Tag: Gladys Swift

Return of the Swifts

We saw our first swifts circling over Nostell Lakes a week ago and, by coincidence, since then their namesakes, my mum’s family, the Swifts, have taken centre stage in my family tree research.

I’ve taken a break from genealogy since the death of my mum in February 2015; she was my last link with my Victorian forbears and I enjoyed updating her with some nugget of family history that I’d unearthed, especially any family scandal, such as an attempted murder.

I subscribe to the Find My Past and a hint in one of their regular e-mails set me on the trail again.

Missing Uncles

Maurice T Swift, Hayburn Wyke, c. 1928.

I’ve gone right back to first principles and and I’m building my family tree again from scratch, starting with my mum, Gladys Joan Swift. The orange circles highlight hints, which usually lead to census records or births, deaths and marriages.

More material has been added to the online resources since I started delving into family history eight or nine years ago, for instance the 1939 Register, which is the nearest thing that we’re ever going to get to a census for the wartime years.

Adding portraits brings the list of names to life and we’re lucky to have photographs going back over the last 150 years and even a few oil on canvas portraits.

I just found a picture of my uncle, Maurice Truelove Swift (above, right), sitting on the beach at Hayburn Wyke, North Yorkshire. Sadly I never met him as he died around the time that I was born.

Maurice Swift

In the family tree (above, far right), there’s an uncle of my mum’s who she never knew about until I started my research. Frederick James Swift was the eldest son of my great grandad George’s first wife and I’ve discovered that he emigrated to New Zealand. Quite why my grandad never mentioned him to my mum is still a bit of a mystery. A family feud? Or did my grandad, Maurice Swift, not renowned as a people person, never see the point of mentioning him.

Filey Beach

Robert Douglas Bell

Finally, here’s a photograph that I found of my dad, Robert Douglas Bell; he was a sergeant major in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War and I think that you can see from this photograph taken on the beach at Filey that, although most of the time he was charming, he could revert to his sergeant major assertiveness when necessary!

It’s good to have a portrait where, for once, the subject isn’t just smiling at the camera; this is very much as I remember him as he implored me to get to grips with my maths and English instead of spending so much time drawing!

Link

Find My Past

Sheffield Blitz, 1940

Two pages from my ‘Exercise Book Encyclopaedia’, drawn in January or February, 1965, when I was aged thirteen. From my mum’s account I’m describing the bombing raid in which the family portrait Boy with a Hoop was damaged.

I can see the influence of the magazine ‘Look & Learn’ which I read as a schoolboy. I very rarely read it cover to cover but I always devoured the pictures and layouts and I can still recall many of the spreads.
blitzDecember 12th 1940; at 7.15 p.m. the sirens went. There had been some bombs before this . . .

My grandma and grandad Swift were having tea, my mother was reading at 77 Netheredge Road. Hearing the sirens they downed everything and headed for the shelter in the garden.

They went into the shelter grandad designed. Next door my great grandma.

[Note what appears to be a periscope my grandad added to the shelter. Or is it a ventilator? I like his ingenuity. Wish I’d known him better!]

blitzMy grandad remembered he had left some rum in the house. He decided to go back for it.

Just as he is almost at the house an unearthly lot of bombs drop nearby.

He goes back to the shelter.

[Great] Grandma had stayed in her house. It was bombed. An incendiary was dropped near the shelter.

When they got back to the house after the raid there was a mess. The bathroom wall was on a slant.

They got grandma out of her cellar [via the coal chute as the house had been flattened]. She went to a rest home. When she got there she sent them back for her bird who was a little shaken. My mum, grandad and grandma went to the country.

Mum; Gladys Joan Swift, aged 22 in 1940.
Grandad; Maurice Swift.
Grandma; Ann Swift, nee Jones.
Great Grandma; Sarah Ann Swift, nee Truelove, widow of George, the Boy with a Hoop.

The Memory of All That

oakleaves

Alice was the last book that I discussed with my mum, Gladys Joan Bell, ten or eleven days ago when I visited her in the nursing home. She recalled how she used to call in after school for tea at her friend Betty’s and they’d sit at the kitchen table and start acting out the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, which they knew by heart; 

‘No room! No room!’
‘There’s plenty of room!’

Eighty years later that was as far as she could remember, so she asked me to look out her copy of Alice and bring it in to read to her. I’ve got her copy here on my desk, a 1954 first edition of the version illustrated by Mervyn Peake, but I regret that I didn’t get around to reading to her on my last couple of visits and sadly mum died a week ago today on the Tuesday morning, 10 February, (of ‘OLD AGE’ as Doctor Singh recorded it) slipping away peacefully, to use the cliche, but in this case it was true.

I’m of the generation who like to put the blame for their shortcomings onto their parents, as I guess most generations do, but you can see from my mum’s college project Oakleaves (above), which she compiled in the Spring of 1937, that she does have a lot to answer for; she’s the one who gave me my love of drawing, books and theatrical spectacle, not to mention a romantic view of history.

Don’t Fence Me In!

Gladys Joan Bell, c. 1946

 

When she was in hospital in October, recovering from a broken hip and broken shoulder, my mum remembered cycling in the Peak District with my dad singing Don’t Fence Me In. But we’re going for These Foolish Things, one of the songs that she used to play on the piano, as her farewell at the funeral. That’s what I remember her playing but for lyrics I prefer the Gershwin song;

‘The memory of all that,
You can’t take that away from me.’

In hospital, rehab and in the nursing home mum had many set backs but somehow kept pulling through. A week after her death, I’m missing her already. For instance, I’d always tell her about historical bits and pieces that I’d come across, like the medieval carved head at Blacker Hall Farm cafe that reminded me of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, which I wrote about the other day.

oakleaves title

Oakleaves is a good example of how my mum undervalued her talents. It was her student project, at Ripon Teacher Training College, to design a pageant for the Coronation of George VI in the spring of 1937. As a child, I was fascinated by the beautifully produced, hand-lettered booklet of blank verse and costume designs that she’d put together.

Ten or twelve years ago Barbara and I had popped up to my mum’s for a Sunday morning coffee and I opened the kitchen swing bin to drop something in it and saw  Oakleaves, ripped out of its loose leaf binding, lying on top of the discarded lettuce and tea leaves.

‘Why’s this in here?!’ I asked.

‘Oh, I thought nobody will be interested in that, so I threw it out.’

‘Well, I’m interested in it!’ I protested as I fished it out. With some difficulty (and a basic knowledge of history) I repaginated it and kept it in my family history drawer.

Last year I decided to go to the trouble of scanning the whole thing and I revamped it into Blurb hardback format and presented her with a copy on her 96th birthday. Even then, she hesitated to show it to her old teaching friend, Olive, thinking that might be a bit bigheaded.

I’m so glad that I went to all that trouble because, this year, on the day that would have been her 97th birthday, we will be attending her funeral.

Link

As a little memorial to my mum, I’ve now made the book is available from Blurb. They’re individually printed and I decided I wanted to try it in hardback with a dust jacket, so it’s rather expensive to produce, even for such a slim volume, but after the original’s near miss with the swing bin, I thought that only the best would do;

Oakleaves at Blurb. It should work out at £20 but Blurb seems to prefer to show the price in dollars or Euros, which makes it a little over thirty dollars.