Christmas from the Western Front .......

Christmas is supposed to be the season of goodwill but war has a habit of twisting the message.

This Christmas card was sent by my uncle to my father on December 12th 1918. The Great War had ended just a month before and uncle Fergus and his battalion of the Black Watch were in Cologne, relieved no doubt that the fighting was over.

On that Thursday in December he wrote that “Cologne was a lovely city with some fine cinemas” but they were prohibited from fraternizing with the civilians which for a young man of just 21 was a bit of a bore given the attractive young women he came across.

But duty was never far away and preparations were a foot because “we are crossing the Rhine tomorrow” and there was a determination “to show the rest of the division the way as we proved to be the finest marchers during the trek to Germany.”


Picture; With Best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a Victorious New Year, December 1918 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

On becoming your dad

I have become my dad which I suppose is not that surprising really.

It is less the physical appearance although that is clearly there it is instead all those little ways that creep up on you and take you back four decades.

So I caught myself sitting in an armchair recently talking to one of my son’s and all the speech rhythms, along with the words I used and even the hand movements were dad.

He retained his hair longer than I ever did and unlike him I am useless at making and repairing things but the rest could be him.

He was a calm gentle man who always put the five of us first even down to the nightly winter task of putting a hot water bottle  into each of our beds and today whenever our kids are sleeping over I will do the same, even given that the eldest is nearly 40 and the youngest just 28.

And it made me reflect on just how much we carry forward from the lives of our parents and pass on to our own children.

Now dad was born in 1906 and mum in 1920 which pitched their formative years in the first half of the last century and some at least of those experiences flowed into how they brought us up.

Our Christmases blended the growing consumerism of the late 1950s with older traditions which with just a little tweeking could even have come out of the novels of Dickens.

Of course much of it was down to that simple fact that so much of everyday life was still the same.

The coal, the milk and the papers were delivered to the door,  Sidney the knife sharperner made a regular appearance with his hand operated machine which he pushed around the streets and Sundays remained the day you endured with little to do and little on the television to watch.

That said there are clear differences between me and my dad.

I never shared his politics which were grounded on a belief in Empire and property or for that matter his preference for plain food which “was not mixed about.”

Instead I very early adopted  mother’s politics coloured as they were by the mass unemployment and Means Testing of the 1930s.

For her class politics remained at the bedrock of how she voted and how she saw the world.

But then mum died when I was 25 while I had my dad until 1994 which perhaps has something to do with that simple fact that I grew more like him with the passage of time.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Secrets from a century ago ………

Now I say secrets, but if I am really accurate, they are less so and more a confirmation of what I really knew mixed with stuff that takes the family story just a bit further on.

Hope Street, 1900

And yes, this is family history story and I am acutely aware that one person’s family stories are another person’s yawn, but this is linked to the release of the 1921 census, which has been eagerly awaited by many.

Not only does this release take us all a decade on from the 1911 census but will be the last available until 1951, because the 1931 census was destroyed and the 1941 census never took place due to the war, leaving just the 1939 Registration document which acts as a sort of census.

If I am honest, I was going to leave accessing the 1921 census in the hope that it would in time become free to use on Findmypast which is the only genealogical platform where it can bee seen.  Although if like me you live in Manchester you can access it via the Central Reference Library for free.

William Hall circa 1930s, my grandfather

But on a cold day with the rain coming down like stair rods, I chose to pay to see the entry for my great grandmother and pay again to see the original form, which altogether cost just over a fiver.

That said what price finding your family from a century ago?

And found them I did, where I knew they would be in 1921 which was at Court 5 2 Hope Street, Derby and almost opposite the property my grandparents moved into sometime two years later.

The electoral address in 1921 recorded that great grandmother Eliza, and  two of her children were living there, but that was it, so the census has filled in the gaps.

And these are important because soon after the census was taken her son Jack had moved out to get married and her daughter Laura emigrated to Canada.  

Which left my grandfather still in uniform in the British army of occupation in Germany where he met my grandmother, got married and had two children one of whom was our mother.

Jack Hall, circa 1950s

Eliza remains a shadowy figure, who didn’t always walk with reality.  In her twenties she took up with my great grandfather travelled the country before settling in the south and then leaving him to have our great aunt Laura in the Derby Workhouse in 1902.  

Aged just 22 she was brought up in court for a brawl with a policeman, at 39 her children were taken into care, and a decade later she had been committed to the Derby Asylum.

So, 1921 does seem to mark a stable moment in her life, living with two of her four children, with the prospect of being reunited with another son, a daughter in law and two grandchildren, leaving just her son Roger who opted to be migrated to Canada in 1914 by the Derby Union rather than stay in care.

We know that she had made efforts to get all the children out of care, and so the census offers up some valuable information to both my family here in Britain and the Canadian grandchildren of Laura.

