Category Archives: Opinion

Isabella Sophia “Belle” McConnell 1878-1971

20 Thursday Nov 2025

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A Story of Wealth and Connections

Belle Nickols 1921

My great-grandfather Joseph (1834-1913) married Jane Pickersgill (1847-1887), sister of Leeds Bookmaker “Honest Joe” Pickersgill. Honest Joe made a lot of money from betting, and his five children were afforded all the luxuries that England could offer at the turn of the twentieth century. Joe’s second daughter, Maud (1882-1928), married Harold Nickols Jnr. (1885-1933), the son of Harold Nickols Snr. (1848-1925). The Nickols family owned the Joppa Tannery in Kirkstall, Leeds, and were themselves wealthy and well connected.

Harold senior’s first wife, Harriet Fraser, died in 1898, and in 1908 Harold married Isabella Simson, nee McConnell, when he was fifty-nine, and she was thirty. Isabella, better known as “Belle”, was even then quite a character.

Belle had been born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1878 to William McConnell and his wife Eliza. William was a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary before he became the Clerk of Petty Sessions in Kilkenny, so was very much part of the English establishment in Ireland, despite being Irish himself. Belle had plans, and married wealthy Scottish brewer James Simson (1849-1903) and moved to Edinburgh. James was the part-owner of James Simson and Sons, brewers established in Melrose by his father, also called James, but present in Edinburgh since 1864. Belle lived in the city in some luxury and bore James two children, Jenny and James Jnr. In 1869 James Simson and Sons merged with James Ewan McPherson & Co. to form Simson and McPherson Ltd. In 1900, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne business of Robert Deuchar Ltd bought the Simson breweries, which is most likely why on the Scottish census of 1901 James is listed as “Retired Brewer”.

James Simson died in 1903, and in his Probate records his estate’s value is listed as “Sealed”, and Belle was confirmed as the widow. I don’t know anything about Scottish law, but I suspect that there may have been claims on James’ estate other than any legacy to Belle.

By the time Belle married into the Nickols family, she was probably a wealthy woman in her own right, but her new husband was also very wealthy.

Harold Snr. fathered one child with Belle, Bridget, who was born in 1910. Harold, Belle, James and Jenny Simson, and Bridget, all lived in Seymour Place, Mayfair, London. You don’t need to be a native of London to know that Mayfair is perhaps the most prestigious address in that city.

Belle and Harold Nickols (undated)

Bridget, like her mother, had an eye for a wealthy man, and in 1932 she married Charles Allsopp, the Fourth Baron Hindlip. The name Allsopp, particularly with regard to the Allsopp’s Baronial title, rang a bell with me and, with a bit of time spent poring over the Allsopp family tree, I discovered that British TV presenter Kirsty Allsopp is the great-niece of Bridget’s husband, Charles Allsopp. The Nickols-Allsopp marriage, though, was very short lived and in 1934, Bridget married actor Harold Huth.

Harold Huth (undated)

I’d never come across Harold Huth, but in the world of film he was a well known silent-film and stage actor, film producer, and director. IMDb has reams about him, as does Wikipedia.

Bridget Nickols 1921
Harold and Bridget Huth, with their daughters Angela and Patricia 1944

Bridget and Harold Huth had two children together, Angela and Patricia, both of whom are writers and both of whom are still alive today. Angela Huth wrote, among other things, the novel “Land Girls”, which was made into a successful British TV series. She also wrote a memoir, which I haven’t read, but I did read an extract from it published in the Daily Mail in 2017. In it, Angela devotes quite a bit of time to her famously dotty grandmother Belle, of times spent with her in her London apartment on Piccadilly, and how she was famously very loose with her money. When Belle died in 1971 she left over £350,000 in her will. However, according to her granddaughter, most of that went to pay off years of accumulated debt.

All of the people I’ve listed do fully qualify to be in my family tree, although the links are tenuous in the extreme. I’ve written it all down partly for its novelty value, but partly as a counter to the vast majority of my family who were from working class stock and lived working class lives; these people were wealthy, but most of the family were not.

Back at the top of the story, with Honest Joe Pickersgill, my great-grandfather who married into that family was a shoemaker by trade, in Leeds. It’s ironic that Joe’s daughter married into the family of a Leeds leather producer, who may well have supplied leather for my great-grandfather to make shoes.

Wealth and connections for sure.

Robert McNeil Mayne 1897-1918

09 Sunday Nov 2025

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Another Armistice Day entry, and this concerns family member Robert McNeil Mayne, a native of Huntington County, Indiana. Robert was just 21 when he was killed in the US-lead Meuse-Argonne Offensive, late in the First World War. He died on November 1st, 1918, just ten days before the Armistice.

