Firsby

St Andrew's Parish Church, Firsby.

This is another of the articles written by Susan for the benefit of delegates to the Hundleby Convention in May 2007 (with a few interpolations by Roger).

We believe we have traced our ancestors back to Robert Hundleby, who died in 1766, leaving a will in which he is described as 'a Graiser in Firsby'.

(A 'graiser' is probably someone who owned/lived on/worked a patch of meadow; or a reaper who cut grass with a sickle for fodder.)

This Robert Hundleby married Elizabeth Gresswell in Great Steeping on 27 May 1740. Based on the information in his will, he and Elizabeth had five children: Mary, Robert, Ann, Elizabeth and John (born about 1756).

We think it was Robert and Elizabeth's eldest child, Robert, who married Elizabeth Dawson in Irby on 11 July 1777. Robert junior and Elizabeth's first two children (Elizabeth and Ann) were baptised in Irby but thereafter in Firsby.

(It is interesting that this second Robert underwent an adult christening a week before he married Elizabeth, which would have been necessary for the ceremony in an Anglican church.)

Following Elizabeth's death in 1811, Robert junior married his second wife, Sarah Cheales, in Firsby on 16 April 1812. Like his father, Robert left a will when he died on 2 December 1824. This refers to farms in Firsby, Ashby by Spilsby and Ingoldmells.

It was Robert (senior) and Elizabeth's youngest child, John (b ca 1756), who married, we believe, Mary Cockson on 30 January 1789 at Firsby.

The Anglican parish church was dedicated to St Andrew and was rebuilt from local stone in 1856, presumably on the same site as the one in which John and Mary married.

John and Mary Hundleby had three sons: John (bap 1791), Robert (b 1793) and Thomas (b 1794). We don't know exactly where John and Mary lived, but John junior was baptised in Great Steeping; Robert was also born, according to census records, in Steeping (although he appears to have retired to Halton Holegate after farming for many years in Surrey). Thomas was born in either Firsby or Steeping.

(Robert died aged 82 in 1875. Nothing is known about any progeny.)

John Hundleby senior was, we think, buried at Monksthorpe Baptist Chapel on 21 July 1793, aged 37.

(This means that Mary was pregnant with Thomas when her husband died and had two other sons less than three years old.)

In 1841 the two brothers John and Thomas were living with with their families in Ashby by Partney. Almost everybody at the convention were descended from one or other of them.

(Other known 'Hundlebys' descend from Thomas and John's uncle Robert (the one christened as an adult in 1776), and include the antipodean branches.

There is a record of a Hundleby earlier than the original Robert (the graiser), namely Elizabeth (bap 1682 in Willoughby), who married William Sizer in 1721. Her latest descendant, her great (times seven) granddaughter is nearly ten!

Whatmoughs and Hundlebys

I’ve mentioned the usefulness of Google alerts before, I think. I have two set up, one for each of the variant spellings of ‘Hundleby’. It provides a lot of interesting links from the news, websites and blogs, although it has to be said that it isn’t perfect and misses many. But it recently led me to a useful website, called RootsWeb. It's one of many such sites on the net, and often you need to pay to get access to the best information and sources, but this was one’s great advantage is its message board.

A Google alert let me to an enquiry on that board by Becky Whatmough about her great-grandfather who had married a Hundleby sometime around 1916/17.

http://boards.rootsweb.com/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=38201&p=localities.britisles.england.lan.general

It fitted neatly with one of Susan’s charts and I calculated that I was Becky’s third cousin, once removed. I mention that partly because I’m proud of the fact that I have finally learned what that sort of expression means. There’s a helpful explanation here, including a handy chart.

The way our families are linked seemed quite straightforward, but the correspondence on the message board has thrown up one or two mysteries. So I’ll list the facts and queries in chronological order, for information and in the hope that people out there might throw some light where things are dark.

I should add that I have not visited any original sources myself, and I have Becky’s permission to name the current members of her family.

First generation:

Let’s start with Joseph Hundleby (1853-1938), the grandson of Thomas Hundleby and Ruth Bradley. He married Annie Inman, and spent his first years in and near Lincolnshire - Baumber, Laughton, Worksop – and worked in the threshing trade, as did so many Hundlebys of that time.

By 1889 he had moved south to Hertfordshire, and his fourth child, Samuel, was registered as being born in Standon. It is worth noting that his third child, who was sadly killed in action in 1918, was called William.

