Newsletter – 7th
October 2024
How to interest your
grandchildren in family history
Court records provide
rare insight into fostering in the 1600s
100 couples marry on
the same day
Forenames in 20th
century America
Films and photos from
the 1920s onwards
The LostCousins
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How to interest your grandchildren in family
history
In
the last issue I posed a conundrum: we owe it to our ancestors to ensure that
future generations know at least as much about them as we do – the challenge
is, how can we do that if we don’t have children or grandchildren who are keen
to continue our research?
I
was blown away by the book that LostCousins member John created for his
children – it’s a great way to spark an interest in family history because it’s
so cleverly put together, as you can see from the PDF copy that John has kindly
allowed me to upload to the Peter’s Tips page of the LostCousins site. Note that you’ll need to log-in to your LostCousins
account first, since documents on the Peter’s Tips page are reserved for
the use of registered members (which includes everyone who received an email
from me telling them about this newsletter).
Tip:
it’s a very good idea to log into your account from time to time: not only might
you discover a new connection to a ‘lost cousin’, logging-in also confirms to
me that you are still interested in family history (and that the primary email
address in my records is still valid). I don’t routinely contact every member
on the mailing list when a new edition of this newsletter is released because I
don’t want to be accused of sending spam – if it’s more than a couple of years
since you last logged-in you’re likely to miss out on some of the newsletters,
and it’s more than 5 years you’ll only be notified occasionally.
It
doesn’t matter whether your ancestors were famous or did something notable
– the greatest achievement of most my ancestors was to survive long
enough to have children, and then to bring them up, sometimes in great poverty
and as a single parent. Whilst I don’t have any children or grandchildren, I’d
like to think that if I did they would be more
impressed by the story of an ancestor who grew up in the workhouse than one who
came from a rich family. We can all produce a book like the one that John put
together – the important thing is to make it interesting and intriguing, so
that we don’t have to pressure the younger generation to take an interest in
their forebears, it happens naturally. It mustn’t be like the history lessons I
endured at school, but like the history lessons I deserved. (History O-level is
the only exam I’ve ever failed, and I failed it dismally – thanks to the awful
teaching.)
Perhaps
you don’t have grandchildren of your own – but like me you may have siblings or
cousins who do. But please don’t give them a book about their ancestors instead
of a birthday present, otherwise they’ll resent it just as much as I resented
the gifts of socks and handkerchiefs when I was young! Make it an extra present
at a different time of the year, and then it’ll seem extra special.
Tip:
depending on the age of the children you could ask them to name the ancestor
they would most like to have met (and give the reasons why).
Court records provide rare insight into fostering in the
1600s
Papers
published in academic journals don’t often make it into the mainstream media
but a study in The History of the Family by Cambridge University PhD
student Emily Holmes featured in the Guardian as well as on the BBC News website (and
no doubt elsewhere).
Because
it is drawn from court records (for the period 1660-1720), Women as child
carers: Arranging and compensating mothering in early modern Lancashire focuses
on cases where things went wrong – typically a failure by the Poor Law overseers
to pay the agreed rate, or anything at all. Most LostCousins members are researching
in the 1500s and 1600s on some of their ancestral lines, so this study will be
particularly relevant, but even if you’re marooned in the 1700s it’s worth
reading at least one of the reports I linked to above. Indeed, since the journal
is open access I recommend reading the entire study if
you have time – it’s not much longer than this newsletter, and you’ll get
insight into an aspect of life 400-450 years that could well have impacted your
family. You’ll find the full text of the article here.
100 couples marry on the same day
Old
Marylebone Town Hall has just celebrated 100 years as a wedding venue. As a
family historian my instinctive reaction was that despite the name, it can’t
that ‘old’ if it’s only 100 years, but that probably didn’t matter to the love-struck
couples! Here’s how one of the lucky bridegrooms, Thomas Mackintosh, began his
article on the BBC News website:
“Love
was in the air this week as one of the UK's most iconic wedding venues married
100 couples, for £100 each, to celebrate 100 years of hosting marriages. Old
Marylebone Town Hall has held marriages of musical legends, footballers and
Hollywood stars and usually costs between £621 and £1,230 per ceremony. I'm
fortunate enough to have joined that glitzy list after I tied the knot at the
event on Tuesday.”
