Month: March 2021

We call our first names ‘given names’, that is, as helpless babies this is the first indication that we don’t control our own lives. This can lead to trouble later on for any number of reasons. For example, I was named Martin after my own father, also called Martin. The story goes that I came four weeks before expected, and Mum and Dad had not as yet agreed on a name. Under pressure to register me formally in case the premature birth didn’t go too well, Mum called me after Dad because it was the only name she could think of. Later in life, when she called ‘Martin!’ both of us would answer, unless she seemed to be on the warpath, in which case neither of us would answer, sometimes grinning at each other as we made off stealthily.

Thanks to my cousin Tom (and a link to a Minogue family tree being put together in America) I now know that the rather exotic name Anastasia mentioned in my earlier blog appears to have entered the family by marriage in 1807. How this name reappears in 1893 is uncertain. It seems possible that the transmission over such a long period could have been oral, a preservation of family names through stories passed down the generations.

Genealogies also make clear how much names are passed down from generation to generation and are in some sense ‘traditional’. In Germany, recently, the authorities in Lower Saxony charged with summoning people in the oldest age group for Covid19 vaccinations, sent out letters to people they judged to be in this highest age group on the basis of their first names. Toddlers called Fritz or Adele were invited for vaccination, while octogenarians named Peter or Brigitte were ignored. It seems that many old-fashioned names have been revived recently. This at least explains why German friends of mine have just given to newly born boy twins the names Ludwig and Leopold, which conjures up the faded nineteenth century world of aristocracy and empire.

The name Martin, I’m glad to report, conjures up more acceptable visions. St Martin, a 4^th century Bishop of Tours, is regarded as the patron saint of beggars, because of the legend that he divided his cloak in two to clothe an old naked beggar. A painting similar to the one above was one of only two paintings my parents had in the house, and any beggars knocking at Mum’s door (as they often did in the late 1940s) never left empty-handed. I also like the association with St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, where there is a St Martin chapel, with a plaque to Vera Brittain, whose pacifist views Mum had always shared.

So our names matter to us, and become a fixed part of our family identity. This can still cause complications. For example, my brother-in-law Tom comes from a family (the Stanfords) which traditionally would name each eldest son Thomas. His grandfather and father were named Tom, so was he, so was his eldest son and so was that son’s eldest son. If one of them comes up on a telephone message, I have no idea at first which Tom is getting in touch (I have now set up my phone to register them as Tom 1, Tom 2, and Tom 3). Another example is my own youngest son, who was at birth registered as Michael: but we never ever called him that, always giving him the name Ben. My mother couldn’t cope with this and always addressed him as Michael. Eventually, after a great deal of bureaucratic nonsense, we managed to get him officially registered as ‘Ben Michael’, at which point his elder brother Nick always called him ‘Bendy Michael’.

Given all the problems we see arising with naming, let’s give the last word to Shakespeare’s Juliet:

           What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…

Teeth have been a life-long source of misery, from my childhood onward. It was only recently borne in on me that, unlike my own children, I never got visits from the Tooth Fairy, almost certainly because my parents could not afford her. My mother had her own favourite methods of dealing with these things. She regularly brushed my teeth, and those of my sister Maureen, with soot from the chimney back of our kitchen fire, presumably a folk remedy dating from mediaeval times. When our teeth, unsurprisingly, objected, Mum would clamp a large piece of brown paper suffused with vinegar over our jaws, meant to reduce any need for further, impossibly expensive treatment.

The threatening financial burden of healthcare was, of course, lifted from the shoulders of poor working class families like mine by the post-war health reforms of the new Labour Government. This turned out to be a mixed blessing for me, for it meant that a dentist could now be let loose on me and my ever recalcitrant teeth. There was only one dentist in the nearby small town of Boroughbridge, and he appeared to have inherited the agricultural practices predominant in the locality. I bled for days after this first appalling intervention and didn’t even have anything to offer the tooth fairy by way of appeasement. Wild horses would not drag me to a dentist thereafter, which naturally ensured that I would always have need of one. So the Tooth Fairy and I have kept a love-hate relationship going for most of my life. Good NHS dentists have got fewer, but so have my teeth. Clearly, the chimney soot treatment hasn’t worked.