Robert was the only son of Arthur McNeill Mayne and his wife Laura Belle Purviance. He was the great-grandson of Henry Collins Mayne and Anna Robinson, who had left England in 1822 and made their way to New York. Robert and I share a common ancestor in Henry Collins Mayne’s father, Joshua Mayne.

Robert entered service on Feb 18th, 1918 at Fort Wayne and was assigned to Company E, 30th Engineers at Fort Meyer in Virginia. He embarked for France on June 28th, 1918 and was killed at Argonne Forest in Northern France four months later. Robert has the sad distinction of being the first boy from Huntington County to be killed in the Great War. He was buried where he fell.

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive claimed 26,277 American lives, over 28,000 German lives, and an unknown number of French lives, of which Robert was just one. His name is recorded in the Indiana Gold Star Honor Roll 1914-1918.

Like all the other war dead in my family tree, Robert will be in my thoughts on Remembrance Day, November 11th.

The Family Tree

04 Tuesday Nov 2025

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I started looking into my family tree a short while before my father died in 2009, but didn’t get very far. I think Ancestry.com was around then, but I hadn’t signed up, and anyway I was heading off for my new life in Canada.

Finding myself with more time than I’d anticipated, I picked everything up again a few years later, and this time I did sign up with Ancestry, which opened up more doors than I thought possible. I now have a family tree with over fourteen thousand people listed (not all that I’d call very close relatives, to be fair), and many of them are, or were, situated in places that I didn’t know my family had reached.

Two things set the ball rolling in an unstoppable way. One was Mary, a native of Indiana, contacting me out of the blue, and the other was doing the Ancestry-linked DNA test.

I was, I will admit, perplexed that I appeared to have a relative from the United States. My family, my dad’s side at least, was pure Yorkshire, from Leeds, I thought. Goodness, how wrong I was. Mary pointed out that we had a common ancestor, Joshua Mayne (b. 1761), and everything fell into place from there. With Mary’s help, I was able to discover that one of Joshua’s offspring had left Britain in 1822, bound for New York, and from there had built a formidable Mayne dynasty in the New World. Not only that, another of Joshua’s sons had, in 1849, taken his young family to Durban in South Africa and had set up a similar Mayne dynasty there. To top it all, Mary established that Joshua himself, and his wife Elizabeth Collins, were not from Yorkshire at all, but had arrived in Leeds from Cork, Ireland in 1792.

The DNA test came up with equal amounts of potential contacts on my mother’s side of the family, as well as my dad’s, and that was an area I hadn’t addressed up to that point. Building up her side of the tree has shown that we were drawn from agricultural stock in the north of Devon, England, and while many of the family had stayed there and are there to this day, many more had moved away from the land for a new life in Canada and, ultimately, in the United States. Indeed, direct Devon relatives had made it to rural Southern Ontario 150 years before I did.

I haven’t yet found the outer limits of the family tree, either on my dad’s or my mum’s side. I can find very little about my paternal grandmother who’s father arrived in Leeds from Belfast, Ireland, at some point in the early 1880s, although my 24% Irish DNA is in part her legacy to me. Her mother was from Leeds, but her father was from Liverpool, and with a name like Garrett, the chances are that there’s Irish blood from him as well.

On the whole, both sides of my family are from poor stock. Some have done well, though, the South African connection has links to the DeBeers diamond industry. There was some conspicuous DeBeers-related wealth on show in the early twentieth century, with homes in Portman Square and Kensington in London, and even a family burial plot in a Royal Park, the Royal Brompton Cemetery in West London.

My grandfather married into, worked for, and eventually took over, the Pickersgill family business in Leeds in the 1920s. Joe Pickersgill, a very wealthy Turf Accountant, was said to have held the Prince of Wales own betting account in the 1910s and was a millionaire when he died in 1923.

On the American side of the tree, a distant cousin married Mariko Terasaki, the daughter of Hidenari Terasaki and Gwendoline Harold, in 1953. Hidenari was a Japanese diplomat who married Gwen, a Tennessee girl, and worked to avoid Japanese conflict with the USA in the late 1930s. Both were forced to flee to Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack, but Gwen wrote a book about her experiences which was made into the Hollywood movie A Bridge To The Sun. Mariko’s children, those that survive, are prominent peace campaigners, following their grandfather’s lead.

But most of my family tree is comprised of poor people doing poor people’s work, and very much echoing the social structure nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Farmers, farm workers, labourers, coal miners, and factory workers, all living in mostly poor conditions but surviving nonetheless. One thing that does jump out is the number of war deaths, at the moment numbering seventy-two. One of the first on my family recorded in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission databases was killed when his ship exploded in the Thames estuary in 1914. One of the latest was a young Canadian naval officer, killed two days after D-Day in 1944 when his ship was sunk in the English Channel.

As I’ve grown the tree, there have been a lot of fascinating stories come out about the individuals in it. In future posts here I’ll try to record some of their stories; not about my family necessarily, but the places they lived and the lives they led, which were in large part, entirely typical.

