'..the psychology, Yorkshire!'

HOBSON:  It isn’t easy sitting behind that desk Mrs Swinburne.
JILL:  Well you should try sitting behind mine, you’ve got a computer, I haven’t even got a power point.
HOBSON:  I have an impeccable career record and academic record, I have confidential information of all kinds at my fingertips, I have men and women at my command who will obey orders without question, I have legal status and the backing of the judiciary and yet.
JILL:  You remain unfulfilled?
HOBSON:  One thing still defeats me Mrs Swinburne.
JILL:  I hope you feel able to confess it Inspector.
HOBSON: The dark, impenetrable, tantalising, mystery; the psychology, Yorkshire!
Alan Plater, The Beiderbecke Connection (Yorkshire TV 1988)

The recent death of my father has prompted me to reflect on his Yorkshire-ness. Through the culture he had absorbed, I came to learn that Yorkshire had always been England’s largest and most important county, and therefore when viewing the world from within it; beyond the Pennies became another country, and what happened over the Humber was really only the proper business of the Diocese of Lincoln!

Father (Michael) and his elder brother (Peter) were born and brought up in and around York, itself at the heart of the Vale of York, they like Alf Wright’s (James Herriot’s) son Jim, knew the view from Sutton Bank from a young age. Standing on the edge of the north Yorkshire moors looking westward were ‘the Dales’ of popular fiction whilst behind you were the hill farms that made up the daily rounds of the vet, born in Sunderland but brought up and educated in Glasgow. Similarly Alan Plater was not born in Yorkshire either. The central theme of the Beiderbecke trilogy is how outsiders somehow cope with living in Yorkshire. Yet in the end Inspector Hobson suffers the greatest indignities because he wants to understand rather than grudgingly accept. (The true Yorkshireman asks no more than that - he’d be seriously worried if you were not found to be defending your own part of the country, at least on important occasions!)

I grew up between the age of eighteen months and eleven years three months close to Newcastle, then my father thoughtlessly took me away a second time, to somewhere where no one understood what I was saying - Devon. But, ‘we adapt’. Throughout childhood l was his ‘general dogsbody’ and unpaid ‘deputy assistant under-manger’ whenever it came to DIY, gardening and navigating in the car. With all this came a certain amount of park-bench philosophy; ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’, ‘more haste less speed’, ‘a poor craftsman always blames his tools’.

In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, the greatest frustration was his decision-making process. One learnt to ask a question a good two weeks before one needed a reply. One work colleague often reflected that she was always finding father simply staring out of the window, concerned this might be a sign of distress she would enquire how he was and get the reply; ‘I’m thinking’. What he meant was he was ‘thinking through’; everything had to be thought through. Impulses and spontaneous reactions were always suspect, but if you waited long enough the ‘right’ answer would emerge. But it was an active process of contemplation, something more than setting aside to consider in a calmer mood (he always endeavoured to be in a calm mood). And it is at this point that we arrive at a particular kind of Yorkshire-ness, and perhaps at a particular history.

‘How do you feel about tin churches?’ Lyn Turtle, the body language specialist asks at one point in Andrew Davies’ A Very Peculiar Practice (BBC TV 1986), and the heart sinks. Father’s family were Chapel to varying degrees (non-conformist Protestants). He confessed to me once that despite the landscape of his childhood being dominated by York Minster he never got inside it until he was in his early twenties!

Separating the emotions and cognitions of the man from the upbringing or cultural environment is particularly difficult in close family relationships, however one breakthrough in understanding came to me when Alan Bennett (truly a lad from the outer reaches of Leeds) wrote and presented the documentary Dinner at Noon, filmed almost exclusively in the Reception area and front Lounge of a Harrogate hotel.

‘The real solvent of class distinction is a proper measure of self-esteem. A kind of unselfconsciousness. Some people are at ease with themselves so the world is at ease with them. My parents thought this kind of ease was produced by education: “Yer Dad and me can’t mix, we’ve not been educated”. They didn’t see that, what disqualified them was temperament. Just as, though educated up to the hilt, it disqualifies me. What keeps us in our place - is embarrassment.’ Alan Bennett (BBC TV 1988) Dinner at Noon.

I may be reflecting on a quite specific time in Yorkshire history too, which just happened to have a broader cultural appeal because of its oddity and therefore potential humour! A time in fact between the reign of Queen Victoria and the final disenfranchisement of the Yorkshire male by another Victoria, that is the Lancashire lass Victoria Wood!

