I’ve voted Labour all my life, except for a period after Tony Blair led us into war on Iraq, and even then, could not have voted Conservative. We watched the news as a family when I was young, and I have a clear memory of the Labour politicians of my youth: Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, Dennis Healey (I bumped into him once on Charing Cross Road and he gave me a lovely twinkly smile from beneath those bushy eyebrows). They were the bright young things when Clem Attlee was Prime Minister, and although I knew his name, I was sadly unaware of the extent of this man’s huge contribution to the quality of life for British people over the last 70 years. After reading Francis Beckett’s beautifully written and accessible biography of the man, I feel better informed.

Clem Attlee was a small, quiet man, from a middle-class background. He was educated at Haileybury, a boarding school, and Oxford,  following his father into a law practice. Had it not been for some voluntary work  he undertook in the East End of London, this ex-Major, who saw active service in the First World War (he was the last but one soldier to leave Gallipoli when it was evacuated), might have lived an altogether different life.

One evening in 1906, Attlee went along with his brother on a visit to a youth club in Durham Road, Stepney. Haileybury House had been built by old boys of their former school who had decided, in 1890, to do something to help clergy active in the working-class areas of the big cities. One of the growing influences leading to this work was a pamphlet published by the Revd Andrew Mearns in 1883 - The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor.

A shy young man, Attlee found the evening uncomfortable, but he learned enough to want to come again - the start of a process which opened his eyes to the appalling conditions suffered by those less fortunate than the prosperous Edwardian middle and upper classes, and the real meaning of poverty. His involvement increased from that night on - he felt for the first time in his life he was doing something with a purpose. He realised, as Andrew Mearns had written, that only large-scale action by the state could have any serious impact - unless society was organised so as to eliminate it, the wretchedness he saw around him would continue for ever.

By 1907, Attlee was a socialist, and he began his political career as a member of the Stepney branch of the Independent Labour Party. He very quickly took on the onerous and painstaking duties of branch secretary, giving his time and skills unstintingly. His closeness and work with the ordinary East End people and orderly upward progress through the rank and file of the local Labour group gave him an invaluable insight into their real problems, aims and ambitions. As Beckett relates:

'He took on all the humble, time-consuming jobs which have to be done, and which ambitious politicians generally consider are for lesser mortals, because, like Jim Callaghan, Clem Attlee liked all that. He cut up loaves to feed dockers'  children during the 1911 dock strike, and stood at the bottom of Petticoat Lane with his brother Tom holding collecting boxes during the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union strike in 1913. He carried the Stepney Independent Labour Party branch banner on demonstrations through Central London. He went to court to plead mitigation when a half-starving boy was caught thieving.'

Beckett’s book outlines the life of a man who dedicated himself to working, for 16 hours a day for 45 years or so, for the good of the many, not the few. He became Mayor of Stepney, then its MP in 1922, a junior minister in Labour governments in the 20s and 30s, and party leader in 1935.

Attlee's commitment to realising his ambition of bringing about fundamental changes for the working-classes achieved, with his fellow Labour party workers, the radical creation of what we benefit from today. Most people of my generation (born in the 1950s) and those since have no knowledge or experience of what life was like before the welfare state - we’ve taken it for granted.

He was in many ways, a very unusual man. He led a quiet and modest home life, dedicated to his wife and children, never ‘taking work home’ to his family. He liked mending things in his spare time. He never read the papers or watched television. He worked steadily towards his aims, not swayed by the opinion of others. He was not a pacifist, though his older brother Tom was a conscientious objector, but  had been appalled by the waste of life he witnessed in the Great War, and was a passionate supporter of the League of Nations and later the United Nations. His early experience of social work contributed to his writing The Social Worker,and  teaching the subject at the LSE. He had very definite views about charity: he thought that if a rich man wanted to help the poor, he should pay his taxes willingly, not dole out money at whim. He wrote:

Charity ‘tends to make the charitable think that he has done his duty by giving away some trifling sum, his conscience is put to sleep and he takes no trouble to consider the social problem any further’. 

Attlee served in Churchill's coalition government as Deputy Prime Minister during the Second World War, effectively running the country while Churchill concentrated on the business of fighting the war. Attlee was a staunch patriot, but once the war was over, he had an iron resolve to ensure that, unlike the aftermath of the First World War, when so many were thrown onto the streets, this time the opportunity to effect real change in the social welfare of the majority of the British people would not be lost.  After the war, Attlee led the most influential reforming government of the last century, implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report, establishing the NHS and nationalising a fifth of the UK economy including the coal mining and steel industries.

