Boston Grammar School

THE SUCCESSION of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister has led to articles in the press about his home town in Scotland, Kirkaldy. One theme has been the number of celebrated or successful people who have emerged from a place where the protestant virtues of hard work and self help held sway for so long.

Men like Adam Smith, the ‘father of modern economics’ and apostle of the free market. I always remember learning about him at school and was particularly struck by his analysis of the division of labour. His most famous illustration was the pin, to produce which requires 19 separate operations.

Robert Adam, the architect, came from Kirkaldy, as did David Steel, the Liberal Democrat politician, and Sandford Fleming, who built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Another Scots-Canadian from Kirkaldy was the recently deceased Bertha Wilson, who became the first female judge of the Canadian Supreme Court.

And I mustn’t forget Jocky Wilson, world champion darts player.

ANOTHER POLITICAL STORY recently was the Conservative opposition’s change of policy on grammar schools, secondary schools where pupils are selected on academic ability. Most secondary schools in Britain are comprehensive, but some grammar schools have survived, especially in Lincolnshire. They remain a bone of political contention.

At the age of ten I was set an examination at my primary school. I had little idea of what it was all about, but some time later I was told that I would be going to Boston Grammar School. Apparently I had passed the ‘eleven-plus’. My family seemed very pleased, even proud. I myself was, if anything, merely relieved that I wouldn’t be attending the secondary modern school, about which I’d heard horror stories about initiation ceremonies.

THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL occupies a former monastery, Franciscans or Greyfriars I believe, together with modern additions. It was granted its charter by (Bloody) Mary I and the main building, ‘the old school’, now the library, has a stained glass window depicting her alongside her husband, Philip of Spain. Philip thought being married to the Queen Regnant entitled him to be called King of England, and later would send the Armada in an attempt to make that a dream a reality. I remain quite proud of my old school, but not the bloodthirsty Catholic and foreign invader who founded it.

Lessons were held in classrooms arranged in a rectangle around a large grassed quadrangle. Teachers often wore gowns and would dispense summary corporal punishment for minor infractions. Surnames only were used. It was also a single-sex school, although in recent years the sixth form has become co-educational. I find it odd that the idea prevails that sixteen and seventeen year-olds are better able to work ‘maturely’ with the opposite sex than eleven-year olds. Be that as it may, the award of best scholar of the year was recently awarded to one of the girls.

All in all, an old-fashioned institution, with emphasis on discipline, competition and academic achievement.

In the sixties I was in favour of comprehensive education, Frankly I am still uneasy about the stark division of pupils into ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ at an early age, with little free flow between them. Moreover, it has always seemed wrong to me that the percentage attending grammar schools varies from area to area depending on places available. On the other hand I believe that the ethos of the grammar school is sadly lacking in modern education.

COMPREHENSIVE EDUCATION went wrong, in my opinion, for various reasons. First, the schools are too big. This is one area where the economies of scale do not apply. Second, it was accompanied by trendy liberal educational theories, such as the downplaying of competition and the fear of ‘elitism’. The non-selection of pupils (as I insist on calling ‘students’) was extended with the new schools so that streaming was no longer the norm. Third – and this is not the fault of schools – a new breed of parents was coming into being, who are frankly incompetent at the job, unable to discipline or motivate, concerned only with earning money for foreign holidays and second cars, thinking that the rearing of children is the government’s job.

It’s an indictment of the social mess we have created that grammar schools, for all their apparent unfairness, remain quiet commonsense engines of social mobility, leaning and citizenship.

IF YOU ASK what has all this to do with the Hundlebys, the answer is ‘not a lot’. Merely that BGS is my old school. What’s more, I once delivered newspapers to the home of one the school’s more celebrated old boys, R J Budge, boss of a company running some of Britain’s few remaining coal mines. As I remember the household had two newspapers a day – that always impressed me – probably The Telegraph and The Daily Mail. You could tell a lot about people from the newspapers they bought.

Another famous old boy was George Bass, surgeon and explorer, who gave his name to the strait between Australia and Tasmania.

Lincolnshire has had more than its fair share of explorers. Yorkshire, as usual, grabs the glory with James Cook, the only English captain to tour Australia without playing a single test, but we have had Bass (from Lincon), Flinders (from Donington) and Franklin (from Spilsby).

As a film fan I must pay tribute, though, to Barry Spikings, who left BGS to work for the Boston Standard and somehow ended up in Hollywood producing The Deerhunter. Now that is an achievement.

I became a librarian. Hey ho!

The Hundleby Convention 2007

IT'S TAKEN ME over a month but at long last I’m ready to set out my personal thoughts on the Hundleby Convention. Sunday 6 May 2007.

The bus from Lincoln to Horncastle continues to Skegness and I wondered if it would be full of day-trippers. I arrived at the bus station to find a crowd of children and large women eating a breakfast of hamburgers. ‘Bother,’ I thought, or words to that effect. But then the transport arrived, the children dashed upstairs, the mothers wobbled, gasping, after them, and I settled down to read Far From the Madding Crowd and fantasise agreeably about Julie Christie.

It was a sunny day, a good one to travel through the open, rolling foothills of the Wolds. Hundleby country, I thought, as I saw the signs for Hemingby and the original village itself.