The past, it is said, is another country; they do things differently there. Well, Sarah tells me that in the 1930s and 40s it was thought that the best present a would-be bridegroom could give to his bride, was the present of a completely new set of teeth to show off at the wedding. In the more recent setting of Thatcherite Britain, the novel Shuggie Bain (by Douglas Stuart) shows us young working class girls with bad teeth, who have them all removed at once and replaced by a set of pearly gnashers with which to outface the world. Perhaps the soot treatment had not worked for them either.

It seems appropriate to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by reference to these members of the Irish side of my family. Thomas (Tom) was my grandfather, born in 1878; Patrick was his brother, born in 1885. Anastasia was their younger sister, born in 1893. The two young men, Patrick possibly no older than 15, migrated from their home in Outrath, Kilkenny, around the turn of the century, as described in Chapter One (Hard Times) of my memoir. Anastasia is a bit of a puzzle, appearing in a list of eight children replete with conventional Irish names. Originally, I thought she might have been named after the famous Russian Romanov princess of the same name, but the princess was born in 1901, her Minogue namesake in 1893. If anyone out there can offer an explanation, I’ll be delighted.

The story of Tom Minogue’s settling down to work, marriage, and children (one of these my father Martin Bernard) on the estate of the Catholic aristocratic Mowbray and Stourton family is told in Chapter Two (...and Hard Masters). Buttoday I want to tell a much later story about how my Dad (and Mum) went to visit Ireland for the first time ever in 1971.

We (me, my then wife Lizzie, Dad, and Mum Josephine) travelled more in hope than expectation, since Grandad seemed to have left scant information about his old family haunts, or indeed his family. This was also the first time my parents had been in an aeroplane, a baptism of fire so far as Mum was concerned. When we were told we could remove our seat belts, I turned to look back at them. Mum still had her eyes closed and was clearly in a state of permanent prayer. Dad caught my eye and said, “Have we taken off yet?”

After a night in Dublin to recover, we headed off in a hire car for Kilkenny.  Arriving, we tried ringing various Minogues in the telephone book (you see how ill prepared we were).  Given that Grandad and Patrick had scarcely ever returned there over the intervening six decades, the polite but baffled responses were unsurprising. We decided to sink our sorrows in a local pub. It soon became clear that our very English group was being regarded with a sort of guarded curiosity. A couple of men came over quite deliberately to chat, and I remember feeling a little anxious, reflecting that the English were not likely to be popular just then, given what had been going on in Belfast. I need not have worried. Dad told them why we were there, about his Irish origins, and his usual cheery and open demeanour seemed to allay any suspicions. He was soon the life and soul of the evening. At closing time, we were almost caught flat-footed when everyone rose and struck up ‘The Soldier’s Song’. Happily, Dad knew the rousing words, schooled at his father’s knee, and our new friends wished us well in our search.

Touring the West of Ireland, we found ourselves in Bantry. The highlight here was a race meeting, in a large farmer’s field outside the town. Things seemed both in spirit and practice probably much as my Grandad would have found them in 1900. You paid a couple of pounds to get in, though a large number of people were unwilling to countenance this charge and stood outside along the hedge, jostling for position to view the races for free. Inside was a long oval track marked by oil drums roped together. Inside the oval everything else took place; horses trotted about and were weighed out and in for each race. About six bookies had set up shop. Each employed runners to convey odds and carry back bets for the many people lining the hedges outside. I often wonder if they ever took any winnings back.

The horses were all ridden by jockeys who could not have been more than 14 years old, mostly quite skinny and light. The racegoers were tremendously friendly and informative. One informed us that the horse that had just won the first race would be racing again later but under a different name.  “Don’t spend your money,” he advised, “she’ll be held back”. Sure enough, when the twice-named horse ran again, the jockey visibly stood up and with all his strength held the horse on a tight rein as the others ran past. Ascot it was not, but everybody seemed to be having a good time, punters, trainers and jockeys all trying to outsmart each other. I now understood better why my Irish Grandad always at race meetings parked himself firmly alongside the bookmaker, making sure that he would not run off with the winnings.