Jack the eldest son had been apprenticed to a blacksmith and Laura sent north to work in “service”.

By the time of the census Jack was employed at George Fletcher Company and Sons, on Letechurch Lane who were “Sugar machinery manufactures” while Luara was a “Tasle Maker” for the Textile Manufacturers, E Dould & Sons at Spa Lane.

Laura Pember, nee Hall 1968

Neither company now exists, and a walk down Letechurch Lane, and Spa Lane is a grim experience on a January day with little left of the original industrial buildings that once fronted these two streets and no indication if what are left are linked to our workplaces.

That said that wonderful site, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History has a timeline and pictures of Fletcher’s, which was established in 1838, and went through a series of mergers during the 1950s and 60s.

And we do have a testimonial from E Dould & Sons when Laura left in 1925.

All of which confirms much of what we already knew, but the census also offers up an intriguing reference to our great grandfather, who was a Montague Hall, and never actually married Eliza.  In the column headed Marriage or Orphanhood, the entry reads “Husband missing not known whether Dead”.

In fact he had died in 1916, but I rather think Eliza would not have known this as they separated in 1902, with him remaining in Gravesend, and going on to get married and have another family.

Great aunt Laura's testimonial

Eliza appears to have only given her children the vaguest of outlines of their father, and in correspondence written in the 1970s Laura wrote that there was little they knew about her.

But then I suspect she was a family secret, and continued as such until 2008 when I stumbled on her in the course of working on our history.

All of which leaves me to comment on the census itself.  

Like it’s 1911 predecessor it is a single form recording the inhabitants of the family home, rather than those for the street, and requires more information about any children under the age of 16 but omits a reference to how long a couple have been married.

Plan of 5 Hope Street, 1947

And for me there is Eliza’s signature which is the first time I have come across her handwriting, all of which brings me a little closer to her.

As does the knowledge that the property was a two up two down, exactly like the one opposite which was inhabited my grandparents and where I stayed.

So that is it, I guess I will be returning to 1921 to look up dad, and in the fullness of time track others.

Location; Derby in 1921

Pictures; grandfather, circa 1930s, great uncle Jack, circa 1950s, and great aunt Laura who we called aunt Dolly, circa 1968, from the collection of the Simpson Pember families, Plan of 5 Hope Street, 1947, Syd and Pamela Dilkes, and Hope Street, Derby, 1900, from the OS map of Derbyshire, 1900, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

* Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/George_Fletcher_and_Co

Who do I ask? .............. Lost family stories

I will never know who this man is, or when he posed for this picture on a building site in Derby or for that matter any of the other men in the remaining two pictures.

They were found in a collection of old photographs that we inherited long after my grandparents and parents had all died.

None of them were very promising, for all three were negatives and have rested in an old torn envelope for eighty years.  The original prints have long since been lost and at first glance these did not offer up much.

For a start they were not the usual small size negatives so would not fit into one of those commercial machines you can buy to reproduce a print and they seemed pretty faded.

But ever the optimist I put them through the home scanner and this is what we got.  Despite their age they have a quality and detail which is remarkable.

That said I did manage to reverse one image, so that on close inspection the lettering on the shop front is back to back.  Given time I shall correct the mistake but for now this is what you have got.

Now I think we must be dealing with my grandfather who pretty much lived his entire life in Derby.

He had been born in Birmingham in 1899, lived in Kent around the turn of the last century and was in Derby from 1902, when his mother gave birth to his sister in the Derby Workhouse.

The next thirteen years of his life were spent in various care homes including a year in a naval boot camp before like so many young men he was swept up by the Great War.

He enlisted in 1916 and stayed in the army until 1922.  By which time he had met and married my grandmother who was German and they had two young children.

So much of his early life and their married lives in Derby remains a mystery.  Indeed I doubt that he had much of an idea about the first five or so years of his life.  For whatever reason my great grandparents parted company in 1902 and I doubt he had much more than a vague memory of his father.

This may account for why on his marriage certificate he gave his place of birth as the Transvaal in South Africa which was where my great grandfather had served in the early 1890s or just possibly was motivated by a desire to seem a little more romantic to his young German bride and the assembled family and civic authorities.

And that air of mystery continued through the next twenty years in Derby.  I can only guess at how difficult grandmother found the journey alone with two small children from Germany to Derby for her husband had been transported separately to the UK and demobbed in Belfast.

The early years of their marriage were difficult, she encountered some anti German hostility and he found it difficult to find regular work.

Which brings me back to the pictures.

I think I can indentify one of the men as grandfather standing at the back of the group in the last picture, but of the man on the building site, and sitting alone on the upturned barrel I am less sure.

Of course there will be those who question does it matter?

