After a very unpromising start, in which Mum managed to get sacked from the Job From Hell because her face and her attitude didn’t fit, 1983 turned into an amazingly good year, with lots of travelling, a couple of residential writing courses, a mining history conference and two unexpected events that would change her life in different ways.
The first of these was in the February just after her great-aunt Laura had died at the age of 87. Shortly after the funeral, her widower was sorting her things out and came across an “In Memoriam” ribbon for a man called Richard Boyes who had died at Birkenshaw Bottoms, Yorkshire, in March 1912 at the age of 90.
When he showed this to Mum and Granny Betty, they both realised that this must have been great-aunt Laura’s granddad. This meant he was also great-granddad to Granny Betty and great-great-granddad to my mum.
As they knew very little about the family from so far back, they decided to try and find out a bit more, starting by looking for his grave in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Birkenshaw, as this was only three or four miles from where they lived.
They had no luck there, though Mum did have a lucky escape as the old part of the churchyard was a bit neglected and, as she stepped over the corner of one grave onto what she thought was solid ground, her foot slipped into a hole under the kerbstone of the next grave – though fortunately she caught her balance and managed not to fall in.
This was long before the days of the internet and online family research and so the next stop on their quest for more information was the public library in Cleckheaton which had newspapers from the area for that period.
Mum was hoping to find a short paragraph that would perhaps give her the name of his wife and maybe a few more clues. Instead she found quite a long write-up, naming the place where he’d been born in 1822 and saying that at the age of eight years he’d been apprenticed to a mule-spinner at a mill in Bradford.
(I asked Mum if a mule-spinner was someone who spun donkeys round and round, which I thought was a bit cruel, but she explained that a spinning mule was a machine with lots of spindles which could spin sheep’s wool into yarn for weaving into cloth.)
The write-up went on to say that when Richard Boyes was older, he’d become a farmer with 13 acres/5 hectares of land at Birkenshaw Bottoms, where he and his wife, Jane, raised 12 children.
He also had a donkey and cart and delivered groceries for the local co-op store.
But the two bits of the obituary that Mum liked best came near the end. The first one described her great-great-granddad as “a man of splendid physique” – which made her laugh as all the men on that side of the family have struggled to be 5 ft/152 cms tall…
…and the second one said he was “fond of a glass of ale”, which Mum thought wasn’t a bad thing to be remembered for.
With the knowledge she picked up from the newspaper, Mum was able to find Richard Boyes’s baptism at St James’s church in Tong and, as this also gave the names of his parents, she was back to people who were born in the 18th century.
Mum also made a note of all the other people called Boyes in the parish registers for Tong, including one William Boyes who had fathered a boy to a woman he hadn’t married. Then, one hot and humid day that summer, she and her cousin drove out to the church to have a look round and see if they could find any family graves.
They spent quite a while reading every inscription on every gravestone in front of the church, but didn’t find a single one with the name Boyes on it. Then, just as they were about to give up and go home, Mum spied a few more gravestones around a corner towards the back of the church.
Making their way to them, Mum and her cousin saw the name William Boyes and, going by the dates, realised he must have been the one with the illegitimate son. They quickly read the inscription and made a note of it. Then they read the verse that followed, which announced that William was “waiting for the angels’ last trump”.
This was too much for Mum and her cousin and they both burst out into childish laughter…
…at exactly the same moment that a huge crack of thunder pealed out from a black cloud that they hadn’t noticed.
They ran out of the graveyard as if the Devil himself was after them and, once they were safely back in Mum’s car, they promised they’d never laugh at an inscription again.
It didn’t put Mum off researching her family history, however, and one day at the County Record Office in Wakefield she saw a leaflet advertising a master’s degree in Yorkshire history at the University of Leeds. With what she was learning about her Yorkshire roots, Mum thought it would be very interesting – the only problem was that she didn’t already have a degree which would allow her to go on the course.
Then she remembered the Open University and the fact that her library qualifications counted as a third of the credits needed to get a first degree there. She applied and was accepted – something she certainly hadn’t been thinking of at the start of the year.
Even further from her mind at the start of 1983 was the life-changing meeting at the Arvon Foundation’s Lumb Bank at Heptonstall later that summer – but I’ll tell you more about in my next post. Meanwhile, take care, stay safe – and look out for more tales from me soon!
Follow my next blog: 126. MY MUM THE STORY- TELLER – PART TWENTY TWO
21/01/2021
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 