It’s been an education thus far, and I’d like to document as much of it as I can.

Oh, Microsoft.

21 Tuesday Oct 2025

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I get it, Microsoft is trying to take over the world and our descent in Windows 11 is the last straw. With the new computers we’re going to have to buy, they’ll soon be logging our toilet habits and how often we cut the grass, all in a great master plan to keep us docile and obedient.

OK, so I’m exaggerating somewhat. I’ve read some pretty hair-raising stuff about Microsoft’s plans for world domination, but fortunately I don’t believe everything I read on the Internet. Sure, I’d love to move to Linux, or something similar, but life is too short to waste on the techie-heaven of Unix-inspired products, wonderful though they may be. I’m also sharing a house with people who will happily give up some independence to Microsoft if it means they can watch their favourite videos, or upload decades-old pictures to the cloud, with little or no additional techie knowhow. Much as the anti-Windows crowd will call me, us, slaves to the ‘Soft, frankly we don’t care enough to be concerned.

All that said, I am a little miffed that three perfectly serviceable PCs in our house only have a year to struggle on using Windows 10. Two of the offending PCs are Microsoft Surface laptops, which tends to rub salt into the wound. However, doing a little digging, I realise that my outrage is perhaps a wee bit premature.

The HP desktop that can’t move to Windows 11 is eight years old, and the Surface laptops are seven and six years old, which in PC terms is geriatric. Sure, they’re all still working, but like cars, we tend to like a new one every now and again (acknowledging that not everyone can afford a car, let alone a new one every few years), and PCs are nothing like the cost of a new car. Is it just that because we’re being told we need a new PC that we’re resisting? It might just be the case.

I’ve signed up the three PCs for Windows 10 security updates and will look at getting new kit in the New Year, but I think, honestly, I should have been doing that anyway. That big old HP desktop is working now, but who is to say that it’ll keep going? They’re fickle things, Personal Computers.

So maybe Microsoft is doing me a good service here?

To the folks who worry about data collection and control, I’ll say this; check your phone’s habits before you worry about your PC.

As a final note, anyone suggesting that we move to Apple products can either send me the money to buy the overpriced hardware and software, or stay in their lane.

Now, how do I get that Windows 10 context menu back…

The Need For Speed

16 Thursday Oct 2025

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We’re having a little bit of an upset in Ontario at the moment, surrounding that bête noir, speed cameras.

The Province’s Premier, the one in charge, says that speed cameras are nothing but a cash-grab and that he’s going enact legislation to make them unusable. This in a Province where speed limits seem to be merely suggestions and efforts to curb speed (and therefore improve road safety) are at best, minimal.

I learned to drive in a country where speed cameras are used extensively, namely the UK. When I go back, which seems to be quite often these days, I’m immediately aware of the speed discipline that drivers employ; in Ontario the speed limit seems to be the absolute minimum, in the UK they are generally abided by, and plenty of people drive well within the limit. Tellingly, there are twice the number of cars in the UK than there are in Canada, but only half as many injuries and fatalities on the roads. From this we can reasonably deduce that speed cameras are, at least in part, a boon to road safety. So why is Ontario so against something that will aid road safety?

It’s political. That’s about the strength of it. Speeding is a curse in Ontario, and you’ll regularly read about drivers cussing one another out because they were driving at the speed limit and not some speed well north of it. “Hand your license in if you can’t do 20 over” is a common refrain from the speeding fraternity. It seems that posted speed limits impinge on people’s personal freedom to drive at whatever speed they like, and hang the road safety implications because, “Hey, I’m a good driver!”. Our politicians see this expression of personal freedom as a vote winner and are being aggressive in reducing what they see as limitations of drivers in the hope of winning over, or at least retaining, the support of the supposedly put-upon drivers of the Province. People who are killed or injured speeding? Pfffft. It’s eerily reminiscent of the argument for gun ownership in the US, death and injury seems to be an acceptable price for personal freedom.

I’m at a bit of a loss to follow this logic. Drivers can’t be trusted to obey posted limit signs, so why would a responsible government not put in place a cheap and effective method of control? It’s only a cash-grab if you speed, and is so easily avoidable, but it also comes with a free side order of road safety, so what’s not to love?

I guess it will take the death or injury of a politician’s loved one, or a large number of ordinary people, for things to change, which is really a very sad state of affairs for the twenty-first century. In the meantime I will drive to the limits, avoid any cash-grabs (if there are any left), and hope that no one in orbit get hurt by a speeding driver. What a life.

Spirits of the Past

21 Sunday Sep 2025

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We have just visited a few more graves belonging to relatives I never knew I had, this time in London, Ontario.

