You mean people still do this?

Ooh look, a train station! The Gare du Nord in Paris, to be precise. Not very long ago, either. So, contrary to the current television news coverage, it is still possible to get about without flying.

Listening to BBC Breakfast this morning, it was borne in upon me to what extent the right to take a plane absolutely everywhere really is taken for granted now. Woeful tales of coming from Rome by train, crossing the Channel by boat, and going to Belfast via Scotland (Stranraer) - sheer torture, evidently. Any of these was quite normal even twenty years ago, because flying was so expensive, and they could actually be the most pleasant and meaningful ways of getting there. Yes, I love flying, but my journeys by land and sea were considerable adventures in their own right, and a real indication that I'd travelled hundreds of miles - I don't suppose I'll ever forget the moonlit journey to Stranraer to catch the ferry to Belfast, or getting on board a ferry from a motorboat off the coast of Norway, or seeing the hustle and bustle of Basle station in the early hours of the morning. Clearly sometimes a flight is justified, and I sympathise enormously with those travellers who are now stranded, but maybe we need to go back to the significance of the journey as part of a holiday, rather than just rushing to get there?

Tales from the shredder

Last week I spent an extremely therapeutic hour throwing out old documents, and took one sentence at random from each:

After five years a distributed mini and micro computer network would have been set up with 72 terminals. The world has changed. I do not want to say more on this for now. Work and responsibility to be divided equally between workers and management coperating together in close interdependence. What steps can you take to maximise positive and minimise negative impact of personality type mix? In 55 minutes from now there will be a fresh egg affixed by string from the ceiling. Whatever you are looking for, our online search facility provides a quick and easy source of inspiration. Think of the Angel of the North. See Efficiency and Effectiveness.

I'm not sure whether this says a lot or nothing at all!

The last of the snow?

I hope so. I hate to sound like the grown-ups in my childhood, but it was an absolute nuisance in the end. Too much ice and not enough snow, for a start. “I ’ave ad eeenough” as one of my V&A colleagues used to declare. Snow in London always gets dirty and slushy very quickly, anyway, even if when it first falls it can look quite picturesque - as here on the palms in Bethnal Green Gardens last Tuesday morning, with the red brick of the Museum in the background for contrast. It did one very useful thing, too, which was to light up the park after sunset – normally the centre is ‘orribly dark then, but people were walking across quite happily. You still run the risk of being shut in for the night, so I wouldn’t, but at least you’d probably be visible to the parks staff who lock up.

Snow out in the ‘West London Alps’ is a bit different – plodding up and down the side road where we live was really quite tiring all week, even when suitably shod, and there were odd patches lingering in the shade until yesterday.

Oranges and Lemons

Recently I had to do a BBC Radio London Interview with Max Hutchinson about the origins of the traditional rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'. This was an outside recording in Martin Lane, in the City of London: I was the first to arrive, and had just succeeded in walking straight past the rendezvous point - what little was left of the church of St Martin Orgar - when my attention was grabbed by this knitted set of oranges and lemons adorning the railings. Only in this country, surely!

'Oranges and Lemons' was always one of my favourites as a child, and not only for "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head" (though that did play a large part). There are several versions of the words, but they all chime - and we concluded that the rhyme had been made up largely for the pure pleasure of the sounds, although it may possibly have had some part of its origin in inter-parish rivalry, perhaps over monetary matters.

Strange Dreams

No idea why, but there seems to be a deal of strange dreaming going on here at the moment. My waking dream this morning, for example, involved a team-building exercise for work – not the stuff of strange dreams? You don’t know our training section, but anyway…this one looked like a something out of Hieronymus Bosch crossed with Breughel. A lot of brightly coloured figures were being active in a large grassy landscape – over in the distance, for example, I could see a team of people, including a retired colleague, moving a telegraph pole about while blindfolded by hoods over their heads. “Oh dear” I thought “Halina wanted a peaceful retirement”.

There was a giant flower, a dianthus, I think, which was a meeting point, and I went over there to meet the rest of my team (I think I ended up in the wrong one, but that’s dreams for you). We were given some lines out of context from essays which had been submitted previously and had to do something with them.
Examples included “…1135 was bigger than the previous one…” and (my favourite)
“That way it’s easier for the mice to meet the chickens – and vice versa”. I think I’d better remember that one – it’s slightly zen and the sort of strange thing that occasionally comes in useful.