But much of that ‘have-a-go at Yorkshire’ humour centred round buttoned-up emotion and suppressed sexuality. Now that could only succeed as humour if it was restricted to a minority. I well remember the last time I got a belly laugh out of my father. It was when I repeated an old joke from season two of Last Of The Summer Wine (BBC TV 1975?) written by Roy Clarke – one much reworked and watered down later over the years of what was to become the world’s longest running ‘sitcom’. The show began as a tale of men made redundant in late middle age trying to recapture childhood play, and in the process reconstruct the reality of their lives. They made relative, the taken for granted reality of the other members of their community. They made themselves a disruptive influence. Anyway, without context, the joke reads thus;

(Nora seen showing Compo off the premises with aid of broom.)
BLAMIRE:  Why does that man keep chasing that woman?
CLEGG:  Probably because it’s more fun than actually catching her!

In time, as the reader may know, Nora’s husband dies, but Compo never gives up in his pursuit of her, which we are always led to believe began when they all came of age around the time of WWII. When Compo dies, Nora is devastated. Compo was always tramp-like and unwashed and rejected by Nora because of it. She was a woman who naturally enough took a scrubbing brush to her front door step once a week. But Compo, without a thought to what others thought, was as devoted in his admiration of her as was humanly possible, he had paid her the greatest complement he could. That is the context.

But the line is actually spoken by Cleggy, the only one of them who was ever married for any length of time, and is now a widower. She was strict Chapel and he had realized there was no escaping from her from the moment their eyes first met at a chapel tea. Compo naturally was the only one uninhibited enough to approach the subject of sex with Cleggy. He in turn confesses that they had indeed had their moments but that the chief difficulty had been the necessity to negotiate so many layers of flannelette even on a summer’s evening. He now found it a great relief not to be married.

Roy Clarke was also the author of Open All Hours (BBC TV) about a corner shop, somewhere in the suburban streets of somewhere like Doncaster. Again the humour is of a time and a place which chimed with my father. My favourite line is uttered by Arkwright the owner, when describing a customer; ‘That man has the silent tread of a Yorkshire county cricket supporter’. Which kind of places it in the early 80’s when it was possible a fan might need to hang his head, and skulk home, hopefully unobserved. Arkwright despite his cynicism and often appalling treatment of others is a passionate man, first - it has to be said – for money, and second for the largely imagined delights of marriage to the community nurse living across the street.

Now then, my father enjoyed classical music, but like everything else, ‘passionate for’ or ‘passionate about’ were never phrases that sprung to mind when you heard him talk of the people who interested him. He knew perfectly well that down the road from Doncaster was Thorn the birthplace and childhood home of singer Lesley Garrett, famous for finding her voice whilst sat on the outside privy as a child. He considered it a fault that her passion appeared at times to overwhelm her technique, whilst I was feeling, that’s the point – passion must lead.

I believe myself to have been, partly at least, saved by the ‘television age’ bringing me a broader education than my prescribed environment contained, and later by the Web offering an explosion of alternatives.

'Do it on the radio'

FRANK  (looking up) What?’

RITA  I’ve done it.

FRANK  You’ve done it?

She hands him the essay. (Reading aloud) ‘In attempting to resolve the staging difficulties in a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt I would present it on the radio because as Ibsen himself says, he wrote the play as a play for voices, never intending it to go on in a theatre. If they had the radio in his day that’s where he would have done it.’

Willy Russell Educating Rita 1985 (First performed 10.6.1980)

BBC (1946?) and Heart South West 2014

‘I had two years of psychiatry. And I learnt a great deal from old man Freud. One of them was - trust your unconscious. It has a logic all it’s own. The second thing was, all motives are quite simple, there’s one motive to do anything, intellect is the great rationaliser, the great excuser. It gave me the courage to devise a form of doing the talks which was to sit down and write them - whatever came to mind.

They were supposed to be thirteen minutes, thirty seconds; sometimes they were eighteen minutes, seventeen, fifteen - then slash them, then censor the more outrageous thoughts, in the interests of domestic tranquillity. (Laughter) And so on. Don’t censor yourself as you go, don’t pretend, don’t try to be somebody else, and this great line of Freud’s - the intellect is the great rationaliser of simple motives, all motives are child like, anger, greed, the wish to be liked and so on.  …a broadcaster, especially radio, must be somebody talking to two friends, no more, in a room.’

