YOU NEVER KNOW WHO YOU MAY TURN OUT TO BE

 WHO do you think you are? asks the popular television show, but you don’t have to be a celebrity to unearth a fascinating family story of your own. Ten or so years spent investigating my family’s past have thrown up a few surprises about our origins. Like the fact that my great-great-great grandmother, Mary Hargreaves, was born in Dublin. And while this doesn’t mean I’ll be celebrating next St Patrick’s Day, it is remarkable how much this kind of information changes the way you view yourself. As it turns out my once decidedly Derbyshire DNA has pieces from all over Britain. I still feel like a Derby girl, but I can no longer deny associations with other counties and even countries.
I’ve also learned how foolish the idea of social “class” is. On the face of it, my family is of sturdy “working-class” stock. We have blacksmiths, agricultural labourers and elastic weavers to prove it. But there’s also the occasional rich and aristocratic family member like Sir Richard Whieldon Barnett of Hales Hall, who is my fourth cousin. All very exciting; he was a competitor at the 1908 Olympics, a chess champion, an MP, but somehow just not as much fun as my great-great-great-great grandparents, Richard and Mary Wilkes, who worked as village rat catchers well into their dotage. And I can’t help thinking, if I were living in a vermin-afflicted cottage, who would I rather have as my neighbour?
Then there’s the possibility of inheritance. Not in the financial sense – I doubt rat catchers were ever high earners. – but perhaps I had inherited some hitherto unexplored talent from the several artists I had discovered. Sadly, I can’t even draw a convincing banana and probably have more in common with the long line of publicans on my paternal grandmother’s line.
I did find one living relative who carries the art gene – my distant American cousin, Judy, who is a talented painter. And there’s another joy of family research - encountering new relatives. Through Judy I have the pleasure of hearing about everyday life in the charming village of Ballston Spa in New York State.
Other relatives have their own experiences to share too. There’s third cousin Naomi, who runs a falconry centre in the Cotswolds; fifth cousin Julia, who lives in Australia; and seventh cousin Ulrich from Denmark. We have fun trading family news and Christmas cards – and the latest discoveries. Like our connections to Thomas Whieldon, the world-famous potter, and my first cousin (admittedly eight-times-removed); or George Rowley, the well-known china painter for Royal Crown Derby, and my great-grandfather’s half-brother.
Thanks to the dedicated research of these new-found relatives, I have sometimes been able to go back several hundred years in an afternoon. My earliest ancestors to date are William and Joan Whieldon of Ipstones in Staffordshire, who were probably born in 1582, the year William Shakespeare married Ann Hathaway.
I’ve learned about places I’d never heard of before, like Chilvers Coton near Nuneaton, where my ancestors attended the same church as novelist George Elliot. I’ve researched life in the Lincolnshire fens when the early Rippons would have travelled from village to village by boat; studied the smart houses of Wimbledon where my great grandmother worked as a housekeeper; and investigated life at Welbeck Abbey where my great-great uncle Alfred was in charge of the Duke of Portland’s stables.
There have been countless mysteries, illegitimate births, untraceable marriages, lines that disappear into thin air, rumours and speculation, elopements and uncovered secrets aplenty.
And there have been tragedies, too. Great-great uncle Willie Rippon returned from the First World War with shellshock and was haunted by the horrors of his experiences for the rest of his life, while Frederic Rowley fell victim to typhoid fever at his Campion Street home. And my great-great grandmother Eliza Hough died, aged 30, having just given birth to her sixth child.
There have been the horror stories, too, like that of my great-great grandfather working down a Durham lead mine as a 14-year-old. And the sad story of my great-great uncle Alexander Craig, who was born in Bruges in the late 19th century because his father was a commercial traveller, but who returned to Belgium with the Sherwood Foresters in 1915, only to be killed just a few miles from his birthplace.
Researching my family tree has not only introduced me to a host of fascinating ancestors, but I’ve discovered a whole new me. So now who do I think I am? Not just a Rippon, but a Whieldon, an Entwistle, a Poynton. An English girl, a Scottish lass, an Irish woman. If you haven’t already delved into your own family’s history, it’s time you got started – you’ll probably be amazed at who you turn out to be.

