Would Zachariah have seen a banana?

Burston now - courtesy of Google

Faden's 1797 map of Burston

When I started my family tree just before Christmas I knew only a little bit about my mother’s side of the family. Now I have names, birth dates and locations going back to the 16th Century for the Broadleys (my great-grandmother on my mother’s side). They were all from East Yorkshire (Beverley way), not far from where I’d worked until moving to London a couple of years ago.

Also, I was surprised, but quite pleased to find that my maternal great grandfather, John Burrows, had been born in Norfolk and I was also able to trace his father, Job and his grandfather (my 3 x great grandfather) Zachariah. They lived in Burston, a small village to the north east of Diss and so while I was on holiday last week I went to visit Burston to walk in their footsteps and to see if there was anything that remained of what Burston would have been like in 1788 when Zachariah Burrows was born.

I also visited Hales and Stockton, home of my great ancestors on my dad’s side. More of that later, but it was interesting that Margaret remarked how much my sister Maggie loves Norfolk. She wondered if something had been passed down in the genes - who knows?

Anyway, back to Burston ... The thing about visiting any village or town and trying to envision it many years ago is that it is extraordinarily hard. If I go back to places I knew 40 years ago, they’ve often changed completely. Around Burston, all major roads will have been straightened, dualled or given completely new routes in the past 50 years. In Burston, it’s a bit off the beaten track, but there was a railway station opened in 1845 (long after Zachariah and Job were born) and closed by Dr Beeching in the 1960s. It was probably the coming of the railway which enabled my ancestor John Burrows to leave Burston in search of a better life. Now, in four generations, it has been opened and closed.

The main Diss to Norwich road has certainly changed course, but not far (and it would never have run through Burston I guess, although it is a more direct route than the current road). Anyway, Burston is now a typical dormitory village with very little industry - still plenty of agriculture, but highly mechanised so that one person and a tractor can do the work of a score of men and horses. There’s an office complex, a pet-food outlet and a millers.

Farmyards will now be housing estates, woods felled for agriculture, hedges planted and then torn up to create larger fields ...

We drove into Burston along Audley End, which is one of the addresses I had for my ancestors, arrived at a crossroad, carried on for a while until we drove out of the village again, then backtracked and returned to the crossroads. Like many travellers, the pub seemed like a good place to take stock. Gravel and Holly were with us, so we treated them to their first pub lunch and, apart from a good old woof when a labrador came through the door, they were pretty well behaved. The pub is called the Burston Crown and a plaque on the front dates it from the 16th century, although the present building was certainly more modern, perhaps no more than 200 years old, but a very nice pub all the same.

The Burston Crown

Perhaps Zachariah, Job and John have slaked their thirst in the bar more than a few times?

There was no longer a post office or a shop in Burston (the landlady blamed Tesco, which she said had not only destroyed all the shops in the village, it was also responsible for half the shops in Diss being boarded up). It’s a familiar complaint, but why do we complain and then shop at Tesco? Why do we elect councils and governments that allow out-of-town supermarkets to destroy our traditional market towns and village shops?

After lunch, we had a walk around the village. It has the usual mix of council houses, built after the First World War as homes for agricultural workers (now in private ownership), some old people’s bungalows, old cottages restored, knocked together and extended, and the modern, four-bedroomed, doubled-garaged ‘executive’ homes you find everywhere. Barratt probably didn’t build them but they look as though they did.

I had few addresses for the Burrows clan. I knew that Job ended up lodging in Church Green and that he’d also lived on Audley End. We started our tour at the church, St Mary the Virgin, which was locked (not a good start), but we had a good wander round the churchyard and failed to spot any Burrows’ gravestones. They would have been buried in there, but probably didn’t have the cash to splash on a fancy headstone. Many of the headstones that were there were overgrown, eroded or covered in lichen, so reading their inscriptions wasn’t possible in many cases. Half the graveyard has been given over to a wildlife conservation area, which is a crafty way for the church to avoid keeping it tidy. The church is not fine - a square building of brick, stone and flint with a single bell housed in an open wood frame on the apex of the west gable. It was built in the 14th and 15th centuries and once had a round tower (typical of many churches in Norfolk) with an octagonal top. Sadly it fell down in 1753 and the church was the subject of major restoration in the 19th century.
 
