Piece By Piece A Genealogical Jigsaw 2h6o3

To the memory of my beloved parents, John and Jennie Lewis and for the progeny of Frederick and Louise for all time

Published March 2015

Everything hidden will be revealed and everything secret will be brought out into the light

Mark 4:22

AUTHOR’S NOTE

What follows is a true of a search for the truth made (before the advent of the internet) by my late husband, Bob, and myself. We instigated it in order for me to keep faith with my father by solving a life-long mystery surrounding the birth of his mother. It took us more than ten years of painstaking, spare-time work to complete our quest, but our patience was more than rewarded when at last we discovered the staggering truth.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am especially indebted to my late husband, Bob, who made the research possible and assisted me with much of it, and to my late sister, Jennifer Harraway, for her never-failing encouragement. To the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, the Welsh Folk Museum at St. Fagans, the late Dr. J.D.K. Lloyd of Montgomery, David Mills, contractor of Llansantffraid, Fru Karen Neiiendam ex-Director of the Danish Theatre History Museum at Copenhagen, and others too numerous to mention, my thanks are also due.

SOURCE REFERENCES

[1] Births. Sub-district of Llansantffraid. 1884 Entry No. 350

[2] Marriages. District of Atcham. 1881 Entry No.68

[3] Extract from the ‘Shrewsbury Chronicle’. Issue 28 th January 1881

[4] Extract from ‘The Montgomeryshire Collections’. Volume 4 Page 129

[5] Llansantffraid church baptisms. 1851 Page 33. Entry No. 262. 14 th March 1994

[6] Cutting from national newspaper ‘Today’ issue 29 th December

[7] Probate Registry 1891. Entry page 322. Lewis – Elizabeth. Personal Estate

[8] Population Census 1851. Llansantffraid-ym-Mechain. Page 6. No.26 and extract of Ann Wynn’s baptism 1809 (she was 42, not 37 in 1851)

[9] Population Census 1851. Llansantffraid - Trederwen, No.22

[10] Population Census 1861. Llansantffraid – Schedule 48 Llanerchelli

[11] Population Census 1861. Llansantffraid - Schedule 32. Village (Eagle Inn)

[12] Population Census 1871. Llansantffraid Pool.Schedule 40.Village Eagle Inn

[13] Population Census 1871. Llansantffraid Pool.Schedule 40.Village Eagle Inn

[14] Extract from ‘Montgomeryshire Express’ issue 10 th July 1888 Quarter Sessions

[15] Extract from ‘Montgomeryshire Express issue 23 rd Oct.1888 Quarter Sessions

[16] Extract from ‘Montgomeryshire Express’ issue 9 th Oct. 1888 (the weather)

[17] ‘Christian IX’ by Hans Roger Madol – published 1939. Pages 58-59

[18] ‘Scenes & Memories’ by Walburga , Lady Paget. Copenhagen. Page 113

CHAPTER ONE

Background and the early pieces

Throughout the whole of his adult life, my father, John Thomas Lewis, wanted nothing as much as to find his maternal kin. Orphaned at the tender age of six, he and his eight-year-old sister, Elizabeth Ann, were removed from the rural beauty of their native Montgomeryshire to the grime and pollution of the industrial Midlands where, to their dismay, they found they were to be reared several miles apart from one another.

Elizabeth Ann was lucky in that her foster-parents, Harriet Stamp and her husband, had no children of their own, so that she was made much of by them and, as far as I know, was relatively content. My father, on the other hand, was made to feel an intruder in the home of Harriet Stamp’s sister, Lizzie Williams and her husband, who already had a number of children of their own. His sense of isolation was further increased by the fact that he and they had difficulty in understanding one another. This might have been due simply to the difference in their dialects, but it is also possible that my father’s first language was Welsh. Due, no doubt, to the traumas they had experienced, neither my father nor his sister retained many memories of their life in Wales. Even Elizabeth Ann, the elder of the two, seemed only to recall the time when she was lifted onto a chair near a window to watch their father’s coffin carried past. My father could not even this, though he did have other, less specific, memories, such as being taken to a water meadow to collect reeds, which, my brother suggested, would probably have been dipped into tallow or mutton fat to produce a cheaper light than that from a halfpenny candle. My father also recalled sitting on some kind of seat - probably a flat gravestone in a churchyard and wondering how long it would be before his little legs had grown sufficiently to reach the ground, while the lady he was with - perhaps his mother? - was crying. He ed, too, the excitement he had felt at the prospect of a long journey in a carriage and his disappointment on being made to travel all the way with the blinds pulled down. I always assumed, when he spoke of it, that this had been a horse-drawn carriage, but now I rather think he might have been referring to the railway carriage in which he and his sister were conveyed to Birmingham.

As soon as they arrived, they were told that Elizabeth Ann was henceforth to be known as ‘Lily’ and that John would now be known as ‘Jack’. He was so devastated at being parted from his big sister that not even the prospect of his first tram ride could console him, especially as he was forbidden to look out of the window. But worse was to come for, on arrival at his foster home in Spon Lane - at that time a most insalubrious part of West Bromwich he was kept indoors for such a very long time that he began to fear that he would never be allowed outside again. Naturally, his foster-brothers and -sisters addressed their parents as ‘mummy and daddy’, whereas he was told to call them ‘auntie and uncle’, so that, as he grew up, he began to ask himself – and anyone else who would listen - who and where were his mummy and daddy? Consequently, it could well have been a search for love and affection that led him to spend much of his time at the home of his foster-father’s brother, William Williams and his wife. As a young boy, John (as she always insisted on calling him) would run errands for this other “aunt”, and be delighted to do whatever she asked of him, and as he grew older, they would spend long hours talking together and ‘putting the world to rights’. She and her husband had only one child, a daughter, Annie, and so this other “aunt” gradually came to look upon him as the son she never had. How long after my father’s arrival his foster parents’ fortunes improved, I do not know, but improve they certainly did, for they moved to a much larger property in Beeches Road, a favoured residential area of West Bromwich, where they hired a servant girl to help in the house. The education he received was basic. Despite acquitting himself well at school and being eager to learn, he was not allowed to continue with his studies, but at fourteen was set to work making colliery balances at Salter’s weighing machine factory. He became a very keen sportsman and gymnast, initiating the movement which led to the formation of the West Bromwich Cricket League and becoming instructor of three gymnastic clubs at one and the same time. Physically, therefore, he was extremely strong, but the work he was engaged upon, making colliery balances, entailed lifting very heavy weights all day long, so that, after a

twelve- or fourteen-hour shift, even he succumbed to weariness.

One evening, after a particularly strenuous day, he had occasion to call upon his other “aunt”, who must have noticed how tired he looked, for she turned to him and said: ‘Never mind, John. There are some people looking for you and, when they find you, you’ll never have to work again’. Of course, he asked her, then and on several other occasions, what she had meant by that statement, but she would never be drawn further. His spiritual education was not neglected, for he was sent regularly to Sunday School and services at the non-conformist Ebenezer Church, where he later took an active part in church affairs and taught in Sunday School. And it was in the church that he met the love of his life: Jennie Maria Postlethwaite.

Jennie was eighteen at the time and a chorister. Whenever large, choral works were to be performed in the church – as they often were in those days, for anniversaries and the like - professional soloists would be hired from Birmingham for the alto, tenor, bass and baritone parts, but Jennie always took the soprano lead. An excellent musician, member of a mandolin band, attractive and intelligent, she was the apple of her father’s eye. I suspect that Harry Postelthwaite would have been just as discouraging to any man who had come courting his lovely Jennie, but Jack became convinced that the antagonism he found in him was occasioned by his own lack of family and questionable background, and this, of course, intensified his desire to discover his roots and some kin of his own. Upon his coming of age in 1905, he and his sister Lily were utterly amazed to receive one hundred pounds each, (a considerable sum in those days, when best house coal cost around eight old pence a hundredweight) and Jack wisely invested his in property. Neither of them could ever find out where the money had come from, but as it had been made over to them by a solicitor, they assumed that someone must have bequeathed it to them. It seems incredible to us, now, that they did not demand more information, but we came to understand, during our research, how very different life was then: the majority of people were brought up to accept whatever befell them, good or bad, and certainly not to question their ‘betters’, as solicitors and anyone in a professional capacity was deemed to be. On Jack’s coming of age, too, their foster-mothers, Harriet Stamp and Lizzie Williams, also received a lump sum each from the solicitor, though as to the amount and to whether they were aware of the source, my father never knew, but the Williamses threw a large party to celebrate. Naturally, Jack invited Jennie to attend and, after a great deal of pleading with her father, she was allowed to do so, but only on condition that Jack escorted her home - by half past nine! Eventually, and probably as a result of his increased curiosity about his parentage, Jack was given his birth certificate¹ together with a photograph of each of his parents, a gold watch and chain, a policeman’s notebook, a telescope and a sword disguised as a walking stick, all of which, he was told, had belonged to his father.

From his birth certificate, he learned that he had been born in Llansantffraid-ymmechain in North Wales. He also learned that his father had been a police constable by the name of Owen Lewis and that his mother had been Elizabeth Lewis, nee Wynn, which meant that he could, at last, prove to Jennie’s father that he was not illegitimate, a terrible stigma at that time.

In addition he discovered that he had been born in an inn and he therefore assumed that his father had been an innkeeper. Consequently, when he was later told that his father had been a lay preacher, he would proudly state that he had been a policeman, a publican and a preacher - an alliteration that I suspect appealed to his Celtic lyricism! I do not know whether he was told, or whether he retained some vague memory of it, but he used to tell us that he and his sister once had an older brother, who had slipped at the graveside at their father’s burial, fallen onto the coffin and sustained injuries from which he had died. Neither he nor his sister had any recollection as to what the name of this brother had been and, although Jack, in particular, made many attempts to speak with his foster-parents about him, he was always met with the same dusty answers as he had received whenever he questioned them regarding any aspect of his life in Wales. On August Bank Holiday Monday 1910, Jack and Jennie were married. He was twenty-six at the time and his bride was twenty-three, and less than two years later, on 4th. April 1912, their first child, my brother (John) Owen, was born.

In view of the fact that Jack now had a family of his own, one might imagine that his burning desire to find his roots would have been lessened, but on the contrary, they now became even more urgent, for while his little son had grandparents and relatives in plenty from his mother’s side, all Jack could offer from his own side was his sister, Lily, who now had a husband, Harold Everett, and a two-year old daughter, Elsie. Eventually and, I now suspect, in the hope that it might satisfy this need in him, he was given a piece of paper on which was hand-written:

“Mr. John Lewis “Ty-Ucha” Bwlch-y-cibeau Montgomeryshire”

and was told that this was his uncle, his father’s eldest brother. Here at last was what he had been longing for ever since his arrival in Birmingham: relatives of his own and a link with his parents. He was overjoyed. Surely, he thought, through this uncle he and his sister would be reunited with all their family. His first instinct was to catch a train to Bwlch-y-cibeau right away, but it crossed his mind as to why this uncle had not ed them before and he felt a little uneasy as to how he would receive them after all this time. It was therefore decided that Jennie and young Owen should stay with Lily for the weekend, while he and Lily’s husband travelled to North Wales to make the first . He need not have worried, for they welcomed him and Harold with open arms and he was thrilled to discover that his uncle had children, who were, of course, his first cousins - all seven of them. Moreover, Uncle John had sisters still alive, too; one in Liverpool and one in Shrewsbury. These were his real aunts and

when he was told that both were eager to meet him and Lily, his joy knew no bounds. Meanwhile, back at Lily’s home in Smethwick, Jennie and Lily chatted animatedly about this new turn of events. Lily’s foster-mother, “aunt” Harriet Stamp - who, now old and widowed, shared a home with Lily and Harold - sat in silence, listening to their talk. Soon after they had started tea on the Saturday, Jennie turned to Lily and said: ‘Now that Jack has found your father’s people, he’s determined to find your mother’s people, too’ - an inoffensive enough remark, one would have thought, but it caused “aunt” Harriet suddenly to choke on her tea. ‘He mustn’t’, she spluttered agitatedly, ‘He mustn’t do anything of the kind. They’re big people. They don’t want to know the likes of you’. Jennie was completely taken aback, for she knew that Harriet was well aware that her father had his own decorating business and a retail shop besides, so that Jennie had never been sent out to work. It was true that she considered herself to be the poor relation as far as some of her extended family were concerned, for they had larger houses and servants to wait upon them, but they had never made her feel inferior, as Harriet Stamp had now. ‘Promise me’, Harriet was screaming hysterically, ‘that you won’t let him do it. Promise me. Promise. You’ve got to promise’, and so agitated did she become that Jennie feared she would have a seizure. Together with Lily, she tried desperately to calm her down, but the old lady would not be pacified until Jennie had promised that she would tell Jack that he must leave well alone. She did tell him, of course, on his return, but as he had received no satisfactory answers from his uncle regarding his mother’s kin, it served only to heighten his curiosity and make the enigma even more intriguing. As soon after this as time and money would allow, Jack and Jennie left their young son with Jennie’s parents for a weekend, while they travelled to Bwch-ycibeau, where Jack proudly introduced his wife to his new uncle and cousins. “Ty-Ucha”, where Uncle John lived, was a farm and, as he had already set up several of his children in farms of their own, there were plenty of places for Jack and Jennie to visit and lots of people for Jennie to meet. The softly-rolling countryside of Montgomeryshire was such a welcome contrast to the bricks and

mortar of the Black Country that, on the Sunday morning, “the two Jays”, as they were often called, decided to take a long walk over the hills, but after walking for quite a long time, they realised with some concern that they were lost. As luck would have it, however, they spotted an isolated cottage and, on making their way towards it, discovered an old man, taking the air in his garden. After ing the time of day, they asked if he would kindly direct them back to “TyUcha”. He looked at them questioningly. ‘You’re not from around these parts’, he said. ‘Well, I am and I’m not’, my father replied, proud of his new-found identity. ‘I don’t live here now, it’s true, but I’m a Lewis and I was born in Wales.’ ‘Related to John Lewis of “Ty-ucha” then, are you?’ he enquired, and when John replied that he was, he began questioning him as to which branch of the family he belonged. He seemed to know them all, but eventually, still at a loss, he asked ‘Then who might your parents have been?’ As soon as Jack mentioned their names, the old man’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Then you are the young squire’, he said, his voice faltering and, wiping his hand down his Sunday suit, he turned to him again ‘Would you shake hands with me?’ he asked. As might be imagined, Jack and Jennie were flabbergasted - and not a little embarrassed. ‘I’ll shake hands with you and gladly’, Jack replied when he had recovered his breath, ‘but I’m afraid you’ve got it all wrong. I’m no squire. I work in a Birmingham factory for my living.’ ‘It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing’, the old man insisted, ‘Your grandmother was youngest daughter to the great Wynns of Oswestry. You must go to them’, he urged, ‘They’d be right glad to know you’, and he went on to tell them how, as a boy of eight, he had ridden with his father on a cart to attend her wedding breakfast. Anyone who had travelled more than a certain distance, he told them, could sit and partake of the huge feast, and there were hundreds upon hundreds there. Jack and Jennie listened in amazement, but at length, having received the directions they required, they thanked him and went on their way.

Although both my mother and father recalled that encounter many times at the request of us children, I suspect that, at the time, they must both have taken the old man’s story with a pinch of salt, or else they would have questioned him further as to names, dates and other details. For my part, while I had no doubt whatsoever that it had happened exactly as my parents reported it, I am afraid I came to the conclusion that the old man had been in his dotage. Even as a child, I had attended several wedding breakfasts and all had been by invitation only. I could not imagine that gentry would have allowed any Tom, Dick or Harry to dine at their board. As far as I know, this was the first time that my father had heard tell of the illustrious Williams Wynn family and certainly the first suggestion he had heard of a link between them and himself - but it was not to be the last. Having no car and working long hours to wife and family, he had not the time, means or opportunity for research that we later had, but almost every path he took in that pursuit led him back to that same family - and, of course, the one advantage he did have was that he was working within living memory, whereas by the time we came to search, all direct s had already ed away. On his very first visit to “Ty-Ucha”, he had questioned his Uncle John regarding the whereabouts of his mother’s kin, and later, when he met his Lewis aunts at Liverpool and at Red Barn Farm, Shrewsbury, he questioned them too, but his enquiries were always met with platitudes, such as: ‘They came from over the hill’ or ‘They came from the Powys marches’. His aunt at Shrewsbury did once tell him, though, that as soon as she heard that he and his sister had been orphaned, she went straight to their home with the intention of taking them back to Shrewsbury with her and rearing them herself. She had been horrified to find them gone and on learning from neighbours that some ladies with Birmingham accents had taken them, she caught a train to that city and tramped the streets for days, asking after them of everyone she met. Jack and Jennie and their growing family (in 1913, John Owen had been ed by Norman Wynn and, in 1916, by their first daughter, Aubra Mabel), spent many a happy holiday at “Ty-Ucha” and later at the farms of Jack’s cousins also, but neither Jack nor Jennie, nor any of their children as they grew up, could ever glean from them any information about Jack’s mother’s family. Once, however, when Jack was spending a few days in Montgomery town at the

invitation of a Mr. Richard Roberts, a grocer who had been introduced to him in West Bromwich as a friend of his foster-parents, he fell into conversation with a lady, a customer in Mr. Roberts’ shop. As soon as he told her his name, she became very excited and told him that she used to bounce him upon her knee when he was young and call him her ‘little Welsh dumpling’, because he was so chubby and rounded. ‘Then you must have known my mother’, Jack turned to her excitedly, ‘Oh, yes’, she replied, ‘I Mrs. Lewis very well. She was a lovely lady with beautiful hair. Everyone used to remark upon it. Deep gold, it was, like the waving corn’. Jack felt as if his head would burst with all the questions he wanted to ask her, but suddenly his host intervened and, grabbing his arm, led him hurriedly away to his pony and trap saying that unless they left right away he would miss his train back to Birmingham. On their way to the station, Jack enquired as to whether his host knew the lady’s name or, better still, her address, as he wished to continue their conversation by post, but he replied that he had no idea who she was. Naturally, Jack asked him if he would keep an eye open for her and, if he saw her again, give her his address. Richard Roberts promised to do so, but when Jack made enquiries of him later, he told him he had never been able to trace her. Owing to his lack of other facilities, such as time and a car, much of my father’s research was carried out by post, and it was, I believe, the replies to these enquiries that led him again and again to the Williams Wynn family. In fact, he eventually considered the evidence to be so strong that he wrote letters of enquiry directly to one or two of that great family but, sadly, the copies of the letters he sent and all the replies he received, which he kept in a polished mahogany box with a secret drawer, were destroyed - box and all - together with a great quantity of other family papers, by our brother, Norman, soon after our father had died. I know that he did it to save the rest of us all the grief and pain that he had felt on reading some of it, but oh, how I wish that he had left us to suffer! It was just prior to the birth of this same brother, Norman Wynn, that one Monday morning, while Jennie was busy doing the washing, she opened the door to a maid servant of the “aunt” of whom Jack was so fond. She had brought a message from her mistress to the effect that she wished to see Jennie as soon as possible. Like Jack, Jennie had become very fond of this “aunt” and she knew she would not have sent for her if it had not been urgent, so leaving her washing

and taking young Owen with her, she went straight away on the tram to her home, where she was upset to discover that the old lady was ill and had taken to her bed. Jennie asked if there was something she could do to help her, but she replied that she had all she needed and was being well taken care of by her doctor and servants. She went on to say that she knew she would not get well again, but that Jennie and John were not to grieve for her; she had made her peace with God and what she wished to do now was to put her other affairs in order and that was the reason she had sent for her. On the previous evening, she continued, her lawyer, Mr. Foley Bache, had called upon her after chapel and together they had drawn up her will. She held a considerable amount of money in her own right, she went on to explain, which had been left to her by her father, who had been a farmer. ‘And so I wanted you to know’, she said, ‘that I have left a sizeable legacy to you and John - and little Owen there will be all right, too’. The remainder of her estate, she added, she had left to her only child, Annie (who by now was married to a man named Isaac Hadley). She went on to explain, however, that none of the legacies would be payable until after the death of her husband, William. Until then, her estate would be held in trust, so that some of the interest could be used for his needs. Before Jennie left, the old lady expressed a wish to see John on his return from work and, when he went to her, she confirmed to him, everything that she had said to Jennie. As she had foretold, she died soon afterwards and, in spite of her request that they should not grieve, Jack and Jennie mourned her loss, for they had loved her dearly. They had half-expected, on attending the funeral, to be invited to hear her will read, but when they were not, they assumed that it was because they were not entitled to receive their legacy yet and so they thought no more about it. It was ten years later that William Williams died, but again Jack and Jennie heard nothing about a will, either of his or his late wife’s making. At this time, at Salter’s, Jack was working quite close to their son-in-law, Isaac Hadley. Jack had been a witness at his marriage to Annie Williams and the two were quite friendly. One day, soon after William’s funeral, Isaac Hadley returned

from lunch in a state of some excitement.’ Annie was sorting out some of her father’s clothes this morning’, he said to Jack, ‘And what do you think? She found a will made by her mother. It was in the pocket of his old alpaca jacket’. Although Isaac had not said that it contained any reference to Jack and Jennie, they naturally hoped that this would turn out to be the will of which “aunt” had spoken and they waited patiently to hear from her solicitor - but nothing came. Some weeks later, Isaac informed Jack that no will had ever been proved for his mother-in-law, but that under the of the will she had found in her father’s alpaca jacket, Annie had been entitled to the rents from a row of property in Beale Street, West Bromwich, which she should have been receiving over the past ten years. He added that she intended to sue Foley Bache the solicitor for it and for concealing her mother’s will. Still no mention was made by Isaac of the promised legacy for Jack and Jennie and their young son and so they could only assume that the will Annie had found must have been an earlier one. They were puzzled as to what had become of the later one, for they had no doubt whatsoever that “aunt” had made it, just as she had said. She had been a good living, God-fearing lady, who had no reason to lie to them, especially on her deathbed. But if, as Isaac had said, no will of hers had been proved, then there was nothing they could do about it. They had no copy and there had been no witnesses. Besides, it would not have been in the nature of either of them to fight over such a thing. In the event, it did not prove necessary for Annie to sue Foley Bache, for, according to Isaac, they settled out of court, the solicitor paying her around £600. Soon after this, Foley Bache met his death under a train. Few were staggered more by this news than the employees of Salter’s Spring Balance Company, for Foley had been a member of the family who owned that company. Following the inquest, a notice was displayed in Salter’s factory, stating that a verdict of accidental death (or it may have been misadventure, I cannot now ) had been recorded on the death of Mr. Foley Bache. According to my father, that notice was displayed most prominently on the notice board nearest to where Jack and Isaac worked and Jack later came to look upon this as significant. Prior to this affair, there had been several other incidents that had gradually led

Jack to suspect that someone was keeping a watching brief over him; a sort of umbrella, under which he was allowed to survive, but not to thrive and under which there also existed a conspiracy of silence to prevent him from discovering his maternal roots. He could not begin to imagine who might have raised such an umbrella, nor why, for he had never knowingly done anything to upset anyone, but he began to suspect that it was being held in place by Freemasonry. Now, of course, he saw the intervention of a member of the Bache family in the will episode as further proof of that umbrella, in that once again he had been prevented from obtaining more money than was sufficient to keep his wife and family decently housed and fed. Whether he was right in this assumption will be judged more fairly by the reader when all the facts are revealed, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the same family were later instrumental in engineering his financial ruin, though whether this was for the reasons my father suspected or purely for industrial gain and monopoly is open to conjecture. Whatever their motives, the results were poverty and near starvation for us all. Always ambitious, clever and inventive, Jack had worked into the early hours, night after night, devising, developing and perfecting a device to zero the pointer on spring weighing machines, which would allow the manufacturer to preengrave the dials and thus mass-produce them. Had he been employed by Salter’s in a design capacity, then his invention would, presumably, have belonged to his employers, but although he had applied for promotion each time a suitable vacancy had occurred, he had never been allowed to advance beyond the workbench. Consequently, as all the work upon his invention had been carried out entirely in his own time, at his own expense and on his own premises, he felt under no obligation to offer them any kind of option on it. Instead, he took out a provisional patent and entered into a partnership with a William A. Rabbage, a man who professed to know all about selling, an area of industry of which my father had no experience. He then sold the house in which we lived and, in the year in which the last of their children, Jennifer Margaret, had been born, he moved us all to Malmesbury in Wiltshire, where he set up a factory to manufacture “Vicka-Lewis” spring balances.

At first, everything appeared to be going fine. As agreed between them, my father concentrated upon setting up the machinery and overseeing the manufacture of goods, while Rabbage controlled the ordering of parts, marketing and general istration. My brother, Owen, already established in his career in West Bromwich, did not move to Malmesbury with us, but both Norman and Aubra (now aged 21 and 18 respectively) were employed in the “Vicka-Lewis” factory, Norman assembling parts and Aubra engraving dials, so that, as I say, all seemed to be going well. Then, within a few months, my father began to notice that a large number of finished balances appeared to be piling up in the stores, but when he approached Rabbage about it, he assured him that production was simply ahead of schedule and that most of the stockpile would be cleared out to customers within the next few weeks. Bowing to what he assumed to be Rabbage’s superior knowledge in such matters, my father accepted this explanation, but a month or so later, although the pile of balances had lessened somewhat, the stocks of springs and other parts, which Rabbage had bought in, ready for manufacture, had grown to ridiculous proportions and this time, when my father tackled him, he told him to mind his own part of the business. I believe it was at this point that my father began to realise that he had made a mistake in taking Rabbage into partnership though he had yet to discover the extent of his error.

Rabbage had a wife and two daughters at his home in Wolverhampton, but when we all moved to Wiltshire, he left them behind and set up home with his mistress, Fanny Broome, who came from a village near Malmesbury. As soon as his stockpiling had reduced “Vicka-Lewis”‘s resources to a crucial level, he announced to my father that two of Fanny Broome’s relatives were eager to invest some money in “Vicka-Lewis” and he strongly recommended accepting their offer. By now, short of declaring the company bankrupt, he had little option but to agree. From what Rabbage had told him, Jack had assumed that the Broomes would become shareholders, but when they were ready to invest their money, both they and Rabbage insisted that they should be made non-working partners in the company. To be fair, I do not think my father was entirely against this at the time, for he hoped that, with their money at stake, they might vote with him to curb Rabbage’s hitherto reckless spending, but alas, those hopes were soon to be dashed. You see, the Broomes were unsophisticated, country people and Rabbage had presented himself to them as a high-flying city businessman. It was on his advice that they had invested their money in this new company and, in addition, he was associating with their kinswoman, Fanny. Therefore, as they saw it, he was the one most likely to have their best interests at heart. Consequently when, within a very short time of them becoming partners, Rabbage put forward the proposal that, until all the parts in stock had been made up and sold as balances, none of the partners should draw a wage, they ed his proposal and my father was out-voted. All his assets were tied up in the company; he had no other income. Calling to Norman and Aubra to follow him, he walked out of the factory and straight to his solicitor, but he was told by him that, unless he returned and stuck it out, he stood to lose every penny of his investment. And so the siege began - and there was no Social Security then, . If one could not provide for oneself, one’s only option was to starve or enter a workhouse, an institution looked upon by all with dread. I, their second daughter, was barely seven years old at this time, but even at that tender age, when, day after day, one’s diet consists solely of bread and broad beans (in glut that season) with an occasional rabbit donated by a kindly member

of the Broome family, one does not forget. It leaves its mark. Far more vivid and disturbing to me, though, is the memory of waking in the night to the sounds of my mother’s stifled sobbing. I was too young, then, to understand her difficulties in trying to breast-feed my baby sister on almost a starvation diet. I was also too young, at that time, to appreciate the full extent of my family’s sufferings, but my sister Aubra has told me much of it since; such as the time when our mother roused her and Norman from their beds before daybreak to go in search of our father who, tortured by worry through a sleepless night, had left his bed and wandered off alone. When at last they found him, he was miles from home, broken and beaten by the thought that he had let his family down - that he had failed us. And yet that failure was none of his doing! There was hardly any work available locally, but both Norman and Aubra took the first vacancies that arose. They were at Westonbirt, a high-class school for young ladies, where Norman helped in the kitchens and Aubra waited at table. Both were required to reside there, which eased the food burden at home, and both insisted on giving my parents almost every penny of their meagre earnings. One can only guess what my parents must have felt when they saw their family brought so low that Aubra cried for joy when she found a pair of cast-off sandals in a ditch. It was then that my father sold his gold watch and chain - one of the pathetically few links he had with the parents he had lost so young. In all my life, I never knew him do an unkind deed, nor utter an unkind word, save against those he truly believed had engineered his downfall. To me, he was the epitome of an honest man, sober and God-fearing, his only spur his love for his wife and family and a driving ambition to do well for us all - and oh, how he tried, but, straight as a die himself, he accorded to others the same sense of honour; he trusted those who were not worthy of his trust. Rabbage lived to be over a hundred and three and was already a very old man by the time I felt able to control my emotions sufficiently to call on him and speak of the “Vicka-Lewis” enterprise. Whether age had mellowed him - or whether, as my husband suggested at the time: “at his age, even a confirmed atheist might consider it wise to hedge his bets” - who is to say, but he climbed the stairs into the roof-space of his bungalow and brought down a brass, “Vicka-Lewis” dial. I found it very evocative and when I remarked that it had probably been engraved by my sister, he told me he had others and so I could keep it and he also lent me

a book about Salter’s.