Transcribed extract from Writing for Talking Alistair Cooke speaking at the Royal Television Society 3.12.1997

The last roll of film

Once upon a time I was going to be a photographer, but that was forty years ago.

Below are a few pictures from my last roll of 35mm film taken a couple of years ago. The Olympus OM1 with which they were taken sits in the cupboard alongside the rest of our family camera collection dating back more than a hundred years. There is also a digital camera too, now only used when a smartphone camera won’t do!

In 1977 I gained an ‘A’ level in Photography, one of the first few hundred students in the country to do so. The exam had a history paper, as well as a technical one and of course there were the practical assessments. Back then it was a popular cliché to call photography ‘the art form of the 20^th century’. The technology has changed since then, but have the attitudes, motives and actions of photographers - the decision making process that leads to the release of the shutter and the fixing of a moment?

Equally the product, do we still believe the still image, does the illusion which everyone recognises, still appeal as curiously realistic? The apparent realism of the medium seems to have always been at the heart of arguments over its value. Do commercial users still depend on the perceived representation of reality, whilst artistic users merely take reality as a point of departure?

The subject, viewpoint, content, colour, tone and mood are all at the total discretion of the photographer. The greater the belief in the realism of photography, the greater its power to deceive. Whatever the application, the nature of the medium remains the same.

Perception, interpretation and manipulation is a technical process which must be learnt but which may, given enough time and practice, come to feel seamless and instinctive, leading to the release of the shutter at Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ or the decision to fix a print. Only once the craft skills are achieved, do questions about motivation and freedom of expression come to the fore. The loss of such a craft perspective led Lord Snowdon to comment; ‘To the untrained eye it is muddling to distinguish between what is acclaimed at art schools and rejected at Kodak.’

Equally it is possible to believe absolutely in one’s own version of reality, leading Andre Kertesz to assert; ‘I don’t create anything. It is life that creates what I am photographing.’ I think I’d rather stick with Ansel Adams; ‘There is no such thing as reality in graphic expression. ..What is important is how the photographer saw the subject and how he visualised the final print.’

Kodak alas is no more, it was their introduction of the ‘Box Brownie’ in the 1880’s which put a camera in the hands of anybody. Whilst the miniaturisation of high quality cameras in the 1920’s and 1930’s allowed for the apparent realism of the social document. Now the great picture libraries are in the hands of corporations who mine them for prints by the star names which can then be sold for thousands of pounds as art - once they appeared in mass circulation magazines seen by almost everybody.

Although today the technology of stills photography is handed out free to almost everyone, the ability to add value still depends on individual skill. Mobile devices give us the ways and means, but not the eye to see. If done well, it can still have the power to change what everyone sees!

(To see the result of my efforts with a smartphone camera visit my Facebook Albums.)

So some highlights from the last roll of film…

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Are you one of those people who routinely puts a book in your bag before leaving home? Okay, so we are in the minority, a few more may leave one in the car, or pack one only when they know they will be away from home for more than a night or so. When I say book I recognise that today this may include electronic forms, but this post is about how a single book may become a companion and be read over and over again. And whilst I am not a religious person, and pass no judgement on other’s holy texts, the kinds of book I refer to here certainly do aid contemplation, offer much to meditate upon and are a source of wisdom and spiritual guidance.

‘.. ‘We’re not Christians,’ they say. ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.’ ‘Christian’, in their way of speaking, means ‘human being’…’ (Levi 1982:11)   

Those of us non-electronic readers, who are lucky enough to be able to scan our bookshelves in the last moments before leaving home and select what we will read today, face a bigger dilemma when we know we will be away for any length of time. You may feel you only have the space for one book, or are only prepared to tolerate the weight of one, but some of us go a stage further and ask; what one book will satisfy all our needs on this journey, or indeed any journey which may be of indeterminate length? Sometimes we end up giving the status of companion to a single volume for years at a time.

I first became aware of this as a child when I read John Buchan’s Richard Hannay spy stories, where one of the central characters uses John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a guide and companion. Only reading Buchan later in life did I realise how much Bunyan had influenced all his stories, leading later still to an appreciation of how Bunyan’s personal story had come to have such a powerful impact, over more than four centuries, on thousands of people pursuing less than conventional religious lives.

It was around the beginning of the 1980’s, when I was in my early twenties, that I found myself placing a copy of Kipling’s Kim in my rucksack whenever I went on a trip. I had begun to realise, as with Buchan, that what others had told you was childhood reading did in fact contained more, much more, if you were willing to learn a little about the historical context in which they had been written.