Next to the Church is Church Green. This is now the site of the Burston Strike School, famous for being the centre of the longest strike in history. Basically, the school teachers were sacked in 1914 and the pupils (with their parents’ support) went on strike. The two teachers taught in a strike school using a tent and the village chapel until a school-house was erected. The strike lasted from before the First World War until just before the Second World War (1939) when the sacked teachers retired. The strike was about the poor conditions available for the pupils; they were cold and, if it was wet, many would have to sit in damp clothes all day. Children were often taken out of school to work on farms if extra labour was needed. The Strike School is now the focus of Labour Party rallies and something of a cause celebre in the union movement.

Job Burrows lived at 26 Church Green in 1891 when he was 72. I guess there was once quite a few houses around the Green, but now there’s just one large modern bungalow and an older house at the west end of the green (which would have been old enough to be around 150 years ago. To the south of the green, there’s a new development - Higdon Close (named after the teachers) which may have replaced older properties. There seems to be the remains of a pond (overgrown and silted up). The Green would not have been there when Zachariah was around, it was created in 1871 when 36 acres of common land in the village were enclosed. I bet that land grab went down well with the locals who would have kept some livestock there.

Audley End is a narrow road leading south towards Scole Common. There’s a small development of bungalows and what look like former council houses near to the village also an office complex in what looks like the old school, but soon you’re in fields with a few scattered houses along the road until you reach the railway crossing. The railway (Norwich to London, Liverpool Street) is still there, but the station, which opened in 1849, courtesy of the Eastern Union Railway, was closed in 1966 thanks, no doubt, to Dr Beeching. Some of the houses along there look as if they could be quite old, but they have been extensively altered and renovated.

I wonder if I had time to wander round, engage some older people in conversation, whether I might find a trace of the Burrows (or even a living Burrows). Maybe that’s a job for another day, we had very little time, two restless Springer Spaniels and several other villages to visit. This was a quick recce and really useful and interesting.

Since my visit I’ve done a little more research, found the names of Zachariah's father and mother, sons and various wives and babies. I’m still inching my way through scanned parish records, kindly provided by the Mormon church!

So let’s put a few things in perspective:

Zachariah was born a year before the French Revolution when George III was on the throne, although he was increasingly mad and so the Prince Regent (later George IV) was the power. As he was growing up, Napoleon was rising to power and taking over half of Europe. He was married in 1801 as Britain was at war with France, his first daughter Ann was born the year after the Battle of Trafalgar and was growing up as Sir John Moore’s army was retreating to Corunna and as Wellington chased the French out of the Iberian Peninsular. Job was born in 1819.

In their day, no-one travelled faster than the wind or than a horse could gallop; you could be transported for petty crimes and there was still public execution. There would be no running water in their homes, no gas and no electricity (unless you were struck by lightning). News would be carried by pedlars or (around the village) by word of mouth.

They could not read or write (Zachariah and Job made their 'mark' on their wedding record), there was no cinema, no photographs and no music hall. Sources of joy would be family celebrations, local fairs and the companionship of spouse and family. The church would have been a focus of the community and their fears would have been debt and disease.

Would Zachariah have seen a banana? He certainly would not have - the first bananas (an everyday fruit for us) were imported in 1901.

Burston Church - St Mary the Virgin. Its tower fell down in 1753

Burston Green - they grabbed 36 acres of common land and gave the
villagers a green. Bad deal - I think so, but Margaret, Holly and
Gravel don't care on a sunny day.

Audley End - narrow country lane where my ancestors
lived in the 19th century

Go to see Nina Conti

Nina Conti and Monk

Margaret and I watched this absolutely amazing film the other night.

It was called Her Master's Voice - Nina Conti: A Ventriloquist's Story and it was one of the most moving, disturbing and thought-provoking documentaries I've ever seen.

Ventriloquism is an entertainment form that's become a little threadbare. I guess Keith Harris and Orville have pretty much hammered every nail in its coffin and my first memories of ventriloquism came from Lenny the Lion, a really lame children's TV act where you could see the guys lips moving even more than the lion's. The lion (Lenny) also had no padding in his lower body so his back legs just hung loose and floppy. I know rationing had only just finished, but they could have shredded some newspapers to pack his belly.

Anyway, I do have something of a fascination for the art and I had a feeling that this would be good.

Nina Conti is the daughter of actor Tom Conti and she comes across as being a little troubled and emotionally damaged. We'd heard how, as a woman in her early twenties, she'd had an affair with actor and director Ken Campbell (some 40 years her senior) and it was him that had taught her the basics of ventriloquism and got her started. He left her the puppets in his will, including one that was a likeness of himself.