Second generation:

Joseph’s sixth child was his daughter, Susan (1892-1972), and it is possible that her place of birth was Standon Lodge (pictured above).

According to Susan, Susan married John Whatmough. One of Becky’s correspondents has discovered that John (known as Jack) Whatmough married a Lily Hundleby at Willesden, London, in 1917.

This is our first query. Is Lily the same person as Susan, and if so, why the difference in name? Did she bear them both? Was Lily a pet name for Susan, as our contemporary Susan has suggested, as the Hebrew for lily is the basis for the name Susan?

Third generation:

William Alexander Whatmough appears to have been born in 1916. This is or Susan’s belief and also that of Becky’s family. There are a few questions, though:

There is a record of the birth of William Alexander Hundleby in Lambeth, 1916. Is the father’s name on the birth certificate? Was that father John Whatmough, and was William subsequently legitimised and renamed by the marriage of John and Lily/Susan? Or was he adopted?

According to Becky’s information, William was born on 21 June 1916 in St Mary’s London and his death is recorded as 21 June 1987, aged 70.

William had a sister, Marjorie Jane, who was born about 1926 in Manchester. She went on to marry Peter Haynes.

Doubts have been raised by a correspondent searching in ancestry.com’s births, marriages and deaths index who found a William Whatmough born in Preston in 1916 to a mother named Mitchell.

Moreover, there is also a strange reference to two children, Marjorie Whatmough and William Alexander Whatmough, born respectively in 1924 in Prestwich and 1930 in Lambeth, both with a mother whose maiden name was Hundleby. How can that be explained?

Becky is adamant that William, her grandfather, was born in 1916. And she should know.

At this point I should name some of the other surnames acquired by Joseph Hundleby’s other daughters, which might be helpful to Becky:

Mary (1885-1955) married Joseph Ratcliffe.
Jennifer/Jane (1894-1948) married William Stone.
Annie Dora (1901-1972) married William Sutherland.
Eva/Evelyn (1904-1976) married Edward King (possibly Wing).

Becky is aware that her grandfather, William, had a cousin named Hundleby, possibly ‘A. Hundleby’, who could well be Alfred Joseph Barber Hundleby (b 1916), son of the Samuel mentioned earlier.

Just as a matter of interest, Annie Dora Hundleby, Susan’s younger sister (1901-72), who married William Sutherland, had four sons, the first three of whom married respectively women called Alexandrina, Jamesina and Christina.

Fourth generation:

William Alexander Whatmough had three sons, Clifford, Alexander and Tracy (now known as Terry). Alexander is Becky’s father and, if my calculations are correct and the established information accurate, my own third cousin, born by chance in the same year as I, 1949.

Fifth generation:

This brings us to Alexander’s children, Becky herself and her brother Mark Alexander, and Becky’s son, Joshua Shaun, born on 17 January 2007, the representative of the 6th generation. Since I think I’ve got the hang of the term, I can’t resist saying that little Joshua is my third cousin, twice removed.

Probably.

Cornelius part IV

Just one more blog inspired by Cornelius and then I’ll move on. I promise.

As a modern forename Cornelius is not common. Offhand I can think only of Cornelius Ryan, who wrote The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, amongst other works on the Second World War.

Roddy MacDowell’s chimp in The Planet of the Apes was called Cornelius and Shakespeare used the name a couple of times, in Cymbeline and Hamlet. I’ve found that there is a basketball player called Cornelius Hawkins, nicknamed Connie.

But its origin is much grander. The Cornelii – let’s call them the Cornelians and my spellcheck will stop bothering me – were one of the great aristocratic clans (gentes) of Rome. Over hundreds of years they provided a high proportion of Consuls, Rome’s chief executives, as well as many other leaders.

One of her greatest generals was Scipio (pictured), the man who finally defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama in North Africa and ended the Second Punic War (202 BC). In full his name was Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major, where Publius is a personal name, used by intimates, Cornelius his clan name and Scipio is family name. The ‘Africanus’ was an honour given to him after his victory over Hannibal, similar to the British award of a peerage to a successful general, for example Montgomery of Alamein. ‘Major’ distinguishes him from a later Scipio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Africanus

I read that Scipio turned down huge powers in Rome, such as ‘dictator for life’ at the end of his campaign, but later Cornelians were less modest.

