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.

Books Do Furnish a Room

(First posted, 17.8.13)

About twenty years ago I made a decision not to buy anymore bookshelves. It occurred to me that if I was going to have enough time to read all the unread books and also re-read as often as I wished, then I’d already reached some kind of ‘tipping point’. I invented one rule for myself, if a new book was to be introduced then something inferior had to go. And I’ve stuck to it, though at times I’ve cheated like crazy!

It’s helped that I prefer paperbacks, that over time omnibus editions have appeared that take up less space than original volumes, that cassette tapes became CDs, that DVDs could replace videos – but when it came to judging worth, that was quite another matter.

Very occasionally one undergoes complete reversals of opinion, making it seem unacceptable to keep certain books. But such new space isn’t afforded when it comes to scholarly debate, where having certain authors to argue against is the only way to keep critical faculties awake. Another ‘problem’ is that the better your choice of book in the first instance, the less likely it is to date!

The Web has helped immeasurably, removing the need to keep many reference books although I haven’t acquired the habit of reading online for any length of time, or overcome the need to browse bookshops.

Emotion, sentiment and nostalgia play a large part in keeping certain books on the shelves, but even these would not remain unless I still believed there was something new to learn from them when read by the older me.

In the last year I’ve added just two books to the collection of about four hundred. I like to read several books in series, so many are half completed. My best guesstimate is, that about twenty per cent of the total are unread, whilst fifty per cent have been read twice or more.

But many might argue that by doing all of this I’ve constructed the very opposite of what a library should be – that an ever expanding collection, of even greater numbers of unread volumes, is some sort of guarantee against tunnel vision, some protection from ‘knowing more and more about less and less’ and the dangers of confirmation bias.

Well I like to think of myself as a practical man of limited resources, who knows his time is constrained and can focus on what’s important. I’m prepared to make judgements (the willingness to be wrong) at the same time as accepting that no author represents the last word on anything. To achieve clarity of thought requires selection and discrimination.

(I find I’ve written this using slightly ‘oldie worldie’ English as if I were writing from the library of an old country house, or the smoking room of a gentleman’s club – but then this room does have leather bound chairs and I do enjoy the occasional ‘gasper’!)

It may be a tougher path, but it leads straight to the hilltops

(Email 06.09.08, first posted on Facebook 15.10.11)

Kipling wrote ‘If’ in 1895 supposedly about someone else. But I can’t help thinking of how at the age of twenty-one in 1886, whilst writing for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, he was ostracised by the English community for putting himself alongside, and being the first to write sympathetically about, the ‘native’ people of the city!

If -

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

The Only Way Out (updated 2019)

(First posted on Facebook, 19.7.11)

If society (parents, siblings, peers, school, work, community...) is to blame for the way you turned out, and it almost certainly is, then the chances of it helping you out of the mess, is practically zero! You don't have the answers otherwise you wouldn't have got into such a mess. Neither do your friends or partners, it was their similarity to you which attracted you to them. That's why the only way out, is to find the few people who represent excellence (who have the life you want) and model them.

1/ Note for scholarly readers; in any medical or social scientific enquiry, the actions of the observer always affect the outcome, just like the actions of the participants; with any social species, agency never lies just with the an individual. Agency is always on a positive feedback loop within any human group, just as social structures are only ever temporary pockets of order. So, it’s just the same for the distinguished research professor, as it is for the guy on the street trapped by the habitual influence of significant others!

2/ In pursuit of the life you want; observation is all about recognizing patterns in the actions of others – habits, in everything! If a habit no longer delivers the reward it once did it is a bad habit, the only way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one that delivers the same reward.

3/ Pleasure (this feels good, I want some more); happiness (this feels good, I don’t need anymore.)

4/ Whatever it is you do, do it because it is a worthwhile and purposeful activity in and of itself, here and now.

5/ Money; is this expenditure essential, important, or just everything else?! Will it make you richer (an investment) or poorer (waste)?

6/ Diet: drink; alcohol (really bad), caffeine (not good), water (all you actually need). Food; refined sugars (worst), grains (human invention), dairy (mother's milk of another species), roots/tubers (good in an emergency, but costly to get at), fresh meat cooked fast (best), ripe red fruit and fresh green leaves (best).

