Hogan plus Vowles

Happy Birthday to Rachael today, the 30th of April, 2007, our grandaughter, Greg's little girl is now tall, lissome, and twenty years of age. We were invited by Greg & Michelle to go down to Lincoln last night and have supper with Rachael [plus Elaine and Robert] to celebrate her birthday. These pictures were taken in Lincoln following a really nice supper at the The Big Wok [Chinese of course!]

As you all will probably guess - we are back in Lincolnshire. Becks are nothing to do with Beckham [the footballer] or Becks Bier, becks are the Lincolnshire term for the streams that have biscected this landscape from the Middle Ages, ducks abound and appear in all villages. The peacocks were here when Meadow Court was the grounds of a large farm; the birds decided to stay with plenty of food and good cover of lots of shrubs. Hibaldstow is named after Hybald [apparently an Anglo Saxon Saint of stalwart proportions], the fields are yellow with rape seed oil plants or borage, and this village has a wonderful fish & chip shop, excellent doctors, Women's Institute, and a very good general store selling fattening pies and Grace & Jack's comics. The picture shows the village across a field with the church [and us] to the left and the disused windmill to the right. The Irish venture is over - was it a mistake? I guess it was in a way, it was certainly costly and could have be...

Oftentimes when visiting Michelle and Greg my attention is drawn to this picture of a mother and daughter in the Shetland Islands taken about 1930. The girl has bare feet and, this is a fact, the children there would shed their shoes in the summer but wore boots in the winter! The mother is Michelle's maternal Great Grandmother and the 5 year old child her Great Aunt, Elizabeth Jamieson [Betty.] The mother, Agnes, is approximately 40 years of age in this photo! Betty's husband often went away to the whaling station in South Georgia for a year's work with Salvesen's of Leith producing whale oil and other products - a tough place and tough work - dark, cold and remote. I can remember as a young lad visiting Cape Town and crews homeward bound having their clothes burnt because of their stench. Her Great Grandmother has a kishie on her back loaded with peat for heat and cooking. A kishie is a soft straw basket and it has a kishie-baand -the rope to carry it on the shoulders...

Mabel married the soldier she fell in love with in 1911; he's the tall guy on the left of this picture with colleagues in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a territorial volunteer. He was later promoted to Sergeant. Sometime during the first months of their marriage he was away at Army Camp for training and manouevres. Mabel decided to visit him and booked lodgings at the town near the Camp. She wanted to go to meet him at the base and asked the landlady for directions to the parade ground and also asked how she could go about finding him there. "Oh that's easy!" she said "You just listen for him, you can't miss him!" Tina always remembers her Grandfather as big and loud, she also remembers him as loving and kind - the man with the stentorian voice.

This is Tina's Grandmother - Mabel Goode. the young lady who went with her brother Will to watch the first All Blacks play Leicester in 1911. As I said in my earlier blog we forget that the old were young once and so do look carefully at this picture. She is an attractive young woman with a doting brother who took her to a momentous rugby match. If you look carefully you will see that she has a cameo on a chain around her neck that her seafaring bother brought back for her from Pompeii - Tina has that cameo now. She's wearing an engagement ring - she was courting her soldier lad who was off 3 years later to fight in the Great War.