Category Archives: Second World War

Remembering my Return to East Coker

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In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

T.S.Eliot, East Coker (1940)

This month I’ve been spending time at home in Switzerland with my mother, who miraculously was still able to come out for her annual summer visit – albeit via rerouted flights and increased bureaucracy. Having not seen each other for a year, it has been a very enjoyable visit, with one of our main activities being to prepare for the new Scottish family history blog which I intend to launch in the autumn. While talking to my mother about her childhood, I have been impressed at the breadth and depth of her reminiscences, which go back eighty years to when she was a toddler being carried out to the air raid shelter at the bottom of her garden in west Edinburgh.

Despite having some memories of the war, the ten year age gap between my parents meant that my mother’s experiences differ from those of my London-born father. Yet I was interested to learn that she did indeed spend some time as an evacuee in the countryside outside Edinburgh with her mother at the beginning of the conflict. There they stayed in the mining village of Roslin (made famous by the medieval Rosslyn Chapel which featured in Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code) with one of my grandmother’s older sisters, her miner husband, and their two young boys. I remember visiting this elderly couple in the 1970s in their terraced cottage on the Main Street and playing in a back lane with some local children, thinking how much fun it would be to live in such a close knit community.

Maybe it’s because my mother was so much younger than my father and was always happy to talk about her childhood that there was a sense of her memories being somehow less valuable than those of the more unknown London branch of the family. There was no mystery surrounding her upbringing, and with regular contact with our Edinburgh-based grandparents (and others in their extended families) there were always plenty people to ask about the past. Unlike my English grandparents, my Scottish grandparents had remained in the same house since the 1930s and we were surrounded with the objects they had accumulated over their lifetimes. Opening drawers and cupboards always revealed strange objects (such as sealing wax and hat pins) and once even a cache of old-fashioned toys underneath the floorboards (see Of Lost Toys and Mothers).

In addition to these items were the boxes of family photographs that my grandparents inherited from my great-grandmother when she came to live with them after she was widowed. It is those images which will form the basis of my new blog A Scottish Family Album, and with my mother’s help I intend to investigate how photographs of relatives – many who are long gone – can trigger more memories and family stories. Another pair of eyes can also illuminate some overlooked aspect of a photograph, and looking at such images together will hopefully shed new light on the stories behind the photographs.

This was certainly the case when I took some copies of family photographs to my elderly aunt, who I visited with my English cousin in August 2019. Both of us fully intended to return the following year and make it an annual pilgrimage for as long as we possibly could. However, as this has obviously not been possible, I would like to revisit that afternoon by publishing an updated version of the post I wrote two summers ago. Even on that muggy Saturday I was aware that time was slipping away from us as we talked, and it is perhaps just as well that we had not known then of what was about to happen.

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CROSSROADS.JPGSignpost to Naish Priory in the woods at Burton, East Coker

In the summer of 2019, just before the world ground to a halt, I was lucky enough to have the chance to return to Somerset – where my story began – to visit my aunt. I travelled with my cousin Sandra (the daughter of my father’s younger brother) and we stopped at the village of East Coker on the way. This allowed my cousin to see the places I hoped my aunt would still be able to describe to us from her memories of the family wartime evacuation, making the visit more meaningful for all of us.

Unfortunately, it was a cool, wet and blustery Friday afternoon, in contrast to my first visit in July 2005 (see East Coker), which had certainly been influenced by the good weather. However, fortified with tea and cakes from the National Trust café after our trip to nearby Montecute House, and sporting the matching bucket hats we’d purchased in Sherborne the day previously, we decided there was nothing to stop us exploring the village in the wind and rain. Maybe it would even clear up later, we told ourselves rather optimistically. (It didn’t).

A lucky coincidence saw us approaching East Coker by way of the sunken lanes I’d already described to my cousin. I’m not quite sure how much Sandra appreciated having to squeeze her car by a number of large vehicles exiting the village, but she certainly agreed with me that it was an ‘exciting’ way to arrive. However, those pesky narrow lanes effectively prevented the other part of East Coker – where our fathers had lived during WW2 – from further development, and thankfully could not now be widened due to planning regulations.

HOLLOW LANE.JPGA sunken lane on the approach to East Coker

We soon passed the old hamlet of Burton and the end of Burton Lane (which led to the farmhouse cottage where the Skeltons had lived for the duration of the war). We had, however, already decided to head straight for the heart of the village (which had once been called Up Coker), and park by the alms houses next to the church. Not only did this mean we could start our walk by viewing the impressive church of St Michael’s, with its T. S. Eliot memorial, but it also gave me the opportunity to show my cousin the first cottage in which our grandmother was billeted (West Wells), and where I was told she’d only stayed for a short time as she’d been unhappy about being made to ‘feel like a skivvy’ by the woman of the house.

ALMSHOUSESThe 17th century alms houses by the church

A wedding rehearsal in the church meant we only had time for a cursory look around, and I was glad I’d had the chance to attend a Sunday service with my mother on our first visit back in 2005. It was on that July morning that I felt the sense of the community that pervades the place, as well as delighting in the Englishness of the service, which was so different from my childhood memories of attending the Church of Scotland.

Conscious of the worsening weather, we did not stop for a drink in the Helyar Arms as planned (actually called The New Inn until 1948), but headed past the pub and along the road leading to Sutton Bingham – once a scattered village and now a reservoir, whose medieval church with pre-reformation wall paintings had been preserved. My mother and I had visited the church on that first trip, and had wondered at the homes which had disappeared to make way for the water. My father would have known the village (where there had been a railway station, closed in the early 60s, but not as part of the reservoir development), and it must have been an uncanny experience for him to return to the area and see that great expanse of water where once there were farmhouses and fields.