Kipling was only displaced when a university lecturer pressed his copy of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli into my hands at the start of the Easter vacation in 1984. (I should say that even at that time he was the last remaining philosopher at the university!) What prompted him was one of those conversations that would gather you an audience in the area of the humanities building, between the office and the coffee machine, where undergraduates congregated between lectures. I’d been trying to explain that I was about to return to the community in south west France where I had spent four months or so the previous year. I have described elsewhere this small outpost of the counterculture of the early 1970’s, an organic farm and vineyard in the Bordeaux region. But it was my assertion that in many ways this modern community embodied virtuous aspects of traditional European peasant life that led to the lecturer offering me the book as a corrective influence on what he suspected was my over stated, if not romantic view. But of course what he could not have anticipated was that I would still be reading it thirty years later - for with my experience of WWOOFing, I never came to think of Christ Stopped at Eboli as a negative interpretation of the peasant experience at all!

‘Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return…’ (Levi 1982:11)

After giving back the loaned copy, I bought one of my own. But in time it fell apart, hence the photo above. One of those rare experiences where the cover illustration seems to match the images evoked when reading the text. Still today a copy goes in my rucksack when I’m out walking, or can be found in my satchel when I’m sitting in a café, as of now, trying to devise an ecotherapy that takes better account of the historical reality of agricultural labour and the limitations of our manmade landscape.

So what’s the book about? Carlo Levi was a young doctor and vocal left-wing opponent of Mussolini in Italy in the 1930’s, he was ‘banished’ for a year to one of the most remote and ‘backward’ parts of the country - a mountain village beyond Eboli.

Levi, C (1982) Christ Stopped at Eboli Penguin: London

Imitable Jeeves (updated 2020)

(What follows are a series of short parodies of P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories which I wrote as family emails some years ago. My father was of the generation which automatically read Wodehouse as ‘light reading’. I’m not aware that my sister or niece ever read him, but they did both enjoy the Clive Exton TV adaptations broadcast between 1990 and 1993 starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. I’m the one who is the real addict. Hearing a BBC radio adaptation in the early 1970’s prompted me to roam the half a dozen or so Jeeves paperbacks on my father’s bookshelves. That particular Penguin edition had on the back cover a quote from Evelyn Waugh about how the stories released the reader from the real world into something much more idyllic, he also predicted that the effect would be even greater in the future as our world grew grimmer! My experience has been a little different, as I grow older I find myself interpreting the world more and more in Wodehousian terms; as I people-watch, an internal dialogue between Bertie and Jeeves often erupts, in which the absurdity of others behaviour must be made a source of amusement in order maintain one’s sanity. The first dialogue, from 21.11.09, looks forward to my sister returning from a work trip to Africa.)

(photo by Nick Hewling)

I say Jeeves when is my sister due back from her latest inspection of the Dark Continent?

I couldn't say sir.

Some of her photos make it look quite inviting. Perhaps I should undertake an expedition?

I couldn't advise it, for a gentleman of your description sir.

What do you mean you couldn't advise it!

It has well been said sir, that Africa is only for those with a commanding personality and considerable strength of character.

Precisely, condemned out your own mouth! I take it Cook's do a tour.

I fear it would take you away from England for many months.

Well, I'm sure my friends can manage without me for a while - get packing Jeeves.

Sir! It will require several weeks just to purchase the necessary tropical outfits and camping equipment.

Camping! No, no, no. We shall stay in the best hotels.

I'm afraid sir, they all have a tendency to be several thousand miles apart.

All right, all right. I give in. Bring out the Michael Palin DVDs and fetch me a whiskey and soda.

(This one, penned on the 2.12.09, looks forward to Christmas.)

Well Jeeves, the festive season is upon us.

Indeed, sir.

Therefore the burning question of the hour is; which one of this array of invitations above the hearth should we accept?

Sir! Forgive me for pointing it out, but this service flat has the latest central heating. There is no hearth.

Jeeves! I was speaking figuratively, as well you know.

I see, sir.

Don't you yearn for an open fire, for crumpets toasted over a yuletide log?

I hesitate to mention it sir, but if we are to descend on any one of the residences to which you have been invited there will be nothing but open fires in the middle of winter!

Quite.

Chilly sheets and ice on the insides of windows during the morning hours.

Sounds quite romantic.

Not a situation inclined to induce good feeling in the servant’s hall, sir. Parlour maids are generally required to rise an hour before other staff in winter in order to have fires lit in all bedrooms before 6,00am.

