The History of Our Village Through Time
The following article is reproduced courtesy of Oliver Hart
For several years I had been trying to recover the history of my family’s forebears, about whom almost nothing was known. They were remembered only vaguely as relatives who had returned from the Far East in the nineteenth century, but without any clear account of who they were or what had become of them. There were no letters, no family papers, only scraps of oral family lore vaguely passed down.
Gradually, through patient work in archives and old newspapers, something of that lost world began to re-emerge. I discovered that my great-great-grandfather, Charles Henry Hart, had been a merchant adventurer engaged in what was then known as the China Trade, operating between Macao, Hong Kong and Calcutta during the 1840s. The Canton Register, an English-language newspaper of the period, recorded Charles living in Macao in 1843, while two of his brothers, Alexander and Benjamin, were in Hong Kong.
In time, I was able to piece together much of the later lives of Charles Henry and Alexander. Benjamin, however, remained an enigma. He appeared briefly in the records and then vanished altogether. There was no marriage, no death notice, no burial place, no family memory. He seemed simply to have been swallowed up by history.
Then, in July 2025, something extraordinary happened.
On the Indonesian island of Lombok, members of the Lombok Historical and Scientific Society were examining an old and largely forgotten Chinese cemetery. Hidden among the overgrowth, they found two gravestones marking the graves of Europeans. One belonged to a Swedish man which bore a Masonic emblem. The other marked the grave of an Englishman who had died in 1846, with no religious marking. These were the only European graves in what was otherwise a Chinese burial ground.
Dr James Bennett (left), Emeritus
curator of Southeast Asian Art and
Material Culture @ Museum and Art.
Bpk Jauhari Tantowi and Bpd
Ariyadifahri from Yayasan
Sekolah Pesisi Juang (Foundation
School for the Struggle of Coastal
Communities).
Lalu Lukman Efendi from Lombok
Historical and Science Society, and
Assoc. Professor Dr Muchammadun
from Mataram State Islamic
University, Mataram.
The inscription on the second stone read:
The discovery was remarkable enough. What followed was more remarkable still.
Members of the society contacted Dr James Bennett, a historian living in Lombok, who took the initiative of researching Hapton Hall. He in turn contacted the Hapton History Group in Norfolk. Their secretary, Claire Dove, replied almost immediately. She confirmed that they were aware of the Hart family in Hapton during the eighteenth century and that one of their members, Ben Goodfellow, had written in detail about the family’s presence there in the eighteenth century.
Then she added that a descendant of that same family had recently been in touch.
That descendant was me.
When I first learned of the inscription, I could scarcely believe it. After years of searching, Benjamin had been found - not in Hong Kong, not in Macao, not in England, but on Lombok, nearly one hundred and eighty years after his death.
The gravestone not only answered several questions at once, but left clues for further research. It confirmed that Benjamin was the youngest son of George Hart of Hapton Hall in Norfolk. It gave the date of his death - 26 March 1846 - and as he was aged 27 suggested a birth year of about 1818 or 1819. But what of Hapton Hall?
I was able to find references to Hapton Hall on the internet and it turned out to have been a substantial ‘timber framed manor house built in the Tudor/Elizabethan period’. It was Benjamin’s grandparents who had occupied Hapton Hall and they would have been described as ‘gentleman farmers’, cultivating a large acreage but not with the sweat of their brow. However it was for their devout faith as Quakers that they were principally known - a faith that inspired habits of plain living, charity and moral seriousness, while also placing them somewhat apart from the established order of rural English society.
Benjamin’s father left the Society of Friends, as the Quakers were known, when he married, his bride Catherine Crakanthorp who belonged to the Church of England. Consequently Benjamin was reared in the Anglican Church, but there is no indication of this on the tombstone.
The other enticing clue lay in Benjamin’s middle name - Crakanthorp - his mother’s surname. Tracing this unusual and distinctive name I was able to follow her ancestry back as far as the Middle Ages. Her most notable ancestor was a distinguished theologian and logician, Richard Crakanthorp, who was for a time chaplain to King James I. Earlier ancestors can be traced back through parliamentary records to Westmorland in northern England, where they were Shire Knights, Sheriffs and Members of Parliament.