COKER MARSH ROAD.JPGCottages at Coker Marsh

In the end we only got halfway up the road before heavy rain halted us in our tracks. However, it was enough to give Sandra a feel for this part of the village – called Coker Marsh – and where our uncle’s extended family (the Bouchers) had lived in one of the stone cottages which lined the road. Walking back the same way towards the church, I noticed a small stream running along the left-hand side of the road which, judging from the stone channel in which it ran, looked like it might have once had a purpose beyond just taking away runoff water. The remains of a cress bed? I could not remember it from my earlier visits, but wondered whether this was because it had been dried up previously. This made me think about other aspects of the village I might have missed, or forgotten, and I realised that although I generally prefer to explore places on my own, by showing Sandra around East Coker I was strengthening my own mental map of the area.

Our next plan – to walk via Back Lane to Burton – was stymied by more heavy rains so we missed out going there on foot, much to my disappointment. While it was certainly useful to have a car, particularly in such horrible weather, I have always relished my own rambles around the area, climbing the many wooden stiles and taking the lanes that lead to the neighbouring villages. Being a non-driver admittedly closes off some opportunities, but also means that walking long distances becomes commonplace (just as it once was). For years I was slightly ashamed of this proclivity for visiting new places under my own steam, often in combination with public transport, as I always felt it made me seem like a second-class citizen. But now that eschewing car ownership has suddenly become more mainstream, I feel less defensive about my lack of driving skills.

BACK LANE.JPGWild Flowers in Back Lane

Although we missed out on the very charming footpath up Back Lane – which my aunt later told us was one where she would go with our uncle before they were married and wanted some privacy – I did convince Sandra to park up at North Coker and walk along the road to Burton Cross. This meant that we were able to admire the stone cottages, many with thatched roofs, and their bright and blowsy, albeit rain-soaked, gardens. We passed by what had once been the shop and post office, a sad reminder of how little of these services remain in rural locations. On my first visit in 2005 it had still been trading and my mother and I had been grateful to be able to purchase snacks and a newspaper. No doubt my father would have spent any hard-earned pocket money there – as had most of the village children throughout the years – as well as in the small shop next to the pub, which had long since closed. I pictured him scampering along the road, after having helped out with the harvest or haymaking, wondering whether to spend his precious farthings and ha’pennies on liquorice or boiled sweets.

As we walked up Burton Lane to the cottage where my grandmother and the three children lived during the war, I tried to picture it as it had been in the 1940s, devoid of the new bungalows which were squeezed in between the row of original cottages and the fields. I had once come across a photograph of the lane, taken shortly before the war, which showed a herd of short-horned cows being driven along a narrow dirt track bounded by hedges, trees and fields. In the distance all that could be seen was the roof of the wooden gospel hall – the building my grandmother cleaned in return for reduced rent on the rather spartan Burton Farm cottage opposite.

BURTON LANE (2).JPGLooking down Burton Lane from the road end today

Even today the lane is very much a rural road and it was possible to imagine how it once was – and how different from the busy streets of South London it must have been for the Skeltons. Yet on this visit, I was more conscious of the post-war houses which flanked the lane, looking shabbier now than previously. And I could swear that a couple of newbuilds had popped up between them in the once generous gardens, giving the lane a more hemmed-in feel. In contrast, the original cottages nearer the road-end appeared even more attractive next to their characterless suburban-looking neighbours; although I was aware that to have lived there once would have meant putting up with cold and damp and darkness for a good part of the year.

As Sandra is particularly interested in old buildings (but stressed she still wants to live in new one), I had little difficulty in persuading her to take the sandy track which ran by the chapel towards Gulliver’s Grave (the name of a field), and turns off at a crossroads in the woods towards Naish Priory. This 14th century Grade 1 listed building is now a private home, and although it was never a true priory, it did once have religious connections. It is, however, a remarkable survivor from the period with a price tag only the super-wealthy can afford. Currently it’s owned by the local conservative MP and arch-brexiteer, investment banker Marcus Fysh,  which may have explained the number of EU flags draped over the front gates of several of the more modest houses in the village!

NAISHSide view of Naish Priory

The following afternoon, when I told my aunt of our trip to the priory through the woods, she explained that was the same way she’d walked from the farm cottage to pick up the school bus to Yeovil (a 1920s charabanc brought out of retirement for the evacuees). Although it did not seem like much of a short cut, I’m sure there was a good reason for my aunt to use this trail, rather than take the road. Perhaps she’d simply wanted to avoid someone (such as the local farmer who was rather touchy-feely) or had enjoyed the lonely track, which she told us she’d undertaken in all weathers.

Asking someone at an advanced age about their reminiscences obviously needs to be handled sensitively, and I was conscious that it was just as important for us to talk to our aunt about the present as the past. Luckily Sandra – who knew our older English cousins much better than I did – was able to supply that side of the conversation. While she browsed through photographs of a recent family wedding, I showed my aunt some of the old family photographs I’d accumulated over the years. Most of these she could remember, as I’d either sent her copies in the post or she’d furnished me with the originals. However, viewing them together was a completely different experience. Each image released a most astounding array of sharp memories, as if the photograph had been taken yesterday. For example, a great-uncle I’d never known (my grandmother’s beloved older brother) was described by my aunt for the first time as being ‘pompous’. Even as a boy you can see it in the way he looks!