Cornelius Sulla, who lived from 138-78 BC, was another general who twice marched his armies on Rome at one time was granted an indeterminate term as dictator. He was part of the process whereby the Republic, with its checks and balances and fears of absolute power, was breaking apart and moving towards the time of the Emperors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla

Cornelius Cinna (d 84BC) was another strong man who served as Consul for four years in succession – strictly illegal – and continued the dangerous precedents, using his army to cow the Senate, murdering his opponents and subverting the constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Cornelius_Cinna

Later in the century other Cornelians tried the same thing with less success. Cornelius Lentulus Sura and Cornelius Cethegus were involved in the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome. They were exposed by Cicero, found guilty and judicially strangled in 63 BC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Cornelius_Lentulus_%28Sura%29

So, to bring these meanderings back to the Hundlebys, was there once an ancient history buff called Bradley who fancied the name? Highly unlikely, I would have thought, because most of these men were rather unsavoury characters and were known in any case by their surname – Scipio, Sulla, etc.

It’s more likely that the name was used for religious reasons. Here there are two main candidates, two ‘saints’ in fact.

The first is the Roman centurion Cornelius, whom we meet in The Acts of the Apostles, chapter 10. Already a devout man, Cornelius was told about the gospel in a dream and approached the apostle Peter with a view to baptism. Peter needed a dream himself to be convinced that gentiles as well as Jews were welcome in the Christian fold but eventually Cornelius was baptized. Later he was canonised by the Catholic Church, as was just about anybody whose name appears in the New Testament.

The whole story is drenched in myth, but it represents a vital moment in the history of Christianity, when it ceased to be a Jewish heresy and began its rise to domination of the western world.

The Bradleys seem to have had a taste for Biblical names and I would guess that Centurion Cornelius was the reason for its adoption.

There are other saints named Cornelius, one of whom was a pope and a martyr.

He was a member of the old Cornelian clan and ‘reigned’ as Bishop Rome from 253-251 AD.

Finally, my researches have turned up one interesting fact. Did you know that the rooster mascot of Kellogg’s is called Cornelius?

Corn – Cornelius, get it?

Thoughts on Christian names

My last post was about the name Cornelius, which is a name passed down over several generations of at least one branch of the Hundleby family.

In trawling through the charts, two things struck me. First, the tendency of generations to be linked in this way, children being named after one or other of their parents or grandparents and uncles, etc being honoured. Second, that the pool of names was quite small. This seems to have been the practice about 100-200 years ago, but I think that the tendency has declined.

I rather hope that my elder son, if and when he settles down and raises a family, has an eye to tradition and carries on the names Henry and, maybe Sarah for a girl. It doesn’t have to be the name used, but it provides a link, however sentimental, with the past.

We may never know how a name like Cornelius came to be given to a Bradley child in the prehistory of our records. In my own case, my wives and I agreed that she would have the final choice of names for our daughters and I for the boys.

My first wife named our first daughter after an Orkadian aunt, Jessie being a diminutive of Janet, rather than Jessica. Janet is itself a diminutive of Jane, the feminine equivalent of John. Corinne came from who knows where. I believe I’d never come across it before, but I’ve learned since that it comes from the Greek and means ‘maiden’. Ovid wrote poems to a woman named Corinna.

James received the second name, Henry, for reasons of family continuity and the third, Barrett, was his mother’s maiden name. His first, James, is one of the few boys’ names that I actually like. Names like William, George, Joseph and Henry I find old-fashioned. On the other hand I’m not fond of trendy, modern ones. I’d better not give any examples, for fear of offending people. And I wanted to avoid ‘fancy’ names like Winston or Sylvester. And I’m not fond of those beginning with vowels. This fastidiousness left me a pretty small pool, James, David, Robert, Richard, John and Michael and little else.

I did ponder on Old Testament names – Jacob, Joel, Micah, all of which can be shortened to sound normal – but was, shall we say, dissuaded.

I have a fondness for girls’ names beginning with J and my second wife’s decision on Juliet for our daughter was never a cause for disagreement. A Roman name, of course, the diminutive of Julia, but mainly a tribute to Shakespeare’s heroine.

I’ve often teased my son David that, had he been born three days later on February 14, with a Juliet in the family, he might have been called Romeo. As it was he received another from my limited supply. Nearby cousins named Richard ruled that name out. David grew up happy to bear a king’s name, but less happy to be told it meant ‘Beloved’ or even ‘Darling’.