I owe this title to George Ewart Evans, taken from his classic descriptions of village life and farm work over the first half of the twentieth century, based on interviews and oral accounts from older inhabitants of East Suffolk. He believes that change has occurred over this period to such a great degree that it might be described as a revolution, so that life in these places will never again be the same. In seeking to understand this disappeared society, he suggests we need to help the ‘backward traveller’ “not so much to know the past as to feel it. For history is not merely the acquisition of knowledge about the past, it is more than anything else the imaginative reconstruction of it’. (Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay p.13 Faber and Faber 1956)

I am wholly persuaded to this view myself. A problem with such classic accounts, and there are others based in oral history, is a tendency to create a picture of the past that is essentially unproblematic. We can still enjoy such accounts, especially where they focus on communal practices such as harvesting, or the charm of old tools like flails and scythes, or give us sepia-tinted photographs of splendid Suffolk Punch horses. These accounts are full of interest for the twenty-first century reader, and I have just come across an excellent recent story of one rural labourer’s life and work (see the photograph above). Mont Abbott describes his life and work in Oxfordshire from about 1915 to 1985. His account carries real conviction because it conveys one, very recognisable voice, rather than several grouped into a generalised narrative. Lifting The Latch: A Life on the Land (Day Books 2003) is both a fascinating and moving account.

An earlier account by George Bourne (Change in the Village 1912, Penguin Books 1984) has its fair share of nostalgia, but also recognises the harsher aspects of life and work for rural farm labourers and their families. “A majority perhaps of the labouring folk endure … chronic poverty, in which at some point or other every day, the provision for bare physical needs falls a little short” (p.59). He notes too that this largely poor and exploited group of rural workers seems just to accept an unhappy fate: “The truth which economists begin to recognise, that where there are wealthy and idle classes there must as an inevitable result be classes who are impoverished and overworked, has not found its way into the villager’s head” (p.63).

View Post

My own oral resources for this part of my memoir are my own parents. They left written accounts of their lives which have little room for nostalgia, but tell us a great deal about the courage, resolve and determination required to cope with the always challenging conditions of hard work, inadequate housing, and very low income. In telling their stories, I have had to do a great deal of backward travelling myself, while trying to observe George Ewart Evans’ dictum of ‘imaginative reconstruction’.

Had she still been around, my mother Josephine (Josie) would have celebrated International Women’s Day enthusiastically. From an urban mining family in the North East, but married to a Yorkshire farm labourer, she constantly rebelled against the constrictions she met with in rural estate and village life. This often meant being precipitately kicked out of the tied cottages that came with my Dad’s job, regularly remonstrating with surly farmers about the appalling conditions she was obliged to live in: no running water, no bathroom or inside lavatory, no electricity, no hope of improvements or repairs. Her running battles meant that we made a peripatetic progress around Yorkshire, and I went to three primary schools in five years.

Mum’s readiness to defy authority, regardless of the consequences, is best illustrated during the second world war, when our local village life was more than a little disrupted by a variety of incomers, including land girls, conscientious objectors, and prisoners of war. The latter two groups were treated with unremitting hostility by most village people, but not by my firmly socialist and internationally minded parents. Conscientious objectors were welcomed into our house, as was their penchant for radical political talk, and continued these friendships after the war was over.

But the real clash with authority came because of the friendliness shown to prisoners of war. Mum and Dad made firm friends with some of the Italian PoWs, especially a downed pilot, Rosario Pistritto, in civilian life an artist. This was made known to Dad’s employer, Sir Benjamin Dawson, by a local woman widely known as ‘the Ministry of Information’ because of her readiness to tell these kinds of tales. The whole estate staff were lined up in front of Sir Benjamin and the local British camp commander, and told that such fraternisation was unpatriotic and would henceforth be punished.  Dad was more circumspect after this, not wanting to lose his job and home; but my mother didn’t waver, secretly smuggling packets of woodbines to Rosario and his fellow prisoners, while encouraging me and my sister Maureen to continue our own form of fraternisation with these cheerful and lively companions.

The Italian PoWs were repatriated in 1944, when Italy dropped out of the war. Soon after, we received from Rosario Pistritto, now in Messina, Sicily, a letter enclosing pencil portraits of my sister and mother (see above); the letter ‘in grateful remembrance of a friendship which will last eternalli’ and ‘con amore a chi Josie’, (with love to dear Josie). Whatever the constraints of war, Mum had defiantly done her bit for good international relations and humanity. For a fuller account, see Chapter Four: A Child’s War.

