My ancestors were all ag labs… or were they?
The scenic old County of Sussex with its wide variety of landscapes is where my ancestral roots run very deep and where I feel a real sense of place. My Dudman and Durrant forebears lived simple lives in the Weald of Sussex for centuries as agricultural labourers (ag labs) – or at least that’s what I used to think.
Who are the Dudmans?
The eldest of nine siblings born in 1891, my maternal grandmother, Mabel Dudman, was raised in farmworkers’ cottages in the countryside around the village of Pulborough in West Sussex. While Mabel left home before World War I to work and marry in the booming coastal resorts of Hove and Brighton, most of her siblings and their families did not move far from the family patriarch, Frederick Dudman, who died in 1949 in Fittleworth.
Fred was a lifelong journeyman agricultural labourer (ag lab), specifically a hay trusser, who also operated a sandpit and, during World War I when he was in his forties, served as a driver in the Auxiliary Services Corps. A born-again Christian converted by a travelling missionary as a young man in the 1890s, he had very strict rules about correct language and behaviour and was a larger-than-life character. Even today he is vividly remembered by some of his 43 grandchildren.
Fred once told my father, whose surname was Durrant, that there had previously been a ‘Miss Durrant’ in his family. My father’s own ancestors, at least back to the mid-1700s, were from East Sussex and were not, as far as we knew, related. Things