My youngest daughter was given a queen’s name and her second name, Grace, seemed to fit naturally with it.

So there we are. Forgive me for a somewhat self-indulgent blog. Next time I’ll share my findings about the origins of the name Cornelius. It’s the least I can do, since I fear that at my age I’m unlikely to be able to revive it as a family name.

The Cornelii

In 1967 I went up to university in Bristol. For the first two years I lived in a hall of residence on the Somerset side of the Avon Gorge. The hall was a collection of large, rather grand houses which had been bought up by the university for use as student accommodation. Each house had a ‘sub-warden’, usually a lecturer, whose role was to supervise and support us.

My sub-warden was a lecturer in English called Basil Cottle, whom I discovered to be the author of The Penguin Book of Surnames. In the first few weeks after or arrival he would invite small groups in for sherry and conversation before one of the formal evening meals for which we were obliged to wear academic gowns. It seems like another world, doesn’t it?

At these gatherings, designed to make us feel at home and get to know each other, he would tell us the meaning and origin of our surname. I expected that he would find mine fascinating and unusual. But no. ‘A simple locative,’ he said, ‘place name.’

Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by names and words in general, and wrote about it earlier in the year.

Posting Evelyn’s pen-portrait of Cornelius Bradley Hundleby – sounds like an American general, doesn’t he? – reminded me of when I first came across the name Cornelius. I was doing some desultory browsing through some census records for Hundleby when the name jumped out at me. Such an unusual name amongst all the Henrys, Williams, Samuels and Thomases.

When eventually Susan sent me some of her charts I found more Corneliuses (Cornelii?) and wondered where it had come from and why it had been chosen in the first place. I learned it had been used originally by the Bradley family and imported along with names like Nathaniel and Susanna.

The first instance I find is Cornelius Bradley (born ca 1837), son of Susanna Bradley. He was therefore the nephew of the Ruth and Ann, the sisters who married Thomas and John respectively. Susanna, at some stage, married Daniel Pocklington. Was he the father? If so, why didn’t Cornelius bear his name?

Let me digress to ask the same question about John Hundleby Bradley, born ca 1811 and the first child of the aforementioned John and Ann. Was he John’s child? Why did the parents wait 6 years to marry? Again, why didn’t he take his father’s name?

The fact of being born ‘out of wedlock’ is irrelevant to most people today but I find it a little odd that it happened so often at this period. Other examples are my own great-grandfather, Henry, and Samuel Fox Hundleby (born 1799). It was contrary to the prevailing morality, and many of the family seem to have been keen Christians. But since when have things like that hindered the course of true love?

I was wrong to say that Susanna’s Cornelius was the earliest we know about, for his Aunt Ruth had provided Thomas with a son of that name in 1830, Cornelius (Bradley).

Thomas and Ruth went on to have three grandsons with the name

Their sons William and Joseph (the latter incidentally an example of the name of a deceased child being given to a later baby) used the name for their own sons, Thomas ‘Cornelius’ (b 1848) and Cornelius (b 1859). The third (b 1864) was the namesake of his father.

Cornelius Bradley Hundleby’s wife, Rebecca, was probably glad of the two servants they had acquired by 1871, because theirs was another large family, seven boys and one girl (Ruth of course), who was the eldest. One of the boys was another Cornelius (b 1864) and his brother George continued the tradition by naming his younger son Cornelius Frank (b ?, d 1974). So did Ruth, whose marriage to George Griffin produced Cornelius Griffin.

Going back to Thomas and Ruth, another of their sons was John (b 1833), whose grandson Cornelius was born in 1901 and died 1971 in Louth. Is he the last?

I have been reading up on the original Cornelii of Rome and may write about that soon.

In the meantime I’ll provide this link as I’m wondering which Cornelius is referred to. And who might be the ‘Miss Hundleby’ mentioned? The name Elmhirst also recurs, reminding me of Evelyn’s reference to Moses Elmhirst JP in her essay on Cornelius Bradley Hundleby.

http://www.granthamjournal.co.uk/custompages/CustomPage.aspx?PageID=63664

If the link doesn't work - and it didn't when I checked - try googling "cornelius hundleby", using the quotation marks.

Cornelius Bradley Hundleby (1830-1897)

Evelyn writes:

Cornelius Bradley Hundleby was born on 27 May 1830 in Ashby by Partney, Lincolnshire, and was christened 26 December at St Helen’s Anglican church.