There are many similarities between Clem Attlee and Jeremy Corbyn - both suffered/suffer at the hands of the media - in Attlee's case, the rich owners of large-circulation newspapers. Both had to contend with members of their own party complaining that they weren't  leadership material, and regularly plotting to replace them. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes!

I believe that if Clem Attlee was alive today, he would be horrified at the way his life's work has been steadily undermined in the intervening years, a process begun during the Margaret Thatcher years, of course, and now being greatly accelerated.

If you need just one out of many reference points from a welter of current revelations about how the welfare state and NHS are being relentlessly deconstructed, please read this article about the Naylor report, about which many of us had been ignorant until this week!

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/naylor-report-tory-nhs-privatisation-healthcare-flog-off-conservatives-theresa-may-election-2017-a7766326.html    

​If you have more time available, and I can promise you, it will be very worthwhile reading it, I highly recommend you read Francis Beckett's book. Towards the end of it, there is a little story of an incident, near the end of Attlee's life, which illustrates his modesty and humility. In 1912, the London School of Economics initiated took over a small School of Sociology, and Attlee was appointed its very first lecturer. In 1962:

'The LSE's Social Administration Department, where he had once taught, sent round a standard invitation to all of its former staff to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The organisers thought that the early staff members had died, but just as the platform was settling down in the Shaw Library, someone noticed a small, elderly man arriving inconspicuously and taking a seat at the back. Bernard Crick remembers: 'One of the platform party ran to the back in embarrassment to apologise and try to persuade him to come up to the front. He refused, or rather demurred. The audience, as he was recognised, rose to its feet and applauded. Only then would he join the platform. Afterwards they asked when his car was coming. "No car, came from Kings Cross on the 68 bus. A very reliable route." They had great difficulty persuading him to take a lift back.'

When I saw that Professor Iain Hutchison was giving a talk on his work with Saving Faces at Hall Place (where there was also an exhibition on the related subject of Faces of the Great War) I realised that to go and hear him would mean taking a day off work. It was well worth it.

Professor Hutchison specialises in diseases and injuries affecting the face. He is based at the historic St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the Royal London Hospital.  He spoke of  the relationship between art and medicine, mentioning Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo amongst artists who made representations of the anatomy of the human body, and also spoke of William Hogarth, whose murals of The Pool of Bethesda can be seen in the Great Hall at Bart’s Hospital.

The professor related some of the history of surgeons who worked on restoring faces ravaged by injury or disease, including:

• Harold Gillies, who worked on pioneering  plastic surgery in the First World War 
• Italian surgeon Tanzini,who  invented a technique of using  a pedicled flap of skin and underlying latissimus dorsi muscle. The development of his work was held back for some decades after being somewhat denigrated by Gillies, but his ideas are now very influential.
• Dr Varaztad Kazanjian, a refugee from the Armenian genocide, and Professor of Dentistry, who worked on the front line in WW1, was knighted, studied medicine at Harvard, and became a founding father of plastic and reconstructive surgery in the USA

Professor Hutchison was brought up by two refugees: his mother and aunt, both Viennese Jewish doctors whose father was also a doctor. They fled from the Nazis in the late 1930s, were taken in by Quakers, and worked at the beginning of the Second World War as chambermaids, initially in Tunbridge Wells. After the war they set up as GPs in the Midlands.  When the Professor’s mother, Dr. Martha Redlich, died, he set up a charity in her name, initially used to purchase occasional pieces of surgical equipment. However, by 1995 he decided to use her legacy to create something  in the spirit of the work done by Harold Gillies and Henry Tonks. In 1998 he established the Saving Faces Art Project, employing Mark Gilbert as artist-in-residence within his surgical department.

Their shared aim was to help bring about acceptance of changed faces not only by patients themselves, but also by members of the public. The belief that people could find a painting of such damaged faces much less shocking than photographs, was borne out by members of our audience, who looked away from coloured photographs projected onto a screen in front of us. Mark Gilbert’s practice, which included taking a selection of photographs of operations, was also to ask patients if they would be willing to sit for portraits before and after their operations.  The sitters, Professor Hutchison told us, were proud of these paintings, and wanted them shown to others. They must have had a profound effect on visitors to a travelling exhibition of 100 portraits. One person wrote 6 pages of comment in the visitors’ book, and another wrote  “Testino showed the beautiful people, but these are the really beautiful people”. 
 