She gave the impression that her art, her act, had been a burden and she wanted to give it up. It was also clear that her relationship with Campbell had not been smooth, they'd parted, but she had not let go, not properly finished the affair and then he'd died before she'd had an opportunity to talk to him and draw a line under things.

So the point of the film was, it seemed, to lay the ghost of Campbell by attending the annual congress of ventriloquists in Kentucky and depositing one of the puppets in Vent Haven, a museum, mausoleum, where puppets whose operator/voice has died, can be laid to rest. It's a profoundly creepy place with rows upon rows of silent puppets sitting there, somehow more dead in their dumbness than the people who once gave them voice.

The convention is in a hotel that has nothing to distinguish it at all. It could be the Premier Inn, Peterborough for all the character it had, and the people gathered for the convention seemed an odd bunch of oddballs. Nina, deliberately, has set out to paint her art in a bad light and she is also on the verge of giving up ventriloquism.

There follows a number of amazing sequences, Nina bares her soul in extraordinary ways and through extraordinary means. In the first sequence she has got drunk and is talking like a drunk telling some painful truths in a conversation with Monk, her monkey puppet. It's extraordinary, as Nina appears to be very drunk, but Monk is stone cold sober (a remarkable piece of acting) and extraordinary content as Monk asks piercing questions. Conti said she didn't feel worthy of voicing Campbell's old puppets. Monk knew that that was not all. "You don't like this any more," he said of her habit of talking to and through dummies – the discipline that had dominated the last decade of her life. Conti tearfully shook her head.

Later on, she has a conversation lying in bed with a puppet which was a likeness of Campbell and had the conversation, or something like it, that she would have had if  Campbell had not died. She has an old lady puppet called Gran and Nina takes her swimming in the hotel pool in a sequence that almost has you believing that gran is a real person. The puppet shows real emotions.

Later, she takes Gran to Vent Haven and leaves her there in tribute to Russell. It's as if she's taking her own grandmother to an old people's home. She also stages Monk's death in an attempt to give up ventriloquism, but can't sustain the course of action. It's uncomfortable viewing and you're never sure how much is an act and how much is really Nina's troubled mind.

The documentary also shows acts and performances from the convention. Some of these are poor, some very good and some quite extraordinary. Nina interviews a ventriloquist who can do the distant voice, so it appears that the sounds are from some way away (I guess you could call it throwing your voice). Then there's a chap who can perform bifurcation, where he talks, but moves his lips as if he's saying something completely different, so his voice is saying one thing, but his mouth is saying something else. It's almost frightening, certainly freaky, but so clever. Try it yourself - I did and it just can't be done.

We also got a taste of Nina's act. She did a piece where Monk insisted that she stop working him and he would work her for a change. It moved from comedy, get-your-hand-out-of-my-bum humour to something terrible to watch as Monk "jumps" into Nina and she shakes violently and starts talking like Monk. The audience of ventriloquists hadn't seen anything like that and they were massively shocked (as I was). Nina is careful to end the act and become normal again very quickly. She knows it would be too awful to sustain, the audience are quite frightened (Monk might jump into one of them next), but when it's over they are thrilled and rush to contratulate her. Part of me wants the horror to escalate and continue, but mainly I'm also happy that I've been a little bit disturbed and now it's over.

It shows what a talented, thoughtful person and a good actress can do with a skill such as ventriloquism. It's a million miles away from Keith Harris and Orville.

Nina finishes by giving away her Ken Campbell doll to a young boy, who is thrilled to have it and has already started to improvise an act. It's a good ending. You're happy that Nina has laid a ghost to rest.

Conti directed the documentary and self-funded its making. If it comes on again, try to watch it. You can also see her on Russell Howard's Good News if you type “Russell Howard Nina Conti” into YouTube.

Lapwings in the air

It has been the wettest April on record, the wettest June on record and July has carried on in much the same vein. Apparently, it's all down to global warming and is due to melting of Arctic ice and El Nino which are forcing the Jetstream (high-altitude winds) further south, causing it to suck in wet weather systems off the Atlantic. 


It's only a few years ago that the BBC was saying that climate change would result in warm, wet winters and hot dry summers and we were being told that we'd have to use drought-resistant plants in the garden. It was the end of the traditional English cottage garden and garden centres were offering more drought-tolerant plants. Well, heaven help anyone who planted up for a Mediterranean summer!


