In middle age, Percy married another Woodroffe, a mature second cousin from the London branch who had perhaps run out of hope of better offers. The marriage did not turn out well: Percy’s wife liked to give elegant dinner parties with men in tails and ladies in gowns, but Percy would turn up in rubber boots with his pants tied up with binder twine. When they died they were buried in separate graveyards, Percy with his parents, and his wife with two Woodroffe sisters, including my grandmother, in the churchyard at the village of Alvington. An elderly woman in the village told me she once took a child riding at Alvington Court and they happened to meet Percy carrying a sick animal, prompting the child to report later, “We met Jesus, an old man with a beard carrying a lamb.” Not a bad way to be remembered.
To return to the Woodroffe history, in 1852 William Edmund Woodroffe, born at Woolaston, a few miles from Alvington, married Catherine (Kate) May Bishop, youngest of fifteen children of an interesting family in the fashionable city of Bath, not far away across the Severn River. Her father, William Bishop, had been part-owner of The White Hart, not only a famous inn but the base for a network of coach lines. An old engraving I found in Bath library shows the forecourt of The White Hart crowded with coaches, which were said to be washed with hot water drawn from springs five thousand feet underground and famous since Roman times. For many years a man called Moses Pickwick owned the inn and the coach lines. According to a local legend he got his name when a lady passing through the nearby village of Wick found him as an abandoned baby — like Moses in the bulrushes — and because he was picked up in Wick, she called him Moses Pickwick. It’s likely that Charles Dickens borrowed the name for his humourous stories, The Pickwick Papers. In one story, the central character, Mr. Pickwick, takes the coach from London to stay at The White Hart and is startled to find that the coach is operated by a Moses Pickwick. Dickens, perhaps, was acknowledging the original Pickwick.
My ancestor, William Bishop, sold his interest in The White Hart around 1850 for £30,000. That may not sound like much and to convert it even roughly into today’s money makes little sense because the quality of life in terms of goods and services that could be bought then was utterly different from anything we can experience. As currency values fluctuate, converting sterling into Canadian dollars introduces another uncertainty. Nevertheless, I have tried (here and in following passages) to make a straight conversion, allowing for inflation and at today’s rate of exchange, but I warn that it is at best a rough guide. So, £30,000 then would be about $4.5 million today. The family lived in a five-storey house on fashionable Pulteney Street, designed to be the most distinguished street in a city of splendid architecture. Jane Austen mentions it in her novel Persuasion, and there were numerous famous residents, including Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert who was secretly married to the Prince of Wales, later George IV; Louis Napoleon, later Napoleonlll of France; Admiral Horatio Nelson’s mistress, Lady Hamilton; and William Wilberforce, a leader of the campaign to outlaw slavery. Like William’s other children, Kate studied “Art, Literature and Music” in Paris, and when she was twenty-five, in 1849, received her share of her father’s estate. It was probably a handsome sum because she in turn gave £1,000 (around $150,000 today) to each of her eight children when they reached twenty-one.
Kate was my great-grandmother, and by the time she married William Woodroffe he had become a wholesale wool merchant. They lived at Peckham Rye, in those days on the southern outskirts of London. During my research, I was advised not to venture into the Peckham because it was said to be populated largely by black drug dealers. But being an adventurous fellow, I boarded the familiar red doubledecker bus and headed south. At Peckham, my fellow passengers were mostly elderly women of every shade, carrying shopping bags, possibly full of illegal substances. Venturing a little farther, to Peckham Rye, I walked around the park-like common and, to my surprise, foundVallance House where my great-grandparents had raised their family. But it had been converted into shabby apartments.
Their second child and first daughter was Catherine Blanche, my grandmother. On July 1,1886, she married a second cousin — there we go again — George Smedley. I have a picture of the very Victorian wedding party on the lawn outside a rather grand house. The men are bearded, wearing top hats and frock coats, and the women are in long dresses and bonnets. Peeping out of a door in the background are two maids in aprons and frilly caps. The Smedleys were from the industrial Midlands, and the most interesting thing about them is that George’s father appears to have been the illegitimate son of an Ann Smedley, of Ashover, Derbyshire, and a George Potter, of Darley Hall, Darley Dale, Derbyshire, on the edge of the famous Peak District. The illegitimate George inherited — along with his father’s first name and his mother’s family name — what must have been a substantial sum from an unmarried aunt because very soon he was describing himself as “Gentleman,” which meant he no longer had to work for a living. He and his family moved from the Midlands to live on a small estate near Chepstow.
His son, and my grandfather, George, had not long to wait before inheriting and becoming in his turn a “Gentleman.” They lived in a pleasant villa, probably Georgian, between Chepstow and Aylburton, so now the Smedley/Woodroffes were back close to where Sir Robert had established his manor in 1570. They had four children before George died in 1902, aged fifty-four. He was buried with his father, mother, and brother, all of whom died within a span of sixteen years. I view with some concern the proclivity of the Smedleys for dying young. I have already survived longer than any male relative I can trace.
At his death, grandfather George owned an impressive amount of property, mostly inherited. When the will was probated, the estate was valued at £15,843 ($1.7 million today). George left it all to his widow, grandmother Catherine, who was to maintain, educate, and bring up “in a manner suitable to their station in life” the two sons until they were twenty-one, and the two daughters until they were twenty-one unless they married earlier. But there was a proviso: if Catherine remarried, the estate was to be divided among the four children, who would then provide to their mother an annuity of £200 ($20,000 today). Catherine did in fact remarry, so my mother and her three siblings shared their father’s small fortune.
But it was mostly gone within a generation. My Uncle Will married and emigrated to New Zealand before the First World War, probably for reasons of health, taking his share of the family money with him. Uncle George, apparently fleeing from gambling debts, moved to Canada before the First World War. The family tree shows George as unmarried, but there was an Aunty May; my father told me she had been the wife of the local pub keeper before running away to Canada with George to live on Vancouver Island. George lost a leg while serving as a dispatch rider in the Canadian army in First World War and drew a pension for the rest of his life. He remained a racing man, and between the wars tried unsuccessfully to introduce harness racing in England. When grandmother Catherine remarried, she moved with her new husband to Weston, taking with her my mother-to-be, Diana Blanche, known as Blanche, and Jessie, known as Babs because she was the baby of the family.
I interrupt here to deal briefly with family names. My full name is George Anthony, making me the fifth George in the line beginning with the romantic, or perhaps careless, George Potter. I regret that when my wife and I named our own children it did not occur to me to continue the tradition. As we were both journalists, we thought naturally of names that would look good in a byline, short, snappy names. It would have been awkward anyway to give them long family names because when they were born in Britain in the 1950s ration books and identity cards were still printed on austerity paper on which a pen nib could easily catch while trying to write the full name on the five dots provided. One blot, and a whole identity could disappear. So we called our children just Dan and Tracy. But all is not lost; our younger granddaughter is Annabel Woodroffe Westell.
To return to my story, it was in Weston of course that Blanche met and married the young insurance man, Wes Westell. She was from