Solving some family history mysteries

A faded photo of Richard Gibson Little is the
only image we have of him. He is in the uniform
of the York and Lancaster Regiment, who wore
peaked caps making them all look like officers!

This blog post is hardly my own work - it’s down to research by Mike Towers, husband of my cousin Jennifer, who has spent many hours looking into the antecedence of Richard Gibson Little, my grandfather.

His was a hard life and he died at the age of 49 from pneumonia. Already a widower, his six children were now orphaned.

When their mother died Richard was unable to care for the children and the five youngest went to live in Stanley House, a children's home in Doncaster. My mother had told me many stories of life in the orphanage, of the cruel matron (Mrs Nurse). She had been 14 when her father died and she’d had the hope that soon, she would have been able to leave Stanley House and become the carer at their house in Adwick Le Street, looking after the children, while her father worked.

As it happened, her father died and my mother was placed in service at a large house in Yorkshire where she worked until joining the WRNS during the Second World War and training as a cook.

I’d asked my mother quite a lot about her father, but I’m not sure how much she had known about his life (he died when she was 14) and she died when I was 11 so there’s only so much you’ll tell an 11-year-old. I knew he was a tall man (but most dads look tall to their children) and that he had ginger hair. Later, I took the opportunity to ask my Uncle Dick (cousin Jennifer’s dad). He knew a few things, but was a couple of years younger than my mother and would have had even less opportunity to talk to his father about his past.

So there were lots of untested stories about Richard Gibson Little, which Mike has summarised as:

1.  His birth and death registrations show his name only as Richard Little, so why during his lifetime does he use the middle name of Gibson? His army records and medals from the First World War also show him as Richard Gibson Little.

2.  Did the name Gibson come from the maiden name of his first wife? This was a story I’d heard from my mother and may have passed on to Mike. The story was that he’d fallen in love with and married the daughter of a family of wealthy shopkeepers from Carlisle. They had disapproved and when the woman died in childbirth, he’d left Cumberland and gone to fight in France, taking her maiden name as his middle name. There were other versions and a similar story, with variances was told by my uncle, Dick Little.

3.  Who were Richard’s parents? Was his father called Joseph? Online research had not been helpful, creating more questions and no answers.

4.  Did a maiden aunt bring him up after his mother was said to have died three or four years after his birth?

5.  On Richard’s death, it was said there was a ‘father’ who declined through solicitors, to take responsibility of Richard’s children who remained in Stanley House, the orphanage?

6.  Richard’s ‘father’ was said to have moved to Cheshire, remarried and had two sons with his second wife.

7.  Richard's second wife, my grandmother Nelly Beatrice Burrows, descended from a Scottish connection. I certainly know this not to be true as I have her ancestors firmly planted in Yorkshire and Norfolk for many generations.

Mike has been interested in family history for some years and is quite experienced, so I was pleased that he took on the task of trying to find out the truth. His research started with Richard’s death, which is always a sobering event to look at.

The Death Certificate shows he died of broncho pneumonia on 15 December 1937 at Springwell House, Doncaster, aged 49.  At the time he was living at Village Street, Adwick Le Street about five miles north-west of Doncaster and I know he was a cowman. Uncle Dick had told me that he didn't look after himself properly and had got wet and cold. His must have been a pretty hard life, living on his own and with his six children in a home in Doncaster five miles away. He must have been fairly well thought of because the farmer sent word to Stanley House to say that he'd take my Uncle Dick on as cowman when he left school (aged 14). Dick had been quite scornful of the offer (when he recounted the story to me) and instead was packed off to Keighley on the train with a few shillings in his pocket, the address of a boarding house and promise of work in a mill. 

Anyway, I digress, back to Richard Gibson Little, my grandfather. Seriously ill with pneumonia, he was taken to Springwell House and it doesn't sound a great place. Mike researched it on the web site www.workhouses.org.uk/Doncaster/. Springwell House, built in 1897 in Balby, had been the local workhouse and it must have been grim. The web site says:

“After the Local Government Act, 1929 abolished the Poor Law Guardians in 1930, responsibility for public assistance, and the former workhouse, fell upon Doncaster County Borough Council. The council renamed the premises Springwell House Public Assistance Institution. The buildings functioned as a hospital and provided accommodation for the destitute and for those who [in the language of the period] were classed as 'mentally deficient'."

It must have been a rotten place because when the NHS was created after the Second World War, it was proposed not to adopt Springwell House as a hospital because of the 'poor quality of the accommodation'. In the end, the premises were taken over by the NHS and it became the Western Hospital in 1950. The hospital was used mostly for maternity and geriatric patients. It was demolished in 1974 and the site redeveloped as a primary school and private housing.

Richard's death certificate records his age as 49, suggesting a birth in 1888.  As the family indicated that Richard was born in Cumberland, a search of the Birth Records enabled Mike to obtain a birth certificate in the name of Richard Little born 9 April 1888, a date that matches the family-quoted date.

This certificate records the birth at Ruckcroft, near Ainstable, a small hamlet to the north-east of Penrith, his mother being Margaret Little (nee Lowis), a charwoman, who appears to be illiterate as she had to make her ‘mark’ in completing the registration.

No father’s name is shown on the certificate with the space provided being struck out.  At the end of the 19th century this action by the Registrar generally indicated that the father was unknown or that the mother was not prepared to declare it and, therefore, Richard seems to have been illegitimate.

Mike then began tracing Richard in the census records available within his lifetime, with the following results:

1891 – shown as Richard G [suggesting he was already named Gibson] aged two; a nurse child; living at Cross House, Becks, Ainstable with Anthony and Mary Sander. Margaret Little, his mother, was not listed as living at the house and we've no idea where she was. Had she died and was Mary Sander the aunt of legend (although clearly not maiden)?

