin, his plane crashed in France. He reached the Pyrenees but was captured by the gendarmerie and moved to Marseilles. After trying to get away by ship he was imprisoned and then placed on parole pending trial. He then escaped to Spain via Perpignan, was again imprisoned, finally returning to England in 1941.

Captain Douglas Blackett was captured in 1940 and remained a prisoner in Offlag VII-B in Stuttgart, Germany, for the duration. For a fascinating account of his pen-pal correspondence with Ed Crommelin, a Dutch radio jazz broadcaster, please click here. [link]

(For details of Blacketts who were killed in the World Wars please visit their page on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site.) [Link]