I've been on holiday this week and have been planning my days around the weather. Yesterday was a rare warm and sunny day, so I took advantage to catch up on some jobs in the garden and also to take the dogs on a decent walk. We set off across the fen towards Old Knarr Fen Road at about 10am and it was a lovely sunny morning. Many of the field roads are high with grasses and wild flowers and there were lots of butterflies and insects feeding on the flowers. Holly and Gravel's noses were working overtime and once off the lead they were gone! There's a large field of wheat between the cemetery and the fen, which is just starting to turn light green to yellow.

Ripening barley to the south east of Thorney - it's a
massive field and a magnet for the dogs.

Holly emerges from the barley field and runs back
towards me. I think she wonders why I'm so slow!

Along the hedge, a startled pheasant was put up and the pair of them went tearing after it. There was no sign of either dog when I got through the hedge and into the fen, but I saw Gravel away to the north and Holly was running through the field of ripening barley. I couldn't see her, but I could see the crop moving as she brushed the straws aside. She emerged around 100 yards down and ran back towards me. The barley field is massive and seems to stretch to the horizon. I guess it will be turned into beer, whisky or animal feed.


Just off the path, at the other side of the barley field pictured, there's another massive field of barley and there was a chap with a pigeon lure. The lure is a device with two narrow arms which swing round and round on a central pivot. At the end of each arm is tied a dead pigeon and the lure has some kind of contraption that makes the dead birds' wings flap. At this time of year, parts of the crop can be flattened by winds or rain and pigeons like to land in these areas to feed on the flattened crop. Because farmers can combine flattened wheat or barley, they don't want the pigeons eating it, so will often allow/encourage people to shoot them. The idea is that the lure attracts the attention of pigeons flying overhead who will come down to check what's happening (and get shot).


I gave the chap a wave and he waved back (it's always nice to know that someone with a gun knows you're there). We hadn't seen many pigeons, so I don't know how much luck he'd had, but there were worse days to be sitting in a field doing nothing.


I always like to keep an eye on the dogs. They always disappear, but at least I know which general direction they were heading in ... Holly was very good and never went very far, but this year on our fen walks, she's got much braver and now loves to follow scents and chase wildlife. Her nose isn't as good as Gravel's, but what she lacks in sniff power, she makes up for in the ground she covers. She put up a few hares. There seems to be a large number about this year and they will stay low and still until the last minute when they dash away. Often the dog will charge past and not even see them. They like to get on some open. level ground for maximum speed and a few times this year, the dogs have put up hares in front of me which have then run off down the farm track in my direction. If you stand to one side and keep very still, they will run right past you. A Springer Spaniel hasn't got a hope of catching a fit hare, but that doesn't stop them trying. It's quite funny seeing Holly chase them. She's faster than Gravel and really thinks she has a chance, but the hare is almost twice as fast. It's like Usain Bolt running in an English club meeting.


Since late spring, I've been avoiding parts of the walk or keeping the dogs on lead because there have been lapwings nesting on a couple of the fallow fields alongside the path. We saw the adult birds flying around at nesting time in late winter and counted up to a dozen of them. They are a very distinctive bird with wailing cry and black, paddle-shaped wings. In late winter, they were performing amazing aerobatics (presumably to impress the ladies) and there were a number nesting in a fallow field to the south of Park Farm and further out into the fen.


The young have fledged by July, so I felt happy to let the dogs run. The birds seem to have had a very successful breeding season. They are still about feeding and chilling while the young birds get stronger. Holly ran across their field and put up a massive flock which I estimated at around 70 birds. I didn't count more than 20 birds initially, so that's a good year for them. They make a lot of noise as they all take to the air, but don't seem too put out by the dogs charging across their field. They do a couple of circuits and then land again. I'm pleased to see them even if it has been a nuisance having to keep the dogs leashed.

Cricket and laser shows

Max and I with The Shard behind

I went to the Oval on Thursday night with Tom, Sam, Lucy and Max to watch Surrey v Kent in this year’s Twenty20 competition.

Max and I watched a few Twenty20 games in Nottingham and we’ve also been to Lord’s once to see Middlesex, but the Oval is quite handy for getting to from work and also for Max, so this year we said we’d try to catch a few games. For various reasons it hasn’t worked out as we planned, but we finally made an arrangement to see this game, which is one of the last qualifiers.