Ah, now! Was it not you who pointed out only the other day whilst running my bath, that the doorman Jarvis is required to descend five times a day to the basement in order to stoke the boiler so that we can enjoy this central heating! Umm, well?

Sir, I..

I say, you're not still mooning over that scheme of yours to winter in Provence are you?

Antibes has many attractions for a young man of your description sir, and if the timing is right, can be accessed in little over 24 hours with only two changes of train...

Enough, Jeeves! Never mind showing-off your knowledge of Bradshaw and foreign railway timetables, we shall be spending Christmas with the least objectionable of my relatives - it's just a question of working out which they are?

Very good, sir.

If we ignore them all, we'll get it in the neck from all of them. If we go to one, then at least we have a passable excuse for not going to the others. I shall set my mind to the problem.

At what time would you like to be awoken sir?

No, no, I shall be totally focused on the question in hand. Jeeves, who are the least objectionable of my relatives?

I really couldn't say sir. Perhaps you should attempt to ascertain which other guests are likely to be present before coming to a conclusion. Equally, consideration might be given to the quality of food and availability of alcoholic beverages, and whether, in the absence of the aforementioned, there are good local hostelries to repair to.

Jeeves your cynicism astounds me - aren't you at all moved by the thought of Christmas?

I try to resist succumbing to a sentimental urge, sir. One should always be mindful that it was the popular Victorian moralist Charles Dickens sentimental urge to improve the lot of the working classes which led him to pen the ghost story known as A Christmas Carol, and which subsequently led to many of the current absurdities of modern winter feasting.

Now, don't start getting pompous about The Carol, Jeeves! I've known it backwards since I was a child. I've half a mind to read it aloud to my young niece.

I couldn't advise it sir, the young lady is approaching seventeen and will almost certainly have a portable musical device secreted about her person for the express purpose of fading-out any intrusive adult.

Well then, I shall read it to my father!

He no doubt will use the opposite strategy to achieve precisely the same outcome, sir.

I don't follow Jeeves?

Hearing aids can be turned down as well as up, sir!

Well, what about my sister and her friends?

It has well been said that a public performer needs to know how to cope with hecklers...

Enough! The boat train Jeeves, Victoria isn't it, 5 minutes past midnight, platform 3?

Indeed, sir.

(..and on Christmas Day I sent the following.)

Good morning sir. Your breakfast tray!

What time is it Jeeves?

Ten past nine, sir.

Ten past nine! Is the building on fire?

No, sir. I thought you might care to take breakfast now - in light of events.

Events? The only event, if I remember rightly is that I left the casino at 2,00am. Now is no time for bringing in breakfast, especially on Christmas Day.

It was events at the casino to which I was referring sir. If I might venture the opinion, a hasty return to England might be advisable.

But Jeeves, I won! Handsomely as it happens. I'm on a winning streak.

Precisely, sir.

What's the matter, have you suddenly developed a moral objection to your employer having a gamble.

No, sir. It is just that a winning streak never lasts.

Ah, but I have my system Jeeves.

And so do the casinos, sir. They take great exception to losing large sums of money and will make strenuous efforts to take it back again - with interest.

What, you don't mean strong-arm tactics surely?

Not at all sir, they simply know that if they can keep you at the tables long enough, then their profits will be restored. They have already approached the manager of the hotel with a view to paying your bill and having you upgraded to a more superior suite.

I don't get it Jeeves, it will cost them a packet!

No sir, if they can keep you here for another week they will undoubtedly come out ahead.

Well, of all the bally nerve, spying on their customers - think my credit's not good enough do they?

On the contrary sir, the purpose of checking someone's credit is to ascertain which of their patrons can afford to lose the most, and then encourage them to do so.

And if I go on winning?

Then you will simply be barred, sir.

What!

It is always the successful who are banned from casinos, sir - never the losers.

Well what about your professional gambler then?

Professional gamblers are not particularly wealthy sir. They simply make a good living by travelling from one gambling resort to another, making modest gains at each casino and being careful not to draw attention to themselves.

Good lord, Jeeves! Do you know everything?

I really don't know.

I say, that chef has failed to do my boiled eggs, again! I can't be doing with scrambled.

We are in France sir. English habits are not always respected.

Indeed not, where is the best place to spend New Year?

I am told the Highlands of Scotland...

(It was too tempting not to continue – from 1.1.10.)

I blame you for this Jeeves!

