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?

Slowing Down

It occurred to me the other day that maybe ... just maybe ... there's a slight possibility ... that my life is other than 'ordinary' (whatever that might mean).  Sundays apart - do you remember the 'Keep Sunday Special' campaign? I'm a firm believer in that - I spend most of the other six days in the week sitting at my desk.  

I suppose, if you take out the time spent away for the essentials of living, like preparing and eating meals, washing, a minimal amount of cleaning, and a couple of hours relaxing in the evening, I probably aggregate about three-quarters of my waking hours in that one corner of my dining room that I laughingly call 'the office'.

And what do I do there?  One segment of my time is devoted to the work that I referred to last week, playing my part in a process of turning printed scriptures into digital format for missionary use.  An growing second chunk is becoming absorbed by my recently having taken on the duties of church treasurer, predominantly the preparation of last year's accounts, but increasingly picking up the threads of week-by-week routines of the current year.

Then there's a fairly constant sliver of 'administration': maintaining records of personal finances, energy costs, records of my car mileage and fuel (a hangover from my professional life when this was a necessary part of my annual accounts), and so on.  And finally, any time that's left gets taken up by my family history researches, which vary from a couple of quite intense days to not touching them for weeks on end, depending what else might be going on.

And amongst all this, is what has become a daily mantra, "Oh gosh, I haven't done any Welsh!"  For almost 900 days in the last three years, I have been studying this, the only language designated by Act of Parliament in this United Kingdom as an 'Official Language'.  For this latest iteration of my learning - I gave up the Teach Yourself book-I used when I first retired, upon realising that it is some 50 years out of date - I owe a debt of gratitude to a lady named Portia.

I met Portia in Llandrindod Wells, when I was helping with the by-election campaign that saw Jane Dodds elected as the MP for Breckon & Radnorshire just a few months before the 2019 General Election.  Portia sat at the desk behind me in the office and she introduced me to a wonderful on-line system called Duolingo.  Apart from being an effective teaching medium, it has the advantage of being free (although there are enhancements resultant upon payment of a fee that I've never explored).  The downside is the compulsive element, which demands daily attendance, upon penalty of paying a forfeit in the on-site currency that is built up by passing regular targets and milestones in one's progress.

Although I'm only just over halfway through the course, I'm finding this pressure increasingly burdensome and I'm thinking of abandoning this discipline once I hit that 900 day achievement.  That isn't to say I shall stop learning.  I was given a wonderful selection of Welsh books before leaving Letchworth, and I shall take a more leisurely look at some of these, making use of the skills I've already learned to advance at a more gentle pace in the coming months.

And what, you may well be asking, has brought forth this exercise of self-assessment?  Quite simply that which the Welsh call annwyd, viz. the common cold.  I set out as usual this morning with a finite set of targets and, as I sat down with some relief for my 'chill-time', I reeled off a list of things that I'd just not been able to fit into my day.  I'm writing this during the week, of course, and I'm hopeful that - suitably dosed up - life will be back to normal by the time you read this, but a little objective reflection is never a bad thing if not taken too far.

It Was a First!

When you get to my age, I think, all the greater is the feeling of utter satisfaction when something happens, or you record some achievement FOR THE FIRST TIME!  

A few weeks ago when I cooked my tea, for the first time ever, I broke an egg and discovered a double yolk inside.  Of course, something spectacular like that just had to be recorded, didn't it? 

But that incident pales into insignificance when compared to last weekend. Four or five years ago I popped along to Northampton for a few hours to the Liberal Democrats' regional conference, but until May 2022, I'd never been to a real, live, pack-your-bags-and-stay-for-the-weekend Conference.

For the last fifteen months or so I've been working for an organisation called MissionAssist.  Now, when I say 'working', yes, it's doing work, but this charity has no employees.  All of its workers, from the CEO down, whether in their first or thirty-first year with them, wherever they are in the world, are volunteers. It's a big international family. 

So, when the boss's PA sends you an e-mail saying that the Annual Conference will be from 13th to 15th May, it's not a command.  There's no three-line whip dictating that you shall attend, lest some dreadful penalty be extorted.  It's a gentle imparting of news, reaction to which is entirely your choice.