My eldest son Nicholas (Nick) died when he was 35 years old. Today would have been his 47^th birthday. Our whole family miss him terribly, but today we celebrate the memories of who he was and what he achieved. The photographs trace his academic progress. When he came back from his first day at school and was asked how it was, he replied with a sigh that they had spent all day doing ‘the cat sat on the bloody mat!’.  He would go on to score straight As in all his school subjects, then a First in Chemistry at the University of East Anglia, and  a Ph.D there under the supervision of Professor John Sodeau. Nick went with John to the University of Cork in Ireland to help with the setting up of a new Centre for Research into Atmospheric Chemistry. They still list his contributions to four articles in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Later Nick would leave academic life and work as a management consultant at Accenture in London.

But Nick carried all this success modestly and with an easy grace. A kindly and sensitive person, with a quick sense of humour, he made friends wherever he went, including during a year at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking an optional course there in swimming, he found himself in with the American  training squad for the Olympics. They took him under their wing and when he did his compulsory test times, they ran up and down the poolside shouting out his times, and urging him on: he just squeezed inside the set minimum.

Nick always encouraged me to write about my rake’s progress from a farm labourer’s cottage, and was inspired by it to paint the ‘upward path’ that is the basis for the cover design. It’s a particular sadness for me that he is not able to read this memoir and see the contribution he made to it. But I recall too, at my70^th birthday party, where he gave me this painting as a gift, how he and brother Ben vied with each other to tell the funniest stories about me. I think it was probably a dead heat.

So we all miss Nick very much, as a son, a brother, an uncle,  a cousin, a nephew, and a friend. Peace Nick; and thanks for the cover story.

Now that my book is up and running, so to speak, I’d like to pay tribute to those who had a key role in producing it. I was initially doubtful about venturing into self-publishing, but am now a committed fan. One of the principal advantages of this route to publication is that as author and holder of the copyright, you retain control at every stage of production, and face none of the pressures to leave bits out or do major rewrites, as you might find with conventional publishers. Naturally, this leaves a considerable responsibility with you, the author, to get things right  and not be afraid to make cuts and changes where these seem to be indicated. I had great help with this from  those who read my drafts and gave invaluable critical responses (as well as huge encouragement). You can find them in the Acknowledgements. But I also owe a big thank you to those at my publisher, YouCaxton, specifically Bob Fowke, who produced excellent and clear guidance throughout the whole production process, and Ella, YouCaxton’s  specialist book designer, who was tremendously helpful and efficient. I could not be more pleased with a handsome and well produced book.

While on the subject of efficiency, I must mention the Post Office, an organisation that does not always, these days, attract admiration. But when I posted off several complimentary copies to family and friends from a rural Welsh post office in Knighton at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, the very next morning I  received news that copies had arrived in places as far flung as Knaresborough in North Yorkshire, West Harptree in rural Somerset, and a suburban part of Leicester. So I’m posting in praise of the posting service.

Many years ago, while working overseas, I had occasion to address 500 members of the Postal Service of the Philippines on  the British postal system (please don’t ask why). I began by declaring that the best thing about the British postal system was that if you posted a letter in any part of the United Kingdom one day, it would always arrive the next day. Stunned and loud applause from the serried ranks of Filipino postal staff, who have to cope with huge rural areas and several islands. Then a member of the audience asked for the microphone and declared ‘Well, when you post a letter in the Philippines, you have no idea when it will get there, but IT WILL ALWAYS ARRIVE!’ Even louder and very patriotic applause.

You will find the story of my own labours as a temporary British postman in Chapter Fourteen, Working Life 

The memoir opens with an account of my paternal Irish grandfather, Thomas (Tom) Minogue, who came to England in the late 1890s to seek his fortune, the countryside of Ireland holding out scant promise in that respect. Good fortune did indeed strike him in the shape of Agnes, sweet-faced daughter of Michael and Mary Harrison, who ran a boarding house for Irish workers in Poppleton, in the city of York. Mary Harrison, my great-grandmother. A formidable matriarch, she was celebrated in local newspapers at her death as Pocklington’s first centenarian and described as the ‘Mother of Thousands’.

