November 2022 - a month in review, part 1: Loss

November started with a big loss in our family as Cathy's Grampy, Jim, passed away. We were able to see him in hospital a few days before he died to say goodbye. We had another opportunity to say farewell at the funeral service, which was held on the 21st November in the church in Gloucester he had attended for over 50 years.

I knew most of the stories that were told in the tribute at the memorial service, because Grampy was good at telling stories about his life, often with a humorous twist in them. 

Despite being christened Percival (like my paternal grandfather), he was given the nickname 'Sunny Jim' as a small boy. He introduced himself as Jim all his life. 

Cathy told me that Jim had fought in the Second World War in one of the airborne regiments, but he rarely talked about it. However, later in life he was contacted by a wartime friend and began attending regimental reunions. 

Jim slowly started to talk about his war experiences, including being on Sword Beach on D-Day, and losing his friend from Gloucester who signed up with him and died from mortar wounds. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and later witnessed the liberation of concentration camps.

The extended family all attended the final regimental reunion a few years ago, which included a thanksgiving service at Exeter Cathedral where the regimental standard was officially retired. 

At a reception afterwards, there were some Second World War re-enactors, invited as guests with their vintage weaponry and equipment. Jim saw how one re-enactor was holding a sten gun and told him he would lose a fingertip holding it that way. 

Jim then brusquely took the gun off the young man and adopted the correct position. I watched, unnerved, as the muscle memory laid down decades ago took over and suddenly Jim was in firing stance, holding a gun he clearly still knew how to use. It really brought home to me the way the war he rarely spoke about had shaped him. He also served after the war in Palestine - present in the country when Zionists blew up the King David Hotel that was the British government headquarters at the time - and then briefly in Vienna.

Jim was always very welcoming from the first time I met him when I had just started going out with Cathy, through the many years since. He would always thank me in his broad Gloucester accent for driving over with Cathy to see him. He would always ask me how Shrewsbury Town, and more recently Barry Town, were getting on - although he usually knew already because he kept an eye out for their results. And he was very persistent in trying to feed me cake. (He was frequently successful.)

I grew to love him like another grandparent. Although everyone called him Jim, through Cathy I was also able to call him Grampy, and it was a real privilege to be able to do that.  

I have started to think of grief as the process of remapping the world and we have already started to do that by noticing the gaps. Jim would always ring up on Cathy's birthday to sing 'Happy Birthday' to her. That didn't happen this year, reminding us both of the space that he occupied and has vacated. He will be missed in many other ways and at other times as we remember him.

Fýra, fimm, seks, sjey

I have joined a new Welsh class, refreshing my knowledge of the language by redoing some of the course that I finished back in 2020. I am enjoying it, but I have hit a snag a few times when trying to remember numbers. 

I get started alright - un, dau, tri - and then something funny happens. An old memory of numbers in a foreign language overwrites the Welsh. The next numbers that come to mind are fýra (pronounced foira), fimm, seks, sjey (shay). Then my brain stops counting because it knows these numbers aren't Welsh.

I blame my Grandma.

Me and Grandma, Cardiff Bay, 2006

My Grandma, Ragna, came from the Faroe Islands to the UK when she was 19. She lived the rest of her life on the outskirts of Wrexham until she passed away aged 89. Despite living over three quarters of her life in North East Cymru and having a greater English vocabulary than many people born in this country, she always counted in Faroese. And when she counted she often counted out loud. 

I was grandchild ein

If she rolled a six in a game and was moving a piece she would count ein, tveir, tríggir, fýra, fimm, seks. I'd forgotten ein, tveir and triggir. 

Clearly there were also times she was counting up to seven because I automatically go up to sjey. I'm trying to think when she would have been counting to sjey. She used to count the plates on the table to make sure she hadn't forgotten to lay a place for anyone. That could have been when she used to count to sjey. We often took friends to see them. We crowded round her tiny table no matter how many we were in number.

Fýra, fimm, seks, sjey. I remember when I was a teenager, playing a card game with Grandma, my mum and some of my friends. It was a game called Racing Demons where you have to get rid of your cards by putting them on piles in the middle of the table. Suddenly Grandma disrupted the flow shouting "Sex! SEX!" She was trying to put down a six. My friends were traumatised.

I haven't interrupted a Welsh class by shouting "SEX!" at least not yet. I have apologised for not remembering saith when all I could think of was sjey. I explained it was all my Grandma's fault. 

But I'm grateful in a way that she embedded those numbers so deep in my brain. It's a legacy she left me along with so many other memories. 

BONUS family photo - after my Grandma passed away we went through her photo albums. I found this photo of her with my Grandad at a wedding before I was born. Grandad is trying to sneak a cheeky kiss. I love this photo so much.

Ffootball, Ffriendship and Ffamily (Maybe) in Fflint

On Saturday I went to watch Flint Town United play Barry Town United in the Cymru Premier. Another away day with Barry and a chance to meet up with a friend I'd made online for the first time.

Fflint, to use the Welsh name, is a small place on the Dee river estuary. The Wirral is on the other side. I was meeting up with James, who I had 'met' on a football message board. James is a Bury fan and had recently lived through the dark days of Bury FC collapsing and being expelled from the football league due to a malevolent owner. In one of our discussions, I invited him to come and join me at a Barry game in North Wales as it's relatively easy to get there from Manchester. Today was the day.

I was a few minutes early so was able to take a photo of a large sculpture that is sort of hidden away behind Fflint train station. It's a big ffoot. 

James arrived on the train from Chester. I took this ffoto from the ffootbridge. (That's enough double effs for now.)

We then made the two minute car journey to the football ground. Fflint play at Cae-y-Castell. It's next to the Castell, although there is a lifeboat station between the castell and the ground. 

Next stop, the social club.

I took this selfie before I gave James his Barry Town scarf, which inducted him into the Barry Massive. I wasn't wearing my colours yet either. We were so early we saw the Barry coach arrive and the Clubhouse were yet to open their doors. 

In the clubhouse I noticed this old photo on the wall.

That's the Flint Town FC team in about 1920. Now this is really interesting to me because one of the few things I know about my Grandad - my Dad's dad - is that he played football for Flint Town and Holywell Town. He apparently once played against my great uncle Tommy Matthias, the Welsh international who played for Wrexham. So that would have been in the early 1920s, probably. 

I do have some photos of my Grandad from when he was young, including this photo where I would guess he is about 14, maybe.

My Grandad would have been 19 in 1920. So the question is, do you think the young man in the middle of the front row of that photo could be the 19 year old version of the lad in the formal suit?

I think it might be, in which case, I'm pretty sure that was my Grandad in the photo on the wall of the Flint Town clubhouse. 

Anyway, poor James hadn't travelled all the way to Wales to listen to my family history. We had a football match to go to! 

The Fflint clubhouse is a hundred yards from the actual ground. There was a queue at the turnstiles.

Because of the queue, and because they didn't serve any food in the clubhouse, I was waiting in line for chips when the game kicked off. Barry scored almost immediately and I didn't see the goal. 

We made our way around the pitch to where the Barry fans had staked out their territory by laying out out their flags. Fflint scored twice to lead 2-1 at the break. We were very close to the pitch in the stand we were in and there were hardly any barriers due to a lack of advertising hoardings on that side of the ground. The grass pitch was in fantastic shape.

At half time I walked back around to get a cup of tea from the refreshment hut next to the big stand. It was a long queue, but it was moving quite quickly. Not quickly enough though. The second half kicked off. Barry again scored almost immediately from the start, just as I was placing my tea order. 

I said to the chap serving that I'd missed both goals while standing in the refreshements queue so obviously I should take up residence there, to which he responded "no, you can ffwc off", and laughed.

It was a very even game, with fast-paced breaks from both sides. Barry had two or three really good chances to go in front. With a few minutes to go James observed that "this has last minute winner written all over it". He was right. A chance fell to the Fflint number Ffour and he hammered home a screamer from the edge of the area. Barry couldn't force any more chances in the final few minutes and ended up losing 3-2.

It was still a very enjoyable day though - meeting a ffriend, an unexpected ffamily connection, and a good game of ffootball to watch as well. What more could I ask for from a day out in Fflint?

January 2021 End of Month Review

We are one month through 2021 already. January has been a lockdown month, but a few things have happened. I also blogged a lot so this will be a mix of links back over the month's posts and a few other things that I hadn't mentioned.

One of the big things I haven't blogged previously was my Mum celebrating her three-quarter century. Unfortunately we couldn't have a big party because of lockdown. However, we adopted her an orangutan in Chester Zoo and we sent her a cuddly King Louie to remind her of her adopted orangutan. At some point when restrictions ease, we plan to meet up as a family and go and see the orangutan in person. 

Here's King Louie getting ready for transit:

While there are disadvantages to getting older, at least turning 75 meant my Mum bumped up a level in the vaccination tiers, and I'm really glad she managed to get her jab this weekend. It hopefully means she will be safer from the effects of this virus that doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

What else went on in January? Well, I published my annual Christmas card audit for the ninth year in a row, marked my sixth "diaversary" with a post about my diabetes recovery journey, started reading one of the Judge Dredd case files books I got for Christmas, watched a lot of football on TV, and generally concentrated on making it through Lockdown III. Cathy and I also sorted our stocks of loose Lego into a coherent storage system. It took some time!

One of the many benefits of living in Sunny-Grangetown-on-Sea is the mild climate. I felt a bit envious of my friends living elsewhere who got some proper snow to go out and play in though. Overall the weather has been quite grey and miserable, as if it's in favour of people staying indoors and out of harm's way.

