Beneath the Shelter of an Ancient Tree: A family history

By David Brown

A voyage of family discovery reveals poverty and imprisonment in the West Country; the development of new trades in the industrial revolution; a Rabbi who doubles up as a pawnbroker; and middle-class prosperity and tragedy in the Birmingham jewellery trade. Starting with only minimal knowledge of widely dispersed ancestors this journey tracks down ancient relatives from Wales, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Somerset, Dorset, Poland and Russia. Two mayors make fleeting appearances (one in Gloucester, the other in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne). One great uncle is found to have designed the iconic gantries in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast where the Titanic was built. A great, great, great grandfather has questions to answer about the treatment of child labour in his Calderdale spinning mill.

Starting in the late 18th century Beneath the Shelter of an Ancient Tree catalogues how and where these diverse characters lived, how they made their living, and the ups and downs of family fortunes. It comments on some of the pivotal moments that affected their progress, and draws on contemporary sources, some family memoirs, and genealogical records to build a picture of how working people and artisans gradually – throughout the Victorian era – improved their lot in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398462526

David Brown

David Brown is the host of the hit podcasts Business Wars and Business Wars Daily. He is also the co-creator and host of Texas Standard, the Lone Star’s statewide daily news show, and was the former anchor of the Peabody award-winning public radio business program Marketplace. He has been a public radio journalist for more than three decades, winning multiple awards, and is a contributor to All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and other NPR programs. Brown earned his PhD in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and his Juris Doctor from Washington and Lee University School of Law. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin, Texas.

Book preview

Beneath the Shelter

of an Ancient Tree

David Brown

Austin Macauley Publishers

Beneath the Shelter of an Ancient Tree

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgement

1. A Family Reveals Its Secrets

2. The Platts of Saddleworth

3. Sophia’s Story: The Warp and Weft of Family Life

4. A West Country Odyssey

5. The Cheshires – Getting to Know You

6. Workshop of the World

7. The Last Piece in the Jigsaw

8. The Second Phillips’ Diaspora

9. Looking Back

10. Appendix – Herbert Phillips Settles in the United States

About the Author

David Brown’s varied career as a bus driver, shellfish salesman, civil servant and management consultant (among many other jobs) first led to an interest in knowing what his ancestors had done for a living. And then, as his own grandchildren grew up, he began to wonder where his relatives had come from, and how they had fared in life. Starting from a relatively unremarkable upbringing in the Midlands he discovered a family with roots throughout England – in Poland and Russia – and a diaspora stretching across three continents.

Dedication

With best wishes:

to Whylda for all her understanding – and to my siblings, cousins, second cousins and all

who came before them…

and to my father and mother – John and

Natalie Ruth Brown.

Copyright Information ©

David Brown 2023

The right of David Brown to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398462519 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398462526 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

My thanks to my cousin’s friend, Yvonne Tribick, who first helped me to understand family trees – and revealed my hitherto unknown Yorkshire relatives. And, I am indebted as well to my former boss, Len Collinson, who tried to instil some discipline in my writing, and to my colleague and friend, Steve Baker, who provided much needed polish. Dorothy French’s extensive memoir provided a wonderful insight into some family connections.

1. A Family Reveals Its Secrets

When I retired from what had been almost full-time work – having kept myself occupied latterly by supporting Leah, my home-educated granddaughter – I took a moment to reflect on almost forty-five years of continuous employment. Jobs that had been challenging, jobs that had been fun and jobs that had kept the wolf from the door. I knew already that I had enjoyed my work, seldom been bored, gained much from experience and benefitted from frequent comradeship and occasional conflict. Perhaps not that surprising considering some of the jobs that I had held down (in roughly chronological order): plumber’s mate; bar cellar man; building site labourer; bus conductor and driver; civil servant (employment adviser, auditor, training manager); sea food salesman (part-time with my own wicker basket); odd job man in a management consultancy firm; training consultant (my first and fortunately only experience of redundancy); and further miscellaneous tasks in consultancy – including a short spell in Kazakhstan.

I resolved to record some of that activity, if not for posterity, but for my four grandchildren so that they might learn how their ‘papa’ had spent forty-five years, and that the result might answer that frequently asked childhood question, What did you used to do at work Grandpa? Somewhat moralising perhaps – but I had no doubt that my purpose was to teach them the virtues of hard work and the rewards that it might bring.

As Benjamin Franklin observed in his 18th century autobiography:

’…when Men are employ’d they are best contented. For on the Days they work’d they were good-natur’d and cheerful; with the consciousness of having done a good Day’s work they spent the Evenings jollily; but on the idle Days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with their Pork, the Bread, &c. and in continual ill-humour.’