You
can read the full article if you follow this link – and if you
want to know more there was a running commentary on the BBC website during the
day, which you’ll find here.
Readers in the UK can also re-live the day and see behind the scenes in this 16
minute video
(it currently shows the wrong year in the description, but don’t let that put
you off).
Some
people researching their family history get very hung up over spelling, which
is ironic given that most of our ancestors – even those who were literate –
didn’t, in the immortal words of Clark Gable, “give a damn”.
I
was reminded of this contradiction last weekend when I read a BBC article about the amendment
to the Brontë memorial in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. When I was
learning French at school we were taught that the
French rarely inserted accents over capital letters, so it doesn’t surprise me
that when the memorial was engraved the diaeresis (the two little dots) over
the capital ‘E’ were omitted. In fact, the first newspaper report I chanced
across in the British Newspaper Archive (from the Chester Chronicle of
13th May 1939) included the dots in the article but omitted them in
the headline – which was, of course, in capitals:
©
Image © Reach PLC.
Image
created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.
Used
by kind permission of Findmypast
Ironically
the spelling Brontë was an invention of the authoresses’ father. According to
this article
in the Irish Times he was born Patrick Brunty – the eldest child of Hugh
Brunty, a farmhand, fence-fixer, and road-builder. Patrick changed his surname
from Brunty to Pruty, to Prunty before eventually
settling on Brontë – some have suggested that he was influenced by Horatio
Nelson’s Sicilian title, Duke of Bronte (bestowed by the King of Sicily in
1799).
Though
Patrick fathered 6 children, all of whom survived infancy, he outlived all of
them. Another fact I found surprising, given his long career as an Anglican
minister, is that his mother was Catholic.
Forenames in 20th century America
Talking
of names, the July 2024 issue of Significance magazine, published by the
Royal Statistical Society and its counterparts in the US and Australia, takes a look at the way the forenames given to babies changed
between 1890 and 2010. Interestingly, 5 of the 10 most popular boys’ names in
1890 were still in the top 10 in 1950 (James, Robert, John, William, and
Charles), but that was true for only 1 of the girls’ names (Mary).
By
2010 just one of the 1890 names was still in favour for boys (William) and one
1950 name was still in the top 10 (Michael). New entrants included Ethan, Jayden,
Daniel and Noah. Every one of the top 10 girls’ names changed between 1950 and
2010, though one of the new names (Emma) had been in the 1890 list; new
entrants included Mia, Chloe (also spelled Chloë, Chlöe,
or Chloé), and Madison. The author of the article suggests that the higher persistence
of boys’ names reflects the tendency for fathers to name their first-born son after
themselves, but that the higher number of male forenames in the Bible might also
be a factor.
Another
interesting observation is that parents seem unwilling to give their sons names
that might be perceived as girls’ names – or, indeed, any unconventional name
that might result in their son being teased (Mr & Mrs Morrison clearly didn’t
get the memo – they called their son Marion when he was born in 1907). An interesting
example is of the name Lauren, which was almost exclusively a name for boys
between 1900 and 1940, but began to be seen
differently when the actress Lauren Bacall sprang to fame.
In
England a lot of forenames derived from surnames, and though they were initially
used mainly for sons, over time some become more popular for girls: Wendy is an
obvious example, although it was rare before the publication of Peter Pan;
Beverley is another. If you want to know more it’s easy to search the GRO birth
indexes for first names in England & Wales, but bear in mind that for some
periods initials were used for middle names, which might affect the results you
get. In Wales it’s the other way round – most of the surnames derive from
forenames. As for Scotland… I’ll leave that to you to investigate.
When
the going gets tough, the tough get going. But smart people typically find a way
to avoid dealing with tough problems, looking instead for workarounds or
different approaches that will either make the tough problem irrelevant, or
make it easier to solve. For example, anyone who has done a crossword puzzle
will know that you don’t bash your head against a ‘brick wall’ trying to solve a
particular clue – you move on to the next clue, and hope that in the process of
solving other clues you’ll gain additional insight into the one that’s causing
you a problem.
Genealogy
is like that – or at least, it should be. There’s nothing smart about doggedly gnawing
away at the same problem day after day, month after month, year after year – no
matter how important it is to find out the answer, you’ll have a much greater
chance of solving the problem if you step away and do some research on another
line, or in another part of your tree.
