Facebook post #030 (Aug 2020)
I’ve finished the five generations of the tree – it’s quite a book now. For context, I’m looking at the in-laws and following through to living generations, even though I won’t be publishing the latter.
So, I mentioned that one of my gt-grandfather’s sisters married a literary editor (“Faber Book of Ballads” and so on). At the time, I couldn’t find out where he was in 1939. Now I’ve discovered that he was in the Special Operations Executive – but only that he operated roughly in North Africa. After the war, he was a professor of English: his son remembers him remarking once that he’d quite enjoyed his time as a ‘professor of terrorism’.
That part of the family also owned a Scottish engineering company whose cranes helped build the Forth bridge. Another of gt-grandad’s sisters also married into an engineering family. One of their companies started out making silver-headed walking sticks, and developed into providing all the batons for the UK military marching bands.
Under the able direction of my third cousin, they have entered into a joint venture with Pearl Percussion and the Royal Marines (!) to supply the drums too! And, apparently, they run the online shop for the Gurkha brigade!
Hello cousins, if you are reading this.