Sherlock Holmes Syndrome

(first written 2008, first posted on Facebook 4.5.11, updated 2012, 2016)

You see the problem is there’s this strange phenomenon of people liking mysteries and not wanting them explained.

In the world of mental health it often appears that someone in distress, does not want, nor responds to, either explicit explanation of their difficulties, or to training in techniques to relieve them. It’s even got to the point in our individualistic society where many will argue that there are no universal ways of understanding or helping - apart from the mysterious ‘love conquers all’!

(photo by Nick Hewling)

And the more knowledgeable person certainly doesn’t want to end up suffering the emotional isolation of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome - of going to the trouble to explain (about inductive and deductive reasoning, how he built-up his library, apprenticed himself to learn about such things as horses and dogs, the logic of railway operations and timetabling, etc, etc) only for Watson to call it all inborn ‘talent’ and ‘genius‘, the police to call it ‘luck’, and the public ‘…well when you put it like Mr Holmes, I can see it really is so simple anyone could…’ It was others who set him apart. People fear something is lost in explanation when in fact the reverse is true - it only adds to the wonder of the world.

The wilful ignorance of those who see in others an inborn talent often drives those with such supposed abilities to distraction. The spectator at a golf tournament who said to Arnold Palmer - after he’d made a great shot - how lucky he was to have such a talent, got the reply: ‘Yes, it’s crazy, the more I practice the luckier I get! In traditional craftsmanship, ten thousand hours is the ‘rule of thumb’ for mastering a complex skill set - the point at which practice, becomes ‘seamless’ and the outsider cannot see ‘how it’s done’.

In the context of mental health, explanation leading to instruction, demonstration and practice meets additional resistance because the very subject is the inadequacy of early emotional learning from parents, other adults, siblings and peers. A large part of emotional learning is of course all about sexual intimacy, and here the Holmes analogy is useful again.

Dr Watson a believer in the mystery of love, as much as non-explainable 'genius', offers us this in, A Scandal in Bohemia: 'It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one in particular, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but reasonable balanced mind, but as a lover he would have put himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer - excellent for drawing a veil from men's motives and passions.'

Now we know that such a lack of emotion would have been impossible - modern opinion  divides two ways; either towards some effortful suppression or towards an autistic spectrum, even the sociopathic! It doesn't occur to Watson that Holmes might have applied the same methods to learning about sex and love as he did to everything else. If that were true, then his pursuit of excellence would have led to his rejection by almost all in Victorian society. (It is perhaps worth remembering that it is only points of similarity between people which attract.)

(All of the above refers to the character of Sherlock Holmes originally offered us by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)

It is nice to see that some of the themes above have been highlighted by Elementary, the contemporary take on Holmes from CBS.

HOLMES:  It has its costs.
WATSON:  What does?
HOLMES:  Learning to see the puzzle in everything. They’re everywhere, once you start looking it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions which inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzle of all. Of course they don’t always appreciate being seen as such.
WATSON:  Seems like a lonely way to live.
HOLMES:  As I said it has its costs.

(photo by Nick Hewling)

HOLMES:  ..the things that I do, the things that you care about, you think I do them because I’m a good person, I do them because it would hurt too much not to.
AGATHA:  Because you are a good person.
HOLMES:  No, it hurts Agatha. All of this, everything I see, everything I hear, touch and smell. The conclusions I’m able to draw, the things that are revealed to me, the ugliness. My work focuses me, it helps. You say I am using my gifts, I say I am just treating them…

(Elementary, created by Robert Doherty for CBS.)

What is cricket?

(Slightly edited since, 25.12.10)

'Unusual to see a right-hander coming round the wicket in rain..' said the commentator on TMS (Test Match Special 4.1.11) - but of course it is easy to 'see' on the radio!

So what is this game, and what are the rules? What follows are some short extracts from an academic paper on expertise which necessitated the authors attempt a technical description of cricket for a largely America readership.

‘..Cricket is a complicated game. We must explain some of the rules here on the assumption that not every reader of this journal will know them. We will, however, assume that readers who are not familiar with cricket will know baseball. 

Cricket is like baseball in that it involves the equivalent of a pitcher and a batter, known, respectively, as the ‘bowler’ and the ‘batsman.’ The bowler ‘bowls’ the cricket ball to the batsman and, as in baseball, the batsman tries to hit it. Unlike baseball, there is no limit to the number of balls the batsman may receive - on a good day a batsman may face hundreds of balls before being out. In international matches, one game may continue for up to five days. 

