Author: Ian Elsom

Stathers the Chemist

The Scarborough Gazette Directory of 1905 places Alfred STATHERS, dispensing chemist, at 3 Union Street, Filey. At the census four years earlier, he was resident at this address, above the shop, with his unmarried son, Alfred Bird Stathers, 30, and a Housekeeper, Hannah POOL, age 26 and single. Alfred senior had been a widower for over twenty years, since his wife Mary Jane died in March 1879. Mary Jane was the daughter of Robert BIRD, the subject of last Friday’s post. You may recall that Robert and wife Ruth employed Elizabeth Stathers to help with the running of their London home (1871 census). I speculated that Elizabeth was Mary Jane’s sister in law, and Alfred Stathers was indeed her brother. The relationship of the two women would appear to have been much deeper than mistress and servant, or sisters.

In affectionate remembrance of ELIZABETH STATHERS, late of Malton, who departed this life Dec 27th 1878, aged 49 years.

‘Thy will be done’

Also of MARY JANE STATHERS, the beloved wife of ALFRED STATHERS, who died March 12th 1879, aged 44 years.

‘Nearer my God to Thee

Nearer to Thee’

Also of ALFRED STATHERS M.P.S., who died Sep 3rd 1905, aged 73 years.

‘His end was peace’

This stone is next to that of Robert and Ruth Bird, and if the street numbers have not changed in the last hundred years, Alfred’s chemist shop has morphed into Frothies.

Union Street, Filey

I have united previously unconnected elements of the Bird and Stathers families on the FamilySearch Tree. There is more work to be done – and another stone to present, to make a family group of three.

Path 128 · Church Walk

Migrating Birds

Robert BIRD ran a successful business as a tailor and woollen draper in Queen Street, Filey, for a quarter of a century or more. He seems to have had only two children with Ruth nee POSGATE; Mary Jane born in 1835 and Samuel Robert who arrived twelve years later. Both were with their parents when the 1861 census was taken. Mary Jane married in 1864 and built a nest with Alfred STATHERS. Robert retired from business not long afterwards and flew south to London where the enumerator found him in Hungerford Road, Islington, with Ruth and Samuel Robert, 24, who was working as a junior clerk in the Public Record Office. The trio had a lodger, a commercial traveller in the woollen trade called Adolph WEPPLER, who had been blown across the German Ocean by the winds of fate. The live-in servant, Elizabeth STATHERS, aged 40 and unmarried, was most probably Mary Jane Bird’s sister in law.

The older Birds may have tired of the Great Wen because ten years later they are enumerated in Westcott, just outside Dorking. They are living at The Lodge – and I want to believe they had a few contented years in this small property –

Nowadays, you would have to hand over about £600,000 to acquire ownership but, hey, it is only a couple of hundred metres from Nirvana Cycles.

Robert died in January 1885 and the homing instinct in Ruth was too strong to keep her in Surrey. She is buried in Filey – and her stone remembers Robert. I have put a photograph of it on the Shared Tree.

Path 127 · Headland Way

to Speeton Sands

An Exceptional April

England hasn’t had such a cold April for almost a hundred years, and I think Scotland was chillier last month than at any time “since records began”. The Met Office serves up sunshine and precipitation figures with UK temperatures here.

Durham Tees weather station posted a month mean a couple of degrees centigrade above the UK April average – mainly because it didn’t share Scotland’s experience. It was 2.7°C colder than the 2009 to 2020 average minimum and so accords with the Met Office’s anomaly map for the four nations. But 2021 wasn’t the coldest April of the thirteen years for which I have data. 2012 was 0.68 degrees cooler. All that sunshine last month had an impact after the frosty early mornings.

April, though, is the fifth month of the meteorological year and the running mean from the first of December, in the guise of Temperature Above Pre-Industrial, reveals Durham Tees is quite a bit warmer in 2021 than the IPCC Paris Accord projection. There has been a 0.2°C fall in the month but at 1.42°C above Pre-Industrial on the 30th, Durham Tees is 0.34 degrees warmer than it should be if the 2040 Paris limit is not to be breached. Those trendlines in the graph above are misleading.

Below is a graph indicating April’s mean temperatures above/below Pre-Industrial from 2009 to 2021. Most years are “grayed out” to avoid confusion. Only the warmest and coolest years at the end of April are highlighted, with 2021 emphasized. The average Temperature above Pre-Industrial for the 13 years (2009 to 2021) is 1.17°C. This is about 0.1 degrees above the IPCC projection indicating a warming rate four times greater than expected. 2021 is currently running about sixteen times warmer than the IPCC’s projection (offered in 2017). Not to worry. The Grand Solar Minimum/Little Ice Age is on the way.

Insect 30 · Sea Slater

Ligia oceanica, Filey Sands

Nuts in May

Info graphic (detail) Europe Defender 2021

The NATO exercises kicked off in March and run through to June. Fingers crossed.

The Russian Federation made it known a week ago that it was compiling a list of “unfriendly countries”. Alex Christoforou has something to say about the chosen here.

Craziest of all is this graph from an element of SAGE – the gallimaufry of scientists that we are expected to trust.

A surge of Covid infection  (a Third Wave) is expected to follow the easing of all restrictions and the Warwick model seems to suggest that people who have had two doses of the gene therapy will be worst hit. There is a helpful explanation for this counter-intuitive possibility in the SPI-M-O Summary of further modelling of easing restrictions – Roadmap Step 2, 31 March 2021, where the graph appears.

This shows that most deaths and admissions in a post-Roadmap resurgence are in people who have received two vaccine doses, even without vaccine protection waning or a variant emerging that escapes vaccines. This is because vaccine uptake has been so high in the oldest age groups (modelled here at 95% in the over 50-year olds). There are therefore 5% of over 50-year olds who have not been vaccinated, and 95% x 10% = 9.5% of over 50-year olds who are vaccinated but, nevertheless, not protected against death. This is not the result of vaccines being ineffective, merely uptake being so high.

WalesOnline includes a link to the document in its observations on the rather bleak prospects for the UK. The Third Wave recedes just before “Flu Season” is about to kick off. Lockdown for another year from July, then?

Measure of Man 55 · Helpfulness