Family History – the Oxfordshire Connection

I have to admit to very much enjoying the Oxfordshire section of my family, about whom I knew very little until recently. Not to take away anything from the long-loved Suffolk and Scottish folk, but it’s nice to have a bit of variety, after all, and this lot certainly provide it.

I’m particularly diverted by my great great great grandmother Elizabeth (née Burman) and her second husband. She was born in 1802, married William Meades and had four children, and was widowed in her early thirties. She then married John Harwood, a stone mason from Charlbury thirteen years her junior, so only about ten years older than her eldest son (William the mason, as I always think of him). She then had three more sons: George who was also a mason; Henry, who was a photographer; and Alfred, who among other things ran an eating house in Shoreditch.

John Harwood may even have been a Freemason as well as a mason, which would have helped, but he does seem to have had the three things I always feel you need to get on in life: ability, persistence and luck. He kept a shop in Chipping Norton as well, and the family, including his younger step-daughter Sarah, evidently helped to run it. It was probably something fairly general to begin with, but by 1871 it was a toy shop (!) and he then went into dealing in furniture. That business lasted for some years, and was evidently so profitable that he and Elizabeth eventually retired to Worcester and lived on their own income. She died there at 89, and at some point he moved back to Chipping Norton, married a sprightly young thing in her late sixties called Hannah, and died aged 81 in 1903.

Obviously the paper records aren’t going to tell you what the man was really like, or how happy he and Elizabeth were. It wasn’t all roses, as their youngest son and some of their grandchildren predeceased them, for example, but some of the later Meades family history is really rather grim, and it makes a pleasant change to read about two people who were apparently prosperous and healthy, and lived to a ripe old age.

Family History and the Census

When I’m beavering away at reading Census returns as part of my researches into family history, I often find myself wondering about the event as it actually happened, as well as occasionally puzzling over what was recorded. Were my relatives co-operative or (as I suspect in at least some cases) a bit bolshie about officialdom poking its nose in?

It can’t always have been easy for the enumerators or the enumerated. There were surely many conversations conducted through closed doors, or on the doorstep in inhospitable weather, and/ or with rising irritation on both sides. Even something as simple as having a head cold, or having some teeth missing may have had a bearing on what was heard and recorded. Either or both parties may have been tired, hard of hearing, had an accent the other found difficult to understand, or simply misunderstood the question asked or the answer given. William Meades the stone mason always gives his place of birth as Oxford/ City of Oxford until 1901 when it suddenly becomes Chipping Norton (which is probably correct). Admittedly not that far away, but a sufficiently different response to be surprising. I’m sure that sometimes the question about birthplace was asked or understood to be not ‘where were you born?’ but ‘where are you from?’ – potentially rather different, especially if you’d moved area.

If you add to the complications the larger households ( often including step relatives, in-laws, extended family, and lodgers/ visitors) and the fact that the 19th century respondents were not at all accustomed, as we are, to having to give name, place and date of birth on a regular basis, then it’s no wonder that mistakes were made. William Meades had at least twelve children by two wives (the first of whom died at 32) and lived in at least three places, Oxford, West Ham and Lowestoft, so I’m not entirely surprised that the odd inconsistency creeps in. In an age when personal possession of certificates was unusual you would also be dependent on other people to tell you your correct birth information – and if one or both parents were dead, that simply might not be possible. As I doubt many people bothered to keep a record of things like children’s date and place of birth (or even full names), that’s even more room for variation. I don’t, incidentally, agree that most ordinary people were absolutely illiterate before about 1870, as is often confidently stated. Signing a mark rather than a name when a birth, marriage or death is registered is sometimes cited, but all this demonstrates is that the vicars and registrars at least sometimes made a tactful assumption – and you probably wouldn’t question their authority. Many people knew enough to write their names and read a newspaper, at least, though obviously the standard varied enormously.

All this is without the later mistakes made in transcription, of course – understandable in some cases, though not all. Even if you write Jemima Dunnett as something that looks like ‘Gerunia’ (and it does), it’s never going to be likely that her daughter will be called Manuel (Hannah, actually). But some of it is uncommonly hard to decipher: I always remember an editor’s comment, admittedly about earlier church registers reprinted by the Harleian Society: “the chirography and orthography at this period are both infamous” and feel it’s sometimes equally applicable!