The
thing is, nothing succeeds like success. Or, to put it
another way, solving problems is by far the best way to learn how to solve problems
– partly because you’ll gain in confidence, but mainly because you’ll also gain
experience in problem-solving.
Now
and again I enter into correspondence with someone who
is up against a ‘brick wall’ – typically on their surname line. 9 times out of
10 it turns that they’ve been so focused on that one line that they’ve done
little or no research on their other ancestral lines, which means they haven’t acquired
the wider experience that most of us have. Yet when I suggest that they should
turn their attention to their other ancestral lines the stock response is “I
will do the things you recommend once I’ve solved this problem”. Doh!
Many
family historians get started because there’s a particular family story they
want to verify, or a mystery they’re keen to solve – that’s certainly what got
me started – but the more we learn about problem-solving generally, the easier
it will be to solve the one that matters most to us. Determination can be a great
asset, but blinkered determination is usually a disaster.
I
was born just a few years after WW2 so our bookcase seemed
to be filled with true stories about heroes who escaped from German prisoner-of-war
camps. Rationing was still in force when I was young, and even when it ended I could never get enough to eat so I could relate to
their reliance on Red Cross food parcels. I was even excited by the tales of digging
narrow escape tunnels – it was only 40 years later that I developed claustrophobia.
You
may recall that in August I was able to persuade LostCousins member David to
allow me to share with you the Great War journal of his wife’s great-grandfather,
William Donn, who was captured and held as a prisoner by the Germans. There is
a PDF copy of the journal on the Peter’s Tips page of the LostCousins
site – if you haven’t already read the journal I can thoroughly
recommend it (but bear in mind that you’ll need to log into your LostCousins
account first as the Peter’s Tips page is for members only).
I’m
delighted to say that I’ve now been allowed to share with you a story from WW2 –
this time it involves the member’s father-in-law. I hope you find it as
interesting as I did:
Your PoW article prompted me to write with my
father-in-law's story.
William Henry Whitcombe, along with a friend,
thought, on the way home from the pub one night in 1942, that it would be a
good idea to join up so they enlisted in the South
Wales Borderers. They had had training as medics so were employed as such. In
1944, my mother-in-law received a letter from the Red Cross saying that William
was a prisoner in German hands: this was about the time of the Normandy
landings. It was only a few years later, after his repatriation, that the full
story emerged.
William and his pal, known as Titchy, escaped
capture on the beaches and ran to hide. On their way, they met an injured man
who was unable to walk. William and Titchy hit upon a farmhouse and stole a
wheelbarrow. They put the injured man in the wheelbarrow and wheeled him for
eight hours until they arrived at a house in the country which was being used
as a hospital. They thought their luck was in until they discovered that the hospital
was occupied by Germans. Talk about having a bad day!
Finding that they were medics, the Germans
decided to make use of their expertise so they were
set to work there for some time until the Germans thought they had outlived
their usefulness, and loaded them onto a lorry to be taken to a prison camp.
This next bit beggars belief: the three of them jumped
off the back of the lorry, rolled into woodland and, by some miraculous quirk
of fate, met up with the Resistance. They gave them what they needed to escape,
including a map printed on a silk headscarf (which we still have). Some of
their next exploits are classified and William never talked about, it but they
arrived back in England and, eventually, to their homes in Wales – unscathed,
but very relieved. I have been told that we can now access the full records if
we go to Kew.
My father-in-law died in 1966 at only 46
years of age and, on the day of his funeral, his
daughter answered the door to a man who introduced himself as Titchy. He had
kept in touch all that time with the man in the wheelbarrow, who lived in
Swansea and had made a full recovery from his injuries.
We still have the letters from the Red Cross
which we found in a shoe box in my mother-in-law's wardrobe after her death.
There were also old French banknotes signed by the people my father-in-law was
in contact with. They were meant for William's daughter who was born in 1944 and William had never seen. These, along with the
headscarf, are so precious to us and we are looking for a suitable home for
them so that they will be preserved and, hopefully, made available for people
to see long after our time.
William was sent to work in a medical centre in
Porthcawl after his exploits. They obviously thought he couldn't be trusted any
further afield!
