Accountancy Ancestors: Achievements, tragedy and disaster

Venetia Phair (née Burney) was born in Oxford in 1918 and before her accountancy career she had become known as 'the girl who named Pluto', aged 11.

Venetia had suggested the name of of Pluto, Roman god of the underworld, over breakfast with her grandfather, Falconer Madon, a retired Librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford. Madon in turn passed the suggestion to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, director of the Radcliffe Observatory, who sent the suggestion by telegram to the Lowell observatory in Arizona. The people at Lowell particularly liked the fact that the first two letters of Pluto were the initials of observatory founder Percival Lowell. Less than a month later, Pluto was announced as the official name for the newly discovered planet.

Her family had some pedigree in naming celestial bodies, her great-uncle, Henry Madan, a science-master at Eton, had suggested the names Deimos and Phobos for the moons of Mars in 1878.

Venetia got into Cambridge University at the second attempt, going up to Newnham College in 1938, reading Economics.  After graduation she took articles with the firm of C.W Shelford in London and took her exams in the war years, the intermediate examination in January 1943 and the final examination in August 1944. She remembers taking the Intermediate exam in the City and 'going down under our desks at intervals', which can be taken to mean that air raids were taking place at the time!

Venetia was one of 6 women admitted to ICAEW membership in 1944 (total female membership was still under 100) and she worked, after qualification, for Roley, Pemberton & Co, in Leadenhall Street, London EC3. until she married Edward Phair, a classicist who later became head of English at Epsom College, at the end of 1947. It seems that was the end of her practising, but she did remain a member, becoming an FCA in 1960 and last appearing in the List of Members in 1967. 

When her son Philip (born 1949) was at prep school, Venetia returned to work as a history teacher at Gloucester House School in Sutton, Surrey, and then as a part time Economics Teacher at Wallington County Grammar School, until retiring in 1983 at the age of 65. She died in Banstead, Surrey on April 30 2009, aged 90.

In 2006 the NASA New Horizons mission which flew by Pluto, had onboard a Student Dust Counter instrument renamed the 'Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter' and In 2017 the International Astronomical Union named a crater on Pluto 'Burney' in her honour.

Read more about Venetia

• Interview with Venetia Phair (Cherry's Cache)
• NASA interview with Venetia Phair
• Venetia Phair's wikipedia entry

Sydney Edmund Busher became a member of the Society of Incorporated Accountants and Auditors in 1910 and emigrated to Sydney, Australia, shortly afterwards. Mr Busher later became managing director of the firm W. E. Smith, Ltd. The obituary in Accountancy (1953, 280) reported that Mr Busher had been a 'promising English county cricketer' and that he had twice bowled W. G. Grace in a single match.

Gerard Van de Linde entered the accountancy profession in 1875 and became a member of the ICAEW in 1880. Gerard 'endeared himself to the members of the profession by his constant willingness to read papers at Students' Societies throughout the country' (The Accountant 1922, p400) and he generously passed on all the profits from the printed book of his papers to CABA. At the time of his death, aged 83, Gerard Van de Linde was regarded as one of the most respected members of the profession. In 1917 Gerard published a volume of his Reminiscences.

Tragically, Gerard Van de Linde lived to see two sons die before him. Gerard Casper Van de Linde died of typhoid at the age of 25 (The Accountant 1889, p590) and Sidney Cooper Van de Linde died at the age of 26 after falling from a fifth floor window at the Hotel Metropole, Brighton (The Accountant 1896, p274).

A short biographical note on Gerrit Van de Linde, the father of Gerard Van de Linde, was reproduced from 'The Echo' in The Accountant (1895, p747).

Samuel Culley had, as The Accountant aptly described it, 'an adventurous and remarkable career'. In 1841 Samuel travelled out to New Zealand as a colonist but was forced to return to England for family reasons. Mr Culley made the voyage home from Auckland as second mate on board an American whaler which had already endured one mutiny. It was to prove a far from easy passage home, including a three day storm and at point the whaler was almost shipwrecked. Mid-way through the voyage the Captain was said to have lost his reason and 'there was a renewed outbreak of the mutiny, which Mr. Culley at length repressed by seizing the ringleaders and putting them in irons' (Accountant 1899, p89). Samuel Culley was feted as a hero. Samuel Culley went on to become City Accountant in Norwich, a post he held from 1887 to 1898.

One of the most poignant obituaries in the database is that of Nathaniel Dixon who died on Thursday March 30th 1899 whilst travelling with his daughter on the channel steamship Stella in the week before Easter. The Stella was travelling at full speed from Southampton to Guernsey through a fog that had settled on the channel when she hit the Casquets, a group of rocks near Alderney in the Channel Islands. The Stella disaster claimed the lives of 77 passengers and crew (out of 190 on board).

The Incorporated Accountants' Journal (May 1899, p157) tells us that 'After the ship had struck on the rocks and orders had been given to save the women and children, Mr. Dixon assisted his daughter to fasten on a life belt and saw her taken into one of the ship's boats, he himself remaining quietly on the ship until she went to her doom.'

Another accountant, Maurice Black, also died in the Stella Disaster and his obituary appears in The Accountant (1899, p407).

M. C. McEwan was admitted to the Edinburgh Society of Accountants in 1888. M. C. McEwan had been 'one of the leading rugby players in Scotland' (The Accountant 1899, p460) and represented his country from 1886 to 1892. In 1891 he captained the Scottish team to victory over England at Richmond by three goals to one.