Toe in the Water

Ancestors

Ancestors

Andrea has been working on a submission to the Roots & Wings Contest and we were talking about our respective ancestry as a result. She has done a lot of digging around in her family’s past, discovering all sorts of interesting relationships to important people in history, whereas my researches have been intermittent and easily discouraged. I can go as far back as my grandfathers and grandmothers but all is a bit dim and murky beyond that. Andrea managed to push things back a generation or two in half an hour’s research but it was all pretty uninteresting, to be honest. It seems I come from solid, hard-working but unexciting people who never made even a slight dent in the history of the world.

This actually suits my rather romantic view of myself as a descendant of thoroughly Anglo Saxon working class people with roots going back to the settlement of Angles, Saxons and Jutes in England. So posh people can claim that their ancestors came over with William the Conqueror, but I can say in return that mine came with Hengist and Horsa.

Certainly, my family has been intimately concerned with the industries of Coventry for generations. I worked for several years in a car factory when I returned to England from Africa and my uncle was working in the Jaguar factory at the time. My paternal and maternal grandfathers were both employed in the car industry and their fathers were probably involved in a bicycle factory before progressing to cars. And, before that, the likelihood is that my forefathers worked in the clock- and watch-making industry.

It is easy to trace the long thread of mechanical production that made Coventry a thriving and wealthy city through the centuries. The business of working with metals to produce inventive and useful machines has been a speciality of the city’s people for so long that it is now in the blood; it is entirely sensible that the Midlands and Coventry in particular became the centre of Britain’s car industry in the 20th Century.

The dearth of prominent and important people in my ancestry is entirely to be expected, therefore. My people were busy making useful things instead of wasting their time in meddling with history. Phrases like “the salt of the earth” tend to spring to mind.

So I don’t have anyone to write about for Roots & Wings’ contest for inspiring ancestors. And I’m happy with that. I don’t have anyone to live up to or someone’s shadow to blunder about in, but I do have a natural mechanical ability that has served me well at times through the years. Their names may be unknown to me but I am aware of those who went before and built ordinary lives while being a part of the success of their city.

Which is all to ignore my father. If there is an exception to the general tendency towards staying in the same place that seems the hallmark of my family, my father is just that. He was the only one to leave Coventry for adventures in lands as far away as India and Southern Africa, he managed to escape the factory to become a pharmacist (although he confessed to me late in life that it was never an ambition of his - my grandfather could afford to send only one of his sons to university and, as the elder, my father was chosen).

The problem then becomes that my father was anything but forthcoming about his life story. Ask a question and you would more often be met with a sarcastic sentence or two, rather than a meaningful story. Many times I asked him what he’d done in the war and his answer was always either that he’d sent trucks up and down the Himalayas or a description of the mighty 50-seater privy he’d had built for his regiment (he did claim it as the largest in the world but I fail to see how this could be verified).

In Africa, I know (because I was there by then) that he was the managing director of a pharmaceutical firm in Cape Town for eleven years and was then promoted to run the company’s Central African branch. Retirement from that job produced boredom and he bought a couple of pharmacies to keep him out of mischief for a few years. And, when I returned to England, it wasn’t long before he followed me there, to spend his last few years working part time as a locum for pharmacists and walking his beloved Staffordshire Bull Terrier.

It’s hard to make such a sound but unexciting story into a blockbuster tale of adventure. And, in a way, it would miss the point to do so. The strength of my father was that he supported his family throughout his life, that he did what was necessary to ensure that my mother and his children had a good life, and that he managed it all without a single complaint. On only the one occasion did he ever mention to me that, had things been different, he might have gone a different way entirely.

He was what is known as a good man.


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