I do not intend to bore readers with a daily Post on my blog for the next 40 days; I do not believe my imagination and literary skills are up to that yet. Some days I shall spend my hour planning and editing. This is a learning curve in more ways than one!
Today I am going to cut and paste an article I produced for Oswestry Speakers' Corner to present as my first 'evaluated' Speech. It was truly a big challenge for me to stand up in front of an audience and deliver something about myself. It seems appropriate to use it as a 'cut and paste' exercise for my first Lent blog.
Preface to my ‘Getting Started’ presentation.
Attached is a presentation I made as my introduction to the Oswestry Speakers’ Group. The instruction was that the talk should last between 6 to 8 minutes and it is recommended that the ‘first’ one should tell the Group a little about who you are and where you come from. The research I did for it has given me a whole new understanding of the Mrs Swinnertons of my branch of the family over the past one hundred years. Everyone of them in their different ways a marvellous, individual inspiration to her Swinnerton husband; my mother Helen Patricia Swinnerton (nee Rowley) died in September 2008, the last of the line. Each one played an important role in the family business which was founded in 1866.
Mabel Florence Swinnerton (nee Corbin)
Born Salisbury Wiltshire 1875 – Died Stoke-on-Trent Staffordshire 1929
The family myth was always that Flo’ was my ‘French’ Great Grandmother. However, the 1891 census shows her parents as both having been born in Southampton. We cannot find any trace of them as yet on earlier censuses and we have much more research to do to find the family origins prior to this date but there are very many Corbins in that part of the country and little evidence of any French connection in this particular branch. Her father was a plasterer and we believe may well have done very well in the trade as Salisbury was developing quickly at that time. The earliest document we have is Flo’s christening, extract from Fisherton Anger, Salisbury. The church sadly has been demolished.
She was married to my Great Grandfather (the ‘& Son’ in the Trading name of F Swinnerton & Son Ltd) in Llandudno on Sept 28 1898. On the marriage record her father is shown as ‘Gentleman’. The local Llandudno weekly paper (which we found in the library) reads as follows:-
Wedding
Mr Frank Swinnerton – Miss Mabel Florence Corbin
The wedding took place on Wednesday morning, at Llanrhos Church, of Mr Frank Swinnerton, of Hanley, Staffordshire, to Miss Mabel Florence, youngest daughter of Mr and Mrs Joseph Corbin , Salisbury Wiltshire, and sister of the Misses J. & L Corbin Upper Mostyn Street Llandudno. The bride looked extremely well, costumed in a maize and white silk dress, trimmed with beaver velvet, with a white felt hat to match, upon which were tastefully arranged, beaver feathers and old Irish point lace. She was attended by Miss Viola Corbin, her niece, as bridesmaid, who was robed in white silk, and she was given away by her eldest sister, Miss Corbin, Mr George Swinnerton, brother of the bridegroom, acted as best man.
Mr and Mrs Swinnerton left by an afternoon train for London en route for Brighton, where the honeymoon will be spent.
The presents were of a handsome and costly character.
My talk:
GETTING STARTED
Back To The Future
Madam Chairman, Ladies & Gentlemen last week I found myself going back to the future. Let me explain ..
The title is taken of course, from the film Back to the Future starring Michael J Fox, whose book, Always Looking Up, I finished last week and about which I would love to talk maybe next time ... But for tonight, the theme centres round me.
I am the link between the past and the future.
I am the present, Flo’ my Great Granny is the past
and Joel my Grandson is the future.
He is 19 months old and last week he came to join Charlie and me in Rhosneigr Anglesey. His first visit to the seaside and the beach; a new world of new experiences.
But that beach is so familiar to me that I can walk to the rocks that edge the Boat Pool when the tide is out and my feet some 55 years on, still fall automatically to the footholds that take me steadily and unwobbling to the grassy mound at the top. So very comforting and reassuring.
I spent long summer months of my childhood at my Grandparents home here on the beach. It had a damp, downstairs bathroom , big sash-corded windows which rattled constantly. Everything was covered with a layer of sand.
But why did my Grandparents come here?
Because my Grandfather spent HIS childhood holidays here too!
Let me take you back now, to the past; about a hundred years ago to 1910, before the First World War.
Florence came to Rhosneigr with her husband Francis Swinnerton and her children
my Grandfather, born in 1900, and his younger sister Mabel to stay at the hotel by the big fresh water lake at the back of the village. It was Mabel who told this to me and I owe her SO much in the way of interesting family memories.
They travelled by train from Stoke-on-Trent to Ty Croes, the last stop in those days, on the Crewe to Holyhead line. A pony and trap brought them the last few miles to Rhosneigr.
My Great Grandfather came to fish in the lake, he had no interest in the sea.
But I like to imagine Flo’, exploring the sand dunes which surround the hotel even today, and finding the huge wild empty beach which falls away below them. The sea rolls free here to the horizon and beyond to the coast of America.
Mabel told me that Flo’ went through numerous pregnancies but only she & her brother, Francis were born alive. She had a weak heart all her life. It would seem I have Flo’ to thank for my inherited high blood pressure. Eclampsia (then undiscovered) killed her babies, as it threatened mine. Mabel remembered her cutting the loaf of bread for tea on her ‘bump’.
By 1927, 17 years on, the war long over, and the Second World War not yet looming, the family are pictured in the photograph album in a house in the village. My Grandfather and his pretty wife, Muriel. There is Mabel in her daring riding jodhpurs.
But Flo is standing looking at two year old Grandson Frankie, my father, with a look on her face of contentment and pride which I identify with completely.
It is no surprise, that the album is filled with pictures of Frankie from about the age of 2 to his mid 40s in Rhosneigr. He loved it – the sea, the boats, the fishing and childhood freedom.
In about 1935 Flo’s son (all the men in my family are called Francis shortened to Frank, which make the generations difficult to separate) came home to Stoke-on-Trent to tell his wife, Muriel and excited little Frankie, my father, that he had bought a house in Rhosneigr. When my Granny got there to see it, she burst into tears – she had envisaged a pretty white washed sea side cottage. Instead there was this huge towering monster of a Victorian Semi detached house with no electricity and no bathroom. They modernised it.
I still remember the 1930s pink frosted glass lampshades. And of course the smelly damp bathroom.
She grew to love it and spent the war years there.
My father Frankie, when he left Wrekin College, was recorded as living in Wales and was called up as an 18 year old and commissioned into the Welsh Guards. He served in Italy to the end of the war.
Which brings me back to my family. In 1948 Frank married Helen and brought her with her new baby in 1949 to the beach in Rhosneigr. Where I holidayed regularly through my childhood, till they sold up and went to live in Malta in 1968.
I returned two or three times in 1971 and 72 to stay with my cousins next door but for more than 35 years I did not go back. My children discovered their seaside in the Isle of Man where Frank & Helen moved to in 1974.
Last weekend Suzi, my daughter, joined us in Rhosneigr for her first visit as a 31 year old, with her husband James and ...
Joel.
He took his first paddle in the sea, fell flat on his face in it, got up and laughed and stepped happily over the waves, oblivious to the fact that he stood in the footsteps of 5 generations of his forebears.
Will he take his grandchildren there I wonder . . .and how different will it be from the place Florence knew?
But That will be his present and I will be back in the past.