Sometimes I just had to catch my breath and listen carefully as my aunt described such momentous events as The Crystal Palace burning down in a relatively matter-of-fact way: Mother called us to the window and said there must be a huge fire going on somewhere over South London. We did not know then that it was the great Crystal Palace where we went to listen to bands on a Sunday. My aunt then told us about the car races in the grounds of the Crystal Palace that my grandparents took them to watch. The car racing at Sydenham was something I had not known about, and seemed a strange thing for a young family to do. But then when reading more about it afterwards, I discovered that these were popular events, which in the 1930s would have perhaps fascinated a wider variety of people.

Crystal_Palace_fire_1936Crystal Palace burning down, November 30th, 1936

And so it was that the afternoon continued in a most delightful fashion, my aunt moving lightly from the present to the past, depending on the topic of conversation, her face a range of flickering emotions. Shafts of late summer light from the garden fell through the open stable door of my aunt’s tiny 18th century cottage, lighting up her features, which, as Sandra remarked later, made her look like Nana and Grandad rolled into one person. Behind my aunt on the wall, a clock ticked ominously, making me aware of the limited hours we had – and not just on that afternoon. It was one of those rare moments (or rather a collection of moments, strung together like delicate fairy lights illuminating the dark) where it seems that time has ceased to exist in normal terms. I felt as if we had almost slid into another world: one in which we could glide between 1939 and 2019 with ease, summoning up ghosts along the way.

My aunt’s stories – delivered in that funny old-fashioned clipped London accent that the whole family once had – triggered a range of emotions in me that Sandra later told me flitted across my face in the same way as my aunt’s (and, if truth be told, just like Sandra herself). With my aunt’s uncanny ability to describe past events in exquisite detail, frozen moments in photographs were suddenly set free to take on their own momentum. A picture of the back yard at Denmark Road reminded her of how she and my father used to dare each other to climb over the fence into the next door neighbour’s garden at night and run around without getting caught. She explained that this was because the neighbour’s back yard was actually planted out with shrubs and flowers and had a lawn – as opposed to the more functional space to the rear of their own house.

Another photograph, this time of my aunt and father in fancy dress, brought back a memory of a party at school. My aunt explained that my grandmother had been so delighted with the sight of her two children all dressed up in their costumes (Sandra’s father was yet to be born) that they went straight from their junior school in nearby Crawford Street to a local photographer’s studio in their outfits. And that slightly superior-looking smile on my aunt’s face? Well her Pierrot suit had been specially made for her, whereas my father had just had to contend with what he could find in the dressing up box.

P1070488 (3).JPGMy aunt and father in fancy dress c1933

That afternoon I also learnt that the dog my grandfather brought home to Denmark Road one day, surprising his children, had actually never been meant as a family pet but as a guard dog to protect the house from a ‘light-fingered’ family two doors down. My aunt laughed to recall that one night when they all returned home from a day out (perhaps at the Crystal Palace), the house had been ransacked and the dog was found quivering under the table.

Such tales, although not dramatic in themselves, are important to family historians. Not only do they bring the very human side of genealogy to the fore, but also illustrate the concerns of previous generations – which may have been very different from our own. They also help us to understand the behaviour of our ancestors. As a child I always thought it strange that my father obsessively checked all the locks on the doors and windows of our bungalow every night and admonished us if we left our bicycles outside. I wonder, too, if he perhaps felt guilty that his childhood dog was just left out in the back yard most of the time. In contrast, our own family dog went everywhere with us and was (according to the vet) literally walked to death by my father and myself.

JET.JPG

Our Cocker Spaniel, Jet, 1974-1982

My aunt, however, does not suffer fools gladly (just like my grandfather and father) and certainly could not simply be described as some sweet old lady sitting in a rocking chair, waiting for her relatives to visit. One of the reasons I had not seen so much of her over the years is that she and my father did not always have the easiest of relationships. He found her bossy; she found him difficult. But their younger brother was the adored baby of the family who kept the infrequent family reunions going throughout the years.

My last memory of my aunt on that Saturday afternoon is of her standing in her front garden as we prepared to take our leave (with promises to return in a few months), jabbing at the twisted trunk of an old wisteria tree with her walking stick. She was annoyed with the fact that while she wanted the tree cut down to let in more light, her neighbours wanted it to remain. This was because the old wisteria’s spreading branches also decorated the facades of their own cottages, adding value to the homes.

So like Aunty! Sandra whispered as the garden gate clicked behind us.

So like Grandad! I thought.

Later that evening, ensconced in a quiet country pub, Sandra and I browsed through my copy of East Coker: A Village Album by Abigail Shepherd, a book very much rooted in the tradition of oral history. My cousin was able to easily recognise the old photographs of the places we’d visited, so little had changed in East Coker over the last century and a half, and we both expressed our amazement that our aunt (who also had a copy) had been able to recognise so many people in the book. Not only had she been able to locate Sandra’s father as a child from a sea of other schoolchildren who were all in fancy dress to commemorate the end of the war, but she was able to put names to the blurry faces of some of the adults standing sheepishly at the back. I found it equally impressive that she’d known who everyone was in my father’s boyhood photograph of the 1944 Whit Monday trip to Coker Woods, the discovery of which had reawakened my interest in my Skelton family history (see In my Beginning is my End). 