As in baseball, there are a number of ways of being out, such as when one of the ‘fielders’ catches the ball before it hits the ground. In cricket the batsman stands in front of a ‘wicket’ (otherwise known as ‘the stumps’) that he has to defend with his bat. If the ball hits the wicket, the batsman is out – there is no equivalent in baseball. The wicket is a set of three vertical sticks or ‘stumps.’  The wicket is 28 inches high and 9 inches wide overall. The top of each stump has a shallow groove cut at right angles to the direction from which the ball is coming; two smaller sticks, known as ‘bails’, are carefully balanced in these grooves, the ends of the two bails touching each other where they meet in middle of the groove cut in the central stump. The working, and universally accepted, definition of ‘the ball hitting the wicket’ is that one or both of the delicately balanced bails fall to the ground - the wicket must be ‘broken’. On very rare occasions a ball grazes the stumps, or rolls very gently against them, but no bail falls; in such a case the batsman is not out because the wicket has not been broken. 

In cricket, the bowler nearly always directs the ball in such a way that it hits the ground before it reaches the batsman and it usually then bounces toward the batsman’s legs. The batsman wears a ‘pad’ to protect each leg. Each pad is an armoured sheath running from ankle to just above the knee. The ball is very hard, about as hard as wood at the beginning of the game, though it begins to soften slightly as the hours pass (the same ball is used for many hours before it is changed). The ball can sometimes be bowled at more than 90 mph.  Allowing the ball to hit the pads is an integral part of the game. Clearly, the batsman would never be out if he simply stood in front of the wicket, kept his bat out of the way, and allowed the ball to hit him or his pads. To make that impossible the notoriously complicated ‘lbw rule’ says that a batsman is out in certain restricted circumstances if the pads alone stop a ball that would otherwise hit the wicket - this counts as out in virtue of ‘leg before wicket’. In the normal way, the umpire, who stands at the point from which the bowler bowls the ball, is the sole judge of whether the ball (a) falls within the restrictions and (b) would have gone on to hit the wicket..

.. A cricket ball is not uniformly spherical. Around its ‘equator’ it has a raised seam and the two ‘hemispheres’ become more asymmetrical as the game goes on. The trajectory of the ball after it hits the ground can vary enormously. The bounce depends on the speed, the hardness and texture of the ball - which changes during the game, the state of the ground at the exact point of the bounce, the spin on the ball and the position of the seam. The ‘swing’ - which is the aerodynamically induced curve in the flight of the ball, which can be in any plane - depends on the ball’s speed, its spin, its state, its orientation, the orientation of the seam and the state of the atmosphere. As a result, what happens to the ball after it bounces is not going to be fully predictable from its pre-bounce trajectory

.. In the case of the human umpire making an lbw decision it is acknowledged that the accuracy of the judgment is affected by how close the batsman is to the wickets when the pads are struck by the ball. If the batsman whose pads are struck is well forward in his stance then he is rarely given out. In this way, human judges deliberately introduce a systematic error into their judgments that favours the batsman - the so-called ‘benefit of the doubt’ rule. The importance of this rule will become clear later…’

Extract from draft of Collins H.M and Evans R (2008) You cannot be serious!  Public Understanding of Technology with special reference to ‘Hawk-Eye.’

If the above is unclear, the best I (or anyone) can do is to refer you to the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) located at, or otherwise known as Lord’s…

A Dance to the Music of Time

(photo by Nick Hewling)

(First posted, 17.11.10)

‘Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. ..something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned to the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene

..[The dance to the music of time - painting  c.1640].. in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.’

Part of the opening passage of Anthony Powell’s 12 novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time in which he presents his own life, across 55 years of the 20^th century, through the fictional form of his narrator Nicholas Jenkins. Nick stands at the calm centre of a social world of two hundred characters as the observer and chronicler of their lives. Yet he remains also the central character, changing over time, offering different observations and explanations as he ages. His only conclusion, that he has exerted little influence over the direction his life has taken, drawn along by the rhythm of the dances of others.

It’s my favourite work of English literature and I’m currently in my 5^th cycle of reading.                                             

(As you can see from the first photo, I’m now on my 6^th cycle!)