Great-grandpa and the Institution of Civil Engineers

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Barbara Selby

Earlier in June my professional body, the Institution of Civil Engineers, announced that its membership records dating back to 1820 and up to 1930 had been launched on the Ancestry website.

As well as featuring the most famous civil engineers of the pas,t such as Brunel and, Rennie, the records include my great grandfather, Alfred John Liversedge.  The actual record is of his proposal for membership, the recommendation by members who knew him professionally and personally that he was worthy of membership.

Alfred John Liversedge's proposal for membership of the Institution of Civil Engineers

Alfred John Liversedge’s proposal for membership of the Institution of Civil Engineers

His career to date, 1897, is set out by his main proposer and then supported by six others corporate members.   I have already seen this record and his other membership records in the archives of the Institution.  I have also been into the library and had the satisfaction of asking for his book being probably the first person in many years to open it.

Alfred John Liversedge

Alfred John Liversedge

 

 

 

 

In all his years of associate membership my great grandfather never became a fully chartered engineer.  I have often wondered what he would think of me.  Over 30 years ago I became a chartered civil engineer, a full member of his institution.  Certainly I had advantages that he lacked; a university degree in Civil Engineering whereas he attended commercial school and then went straight into an apprenticeship.  Would he proud that I had followed in his footsteps or would he be scandalised that a woman had succeeded in entering those hallowed halls as an equal to the male members?  I am sure he would have thought that I had certainly had a far easier path than his and I would have agreed with him.  However I hope that if I succeed in putting on an exhibition in celebration of his career in the institution headquarters and in making his contribution to the modern age better known he will forgive me.

Barbara

Categories: The Research Process | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Continuing the Rules for Writing

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Nicola Stevens

Having ended my last blog[i] on Elif Shafak’s the fifth rule that encourages us writers not to be worried by creeping depression – its just one of those ‘things’ – I thought spirits needed to be lifted.

Rule 10 states there is no such thing as writer’s block.   If you ever run out of inspiration take a break.   Being of Turkish origin Shafak suggests going to Istanbul to spend a few days in the chaos of the city.  With the current demonstrations and unrest there it was probably not a good idea.  But she is right that to take your self somewhere different, “observing, listening, feeding the seagulls feeling shrunken and expanded” is a reviving experience.   A change is as good as a rest.

Back to Rule 6; have no mercy on yourself.  Cut. Destroy. Revise.  But not so much Shafak writes, that you are merciless on your characters in Rule 7.   Our job, as writers, is not judging them but to help the reader understand and empathise with them.  They can judge your characters.

If – well I should say when you have lunch with your agent or publisher NEVER talk about your current writing project.  Rule 8 advises ‘take a sip of wine and utter a few words, muffled enough not to give any clues but interesting enough to arouse their curiosity without disturbing the mystical forces of the universe’.   I am not sure I completely confident about this move – but I will think of something and practice in front of the mirror just in case.

Rule 9 encourages us to forget the readers, the critics – in fact forget everyone – returning to the sentiment of solitude in Rule 1, forget there is a world outside.   Your life is your characters’ lives and their world.

There is one more rule – the last, but I will post that next time on 27th June.

 

Nicola Stevens

[i] Rules for Writing on 4th June – WritingFamilyHistory.com

Categories: The Writing Process | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

‘From the City, from the Plough’ by Alexander Baron

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Susie Gutch

D-Day was 69 years ago this week, but that was only the start of some of the most bitter fighting of the war as the Allies struggled to retake France. This  campaign is the subject of the novel by Baron. Born Joseph Alexander Bernstein in 1917, his father was a Jewish refugee from Russia who had come to London in 1913. The family lived in Bethnal Green.

Growing up, Baron was allied to the Young Communist League, but when he was called up he was pleased to be part of an army fighting Fascism. Due to poor eyesight, he was not allowed to join the infantry nor was he able to become an officer because of his political beliefs. Instead he was drafted into the pioneer corps, supporting front-line troops. He took part in the assault landings in Sicily in 1943 and went on to Italy before returning to the UK in time to participate in the D-Day landings. His experiences on the battlefield led him to alter his beliefs, to change from being active politically and instead to start his career as a writer.

He survived the war physically unharmed, but having suffered what was in effect a nervous

From the City, From the Plough, By Alexander Baron

From the City, From the Plough, By Alexander Baron

breakdown. It took him some time to recover. Returning to London, he supported himself by writing reviews and began work on the book that would earn him worldwide recognition. ‘From the City, from the Plough’, published in 1948  by Jonathan Cape, was an instant success. The novel tells the story of a fictional infantry battalion, following them through their final months of training, the assault on the D-Day beaches and the ensuing battles through Normandy. It is a book about the stark reality of war – the soldiers are not idealised. People do not always behave heroically, death is not glamorised, which is why it is convincing as well as moving. The horrific events unfold in a language that is clear and unemotional, though not lacking in sympathy for the pity and waste of war.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in this stage of the campaign and, and who wishes to gain an understanding of the day-to-day experience of war from the point of view of the ordinary soldiers who were involved.

