Shambles

I asked my father once; it was the 13th June 1951, actually, about the TRANTER’s. “Where do we come from, Dad?”

  He looked down and frowned. “Don’t ask.”

  “But I’d like to know.”

  He shook his head and started to fill his pipe with a compacted mass of old rope strands, and tar. The label on the tin informed us it was Lloyds Skipper Tobacco. Sailors used to chew the stuff. They didn’t dare smoke it.

  He contemplated the stuffed bowl. “Better not ask questions.”

  “But, why?”

  While he thought of an answer he tamped the tobacco down. Finally satisfied, he stuck the pipe stem in his mouth and looked at his finger. It had gone black. With a shrug he fished out his matches, struck one, applied flame to pipe bowl and commenced to suck. “You don’t....”suck, “know...” suck, “what you’ll find.”

  “But if I did know I wouldn’t need to ask, would I?”

  “True.”

  Encouraged, I added, “We could always keep quiet about what we find out.”

  “Are you ever satisfied with the answers you get?” he retorted, from behind a smoke cloud.

  How to respond to that? The honest answer is no, I am never satisfied. By this time the pipe and Dad were enveloped in an impenetrable fog of blue-black smoke. The conversation died. I wandered away and forgot about the subject for years. Dad remained seated, perhaps ruminating over whatever he knew he was not going to tell me. Certainly, both he and the subject I’d raised were, for him, happily obscured.

  I think someone in Parliament must have heard about us because shortly afterwards the Clean Air Act was passed. As a result, London’s smog disappeared and asthmatics cheered. I am amongst them. Dad simply ignored the health warnings. In a way I sympathised, for actually I quite liked the aroma of his smoke. I suppose it was part of my comfort zone, the atmosphere of security and love in which I was growing up and for which he and mum were jointly responsible. Maybe, too, raking over the past would have disrupted his peace of mind. I knew enough of his early struggles out of poverty and insecurity to know he had no wish to look backwards. Young as I was, I was sufficiently aware to realise that day in June just wasn’t the moment for family history. Perhaps in the future I’d satisfy my curiosity; maybe even try smoking my own pipe.

  A little background information is necessary. Dad was managing director of a timber firm which he had joined as an office boy and worked his way up. It was not his first choice of occupation—he’d achieved the required scholastic level to go to university but not the financial independence that would have allowed him to do so—and in 1928, when he left school, you took whatever job you could get. As it happened, working in a timber yard was not a bad outcome. He loved working with wood and I still have some of the furniture and marquetries he made in later years. I didn’t know it at the time but this was a clue to past links, as was the fact he supported Oxford University in the boat race, built model railways and gave my brother and I one when we were kids. I wanted a chemistry set but he said “No. You’ll blow us all up.” He did a lot of camping as a youth, once managing to camp in a tent for 50 out of 52 weekends in the year. Then he met mother, a bigger bike was required, so they bought a tandem and, well I’m here, aren’t I? They both loved walking through the woods.

  I have to say that this family history business is weird. You don’t know what you’ll find, as Dad pointed out, but nevertheless, even if he was usually immersed behind a cloud of blue-black smoke, the clues were there, as they often are, in the environment in which you live. I’ve just listed a few, which later investigations have revealed were indeed links to the family past. The discoveries I have since made include the good news, the bad and the spicy.

  I blame one of my daughters. One day, 45 years after my foggy chat with Dad, she asked me, “Where do the TRANTERs and SANGWELLs come from?”

  I started to tell her about the birds and the bees and of course received that look. “I don’t mean sex,” she retorted. “I know all about that!”

  “Oh, do you, my girl,” I began.

  “I mean the family,” she insisted. Sangwell, by the way, was my mother’s and thus her grandmother’s maiden name. “We should be able to find out. Neither name is that common.”

  True, though I think our ancestors must have had a policy of marrying themselves to keep the numbers down, you know, cousins and so on. Or maybe there’s a flaw in our survival techniques for there should certainly be more of us than there actually are. I blame Darwin for that, of course.

  I am not as wise as my father, as he well knew, for one day I took my probing daughter to the local reference library to see what we could find out. To be honest, my own curiosity had been revived.

  The resources available at the reference library presented, at first, a rather daunting prospect. There were hundreds of folders containing transcripts of parish records; thousands of card indexes telling you where to look next but not actually managing to give anything away, and lots and lots of microfiche readers with which you could sometimes clearly read Latinised records on film. Not that that helped too much. At one point in our searches we both stopped and looked up. I caught her eye. “What’s a Galfredus?”

  “Huh,” she retorted, “Cariolus to you.”

  Our blank faces turned to grins, then back to blank faces again. “Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” she said. “I need a cigarette.”

  In the nick of time the cavalry came to the rescue, not in the form of a mounted and charging gallant, waving a cutlass, (though he looked fierce enough to me,) but an eager fellow disguised behind a beard, large horn rimmed glasses and sporting sandals rather than an equine friend as his aid to locomotion. It was The Librarian, with helpful attitude.