The professor told us that  in his experience, returning to normal life is what people want. The late actress Sheila Gish returned to the stage in The Seagull just six weeks after surgery, having lost bones of her face and an eye to melanoma. Courage indeed.

Professor Hutchison wants to raise four x  £5m to endow four professors  to lead the Centre’s work into the future. Saving Faces will control (and protect) their funding, not the hospital. JK Rowling has already promised to match £1m donation if it can be raised. One of the fellowships will, he hopes, be named for Alan Rickman, who was a patron.

If any readers of this blog can help with crowdfunding, he would be glad to hear from them.

Postscript:
Interestingly, Hall Place was the birthplace of another surgeon, Julius Jeffreys, who may well, I like to think, have crossed paths with my great-great-grandparents, John Howard Wakefield and his wife Maria Suffolk.

Related Links:

Saving Faces
www.savingfaces.co.uk

Hogarth Murals at Barts
www.bartsgreathall.com/index.php/the-great-hall/the-hogarth-murals

​Surgeon Julius Jeffreys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Jeffreys

John Howard Wakefield & Maria Suffolk
http://www.judithjohnson.co.uk/blog/the-indian-princess

Readers of this blog and my book will know that I have an abiding interest in the lives of those who fought in the Great War. One particular aspect which has always aroused my deep compassion is the fate of those who survived, but were badly disfigured. Some lived as recluses for the rest of their lives, and others braved the looks of horror they encountered when venturing out in public.

There is a historic relationship between those injured and the skill, not only of surgical teams, but of artists too. The German artist Otto Dix was one of those who portrayed the unpalatable face of war that, while disturbing, allows us to look at an image which, in a photograph, is so much starker.

I have a copy of Ernst Friedrich's 1924 anti-war book Krieg dem Kriege. I have actually stuck a post-it note on the fly-leaf, inscribed 'Warning! Contains very graphic images', and I keep it on a high shelf as I would not want little ones to come across it while exploring our bookshelves. The photographs are shocking. It was Friedrich’s aim to bring to readers' attention the true cost of war. The only other place I’ve seen images like this is at the tatty profit-making private exhibition next to a cafe  near Ypres, behind which is a wood including what is  claimed to be  an original trench system. It has made a fortune for its owners, and is abhorred by the local museums, although some teachers leading trips prefer it, feeling it shows pupils something the others have sanitised.

I recently visited the Faces of the Great War exhibition at Hall Place in Bexley, Kent (and heard there a talk on a related subject: blog to follow).  The exhibition told the story of the pioneers of plastic surgery in Britain from the point of view of the medical staff led by New-Zealand born surgeon Harold Gillies and their patients, based at the Queen Mary Military Hospital in Sidcup, which opened in 1917. Gillies, who moved here from the Cambridge Military Hospital , was inspired by the pioneering skin graft French surgeon Hippolyte Morstin, and in the next World War, Gillies' cousin Archibald McIndoe went on to reconstruct the faces of badly burnt airmen at East Grinstead.

Gillies recruited leading artists, including Henry Tonks and sculptor Kathleen Scott, widow of Scott of the Antarctic, to help in the work of rebuilding the ruined faces of the severely-wounded.  More than 5,000 wounded men from Britain and its Empire came to Sidcup, and more than 11,000 operations were carried out.

Henry Tonks,  a trained surgeon himself, went on to become a celebrated Professor at the Slade School of Art. Gillies asked him to make a record of men's facial injuries which could be referenced for operations and subsequent recovery. Tonks chose to work in pastels, as it was a quick medium that could be easily blended with the finger, and he wanted the men to sit for the shortest time possible. Today, these pastels can be viewed, upon request, at the Hunterian Museum in London. A number had been loaned to Hall Place, and they were displayed in a curtained-off section, again with a warning that the images might disturb. If today, with all we can see on the media, this notice is still considered necessary, how much harder it must have been for those with disfigurements to step out from the safety of their hospital wards or homes. 