It’ll
be interesting to know what the records in the National Archives reveal – maybe
there will be a follow-up article one day. Right now I’m conscious of the fact
there aren’t that many people still around who fought in World War 2 – yet it
seems only yesterday that we were saying goodbye to the last survivors from the
Great War, or World War 1 as most people refer to it today (if they think about
it at all – for the teenagers of today it’s as distant in time as the Crimean
War was for me, and the French Revolution was for my grandfathers).
Of
course, the term ‘World War 1’ only came into use once we started talking about
‘World War 2’. But it might surprise you to know that it wasn’t originally called
the ‘Great War’ – as this sad baptism register entry from January 1915 demonstrates,
it was originally referred to as the ‘European War’, a name which continued to
be used in the USA:
©
Copyright image All Rights Reserved. Sheffield City Council used by kind
permission of Ancestry
I
came across this entry by chance in the Sheffield & Rotherham collection recently
released by Ancestry – for more details see this article
in the last issue.
Films and photos from the 1920s onwards
There is an amazing resource
of more than 400,000 digitized aerial photographs that can be viewed
free at the Historic England website. Since I last wrote about this resource
nearly 2 years they have acquired 20,000 US Army Air Forces (USAAF) aerial reconnaissance
photographs shot between 1943 and 1944, most of which were taken over the southern
half of England – you can find out more and see a map of the sites here.
Two
smaller collections at the Historic England site that you might find particularly
interesting are the collection of photos taken by Arthur William Hobart in the
1920s and 1930s (you’ll find them here)
and the Harold
Wingham collection, which covers the period from
1951 to 1963.
If,
like me, you enjoyed reading Arthur Ransome’s stories in your youth there is
some fascinating archive footage of the Norfolk Broads on YouTube – it’s most easily
accessed from this page
on the Broadland Memories website which sorts the footage by decade, from the
1930s to the 1980s.
I
spent a few days in the Broads with a friend in the early 1970s, so when I discovered
in the second-hand books section of the Oxfam website a paperback published in August
1962 as a guide to navigation on the Broads I couldn’t
resist it! Tucked in a pocket at the front were contemporary maps of the rivers
as well as a tide table for Summer 1963 – things have certainly changed in the
60-odd years since it was written. I was intrigued to find that it referred to the
village of Ranworth as ‘Ranner’,
the same pronunciation given in a turn of the century book in my collection – but
you’ll struggle to find anyone using that pronunciation today (other than my
wife and myself).
The
Ancestry DNA test is the only one that I can whole-heartedly recommend – and
I’ve taken ALL of the tests from ALL of the major
companies. But it’s a bit more expensive than some of the competitors tests, so
it makes sense to place an order when there’s an offer on.
You
can currently make big savings at Ancestry’s UK, Canadian and Australian sites.
I’m wary of quoting end dates as I’ve been caught out by offers ending early,
but you should have at least a week to snap up a bargain. There are additional savings
to be made if you opt for AncestryDNA+Traits (which I
haven’t tried, so can’t recommend from personal experience).
Please
use the relevant link below so that you can support LostCousins with your
purchase (if it doesn’t seem to work first time, log-out from Ancestry then
click the link again):
Remember
that you don’t need to name the person who will be testing when you place your
order, so you can decide on that later. Whoever is testing, do make certain that
you not only read my DNA
Masterclass, but follow the simple, strightforward
steps set out there – otherwise you’ll be wasting your time as well as your
money!
Tip:
you don’t have to understand DNA in order to make use
of it – just so long as you remember that it can only be passed from parent to
child and follow the advice in the Masterclass you’ll do just fine.
Trees
generally have their roots in the ground and their branches in the air, but when
we draw a family tree it’s usually the other way round – our ‘roots’ are at the
top and the ‘branches’ are at the bottom. At least, that’s how I see it – but I
know that some venerable family historians talk about their ancestral lines as ‘branches’.
Lewis Carroll fans will know that Humpty Dumpty memorably said to Alice: “When
I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”,
so who am I to disagree?
Lewis
Carroll was writing at a time when railways were springing up all over the
country, but I don’t think there’s any dispute about the meaning of the term ‘branch
line’ in the context of railways. Wikipedia states that “A branch line is a
secondary railway line which branches off a more important through route,
usually a main line.”
