Through the Trees

Category: Facebook posts

  • March

    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.

  • Family Reflections on VJ Day

    Facebook post #029 (15 Aug 2020)

    I watched ‘Midway’ with my son last night, a reminder of the sacrifice of 160,000 US servicemen killed in the war against Japan. Up to a million Filipinos died too. But it was not just the naval battle and the atom bomb which persuaded Japan to surrender. A battle-hardened force of a million Soviet soldiers were redeployed from Europe (partly because Stalin was deterred from invading western Europe by the atom bomb), and repelled Japan from Manchuria. The long war of attrition in China had turned against Japan, despite the death of up to 4 million Chinese soldiers; around 20 million civilians also died, from multiple causes, including genocide.

    The other front was ‘South East Asia’, which included India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore. The stand-out catastrophe in my family history was the fall of Rangoon on 7 March 1942. The British army narrowly escaped, and burned the city as they left. The retreat was conducted in horrible circumstances. Starving refugees, disorganised stragglers, and the sick and wounded clogged the primitive roads and tracks leading to India. Many civilians had been prevented from leaving earlier.

    “It’s a story rarely told, despite being one of the most difficult, desperate mass evacuations in human history. Astonishingly, some 220,000 refugees survived the harrowing journey, of up to 300 miles long; 4,268 are recorded to have died en route, from sickness, exhaustion, malnutrition, starvation or drowning – although the true death toll will never be known.”

    The Independent

    So when my great-grandparents mentioned it was ‘quite a walk’, you get the idea. I have traced nine families of relatives surviving the evacuation – and two which didn’t make it, and died in POW camps within a few months.

    My Anglo-Indian family was military in its origins but I don’t know how many served in WWII, and the records are not yet on general release. I spoke to one elderly Anglo-Indian relative who had joined the RAF in Australia and was posted back to India, and then to Swindon!

    My Anglo-Indian grandmother, born in Rangoon, was already in England, having married my English grandfather whom she met at Cambridge University. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and by coincidence or not, was posted to the South East Asia Command, newly formed under Mountbatten in 1943. In 1944, he was given command of the Allied Land Forces biological research section.

    (Churchill thought that the fall of Singapore in February 1942 was the great calamity – my other grandmother’s brother managed to escape, tens of thousands were not so lucky.)

    On 8 March 1944, the Japanese crossed the Chindwin River into India. But this was the end of their tether. By the end of June, they had suffered the biggest defeat in their history and were pushed back into Burma. Into 1945, the British and Indian ‘Chindit’ insurgents under Stilwell, and the 14th army under Slim, advanced through the length of Burma. Some British heroes had remained behind enemy lines to coordinate resistance.

    In 1945, the 14th army was the largest in the world. It was built around the British Indian army, with many units from Britain and from all over the British Empire, augmented by Chinese, Thai and Burmese troops. By the end of April, the Japanese fled Rangoon, amongst similarly horrible scenes to those of three years earlier.

    My grandfather’s cousin, a Flying Officer, was killed in 1945 when his Dakota came down in Burma, when carrying troops to garrison Saigon. He and his comrades had performed a vital role in supplying the allies, and had latterly rescued POWs.

    By V-J Day, soldiers in India and Burma were already the ‘forgotten army’. At one point, my grandfather’s Section surveyed the troops on their attitudes, revealing resentment at wasting their lives, and anger at red tape and ‘bullshit’. My grandfather was mentioned in despatches for gallant and distinguished services in Burma. But this was in 1946, the army once again having generally been forgotten.

  • Milling Around

    Facebook post #028 (Aug 2020)

    I was almost shocked to discover Essex roots! Before I knew this, I happened to be in a pub somewhere near Maldon – very close to these roots – when it emerged that everyone there had been to Barcelona. But they refused to believe that it was the first time I’d visited Essex on purpose! When pressed, they each confessed to never having seen Wiltshire.

    Anyway, I enjoyed Maldon, and looped in a quick visit to see the outside of Audley End (pic1). It turns out that the family ran the mill at the edge of that estate, and had a shop at Audley End station.

    It was the Barnard family who built up the fabulous riches mentioned in a previous post. Other than farming and milling (and diamonds), one of their main trades was an artists’ supply business, with a shop on Oxford Street. As well as paints and so on, they supplied early magic lantern slides – all the rage before the advent of cinema! Pictured are a Barnard paint box and a Cinderella slide which I tracked down.

    Cinderella (my collection)
    Barnard paint box (my collection)

    There is much more on my blog, but one line of enquiry I’d like to follow up is around Kathleen Box who was active in Wartime Social Surveys. These allowed the government of the day to understand the views and behaviours of the people.

    Kathleen was cousin of the composer Harold, mentioned in an earlier post. Another composer was James Barnard Smart, who amongst other things was also master of a military band, accompanist to Edward Lloyd and Clara Butt, orchestra leader on Brighton West Pier, and private organist to the Duchess of Sutherland!

    My photos, except for the museum photo of the megacool steam lorry (pic2) that belonged to the family. The last pic is a Barnard house in Lymington that I photo’d by chance.