Well to me it does, but even if that is put aside there is that more general point that so many family pictures are lost to us because no one bothered to provide a name of a date.

Those long lost relatives and friends of family stare back at us with no means of knowing who they were or their significance in the story of who we are.

That said these are a little snapshot of how we worked eighty or so years ago and are also a reminder of just how much chance plays in the survival of family memorabilia.   The original prints have long since vanished but the negatives not much cared for at the time were just put to one side and lasted the course.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The story of British Home Children in just 20 objects nu 10 .......... the parent

A story of British Home Children in just 20 objects which are in no particular order, have been selected purely at random and will reflect one of many different stories.

Now I do not have a picture of my great uncle who went over to Canada in the May of 1914 with the Middlemore charity, and only a handful of photographs of his sibling’s one of whom was my grandfather.

But I do have one of his father who was my great grandfather and that I think will be rare amongst the stories of British Home Children.

He was Montague Hall who was born in 1872, served in the old Queens army from 1888-92 and lived with my great grandmother for eight years

This one was taken sometime around 1914 when he had re-enlisted in the British Army.

His relationship with my great grandmother was I think a tempestuous one, and they separated sometime in 1902.

He stayed in Gravesend in Kent and she returned to Derby with her three surviving sons where she had her daughter in the Workhouse later that year.

All of the children spent time in care and were later placed by the Poor Law Guardians with employers.

Great Uncle Jack was apprenticed to a blacksmith, Laura was sent into service in Northumberland, and granddad went to sea, leaving my great uncle Roger to cross the Atlantic where he was placed on different farms before running away to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and changing his name and lying about his age along the way.

On arriving in Britain with his regiment he was stationed just a few miles away from his father who by then had married and had a second family.

Which brings me back to the picture which was supplied my cousin who is the granddaughter of Montague’s marriage..

Neither families knew of the existence of the other but both were searching for Montague’s story and in that bizarre way we found each other through my great uncle.

Picture; Montague Hall circa 1914, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The context behind a family story ............... discovering the dark secret of Eliza Boot

Sooner or later most of us engaged in family history switch from collecting names and dates to probing behind the lives of those we encounter.

Union Street, Borough Walk, Derby circa 1950

It starts with that census return which offers up not only details of your family but also those of the neighbours and then by extension the surrounding streets which almost at a stroke allows you to place your family in the bigger context.

Bit by bit that delightfully named cottage is revealed to be a one up one down in a terraced street occupied by a mix of people who worked in factories, warehouses and breweries.

Add in the odd map and a few directories and you discover that the house was surrounded by mills, timber yards and an iron foundry and bounded by a canal and railway line.

Living room, one up one down cottage, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1930

Nor will it be any different for those of us who stumble across a farm worker in the family tree which can be equally revealing and presents a picture far removed from that of a rural idyll.

For all sorts of reasons there continues to be a belief that life in the countryside was somehow more pleasant than making a living in the new industrial towns and cities.

But not so, for rural poverty was in places as bad if not worse.

Employment was seasonal, and those idyllic looking rose fronted cottages with their picture book cottage gardens were often wattle and daub properties built directly on to beaten earth with a thatched roof rife with all manner of vermin.

Added to which however awful city life was it did offer some an opportunity for social movement with the chance of betterment.

Whiteman;s Yard, 1882, home of Eliza Boot

Now all this I say because like most of us I can track my family back through the warren of streets in a Midland town where they worked as handloom weavers, silk spinners and railway workers back to the farming communities of Derbyshire and the east Highlands.

Great grandmother Eliza was born in Whiteman's Yard a court off Chapel Street in Derby.

Hers was a  one up one down house where 15 families shared 3 outside lavatories.

And the bigger picture, whether it is the hardships of an agricultural labourer or the plight of a handloom weaver locked into an industry in decline help add to the stories of these family members.

Moreover it also offers up that simple realization that the stigma of poverty, illegitimacy and illiteracy were ones that my relatives shared with countless others.

Look back at an official document and pretty soon at some point in the 19th century one of them will be adding their mark rather than a signature and likewise one if not more of them will have spent time in the workhouse.

In 1851 according to the Census of Great Britain on Education 38% of those getting married used a mark as opposed to a signature,* and many saw the workhouse as just one of a number of options to be considered during a period of hardship.**

Not that any of this diminishes the struggles, indignities, or waste of potential which was the lot of thousands of working people a century and a more ago.

Montague Hall, my great grandfather, circa 1914

Nor does it take away those natural emotions of sadness and anger at being confronted with the plight of one of your own and while it is just an objective historical fact sitting beside all those others their suffering leaves its mark and just occasionally it explains a family silence.

I grew up never knowing about my maternal great grandparents.  They were never mentioned and I doubt their lives would have been shared with me if I had asked.

