From Both Sides Now

I confess, I was out yesterday and completely forgot that it was Friday - the day when I usually write my blog.  Consistency is important, though, (and that's a phrase that has current significance, I realise) so here are a few thoughts about something that has been on my mind for the last ten days or so.

When Boris Johnson was finally persuaded to resign, one thing was inevitable ... an election to find a successor to him, both as party leader and, de facto, as Prime Minister of our United Kingdom.  I'd forgotten just how long and protracted a business this is although, apparently, the 1922 Committee have taken measures to speed things up a bit.

Essentially, the process is in two parts, rather like a French election.  Firstly the current MPs of the party reduce the many candidates to just two.  Secondly, these two are presented to the membership of the party countrywide, to determine which of the chosen two will be the new leader.  The first part of this process can take up to two weeks.  At the start, any candidate who can't find among his or her fellow MPs a required minimum number of supporters is eliminated.  Then the MPs vote in a succession of ballots at each of which the candidate getting the least number of votes is eliminated, until just two remain.

When I first heard how this was being done - I think it was when David Cameron resigned after the Brexit vote in 2016 - I thought, 'How stupid'.  If they were to use a Single Transferable Vote, all unpteen candidates could be presented to the membership from the word go.  It would then take, say, three weeks for the votes to be returned, each showing the voter's preferences and the new leader could be in post within a month.

After all, the MPs' selection process puts into human form part of the counting procedure in an STV election.  The candidates getting the lowest number of votes are eliminated and their votes go to their next preference.  In the actual Conservative party process, they have to decide who else to vote for; with STV that decision process is expressed at the outset.  What's missing in making this comparison is the re-allocation of excess votes over and above the minimum required to elect the winner (the Quota).

My own criticism of the system ended at this point with a declaration that, of course, the Tories would never decide to use STV.

The non-partisan activist group advocating proportional representation, Make Votes Matter, goes a stage further than I did.  Stripping the whole consideration back to first principles, their most telling analysis is simply this.  If the Conservatives really believe that First Past the Post is the best system, the only good way, to hold an election, then they would use it to elect their leaders.  They would send out the complete candidate list to the membership and whoever came out with the most votes would be the winner.

But they don't.  As MVM's leaders have pointed out, 'If FPTP is not good enough for them to use themselves, why should they force the general electorate to use it to elect our MPs?'

One Year On ...

Wednesday marked the anniversary of my removal to Goldthorpe and I thought it would be interesting to review the last year.  A few weeks ago one of my 'Sunday Friends' asked how I was getting on in Goldthorpe.  Aware of my limitations, I answered only the first part of his question, having brought with me a 'bubble' of life into which I felt I had largely withdrawn, cocoon-like.  Join me on a journey through my diary to see if that's true.

The move itself was interesting, starting in rain, but all was unloaded by 2.0 pm.  The major snags were attributable to the steepness of the staircase and the fact of its being enclosed.  The wardrobe had to be disassembled in the lounge and then rebuilt in the bedroom.  The bed wasn't so fortunate; it lingered in the dining room for ten days or so, and was finally destroyed and taken to the council tip.  Meanwhile my first few nights found me using the mattress on the floor until a self-assembly bed frame could be procured.

The garden was the next big challenge.  I hadn't wanted a garden anyway but, in a tight market, I wasn't about to make a fuss.  Many a morning was spent moving concrete slabs, and digging out giant weeds, before trampling it flat and laying a membrane, on which I repositioned the slabs and surrounded them with lots of granite chips.  At the front the tiny area was already stone-covered, but through this was growing what amounted to half a tree. I cut out what I could and treated the root with bleach. However, when it showed signs of new growth, I knew I should have to clear the stones and dig that out too.  By this time the back was ready for the chips, so some got diverted to make the front tidy as well.

As early as the first weekend, I found water running down the landing wall, and the roofing people came to 'fix it' a couple of weeks later.  Only they hadn't. A few months after that, the problem recurred in greater force and just before Christmas scaffolding was erected so that a more permanent repair could be done.  Meanwhile a mystery parcel had arrived.  My landlord, aghast at these and many other 'teething' problems that I'd had to cope with, had sent me a tin of shortbread!  Not much, I hear you say, but she'd had to bear the not insignificant cost of all the work that had been done; I only had a little inconvenience.

