The Bright Family at Ham Green
This post accompanies “Fortunes, Fruit and Fevers – a biography of an orchard. part 1”
“The Bright family of Bristol was a tremendously important and wealthy one, having made its fortune in the slave trade, [West] India dealings and ultimately banking.” Quote from ‘Tempestuous teacups and enigmatic leaves’ Larry Schaff.
Two and bit years ago I visited Sheffield where our son Will had been living for a few years during student days at the University and later working there. He loved the city and had made many good friends but was about to move to Vienna to join his Austrian girlfriend, so this was probably a last chance to explore the city with him to follow up on some family history connections I’d not known about on earlier visits to see him.
I knew my father’s family came from Sheffield but little else of the family’s history at the time Will started at University in 2005 but it was interesting how quickly he felt at home in this city of his ancestors and took so readily to the nearby Peak District that had beguiled my paternal grandparents – they met when they were both members of an early 20th century rambling group I believe and later named their house in Oxfordshire after Winnats Pass.
Continue readingTwo and bit years ago I visited Sheffield where our son Will had been living for a few years during student days at the University and later working there. He loved the city and had made many good friends but was about to move to Vienna to join his Austrian girlfriend, so this was probably a last chance to explore the city with him to follow up on some family history connections I’d not known about on earlier visits to see him.
I knew my father’s family came from Sheffield but little else of the family’s history at the time Will started at University in 2005 but it was interesting how quickly he felt at home in this city of his ancestors and took so readily to the nearby Peak District that had beguiled my paternal grandparents – they met when they were both members of an early 20th century rambling group I believe and later named their house in Oxfordshire after Winnats Pass.
Continue reading
It’s Old Twelfth Night, ‘Twelvey’, 17th January, the date of Twelfth Night in the old Julian calendar before they played catch-up in 1752 to reclaim those accumulated days that we’d lost through miscalculation, or was it just carelessness? This is the traditional day, down ‘ere in the West Coun’ry anyway, when we do our Wassailing – treating the orchard trees to a hullabaloo of singing and saucepan bashing to drive away the evil spirits, Continue reading
Anyone who’s followed these posts will have probably assumed there were to be twelve Twelfth Night Tales; although some included more than one item I only posted 11. There were a few more tales queuing up that I’d planned to tell, however, a few stories just didn’t make it for a variety of reasons. Here are some that got away or never quite arrived. Continue reading
This mysterious, Christmas-coloured creature was a present from our younger son brought back from a gap year visit to Central America when he was 18 In the early 2000s. Continue reading
This glittering souvenir, called, I have recently discovered, a ‘Szopka’, was brought back from Krakow in Poland by my partner when he visited the city for a theatre festival in the early 1990s. Continue reading
On a visit to some friends who live in Montpellier in the south of France we were taken to the extraordinary medieval village of St Guilhem le Désert where we visited a museum that included a 3D miniature landscape tableau. This spectacle was a closely observed Continue reading
In the economically uncertain 1930s it seemed that if you were blessed with a little extra money you might begin collecting modest pieces of silver-plated tableware. Both my grandfathers (unknown to each other at this stage) had started their working lives (one aged 14) as lowly clerks prior to the First World War but after they were demobbed they resumed their occupations and Continue reading
A visit one early winter in 1984 with my young son to a performance of The Nutcracker ballet at Bristol’s Hippodrome (first ballet for both us) was perhaps over-ambitious, or just a tad premature for a 3 year old and left us both struggling with the complicated story (without the benefit of words at the ballet, obviously), a story which is also a little odd… Continue reading
This chimerical mask is made from fired clay, created some years ago by my partner along with some companion pieces; he’s a permanent fixture on the wall above the fireplace, but as a result of a midwinter custom we invented, over the years he’s become a kind of homage to the Green Man. We accidentally initiated this custom out of (mild) despair about 25 years ago in the second winter of living in this house while it was being pulled apart by builders.
Liz Milner 