About the Journal

Until my father William Ridley English died in February 1980, like many people, I had had only a passing curiosity about my family history.

In 1979 however, I’d been fascinated by a BBC series called Discovering your Family History, featuring the family of newsreader Gordon Honeycomb and I’d bought the book soon after. This further spurred my interest.

I knew that Willie (also known as Bill) had been born in South Africa in 1910 and I’d heard (or possibly mis-heard) family stories about the tragically early death of his father WILLIAM English, a gold miner, leaving my grandmother, Mary Sarah Bevington, to bring up four young children. I don’t remember querying why he alone of the four had been brought up in England or why the Rand had paid for his expensive education. I did know he felt a great debt of gratitude towards Elizabeth Bevington, the maiden aunt who raised him, and I too loved her as a proxy grandmother.

Among Willie’s papers were several relating to the Bevingtons, his mother’s London family, and since the name was relatively unusual that’s where I started, regularly visiting St Catherine’s House where the enormous births, marriage and death indexes were stored. I was there every available holiday and soon began to make progress.

The English side of the family however I knew very little about. A portrait photo of my grandmother; a couple of crumpled pictures of my father’s brother Jack; wedding photos of his other brother Harry and pictures of his sister Connie in wartime uniform, and not much else. There had been a collection of oil paintings, one of which my mother kept for me.

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They had been in Aunt Elizabeth’s cottage at Thundersley, Essex but had been collected by a cousin and shipped out to South Africa. My mother was very upset as it seemed to her that anything of beauty and/or value had been stripped out of the cottage and relocated to South Africa. Sadly this seemed to be a pattern I remember well from my childhood. The only thing that didn’t get relocated was my grandfather’s violin though how that came to stay in England instead of going back to South Africa with him, is unknown. I do know my parents said no when asked to send it out in the nineteen fifties!

My mother was my chief source of information (she had a copy of Willie’s christening at Ovingham in Northumberland – since lost or mislaid) but although she didn’t know a great deal about the Englishes my later discoveries showed how correct her memory had been. For example she remembered a book of poems, now in South Africa, written by Willie’s father to his mother, copies of which are on the website, and she was certain Willie was ‘related to the Whiteheads’ but she didn’t know who they were. Also that Willie was named Ridley after an Uncle (Willie’s Aunt Jane married a William Whitehead and there had been an Uncle Ridley who hadn’t died until the 1950s)

In the same way I scoured old family books for marginalia hoping to learn something about their owners, so I investigated everything that had belonged to my father, including his violin. Having opened the rosin compartment I realised I could pull away the entire lining of the case. This provided me with one of the most important starting points of my search for my grandfather. Not only his address at Victoria Garesfield, but the date he was there. This took me within 10 miles of Ovingham.

I began combing the Census Returns then available at the Portugal Street repository of the Public Record Office. I quickly found my grandfather, WILLIAM English, aged 5 in nearby Wylam in 1881, then his father Henry in Tow Law in 1871.

Around this time in the early eighties my life changed and I left London. This put an end to my research. Unfortunately this coincided with my cousin Dorothy English beginning her research into the family. I’m still pretty angry with myself for not responding more positively to her request for help via my mother.

Her letter made it clear she was no further ahead with her research than I was, but since I no longer had access to vital research facilities in London, I wasn’t much help. This of course was years before the internet.

In 1987 or 8 she sent me the photocopied pages of my grandfather’s Journal which I read with growing excitement. With so much primary source material in it I wondered whether it could become a book.

By the time I was back in London in the early nineties I had transcribed 9 or 10 pages but it was hard going and as a teacher I had little time.

The Journal then lay in a drawer for many years, not forgotten but nagging away at the back of my mind, waiting for the time to get to grips with it, until another cousin, Larry Cunningham, a rather more distant cousin than my first cousin Dorothy, wrote requesting information about my father.

Now I was retired with time on my hands, I jumped at the chance to resume working on the Journal. This website is the result. Over forty years after my father’s death, my grandfather’s life as recorded in his Journal can be read by anyone interested.

I hope you enjoy the website as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Hilary Norris
February 2021