Coker Woods.pngThe photograph of my father (right) with friends, East Coker 1944

Since returning from my visit to Somerset, I’ve been rereading Abigail Shepherd’s informative and entertaining book about East Coker, discovering facts I’d previously missed or forgotten about, and tying in some of the stories my aunt told us about (such as Queen Mary’s visit to Mrs Dorothy Walker-Heneage at Coker Court in 1941) with the reminiscences  outlined in the book mentioned above. As it was first published in 1997, many of those interviewed are no longer alive today to tell their tales, including my father’s friend, Alan Cornelius, who as a teenager had taken the group photograph in the local woods with his father’s Box Brownie.

I’m glad that I was finally able to meet Alan Cornelius, and learn about his wartime boyhood experiences, and am grateful for the copy of his (unpublished) notes on the subject of the ‘vacuees.  By chance, my aunt told me that one wartime Christmas the only electric bulb they possessed in their small farm cottage gave up the ghost, prompting her mother to ask her to go to the Cornelius household to see if they had a spare. Of course, my aunt being my aunt simply put her foot down and refused to go out begging for a lightbulb on Christmas Day, and so the family had to celebrate in candlelight. Which sounds as if it might have been wonderful for everyone but my poor grandmother!

A VILLAGE ALBUM

Of course, it is now more than 80 years ago when my aunt and father were evacuated with their respective schools: my aunt to East Coker with Charles Edward Brook School for Girls in Camberwell, and my father to Leatherhead in Surrey with his school. However, only a few months later my grandmother was able to move to East Coker with her younger son and bring the three children together under one roof, while my grandfather continued to work in London. For a fourteen year old like my aunt, the evacuation seemed more like an adventure away from the restrictions of her parents, in particular my grandfather, who could be a rather strict father.

As Alan Cornelius pointed out to me, there was great excitement in the village when the evacuees arrived and a lively social scene grew up, with boys’ and girls’ clubs held at Coker Court, as well as local dances, sports events and cultural activities. It is not surprising then to learn that many of these wartime friendships blossomed into relationships and then into the inevitable (in those days) marriages. It seems strange to think that my aunt’s lifelong connections to the area – cemented by her marriage to a popular local East Coker boy – all hinged on the lottery of the evacuation on the 1st of September 1939.

The Incidental Genealogist, August 2021

The Lost Family – Part 3

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I do not know when he first visited East Coker in search of his ancestors, or how often he came here, but I do know that his last visit was in the late summer of 1939, when he took some photographs of the village and the church, and it must have been then that he gathered  the impressions that he later set down in the poem “East Coker”.

Address given by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis in tribute to T. S. Eliot at the memorial service and unveiling of a memorial plaque at St Michael’s church, East Coker, 26th September 1965

St Michael's East CokerSt Michael’s Church, East Coker, burial site of T.S. Eliot’s ashes

This last post of the year will focus on the final part of the introduction to my family story, edited for a memoir writing competition. In October’s blog post (see The Lost Family – Part 1),  I began by outlining the background to my quest, detailing my experience of working as a probate genealogist or so-called heir hunter in London in the 1980s. Last month (see The Lost Family – Part 2) I turned to the more recent past, when an unknown photograph of my father as a boy reignited my interest in researching my paternal family history, sending me to East Coker in Somerset, where my father had lived as a wartime evacuee. This month I will complete the trilogy by describing the serendipitous meeting with my father’s schoolfriend, Alan Cornelius, the man who took the photograph of his boyhood friends in Coker Woods one spring day in 1944.

As previously, I’ll also be updating the story with current recollections of the events I recount, as well as the additional knowledge gained in the last few years during my struggle to create a coherent narrative from my genealogical quest. This will hopefully inspire some readers to chronicle their own family research, perhaps including their personal responses to the stories they uncover along the way.

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The Lost Family: Part 3

East Coker is a place that has mostly won the battle to preserve its rural charms, mainly due to the Eliot connection, and has few modern buildings or street lights. Visitors come to see the deep lanes, the open fields, the houses of grey stone and the hollyhocks that aim too high. It is even said that Eliot based part of his poem on the 1876 Friedrich Gerstäcker tale of the mysterious community of Germelshausen, where the population had been cursed by the pope and were only allowed to come out of the earth for one day of revelry every hundred years. There is a strange a feeling of liminality when entering the village through the ancient sunken lanes that resemble tunnels into another world. And it is not difficult to imagine that the place is haunted by the spectre of an earlier time, which can only be faintly glimpsed at certain moments.

And the deep lane insists on the direction into the village*: I have arrived in East Coker several times over the years – once on foot over the fields and woods from Yeovil Junction Station, another time arriving ‘the back way’ through Burton Cross, where my father lived during the war on Burton Farm. But whatever road or path I take, it always seems a surprise to come across the village: East Coker gives the impression of being hidden away – both in time and place. This is almost like a metaphor for my own genealogical research, an endeavour which sometimes feels akin to glimpsing through a door which has opened slightly onto another world, only for it to close again when you try to push through to the other side.

After a reader contacted me about my East Coker post, I learned that the deep lane shuttered with branches* was also called a holloway – or hollow way (derived from the Old English ‘hola weg’). Having very little experience of travelling along such sunken lanes it came as a surprise to enter the village along such a route. Perhaps it also reminded me of the road to Dunure in Ayrshire, the seaside village close to our home where our family spent many days in summer. Although not technically a holloway (which are characteristic of Southern England due to the geology of the landscape), it gave the same feeling of entering another world, which was made even more exciting to me by the sound of branches whipping against our Austin 1100 (see Looking Back).

