Category Archives: history

history, personal, ramblings

Families

Yesterday I ended up spending a large part of the day immersed in my family history. It all started because Noreen (who has done at least as much work on my family as her own) noticed that one of the files we had from my mother had a birth certificate in it.

We have three crates of stuff from my mother, much of which is organised as a family timeline and history in ring binders, all of which has been refiled. But we realised we hadn’t been through the miscellaneous files for certificates, which I prefer to file separately. We started on the crate of miscellaneous files thinking we’d find a couple of certificates. We found a couple of dozen!

In entering all the certificate data into my family tree app I came across a death certificate for my g-g-g-grandfather, one James Gambridge (born ca.1789, died 1857) which records his occupation as “Cook on Her Majesty’s Ship Victory”. No this is too good to be true! He would have been about 16 at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar (in 1805). Is it possible he served under Nelson at Trafalgar?


Answer: No.

The crew (an incredible 850 officers and men) on HMS Victory at Trafalgar is well documented. And James Gambridge isn’t amongst them. (Nor is there a James Cambridge, the ‘G’ often being mis-transcribed as a ‘C’.) Now one shouldn’t always believe what is given even on certificates, and this rang alarm bells.

Yet I knew James Gambridge’s occupation was given as “Gunner” on his daughter Sarah Ann’s (my maternal g-g-grandmother) marriage certificate (in 1848). So maybe he was an enlisted sailor. Hmmm … more work required.

Then, talking over dinner, Noreen made an almost throw-away comment: “Of course there’s also Leading Seaman Albert Edward T Hicks of Dover who on the 1901 census is shown as serving on HMS Victory at Portsmouth”. What?

Now the Hickses are my father’s mother’s family and, yes, they come from Dover. “Oh yes”, says Noreen, “he’s one of yours”.

Now my g-g-grandfather was a certain Jabez Hicks of Dover, sometime mariner. And we know his son James Albert (1847-1888; not in my direct line) was also a mariner. Noreen is even more fascinated by this family than I am and has established that James Albert had a son Albert Edward Thomas (b. 1875). Both James Albert and his wife died quite young and it seems that the five surviving children were parcelled out around their aunts and uncles (who were likely also their god-parents).

Young Albert Edward was sent to live with his uncle Edward Israel Hicks and on the 1891 census is at the Royal Naval School at Greenwich. So much can be established from census records etc. (Albert Edward Hicks is quite common as names go, but Albert Edward T Hicks isn’t.) And hence Noreen’s discovery of Albert Edward T Hicks on HMS Victory at Portsmouth on the 1901 census.

This I now start to think I don’t believe.

So let’s see what, if anything, the National Archives come up with. God bless this new-fangled internet thingy ‘cos I can do this from home on a Saturday evening!

So after a bit of grubbing around — and much swearing at the awful slowness of the National Archives’ website — lo and behold I can find a Naval service record for Albert Edward Thomas Hicks of Dover. And the document is available for download (for the cost of a pint of beer).

He joined up for 12 years on his 18th birthday in December 1893 as a ship’s boy. He eventually retired from the Navy in October 1919 as a Petty Officer on HMS Lupin (almost 26 years service). He served several tours on HMS Victory (as well as, inter alia, HMS Hood (1891) and HMS Pembroke) and throughout the First World War. Absolutely amazing.

But following the same pattern I cannot find any service record for James Gambridge — and all the records are supposed to be there. One last desperate effort: let’s just do a general search for him, forget about targeting naval records. Wow! And there is a James Gambridge who served in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines between 1804 and 1839. Now this doesn’t quite fit as quoted ages etc. don’t properly match and I don’t yet have the full document (it isn’t one that’s online) to check it all. But yes, it may be a possible fit.

I never knew I had forebears in the Navy, let alone dreamt that they may have served on HMS Victory (albeit not at Trafalgar). And now I find I may had had two such. And both sides of the family. Wow!

Now I need to find more about my paternal grandfather’s service in WWI and WWII, which isn’t proving easy. I know he served as RAF barrage balloon ground crew in WWII. And in WWI he was a conscientious objector but volunteered to serve in the RAMC as a stretcher bearer at the front. How brave is that!

history, science

My Heritage is Under Threat

Yet again those dastardly Jonnie Foreigners want to slaughter my heritage. This time they’re after destroying Greenwich Mean Time.

They’re not content that our stupid government want to move us onto European time (equivalent to Summer Time) — permanently an hour adrift from real “astronomical time”. Oh no!

Now the scientific community want to abandon good old GMT completely and replace it with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)**.


But wait! Isn’t UTC the same as GMT?