Perhaps we are not keeping our eye on the ball with sufficient assiduity sir.

In case you hadn't noticed the Norwegian's are blowing a force 10 gale at us.

It was your expressed wish to visit the 'home of golf' sir.

Only after you put the idea of Hogmanay in my mind. As it is we only just got here in time!

We did make the journey from Provence to London in record time, sir.

Only to find the London and North Eastern on a go-slow for the entire festive season. And as for that last train, it was positively Victorian.

Indeed sir, the journey has changed little since the time of the late Queen, we can count our blessings we only had to travel the one stop from Leuchars to St. Andrews. The other passengers will have had to continue along the coast via Boarhills, Pitmilly West, Crail and Anstruther before re-joining the main line north of Kirkcaldy...

Enough Jeeves, you're putting me off my stroke.

I do apologise sir.

Damn! Did you see where that one went?

The mist does seem to be closing in. Perhaps one should heed the lesson of Robert Tyre Jones Jr, sir. When as a very young man he came to the Old Course for the first time he played badly, had a temper tantrum and left the championship after eleven holes of the third round, citing intense dislike of the course. Nonetheless he returned and won The Open in 1927 choosing to leave the cup here at the Royal and Ancient, and so won the hearts of the Scottish people.

So, you think I need to take lessons from Bobby Jones on how to be a gentleman, Jeeves?

Oh, no sir, I merely...

Don't think I haven't noticed the way you talk of a 'gentleman of my description', not just a 'gentlemen', always the qualifier huh?

Be in no doubt sir, there is no one else I'd rather be employed by - you offer a life of rare interest and variety. I cannot think of another gentleman who would provide such a challenge to my capabilities.

Very well Jeeves. But you do know that some people think you have me under your thumb.

Heaven forbid sir! May I suggest a five iron next - just to get us back onto the fairway?

(And finally on 20.9.10.)

Well Jeeves, what do you think? Romantic what! Dawn rising, or is it sunset, over the water hole?

Sir! May I enquire as to the purpose to which you intend putting such an illustration?

It's a birthday card for my sister - what with her being an old Africa hand.

You wish your sister to know you associate her with a herd of elephants?

Oh, not psychology again Jeeves.

Indeed sir, visual images are a lot more powerful than words.

Every picture tells a thousand stories and all that?

Something of the kind!

But just think of all the positive associations - they live a terribly long time, their skin is as tough as old boot straps, they can be aggressive when they need to be, pore torrents of foul water on the unsuspecting...

Precisely sir.

And they never forget, and always return... Jeeves I think I'm starting to hallucinate, that picture is transforming before my eyes into a regiment of Aunts - with Aunt Agatha at the head of them! Suddenly I feel the chill at sunset on the savannah.  

Shall I prepare our morning bath sir? It will have a soothing affect and whilst you wait may I recommend a whisky and soda - purely for medicinal purposes.

(In 2018 I found myself wondering if such a relationship as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster could exist in the 21st century? I concluded that it couldn't. So I came up with Sparkwell and I - tales of a personal therapist. See sidebar link.) 

My Artist Grandmother - or how family history becomes everyone's history

One day when my sister and I were really quite young and our maternal grandmother was on a visit she had us painting large flowers and leaves at the table in what our parents called the breakfast room. When they were dry we cut them out, and using a long horizontal pencil line as a guide, stuck them up close together along one of the walls. I don’t remember how high on the wall they were but to my child’s eye view it was as if I was laying in the long grass looking at daisies and other assorted wild things.

Later I came to realise that most of the paintings on the walls of my grandmother’s, my aunt’s and my childhood homes were her work. Later still I worked out that there was a store of other paintings the grown-ups thought didn’t merit a place on the wall. They knew her as an amateur painter and found her work decorative. To me there was a magic to be found in many of them, but it soon became obvious that what I saw was not what the others saw.

Slowly over the years I’ve inherited the paintings of hers that I value the most, with the exception of one which still hangs in my father’s house. Part of the value I ascribe to my grandmother’s work has its source in having witnessed at a young age the magic of her creating the illusion in the first place. But I was also around to see her stop painting in the last years of her life. She went, as so many did, from living independently, to being in a nursing home, to spending the final year of her life on a ward for the elderly mentally ill in one of the local psychiatric hospitals. I didn’t visit her after she left her last home, I was about fourteen at the time and my mother said I didn’t have to visit if I didn’t want to. I said I’d rather not and that was accepted by the family. But the truth is somewhat different. I didn’t visit anymore because my Grandmother had told me not to. It had been my habit to go to her flat once a week after school. I witnessed her mental decline, the increasing inability to take on new memories. She knew what was happening to her and she knew she appeared different to me. I won’t repeat the actual conversation, sufficient to say I interpreted her to mean; ‘I don’t want you to see me like this’. She, increasingly unable to make memories, wanted my memories of her to remain intact.

