From Laundry Boy To Professor Emeritus

First Draft: 3rd April 2013;  Last Revised: 6th May 2013.

Happy Birthday Mum,

I hope you have gotten over the shock of hearing from me after all this time. And now a second letter, so soon afterwards. It would have been a nice surprise to hear back from you but I fully understand why you have not replied, yet. Nevertheless it did seem important for me to be in touch on your birthday; very much in the spirit of this whole project.

My attempts to learn more about our family by using the tools on the Ancestry web site have made me acutely aware of your own and other relatives’ birthdays, as dates of birth, as well as christening, marriage and death are crucial intelligence in my searching. Inserting a relative’s key milestones is the route to finding the correct person in the data bases. In turn Ancestry’s system feeds back signal dates to me for previously unknown relatives and for those family members I might know of but whose milestones I do not yet have.

Thus, for example, having the date of your birthday, marriages to Dad and Ralph, and finally your death in Norwich, I was able to identify you specifically and to separate you from all the other Florence Myra Prides. You would be amazed how many there are. Once I found you in the records, I learned your maiden surname, Ward, which I had never known. This, in turn, led me to your parents, their siblings, your grandparents and quite a lot more. Below, I summarize some of the notable findings so far, focusing on your life up until you married Dad and went to live and work in Cambridge. I think some of it may be a surprise for you; indeed, I suspect some things you never knew.

Chronology and Family Tree

To make it easier for you to follow, I have put the basic chronology of your life before Cambridge on another page with a copy of the initial Pride Family Tree and below I highlight interesting items in the emerging picture. I want to emphasize that I am uncertain about whether my understanding is correct in various instances and I am aware of many remaining gaps in my knowledge. I am looking forward to getting feedback and help in revising and extending the story as you and others read these initial findings.

Information from Certificates

When I started I knew very little about your life from the time you were born in 1912 (101 years ago today!) up until I was born in 1944. The only document among our family papers relating to your early life was a letter from the Rector at the church where you and Dad were married on 6th April 1940, in which he had copied the basic information on you from the pages of his Marriage Register. This told me the names of your parents, which I had never seen nor heard before: Andrew and Florence Pride.

Cousin Lesley helped me learn more by providing a copy of your brother’s (her father, Wally’s) birth certificate (19th November 1916) and the death certificate for your mother, indicating she died from lung cancer (13th November 1925). From these documents I learned that your father’s full name was Andrew James Pride and that his bride’s maiden full name was Florence Annie Ward; and that each of them was 25 years old when you were born. In addition, I found out that your brother’s full name was Walter James Pride. Finally, I discovered that at the time of your birth (1912), your brother’s birth (1916) and your Mother’s death (1925), your entire family was listed as living at 10G Peabody Buildings, Dukes Street, North Lambeth. These intriguing details gave me the critical mass of information to explore further using the data bases. Having full names, dates of events and addresses is invaluable.

Expanding the Picture

Inputting this information into the online Ancestry system, along with other facts I knew about where you lived in Cambridge and ultimately died in Norwich, was enough to start generating useful information from census, electoral, birth, christening, marriage and death registers that gradually enabled me to amplify my knowledge of your life and that of your immediate family and close relatives, from before you were born until you died. It is really exciting to be able to sit at the dinning room table in our Vancouver condo and look out the window onto False Creek while I await search results from the Ancestry computer to arrive on the screen of my laptop. In some instances I can find myself looking at the handwriting of my ancestor who completed the Census form on the night it was to be recorded more than a hundred years ago. Mind boggling!

As you can see from the initial draft of the Pride Family Tree, the emerging picture already reaches back from the time of your death in 1995 to great-great-grandparents in the 1840s. While I’ll leave this larger story for another day, it is interesting to know that the vast majority of these family members were born, lived and died within or close to Greater London. Further, my initial impression is that, until my generation, almost all lived in modest circumstances, frequently were housed in rental accommodation, were often members of large families and likely worked as semi-skilled labourers or in family operated small businesses. Almost no evidence of significant land-owners or wealth, as yet. But these are initial impressions and I already have information that will enable me to delve deeper and shortly be more precise and confident in my conclusions.

Some Specifics, Possible Surprises and Being Careful

If you read over the chronology you can get a quick overview of what I have so far found out about your life from your birth in London and until you married and went to Cambridge. While I knew none of this before I started looking into our history only three months ago, many of my findings prompt intriguing questions and a suspicion that some of it might have been unknown to you.

My sole basis for the latter suspicion is that nothing was ever said to me about these things by you or anyone else. However, I would not be surprised to learn that you knew all of the particulars and much more and that you concluded as a youngster I just did not need to know.  If that is the case, I am fine with your decision and fully understand why you might back then have come to that conclusion. I am conscious that I might now be stirring up memories that may not be happy ones for you and I want to precede with great care. Hopefully, we can find ways to unfold your story so that you are not un-comfortable and I and others in the family, today and tomorrow, can appreciate better what you experienced in making our lives possible.

Your Older Brother

It is intriguing to read that I had another Uncle besides Wally, George Henry Bernard Pride, but I was saddened to find out that he only lived 6 months. If you knew I can understand why you would not want to mention him to me. I am thinking you were maybe never told about him being born just 15 months before you. As I learn about our ancestors I see that most of the families in the 1800s and early 1900s had many children, often 6 or 8, and the too-common tragedy of several of them dying when still young. While I know that infant mortality rates were much higher a century ago, it feels more real when it is your relatives even when you have never known them. I wonder how your childhood might have been different if you had had an older brother in your life, in particular one who looked out for you.