* From East Coker, by T.S. Eliot

The morning I met Alan Cornelius – the old man who’d taken the photograph in Coker Woods on that Whit Monday over sixty years ago – the village was looking its time-warped best. The jaunty union-jack bunting strung up between the thatched houses in the main street hung still in the mid-summer air, and the sounds of hay stooking cut across the yellow fields. The Helyar Arms was preparing for its first customers, and the church was alive with the bustle of middle-aged women setting the final touches to the arrangements for the flower festival.

Flower Festival in St Michael's Church

By noon the cow parsley in the hedgerows was wilting in the heat, and the exhibition in the village hall was coming to a close. ‘We called those long wooden sticks ‘staves’ back then,’ Alan Cornelius said, as he packed away his own copy of ‘my’ photograph amongst his other WW2 memorabilia. ‘And we were off to fight the enemy in the woods.’ He shook his head and smiled.

Among all the other bits and pieces on his stall that the younger visitors to the exhibition found so fascinating, was a copy of his childhood diary. The short, scribbled entries illustrated just how exciting the war could seem to a thirteen-year-old boy. There were numerous descriptions of long bike rides spent searching for incendiaries in the surrounding fields, building model aeroplanes bought from a shop in Yeovil, watching out for enemy aircraft, visiting the local Westland Aircraft Factory (where Lysanders or ‘Lizzies’ were built).

One diary entry triggered a particular memory for Alan Cornelius: ‘Early on in the war, a bomb fell on a nearby farm, killing a bull. Your dad said this was abominable. It was typical of him. He always was a sharp one.’ I thought back to how my father always used to make up limericks and nonsense rhymes, and imagined him honing this skill amongst his peers. He’d come to the village with his mother and baby brother, not as part of a school group, so a sense of humour and aptitude for word play might have eased the path to acceptance by his new classmates.

My aunt was the first in the family to arrive in East Coker when war broke out, ending up there with part of her all-girls grammar school in Camberwell. Yet, while my aunt was sent to Somerset, my father was initially evacuated with his local primary school to Leatherhead in Surrey where he was billeted alongside other children with a Mormon family. Years later, he remembered them chiefly for the fact that they watered down the milk and gave their charges the cast-off bicycles of the junior members of the Kennedy clan. (Joseph Kennedy – then American ambassador to Great Britain – had stayed in a house in nearby Headley during the first year of the war, before being forced to resign in November 1940). I like to imagine my father cycling to school on J.F.K’s old bicycle, and sometimes wonder if that was the source of my parents’ on-going joke that our family and the Kennedys shared a series of (near) parallel death dates. In an uncanny twist of fate, my father was to eventually die in January 1995, several hours before Rose Kennedy did.

True as I’m riding this bicycle: My father used to say this a great deal, something which delighted and annoyed the rest of the family in equal measure. For several years I thought it was ‘Trew’s riding this bicycle’, or words to that effect (another of my father’s favourite expressions). However, it was a while before I finally learnt what he was actually saying – and more importantly, what it meant. He used the  phrase whenever he was pressed about the veracity of the stories he told, so that in the end we could never know what had really happened and what was made up (a trait he shared with his brother). Possibly this was a way for my father to avoid having to go deeper into certain topics or give away too many personal details, something he hated doing. So for most of his life, none of us – including my mother- knew much about his background. However, as I mentioned last month, ‘fact is often stranger than fiction’, and I think my father secretly enjoyed the absurdity of recounting the kind of story which sounds as if it could be made up but was in fact actually true.

Of course, once the 1939 register was available for consultation (and even then I had to wait a couple of years until the redacted names of those who might still be alive were released) I saw that so much of what he’d remembered had actually happened. My father had stayed with a large Russian-American Mormon family not far from the Kennedy’s home. I came to the conclusion that if these facts were true, then why not the bicycle story. There are many people I know (myself included) who might have dined out on such an anecdote for years, but although a good raconteur, my father shied away from the limelight. My mother now admits she wished she’d questioned him more about his past, and I often wonder if that is the main reason why my London family genealogy was so compelling. From an early age I always associated the Skelton family with an unknown – but possibly romantic – backstory. In contrast, I felt (erroneously, I realise now) that I knew a great deal about the Scottish side of my family, removing their mystery for me.

Within a year, my father was back in London  – like many families the ‘phoney war’ had lulled them into a false sense of security – with my grandparents omitting to tell my aunt, lest she also wanted to return home. My father remembered the constant trips to the air raid shelter (always when he was setting out his lead soldiers), so this would have been in the autumn of 1940, when the bombing  started in earnest. Having only recently moved the family from a dilapidated Victorian terrace in Brixton to a modern, cottage-style semi on the Bloomfield Hall Estate in West Norwood, my poor grandmother must have despaired at ever being able to create the comfortable family home she craved.

One inauspicious afternoon, my father arrived back from school to find my grandfather standing at the end of their road, suitcases at his feet, saying that their house had taken a hit and they would be ‘going away’. It is one of the very few things I remember my father telling us about that period in his life – apart from the spectacle of watching the Crystal Palace burn down from his upstairs bedroom window in the old family house in Denmark Road, so I realise it must have been an important memory.

Crystal_Palace_fire_1936Crystal Palace Fire, November, 1936

A Blazing Arch of Lucid Glass: The voiceover accompanying this Pathé newsreel clip above illuminates (no pun intended!) both the iconic status of this building and the horrific drama of the fire which destroyed it. In 1936 the Crystal Palace was already 85 years old, and yet next year (2021) marks a further 85 years since it burned to the ground in such a dramatic way. So just as there are still people alive today who remember the terrible conflagration which lit up the sky over South London and could be seen for miles around, there must have been old people then who could recall the wonder of the new glass building in Hyde Park, perhaps even having seen the exotic exhibits on display during The Great Exhibition in 1861.