So, I decided to write a short memoir of my life: recording the few notable moments; describing my education and various employments; and dedicating it to four, most likely reluctant, young readers. When I had worked for the Department of Employment in the 1970s one of my tasks was to help in the maintenance and updating of CODOT, a vast volume otherwise known as the Classification of Occupations and Directory of Occupational Titles. It was an attempt, and quite a successful one, to capture, describe and classify every job in the United Kingdom from Milk Man (sex discrimination legislation in employment only became active in the late 70s) to Clerk, every type of Engineer, Clergyman, Bottle washer, Bricklayer, Banker, Miller, Jockey and thousands of jobs that you and I have never heard of. CODOT was used in manpower planning, defining new occupations, recognising skill shortages and identifying dying trades. I was sent to visit local places of employment, in my case two engineering factories and one of the very last woollen processing mills in Leeds, to watch how the job was done, the working conditions, the skills and temperament required; and to record how that occupation was changing or had changed since it had last been observed. One factory made equipment for handling steel in blast furnaces, some of it destined for export to South Africa; the other was a large pressed steel plant, manufacturing the carcasses for a well-known brand of gas cooker (New World). The textile works was engaged in milling (or fulling) cloth by washing it in wooden casks not unlike modern washing machines.

My memoir was not quite as detailed as CODOT but at least it gave a flavour of how I had spent my time. And then I decided to add a simple family tree – I wanted to describe where the Browns had come from and find out if possible the jobs that they had done in the 19th and 20th centuries. Enquiries with my cousins (all on my father’s side) yielded one or two clues and then an introduction to an amateur genealogist really got me going. Cousin Sarah’s friend Yvonne put together an introduction to my father’s parents – the grandparents I had never known. It described the history and recent ancestors of George Brown and Ethel Platt. One revelation stood out: Ethel’s family came from Yorkshire (Calderdale) and some from Lancashire. They may have been involved in the textile industry and some were engineers. I knew Calderdale and some of its history and this was just the morsel of information to really get me going – especially as Halifax, Saddleworth and Sowerby Bridge were only just down the road. On George’s side of the family there were farm labourers, waiters, grooms and bootmakers – all waiting to be discovered. They were from the West Country and with fascinating tales to tell.

There was some symmetry in my immediate family. My brother, sisters and I were each given a middle name in remembrance of our grandparents. Hence: Philip George, David Ernest, Judith Eleanor and Hilary Ethel. Ernest and Eleanor Phillips were my maternal grandparents and I knew them well, as well as you can know fairly formal but kind and loving relatives who lived not far away. I was well into my twenties before they passed away. Ernest was from a Jewish family, possibly with roots in Poland and Russia. Hilary had already compiled a history of that side of the family, so for the time being I decided to concentrate on my dad’s parents George and Ethel. And this was where I hit my first brick wall.

My father’s parents had died well before I was born and I suddenly realised I knew next to nothing about them. Dad had occasionally mentioned his father – a grocer’s assistant, born in Dorset, married (I thought in Trowbridge) and lived in Melksham, Wiltshire. He had a fondness for betting on horses – there was a family tradition that newspapers with racing form in them should never be thrown away – and he loved cricket. There was a tale that in the 1930s he had a motor car, perhaps a Morris Oxford, and took the children, there were six, on trips to the seaside, possibly Weston-super-Mare. How this tied in with his rather modest employment was yet to be reconciled.

I knew hardly anything about Ethel Brown (née Platt). I couldn’t remember my father ever mentioning his mother who died in 1933 at the age of 48, I believed of cancer. It may be that he didn’t know her that well. When she died in Melksham, my dad, christened Jack but known as John, was fourteen and at boarding school in Bristol. He had won a scholarship from a county primary school to the (once prestigious) Colston’s School. How often he came home I don’t know – it wasn’t far – I always got the impression he had been a bit lonely at school. But he seemed to do quite well, won a number of prizes and enjoyed playing rugby despite his rather frail frame. His school photograph shows him sitting cross-legged, aged 11 in the front-row of a traditional panoramic view of all Colston’s pupils and masters, circa 1930.

So it didn’t take long to decide that Ethel was my starting point. I wanted to know about her family, where they came from, where and how they lived, what they did and why, and how I ended up being born on the outskirts of Birmingham – remote from Yorkshire and Wiltshire (and Poland and Russia) yet intimately connected. I had retained my interest in work, and started to wander about its relationship with education (or lack of it). I had a notion of progress and technology. And I had a fascination with place – nostalgic remembrances about Dorset (Thomas Hardy’s Wessex) and the wilder Yorkshire moors and dales. Calderdale borders Brontë country – was there a connection?

Researching family history has its fascinations as well as its limitations. We really never get to know our ancient relatives. We get a snapshot of their life, usually defined by life events – birth, residence, marriage, childbirth, occupation and death. Sometimes there are more revealing clues, references to other people, unexpected U turns, instances of poverty or incarceration, or occasionally (often most interesting if not strictly reliable) obituaries or references in newspapers or ‘official’ records. Each building block tells us more about where our ancestors were living and when but says little about their character or personality. It has always been a frustration that I have never come across a reference to pets – did Great Uncle Fred like dogs, did he keep a pet?

And the other frustration in studying our ancient relatives is its darned popularity. Every other 50+ year old seems to be at it and the recent pandemic has only increased their number. This means that there are multiple sources of information from the three or four main commercial genealogy web sites to many free ones, including the vast FamilySearch index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City; many local historical associations; the archives of local authorities; the national archive; academic research papers; church records, History online, records from the workhouse (and sometimes prison); and so on and so on. And genealogy is popular in other countries, particularly