Before I left, he itted to me that, even before we left West Bromwich, the Bache family had been fully aware of my father’s intention to set up a spring balance factory in Wiltshire and he confirmed that they had been instrumental in what later followed. He would not accept my suggestion that it had been he himself who, for financial gain, had made them aware of the project. Instead, he told me that, just before leaving for Wiltshire, he had been away from work ill, and that Miss Mary Bache had called at his home to enquire as to his absence. It so happened, he said, that his garage door had been open at the time and she must have caught sight of the springs and other items he had ordered and was storing there in readiness for the move to Malmesbury. Whether it was usual for Miss Bache to call upon the company’s absentees at their homes, I do not know. And Rabbage did not explain how, simply from a sight of those balance parts, she could have discovered my father’s plans, or even that he was involved in the project. But we shall never learn the truth of it all now. It is understandable, of course, that once they learned of his invention, Salter’s would have wished to obtain the patent for themselves, but why they chose to crush him rather than approach him with an offer to purchase, is open to conjecture. Money is not likely to have been the main consideration, for it must have cost them a considerable sum to ‘buy’ William Rabbage. My parents had sunk the proceeds from the sale of their home, plus every penny of their life-savings, into the “Vicka-Lewis” venture and yet, while we starved, Rabbage picked up money each Monday through the Midland Bank at Malmesbury and every fortnight his orders would be brought to him by a William Paine from Salter’s. We lived in a house ading the factory and, once my parents realised what was happening, my mother swallowed her pride and eavesdropped on the conversations which took place between Paine and Rabbage in the office which abutted one of our bedrooms. She recorded everything she heard in one of the large, Boots diaries, with the idea of using it as evidence against them and the Baches if the matter should ever be brought to court, but my father could never afford to sue them - and they knew it. With the idea that, if he could get them to sue him for libel, he could bring the

whole affair to light in the courtroom, he sent the Baches a great many postcards, openly through the post, accusing them of treachery - but they ignored them all. One of the largest companies with whom “Vicka-Lewis” traded was “Lister’s” of Dursley, for whom they made porcelain-faced milk balances and other agricultural weighing machines.

My father had always found them to be fair and straightforward in their dealings and so, in an effort to foil “Salter’s” when things were at their worst, he had the idea of approaching them with a view to some kind of amalgamation. At first, their reactions were very favourable, but while the finer points were still under discussion, they suddenly abandoned the idea. They gave no explanation, but soon afterwards my father discovered, through a friend, that a member of the Bache family had visited “Lister’s” factory that week. What transpired between them, we shall never know, but my father saw it as possibly the intervention of the masonic brotherhood again and the manipulation of the overshadowing “umbrella”. Eventually, “Salter’s” took over “Vicka-Lewis” and with it, of course, my father’s invention. A small settlement was made, of which I vaguely think my father received something like three hundred pounds. I that, out of it, he repaid the money he had been forced to borrow from my savings bank and my prized Midland Bank money-box, when we had been starving. Whatever the amount he received, it was only a small proportion of his investment and almost nothing in relation to what the potential earnings of the Company had been. He and my mother considered taking a small business of some kind, but before they had found anything suitable, the “Ekco” radio factory was evacuated to Malmesbury and my father was able to find employment there – and actually started their production line rolling. Needless to say, during the terrible “Vicka-Lewis”years he had to set aside all thoughts of attempting to trace his maternal kin, but as soon as he had recovered a little financially, he decided to hire a private detective to search for them. This time, however, war intervened, for the fellow had only been working on the case a very short time when he was called up to serve in the Royal Air Force. Then one evening, around 1944 I think it must have been, I returned home from my work at Lloyds Bank to find that same gentleman waiting to see my father. It transpired that he had been invalided out of the forces and was now seeking to re-establish his detective agency. He had given my father’s case a lot of thought, he said, and wondered whether, if it had not already been solved, he might be allowed to take it up again. He had received his demobilisation pay and some invalidity benefit, too, he explained, and so he would be willing to work on an expenses-only basis initially. His fees would be payable only if and when he solved the case. Needless to say, my father agreed at once and was full of

excitement as to what his enquiries might reveal. ‘I don’t care who my mother’s people turn out to be’, he told the detective, ‘high or low, rich or poor, I just want to know them.’ Within a week or so, he received the first report from the man. ‘It sounds as if he’s hot on the trail’, he told us excitedly after reading it’, but alas, his hopes were destined to be dashed. A short time later, the detective turned up at our home again and told my father that he now realised that the case was ‘too big’ for him to tackle and so he must reluctantly resign the commission. Worse still, he refused to tell my father what he had found that had led him to this decision. Whether he had, in fact found something momentous, or whether he had simply obtained commissions to solve more remunerative cases, who can say? I only know that my poor father was ‘down’ for a long time. And so his burning desire to solve the puzzle of his maternal kin remained and with it now, almost as strong a desire for justice over the Vicka-Lewis affair. It was as a result of the latter that, in February 1947, while he and my mother were visiting my Godmother in Birmingham, the idea came to him to “give himself up” to the police as being indirectly connected with the death of Foley Bache. You see, he firmly believed that Foley Bache had committed suicide. Isaac Hadley and his wife had thought so, too, at the time. They all suspected he had been driven to it by the fear that it might come to light that he had concealed the will of Mrs. William Williams. But of course, whereas Isaac and his wife had in mind the will they had found in Mr. Williams’ alpaca jacket, Jack had in mind the one Isaac and Annie knew nothing about; the one which should have brought him a legacy which, among other things, would have enabled him to intensify the search for his kin. During their stay with my Godmother, then, he reasoned – naively no doubt that if he could convince the police that they should take action against him, then not only that injustice, but also the whole Vicka-Lewis saga, could be brought out in court. At this time, my mother had been suffering from colitis, perhaps due in part to the starvation she had experienced at the hands of Rabbage and the wartime rations which followed, a great deal of her share of which, I suspect, she secretly sacrificed to the rest of us. In fact, life had worn her out with its constant blows, such as losing two young sons, Kenneth and Mervyn Harry, within ten months of

one another, and Owen contracting polio at the age of ten and being unable to walk for three years, to say nothing of the worry, shock and degradation brought upon us all by the Vicka-Lewis affair. It was probably the fear that she would fail in her efforts to dissuade my father from going to the police that now accelerated her colitis, as a result of the complications from which, on the 8th December that same year, she died. Gentle and loving, generous and kind, although small of stature she had been the rock upon which we had all unwittingly leaned, so that every one of us - and especially my father - was staggered by her loss and grieved terribly for her. In his later years, my father more or less shared his life between the homes of us three girls, his daughters, and he would often speak to me of his efforts to unravel the mystery surrounding his mother and his sadness and frustration at not being able to find his maternal kin. It made me think of all the guidance, strength and love we children had always received from him and my mother and I felt desperately sorry that he had been denied such - and yet I felt powerless to help him. Genealogy is a common hobby nowadays and many books are available on the subject, but in those days, I have to it, I had never even heard of the word. I was aware, of course, that one could obtain a copy of one’s birth certificate or marriage lines from the General Office at Somerset House, but my father already had a copy of his birth certificate and I had no idea where to go from there. Then, just by chance, I happened to read somewhere that all such records are open to the public; that one could apply for a copy of any entry - not just one’s own - and so, of course, I sent to them right away for a copy of the entry of the marriage of my grandparents, Owen Lewis and Elizabeth (nee Wynn). We knew that their marriage must have taken place some time before the birth of my father’s sister, in November 1882, and it seemed logical to suppose that it had been solemnised at Llansantffraid, where my father had been born. In fact, it had not, but with both names to go on, the staff at Somerset House were able to find it² and words cannot describe the thrill with which we both read it. There they were: Owen Lewis, bachelor, aged 33, Police Officer of Llansantffraid, his father John Lewis deceased, labourer - and Elizabeth Wynn, spinster aged 30, of 6 Castle Gates, Shrewsbury, and her father John Wynn

deceased, saddler; married 25th. January 1881 at Dogpole Tabernacle, Shrewsbury, by licence. So it all seemed perfectly straightforward: Elizabeth’s father had been a saddler a well-respected trade - and, as no occupation had been stated for Elizabeth, he must, presumably, have left his family adequately provided for. Her home had been in Shrewsbury, rather than Llansantffraid as we had thought, and that is where they had married. As Owen was serving at Llansantffraid at the time of their marriage and my father was born there a few years later, it seemed likely that, following their marriage, the newlyweds had set up home in that village. ‘There doesn’t appear to be anything sinister about my mother’s parentage, after all’, my father turned to me, ‘so why ever wouldn’t Uncle John talk to me about her? She was his sister-in-law after all - and look! – his signature appears here as a witness to their marriage. He might even have been Best Man, for all we know- so he must have known something about her. And yet he would tell me nothing, nor even point me in the direction of Shrewsbury’. I suspect that my father had half-expected to discover that his mother had been illegitimate. Perhaps he even hoped that she had been, for it would have furnished him with some sort of reason as to why, throughout the whole of his life since the age of six, he had met with a wall of silence whenever he had mentioned her name. In fact, the only mystery that we could find on reading and re-reading that certificate, concerned his father’s family rather than his mother’s. If, as stated, Owen’s father had been a humble labourer, how on earth, we asked ourselves, had Owen’s brother, my father’s Uncle John, managed to obtain a farm, set up several of his married children in farms and build a sizeable, detached house to retire into with his three unmarried daughters? ‘Well at least we know, now, that grandmother’s home was in Shrewsbury’, I said, ‘and we can work out, from her age at marriage, the approximate year of her birth, so I suggest we now send off to Somerset House for a copy of her birth certificate. That should tell us where she was born and give us her mother’s name and maiden name as well’. So send I did, with all the information we had assembled, but though the staff at Somerset House searched over a wide area of North Wales and for five years on

either side of the date we had calculated, they could find no record of birth for an Elizabeth Wynn. I would have given a lot to have been able to take up the search seriously then, but I was married with a six-month-old daughter to care for and my husband and I needed every penny to put a home together. I knew that, to further the search for his kin, my father would have given the whole of the meagre amount he and my mother had managed to save since the loss of “Vicka-Lewis”, but neither of us had any idea where to go from there. After a while, the idea came to me to write to a Shrewsbury newspaper, in case they had published a report of Owen and Elizabeth’s marriage. I thought it rather a long-shot, but we were in luck! It read:

“Lewis - Wynn. January 25th at the Tabernacle Church, Dogpole, in this town, by the Rev. Walter Pryce, Owen Lewis, Police Constable, Llansantffraid, to Elizabeth Wynn, only daughter of Mrs. Ann Wynn, Golden Eagle, Llansantffraid³.

So it appeared that it was Elizabeth’s mother, not her husband, who had kept the Eagle Inn. In which case, with Owen working in Llansantffraid, too, why did they not marry in that village? Why go as far as Shrewsbury and be married by licence? And, in those days when women had little or no independence, what was Elizabeth doing at 6, Castle Gates? Far from being straightforward, as we had thought on first reading the copy of the marriage entry, the mystery seemed to be deepening. Sadly, though, my father never lived to see it solved. On 10th October 1958, at the age of seventy-four, he died at Jennifer’s home in Warminster - and there and then I vowed that, one day, I would continue his search. His last words, spoken to his doctor, were: ‘Don’t you think I’ve got a wonderful family?’ His family certainly had wonderful parents.

CHAPTER TWO

Our Search Begins

It was almost eleven years before I had opportunity to keep faith with my father and take up his search again. Consequently, in July 1969, while Neil Armstrong was taking his giant leap into the future by first-footing the moon, my late husband, Bob, and I were taking our first tentative steps into the past. Before setting out, I had written to Owen, Norman and Aubra, asking each of them to let me know everything they could of our father’s recollections, research and experiences. I was hoping that, being so much older than me, they might recall more, but apart from one or two details, their replies had simply confirmed what I already knew. Armed with the only evidence we possessed, i.e. my grandparents’ marriage lines as supplied by Somerset House, the transcript of the newspaper report of their marriage and details ed from my father’s birth certificate (the original having suffered the same fate as all the family papers) we took a short holiday from work and having equipped ourselves with a small ridge tent and the minimum of camping gear, pointed the car towards North Wales. We still had no idea how to go about our search, but we settled upon a route that would take us via Shrewsbury, so as to look at Dogpole Tabernacle, where my grandparents were married, and at 6 Castle Gates which had been given as Elizabeth’s address at that time. However, we had reckoned without the lure of Shrewsbury’s reference library, an institution we came upon soon after parking the car and where we spent so long in the Local History section that we ran out of time. The main attraction, for us, lay in a set of fascinating books known as “The Montgomeryshire Collections”. Compiled in the 1860s, they ran to almost fifty volumes and chronicled the history, to that date, of every town and village in Montgomeryshire. Of course, we did not think for a moment that they would throw any light on our

quest, but we found them absolutely absorbing, especially the section on Llansantffraid, where we were surprised to read the following:

“The Weslyan Methodists commenced preaching in this village and district in a malt-house, now rented by Mrs. A. Wynn, and situated at the back of her house....”

We wondered why it referred to “her house” rather than the “Golden Eagle” inn, but it was good to think an ancestor of mine had gone down in history - even if only for renting a malthouse! We copied down one or two other items from the section on Llansantffraid and, because we thought it so unusual, we included the following, which, though we did not know it then, was to prove of particular significance for us⁴: “The old people of the parish apportioned the burying-ground into two parts, viz., the “Rich ground”, being in front of the church from the porch and at the east end, which was sanctum sanctorum, and the “Poor’s ground”, to the west and from the dial. Great aversion was shown by the parishioners to be buried in this part, and when the favourite part was filled, the west end had to be appropriated for interment, but to this day the clerk tells us there is a prejudice against burying there.”

From Shrewsbury, we made our way to Llanfyllin, in order to call upon the widow of Edwin (Ted) Lewis - one of my father’s cousins and son of his late Uncle John of “Ty-Ucha” - at “Green Hall”, a large and attractive old farmhouse down a very long drive from the road. One of Ted’s sons, Trefor, was farming the land now and he, his mother and his wife, Jean, could not have made us more welcome. Over tea, we touched on the purpose of our visit and they all seemed really interested and told us that my cousin, Elsie, Aunt Lily’s eldest daughter, had called upon them the previous year, bent upon a similar mission. I was overjoyed at this, especially as they were able to give me her address for sadly, due in part to the “Vicka-Lewis” affair, my father had lost touch with his

sister and had been vainly calling for her during the last days of his life. The Lewises also told us that, during her stay, Elsie had found our grandparents’ tombstone in Llansantffraid churchyard, so that, as we took our leave of them and headed off to pitch our little tent on a hillside along the Vyrnwy road, we were beginning to feel we were getting somewhere already. Predictably, our first port of call on the following day was the parish church at Llansantffraid, where it did not take us long to find the grave of my grandparents, for it stood in front of the church and immediately to the right of the porch. A good quality marble stone, it was inscribed:

“In loving memory of Owen Lewis, late Police Constable, who died Oct. 8th 1888 aged 42. Also of Elizabeth his wife, died Jan. 4th. 1891 aged 39. Also Owen Wynn, their son, died Oct.12th. 1888 aged 7. Thy will be done

‘So my father did have a brother, after all’, I turned to Bob. ‘Just as he always maintained’, he nodded, ‘and, according to the inscription, he died within four days of his father, so that bizarre story about the lad falling onto his father’s coffin could well have been true, too.’ ‘It could indeed’, I replied, ‘but I was thinking how pathetically young my grandparents were when they died - and how tragic for Elizabeth to lose a young child like that – and so soon after losing her husband!’ I noticed that the nearest stone to theirs was a large, rectangular affair with a flat top and I could not help wondering whether this was where my father had sat,

swinging his little legs and wondering how long it would be before they reached the ground, while his mother shed bitter tears at the grave of her husband and son. It seemed strange to think that, had he lived, that little boy would have been my uncle. I had only ever known one uncle and one grandparent - both on my mother’s side, of course - and I had loved them dearly. They say that what you never have, you never miss, but now, gazing upon that tombstone, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. ‘Well, it’s a lovely, peaceful spot they’ve got here’, Bob broke into my thoughts, ‘and they couldn’t have chosen a plot closer to the church door without being insi.....’ His voice trailed away and I looked at him questioningly. ‘You hadn’t realised either, had you? he said. ‘Realised what?’ ‘That they’re in the richest of the “Rich ground”!’

‘But they can’t be’, I protested irrationally, for I could see at once that he was right. ‘But those books we read yesterday - the “Montgomeryshire Collections” they were published in the 1870s’ ‘Exactly’, he said. ‘Yes, well, according to them, the “Rich ground” had already been filled by then. ‘Yes - and yet your grandfather, who was the first of the three to be buried here, didn’t die until 1888. It doesn’t make sense - and yet there’s no getting away from the facts.’ ‘And I’ve just realised’, I told him, ‘that this stone must have been raised after all three had died. Otherwise the inscriptions would have been in the order of death: father-son-mother, not father-mother-son, as it is.’ ‘Have you any idea who might have raised it? ‘None at all’, I replied, ‘unless....’ ‘What?’ ‘Well, as they all died so young, perhaps Elizabeth’s mother was still alive, in which case, she could have raised it.’ ‘True’, he said but in that case, why didn’t she rear the two remaining children, your father and his sister, here in their native environment, instead of letting them be carried off to Birmingham?’ ‘Mmm…. There’s my father’s uncle, John Lewis, of course. We know he outlived them all, but then, if he had raised it, why didn’t he tell my father or Aunt Lily where the grave was so that they could visit it? We decided this would have to remain just one more question to which, at present, we had no answer. In order to disprove – or else add further credence to – the story of Owen Wynn having fallen into his father’s grave, we needed to ascertain the date of my grandfather’s funeral, and to do this we needed access to the burial records. I had

discovered some time ago that church records could be made available to the public, but now, on making enquiries, we found that the vicar was on holiday and that the keeper of the keys, the vicar’s warden, would not be available until the next day.. By now, the sky was threatening rain and, as we had been told that the oldest inhabitant of Llansantffraid was far too young to anything pertinent, we decided to take a run into Newtown. Someone had suggested that the Constabulary Headquarters had probably been there and I wondered whether they had any archive material which might give details of my grandfather’s service with the force. The officer who saw us was most pleasant, but told us that the forces of six counties, including Montgomeryshire, had been amalgamated and that all their old records had been sent to Carmarthen. He suggested we should write to the Chief Constable’s office there. We had no more luck at Kerry, a small village where my brother Norman seemed to think our grandfather had once served and where we were hoping we might find some nonagenarian who might just him. There was one, we were told on enquiry, an ex-postman by the name of Jack Davies. He had a good memory, they said, and pretty well all his faculties, despite his great age, but he was now in a home for the elderly - in Newtown! So back we went to Newtown and eventually found him, alone in his sterile little room, smartly dressed and shoes all shining - but stone deaf. He sat on the edge of his bed, poor old chap, and concentrated hard while I mouthed at him that my grandfather had been a policeman at Kerry. I gave him his name and those of my grandmother and their children, but he simply looked bemused. ‘He died in 1888’, I almost shouted. At that, a big smile spread across his weather-beaten face. At last, I thought, we’re getting somewhere. Then: ‘I’m sorry, bach’, he said, ‘I wasn’t born in Kerry, you see. I only moved there in 1907.’ No access to church records, no police archive material in the county and no-one old enough to ; three frustrations in the first day and, though we did

not realise it at the time, that was to prove the norm throughout most of our research. I do not intend to report on many here, for they would make boring reading, but with letters delayed, unanswered or misinterpreted, libraries and record offices closed when we needed to use them and only two or three weeks holiday each year in which to search, it made me realise what my father must have been up against, especially as he had no car and, for much of his working life, no time off work either, other than the statutory Bank Holidays. Nothing daunted, we were up next morning bright and early and, arriving at the church ahead of the vicar’s warden, we decided to take a look at some of the other gravestones in the churchyard. Before very long, we came upon one that stood to the front of the church - but decidedly below the dial and therefore in the “Poor’s ground” - which was inscribed:

“Sacred to the memory of Ann Wynn, late of the Golden Eagle in this village died 5th. April 1884 aged 74 years”

So here was Elizabeth’s mother, my great-grandmother. Everything seemed to be coming together nicely, except for the fact that, so far, we had been unable to find any record of my Great Grandfather, John Wynn the saddler. According to Elizabeth’s marriage lines, he had died prior to 1881 and yet there was no mention of him here, nor on any of the stones nearby. Before we had time to search further, the vicar’s warden appeared and we accompanied him into the church. Unlocking a large cupboard in the vestry, he piled all the record books onto a table and left us to it, excusing himself in order to carry out some business of his own in the churchyard. As far as we could see, the books were in no particular order and so I lifted one at random from the table. As I did so, a small piece of paper fell out and fluttered to my feet. I bent to retrieve it and suddenly the words: “Owen Wynn Lewis” seemed to jump out at me. For a long moment I stood staring at it in disbelief and a strange feeling came over me to think that, having lain among those dusty books for over eighty years, it should now fall at my feet. At length, I picked it up and saw that it was headed: “Certificate of Registry of Death”. Without a word, I handed it to Bob.

‘Talk about the long arm of coincidence! ‘ he murmured as he read it. ‘I reckon that “someone up there” is trying to tell us something, don’t you?’ Leaving the rest of the books unopened, we went in search of the vicar’s warden, to show him the certificate and ask him what it meant. He explained that it was the Registrar’s authority for the vicar to carry out the burial and normally, once the vicar had seen them, they were destroyed. He could not imagine why this one had been kept for so long, but the church had no use for it now, he said, and so we could keep it if we wished. If we wished! We gave him ten shillings for a drink and returned overjoyed, to the books. Before long, we had found the burial entries for Ann Wynn and for Owen and Elizabeth and their son, Owen Wynn. Owen and his son were consecutive entries in the . However, as it stated that Owen had been buried on 13th. October and, according to the inscription on their stone, Owen Wynn had died on 12th., it appeared to disprove my father’s story about the boy falling into his father’s grave. What surprised us most, though, was to read that all three had died in the town of Montgomery and that their bodies had been conveyed the fifteen or so miles to Llansantffraid to be buried in what must have been the most coveted plot in the churchyard - to say nothing of it being in an area which had been recorded as full more than seventeen years earlier. So here was yet another enigma. Next, in case he had been buried in a part of the churchyard we had not yet inspected, we began to search through the records for John Wynn, working backwards from 1881, when Elizabeth’s marriage lines had shown him to be already deceased. There was no sign of him anywhere, but what we did unexpectedly stumble upon was the burial of one Thomas Wynn, who was stated to have been the son of Ann Wynn and who had died of smallpox in 1851. ‘So Elizabeth had a brother, too’, we chorused. ‘Not for very long, though’, added Bob. ‘Meaning?’

‘Well, as she was thirty when she married in 1881, she must have been born within months - either before or after - her brother, young Thomas, died’. ‘Poor Ann!’ The thought saddened us both, but while the records were available to us, we knew we must press on. As the staff of Somerset House had been unable to find any entry of birth for Elizabeth in that district - or, indeed within a wide radius around it - we felt there was little hope of finding any record of baptism for her, but we looked anyway and our search was rewarded. An entry for Friday, 14th March 1851 read: “Elizabeth” and, to our utter amazement, continued: “base child of Ann Wynn, Llansantffraid. Widow”⁵. ‘Well!’ Bob exclaimed as we recovered our breath,’So John Wynn, the saddler, was not Elizabeth’s father after all’. ‘So it would seem’, I replied, ‘though I should think she must have been led to believe that he was, or else she would hardly have named him as such when she married my grandfather, would she?’ ‘Probably not - especially as she was marrying a policeman’. ‘Of course, in those strict, Victorian times, the embarrassment of giving birth to an illegitimate child would have been quite sufficient reason for Ann to have kept it secret, not only from her daughter, but also from as many other people as possible, too’. ‘No it wouldn’t’. Bob’s reply took me aback. ‘It might have been reason enough during Elizabeth’s lifetime, I grant you - even to letting her believe that the late John Wynn was her father - but it certainly wouldn’t have warranted the depth of secrecy your father came up against in his lifetime’. I looked at him questioningly. ‘Think about it’, he said, ‘We’ve just discovered that Ann Wynn died the year your father was born. She was seventy-four then and so, even assuming that her paramour - whoever he was - did not predecease her, it’s reasonable to suppose that he would have died within the next fifteen years or so. Consequently, by the time your father began his search, what possible embarrassment could it have caused to anyone - other than perhaps himself and his sister - if he had

discovered that their mother had been illegitimate?’ ‘Well, none that I can think of’. ‘Exactly. And yet, not long before he died, he told me that, throughout the whole of his life he had been oppressively aware of a conspiracy of silence to prevent him from finding his mother’s people. ‘Besides’, he continued, ‘just look at all the unanswered questions we ourselves have already come up with - especially the one with regard to the position of their grave in the “Rich” ground. It must have taken someone of considerable clout to have obtained that plot for a humble police constable and his family, especially as they were not even living in this parish when they died’. ‘But, as we read that the “Rich” ground had been filled getting on for twenty years earlier, I can’t understand how, even with clout, as you put it, they could have managed it, can you?’ ‘They must have secured it by or before 1871, when those books were published’. ‘But that was long before Owen and Elizabeth were married’ ‘So who is to say’, he persisted, ‘that it was not allocated to Elizabeth from birth?’ ‘That’s a macabre idea’. ‘Maybe, but you’ve got to that the Victorians put great emphasis on those things. It could have been that her natural father – whoever he was – secured it for her, so as to ensure that she didn’t come to a pauper’s grave. He might have felt that, to allow her to do so would not only have put her soul in jeopardy, but his own soul, too. Anyway’, he continued, ‘however it came about, I’m sure there’s more in this than meets the eye, and I vote that we carry on looking’. I had to it that all that he had said made sense to me- and besides, now that we knew that John Wynn the saddler was not my great-grandfather, I was curious to know who was.

Having returned the keys to the vicar’s warden, we went in search of the grave of Ann’s young son, Thomas Wynn. In spite of having made a note of its position on the burial plan, we had a job to find it for, like most others in that part of the churchyard, it was quite overgrown with grass. “Sacred to the memory of Thomas Wynn”, the inscription ran, “son of the late John Wynn, saddler, and Ann his wife, who departed this life May 5th. 1851 aged 17 yrs.”

‘Well, there’s no doubt about this young lad being laid to rest in the “Poor’s” ground, like his mother, is there?’, Bob turned to me, ‘and yet, at the time of his burial - twenty years or so before those books were published - it’s more than likely that there would still have been some plots available in the “Rich” ground. So that would seem to indicate that Ann couldn’t afford to have him or her parents buried there. And yet she – or someone – was able to afford the “richest” plot in the churchyard for her illegitimate baby, Elizabeth.’ ‘It certainly looks that way’, I replied, ‘but I’m glad to see John Wynn’s name mentioned again anyway. Not finding him buried with Ann and then discovering that he was not Elizabeth’s father after all, I was beginning to wonder if he had ever existed. I still think it’s odd that he isn’t buried here though. People didn’t move very far afield in those days, did they?’ ‘He might simply have been out of the parish on a temporary basis for some reason - or he could have ed the Yeomanry and got killed quelling some riot or uprising . No doubt we shall turn him up sooner or later’. After a while, unable to find anything else of interest in the churchyard, we decided to make our way to the local Registry Office in the market town of Llanfyllin. As Elizabeth had been baptised in this area, we reasoned, there was a good chance that she had been born and ed in the same district, though, as Somerset House had failed to find her registration, we viewed it as a longshot. To our surprise and delight, however, the Registrar turned up her entry right away and it soon became clear why Somerset House had not been so successful. On 13th March 1851, the very day before having her baptised “Elizabeth”, Ann Wynn had ed her as - “Mary”!

Another surprise in the entry was that the date of her birth was recorded as 2nd March, only eleven days prior to registration, and the Registrar agreed with us that it was very early days for Ann Wynn to have left her childbed and travelled all the way to Llanfyllin. From what we had read of those times, unless the family was reliant upon the mother’s earnings, a lying-in period of at least two, and often three, weeks after birth was far more usual. Later, it was to prove even more surprising, for we discovered that Ann Wynn was over forty when Elizabeth was born and that, in those days, the road between Llansantffraid and Llanfyllin was in a very poor condition and often badly flooded by the River Cain. We also noticed that Ann had not signed her name in the , but had made her mark with a cross and so we assumed from this that, like many people at that time, she had been unable to write. Mrs. Jones, the Registrar, suggested that we should speak to an elderly local historian, a Mr. Morris of Waen Farm, but unfortunately, when we did so, we found that his interest lay more in the topography and politics of the area than in its peoples. In any case, he was just too young to my grandparents, though he did the “Golden Eagle” inn and told us that he had walked past it each day on his way to school. When he learned that my grandparents had died in Montgomery, he referred us to a fellow historian, a Dr. J D K Lloyd of Garthmyl, a village in the vicinity of that town. Next day, therefore, we took a run up to Welshpool where, in the Registry Office, we found the entries of death of Owen, Owen Wynn and Elizabeth Lewis. From the little boy’s, we were amazed to learn that his inscription on their tombstone had been wrong. He had not died on 12th. October, as stated thereon, but on 13th. - the day of his father’s funeral!