By this time, I'd become established in my new place of worship, the Quaker fellowship in Doncaster, who are inheritors of one of the very first Meetings, established in 1652.  Here I'd learned of their need for an Area Treasurer, and offered my services.  Being new to the fellowship, and not a Member, there were a number of administrative hurdles to be negotiated, but in January I was appointed and set to work immediately studying the complex workings towards the completion of 2020 accounts, and building my own spreadsheet 'family' to produce the required documents for 2021.  This exercise is only now completed - albeit a bit earlier than last year's was - and I can turn my attention to the current year.

I spoke of the 'bubble' I'd brought with me.  The greatest component of this was my work for WEBBS, which I've mentioned often on this blog, helping in the production of digital scriptures in foreign languages for use in the mission field.  Another was my Welsh studies.  By the time I'd clocked up 900 days, I decided that, for all the use I would put it to, my knowledge of the language was sufficient.  The main problems are primarily vocabulary (I probably have only about 1,500 words, if I can remember them) and secondarily, remembering the mutations.  But, given that most of my use of yr iaith Cymraeg is going to be translating into English, I shall recognise these when they occur, and won't have to worry about remembering to use them myself.

Of course there has always been family history to squeeze in. I brought with me the collection of microfiche of which I had been custodian for some years.  When I reminded the Society that I still had them, and was willing to do look-ups if anyone wanted, this was greeted with a kind of semi-serious mirth.  The technology of micro-fiche is virtually obsolete and, thinking that the subtext of my offer was a desire to get rid of them, I was told that they could be junked.  Seeing that I was serious, not only was a notice put in the Society magazine, but a month or so ago I was presented with a redundant fiche reader from the local record office, which is in much better condition than the one I owned.  And it's not an entirely dead technology either, for only this week I've received an e-mailed enquiry that I shall begin to look into after a busy weekend.

Realising the limitations of the answer I had given to my friend's enquiry, I decided to do something about this, and I'm now getting regular exercise by walking into the town one morning a week to join in a community coffee morning which, in some ways, is similar to the one run by the Salvation Army in Letchworth that I helped with before Covid.

I have plans for the future in many of these directions, but I keep reminding myself that the whole idea of moving away from the 'First Garden City' came from the Almighty, and I keep looking to Him for guidance as the days and weeks roll by.

While Gladstone danced with Disraeli and Salisbury ...

The 1911 census may have gone out of fashion following the arrival of its younger successor, but its unique 'fertility statistics' have proved immeasurably useful to family history researchers.  It's one thing to scour the censuses of the late Victorian era, and thereby establish what we might think of as a complete family, but the 1911 record provides what in most cases is the authentic total, and may send us scurrying to the recently-released GRO records to fill the gaps by searching for the mother's maiden name.

By such means a family of six can become a family of eight, three can become five or, as in one case I found recently, two early children and two later ones book-ended four siblings each of whom lived only a few days or weeks before dying in the same quarter as their birth.

But, to go back to my title ... between the spring of 1868 and the summer of 1892 - fairly well matching the to-and-fro of those famous politicians - Arthur and Clara Kerridge were steadily going about their business of re-populating the north of Suffolk.  During those years, they produced a total of eighteen children and, by 1911, they could claim, 'eighteen children: eighteen still living'.  There was no need for me to search for more, nor to seek deaths of infants either.

I had long been aware of their number, and had dutifully recorded their births when researching the family of my cousin's husband, whose grandmother was their twelfth child.  But it wasn't until a conversation during a visit earlier this year, that I realised that I have noted death details for only four of them.  Somewhat taken aback by this shortcoming, I pledged to search for the deaths of the others.  

Now, at last, I've cleared my family history desk of other matters and have managed to squeeze in (between other regular demands on my time) the opportunity to take up this challenge.  So far, I've made a list, noting the quarters and years of their births, and have noted possible deaths accounting for name and approximate age, but allowing that they might have moved around the country.  However, I realise that this is only scratching the surface, for ten of the eighteen are females, so my search can only provide possible deaths if they remained single.

In making my list, I discovered that not all of these siblings have been accounted for in all possible censuses and only three in the 1939 Register, so one of my early tasks will be to complete that chart. Along with this will be the need to find marriages, thinking that these might at least be reasonably local, and then I shall look for evidence of military service for the sons, and possibly the CWGC records in case any died during the war (this was the line of conversation that sparked off the whole search back in January).  