As we drew into Horncastle we passed the library, which I used to visit when I worked for the County Council. It is built over part of the Roman wall which once surrounded the town and indeed part of it is exposed in the reference library. But I hadn’t inspected the town itself until today. It has that organic feel of a town that has developed in a natural but practical way, with streets winding out from the large market square and along the river.

ONTO THE Admiral Rodney Hotel where the clan was gathering. It was an odd feeling: sixty or seventy people, for the most part complete strangers, but all linked by a name, a Lincolnshire village and varying amounts of genetic material.

They came from Lincolnshire – Orby, Spalding, Lincoln – from Lancashire, Cheshire, from Essex, from Berkshire. And from Vancouver Island and South Africa. Not quite from the four corners of the earth, because the Solomon Islanders couldn’t make it. Nor the Brazilians, Japanese or Hong Kongers.

Almost everyone there could trace their ancestry to John Hundleby (1756-1793) and two of his sons, John and Thomas Hundleby, born in or near Great Steeping, who married two sisters, Ruth and Anne Bradley, in 1817. For this information I am grateful to Evelyn, Susan and the other organisers whose notes and charts were of great value in placing ourselves in context. We were even all colour-coded.

I was interested to see any physical resemblances amongst us all. Would it be a roomful of Viking look-alikes? Unfortunately not. We’ve obviously been diluted by the Anglo-Saxons. It seemed rude to stare into people’s eyes looking for the tell-tale blue. And as for the nose, I think that’s peculiar to my branch. Perhaps someone will do a detailed study of the many photos that were taken. I mused on the potential rsults of a DNA study of everyone. Maybe next time. Then again, maybe not.

I grew up knowing that my name was unusual, with very few relatives on my father’s side. And when, as a child, I checked the local phone book, I found very few Hundlebys. And frankly I’d no idea where Orby was then. To find so many cousins in the same room, let alone to see from the charts that there are so many more around the world. I guess there must be hundreds of living ‘Hundlebys’, let alone those in the many female lines. (I’m fortunate enough to be in a female line but still have the name, although I doubt my great-great-grandmother was thinking of the favour she was doing me in 1841.)

Evelyn's notes are invaluable and I’d like to highlight one character she describes. This is Joseph Hundleby, born in 1853 to John and Ann (née Jarvis). He appears to be from a 'senior’ branch of the family, his great-grandmother being Elizabeth Hundleby, eldest daughter of Robert (himself the grandfather of the abovementioned John and Thomas). Another disguised female line, it would appear.

I think I will extricate myself from that genealogical tangle and go on to say that Joseph interests me because in 1874, as a young man, he set sail for New Zealand and a new life. Evelyn tells us he was an installer of sheep-shearing machinery, which must have been pioneering work at the time and in later years he set up his own business exterminating rabbits. No doubt there was never any shortage of work.

As far as I can see he was the only Hundleby who migrated to Australasia and his many descendants are scattered around that corner of the world – Sydney, Christchurch, Japan and Hong Kong. And I note with interest that his great-grand-daughter, in the Solomon Islands, is my own daughter's namesake.

IN THE AFTERNOON many of the delegates set off on a tour of local villages associated with the family – Firsby, Great Steeping, Monksthorpe and Hundleby itself. I find Ashby-by-Partney particularly interesting because it was the birthplace of Thomas, ancestor of myself and so many others. He married Ruth up the road in Candlesby, but seems to have spent most of his life in his home village, and was buried there in 1881, aged 87.

Thomas took his children to be baptised in the Ashby’s Anglican church, but Thomas’ son Samuel preached in the newly built Methodist chapel in 1885. By coincidence, Far From the Madding Crowd, which I was reading that day contains the comment of one character, ‘Chapel folk be more hand-in- glove with them above than we (church people).’ I’ve a feeling that great-great-great-uncle Samuel might have agreed with that.

Methodism seems to have been strong in the family at one time and I myself was baptised into that church. I like to think that nonconformism is still strong in the family, preferably secular - with all due respect to the one vicar we have in our ranks.

I suppose it’s true of all families, as it is of society, that people are pursuing quite different lines of work. 100 years ago Hundlebys descendants were agricultural labourers, many illiterate, with the more upwardly mobile becoming threshers, tenant farmers, carpenters, butchers and publicans. Women were busy raising large families, as well as working in the fields. Now there are engineers, computer experts, doctors, businessmen, artists and civil servants, but the links with farming are still there, as far away as South Africa and Japan.

THE DAY CLOSED with a quiet moment to remember the Hundlebys who had fought and died in the armed forces. Men like L/C Herbert Henry Hundleby of the Lincolnshire Regiment, killed in action in 1915; and Pte W Hundlebyof the Ist Hertfordshire regiment. See: http://www.hertfordtown.fsnet.co.uk/hertsregt.htm (This link didn't work for me, but the site is there). How many others died, I wonder.

It’s as well to remember that and even worse destroyer of human life was Spanish flu, which swept through Europe in the years following the Great War. This affected the Hundlebys too. Harry Hundleby, for example, who was taken by the disease at an early age.

A GREAT DAY. Lots of information, lots of links, lots of contacts and conversations. And even more questions and areas to follow up. And many ideas for postings here.

I can't finish without belated thanks to Evelyn, Susan, Suzanne and Janet for all thier efforts in conceiving, planning and organising the event. A great success. Thank you.