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Glorious Jubilee
My Mum calls and I do some scans for her family tree project. There's an invitation, from the Viscount and Viscountess Galway to my grandfather, Robert Bell to a celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o'clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby.When he arrived, Fred Bagshaw, who worked in the stables, asked him 'Would you like to take a girl on the swings, Bob?'
The Zen question, 'Where were you before your parents were born?' comes to mind. Would my Grandparents have got together if there hadn't been that celebration on that particular day? In 1977 my nephew Richard Robert Ingham was born one hundred years to the day after his great grandfather. My Mum and I spend an hour or more typing up and formatting the Bell side of the family tree. I've typed in the last of some 50 names and dates, and I'm just about to print it out when there is a ten second break in the power supply and I loose everything (trust me just this once not to have saved it). Perhaps one the ancestors is trying to tell us we haven't got right. It reminds my Mum of a series of coincidences involving family films and photographs. Richard Bell,
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A NEIGHBOUR shows me a leucistic Collared Dove he shot early this morning. The 'collar' is just visible on the back of its neck, but it doesn't have the pink eyes of a true albino. I'm sorry that such that such an unusual bird got shot, I wish it was still out their in the wild to confuse birdwatchers, but I suspect the local Sparrowhawk would soon have spotted it anyway.
A Brown Hawker, otherwise known as the Large Aeshna, zooms across the patio and over the pond. A couple of Peacock butterflies feed on the Buddlehia while a Small Tortoiseshell suns itself.
The girl, Fred's sister, Jane, was already in service at the age of 14. She and Robert married some years later.