When Cyril met Geoffrey

I hope you will forgive me, dear reader, for the fact that this week's blog may tax your mind.  You might care to find pencil and paper now, in order to follow its intricacies.

I've been telling friends this week about my upcoming trip in the motorhome, and the plans I have to visit in the course of my travels, two brothers whom I think of as my cousins, but in fact are no blood relation at all.  Their link to me is that their father's brother married my mother's sister, so we have a common cousin, but are not cousins to each other.  If you think that's complicated, read on ...

During the course of trawling through some papers this week, I came across a note that brought to mind the two title characters in this piece.  They have been (I suppose I should say 'were', since by now they have both passed on to a better place) part of my life since I can remember.  They were my mother's work colleagues before I was born.  In one of my earliest blogs, I wrote at some length about the shop where they all spent their working lives.

I'm not sure when they started working there, nor which one arrived first. Each was a few years younger than my mother, and Geoffrey was by two years the elder of them.  I presume they had both seen military service during World War II, but I have no evidence one way or the other.  They were still there long after I worked alongside them during school holidays in my teens.  They also shared a common interest in cage birds, but I now find myself wondering if they ever discovered in their long association the family chains that linked them to one another ... as well as to me.

Cyril's link to me was obvious.  His wife was my first cousin, since her mother and my father were siblings.  Their father's youngest sister Betsy married one Nathan Bridges, whose eldest brother Eli (or Elijah) was the grandfather of Edgar W. Bridges, who was born in 1911 and married a lady called Violet in 1946.

This lady, the vital link in the chain connecting these two men, was born Violet Madge Cooke in 1914. She had previously been married to Geoffrey's uncle.  Like my father (one of twelve), Geoffrey's father, too, came from a large family, being the eldest of ten.  Violet's husband Freddie, born 1909, was his youngest brother.

As I know from personal experience, divorce happens for a variety of reasons, usually a combination of them rather than a single cause.  A common reason for divorce after the war was incompatibility with a returning serviceman husband.  I have no idea whether this was the case for Violet and Freddie.  They had a daughter, born in 1936, who - whatever the causes involved - would have been aware of this tragedy happening around her.

So ... the summary statement, wait for it ... Cyril's wife's grandfather's brother-in-law was the grandfather of Geoffrey's aunt's second husband.  No, I shouldn't think either of them knew their families that well.

How did I get to know all these details? you will surely be wondering.  It all started through a fascination with the Bridges family.  Not only were they linked to my own in the way I've already mentioned; Nathan's youngest brother Sydney (another big family: Nathan was the sixth of nine children) married the illegitimate daughter of another of my grandfather's sisters.  In the course of following up this curiosity, I made contact with a granddaughter of Violet and her second husband Edgar Bridges.

And just to complete the complexities, I remember meeting Violet's and Edgar's daughter Louise when at the local swimming pool in the sixties!

Now, how full is your piece of paper?