    Audley End (my photo)
    Holland Steam Lorry (Saffron Walden Museum)
    Brighton West Pier (my photo)
    Lymington (my photo)

  • Iron Man

    Facebook post #027 (Aug 2020)

    My grandad’s grandad, Daniel Lambert, was a schoolmaster who was apparently an accomplished rower who liked to hobnob with the opera stars of the day. He worked at a British School (pic9) (as opposed to a C of E National School), which focused on the ‘labouring and manufacturing classes’. However, he appears to have deliberately distanced himself from his own working class family. And rumour has it that he was fired for still being in bed in the schoolhouse when the school inspector showed up one day!

    The Lamberts may have originally been flemish weavers but by the C18 ours were from the Shrewsbury area (pic8). Long ago, when I first found the paper record which showed that the family living in Horsehay, Shropshire, it conjured up the image of a rural idyll. Wrong! Horsehay was actually an early centre of the industrial revolution. Abram Darby II, builder of The Iron Bridge (pic3), sited his blast furnaces there (pic6 is of the nearby Bedlam Furnace).

    Update: Abram funded the village school, and I think Daniel stayed on as a teaching assistant, and then a teacher (see Daniel’s page for more).

    Our Jesse (Daniel’s father) had one of the toughest and most skilled jobs of the era, that of an iron puddler (pic5). He produced malleable iron by perpetually stirring and raking molten iron at a controlled temperature until the globs of iron was as heavy as he could lift. Those who survived the back-breaking work, the heat and the fumes generally succumbed to eye problems. The job was never successfully mechanised.

    Jesse’s father may have been at the small foundry at the estate of the extraordinary house of Pitchford Hall (pic1), which I visited last year. Some of their iron was used in the ancestor of the sky scraper – Ditherington Flax Mill (pic2). One of Jesse’s nieces was a domestic servant in the great manager’s house, Dale House (pic4), overlooking the world famous Coalbrookdale Works (the biggest in the world when it made the fountain in pic7 for the Great Exhibition). Horsehay carried on making bridges and cranes, for export all over the world, right into the nuclear age.

    The photos are mine, other than that of the puddling process, and the archive photo of the school.

    Pitchford Hall
    British School, Dorking
    Puddling (CultureNL)

  • Eagles to Dragonflies

    Facebook post #026 (Jul 2020)

    Aero-engines played a big part in my Grandad‘s working life. He worked for the Air Ministry at the start of the war, and had to drive around the Midlands inspecting Merlin production, probably at the 21 shadow factories operated by Alvis. One was the peacetime producer of Tizer soft drinks! I remember a story about him stopping at a phone box to warn a test facility of his own approach. Health and safety rules prohibited running more than 8 engines at a time: as he arrived he would hear 8 engines slowing up, leaving the permitted 8 running. As he drove away, he would hear the second bank starting up again.

    Grandad mistrusted seatbelts as he once had cause to leap across to the passenger seat when a tank transporter (pic1) took out the driver’s side of his car, during the blackout.

    At some point, he transferred to Alvis, who were making and repairing Rolls Royce V12 Merlin engines (pic2), as used in Spitfires and Lancasters (pic3). This was in a new 1936 plant intended first for French engines under licence, and then for their own Leonides (pic4) design. The men from the Ministry changed their minds on both designs, and instructed that the first batch of Leonides engines be destroyed. Grandad had them bricked up at the back of the factory instead…

    I know that he went to work in Coventry in April 1941 after it had been flattened in the air raids, and I’ve heard the stories about people working in roofless factories with salvaged machine tools to keep production going. But I was surprised to see – last year at Coventry Transport Museum – an enlargement of a German reconnaissance map (pic5) clearly showing the aero-engine factory. I subsequently discovered that the Germans were able to eliminate the plant with extraordinarily precise and destructive bombing. I then found out that the bombing was better than the intelligence: the target had actually been the car plant, the aero-engine plant having been built in the empty space to the north! So that put pay to production of the lovely pre-war cars like the Speed 25 (pic6) and Silver Eagle.

    In 1944, the government allowed Alvis to start planning for peace, and the Leonides was dusted down.Those early Leonides units were used in the first hovercraft (pic7) and early helicopters (pic8). They did eventually make cars after the war but the main business was armoured cars (pic9). When BAe had finished with the name, Alvis was bought by enthusiasts, who started on a mission to complete the batch of cars (and engines) originally planned for 1939 (pic10)!

    My photos, gathered over the last couple of years.

    Alvis Speed 25 (1938)
    Alvis Cars, Factory, Leonides Engine and Applications

  • Socks on the Golf Course

    Facebook post #025 (Jul 2020)

    This is Phyllis (and one of the pianos her family made). You should feel sorry for Phyllis because she had her 21st birthday present stolen while she was dining. The family lost £1.2m (in today’s money) in the 1927 robbery in Sunningdale. Then she married my cousin.

    She had already stunned the world by wearing socks on a golf course (as one of the famous golfing sisters). According to a website I’ve just found, she went on to be renowned for skating, skiing and toboganning. And bred champion Irish Wolfhounds. And raced a Bentley in the Monte Carlo rally. And lived to 92 (still driving), surrounded by haute couture, fine art and pictures of horses.

