I've traced my family to about 1580. Its not a very remarkable history; on the one side, a family that literally never left the same village for about 300 years, and when they did, it was to a place 20 miles down the road. The other half is harder to trace, because its London. I know there are Irish connections, Devonian connections. Knowing about Irish immigration in the 1850s doesn't really make me change my views on the famine. I don't feel a connection to Ireland, in the way immigrant societies in North America and Australasia do. Mainly because I don't think of Ireland as a normal country. Its just another place in the British Isles (when the Mannixes left Cork, they weren't emigrating, they were moving house). But the more recent family history did make me change my views. Nothing in the family happened much until about 1919. 300 years of basically poverty, either farm labouring, orm working in the London leather trade. After 1919, you see changes happen. My maternal great grandfather was born in a workhouse, out of wedlock to a 17 year old chambermaid, who herself was also born out of wedlock (bang goes a Victorian stereotype). She married, and he had step brothers. His stepdad beat him black and blue, so he ran off and joined the army at 13. By the start of WW1, he was a 10 year veteran of the army, based in Egypt, in the Dragoons. He had gotten out and seen something of the world. Being in the army was likely the first time he had met someone from outside his county, but he would still have been a relatively uneducated bloke. He was in the first cavalry charge of the war, and the last, in 1918. He survived, posted to Ireland for a bit. Came back, and got a job as a labourer at the local iron works; I have a suspicion working for the same man him mum was in service to. That seems a minor step, but it set the path for him getting jobs for his sons as engineers at the works. And my grandfather becoming the County Civil Defence Coordinator. That's social movement. On my father's side, in London, still a <deleted> life in 1920s London. The main significance was a collapse in the leather trade forced a move from Southwark to Hackney. My paternal grandfather worked as a printer for a bit, then on the buses, before the depression forced him to join the army, end up on the beach at Dunkirk, then in Singapore, and to a Japanese prison camp, where he learnt to speak Japanese, and pretend to be a bus machanic. Post war, he became a man from the Pru, got enough money to buy a small shop in Hackney. My dad joined the army after failing is A-Levels, stayed in 25 years, saw the world, and then me. Along the way, I see ancestors emigrating to Australia, Canada, US. One became a bigamist and married her brother in law in Canada. Another somehow got into the RFC, war ended just as he finished his flying lessons, then he got into being a "trader" in Nigeria, learned how to farm cattle after a course in Devon, and wound up in Zambia/Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s. Another spent all his life telling the family he was a conscientious objector in ww1, when in fact he was rejected from the army due to poor eyesight. The details don't really matter, but what I see was the destruction of a ruling class in WW1 opened up opportunity. The revelation is my ancestors were much like me; what I am today is down to their genetic inheritance. They were as capable as me, but lacked the opportunity. I've been lucky that I was able to access higher education, go to university, gain a PhD, the grandson of a boilermaker and bricklayer. And when you think why they, and their predecessors, lacked the opportunity to get on in life, that can leave you feeling a bit angry about all that lost potential. And I get annoyed when some politicians today try and denigrate higher education. I feel in someways, they want to turn back the clock, and put us back in our places. Overall, expanding access to the universities was not a bad thing. And I vote Tory, each time and every time. I think at times Maggie thought about her family histroy from Lincolnshire at times, and that energised her in seeking opportunity for all.
Create an account or sign in to comment