However, by the time my father saw the smoke and flames rising above Sydenham Hill the Crystal Palace was certainly not the exalted place it had once been, with the surrounding gardens popular places for working class families to gather on Sundays. My aunt recalls the whole family going there to watch the motor racing which took place in the grounds from 1927, a fact that surprised me at the time but proved to be correct. The actual building had several uses over the years – there were the popular Saturday music concerts, and it even housed the Imperial War Museum for a few years in the 1920s. However, historians agree that by the end of the 19th century, the Crystal Palace’s best days were over.

As a family historian, I am interested in the fact that the Crystal Palace and gardens links the two unknown sides of my family: both the ‘struggling’ and the wealthy. The former branch of the family (from which I descend) may or may not have visited the Great Exhibition (an event which cut through the classes as long as one could afford the one shilling entrance fee) but they certainly took advantage of the building’s relocation to South London to enjoy their Sunday downtime. Some of the wealthier side of the family – the ‘undiscovered’ branch – were actually involved in The Great Exhibition itself, with James William Skelton’s in-laws (the Sleath family) winning an award for their glass eyes (see Artificial Limbs on Curious Plans).

When the newly dubbed Sleath-Skelton family took up residence in The Avenue in Dulwich, they were only a stone’s throw from the Crystal Palace, which had moved there from Hyde Park only a few years previously. Then the glass building and its surrounding grounds was seen as a neighbourhood attraction which brought the railway to this rural outpost. But as the century moved to its end, the area filled up with the new railway commuters and rows of terraced housing began to march over the fields, gobbling up the market gardens and dairy fields, and in the process attracting more of those who were seeking cheaper housing. This was how my great-grandparents ended up in the area (in nearby Romanny Road) for a few years in the late 19th century, and again in 1938 when my grandparents moved to a new house on the Bloomfield Estate, a place they all loved. The concept of the interwar cottage estate particularly interests me, and there is some fascinating information about the ones in Lambeth at the excellent Municipal Dreams blog here.

P1030886 (2)My grandparents’ house on the Bloomfield Estate, today

In the end, my grandmother took her two boys to Somerset to join their older sister in a bid to keep them all together, while my grandfather stayed in London working as a tram conductor at the Camberwell depot, a reserved occupation, although as a veteran of the Great War, he was too old to serve again. My aunt later told me that this was not an easy time for my grandmother: in her first billet she stayed with a woman who treated her like her own personal skivvy. This must have been galling to a mature mother of three, but she eventually found a more convivial place for the family in a cottage at Burton Farm, where the Dunning family lived. And this was the place where my father retained strong memories of helping out on the farm with the other children – and which gave him his lifelong love of the British countryside.

BUR_COTBurton Farm Cottage, East Coker, today

The more I heard from Alan Cornelius about life in East Coker during the war, the more I realised that evacuation to the village would not necessarily have been a hardship. Most of the villagers appeared to have made a great effort to integrate the evacuees, and many of the youngsters were pleased to welcome the newcomers to their clubs and dances. As my father’s old schoolfriend pointed out to me himself: What adolescent hasn’t rejoiced at the injection of new ‘talent’ into their midst?

It is never too soon to start asking questions: Like many evacuees, including several in East Coker, my aunt actually married her childhood village sweetheart. Jack Boucher, was an older and ‘cooler’ local lad who also featured in the 1944 Whitsun Monday photograph. Even as an old man, Alan Cornelius remembered him well, writing in his unpublished memoirs: Our 1940s equivalent of ‘The Fonz’ was a young man several years our senior. He was a natural leader in everything that the youth of the day rated as important. He then listed my uncle’s achievements on the sporting field as well as describing his prowess at organising youth entertainments, going on to say: I rarely saw him idle his time away, and he undoubtedly set a high standard for all the other lads around him.

I was lucky enough to meet up with my uncle again (after many years) in 2005 on my first visit to East Coker, and wish I’d asked him more about his upbringing in the village. Sadly it would be the last time I’d see him, and just like the passing of Alan Cornelius it underscored for me how important it was to talk to those who held the memories of the past. And yet there is still this part of me which is reticent to ask too much – perhaps after having a father who did not like to talk about his childhood I’m afraid to upset or offend elderly friends and relatives. I sometimes wonder now if I’ll ever see my aunt again, and wish I had not been so cavalier about my ageing relatives in my youth, particularly when I was first carrying out family research in the mid-80s and early 90s. 

The photograph below shows the East Coker Boys Club, taken in 1944 at Coker Court. My father is in the front row, far left (kneeling) and Alan Cornelius and Jack Boucher are also in the front row, 3rd and 2nd from the right, respectively. In his memoirs, Alan wrote: Over the last few years of the war, there were some twenty of us, but the core group were no more than eight, with others moving in and out for a variety of reasons. 

East Coker Boys ClubEast Coker Boys’ Club, 1944

Despite the charms of East Coker, for the rest of his life my father was to wonder what direction his life’s trajectory might have taken had he been able to attend the prestigious James Alleyne’s School in Dulwich. He remembered the smart uniform which had already been bought, and the sense of life about to begin; but the war sent him off spinning in another direction, away from his scholarship studies. East Coker, however, kept him rooted during a time of great upheaval. And he was, I believe, always grateful for that.