I found these portraits, accompanied by biographical detail, very touching. They included the following:
 
Private Robert Davidson, RAMC Orderly, was wounded in April 2016. He was initially reluctant to mix with his fellow patients, but after his discharge in 1919 he continued to work at the Queen Mary Hospital in Sidcup until the 1960s, having married Sidcup resident Alice Wise.

Private George J Stone, 1st Newfoundland Regiment, suffered a gunshot wound to the upper lip in France on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, aged 21. He contracted a severe infection six weeks after wounding, so his first operation was delayed until three months after the initial injury. He underwent six operations at the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot and at Queen's Hospital, Sidcup. By August 1918, Private Stone declined any further treatment for facial injury, and returned home to Bell Island, off Newfoundland, to work as a machinist.

Private S Gardiner, a 35 year old New Zealander serving with the 7th Canterbury Regiment, suffered a gunshot wound on the First Day of the Somme which fractured his jaw. He underwent three operations, and ten months after his injury, surgeons tried to graft bone to bridge the gap in his jawbone. Because he lacked teeth, the wound didn't heal properly, and the graft was removed. In 1950, Gardiner returned to visit Gillies in the UK, reporting that six of his seven sons had served in the Second World War, all returning to NZ with their jaws intact.

Sadly, Lieutenant Dudley Grinlington, of the 48th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force, did not fare so well. He was admitted to the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot, in August 1916 after a gunshot wound to his left cheek nine days earlier. Discharged in March 1917, he returned to active service and was killed in action on 17 October during the Battle of Passchendaele. Having been shot in the knee, he perished, in the same casualty clearing station he had passed through a year earlier. He is buried in Nine Elms Military Cemetery, near Poperinghe.

The exhibition was curated with a sure, light touch - not overwhelming or overstuffed. I was glad to see and learn of some new things, among them:

The GRI Silver badge, first issued in 1916, was worn by those not able to fight: discharged owing to wounds, ill-health, or had reached the age of 51. Hopefully these helped to fend off the advances of the white-feather brigade...

Steel helmets were not standard issue to soldiers until 1916; before that they had soft caps.

Blue benches were provided along the road from St Mary's hospital to the village of  Sidcup exclusively for recovering patients to sit on when out for a walk, which could be avoided, presumably, by more squeamish local residents (though many treated the soldiers with great kindness).

Ironically, the MG08 machine-gun, which could fire up to 400 rounds per minute, and was used by the German Army in WW1, was an adaptation of Hiram Maxim's original 1884 Maxim Gun, manufactured in Crayford (6 miles from Queen Mary's Hospital)  by Vickers at the time when Maxim was resident in Bexley.
 
 
Further reading:

Krieg dem Kriege: Ernst Friedrich - Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munchen (reprinted 2004)

My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young (grand-daughter of Kathleen Scott)
A wonderful novel which I also learnt from.
​
War, Art & Surgery: The Work of Henry Tonks and Julia Midgley (Ed. Samuel JMM Alberti, Royal College of Surgeons, 2014)

Related Links:

The Tonks Pastels  (Please note: graphic images)
http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk/tonkspastels.htm

Otto Dix - article with images from The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/may/14/art-apocalypse-otto-dix-first-world-war-der-krieg-in-pictures

Vickers Factory, Crayford
http://www.crayfordhistory.co.uk/index/history-of-vickers-crayford/

I spent three jam-packed days last week visiting coach companies in Cumbria, Northumbria, Yorkshire,  and Lincolnshire. As a southerner who has rarely ventured north,  and  a deeply curious person, I found it frustrating to have to drive past such tantalising sights as the sign for the village near Kendal which is the home of my Quaker ancestors, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Fountains Abbey, the Angel of the North and the beautiful Beverley Minster. One day I would like to do a tour of the great Cathedrals and ruined abbeys of Britain - Ely, Peterborough, Lincoln, Norwich etc.

I could not, however, forgo the opportunity, however brief, of driving alongside a mile or so of Hadrian’s Wall - longed-for sight since my early childhood. It didn’t disappoint! I stopped for five minutes at Birdoswald Fort (more of a butterfly kiss than a long embrace) and stood, exhilarated, facing into a fierce westerly, thinking of WH Auden’s wonderful poem, Roman Wall Blues. If you don’t know it:
 
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I’ve lice in my tunic, a cold in my nose.
 
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.
 