  In an unguarded moment, probably whilst distracted looking for his matches, or extinguishing the carpet, Dad had let slip he was a Londoner, as was his father. We informed The Librarian of this useful fact and as soon as we’d done so his face lit up. In a very few minutes he showed us the 1881 census and explained how to use it.

  We started our search. After a while I glanced up, to rest my eyes, and saw The Librarian had returned. He was sort of hovering, full of indecision over some hidden agenda. I did not wish to upset him but at the same time I wanted to convey the impression we were perfectly capable of looking through index cards and actually preferred to do so on our own. Long gone were the days when we’d had to endure the attention of hovering schoolmasters. The Librarian did not get the message. He lingered. He did more than that. He twitched nervously, and there was a Galfredus look in his eye. He opened and shut his mouth several times and finally, as unwisely I looked at him again, he summoned up enough courage to demand, “What’s your name?”

  I didn’t mind telling him that. “TRANTER” I replied, casually, for we try not to make too much of it, even though we are fully aware we are a rare breed. However, I was curious, wondering at his interest, so I asked, “Why do you want to know?”

  It was the only prompt he needed to reveal his desperate need. He had a new toy, some software on his computer, which contained indexed names of all the people who had appeared in THE TIMES in the nineteenth century. He was dying to use it but so far no one had let him look up a name. Did it work? Was he in the presence of a descendant of an historical celebrity?

  I shrugged. “Go ahead,” I said. “You won’t find anything. We’re not famous, just relatively rare. We might be in the local rag, attending a fete, or in the Births, Marriages and Deaths columns. I admit our ancestors are guilty of these things, but that’s all.”

  He was no longer listening. In fact, he’d gone, the urgent slap, slap, slapping of his sandals on the hard, shiny floor, signalling his focussed purpose and eventually fading into the distance.

  A little more background. I’d lived most of my life in Middlesex, and then Hampshire, with a few years away at sea, and until the expletive deleted French broke a promise and made me redundant; I had only ended up living in Oxfords
hire from chasing the job they destroyed when they took over my work place.

  We found my grandfather. There he was, two years old, living in Fulham in 1881 with the rest of the family, as it then was. Slightly more surprising I found, scanning down the census pages, there were more TRANTERs next door. An older generation, no doubt. They were, in fact, the Mum and Dad (i.e. grandparents) of the one for which we had been looking. The big surprise was to discover that these older TRANTERs were not Londoners at all. They’d been born in Oxfordshire, in Lewknor which, within three miles, was where I had ended up chasing that job!

  That was a weird feeling. It was if I was haunted by the past for I had gone back to the family country roots and until now had been completely unaware of the fact. And real roots they are, the TRANTERs, RIXONs, MESSENGERs, AUSTINs, PIGGOTs, to name just some, were once residents of Lewknor, Radnage, Aston Rowant, and Stokenchurch, small Oxfordshire villages. Some of these ancestors were carters, a few were farmers, and there were woodworkers, even bodgers amongst them. A bodger is one who does preliminary chair making work on raw timber and then hands the result on to others to finish. These days it is often used in a derogatory sense, to mean someone who never finishes anything, but that neglects the fact that someone has to have the initial idea and start the production process. It was a term Dad had often employed with me in mind.

  Those family clues were, unexpectedly, beginning to tie in. We didn’t know all that then but we were still pretty elated when we turned to leave the library with what we had. One ancestor married twice, he was in his 60’s the second time, and went on, with the help of his wife (and ex housekeeper his first wife had employed) to produce several more children while his wife was still alive. There’s nothing new under the sun, they say and it is true. See below.

  As we approached the exit, Beard and Sandals hurried up, a smile of satisfaction on his face. He thrust three pages of typescript into my hands.

  “What’s this?”

  “Hot off the computer,” he said.

  “What is hot off the computer?”

  “Entries from THE TIMES,” he told me, gleefully. His new toy evidently worked.

  That was a surprise. “You found TRANTERs in THE TIMES?” It didn’t seem credible. Grandfather was a railway porter.

  “I have indeed. Eighteen entries.”

  “Good grief.” I started to examine his printed sheets and as I did so, asked, “What are these?”

  “Criminal records,” he blurted out, and then went scarlet with embarrassment.

  “What!”

  “It’s in black and white.”

  “All eighteen?”

  “All eighteen,” he confirmed, with a gulp, and then, trying to make amends for an imagined solecism, he actually committed one by adding, “Do come again, we might find some more.”

  “Oh, thank you so much!”

  Of course, I tell everyone that THE TIMES list is of a totally different collection of TRANTERs. They have nothing to do with us. I mean, some of the crimes--I didn’t know you could do such things. No, they could not be part of our lot, and we did not find any actual links, apart from the names. To me, that was the good news. My daughter found it all very interesting!

  Later on we did further research with the assistance of many people who’ve trod similar pathways long before us. I’ve the will of one family farmer. In 1832 he left everything to his wife, provided she did not marry again. She was 71 at the time! It was probably to do with the absence of the married women’s property act rather than her adventurous nature. Another ancestor married a lady--I think she was a lady--called Elizabeth VEAR, in 1580. In those days most commoners were illiterate. A clerk would write down names as they sounded. He wrote V-E-A-R in the Register, but she may well have been V-E-R-E, only of course she didn’t know it could be spelt that way. Does it matter now?