Living in the Peabody Buildings

Since discovering that your mother and father were living in one of the Peabody Buildings at the time they were married (1910) and when you (1912) and Wally (1916) were born I have been curious about what it was like for you living in them.

The records show that your mother and father were living there before her death and that afterwards he continued living the building until 1929. Whether you and Wally were living there during all those years, when the two of you were growing up, I am not sure. Passing remarks I dimly recall you making on several occasions, lead me to believe that you and Wally might not have been living with your parents all that time. Lesley also recalls Wally speaking about living elsewhere and mentioning with great affection an “Aunt Lucy“, who looked out for the two of you. So far I have been unable to find information on specifically where you were living or whom Aunt Lucy might have been. I have discovered several relatives whose names were Lucy or Louise, any one of whom might have been the person Wally was speaking about (see partial Pride Family Tree). At this point I am not sure whether I will be able to resolve this question with the information sources available to me while I am in Vancouver. It is possible that I can learn more from local records that I can search when Plu and I are in London next summer.

I was delighted, however, to find that G Block of the Peabody Buildings is still very much lived in and that along with  a couple of hundred other buildings established across London by the American philanthropist, George Peabody, beginning in 1864, it has a long and illustrious history of providing innovative social housing.  Even more interesting was to be able to look at what I think is the building in which you lived by using the street photography available online from Google.

Until I visit I will not be able to tell whether this is in fact your building. In the meantime, I am beginning to learn more about the Peabody Buildings and the Trust that I discovered still manages it today. Last year the Peabody Trust celebrated its 150th Anniversary and this has inspired the creation of an online archive of records, pictures and oral histories from people who lived in Peabody Buildings since their first construction. From a first look it appears that they have gone through all kinds of renovations and re-developments since they were first constructed but to a large extent the original structures have survived and still show the quality of the living they provided. I am hoping that the historical records, pictures and stories will give me a window on to the life you and the rest of your family might have had when living there. More on this in a future letter.

Your Step Mother and Living in Coronation Buildings

The next revelation for me was to find that when your father left the Peabody Buildings in 1929 it was to marry again and move to the Coronation Buildings in Brixton and Kennington. His new wife, Ada Louise Wilkes was 44 years old, almost the same age as your Dad, had not been married before and had lived in the London area since she was born in Camberwell (Peckham) in 1886.  But sadly your Dad died only three short years later. I do not know the cause of his death but coming so soon after your own mother had died, it must have been devastating.

As before I am not sure whether you and Wally were living with your Father and Stepmother during these years. What I do know, probably because you became old enough to be recorded in the Electoral Register in 1933, is that from then until 1935 you were listed as living with Ada Louise in 128 Coronation Buildings.

I am suspecting that it was your Stepmother’s decision in 1935 to marry Thomas Tabberer and move to where he had been living in 172 of the Coronation Buildings, that at least in part prompted you to move. Maybe, given that you were by now 23 years old, where you were working also influenced your decision to re-locate, although I do not know anything about your schooling or first jobs. This again, is something I am hoping to learn about from local records, such as those kept by schools, when we visit this summer.

Likewise I am hoping to find out more about the Coronation Buildings when we are in London. I have been unable to track down any photographs of it and those from Google of its street suggest it was demolished and a new building constructed on the site. However, I do know it was still standing in 1963 because that is when Ada dies and she is recorded as still living in the building. Her husband is listed as dying the year before but, most interestingly, it is not her second husband Thomas Tabberer but a third husband William G. Cleall, whom she married in 1950. So far I have not determined whether her third marriage came after the death of her second husband. To say the least, this is an intriguing sequence of events. I am guessing that you may not have known anything about what happened after you moved on in 1935.

Living with the Perry Family

I do not have any way of knowing why you chose to start living with the Perry family at 17 Hargwyne Road in Brixton and Kennington when Ada re-married in 1935. The other three people recorded as living in the Hargwyne house between 1935 and ’37 are all members of the Perry family and so I am guessing you must have been lodging with them.

I can also see that you go with the Perry family when they move to live nearby at 46 Grantham Road during 1938-’39 and, most notably, that Wally appears at last and is listed as being with you during those two years. This is the first time I see the two of you identified  in records as living in the same house; while you might have been together previously, this is the first year in which Wally would have been old enough to be included in the Electoral Register.

So, as you can see, my initial inquiries have begun to tell me much that I never knew and have yielded some intriguing insights as well as mysteries. I am all the more excited to explore everything further. However, I am already becoming aware of the limits of understanding that can be extracted from merely finding out names, dates and locations relating to your early life and of all our ancestors. One way in which I now see enriching my understanding of your experiences and that of others is to develop a better appreciation of the larger context of the times and places in which you lived. The era into which you were born was tumultuous not only in London but around the globe and brought about unprecedented change and extraordinary challenges for young people like you and your brother, all the more as you had to cope with first losing your mother when you were only 13 and Wally 9, and then your father just 8 years later. In a coming letter I will share some thoughts that I am beginning to form about how I might better understand this context and hence your life.

My love, as always,

Anthony

PS Since my first letter did not bounce, I am assuming that you have access to the internet where you are now and so am including a few web sites into my letters.

TO TONY’S COMMENTARY 2