When
it comes to family trees, one way to clarify the issue is to avoid using the word
‘branch’ altogether. The term ‘collateral line’ might not be familiar to
everyone, but it describes a line in your tree which connects people who are neither
direct ancestors of yours, nor descendants of yours – people that you might otherwise
refer to as cousins, though we generally use the term ‘blood relative’ at
LostCousins, so that when we talk about ‘cousins’ we’re normally referring to
living people.
I
rarely talk about ‘roots’ although it was the 1976 Alex Haley book and the
subsequent TV series which got many people thinking about their own ancestry, possibly
for the first time. Nor do I talk about ‘direct lines’, since in the UK there
is a very well-known insurance company called ‘Direct Line’. I generally talk about
‘ancestral lines’, though if you think of them as ‘direct lines’ that’s fine
with me.
I
recently came across this quote on a family history website:
“One of the most
common research mistakes that family historians make when building their tree
(especially for the first time) is also one of the most limiting and
potentially detrimental. We like to call it the Direct-Line Mistake, and its
influence on your research outcomes is pretty huge.”
It’s
a way of explaining that a blinkered focus on our direct ancestors makes it
more difficult to knock down ‘brick walls’, and can
lead us to make errors when identifying our direct ancestors.
Tip:
just because your ancestor didn’t make a will and neither of the witnesses at
their wedding were family members doesn’t eliminate wills
and marriage witnesses as an important source – a crucial clue to the parentage
of one of my ancestors came from the will of her sister’s husband. And finding
the signature of an ancestor as the witness to the marriage of a sibling, cousin,
niece or nephew can be just as important. Of course, it’s not always good news –
another will, again of a supposed sibling’s husband, proved that I’d found the
wrong parents for my ancestor. I still haven’t found the right baptism, but at
least I’m no longer researching the wrong line!
Reading
the previous article you might have gained the impression
that the worst sin any genealogist can commit is to ignore their collateral
lines (or, as many of us prefer to call them, branches), the lines that descend
from their direct ancestors’ siblings. But to my mind there’s something far, far
worse – and that is to ignore your direct ancestors. Your very existence
depends on them – if ANY ONE of your direct ancestors had died as an infant you
would never have been born. So if we’re going to
research our ancestors, we should surely treat all of them equally?
In
the old days – before computers, before the Internet, before women could vote
and before married women could have possessions of their own – researchers often
focused on a single line, the direct male line. Prior to the 20th
century genealogy was mostly about the inheritance of titles and land – things
that typically passed to the eldest surviving son. Most people know that Queen Elizabeth
I, one of England’s greatest monarchs, was the daughter of Henry VIII – but
many would be unable to tell you who her mother was.
Nowadays
we can do research in a day that would have taken someone from an earlier
generation a year, a decade or even a lifetime – we have so much information at
our fingertips, thanks to sites like FamilySearch, Ancestry, Findmypast, The
Genealogist and the rest. There is no reason for us to focus our attention on a
single line, or even a handful of lines – if the parish registers for most of the
counties of interest are online we can reasonably hope
to research dozens of lines in some depth, and make a start on dozens more.
The
good news for anyone who hasn’t extended their research to include all of their ancestral lines is that you’ll find it really easy
compared to the lines you’re currently working on (since on those lines you’re
up against ‘brick walls’). So easy, in fact, that you’ll wonder why you didn’t do
it before…..
Tip:
when there are more lines and more ‘brick walls’ than you can possibly crack on
your own it’s time to collaborate with your ‘lost cousins’, the experienced
family historians who not only share some of your ancestors but are researching
them.
My wife Sian has been very busy in the garden, but I've persuaded her to tell us all what she has been up to!
Autumn
is either perceived as a time to “put the garden to bed” for the winter, or as
“the start of the horticultural year”. The former usually applies to gardeners
more focused on routine maintenance and minor improvements before winter sets
in; the latter to the professionals who have been waiting over the summer until
working and planting conditions are more favourable. I believe that we can
usefully borrow from both perspectives – and that the demoralising weekly and
monthly lists of “jobs” dumped on us by the gardening shows and magazines don’t
have to spoil the majestic beauty of Autumn with their tyrannies.
