A wonderful opportunity to write about ME - my fave subject - and also my second and third favourites at the moment, my family history and the story of the Llyn Peninsula where all my mother's family lived. That's how I see this series of blogs.
But first, just to get it out of the way, I'll mention my English father's family. As he was adopted soon after birth and was unable to trace his real mother I've never had much interest in trying to trace the forebears of his adoptive family. However, the subject was foisted upon me recently when Pwllheli Golf Club decided upon their centenary to research their history back to 1907.
'Anita!' came an excited telephone message, 'We've found a Mrs. Smalley who was a member right from the start and she won the Great Britain Ladies Golf Championship in 1907! Your maiden name was Smalley so she must be related.'
A common Welsh delusion. Because of the paucity of Welsh surnames - all those Joneses, Williamses, Evanses and so on - Welsh people tend to see quite common English names as unusual, and assume that people owning them are all related. When my English husband and I came back to my home area to live 9 years ago, several people said, 'Oh, you're a Rowe! There's a Rowe family in Llanbedrog. You must be related.'
I pointed out to my friend on the phone that my father, who was adopted by a couple called Smalley, came from Burton on Trent and met my mother at Bangor University in 1940. As far as I knew neither he nor any of his adoptive family had set foot in Pwllheli until then. My father was killed in WW2 aged 22 when I was 18 months old. When he was 7 his adoptive father had died and I don't even know what his occupation was. Soon afterwards Mrs. Smalley remarried a Mr. Burbank, who apparently forbad my father to have any contact with his Smalley relatives. But my father kept the surname. Mr. Burbank (nobody ever suggested I call him granddad) was a miner. He and my Grandma were a low-income, working-class family. As I told my friend, any married woman who played golf to national championship level in 1907 must have had a houseful of servants. And Smalley is quite a common name in the Midlands. So I doubted any possible connection.
However, she was so persistent that I agreed to make enquiries. The only known connection to our Smalley family is Chris Bates, who managed to make contact with my mother in the early 1980s while on holiday in Pen Llyn, through a chat with a gravedigger in Deneio Cemetary in Pwllheli. Chris' mother's father was the brother of the Mr. Smalley who adopted my father, but she wasn't allowed to play with her little cousin after the Burbank remarriage, and had lost touch with the family. But she did know he'd been in the RAF, had married a girl from Pwllheli and been killed when his plane was shot down a couple of years afterwards. So she'd asked Chris to look for the grave while he was here.
The first thing Chris asked me was: 'How did this lady golfer spell her name?' Surprised, I checked with my friend and replied that it was just like my mother's married and my maiden name, Smalley.
'In that case,' said Chris, 'She couldn't possibly be connected to our family.' And his explanation made an amusing tale. Apparently all that side of the family spelled their name Smorly up until the end of WW1, during which his great uncle Private Smorly was greatly harrassed by a sergeant who persisted in calling him 'an 'orrible little man wot can't spell 'is own name proper'. So upset was he by this persecution that at the end of the war he initiated a huge family conference of all the Smorlys, who unanimously decided to change the spelling of all their names to Smalley.
Shortly after this I had to go through the same rigmarole with a member of Pwllheli Cricket Club, who was also researching the club's history back to its start in 1907. They had found 2 Mr. Smalleys who simply must be related to me. 'But your mother was Mrs. Smalley. She had a brother called Robert William Smalley, didn't she?'
'My mother was born a Jones and married a Smalley. My uncle was Robert William JONES.' It seemed to take a long time to sink in.
Why this sudden upsurge of sportiness in 1907? you may ask. Well, it was the year the railway came to Pwllheli, and the train station opposite which I used to live was built. A tremendous influx of tourists followed, with a plethora of hotels, cafes and B & Bs to cater for them. No doubt the extra sporting facilities were also tourist amenities. Quite likely the cricketing Smalleys were related to the golfing Mrs. Smalley - possibly they only spent the summers in Pwllheli - but they definitely did not belong to me.
PS My father's birth was registered by his mother, Miss Eleanor Hammond, with no father's name given, and she called him William Bertram Hammond. His adoptive parents added the surname Smalley. At college he changed his christian name to Tony, but not officially. It was the name by which my mother and his RAF friends knew him. I've inherited his medals from my mother, but as a pacifist I'm unsure whether they're a source of pride or embarrassment to me.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
Mature student, sixties style
I've been thinking about blogging for some time but not got around to it till now, when my new Bangor Uni MA course in Writing says I have to, so here goes.
The course began this month and one thing has ama-a-a-zed me - nobody I've told about it so far has said, 'Why are you going back to college at your age?' (I'm 66). Amazed, because when I began my BA as a mature student loads of people said it. And do you know how old I was then? I was all of 26. But I was married with two children, teaching full time and had a third child during the 5 year course. In those days, before the OU began, being a mature student was very unusual and even more so if you were a woman. There was only one way to do it and that was through University of London external. No continuous assessment in those days. You had to study for five years then take ten exams in a week at the end of it. One three hour exam Monday morning, another in the afternoon. And the same for the next four days: 9 till 12, then 1 till 4.
I'll never forget that first day when I joined a mixed bag of around 30 total strangers in a grotty old school somewhere in Nottingham, a place I'd never been to before. I didn't drive then. We'd all had to get up at six so my husband could drive me the twelve miles into Lincoln to catch the train for Nottingham before taking the children to school and going to work. I'd managed to find our exam venue with the aid of a Nottingham street map and stumbled in panting with 3 minutes to spare. And the first thing I noticed was that they all looked even more nervous than I did. Two or three really were a nasty shade of pale green. So maybe I was lucky not to have time to hang about. Sitting at the old-fashioned oak desk, just like the Victorian relics of my own childhood, I was flooded with a sense of well-being, as if transported out of my unhappy marriage back to the calm security of my schooldays. Each exam required 3 essays, each to be around 500 words in length. That worked out at 3000 words a day, 15,000 for the week. Many professional writers are able to work at this pace, but I never have been able to replicate the feat.
The course began this month and one thing has ama-a-a-zed me - nobody I've told about it so far has said, 'Why are you going back to college at your age?' (I'm 66). Amazed, because when I began my BA as a mature student loads of people said it. And do you know how old I was then? I was all of 26. But I was married with two children, teaching full time and had a third child during the 5 year course. In those days, before the OU began, being a mature student was very unusual and even more so if you were a woman. There was only one way to do it and that was through University of London external. No continuous assessment in those days. You had to study for five years then take ten exams in a week at the end of it. One three hour exam Monday morning, another in the afternoon. And the same for the next four days: 9 till 12, then 1 till 4.
I'll never forget that first day when I joined a mixed bag of around 30 total strangers in a grotty old school somewhere in Nottingham, a place I'd never been to before. I didn't drive then. We'd all had to get up at six so my husband could drive me the twelve miles into Lincoln to catch the train for Nottingham before taking the children to school and going to work. I'd managed to find our exam venue with the aid of a Nottingham street map and stumbled in panting with 3 minutes to spare. And the first thing I noticed was that they all looked even more nervous than I did. Two or three really were a nasty shade of pale green. So maybe I was lucky not to have time to hang about. Sitting at the old-fashioned oak desk, just like the Victorian relics of my own childhood, I was flooded with a sense of well-being, as if transported out of my unhappy marriage back to the calm security of my schooldays. Each exam required 3 essays, each to be around 500 words in length. That worked out at 3000 words a day, 15,000 for the week. Many professional writers are able to work at this pace, but I never have been able to replicate the feat.
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