The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.
 
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don’t like his manners, I don’t like his face.
 
Piso’s a Christian, he worships a fish;
There’d be be no kissing if he had his wish.
 
She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
 
When I’m a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
 
I also relished the chance later that day to drive over the Humber Bridge.

“This is the first time I’ve driven over the Humber. I’m quite excited!” I told the nice lady at the toll booth, as I handed her my £1.50.
​
“Oh, well, enjoy the bridge!” was her friendly reply.
 
I’m grateful that at 60, I can still feel the wonder and excitement of a child at times like this. Life is good!
 

Private Roland Eldrige, No 1945, 19th Bn Australian Infantry, AIF, died on 11 November 1916, age 31. He is Buried at Heilly Station Cemetery, Mericourt l’Abbe, Somme, France: Grave ref V.E.3. He was the son of Ellen Eldridge of 21 Forge Road, Southborough, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Roland had emigrated to Australia at the age of 21 and worked as an agriculturist at Surrey Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. He had served with the Kent Volunteers in England. He embarked at Sydney on HMAT A54 Runic on 9 August 1915.

From the Courier, 24 November 1916: Mr and Mrs Eldridge of Forge-road have received the following letter from a Chaplain of the Australian Forces: “I am very sorry to say that your boy was brought in here last night hopelessly wounded. He was unconscious, and did not live long after leaving the ambulance. I have just buried him in our little cemetery, where so many of our brave lads lie. His grave will be marked with a cross.” Private R Eldridge is the fourth son of Mr and Mrs Eldridge, and he joined the 19th Battalion Australian Forces in December 1914. He was twice wounded while serving in the Dardanelles. It is a coincidence that he should have been killed four days after Sergeant Parker (whose death was reported last week) with whom he went to Australia about seven years ago. Mr and Mrs Eldridge have three other sons serving in the Army.

I’ve always suffered from piles! Yes, you’ll find them all over my house. I’ve recently been waging war on them using Marie Kondo’s decluttering methods, but have called a temporary truce, with other demands on my time intruding! My newspaper/magazine/newsletter pile recently yielded up a copy of The Guardian from late July. I enjoyed reading Lauren Elkin’s article Reclaim the Streets, on the subject of the flâneur, a figure of privilege and leisure, with the time and money to amble round a city at will, and developments since the 19th century, when the flâneur was something of a phenomenon. Elkin writes: “For a woman to be a flâneuse, first and foremost, she’s got to be a walker - someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind facades, penetrating into secret courtyards.”

Well, I’m not a figure of privilege and leisure, but otherwise I reckon I fit the bill, and reading the article prompted me to dive into another pile to find a wallet of photos I took in 2002 on a work trip to Berlin. It was my first visit, a three day educational development conference on editing alumni magazines. For a history-buff like myself this was a heaven-sent opportunity to see something of  a deeply fascinating city. In order to make the most of it, I decided to get up at the crack of dawn each day and walk its streets, a favourite strategy in an unknown place.

I’d arrived courtesy of Lufthansa at the old Tempelhof airport, where the US Air Force hangars were still visible, and was thrilled, in an Indiana Jones moment, to see a Zeppelin airship warming up ready for take-off on one of the runways. I had some time before the introductory seminar  to catch the bus to the British Military Cemetery near Charlottenburg. It was established in 1945 as a central burial ground for aircrew and prisoners of war who were interred in the Berlin area and East Germany. About 80% are aircrew, killed in action over Germany, the remainder prisoners of war, and two Southborough men, Edwin Cooper and Cyril Wickens lie buried here.

Early the next morning I visited the old Jewish quarter, easily reachable from my hotel at the northern end of Friedrichstrasse. I walked over the Montbijou Brücke and down streets including Georgenstrasse, Ackerstrasse, Oranienburgerstrasse, Gross Hamburgerstrasse, Koppenplatz and Turstrasse. Whenever I saw a doorway open to an old courtyard, I nipped in and looked round (incurably nosey, ask my husband!). I saw a memorial to Berlin’s Jewish dead, and a lovely little Jewish school right by it. In 2002, there was, just fifteen years after re-unification, a huge amount of building and renovation going on. The array of wonderful old buildings (some in the old East Berlin still pockmarked with bullet-holes from 1945, or with plaster still missing from the bare brick walls) mixed in with the ultra-modern, the Spree meandering through, but underlying it all, for me personally, was the knowledge that while it’s a great and elegant city, in Nazi times it was full of terrible violence, hatred and fear for those daring to oppose the regime.

The next day I walked down to Checkpoint Charlie and beyond, then up via Leipzigerstrasse, Jerusalemstrasse, Hausvogteiplatz and Oberwallstrasse to Unter den Linden, past the German Historical Musem and Lustgarten to the Berliner Dom, where creative beer-drinkers had left an impromptu art piece on the steps of the Cathedral. An old man was doing some early-morning fishing from the Eiserne Brücke. Later that evening I ducked out of a suggested drinking session with colleagues and instead heard a beautiful concert in the Cathedral, which has sublime acoustics, given by a choir from Bonn, of Spiritual Choral Music from the last 300 years.

On my last morning I walked up to the Brandenburg Gate (covered up except for the Quadriga) and back past the Russian Embassy, down to the Marx-Engels Platz (now Schlossplatz I believe), where a woman in shorts roller-bladed round the Platz and down the tree-lined paths beside it. The Neptune Fountain was dry, no doubt a temporary casualty of ongoing works. I bought my son a Russian surplus army beret at the flea-market along Am Kupfergraben, had breakfast at Cafe Chagall, then caught the U-Bahn to Luftbrücke Platz, and walked through the little park, which includes a memorial to those who died in the Berlin Airlift, to Tempelhof, just in time to snap a Zeppelin taking off. Flying home, I knew I would definitely want to return and see more of Berlin.

If you’d like to read more around the subject, some of my other related blogs:
The Casualties of War
Holocaust Memorial Day - Anita Lasker Wallfisch
Berlin in October
Through a Glass, Darkly

We recently visited Eltham Palace for the first time - a birthday treat for the pot and pan - with our son, daughter-in-law and baby grand-daughter. It was a lovely summer’s day, and the beautiful grounds around the old palace and its adjoining 1930s house were full of happy visitors - other multi-generational families were having fun too, listening to jazz on the lawn, or with kids playing in the adventure playground next to the cafe, relaxing and enjoying the  cameraderie of their fellow human beings.

There is something for everyone here: mediaeval architecture, 1930s modernist style, unusual garden plants, and in the distance a wonderful panoramic view of London - from Alexandra Palace across to the City, with many of its famous landmarks clearly depicted against the skyline. When Stephen and Virginia Courtauld had their 1930s Art Deco mansion built, incorporating the Great Hall where Henry VIII and his forebears once resided, there were critics abounding, but today, since its restoration by English Heritage after the Army Education Corps vacated the premises in 1992, most of its visitors would no doubt agree it is a splendid house.

Having both recently read William Woodruff’s wonderful memoir The Road to Nab End, it struck us, seeing the opulence here of a house created by its millionaire owners, with money no object, that there was, of course, another vastly different side to life in 1930s Britain. I urge you to read his book if you haven’t yet. It will remind you of what has been achieved in the last eighty years, and what we stand to lose if we are not careful...

Wandering out into the sunshine, we wondered what the strange-looking berries were on the tree at the end of the lawn. They looked like large, luscious raspberries crossed with blackberries. We had the good fortune at this point to bump into an Iranian family, who explained that they were mulberries; the family told us they had, on various outings in and around London, mapped most of its mulberry trees. I love this kind of serendipitous encounter, all the more so on this occasion, after discovering we were fellow bloggers, making the acquaintance of Mehrdad Aref-Adib, whose websites are treasure-houses, boxes of delights, which will bear many hours of happy browsing!

www.aref-adib.com
www.shahrefarang.com
  

My grandfather Harold Edgar Shaw died when I was a child so I don’t know as much about him as I’d like. During the First World War he  was a medical orderly. He had trained as a pharmacist with Boots after an embezzler in his family, whose theft had to be repaid, made it financially impossible for him to train as a children's doctor, his cherished ambition.  Mum told me once that, when he set up on his own, and during the straitened times following the economic crash in 1929 and Great Depression, he often gave medicines to the needy without payment, though he could ill afford it.  She also told me recently, in one of her lucid moments, that he was a Labour man, through and through, all his life. He must have served in Egypt as well as on the Western Front, as my sister recalled he had some treasured 78s of Egyptian music which he had brought home from the war. In later life he loved to read the works of celebrated travel writer HV Morton, and I have inherited one of his books, A Traveller in Italy.

