Friends of Hastings Cemetery

AR L23

Gustave Schmalz died aged 71 on 26th July 1889 and his wife Margaret Schmalz died on the 22nd November 1920, aged 94.  She is buried in EL F02.

[Frederick] Gustave Schmalz had settled in Ryton-On-Tyne near Newcastle as a prosperous merchant and German Consul after moving from Dantzig in Northern Germany in the 1840s.

He married Margaret Bell Carmichael on the 1st May 1850. (Frederick William Gustave Schmalz and Margaret Bell Carmichael, 01 May 1850; citing Old Church,Saint Pancras,London,)

Her Father was the famous marine artist John Wilson Carmichael who had been captured at the age of fifteen and forcibly shipped off to the Peninsula War as a cabin boy were he developed his love of the sea.

Gustave and Margaret had three children, Maria Flora Schmalz  was born in 1851

Ernest Carmichael Schmalz was born in 1853, and Herbert Gustave  in 1856.

.Herbert was to become a painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites.  Michael Wood in his book “Victorian Painting” says      “….the appropriately named Schmalz.  … Like so many late Victorian pictures, the best that can be said for it [Zenobia] is that it anticipates Hollywood and the epics of Cecil B De Mille.  However, his paintings were very popular at the time, and were exhibited all over the country.  There were several exhibitions in Hastings, including one in W. Slade’s Piano shop (which he cleared for the exhibition by a sale of musical instruments.)

In 1918 Herbert changed his name to Herbert Gustave Carmichael.  Art catalogues etc. often now refer to him as Herbert Gustave Carmichael Schmalz. E.g. – “Herbert Gustave Carmichael Schmalz, the London-based Victorian genre painter, captures the budding romance….”

Ernest also changed his name:

THE LONDON GAZETTE, 28 DECEMBER, 1917.
I ERNEST CARMIGHAEL CARMICHAEL, being a British born subject, heretofore called and known by the name of Ernest Carmichael Schmalz, Vicar of Padbury, in the county of Buckingham, M.A., Clerk in Holy Orders, hereby give public notice that on the fifteenth day of October, one thousand nine hundred and seventeen, I formally and absolutely renounced, relinquished arid abandoned the use of my said surname of Schmalz, and then assumed and adopted, and determined .thenceforth on all occasions whatsoever to use and subscribe the name of Carmichael, that being my Mother's maiden name, instead of the said name of Schmalz; and I give further notice, that by a deed poll dated the fifteenth day of October, one thousand nine hundred and seventeen, duly executed and attested and enrolled in the Central Office of the Supreme Court on -the seventh day of December, one thousand nine hundred and seventeen, I formally and absolutely renounced and abandoned the said surname of Schmalz, and declared that I had assumed and adopted, and intended thenceforth upon all occasions whatsoever to use and subscribe the name of Carmichael instead of Schmalz, and so as to be at all times thereafter called, known and described by the name of Carmichael exclusively.—Dated the twenty-first day of December, one thousand nine hundred and seventeen. ERNEST CARMICHAEL CARMICHAEL, late Ernest Carmichael Schmalz.

In 1887 Mr. and Mrs Schmalz are listed as arrivals at the Hydropathic Establishment (Old London Road)

Sussex Agricultural Express - Saturday 27 July 1889
SCHMALZ.-On the 23rd inst., at St. Leonards-on-Sea, Gustave Schmalz, late German Consul New castle-on-Tyne, in his 72nd year.

Probate was granted to his widow Margaret Bell Schmalz and son, the Reverend Ernest Carmichael Schmalz, both of 19 Mount Emphraim Tunbridge Wells.