When I started up this Ancestry.com thing, I had no idea that any of my ancestors had left England, but that misunderstanding was blown away when a distant cousin from the USA contacted me through Ancestry. She’s from my dad’s side and had been born with the same surname as me, and she opened up a branch of my family tree that I hadn’t found at that point. It turned out that I had an entire dynasty related to me in the USA, and I’m talking hundreds, probably thousands, who all came from one couple arriving in the New York in 1822, from Leeds, in Yorkshire, England.

When I did the Ancestry DNA test, I was matched up with people from my mum’s side of the tree, which I hadn’t really started to research. Curious to see where people fitted, I started to build that side of the family tree and, just like my dad’s side, I found that there were some wanderers.

My mother was born in Torquay, Devon, although I knew that her dad’s side of the family were from Exeter, also in Devon, and her mum’s side were from a small village just outside Torquay called Kingskerswell. My earlier forays into the family tree, when my mother was still alive, hadn’t gone too far and she maintained that the records relating to the Exeter branch of the family were all lost in a fire. When I kicked the family tree thing off again, after her death, I found that she was only partially right about the fire. The whole 1931 Census for England and Wales was lost in a fire, and that included many records relating to my family. But, thankfully, there were many other records that were obtainable, and like my dad’s family tree, the whole thing opened up and hasn’t stopped opening since.

My maternal grandfather was a Stevens, and the Stevens family are solidly Exeter born and bred, despite my grandfather sneaking off to Torquay at some point in the 1920s. My maternal grandmother was a Hill, and the Hills hail from Kingskerswell, and other small places in south Devon. My maternal great-grandfather, though, married into the Bater family, who come from Dolton, in central North Devon. The Baters are, to say the least, a very large family. My maternal great-grandmother, Edith Bater, was one of thirteen children, brought into the world by William and Eliza Bater, and William Bater himself was one of seven children, so you get the idea that there are a lot of Baters related to me in North Devon.

All the Baters, and all of their spouses, were in the business of farming, be that humble labourers or actual landowning farmers, and they all came from an area in north Devon bounded by the Taw and the Torridge rivers. At some point around 1850, one of William Bater’s brothers, George, left Devon and made his way to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At about the same time, two of William Bater’s uncles, George and Richard Cudmore, also from Dolton, made their way to Toronto, and onward to Clinton Township in Huron County, on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. That seemed to spark a trend because while none of William Bater’s thirteen children moved to Canada, four of his grandchildren did, and they all arrived in the city of Guelph in Ontario, albeit fifty or sixty years after the original Bater and Cudmore incursions into Ontario. George and Richard Cudmore stayed in farming, but George Bater worked in a paper mill in Toronto, and the later arrivals all went into manual labour in the cities of Guelph, Cambridge and London, Ontario.

The Cudmore families expanded and moved on, mostly into the United States. Some pushed westwards into North Dakota to establish farms on the American Prairies, and Alice Cudmore, wife of Richard Cudmore and native of Dolton, eventually made her way to one of her son’s farm in North Dakota after Richard died, and she ended her days there. She’s buried in Hannah ND, quite close to the Canadian Border and the Province of Manitoba, where some of my dad’s family had ended up, homesteading on the Canadian Prairies.

All of that family history is detailed here so that I can link the visits we have made to the graves of some of the people who travelled to the New World from rural North Devon. To start, though, in 2023 we visited the church of St. Edmund in Dolton, Devon, and saw the graves of my 3 x great grandparents William and Eliza Bater, at the time not really understanding just how pivotal they were in the migration to Canada.

In early 2025, we drove up to Huron County*, Ontario, and visited the graves of Richard Cudmore, and his family members, who had stayed there farming the newly reclaimed land. They lived in log cabins, they cleared the trees, and set up the townships that still exist today. It was quite humbling to visit a tiny roadside cemetery in rural Ontario and find the graves of my family, people who’d travelled out from England to establish themselves on that new farmland.

Then just this last week, we went to London, Ontario, to visit some of the graves of the newer immigrants to Canada. The Steer and the Ebsworthy families arrived in Canada from North Devon just before the First World War and established themselves as factory workers, at least initially. Again, it was quite humbling to know that the graves held a little piece of North Devon, and were related, as all the immigrants I’ve mentioned here, to my 3 x great grandfather, William Bater of Dolton.

There were many other arrivals from North Devon into Canada, and not just from the Bater family. The Cater family from Kingskerswell, linked by marriage to my grandmother Lilian Hill, are represented in Newfoundland. John Cater arrived in St. John’s around 1850 and took a job as a shipping agent. He married a local girl, Anne Murphy (most likely with Irish roots, like so many people in Newfoundland), and founded a dynasty of his own that’s centred in Grand Falls. There is an outpost of the Bater family in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and further south in the United States, in Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and beyond, both Baters and Caters have established themselves.

I have no doubt that there are many people like me, discovering the exodus of their families from the UK to Canada and the United States. I’m fortunate to have followed in their footsteps, albeit unwittingly, and have been able to visit not just grave sites but the towns and villages that they lived in.

