What a couple of weeks it has been. Firstly, frantically preparing for our trip to Canada, when I still haven’t quite got my head round not being at sea on the Baltic Cruise. I polished off my school-girl French (never a strong point) in order to book camp sites in Quebec – only to get the replies in English! Be fair, I tried.

Before that I have my talk at Cambridgeshire Family History Society Fair to look forward to. This involved creating a Swords and Spindles display. Thanks to Jo Rutherford and her Alter Ego project, I had some great material to work with. I also have a school day in the seventeenth century coming up – a great start to their (and our) school year.

And the fame? Well, in the space of a couple of days, my Canadian presentations were mentioned on the Anglo-Celtic Connections blog, a blog post that I wrote was referred to by Dear Myrt and then this is picked up in Randy Seaver’s blog. To add to this, today I find that my cruise presentations and Coffers, Clysters book have been mention in Jennyology’s August podcast. For non-genealogy readers, who are now totally bemused and going, ‘So?’, these are some of the big names in the world (and I do mean world) of family history. What am I doing being mentioned in the same breath?

I have also been struggling to finish ‘editing’ the Braund Society journal. Why is it that sometimes ‘editing’ just means ‘write the whole darned thing yourself’? That is a little unfair but I did seem to have to do the lion’s share this time. In the course of this though I found an interesting and comparatively recent, murder accusation that did not seem to come down in family or local gossip and was all over the newspapers in 1919. Such are the excitements of an historian’s life.

Then there was the spectacular Torrington Bonfire last night. These extravaganzas take place every few years and are truly bonfires like no other. This year they were setting fire to a life sized model of Trumpton – as you do. It was amazing but also a chilling reminder of how fire would have spread through, predominantly wooden, towns in the past.

A number of family historian bloggers take part in the #52 ancestors project, where they write about one ancestor each week. I don’t have time to participate but today would have been my father’s 100^th birthday, so I thought that I would devote today’s blog post to him. This then is my #1ancestor.

My father died when I was nine. When I decided to write the story of his branch of my family, in the late 1990s, I realised that I had spent many hours tracing more distant ancestors but that I had neglected to document my grandfather and father, whom I had known. So I decided to research their lives and published their story in In the Shadow of the Iron Horse.

Although I have very good recall of my early childhood, my own memories of my father are fleeting; probably because he worked long and unsocial hours, so our time together was limited. I was able to talk to my mother but inevitably, now she is no longer here to be questioned, I realise that there is still so much I don’t know. I have some facts. Dad, Cyril Albany Braund, was the middle of the three sons of Albany and Elizabeth Ann [Bessie] Braund née Hogg. All three boys were born within three and a half years so times were hard for the family, who were not well off. My grandfather, Albany, was a cleaner and later a porter for London South Western Railway.

Dad went to infants’ school at St. Mark’s in Battersea; a one room school attached to the church. The story in the family is that Dad and his brothers often had to take it in turns to attend school, so that they could share a single pair of boots. Another story relates that Dad, who was very keen on drawing, had to swap his teddy bear in order to obtain a pencil, because the family were so poor. Drawing and painting was a lifelong hobby, as was music. He taught himself to play the piano in the pub owned by the parents of his great friend Eric John Golding. Dad was eighteen and earning before he could afford piano lessons.

At the age of eight, Dad transferred to St Peter’s School, in Plough Lane, Battersea, an enormous, seven story, building, where he remained until leaving school when he was fourteen. He had “been punctual and regular in his attendance and exemplary in his behaviour”. Like his older brother, he began working in the exciting new world of the cinema as a ‘page boy’, employed in the foyer under the supervision of the doorman. This was the ‘dream job’ for boys of the time; perhaps akin to being a computer games developer today. He joined The Majestic, Clapham in an era when silent films were giving way to the ‘talkies’, eventually working his way up to become a projectionist.

In 1939, Dad was employed by the Granada Group, who owned several London cinemas, at their Wandsworth Road branch. Thanks to a wonderful history of Granada Cinemas (Morgan, Guy Red Roses Every Night: an account of London cinemas under fire Quality Press 1948), I know many details of life in this cinema chain during the second world war. For example, on the 28^th of August 1939, the staff were read the following memo from the managers of the Granada Group. “A priority air-raid warning will be given to cinema managers when enemy aircraft are sighted over the North Sea. You will not on any account pass on this priority warning to your audience. You will merely give the warning ‘RED ROSES’ to your staff so that they will be prepared”. Today, this conjures up rather farcical images of staff rushing round whispering behind their hands and it seems unlikely that regular patrons would have remained ignorant of the password for long.