Research did not produce any connection between the Sanders and Margaret Little (nee Lowis) other than Anthony Sanders being the son of Joseph Sander, Registrar, who registered Margaret’s birth. Becks is within a mile of Richard’s place of birth and west and south of Ruckcroft, so we're talking about a small community where folk would be known to one another.

1901 – he pops up shown again as ‘Richard G’ aged 12, this time named as son with Joseph and Margaret Barnes at Ruckcroft. Joseph was an agricultural labourer but in later life became a corn miller. Joseph’s parents, and eventually Joseph, were millers at Dale Mill, Ainstable. So who were these people? Was Richard being fostered and had he now been adopted? Mike researched the Barnes family and found that Margaret, Joseph’s wife, was named Margaret Little (Richard's mother) on their marriage certificate. She was shown as a widow and her father as Henry Lowis. Margaret Barnes, was the same person as Margaret Little, nee Lowis, the mother of Richard. It's not clear where she'd been in the last census, but she was clearly alive and whatever her circumstances 10 years earlier, she'd got herself back on track and had taken Richard back into her care once she had a secure station in life? 

1911 – Richard cannot be found with or without his G, but would have been 22 years old. He served in the Great War with the York and Lancaster regiment which mainly recruited from the south Yorkshire (Hallamshire) area, so he may have moved there for reasons of work. Easy for a single man to slip through the census.

Mike needed to know a little more about Margaret Little (nee Lowis) and so he searched Cumberland Records for marriages of a Margaret Lowis (and alternatives such as Lewis and Lowes) and found a marriage to a John Little in 1871. Ten years later, in the 1881 census, Margaret and John were living at Castle Dyke, Ainstable, with their sons Henry Lowes Little (b.1871) and John Richard Little (b.1879). Also on the census page immediately above was that of a Henry and Jane Lowis. Tracing Henry and Jane back through the census records confirms that Margaret was their daughter, as did a copy of her birth certificate giving her birth as 11 April 1851 to parents Henry Lowis and Jane Lowis (nee Gibson).

To get closer to the Lowis/Little connection, in June 2012 Mike spent three days visiting the Carlisle Archives to examine specific Parish Records and he found baptism records for Margaret (8 February 1858 at Ainstable ie seven years after her birth) and most of her nine siblings. In addition, he found Parish Records confirming her two marriages to John Little (11 Nov 1871) and Joseph Barnes (28 Oct 1891).  Both men were shown as bachelors and Margaret Little as widow when she married Barnes. The 1911 census shows there were no children to this marriage, but she was 40 when she married for a second time and she'd been 37 when she had Richard.

So it looked as if Richard would be the son of John Little and Margaret (Lowis, Little, Barnes), explaining his surname and with the Gibson connection coming from Margaret’s mother’s maiden name. Margaret was clearly quite keen to keep her family's female surnames in memory because she’d used her own maiden name as the middle name for her first child. Her husband John had died, Richard was cared for by foster parents until Margaret got back on her feet and married again, then he was brought up by his birth mother and stepfather - all explained (or was it?).

Why was John Little not shown as Richard’s father on his birth certificate and what had happened to her other two sons? Mike subsequently traced John Little’s death to Sleetburn Colliery, Brandon and Byshottles just east of Durham on 8 January 1885 - Richard wasn’t born until April 1888, three years later. John Little could not have been his father.  

Like a lot of family history trails, this one was throwing up as many questions as answers.

One thing that is obvious in my family tree is the change in social history in the second half of the 19th Century with people becoming far more mobile. One of my great grandparents moved from rural Norfolk to the bustle of Liverpool, another moved from Norfolk to East Yorkshire; there was emigration to Canada and there was migration to London. People that had worked on the land for generations were being pushed off by mechanisation and they were also able to earn better wages by working in industry.

The fact that John and Margaret Little moved across the Pennines from near Penrith to Durham is not such a big leap. Durham was a thriving coal-mining area and would be hungry for workers. The connection with Durham seems to have come about because Margaret’s younger sister, Sarah, married John Healey and they moved to Co Durham where John Healey worked in the mines. I guess Margaret and John heard there was good money to be earned and followed them.

An interesting aside is that Sleetburn Colliery is not just a coalmine. A mineral called Witherite was mined there. This is a highly poisonous form of barium and it was considered pretty worthless (except as rat poison) until Josiah Wedgwood used it in his Jasper ware.
So, upon Richard’s birth in 1888, Margaret had been a widow for more than three years. We know from his birth certificate that she was working as a charwoman (cleaner) and Mike was able to confirm that her two sons Henry and John were living with their father’s family.

Mike was not able to find a baptism record for Richard. He also searched the official Bastardy Records for the period to see who may have taken financial responsibility for Richard until Margaret married Joseph Barnes, but these did not extend beyond 1874 and so proved fruitless.

So who might Richard’s father have been and what would the Sanders’ motive have been for looking after him?

Anthony Sander, who was caring for Richard as a two-year-old in the 1891 census, was the son of Joseph Sander b.1802. In the 1851 census, Joseph Sander shows as a farmer of 65 acres and also a Registrar of Births and Deaths, living at The Vicarage, Ainstable with his wife Ann, a daughter and four sons, including Anthony (b.1831) and another called Joseph (b.1836) in Ainstable. Anthony married Mary and they also had a son called Joseph b.1867 in Ainstable.

You will recall that family lore states that Richard’s father was called Joseph, which may have been Joseph Barnes (his stepfather) but there are now a few other Josephs who have stepped into the limelight. Could either the son or grandson of the original Joseph Sander, both also called Joseph, be Richard’s father?

