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.