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Dad was the second of four children. The photograph, which must be from about 1912, shows them all: Polly, Cissie, Dad and Tommy.
I saw very little of her through my childhood because there was a falling-out at the time of Grandad's funeral.
Grandad had a gold watch and chain, which Dad understood was to be left to him.
Auntie Polly, however, had looked after Grandad for his
last three or four years, and apparently (and not unreasonably) thought she
was entitled to a larger share of Grandad's property, such as it was.
She had the watch chain made into jewelry. My father
did get the watch (and now I have it, with a new
chain), but he wouldn't speak to Polly for several years. Dad was a
man who could nurse a grudge.
Polly married a man named Eddie Jones, who was, or became, underground manager at the Granville colliery, then at the Woodside.
"He worked hard and liked a pint," says Noel. They had three daughters:
Molly, Betty and Isobel. Molly went off to South Africa, though she came back for Polly's funeral in 1978, where I met her.
Later she came back permanently: she was living in Oakengates in July
2003.
Betty married a London policeman and took to drink, dying young as a result.
Isobel married a man called Ken, and they live together in a pretty bungalow overlooking the ruins of Lilleshall Abbey, in
Shropshire. They have no children. Polly and Eddie lived with them in their last years.
Eddie died first, Polly in 1978.
In old age, my father let slip that Aunt Polly had had an illegitimate child before marrying Teddy, "but it
died".1
Thomas Noel was killed
May 28, 1930 at age 23, while riding a motorbike. This event devastated the Derbyshire family, most especially my grandmother. ("She never
recovered"
— Dad.) He was unmarried. Dad liked to say that I was Uncle Tommy reincarnated, I suppose because he thought our personalities were similar.
After Grandad's death, Polly looked after Uncle Tommy's
personal effects. They ultimately passed down to Cousin Isobel (as did
Grandad's).
Elizabeth
— "Auntie Cissie"
— was born in 1910 and married a local man named Fred Derry.
Fred worked for a men's clothing firm named George Orme & Son. Sometime before the Second World War he was sent to manage their store in Gold Street, Northampton, next to St. Peter's church.
(It seems to have been just coincidence that both Cissie and John Robert ended up in Northampton.)
Cissie and Fred lived over the store and had two children, Janet and Michael. Sometime in the 1950s they bought a new-built house in Glastonbury Road, five minutes walk from our house in Friars Avenue. Fred went on being manager of the store until he retired. I actually worked for him for a few weeks, as a Saturday job in (I think) 1960.
Janet Derry had a brief career as an actress — I remember seeing her on TV commercials in the late 1950s — then married a Fleet Street journalist called Len Sandys (pronounced "Sands") and went to live near East Grinstead, in Surrey. They had two daughters, Alison (1964) and Joanne (1967). Alison worked in the travel industry for some years, but in late 2004 was studying for a change of career to Information Technology. In 1989 she married Michael Brown, a manager at Gatwick airport (near London). They live in Hartfield, East Sussex, on the edge of Ashdown forest — Winnie the Pooh country, as Alison points out. Alison and Michael have two daughters, Catherine and Jacqueline. Joanne married Hasan Nasr, an engineer from Jordan. They live in Richmond, Surrey, with their three children: Sahra, Ayman, and Faris.
Michael was a musical prodigy, and appeared on the TV children's program All Your Own in the early 1950s. (The producer of the program was Huw Wheldon, who later rose to great heights in British TV production and management. Michael remembers him as "unctuous.") We were taken up to Glastonbury Road to watch this performance.2 Michael became a schoolmaster and married a girl named Lynne. They had two boys, Kristian and Anton. Kristian works in optics, as does his fiancee Vicki. Anton was working for a fashion designer, Antoni & Alison, in late 2004, and also has a T-shirt business of his own. He is married to Amanda; they have two boys, Ben and Luke. (Neither, adds Michael, a Star Wars fan).
Auntie Cissie died November 26, 2001.
Some Derries: Anton, Amanda, Luke, Ben, Vicki,
Kristian.
(In mid-2004.)
1. My family history does not lend much support to the popular notion of Victorian and Edwardian ladies securely strapped into impregnable whale-bone corsets.
Auntie Polly and Great-Aunt Leah both strayed; so (though admittedly we are now into the reign of George V) did Auntie Sally.
If this is a fair statistical sample of the dozen or so women of those generations named in this document, the very severe social, religious and economic sanctions of the time did little to prevent Nature taking her course.
According to my mother, when Auntie Sally was in labor
— at home, of course
— Granny
Knowles held a kitchen knife over her throat and said: "If you make
a sound, I'll kill you!"
2. The Derrys had TV before us. My family acquired a TV set in 1957.
Before that, any TV I saw was at Auntie Cissie's, Auntie Annie's, Auntie Gwen's, or at the house of a boy called John Smith, who lived across the road from us in Friars Avenue.
Around 1955, my mother went to hospital to have her gall bladder removed.
My sister and myself had to be found accommodation (my father, I suppose, not being thought able to look after us).
Judith went to stay with Auntie Gwen in Cannock, who had a TV. I went to stay with Auntie Muriel in Birmingham, who had a budgerigar (= parakeet).
I remember thinking this was a pretty fair division of the available attractions.