PUBLISHED IN THE DERBY TELEGRAPH ON THE DATE OF THIS POST

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH AN OLD-FASHIONED EDUCATION!

There's nothing wrong with an "old fashioned" education
I WAS talking to a woman at the bus stop last week. She was concerned about the amount of homework her eight-year-old granddaughter had been given. “Homework? She’s eight – surely she doesn’t have homework?” I queried. And after a bewildering five minutes of key stage this, and Ofsted that, I discovered just how far primary schooling has moved on since I left Dale School, Derby, in 1980.
I was fortunate to have benefited from what even people of my age would consider an old-fashioned education. Our school in Normanton was run under the auspices of the always immaculately turned-out Miss Clarke. She was petite and ladylike and ruled the school with an iron, if perfectly manicured, hand.
While other school heads were embracing modernity, Miss Clarke made sure her boys and girls were brought up the classical way. No trendy educational ideas for her. From the moment the old school handbell was rung on the playground outside, and the chattering crocodiles of more than 500 children filed inside, we were taught on traditional, if occasionally quirky, lines.
Each morning the school, divided into infants and juniors, attended assembly. We entered the halls to the strains of classical music. The composer of the day was clearly displayed at the front, and woe betide anyone who could not read or pronounce his name. From Tchaikovsky and Brahms to Schubert and Liszt, we learned to recognise a huge range of music. Among Miss Clarke’s favourites were loud or stirring pieces, like Grieg’s Morning or Delibes’ Coppelia. It was all about instilling in us enthusiasm, energy and get-up-and-go. And it worked.
And each day there would be a poem to listen to – like Keats’ To Autumn – and always read with an almost fevered relish by Miss Clarke’s ever-jolly colleague, Mrs Smith, her foot tapping out the rhythm of the words. She read all manner of poems from writers as diverse as John Masefield, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. We started each morning with a hymn and a prayer, of course, and to my shame my primary school self never questioned what my non-Christian schoolmates thought of that. But I loved it, and I’ve always valued hymns and prayers for their use of language and poetry, as much as for their spiritual content. There was also the element of everyone doing something together, which just seemed to set us up right for the day.
PE lessons at Dale also had an interesting twist. Confined for most of the year to the concrete playgrounds on either side of the school, or in the assembly halls, our sports curriculum relied upon the equipment we had inherited from earlier generations. Indoors there was the usual gym apparatus with poles to twizzle on and rope frames to climb up, monkey bars to swing on and a range of aged benches on which to balance, all of which bore the marks of 75 years of children’s feet bashing and rubbing on them.
When it came to fresh air fun, there was a more exotic choice. Nestled among the skittles and canes, beanbags and hula-hoops were a set of ancient shinty clubs. Now, unless you went to Dale, or lived in the Scottish Highlands, you’re unlikely ever to have encountered that particular sport. It was a forceful and violent Gaelic forerunner to hockey and quite what this set of clubs, which resembled upturned and flattened out walking sticks, were doing in the PE cupboard of a Derbyshire primary school, no-one seemed to know, but under our teachers’ guidance we would, gently of course, tap a plastic ball up and down the playground around the obstacles laid out before us. It probably owed very little to the archaic sport, but it was utterly engrossing nonetheless.
But I think the most valuable lesson that Dale School taught us was the how to mark the passing seasons and seize the moment to appreciate the world around us. No matter how important the lesson we were having, there was always time to abandon it for a morning spent outside studying a frost-encrusted spider’s web, or a bird’s nest. Then it was back inside to write stories and poems inspired by them. It was fun, but it was learning too, and it never seemed like hard work.
I wonder, with all the emphasis, in today’s schools, on homework and breakfast clubs; with lessons in citizenship and technology; with ICT rooms and interactive white boards in most school; with websites, newsletters and class councils to keep pace with - all the undoubtedly wonderful and essential components of modern education – is there still time for our youngsters to experience the more esoteric aspects of life? It would be an awful pity if, amid all that technology and financial investment, they were literally missing out on smelling the roses.

PUBLISHED IN THE DERBY TELEGRAPH ON THE DATE OF THIS POST