However
– gardeners are improvers by and of nature, because with each cycle of the
seasons we hope to learn about and grow a healthier and lovelier garden. So now
is a good time to take stock and take advantage of the ironically labelled “end of
season” offers available from nurseries, because a plant put into the ground
now will gain a considerable head start (although If you’ve been hit by recent
heavy rain, don’t plant into waterlogged ground). The pattern of slow cooling
of the ground in autumn and slow warming in spring is similar
to sea temperatures – a spring day can be very warm, but the ground and
sea can be surprisingly cold!
We
have seen torrential downpours and dangerous flooding in several areas of the
UK recently, risking and disrupting far more in life than a few back gardens.
Sometimes we can improve drainage and/or invest in raised beds at modest
expense for smaller areas. However, there is little doubt that UK weather is
seeing more extremes of rainfall, high winds and drought – and that similar
changes are occurring across the world. I am not a big fan of expensive trends
like ripping out entire gardens to replant with “climate resistant” vegetation,
because extremes are exactly that, and the vast majority of
plants have evolved within a limited range of atmospheric and geological
conditions. Perhaps experimentation is the gentler alternative – to replace a
struggling plant with one that has a wider tolerance of conditions. And now is
a great time to evaluate whether some of our plants need moving or replacing –
while the soil is warm.
All
change in the Kitchen Garden
For
those of us who grow edible plants, it is an expensive hobby if we don’t
regularly evaluate how our crops have performed and try to improve selection
and growing methods. The best value from our kitchen garden comes from a)
selecting for the specific growing conditions in your veg patch (mine is
exposed to the prevailing winds, and is a raised bed garden on dense clay); b)
growing what you prefer to eat, because supermarkets mainly sell a limited
range of fruit and veg produced on an industrial scale under tightly managed
conditions and anything different can be expensive; and c) maximising yield, by
ensuring that the conditions for each crop are beneficial to strong
performance. Growing our own is about personal taste, careful selection, and
reducing food miles and pesticides. It’s not an easy feat to grow a wide
variety of fruit and veg in your own garden, but a really
tasty tomato or strawberry picked from a single plant might be enough of
a reward to try growing them next season.
As
autumn takes hold I’m keeping a vigilant eye on the night temperatures, to
squeeze the last few harvests of tomatoes (now stripped of their leaves and
tips) and climbing beans out of the garden before preparing beds for onions,
leeks, garlic and winter greens such as kale, sprouting broccoli and the newer
types of “floret” greens – all of which I try to keep going as perennials for
as long as possible. There are other frost-tolerant crops like broad beans, but
we have too many squirrels, field mice and voles for our elderly cat to chase
away.
I
am a repeat offender with hosepipes, having left them lying around over
previous winters only to discover them full of pinholes when the time comes to
use them again. The spray attachments are even more vulnerable to frost. Once
the pathways have been cleaned, the hosepipes will be put away in the garage. I
will then spray our outdoor garden furniture and pathways with Wet and Forget – a spray-and-leave
solution which keeps algae, slime and mould off all manner of surfaces for many
months. No jet washing or scrubbing!
Keeping
Track
Genealogists
become excellent recorders – of facts, observations, hunches, photos and much
more. Gardeners can usefully employ similar record-keeping techniques for a
variety of reasons. While genealogical facts remain visible and fixed once we discover
them, trees and plants change with the seasons; many vanish underground or
change almost beyond recognition. Plant labels go missing (or the name
disappears from the label); animals eat plants we choose and introduce seeds of
plants that we didn’t choose. Keeping a record helps us to remember that we
planted a five-foot-tall shrub rose which is yet to reach maturity… or that we
might have a fruit tree at the bottom of the garden in need of occasional
feeding and pruning. I have a collection of planting plans, lists, delivery
notes, garden notes and all manner of photos taken over the years. Like many
family historians, now all I need is an uninterrupted week or so to pull them
into some kind of order!