Nearly half the men Dad’s age were in uniform and with the extension of the call-up, in May 1940, he enlisted, together with Eric Golding. They joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on the 4^th of July; thus losing their independence on Independence Day. Dad became Gunner 1351715 and was described as being five foot eleven inches tall, with a thirty two inch chest, black hair, hazel eyes and a fresh complexion. I have used service records and family memorabilia to follow Dad’s second world war career, part of which was spent on Sicily and in southern Italy. He was actively involved in the entertainment of the army camp. By the spring of 1945, the end of the war was in sight and Dad was effected by the War Cabinet’s move to draft naval and air force personnel into army. On the 13^th of March 1945 he was officially discharged from 2859 squadron on enlistment in the army. His air force report read, “A very good type Airman though not a good J.N.C.O. He could be well employed in his civilian trade. General Conduct excellent.”

In the spring of 1945, he met my mother and despite the RAF report, he spent time as a gunnery instructor in Ireland. Once the war was over, Dad remained in the army, as a sergeant with the Department of National Service Entertainment, resuming his civilian trade as a cinema projectionist. He returned to Naples and helped to set up a cinema at Pomigliano. Dad was formally transferred to the army reserve on the 23^rd of August 1946, with effect from the 6^th of November. His reference reads “This N.C.O. has proved himself a capable worker and given consistently good service in the Cinema Division. He is a qualified projectionist and is keen hardworking and reliable. An efficient and valued N.C.O.”.

He went back to his work as a projectionist and my parents married in 1947. During the first months of their marriage, they lived with their respective parents, staying with each other only on Dad’s days off. In June 1948 they found a flat, 65 Mallinson Road, just round the corner from Cyril’s family. During the first years of their marriage my parents often went on outings and holidays with Eric Golding and his wife, Eileen. In 1951, this time with mum’s school friend Joyce Chaplin and her husband Peter, they took their first holiday on the Isle of Wight. They stayed at Norton Grange holiday camp in Yarmouth where, fifty years later, their granddaughters performed regularly with the Shanklin Town Brass Band.

Dad was never really satisfied with his working life and changed jobs fairly frequently to try to find something more congenial. One of my particular memories is of being aware of how much he hated his short spell of employment at Cinerama cinemas. His dream had been to set up his own business with Eric Golding but this never transpired. He left for work on the first day of the school holidays in 1965 and died of a heart attack on his journey.

So I have managed to document quite a few facts. When my mother died, I found ‘Forces War Record’, recorded for her by my father in 1946. I had no real recollection of how he sounded. I was able to get this recording put on to disc, just before it deteriorated beyond saving. He was sending my mother birthday greetings. He had got the date wrong but they hadn’t know each other long at this point! I was amazed to hear that his Battersea roots were not noticeable in his accent, which was distinctly BBC – probably a legacy of his career as a cinema projectionist – all those clipped tones of the film stars of the 1930s! So I have his voice.

What I strive to recapture however is some sense of his personality. I know he always felt inadequate in the shadow of mum’s more middle class family and certainly was of the opinion that he had to make up for her ‘marrying beneath her’. I do have a few diaries of the 1960s, which record notes of appointments and events. Just occasionally Dad’s personality shines through the bald statements of fact in these diaries. One such entry is “Beat Bob at Chess!!”, accompanied by a doodle of a flag. Family pets also get a mention in the diaries, for example, the birth of the family dog, Sparky. Even the death of the remarkably long-lived hamster, Nora, is recorded, in the same way as the many deaths of family members, with her name surrounded by a black box. I do have the chance to learn more, as I inherited all Dad’s letters to mum, written whilst they were apart in 1945 and 1946. So far, I have only had time to skim through these but I have promised myself I will study them in detail to try to recapture more of the essence of the man behind the facts that I have gleaned.

More details of Dad’s life and that of his father, can be found in my book In the Shadow of the Iron Horse which is available from me.

Ok, so I am almost as far away from Scotland as I could be, given that I am in the UK. Nonetheless I have taken quite an interest in the history-making Scottish independence referendum; fuelled perhaps by my recent visit to Scotland. Media of all kinds have brought this campaign to a world-wide audience and anyone who considered this issue realised that the impact of the result, whatever the result might have been, would stretch way beyond Scotland itself.