The first Joseph (b.1836) can be discounted as he died in 1869.

Anthony’s son, Joseph (b.1867) left home between 1881 and 1891 moving to Benwell, north of Gateshead, to become a crane driver. He was living with Richard Pearson and his family who had all been born in Ainstable and this was probably the connection that took him there. By the 1901 census, he had moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, become a Bank Porter and married Jane Chalder in 1893. She came from Alston near to Ainstable. In the 1911 census the family were still in Newcastle and Joseph was now a Bank Messenger.

The question is whether this Joseph was Richard’s natural father. This can only be answered if the Sander family can be traced and they have the knowledge. He was certainly of an age to have been the father and the connection of Ainstable between Joseph and Margaret is clear.  Further, it could be possible that Joseph’s parents, Anthony and Mary, cared for Richard as a ‘family’ son as Margaret was unable to provide financially for Richard.

This might seem a good explanation of why Anthony and Mary Sander were looking after Richard. Perhaps Margaret returned to Ainstable from Durham a widow with two sons. The Little family took in the sons and Sanders offered her some cleaning work where she caught the eye of young Joseph ...

It's possible, but Joseph would have been 21 and Margaret 36 when the "act" took place. I don't really have an image of my great grandmother as a 'cougar', but it's possible of course.

Joseph Sander died in 1932 aged 65.

After the 1901 census, there’s no trace of Richard Gibson Little (my grandfather) until he pops up as a soldier in the Great War. The regiment he joins is a small one which recruited from a distinct area and so it’s quite likely that he’d gone to South Yorkshire seeking work and had joined up soon after the outbreak of war. He’d been wounded and sent home for a spell. One of Richard's first actions was the Battle of Loos, where the British used poison gas (chlorine) for the first time. It wasn't massively successful as the wind changed and blew the gas back into the British trenches. Troops had gas masks, but these either didn't work properly and let the gas in or soldiers couldn't breathe with them fitted and so had either to take them off and have a whiff of chlorine or suffocate. I wonder if this contributed to Richard's death years later, making him more susceptible to lung infections. At the time, I guess he was glad to be ‘home’ in Cumberland, met Annie Elizabeth Braithwaite and wasted no time in marrying her on 20 September 1917 at Ousby – a village south-east of Ruckcroft and Ainstable.  

There is no father’s name shown on this marriage certificate, suggesting that Richard was illegitimate. Clearly, Richard did not take the name Gibson from Annie but certainly from his grandmother, Jane Lowis, whose maiden name was Gibson.  Sadly, the story about his first love dying was true as Annie died on 9 November 1919 during childbirth and there is no reference of the child surviving – it was not made compulsory to register a stillbirth until 1927.  My Aunt Margaret (Margaret Smith) has the prayer book given to Annie on her confirmation on 12 May 1910 by the Rector at Ousby.

Richard also shows himself as Gibson on his second marriage, to my grandmother Nelly Beatrice Burrows.  Nelly’s birth certificate shows she was born on 6 Apr 1894 at Low Catton, Pocklington, east of York.  Her father and his family come from Burston, Norfolk and her mother’s family are East Yorkshire based (both well documented), so no Scottish connection here.

Richard’s marriage certificate to Nelly records his father as Joseph Little. This is most likely to be his late stepfather Joseph Barnes. Mike thinks that Richard gave the name Joseph and occupation miller to the Rector when asked and the Rector had incorrectly written the name as Joseph Little instead of Joseph Barnes. Joseph had, of course, taken responsibility for and acted as Richard’s father following his marriage to Margaret, so he deserved some credit. Probably, no attempt was made to correct the mistake (if it was spotted) as Richard had other things on his mind (it was his wedding day) and both Joseph Barnes and his mother Margaret had died a few years earlier. Nelly was also four months pregnant when she married, so perhaps they just wanted to get the job done.

The question of Joseph Barnes being quoted as ‘father’ in official documents, such as the census, is common during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the case of second marriages by one partner. Richard's mother Margaret died of stomach cancer on the 30 May 1916 at Ousby Mill, Ousby, as the widow of Joseph Barnes, corn miller – Joseph had died in early 1915 in Ousby.  Mike visited St Luke’s Church, Ousby and with the help of a graveyard plan in the church, found and photographed the adjacent sites of Margaret and Joseph’s graves although no headstones are erected.

Sadly, after Nelly’s death in 1933 (at the age of 39), all of their children, except John, were taken into Stanley House Children’s Home run by Doncaster Council.  Upon Richard’s death in 1937 family lore states that a ‘father’ (grandfather) had declined to take responsibility for the children. Who might have turned their back on the family?

The only father figure still living at Richard’s death was John Burrows, Nelly’s father and the children’s grandfather (my great-grandfather). At this time he was 76 years old, a widower, and understandably unlikely to be willing (or able) to take in the children. He died in Doncaster three years later in 1940. I never heard my mother talk about her grandfather.

So where has this research left those family mysteries?

Mike has established:

➨  Richard was certainly illegitimate, with no natural father established. He clearly was given the name Gibson by his mother. It was her mother, Jane Lowis' maiden name and Margaret clearly liked to keep the female names alive (she'd christened her first son Lowis).

➨  Richard's mother was Margaret Lowis (born 1851; died 1916) who married first John Little (died 1885) and secondly Joseph Barnes with whom she brought up her illegitimate son Richard Gibson.