    Phyllis Strohmenger and a Strohmenger piano

  • Weaving Not Drowning

    Facebook post #024 (Jul 2020)

    ‘Weaver’ is not a trade name – in Britain, that is Webb. Rather, the name is thought to derive from the River Weaver in Cheshire. Pictured is the church at Weaverham, possibly the centre of the universe… before it shifted to Sutton Coldfield. The C15 Thomas De Wever sounds quite grand but in Sutton (C18-C19), we were agricultural labourers, living in ‘Blabbs’ – which seem to have been a group of shacks named after the sound of the brook running past.

    My 3rd gt-grandmother Rebecca can’t have had an easy life – she seems to have fallen out with her father (who ended his days in the Aston Union Workhouse), and was a domestic servant from the age of 12. She never revealed the father of her son. However, she met a good man, who took them both in, and she lived until the age of 95. My grandad’s sister remembered her well and was therefore able to pass on mid-C19 reminscences of the time long before cars! Her son worked his way up to head gardener at Middleton Hall (pictured) near Tamworth, which is now (normally) open to the public.

    His children did well, and remained in the Sutton area. But the big surprise has been the number of coal miners in the family that have shown up in the research. There were small coal seams around Tamworth and West Bromwich, but the family followed the work to the West Yorkshire coalfield, and, by 1939, many of Rebecca’s brother’s descendants were to be found in the Wakefield area. Others remained in the industrial West Midlands – including Small Heath of ‘Peaky Blinders’ fame, or emigrated. The Barnes family remained well-off farmers in Staffordshire. One family member was an engine driver, another wrote a book on satire! (Use the menu to find the family pages).

  • Boot, Boat and Goat

    Facebook post #023 (Jun 2020)

    To those awaiting the reopening of the Great British pub… I didn’t know we’d ever had a pub in the family but it turns out there were many. Pictured is one of a handful that will hopefully reopen soon – the Rose & Crown in Stirchley, Shropshire.

    Luck ran out for most of them over time, a couple due to road improvements, and quite a lot of Birmingham has been knocked down… The unluckiest was probably the Plough Inn in Gillingham, Kent, which was bombed in 1941, killing 2nd cousin Fred. It was rebuilt, and knocked down again in the early C21.

    Creative Commons Licence [Some Rights Reserved]   © Copyright Richard Law and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

    Others included:

    * Travellers’ Inn, St Helier, Jersey

    * Goat, Liverpool

    * Cuckoo Vaults (or predecessor), Liverpool

    * Rodney Inn, Little Baddow, Essex

    * Greyhound, Blandford Forum, Dorset

    * Smithfield Hotel, Lichfield, Staffordshire

    * Bordesley Park Tavern, Deritend, Birmingham

    * White Hart, Ingatestone, Brentwood, Essex

    * Kingfisher, Biggin nr York

    * White Lion, Doncaster

    * Horse & Groom, Ripple, Worcestershire

    * Rose & Crown, Ledbury Road, Hereford

    * Boot Inn, Sutton Coldfield

    * White House, Gillingham, Kent

    * Ram’s Head, Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire

    * Rozel Bay Hotel, Jersey

    * Wellhead Tavern (latterly Hare of the Dog), Birmingham

    * Tyburn House, Erdington, Birmingham

    * 81 Highgate Road, Sparkbrook, Birmingham

    * Boat Inn, Minworth, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham

    * Horseshoe Inn, Stone, Staffordshire

    * White Lion, Doncaster, Yorkshire

    * Wilton Arms (latterly Captain Cook), Fulham, London

    * The Inn, Clanfield, Oxon (boarding?)…

    …and the pianist at the Palace Hotel, Southend-on-Sea, Essex…

    …and various brewery workers, including a drayman at Charington’s Blue Anchor Brewery, Mile End, London

  • Rawalpindi or Bust

    Facebook post #022 (Jun 2020)

    So, there are nearly 50 ships researched and pictured in my family history as our people travelled or served upon them. SS Rawalpindi is interesting as cousins on both sides of the family travelled to India on her in the 1920s (here and here).

    She was requisitioned in 1939, with most of her crew. In November of that year, when on convoy protection duty off Iceland, she “had the great misfortune to encounter the mighty German battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau”, with predictably sad results for the brave crew, battle ensigns hoisted.

  • What the Dickens?

    Facebook post #021 (9 Jun 2020 – 020 was a progress update)

    Today is the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death. I’ve mentioned him more often than any other person in my family story – he was an imperfect man but he gave Britain a conscience, he entertained, he vividly described workhouses and rookeries. He wrote of Crystal Palace and the Niagara Falls. And he lived in the same streets, travelled on the same ships, and his son fought and died alongside ours.

    Here is a picture of a dog being thrown out of one of his readings. It was as well, he says, that he was reading a comic part at the time, as he was seized by a paroxysm of laughter after the dog had reappeared in an entirely new place amongst the audience, staring intently at him.