It should have been a good game - local derby, some big names playing (including Kevin Pietersen, the England batsman) and Surrey needing to win all their remaining games to stand a chance of qualifying for the final. Surrey won the toss and put Kent into bat and they made a bit of a plodding 137, with some nice shots from Robert Key and some good fast bowling from Steve Finn. Pietersen took three catches, one of them a difficult forward dive.

We thought Surrey would knock off that score quite easily, especially with Pietersen in the batting line-up; in fact, we were a little worried that they wouldn’t need to hit out, they could just nurdle their way home. In fact Surrey were all out for 88 and Pietersen went lbw in the first over while I was getting a round of beers from the bar. It was the lowest all-out score in Twenty20!

So the match finished at around 9.40pm and I said that we should go to watch the opening of The Shard, which is by London Bridge and the tallest building in Europe at just over 1,000 feet. The exterior has just been completed and the occasion was being marked by a laser light show that promised to be quite spectacular. Max loves The Shard and he was up for it and Tom said he’d come along as well. Sam and Lucy weren’t interested, so they walked back to Stockwell for the Victoria Line and we headed for the crowds on the Northern Line.

Our plan was to watch from the north side of London Bridge, but when we got there the crowds were massive. London Bridge was completely blocked with people, so that all the traffic had been stopped and there was a double decker bus trapped in the middle.

There was something pagan about standing there in that massive crowd waiting for the show to start. It was as if we had come to worship the great shard and were waiting for the miracle to begin. It must have been like this at Stonehenge in its heydey - a big crowd moaning: “Is this it? I thought it would be more spectacular” - and someone else saying: “yes, but just wait until the sun rises, it will be fucking amazing!”

Anyway, we were a little underwhelmed by the laser show. Basically, The Shard changed colour several times (which I guess was quite clever) and some lasers flew out of the side and the top, including one that shone on the dome of St Paul’s across the river. The crowd soon got bored and started to drift away and we decided to go as it thinned out. Tom headed north for Bank and we went south to Borough High Street to miss the worst of the crowds.

London Bridge is packed with people - the bus is
stranded for over 45 minutes.

Visiting the past

A few weeks ago, I was doing some family tree research and discovered that my great-grandfather's youngest brother Harry Mitchell had been living in London in 1901.

It was quite exciting to see that the address he'd been living at in St Panras was still there and I thought I'd pop along one day to take a look.

So today, by chance, my colleague Laura Jones and I had a meeting at Johnston Press which has a new office in Charlotte Street. My ancestor's address was just down the road, so I wandered down there with Laura after the meeting to take a look.

The house was 18 Colville Place and Harry was living there at the time of the 1901 census as a 20-year-old with his uncle Samuel Peck (57), his aunt Anna (56), cousin James (23) and cousin Amelia (16). Harry had come from Hales in Norfolk and was clearly trying his luck in London. His job was listed as an agricultural labourer and London must have seemed a massive, smokey place after living in a small Norfolk village.

His uncle was a self-employed plumber and his cousin was also a plumber. Perhaps Harry had been promised some training and to join the firm? 

There were three other people living in the house as lodgers - Bruce Miller (a musician), Joseph Dronet (a hotel porter) and Ulrich Bergamim, who was described as a hotel worker/porter (I wouldn't trust the spelling of that name). Bruce was American, Joseph was from France and Ulrich from Switzerland. It was clearly very cosmopolitan and must have seemed very exotic to a young agricultural labourer from rural Norfolk (and it doesn't get much more rural than Hales - even in 2012).

Today the street is a very pleasant mews property. No 18 is an end-terrace and it looks as if part of the street has been demolished and a small park/play area created next door. You can still see the chimney place of the next house, so it clearly didn't start off as an end-terrace. There's every chance that the rest of the street was demolished after bomb damage in the Second World War. We're lucky that No 18 survived.

By chance, the house had a sold sign on it from Hudsons estate agents. I looked on the site and the asking price was £1,850,000! It is described as a traditional terraced mews house with four bedrooms and five floors (including a cellar). I wonder what Harry Mitchell would think about his old lodgings changing hands for £1.8 million?

I took the street shot (top) on my Blackberry phone and Laura took the one of me in front of the house.

Next week, I'm on holiday and I'm hoping to visit some of the homes in Norfolk where the Mitchell family lived. I also have some Norfolk relatives on my mother's side and I have one or two addresses from their past too.