‘Then I reckon he must have slipped at the graveside after all’, Bob turned to me. ‘Don’t forget your father didn’t even know the name of his brother, let alone when he died, so it’s not likely that he would have made up such a story’. ‘Of course he didn’t make it up’, I retorted. ‘Either it was a vague memory or someone must have told him. But in any event, it doesn’t say anything here about him dying from head injuries or as the result of a fall. In fact, it states that he had been ill with tubercular meningitis for two weeks prior to his death.’ ‘Well, that doesn’t necessarily disprove your dad’s story’, Bob protested, ‘Supposing that, having been ill, he was feeling a bit better and wanted to go to the funeral. Don’t you think it’s possible that his condition might have made him giddy and so caused him to fall?’ I could not answer that one, but a Montgomery doctor, to whom we later got chatting, told us that, in his opinion, it was a perfectly plausible theory. ‘I wonder how the date of Owen Wynn’s death came to be inscribed wrongly on their tombstone’, I remarked as we made our way back to the car. ‘I can’t imagine’, Bob replied, ‘but it proves one thing.’ ‘What?’ ‘That the stone wasn’t raised by anyone very close to the family.’ ‘You mean that, to anyone who really cared for them, the thirteenth of October would have been a date they would never forget?’ ‘Exactly. It was the day when a man who had been in the prime of his life was buried and his seven-year-old son had died’. ‘As we left Welshpool to return to our camp, my mind and heart were full of Elizabeth’s tragic life. Since her marriage, less than eight years earlier, she had married, borne three children, lost her mother, lost her husband and lost her eldest son. I thought of her, with those three little children to care for, nursing her husband for eight months with the scourge of those days, tuberculosis, and then, on the very day he was buried, losing her first-born child. And when, little more than two years later, she lay ill with the same disease herself, how she must

have worried and wondered as to what would become of her two remaining infant children. That evening, over supper outside our little tent, we discussed all that we had found and tried to decide where our research should go from here. It seemed that, the more facts we had found, the more anomalies they had thrown up. Although we were starting to build up a picture of Owen and Elizabeth’s life, we now had more unanswered questions than we had at the outset and were no closer to finding any of my father’s maternal kin. We both agreed that the first thing we needed to do was to establish the identity of Ann Wynn’s lover, my great-grandfather. But how? It was then that I recalled that once, in a play or film, I had heard ‘Sherlock Holmes’ say: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” and so I suggested to Bob that, in the absence of definite clues to follow, we would have to work in a similar way. We therefore decided that henceforth we would put up theories, like “Aunt Sallys” and then attempt to knock them down by disproving them. That way, we reasoned, we might eventually find one that would withstand all our attempts and thereby reveal the truth. ‘So where do you suggest we should look for our first “Aunt Sally”?’ he asked. ‘Well if, as you suggest, Ann Wynn’s lover was a man of some clout, we’d better take a close look at all the local big-wigs of that time. With luck, we might find one or two among them who might qualify as likely candidates.’ ‘Agreed. But first I think we should take a close look at the name we’ve already got - the family your father’s searching always led him back to: the Williams Wynns, because, judging by what I read of that family in Shrewsbury library, they would have had plenty of clout.’ ‘Just about’, I replied, ‘Do you know, I read where, at one time, in the whole of the United Kingdom, only the Duke of Westminster owned more land than they did. It seems odd but, as far as I can make out, every baronet, irrespective of their Christian name, has been known as “Sir Watkin”. And they were so powerful that the Prince Regent used to refer to the Sir Watkin of his day as “The Prince in Wales”. We can look at them, if you like, but I don’t hold out any hope.’

‘Why not?’ ‘Because I read that their main seat, “Wynnstay Hall” is at Ruabon and that’s miles away from Llansantffraid – and in any event, how on earth would someone of that calibre have come to have an affair with a widowed innkeeper of over forty? ‘In fact’, I continued, ‘the only link I came across at Shrewsbury, between the Wynns and Llansantffraid, was the fact that Sir Watkin had a pew in Llansantffraid church - and I dare say he had one in most of the North Wales churches.’ ‘Didn’t you read the of how, in the previous century, a Llansantffraid man had been injured while saving a Sir Watkin’s life in battle - and when Sir Watkin noticed his injury, he turned to him and cried: “My God, John, your guts are hanging out”?’ ‘No I did not, but trust you to something like that’, I smiled. ‘Well I still think we should go and take a look at the place’, he insisted and so the next day found us bound for Ruabon where, on arrival, we were surprised to learn that “Wynnstay Hall” was no longer the seat of the Williams Wynn family, but was now in use as a college, known as “Lindisfarne”. Nothing daunted, we drove up to the house and, as luck would have it, arrived just as the students had broken up for the summer holidays and we were received very courteously by the heaster - Mr. Roy Jones, I believe, was his name and a Mr. Lightowler, who was head of the prep. school and had a flat over an erstwhile stable block. They could not have been more helpful and, to our surprise and delight, offered to show us all over the place (an invitation which Bob later cynically suggested was prompted by the fact that we were sporting a Porsche at the time - albeit an old one!). The setting of the house was superb. Standing on rising ground, it looked over pleasure gardens and parkland, laid out by Capability Brown, to the rolling hills beyond, but the exterior aspect of the house was not at all in keeping with such soft and verdant beauty. On the contrary, we both found it very hard and

overpowering. The heaster told us that the previous house had been destroyed by fire in the 1850s and that the style of this one, which had been built to replace it, was that of a Danish castle, very similar, people had remarked, to “Elsinore”.

The interior of the house was now laid out and furnished as a school, of course, but one could tell, from the ornate ceilings and fireplaces still extant in some rooms, that it must once have been very grand. The heaster drew our attention to a particularly fine organ in the gallery of the main hall and told us that it had once belonged to Handel and that the Wynn family had brought it to “Wynnstay” from their London residence in St. James’ Place. We had been hoping that the private chapel would yield us some information as to the whereabouts of family interments, but apart from three coats of arms on the old oak door, there was nothing of the family there at all. According to the heaster, the chapel had never been licensed for anything other than services. Some of the family had been buried in Ruabon parish church, he said, but most of the more recent interments had taken place at Llangedwyn, a village in the Tanat valley, and the family seat had now been transferred to “Llangedwyn Hall”. Lots of information on various branches of the family was available in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, he added, and he believed that a previous incumbent of Ruabon parish church, the Reverend T.W. Pritchard, who now lived near Glen Caeriog, was currently researching the family with the intention of writing a book. Needless to say, our next port of call was Glen Caeriog, where we found the Reverend Pritchard in his vicarage at Pontfadog. We felt somewhat embarrassed when, in answer to our knock, he told us that he and his wife and family had only just returned from holiday and were at that moment partaking of an egg and chips meal, but he would not hear of us calling later and his wife insisted on making us a cup of tea. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that his interest lay with the eighteenth century baronets, an earlier period than we were attempting to research, but he kindly gave us a copy of the church guide book he had written during his time at Ruabon, which detailed a great number of gifts from, and memorials to, of the House of Wynnstay. He also showed us another little book, a hardback, very old and now out of print, entitled “Wynnstay and the Wynns”, which appeared to be a mine of information on the family, but which, of course, we could not impose upon his generosity

long enough to read in any detail and so we thanked him sincerely and took our leave. Before driving out of Glen Caeriog, we searched our map to find Llangedwyn, the current seat of the present Sir Watkin, and discovering, to our delight, that it was in the very next valley to Llansantffraid, decided there was time to make the short detour to visit the church there. On the way, I began to peruse the church guide book the Reverend Pritchard had given us and I remarked to Bob that a Marie Nesta Williams Wynn, who had died in 1883, appeared to have been very much mourned, for both the church clock and the east window of the church were dedicated to her memory and the latter contained a portrait of her. But it seemed that Bob’s mind was exploring a different tack, for he said: ‘Do you think there could be any significance in the fact that “Wynnstay” was destroyed by fire relatively close to the time of Elizabeth’s birth?’ ‘I doubt it’, I replied, ‘but there could be in the fact that Llangedwyn Hall lies “over the hill”, not only from Llansantffraid, but also from where my father’s Uncle John and most of his children lived. Do you my father telling us how “from over the hill” was one of their stock answers to his enquiries as to where his mother’s people came from?’ ‘Yes I do. And do you realise that, so far, we’ve not disproved a single thing your father said? I think that, for that reason alone, we should take a very serious look at the Williams Wynns.’ ‘If only Norman hadn’t destroyed all those papers’, I sighed, ‘we might have had a better idea as to what kept leading him to that family. We’ve found nothing of any consequence yet to link them with Llansantffraid. I think that, unless or until we do, we should select our “Aunt Sallys” from the vicinity of Llansantffraid.’ ‘Okay’, he said, but he made for Llangedwyn anyway and pulled up outside the church. In answer to my disapproving look, he said: ‘Bear with me. I’ve got a gut-feeling about this family’. In the churchyard, we found a number of Williams Wynn family graves, surrounded by a small box hedge and, within the church, more memorials, including another stained-glass window to Marie Nesta, who, it appeared had been the fourteen-year-old daughter of the sixth baronet.

By the time we returned to our campsite that night, we were both tired out. Our short holiday was drawing to a close and we had crammed an awful lot into it, especially that day. The pressure must have been getting to Bob, for though usually a very sound sleeper, he shook me awake at three in the morning with: ‘When did Marie Nesta die?’ Neither of us could get to sleep after that, but lay thinking and talking of all we had found. ‘I seem to there used to be strong superstitions against church functions taking place on Fridays’, Bob remarked at one point. ‘So?’ ‘So it seems an odd day to have chosen for Elizabeth’s baptism’. ‘Unless she was ailing’, I suggested. ‘I don’t expect Ann would have cared what day it was if she feared she might not survive’. ‘True’, he replied, ‘but surely, if that were so, Ann would never have left her the previous day and gone rushing off to Llanfyllin to her - and in a different name at that’. ‘I know. It’s all so curious and tantalizing and, now that we’ve started, I wish we could just go on searching until we find all the answers.’ ‘We will’, he replied, ‘but it will have to wait now until the next time we can come’. But we only had one more week’s holiday due to us that year and, as we’d already promised to spend that with Aubra and her husband, George, we both knew that ‘next time’ was going to be a frustratingly long time coming.

CHAPTER THREE

In the event, it was to be a whole year, almost to the day, before we were able to resume our “Wynn-digging” (as the family had begun to refer to our jaunts to North Wales.) In the meantime, although work and other daily tasks had impinged upon our lives, we had nevertheless managed to make some progress in our search. By post, from the relevant Registrars, we had obtained copies of the birth registrations of my grandmother Mary (Elizabeth) Wynn, her youngest son (my father, whose original certificate had been a victim of Norman’s ‘clean sweep’) and those of her other children, Owen Wynn Lewis, Elizabeth Ann Lewis (Aunt Lily). They made interesting reading and served to put a little more flesh on the bones, as it were, but far more moving were the copies of some death registrations, which we also obtained. Ann’s son, Thomas Wynn’s certificate, for instance, told us that, at seventeen years of age, he had already followed his father into the leather trade by becoming a shoemaker and that he had only been ill with smallpox for seven days before he had died. Ann’s own certificate, on the other hand, showed that she had been paralysed for three months prior to her death at the “Golden Eagle” inn and so, as my father had been born there during that same three-month period, we were able to deduce that Elizabeth had probably been staying there at the time, in order to nurse and/or comfort her mother. Only four years later, from her own home in Montgomery town, Elizabeth had travelled to Welshpool twice within a few days, to the deaths, first of her husband and then of her eldest son - and their certificates recorded that she had been “in attendance” upon each of them when they had died. But when, so tragically soon afterwards and at only thirty-nine years of age, she herself lay dying, she had no loving daughter or spouse on hand to comfort her or minister to her needs. The person “in attendance” and who had ed her death was one Bessie Morgan of the “Piggin Tavern”,Montgomery. We couldn’t help wondering who this Bessie Morgan was and whether she had cared well for my

poor grandmother.

During this year, too, we had managed to spend an exhausting day in London where, among other things, we searched the Probate Office records. There, in the index, we were delighted to find reference to a will made by Ann Wynn and also to one made by Elizabeth. Needless to say, we ordered copies of them right away and waited very impatiently for them to arrive. From the few details given in the index, we had been amazed to learn that Ann had left five hundred and forty-six pounds and three shillings. This may not seem a great deal to us today, but in 1884 it was quite a fortune. We saw some estates there valued at as little as five pounds and there were many of twenty pounds or less. To give some comparison: in a December 1994 issue of the “Today” newspaper, I read that an antique golf ball was expected to make ten thousand pounds at auction. “It originally [1845] sold for 3s 6d - about £115 today”, the paper reported . At that rate (subject to any inflation between 1845 and 1884) Ann left the 1994 equivalent of a staggering £358,800 - and yet, in the year of Elizabeth’s birth, she had buried both parents and her only son in the “Poor’s ground” of the churchyard! ‘And we know from “The Montgomeryshire Collections”‘, I pointed out to Bob, ‘that she only rented the malt-house - she didn’t even own that.’ ‘Well all I can suggest’, he replied, ‘is that either that inn did a roaring trade, or saddlery must have been a more lucrative business than I had imagined’. In order to test the latter, we searched the indexes thoroughly for her one-time husband, John Wynn, but he had left no will and neither had her parents. So how, then, we asked ourselves, had Ann managed to amass such a fortune?

As it happened, hers was the first will to be brought to us. We found it short and to the point. She had made Elizabeth her sole executrix (still no reference to her as “Mary”, even in this, a legal document!) and apart from two bequests of fifty pounds each, had left her entire estate to her. One of those bequests was to her brother, a John Thomas of Kinnerly and the other was to someone named Elizabeth Kenrick.

No relationship, place of abode or other details were given regarding the latter, but that name, Elizabeth Kenrick was ringing bells with me, for I now ed hearing from my father that Kenrick had been the maiden name of the two sisters who had reared him and my Aunt Lily - and the one who had reared my father had been Elizabeth, too. I mentioned this to Bob. ‘Do you think they might have been related in some way?’ I asked. ‘To Ann Wynn? Or to the beneficiary? ‘To either - or both’. ‘Could be, I suppose, but I doubt it?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, think about it. If someone related to those two women was so close to Ann Wynn that she left them the equivalent of about thirty-thousand pounds, then surely, in all the years they were growing up in their homes, your father and aunt would have become aware of that closeness, even if they had not been told of it directly.’ ‘One would imagine so, yes. Unless...’ ‘What?’ ‘Well, unless the conspiracy of silence stretched that far.’ ‘It would have been a pretty tall order to keep the relationship quiet for so long. Those children lived under their roofs for twenty years or more, , and your Aunt Lily continued to live with one of those Kenrick sisters, Harriet Stamp, even after she and your Uncle Harold were married.’ At this point, Elizabeth’s will was brought to us and the first thing that struck us was that she had made it less than two months before she died and had signed it on the eighth birthday of her little girl, Elizabeth Ann (Lily). She must have found the last years of her life expensive - probably since losing

her husband - for by the time she died, it appeared that her legacy had been reduced to two hundred and seventy-eight pounds, nineteen shillings and three pence (around £180,000 using the same analogy) and we were amazed to read that she had bequeathed it all to two tradesmen: John Powell of Arthur Street and Richard Roberts of Broad Street, both of Montgomery town and both of whom she had appointed trustees of her estate, charging them to use the money for the benefit of her infant children until such time as they had both reached majority⁷. ‘So that’s where the money came from!’ I exclaimed excitedly, ‘? The one hundred pounds each that my father and Aunt Lily were given when he became twent.....’ ‘Hang on a minute’, Bob interposed, ‘there’s more. Just look at this: “I appoint the said John Powell and Richard Roberts to be the Guardians of my infant children” You never told me your father had two Guardians.’ ‘No, of course I didn’t, because I didn’t know - and neither did he, nor Aunt Lily. But why didn’t they know? What possible reason could anyone have had for not telling them? Bob simply shook his head ‘Well, whatever their reasons’, I continued, ‘it was nothing short of cruelty. All his life my father longed for news of his parents - and especially of his mother. Just imagine what it would have meant to him and Aunt Lily to have known that their mother had loved them so much that, as she lay dying, she took steps to provide for them and appoint Guardians to ensure their welfare. She says nothing in her will about keeping them secret, does she?’ ‘I’ve read nothing to that effect so far.’ ‘So who decided they shouldn’t be told?’ ‘Ah, if we knew that, we might know a whole lot more. But look, there’s a codicil.’ We sat and read it together, then turned to each other, dumbfounded. If neither of her children reached the age of majority, it stated, then the whole of her estate was to be divided between HER TWO COUSINS Elizabeth Williams and Harriet Stamp - the sisters Kenrick!

‘Well!’ Bob exclaimed at length, ‘If that doesn’t prove your father’s claim that there was a conspiracy of silence, I don’t know what would’. I was still in a state of shock as he continued: ‘If those two Kenrick women had not been at pains to maintain a purposeful silence, then you’ll never convince me other than that, in all of those years one or other of them would not have spoken to the children of “your mother, my cousin Elizabeth...” or “your grandmother, my Aunt Ann...” - or at least referred to them in some way in the children’s presence. That would have been downright unnatural.’ ‘You’re right’, I sighed, ‘and the irony of it is that, if they had done so, it could well have satisfied my father. All he wanted was to find his mother’s kin and, seemingly, there they were - with him all the time - and yet they let him grow up not knowing. All they needed to have said in reply to his many question was: “but we are your maternal kin -your mother was my first cousin”. But they said nothing. In fact, Harriet Stamp even denied kinship, by implication, when she told my mother: “They’re big people. They don’t want to know the likes of you”. Why would she have said that unless she was deliberately trying to throw my father off the scent?’ ‘Perhaps she was aware that she and her sister were not blood relatives of his at all.’ ‘But we’ve just discovered they must have been. His mother refers to them in this will as her cousins.’ She also referred, at marriage, to John Wynn the saddler as her father, but we now know for sure that he wasn’t. All I’m suggesting’, he continued on noticing my confused expression, ‘is that the identity of her father might not have been the only untruth Elizabeth was led to believe. Supposing that Ann Wynn was not her natural mother, either… that could for the way her name was changed overnight from Mary to Elizabeth - and for the speed with which Ann ed her birth.’ Coming so soon after all that we had just discovered from the wills, I found that suggestion too much to cope with. ‘Until you come up with a more eligible candidate for my great-grandmother’, I told him, ‘I’m sticking with Ann.’ ‘Okay’, he smiled, ‘but there’s another aspect to that codicil that strikes me as odd.’

‘Which is?’ ‘Well, don’t you think it’s a little peculiar for a mother knowingly to make a will which would benefit those who were to rear her children, but only on condition that neither of those children survived their childhood?’ ‘Good Lord!’ I exclaimed - and then: ‘But perhaps that aspect of it never struck my grandmother. It hadn’t struck me until you pointed it out.’ ‘You’ve only just read it’, he argued, ‘whereas Elizabeth had been ill for eight months before she died and would have had plenty of time to think about it in depth.’ ‘So what are you suggesting?’ ‘That either she knew nothing about the codicil or else she had no idea the children would be reared by the sisters Kenrick.’ ‘I can’t see anyone adding the codicil without her knowledge’, I replied. ‘It would have involved forgery, for a start and besides, it makes sense for her to have left instructions as to the disposal of her estate in the event of both children dying young.’ ‘But as to her being unaware that the Kenricks would be fostering them, I think you could be right , because if she did know and yet still trusted her cousins enough to make such a codicil, why did she bring the two men, Powell and Roberts into the equation at all? Why not simply leave the money in trust to the Kenricks and make them the children’s Guardians?’ ‘Exactly. And here’s another thought: that grocer chap your father stayed with in Montgomery – the man he had been introduced to as a friend of his fosterparents – wasn’t his name Richard Roberts? ‘Yes…yes, it was! ‘Then I reckon he must have been one of the children’s two Guardians – especially as your grandmother and the children were living in Montgomery when she died!’

Soon after that, I made at last with my cousin Elsie, the eldest of my Aunt Lily’s two daughters, and received a lovely warm letter in reply. She and her husband, Walter were living in Guernsey, which had made it difficult, she told me, for her to continue her own search for our roots and so she was delighted to learn of all that Bob and I had discovered. With sadness, I learned from her that her mother, my Aunt Lily, had died some years earlier. She had been fifteen months older than my father but Elsie confirmed that, like him, she seemed to have retained very few memories of their early life. Elsie and I agreed that it was probably due to all the traumas they had experienced at such a young age and especially the upheaval of their removal to the Black Country and being parted from one another. I was pleased to learn, though, that Elsie’s father, my Uncle Harold, was still alive and, at ninety-three was dividing his time between Elsie and Walter in Guernsey and his other daughter, Doris and her husband and family in Exeter. He was at present with Doris and, as we were soon to go on holiday in Cornwall with Aubra and her husband, George , we decided to call upon them en route. Aubra knew Doris and Elsie very well, for they had seen each other frequently in their youth, before their parents lost touch with one another. We were made very welcome and we found Uncle Harold to be a remarkably sprightly man for his age, which he attributed to walking three miles every day. I had hoped that, as Harriet Stamp had shared their early married life, he might have been able to tell us something that would further our quest, but he said that neither he nor Aunt Lily had ever been able to glean anything from her. When we told him that Elizabeth had appointed Guardians for my father and his late wife, we could see that he was truly amazed. He and Aunt Lily had known John Powell and Richard Roberts quite well, he told us and they had once spent a holiday in Montgomery town as guests of the Roberts family. ‘Your parents knew them too’, he turned to me. ‘In fact, Lily and your father had already been introduced to them long before your mother and I came on the scene. But all four of us only ever knew them as friends of their foster parents and there was never any suggestion that they were any sort of Guardians. Are you sure you’ve not made a mistake?’ We assured him that we had written proof, but he still seemed hardly able to

credit it and kept repeating that neither John Powell nor Richard Roberts had ever even hinted at any such arrangement, nor even that the Lewis family had lived in their town and that they had both known them well ‘As trustees, they would have been the ones who arranged for the money to be paid to their wards upon my father’s coming of age’, I began to explain to him. ‘We were never told that’, he cut in quickly, ‘I went with Lily to collect her share from the solicitor, but we could never get a straight answer out of him as to where it had come from.’ ‘I reckon those two men must have made some incredibly shrewd investments’, Bob remarked, ‘Just think: after paying Elizabeth’s funeral expenses and probate costs and settling any debt, they managed to pay for the upkeep of both children for fifteen years or more, as well as pay a lump-sum to both foster-parents at the end of that time and yet, out of an estate worth less than two hundred and eighty pounds, they still had two hundred pounds left - and exactly two hundred pounds, mark you - to divide between the children. I know money went a lot further in those days, but interest rates were a darned sight lower, too. Everyone present, including Uncle Harold, had to agree that it seemed a remarkable feat, but none of us could offer any suggestions as to how they might have accomplished it. Consequently, in July 1970, when we made that second visit to North Wales, we felt that our first aim must be to investigate those financial wizards, Powell and Roberts. At the time that Elizabeth made her will, both men had been in business in the town of Montgomery and so we decided to approach Dr. J.D.K. Lloyd of Garthmyl, the local historian we had been told about on our first visit to Wales. We found his home, “Bron Hafren”, to be a charming old house, set well off the road in a peaceful, old-world garden. As we made our way up the path, he called to us from an upstairs window and, on learning the purpose of our visit, told us to go through to the drawing room and pour ourselves some sherry. ‘You can pour one for me, too, please’, he added, ‘Carry them through to the kitchen, if you will, and I’ll you directly.’ As we neared the kitchen, we were met by a delicious smell, for he had some

cooking on the go. It was a craft he had taken up at the age of seventy, he later told us, when his housekeeper had retired due to old age. He was a most knowledgeable and interesting man and, as he prepared his meal, he told us a great deal about the history of Montgomery. I asked him about “the Gaol Cottages”, Elizabeth’s address as stated in her will, and also about “Castle View”, the family’s address according to all three of their death certificates. He explained that, after “the New Gaol” had fallen into disuse (it was still known as “the New Gaol”, he pointed out, even though it had been built way back in the 1830s), some of the stones had been re-used to build “Gaol Cottages” nearby. As there was a clear view of Montgomery Castle from the ridge on which they stood, some people referred to the row of houses as “Castle View” and so, in fact, they were one and the same place and he gave us directions to find it. He ed Richard Roberts well, he told us. He knew him as an elderly, bearded gentleman, who owned a grocery shop, a fair-sized property in Broad Street, the main thoroughfare. He had been mayor of the town a number of times. ‘In fact’, he added with a twinkle in his eye, “his wife ran the town for years!” And he went on to tell us, to our surprise and delight, that one of Richard Roberts’ daughters was still alive and living in the town, as were both a daughter and son of John Powell and he explained to us exactly where they lived. By now, his food was nearly cooked and we had come to realise that he was expecting guests and so, thanking him for his help, we drained our glasses and left him to enjoy his evening. We found Miss Roberts in “Myrtle Cottage”, her home towards the top of the town. A lady in her sixties, she was now living alone, due to the recent death of a family retainer, who had been with her, and her parents before her, for more than fifty years. She proved to be a most pleasant and hospitable lady, but she said she knew nothing about her father being trustee of my grandmother’s will, or Guardian of her infant children, though she did suggest that, as my grandfather had been a lay preacher and both her father and Mr. Powell had been sides-men or wardens of the same church, they might all have become acquainted through the chapel. We were surprised to learn from her that her father had not lived all his life in

Montgomery, but had moved there from, of all places, Llansantffraid, where he had been employed as a grocer’s assistant. This immediately brought to my mind the fact that a Llansantffraid grocer, one Richard Lewis, had been a witness to Ann Wynn’s will and I wondered whether he had been the one who had employed Richard Roberts. I asked Miss Roberts, but she did not know. Her father had a lot of relations in the Llansantffraid area, she went on to tell us, but he would allow no-one, not even her mother, to refer to them, nor did any of them ever learn what had caused him to break away. Even so, she thought it very odd that her father had said nothing to the Lewis children about being their Guardian, nor spoken to them of their mother, father and brother, nor even told them that they had once lived here in Montgomery town, for except in regard to his relatives at Llansantffraid, he had not been a secretive man. She went on to tell us that he had risen to become, not only mayor of the town, but also a magistrate and a governor of various schools and colleges and she said that she could never understand how he had achieved such heights, being, as she put it, “just a humble grocer”. She had once asked her mother how he had managed it and was told by her that a Major Lomax had arranged it all and “pushed him on”, but her mother seemed to know no more than that. In the course of our conversation, it came to light that both she and I had sisters named Aubra. We were both absolutely amazed at this, for neither of us had ever heard of anyone else of that name. Miss Roberts said that her grandmother had found the name for her sister in “Fox’s Book of Martyrs” and I wondered whether my parents had dipped into the same book for my sister’s. Later though, I was to learn from my maternal aunt that they had named her “after the daughter of some friends of theirs in Wales” - which, of course, was further proof that my parents had known the Roberts only as friends. Thanking Miss Roberts for her time, we took our leave of her and went to call upon the Powells in Arthur Street. We found that Edith Powell was well into her eighties and that her brother, John, was ninety-three. Both had been born in the house in which they now lived. They received us most cordially and, although John’s speech was a little difficult to understand (he appeared to have no teeth), they told us a lot about life in old

Montgomery and vividly recalled the excitement they had felt as they watched their sister, Florence, being taken for a ride in the first car to arrive in the town. Their father’s grocery shop had been quite small, they explained and so, to make ends meet, he had done “a bit of tailoring on the side”. One or the other must have paid extraordinarily well, Miss Powell remarked, for he had put John through University and had bought, not only his shop, but also the whole row of thatched cottages in which it stood - and then re-roofed them all! Edith was very animated and told us that she was a retired Collector of Taxes and that John had an honours degree in languages and used to teach at Grammar School level. From him, we were thrilled to discover that he ed my father, whom he referred to as “the boy”. He had first met him when he spent a week at West Bromwich with my father’s foster-parents, the Williamses, at which time, he said, “the boy” was about fourteen. And later, one of the Williams children had spent a holiday with them here in Montgomery. We tried to discover how their family had met the Williamses and what the link, if any, had been between them, but neither John nor Edith seemed to know. I do not think it could have been very close, however, as when we mentioned the name Kenrick, it meant nothing to them. Edith told us that both John and their sister, Florence, had attended my father’s coming-of-age party, but she herself had been working and unable to go. This reminded John of how, while at the party, they had met an old man who, on learning that they were from Montgomery town, told them excitedly how, as a boy, he had attended a public hanging there and the hangman had let him hold the rope. Neither of them knew that their father had been Guardian to “the boy” and his sister, though it did not appear to surprise them greatly. There was no mistaking their amazement, however, when we told them that neither of the children had ever been made aware of that fact. Edith, in particular, seemed to find it hard to credit, for she told us that her father had taken on the Guardianship of some other children after their parents had been killed and she knew for certain that they had been made fully aware of their own background and also of the fact that they were his wards. Before leaving, we asked if they knew anything of Bessie Morgan of “the Piggin Tavern”, the person who had been with my grandmother when she died and had

ed her death. They told us that “The Piggin Tavern” was now one of a small row of cottages beneath the Castle Rock. Within their memory, Bessie Morgan did not keep the tavern, but lived in one of the cottages. ‘She was a nice person’, Edith said, ‘who “wore her hair brushed back into a bun and did a bit of nursing.” ‘When Bessie Morgan went’, she continued, ‘“The Piggin Tavern” became a sweetshop and was kept by an old gentleman who always wore a top hat and frock coat and could the news of the Battle of Waterloo being brought to Montgomery’.

It all made fascinating hearing, but did not further our search a great deal and, disappointingly, the rest of that holiday proved pretty much the same. Two months later, however, we managed to escape to North Wales again. We could only spare a couple of days, but this time Aubra and George came with us. Of course, we took them, among other places, to Montgomery town and showed them the cottages near the gaol where our father and his family had lived and where both parents and his brother had died; the chapel where grandfather had preached and the school which all three children must, at some time, have attended. We all found it moving. ‘But if, as Uncle Harold told us’, Aubra turned to me, ‘he and Aunt Lily spent a holiday here with the Roberts family, why ever weren’t they shown all this and told all about their brother and parents?’ ‘Why indeed’, I murmured. From Montgomery, we headed for Llansantffraid where, after visiting the churchyard to show Aubra and George the headstones we had found, we took a walk along the village street. Although it had long ceased to be an inn, there was no mistaking the old “Golden Eagle”. For one thing, I had in my possession a picture postcard of the property, which a friend had sent to my father in the nineteen-fifties, when it was the “Eagle Tea Rooms”, but even without this, we would have recognised it from the malt-house, which, according to “The Montgomeryshire Collections”, Ann Wynn had once rented and which still stood tall on land to the rear of the house. We noticed that the house itself was now in use partly as private residence and partly as a radio and television shop.

‘Do you think the owners would mind if we took a photograph?’ Aubra asked. ‘There’s only one way to find out’, replied Bob and promptly marched off into the shop. The proprietor’s wife proved extremely kind. ‘Take as many as you like and welcome’, she told us, then added: ‘I’m a bit tied up with the shop during the day, but if you’d like to call at the house this evening, I should be only too pleased to show you inside’. True to her word, when we arrived she showed us over every room in the square, three-storied building. ‘There’, she said, when we had come a full circle back to her living-room, ‘now you can be sure that you’ve been in the room your grandmother was born in.’ ‘And our father’, Aubra added, ‘He was born here, too.’ ‘Then I think that calls for a celebration’, she replied, reaching for some glasses, ‘We’ll drink a toast to them both.’ And so we did.

Less than two months later, I was saddened by the death of my Godmother, my mother’s cousin Maud, but among the items I inherited from her were some albums of old picture postcards. She had been an avid collector in her youth and family would to her any they received. One evening, as I sat browsing through them, I was brought up short by a view I recognised. It was of Broad Street, Montgomery and, apart from the fact that the only figure in it was wearing a hooped skirt, it looked just the same as we had left it a matter of weeks earlier. As I stared at it, I noticed that an ink cross had been placed on it, near the shop which we now knew had belonged to Richard Roberts. Intrigued, I removed it from the album and read the reverse side. Signed: “love from Jack and Jennie”, it was addressed to my mother’s maternal grandmother, Hannah Blackham, and had been posted from Montgomery in July 1905, just a few months after my father’s coming of age.

“...the x on the other side”, my father had written, “is lawn belonging to the friends we are staying with...”

As far as Bob and I were concerned, my father’s claim that there had been a conspiracy of silence had already been proved, but if we had needed further proof, then here it surely was. At twenty-one years of age, my father, who had been asking questions about his family for as long as he could , had unknowingly stayed under the roof of his Guardian and Trustee of his inheritance, a man who must have known his parents well, and yet he had told my father nothing; not even that, as a young child, he had lived with his parents and siblings there in Montgomery. Suddenly I recalled the lady my father had met on a visit to Wales, the one who had described his mother’s hair as being “like the waving corn” and had told him that she herself used to bounce him on her knee and call him her “Welsh Dumpling” because he was so chubby and rounded, and I now began to wonder whether that lady might have been Bessie Morgan of “The Piggin Tavern”. When we had first seen her name on my grandmother’s death certificate, we had no idea that my father had ever visited Montgomery town, but now that we knew for certain that he had, I thought it very likely to have been her. ‘She could well have come across my father in Richard Roberts’ shop, I suggested to Bob. ‘A strange face would have been unusual in a small place like Montgomery and she might well have struck up a conversation with him’. ‘Sounds plausible’, he replied, ‘and as we now know that, like the Kenrick sisters, Richard Roberts had been at pains to conceal from your father all details of his early life, it could well have been that he interrupted their conversation, not so much to catch the train, as he told your father, but for fear that she might reveal too much’. As Bob had said, it sounded plausible, but it was not likely that we should ever know for sure. What we did know now, though, was that Richard Roberts had been involved up to his neck in the conspiracy of silence, though what motive that pillar of the community might have had for such calculated and seemingly callous behaviour - or on whose orders he might have been acting - we were no nearer to finding out.

Not long after that, we had to put our search on hold, for the company that employed Bob ran into trouble and he was made redundant. We had always fancied working for ourselves and, as this seemed a good time to put it to the test, we decided to sell our home in Tetbury and buy a guesthouse in Cornwall. We found one in a beautiful spot, down a quiet country lane about a mile outside Padstow and looking out across fields to Trevone Bay and the sea. It had nine letting rooms, but it needed a lot of redecorating and refurbishment before we could open, which left us with no time for anything except hard work, especially during the holiday season. The winters were considerably quieter, but there was usually some re-decorating to do and, in the early and late season, our extended family and friends would naturally wish to come and stay with us. From January onwards each year, we were unable to be away from the place for fear of missing bookings for the following summer and so the most we could do to further our search was write a few letters and indulge in a lot of background reading. Consequently, it was all of three years before we were able to escape to North Wales again and, being late in the year, it was too cold for camping and so we hired a touring caravan and booked into a site at Llansantffraid. As we had not had time to make plans before setting out, nor even to read through our notes again, we felt somewhat out of touch and unsure as to how to pick up the threads of our search again. ‘Perhaps if we go to the churchyard first and visit your grandparents’ grave we might find inspiration’, Bob suggested. But having parked outside the church and walked up the pathway, it was not inspiration that we found, but shock and horror, for all trace of their headstone had completely disappeared! Even now, I find it hard to describe how it made me feel -it was as if we had been robbed of the only tangible proof of their existence. That was not so, of course, for we still had the copy certificates of marriage and death we had sent for, and the paper that had fallen at my feet in the church, but I nevertheless felt a devastating sense of loss. We went straight to the vicarage next door. ‘That’s right’, said the vicar,’we did clear some stones in... let me see... yes, October 1970 it would have been’.

Bob and I exchanged glances and each of us knew what the other was thinking: that it had been only a month after we had brought Aubra and George here to see it! ‘Under a scheme called “Operation Eyesore”‘, the vicar was saying, ‘we were allowed to remove any stones prior to 1900 and public notices were displayed to that effect in our local press.’ ‘A few sandstone ones crumbled’, he continued, ‘and some slate ones laminated upon removal, but the remainder of the stones were kept and are stored in the churchyard’. When we told him that the stone we were seeking was of marble, he replied that, in that case, it would definitely be there, because none of the marble ones had broken. He returned with us to the churchyard to show us where they were kept, but although the three of us inspected every one, there was no sign whatsoever of my grandparents’ stone. During our search, we began to realise that the only area that appeared to have been cleared was the one in which this stone had stood. Ann Wynn’s was still standing, further down the path but past the sundial - and, on the west side, so was her son’s, the seventeen-year-old shoemaker, who had died in 1851. In fact, there were many, many stones pre-1900 and in a poor condition, that had not been removed. We remarked to the vicar that it appeared to have been a very small clearance for such a grand title, to which he replied that “Operation Eyesore” had been the name given to the removal of selected stones from churchyards over quite a wide area. Before leaving, we asked him for the name of the Contractor who had carried out the work and he told us that he was a Mr. David Mills who, he believed, lived in the village, although he did not know his address. We spent the afternoon in Oswestry library, where we took a close look at several families of substance who had lived within a reasonable radius of Llansantffraid at the pertinent time, but eventually we came to the conclusion that none had been important enough to warrant - or powerful enough to instigate - the elaborate precautions we now knew had been taken in order to prevent my father and his sister from discovering their identity. While we were there, we gleaned quite a lot of information about the Williams

Wynns of Wynnstay and other branches of that illustrious family and, as we could find no family tree for them, I started to compile one. Thinking to pick up some dates from the Wynn graves there, we drove back via Llangedwyn again, where we found some people decorating the church in readiness for their Harvest Festival. Among them was the vicar and so, as it had already crossed my mind that the church records should reveal more details about the Williams Wynns than could be seen on their tombstones, we obtained his permission to peruse them on the following Monday. Next day, after a few false starts, we managed to track down David Mills, the Contractor who had removed some of the stones from Llansantffraid churchyard. He seemed to understand my distress, but was completely baffled as to why our stone was not among those stored, for he could not any of the marble ones breaking. All those that had broken, he told us, had been used to fill in a pond. He would willingly look there for ours, he said, but, like us, he was not very hopeful of finding it. Nevertheless, on returning to our caravan the following day, we found that he had pushed a note under the door, asking us to call on him the next morning. When we did so, he appeared as pleased to tell us as we were to hear, that he had found part of the stone. It had been broken top and bottom, he reported, but as luck would have it, the names and details on all three inscriptions had remained intact. He remarked upon the excellent quality of the stone and said again that he just could not understand how it had come to be broken. He had no recollection of it happening - or of its removal to the pond. ‘It’ll go in the boot of your car, if you like’, he turned to Bob, but seeing Bob’s hesitation, he very kindly offered to store it for us until we could arrange to have it re-sited. Little did we imagine then that five years would before that day came. For one thing, it took a great deal of slow correspondence with church dignitaries before we could obtain permission to have it replaced, and then it was only given on condition that we had it laid horizontally. Even after that, David Mills told us later, he tried for months to get a firm answer from the vicar as to when it would be in order for him to carry out the work for us. In fact, he never did manage to pin him down, but eventually got so fed up that he decided to go ahead and replace it anyway.

Months later, he told us all about it. Thinking it politic to keep the knowledge within his own four walls, he had bribed his young son, with a ten pound note, to give him a hand. And so, on a dark and foggy November night, they had loaded the stone onto his wagon and set out for the church. It was like something out of a Dickens’ novel, David recalled, as, armed with spades and a sack in which to remove the spoil, they carried the stone in silence towards the churchyard gate. When it squeaked, they jumped so much that they almost dropped the stone and were tempted to take flight. However, they drew deep breaths until their courage returned and then they carried on up the pathway to the church porch, by the side of which, their hearts beating fast in that dank and lonely graveyard, they eventually completed the task. Although desperate to be gone, they smeared the face of the stone with soil before leaving, in the hope that, should the vicar notice it had been replaced, he would think it must have happened some time ago, but David added that he had deemed it safer to stay away from church until Christmas, as an extra precaution against face-to-face interrogation.

Our search of the church records at Llangedwyn, the following Monday morning, yielded us more than we had expected, for we discovered the baptism, in December 1833, of Thomas, son of John and Ann Wynn of “Green Cottage”, Llangedwyn - Ann’s son, the young shoemaker. Up to now, we had been unable to imagine any possible link between Ann Wynn of Llansantffraid and the Williams Wynns. But now it seemed that, while one branch of that great family was residing here, at “Llangedwyn Hall”, Ann Wynn had been living in a house in the same village. Here was hope indeed that we might yet be able to establish a link between them. We had noticed the green as we ed through the village and also the “Green Inn”, which stood at the far side of it. What better place than the inn, we asked ourselves, to enquire as to the whereabouts of “Green Cottage”? Over a delicious lunch there, we were delighted to learn from the innkeeper that “Green Cottage” was still extant and stood right next door to his inn - and in fact overlapped it at the rear. His predecessor, he told us, had been given the opportunity to purchase it from “the estate” for £450, but had declined. That was about five years ago, he added, and a gentleman from Middlesex had then bought it but had done nothing to it since. As might be imagined, on leaving the inn we could not resist the temptation to explore the cottage, where we were lucky enough to find a broken window at the rear, through which we leaned and, by unbolting a door, gained access. It was a good-sized property, with accommodation over three floors and a single-storied extension which could well have served as a saddler’s workroom. Electricity had been installed by the time we saw it, but there appeared to be no sanitation of any kind and we could hear a fast-flowing stream running beneath the flagstoned floor at our feet.

‘If, as the innkeeper said, this house was once part of the estate’, Bob said as we re-bolted the door and set off back towards the church, ‘then there is our link to Sir Watkin. Saddlers would have been in such great demand in those days, that it would probably have paid him to have one living on his land, in order to have first call on his services. And who knows’, he continued, warming to his theme, ‘but what Ann Wynn might have been employed at “Llangedwyn Hall”, too, before they were married’. ‘Hang on a minute’, I told him, ‘Sir Watkin’s seat would still have been at “Wynnstay Hall” in those days, not here at Llangedwyn’. ‘But someone from the Williams Wynn family must have been living there’, he persisted, ‘and so maybe that’s the branch we should be looking at in detail’. ‘We’d have to find out who they were first’, I replied. The imposing, wrought-iron gates of “Llangedwyn Hall” stood immediately opposite the church and now, as we approached them, it suddenly struck me that the estate might have retained records of its erstwhile employees, in which case, John Wynn – or even Ann – might be mentioned there. ‘The estate manager would be the one to see about that’, Bob seized on the suggestion at once and went marching off towards the house, though, to my relief, he approached it via a less-important-looking drive which we had noticed further along the road. Everywhere seemed pretty deserted at first, but eventually we came to what appeared to be kennels, near which a man was stooping to pull burrs from a dog’s coat. We had been chatting to him for some time before we realised, from something he said, that he was, in fact, Colonel Sir Owen Watkin Williams Wynn, the current baronet - known, of course, as were all his predecessors, as Sir Watkin. In answer to our enquiry, he said he thought it very probable that such records had been preserved, but that when “Wynnstay Hall” had been sold, all such archive material had been ed to the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. As it happened, we had recently received a similar reply from the Diocesan Records Office when we had made enquiries of them regarding records we thought might have led us to the burial of John Wynn. Consequently, we now

knew where the last two days of our holidays had to be spent. After towing the caravan to Aberystwyth, finding the library and obtaining readers’ tickets for it, there was not a great deal of the first day left, but we made such good use of the second day that we were absolutely shattered by the end of it. We found the volume of material housed in that library quite staggering and, as we had not had opportunity to peruse a catalogue beforehand, it took us some little time to decide where to start. Eventually, we settled on the Bishop’s Transcripts for the Diocese of St. Asaph, which are basically copies of church records throughout the diocese. It certainly proved a great deal quicker than visiting the individual churches and infinitely preferable to traipsing around wet churchyards, but we still did not find the burial of John Wynn. What we did find, however, was the record of his marriage to Ann (nee Thomas) in 1833 and less than five months prior to the birth of their son, Thomas, whose baptism we had recently found at Llangedwyn. Their marriage had not taken place in that village, however, but at Llanfechain, a village a short distance along the valley from Llansantffraid. As Ann’s place of abode at the time of their marriage was also stated to be Llanfechain, it disproved Bob’s theory that she might have been in service at “Llangedwyn Hall” and so served to weaken, rather than strengthen, the tenuous link we had been trying to establish between her and the Williams Wynn family. One very significant fact did emerge from the record of their marriage, though: Ann had signed her name in a firm and neat hand. And yet, when she ed the birth of Elizabeth (as Mary), more than seventeen years later, she made her mark with a cross! ‘Then she must have chosen not to sign at Elizabeth’s registration’, I turned to Bob. ‘Why on earth would she have done that when she was quite capable of g?’ ‘Goodness knows’, he replied. In fact, I understood that, in those days, anyone who was literate was likely to be proud of the fact’. ‘That’s true. Unless… ‘Unless she didn’t want to break the law by g her name to a falsehood?’

‘How did you know I was going to say that?’ ‘Because I was ahead of you, as usual’, he taunted, ‘and anyway, I can’t see any other reason for it’. Disappointingly, our study of the Williams Wynn documents did not reveal what we sought, but I was able to glean a great deal of information to add to their family tree. Perusing the great tomes was physically exhausting though, for some of them were so large and thick that I could not turn the pages from a sitting position, but had to stand up to read them. Although they yielded nothing to further our search, we found the Rent Books particularly interesting. They were written in a copper-plate hand and gave some indication of the vastness of their holdings. From them, we discovered that, at one time, they could travel from Ruabon, not far from the English border, to Aberystwyth, on the west coast, without leaving their own lands. They gave some idea of their enormous influence, too, for quite amazing comments had been made in the margins. One, in particular, I , which had been written beside the name of the tenant of a certain manor house. It read: “Treacherous and ungrateful man. Voted for Colonel Edwards. Has been deprived of his lands”. It was all absolutely fascinating and I could have spent weeks there, but we had hired the caravan for a limited period and had promised to visit Bob’s elderly mother at Wootton Bassett before returning it. We had, however, uncovered one important fact: the branch of the family in residence at “Llangedwyn Hall” in 1851, the year of my grandmother’s birth, was that of Charles Williams Wynn Esquire, M.P., uncle of the Sir Watkin of that time and later to be dubbed “Father of the House of Commons”. ‘I reckon it might pay us to take a very close look at Charles Williams Wynn’s unmarried daughter, Charlotte’, Bob said as we drove to Wootton Bassett next day, ‘We’ve already reached the conclusion that, coming from such an illustrious family, it would have caused quite a stir if your grandmother had been the result of some dalliance on the part of Sir Watkin or one of the other young blades of his kin, but just imagine how much more embarrassment it would have caused if a female of the species had committed such an indiscretion.’.

‘I’m sure it would have’, I replied, but as yet we have no evidence to suggest that Elizabeth was other than as stated at baptism: “base child of Ann Wynn”. And certainly Elizabeth must have believed, not only that Ann was her mother, but also that John Wynn was her father, for she would never have perpetuated the names of Wynn, Ann, John and Thomas by giving them to her children, if she had been aware that they were bastard names’. ‘I agree. I think that, like your father and aunt, Elizabeth was kept in ignorance of a great deal. And I agree, too, that we haven’t yet found any concrete evidence to the fact that Ann was not her mother, but, to my mind, the circumstances just don’t ring true’. ‘Go on’ I said. ‘Well, there is Ann Wynn, a widow of forty-two - and women aged a lot earlier then, - and her only child is seventeen years old. Now, in those days of little or no contraception, this suggests that she had probably been widowed for quite a long time. And by the same reasoning, she had not, thus far, been promiscuous. And yet we are asked to believe that this hitherto respectable woman not only goes off the rails and gives birth to a child, but also cuts short her lying-in period to about half that of younger women and travels miles over bad roads – and probably even through winter floods - to the birth at eleven days, even though the law allows her six weeks in which to do so. Then, although she’s quite capable of g her name in the , she decides to make her mark with a cross instead. And as if that weren’t enough, she names the baby ‘Mary’ only to have her baptised the very next day as ‘Elizabeth’ never, as far as we know, to be referred to as Mary again. Can you honestly say that makes any sense?’ I had to it that it didn’t, but neither did so many other things we had learned thus far. ‘I reserve judgement’, I told him, ‘but at this rate we shall never discover who my great-grandparents were. We’ve just got to find some way to speed up our search.’

CHAPTER FOUR

As soon as we were settled back home in Cornwall, I replied to the first newspaper ment I could find which began: “Trace Your Ancestors” and enquired as to their scale of charges. As I had feared, they were calculated by the hour and the rate was far from cheap. Having invested heavily in our guesthouse, we could not afford to spend a great deal, but we decided to invest a few pounds and see how far it took us. In the event, it turned out to be money well spent, for though it yielded only one or two relevant facts, they were important ones and we also gleaned from their literature a wealth of information as to how we might continue the search ourselves. For instance, we had not been aware, until then, that details from the National Population Census forms, which we are all bound by law to fill in and return every ten years, are made available to the general public after one hundred years. By the most amazing stroke of luck, a census had been taken on 30th. March 1851, just four weeks after my grandmother, Elizabeth, had been born, and the genealogists we had employed sent us extracts from it, including details of everyone resident in the “Golden Eagle Inn” on that day. They were: William Thomas, a seventy-three-year-old widower, who was the publican and also farmed five acres of land; his unmarried son of thirty-one, who bore the same name; his widowed daughter, Ann Wynn, who was serving at home, and his grandson, Thomas Wynn, the seventeen-year-old shoemaker⁸. ‘So where was Elizabeth? ‘ we almost chorused in amazement. ‘Perhaps, as she was only four weeks old’, I suggested without conviction, ‘they decided not to include her.’ ‘Rubbish’, Bob reed. ‘Officials came to the house to take details in those days, because a large proportion of the population was illiterate. Almost everyone breathing had to be entered on those forms and it certainly wouldn’t have been in the remit of the recorders to decide to omit anyone - even a babe in

arms. No’, he shook his head in bewilderment, ‘it’s just one more mystery to add to the rest.’ ‘Well at least we’ve learned two things’, I told him, ‘firstly, we now know that it was Ann’s father, William Thomas, who was the publican, not Ann herself, and secondly, we know that she had another brother, besides the John Thomas mentioned in her will‘. ‘I doubt if either of those facts will go far towards helping us to solve the mystery’, he replied, ‘but it all helps to build up a picture, I suppose’. That winter, through the post, we managed to build up quite a lot more and what a tragic picture, in parts, it turned out to be! We discovered that, only eight days before the census had been taken, William Thomas the innkeeper had lost his wife, Ann Thomas (Ann Wynn’s mother), from what appeared to have been a stroke, and very soon afterwards, William Thomas himself, (Ann’s father), had died of smallpox. Then, only a fortnight later, the same disease had killed his seventeen-year-old grandson, Ann’s son, Thomas Wynn, the little shoemaker, whose grave we had found at the west end of Llansantffraid churchyard. And so, within six weeks of Elizabeth’s birth, Ann Wynn had lost both parents and her only son. Whether or not she was, in fact, my great-grandmother, we felt sorry in our hearts for her - but we had still not discovered how she had amassed her huge fortune, nor what on earth she had done with the baby Elizabeth. Now that we knew the names of her parents and brother, we were able to make enquiries as to whether she might have inherited her wealth from one of them, but though a friend made a thorough search of the Probate Office on our behalf, she could find no wills proved in their names and no letters of istration granted. Needless to say, during this time we had also been researching the life and times of various of the Williams Wynn family, but in each case, we had found something that either did not fit or did not ring true and so, one by one, those “Aunt Sallys” had fallen. In fact, the only one who was still standing up to our scrutiny was Charlotte, the unmarried daughter of Sir Watkin’s Uncle Charles at “Llangedwyn Hall”.

Through Padstow’s small but efficient library, we had obtained a copy of a book entitled “Memorials of Charlotte Williams Wynn”, a collection of her letters, edited by her sister. The book covered the thirty years of her life from 1839 until just before her death in 1869 and we noticed that letters had been included for every year except 1849 and 1850. As Elizabeth was born early in 1851, our hopes began to rise, especially as in one of her letters, she had hypothesised on how best to bring up a daughter. She came over as a most cultured, erudite, open-minded and comionate lady and I came to ire her so much that, if Bob’s theory were right and Ann Wynn was not my great-grandmother, then I felt that I could hope for no-one better than Charlotte to fill that role. Irrespective of her wealth and position, I would have been proud to claim kin to her. But apart from believing that Ann Wynn and her husband and young son had once lived in a house on Charlotte’s father’s estate, we were still no nearer to establishing a link between the two women. My cousin Elsie and I had continued to correspond. I sent her a copy of the photograph I had of our mutual grandfather, Owen Lewis, in his many-buttoned police uniform and, when she learned that I had no photograph of Elizabeth (my father’s copy having suffered the same fate as other family documents), she kindly sent me a copy of hers and, to our surprise and delight, one of Ann Wynn, too, which she presumed her mother must have obtained from her foster-mother, Harriet Stamp. Of course Elizabeth’s photograph was familiar to my brothers, sisters and myself, for our father’s large, framed copy had hung in our dining-room at home for as long as any of us could , but none of us had ever set eyes on Ann Wynn’s likeness before. What age she would have been when the photograph was taken, we had no means of telling, but we could not imagine that, at over forty years of age, she had been sufficiently attractive to have turned heads especially that of someone as eligible as Sir Watkin.

We had already been feeling frustrated in our desire to continue our search and, in particular, to discover the whereabouts of Elizabeth at the time of the census. The sight of these photographs increased that frustration to such a pitch that we recklessly decided to shut up shop and do a two-day flyer to North Wales where, we had heard, copies of the 1851 census could be viewed on microfilm in Newtown library. The search was not easy. We looked in detail at every household in Llansantffraid, but without success and so then had to begin searching the outlying district. At last, however, our patience was rewarded, for in the tiny hamlet of Trederwen, some three miles or so from the village, we came across the entry for the household of one John Hughes, a farm labourer, his wife, Mary and their large family - and there, at the bottom of the list, we saw: “Elizabeth Wyn [sic]…1 month... visitor” ‘What did I tell you?’ Bob cried animatedly, ‘Ann Wynn couldn’t feed her because she hadn’t given birth to her and so she was put out with a wet nurse. Look, the youngest of John and Mary Hughes’ brood was only seven months old, so Mary would have had milk for her’. ‘You’re getting carried away again’, I told him.‘Quite a number of natural mothers are unable to feed their babies - and Ann was no chicken, ’. ‘Granted. But according to those background books we took such pains to read, it was usually women in the upper classes who engaged a wet nurse, because they didn’t want their social lives interrupted or their figures spoiled. And then the nurse would normally live in - not three miles away. If people of Ann Wynn’s ilk couldn’t feed their babies they would give them diluted cows’ milk, or even goats’ or ewes’. His arguments made sense and his enthusiasm was infectious, but I preferred to err on the side of caution. ‘All right, then’, he continued, ‘assuming for the moment that Ann Wynn really had given birth, why do you think she would have sent her baby all the way to Trederwen? In those days of large families, there must have been plenty of women in the village who would have been only too eager to earn money, by calling regularly at the inn to feed Elizabeth - and that way, mother and child need not have been parted’.

Just then, the librarian brought us another roll of film and Bob moved to a different viewer. I had been about to suggest to him that Ann might have sent Elizabeth away in order to isolate her from the smallpox, but then I ed that Ann’s father and son had been the first to die from it in the village and, as neither of them had contracted it until more than two weeks after the census, the danger would not have been apparent at the time that Elizabeth was removed to Trederwen. ‘Come and look at this’, Bob broke into my thoughts from across the room and, on ing him I found he was studying not the 1851, but the 1861 census returns. As I read, my heart skipped a beat, for there was Elizabeth, now ten years of age - and still boarded out with the Hughes family!¹ ‘Well?’ he asked excitedly, ‘are you convinced now, or can you offer any other reason why, if Elizabeth really had been Ann’s daughter, she would not have taken her to live with her?’ ‘No, I can’t’, I replied, ‘unless...’ ‘What?’ ‘Well... perhaps it was a very busy inn and all the rooms were let to guests’, I suggested. ‘That could have been where some of her money came from.’ ‘She’d have had to have let a few hundred rooms to earn the amount she left’, he replied sceptically, ‘but we can soon find out’, and with that he ran the viewer until he found the “Golden Eagle Inn”. ‘There you are’, he said, pointing out the entry: ‘Ann Wynn was the innkeeper by then - and she was given as head of the household now, you’ll notice, not her brother William – and the only person living there besides those two was a general servant - their niece, Mary Kenrick!’¹¹ I ceded victory.

‘What I can’t understand’, Bob said as we drove home, ‘is why the powers-thatbe bothered to bring Ann Wynn into the set-up at all’.

‘Whom do you mean by “the powers-that-be”? ‘Whoever was seeking someone to take care of Elizabeth. If they were content for the Hugheses to rear her, why did they need Ann, too? Mrs. Hughes could have claimed to be her mother, just as Ann did – and that would have been a darned sight more credible, too.’ ‘True’, I said, ‘except that she had a child of her own that was only seven months old, though I suppose she could have claimed that Elizabeth was premature’. ‘Yes, or even delayed ing her for five or six weeks and declared her birth date later than it was’. I frowned. ‘Okay, so it would have been illegal - but so was what Ann Wynn did when she declared the child was hers’. ‘On the other hand, I said, ‘Mary Hughes was nowhere near as old as Ann and not widowed either. To my mind, she would have been the most sensible choice’. ‘I agree, but I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps she didn’t fit the bill in one important respect’. I looked at him enquiringly. ‘Her name was not Wynn’, he said. ‘You mean... that they might have preferred that she should keep her rightful name?’ ‘Something like that, yes’. ‘It’s a possibility, I suppose’, I nodded thoughtfully, ‘And come to think of it, an eagle features prominently in the Williams Wynn crest - and in their motto - so perhaps, if she really did have some link to that family, they named the inn the “Golden Eagle” in order that she should dwell under that, too’. ‘That would make sense’, he nodded.

‘But if we’re honest’, I sighed abjectly, ‘we have to it that we’re no nearer to solving the riddle now than we were at the outset’. ‘Rubbish!’ he exclaimed vehemently, ‘We know a hell of a lot more now than we did. And, thinking about it, I had to it that the facts were slowly but surely emerging and, like some giant jigsaw puzzle, we were piecing them together to reveal a fascinating picture. But it was a picture with an empty space at its heart, a space I knew would never be filled until we could answer the burning question: “Who were the parents of Elizabeth Wynn?”, for we were now convinced that Ann Wynn was not one of them, and I was beginning to fear that the cover-up had been so efficient that we should never discover who was. As soon as we returned home, we turned our spotlight upon the “Golden Eagle Inn”. If Ann Wynn had owned it, we reasoned, then some of the money she left would have been raised by the sale of it - and if she had not owned it, then it might pay us to find out who had. It turned out to be a harder task than we had imagined, involving a staggering amount of correspondence, but eventually we managed to establish that she had never owned the premises and neither had her father nor any member of her family. It appeared that, during the time of their occupation, it had been owned by a John Lewis (no connection with any of my father’s paternal kin, as far as we could make out) and a James England, but about these two men and their partnership, try as we might, we could discover nothing whatsoever, which prompted Bob to suggest that they might have been pseudonyms. There were two other hostelries in the village of Llansantffraid, “The Sun” and “The Lion” and, for the period 1848 to 1850 (i.e. the year prior to Elizabeth’s birth) we discovered records of rates paid by both these inns, but there was no similar record for the “Golden Eagle”. We did, however, find that, during the same period, Ann’s father, William Thomas, was paying rates on a house and two acres of land at Melyniog, a hamlet on the outskirts of the village, which seems to suggest that the family must have moved into the newly-created “Golden Eagle” only at the time of, or shortly prior to, Elizabeth’s birth. At some time after Ann’s death, the premises ed into the hands of “The Shrewsbury & Wem Brewery Company” and, by an incredible stroke of luck, a

solicitor who had acted for them when they had disposed of it in 1928, had retained a catalogue of the sale, which he most kindly sent to me. It gives an indication of how slowly inflation was rising - even then, after the Great War had intervened - for it describes the erstwhile “Golden Eagle” as having: a Bar, a Snug, a Smoke-room, Sitting room, Kitchen, Back kitchen, Cellar, Six Bedrooms and Stabling for two horses and yet in 1928 it was bringing in a rent of only £12 per annum! The most useful and surprising information we gleaned from that sale catalogue, though, was that Ann Wynn had relinquished the licence in 1869 and it had ceased to trade as an inn.

‘Elizabeth would have been eighteen by then’, I turned to Bob ‘so perhaps that is when she came back from Trederwen to live with Ann’. ‘Very likely’, he replied. ‘She would have been approaching marriageable age and, from her photograph, I should imagine she must have been quite an attractive young woman. The last thing the powers-that-be would have wanted would have been for her to marry and have children. It must have complicated their task beyond belief when she did’. ‘If you’re right in that’, I replied, ‘then closing the inn would make sense. It would have prevented her from coming into with so many people and Ann Wynn would have been able to chaperone her well on a one-to-one basis’. ‘She must have done a pretty good job of it, too’, he said, ‘for wasn’t she nearly thirty by the time she did get married?’ ‘Of course!’ I exclaimed in sudden realisation. ‘They eloped! It all fits. That’s why they were married by special license and went all the way to Shrewsbury to do so. If Ann were keeping such a tight rein on her, elopement might have been their only option’. ‘True. As you say, it all fits, though I can’t see how we can ever prove it. Next time we go to Newtown library, though, we could at least check the situation at the “Golden Eagle” at the time of the 1871 census; they should have film of it there by now’. And so we found them: just Ann and the twenty-year-old Elizabeth alone in the erstwhile inn. Ann’s niece, Mary Kenrick, had gone - perhaps to return to her home at Chester? - and, as we were later to discover, Ann’s brother William, by then a Master Maltster, had died of tuberculosis six years earlier.¹² ‘What a lonely life it must have been for the young Elizabeth’, I remarked to Bob. ‘She had come from a houseful of foster-brothers and -sisters and was now living with a sixty-two-year-old woman, who she presumably believed was her mother, but who must, at first, have seemed like a stranger to her’. ‘Yes, and what puzzles me’, he replied, ‘is what on earth they lived on. The inn never opened again during the remaining sixteen years of Ann’s life, , and there would have been two of them to keep for the first thirteen years, until

Elizabeth eloped’. ‘Then either Ann had already come into her fortune - and, if so, where from? - or else a third party must have been funding them’. ‘My money’s on the latter’, he said, ‘and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the same third party had provided the inn’. ‘What makes you say that?’ ‘Well can you imagine any normal landlord allowing Ann to relinquish the licence and still remain in residence? The goodwill would have been lost and the letting value reduced. And while we’re putting up “Aunt Sally”s....’ ‘Go on’. ‘Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about Ann’s will. That was a hell of a lot of money for her to leave - wherever it had come from - and I’m wondering whether someone might have augmented her estate and that only the hundred pounds she left between her brother and sister was, in fact, her own money. Even that was a small fortune in those days, , and a great deal more than someone in her circumstances would normally accrue’. ‘Are you suggesting that Elizabeth’s natural parents might have funded the rest the amount that was left to Elizabeth?’ ‘Them or their agents, yes - or whoever set up this whole charade’. ‘But why would they want to do that?’ ‘Because they would have been aware that, once Ann had died, they might find it difficult to money to Elizabeth without showing their hand. I suspect they were at pains to ensure that she had enough to live on and, probably even more important, that she didn’t die a pauper’. ‘How do you make that out?’ ‘Well somebody must have arranged that grave plot for her in the richest of the “Rich ground”. As I’ve said before, hellfire and damnation were a constant threat in those Victorian times and so they wouldn’t have let her come to a

pauper’s grave for fear of damning her soul – and theirs’. ‘You’ve got an over-active imagination’, I told him dismissively, but I had to it - to myself at least - that his argument offered the only plausible solution that either of us had managed to come up with to the mysteries of both Ann Wynn’s estate and Owen and Elizabeth’s grave plot. With regard to the latter, I was now convinced that Bob had been right when he suggested that it had been secured for Elizabeth many years earlier, for when Ann Wynn died, in 1884 (and that was four years before Owen) she had been buried in the “Poor’s ground” in spite of all her wealth. In what seemed no time at all, the Cornish holiday season was upon us again and we had no time or energy for anything but work. After it was over, we had arranged to go to Eton, where a cousin of Bob’s was getting married. We had also arranged to pick up Bob’s mother en route, but when we arrived at Wootton Bassett, we found her so unwell that we decided to stay there with her and look after her. She was a dainty little lady and her cottage home was in proportion to her needs. Consequently, our own accommodation was cramped, to say the least and, to complicate matters further, as the season drew to a close, I had developed a DVT in my leg and was under doctor’s orders to spend as much time as possible with it raised above my hip. In spite of our ministrations, Bob’s mother’s condition did not appear to be improving, so that we were not only sleeping in cramped conditions, but also working long days under mounting pressure. Perhaps for this reason, I dreamt a lot during this time and one of those dreams, in particular, was exceptionally vivid. It was not over-long and the content did not make much sense to me, but it had such a special quality about it and it stayed with me for so long that, eventually, I mentioned it to Bob. In it, I had found myself waiting in a hairdressing salon. I had made no appointment, but had been told that they would try to fit me in. As I sat waiting, I gazed around at the decor and was surprised to find that it was designed to represent a monastery, with cut stone walls, vaulted ceiling, pillars and cloisters. At length, I was approached by a rather small, middle-aged lady with reddish hair. She was in modern dress, but the assistant who accompanied her wore a monk’s habit in brown, complete with hood and girdled waist.

‘We’ve managed to find you a slot’, the lady smiled, ‘if you’d like to accompany Bonnor here, he will see to you now’. As I followed the “monk” along a ageway, I thinking to myself that they had even given their assistants monks’ names. That’s all there was to it and then I awoke. ‘I didn’t know Bonnor was a monk’s name’, Bob said when I told him. ‘I don’t suppose it is’, I replied, ‘It’s just that, in my dream, I seemed to know that it was’. We talked very little more about it, but, to this day, I can see it all very vividly. A week or so later, Bob’s mother still making no progress, we asked for a consultant geriatrician to be brought in, who, having examined her, thought it best to it her to hospital. As she had a niece and nephew and plenty of friends nearby who would visit her, Bob insisted that, once we had settled her in, we should go to Aubra and George’s home, near London, for a much-needed rest. For the first twenty-four-hours or so after our arrival, we did almost nothing but sleep, but once refreshed, we could not bear to be that close to London without doing some research and the document we were keenest to peruse was the will of Charlotte Williams Wynn, for we had still not abandoned hope that she might have been Elizabeth’s mother. One of her closest male friends had been the Reverend Frederick Dennison Maurice, founder of “The Working Men’s College” in London, and we had wondered, on occasions, whether to investigate him as a contender for the role of my great-grandfather. Consequently, over breakfast, I said to Bob: ‘While we are at the Probate Office, it might pay us to see whether the Reverend F.D. Maurice left a will’. To my amazement, he replied: ‘What, old Bonnor Maurice?’ ‘Why did you call him “Bonnor” Maurice? ‘ I asked ‘I don’t know’, he replied, looking as perplexed as I felt. ‘It just sort of came

out’. Neither of us could understand it, for we had never known him to utter anything unintentionally before and so we asked Aubra and George whether they had ever come across the name Bonnor Maurice, but the nearest they could offer was Bonar Law or Bonham Carter and, in the end, we all attributed Bob’s involuntary words to the stress he had been under during the last few weeks. Nevertheless, he and I spoke about it again on the way up to town, for we both felt that it was a strange coincidence that I should recently have dreamt of a Bonnor, too.

At the Probate Office, the indexes are filed by year, and alphabetically within each year, and so, as we knew the date Charlotte had died, it did not take us long to locate her entry. As to when the Reverend Maurice had died, however, we could only hazard a guess and therefore decided that we would each search a block of five years. I had barely started on my second tome when I felt someone tap my shoulder and Bob beckoned me to follow him to where he had been working. The index he had been searching lay open on the desk and before my eyes had scanned the small amount of Maurices listed there, a lower entry seemed to leap at me from the page: “BONNOR MAURICE, Robert Maurice... died 27th. April 1872... late of Bodynfol, Montgomeryshire...” ‘From Montgomeryshire, too! ‘ I exclaimed excitedly. But we had never heard of Bodynfol. It could have been in any part of that county for all we knew. and we couldn’t imagine what interest it could possibly hold for us. Nevertheless, in view of the strange way Bob had mentioned Bonnor Maurice that morning and I had dreamt of the name Bonnor, we felt we simply must make a note of the details - just in case. Some weeks later, when Bob’s mother was out of hospital and recovered sufficiently for us to leave her, we returned home and, from there, began to search for Bodynfol. As no further details of the address had been given in the will index, we had assumed it must be a village or small town, but to our amazement it turned out to be a country mansion in the parish of Llanfechain the next village along the valley from Llansantffraid!

It was the village where Ann and John Wynn had been married and where Ann had been residing at that time - and as we also discovered that there had only been one other house of consequence in that village, we reckoned there was a fair chance that she might have been employed at Bodynfol. More interesting still, as far as our Charlotte “Aunt Sally” was concerned, was the fact that this Robert Bonnor Maurice of Bodynfol had been captain of the Llangedwyn troop of the Montgomeryshire Yeomanry - a troop that had been mustered by Charlotte’s father, Charles Williams Wynn - and both Robert and Charlotte had died in , within three years of one another, almost to the day. ‘There’s a romantic scenario for you’, said Bob. ‘The handsome young captain, resplendent in his uniform, must have spent a great deal of time at Llangedwyn Hall, drilling his men, and so would have come into with Charlotte quite frequently’. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions again’, I told him. ‘We have no proof as to whether he was handsome or not and, as Charlotte had her own establishment in London, there might well have been little or no between them. But it’s worth more research, I grant you’. As it turned out, however, we had no more time for research that winter for, due in part to my leg trouble, we decided to sell the guesthouse and move back to Wiltshire, where we could also keep a weather eye on Bob’s mother. It sounds so simple, put like that, but in fact the state of the national economy at the time was such that, in order to achieve our aim, we first had to exchange the guesthouse for a farm, still in Cornwall, and then exchange the farm for a house up-country. Consequently, it was spring before we could escape to Wales again, and then only for a weekend, but it was long enough for us to find “Bodynfol Hall” - a sturdy, stone-built mansion, set in a fold of gently-rolling hills – and, without hesitation, Bob drove us straight up the drive and rang the bell. To our surprise, it was answered by the owner himself, who courteously invited us into his library, where we were delighted to learn from him that the house had not changed hands; he was a Bonnor Maurice and, as far as we could make out, a direct descendant of Captain Robert. We told him that we were seeking information on someone who might have been employed by his family in the

1830s and we wondered whether any staff records from that time had survived. He said that, as far as he knew, he had none, but that his mother would probably know more about such things and so, if we would like to leave our address, he would ask her and let us know. As Bob handed him our address, he noticed that we were living in the village of Crudwell and told us, very animatedly, all about the famous racehorse of that name. ‘Have you spoken of your requirements to my cousin at “Bryn-y-Gwalia”?’ he asked suddenly as we were leaving and, when we gazed at him enquiringly, he added: ‘It’s just over the hill from here, at Llangedwyn. My cousin is a bit of a recluse now, I believe, but if his sister’s there, she might be able to help you’. He then went on to explain how to get there and added that the entrance to their drive was on the right-hand side of the road, just past the “Green Inn”. We thanked him for his time and turned the car for Llangedwyn. ‘But I thought Sir Watkin’s “Llangedwyn Hall” grounds stretched right up to the “Green Inn” and beyond’, I said to Bob as we approached the village. ‘I can seeing that little lodge Mr. Bonnor Maurice described, but I assumed it was just a minor entrance to Llangedwyn Hall’. ‘So did I’, he replied as he turned onto it, ‘but we shall soon find out’. The driveway, which curved steeply up hill between purple rhododendron bushes, must once have been quite imposing, but now it was unkempt and badly overgrown and rabbits played like kittens in our path. The house, which had not been visible to us from the road, came into view as the drive levelled out and we noticed that it, too, was badly in need of care, though we both remarked on its glorious setting, commanding views, as it did, across the verdant Tanat Valley. The doorbell did not appear to work and our first and second knocks received no reply, but just as we were turning disappointedly away, we heard the bolts being drawn and an elderly gentleman put his head around the door and called to us. He seemed almost as unkempt as the house, but his voice was kind and cultured and so we told him of our quest and of how we had been referred to him and his sister by their cousin at Bodynfol.

‘I’m afraid I know of no records’, he replied. ‘My sister Diana’s more for that kind of thing. She may be able to help you, but she’s moved into the old gardener’s cottage, further up the hill’. We thanked him and walked on up the drive, where we found Diana sitting in her cottage garden with a cup of coffee and the Sunday newspapers. From the moment we introduced ourselves, we got on like a house on fire and a close friendship was forged between us that day, which was to last until her death, nearly twenty years later. She had no records of past employees of Bryn-y-Gwalia, she told us, let alone of Bodynfol, and she was amazed that her cousin had thought she might have, for the two families, though friendly enough, lived very separate lives. Those at Bodynfol were named Bonnor Maurice, she explained, whereas she and her siblings had been just plain Bonnor, until her late mother had discovered a dormant feudal barony, to which they were still entitled. Consequently, her brother John, whom we had just met at the big house, was now Baron Moris of Main, although he did not use the title, and she and the rest of her family were now Bonnor Moris (Moris being the ancient spelling of Maurice).

‘We’ve been to this village a number of times’, Bob told her, ‘but until today, we had no idea that “Bryn-y-Gwalia” existed. We understood this land to be part of the “Llangedwyn Hall” estate’. ‘No’, she replied, ‘Sir Watkin is our neighbour. Our lands are ading’. ‘But that’s odd’, I remarked, ‘for surely the “Green Inn” and “Green Cottage” were once part of the Williams Wynn estate and yet they are on the opposite side of your land to “Llangedwyn Hall”‘. ‘No, dear’, she replied, ‘the inn and the cottage always belonged to this, our “Bryn-y-Gwalia” estate. We only sold them off a few years ago. They’re on all our old maps. ‘Then in that case’, I remarked to Bob, ‘in 1833, when John and Ann Wynn moved into “Green Cottage following their marriage, John must have been employed, not by Sir Watkin, as we thought, but by a member of the Bonnor family - one of Diana’s forebears. Oddly enough’, I turned to Diana, ‘they were married at Llanfechain and Ann had been living there at the time. As it’s such a small village we’ve been wondering whether she might have been in service at “Bodynfol” prior to their marriage’. ‘That’s very probable’, Diana replied, ‘for in those days there was much more trafficking between “Bryn-y-Gwalia” and “Bodynfol” because the owners were not just cousins, as we are today - they were brothers: Richard Bonnor here and Robert Bonnor Maurice at Bodynfol.’ ‘That must have been the Robert we found reference to in the Probate Office’, I exclaimed ‘He would have been alive then’. ‘Where did the Maurice come in, then?’ Bob sounded puzzled. ‘Their mother’s maiden name was Maurice’, Diana explained. ‘Being the eldest son, Richard inherited “Bryn-y-Gwalia”. Robert, the younger one, had no estate, but a Maurice uncle offered to make him his heir if he would add Maurice to his name. He did so and bought “Bodynfol” and its lands out of his legacy. The cousin you met today is descended from Robert, while we are descended from Richard. He was my great-grandfather, in fact. We are all very proud of him, for, like many of our ancestors, he was a man of the cloth and not only did he rise to

be vicar to Sir Watkin Williams Wynn at Ruabon, but he was later made Dean of the Diocese of St. Asaph’. Bells were beginning to ring in my head, but I was finding it a bit much to take in all at once and so, to change the subject, I started to tell Diana about the strange way we had discovered “Bodynfol” - and thus herself, here at “Bryn-yGwalia” - through my dream and Bob’s involuntary words. ‘Oh, my dear!’ she exclaimed when I had finished, ‘Do you know, that’s made my hair stand on end.’ She shivered visibly. ‘You see, before ever this place was built, a monastery stood on this site’. ‘Never!’ Bob and I chorused. ‘Oh, yes’, she insisted. ‘I’ve read all about it and you can still see the remains of the abbot’s fish ponds beside the back drive. In fact, I think they must, at one time, have continued in tiers down the side of the hill, for the stream still flows that way and es beneath “Green Cottage” and out onto the green.’ And then it suddenly struck me that, like the person in my dream, Diana was a rather small, middle-aged lady, whose hair had a decidedly reddish hue!

In all, we must have stayed with Diana for three or four hours and even then she seemed reluctant to let us go and insisted that we should keep in touch. ‘Fancy “Green Cottage” turning out to be on the Bonnor’s estate and not the Williams Wynn’s after all’, I remarked to Bob as we drove away. ‘Yes, that was a turn-up for the book’, he replied, ‘but we’ve done what we’ve been trying to do for ages, nevertheless’. ‘Established a link between Ann Wynn and Sir Watkin, you mean? I don’t see how’ ‘In the person of the Reverend Richard Bonnor, of course. Both John and Ann Wynn were well known to him, , and he was Sir Watkin’s own vicar’. ‘And friend and mentor, too, according to Diana’ I replied. ‘Well, thinking about it, that would make sense, because all the time he was growing up at “Bryn-y-Gwalia”, he was right next door, as it were, to Sir Watkin’s uncle and cousins - and they included Charlotte, . There was probably a great deal of between the two families’. ‘So...’ I ventured, ‘if Charlotte - or any of the Wynns - were faced with the problem of an illegitimate daughter, their vicar friend could well have come to their aid by setting up Ann Wynn to take care of her’. ‘That’s a good “Aunt Sally”‘, he allowed, ‘but I’ve got a better: What if Elizabeth had been the result of an illicit liaison between Charlotte and the Reverend Bonnor himself - a man of the cloth? That really would have put the cat among the pigeons - and Diana did describe the Dean as being “a very loving man”, ’. ‘That was because he had three wives and ten children’, I told him, ‘which probably kept him far too busy to indulge in extra-marital affairs - and besides, since reading her letters, I’ve learned a lot about Charlotte and I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that she was not the type of person to have entered into some clandestine affair’. ‘You can’t possibly know that’, he protested. ‘We’ve all got hidden depths’.

‘All right, but even supposing she had, I just can’t see her surrendering her child to someone else. I feel sure she would have insisted upon rearing her herself, even if, for propriety’s sake, she had been forced to leave the country to do so’ ‘So most of what we have learned today has all been a glorious waste of time?’ ‘‘Not in the least’, I told him. ‘It’s all building up a picture, a background to our jigsaw and to whatever events followed, the characters of the people who might have been involved and their relationships to one another. And in any event, after the strange way we discovered the Bonnors - to say nothing about what Diana has just told us about “Bryn-y-Gwalia” having been a monastery - I can’t believe other than that we were sent here for some reason’. ‘I’ve said all along that “someone up there” is trying to tell us something’, he replied. Later that year, when we visited St. Asaph’s cathedral, it seemed to us that we were being given confirmation of this. It was beginning to grow dusk even as we arrived, and as we wandered alone in the nave, with the altar candles lit in readiness for evensong, lending the only light, we found ourselves standing before Dean Bonnor’s memorial, a large brass cross, let into the south wall. We read the inscription and then our eyes fell on the epitaph: “He, being dead, yet speaketh”! Whether this had been chosen by himself or by his grieving widow and children, we had no way of knowing, but I knew in that moment what Diana had meant when she spoke of her hair standing on end!

Before returning home we called, as we usually did when we were in the area, upon my Lewis cousins at “Green Hall”, near Llanfyllin. Sadly, during the years since our first researching trip to Wales, the old lady, Ted’s widow, had died, but her son, Trefor, his wife, Jean, and their three sons made us as welcome as ever. Trefor’s brother, my cousin Raymond, also farmed in that area, and it so happened that, on this occasion, he was at “Green Hall” when we called. As we all sat talking over coffee, the conversation turned to family relationships. ‘I’ve been trying to draw up our Lewis family tree’, I told them. ‘I see there are a

number of our headstones along the road, in Bwlch-y-cibau churchyard, and we’ve managed to pick up some dates from those, but - have you noticed? - they are mainly of people who died this century. There are no really old stones there’. ‘No, there wouldn’t be’, Raymond replied, ‘because our family didn’t come from this area originally’. ‘Really?’ I exclaimed. ‘I’d no idea - so where did we come from? ‘From Llangadfan’, he replied and, noticing my puzzled expression: ‘It’s about twelve miles from here’, he added, ‘near the main road to Dolgellau’. ‘Do you know what made them decide to move here?’ I asked him. ‘Our grandfather, it was. That would be… let me see… your great-uncle – your father’s Uncle John. He moved here because he’d been invited to become Head Man - or Bailiff, as some people call it - for the Bonnor Maurices at “Bodynfol Hall”‘!

‘All these years’, I remarked to Bob on the way home, ‘and none of us had ever heard of the Bonnor Maurices and yet now, since discovering them in that strange way, we seem to be hearing of them on all sides’. ‘What did you think about your father’s Uncle John being offered that important job by them then?’ he asked.’Was it just the long arm of coincidence, do you reckon? Or might it have been his reward for not insisting on rearing his brother Owen’s orphaned children?’ ‘I need notice of that question’, I told him. Once my father had been re-united with his Uncle John, there had always been a great welcome for him, my mother and our family at “Ty-Ucha”, so that it had always struck me as odd that he had allowed others to take away his young niece and nephew and, presumably, had lost touch with them for more than twenty years. Furthermore, considering the evasive answers - or none - which my father had always received from him and his family whenever he broached the subject of

his mother or his maternal kin, I strongly suspected that he had been involved in the conspiracy of silence. This newest “Aunt Sally” of Bob’s was going to take some knocking down. And yet it all seemed so far-fetched. Would people really have gone to such lengths, I asked myself, even in those prudish Victorian days, just to cover up some embarrassing misdemeanour. Later that week, as we recounted to my brother, Norman, all that we had learned, he ed how once, on a visit to “Ty-Ucha”, Uncle John had taken him to the top of a very high hill nearby and had pointed out to him, in the far, far distance, where he used to live as a child and where he had worked when he first left school. They were several miles apart from one another, he had told him, but on his first pay-day he had run every step of the way home to give his mother his week’s wages. Only sixpence it was, but she had been a widow then and, with other children to rear, he had known how much she had been in need of it. ‘Bailiff at “Bodynfol” must have been a great step up in the world from that’, Bob remarked. ‘It certainly must’, replied Norman, ‘and it didn’t stop there, did it? ‘What do you mean’, I asked. ‘Well we know that he went on, not only to run his own farm, but also to see most of his children set up in farms and build “Bryn Bolia” a good-sized, solid, detached house to retire into with his three unmarried daughters’. ‘That’s all very well’, I said, ‘but we could be doing Uncle John a great injustice by suggesting that he turned his back on his brother’s children in order to line his own pockets’. ‘It wouldn’t have been a case of turning his back on them’, Norman replied. ‘You’ve seen for yourself the power and influence the likes of the Williams Wynns could wield in those days. He would doubtless have been assured that the children would be well taken care of, but it’s not likely that he would have been given any choice in the matter. ‘And now that I come to think of it’, he continued, ‘I that father once remarked to me that, while Uncle John had seemed truly delighted to see him when they were first re-united, he thought it strange that he had never enquired as to how he had managed to find him, nor asked him what sort of life he and

Aunt Lily had led during the intervening years’. ‘That does seem odd’, I agreed. ‘What doesn’t about this affair?’ put in Bob. ‘In fact, the more we discover, the more amazed I become at the scope and complexity of the organisation that must have been used to obscure the details of the birth of one small child - and the more I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve been barking up the wrong tree’. ‘In what way?’ I asked. ‘Well, we’ve been assuming that the motive for the elaborate cover-up that we’ve found was to avoid embarrassment to some influential family or other, but I can’t imagine that any of the contenders we’ve come up with as parents for Elizabeth - not even Sir Watkin himself - would have warranted such a vigilant watch into the next generation and beyond, simply for the sake of embarrassment’. ‘So what are you saying?’ I asked. ‘I can think of only one other possible motive’, Norman said, ‘and that’s money’. ‘Is that what you’re suggesting, Bob’, I asked, ‘that she might have been a changeling?’ ‘I don’t know’, he replied, ‘but to my mind, something of that sort would certainly make more sense of the size of the cover-up’. ‘He’s right, you know’, Norman turned to me. ‘Just think how many people they had to involve in it, for a start: there was Ann Wynn, and the children’s Guardians, Roberts and Powell and great-Uncle John Lewis - all of whom, , accrued such wealth, in proportion to their humble beginnings, that it’s reasonable to suppose that they were rewarded for their silence and loyalty and then there were Ann Wynn’s two nieces, the Kenrick sisters, who were not only paid for rearing father and Aunt Lily, but also received a lump-sum each upon father’s coming-of-age. And then don’t forget all the first-generation Lewis cousins, who, though they might not have known the reason why, must have been schooled in what -and what not - to talk about to us all - and they, of course, stood to benefit through their father.

‘It must have taken such an enormous amount of time, money and effort to organise a comprehensive and far-reaching umbrella like that’, he continued, ‘I can’t imagine the fear of embarrassment being sufficient for anyone to institute such extreme precautions’. ‘I wonder how the general running of the organisation worked’, I said. ‘After all, it would have been necessary for whoever was the prime mover to set up some kind of secret communications network among all those involved, wouldn’t it?’ ‘Perhaps they didn’t need to set one up’, suggested Bob. ‘Perhaps they used one that was already in existence’. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Freemasonry’, he replied. ‘That’s possible’, said Norman. ‘It’s a nation-wide network with wellpractised in loyalty and silence. And besides, I know dad always felt they were involved somehow’. ‘I seem to reading’, said Bob, ‘that not long after Elizabeth’s birth, Sir Watkin was made Grand Master of Freemasons for the whole of North Wales with Shropshire added’. ‘Yes, I read that, too’, I said, ‘but we don’t know that Sir Watkin - or any of the Williams Wynns for that matter - was the prime mover’. ‘Oh, don’t give up on the Williams Wynns now’, Bob cried, ‘not just as we’ve established a definite link between that family and Ann Wynn via the Reverend Bonnor’. ‘But I thought we’d just decided to lean towards money or inheritance or something as the motive for the cover-up, rather than embarrassment?’ ‘So?’ ‘So I don’t a situation in any of the branches of the Williams Wynn family that we’ve perused – and we’ve looked at them pretty thoroughly, - which might have tempted foul play, do you?’

‘I think you should stay with them, nevertheless’, Norman urged. ‘I know that if it hadn’t been for my lack of foresight in destroying father’s papers, we’d have more information to g…’ ‘Oh, please don’t start blaming yourself again on that score, Norman’, I put in quickly. ‘We all know you only did it for the...’ ‘Okay’, he cut in, ‘but just let me say this: there were all kinds of papers and documents there, but by far the greatest amount related to two subjects – “ Vicka-Lewis” and father’s search for his maternal roots. There were letters regarding the latter, stretching across many years, from all kinds of people, highand low-born, together with documents and copious notes besides. I didn’t read them all, I have to it, but I did skip through a great number and, while I can’t recall the details, I was left with the definite impression that the evidence he had collected over those years - some of it hearsay and circumstantial, I grant you pointed overwhelmingly towards the Williams Wynn family. Now, whether one of them was, in fact, “the prime mover”, as you put it, is another question, but I feel certain there’s a tie-up there somewhere’. ‘Oh, good’, cried Bob, turning to me tauntingly, ‘now all we have to do is find it.

CHAPTER FIVE

Feeling a little unsure as to which direction our research should take from here, we now decided it was time to review what we had discovered so far. We had found irrefutable evidence that someone, at present unknown to us, had instigated a conspiracy of silence in order to keep secret the parentage of my grandmother, Elizabeth (Mary) Wynn. Judging by the extraordinary lengths they must have gone to in order to protect her identity, we knew that their motives - though again, as yet, unknown to us must have been strong and compelling. By way of the Reverend Richard Bonnor, we had established a definite link between Ann Wynn and the Williams Wynns of both “Wynnstay” and “Llangedwyn Hall” we had discovered that Ann Wynn had neither fed nor reared Elizabeth and we had also found sufficient evidence to convince all but the most sceptical that, in spite of official record entries to the contrary, she was not Elizabeth’s natural mother. As to who was, we had to it that we had almost no more idea now than we had at the outset. In the light of what Norman had told us, however, we decided to continue to research various branches of the Williams Wynn family, but at the same time, to take a second look at some of them and at some of the other important local families we had already researched, but this time looking, not so much for a potentially embarrassing situation, as for one in which someone might have stood to gain financially from the disappearance of a girl child. Except in one case, however, which we later ruled out for other reasons, we could find no situation in any of them that was even remotely suspicious. This was laborious work and so, for the sake of variety, we took to pursuing other lines of enquiry at the same time. For instance, we found, in archive newspapers in Newtown library, reports that at the Montgomery Quarter Sessional Court, police officer Owen Lewis (my grandfather) had been awarded, when he fell ill, a temporary pension for six months, which, judging from other reports we read - of both earlier and later date - appeared most unusual, other

than for very long-serving officers or those of higher rank.¹³ Later that year, and following his death, we noticed that the same Court had awarded his widow, Elizabeth, a gratuity of a year’s salary - a generosity which, in all the reports we read, had not been extended to the widows of other police constables.¹⁴ Indeed, changes among the lower ranks of the force were usually reported to the Court only as numerical statistics e.g: “Three ed, one left, one died” ‘That’s another instance of someone ensuring that Elizabeth wasn’t reduced to penury’, said Bob. ‘Keeping an “umbrella” over her, as my father would have put it?’ I replied. ‘It’s a possibility, I suppose’. ‘I’d put it far stronger than that’, he said. ‘Didn’t you notice? On both those occasions, the Chairman of the Court was absent and the Chair was taken by Charles Williams Wynn Esquire - Charlotte’s brother and Sir Watkin’s cousin!’ One other small report that caught our eye made reference to the weather. Although only a week into October, it stated that snow had fallen heavily during days following my grandfather’s death, which offered further credence to the possibility that his young son might have slipped at his graveside.¹⁵ Though furthering our quest very little, this kind of background research was sometimes quite interesting and rewarding, but far more often it proved frustrating, especially when we found we were being given the run-around as, indeed, we were on so many occasions that we strongly suspected that the wall of silence was still very much in place. For example: it was around this time that we discovered that, although the firm of solicitors who had drawn up Elizabeth’s will, had been incorporated into an established Newtown firm, they had retained their premises in Montgomery, from where they still offered their services once or twice a week and where, according to our informant, they had archive material “dating from the year dot”. Thinking that those archives might contain paperwork relating to Elizabeth’s will and, in particular, to the Guardianships and/or Trusteeships of Roberts and Powell, I wrote to the senior partner of the firm at Newtown, mentioning nothing specific as to our quest, but making general enquiries as to the possibility of

access to some archive material. Two days later, finding ourselves with an unexpected opportunity to go to Wales, we called into his office on the off-chance of seeing him, but were disappointed to find that he was not working that day. However, his secretary told us that he had already dictated a reply to my letter, in which he had stated that, if I would let him have full details of what I required, he would be very happy to make a search. She went on to tell us that he was an elderly gentleman, now partially retired. He knew Montgomery town well, she said, and as he was an amateur local historian, he had been most pleased at the prospect of carrying out some research for us. Naturally, we were delighted at this and, as soon as we returned home, I wrote to him at length, giving all the details of the will and the sort of information we were looking for and I also assured him of our willingness to pay for his time. From that day to this, he has not replied. I know he received my letter, for I rang his secretary after a while, who not only confirmed its safe arrival, but also told me that she had never before known him to ignore a letter. The next time we visited Montgomery, we found to our chagrin that the office had been closed and it was obvious that the archives must have been cleared out, too, for the local museum now had some of their contents on show, though, as might be expected, nothing of what we sought. In desperation – and also, perhaps, to add power to the elbow of Bob’s “someone up there” - we also ed psychics. While we received nothing from them to further our quest, some of them displayed a remarkable gift. One in particular I , with whom the only I ever had was by mail. Initially, I wrote simply that I was trying to solve a mystery surrounding the birth of my paternal grandmother in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was both clairaudio and clairvoyant and not only was she given the names of Annie, William and Thomas (which, as will be ed, were the Christian names and surname of Ann Wynn’s parents), but she also “heard a gaol door slam” and “saw a policeman with a row of shiny buttons down his uniform”. Of course, she also mentioned things which did not make sense to me, such as hearing the “Emperor Waltz” all the time she was “tuning in” to my wave length. In one later letter she told me that she had “been given a song by Jessie

Matthews”. She felt that the title: “Head over heels in love” was immaterial, but that the singer’s name was significant in some way. This meant nothing to me either and I thought it odd that she had mentioned it as she must surely have been aware that Jessie Matthews was far too recent a singer to figure in my nineteenth century research. However, a few weeks later, I had reason to refer to our copy of Elizabeth’s will and as I turned the page, the name Jessie Matthews leapt out at me and, reading it, I could see that someone of that name had been a witness to my grandmother’s signature and had, in fact, been a neighbour of hers at Montgomery!

It was relatively soon after this that two things happened which, though not in themselves connected, were to lead us towards our first real break-through. Firstly, we discovered that there had once been a seat of the Williams Wynn family near Oswestry, though the mansion had since been razed to the ground. It had been known as “Llanforda Hall” and, at the pertinent time, had been the seat of one Sir Henry Williams Wynn, brother of Charles Snr. and so another uncle to Sir Watkin.

‘The Wynns of Oswestry!’ I exclaimed to Bob as soon as we read it. ‘That was how that old man referred to them. ? The old man my parents met across the hills and who addressed my father as “the young squire”. ‘I ’, he replied, ‘but I’m wondering why we haven’t seen them referred to as that anywhere else - not even in this book that mentions “Llanforda Hall”. ‘I daresay that was the way that the local people would have referred to them in order to differentiate between the various branches of the Wynn family’, I suggested. ‘Don’t forget that the area where my parents had met the old man was only about eight or ten miles from Llanforda. It’s quite likely that the country people would have spoken of them as “The Wynns of Oswestry” as opposed to “The Wynns of Wynnstay” - and I daresay Charlotte and her family would have been known as “The Wynns of Llangedwyn” and so on’. ‘We haven’t looked at the Oswestry branch in depth, have we?’ he said. ‘No, not yet. We’ve only this moment discovered that “Llanforda Hall” was their seat’. ‘But we have come across Sir Henry before’, he persisted. ‘Wasn’t he the uncle who became Sir Watkin’s father-in-law, too?’ ‘He was’, I replied.’Sir Watkin married his youngest daughter. Marie Emily, and we’ve not yet researched that branch in depth because we decided to give other branches priority when we found that Sir Henry and his family had lived abroad for years. In fact, if I rightly, Marie Emily herself was born abroad’. ‘Well, now that we’ve identified them as “the Wynns of Oswestry”, he said, ‘I vote we take a closer look at them’.

‘Secondly, and within a few days of this discovery, our local library at last managed to obtain for us a copy of the out-of-print book, “Wynnstay and the Wynns”, which we had been trying to locate ever since the Reverend T.W. Pritchard had shown us his copy when we interrupted his vicarage tea of egg and chips.

While at the vicarage, we had noticed that this little book referred quite frequently to “Sir Watkin”, but as all the baronets, with the exception of the first two, had been known by that title, it was not until now, when we began reading it, that we realised it had been written during the time of the sixth baronet. This was the one who had married his cousin, Marie Emily and whose vicar and friend had been the Reverend Richard Bonnor; in short, the one in whom we were particularly interested. Consequently, by far the greater part of the book was devoted to descriptions of events which had taken place during his lifetime. It told of his love of the hunt, of his bravery during the great fire at “Wynnstay” and of how he was made Grand Master of Freemasons and Queen Victoria’s Aide-de-camp. But what amazed us most was the author’s description, in detail, of the vast celebrations which had taken place throughout the whole of North Wales to mark the occasion of his marriage to his cousin, Marie Emily. By our present-day standards they seemed incredible and sured by far anything we had seen, even to celebrate the marriage of our own Prince of Wales. It appeared, however, that in those days, immense festivities were not unusual on such important occasions, for elsewhere in the book we found detailed lists of food which had been consumed at “Wynnstay” on the coming-of-age of the fifth and of the sixth baronets. By comparison, they made Mrs. Beeton’s extravagancies pale into insignificance. Beneath one of the lists, it stated: “By computation 15,000 People all at ye same time dined in Sir Watkin’s Park.”

Suddenly, we ed again the words of the old man, in which he had told how he and his father had partaken of a wedding breakfast with the “great Wynns of Oswestry” - and I felt a pang of guilt at how easily I had dismissed them. We knew that Marie Emily, daughter of the Oswestry branch of that illustrious family, had married her cousin, Sir Watkin in 1852, the year following Elizabeth’s birth. And we knew, too, that the old man had told my father that he had been eight years old when he went to the wedding feast. Therefore, if he had, in fact, been referring to Marie Emily’s wedding, then he must have been born around 1844. My father had not been given the address of his Uncle John Lewis until after his first child, John Owen, had been born and it would therefore have been 1912/1913 when he first took my mother to Wales. By then, according to our calculations, the man they met would have been approaching seventy and so my parents, then in their twenties, would naturally have considered him “old”. We could see, now, that the man and his father could well have partaken of the wedding breakfast of the daughter of the great Wynns of Oswestry, just as he had said; not at their board (as we had at first assumed he meant) but in their park. And if he had been right about that, we now reasoned, what of the other things he had told my parents? He had said that my father’s grandmother had been the youngest daughter of the great Wynns of Oswestry and so, we asked ourselves, was the Lady Marie Emily, in truth, Elizabeth’s mother? ‘We know next to nothing about her’, said Bob. ‘No’, I replied, ‘but from what little we do know, my bet says that she wasn’t’. ‘What, Elizabeth’s mother? Why not?’ ‘Because, if she had been and Sir Watkin was the father, then it’s likely they would have accelerated their marriage plans, so that their child would have been born in wedlock’.

‘Okay, but supposing that Sir Watkin had not been the father - then what?’ ‘Then it’s most likely that the child would have been conceived abroad. In which case, it would surely have been simpler to have left her to be reared abroad, rather than go to elaborate lengths to conceal her identity in Britain’. ‘You’ve got a point’, he acknowledged, ‘but we must also take human nature into consideration. What if Marie Emily couldn’t bear to leave the child behind? What if she insisted on having her where she could keep an eye on her? ‘It’s possible’, I said, ‘but in that case, why would she allow her to be placed with someone so far down the social scale from themselves? From what I’ve read of the Williams Wynns in that era - and it’s an enormous amount, as you know - they were a very high-principled and respected Christian family who...’ ‘That doesn’t preclude them from having an illegitimate child’, he cut in quickly. ‘The most well-intentioned of us get carried away and make mistakes sometimes’. ‘I accept that’, I told him, ‘but the point I was trying to make was that, if such a child had been born to one of them, I believe that, even at the risk of discovery, they would have taken better care of it - made sure it had a good standard of living - not farmed it out among the peasantry, as Elizabeth seems to have been throughout her childhood’. ‘Well, there’s only one way to find out’, he replied. ‘We must unearth all we can about Marie Emily and, in particular, about everyone with whom she might have been associating prior to her marriage to Sir Watkin’. It seemed to us, then, that this would be a relatively easy task and indeed, at first, so it was. Unlike those of Ann Wynn’s station, the movements of eminent families, such as the Williams Wynns, were reasonably well documented, so that we very soon discovered that Marie Emily’s father, Sir Henry Williams Wynn, was a member of the Diplomatic Corps and at the pertinent time - i.e. 1850, the year of Elizabeth’s conception - he had been British Ambassador to Denmark for more than twenty years, in which post he had so won the trust of his monarch, Queen Victoria, that she had made him her Minister Plenipotentiary, which empowered him to make decisions on her behalf. Marie Emily had been baptised in Britain (with water from the River Jordan) and

it is likely that she would have received at least part of her education here, but she had been born in Copenhagen, where she would doubtless have spent a great deal of time with Sir Henry and her mother, Lady Hester, at the British Embassy there. ‘So it was probably due to her influence’, Bob conjectured, ‘that, following the fire, “Wynnstay Hall” was rebuilt in a continental style. How did the heaster describe it - “after the castle at Elsinore”, wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes. Well, if we come across any pictures of Elsinore, we’ll compare them’, I replied, ‘but in the meantime, how do we set about discovering Marie Emily’s associates?’ ‘I should think there must be quite a lot of information in the Foreign Office archives as to who ed in and out of their various embassies, and when’. ‘True’, I said, ‘but I doubt very much if they’d allow us to look at it. What we really need is a copy of an 1850 Danish “Tattler”‘. ‘You mean a sort of who-was-who at the Court of Copenhagen?’ ‘I don’t know that they would have moved in Court circles, would they?’, I replied, ‘more like who-was-who among the upper echelons of Danish Society’. ‘I think they probably would have moved in Court circles, you know, because in that travel book on Denmark that we found last week...’ ‘The one I’m still waiting to read?’, I interposed sarcastically, ‘Yes, go on’. ‘Yes’, he smiled, ‘Well it states that, prior to 1848 - and that’s only two years before the time we’re interested in - they had no parliament. Their kings were autocrats and made all the political decisions themselves. Therefore, other than for the last two years, Sir Henry would have been Britain’s Ambassador to the Danish King and not to any Danish Government, because there wasn’t one’. ‘What a stroke of luck!’, I exclaimed. ‘That should simplify our task no end, because records of what went on at Court should be relatively easy to come by’. But how wrong I was!

There was a fair-sized library at Chippenham, the town in which we were working at that time, and the staff there were very helpful, but even they seemed surprised to find how very little had been published in English about Denmark. In fact, apart from a few travel books and guides, we found that most of the references to that country were contained in serious works on the history of Europe. ‘I think we should read them anyway’, I turned to Bob, ‘if only for background. I’m ashamed to it that, other than for “Hamlet” and the Viking invasions, I know little or nothing about Denmark. History books might at least show us their relationship to other countries in Europe, including Britain’. ‘They’re not likely to give us the low-down on what Copenhagen high-society was up to at the time, though, are they?’, he replied despondently, ‘let alone who Marie Emily might have been seeing’. ‘No. They’ll be mostly political - but Sir Henry’s career was political, , and so they could well tell us the topics of conversations and discussions she would have been exposed to - or even taken part in - at the Embassy’. ‘That’s what I call very remote background reading’, he replied, ‘but we’ll have a go, if you like, though my guess is that they’ll be dry as dust and we’ll be bored in no time’. ‘Well, we’ve got no other leads to follow’, I said, ‘so let’s give it a go and hope that your “someone up there” might show us the way again.

Before long, I was beginning to think that Bob might have been right about the books, for the first one we got hold of had more notes than text on most pages, which did not make for easy reading. Nevertheless, we persevered and gradually became aware that, in the middle of the nineteenth century - the time we were concerned with in our research - there existed in Europe a most unusual political situation. It became known as “The Schleswig-Holstein Question” and, as we later read, was so complicated that when, some years afterwards, Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, was asked to explain it to the House of Commons, he replied that only three people had ever understood it: the Prince Consort, a German professor and himself. The Prince Consort was now dead, he continued, the German professor had gone mad and he himself had forgotten it.

From what we could make out, though, it had all hinged on the two ading Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which lay between Denmark, to the north, and the German Confederation of States ( was not unified until later), to the south. For centuries, the Kings of Denmark had also been the Dukes of both Schleswig and Holstein. Both kingdom and duchies were governed by the king/duke from Copenhagen, but their laws were quite separate. If the king wished a law to apply to both his kingdom and his duchies, he had to enact it twice: once as king for Denmark proper and again as duke for Schleswig and Holstein. Now, back in the middle ages, one of the king/dukes had brought in a law which allowed succession to the throne of Denmark via either a male or a female line, but unfortunately he had omitted to re-enact that law for the duchies, with the result that they now still clung to the old Salic law and would not accept any duke who was descended through a female line Up until the time in question, this oversight had not been important, for in the House of Oldenborg, the dynasty which had ruled both Denmark and the duchies for the past four hundred years, there had always been a male-line heir to succeed to both kingdom and dukedoms. By the middle of the 1840s, however, the succession of this dynasty was looking seriously under threat. You see, the present king/duke, King Christian VIII, had only one legitimate child - the Crown Prince Frederick - and he was already approaching forty years of age and still childless. The king/duke’s only brother, Prince Ferdinand, was also childless and although their sister had a son, the king knew that his duchies would never accept him as heir, for he was, of course, descended through a female line’. ‘How confusing!’, said Bob, not for the first time. To be fair, Bob had been involved in other projects of late and also been very busy at work, so he had not had as much time for reading as I had. Consequently, he had taken to asking me to clarify points for him, rather than read the books in depth for himself ‘You might find it easier to understand’, I told him now, ‘if you were to compare it to a hypothetical present-day situation. Just imagine, if Prince Charles were

Queen Elizabeth’s only child and he himself had no children, the queen would naturally be worried about the succession of the Windsor dynasty, wouldn’t she? - especially if her sister, Princess Margaret, had no children either’. ‘I can’t quite see why it should have been such a problem in Denmark though’, he replied. ‘If, as we read at the outset, King Christian was such an autocrat, why didn’t he simply enact a new law for the duchies to allow dukes to succeed via the female line?’ ‘He did try’, I told him, ‘but the duchies would have none of it and threatened to revolt’. ‘Crumbs!’ he exclaimed, ‘That was daring for those days, wasn’t it? It’s a wonder the ringleaders weren’t clapped into the tower - or whatever the Danish equivalent was’ ‘A few decades earlier, they probably would have been’, I said, ‘but a great wave of radical feeling was sweeping across Europe at that time - had another revolution, , and even Britain had her Chartists. In the light of what had previously happened to the French aristocracy, I daresay monarchs were a little unsure as to how far they could push their subjects. And anyway, the duchies were probably feeling braver than normal because, in this instance, they weren’t on their own’. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘They’d got the might of Prussia behind them, as represented by Chancellor Bismark. In fact, she was inciting them to riot for her own ends’. ‘Why? What did she hope to get out of it?’ ‘Well, if you think about it, Prussia was land-locked. Her only coastline was on the Baltic. Bismark figured that if she could procure the duchies - or even one of them - for herself, it would give her access to the North Sea and she could fulfil her ambition to become a maritime power. There! Now if you wish to know more, you’d better get reading and catch me up’. ‘Okay’, he replied, ‘but just answer me one more question. Was Christian VIII still on the throne in 1850, the year Elizabeth was conceived?’

‘No. He had died two years earlier and his son, the Crown Prince, had succeeded him as King Frederick VII. He was the one who had relinquished some of his power to the people and given them their Constitution and Parliament. And, according to this book I’m reading, he was still without an heir.

I heard nothing from Bob for about three hours after that, while we both sat studying our books on the history of Europe. Then, as I rose to make a drink, he said: ‘I have got this right, haven’t I? Basically, the Kingdom of Denmark would accept accession through the female line, but Schleswig and Holstein wouldn’t and there was no male heir to follow the new King/Duke, Frederick VII’. ‘That’s right’. He beamed. ‘And if Frederick had tried to force the duchies to accept a femaleline heir, war would have broken out, with Prussia backing the duchies for her own ends’. ‘That’s it’, I said, ‘you’ve got it exactly. And according to what I’ve just been reading, in the two years since the king had given the Danes their parliament, a very strong democratic party had risen to power, and they wanted Denmark to abandon German-speaking Holstein and force Schleswig to accept Danish law by making her a part of the kingdom proper.’ ‘What a mess!’, he exclaimed, ‘King Frederick and his queen must have been praying for a child, mustn’t they?’ ‘Well, praying for a son, anyway. A daughter wouldn’t have solved the problem’. ‘No’, he said thoughtfully. ‘But what if a daughter had been born to them? That would have complicated things even further, wouldn’t it?’ ‘That’s an understatement’, I replied, ‘because while the aristocrats blamed Frederick for giving too much power to the people, the rest of his subjects adored him and called him: “Constitution Giver” and “The People’s King”. Therefore, it’s likely that they would have chosen any child of his - male or female -as his successor, in preference to any other contender, especially as some of those who were eligible were known to have pro-German sympathies.’

‘So you’re saying that, much as King Frederick needed an heir, a daughter would have put the cat among the pigeons. Is that right?’ ‘Only in the absence of a legitimate son, I replied. ‘Then it would have caused a war between Denmark and her Duchies. And with Prussia ready to light the touch-paper, such a war could easily have escalated to engulf most of Europe including Britain, of course’. On returning from the kitchen with a tray of coffee, I noticed that Bob had closed his book and seemed in a brown study about something. ‘Okay’, I said, ‘which bit’s puzzling you now? I thought I’d made it all clear’. ‘Oh, you have’, he replied, ‘crystal clear. And you don’t realise, do you?’ ‘What?’ ‘That we’ve just stumbled upon what we’ve been looking for all along’. I looked at him questioningly. ‘A situation’, he continued, ‘that would have warranted the high-profile cover-up they did on Elizabeth’. I stared at him, dumbfounded. ‘You can’t seriously be suggest...’ ‘Just think about it for a moment’, he cut across my protest.’ Supposing - just supposing - that, after however-many-years of childless marriage, the Queen of Denmark had suddenly found that she was pregnant (perhaps at the change-oflife?), what do you reckon the king’s reaction would have been? Thrilled as he might have been at the prospect of an heir’, he continued without waiting for my answer, ‘he must have been worried to death that she might have a daughter, and I can’t see that he would have had any option but to keep the pregnancy secret until after the birth. Then, if the child were a boy, he could have proclaimed him his heir, but if the queen had given birth to a girl, they would have been forced to sacrifice her - to hide her away somewhere - in order to preserve the peace, not only of their realm, but of Europe’. ‘Dear God’, I murmured, ‘what a decision to have to...’

But Bob was warming to his theme. ‘And who better’, he went on excitedly, ‘than Sir Henry Williams Wynn to smuggle her into exile? The king had known the man for twenty years and more , and he was a diplomat. He would have known how to keep his mouth shut. Besides, in helping to avert a bloodbath in Europe, Sir Henry would have been acting in the best interests of his own monarch, too. Both she and Prince Albert were of European extraction, , and related to practically every crowned head on the continent. The last thing they would have wanted would have been a war to set them at each other’s throats’.

‘Hang on a minute’, I gasped dazedly. ‘You can’t seriously be suggesting that my grandmother was some exiled Danish princess’. ‘Why not, if it fits all the pieces we’ve got?’ ‘Because it’s all too much for me to take on board, for one thing’, I told him. ‘But mainly because you can’t just take some international situation we’ve happened to stumble across and try to fit her into it. That’s not the way we’ve been working at all’. ‘No’, he agreed’, ‘we’ve been researching various individuals, but the main thing we’ve been looking for, regarding them, has been a situation where the birth of a child - and a girl child, mark you - would either have proved an acute embarrassment to them , or else have stood between them and some hoped-for inheritance. Up until now, those have been the only motives we could envisage for the elaborate cover-up’. ‘But now you’re suggesting the motive was political?’ ‘I’m suggesting it could have been, yes. I’ll it it’s one that had never entered my head until now - and probably wouldn’t have done if we’d not found this extraordinary situation. I wouldn’t mind betting that it’s the only one in history where the birth of a girl could have caused a war. ‘Look’, he urged in response to the sceptical look I gave him, ‘all I’m asking is that we should find out all we can about King Frederick VII of Denmark and his queen; turn the spotlight on them in the same way as, up to now, we’ve been turning it onto the Williams Wynn family and others. This time, though, it will be different in that we’ve found the situation first. And we didn’t just “stumble upon it”, as you put it. We were led to the Danish Court by Sir Henry’s association with it and the old man’s reference to the “Wynns of Oswestry.” ‘Okay’, I said, ‘let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that a secret daughter of the King and Queen of Denmark was exiled to Britain. How many female births, would you say, were ed in this country at around the same time as my grandmother’s?’ ‘Hundreds’, I daresay’, he replied, ‘or perhaps thousands, considering the Victorians’ propensity for large families - why?’

‘Because I suspect that you could take any number of those and make out a case for her being the exiled princess’. ‘Rubbish’, he snapped, ‘I’ll bet there isn’t one of them for whom you could establish a link to the Danish Court’. My brain was teeming and I needed time to think. A firm link had certainly been established from that Court, via Sir Henry, Sir Watkin, the Reverend Bonnor and Ann Wynn, to my grandmother. But an exiled Danish princess...! ‘Even if the king and queen did have a secret daughter’, I turned to him at length, ‘we’d never be able to prove it’. ‘We could have a jolly good try’. ‘And we’d fail’. ‘Why should we?’ ‘Because it’s not likely to have been documented anywhere, is it? And in any case’, I continued’, ‘we can’t just accept a part of the old man’s testimony and reject the rest. He pointed the finger quite definitely at Marie Emily as Elizabeth’s mother, don’t forget’. ‘Ah, that had been puzzling me, too’, he itted. ‘But you’ve found an answer, I suppose’, I remarked, sardonically. ‘If you think about it for a moment’, he said with more patience than I deserved, ‘I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s unlikely that Sir Henry would have delivered the child directly to Ann Wynn himself. Right?’ ‘Go on’. ‘So my best guess is that, after smuggling her across the North Sea - probably in that yacht of his we read about - he and Lady Hester would have taken her in secret to their home near Oswestry.. ‘Now, supposing that while they were there’, he continued, ‘the servants had happened to get wind of her. Don’t you think it’s likely that they would have

assumed she was Marie Emily’s?’ ‘Well, I supp…’ ‘And that sort of rumour would have spread very quickly’, he cut in, warming to his theme, ‘And… of course!’ ‘What?’ ‘That must have been the reason why most of your father’s enquiries led him towards the Williams Wynns. He was working within living memory, . ‘In fact, it’s all beginning to make sense’, he continued, ‘the conspiracy of silence and the brick walls we ourselves have come up against, your dad’s old “aunt” saying some people were looking for him and Harriet Stamp saying “they’re big people”. Everything fits – even to that medium, Elizabeth Allen, hearing the “Emperor Waltz” when she was tuning in to you. By now, I was in a state of shock, not least because it was, as he said, all beginning to make sense. These new - albeit hypothetical - pieces were slotting into our jigsaw with a pace and ease no others had. If they continued at this rate and Bob’s theories held water, then we were embarking upon something far larger than we could ever have envisaged – perhaps even larger than we could cope with – and I found the prospect most unnerving. Nevertheless, I knew in my heart that there was no turning back. We had no choice but to pursue this theory and prove or disprove it, as we had all the others, but an awful lot of research lay ahead of us, for we knew relatively nothing about King Frederick VII of Denmark - not even the name of his queen. ‘That’s some Aunt Sally, Bob!’ I murmured.

CHAPTER SIX

As has been said, works about Denmark, published in English, seemed very few and far between and we had pretty well exhausted those in our local library. In addition to this we had just moved house, from Crudwell to Chippenham, so as to be nearer to where we were both working, and so we found that time to pursue our research was also in short supply. In fact, I cannot ever feeling so frustrated. Eventually, however, we managed to find time to take a run down to Bristol where there was a much more comprehensive reference library. There, from an International “Who’s Who” and various other tomes, we quickly discovered that King Frederick VII of Denmark had made two disastrous and childless royal marriages and in 1850, the year of Elizabeth’s conception, was without a queen at all. ‘Well that puts the kibosh on your theory right away’, I whispered to Bob as we read it. ‘Seems like it’, he whispered back. ‘But look - it goes on to say that, for some years, he had been living with his mistress, an ex-ballerina by the name of Louise Rasmussen, at first in secret, but after his succession in 1848, quite openly. What if she had had a secret child?’ ‘It wouldn’t have been the same. The child would have been illegitimate. But then again…’ I added as a thought struck me, ‘there might still have been an element of danger because of that strong Democratic Party – what did they call themselves? – the Eider Danes, wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes, of course!’, he exclaimed, ‘from what we’ve read, they would have preferred even an illegitimate child of “The People’s King” to any of the alternatives available at that time. After all, legitimate or not, she would still have had Oldenborg blood in her veins. So if this Louise Rasmussen had borne him a girl child, the danger would probably have been just as great’. ‘I wouldn’t go that far, because it’s unlikely that the “Eider Danes” would have

been able to rally as much for an illegitimate child, but there would still have been trouble’, I replied as we both continued to search the shelves for more information. This time it was me who found it. ‘Read this’, I said to Bob after carrying my book across to where he was browsing. A moment later, he gave a loud whistle and I had to nudge him to keep quiet.’So he married his mistress, then!’ he whispered. ‘Yes, and did you notice the date?’ – 7th. August 1850 – just seven months prior to the date ed as the birth of my grandmother!’ ‘Who said my theory had been given the kibosh?, he taunted. And then: ‘But I think something’s wrong somewhere, because I’ve just been reading that Frederick only had two queens. I forget their names, but it certainly didn’t say anything about a Queen Louise’. ‘That’s because she wasn’t a queen’, I replied. ‘If you read on in that book I just gave you, you’ll find that, on their wedding day, he created her Countess Danner – and that was because the marriage was morganatic’. ‘Morgan what?’ ‘I had to look it up in the dictionary, too’, I smiled as I nudged him again (Bob always found it difficult to whisper).’Basically’, I explained, ‘it means that, although the marriage is as legally binding as any normal marriage, and any resultant offspring are legitimate, neither the wife nor the children have any automatic right to inherit the possessions or titles of the husband’. ‘Wow! That was a pretty crafty move on the king’s part, then’, he replied, ‘and it certainly adds weight to the theory that Louise might have been pregnant when their marriage took place’. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought’. ‘He was hedging his bets’, he continued. ‘Neither a son nor a daughter would have had any right of succession, but he could have declared a son his heir and, being legitimate, all his subjects would have accepted him. On the other hand, a girl would have been even more of a hot potato, because, being legitimate, it wouldn’t have been just the “Eider Danes” who would have clamoured to put her on the throne. Probably most of the rest of his realm would have ed them, too – with the exception, of course, of the Duchies, - and that would have led to

war again. Although we remained in the reference library for some long time, we learned very little more of note about King Frederick VII. Of the Countess, however, we discovered that, nine years before her marriage to the king, she had given birth to an illegitimate son. Frederick, who, by then, was Crown Prince, was still married to his second wife, and it was a life-long friend of his, a printer by the name of Carl Berling, who claimed paternity. The way it was phrased was ambiguous and we were not sure whether the author had meant to infer that Louise was Carl Berling’s mistress prior to becoming the king’s, or whether Berling claimed paternity in order to prevent a scandal involving the Crown Prince. In any event, the boy was both born and raised in secret and when Frederick and Louise married, his surname was changed from Berling to that of his foster-mother, Ane Jacobsen. After he had been confirmed, she accompanied him in secret to settle in Britain. A secret birth and rearing, a foster-mother named Ane and a flight in secret to Britain! The similarity to our own “Aunt Sally” was simply staggering and the whole affair was becoming more and more fascinating – and more and more frustrating, too, for we were desperate to acquire more information. We had discovered that there were a number of books in the library of the British Museum that might have helped us - but they were not in English. I was even attempting to teach myself Danish in the hope of being able to read them, but with no tutor to refer to, a home to run and a full-time job, progress was pathetically slow. We spoke of our difficulties to my sister, Jennifer and her husband, Charles when they called on us one evening. Charles was employed, at that time, by the Wiltshire Library Service, working out of their local library at Devizes and he told us of a newly-installed national computer service, designed to supply titles of all books which made reference to a given subject and state their location. As far as he knew, the Chief Librarian was the only person at his branch who had access to the terminal at present, but he felt sure that she would be willing to request titles of books containing reference to King Frederick VII of Denmark and Louise, Countess Danner, and he would let us know as soon as he had the results. Here was new hope indeed and, true to his word, he arrived at our home a few days later with the information his Chief Librarian had ed to him. Having

expected a computer print-out of some kind, we were surprised to see that it was hand-written on a rather scrappy piece of paper. We scanned it eagerly – then stared at one another, nonplussed. Instead of the list of book titles we had envisaged, it gave the Copenhagen address of one Robert Neiiendam, beneath which was scrawled the enigmatic message:

“Author of books on The Countess Danner. Willing to give assistance on research. Write to him at the above address, stating names and dates of possible descendants.”

‘Good Lord! Where did this come from?’, Bob asked. ‘From the Chief Librarian’, replied Charles, ‘She gave it to me this afternoon.’ ‘And did she tell you it had come from the computer?’ ‘Well not in so many words’, he replied, ‘but it must have done, because she said it was in answer to my enquiry – and I’ve only made one. Jenny thought it odd, too’. “Odd” was an understatement. ‘If that computer service is as new as Charles says it is’, Bob remarked to me later, ‘this Neiiendam chap must have lodged his request pretty recently’’ ‘He could, perhaps, have lodged it some time ago, onto the manual system’, I suggested, ‘in which case, it might automatically have been transferred onto the new computer system. I had no idea that public libraries offered that kind of service, though, had you?’ However, no matter how his name, address and message had found its way into our library system, we were delighted to have been given a Danish – especially one who seemed eager to give out information about the Countess Danner and who appeared to be searching for possible descendants of hers. We just couldn’t believe our luck and we wrote to Robert Neiiendam right away.

Erring on the side of caution, as we had come to do, the only facts we revealed in our first letter were: the way in which we had been put in with him; that we were interested in King Frederick VII and Countess Danner; the few facts about them we had already gleaned and the difficulty we had experienced in obtaining books about them in English. In addition, we asked him whether he knew anything of the couple’s movements during the months following their marriage and also where, if we should ever come to Denmark, we might find portraits of them. Barely a nail-biting week later, we were thrilled to see a letter with a Danish stamp come through our door. However, it was not from Robert Neiiendam, as we had been hoping, but from his daughter-in-law, one Karen Neiiendam, who wrote that Robert had died some years earlier in 1966! She went on to explain that her father-in-law had been a Theatre Historian and had founded the Danish National Theatre History Museum, into which she had now followed him as Director. It was during his research, prior to establishing the museum, that he had become fascinated by the extraordinary life of the dancer/countess, and Karen went on to say that “he had always wanted to ‘raise a monument’ to what he called ‘the most abused woman in this country’”. He wrote his first book about her in 1956, she told us, but waited until the last of Carl Berling’s children had died before revealing the huge secret he had discovered: that Louise had given birth to an illegitimate son, of whom Carl Berling had claimed parentage. It was actually due to her (Karen’s) efforts, she wrote, that, in the 1930s, her father-in-law had made with Alba Jacobsen, the eldest of two daughters of that illegitimate son. Alba was still living in East Anglia, near where her late father, Carl Jacobsen, had settled, and Karen offered to send us copies of her replies to the letters Robert Neiiendam had written to her. She also offered to answer any more questions we wished to ask “on this subject that seems to interest us both”, and she went on to say that, if we should ever visit Denmark, we could have more than the ordinary conducted tour through “Jaegerspris”, the erstwhile home of the King and Countess. Although surprised and disappointed to learn that Robert Neiiendam had died, we were over the moon to learn of Karen’s interest and willingness to help. We wrote back right away, accepting her offer of copies of Alba Jacobsen’s letters and asking her many questions, including whether she or her father-in-law had

ever come across anything which might suggest that the Countess had given birth to a girl-child early in 1851. That did it! It was a month before we heard anything further from Karen and, when she did write, the reason she gave for the delay was that she had been trying, unsuccessfully, to obtain a book for us by a Danish author named Bo Bramsen, who had been a friend and colleague of her late father-in-law. It was a biography of King Frederick’s uncle, Prince Ferdinand, she explained, and contained a good description (in Danish, of course!) of Jomfru Fanny, King Frederick’s illegitimate half-sister, who must, Karen said, be the one we were interested in – and who (I was later to discover) had been born almost half a century earlier! She even enclosed the author’s address with the suggestion that I should write to him if I wished to know more, but although I wrote at length (though not, of course, about Jomfru Fanny!) I never received the courtesy of a reply.

Other than that, Karen answered none of our questions and her letter was very brief. In fact, the whole tone of it was entirely different from her earlier ones, though she did enclose copies of Alba Jacobsen’s letters and for that I shall always be grateful. They made fascinating reading, for one could almost feel Alba’s confusion on learning of the Countess from Robert Neiiendam’s letters. “I do not understand what you say about my grandmother”, she writes in reply, “If she married King Frederick the 7th how is she my grandmother and how was her name Jacobsen?”. As one reads on, it becomes quite obvious that her father had told her and her sister nothing whatsoever of his real parentage and had led them to believe that his foster-mother, Ane Jacobsen, was their grandmother. He also allowed them to think that the trips he took alone to the continent were simply for pleasure, but Robert Neiiendam had discovered that, after King Frederick had died, the widowed Countess took frequent trips abroad, during some of which she would rendez-vous in secret with her son. However, what thrilled us most about Alba’s letters was that Robert Neiiendam had obviously asked her, in more than one of his letters to her, whether her father had ever spoken of his sister! Of course, she had replied in each case that he had not, but as he had kept her and her sister in total ignorance of his biological relatives, this was hardly surprising.

Needless to say, the whole thing made us bitterly regret that we had been too late to make with Robert Neiiendam. I wrote at some length twice more to Karen, in the hope of re-awakening her interest. I asked her, too, if she knew - or if she could tell from her father-in-law’s notes - what had led him to suspect that the countess’s son had a sister, but her replies were so short and cold in comparison to her first letter, that we were forced to conclude that she could not, or would not, help us further. Later, though, she did arrange for me to purchase copies of both the Bo Bramsen book and the book on Countess Danner written by her father-in-law. Apart from this, the change in her attitude had been so marked that Bob wondered whether someone had warned her off, but I told him to stop looking for “reds under the bed”. However, the next time Charles and Jenny visited us, something came to light that made his suggestion seem less farfetched. ‘By the way’, Charles said, when we had finished telling them of our disappointment over Karen, ‘those details I gave you about Robert Neiiendam didn’t come from the central computer after all.’ ‘Oh?’ said Jenny, looking as surprised as we were, ‘Where did they come from, then?’ ‘It seems they were given to the Chief Librarian by a friend of hers’. ‘Well didn’t you ask her who?’ Jenny persisted. ‘I didn’t need to. She told me. Her name’s Mrs. Lloyd and she lives somewhere in Long Street in Devizes’. ‘Well if this Mrs. Lloyd knows that much about Robert Neiiendam’, Bob said, ‘she probably knows a lot more’. ‘Or about the Countess’, put in Jenny, ‘I vote we should go and see her’. ‘Me, too’, I said, ‘though her knowledge can’t be very up to date; she obviously wasn’t aware that he had died, for a start’. We managed to find Mrs. Lloyd listed in the telephone directory, but when I rang to ask if we might meet with her, she simply refused, offering no explanation or excuse, and when I broached the subject of the Countess, she became extremely

vague. “Wasn’t she some kind of dancer?” she said and would not be drawn further. When I mentioned the books Karen had obtained for me, however, she offered to put me in touch with someone in the vicinity who could translate them for me. In the course of our conversation, she happened to let slip that she had seen Karen Neiiendam only a short while ago and, when I picked up on this, she itted that she knew her well and had seen her often during the years she had spent in Copenhagen – with the British Embassy! ‘But if Mrs. Lloyd knows Karen that well’, Jenny remarked later, ‘what was her game in suggesting that you should her father-in-law?’ ‘You tell me’, I replied, ‘She must have known he’d died years earlier. And why quiz us about possible descendants? It doesn’t make any sense’. ‘That’s a phrase that’s become familiar to us over the past few years’, remarked Bob. At this time, he and I were in the throes of moving house – yet again. He was only a few years from retirement and, with this in view, we had sold our rather large house in Chippenham and bought a bungalow near Jenny and Charles plus an investment property to augment Bob’s pension. At the outset, this investment property took such a lot of our spare time and money that there was very little of either to spend on our research, though it was never far from our thoughts. I had ed one of the Danish books to a translator Charles had found and for whose services he and Jenny had kindly insisted on paying. Then, as the charges for translation quoted by the person to whom Mrs. Lloyd had referred us seemed very reasonable, we decided to hand the other book to her. A week or two later, she brought the first instalment of her work to the security gate of the place where I was employed. Handing me a large envelope over the barrier, she greeted me with: ‘Do you think you have royal Danish blood in your veins?’ I was absolutely flabbergasted. I had not even hinted, either to her or Mrs. Lloyd, at the reason for our research. In fact, having from experience come to the conclusion that the conspiracy of silence was, to some degree, still extant, we had been at pains to conceal it from almost everyone. Covered in confusion, I paid her what she asked and hurried back to my office,

where I soon realised how stupid I had been, for I should never have paid her before inspecting the contents of the envelope. When I did so, I found that she had returned the book I had given her, without translating a single page. On a note enclosed, she explained that Mrs. Lloyd had told her that what we were really looking for was a description of everyday life in nineteenth century Copenhagen. Consequently, she had bought a book in Danish that described it and had translated part of that instead – and, as if to add insult to injury, she had added the cost of the book to my bill! Needless to say, we did not use her services again. From the few pages of translation Jenny and Charles were bringing us each week, we were beginning to build up a picture of Louise, Countess Danner’s life, of her loving relationship with her Frederick (or “Fritz”, as she often called him) and of their long and very close friendship with Carl Berling. We learned, among other things, that Frederick never tired of telling how, one day, he had arrived late for a performance at the Royal Theatre and, not wishing to disturb everyone, had decided to watch from backstage. Louise, in her early teens at this time, was a member of the corps de ballet and, as she came dancing off the stage with a sheaf of corn in her arms, she accidentally tripped over the prince’s foot. Chivalrously, he hurried to the aid of this girl with the red-gold hair and as she turned to thank him, he found himself gazing into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. It was a romantic story and it enabled us to put some flesh on the bones, as it were – but that was all. To be fair, a great deal of the book still remained to be translated, but we were impatient and, so far, the translations had provided no answers to the hundreds of questions that were plaguing us. Consequently, by the time we had settled into our new home and finished working on the other property, frustration was beginning to build again in a big way. ‘There’s nothing for it’, I said to Bob as we sat talking it over with Jenny and Charles one evening, ‘we’re going to have to go to Denmark and do some research for ourselves, in spite of the language barrier’. ‘I know’, he replied, ‘but if you’re thinking of going this side of Christmas, then I’m afraid you’ll have to count me out. We’ve got that big contract on at work and there’s no way I could get away until about February.’

He must have read my disappointment, for: ‘You’d go with her, though, wouldn’t you, Jen?’ he turned to my sister. ‘Can a duck swim?!’ she exclaimed.

We decided to go by ferry and take the car, so as to be mobile while there. As we neared the shores of Denmark, we remarked upon how strange it was to think that some of our forebears had probably ruled that land and it was likely that, as a babe in arms, our grandmother had crossed these very waters on her journey into exile. The first thing we did on arrival was to try to make with Karen Neiiendam. For one thing, she had told me that the Theatre History Museum had quantities of pictures and artefacts that had belonged to the Countess, and she had also spoken of more than the usual tour of “Jaegerspris”, one of the private homes of Frederick and Louise and where, after Frederick had died, Louise had set up a museum to his memory. For another thing, though, Jenny and I were hoping to set up a meeting with her, for we reasoned that she might not find it as easy to be evasive, face to face, as she had been by letter or on the telephone. Unfortunately, it was her son who answered our call and, on discovering who we were, told us that his mother was not available. She had retired from the museum, he told us, and he himself was now the Director. This was most disappointing, but we told him all that she had offered and he agreed to provide the same. We arranged with him a time for us to visit the museum and he told us to ask for him by name, but when we did so, the messenger returned to say that he was not available. That evening, we rang him again and he apologised and made new arrangements for us to visit later in the week, but when the same thing happened all over again, we could only conclude that he was avoiding us – especially when we discovered (from some people we met there who told us they were regular visitors) that a door which was now closed (with a ribbon pinned across the doorway and a display case in front of it) was normally open and the room contained most of the Countess’s exhibits. All that was left for us to see, relating to her, was a pair of ballet shoes and a few other artefacts in the display case and one or two pictures of her and of the king. I wasn’t sure if it was allowed or not, but I took some photographs of all that was there and we bought a few picture postcards, then left for the second time, bitterly disappointed.

‘Well at least we know one thing for sure’, Jenny said gloomily as we went in search of some coffee’. ‘Which is?’ ‘That it will be no use asking Mr. Neiiendam to arrange any special privileges for us at “Jaegerspris”‘. ‘That’s true’, I said, ‘If he ran true to form he’d be more likely to make sure all the exhibits were locked away on the day we went. But I’d like to take a look at the place anyway’. The short time that we were able to be away was disappearing fast. We had crammed quite a lot into it, including visits to Frederiksborg Castle, where, in the ornate chapel, Frederick and his Louise were married and to Roskilde Cathedral, where, in coffins or sarcophagi lie most of Denmark’s monarchs

. We had also visited a reference library, but although the smattering of Danish I had managed to assimilate had stood us in good stead when finding our way about, it had proved desperately inadequate when it came to serious research, especially as many documents were written in Gothic script. Being knocked back for a second time by Neiiendam now seemed like the last straw and we commiserated with one another over coffee. This trip had cost us a lot of money and we seemed to be getting nowhere. Drat it, we thought as we paid our bill and left the café, we’ll do the only sensible thing: give ourselves the rest of the day off and indulge in a canal trip and a visit to the Tivoli Gardens. With a little effort, we both managed to ignore the pangs of conscience and thoroughly enjoyed the day, so that by the next morning, when we set out for “Jaegerspris”, our spirits were somewhat lighter. The castle, which lies not far from Frederiksund, was quite a drive from where we were staying and so we decided to make the most of the journey by doing a little sightseeing and picnicking on the way – so that we arrived there only to find that, it being late in the season, we had missed the tours for that day. I think our disappointment must have shown in our faces, for a very pleasant, middle-aged gentleman told us in rather broken English that, if we didn’t mind waiting while he had a cup of tea, he would conduct us around. In the event, this turned out to be to our advantage, for he didn’t hurry us along at all and we were able to ask as many questions as we wished, though we didn’t dare ask any of those which were uppermost in our minds for fear that he might cold-shoulder us, as Karen had done. The place was a far cry from the Theatre History Museum. It had been the favourite home of the king and Louise and was filled with items that had belonged to them. In the beautifully furnished dayroom of the Countess, where hung a huge portrait of the king and a similar one of Carl Berling, our guide asked if we wished to see a likeness of the Countess. When we answered in the affirmative, he raised the lid of what I had assumed to be a small desk and, turning to Jenny, said: ‘Look in there’. As she bent to do so, she saw her own face reflected from a mirror on the inside of the lid. ‘I had to show you’, the guide said, laughing at her surprise, ‘You look so like her’ but we had no means of knowing whether he meant it or whether he made a habit of saying it to someone in every party he showed around. When the tour was over, he told us

there would still be time for us to take a walk in the grounds.

One large wing of the house had been turned into an orphanage for destitute girls, which, according to the guide, had been established and endowed by Louise, following the king’s death. Near the entrance to the grounds, we came across reference to it on a notice board. It was written in Danish, of course, but I managed a rough translation. ‘As far as I can make out’, I told Jenny, ‘it reads: “Daughters of King Frederick VII Institute” and then there follows something like: “Welcome home to mother’s house, our broken-hearted sister”‘.

‘Are you sure you’ve got that right?’ she asked. ‘I can’t imagine her calling it “Daughters of Frederick VII…” when, as far as official records were concerned, he didn’t have any’. ‘It does seem odd, I grant you, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it says’. Directly beneath the windows of the Countess’s dayroom, we found a bust of King Frederick VII, freshly garlanded with flowers, and in another part of the grounds we came across a large, grassy mound, the heart of which had been hollowed out to form a crypt where, behind iron gates, hung with wreaths of fresh flowers, lay the coffin of Louise. We stood in silence before it for a long, long time and I found it immensely sad to think that these two, who had loved each other so well in life, should be forced in death to lie so far apart.

‘You know, Jen’, I said as we made our way back to the car, ‘this place has moved me more than I would ever have thought possible and I doubt whether I’m going to be able to explain that to Bob. It’s not even as if we’ve found anything of significance for our search, is it?’ ‘No’, she replied, ‘but I know exactly what you mean. I feel it, too – and it’s not just because we’ve seen the rooms they inhabited and a lot of their belongings, either. It’s something deeper and far less tangible than that’. ‘You’ll probably think me stupid’, I said, ‘but it seems almost as if their presence is here - as if, somehow, I’m being drawn very close to them’. ‘I don’t think that’s stupid at all. In fact, I’ve had the same feeling. And do you know why I think that is? ‘Go on’. ‘Because here, they are still loved and respected, whereas, in many other parts of this country, their memory has been denigrated in order to show those who followed in a better light. We’ve seen it for ourselves, haven’t we, even in the short time we’ve been here? At Frederiksborg, for instance’. And I had to agree. Frederiksborg Castle houses Denmark’s Museum of National History, wherein portraits and memorabilia of all her monarchs and their consorts are displayed in splendid and ornate rooms. All, that is, except Frederick VII, whose display has been allocated, by comparison, a small and almost dingy room, in which almost the only reference we could find to Louise was a bust of her, displayed against the light and half-hidden by a curtain.

But while I regretted it, this shabby treatment of them had come as no great surprise to me, for I had noticed it when reading certain biographies and other works purporting to be based on fact. Indeed, it seemed that the only thing that one historical author could find to say about them was that they both grew fatter and fatter from eating pea soup. And yet, in his day, Frederick was “The People’s King”, beloved of his people for having relinquished part of his power to give his subjects their Constitution and their Parliament! A number of modern authors have maintained, too, that Frederick was impotent and one even went so far as to suggest that he had been castrated in youth by a mad Norwegian monk. And yet, in more serious works, written nearer to his own time, I have seen no suggestion of this. On the contrary, I have read that, although they liked Louise, many of his subjects were disappointed when the king married her, because the fact that their marriage was morganatic robbed them of their hopes that he would yet beget a royal heir.¹ ¹⁷ ‘How would you feel about coming again tomorrow?’ Jenny’s words cut across my thoughts. ‘I’d love it’, I replied, ‘but you do realise, don’t you, that it’s our last full day?’ ‘I know, but we’ve got nothing better planned, have we? And you said yourself that this is the only place that has really meant something to us. What do you say? It was a tempting thought. We could come earlier, picnic in the grounds, tour the house again and really soak up the atmosphere of the place – but with only one day left and so little of moment to report to Bob on our return, I was feeling that we ought to use the time to search elsewhere. But where? Short of breaking the language barrier, I reasoned, where can we learn more about Frederick and Louise than here at “Jaegerspris”, where they lived and loved and where we have felt so close to them?’Oh, what the hell’, I turned to Jenny, ‘Why not?’

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Blast!’ said Jenny as we turned out of the entrance to “Jaegerspris”, ‘I meant to use their toilets before we left’. ‘Turn back if you like’, I replied, ‘unless you’d rather look for some on the way’. Having decided upon the latter course, we came across some in no time in Jaegerspris village street and, as there was almost no traffic about, we were able to pull up right outside. On approaching the door of the “Ladies”, however: ‘Would you believe it!’, she exclaimed, ‘It’s locked!’. ‘Never mind, we’ll look further …’ ‘But the “Gents” isn’t’, she added. ‘Come and keep cave for me, will you?’ ‘You’re surely not going in there’, I protested, jumping quickly out of the car, ‘You’ll be…’ But it was too late. With a: ‘Just stand there and make sure no men come in’, she disappeared from view. ‘Hurry up, then’, I called to her from the pavement, ‘There’s a language barrier, ’. I gazed anxiously up and down the street and was thankful to see that it was deserted, but almost before I could sigh with relief, a large motor bike came roaring up and stopped at the kerb. My heart sank as the rider dismounted and I searched my brain wildly for Danish words that might dissuade him from entering the building, but my mind had gone blank and he was now almost beside me. ‘No, no, no’, I cried out, catching at his sleeve to hold him back. He turned quickly towards me, his expression at once puzzled and apprehensive. Then, as I saw his face break into a grin, my pathetic command of Danish returned and: ‘Taler de Englsk?’ I asked.

His grin widened. ‘Certainly’, he replied. ‘How can I be of help to you?’ This time I really did sigh with relief and began at once to explain my predicament – and Jennifer’s! He gave a hearty chuckle and, by the time Jenny ed us, we were chatting away merrily to one another. He told me that he did not normally frequent this toilet, but a work colleague had lost his cigarette lighter and thought he might have left it inside and so he had offered to search for it. He went on to ask all the usual questions: how long were we staying in Denmark, had we been enjoying ourselves and where had we been today. Afterwards, we could never quite decide whether it had been his open face and disarming smile, or the peculiar mood we had both been in since deciding to return to Jaegerspris, that had caused us suddenly to find ourselves outlining to him the salient points of our theory. In view of our experiences at home –and especially here in Denmark with Karen – we had been at such pains to conceal it from everyone. Even as I heard myself telling him, I could hardly believe my ears. It was the most uncanny feeling – almost as if my voice had a mind of its own. He listened, obviously fascinated, and asked several questions. ‘But if you are right and are truly descendants of the king and countess’, he said at length, ‘then you must go at once to the castle and make yourselves known. All those who work there would surely be thrilled to meet you’. ‘They would never believe us, son’, Jenny told him, ‘We know the extent of the cover-up that took place in Britain. It doesn’t take much imagination to realise how much more important it would have been to cover their tracks here’. ‘My sister’s right’, I said, ‘It’s extremely unlikely that any conclusive documentary evidence exists – and what other proof would most people accept?’ ‘Oh, but that is so sad’, he sighed, ‘to think that you have discovered such things – things that are part of my country’s history - and yet no-one will ever know’. ‘We know’, I replied, ‘and, in time, our children will know and our children’s children - and perhaps that’s all that really matters’. ‘And now you know’, Jenny laughed, ‘And we’ve had such a wonderful day today that we are coming again tomorrow – and whether we ever prove our theory or not, no-one can take these memories away from us’.

As soon as we had said goodbye and even before he and his motorbike went roaring off down the road, I began to regret what we had done. ‘All those years we’ve kept it so secret’, I turned to Jenny, ‘and now we’ve gone and blurted it out to a perfect stranger – and a Danish stranger at that. Dear Lord! Whatever were we thinking of? It’ll probably be in the national papers before we set sail. Bob’ll think we’re stark, raving mad – and he’ll be right’. ‘Actually, I felt a kind of madness at the time. Didn’t you?’ ‘I felt reckless’, I itted, ‘and yet unable to stop myself – ‘and that poor lad must have thought we were ‘tiddly’’. ‘ ‘And if I weren’t sure that we hadn’t touched a drop’, she said, ‘I’d be half inclined to agree with him’. ‘Well let’s hope and pray he attributes it to that and thinks no more about it’.

By the time we got back to our hotel that night, all we wanted was a meal and bed. ‘But not before I’ve tried once more to Karen Neiiendam’, I said to Jenny, ‘She can’t be permanently unavailable, can she?’ ‘Want to bet?’ she called after me as I went to the ‘phone. But this proved to be third time lucky, for it was Karen herself who answered my call. I could sense her confusion on discovering my identity and she told me the reason we had been unable to her earlier was that she had been visiting her out-of-town summer house. I accepted this explanation without question until, later in the conversation she told me that “a couple of days ago and by the merest coincidence” she had bumped into her father-in-law’s old friend, the author, Bo Bramsen outside his home, which of course, I knew to be in Copenhagen! She went on to say that, oddly enough, they had been speaking of me and my research and it was his opinion that, as it had all happened a very long time ago, it was now “better to let sleeping dogs lie”. This seemed to me a very odd view for a historian to take and I realised, not only from this, but also from the conversation that followed, that the shutters had been well and truly closed against us and that we should glean no further information from either of them. Disappointed, but by now hardly surprised, I

wished her well, said goodbye and replaced the receiver.

