My favourite photograph of great grandad George Swift, sneakily taken, I’m guessing, by a teenage photography enthusiast: my grandad Maurice (I bet that’s his thumb print from when he developed the plate negative). George was a third generation spring knife maker in Sheffield but times were hard in the 1880s so he and Sarah Ann opened a corner shop as a sideline (note the Peek Freans ad, board). Must have been an exhausting business.
What do you do in a family crisis? Yes, bake scones. Here’s my mum-in-law Betty Ellis in a sketch of mine from the 1980s in her kitchen baking at her fold-out Formica-topped table. She once told me about cycling 25 miles through the black out to deliver a Christmas cake to husband-to-be Bill at his temporary camp in Sheffield when he enlisted in the army in 1939. So glad that I persuaded her to write it down.
The Nation’s Family Album
I’m submitting these images to The Nation’s Family Album: the National Portrait Gallery and Ancestry.co.uk are creating a special display at the gallery in 2023, so hope that Betty and George will be featured.