➨  Richard’s natural father cannot be determined and, whilst I have pointed a finger at Joseph Sander, Mike thinks this is unlikely. He thinks that if he had been the father Margaret and Joseph would have married before or shortly after Richard’s birth as, being single, neither had any reason not to do so. He also thinks that because Joseph’s grandfather was the local Registrar, a man of standing in the community, to legitimise the birth would have been a priority. That's all true, but of course, there was quite an age difference between the two and a 21-year-old man marrying a 37-year-old woman would have been highly unusual, even scandalous. Would Joseph's parents have wanted that? The age-difference alone might have been reason enough not to marry. In the event, Joseph was packed off across the Pennines and 'grandparents' Anthony and Mary Sander help out while Margaret gets back on her feet and bags husband no 2.

➨  If Joseph Barnes was the natural father the same argument (no restrictions on marrying) hold good, so why wait three years. Based on Richard and Nelly’s marriage certificate it was Joseph Barnes who family lore believe to be Joseph Little, father of Richard. This is supported by the father’s occupation being shown as miller on the certificate. I guess we'll never know and we should be happy that Joseph Barnes and Margaret Little were married and were able to bring up Richard.

➨  Nelly Burrows was certainly not Scottish - her family roots are deep in Norfolk and Yorkshire.

➨  The question of a father moving to Cheshire can be discounted.

➨  There was no maiden aunt and Richard’s mother did not die until much later when he was an adult. Perhaps the Sanders were the source of the maiden aunt story?

There are links here to previous blog postings concerning Richard Gibson Little:

Family History Mysteries

Family History Medals

If you’ve stuck with this posting to the bitter end, well done. Some family history research provides rollicking good stories like the frontiersman Zachariah Burrows, other stories are rather more forensic. Thanks again to Mike Towers for his diligence - this was a complicated one to unravel and there remains just enough uncertainty to keep that murky air of mystery that has made Richard Gibson Little so intriguing to us all.

If anyone wants access to the family tree just mail me and if anyone knows who my great grandfather really was then I’d love to know! We hate blank spaces on the family tree.

Medals of Richard Gibson Little from the First World War. The medals are all
inscribed: 15891 Pte R G Little, York. & Lanc. R. The medals are (left to right):
Allied Victory Medal (Wilfred), 1914-15 Star (Pip) and British War Medal (Squeak).

Cyberspace thinks I’m a fat man with a little willie

My Junk e-mail folder fills up at three or four times the rate of my In-Box, which kind of suggests that e-mail is a very unhealthy medium. At best it’s full of people trying to sell you things you don’t want; at worst it also has a heavy sprinkling of crooks, fraudsters and identity thieves.

We all know which one it is and, if you don’t believe me, take a look at your Junk folder.

Spam e-mail knows quite a lot about me. It knows which country I live in, it knows I’m male, it seems to think I’m fat (although I would dispute that) and, most bizarrely, it knows I live in a hard-water area!

It seems to think that I have bank accounts with seven major banks and keeps sending me helpful security messages for accounts I don’t have, warning me to log on immediately and give them all my bank details, so they can get this security breach fixed forthwith.

The biggest worry, however, is that the spam-a-sphere, is convinced that I have a small penis.

Ten of the messages on the first page of my Junk folder relate to the size of my manhood and, frankly it’s giving me a complex. As my junk folder runs to 15 pages a month, that’s 150 penis enlargement offers - almost 40 per week, six a day.

Promo Men’s Supplement suggests “Take Pills, Get an Increased Size Tomorrow” and promises: she will surely pounce on you. Another spam enlarger says: You will grow very large in just 2 months with our wonder drugs and another Get all the bed action you have ever dreamed of with your brand new pecker.

This last one seems to think I need a complete replacement, rather than just an extension to what I’ve already got.

Second only to penis enlargement offers are weight loss promotions. Cyberspace thinks I’m a fat man with a little willie.

Both are efficacious by the simple ingestion of miracle pills - isn’t modern medicine wonderful.

I wonder if anyone is daft enough to actually take up any of the offers, but logic suggests that if no-one ever actually did, then there wouldn’t be hundreds of them dropping into my Junk folder every month.

Clearly, penis and waist size are the two major factors driving modern man to distraction, never mind global warming or the fiscal cliff, and coming in at a pretty distant third is snoring. People who worry about snoring are a pretty considerate lot, most of us just sleep through it and, for me, it’s not a problem - my wife moved out of the bedroom years ago.

Actually, come to think about it - was it my snoring or my small penis that drove her away?

So what’s left in the Junk folder? A favourite is the identity theft mail. I get almost as many of these as I do weight loss offers. You might wonder who would want to steal my identity - a fat, sexually inadequate snorer, but there are plenty who do.

BT provides my e-mail service, but it is constantly telling me my mailbox has exceeded its limit and I should “click here” to validate my account. Perhaps I should take heed, perhaps my mailbox is about to explode, perhaps the laugh will be on me? I feel like mailing back to say that my mailbox would be a lot less full if you didn’t keep sending me bloody e-mails!

Some of these, including the bank-security-scare mails can look quite convincing and they must fool some people. I work on the principle that if I don’t have a Barclays account then Barclays won’t be e-mailing me. It’s also odd that the taxman should mail me to say he owes me a substantial amount (now that is unbelievable!).

It’s also stretching credulity a little to believe that a very rich person in Africa just happens to have found my e-mail address and desperately wants to transfer $5 million into my account. These people are so trusting - don’t they know the internet is full of crooks and conmen?

I had a lovely e-mail this week from Joy Kipkalya Kones who is writing to me from a refugee camp in Kenya  “with pains, tears and sorrow from my heart.” Hers is a sad story. Her father was the former Kenyan road Minister. He and Assistant Minister of Home Affairs, Lorna Laboso, had been on board a Cessna 210, which was headed to Kericho and crashed in a remote area called Kajong'a, in western Kenya.