I have so much more research to do, and so many more people to discover. Who knows where those spirits of the past will take me?

*Huron County Land Acknowledgment (taken from http://www.huroncounty.ca)

We acknowledge that the land we stand upon today is the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples and is connected to the Dish with One Spoon wampum, under which multiple nations agreed to care for the land and its resources by the Great Lakes in peace.

We also acknowledge the Upper Canada Treaties signed in regards to this land, which include Treaty #29 and Treaty #45 ½.

We recognize First Peoples’ continued stewardship of the land and water as well as the historical and ongoing injustices they face in Canada. We accept responsibility as treaty people to renew relationships with First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Peoples through reconciliation, community service, and respect.

Dead Rellies

16 Wednesday Jul 2025

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(That’s dead relatives)

We had occasion to visit the lovely town of Blyth, Ontario, in Huron County. It’s about two and half hour’s slow drive from home, and a lovely place to enjoy a play at the annual Blyth Festival. It’s also close to the place where a large group of my relatives, on my mother’s side, had ended up after emigrating from England in the middle of the nineteenth century.

From my family tree research, I had discovered a few graves of those relatives just twenty minutes from Blyth, and this was too good an opportunity to be missed.

At the top of the list was John Richard Cudmore (1811-1887), my great-great-great-granduncle. His sister, Elizabeth Cudmore (1796 – 1873) was my great-great-great-grandmother, and the mother of William Bater (1829-1894), my great-great-grandfather, whose grave we had visited in the churchyard of St Edmund’s, Dolton, when we were in England last year. John Richard, better known simply as Richard, arrived in Canada at some point between 1841 and 1845, and his first Canadian born son, William Horace Cudmore, entered this world while the family were in Tuckersmith Township, now Clinton Township, in 1845.

In the England and Wales Census of 1841, Richard Cudmore is shown as being an agricultural labourer and living in Dolton, Devon. In the Census of Eastern Canada for 1861, Richard is listed as being a farmer and living with his wife Alice and their six children in a single story, log-built house. I can’t verify whether he was farming his own plot of land or working for someone else, but Tuckersmith, like most other rural townships in North America, had been divided up into small parcels of land and it’s likely that he worked one of these. I’ve seen maps of other areas, notably in Kansas and in North Dakota, with the land parcels’ owners named, but the records of Huron County, at least those I’ve found so far, don’t go into that detail.

Richard Cudmore stayed in Tuckersmith for the remainder of his life, and died in 1877. He was buried in Turner’s Cemetery, just south of Vanastra, Ontario, between Clinton and Seaforth, and there he remains. It wasn’t hard to located the cemetery, nor the grave, and it was quite the feeling to be close to one of my relatives, but in a country thousands of miles away from our shared homeland. The cemetery is small, but meticulously maintained (by whom I don’t know), and is fittingly surrounded by the rich, arable farmland that Richard had worked.

Talking of land, I must acknowledge that the area around Tuckersmith is native land and was the subject of Treaty 29, The Huron Tract Purchase, signed by the English Crown and certain Anishinaabe peoples on July 10th, 1827. Full details of the treaty can be read here.

Of course, Richard Cudmore wasn’t the only one of my dead relatives in Turner’s Cemetery. His son John and his daughter Elizabeth are there, as is another daughter, Sarah Alice Crich. There are many members of the Crich family in Turner’s cemetery, as there are on the census listings for the time. It was inevitable that a Cudmore would marry a Crich at some point in Tuckersmith, and of all those Crich family members resting alongside Richard Cudmore, I’m certain that there will be family connections. Indeed, subsequent research has shown up many more family graves in Clinton itself, right up to Keith Ward Jenks, a direct descendent of Richard Cudmore, who died in 1944 when he was aboard a Royal Canadian Navy vessel taking part in the D-Day Landings.

While we were out and about in Huron County, we visited a grave in Harpurhey Cemetery near Seaforth, that of another of Richard Cudmore’s sons, Henry, and his wife Ann. Henry died in 1930 and Ann died in 1945, so their gravestone was significantly newer than those we found in Turner’s Cemetery.

On the way home we called in at the Exeter (Ontario) Cemetery looking for a member of the Crich Family. As it’s quite a large cemetery compared to the country burial sites, and I couldn’t work out the plot numbers, I didn’t find the grave. I’ve since discovered that he’s in his wife’s family plot, the Rowcrofts, so if we go again I know what to look for.

I can only speculate what drove agricultural workers from North Devon to get on a ship and travel to the New World. It may have been a lack of work in England, or it may have been the prospect of being able to own (subject to the treaty of course) some land of their own. My family tree is littered with Baters and Cudmores who travelled from Devon to Canada and to the United States, sometimes landing in one country and ending up in the other, but they were nearly all farmers, or in a trade related to farming.

Following up the descendants of these immigrants, I’ve discovered that after they established themselves, some made their way to other homesteading projects both in Canada and in the USA. Crich family members set up in Saskatchewan, while others went to North Dakota, curiously not too far apart geographically, even if they were in different countries. Indeed, after Richard Cudmore’s death in 1877, his wife Alice went to live with their daughter Ann and her husband John Fitzpatrick, in Park River, North Dakota, and never returned to Tuckersmith Township in Canada.

Browsing through Google Maps and Streetview, as I do, I was hugely interested to see the settlements these immigrants made their way to, and what they look like now. One was a town called Wales, North Dakota, which even in it’s heyday was little more than half a dozen grain elevators by the railway track, and Hannah, a little further north, at the end of the railway line, and just a few miles south of the Canadian border. Hannah was very similar to Wales, except that there is a cemetery there and yes, there are some of my family’s graves there. Both Wales and Hannah are little more than ghost towns now, with Wales listed as having a population of ten. However, the land around the towns is still extensively farmed and probably doesn’t look too much different now than it did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another branch made their way to Cedarville, Michigan, not too far from Ontario’s Huron County. As some point the family became involved with the Les Cheneaux Club on Marquette Island, which is in the Mackinac Straits and not too far from Mackinac Island. Marquette Island, and specifically the Les Cheneaux Club, was a summer getaway for wealthy Chicagoans when their summers became too hot, and my relatives were caretakers of the Club in summer and winter in the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, my fourth cousin, once removed, Uldene Ethel LeRoy (nee Rudd), wrote a book called Six on an Island: childhood memories from Lake Huron, which was published in 1956. While searching around for the book, I discovered an undergraduate paper from Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, written by Uldene’s grandson, Joshua Lycka. It references her book and compares his own memories with hers. The things you find on the Internet!

Both my mother’s and father’s families have extensive connections with emigration to the New World. The Mayne’s led the way, but the Caters and the Cudmores from North Devon, and quite a few of them, followed up a decade or two later, and both branches of the family are now spread far and wide across Canada and the United States. I wonder how much more I will discover as I delve even deeper?

Travel

25 Sunday May 2025

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It certainly broadens the mind, but it doesn’t get any easier with age.

We just made one of our now fairly frequent trips across the Atlantic Ocean, from Toronto to London. The prospect of four weeks in the land of my birth is an enticing one, obviously, but it starts with that overnight flight, and getting over that seems to take longer each time.

Of course, air travel has revolutionised the world. My ancestors who made the trip from England to North America rarely had the opportunity to make even one trip back to their homeland, so I do recognise my good fortune, but that’s hard to remember when you can’t make simple decisions after an almost sleepless overnight flight.

We always start our trips with a three to four hour drive up Canada’s busiest highway, the Ontario 401. Mostly it’s just a chore, but this time the weather was horrible, low cloud and rain, and that resulted in collision-related delays. We had allowed a big dollop of wiggle room on timing, so arrived at the airport more or less as planned, which was obviously a good thing. Another good thing in this multi-modal journey is the “Park N Fly” valet service where we simply dump the car at the PNF lot and have a bus whisk us off to the airport terminal. Sure, it’s not cheap, but well worth the relative ease of leaving your car somewhere.

Toronto Pearson airport went the way of London’s Heathrow and revamped their terminal waiting areas with bars and restaurants which will, with a phone-based app, deliver your food and drink requirements to the table you’ve chosen. There are two major issues with that, though. Firstly, most of the regular seating was removed to allow for the food outlet tables, and secondly the food and drink is scandalously expensive. It’s probably my advancing years that make me so curmudgeonly, but I won’t buy from these places on principle. On this trip we did locate some regular seating, and sat in comfort to enjoy the sandwiches we’d brought from home, which went some way to offset my grumbles about airport rip-off pricing.

** I tried to find a photo of the departures area, but couldn’t, at least not of the regular area around the gates. Anyone would think that the Airport wasn’t proud of it’s rip-off strategy.

Our flight was late leaving, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. The gate staff kept us informed, although I never enjoy being chivvied into boarding the aircraft quickly when I’ve been sat in the terminal for hours. Maybe airlines should allow a longer turnaround time?

We’d been messed about by the airline, British Airways, on our reserved seat allocation. We had paid a staggeringly high fee to book specific seats, but they’d changed the aircraft type and had to reallocate the seats, meaning that we’d lost our two window seats. I know, a seat is a seat, but I don’t like to get gouged on a fee to reserve a seat, then not get said seat. I have lodged a claim with BA to get that reservation fee back, so we’ll see what transpires there.

The aircraft for the flight was an Airbus A350. Big, for sure, and by modern standards quiet and smooth, but the seating on the ‘plane was horrible. The designers of these things must have to work quite hard to make seats so uncomfortable. Their primary aim is to save weight, but the thinly-padded shells you sit on are not good for a six-hour flight, so goodness knows what they’re like for a longer flight. We were in World Traveller Plus, one up from Economy, so the seats recline quite a bit. But that reclination causes havoc when you have to get out of your seat for a call of nature, but the person in front is in maximum recline. There was a woman in the row behind us had to get a flight attendant to wake up her next-seat neighbour so she could get out. There were lots of vacant Economy seats in the cabin behind the Plus area, and she settled herself there instead of coming back to the supposedly better seats, just so she wouldn’t be trapped again.

I must have slept a little, but I couldn’t get myself into any comfortable position at all, so whether I slept or not, I didn’t feel at all rested.

I should make a comment about the food service, because I fell foul of BA’s love of curry-based menus on our last trip. There were three options this time, in the shape of meat, fish, or pasta. I didn’t fancy the fish because it was trout, which is way too fussy for an aircraft meal. I didn’t think the lamb would be up to much, so I opted for the pasta, although not before being pleasantly surprised that all three options were still available by the time the cart reached our seats. The pasta wasn’t bad, but I passed on the curry-based starter, and only had half of the cheesecake thing they dished up for desert. Coffee was served, but it was such a miniscule amount that I barely tasted it. Airlines, not just BA, seem to strive for fancy meals when simpler, plainer fare would surely be easier, cheaper and more appreciated by mugs like me.

Arriving in London. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is about as good as you’re going to get in that airport. It’s busy, for sure but everything runs quite smoothly. The UK Border was a breeze, with a very pleasant young border person welcoming us to the UK, and the baggage reclaim was similarly easy, which certainly takes the edge off the sleepless hours in the air.

Some hours later, at our destination and feeling helplessly tired, decisions were hard to make and tempers were beginning to fray, which is why bed was so welcome. The time difference is an issue, but not that first night when sleep is all you crave, regardless of what the clock says.

Our first full day here, though, was a struggle. The time difference and the sleep deficit all combined to make everything fraught. We did at least do something spontaneous, but not before some ritual shouting at each other; we have an excitable but tired four-year-old with us as well, which really doesn’t aid our attempts at achieving Zen.

Our second full day had me wide awake at 5am, which is the other issue with travelling, at least for me, and why I’m sat here at seven-thirty in the morning having finished this blog entry. As I said, travelling doesn’t get any easier. For our next, grown-ups only trip, I think we will seriously have to look at the BA version of Business Class, with its pods and bed-like seats. I guess we should start saving.

Working tales…

21 Monday Apr 2025

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Having penned a very long-winded story about the UK Government’s distaste for window envelopes last time, I thought I might jot down a few other, largely silly, experiences I had in my thirty-four years of Government employ.

I joined in 1977 as a clerk, taking myself off to the big city (London) to push bits of paper around for the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Now this won’t be a story to match Pete Hesgeth’s security breaches in the US DoD, because although I had worked in some sensitive areas occasionally, most of my time at the MoD I spent pushing bits of innocuous paper around, or pressing buttons on computers, that were as far removed from Government secrets as you could get. Anyway, I have signed the Official Secrets Act, a Government NDA, so it’ll be all very bland.

In the early 1990s, I was working on a computer system that was networked around the UK’s Royal Navy holdings, including some of their ships. It was convenient to put the land-based nodes for this system in underground bunkers, mostly to protect against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), deliberate or otherwise, and it was to one of these holes in the ground in Scotland that we were sent to install a software upgrade. If I tell you we were using reel-to-reel tapes for the magnetic media, you get an idea that this was not a fancy, James Bond type computer, but an old, old system.

Similar, but newer…

The bunker at this site was a WWII construction, quite deep and a veritable rabbit warren of little passages and low-ceilinged rooms. The computer was in a small space, and with extra people working in there, the cooling system began to struggle a bit. Consequently, once we’d mounted the tapes and set the update running, my coworkers and I retired to our beds on the surface for the night.

Oh my! One of the systems we were working on, although not the actual one of course.

At 1am we were paged because the update wasn’t working well and the temperature and humidity in the computer room was causing concern. When we arrived to see what was happening, there was an HVAC guy already there, with his young sidekick. We checked the update, it needed restarting, and just as we had the tapes whirring again, the HVAC guy said he wasn’t happy with the temperature. He asked his sidekick to power-off the cooler so he could check things out, and all of a sudden all the power went off. The computer, complete with updates running, stopped, and the lights went out. We stood in total darkness, in complete silence, for about fifteen seconds before the emergency lights kicked and we wondered what on earth we were going to do. The HVAC guy meanwhile was apoplectic, in a serious rage, because it turned out that his sidekick had hit the emergency power kill switch for the entire computer area rather than the switch for the cooler. What it meant for him was another hour while he reset his cooling system, which was another hour away from his lovely warm bed.

We knew we were in for a long night, but fortunately the power was restored quickly, the cooler ran up smoothly and we were able to get the update restarted for the third time that night.

One of our number stayed while the update ran this time, but the rest of us went back to bed. It was with some trepidation that we went back underground at 8am, but our night watchman was perfectly happy because the update worked. He was even happier because some nice sailors that worked there had found him a nice bacon sandwich and a cup of coffee.

I love a happy ending.

As a postscript, I discovered that the Scottish underground bunker that we’d spent part of night working in had been decommissioned in the early 2000s. Not only that, it had been filled in, and there is now a bunch of new houses sat atop it. I wonder if the owners of the houses know what was once beneath their feet?

Trump Relief

15 Tuesday Apr 2025

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I was trying to think of something to write about that didn’t involve the second coming of President Donald Trump. When you live in Canada and have a left of centre view of things, everything Trump says and does is wrong; Fifty-first State, tariffs, rule of law, disappearing people, and all the rest, it dominates every day life. But then I received a Government (of Canada) brown envelope in the mail, and that set me thinking about my jobs in the Government (of the United Kingdom).

What news was contained in my brown envelope today wasn’t good, I’ve been dumped out of the Seniors Dental Plan because our family income is too high to qualify, but I can live with that because, well, I’m socially minded and understand that we can afford dental treatment without Government help. Let someone else less fortunate benefit instead. But I digress.

The envelope, as you can see, is a lovely “half-letter” size and has a Government QR code for the postage, and not one but two nice little windows so that the address and reference can be read without having to write anything on the envelope itself. When I worked in Government, we had windowed envelopes, but just the single window variety, and they were not widely used as they were expensive to buy, comparatively speaking. It used to be that all outgoing letters were in windowed envelopes, but Margaret Thatcher took up office as Prime Minister and put paid to all that, so we were then in the business of hand writing addresses on envelopes, at least at the level of output most of us achieved when issuing letters. But then I moved jobs within the Government.

My new job involved running an office that issued around seventy-thousand cheques a year, related to expenses incurred by a national subset of the Government called the Royal Observer Corps. These were spare time people, engaged in unpaid work for the good of the nation, but they were entitled to out-of-pocket expenses. While all Government workers were paid directly to their bank accounts, even in 1985, the Royal Observer Corps folks were still getting cheques, posted to their homes, on a quarterly basis. We had a tabulating machine, and a machine to print the cheques, we even had a fancy machine that put the cheques in the envelopes, albeit that you had to feed the cheques into the machine one at a time. Of course, given that the recipient’s cheque had their name and address on it, we used a window envelope to avoid having to type or write an address on seventy thousand envelopes.

In those days, Government stationery came from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO). They held the money and the stock, all we did was order what we needed. The dreaded shadow of Thatcher loomed up quite quickly when HMSO arbitrarily changed the dimensions of the envelopes we used, “to save money”. The new envelopes, though, didn’t fit the cheques, and the window didn’t line up. That started a big kerfuffle when I had to get into an argument with HMSO in order to convince them that it was cheaper to supply the right envelopes than it was to retool our entire operation with new tabulators and envelope machines, just to fit their stationery. Fortunately we had sufficient of the old stock to weather the protracted argument, and HMSO did relent and start us back with the original sized envelopes eventually.

But things took a odder turn with further cost-cutting edicts from Thatcher. I ordered the requisite three months supply of envelopes, only to be told I could only have half the amount. I politely told HMSO that I couldn’t send only half the cheques out, but they were not to be moved. When I pointed out that each cheque had to go in an individual envelope (it was the law) and there was absolutely no room for economy, I was told that the HMSO budget couldn’t stand the use of expensive envelopes. To this day I can’t get my head around being told it was my problem that I could only have thirty-five thousand envelopes to send out seventy thousand cheques. Talk about “jobsworth”.

It took desperate measures to finally resolve the issue. I threatened to misappropriate money from our organisation’s operational budget and buy our own envelopes, and it was only that and the thought that I might usurp the authority of HMSO that finally made them see sense. Oh, and the very real risk that the volunteers who weren’t going to get their expenses cheque may very well walk off the job, all for the want of an envelope.

I’m glad to see, then, that the Government of Canada is happy to buy proper envelopes. They don’t yet trust to e-mail for these important communications, but as a tax payer and former envelope stuffer I’m happy to contribute to the purchase of nice envelopes.

As a postscript, not too long after the Great Window Envelope Scandal, we moved to a computerised expenses payment system where the recipients could opt to have direct payment to their bank accounts. It was a slow take up initially, until people worked out that their friends were getting their expenses two weeks before those still waiting on cheques. When I left that job, we were only issuing about twelve thousand cheques a year, so I guess someone at HMSO was happy about not having to buy so many windowed envelopes. What a happy ending.