Uncle Maurice and Aunt Florence at my mum and dad’s wedding, Sheffield. That’s Grandad Swift on the left, giving them the cold shoulder.
I never met my Uncle Maurice and Aunt Florence, pictured here at my mum and dad’s wedding, and my mum hardly knew them either because, following some family falling out, he left home when my mum was still a toddler. He and my grandad never spoke to each other and, as she grew up, my mum realised that she’d be in trouble if she ever contacted him.
“I don’t know how you put up with him,” said Maurice, on a rare occasion when he saw her walking home from school and pulled up in his car. My mum looked around nervously, hoping that no one would spot her speaking to her banished brother and relay the news back to her father.
Rivals
Telephone directory: Grandad’s firm, Swift & Goodinson, had some competition from Maurice Swift junior (in column 3). Copyright Ancestry.com
As I’ve explained previously, it didn’t help that my uncle, Maurice T Swift, set up a rival funeral directors business to his father’s and, as he had the same name, there was then confusion about which business was which.
The rivalry extends into the 1939 telephone directory with Maurice T’s listing dwarfed by a masthead banner from his father insisting that ’85, Headford Street’ is the ‘ONLY ADDRESS’ for Swift & Goodinson’s complete funeral furnishers.
The 1939 survey, image from Find my Past.
The 1939 survey, the nearest we have to a wartime census, provides a valuable snapshot of my long lost uncle’s life.
He a ‘Coffin maker, own a/c’ and Florence, ‘Shroud maker’ are living at 54 Hereford Street, not far from The Moor in the centre of Sheffield.
The Crerars
They’ve got lodgers; a family of variety artists, the Crerars: Peter and Elizabeth Crerar, aged 52 and 42, and their children, James, 21, Peter, 19 and Katherine, 17, all listed as variety artists, and Alexander, aged 10, who is still at school.
In the 1939 survey James and Peter have taken jobs in the steel industry and Katherine is a glazing machinist.
I’ve been unable to find any reference to members of the family on the variety circuit.
A year in December, 1940, James has enlisted but, along with a fellow soldier, Samuel Reynolds, aged 27, he’s remanded in custody in Rochdale Magistrates Court, charged with ‘having had carnal knowledge of a girl aged 15 years’.
Peter also enlisted as a gunner with the Royal Artillery. On 8th October 1941 he is listed as a casualty in the ‘Middle East’.
Moors somewhere near Castleton, Oil painting, Ernest Bowler, 1920s, canvas approximately 24×20 inches.
Does this moorland scene look familiar to you? I’m guessing that it’s somewhere near Castleton in the Peak District but I’ve never been able to pinpoint the exact location. Please let me know if you have any ideas.
Bowler’s painting of Peveril Castle in my 2006 book, High Peak Drifter, a sketchbook of the High Peak in spring.
My grandad Maurice Swift, a cabinet maker and funeral director from Sheffield, bought this painting and a another of Peveril Castle from Castleton artist Ernest Bowler in the 1920s.
My mum inherited both pictures in the 1960s so I’d long been familiar with them, although I didn’t get to visit the area until the spring of 2006 when I drew my High Peak Drifter sketchbook. I’d always wondered if Bowler had romanticised the view of the Castle but no, when I drew in Cavedale, I discovered that is pretty much the way it is.
The Secret Life of Paintings
I re-hung the moorland scene today, which gave me a chance to take another look at the back of the painting.
A few years ago, Robin Taylor(see link below) cleaned the painting and revarnished it, bringing back colour to a moorland scene that had always looked rather dour and brownish. You can see from this back view of the canvas that it has been around for a while, but that’s understandable because we’re pretty sure that the painting was hanging in grandad’s house during Sheffield Blitz, 80 years ago last Saturday. The house was damaged beyond repair but grandad managed to salvage some of his possessions, including a boyhood portrait of his father George. This was also oil on canvas and was damaged in the raid but grandad repaired it using a puncture repair kit. The rubber patch is still in place on the back of the canvas.