Last year's Conference was held on line, through the good offices of Zoom, and that for 2020 had to be cancelled altogether so, for those who have been part of the MA family for almost any time longer than I have, this offered the opportunity for friends and on-line colleagues to meet each other for a catch-up for the first time for three years.  I'm pleased to say I was far from the only 'newbie' attending and, for all of us it was a chance to fit faces to many who have been no more than names on an e-mail up to now.

Hayes Conference Centre,
Swanwick

I think in excess of a tenth of the total membership attended and, unlike the big conferences that regularly make the news, we didn't have to travel to the seaside.  However, the weather in Derbyshire was exceedingly good, such that a seaside location would have been perfectly acceptable.  

We had an inspirational guest speaker who gave four talks on an appropriate theme, and there were the inevitable reports from departmental managers and workshops to join in, as well as time for casual conversation and to learn what other people's roles consisted of.

And the food was fantastic!  Dinner on Friday evening was welcome after the drive there in late afternoon, but the shock of three cooked meals on Saturday - not to mention coffee and biscuits in the morning and tea and cakes mid-afternoon - was far more than my body is used to, and sleep was not my constant companion that night.  Sunday morning found me by-passing the breakfast buffet and heading for a plate of porridge instead.

At a political conference the last event is the leader's keynote address - remember David Steel's famous 'Go home and prepare for government' line? - and in a way, I suppose our Sunday send-away mirrored that.  Having formally welcomed us after dinner on Friday, and popping up many times between programme items during Saturday, our CEO led us in a service of Holy Communion after the final talk on Sunday morning.

Then it was time for Sunday lunch and departure, some to the nearest train station, others to their cars, and work as usual the next day.  I've already completed two pieces of work this week, and have also expressed my intention to attend next year's Conference.

The Trouble with You, John ...

... is that you had a cousin.  It's not your fault - it isn't his, either.  But the trouble is, you were both called John - and worse - you were born just weeks apart in the same village!  

Some years ago I read about a process called 'Family Reconstruction', and I realised that this was what I'd just started to do with all of my family history data which, up to that point I'd collected willy-nilly and tried to make sense of in a variety of complex spreadsheets, none of which actually did what I wanted.

Then I hit on a far simpler idea.  I started a new spreadsheet, with a single line for each person, starting with all the key personal data, like names, reference numbers, dates of birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial, and following this with columns for each census from 1841 to 1911 ... and since I began, I've had to add two more columns for 1921 and 1939.  

The very sequence of the lines groups the individuals into families and, by shading the census columns for each one they lived through, and leaving blank those before their birth or after their death, I can see easily how the family has grown over the years.  Adding the place-name into the census column lets me see which ones I've found and which I have left to look for.  It's a long job and, I have to admit, it may never be finished.  But it keeps me occupied in retirement and provides satisfaction and the odd blog-worthy story from time to time ... which reminds me ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about a tragic murder and suicide in a north Suffolk village.  The deceased couple were John and Betsey Churchyard, and it's their son John who starts this tale.  John was born in Hoxne in the spring of 1878 and in the course of a morning last week I was able to construct the detail of the family of which he was the head.  He married Sophia Allum in 1901 and had six children, who were all living in 1911.  The one thing I was missing was the date of John's death. 

Findmypast very helpfully offered two Suffolk-born possibilities, both born in 1878.  One died in 1934, the other in 1947.  I decided to check the 1939 Register.  At the start of World War II, John was living with wife Mary and two children, the elder of whom was clearly, by name and date of birth, the second son of Sophia.  

A little more digging provided some additional detail. Two  more children were added to the family in 1913 and 1915, Sophia died in 1919 aged 46 and almost five years later, John married Mary Cook. with whom he had three more children.  It was one of these who was the youngest of the family unit in 1939.  Hence the 1947 death date was the one I needed, and it was also fitting that the district included the village where the family had been recorded in 1939.

But the trouble was ... John had a cousin, also John, also born in 1878.  Their fathers were brothers.  Clearly all the details I'd found out tallied, the two marriages, the family in 1939 and the death in 1947 ... but which John did they apply to?  Was it, as I had assumed, the John of the family shattered by tragedy in his childhood, or his cousin, for whom I had only a birth record?  

There was one key piece of data I had yet to explore.  I said that the family in 1911 consisted of six children, all still living.  However, the census listed only five: the second son, still with his father in 1939, and four younger siblings.  Robert, the eldest, was missing.  After some searching, I found a Bobbe {sic!} Churchyard, living with his grandparents in 1911.  These were George and Jane Churchyard.  George was the younger brother of the John who had wielded that lethal shotgun.