They had met sometime around 1893, lived a tempestuous life, and had five children across the country from Birmingham to Kent and finally Derby.

They never married and in 1902 separated leaving great grandmother to have her last child in the Derby Workhouse and great grandfather to marry in 1906 and raise another five children in Kent.

He had died in 1916 but she was still alive while I was growing up.

And yet despite visiting my grandparents in Derby I have no recollection of meeting her.

Traffic Street School entrance, 1990

Over the years I have tried but the documentary evidence is sparse.  I have her birth and death certificate, references to her on several census returns, one newspaper report, a comment in the admission register of the Poor Law Union and two letters about her along with one entry on a street directory.

All of which is not much for a life that began in 1872 and ended in 1963.

But just this week I turned up a reference to her as a patient in the Borough Mental Hospital Derby in 1939 where she died twenty-four years later.

Of course she may not have been in there for the entire time but I rather think she might given that she was described as “Incapacitated” on the hospital register in 1939 and the judgement of the Poor Law Guardians back in 1913 when three of her children were admitted into care was that “mother was unfit to have control.”

One of my cousins reflecting on the news commented that given the life she had lived including the loss of one child and the suicide of her brother there is a context here.

Traffic Street School, 1990

And that brings me full circle leaving me only to finish with this picture of Traffic Street school in 1990.

It was built in 1879 for 1000 students and was a Board School

Given that my great grandmother Eliza was born in 1872 it is just possible that she would have attended it and just 46 years later it was where my mother and uncle Roger were taught.

As Board Schools go it was one of the bigger ones but resembles the I went to in London in 1954. Such are the twists and turns of family history.

Location; Derby

Pictures; Union Street, Derby, circa 1950 and Traffic Street School, 1990, from the collection of Cythinia Wigley, Whiteman’s Yard,1883 from the OS map of Derby, 1882-3, and Montague Hall from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The 1851 Census of Great Britain on Education was carried out at the same time as the general census and sat beside a similar exercise into religious worship.

**THE STORY OF CHORLTON-CUM-HARDY, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/the-story-of-chorlton-cum-hardy.html

Beware what you read on other people’s history sites ……………. the missing family and a question

Now I could just say it is my fault for reading someone else’s’ history site, or that I should be less sensitive.

Montague Hall, circa 1914

Certainly the story I wrote about my great grandparents back in 2017 had pretty much been forgotten by me.*

It was written in connection with a project by a group of school students researching the stories of soldiers from the Great War who were buried in Gravesend.**

I was asked to make a contribution about our great grandfather, who was Montague Hall, and from memory I made reference to Eliza his partner, their children, and that after the relationship ended he went on to marry and have another five children.

By chance I met up with one the great grandchildren of his second relationship and we have remained friends.

In the course of which I also talked to another descendant of that marriage.

We all thought it odd that two different sets of great grandchildren should be united having never been aware of each other.

What surprised me, and if I am honest knocked me back was on discovering an online history of  Gravesend, which my cousin Marisa in Canada uncovered.

There in a listing for The Queens Own Royal West Kent Regiment was our great grandfather, listing his wife, and their children, but with no reference to ours, although the researchers had discovered his place of birth, the name of his parents, and that he had served in the East Yorkshire Regiment.

Jack, Bill and Laura Hall, 1930-50

Our Marisa called it “whitewash”, in that the marriage was mentioned, but his relationship with our great grandmother which lasted from around 1894 to 1902, and resulted in five children was omitted.

Of course it may just be poor research, coupled with the fact that there are few historical records for Montague and Eliza, other than a press report from 1894, the birth certificates and one death certificate for their five children and one census return.

War Grave of Montague Hall, 1999

Easy perhaps to miss, if you weren’t looking for it, although a cursory search of the census records, will have turned up the entry in 1901 for when he was with Eliza in Gravesend, and that of 1911, when he was with his wife in Gravesend.

And if pushed the research might have delved into his military records during his time with the East Yorks.

But perhaps his time after he left our great grandmother and stayed in Gravesend was enough for them.

I am left wondering as to why the omission, but at least the 2017 story has come back out of the shadows, and is being reread, and I feel better as I know Marisa will, that we are setting the record straight.

Location; lots of places

Pictures;  Montague Hall, circa 1914, the three of his surviving children from his relationship with Eliza, circa 1930-1950, and his gravestone in Gravesend, 1999, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*From Gravesend to Ontario and back ........ the travels of great grandfather Montague, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2017/02/from-gravesend-to-ontario-and-back.html

**“Remember Me To All” – Gravesend Parish Memorials.

Of random thoughts and the stories they hold ............... another post on becoming my dad

Perhaps it is just a factor of age but I find myself in  those quiet moments drifting back over the acres of the past.

