I blame it on my maternal grandmother, Grace Wilcox.
In 1958 my father, Bill Carver, decided that he wanted to be a publican. I was ten years old and living with the best part of my entire family of six siblings and my parents, in Redhill, Surrey. Bill Carver was a very successful turf accountant, or bookie. This was in the days before betting shops were legal. Bill had an office at the bottom of our road where all betting was via credit accounts and the telephone or via bookie’s runners who were collecting bets in cash from local factories.
We were living the life of the nouveau riche during the post war years. Not wealthy but never poor and my parents were becoming socially well connected in the community. For some reason, Bill decided to try his hand at running a pub. Not just a pub. He went and bought a small hotel in Bexhill on Sea. This is a seaside town between Hastings and Eastbourne, well documented by Spike Milligan in his war time memoirs.
The York Hotel was a pub with traditional saloon bar, public bar and an enormous function room and bar at the back. It had about eight guest rooms and an enormous billiards room on the first floor that became my bedroom. Along with my younger brothers and any other family members that came to stay at the weekends. It was that big. My parents began the life of working every day for seven days a week for the next two years. They were used to this lifestyle having spent their whole lives running their own business, whether it was an off-licence, a dairy or a café. They were entrepreneurs at heart.
Grace Wilcox came to stay with us on a number of occasions and she loved to busy herself with her daughter, Grace Carver. Grace was her Sunday name. Her mother , Grace senior, always called her Etty. Grace Wilcox was always in the kitchen or helping with other areas of the building.
For me, living in Bexhill was an emotional wrench having been brought up in one house in a provincial town where I had many friends and a wonderful recreation park at the bottom of our garden. The challenge for me in Bexhill was occupying my time. I was at the age of wanting to read a great deal. Anything that I could lay my hands on. I was always spending pocket money on comics and one magazine in particular, The Boy’s Own Paper. My memory of that paper was that it was full of stories about daring do and articles on how to build things. This was at the time of the invention of the Hovercraft by Christopher Cockerell and BOP had a complete guide to building your own model. That same year BOP had an article on how to research your family tree. It gave step by step information on how gather information. In particular it described the registry at Somerset House in London where for a small fee of about two shillings and sixpence, one could request the birth, marriage or death information of a relative.
So, imagine the setting. A warm parlour at the back of the hotel where we had all our family meals beside a coal fired furnace, sitting and talking to my grandmother about this exciting idea. That I would be able to go to London on a day out and find out all about our family history for a small fee. I really would like to think that if this was in 2022 and I was the grandparent that I would be offering encouraging help to a grandchild wanting to try out a new hobby.
My grandmother stared at me. She thought carefully and then said, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea David. You don’t know what skeletons you might find in the cupboard.”
I didn’t understand. But others in the room said that it was meant to mean that there might be secrets that should not be uncovered. How to dampen the spirits of a child eager to discover.
Not anymore. Sixty four years later I have now become a proficient family history researcher and I have spent the past ten years learning how to uncover the facts about past generations of my family, my wife’s family and the history of my house. Not for two shillings and sixpence sadly.
This then is the blog of my ancestor’s lives. I have found no skeletons, yet. But I have discovered some wonderful stories and some wonderful people who have made an impact on my life and that of my family. I have also discovered some new relatives who have been eager to fill in the gaps of my knowledge and research.
I want to bring these stories alive by also looking at the social history connected to the people that I write about. In the coming months and years I hope that whoever reads and follows this blog will be as stimulated as I have been in compiling it.