Talking of being in harm's way, I've had a frozen shoulder for six months now. I was actually able to get a proper face-to-face physio appointment at the beginning of January. I had the shoulder worked on by the physio and two students, which was quite helpful because the physio explained things to the students so I learned a lot about how shoulders work (or in my case, don't work!) and why it couldn't be nerve damage. He was a bit disappointed that their actions had no discernible effect on my movement, but I felt it was a useful appointment.

A few week's back I posted about my 2020 Jaffa Cake comparison project. The 2021 project is up and running and I was very excited when Cathy came back from the shops with these!

I will be blogging about them in due course!

Meanwhile, over on my blog about Tony Gwynn baseball cards I ran out of baseball cards to blog about. I then managed to get hold of some more! I'm now up to 578 cards in total. I have spent a lot of time looking at baseball cards on eBay. 

On one of my late night eBay trawls I found a cigarette card depicting my Great Uncle Tom who played football for Wales. I am planning a blog post about him soon, but in the meantime, here is a century-old collectible featuring a member of my family.

Roll on February. 

Delving into the family archive: my great-great uncle, Robert Ivor Bostock

Two years ago we rescued some old family photos from my parents’ garage and scanned them. There was a lot of family history in the albums and I ended up discussing my great-great-uncle with my Dad.

When my Dad was little he lived with his Grandma, who he called Ninna, in New Broughton just outside Wrexham. Ninna’s brother, Robert, had left the Wrexham area early in the twentieth century to seek his fortune in America. When my Dad visited New York and went to Ellis Island he found his great-uncle’s name in the vast arrivals logs that the US Immigration Service has open there.

Robert Ivor Bostock was born in 1877. He was adopted by the Roberts family of Brymbo, my great-grandmother’s family, but kept the Bostock surname. I’m glad he did because there is a website dedicated to tracing Bostocks and it has a lot of information about him, and his family, on it.

For example, thanks to that website I know that in the 1901 census he was registered as a clerk in a brickworks in Brymbo. The next census he appeared in was an American one, in 1910, by which point he was living in Long Beach, California.

What happened in those 9 years? Well in 1905 he went to America on a ship called the Oceanic. Having gone through immigration at Ellis Island, he then travelled inland to Mahoney City, Pennsylvania. I know this because he had a photo taken there, which he sent back to his sister, Elizabeth (Ninna). Sadly the photo mount got cut to make it fit into a photo frame at some point, so his message on the front has been lost, but the information on the back is intact.

From Mahoney City he made his way to Los Angeles. A couple of years later, in 1908, he got married. His new wife was also called Elizabeth. She was originally from Skipton in Yorkshire and was another immigrant to California. We have a wedding photo.

I think Elizabeth must have emigrated with her family as she seems to have her mum present. Robert went the America alone, although he did already have a cousin who was also called Robert living in the USA. I don’t know if his best man is his cousin or a friend he made in California.

Within a year, Robert and Elizabeth’s first son, Albert Ivor was born. Albert lived until 1995. We have a baby photo sent back to Ninna. Photos like this would have been the only sights she had of her nephew.

In 1911, Robert and Elilzabeth had a daughter called Gwendolyn. I think this photo is of Albert and Gwendolyn as small children, mainly because we have no other photos of children dressed like this in the archive.

The next item in the archive is a postcard sent in 1917. It’s dated 23 May. 

The message on the back is a bit difficult to read. I think it says:

“Dear sister and niece [possibly my grandma, Eliza Jane Richards]

Just a line to say we are all well, hope you are the same. How is [???] boys that are at the front

did you hear from [???] soon

What do you think of the U.S.A. joining in the war

with best wishes

Your brother Bob”

It gives his address as 622 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, California, USA. This is now right in the centre of downtown LA, only a couple of blocks away from the Omni Hotel where Cathy and I stayed on our first ever American roadtrip in 2004.

Robert had applied for American citizenship in 1912, at which point he was an agent of the Metropolitan Life Assurance Co., now commonly known as Met Life. In September 1918 he registered for the army, at the age of 41. A large number of men he would have known from his days in Wrexham would have been fighting in the First World War, and maybe the pull of loyalty to his original homeland persuaded him to sign up once his new homeland entered the war. However, I doubt he would have left the USA as the war was over a couple of months later.

In the 1920 census he was a bookkeeper in a shipbuilding company. By the 1930 census he was back working as an insurance salesman. He died in 1932, aged 54.

The only other photo we have in the archive is this photo of Gwendolyn, or Gwennie as she is called on the note. It’s dated 1927, so she would have been 16 in this photo. She lived all her life in Los Angeles and died in 1992.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert and his journey to America. We forget sometimes what emigration meant in the era before air travel. He left home, travelled abroad, and never saw any of his family again. There was probably an exchange of photographs and occasional letters. His sister only ever knew her nephew and niece through those pictures that arrived in the mail. None of his family from Wrexham was present at his wedding or his funeral, and none of them ever visited his grave.

I feel this small blog post is a belated tribute to someone who went out and changed their own future, swapping Denbighshire for California.