The Incidental Genealogist, December, 2020

We Are At War

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Hindsight can mess with history to a fatal degree, and we are lucky to have such passionately argued and reliably frank correctives as these.

Simon Garfield, We Are At War (2005)

We Are At War

Military epithets abound to describe our present situation, putting many of us (regardless of our age) in mind of World War Two and the so-called ‘blitz spirit’. But it can almost be harder to deal with this unseen and unknown contagious enemy than one realised in flesh and blood. And as our current prime minister recently discovered to his cost, showing no fear in the face of this invisible fiend is neither heroic nor sensible. What is needed now is often the exact opposite of that which was expected from the population eighty years ago. No wonder our initial national response to this pandemic was (at worst) chaotic and (at best) mixed!

Yet, during this strange period I’ve been reflecting on what it must have been like to live through the long years of the Second World War, which are only just still within living memory. This is not to denigrate the wars since that have taken place on foreign soil, but simply because WW2 was the last major conflict that my London family went through together, the memories of which have been passed on to future generations through their stories and anecdotes. As my own research has shown, those experiences often were different from the perception we usually have of everyone pulling together as one, with a communal mindset. Our blitz-spirit-soaked nostalgia for this era, kept alive in films and books and political rhetoric, seems rather naive when we consider that – just like today – it was a case of ordinary people trying to get by, with their very ordinary reactions to their individual situations. Some did heroic deeds, others stole and lied; and in between this, there was a wide continuum of human behaviour (with many moving up and down this invisible line as the war went wearily on).

It was the persistent idea that there was nothing extra to add to the narrative of WW2 studies which prompted writer Simon Garfield to initially focus on Britain’s post-war period while undertaking research at the archives of the Mass-Observation Project, housed at the University of Sussex. This resulted in the first of three books based on extracts from some of the diaries kept by ordinary people from the period 1939-48 (although the project actually started in 1937 and lasted for much longer).

Our Hidden Lives

The first book Our Hidden Lives (Ebury, 2004), focused on the three years immediately following the war, up until the birth of the National Health Service in 1948. However, while reading through the wartime diary entries, Garfield realised that much of what had been recorded during the conflict did in fact shine a light on some of the hitherto undocumented experiences of ordinary citizens. So, just like the time-jumping Star Wars trilogy (as Garfield himself says in his website), the second book, entitled We Are At War (Ebury, 2005), moves backwards to cover the period shortly before the outbreak of war and up to the start of the blitz in autumn 1940 (the so-called phoney war), while the third book deals with the period from then on until the end of the war.

It is in this final book, entitled Private Battles (Ebury, 2007), that Garfield lays to rest the idea that everyone was working together for the common good throughout the war period.  He points out that: The diarists writing here – by no means a representative sample of the country’s mood, but nonetheless a valuable snapshot of it – describe a wartime Britain we may be a little unfamiliar with. Displays of genuine camaraderie and the Blitz/Dunkirk spirit of legend are matched by acts of selfishness and expressions of spite. Usually these are the result of the daily grind: beating someone else to the rationed fruit or shoes, feeling resentful about the lack of support when fire-watching. But there is a deeper malaise too, a belief that the war is not being prosecuted well and that those in power do not understand the prolonged suffering of the less privileged. Churchill is by turns revered, mocked and scolded, his ministers treated with equal parts respect and disdain.

Private Battles

For me this was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the diaries: the fact that many of the writers (and their family members, friends and colleagues) expressed opinions that seemed startlingly out of line with the perceived notion of how the population thought and behaved during wartime. Some have the odd sympathy with the Nazi party and express anti-semitic tendencies, others (on the left and right) want to play their part in creating a new and better world order. All are critical of the government at some point. As one diarist succinctly points out: The trouble is that we foolishly expect our war ministers to be supermen. Another describes the theft of a much-needed (and hard to come by) torch, while a neighbour of one diarist is fined £15 for ‘causing dismay’ by spreading rumours that the BBC was not being truthful in its reporting of events. And all this played out against a background of humdrum events – regular trips to the  cinema, moaning about the entertainment on the wireless, borrowing books from the library – I Married A German by Madelaine Kent (an English woman’s account of living in Nazi Germany before WWII) seemed to be popular with the female diarists. The identity of Lord Haw Haw is a much discussed subject.

Many of the issues that currently face us – such as fear of an unknown future, worries about financial security and concerns about mental and physical well-being haunt the pages of these three books, in particular the first one (in terms of chronology), We are at War. This volume documents the vacillating moods of the diarists as they receive and react to the official – and unofficial – news updates in the early months of the war. As Garfield  states in the introduction: We join the diarists at a time of uncertainty, but we leave them at a time of resolve.

Some of the concerns of the protagonists may seem strange or comical in retrospect – but just like the old-fashioned language they use* (How the devil/blazes? etc.), it feels disrespectful to mock them in any way, as we in our turn will also be found outdated in thought and speech by future generations. Many of the diarists write about things that would seem racist or sexist today, a reminder to us of what society deems acceptable or not can change so rapidly. Some expressions appear to have picked up their negative connotations during war time. The diarists frequently refer to the Japanese as the ‘Japs’, yet I remember admonishing my Scottish grandmother for this pejorative term when we discussed my upcoming teaching position in Tokyo in 1991. As can be seen from reading the diary entries, war and other major crises do not only create new expressions or bring certain ones into prominence (the current term ‘ramp up’ springs to mind), but also change the meaning of words.