The
Caerhays Garden Diary
But some go further
in their gardening ambitions, and indeed the expeditions of some peoples’
ancestors led to the breeding and marketing of many garden plants which were
once rare and precious. The owner of Caerhays Castle
in Cornwall maintains a daily diary of observations in the magnificent grounds
of the castle and Burncoose Nurseries, where they specialise
in breeding and propagating acid-loving trees and shrubs – mainly magnolias
(they have the National Collection), camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas. This
diary was started by his great-great grandfather and
it has been continued every day since by his grandfather and father until he
inherited the responsibility in 2007. The Burncoose
website is a trove of information and videos about propagating and caring for
these shrubs, so I often visit it for reminders, insights and inspiration. The
original diary contains a lot of detail about how the collection was developed
from seeds brought back from the far-flung mountainous regions inhabited by the
“parents” of today’s much-loved varieties. If you have a little spare time, do take a look at this page and some
of the videos. They also have an impressive range of plants raised for sale and
an excellent mail order service. The specimen rhodos
and magnolias from Burncoose that I planted in our Essex garden years ago have grown beautifully well (see the
magnolia on the right, which flowered for the first time this year). Are they recorded somewhere? Yes – I’m just not sure
where…
Current
offers
Luckily
for us amateur gardeners, many online nurseries are having some serious “end of
season” sales where it is easy to pick up some serious bargains to plant out
before winter takes hold.
Gardening
Express currently has discounts of up to 60%, including garden furniture
bargains such as foldable egg chairs. I have mentioned their bargain roses many
times – they now have a dedicated offer on a wide range of rose varieties.
There are also some bumper sized specimens of magnolia, hydrangea, Japanese
Acer and other shrubs at very keen prices: large specimens are usually hard to
find and cost a small fortune.
Crocus
have a phenomenal range of plants and other garden supplies, and a very good
website with accurate descriptions (I often use it for research purposes).
Currently they are offering generous discounts on spends over £50, £100 and
£200. Perfect if you don’t need a discount on a particular plant,
but would appreciate an overall discount on your gardening purchases.
My
wife and I got our autumn COVID jabs and annual flu jabs on Saturday: the
sports hall of a leisure centre was repurposed for the day. 30 years ago you might have found us playing badminton in the very same
hall, so you can tell that it has a high ceiling. There was hardly anybody else
wearing a mask – not one of the dozens of members of the public or volunteers in
the room, just two of the NHS nurses. The ceiling may have been high, but the
odds of catching something were higher since the young lady who checked me in
kept sneezing: I was very glad that I was wearing my mask,
and sanitized my smartphone as soon as we got back to the car (since she
had sneezed all over it while typing in my NHS number). I don’t suppose she had
COVID, but whatever it was I didn’t want to be one of those who caught it!
Talking of masks, many
of you will have seen or heard of the Cochrane
review published in early 2023 which was interpreted by many commentators –
including some of the authors – as showing that masks and mask mandates are
useless. I don’t intend to re-open that discussion, but it’s important to recognise
that there are different types of mask, and that most
masks (including the ones handed out at doctors’ surgeries) might be cheap but
they are far less effective than respirators – a highfalutin name for a mask
that is designed to filter small airborne particles rather than simply block large
droplets. You can tell if a mask is any good by breathing in – you should sense
the fabric getting closer to your face due to the resistance of the filter. A May
2024 review published in the
journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews highlights the enormous differences
in effectiveness between different types of mask – much of the paper was beyond
me, but the charts in that section are easy to interpret.
Since
I last wrote I’ve been making more jam. The Essex Bullace (alias Shepherds Bullace)
trees which were already here when we arrived in 1997 are now getting old, but
we had the foresight to propagate them about 10 years ago, and we now have several
new trees producing bigger and less-blemished fruit than their parents. Fortunately the birds don’t seem interested in them,
possibly because the colour of the fruit doesn’t particularly stand out against
the foliage. Or it could just be because they’re quite sour, even when they’re
fully ripe – and that, of course, is why they make such delicious jam.
My
jam-making is over for this year – there are about 30 neatly-labelled jars in
the cupboard – though I’m sorely tempted to use some of our surplus tomatoes to
make more of the deliciously sweet and sour tomato jam that I essayed for the
first time this year. If the second batch is as good as the first
I’ll share the recipe with you!
Finally,
I was very sorry to hear of the death of Dame Maggie Smith, who was not only
born in the same town as me, she was quite possibly born
in the same maternity hospital (there was only one). It’s 55 years since I went
to the cinema to see her play the lead in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,
the role for which she won her first Oscar so, whilst we never met, I felt like
I’d known her for most of my life.
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2024 Peter Calver
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