It doesn't help that there was a family habit of the second forename predominating in common use, for eight of them had two forenames and the first two daughters had three each!  None of the names are particularly rare, if you discount the 'd' in the middle of Standley.  And then there's always the worrying possibility of Philippa Louise being known as Betty ... or similar (not that these specific examples appear at all, but you get my drift).

I did think of following the headlines of recent years, the 'Birmingham Six', the 'Guildford Four' and so on, by heading this piece 'The Hopton Eighteen', but apart from the inaccuracy in that the first three children were born in Hinderclay, and only the other fifteen in Hopton, this template would cast an undeserved slur on the family, and the names wouldn't be so eye-catching anyway.

Given the amount of time and resources I have available to throw at it, this challenge will probably occupy me for the rest of the year, but I think it will be instructive for me as well as an achievement if I can reliably fill all the remaining gaps.

Supporting Schedules

Living alone, I admit that I spend a lot of time thinking about the past.  And the hobby of digging into my family history certainly aids to that phenomenon.  This week, however, there has been another string to that bow.  I've been reminded of my past career, in which I worked in the accounts departments of a sequence of industrial and commercial businesses across East Anglia.

In that profession, one of the most stressful times is that between the end of the financial year and the arrival of the audit team.  In the larger organisations, one of the most time consuming aspects of the pre-audit season was the compilation of Supporting Schedules.  Once the actual figures have been balanced (something that's automatic these days with computerised ledger systems), there is the need to justify that these balances actually reflect what has been going on.

At one office in my past, this was further complicated by the fact that we were dealing with transactions that were not all denominated in Sterling.  With an American parent and two other European subsidiaries, we dealt with four currencies as a matter of course, and there were always difficulties arising from the rates of exchange that had been used.

After that career, when I began work as a self-employed courier driver, it was second nature to do my own accounts.  With a 'business' of that small size, the tax inspector was only really interested in three figures, and in fourteen years I was never asked for more detail.  Nevertheless I now have, stored away in a cupboard, something resembling the same formal accounts for each year as would be prepared and submitted for a business with a million-pound turnover.

Some would say that I was playing a game, and I admit that that's a realistic judgement, but it gave me a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.  Of course, the great tool that assisted in the preparation of these figures was Excel, and the whole 'presentation' included reports of journeys, fuel consumption, and comparisons to a budget that was really no more than an initial estimate of how the coming year would pan out, and not a tool to control expenditure.

Soon after I moved to Yorkshire, I learned that my church was looking for an area treasurer, and I offered my services, thinking that I ought to be well able to cope with this.  As with my predecessor in the post, Excel has played a great role in this.  I spent quite a while following through her spreadsheets for 2020, and found that these were very complex.  With all due caution I decided them to be unnecessarily so, determined what ought to be required for 2021, and spent a week or so compiling a fresh suite of spreadsheets into which I slotted all the year's transactions as they were provided to me.

Now, with only a few weeks left before the date that these have been promised to the accountants, I've reached that time of pressure that I described at the beginning, and the last week has been devoted to preparing those Supporting Schedules.

As I look back on the task, which is now almost complete, I realise that this exercise - that of explaining and justifying balances - can be applied not only to financial results, but also to the present-day outcomes of the various compartments of my life.  I suppose the very fact that I'm doing this particular job in the first place is just one of those compartments for review!  If my life weren't quite so full, would I actually be happier, or would I regret not having so many options to which to turn my hand?

Icebergs

It was US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who talked about 'known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns'.  That was at the time of Iraq and the possibility of her having WMDs, back in 2002.  But this week I've found myself being brought to a greater awareness of these three classifications. (The academic might say there are four, because the third one can be divided into what we might or might not understand if we only but knew of these things.)

As one who has foresworn TV, knowing from past experience of its addictive properties, I enjoy my evening 'unwind time' watching videos on YouTube and I have many regulars, which include themes that are to me an education of what had hitherto been 'unknown unknowns', such as the industrial history of Greater Manchester, and the extent to which railways had covered this country in the early part of last century, and how much of that vast network had already been closed - and virtually all evidence removed - before the famous Dr. Beeching began to wield his metaphorical axe in the 1960s.