  Well, it so happens that the family name of the Earls of Oxford is de VERE, and what with droits de seigneur it is conceivable (pun accidental) that our Elizabeth was the result of such a right being exercised. Well, it is a thought, but it leads inevitably to the bad news. We cannot be absolutely certain we are not related to royalty!

  The unsettling coincidences don’t end there so perhaps Dad was right. Leave the past well alone. But I’m insatiably curious and the more I discovered the more I wanted to know. For example, in Hampshire I lived in Whitchurch. My first wife had chased a job this time and believe it or not, when we investigated my mother’s side of the family, we found that, despite the fact that she and her father were Londoners, the SANGWELLs all came from Kingsclere and Brimpton, in Berkshire, just four or so miles away from where we lived at that time. Was it yet another coincidence to find we had resettled once again upon an ancestral stamping ground?

  A penultimate bit of background. In order to survive after redundancy, and unable to persuade potential employers that there was more between my ears than bodger’s sawdust, or perhaps they thought there was a brain in there, and took fright, I took on taxiing. I did that for four years until I became solvent enough to stop and yes, there is a link. For recently I found out that my mother’s grandmother was Ann WEBB, who died giving birth to Mum’s father in 1878, and Ann WEBB’s father was one William WEBB of Hanover Square, London, Cab and Cart Proprietor!

  Hanover Square! Cab proprietor. I’ve said repeatedly that family history is weird, and so it is. Perhaps uncanny would be a better way to describe how my present life mirrors so much of the life of my ancestors. Whatever next? Maybe I’d better take a closer look at those criminal records, just in case!

  Whatever next has just turned out to be on Mum’s side, the SANGWELLs. With the help of others I’d managed to trace her London links back to Brimpton, and Kintbury, and Woolhampton and Kingsclere where, in 1807 Timothy MARSHALL married a Mary SIMS. For a long time we were unable to make further progress. Then we discovered that young Tim was not a Marshall at all. His real surname was WIGMORE. Apparently Tim’s grandfather was a bigamist which, when Tim married, the vicar covered up by giving him the MARSHALL surname. So Tim and his wife became MARSHALLs and their children little MARSHALLs, nicely obscuring the truth, rather like my father hiding behind his smoke screen.

  I mean, who cares? A little bit of scandal is rather spicy after all, adding excitement to a hobby that is sometimes a rather laborious process of discovery, and a source of constant frustration. So I say hooray for the spicy bits. I bet most of us have a spicy bit or two in our own lives. I must admit, though, I haven’t quite acclimatised myself to those criminal records in THE TIMES.

  The final piece of background and another bit of spice. One day, after my divorce, (sorry, not that spicy!), I answered a family history query from a lady in Australia. Could I help with her family tree (STYLES & others)? It turned out I could, we got emailing, then phoning, then I went to Australia and we came back to England, for a while. She’s ace at the business of record searching and demanding proofs, and we’ve made great progress. Now, it was not to escape my past, you can never do that, even down the generations, as I now realise, that we decided eventually to go back to Australia. When we arrived we found both sides of both families had emigrated here in the nineteenth century, and by no means were all of them deported criminals, despite those records in THE TIMES. One was actually a mayor.

  We got married and, in my 64th year, I started a new family (with my wife, no housekeeper involved) and if I read this to my wife and she makes the link to my ancestor, who obviously anticipated me, (see above), I expect she’ll have me sorted out. I can hear her saying it, “Lot’s more children, indeed! He was a woodman, and lived in the woods! What else could he do in the evenings?” Should I point out that we have 6 1/2 acres and lots and lots of trees? We seem to spend an awful lot of time amongst them!

  I promise you that this is a truthful, but not a complete account. Sadly, it can never be that. In addition to the names mentioned I am looking for ADAMS in Depford; COOK(E) in Woolwich, and a Sarah ADAMS, Nee ?, wh
o was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia around 1817; SIMS, MARSHALL, SANGWELL, WICKENS, MILLS, HAZEL and now WIGMORE, (all Berkshire); one W TRANTER who played for West Ham in 1900, but I support Spurs, so he was probably one of those other TRANTERs we don’t mention too much, and of course, quite a few ladies who must have existed but for whom we have either only a Christian name or no name at all.

  There is a little more. According to the DNA analyses of Prof. Brian Sykes, (See Brian Sykes “The Seven Daughters of Eve”, a Corgi paperback) all the females in my mother’s line ultimately descend from one Helena (his name for) a real and identifiable lady who lived 20,000 years ago, on a part of the Mediterranean coast that is now under the sea. I bet there are lots of spicy bits in 200 centuries and 1000 generations! What a shame we shall never know.

  Or is that so? Strip away our technology and veneer of civilised behaviour and we are left with ourselves, much as we ever were. Helped by a background of growing historical knowledge we can use our imagination to fill in more and more detail. On one level there is no mystery; it is easy enough to produce rational explanations for the coincidences I have described. One wonders though, given all those haunting links, just how much is in each of us of our forgotten ancestors?

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