He was the son of Ruth (née) Bradley and Thomas Hundleby, and followed in his father’s footsteps by ‘staying on the land’. By 1851 he was living in the village of Grebby, in the civil parish of Scremby, working as a ‘farm servant’ to Joseph Kime, a widower of 69, who was farming 90 acres.

(He was the younger brother of my own great-great-grandmother, Sarah (1822-1839) - Roger)

In 1858 he married Rebecca Rysdale, who was christened on 11 March 1834 at St Peter’s, Nottingham. She was the daughter of William, an agricultural labourer, and his wife Frances, of Great Sturton, Lincolnshire. William had been a grocer at Greyfriar Gate, Nottingham.

Cornelius worked in Revesby and Butterwick before settling in West Ashby, two miles north of Horncastle, in 1863.

His younger brother, Samuel, states in his journal that Cornelius was a local Methodist preacher working on the Horncastle Circuit. According to the Directories of the time, a Wesleyan chapel was not built there until 1878, and it is quite possible that Cornelius preached from his own or a neighbour’s house before then.

By 1871, still in West Ashby Cornelius was a Working Foreman and Farm Bailiff. He had two servants, Thomas and Steven Wattam, and a lodger, George Hodson, who was a labourer.

In 1872 another ‘Revolt of the Fields’ broke out. From the early years of restriction of Trades Unionism through various pieces of legislation, it was now legal for men to belong to Associations and Unions. The 1867 Report on Agriculture highlighted the hard times that the farm workers were still experiencing. A certain John Kinswood of Ludford had said, ‘I don’t like the lasses to go out to work so much; nor boys nor women. There’s lots of men out of work, when women and boys can get it. It’s because they’re cheaper. At weeding time it is so, and at turnip-dragging time in winter; women do it.

There was a Labourers’ Association conference in Grantham on May 3 1872. One of the delegates was George Wilson, who represented the Spilsby Amalgamated Society of 181 men. Agricultural labourers were asking for two things: a nine-hour workday (7am – 5pm, not including lunch), and a raise in pay from 2/6 (two shillings and sixpence or about 12 pence) to 3/0 (three shillings or 15 pence) per day.

Moses Elmhirst, of West Ashby, was a Justice of the Peace, and on Feb 20 1872 he had a labourer from Hagworthingham, Tom Jeffery, brought before him in this regard. It must have been a very hard time for Cornelius, trying to keep everything running and yet feeling sympathy for the men he supervised.

The Golden Age of Farming, or High Farming as it was called, was almost over and by 1879, when a very bad harvest was experienced, an agricultural depression was well underway which was to last until World War I. By 1891 we find Cornelius once more an agricultural labourer.

He died on 6 April 1897 and was buried on the ninth in the churchyard of All Saints, West Ashby. By his epitaph we know that he was well-love and respected during his lifetime:

‘His life was a life of truth

and his heart was the law of kindness.’

His wife Rebecca stayed in the farmhouse in west Ashby with her sons until some time after 1901 and then went to live with her daughter, Susan Squires, until her death in May 1918.

This is one of several articles written by Evelyn for the May 2007 Convention. More will be posted in due course.

A Little Politics

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d be talking about Vladimir Ilyanovich Lenin on the Hundleby weblog, but it’s an interesting idea.

The pub where I am a regular is one of those which have several shelves of books. I am one of the very few customers who actually read them, when I can find one worth reading, that is. For these books are obviously acquired by the truckload and you need to trawl through yards of dross to find the odd nugget.

I’ve found A G McDonnel’s England Their England sitting next to a 1924 textbook on accounting; Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage squeezed between rows of Georgette Heyer and Peter Cheyney. I’ve even discovered Shakespeare’s Henry V translated into German.

‘Uns wen’ge, uns beglücktes Haüflein Brüder . . .’

And then, the other day, sitting next to Lord Montgomery’s war memoirs was volume 12 of the Selected Works of Lenin: Theory of the Agrarian Question.

I haven’t read it and I won’t, because I’m prejudiced, not to mention easily bored. But what little browsing I have done shows that it’s hardly a serious economics discussion, more a political polemic. But my eye was caught by the mention of Lincolnshire in his chapter on ‘Capitalism in Agriculture.’