To cut a long story short, her wicked stepmother (if anything convinced me this is a fairy tale, it was the wicked stepmother) has stolen her money and property. She’s now down to her last $5 million, which is in a bank at Burkina Faso and they won’t let her take the money until she is married or else has a trustee/partner who will help her invest the money overseas.

Joy swore me to secrecy in case her wicked stepmother found out what she was up to (sorry Joy) and she signs off: May truth and love be the guiding word in my refuge. I don’t think truth and Joy have much of a relationship.

Hot on the heels of Joy’s sad story comes a note from Dr John Williams of the African Development Bank, Burkina Faso. He has $10 million, which was deposited in his bank by Mr Kattan Azmal from Jordan “who died in a plane crash in 2000 Tbm 700 aircraft on 31st July with his wife and the whole crew on board.”

I’m ignoring another plea for confidentiality by telling you that Dr Williams doesn’t want this money to go to his bank, he’d like to transfer it to me so we can share it out, which is pretty bloody decent of him.

Have you spotted a pattern here? Never, ever step into a plane in Africa - they’re literally dropping out of the sky.

There is a serious side to all this. I’m getting around 700 Junk e-mails per month and a high proportion of those are criminal. They’re either pedalling drugs or trying to gain personal details to steal money. These mails would not exist if they didn’t work.

Why can’t something be done about it? If it was Royal Mail delivering this wave of criminality there would be an outcry, because it's e-mail, no-one seems to care.

This is my criminally-corrupt e-mail folder

How hard can it be to spend £5,600?

Yesterday I was a broken man, worn down and dispirited by an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy; today I am triumphant.

Like Attila the Hun standing before the walls of Constantinople, I could have thought “no chance, let’s attack those pussy French instead”, but no, instead I am Mehmed II, standing victorious within the Golden Gate - season ticket in hand.

Season ticket in hand? Yes, the object of my travails, these past two days has been to renew my annual season ticket - Peterborough to London (FCC only).

And I have to admit that actually I was no Mehmed either. Instead of conquerer I was conformer. I have succeeded by doing as I was told and jumping through every hoop that was held in front of me. “You want me to jump - how high?”

Just how hard can it be to get a new season ticket? Not hard at all one would think, especially as I now have a photocard and I’m “on their system”.

This year, I’m not so cash rich, so instead of stumping up all the cash on my own account as I have previously, I applied for a company travel loan (interest free and repayable over 12 months, with repayments automatically deducted from my salary). It’s available up to a maximum of £4,500, so doesn’t cover the whole cost, but goes a long way.

The cheque arrived on November 22 and I waited a while in order to renew the ticket as you can’t do it too early (learned that last year). It expires on December 29 and on Wednesday evening, after work, I popped into the ticket office at Peterborough station to get it renewed. There was a short wait for a window to become available and then a further short wait while the woman at the desk had a little fiddle with the papers, got up and disappeared for a few seconds (they love that trick) and then reappeared, pressed her light and met me with a look of utter disdain.

That look intensified when I uttered the words “renew my season ticket”. She immediately became flustered and fired off a string of questions. Where to, when did it expire, when did I want it to start from? I said I’d like it to run consecutively - I could have been speaking French or barbarian. It must have sounded like ba, ba, ba to her. The next stage of the process involved shouting down a long line of desks to her colleague, who seemed to be trained to a higher level in season ticket obstruction.

It could be done, but I couldn’t have a Gold Card. What was a Gold Card? That’s what I’d got now apparently and she couldn’t issue one. What did it do? Well, it seems I can book discounted fares on the whole FCC network using my Gold Card. I said I never went anywhere except London, so it didn’t matter, I’ll have the standard card - not silver, not even bronze, just paper.

It could be done, but she’d have to cancel my existing ticket. Why? Because you can’t have two season tickets. I wouldn’t have two, I’d have one finishing on December 29 and one starting on December 30. That’s two. Well, how can I travel in the meantime, I’ll be losing a week’s travel. No I wouldn’t, she’d do me a new ticket starting now and finishing on December 30 2013. It seems unnecessarily complicated but I said yes.

How was I going to pay. I got out my company cheque and her eyes lit up. She knew she’d got me:

We don’t take cheques (triumph).

You don’t take cheques (incredulity).

We haven’t taken cheques since (checks with her colleague); some time last year (der).

But my colleague has just renewed his season ticket with a cheque. That’s probably a First Capital Connect ticket office, they might take cheques, I don’t know, we’re East Coast, we don’t take cheques.

There’s little more to be said. The Theodosian walls are standing high above me and if I don’t move aside some Byzantine grunt will drop a rock on my head.

Margaret was quite angry and was keen that I knew that the woman behind us in the queue had been tutting and shaking her head. Apparently, she couldn’t believe it either. Well it might have been more helpful if she’d joined me at the walls instead of standing back there tutting, but no matter.

I texted Richard Nash, who had renewed his ticket at Royston without fuss or bother and also called First Capital Connect customer care. A woman at the Indian call-centre said they did take cheques at FCC. Was there an FCC ticket office at King’s Cross? No, but there was one at St Pancras. Did she know where? No.

So I have two new plans:

1. The FCC ticket office at St Pancras
2. Renew at Royston

Plan A (sorry, plan no 1) was enacted on Thursday morning. I walked across to St Pancras’ station, pushed through the Eurostar crowds, through the shopping mall and found the FCC ticket office. A short wait and I’m faced with another window and an unhelpful face behind the glass, another disembodied voice speaking to me through twin speakers.

I went through the preamble ... renew my season ticket ... Peterborough to London ... no tube ... do you take cheques? You do, that’s great!

Have you got a letter from the company?