Of course being an historian, especially one with an interest in the seventeenth century, I can’t help wondering how the bringing together of England and Scotland might have affected our ancestors. It was of course a two stage process. The accession of James I/VI in 1603 created the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland; from then on we shared a monarch, almost by default. On that occasion it was England who were reluctant for their parliament to be subsumed in that of Scotland, rather than vice versa. Had, as King James no doubt expected, the union of the crowns been also an immediate union of parliaments, would Edinburgh rather than London have been the seat of the united government?

Despite abortive attempts during the seventeenth century (1606, 1610, 1667 after the Restoration and 1689 under William and Mary), it was to be a century down the line before the parliaments of the two countries were united. An Act for a Union of the Two Kingdoms of England and Scotland was finally passed in 1706 and came into effect on 1 May the following year. This was in part prompted by the potential constitutional crisis that was on the horizon, as a less then healthy Queen Anne, who had singularly failed to provide an unequivocal heir, neared the end of her life. In 1706 the decision was in the hands of a few. In 2014 a huge majority of the population of Scotland, male and female, of all income brackets had their say.

View of the monument to William Wallace, hero of an earlier attempt at Scottish independence

I think of the ancestors that I can name, who would have been alive at the time. A young John Braund, living in Devon (wish I knew where). His future wife Florence (I am not even sure of her surname). The Madicks and the Elfords, also of Devon and the Oughs of Cornwall. How would the new regime have affected them? Well I strongly suspect that they were blissfully unaware of what was going on. It may have been days before they were aware of a change of monarch, let alone a change of regime. Would the Act of Union eventually have been announced from the pulpit or on a news sheet? John Braund and Peter Elford may have been able to read, the latter was an overseer of the poor but I think it is unlikely that they had much understanding of the workings of parliament, united or otherwise. I doubt that any of my ancestors had the vote until 1832 at the earliest.

I do also have ancestors from Northumberland. I don’t know the names of those who lived there in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century but they are every bit as much my ancestors as those who I can name. I feel that this may have had more of an impact on their lives. To me, putting our ancestors in the context of the national events of their time is an integral part of being a family historian. So how did the Union of the Crowns or Parliaments effect my ancestors? I don’t know but it is right that those questions should be asked.

Regular readers will know that I am being ably assisted by a group of lovely ladies who are writing about their experiences of the period 1946-1969. This month’s topic is schooling and as I can’t expect them to do something that I wouldn’t do myself, I have been waxing lyrical about ‘the best days of my life’. This has been made easier by membership of Facebook groups for my cohorts at both primary and secondary school. One of my lasting primary school memories was of being chosen to read part of the commentary for a film that we were making about our school and its surroundings. My portion was about the local lollipop man and the resulting 35mm film was being sent to a school in New Zealand. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to trace the film fifty one years later. None of my contemporaries recalled this at all and I began to think I had imagined it. In any case New Zealand has many school and I had no idea which one.

Then, as part of my writing, I raided the souvenirs’ box. Something that I had retained was a letter to parents from the headmaster, written three years after the film was made. Amongst other things, it referred to Mr Head who had taught at my school for a year in 1961 before returning to New Zealand. Now I at least had a teacher’s name. It also mentioned that Mr Head was then in the Pacific Island of Niue. Googling ‘Mr Head teacher New Zealand’ and the like is not awfully successful as up come all the head teachers in the world, or at least in New Zealand. Niue however is a different matter and it turned out that Mr Head was not only a teacher but an active campaigner against landmines and had been awarded for his work. Wikipedia even provided me with a list of schools at which he’d served, of which there were a great many. Unfortunately no dates were mentioned and I needed to know where he was in 1963. None of the schools’ websites had a ‘past staff’ section or indeed any kind of ‘history of the school’ page. I was close but not close enough.

By this time I had identified some of Mr Head’s descendants on Facebook but I was unable to send them a message as they weren’t my friends. Next I sent out a plea to family historian friends in New Zealand. Amongst other information, one was able to use the New Zealand equivalent of ‘Friends Reunited’ and find that a profile had been created for the late Mr Head. This time I was able to identify the appropriate school. It just shows where the right contacts and a little detective work can get you. I would like to be able to say that a copy of the film is now on its way to me but things aren’t that good. I have used the school’s website to send a message asking if they have a reel of 35mm film lurking in the back of a cupboard. No response so far but maybe it will depend on whether on not the person who sees the message is history minded. Watch this space.

And on the subject of school I am now off to a school reunion. I am going via a talk about seventeenth century witchcraft (best not to enquire) at The Society of Genealogist. More of this later.