An unknown moment in time

It isn’t nostalgia, it is more a random series of thoughts encompassing events, accidents and faces all jumbled up in no logical pattern which tumble over themselves.

Now we will all have them but in the past they were either very purposeful or very fixed and lasted just a short time.

But all of that I suspect has a lot to do with busy lives where work, the kids and the supermarket all compete to push such rambling thoughts into the background.

Not so anymore and here I think Dad comes into play, because I noticed the same in him.

You would wander into the room and catch him staring into space lost in his own private world.

Of course he may just having been thinking about what to have for dinner or when to repaint the chipped and scratched kitchen door but I rather think there was more.

I never asked him which was less about not wanting to intrude and more about being too preoccupied with myself but then I doubt he would have said overmuch.

He was a quiet man who kept much to himself and like his brothers shrugged off questions about his past as pointless.

Sometime in the 1970s

All of them seemed far more interested in the present and so you would find that you got half an answer which was then closed down with a change of subject.

That said I never pursued some of the questions and as a result whole chunks of our family story have been lost.

And in turn that has meant that endless trek across the official documents from census returns to certificates of births, deaths and marriages.

All designed to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about dad.

I would like to say it is a generational thing but I find myself doing something similar although in my case it is simply finding the time to tell the story.

All of which leaves me wondering what Dad did think about which is all the more immediate as I trawl through more of his papers.

Here are pictures of friends who I will never know, a shed load of official documents including his passports stretching back to before the war and those personal bits and pieces like the testimonials and references from past employers.

At which point I have own up that this is nothing more than an idle set of thoughts loosely held together with the idea that we should all commit our stories to paper especially if like me those thoughts are becoming more frequent and more random.

Picture; dad and unknown friend, date unknown and in the 1970s

Rediscovering a personal story, making a Canadian connection and opening up new online records

Now here is a connection I doubt I would ever have made between two of my family and a set of new online records about London from Ancestry.

William Henry Hall on board TS Exmouth 1913-14

We had always known that my grandfather went to sea, but the reason behind the career choice and the ship he sailed on was shrouded in mystery.

Then some years ago our Elizabeth made the discovery amongst the papers of the London Metropolitan Archives of the time granddad spent on the Training Ship Exmouth which was a naval boot camp.

We knew that along with his elder brother it had been decided that his wayward behaviour needed correction and a dose of discipline which involved both of them being sent to the training ship.

Conduct on T S Exmouth

But for reasons still not clear great uncle Roger opted to go to Canada as a British Home Child while granddad did his time in correction.

Sadly the condition of the records unearthed by my sister proved difficult to read and his destination after he had completed his sentence was impossible to read.

But now Ancestry have just added the London Metropolitan Archives to their online collection and as with digital records the quality has been enhanced and we now know that he joined the SS Megantic in the November of 1914.

This was no tramp steamer and he was no cabin boy.  The SS Megantic did the Atlantic run to Canada and with its sister ship was the largest vessel on the Canadian crossing.

SS Megantic, 1909-1920s

The name comes from Lake Megantic in Quebec but that is not the only connection because in the same month and the same year his brother also crossed to Canada as a British Home Child.

Neither lasted long in their new “careers.” Great Uncle Roger after three unsettled placements on farms in NS and NB ran away to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915 and granddad enlisted in the British Army in 1916.

Of their subsequent time in the military we know more about Roger than we do about granddad, simply because something like 60% of the British army records were destroyed in the Blitz while the Canadian ones are intact and are available online

Running out the guns, on board a training ship, date unknown

And that brings me neatly back to the Ancestry and their new offerings which include as we as the TS Exmouth Training Ship Records, 1876‑1918, Stock Exchange Applications for Membership, 1802‑1924, Freedom of the City Admission Papers, 1681‑1930, Gamekeepers’ Licences, 1727‑1839.

Now I grant you that most of us will be hard pressed to find a relative in some of these new additions, but you never know which of course is the beauty and the value of online records.

They are easy to search, often offer up quality reproductions and above all are readily accessible unlike some precious source material which only a few will ever see.

So I have no time for those who mutter darkly that such records are no substitute for holding the original, which is fine but if the original is on a dusty shelf in a university in Oregon or too fragile to be handled then give me the online substitute.

Of course there will always be a charge for many of these records but if the alternative is the cost of an air flight to North America I will happily continue my subscriptions to Ancestry and Findmypast.

Location; pretty much everywhere.

Pictures; entry of William Hall TS Exmouth, 1913-14, courtesy of London Metropolitan Archives in association with Ancestry.com the SS Megantic circa 1909-1920 from The George Grantham Bain collection in the Library of Congress and taken from SS Megantic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Megantic  a training ship, from the archives of the Together Trust, courtesy of the Archivist,http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/p/about-blog.html

Be careful what you go looking for ........ digging deep into the family records

We don’t have any pictures of mum and dad’s marriage.