Well no, actually. Not as currently defined. Although it looks the same at the moment, the proposal appears to be to do away with leap seconds (of which there have been 24 in the last 40 years) which are inserted into UTC to help our electronic time keep track with the actual motion of the planet. Inserting leap seconds is a pain and a technical challenge, but not an insuperable challenge. But the proposal is in favour of apparent simplicity: to abandon leap seconds in favour of some currently undefined (and doubtless cocked up) solution in years to come when our modern atomic clocks have drifted too far from astronomical reality.

But surely GMT, when originally defined, did not have leap seconds defined? That’s true. Leap seconds weren’t invented until 1972, by which time GMT had been the universal time standard for almost 100 years.

So where’s the problem? Why can we not return to the original GMT, without leap seconds, if that is a scientific imperative?

Ah, now, that’s because GMT defines noon as the time the sun is exactly overhead at Greenwich. And in days of yore that was reset at regular intervals (daily?) so in effect GMT kept in track with every slight wobble in “astronomical time” automatically. But with atomic clocks that doesn’t happen. Time progresses regularly like, well, clockwork. And without leap seconds modern “electronic clock noon” (UTC) would drift away from “astronomical noon” (GMT) and that spells disaster for things like GPS.

So let’s just redefine GMT to be atomic clock time? But that would make it neither “mean time” nor “Greenwich time”, so it would be a misnomer. At least with a new name it is clear that the time being measured is different.

So … We have a working system which we are proposing to break. This is absurd. We should keep GMT (with leap seconds). It is a valuable part of our heritage. It tells people the history and science of measuring and recording time. Why are we throwing our history away so carelessly? Is nothing sacred?

** I’m sure the acronym for this should be “CUnT”.

beliefs, current affairs, history

Poppy Off

So FIFA have decreed that the England football team may not wear poppies on their shirts during their friendly match against Spain this coming Saturday. This is on the grounds that:

Fifa decrees that shirts should not carry political, religious or commercial messages. “Such initiatives would open the door to similar initiatives from all over the world, jeopardising the neutrality of football,” [FIFA] said.

I’m with FIFA. For once they’re absolutely right. If an exception is made in this instance it’ll be made for every other instance. The words “wedge”, “thin” and “end” come to mind.

Moreover someone has to stand up to this sycophantic poppy nonsense. As I wrote last year, I’m not saying we should forget all about the wars for the liberation of Europe, the bravery, the fallen, etc. But the whole thing is so totally out of hand one dare not do anything but go along with it. It’s dictatorial; it’s sycophantic; and it’s backward looking. We need to turn round and be going forward in happiness, thanks and peace; not looking backward in a sugar-coated, maudlin, pseudo-Christian, glorification of war. Yeuch!

I don’t expect other people to agree with me — although I can hope that some will. But it is only if dissident voices are heard that opinions (on anything) will ever change and progress will be made.

beliefs, history, links, science, sexuality, thoughts

Links of the Week

This weeks collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed …

Lord Norwich makes some sly remarks about Popes. But how does he know what Pope Nicholas V was like?

Now apparently out gut bacteria may be causing obesity. And you thought it was because I ate too much.

Scientists also think they’ve discovered why some of us hate Brussels Sprouts. Yes it’s all in the genetics, and our taste buds.

In other news, speculation is rife that Palaeolithic man went in for piercing his penis. It all sounds pretty tenuous to me, but then there’s nothing new under the foreskin sun.

And finally … And finally someone in “authority” has come to realise that what we’ve been saying all these years might just be helpful: prostitution could be solved by decriminalising brothels. Government: smell the coffee … it ain’t going to go away and if you licence it you can tax it!

history, memes, words

Word of the Week : Wapentake

Wapentake

1. A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties. The shires which had divisions so termed were Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire; in all of which the Danish element in the population was large.

2. The judicial court of such a subdivision.

books, current affairs, history, personal, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection of quotes which caught my eye during the last week …

Everyone has a photographic memory … Some just don’t have film.
[Thoughts of Angel]

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
[Kurt Vonnegut]

Which links quite nicely to the following two …

We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

As we have found, time and again, informers have often a need to create information. They are ‘projectors’ who provoke or indeed invent dangerous sentiments in order to denounce them. They are ‘politicians’ in that pejorative Elizabethan sense, the sense in which Shakespeare means it when King Lear says, ‘Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not’.
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

beliefs, history, memes, words

Word of the Week

Dzong.

A religious and/or governmental centre in one of the Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas (Bhutan and Tibet). A Buddhist monastery. The architecture is massive in style with towering exterior walls surrounding a complex of courtyards, temples, administrative offices and monks’ accommodation.

history, memes, words

Word of the Week

Palimpsest.

A parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing.