20th Century
Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract – A review
From 2006 to 2018, Richard Atkinson worked as an editor at Bloomsbury publishers, rising to senior commissioning editor and responsible for some of the most successful illustrated cookbooks of the last two decades, including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series. From 2010, he was increasingly occupied with researching and writing his own first book, a … Continue reading
… a story of slate and more . . .
Last year, I became the published author of a family history: The Cassons in North Wales: A Story of Slate and More (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2019). The culmination of 8 years of research and writing, it tells the story of my maternal grandfather’s family. Since childhood, I had heard how, at the beginning of … Continue reading
A visit to the Somme
We recently visited the Somme area for the first time. My husband’s maternal grandfather was killed there during the First World War and as the centenary of his death approaches, it felt appropriate to see where he is buried and pay our respects. In a sense he was fortunate in that he has a named resting … Continue reading
A Change of Fortune
After the photograph of the Slaughter family taken on the steps of the loggia at White Ness ca. 1906, as far as I know they were never together again – at least, there is no extant group photo of them from a later date. Mihill [Mac] and Connie were married in 1906,and in the … Continue reading
William’s ‘other’ family
During the early 1980s, my mother saw an advertisement in the Times requesting any descendants of William Capel Slaughter to contact a box number. This my mother duly did, and through subsequent enquiries discovered that her grandfather had had an affair with a governess after the death of his first wife and that a son … Continue reading
Mr Slaughter and Mr May
William May’s background was very different from William Slaughter’s. Born in 1863, May was from a professional, landowning family in Berkshire. His father was a surgeon in Reading, as had been his grandfather. William was born in the family home at Caversham, a mansion set in large grounds by the Thames. He was educated at … Continue reading
Gallipoli 1915
My grandfather, Arthur Slaughter was in the 5th [territorial] Battalion of the Manchester Regiment. On September 10th 1914 they sailed for Egypt from Southampton on board the Caledonia, arriving in Alexandria on September 25th.They were quartered in the Mustapha barracks where they were kitted out for the tropics. By October, they had started training. On … Continue reading
Great-Grandma’s recipe book
My great aunts recipe books have long fascinated me so when today I was sorting boxes to try and kick-start my research into their father’s life I allowed myself to distracted by one. To call it a recipe book is rather misleading as the pages have long since detached themselves from the cover. It … Continue reading
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain – a review
The red flower for this Valentine’s Day piece is the scarlet poppy on the front of the Virago anniversary edition of Testament of Youth. First published in 1933 by Victor Gollancz, it became a great success both in the UK and the USA, and familiar to a later generation when reissued in 1978 and a … Continue reading
Different perspectives
My youngest sister, in her retirement, has set off on a round-the-world tour on which one of the stops is Singapore. She has been asking me and our other sister for our memories of the place in the mid-1960s when our father was stationed there for three years with the RAF. While my other sister … Continue reading