My rules

1. You really can have what you want, it just takes some creative thinking
2. Never walk past a skip without looking in
3. Recycle, freecycle
4. Set yourself a challenge. For example say you're going to turn £10 into £1000 in 3 months and give it a go.
5. Take a risk. Aways ask yourself "what's the worst thing that could happen?"
6. Sell your grandmother if she's available (and valuable)
7. Remember karma and never rip anybody off

Sarah Haddock: a fishy tale indeed...

A name picked almost at random. I did have an aunt whose maiden name was Haddock and it always made me laugh.
Sarah Haddock was born in Lambeth around 1850. In 1911 she's living at 36 Maxted Road East Dulwich aged 61 with two grown up daughters Lottie and Rose. Lottie is a shirt ironer and Rose is a cashier in a restaurant. Sarah has six living children and has been married for 34 years - her husband is not in or not around.
In the 1890s they were living in Edmonton (north of the river!!) in Palmers Green Road. Her husband John was born there so she must have gone north for him. First child in Lambeth, second one in Walworth third in Southgate. In 1891 John Haddock is a general labourer.
In 1881 they're at 6 William Place Walworth. That's just off the north end of Walworth Road, by Prospect Place. John works as a carman and they've two toddlers, Sarah and John junior.

Mary Box

Mary Box is a distant ancestor of mine, a good place to begin. I like her name and its basic nature: Mary is a good solid name and Box is a solid object. I know nothing about her so I've begun with the census and some light internet browsing.

Mary was born in 1846 in Midsomer Norton, Somerset. These were the Somerset coalfields and her family were miners. The seams were thin and mining was particularly difficult. They'd been based there for at least two generations and had probably originated there (I'll try and find out). Mary was the fourth child of seven. When Mary was 5 they lived at Victoria Buildings, Principal Street. Her father William aged 55 was a coal miner, as were her brothers Alfred  18 and Richard 15.


In 1861 when Mary was 16 she is listed as a domestic servant, her father still a miner at 64

23 December 1865: Arthur Dowling, a 22 year old bachelor, resident in Midsomer Norton, Somerset, employed as a labourer; son of Simon Dowling, a mason, married at the Midsomer Norton Parish Church Mary Box, a 20 year old spinster, resident in Midsomer Norton; daughter of William Box, a coal miner.

By 1871 she has married Arthur Dowling, a brewers labourer and is living in Welton. William is living with them (at 73) alongside a lodger and a 2 year old nephew. Arthur's widowed mother is next door.

In 1881 Mary, at 35, seems to have no children but Francis the nephew is 12 and still with them. Arthur has progressed to cellarman.

In 1901 Mary is listed as a pauper and is living with nephew Frank and his family in Welton. Arthur seems to have died

At time of death, Mary was resident at Cambrook House, Clutton, Somerset; buried in Midsomer Norton on 23 January 1915, aged 71. Cambrook House was the new name for the Clutton Union Workhouse.
The workhouse register records cause of death as 'Fatty degen'n of Heart. Dropsy.'

On the face of it a hard life. Born into a poor mining family, married to a labourer, unable to have children, died in the workhouse.. For all we know she could have been blissfully happy, never knew anything different. Although Mary and Arthur had no children they had little Frank, who did his best to look after her in later years. There was always work and Arthur did progress. There were lots of elderly people dying in the workhouse infirmary. They wouldn't have been able to afford the doctor (who was Evelyn Waugh's grandfather and a violent man so perhaps Mary was better off....)

 

Real and extraordinary lives

My project is to investigate ordinary lives in a random fashion and see how they can be linked to wider events and other people of their times. Using original sources I will track individuals and see what we can find, linking also to inages and words . The ultimate detective stories, satisfying the urge to pry into ordinary lives and uncover the dark sides, the scandals and the unexpected connections.

Dreaming

Last night I dreamt that I used found, anonymous photographs to make art. Such an idea, I  might actually do
it....

Kings Cross, what shall we do?

King's Cross!
What shall we do?
His Purple Robe
Is rent in two!

For me, there are areas of London that retain a tangible vibration of what has gone before: so close to the surface that you can be physically and emotionally struck by it. Some of this is from my own personal experiences, some of it inherited from my forbears, some of it just from collective emotion over the centuries.

Kings Cross is not a place I know that well but whenever I have been there it has had an air of gloom: it seems to me that however much you tart it up there is an undercurrent of darkness. Tacitus records it as a place of battle between Boudica and the Romans.




 It is bleak, drab and depressing.

Consider the misery and filth of Somers Town, where Dan Leno was born in 1860. When the Duke of Bedford was developing his Bloomsbury estate he was moved to erect a 'cordon sanitaire' to keep out the undesirables

The Polygon, shown here on the 1799 map as pretty much on the edge of London.

The Polygon was a housing estate, a Georgian building with 15 sides and three storeys that contained 32 houses.
Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, in the Polygon.  Charles Dickens lived at No 17 in the 1820s shortly after his father, John Dickens, was released from debtors prison.

It was demolished in the 1890s, by which time Somers Town had become a cheap and run-down neighbourhood, almost entirely because of its location. Railways were loud and smelly places, and they depended upon cheap labour - and that combination was a killer for an area's aspirations.




It is still a housing estate, the Somers Town Estate was built over it  

Kings Cross has a large and active Chinese community

In the beginning of 2010 Chinese authorities announced a bold plan to link Chinese high speed national railway directly to London King's Cross international railway station. This would allow passengers to reach London from Beijing in just two days.

Grandfather

I will become a grandmother in March of next year, an alarming but very welcome development. It's prompted me to think of my own grandparents and how they must have felt when I was born. One of them I never knew; he died in 1918. I feel that I have inherited my own father's loss of his father. My fascination with that side of my family, the one that bears my name, is a very deep and emotional one. Their Dickensian existence in the slums of Bermondsey and Lambeth, how they came to be there and the tragicomic stories that I grew up with, has fostered in me a great love of London past and present.

He died 43 years before I was born. A profile photograph of him hung in my aunt's front room, good looking with a moustache. Another photo of him with his children shows him sad eyed and vulnerable. His army records show that he was only 5ft 2, blue eyes, his hair was grey at 40 and he had a tattoo.
When he was born Disraeli was Prime Minister and Queen Victoria had just been proclaimed Empress of India. Anna Karenina was published and Tchaichovsky's Swan Lake was first staged.

The booth notebook for Alice Street Bermondsey

At one point in the 1890s he and his father ran a photography business with studios in Charing Cross and Oxford Street. Family legend says they drank away the profits


His was a horrible end:




















Alexander McKenzie served with the Northumberland Fusiliers and was discharged on medical gounds in August 1917.
He died at Cane Hill little more than six months later in March 1918. Ironically a mere month after his perfunctory burial in Cane Hill, Alexander's younger brother won the Victoria Cross for his part in the Zeebruge raid in April 1918.
More than 40 poverty-stricken soldiers suffering from psychiatric problems were admitted to Cane Hill during the First World War.


Hospital records show many of the soldiers died within months.
They were buried penniless in the Cane Hill cemetery in Portnalls Road
Croydon Guardian

His death certificate gives the cause of death as: General Paralysis of the Insane

General paralysis is another name for neurosyphilis, which is the neurologic syndrome caused by tertiary syphilisGeneral paresis, also known as general paralysis of the insane or paralytic dementia, is a neuropsychiatric disorder affecting the brain and central nervous system, caused by syphilis infection. It was originally considered a psychiatric disorder when it was first scientifically identified around the nineteenth century, as the patient usually presented with psychotic symptoms of sudden and often dramatic onset.