*I was interested to note that one diarist describes the term ‘slacks’ being a more polite form for trousers – a word my father used frequently, but rarely heard now (conjuring up, to my mind, visions of sleazy 70s loungewear).

From reading the diaries it becomes clear that the greatest worry that hung over the heads of all the protagonists was the uncertainty, along with the restrictions to their liberty. As one diarist mentions: Though  these events determine our future we have no control over them. We live from day to day in a kind of resigned doubtfulness unable to make plans for more than a month ahead. These are of course things that also make our current situation so troubling. It is now easier to put ourselves into the heads of our wartime ancestors and understand better their fears and worries and frustrations, alongside the feeling that they had no choice but to trust in a government which they did not always believe was following the best course of action. There was concern that if they spoke out against the government they were being disloyal and undermining the war effort (as well as receiving a fine), yet most also realised that in a functioning democracy it was incumbent on the country’s citizens to always remain questioning and vigilant.

For my English grandparents, separated from each other through the evacuation as well as the reserved occupation of my grandfather (a cavalry veteran of WW1 – see Portrait of my Grandfather as a Soldier – and a Lambeth tram conductor*), it was undoubtedly a stressful time. And to think that it lasted for almost six years – with the effects being felt into the next decade, not to mention the lifelong implications of mental and physical wartime deprivations. All his life, my father wondered how things would have turned out for him had the war not prevented him from taking up the scholarship to Alleyne’s School in Dulwich. The smart new uniform which had been bought for my 11-year old father was never to be worn and he spent the rest of his school years in East Coker (see East Coker), attending the local school in Yeovil. In between these two events, there had been a brief stay in Leatherhead in Surrey, living with other evacuees with the acting president  of the Mormon Church in the UK, the Russian-Greek emigré Andre Konstantin Anastasiou and his family. This was where my father – according to my mother  – was given President Kennedy’s cast-off bicycle to use. (Joseph Kennedy had lived nearby in his role as the American Ambassador from 1938-40).

*One diarist writes in October 1939: I asked a bus conductor, ‘What will you chaps do in an air raid?’ ‘We’ve been told to leave the bus and make for the nearest shelter. We should have lists of the shelters but we haven’t got them yet.’

Kennedy Family, London 1938

Kennedy Family, London 1938

While all this sounds fascinating and worthy of the kind of dinner party anecdote my father would have never wanted to indulge in (hating dinner parties, in any case), I don’t think he was particularly happy there. Consequently it must have been a relief when it was finally decided that he and his younger brother should follow his mother to East Coker to join his older sister, who’d been evacuated there with the Camberwell School for Girls on the 1st of September at the outbreak of war. She was already half-way through her grammar school education at the time and billeted with a local family, and thus it would have made sense not to disrupt her education.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons my father never got on as well with his sister as he did with his younger brother. There might have been some resentment that she was able to complete her scholarship education, while his was never even allowed to begin. On a recent visit to my aunt (see Return to East Coker) it was brought home to me how very much she resembled my father – and her own father – she was, so it was inevitable there would be personality clashes between two bright, strong-willed siblings whose lives had been overturned by the outbreak of war. Sometimes I wonder how my motherly grandmother survived those headstrong family members, but at least she had her baby boy, my uncle, who seemed to be the one who was ‘easiest’ to parent. As my aunt tellingly remarked: although they all missed their father (who visited them from London every six weeks), day-to-day life was often easier without him!

Alleyn's School in 1922

What Might Have Been, Alleyn’s School (1922)

Recently I have been interested to read about how the current situation has changed the dynamics of our relationships with others. While most people obviously miss close contact with friends and family members, some relish the chance to be free of social and familial obligations. For many (health issues notwithstanding) there seems to be an uneasy mix of both these feelings, just as there might have been during wartime. In my own family, it would appear that after the war my grandfather never continued the relationships with his Skelton siblings (to the relief of my grandmother), which was one of the reasons I knew so little about my London family initially. Although my father had many cousins on his father’s side, it was only my aunt who was able to fondly remember them all from having been a regular visitor at their home in Thornton Heath before the war.

I very much wish that someone in my own family had recorded their thoughts and feelings (wartime or not) as carefully as the diarists in Simon Garfield’s trilogy. One of my favourite characters was Maggie Joy Blunt – a pseudonym for the writer Jean Lucey Pratt and the only one to appear in all three books. It emerged that I wasn’t the only one who particularly looked forward to reading her descriptions, but that many readers also wanted to find out more about her. Therefore I was delighted when a few years later Garfield finally gained permission from her niece to edit and publish Pratt’s own extensive private diaries (which spanned over sixty years), resulting in the book A Notable Woman, published by Canongate in 2015.

A Notable Woman

The psychologist, Julia Shaw, writing recently in the Guardian newspaper emphasises in her article entitled Lockdown is distorting our memories but there are ways to gain control (link to full article here) that it is imperative to keep a diary if you really want to remember your experiences accurately. She points out that: The one thing that almost every memory scientist repeats ad nauseum is this: if there are moments in your life that you want to preserve for posterity, write them down. Now. Assume that no matter how emotional, or interesting, or historic your experiences during the coronavirus lockdown are, you will forget them. Recording these memories outside your brain is the only way to truly keep them safe.

2020 Diary

As the Mass-Observation Project is currently asking for volunteers to write up their experiences of living through the 2020 pandemic in order to help the social historians of the future (see link here for details), could this be the year for some of us to play a part in living history? Even if we only keep a diary for ourselves in these strange and unsettling times, we never know who might find it useful eighty years hence.

The Incidental Genealogist, May 2020