Susie

Categories: The Research Process | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Cheated of his inheritance?

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Margaret McAlpine

My mother maintained a lifelong sense of grievance that her husband, David Lockwood Burnley, had been deprived of a rightful inheritance from a maiden great aunt by a scheming outsider.  This caught our interest as children – goodness, we might have been rich!

So, it has been satisfying to search for the truth, or rather such facts as are in the public domain.  My father’s great aunt, Emma Blanche Burnley, died suddenly in 1941, in Llanfarfechan, North Wales

David Lockwood Burnley

David Lockwood Burnley

and left her small estate valued at £700 to her older sister, Gertrude Elizabeth.  One Robin Arden Hayes, a lecturer in engineering at Trinity Hall, Cambridge was her executor.  Elizabeth died two years later in Bangor, in 1943, age 70.  She left my father £100 and the rest of her £1300 estate to her cousin Robin Hayes, in a Will of only a few lines, with no clue as to her reasons.  I am certain he was not a first cousin but have been unable to trace how they might have been related.  My mother maintained he wheedled his way into the old lady’s affections.  Possibly he was an assiduous visitor, which my father most certainly was not.  At a present day value of about £40,000 the inheritance was not a large sum but a feeling of grievance might be justified in comparison with the dutiful dispositions made by all the other spinsters in the family throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

On the other hand there was much to disapprove of in David’s feckless character and recent marriage beneath him, so to speak.  So I am well aware that there may be another side to this story.  However, all those directly involved took their reasons with them to the grave.   Robin Hayes was a bachelor, but had relatives and if any of them know anything further I would be delighted to hear from them.

 

Margaret

Categories: Men of God, and of Commerce | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

A 19th Century Questionnaire

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Barbara Selby

One of the hardest things I’ve found when trying to write my family history is imaging their thoughts; lucky are those who have decades of letter and diaries to refer to, I have largely anonymous photographs which do not give me a window to the soul.  But recently I acquired a book that may help me understand some of their hopes and fears and even what they looked for in a spouse.

This book looks like an exercise book but contains printed questionnaires that were filled in by both men and women in

A postcard from Rouen

A postcard from Rouen

Rouen  between 1872 and 1876, possibly based at the British Consulate.  About half are in English with the rest in fairly easily translatable French.  Some have taken the exercise seriously whereas others have had fun.  So I can see that while Chas’ favourite qualities in a woman are “a sweet temper and cultivated mind; withal obedience”, H. Hyde looked for “silence” and Marcel favoured “l’amour, la grace et la douceur”.  Meanwhile women asked that men have “courage, fidelity” or “sobriety and firmness” or even “moral courage and amiability”.

As for leisure time Maggie’s favourite occupations are “needlework, skating, flirting” whilst W.J.C. prefers “sleeping”, Robert “fishing” and Frank opts for “smoking and enjoying music and singing”.

Their favourite authors and poets reflect the stars of the times; some are familiar to us today but others have largely faded.  Thus we range from Rousseau, Thackeray, Dickens and Walter Scott to Mrs Riddell, Ainsworth and Mrs Henry Wood.

Heroes and heroines summon up a very different world as Florence Nightingale, Wellington, Napoleon and Grace Darling feature in the list of those from “real life” and John Halifax, Sam Weller, Shirley, Sweeny Todd and Little Nell from “fiction”.

The lists of favourite food and drink reveal both homesickness and a more cosmopolitan taste from living in France.  So we have “grouse and port wine”, “bulls’ eyes”, “roast beef and good tea”, “les gateaux et le Malaga”, “cold roast beef and champagne”, “oysters and brandy and soda”, and “beef olives and stout”.

Some of the best answers are in response to “for what fault have you the most tolerance?”  The “faults” include “jealousy”, “refusing to give up your latch key”, “a bad shot” and “a lady declining to state her age”.

And finally that stand-by of even the Guardian’s Saturday questionnaire “what is your present state of mind?”  For this the majority response is “confused” or “l’indecision”, just as it often is today.

Barbara

Categories: Journeys, The Research Process | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Rules for Writing – Well, helpful thoughts anyway.

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Nicola Stevens

For me, now the Hay festival has over for another year, the weekend papers’s cultural and review sections become a little less interesting as the inspirational nuggets from writers disappear.   But this year I have saved some of these bon motes to pin on the door of my fridge/freezer to comfort me before I delve into its depths searching for sweet calorific comforts of compensation.