Politicians are notorious for their vague, unhelpful or misleading answers to interviewers' questions.  It was over forty years ago that I first realised their use of the basic fact that the total expense on something is dependent on both the unit cost and the number of units ... in mathematical terms, E equals C times N.  We regularly hear answers like one I've heard much repeated this week.  

The question concerned the miserly award of 7p to pay for the increased cost of providing a free school meal (C).  The politician's response is to quote an amount invested (whether this is the total cost of the service, or just the sum injected to provide the increase (E).  The emphasis is on the apparent enormity of E, when taken out of context, and the subtext is 'look how much we're spending on this - why are you complaining?'  The question remains un-answered, and the implication is that the politician is either unaware of, or just doesn't care, how small C is; or is unable to divide E by N; or is totally unaware of N in the first place.

Back to my education (although the above was an education to me, having had no contact with school meals for decades!).

One video I watched this week answered the question why Vladimir Putin is so keen on annihilating Ukraine.  In essence - as I try to summarise 40 minutes of swiftly delivered, illustrated commentary - when the USSR dissolved and Russia was left in 1989, Russia lost, in effect, a sizeable proportion of its oil and gas reserves, mainly to Kazakhstan and Ukraine.  We hear much about the extent that the EU depends on Russia for their energy; I certainly had had no idea just how much of Russia's gas and oil trade is with the EU.  If they could add back the Ukrainian element to their own, their economy would be under far less pressure.

Closer to home, I read a very informative blog this week, which expanded and explained - and it extended to several pages to do so - the situation regarding our Government's attempts to refine, or completely override, the Northern Ireland Protocol, which is part of the Agreement with the EU that achieved Brexit.  Although I have followed the progress of Brexit intently since its inception, there was much about the underlying ramifications of which I had been unaware.  I won't do the blogger the insult of trying to summarise his content - indeed, it would be totally beyond me to do so - so I'll leave you a link, so you can read it for yourself.  It's both surprising (it was to me, anyway) and informative.

Peace at Last?

Sometimes a story falls into your hands, already written, and all you have to do is summarise it and acknowledge the source.  A few weeks ago I published just such a story here.  Since then I have been following up the lives of some of the minor characters in that tale.  Often the pieces fall into place quite easily, but tell of 'normal' lives and certainly don't crave turning into another on-line story.  This week, amidst other work, I've been able to piece together one from the other extreme.

The original tragedy unfolded in the north Suffolk town of Hoxne in 1895 amidst a family of nine children ranging in age from 25 to just six years old.  I had made notes of the marriages and families of some of these nine; others proved quite elusive and I found nothing.  Just two of the nine were daughters.  One, the youngest, posed a problem when it came to research, for she appeared to have many names.  Her birth names (Honor Louisa) differed from that by which she had appeared in the 1891 census (Lucy), and from that reported in the press (Elizabeth).  I'm confident that I've correctly traced her living with an aunt in Stradbroke in 1901 and 1911, but when it came to tracing a marriage or a family, there were a number of choices and nothing to guide me between them.

Her sister Florence had been, according to the newspaper report, "away from home for a couple of weeks".  Florence was 19, and earlier that year had given birth to a daughter, Mary Ann.  Maybe she was in the process of setting up a home for herself, or maybe just visiting friends or relatives.  According to the 1901 census, when the family home broke up, she and one of her younger brothers found a place in the capacious home of another of her mother's sisters.  They were living in the village of Norton, which is over towards Bury St Edmunds, and so quite a way from her other siblings, some of whom were still in Hoxne and some at Mendham, near Harleston.

With such a large household, the uncle and aunt, Charles and Sarah Laflin, found it difficult to account for all the relationships, and after listing Leonard and Florence as nephew and niece, they then described Florence's two daughters, Mary Ann and Florence Rose (born in 1897 in neighbouring Finborough), as 'granddaughters' ... which may well be how the girls were treated, amidst their five cousins.

I referred to the distance between the siblings; this didn't mean there was no communication between them,  The two brothers in Mendham were living just two doors away from a household that comprised a 'married' (probably widowed) man, his two children under 10, a housekeeper and her 15-year-old son.  Obviously a variety of interpretations can be put on this ménage, but word may well have got back to Florence that this man, James Brundish, who was some 18 years her senior, was looking for a more permanent arrangement ... or, alternatively, news of her might have attracted his attention.  However it came about, the two were married in the latter part of 1902.