So I had my answer - The John whose story I had now established with such detail, was the son of George and Jane.  The John with the tragic childhood also married during the Edwardian decade.  He was living as a gamekeeper in a nearby village in 1911 and it was he, I have decided, who died in 1934.  Amusingly, perhaps, his second daughter was born in the same year as a daughter of the other John.  Each was called Florence, but at least each was given a second name.  One was named Sophia after her mother, the other Louisa after her aunt.

I spoke of the stories that come from looking deeply into families in this way ... there is more to tell here so watch out in the coming weeks!

As I Live and Breathe!

I was privileged to grow up in a market town.   Unlike children of farm workers in an earlier age, I was under no pressure to follow my father on the land because no other jobs were available.  In fact, quite the opposite applied.  If I'd grown up on a farm as he had, farming - or at least farm work - would have been part of my life almost from day one, and finding my early amusement in the farmyard would almost inevitably have led to a life on the land. 

In my earliest memories, I sometimes didn't see my father from one weekend to the next: he had gone to work by the time I got up, and I would be in bed by the time he got home again - at least this would have been the case in the summer time.  

By far the greatest part of my early years was therefore spent in the company of my mother and her family.  The family home was within easy walking distance of ours; so, too was the town itself.  The things that filled my early experiences were linked to the shops and businesses in the town.  Mine was essentially an indoor childhood.  Little wonder, then, that my working life was office-based and in the general area of business, finance and commerce.

I've progressed gradually in adult life to an awareness of agriculture and the farming way of life through reading, through talking to my father man-to-man, and from the researches into my family history.  It's essentially head knowledge, though, not heart knowledge; it's not an emotional attachment.

'What has brought about this latest bout of introspection and self-analysis?', I hear you ask.  The answer is a combination of three things ... possibly four, if you include my move to south Yorkshire last summer. Last week, I decided to visit the outer parts of Barnsley, to see in daylight where I would be driving after dark for last night's election count.  On my way there, I passed what was clearly the winding gear (now preserved) of a former coal mine, and afterwards I did a little research to find out about it.

The second factor was loosely connected, to browse a couple of websites containing both written and pictorial material relating to the history of my new home town.  From the 1890s to the 1980s the town, its people and its economy were focussed almost completely on coal mining.  There were a number of collieries in the immediate area, and many of their employees lived in the town.  

When in 1907 it was decided to develop a mine that had last been active in the eighteenth century, the enlargement of the town itself, already well under way, accelerated to keep step.  Many new streets were laid out, mainly in the area between the town centre and the location of my home on the edge of the built-up area, and it seems likely that the whole area lived and breathed coal - almost literally!

Finally in my explanation, I came to the end of a book I've been reading over the last few weeks, How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn's tale of life in the mining valleys of south Wales.  Although a work of fiction, it presents a very believable picture of life in a mining community at the turn of the twentieth century, made more so for me as I walk around this town of mine.  The only things missing are the mountains and the growing slag heaps.  Since the closing of the mines in this area, these have been landscaped and the sites put to new uses.

One of those websites I was looking at carries a whole list of newspaper extracts, many of which are reports of the inquests following deaths in the mines.  As always, these gave full details of the deceased including their complete address.  The other day I walked around some of these streets and I could easily imagine fathers and sons emerging from the doors I was passing, making their way through the town to work, not knowing whether or not they would safely emerge into daylight again at the end of their shift.

This multi-faceted experience has brought to life the contrast between, on the one hand, growing up in a community such as this, when there would have been little alternative to following one's father down the pit, or like my father, with a similar inevitability about life on a farm and, on the other, the early life I had when there were so many options and opportunities that I just didn't know what to choose as I drew near to leaving school.

This flood of possibilities wasn't without its downside, though.  For one thing some choices just weren't possible, either for lack of academic qualification, or the absence of parental approval.  Having finally made my choice, I discovered after six months that it wasn't for me (although ten years later, I realised that it might well have been if I'd had a vision of what could have developed from that situation).  I left for another job, for which, with A-levels, I was over qualified.  One dead end led to another until eventually, while working in an office at a factory a few miles from home, it was suggested that I might like to take day-release towards gaining a professional qualification ... and the rest, as they say, is history!