Although born in Strasbourg, Elif Safak is heralded as a Turkish writer[i].   In her eleven listed  Rules of Writing[ii] she urges, “authors to write the book they want to read and to cut their work mercilessly.”   Well you have to be writing something to cut anything, so here follows the first five of her rules – they gave me some comfort.

1. Writing is a tribute to solitude.  It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.   Writers might enjoy a good gossip or a crazy party once in a while, but the act of writing and the nexus of our lives is pure solitude.

2. The only way to learn writing is by writing.  Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process.  Work is 80 per cent.  The remaining 8 per cent is ‘luck’ or ‘zeitgeist’ – in short, things that are not in our hands.

3. Read.  Read a lot.  But do not solely read the same writers.  If possible, read as widely, irrationally.  Fiction cannot be reduced to a function.

4. Write the book you’d love to read.   If you enjoy what you are writing (which doesn’t mean you won’t suffer while writing it) chances are people will feel the same way while reading it.   If there is not love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

5. Don’t be afraid of depression.  It is part and parcel of the journey.  But be careful not to romanticise depression.  Treat it as a free-spirited unreliable friend who comes and goes as she likes.

I realise that I do miss the company of people – and cats, but I like Shafak’s encouragement to read widely.   I think I will pull out one of my books that gives diagrams to follow and plot a fictional story.  I wonder how the information I know about the van Aken (Heacken) brothers will fill in to such formulas?   Can’t think why I try it before now.

Nicola Stevens

[i] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/elif-shafak-fear-is-a-very-dangerous-thing-8571991.html

[ii] The Daily Telegraph, 25th May 2013, Review Section  R29   http://www.pressdisplay.com/staging/timesonline/viewer.aspx

Categories: The Writing Process | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Seventy years ago

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Susie Gutch

Peggy would never forget the day in May 1943 when she was sitting in the garden at Mardens , the house near Guildford where she was living as a paying guest. Pat, just six months old, was on her knee. There was a knock at the front door and then one of her fellow lodgers appeared, holding a telegram. ‘It’s for  you, Peggy,’ she said, ‘but it can’t be important as they don’t want a reply’. Peggy took the envelope. The message only took a few seconds to read, a few seconds to change her life for ever.  It told her that Major M.A.T.Burke was missing in action, believed killed.

She remembers almost dropping her baby in shock, and with a scream running down the garden trying to escape the news and the dreadful certainty that she would never again see the man she loved most in the world.

Some time later she heard what had happened to her husband. He was with the Reconnaissance corps, seconded to the Royal West Kent regiment, involved in the bitterly fought North African campaign. He was in charge of the crew of a light armoured car, trying to find out enemy positions near Medjez-el-bab in Tunisia. Their armoured car came under attack from a German Tiger tank, which had spotted them before they could get away. Some of Mike’s crew managed to get out of the vehicle and ran to take cover nearby. They were the lucky ones. The armoured car took a direct hit and exploded. No-one inside had a chance, and it was over in seconds. Later, the survivors managed to recover some of the bodies and arrange a burial in the military cemetery at Massicault, now a Commonwealth War grave site.

Peggy know nothing of this at the time, but she had somehow to get used to the idea that Mike was dead , that he was never coming home and that she was on her own with her baby son. Until that day, her life had been relatively untouched by the war apart from the daily difficulties of finding food and clothes due to rationing, the lack of petrol and the crowded trains. The corner of Surrey where she lived was peaceful, far enough away from

Peggy and Michael's engagement photo 1940

Peggy and Michael’s engagement photo 1940

London not to be affected by air-raids. But now the war had come to her in the cruellest way, and she had few resources to face the challenges ahead. In an instant her youthful happiness and her new-formed family life was torn from her and she had somehow to find the strength to carry on alone. She was only 23 – the same age as Michael, and they had been married for just eighteen months.

If you look up the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on the web, you will find Massicault War Cemetery in Tunisia where 1446 casualties are commemorated. Nearly all are young men in their twenties. This is just one of about 23000 cemeteries or memorials maintained by the C.W.G.C. worldwide.

Susie

Categories: Legacies, Strong Women | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

New Life in Life Writing: Part 3 – Questions from the Audience

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Annie Hedington

Notes from a discussion, held at Senate House, 15 May 2013

Chair: Max Saunders: Professor of English at Kings College; Co-Director of the Centre for Life Writing Research.

Michael Holroyd: CV on literature.britishcouncil.org.

Sarah Bakewell: her first biography:- How to live: a Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty answers.

Wendy Moffat: American, Professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania.

*****

Part 3 - Questions from the audience

1) How had the panellists found their writer’s “voice” for their works?

Michael Holroyd said he had always read his own work out loud to himself.   The other panellists agreed they couldn’t do better than that.

2) How do you answer when asked, but why are you writing about him/her/them?

Wendy Moffat said she pointed out that some lives have been privileged over others by history, but biography can accept the challenge of discovering the fascinating lives of the unprivileged or forgotten.

Holroyd said he pointed to novels – no-one knows a novel’s characters until the novel is published.

Max  Saunders reckoned it’s virtually impossible to get mainstream publishers interested in in “unknown” lives now.

Sarah Bakewell said “you accept the challenge by discovering for yourself what’s interesting about your subject and telling the story, even if the reaction is discouraging.”

 

Categories: The Research Process, The Writing Process | 1 Comment

A Bronte connection?

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Margaret McAlpine

Throughout the 19th century my Burnley ancestors lived at Pollard Hall, Gomersal, which meant they were next door neighbours of the Taylor family at the Red House there.   Charlotte Bronte was a frequent visitor to the Red House, in the 1830s, to see her school friend Mary Taylor.  She fictionalised the Red House as Briarmans and Mary’s father as the benevolent landowner, Hiram Yorke in her novel Shirley, published in 1849.   Mary Taylor remembered family discussions of violent dissent and radicalism, with tirades against despotic aristocracy and mercenary priesthood.  Charlotte, from an Anglican background was far from shocked and considered  …the society of the Taylors’ …  one of the most rousing pleasures I have ever known’.

Joshua Taylor, Mary’s father, was born in 1766 and came from a respected but unconventional Yorkshire textile family.  His father John had the preacher John Wesley to stay a number of times.  Joshua was a fierce radical in religion and politics and instilled in his six children independence of thought and action, as well as freedom of expression.  Educated, cultured and strongly cosmopolitan, he exercised a major influence on his family. They often travelled in Europe, having business connections there with the export of cloth, as well as relatives in Brussels.

Might my ancestors have met Charlotte Bronte before she became a famous author?  The Burnley and Taylor families were neighbours, but as both houses had large grounds they were set apart.

The Red House, Gomersal

The Red House, Gomersal

Although the Taylor and Burnley families were merchants, manufacturers and religious dissenters, in other ways they were very different.  My ancestors were plainer in style, fervent evangelicals and in politics moderate reformist Whig supporters, in keeping with their class.  Neither family would have found the other congenial company.  I very much doubt that the Burnley family would have read any of the Bronte sisters’ novels either.  The Calvinists around Batley and Dewsbury were very critical of all the Bronte sisters’ books which they considered coarse and degrading for the cruel and wilful behaviour they depicted – Jane Eyre was known as a ‘naughty book’ according to Charlotte’s biographer, Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell.

Margaret

Categories: Men of God, and of Commerce | Tags: , | 1 Comment

Whither Whitsun?

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Diana Devlin

This year Whit Sunday fell on 18 May.  When I was a child, half term in the Summer Term was Whit Week, but it only occurred to me the other day that this is no longer the case.  Since 1971, we have had the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday in May, and most schools take the rest of that week off.  Whitsun seems to have been forgotten.

Since Norman times, Whitsun was the English word for the festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s disciples:

Tongues of fire

Tongues of fire

 

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.(The Acts, Chapter 2 vv 2-4) 

Whitsun Morris Dancers

Whitsun Morris Dancers

 

From at least medieval times, Whitsuntide was a holiday for agricultural workers, and there were many traditional celebrations, such as pageants, fairs and morris dancing.

There are at least two Shakespearean references to the festival. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia has disguised herself as a boy to follow her lover Proteus to Milan.  There, as Proteus’s  ‘page’, she has to deliver to his new love, Silvia, a ring which she herself gave him.  In the ensuing dialogue, she does not reveal herself but claims to know the unhappy ‘Julia’ well:

Silvia: How tall was she?

Julia: About my stature: for, at Pentecost,

When all our pageants of delight were played,

Our youth got me to play the woman’s part,

And I was trimm’d in Madam Julia’s gown;

Which served me as fit, by all men’s judgments,

As if the garment had been made for me.

She claims that ‘Julia’ played the part of Ariadne, betrayed by Theseus.  In The Winter’s Tale, the reference seems happier, but the scene will end in turmoil.  Perdita, the shepherd’s daughter, does not know she is really a princess, but has to dress up like the goddess Flora to be hostess of the sheep-shearing feast:

Perdita: Methinks I play as I have seen them do

In Whitsun pastorals.

In both scenes, Shakespeare uses customs typical of Whitsuntide to present a piece of play-acting that, unbeknownst to most or all of the characters, is nearer truth than fiction.

 

Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 1 Comment