When I recall Grandpa I feel heart-warmed, and have an emotional memory of a kind, quiet, humble man. He ended his days in a mental hospital, where he used to wake in the night, weeping in great distress, believing he was back amongst the terrible scenes of the battlefields.

I have been to battlefield cemeteries of both world wars on a number of occasions, and stood at the graves of men from many nations - Chinese, Indian, American, Canadian, Australian, Russian, French, North African, German, Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh, all in their time deeply mourned and missed by their loved ones.   As most do, who visit these places, I am  always profoundly moved.

One young man commemorated on my local War Memorial was Oscar Maier, a Private in the West Kent Yeomanry (Queen’s Own), who died on 31 August 1916 in the Battle of Delville Wood, and was buried in Mametz, in the Somme. Ironically, Oscar’s parents were economic migrants from Germany, arriving in Southborough in 1895. They had heard from the War Office that Oscar had been wounded several weeks before his death was finally confirmed to them on November 29th. Until then they hoped he might still be alive. His younger brother, was 16 at the time. His son Clive told me “The only thing my father ever told me was that the telegram came on the morning of his sister’s wedding.  His father read the telegram, put it in his pocket, told no one and went through with the wedding. Only when the last guest had gone did he tell the family.”

On 1 July 2016, in one of many ceremonies, the democratically-elected leaders of the nations who took part in the First World War will gather for a ceremony at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing near Albert, in France, to commemorate the appalling carnage of the First Day of the Battle of the Somme 100 years ago.
​
How desperately sad that what should have been a coming together of our leaders in a spirit of community and cooperation should be marred by the shocking division and hatred stirred up by the British referendum on 23 June.
 

When I was a child, the story in my family was that my siblings and I were descended from an Indian princess. I knew that my father, James Hayter, had been born in India, and lived there until he was seven, but it wasn’t until some years later that I learnt more about my Indian ancestry.  My Aunty Janet and cousin Mary both had a passion for investigating the story of my great-great grandmother.

My father was born in Lonavala, a hill-station near Poona (now known as Pune), in Maharashtra, India,  in 1907, and was sent 'home' in 1914 for a British education at Dollar Academy, Scotland. He boarded with an aunt, and wasn't to see his mother again until after the end of the First World War. A family photograph of that time (see below) includes someone who was perhaps an 'ayah', who may have accompanied the children on the voyage. I read recently that these women were often shamefully abandoned after they outlived their usefulness. I hope this wasn't the case with my family.

​My great-great-grandfather John Howard Wakefield  was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian Army, and First Cantonment Magistrate in Lahore. He had been born in 1803, into a Quaker family, and was the grandson of Edward Wakefield, London merchant in Gresham St, and Priscilla (Bell) Wakefield, authoress and botanist. One of his brothers was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a coloniser of New Zealand.

It was said that John Howard  eloped with a young woman he first spied over the fence of an enclosure. It's not always possible to tease out fact from fiction, but it is rumoured that their meeting was the basis of the love story in MM Kaye's The Far Pavilions. He married her in 1831, she converted from Hinduism to Christianity, after being re-named Maria Suffolk.  She was the daughter of Kheru-Jumnu, Hereditary Vizier of Bashahr, and also the ward of the Rana of Kumarsain. I have been told that her father was put to death by the British for his part in the Indian Mutiny (I have recently read The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, which was very illuminating on the subject of the Mutiny from the Indian viewpoint). Maria died in 1852, ten years before her husband.
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I am told that John Howard Wakefield persuaded all of his regiment to take the pledge, and go teetotal, and that in 1862, resident by that time in Canonbury Square, Islington, he caught a chill on the way home from a temperance meeting at the Union Chapel on Upper Street and died soon after of pneumonia.
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Their son, my great-grandfather, was George Edward Wakefield* (East India Company Deputy Commissioner Ludhiania, Punjab ) (1831-1892). One of his daughters was my grandmother Violet Mary Wakefield.

In 1976, Aunty Janet, then around my age now, travelled to India for the first time since her childhood, flying in to Karachi and then taking the train to Hyderabad. She wrote: "Visited Gymkhana Club - just as remembered - and St Thomas Church...in the evening discovered to my great joy the bungalow we lived in, and had tea and delicious carrot sweet with the kind Lt Col's  family (the Najams) who inhabit it now...it was quite eerie going round the bungalow, and I expected to meet my own small self in a solar topee any moment”.