So in time my mother and my aunt became the custodians of one half of my family history. Along with my grandmother’s paintings came a mass of photographs and documents. Later my Great uncle died (brother of my Grandmother’s husband) and the rest of that side of the family’s history became available to view. In this computer age, which has given such an impetus to the idea of a family history, it slowly dawned on me that one of my ancestors above all had given this side of the family a history.

Hebert Crosoer (1859-1934), was a tailor from Ashford in Kent, his hobbies were photography and family history. He traced the family tree of our ancestors (Huguenots) back to the seventeenth century, almost to the point where they stepped of the boat from France. And he took pictures of the gravestones whenever he got the opportunity, lugging his heavy camera and tripod around the country. I once stumbled upon a reference to a particular location, but for me it was only a matter of minutes, courtesy of Google Earth, before I was looking into that churchyard. He left eighteen photo albums, the one of his honeymoon on the Isle of Wight was given to me by my mother many years ago. Just browsing the pictures and the short captions with the benefit of a little knowledge about early photography turned out to be a revelation and seemed to contradict a family myth.  

Herbert married Ellen Mary Giles (1866-1951), she was remembered by my mother and aunt as a strict Victorian grandmother with a moral code to match, who invaded their childhood home during her final years. She was also credited with dressing her younger son (my Great uncle) in female baby clothes (because she really wanted a girl), which was recalled as being in some way related to his lifelong speech impediment (a profound stutter). But the honeymoon album tantalisingly suggests a different character, at least in youth. Many of the photos are really self-portraits, though you wouldn’t know it without knowledge of photography in the 1880’s. They were not a wealthy couple, but the album they put together would have impressed everyone they showed it to. The pictures are of a couple, appropriately in love, relaxed and lounging amongst scenic locations from across the island. They were all made within a week of the marriage ceremony. Together they must have organised the pony and trap, the heavy tripod, the large camera, the box of ‘half plate’ glass negatives, found the locations and the weather, composed themselves in an intimate but respectable way, hidden the shutter release (held in Herbert’s right hand) and of course ‘held the pose’ for up to half a second in order to get the correct exposure. This couple acted as one, it couldn’t have been organised in the time available unless they had. Neither could have dictated to the other. This couple knew each other very well before they were married.

There are other pictures of their first home, of his chair and her chaise lounge. We have all inherited a cultural belief in a repressed Victorian sexuality, I wonder? In practical terms engagement meant being given public permission to be alone together. She, according to popular fiction, retires to the withdrawing room with the ‘vapours’, he goes down on one knee, half an hour later they emerge engaged to be married… Now, when just about any of us can call ourselves a historian, the problems of historiography multiply. Any follower of the television series Who Do You Think You Are will know that there always comes a point when the celebrity family historian starts to empathise with a particular ancestor and states how, not just genetically, but psychologically some part of that distant relative seems to live within them today. This is dangerous ground indeed. As for Herbert, I’ll leave further elaboration of that story until I’m in a position to show you the evidence.

Since the death of my mother and my aunt I’ve had access to more information about my artist Grandmother. One example is knowledge of the context in which the above picture was painted, it’s a favourite and has hung on my wall for more than twenty years. But part of the reason I was allowed to take possession of it the first place was that it wasn’t a particular favourite of any of the rest of the family. The composition is classic and simple, perhaps banal to the more sophisticated. But the location is real. It was painted on a trip to Switzerland which she undertook with her local art group in the early 1960’s. That much I always knew. But it wasn’t until I was sorting through my late aunt’s possessions that I found the following.

(The ‘process of mastication’ by the way refers to the fact that at the age of almost forty my aunt decided to have all her teeth removed in favour of dentures. It became a source of comment in the family because she wasn’t suffering from excessive tooth decay rather it was thought she was over occupied with her ‘crooked’ teeth.)