Ah, the ladder was against the walls and the first janissaries were getting to the top when it was cruelly thrust down.

Letter from the company? It turns out that I need a letter from the company saying that the cheque has been issued to me to pay for my season ticket. This is despite the fact that the cheque is made out to First Capital Connect (why else would the company give me a cheque for £4,500).

I was a broken man. I might have got my debit card out there and then if I’d had enough money in the bank to cover it.

Anyway, still sans season ticket, back in the office Richard said he’d sailed through the renewal at Royston, but Marc Tucker had been to Royston and had also been knocked back for lack of a letter (new rule since November). Later that day accounts kindly provided a letter, Davina forged Kerry Mullins’ signature (very badly in my view) and I had the requisite paperwork. If I’m forging a signature, which I don’t do very often, I like to do it with an illegible flourish. Davina basically wrote her name, but spelled it K Mullins.

This morning I arrived at King’s Cross and thought I’d try the ticket office there to see if I could save myself the time of walking to St Pancras. Everything fine, except you can’t renew your season ticket (according to their rules) until seven days before and I was one day early. The chap at the counter said it with a smirk, but I didn’t care; I knew I could break through the walls just around the corner.

St Pancras station FCC ticket hall, same chap as yesterday (he remembered me and I remembered him - thank god I wasn’t rude). Every question (and there were lots of them) answered, every bit of paperwork produced, there was one slightly wobbly moment when I said I wanted to pay part by cheque and part by credit card, but that was only a slight stutter and then I was over the line.

Never ever before have I had to work so hard to spend £5,600. Was it a good experience? No, I thought this kind of petty bureaucracy had disappeared from public services in the Thatcher era. It’s alive and well in the railway industry and and just waiting for its moment to return.

My first year as a blogger - the stats

I didn't start to write my blog in order for people to read it. It seemed to me a good way of keeping a diary and various thoughts/essays in a format that I could maintain more easily than pen and paper.

The fact that other people could read it is not a problem. There's nothing too personal and if I write anything bad about anybody, then they deserve it and should act better in the future.

One of the good things about Blogger is that it keeps all kinds of stats and, although I didn't start a blog to attract readers, once I started to write things and saw that people were reading them, it became something of an interest.

These are the stats. I'm not obsessive, by the way, Blogger makes it easy, almost compulsory to record every click.

My year started quite well in November 2011 with 117 page views and the records kept tumbling. I hit pay-dirt last month when I wrote a piece about a bike racer's battle to get fit after an horrendous leg injury. Tom tweeted it and the rider - Ian Hutchinson - retweeted it, so my page views went through the roof!

This is the records of page views from November 2011:

November.....117

December......69

January......118

February.....342

March........251

April........208

May..........348

June.........309

July.........324

August.......234

September....384

October......518

November...1,671

Total......4,893

and in graph format ...

It's interesting to see where blog readers come from (well it is to me). Most are UK based, with the USA being the next biggest, then Russia ... let's make a nice list:

1. UK

2. USA

3. Russia

4. Germany

5. Ireland

6. France

7. Australia

8. Belgium (thanks Tom and Hannah)

9. Sweden

10. Isle of Man (probably due to writing about the TT and TT racers).

Now I've started making lists I can't stop. These are the top search terms that have brought people to my blog:

1. Boris bikes

2. Nina Conti

3. Saxmundham (a bit random)

4. Burston Field House

5. Barley Field

6. Astbury Pelsall

7. Ian Hutchinson leg

The top stories, by page views, were:

1 Ian Hutchinson - Closer to the Edge (824)

2. Cakes, Puddings and Quince Jelly (151) - I think this benefited from being next to the Ian Hutchinson post. Bike race followers read that and went to see what was next. They must have wondered what the hell they were reading.

3. Taking in the TT (130)

4. The Joys of Motorcycling (70)

5. My Wedding Diary (54)

6. Mad Sunday T-Shirts Banned (53)

7. Save the Suffolk Newts (52)

8. Pedalling my Boris Bike (50)

9. What Colour is the Highway Code? (50)

10. Letter from Amarica (50)

The joys (and problems) of a coal fire

I subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media. It’s a daily poem and a collection of small essays and snippets about things that have happened on the day the newsletter is sent round.

On December 5th, it was the 60th anniversary of The Great London Smog, these days we’d call it air pollution and there would be a massive outcry. No-one really knows, but the smog of December 1952 is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of about 12,000 people.

This is what the Writer’s Almanac had to say:

London had been famous for its fog for hundreds of years; it was one of the city's defining characteristics. In his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), Evelyn Waugh wrote: "The decline of England [...] dates from the day we abandoned coal fuel. We used to live in a fog, the splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood [...] We designed a city which was meant to be seen in a fog."

The weather had been especially cold that early December in 1952, and Londoners responded as they always had: by burning more coal to keep their houses warm. But late on December 5, one of the city's trademark fogs rolled in, blanketing the capital. The fog mingled with soot, tar particles, and sulfur dioxide, and it was all trapped over London by a weather pattern known as a thermal inversion. A cold, still air mass hovered over the city, and the sun — which normally would warm and disperse the air mass — was unable to break through the clouds of smog. So the cold, dense, yellow-black air lingered. And the moisture in the fog reacted to the chemicals in the pollution, creating droplets of sulfuric acid, or "acid rain."

For five days, visibility was so poor that the city was virtually shut down. At some points, people couldn't even see their own hands and feet, and were getting lost in their own neighborhoods. A hundred thousand people were made ill, and ambulances couldn't drive in the smog, so the sick received no treatment unless they could make their own way to the hospital. People didn't panic, though; they were used to London's thick fogs. It wasn't until the undertakers were running out of coffins, and the florists were running out of flowers, that they realized how deadly the Great Smog had been. When the smog finally lifted, it left 4,000 Londoners dead in its wake, and over the following months, an additional 8,000 — mostly the elderly and those with chronic respiratory conditions — died of complications from exposure to the acid smog.