Nor would I expect there to be any.  They were married in 1952 in Camberwell and back then wedding photographs were for the well off.

That said both mum and dad had plenty of pictures taken of themselves before they met and plenty after we started to come along, but none of the wedding.

But then until today we couldn’t confirm they had actually been married.

So while the document places all of my four sisters as legitimate it leaves me out in the cold because I was born in 1949.

There has been an ongoing debate between me and my sisters about whether they were married which in part was because dad was very meticulous and kept lots of records.

These included the birth certificates of each of the four girls along with his driving licenses, dating back to the 1920s and all of his passports from the ‘30s onwards but nowhere was there a marriage certificate or my birth certificate.

Of course on one level it doesn’t matter.  We were loved, and brought up in a caring and safe home and never wanted for anything.

Our parents had lived through a world war, and the Great Depression, which brought mass unemployment, and the Means Test and so they made sure that we grew up in a better world.

But that marriage was always the elephant in the room and we never quite let the matter rest.

I had assumed that as they re-registered my birth in 1956, they may well have taken the opportunity to marry before my sisters were born, but I never bothered to go looking for the certificate until last Sunday when with the debate again in full swing I decided to lay the ghost to rest.

But looking at the certificate which arrived today only set new hares racing.

There were two witnesses, one was our uncle George, but the other was unknown to me. He was not someone I knew nor was he someone Dad ever mentioned, which left me just a name.

A search of the records offered up a suitable candidate who according to the electoral registers lived close by during the late 1940s into the 50s but there the trail ended.

If he was a work mate, we will get no where as the employment records of where Dad worked vanished decades ago and the possibility that they shared digs together seems remote.

The small glimmer of hope that I might track him and his family with the even vaguer chance of a wedding picture of mum and dad has proved illusory.

But I had misread the name, and while the surname was the same the initials were different which led to a new search leading to a woman not a man, but happily still very close to where we lived.

Sadly the marriage certificate offers up no other clues, save that they were married in Camberwell.

The Registrar and Superintendent Registrar are long dead, and none of us thought to ask Uncle George about when and where mum and dad were married.

But then I doubt he would have told us.

Leaving me just the Registry Office, which may or may not be the one at 34 Peckham Road.

I may strike lucky and find someone who has a pictures of the building as it was and maybe even of the inside.

Now that would be good.

Location; Camberwell







Pictures; dad and mum 1947-55, from the Simpson Family Collection

Crossing the bar .......... the thank you

Now in the early evening of yesterday the blog passed the four million mark.

Sardinia, 2013

This I say, not out of any vain and boastful bout of self congratulation but more out of a sense of gratitude to those four million readers and to the people who have contributed to the blog since it was set up at the end of November 2011.

And here I know I will miss some one out, but I am sure those who are not conducted into the Hall of Fame will not mind.

It is a long list and includes Andy Robertson who has been recording the changing landscape and buildings across Greater Manchester and whose portfolio of images are an invaluable record of how the Twin Cities continue to adapt and change.

Manchester, 1979

And of course there are the paintings of Peter Topping, the first of which appeared on the blog six years ago and regularly form a backdrop for a story and more often than not are the story.

Peter and I now collaborate on a range of projects from exhibitions to festivals and of course books, of which we have written five together, with two more planned for the end of the year.

Alongside those images there are the articles which have been contributed by Martin, Tony, Sally, Susan, and a host of other people.

Each of them has brought their own interests and research to the blog producing some fine pieces.

And the blog wouldn’t be half as a successful if it wasn’t for those like Tricia, Neil, Bill, and Sally and many more who have offered up their research with just the throw away comment “I know you can make something of this”, and along with the research there have been all those people who have passed over a picture or agreed to me using one of their own photographs.

Greenwich by the River Thames, 1979

Of these I do have to single out David Harrop, who will contact me to say he has just acquired a new picture postcard and asking if I can use it, or suggesting stories from his vast collection of memorabilia from two world wars and the history of the Post Office.

And also Dave Kennedy, who has been happy to share his father’s photograph album with me as well as his own extensive collection.

To which must be added Neil Simpson and his colleagues at Central Ref who have uncovered a fascinating new archive of Manchester pictures and Ron for his magnificent collection of old picture postcards and ghost signs and Ryan's of London Bridge.

London, 1983

Nor can I miss out that long list of other blog writers, which includes my old friend Lois in Weston-Super-Mare, my new friend Liz the archivist at the Together Trust, Lorri and Arthur in Canada, and heaps of others who have allowed me to plunder their work and in return have referenced and show cased my stories.

At which point I also have to acknowledge social media and especially Facebook, which remains a powerful platform for all of us to share our photographs and articles, while making it possible to connect with people and places around the planet.