The ‘fine art restorer’ George Wilkinson, who either framed the picture or repaired it after the bombing raid, was to crop up in grandad’s life a few years later in a rather dramatic fashion.
Sarah Ann
This is my great-grandma, Sarah Ann Swift (nee Truelove), doing her bit for the war effort by making dolls for the Penny-a-Week fund which raised money for hospitals. She lived next door to grandad in a substantial stone-built semi-detached house on Nether Edge Road.
Comic strip account of the air raid, drawn from my mum’s description when I was 14 years old.
As the Dorniers and Heinkels of the Luftwaffe flew over, my grandma and grandad and my mum sheltered in their air-raid shelter in the back garden but my great-grandma Sarah preferred to head for the shelter of her cellar, along with Queenie the Pomeranian and her pet bird. Great-grandma’s side of the house was so badly damaged that rescuers had to bring her, along with Queenie and the bird, out through the coal chute.
Sarah at the time of her marriage to George Swift.
After the raid, grandad and grandma and my mum relocated to Bradway Road, while Sarah Ann not only bought her own house elsewhere in Sheffield but also another house to rent out as a source of income. This didn’t go down well with her only son, my grandad Maurice. He thought it was ridiculous for her to saddle herself with a mortgage at her age, so he bought the house for her.
A few years later when Sarah died, he might well have assumed that she would have left the houses to him. It didn’t turn out like that.
As the funeral cortege drove through the streets of Sheffield, it started snowing. Maurice’s driver, Billy Elliot, pulled in:
“We’ve lost the rest of the party Mr Swift, would you like me to wait for them.”
“Let the b*****s find their own way!” snorted grandad.
After the funeral, organised by my grandad (he was an undertaker, as I’ve said), family and friends gathered for a funeral tea.
A rather nervous solicitor got up and read Sarah’s will. Sarah had left a small savings book to Maurice, which probably didn’t cover his expenses in organising her funeral, but she had left her houses to two young ladies (but that’s another story).
“Does anybody have any questions?” the solicitor asked.
Grandad stood up: “Yes, I’ve got some questions!”
“This should be interesting!” my mum whispered to her friend.
So, the connection with Geo. Wilkinson, ‘fine art restorer’? He acted as one of Sarah’s executors. A brave man to face up to my grandad!
Ten or fifteen years ago, when my mum and I were researching the family tree, we ordered a copy of the will. In the family archive we’ve a letter to Maurice from his solicitors, explaining that although there were defects in the way his mum’s will was worded, it was a valid document.
Further Reading
High Peak Drifter Richard Bell, available from Willow Island Editions, ISBN 1-902467-16-7
book
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com
My thanks to Andy Beezer, member of the Nether Edge History Group, who a week ago, on the 80th anniversary of Sheffield Blitz, hosted an online Zoom tour of the air-raid shelter for my brother and sister and I. Grandad’s house may be long gone but the robustly-built concrete air-raid shelter survived.
Link
Robin Taylor, Bespoke framing and oil painting restoration services covering Wakefield, Leeds and Dewsbury.
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!
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. December 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!]
My 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.
I’VE WRITTEN several times about my great grandfather George who worked in the cutlery trade in Sheffield. Here’s a watercolour by his son Maurice Swift, my grandfather. It’s signed ‘M. Swift age 13’ so that means that he painted it around 1900.
The farmhouse on the hillside with its shelter belt of trees could be a real location on the Peak District side of Sheffield, or perhaps it is imagined with that kind of country in mind. I phoned my mum to say that I’d been surprised to come across it in a drawer in my plan chest – I’d forgotten all about it. She suggests that it might be a copy of a picture and remembers that it was once framed. It’s mounted on a kind of brittle card, 2 or 3 millimetres thick, which is typical of that period.
Like so many family treasures, my mum had put it in an anonymous brown envelope, (postmark dated December 1986, which I guess might have been about the time that she handed it to me; she’s pencilled my name in block capitals on the back of the envelope).
