As Time Goes By: History Holidays
...Old parish registers and Census returns revealed facts about my ancestors and my distant relatives. Letters, meetings and phone calls all recalled memories, and I became aware of half-remembered tales of an uncle going to Australia, of shoe makers in Norwich, cabinet makers in Shoreditch, concert parties and carnival floats raising money for charity, piles of fruit on a stone kitchen floor in Enfield to be made into jam by the cook (my aunt Doll), early photographers working from a tent in Saskatchewan, and the aluminium foundry in Islington...
Eileen Perrin follows a fascinating trail in search of her family history.
To read earlier chapters of Eileen's autobiography please visit http://www.openwriting.com/archives/as_time_goes_by/
In early January 1981 my cousin Leslie James and his half-brother Arthur Coan, sons of George Victor Coan, met for the first time in their lives in my Pinner home.
In the Spring Les and I were invited to Leslie’s 72nd birthday party held in a New Barnet church hall, where I met Les’s second wife Georgina and son Leslie William by his first wife, and his children Nigel and Susan.
Old parish registers and Census returns revealed facts about my ancestors and my distant relatives. Letters, meetings and phone calls all recalled memories, and I became aware of half-remembered tales of an uncle going to Australia, of shoe makers in Norwich, cabinet makers in Shoreditch, concert parties and carnival floats raising money for charity, piles of fruit on a stone kitchen floor in Enfield to be made into jam by the cook (my aunt Doll), early photographers working from a tent in Saskatchewan, and the aluminium foundry in Islington.
As I had found my ancestors lived in Westhall in the 1700’s I was keen to explore that part of Suffolk and so we spent a fortnight staying in Mr. and Mrs. Last’s bungalow within reach of St Andrew’s thatched church where my great great grandfather John Coan was baptised in 1760. We spent time touring around and went to Sheringham on the coast, and to Southwold and Walberswick, and up to Holt in Norfolk where in the pretty village I found a small front garden covered with closely packed rosettes of an ice plant, of which I took a sample and still have its descendants growing in our garden now, twenty eight years later.
In the summer of 1981 we took a holiday in Scarborough and visited Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay.
In 1982 Argentina invaded the Falklands. Margaret Thatcher sent out our Army, Navy and Air Force men.
On July 20th 1982 in Hyde Park a troop of mounted soldiers was bombed by the Provisional I.R.A. resulting in the death of eight soldiers and seven horses. Forty-seven people were injured.
Successful films in 1982 were Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ with Ben Kingsley, ‘Tootsie’ with Dustin Hoffman, and ‘E.T – the Extra Terrestrial’.
Prince Charles and Diana had their first child Prince William.
In October Henry V111’s flagship the ‘Mary Rose’ was raised to the surface after 437 years at the bottom of the Solent.
In Britain 20 million elm trees died with Dutch elm disease.
March 1983 brought us another grand- daughter Gemma Florence Perrin, second child of Val and Anne Marie, in Cambridge.
My meetings with new members of the Coan family increased when on the 27th May we had my great uncle Albert Barnard Coan’s gt. grandson Alan Brian Coan from Vancouver stay with us for a few days. I learned that his grandfather was the photographer in the tent in Canada and Frank his son, who is Alan’s father now ran a lithographic business.
On a visit to Winchester we looked round the large pre-medieval cathedral church which had been built for King William the Conqueror. It was built of limestone from a quarry on the Isle of Wight. To provide support for building on swampy land the king gave permission for trees from one of the royal forests to be used, and all but one tree was taken, much to his dismay. Eight hundred years later when the timber started to rot, the building began to sink into the mire and the structure needed to be shored up.
A deep sea diver William Walker 1869 -1918 was employed, (he died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918). He had been trained at Portsmouth, and had worked on the docks in Gibraltar and on the construction of the Blackwall tunnel.
He started building a concrete platform on top of the original gravel bed, working under water in darkness. It took six years to finish. William had a family of several children, and he cycled home at weekends to see them in Croydon, 150 miles there and back.
The cathedral celebrated its 930th birthday in 2009.
It was later in summer1983 that we went to Anglesey and stayed in the cottage belonging to Ted Eustace my Head of Department at Kingsway College, who retired that year and the post of Head of Science dept was taken over by Isobel Castle.
In 1984 I started a Suffolk Group, meeting once a month in our front room. It was made up from members of the local Central Middlesex Family History Society who met monthly on Friday evenings in the Quaker Hall.
For our holiday in the summer of 1984 we went back to Suffolk and stayed at the Castle Hotel in Woodbridge, where there was an old tide mill on the estuary of the river Deben. We went to see the excavations of an 80ft long Viking ship burial of an Anglo-Saxon King at Sutton Hoo, along the banks of the river. Later in the British Museum in London we saw the treasures that had been in her, including a bejewelled sword, a ceremonial helmet, gold and silver cups, bowls and buckles. There are some twenty Anglo-Saxon burial barrows dating from the 5th to the 7th century on the east bank of the river Deben.
I was contacted by Diane Coan in Quebec and her sister Marjorie. Members of COFAMS were increasing and I continued sending out the quarterly LINES newsletters.
On October 12th news came through that there had been an I.R.A. bomb set off at the Brighton hotel where members of the British Cabinet were meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at her Tory Conference. She was unhurt, but 5 were killed and 34 seriously injured.