The Great Smog changed the way people looked at pollution, and, in 1956, Parliament passed the first Clean Air Act, which regulated the burning of coal in urban homes and factories.

The debate about clean air in the 1950s and whether to legislate or not is reminiscent of the current debate around CO2 emissions and global warming. Many politicians opposed the clean air legislation, the scientific evidence was disputed and rubbished; some claimed any Englishman had the right to burn coal in his grate and others questioned what it would do to society and family life if there wasn’t an open fire burning in the living room.

I can remember the Clean Air Act coming into force in Cheshire where I lived. It would have been the late 1950s or early ’60s. We had the open fire in our living room replaced by a stove, which burned smokeless fuel call Furnicite (little black eggs) or Coalite. The Aga in the kitchen (it was actually a Rayburn, but I’m using Aga as a common noun) had always burned coke and when we needed the fire in the front room, we used Coalite in the open grate.

When I was a boy, it was my job to get the coal in and tend to the fires (it was a job I generally enjoyed), although going down the end of the yard to the coalhouse in the pitch dark was a task I had to steel myself to undertake (on account of wolves, vampires and various other monsters that Hammer films put in my head). If only head torches had been invented ...

We always had two types of fuel - coke for the Rayburn and house coal for the open fires. They were tipped in the coalhouse, which was a large brick building on the back of the house, with two stalls divided by thick wooden planks. The coalman would carry the fuel in sacks of 1cwt (about 50kg) loads on the back of a flat-back lorry. Coalmen wore leather protectors on their backs and worked two or three to a lorry so that a steady stream of them would troop down the entry, down the yard and into the coalhouse to tip the sacks, which they took away with them. They carried the coal on their backs, lifting it off the lorry and walking with a stoop to tip it over their shoulder into the coal pile. My mother would have me count how many sacks were brought in. Every coal lorry had a large set of scales on the back and sacks were checked on the scales before being carried in. The coalmen were always dirty and quite scary. I don’t think I’ve have wanted to argue if they’d delivered seven sacks instead of eight.

We had a bucket for coal and a scuttle for coke, which was tipped in at the top of the Rayburn and would last for about 12 hours. I could just about carry each one when full. The coal was shiny, brittle and hard. Sometimes it came in huge slabs, which had to be hit with a heavy coal-hammer to break them up so they would burn. At the bottom, there would be an accumulation of small pieces of coal and dust (which we called slack) and you’d use this to dampen down the fire when it was burning too quickly or to bank it up if you were going out. I liked breaking the coal and would cheerfully have smashed it all to slack given the chance.

When we had new coal delivered, there was always a debate as to whether it was good coal or not and sometimes my mother would threaten to change coalman. Great interest was taken as to how well it was burning and from time to time, there would be some shale in the coal which would cause it to burst with a bang and shoot pieces out of the fire. There was always great interest in clinker, which was solid pieces in the ash-pan.

There’s nothing like watching a proper coal fire - it sizzles and flames, you could bring it alive by a couple of stabs of the poker and good coal also had gloops of tar running out as it burns and little jets of flame spouting from the pieces of coal.

Coal was the means of heating our house until I was about 15 when my dad (who was a plumber) installed an oil-fired boiler with radiators and took the old Rayburn out of the kitchen. The coalhouse was part filled with a large oil tank. He installed oil as it was considered cheaper than gas (natural gas from the North Sea hadn’t yet arrived).

Coal wasn’t just a fuel for heating back in the 1950s, it also powered almost every train and was the main means for generating electricity and for producing gas (a by-product of coke). The smell of smoke was everywhere and when I smell it now (very rarely) it has a pungency that surprises me. With street upon street burning house coal, no wonder we almost poisoned ourselves.

Two flats and a Pre-Raphaelite show

Astarte Syriaca by Rossetti - poster
image for the Tate show

I don’t know what it is with my children, none of them can be relied upon to look after cars or motorcycles.

Tom will be gnashing his teeth in anger at that statement and will be able to cite multiple repairs and improvements that he has made to vehicles in his ownership.

In turn, I could cite a number of occasions when failure to add petrol to a motorcycle left him stranded and me riding to the rescue with a petrol can balanced between my legs.There was also that incident when he rode to Brands Hatch and (almost) back with only a cup-ful of oil in the engine.

Sam has a zero maintenance policy when it comes to four wheels, although he is now the proud owner of a foot-pump.

They were always very keen to get behind the wheel of a car, but less so to get under the bonnet and eschewed all attempts to interest them in oil levels, tyre pressures and washer fluid.

Latest car crisis came on Wednesday when I visited Max for a drink and some dinner. Driving home from school that day, he’d pulled up into his car park and felt a clunk at the back wheel. His tyre was flat. I said I’d help him put the spare on and so, after pints and pasta, we got busy by the light of a sodium street-lamp and a head torch.

Had a bit of trouble with the locking nut, but we got it off in the end, only to find that when we let the jack down, the space-saver spare tyre was almost as flat as the one we’d taken off.

“Do you ever check your tyre pressures?” I asked.

“Of course,” lied Max.

He couldn’t remember when he last checked the spare - probably not been checked since 2000 when the car was built. Next morning, the spare looked even flatter and so Max was on the bus and a trip to Halfords beckoned. The space-saver spare was pumped up and the punctured tyre replaced. It was pretty worn so two new tyres were needed on the back.