And finally there are my sisters and our four lads who have at times gone out of their way to take a picture I have asked for or shared their holiday pictures.

So thank you to our Jillian who has an impressive portfolio of her own photographs,  Liz, Colin & Theresa, and Ben, Luca, Joshua and Saul and their partners.

Saul and Emilka's pictures of Naples and southern Israel have provided me with some fine stories, as have those of our cousin Chris and Andrea in Canada

Greece, 2014

All of which is turning into a mutual pat on the back, and that would never do, so I shall leave it there, with just the obvious comment .......... never feel shy about bringing on a story, a picture, or some research and of course a thank you to the four million.


Location; pretty much everywhere


Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Why did the Derby Poor Law Guardians lose grandad's place of birth?

Beware what you wish for is one of those warnings I have never really understood.

William Henry Hall, circa 1930

But then I have never really made that many wishes and likewise have never really been one for planning out my life.

For me it’s about bumping along which some would suggest betokens a lack of ambition but on the other hand means I am rarely disappointed.

And in the same way I have not got over upset about the discoveries I have made about our family history.

There have been the usual ups and downs, from unemployment, sudden and early deaths to some surprising achievements and along the way a few born out of wedlock,  a couple of rogues and a lot of ordinary people who lived out their lives against the great events of the last three centuries.

But just occasionally I have been brought up sharp, like the time I discovered a relative who had committed suicide.  It had been one of those fairly routine exercises in tracking him down and sending for his death certificate only to be confronted with the evidence of a horrible death and a sense that I was somehow intruding into someone’s private life.

And today has been another of those moments.

I knew that my grandfather and his siblings had been brought up in care and that eventually one would be dispatched to a naval training camp, another to Canada as a British Home Child, the eldest apprenticed to a blacksmith and great aunt Dolly into domestic service.

Laura Isadora Pember nee Hall, 1968 

What I was not prepared for and what has saddened me is that the entry in the census returns for all three while in foster homes listing their places of birth "as unknown."

And yet the documentary evidence is all there.

Great uncle Jack was born in Bedford my grandfather and great uncle Roger in different parts of Birmingham and great aunt Dolly in the Derby Workhouse.

Which leaves me with that simple question of why were their places of birth unknown?

It might have been the policy of the Guardians to omit such information which looks to be the case given that none of the youngsters in either foster home has a place of birth beside their name.

And I certainly don’t think it was because the information was not out there.  My great uncle Roger was 13 in 1911 and must have known where he had been born and likewise it beggars belief that the authorities didn’t know where great aunt Dolly had been born given that it was in their own hospital.

Now I know that their mother way well have been unable to help. I had long suspected that her grip on reality was light.

After a brief spell of looking after them in 1913 she was judged  to be “unfit to have control” and the younger three were taken back into care, and later in 1939 she was in the Borough Mental Hospital where she died in 1963.

But I still find it hard that the children were listed as such.

Great aunt Dolly was well aware of where all of them had been born and said so in a letter she wrote in the 1970s and I suspect so did the others.

It is true that later great uncle Roger would tell the Canadian army that he was born in Derby but he also listed as his next of kin his aunt rather than his mother which would suggest a deliberate decision to muddy the waters which given that he was running would fit with him also lying about his age and changing his name.

It is all a long time ago and all of the children are now dead but I am more than a little angry that such a vital piece if information as their place of birth was never recorded.

Location; Derby

Pictures; William Henry Hall, born 1899,  Laura Isadora Pember nee Hall born 1902, and John Nelson, Montague Hall, born 1896,  from the Pember and Simpson collections.

Cynthia ..... and stories of family revealed

I have been thinking of my friend Cynthia and how she brought me closer to my grandparents and the uncle I never knew.

Cynthia, 2000

We came across each other purely by chance almost a decade ago when I was writing a series of family stories for the Derby Telegraph.

She read them, recognised the names and got in touch and then for a few brief years until her death we spoke and corresponded regularly.

She was an amazing woman full of wit, knowledge and as our friendship grew revealed a wealth of stories about my family.

Like them she had lived on Hope Street, first as a child and then later with her husband and children.

Now Hope Street is pretty central to our story.  My great grandmother Eliza, great uncle Jack and great aunt Dolly lived on the street and sometime in 1922 my grandparents set up home at 12 Hope Street, which is where they brought up my mother and uncle and where I visited during summer holidays until they moved in the late 1950s.

My memories of that house and indeed the area are those of a child and had become shot through with doubts about the veracity of what I remembered.

Uncle Roger, 1937

But Cynthia confirmed much of those memories and more than that added to the store of family detail.

From her I learned the degree of prejudice shown to my German grandmother which ranged from cold stares to having the washing in the communal yard thrown in the mud.

