RESEARCHING A LEGEND
What do you do if a member of your family was a world-beater several generations ago, and you feel a sense of responsibility to preserve that heritage? Sporting heroes, wild adventurers, war veterans, innovators and inventors; all had parents, and some had spouses and children; the net result is dusty boxes in the darkest attic corners and the backs of cupboards, containing old photo albums, bundles of letters, diaries, yellowing newspaper cuttings – the paraphernalia of a famous life. With sailors this list can extend to coils of rope, salt-stained log books, blackened silver trophies, unpolished for decades, and sometimes even the actual boat. What can you do to safeguard that treasure trove, and make sense of it?
This is the task that has preoccupied Jane Shaddick and Richard Palmer for the past decade. Frank Morgan Giles was their grandfather: they lived with him at the end of his life. They knew a mention of his name in dinghy-racing circles produced excitement and respect. Yet the Morgan Giles Heritage Project, which they have built from nothing, was not what they intended from the start. It just grew, and has now become a central feature of their lives.
Their mother, Frank’s daughter Hebe, brought them up to respect the historic roots of everything around. She was