In the future we will know more of the past. This is true of both recent and more ancient times. One of the awareness’s of age is not just that ‘everything our parents/teachers/other authority figures taught us was wrong’, but that new technology makes available masses of additional evidence or data to argue over! Equally, it appears that for the foreseeable future computers will not have a problem with memory capacity, and so should we choose to, then what we post on the Web can not only be available to anyone, but for an indefinite period in the future. It is a slightly scary thought. I often pause to check in my own mind whether I'm really happy for anyone to know what I’d like to say. But one should also be aware that the same patterns of self-censorship are being applied by the viewer of Web content as they are in any other realm of life. So what is useful to share of a family history, perhaps those aspects which are not common to all families?

It is remarkable how much of the 20th century was recorded on film, and is rapidly becoming available in bite-sized chunks on YouTube and elsewhere. At some point one of our family will almost certainly place on the Web the forty minutes of black and white, nine and a half millimetre cine film, taken by my maternal Grandfather in the 1930’s and 40’s which features, albeit fleetingly, all the characters mentioned above. I’ve yet to find on the Web the aerial movie film shot by Claude Friese-Greene from a biplane in 1919 and restored by the British Film Institute, showing the down Cornish Riviera Express leaving Exeter, travelling down the Exe estuary, onto the sea wall and passed my window. Perhaps I should post it myself.

Written records, slowly becoming digitised and available in an easily searchable form, abound for the last few centuries. It is a highly skewed record of course, produced by and reflecting the concerns and priorities of mostly educated, relatively wealthy and powerful men. What is less well known is that museums, local records offices, government departments, the National Archive and numerous other organisations have massive warehoused collections of which they themselves are only vaguely aware of the contents. For many ancestor hunters however the story does appear to dry-up in the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries unless someone was particularly well connected. If your family were in any way connected to the English court, then you may find much to amuse in the Tudor period. It tends to be the most popular period in English history, not least amongst television producers. The reason for this is simple; it was the first time that detailed records of day to day activities were maintained. Modern-day bureaucracy was born at that time, and many a modern academic career has been built on  the back of long hours spent bent over Henry VIII’s laundry lists! Another possibility is that you have an ancestor who belonged to a minority religious group for whom membership of, and identity with, the group was their particularly priority in life. The story of the founding of a New England, and therefore an America, became the dominant narrative because the Puritans recorded everybody and everything which went aboard the Mayflower. Puritan identity was reinforced by their invention of additional Christian names like Verity, Prudence etc.

But it may be that in the future a personalised family history need not shade away to something remote in time and place, alluded to only in less accessible history books. We can increasingly access thousands of years of family history. Facebook is not just the biggest social media network of now, or for the future - it is also a resource for the past. Hewling and Crosoer are two of the less common surnames, search them on Facebook and you have an instant ‘data set’ of manageable size, just let your eyes scan the faces. We were vaguely aware that a Hewling had once migrated to the West Indies, there are plenty of black Americans with the name Hewling on Facebook. Genes get passed on complete or not at all, they are digital and don’t get mixed like items from a recipe which is then cooked. So there are distinct facial characteristics, you may have the nose of one grandparent, the forehead or chin of another.

DNA only tells you about the past, genetics is the study of the past. Anything else is about uncertainty - forecast, prediction, probability. DNA profiling will become commonplace and what is tells you about your ancestry can be accepted with much greater confidence than what it says about the probability of you suffering a fatal disease thirty years in the future! It is a relatively simple comparison with a data base of over two hundred thousand samples, gifted by people from every location on the planet, who have had close family living in the same place for at least three generations. For example, it can tell you how much of you is northern European, how much of you is from elsewhere; and that, combined with other data, can tell you how long your ancestors have been here and their migration route since all of us of non-African descent shared a common female ancestor who sailed out-of-Africa eighty thousand years ago. It may tell you that you carry the genes of humans other than homo sapiens.     

The story of genetics is the same story as the creation of different languages and the story of human migration. When I was a child I asked my mother if she was born in the Middle Ages, after-all she'd described herself as middle-aged! Now I can state with some confidence that we, with all the same physical and mental capacities and capabilities have been around for between one hundred and eighty and two hundred thousand years. We live in one world in so far as we are prepared to think in an evolutionary way. But I can also 'see' our ancestors; the view from my window as I write is of Lyme Bay (well Berry Head to Portland - on a good day!) Whilst their human remains lie in the sands below the English Channel, in my imagination I can visualise the lower sea levels of earlier times (at the last glacial maximum sea levels were one hundred and twenty metres lower than today), the channel as one vast river plain and estuary fed by the Rhine, the Thames and the Seine and at times easy enough to cross.