The story did not end there. Concerned that the grave was neglected and vulnerable, local supporters proposed protecting it. The cemetery custodians objected to the erection of a metal fence, believing it would be bad feng shui, but they approved the construction of a low wall around the base. I was glad to contribute the modest cost, and work soon began.
All the while, we were naturally curious as to why Benjamin had been in Lombok in the first place. Lombok is often assumed to have formed part of the Dutch East Indies throughout the nineteenth century, yet Dutch control of the island was not completed until 1894. In the 1840s it was ruled by a Balinese dynasty centred in the west of the island, whose ruler controlled the port of Ampenan, where Benjamin’s grave now lies.
Ampenan was then Lombok’s principal harbour: an open anchorage with a pier extending from the town’s warehouses and customs offices. It exported rice and tobacco, but it was also a lively regional entrepôt, linked to the wider trading networks of Southeast Asia. Ships arrived from Singapore, Calcutta and the Indian Ocean; from China and the Philippines; and from the south through routes reaching towards Australia. Through customs dues, anchorage fees and trade, the Rajah of Lombok derived considerable wealth.
At the time of Benjamin’s death Ampenan was one of the more active ports in the eastern archipelago considered a rival to Singapore. An average of forty shipping movements being recorded at the port over a twenty four hour period. However Singapore’s Freeport status resulted in Lombok’s gradual decline.
The fact that the gravestone was erected “by his friends” without mentioning his brothers suggests that he was sailing independently of them. We know from historical records that Charles Henry Hart’s activities some years earlier had included voyages from Sydney to Micronesia trading turtle shell and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber). It is therefore possible that Benjamin too had joined one of the free-ranging merchant schooners that moved restlessly through these waters, seeking trade wherever it might be found.
When news reached me that the grave had been repaired, I was determined to visit the site and thank those who had made it possible. So in April 2026 I travelled to Lombok with my son, Alexander - bearing the same name as Benjamin’s brother, and representing the fifth generation descended from that family.
Our flights connected through Singapore, where Charles Henry’s son and grandson had once lived, offering further opportunities for research. But that is another story.
We arrived in Lombok by boat from Bali and were met by James Bennett and Pak Jau, whose energy and goodwill had done so much to preserve the grave. After lunch together, and much discussion of the chain of coincidences that had brought us all together, we arranged to meet later in the week at the cemetery.
When the day came, Pak Jau had invited children from his nearby charity school to join us. Through an interpreter, Alexander explained to them why we had come: to honour the memory of an ancestor long forgotten, and to give thanks to those who had cared for his resting place.
At the graveside we held a short ceremony. I spoke of what it meant to discover, after so many years, the burial place of one whose life had almost entirely disappeared from family memory. Benjamin had died young, far from home, yet his tombstone told us that he had been “beloved by all who knew him,” and that his loss had been felt deeply enough for his friends to raise this tribute in his memory.
Like Pak Jau, Benjamin’s brother Alexander had been a schoolteacher, and I could not help thinking Benjamin would have approved that the children from the ‘School for the Struggle for Coastal Communities’ were now among those watching over him.
The children then scattered flower petals across the grave.
Afterwards the children led us to the nearby beach, where they took part in a small clean-up organised by their teachers and led by Alexander. Given the scale of the discarded plastic it was a symbolic gesture more than a practical one, but this too was an act of care: for the shore, for the future, and for the place where Benjamin had come to rest.
As I stood there, I thought how completely Benjamin had once vanished. For generations he had been no more than a name, then not even that. Yet on a distant shore, nearly two centuries after his death, strangers had restored him to memory, and his own family had come back to find him. Benjamin had not returned to Norfolk. Instead, after all those years, through the collaboration of the two historical societies Norfolk had returned to him.
Oliver Hart
Sunday 3rd May 2026
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