I had arranged to meet Max at Balham Bowls Club, which I much prefer to The Bedford, and I was quite late as I’d been to Shepherd’s Bush for a meeting which made me late setting off and had then gone straight to Balham from there. Normally, I catch any number of trains from Victoria and it’s a 15-minute journey. From Shepherd’s Bush, I had to catch a branch of the North London Line which went across the river to Clapham Junction and change there for a train that went through Balham.

The station at Shepherd’s Bush was rammed and when the train arrived that was also rammed!. Fortunately, quite a few people get off there (presumably to get onto the Central Line) so I managed to squeeze on. By the time we got to our last stop before Clapham Junction, the train was packed - worse than the Victoria Line on a bad day. People were left waiting at the stations, there just wasn’t enough room to get on the train.

Clapham Junction is an astonishing place. There are almost 20 platforms (twice as many as King’s Cross) and I had to get from platform 3 to wherever a train that went through Balham could be found. Fortunately, there was a large board with all destinations listed in alphabetical order along with the platforms to use. Balham said 15-17 so I made my way through a long connecting tunnel, shuffling along with the crowd and cursing the ‘idiots’ who chose to ignore the keep-left signs and pushed against the flow of people. I’m glad I don’t have to do that every night!

Inna joined us for dinner. She’d been late at work because they were filming a quiz for their Christmas party. Some of the questions were “guess the film” with the staff acting out well known scenes. There was the James Bond “no Mr Bond, I expect you to die” scene recreated with a laser pen and a few others. It sounded like good fun. We went to my favourite busy Italian on Bedford Hill Road and I had pasta with broccoli, chiorizo and cream. Max and Inna surprised me by saying they had been thinking about children’s names. I thought a big announcement was about to be made, but no, they had just been thinking about children’s names. Inna liked Chloe for a girl (she has a uni' friend called Chloe) and for a boy, they thought about a Russian name - Artem. That would be the first Artem in the family tree.

On Sunday, I took pictures for my project to record our garden through the seasons. I’ve been taking four shots of the garden from the same position once every month to show how it changes. There’s often a dog (generally Holly) photo-bombing the shot! It has been a fairly mild November; we’ve had some frost, but not enough to fully kill the dahlias or geraniums, although it has seen off the begonias which have provided so much colour this year. The main feature, however, has been rain (and lots of it). 2012 was the wettest summer for many years. A drought and hosepipe ban was declared in spring and, basically, it hasn’t stopped raining since! The ground is sodden and more rain has been falling. In the west country, Wales and parts of Yorkshire, there has been severe flooding and the washes road to Whittlesey was closed this week. We drove across it on Saturday and the water was well up. It shut on Monday and several drivers who had ignored the ‘road closed’ signs and tried to cross got stranded in the flood. I remember Max and I driving through the flood one year in the VW Sharan. I thought we’d be fine because the engine is positioned quite high, but in the deepest part the car started to rock and I think we were briefly floating. I decided to come back via Guyhirn! Apparently police have been prosecuting motorists who ignore the signs, which is a little harsh - a big bill to tow you out, dry your engine and then a fine and three points on top!

On Friday, we went to the Haycock at Wansford for a taster night. The idea is that you have a meal, comprising lots of small courses and there was a different wine to try between each course. A jazz singer in the Elkie Brooks style (Lesley) crooned away during the meal and she was quite good. The food was good, nothing too challenging, but there was a particularly nice rhubarb crumble to finish. It was a bed of thinly sliced just-cooked rhubarb topped with ice cream and with baked crumb sprinkled quite generously over the top. A thin slice of (I’m guessing) oven dried rhubarb was pushed into the ice cream. The flavour was intense in the dried rhubarb - a really interesting dish.

The wine waiter was an amiable Geordie who not did let a complete lack of knowledge dampen his enthusiasm. You’ll have to read this in a Geordie accent to get the best from it, but he told us that he didn’t know much about wine; he’d been on a course this week and this was his first night.

The first wine was an Italian white which he told me was “not too bad”. I asked him what grape it was and he was completely flummoxed (I hadn’t meant to make him so). He didn’t know, but started reading the bottle: “It’s a light, fruity wine ...”

The next was a Merlot which was described as “a bit better” followed by a “cabaret savvie-non” which was his favourite “aye, it’s all right is this.” The final wine was a sweet pudding wine. A sauternes? I enquired. He started reading the label - "no it’s a Gironde." We finished our wine chat at that stage. I don’t think he has a great future as a somelier, but he was a thoroughly nice chap.

The previous Friday, I’d gone to see the Pre-Raphaelites exhibition at The Tate with Lawrie, Davina and Laura from work. Margaret was supposed to come as well, but hadn’t felt like it on the day and so her ticket was wasted. I enjoyed the show, there was a lot to see and it was busy enough to have some atmosphere, but not so busy that you couldn’t comfortably see the works, which included tapestry, carpet, wallpaper and painted furniture as well as paintings.

Portrait of Sophy Gray

The art isn’t challenging or technologically ground-breaking, much of it is shamelessly romantic and rather sugary, but nonetheless there were some stunning paintings, most notably (for me) a portrait of a young girl Sophy Gray by John Everett Millais. She was the younger sister of his wife and he caught her at about 14 with a youth and innocence combined with awakening sexual awareness that resulted in a painting with the power to look straight through you. If I were Millais' wife, I'd keep a close eye on young Sophy!

I liked A Vision of Fiammetta by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber) and his other stunning work, Astarte Syriaca, which was the cover shot of the exhibition. It looks much better in reality than on the reproductions.

I’d seen a few of the paintings before, but great to see them again and to see so many well-known works of art in one place.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A Vision of Fiammetta (owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber).