IN SEARCH OF MY FATHER

Why did your father sing the Maurice Chevalier number ‘Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise’ to annoy your mother? Although your mother’s ancestry was traced back to the early 1600s, why didn’t you know anything about your father’s family?

You certainly couldn’t ask him; he was an army officer and when he said ‘jump’, you jumped. Driving lessons from him certainly proved to be a memorable experience, if for all the wrong reasons.

Even after he died, your mother told you that there was a lot you didn’t know about your father – and much you certainly didn’t need to know! She didn’t, however, enlighten you about anything.

Sally Mabey, the guest speaker at the May 2019 Cowbridge U3A History group’s meeting, told the audience that, out of sensitivity, she waited until her mother had died (at the age of 100) before engaging in the search for her father’s family history.

Sally did know her father had been born in Hull and the family surname of Friis certainly helped in her quest for information. Her father had been born in 1884, the youngest of 13 children. His father, originally a sailor, had come to England from Denmark and started a successful business which had financed the purchase of a large house. Through her research, Sally made contact with previously unknown cousins, who were able to provide photographs of her paternal grandparents and also her father as a 2 year old child (‘rather ugly, but he grew up to be handsome’), together with additional family history. For example, the Danish side was related to both the real-life Rosencrantz and Guildenstern families (the names weren’t just inventions of Shakespeare in Hamlet).

A sad story was that four of her father’s siblings had died of scarlet fever within a month of each other in 1881.

As for his army career, her father had been in the 9th Lancers for 12 years and, after leaving, became a telegraphist.

He rejoined the army in WWI, eventually being commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1918. He became a career soldier after the war.

The reason that the name Louise annoyed her mother also became clear; that was the name of her father’s first wife, who had been 15 years older than him when they married. There had been no children from the union, so Sally had no half brothers or sisters.

Somehow, her father had arranged for Sally to be christened by William Temple, when he was Archbishop of York; he would become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942.

Sally’s concluding advice was not to believe family stories unless they could be verified and, preferably, not to start researching your family history in the first place, as it became far too addictive.

Steve Monaghan