In the early evening of Friday 9 June 1950, two schoolboys walked to the cliffs on the north side of Carr Naze in search of seagull eggs. Only one returned to sleep in his own bed. Michael David WARE slipped while making his way down a grassy slope towards a nest he had seen, failed to control his slide and vanished over the cliff edge into Black Hole.

Michael’s friend, Benjamin ROBERTS, alerted the Coastguard and his account of the accident appeared in later newspaper reports.

Michael was buried on 13 June in the sheltered corner near the south door of St Oswald’s.

The “book” stone remembers his parents Roderick Leslie and Edna May. They are represented on the FamilySearch Shared Tree but Les, as he was widely known, has not yet been connected to his father, William [LH7X-Z15].

William is waiting for a wife – Caroline Elizabeth BEGG – and the WARE male line doesn’t go back far. I wonder what our ill-fated egger would have thought about having King ALFRED as a many times great grandfather, had he lived to be a silver surfer. If the Shared Tree is to be believed, Michael had many other forebears among royalty and the elites of Great Britain and several European nations. I recommend a grand tour of his ancestry, all the way to Welsh kings who lived before the birth of Christ. His father, Les, involved himself in charitable work with Filey Lions for the last thirty years or so of a long life and this contribution is honoured on a bench near the Church Bridge gate.

Michael’s mother died aged 82 on the 43rd anniversary of her boy’s funeral.

Measure of Man 56 · Arndale