After an en route visit to Mohenjodaro, Janet flew on to Lahore "where I hoped to get help in tracing great-grandmamma's grave", which she did, via the Anglican Cathedral and the Diocesan Council's records of old burials.  She wrote: "...In the morning I called on the Reverend ...he called for someone to open a room going on the garden ... When the door was opened we were faced with a horrible smell. Don't go in, said the Reverend, "let the air go in first" ... the room had some odd growths hanging like strings from the roof, and one wall was lined with enormous leather-bound volumes in a very bad state of preservation and in no kind of order. They were going to fetch me a chair, and I was prepared to spend the whole morning, perhaps several mornings, searching. But by an extraordinary stroke of luck, the very first volume I picked out at random was an index of graves in the old Taxali Gate Cemetery, and so in less than five minutes I had found what I wanted... the Gate is one of the five gates of the old walled city... when I entered the cemetery my heart sank ... it is enormous ... and most of the gravestones have been knocked about and destroyed ... I walked through, and there it was - a plain slab of red sandstone flat but raised from the ground and in a remarkably good state of preservation, one of the best in the cemetery. Beautiful undefaced lettering."

Then she went on to Simla: "Explored Simla. Climbed Jacko - terribly steep - to Raja of Bushayr's house, which has what must be the most wonderful view in the world.

And on again, "breathtakingly lovely run", to Ranpur. "We climbed to almost 9,000 feet, and then gradually (the run took 6 hours), dropped down into a deep valley  made by the famous River Sutlej. Ranpur , the ideal capital of a small state ... one of the first free schools in India formed by the late Rajah Padam Singh ... on it is inscribed: BETTER UNBORN THAN UNTAUGHT, BETTER UNTAUGHT THAN ILLTAUGHT, and below that, COME AND LEARN GO AND SERVE and SERVE MAN AND SO SERVE GOD". (Note - I have inherited Aunty Janet's love of copying down inscriptions!)."The same Rajah built the new place, in 1926, where I am staying in lonely state ... in the grounds is an ornamental pavilion ... the most ancient building in Bushahr ... over it stands an enormous peeput tree - four or five hundred years old. I wonder whether Great Grandmamma played under it?... Taku Sahib, who is Chairman of the Municipal Council, thinks Great Grandmamma may have come from Pooh, another day's journey from here, and says there is a ninety year old there who is reputed to have talked about a Bushahr girl going off with an English soldier... alas! It is in restricted territory and I could only get a permit to go there in Simla... I'll have to come here again, later in the year next time."

Back in Simla, she "rushed to see Rajah of Bushahr, who said if I tell him the name of the Old Man of Pooh, he'll write to him and try and get some information for me. He said he was sure he'd seen the  name Wakefield on a sword or something."

In Mussoorie, she visited the church where her mother was married, and "Granny's house ... where we used to spend the hot weather ... I remembered how I had built a shrine on the steep bank above it and made a cross out of two bits of dried bamboo, and knelt there and prayed fervently. When I got bored with that I used to scramble down, go into the house, stand on a chair and steal toffee out of a large jar on a high shelf. Then I'd go back to my shrine and pray for forgiveness - and then back for more toffee, and then more prayers!"

I'd love to track down my great-great-grandmother's original home one day, should the opportunity present itself. I learnt today that 'in a step to create one of the largest repositories of Indian genomes, Bangalore-based Medgenome has teamed up with a southeast Asian consortium that has committed to sequence 100,000 Asian genomes. Were it to work to plan this could mean a consolidated storehouse of at least 30,000 Indian genomes'. So maybe one day I'll be meeting one of my distant Himalayan cousins!
 
 *John Howard’s aunt Isabella Wakefield married John Nicholson, Quaker of  County Down, and they had 16 children, the third child Alexander himself being the father of Brigadier-General John Nicholson, Soldier and Administrator, later styled ‘Hero of Delhi’, killed in the Indian Mutiny. He was Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar in 1857 with George Edward Wakefield (1831-1892, East India Company Deputy Commissioner Ludhiana, Punjab ) as an assistant (and also his first cousin, twice removed).