Some were unfamiliar to me but others can be found in any Ususal Suspects box. I hope they get their day in a Hague court. (The link is to a PDF.)

Anniversaries

1891 Filey · Birth Maude was the youngest of six girls born to fisherman Mark SCOTTER and Alice née COLLING. Five days after her father was killed aboard his yawl Susie by a German submariner, she married George Lenarto DORAN.

George, a Gunner in the Royal Field Artillery survived the war but he had been seriously wounded in September 1916 and brought to the Perth War Hospital for treatment.

Maude died twenty years after George. They have a simple headstone in St Oswald’s churchyard.

1836 Filey · Baptism It took her a while, but Henrietta found a husband in her home village of Gristhorpe in Filey parish. After fourteen years and the births of two children, Francis Robert FOSTER died. Henrietta ran a lodging house in Filey for a number of years and then moved to Leeds to live with daughter Agnes, who had married a joiner in 1900. Sharing a house with four granddaughters and sister in law Sarah must have kept her young. The only death registration for her that comes close to fitting (a two-year discrepancy perhaps) gives her age as 92 in 1926.

Henrietta on the Shared Tree.

1817 Cayton · Marriage Ralph RICKABY was born in Wath, near Ripon. He married Mary DENTON in Cayton and, after bringing five children into the world, both died in 1824. Jonah, an orphan at two years, would become a master cordwainer in Filey and make connections through marriage to some of the main Filey families.

But what took Ralph and Mary at such young ages? Ralph, a farmer at Lebberston, died at the end of November, aged 41. Mary followed him to the grave three weeks later, just before Christmas. Causes unknown, (though youngest child Jane’s birth had been registered in the September quarter).

Note: Marriage licence date, Muston, dated 24 January in a couple of sources but with the intended marriage place given as Cayton.

1878 Swaffham · Death Margaret DUNSMURE was seventy when she died in Norfolk – and she was born in Edinburgh. There is a chance, however, that she set foot in Filey, maybe a few times. At the age of 23, she married a high status chap who is sometimes confusingly referred to as Robert Admiral MITFORD. A street in Filey has been named after him (rather than some other Mitford).

Robert was a quarter of a century older than Margaret but he nevertheless managed to be married to her for forty years. They seem to have had only one child, a daughter, but somehow this Mitford branch of the family is connected on social media to the 20th Century’s Nancy and her bright young sisters. (Unity “had a relationship” with Adolph Hitler and Diana married Oswald Mosley.)

Camille Silvy may have photographed Margaret a few years before she acquired dowager status. The attribution isn’t certain. Find her with Admiral Mitford on the Shared Tree.

1945 Filey · Burial Aeneas Robb SIMON is a singleton. He has a place on FG&C because in 1945, at the age of 63, he was buried in St Oswald’s churchyard. There isn’t a Monumental Inscription record but Kath gives his last address as 29 The Croft.

I made a token effort to place him in a birth family, with limited success. I think he married Florence BENNION in Liverpool in 1915. Percy William Robb SIMON and Marjorie Florence are the only children I could find. Why Aeneas? It isn’t a typical Morayshire given name.

Journal

1991 Hull

Friday

Sorting, clearing, getting on.

Went to see Dot Ramsey in the afternoon. Memories of walking, running along drain side early mornings to walk Joan Veitch to school. Playing on Trevor Grief’s “bogey”, (an unfortunate word we used then for a four-wheeled, hand-built-from-scrapwood cart).

Dot in plaster. She’d recovered from a broken ankle only to be knocked down by a car on Christmas Eve. Twelve days in hospital. Cheerful though, now, and uncomplaining. Always a pleasant, light-hearted woman. Reminisced and the folk we forgot were recalled by Janet when she arrived with her daughter Helen. Alison Russell, George Kirk, Gillian Brown, Peter Carter, Johnnie Fitzmaurice, Adrian Coggin, Jennifer Williams – and many more. Two and a half hours of nostalgia. Dot said my mother was such a bonny girl. She said Ron was handsome and never short of women and that Walt had charisma – but my dad didn’t share their philandering “’cos he was married.” She didn’t sound convincing – after all, Walt was married too – and my father had occasionally hinted at “affairs”.

Dot also recalled seeing me involved in a fight on the waste ground by the school. Remember it well – though I never knew I was seen! Think it was Trevor (?) Midgeley who’d taken against me and it was “arranged” to meet after school, with Clive Boyes as my “second”. A tougher lad than me, Midgeley, but I seem to remember giving a reasonable account of myself. Dot said my mother was very upset to hear about it but my father said I had to learn to stick up for myself sooner or later. I never liked fighting and a tussle with Paul Silabon when I was 11 or 12 was the last time I used fists in, then, puzzled self-defence.

I guess I am perverted in a particular way. For the first time, I felt like weeping over the Gulf War. The images of oiled, perplexed cormorants swimming through the slick off the Saudi coast distressed me far more than the nightly scenes of Scuds shattering Tel Aviv, Haifa, Riyadh and Dharan. There really isn’t such a thing as an innocent human being. We’re all implicated in this war. But all other creatures… Each side blames the other for the spillage. Whoever opened the tanks …

Townscape 76 · Bland’s Cliff