It seems likely that, after their marriage - or even before - Florence and her daughters had replaced the housekeeper and her son in James's house in Mendham.  This might have been the 'happily ever after' point but I couldn't find them in the 1911 census to confirm this.  There was no trace of Florence, James or his children ... nor of the housekeeper or her son.  Eventually I discovered that James had died early in 1904.  

Just six months or so after James's death, Florence married William Daniels.  William was almost four years younger than Florence, and had been born in the next village, Weybread.  In 1911, Florence and William were living in Mendham with his father, their own young daughter, Winifred, and Florence's younger daughter, who was now 13 and going by the name of Rosa.  The family was further enhanced by the arrival of Florence's fourth child, Wilfred in 1912.  Unfortunately, I've not been able to trace what happened to Mary Ann.  Still only 16 in 1911, she was probably in service somewhere, but under which of the three names that she could have used?

Florence died in Mendham in 1932, at the age of 56; William re-married three years later, was still living in Mendham in 1939, and died in 1962 at the age of 82.

A Weekend of Celebration

Well, it's arrived at last!  It seems the whole country has been planning for it for ages, and now it's finally here ... the Platinum Jubilee.  This thought isn't my own, and I confess that it hadn't dawned on me until someone pointed out, just a day or two ago, the confusion over what it is we're actually celebrating.  Thursday 2nd June was actually the 69th anniversary, not the 70th, of the queen's coronation.  But let's not throw too big a damper on proceedings.  She has been our queen for seventy years: the 70th anniversary of that was back in February ... but who wants to celebrate in the middle of winter?

And what a remarkable achievement.  Only a small proportion of our population has been alive other than during her reign, and to have any credible recollection of life under the reign of her father, you have to be at least 75 years old.  As I've often quipped, I may be old enough to have had a ration book, but I'm not old enough to have known that I had one.

A characteristic of many public gatherings and celebrations this weekend will be portrayals, illustrations and photographs of many different aspects of our lives as they have changed over the last seventy years.  So many things that were commonplace at the time of the coronation have now long since disappeared and been forgotten, while others that we take for granted today were not even dreamed about then ... at least not beyond the realms of science fiction.

Many, like me, will find their own memories being nudged back to childhood as they recollect times of long ago, faces of the past, former generations who haven't been part of family gatherings for many a decade.  For some, these journeys into nostalgia will be comfortable, an opportunity to enjoy once more the happiness of a past life.  For others, however, they will bring back the horrors of war, loneliness, loss and pain from which the comforts of modern living had brought some relief, and they will long for all the fuss to be over and for normal, modern life to return.

This week I have been working with Genesis.  I knew that it was Genesis because there were fifty chapters of it, and that was the name of the computer files.  Moment by moment, as words in a foreign language passed to and fro across my screen, they could have been anything.  My only concern was that what was in one window was the same as what was in the other.  Working from an original where the verse numbers are in the margin, one person's interpretation of where the verse actually ends sometimes differs from another's.  At these points, I had to call upon an English version to adjudicate,  comparing the 'shape' of the familiar text and its numbered verses to the original I was working with.

It was at those moments that I got a glimpse of the 'story', and was reminded that this was, indeed, Genesis.  Those fifty chapters cover a vast span of history, from creation itself, to Noah and the flood, and to the story of four generations of Abraham's family, ending with Joseph and his brothers in Egypt.  Compared to that, this week's celebrations, and the seventy years over which we're looking back, pale into insignificance.

It's often easier to think about things that are familiar, than to strain one's imagination with the concept of centuries of development.  So, on these momentous occasions, we recall our own families, grandparents perhaps, but little further than that. In the same way, I found a comfortable familiarity in the closing bits of Genesis: in particular the bit where Joseph brought his sons to his father Jacob for a blessing.  Joseph noticed that the boys were the wrong way round, and made to reverse them, but Jacob persisted,  I wonder whether Jacob was looking back to his own childhood and the way his own and his brother's fortunes had been reversed.

This weekend, I think back to my own grandparents, in their old age, when my mother used regularly to take me to their home, and I wonder what they thought of this six- or seven-year-old.  Did they question, perhaps, what I would grow into long after they'd passed on?