And that prejudice extended to mum and Uncle Roger who were born in Germany.

All of which is ironic given that grandfather, his brothers and indeed my great grandfather served in the British army during the Great War, and mother and Uncle Roger were in the RAF during the Second World War.

I never knew my uncle, he died aged 21 faraway in a Japanese prison camp and my memories of Nana are of a woman who was in her sixties, but Cynthia knew them when they were young.

Nana, 1934

In the case of Roger there was she admitted with a wry smile more than a bit of romantic interest but sadly it was not to be, and in 1938 he enlisted as a boy recruit in the RAF.

Nana she remembered was a humorous and caring individual who by the 1930s had not only come to be accepted by her neighbours but was respected.

Now these tiny snapshots are important because they offer up an impression of my grandmother which seemed at odds with the stern no nonsense woman I knew a full two decades later.

12 Hope Street, 1963, marked with an X

And in the case of my uncle Cynthia’s comments brought him out of the shadows.

More than that she also supplied details of Hope Street and the surrounding streets which again confirmed what I vaguely remembered.

Nor is that quite all because just a little after Cynthia and I made friends another near neighbour from the late 1930s made contact in a course of letters supplied information about the houses on Hope Street, but that is for another time.

Location Derby

Pictures; Cynthia Wigley 2000, courtesy of Cynthia, Uncle Roger 1937,  Nana, 1934, Hope Street, 1963 the Derby Evening Telegraph, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Finally the apology that matters .......... “a sincere apology to the former British Home Children” ....... reflections from a British descendant of a BHC

Now the news is just filtering through over here of the historic vote in the Canadian House of Commons offering a “sincere apology to the former British Home Children who are still living and to the descendants of these 100,000 individuals who were shipped from Great Britain to Canada between 1869 and 1948, and torn from their families to serve mainly as cheap labour once they arrived in Canada.”



Report on Roger Hall 1914 ......our BHC

It is of course long overdue particularly in the light of my Government’s apology back in 2010 and a similar one from the Australian Prime Minister.

But that is a churlish response to what is a most important recognition of the countless broken lives and awful stories which followed from that migration.

All the more so because living in Britain I was unable to sign the petition calling for that apology but as a descendant of a BHC I am so very pleased, and appreciate the hard work that went into the campaign.

St John's River, NB, 2008, along way from Derby

It made me reflect on a story I posted in 2012 soon after discovering that one of my great uncles was a British Home Child.

At the time I reflected, that I had “mixed feelings about the need for Governments to apologise for acts done in their name or on their watch when those events have long since passed from living memory.

The opponents of such apologies tend to distort the argument by citing ancient acts of wrong doing from Herod’s massacre of the Innocents to the murder of the small Jewish community in York in 1190. 

William Henry Hall, circa 1930s

Who after all could be held responsible? Not only is there no one who could in anyway be linked to such acts but the very systems of government around at the time have long since vanished.

More recent crimes are no less easy to deal with. In most cases successor Governments had nothing to do with those past events and apologies do not allow those who suffered to escape from being seen as victims. 

How much better then to follow the South African policy of truth and reconciliation which has been a brave 
way of coming to terms with the years of oppression and apartheid. 

But I think this is to miss the point. It is not so much about saying sorry as allowing those who suffered to feel that their lives and experiences were important and deserve more than a footnote in a history book.”

Laura Isadore Pember, nee Hall, 1968

That is why I was pleased that the British and Australian Governments and now the Canadian  House of Commons have apologised for the way that thousands of our children were taken from Britain and placed in Canada and Australia.

Many may have had better lives as a result and made great contributions to their adopted countries, but few had much say in what happened to them. They paid the price for the fact that the biggest and richest world empire could not look after them, and chose instead to let a group of individuals and organisations solve the problem of child poverty by taking them elsewhere.

Now the same people who oppose such apologies will argue that it was a different time and under different rules, except there were plenty of people at the time from socialists and trade unionists to middle class reformers who criticised the way capitalism tolerated such poverty as an essential part of the system.

John  Hall, date unknown

Sadly for my great uncle and most of the children shifted off to Canada it is all too late. The last that went across in the 1940s will be very old. Most of them never talked about their lives as British Home Children and so the stories of who they were, how they got to Canada and their early childhood experiences are in danger of being lost.

Some of us have begun to do our own personal research and storytelling. In my case I have been helped by the growing network of others doing the same thing, and by the Library and Archive of Canada, as well people over here.

Along the way BHC has become a legitimate area of historical research and the apology is another step to a greater understanding of what happened.

So, not that they need me to say so, but well done to the Canadian House of Commons.

And while we have no photographs of our BHC we do have image of his three siblings which will always be as close as we will get.

Location; Canada, Britain & Australia

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the Pember family