Category: Family

Naughty Margaret

Earlier this month I introduced my great, great great grandmother, Margaret Bryan. She kept for a few years an album with entries by her friends and today it’s time to take a look at some of them.

Driving Prince Philip

Neither the very young nor the very old are good drivers. My first lesson was in a farmyard at Barmeath in my grandmother’s Morris 1000.

Published
Categorised as Family

A Grandmother’s Album

My paternal grandfather’s mother died in childbirth in 1893 leaving my great-grandfather with four young children to bring up. He married again in 1895 and had three more children.

Published
Categorised as Family

Death in Rome and Venice

Infant mortality was a fact of life, or rather death, until the twentieth century. It did not discriminate between rich and poor.

Published
Categorised as Family

The Tichborne Tattoo

While America was gripped by the Lindbergh kidnapping case in the 1930s, Victorian England was obsessed by the Tichborne case in the 1860s and 70s.

The Last Rose of Summer

An old friend died yesterday. We were contemporaries in the Irish Guards and at Durham, so go back a long way.

The Dining Room

Come into the dining room. The walls are painted dark red; not quite Farrow & Ball’s Eating Room Red but similar. Around the cornice are shields of Bellew wives and Irish provinces. Not enough wives are armigerous and there are only four provinces so they repeat themselves.

Published
Categorised as Family

Dead Man’s Penny

The first I’d heard of a Dead Man’s Penny was by chance yesterday. If you know all about them you may want to skip to a digression at the end of the post.

Shrouds of the Somme

My grandfather was shot through the back of his neck by a sniper at the Somme. He was fortunate not to bleed to death. Three other Bellews died and have no graves.