I was reminded of this background by a report in today’s Guardian, 4^th March 2021. It records that Pontin’s holiday camp operators had been caught blacklisting people with Irish surnames, saying ‘we do not want these people on our parks’. They also sought to exclude Gypsies and Travellers. All this was reported as a widespread practice for many years. The Executive Director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) judged that this practice amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. A leading charity commented that it was ‘hard not to draw comparisons with the signs displayed in hotels and boarding houses fifty years ago, explicitly barring Irish and black people’. More than 100 years ago, my great-grandmother’s boarding house gave a haven to young men who elsewhere had been repulsed by signs reading ‘No Dogs and No Irish’. It’s striking that this kind of discrimination was still alive and well in the 1970s, and continues, if clandestinely, to this day.

Tom and Agnes married on 13^th January 1902. My father Martin (yes, same name as me, another story told in Chapter Three of ‘Shifting Classes’), came somewhere in the middle of Tom and Agnes’s 11 children. Though a British citizen, he was 100% Irish by blood line, so in my book that makes me half Irish, a calculation further complicated by my mother’s Celtic inheritance through a Scottish maternal line. I regard myself as something of a mixture, part British, part Irish, part Scottish, and not 100% of anything. This came in useful in a later part of my working life, when I frequently travelled to and worked in countries where the British, or more specifically the ‘English’, were not universally admired. I would shamelessly claim to be Irish in these circumstances, even ready if need be to sing one of my Dad’s old Irish favourites. Danny Boy always went down a treat, and my work always went well the day after.

WORLD BOOK DAY

As today is World Book Day it seems appropriate to say what I’m reading just now. This is Shuggie Bain, amazingly a debut novel by Douglas Stuart, and winner of the 2020 Booker Prize (most deservedly so, something you cannot always say about these awards). Set in post-Thatcher Glasgow, it’s a compelling account of the brutal consequences of poverty and addiction (to alcohol rather than drugs), told in episodes which make you wince. At the centre is a mother, Agnes Bain, who cannot cope with the bad hands that life has dealt her in a persistently macho male-dominated society. She longs to find love, and seeks this desperately through her three children, but all in the end desert her, struggling to cope with their own lives and problems. There is plenty of warmth, and that tough brand of humour you find in downtrodden places, but the sense of horror and tragedy is always just below the skin. Above all, it rings utterly true, a revelation of the desperate lives many people lead in our deeply damaged society, and the absence from these lives of any real hope. A must-read.                                  

Why it’s a labour of love almost goes without saying. It must be in part a hymn to the past, and if it’s a family memoir (as Shifting Classes is) it is rooted in many personal histories. You will be writing about the closest members of your family, and your closest friends. The very act of writing up these personal stories leads you to relive all kinds of past intimacies. Many will be loving and happy events, milestones in a life such as births, weddings, celebrations of educational or sporting or occupational success. Some of the intimacies will be complex and difficult: angry squabbles, misunderstandings, clouds without silver linings. As an author, you give yourself the power to interpret all these differing relationships, to draw your own portraits of people. These interpretations may be challenged outside the pages of the book, but not within them. The power this gives the memoirist is not to be used lightly. On the other hand, you will always be held accountable by your readers. Those in the inner circles of your story will, as readers, be able to fight back: to criticise, correct, disagree. As I remark in the Preface, honouring my mother’s favourite phrase, ‘the living truth’ has many versions, and I would never wish to claim superiority for my own version, as set out in this memoir (I will discuss another time the interesting issue of whether there is a blurred line between fact and fiction, either in memoir, biography, or creative forms of literature.)

Where does the frustration come in? Well, not with the writing itself: in my experience, once you are started the writing takes over, and you can’t stop. Of course, there are irritations along the way, often to do with the technology (hard-won text lost through computer glitches, confusion over which of several versions is the latest corrected one). But the major frustration comes at the point where you have a version you are sufficiently pleased with to consider that it might be publishable. Here you enter a battle zone littered with the corpses of would-be authors, shot down by hatchet-faced publishers or simply left for dead by literary agents who don’t even tell you why. It’s not the rejection letters that hurt, at least someone has had a considering look; no, what gets to you is the Silence, the Not Knowing, until after a few weeks you have to accept that any considering look given to your work was probably one of contempt.

But you can still be saved from all this frustration, as I have been, by the Magic Hat of Self-Publishing, from which a wide variety of rabbits may now spring: and rabbits may in fact be found in Chapter Six: Country Life: Happiness and Miseries.