His aim is to demonstrate that the agricultural worker, whom he variously describes as ‘the small producer in agriculture’, ‘the small tiller of the soil’, or ‘the small peasant’, was even worse off, in the late nineteenth century, than the artisan or industrial worker. For not only did the farm labourer work his fields as long as there was light, he also had to repair his equipment, tend to his and his animals’ buildings and his tools; all things which the industrial worker would expect to be paid for as overtime.

He quotes from a British Parliamentary Commission of 1897, where a witness from Lincolnshire stated, ‘I have brought up a whole family and almost worked them to death.’ Another said, ‘We and the children sometimes work 18 hours a day; on an average we work form 10 to 12 hours.’ ‘We work harder than the day labourers; we work like slaves.’

Maybe I’m wrong, but I rather get the impression that these witnesses were farming their own, or at least rented land. Which makes them capitalists themselves, doesn’t it?

*

BE THAT AS IT MAY, Lenin never had many adherents in Lincolnshire, although God knows farm workers’ wages were always appallingly low and the amount of forelocking tugging that went on was sickening. For all that, the county has always been staunchly Tory, apart from the county town itself which until ten years ago was usually marginal. It’s represented currently by a former ‘Blair Babe’, who probably rings the PM for the right answer before she answers the question, ‘Is it raining?’

My own personal interest in politics began at the time of the 1966 general election when Harold Wilson’s government was returned with a large majority. We had a mock election at school and I acted as agent to the Labour candidate. Who won, I might add. Our 500-strong electorate reflected pretty closely the country as a whole, except for the fact that our Communist opponent did unexpectedly well. My explanation was that he’d bribed all the first-years with promises of longer school holidays and the summary execution of the headmaster.

During the campaign, my father, Ernie (pictured on his wedding day in 1948), took me to see George Brown who spoke from a makeshift platform in Boston Marketplace. It was a good old-fashioned political speech, complete with hecklers, whom George saw off with ease. As I recall, he was sober. He was always Dad’s hero, proof that you could reach the top from humble origins.

Somehow I was invited to attend our constituency count. This was ‘Holland-with-Boston’, by the way, a longtime Conservative stronghold. To be precise it was a ‘National Liberal’ stronghold, a label that went back to the days of Ramsay Macdonald’s National government, when many Labour and Liberal MPs defected.

The old MP, who had had a high personal vote, had retired and Labour sensed a chance to take the seat. They nearly did. At the count I watched the bundles of ballot papers for the two candidates stacking up and creeping along trestle tables, neck and neck. I saw a huddle of officials consulting with them and then there was the announcement that there would be a recount. Finally, the result, and I declare that Richard Body, Conservative, is duly elected to serve as Member of Parliament for this constituency.’ Something like that is how it goes.

He won by about 300 votes. Body was later to become Sir Richard and a strong opponent of the European Union, a stand which moved me to write to him once, urging him to keep up the good work.

*

MY FATHER, ERNIE HUNDLEBY, was always a staunch Labour man. He was the first person I ever heard speaking disparagingly about Winston Churchill. Great war leader he may have been, but that counted for little against the fact that he was an upper-class Tory. I grew up in the fifties, when MacMillan was prime minister, another Tory toff much despised by my father. I rather liked Supermac’s style, which was one of languid nonchalance and aristocratic aloofness.

Dad just snorted when Macmillan described the resignation of several members of his cabinet as ‘a little local difficulty’ and responded to an angry outburst by Khrushchev by politely asking if he might have the translation.

But Dad’s support for the Labour Party was never ideological. It was a matter of class. Labour was the only party interested in improving working conditions, the health service and education, and making the rich pay for it. He wasn’t bothered about egalitarianism, and so he was pleased when my sister and I found places at local grammar schools. I suppose he was interested in opportunities to rise, rather than bring everyone down to the same level.

But even Dad had a political crisis. In the seventies, the Left was taking control of the party and Dad was appalled, for the working class is essentially rather conservative. It doesn’t want a different kind of cake, just a bigger slice of the one on offer.

So, when Dick Taverne, Labour MP for Lincoln, resigned to fight a by-election under the ‘Democratic Labour’ banner, Dad supported him. Taverne won and but it was a brief victory for the movement which was later resurrected later as the SDP and finally in the person of Tony Blair.

Dad was long gone by then, sadly, and it’s one of my great regrets that he died too early for us to share many a great political argument.