Tag Archives: family

Maisie and Cedric Alfred – or is that Charles Archibald, or…

Wallace Ash advertisement 1916
Where Cedric Beacon worked

My great aunt Maisie married Cedric Alfred Beacon in 1914. He was dead before I was born, but their story turns out to be quite a tumultuous one that I didn’t know much about until a week or so ago.

Cedric worked for a local store in Portsmouth, Wallace Ash Ltd., as a Publicist and Staff manager.  On the marriage certificate, he’s a “Furniture Dealer” – not entirely false, but somewhat puffed up in my opinion.

Cedric’s dead father, listed on the marriage certificate as a Clergyman and in the newspaper announcement as “…the late Rev. A. A. Beacon, Ph.D., M.A., etc….” was variously a schoolmaster and Train Inspector (assuming this is the right Mr. Beacon; this is a tangled family tree).

Perhaps it is how someone behaves that matters, not a minor gloss over awkward details or a little bit of aggrandizement. By that yardstick, Cedric doesn’t fare well at all.

Continue reading Maisie and Cedric Alfred – or is that Charles Archibald, or…

Aunts and grandparents to the rescue

Gamps, Edwin, Goggie & Millicent May
Gamps, Edwin, Goggie & Millicent May

My grandfather was very much of his generation – fought in WWI, wore a jacket and tie on country walks with his dog, said things like “if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” and tried to part my hair on the right (it parts on the left) because he had the idea that boys’ hair parts on the left and girls’ on the right – like shirt buttons, but not exactly! Politically he was pretty conservative – used to rail against trade unions until I told him I was joining the National Union of Students (it was mandatory at the time) when I went to university. “I’m sure you’ll straighten them out, darling” was how he reconciled that clash. Continue reading Aunts and grandparents to the rescue