Our last day at Jaegerspris was idyllic. Weather-wise, it was the best day of our stay and we were able to eat our roughly-assembled picnic beneath the shade of a large tree. As there were very few other visitors about, we were afforded another leisurely tour of the museum and still had time to wander freely about the grounds. We really soaked up the atmosphere of the place and we both experienced again the strong feeling that the spirits of Frederick and his Louise were with us in that lovely place. All too quickly, it was time to make our way back to the car. As it came into view, Jenny said: ‘Isn’t that the young lad we saw yesterday?’ I followed her gaze and, sure enough, there he was, astride his motorbike in the next parking lot. He grinned broadly as we approached. 'I hoped that I would find you here’, he said, ‘but until I saw your car I was afraid you might have changed your plans’. My thoughts fled to our reckless talk of yesterday and panic gripped me. I could think of no other reason for his presence here than that he had brought reporters who, even now, were lurking in the bushes, waiting to pounce upon us. ‘Did your friend find his lighter?’ I asked in an effort to keep the conversation casual. ‘No’, he replied, ‘but his girlfriend did. She had put it in her handbag’. And then: ‘I hope you do not mind’, he said, ‘but last night, when I reached home, I told the wonderful story of your family which you are re…’ ‘Who did you tell?’ I could hear the tension in Jenny’s voice as she interrupted him. ‘Why, my grandmother, of course. She is the one I live with. I thought I told you yester...' ‘Yes, yes, you did’, I cut in quickly, ‘And was she the only one you told?’ ‘There was no-one else to tell. We live alone’.

‘But what about afterwards?’, Jenny persisted. ‘Did you not meet with your friends?’ ‘Only my girlfriend.’ He grinned broadly. ‘And we have other things to talk about’. ‘We’re sorry to be so inquisitive’, I said, ‘but I’m afraid we said too much yesterday. As I told you, there are parts of the story we may never be able to prove and so we would not want everyone to hear of it’. ‘There’d be lots who wouldn’t believe us’, put in Jenny, ‘and they might think us mad – you know, the sort of person who has delusions that they are Napoleon or some other celebrity. So for the time being, at least, would you mind if we kept it our little secret?’ ‘And perhaps you could ask your grandmother not to it on, either’, I said, ‘if you wouldn’t mind’. ‘I do not mind in the least, but she will be very disappointed’. ‘Oh, she likes a good story then, does she, your grandmother?, Jenny smiled ‘No’, he replied, ‘she’s not like that but she is the reason I am here. She wishes to see you’. ‘To see us?’ we chorused in surprise. ‘You would not believe how interested she was in your story’, he said, ‘I have never seen her so excited. How can I speak with these ladies, she asked, and when I told her that you had said you would come to “Jaegerspris” again today, she begged me to take you to see her. But now that you tell me you do not wish to talk more about it, I understand that you will not wish to come.’ As Jenny and I exchanged enquiring glances, something of the mood of the previous day seemed to come upon me and: ‘Oh, drat it’, I said, ‘why not?’

‘Do you think we’re being a bit rash?’ Jenny asked as we drove along, following closely behind the youth on his motorcycle.

‘Probably’, I replied, ‘but the damage was done yesterday and, if we’re careful, there’s no reason to give away more. In fact, we can use the opportunity to beg his grandmother’s discretion’. ‘I don’t mean in that way’, she said. ‘I mean being lured off by a strange man. Supposing this talk of his grandmother is just a ploy to abduct us!’ ‘We’re a bit long in the tooth for the white slave trade, aren’t we?’ ‘Speak for yourself’, she laughed. ‘But seriously, we’d better be on our guard in case anyone tries to slip something into our handbags or pockets to get it through customs tomorrow’. ‘Drugs you mean? Oh, Jen’, I exclaimed, ‘you’re making me nervous’. The motorbike was slowing now and Grandmama must have recognised the sound of it for, as we approached, she appeared in the doorway of her home. I judged her to be in her mid-sixties and her manner was warm and welcoming as she led us inside. Everything was as neat as a pin, but homely, for all that. I noticed that a side table had been daintily laid with three cups and saucers and all the usual trappings for tea and I thinking what an optimist she must be; how sure that we would come. Although her accent was stronger than her grandson’s, she had a good command of English and, while we were seating ourselves, she kept up a lively chatter about things in general, but once the lad had taken his leave of us and zoomed off on his motorbike, her conversation took a more serious turn and she began to ply us with questions. Sitting on the edge of her chair, she asked where we lived, where we were born, about our parents, our grandparents, brothers and sisters and all manner of things for which I could see no reason. In fact, as we remarked later, she gave us a grilling that would not have shamed MI5, and by the time she reached aunts, uncles and cousins, I was convinced she must have a hidden agenda and found myself wishing desperately that we had not come. Then, just as I was exchanging nervous glances with Jenny and racking my brains for a polite way to make our escape, the questions ceased and, with a sigh, she settled herself back in her chair, her whole demeanour completely changed. ‘And now’, she said at length, ‘I would very much like for you to tell me the real purpose of your visit to Denmark. You know what I mean: the story of the search

for your father’s mother and all that you have discovered about her – the way you told my grandson yesterday’. ‘But your grandson said that he had told you all about it’, Jenny said, ‘and that was why you wanted to meet us’. ‘That is so’, she replied, ‘but I would like very much to hear it again – only this time from you and your sister’. There seemed nothing for it but to comply, though we were both careful not to give away more than we already had. When we had finished, I said: ‘I daresay you will consider our theory far-fetched and it’s very unlikely that we shall ever find documented proof. Therefore, as you might imagine, it would not do for it to become widely known. It was very remiss of us to have spoken so freely to your grandson yesterday’. ‘It certainly was’, put in Jenny. ‘In fact, we have just asked him if he would please not speak to anyone, other than yourself, about the things we told him. And we should be most grateful if you would not speak of them to anyone else, either’. ‘Oh, I know how to keep a secret’, she replied, ‘as you will presently learn. But first’, she added, moving to the edge of her seat again, ‘I should be pleased if you would answer some more questions’, and with that, she began grilling us again, though not, this time, about ourselves and our family. This time she wanted to know exactly how our search had led us to Denmark and, even more so, all that we had discovered about our grandmother’s life. I thought this odd, but neither of us minded too much, because now we were dealing mainly in facts for which we had ample documentation and which could, if required, be proved. After what seemed an age, she suddenly said: ‘Thank you both very much. Now we shall first have tea and then I shall tell you a story. True to her words, once we had drunk our fill and scoffed several of her delicious pastries, she settled herself back into her chair again and began: ‘When I was a young girl, my grandmother entrusted to me a secret, with which she had, many years before, been entrusted by her own grandmother. That would, of course, have been my great-great-grandmother, you understand?’ We nodded.

‘My grandmother made me learn much of this secret by rote and urged me to keep it locked in my heart until the time came for me to it on to my own granddaughter. ‘This has been troubling me greatly of late’, she continued, ‘for I am now over seventy years of age and I have not been blessed with a granddaughter. Therefore, I have been asking myself – and my God in prayer – whether I should entrust it to one of my grandsons. But no. I now see that it has all been for a purpose and that you have been sent to me in answer to my prayers, to lift this burden from me’. This was becoming a bit intense. She looked so serious. I glanced across at Jenny and could tell that she was feeling uncomfortable, too. ‘Look’, she turned to the old lady now, ‘just because we have confided in you and your grandson, there’s no call for you to go sharing your family secrets with us, too’. ‘Oh, no, no, no, it is not like that at all’, she protested strongly. ‘You see, I must tell you all that I know, for I am now convinced that the knowledge rightfully belongs to you. And once I have told you, the secret will be yours – to keep or tell as you think fit. All I ask of you, in return, is your word that you will say nothing that would reveal my identity. I would not mind for myself, you understand, but my family know nothing of this – nothing whatsoever - and I would not wish to unleash upon them the publicity that would surely follow.’ ‘Well, we certainly wouldn’t wish to do or say anything to embar…’ ‘I am afraid that I must ask for your word of honour on this’, she cut in. We each gave our word, of course, for by now she had us intrigued, but I have to it to thinking that she was being over-dramatic. ‘It is difficult for me to know where to begin’, she said, ‘for, from what you have told me, I realise that you already know a great deal of the history of this country during the middle of the last century. You know, for instance, of the crucial political situation that existed between the king’s realm of Denmark and his duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, so I need not go into all that. And you are aware, too, of the romantic first meeting between Prince Frederick and the love of his life, the little dancer, Louise Rasmussen. She was very young at the time, of course, and he was a handsome prince of twenty-one with plenty of wild oats to sow, but he could never banish the thought of her from his mind.

‘Now at that time’, she continued, ‘his father’s brother, King Frederick VI was on the throne and, as he had no sons, Frederick’s father was Crown Prince. As soon as the king and Crown Prince heard of Frederick’s association with Louise, they arranged that he should marry one of the king’s daughters, his cousin Wilhelmina’. ‘But didn’t he protest?’ asked Jenny. ‘I daresay he did, my dear’, she replied, ‘for he could be a bit of a rebel, but our kings were autocrats in those days, you must ; good or bad, their word was law. In any event, the marriage took place and they were both very unhappy. In fact, whether it was ever consummated remains in doubt. Perhaps the old king took pity on his daughter and nephew, for within a few years he allowed the marriage to be dissolved, though of course, he would still not have allowed Prince Frederick to marry a commoner. Consequently, by the time the king died and Frederick’s father succeeded to the throne, Frederick, who was now Crown Prince, was still the last of his line – the four-hundred-year-old dynasty of the Oldenborgs. ‘This was when Frederick’s father, the new King Christian VIII, tried to force his duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to accept succession via a female line, but when this failed – due in part to Prussia’s meddling - he decided to get Frederick married off again quickly, in the hope that, this time, he would produce an heir. Thinking to mollify his people of Holstein, he chose for him a German princess, Mariane of Mecklenberg Strelitz, but alas, for poor Frederick that marriage proved to be even more unhappy than his first’ I knew most of this and found myself wondering where it was all leading. Interesting as it was, I thought to myself, it must surely be common knowledge, here in Denmark. So what of the family secret she’d threatened to tell us? Had she changed her mind after all? I hoped so. ‘But what was happening to Louise all this time?’ Jennifer was asking, obviously engrossed, ‘Had Prince Frederick stayed in touch with her, do you think?’ ‘Oh, yes’, she replied, ‘though he could hardly have done so openly, could he? He was married for most of it, . However, as you already know, he had an extremely good friend in the printer, Carl Berling and it was he who, seeing the prince so unhappy and knowing where his heart really lay, devised a means

whereby he could see his Louise’. ‘How on earth did he manage that?’ I asked. ‘Well, you see, Berling made a point of publicly favouring Louise with his own attentions. Then, when everyone assumed she was his mistress, he was able to “introduce” her as such to Prince Frederick, which, of course, enabled the prince to come into with her openly. And he did so, too, at every opportunity – and not only openly either, but clandestinely as well! ‘Under the cloak of darkness, the two friends would drive, in an unmarked carriage, to a less-fashionable part of the city, where they would call upon Louise at the flat above a chemist’s shop, where she lived with her grandmother.’ ‘Really?’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘Really’, the old lady repeated, ‘and you can draw your own conclusions as to what took place, but in my day three was a very odd number when it came to romantic assignations. As I see it, if the liaison had truly been between Carl Berling and Louise, there would have been no reason whatsoever for the prince to have tagged along. But there would have been every reason for Carl Berling to have played chaperone if, as I believe, Louise’s paramour was really Prince Frederick. ‘Yes, I can see that’, I said. ‘And do you know for how long they continued to meet in that way?’ ‘Not as long as they would have liked, I suspect’, she replied. ‘Word of their triangular friendship must have reached the ears of the king, for he suddenly posted his son away from the capital and installed him as Governor of the Island of Funen. Louise had had to retire from ballet owing to trouble with a knee, but wishing to give Frederick a chance to find happiness with his second wife, she went to Paris and trained as a milliner. In fact, on her return to Copenhagen, she opened a hat shop and ran it for a while, but nothing could keep the lovers apart and, accompanied by Berling, she followed the prince to Funen’. ‘Oh, this is all so fascinating’, Jennifer exclaimed, ‘I can’t wait to hear what happened next’.

‘What happened next’, said the old lady, ‘was that, on 5th June 1841, Louise gave birth to a son’. ‘Oh, yes’, I said, ‘we do know about him. His surname was later changed to Jacobsen, the name of his foster-mother, wasn’t it? And he was sent, with her, to live in Britain. We also know that Carl Berling claimed paternity. But do you believe that he was, in fact, the father? Or was he perhaps shielding the Crown Prince?’ ‘Ah, you may well ask’, she said. My great-great-grandmother was never told that, even though she was later in the personal service of Louise, Countess Danner and became her close confidante. However, when I have acquainted you with all the facts, you will be able to judge for yourselves, just as I did, many years ago’. So… I thought to myself… if, as she said, her great-great-grandmother was close to Louise, perhaps her family secret – when she finally gets around to it - might help to throw some more light on our research. Meanwhile, as Jenny had said, this was all very intriguing stuff’. ‘Calling herself Madame Jensen, Louise went in secret to a nursing home to have the child’ the old lady continued, ‘and following the birth, she received a most beautiful pearl from the king. She told those who enquired that it was from her husband who was travelling abroad ‘They named the boy Frederick Carl Christian Louis. The Louis was for Louise, of course, and his other names were exactly those of Prince Frederick, though “Carl” was also the same as Berling’s. ‘He was illegitimate, of course, whoever had sired him, and a scandal so close to the throne would have been most undesirable. To avert such a threat, they hid him deep in the countryside and very few people indeed were ever made aware of his existence. But he was certainly not forgotten. All three had his welfare very much at heart. ‘As soon as the Crown Prince was divorced from his second wife, he defied his father and consorted with Louise. Of course, when this became known, the public, who had believed her to be Carl Berling’s mistress, thought that either the prince had stolen her from his friend, or that she had been faithless enough to prefer the greater prize’. ‘I suppose it was only natural that they should come to such a conclusion’,

remarked Jenny. ‘Yes’, I added, ‘and because of the circumstances, neither of them would have been able to offer any defence, would they?’ ‘Exactly. As your British poet, Scott, once wrote: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”‘ ‘I’m impressed’, I said, ‘You’ve studied our literature’. ‘Not really’, she itted, ‘there are just a few quotations I from school. But to return to my story: in spite of his liaison with Louise, many people, at this time, still hoped that their prince might make another royal marriage and beget an heir. But they were destined to be disappointed. Louise adored her prince and he wanted no-one but her. They were living quite openly together when, on the death of his father in 1848, he became King Frederick VII of Denmark and, of course, Duke of Schleswig and Holstein. ‘Now, as you know’, she continued, ‘one of the first things King Frederick did was to give his people a parliament and a proper Constitution. And they loved him for it. They called him “The People’s King” and he was so proud of their love, that he took as his motto “The People’s Love is My Strength”‘. ‘Oh, yes, we’ve seen that on his statue in Copenhagen’, I said, ‘and in Frederiksborg, too, I believe’. ‘Ah’, the old lady replied, ‘but do you know on what date the king chose to sign that Constitution?’ ‘I must have read it somewhere’, I said, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t ‘. ‘The date the king chose to mark as one of monumental importance in the history of his country – and, of course, the date we still celebrate as Constitution Day’, she smiled knowingly, ‘was 5th. June 1849 - the eighth birthday of Louise’s son! ‘You know, I’ve always felt’, she continued as we exchanged surprised glances, ‘that if the king had simply wished to honour his mistress, he would have chosen to sign it on her own birthday which was, after all, only a few weeks earlier, rather than on the birthday of her bastard son by another man – for, according to

the records, that’s what the boy was.’ ‘But you don’t believe those records are right, do you?’ I ventured. ‘To be honest, no. I think it much more likely that, in choosing that date, the king was publicly acknowledging his son in the only way he dared’. ‘Though, I suppose’, put in Jenny, ‘that very few people would have been aware of that fact’. ‘Exactly’, she replied, ‘for only a handful knew of the boy’s existence. And there was another pointer, too. I do not know if you are aware of it, but when, on their marriage, the king created Louise a Countess, she took as her motto: “Fidelite est ma Gloire”, which translates to: “Faithfulness is my Glory”. Now is it likely, do you suppose, that a woman of high moral integrity (which is what my greatgreat-grandmother always found her to be) would have adopted such a motto if any but the man she was marrying had fathered her child?’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘But no matter how we might conjecture’, she added, ‘only the three persons directly concerned will ever know – and they can never tell us now.

‘But I can tell you’, she continued, her manner becoming more confidential, ‘that there is no doubt whatsoever as to who sired Louise’s second child’. ‘Louise’s…’ I stumbled, my mouth suddenly dry. ‘Then she did have another!’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘She did indeed’. ‘But when? Where? Was it a girl? How do you know?’ My heart was beating twenty to the dozen and my brain was teeming with questions. ‘I do know and you shall learn all before you leave’. She reached out her hand to me in a calming gesture, but I found it hard to compose myself. I sat on the edge of my chair and hung on her every word. ‘It is hard for us to imagine’, she was saying, ‘what agonies of mind the king and countess must have suffered, here at their castle of Jaegerspris, as they awaited, in secret, the birth of that child. The king needed an heir so desperately – and yet… Oh, it is so ironic to think that, at almost any other time in our history, a baby girl would have posed no threat at all. As the king’s morganatic daughter, she could have lived a normal life with them both, and made up to them, to some extent, for the fact that they were unable to acknowledge the boy. And later on, the king could have conferred a title on her – for even illegitimate children of our monarchs have received as much in the past’. ‘Oh, it was tragic!’ Jenny exclaimed. The old lady nodded. ‘And you know, while he was without a legitimate son, the same incredible situation would have arisen even if the king had sired a daughter in a royal marriage, rather than a morganatic one. If any legitimate child of King Frederick had survived him, there were those who would have stopped at nothing to place that child on the throne, female or not, and force Schleswig to accept her. But the king knew that that could only lead to war and probably to the loss of his duchies to a scheming Prussia.’ ‘That was an extremely complicated time in Denmark’s history – and, in fact, in the history of Europe’, I remarked. ‘You must have studied it in depth.’

‘Goodness, no, my dear’, the old lady laughed aloud. ‘I would never have had the brains. Caring for my home and family has always been enough for me. ‘But as I told you – my grandmother taught me well’. ‘Oh, the things she told you were not secrets about your family, then’, Jenny remarked, ‘but about Denmark’s history’. ‘They are inextricably entwined, as I am about to explain to you. It was, as you say, a most complicated and unusual time in our history. Perhaps never before, or since, has a nation – and potentially a continent – been placed in jeopardy by the birth of a female child. ‘My husband made the same remark’, I told her. ‘And he was right’, she replied, ‘and that was why the king had no alternative but to send their little daughter into exile. And, as you rightly suggested, he chose Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassador, Sir Henry Williams Wynn, to be her protector.’ ‘Oh, we were right!’ I exclaimed. ‘You certainly were. And my great-great-grandmother’s heart bled for her poor parents that night. Never to see their darling again… Oh, it was cruel!… Cruel!’ ‘But how did your great-great-grandmother discover all this’, Jenny enquired, ‘when they must have been at such pains to keep it secret?’ ‘She did not need to “discover” it, as you put it’, the old lady replied, ‘for she was one of the privileged few entrusted with their secret. In fact’, she added proudly, ‘it was she – and only she, of all their most trusted servants - who accompanied their child to Britain’. For a long moment, Jenny and I just stared at one another, open-mouthed. ‘I just can’t believe what a coincidence this is’, I murmured at length, ‘It’s uncanny that we should, not only have met your grandson yesterday, but also opened up to him in a way we had never done before to anyone – let alone to a stranger. We’ve had some pretty incredible things happen during the years of our research, but this surely beats the lot.’

‘Little did we guess, as we spoke to that young lad, your grandson, yesterday’, put in Jenny, ‘that one of his forebears had probably carried one of ours into exile’. ‘From all that you have told me, there is no “probably” about it’, the old lady protested. ‘And I cannot believe it was coincidence, either. You might think me a foolish old woman, but I had prayed, . As you have pointed out, you came into with my grandson by the merest chance and in the most unusual circumstances – and moreover, in a place he would not normally have reason to frequent – and yet you felt the need to open your hearts to him. In addition, you tell me that something seemed to draw you back to Jaegerspris again today, which provided the opportunity for me to meet you. That is more than coincidence, my dears. That is a prayer answered. ‘Besides’, she continued, ‘our forebears had a much closer relationship than you might think, for only a few months before the countess was confined, my greatgreat-grandmother had given birth to a child of her own, and so it was as wetnurse that she accompanied your grandmother to Britain’. ‘You don’t mean it!’ I exclaimed. ‘Indeed I do’, she replied, her eyes shining with pride, ‘She was wet-nurse to the King of Denmark’s only daughter and she said that she came to love that child as if she were her own. In fact, it broke her heart to have to leave her on that foreign shore, and throughout the rest of her life, she worried and wondered as to what had become of her’. ‘But surely Sir Henry kept the parents informed of her whereabouts?’ exclaimed Jenny. ‘No’, she replied sadly, ‘I am afraid that he did not. Oh, he assured them that she was safe and well, of course, but whenever they questioned him further, he became evasive and soon afterwards he retired home to Britain. It seems that my great-great-grandmother was not surprised at this, for, truth to tell, she had sensed, while she was over there, that something was amiss. The countess had told her that Sir Henry had promised the king that their child would be reared as one of his own, but it soon became clear to great-great-grandmama that he had other plans for her. She could never understand him breaking his promise, for he had always been considered so trustworthy’.

‘Well, if that baby really was our grandmother’, I said, ‘then break it he certainly did, for, as we have told you, her upbringing, though adequate, was certainly not affluent. Mind you, knowing what we know now, it’s not hard to imagine that the anxieties – and perhaps even the orders - of his monarch might have prevented Sir Henry from keeping the child near him’. ‘My great-great-grandmother had the same thoughts. She always suspected that Queen Victoria’s fears for the peace of Europe had proved even greater than he had anticipated and that she and Prince Albert probably considered that a child brought up in Sir Henry’s household would too easily be traced back to Denmark. ‘Whether our king ever enquired directly of Queen Victoria regarding his daughter’s whereabouts and well-being, my great-great-grandmother could never be sure. But she knew that, if so, he could have received little satisfaction, for when, twenty years later and after the king had died, the widowed countess journeyed to London, she told my forebear that she was doing so in the hope of tracing her erstwhile nurseling. But, as we know, it was all to no avail. ‘But we know – now – what happened to their darling, don’t we?’ she added, suddenly leaning forward and grasping us both by the hand. ‘And it’s wonderful to think that, in you and your children and your children’s children, the ancient blood of our “People’s King” still flows’. I don’t know for how long the three of us just sat there, holding hands, too overcome by emotion to speak, but eventually - and just as suddenly - she released us and, without a word, fetched a bottle and three glasses from a nearby cupboard and poured us each a drink. ‘Here’s to our forebears’, she said, raising her glass, ‘and to the respect, love and trust they found in one another. May it now continue in us.’ As we drank, I experienced an odd mixture of emotions – a feeling of continuity and yet, at the same time, a feeling of completion. Continuity in the realisation that, just as this good woman and her forebears had kept our secret across the years, so must we now keep hers – at least until after she had gone. And completion in that, after more than ten years of frustration and hard work, the parentage of our father’s mother had at last been confirmed to us beyond any shadow of a doubt. This was the culmination of all our research and I wished with all my heart that Bob were there to share it with us.

‘According to my great-great-grandmother’, the old lady was saying as we resumed our seats, ‘it was this episode that brought home to Queen Victoria just how precariously the peace of Europe was balanced upon the succession of the Danish throne. And so she called all the major powers of Europe to a meeting in London; Norway, Russia, Austro-Hungary - all of them were there, and it took a great deal of deliberation before they decided on Prince Christian of Glucksborg as being the least dangerous candidate to succeed Frederick as king’. ‘I didn’t realise that, did you, Irene?’ asked Jenny. ‘Yes, I do reading of it. I think it became known as “The Treaty of London”. ‘And this happened soon after our grandmother was born?’ ‘Quite soon, yes’, I replied. ‘By the time they had managed to assemble everyone and the Treaty had been signed…’ I turned to our hostess, ‘it was about a year, wasn’t it?’ ‘That’s right’, she replied, ‘in 1852. And as you will probably , many of those present had a far better claim to our throne than the Prince of Glucksborg – and that included his own wife and his mother-in-law and even the Czar of Russia – but of course, unlike him, they were all descended through the female line, which everyone knew could lead to war, and so they all renounced their claims in his favour ‘As you might imagine, their choice did not find favour with everyone, especially as his wife and her family, the Hesse-Cassells, were suspected of being pro-German. In fact, so strongly did feelings run in some quarters that, on occasions soon after his succession, they feared for their lives. At one time I believe they had to barricade themselves into their palace and their son, the new Crown Prince, was spat upon in the street. But I believe Christian IX turned out to be quite a good king and his children supplied so many crowned heads with consorts – and your Queen Alexandra was one of those children – that he became known as “the father-in-law of Europe” and his descendants still rule us to this day.’ ‘But didn’t King Frederick mind them choosing his successor?’ Jenny asked. ‘Didn’t he want a say in the matter himself?’

‘He could have had one, of course’, she replied, ‘but in the absence of a legitimate son, *there was no practical alternative. He and his Louise had already sacrificed their baby daughter in an effort to preserve the peace of his realm and he now knew that the best hope of preserving it after his death lay with whoever the other great powers were willing to . And so he had little choice but to ratify their decision, though whether he still harboured any secret hopes that the countess might yet bear him a legitimate son, we shall never know. ‘At the time - according to great-great-grandmama - there were those who criticised the king for his association with Louise, and accused him of putting the desires of his heart before his kingly duties. But you know, a king is nought but a man beneath the crown. And if he did wrong, then he and Countess Louise certainly paid an enormous price for their sins – and a price of which their critics could never be made aware’. ‘Were there many who criticised them, do you think?’ asked Jenny. ‘Not among the masses, no’, she replied. ‘He was their king, their “Constitution Giver” and they mourned him deeply when he died. But there were plenty among the aristocracy who blamed him for delegating so much of his power to the people and who would never receive Louise or accept her as his wife. It split Copenhagen high society into two camps and brought great heartache to them both. For he needed her, you know. She was the love of his life and a source of great strength and comfort to him. In fact, he was often heard to declare that, without her, he would have turned his toes up long ago. ‘And it would appear that her love for him was just as strong,’ she continued, ‘for she never stopped missing him after he had died, and she installed in his memory the museum, here in their favourite home of “Jaegerspris”‘. I nodded. ‘We visited it today - and yesterday’. ‘Of course, you would have done. And did you know that she also set up memorials to all those who were nearest and dearest to her? In memory of the grandmother who reared her, she endowed a home for the elderly, and for her exiled son she raised a monument in Copenhagen. She would not have been able to proclaim that it was for him, of course, and I do not know what form it takes, for I have never been to our capital city, but I do know that she sited it at the point where, disguised as a peasant, she alighted with him from a poultryman’s

cart, on which she had fetched him from his hiding-place in the country to be raised by his new foster-mother, Ane Jacobsen. ‘And as for her little daughter’, she continued, ‘Well I daresay you noticed that large refuge at “Jaegerspris”,which she endowed for destitute girls’. ‘Yes, we did’, said Jenny, ‘and we were most impressed, but we thought that “The Daughters of King Frederick VII Institute” seemed an odd name to give it, when, according to the records, he didn’t have any.’ ‘Yes, most people remark upon it’, she replied, ‘but of course they do not realise that she intended it to be a pointer to the one they had to part with – your grandmother – and it was her memorial. Great-great-grandmama reckoned that neither the king nor the countess ever recovered from the loss of her. They missed the boy, too, of course, but at least they knew where he was and received regular reports on him via Ane Jacobsen, but of how their daughter was faring they had been able to learn nothing. By endowing such a refuge, the countess probably felt that she was casting her “bread upon the waters”, so to speak, in the hope that someone, somewhere, would provide a refuge for their child if she were in need. ‘The boy was well provided for, you see’, she continued, ‘In his role as Keeper of the King’s Purse, Carl Berling had been able to arrange that. And the fact that they were unable to provide their daughter with a like portion, was always a source of great sadness and worry to them both. ‘Louise was an extremely wealthy widow, you know, for apart from what she had amassed from her own business enterprises, the king left her his vast personal fortune. Stored in the cellars of “Jaegerspris”, she had an immense collection of art treasures, all of which she would regularly instruct her staff to inspect. All, that is, except one large chest, to which she would never allow anyone else access. When, after her death, her executors opened it, they found, to their amazement, that it was full of money. She had left them no instructions and no mention was made of it in her will and so they came to the conclusion that it must have been some kind of emergency fund, which she had kept ready to take with her if ever she had felt the need to flee the country’. ‘And is that what your great-great-grandmother believed, too? I asked. ‘Not for a moment’, she replied. ‘Why on earth would the countess need to take

a cumbersome thing like that with her when she already had plenty of money abroad. She owned three estates in Norway, for a start, the income from which would easily have ed her, apart from her other foreign investments.’ ‘So did your grandmother have any idea as to why the countess should have hoarded it?’ enquired Jenny. ‘She was never told, but she knew that, until the day she died, the countess never gave up hope of finding her exiled daughter, and it was my great-greatgrandmother’s belief that, as soon as she did so, she intended to find a way of ing that money to her in secret. And that would have ed for the fact that she made no reference to it in her will.’ ‘Did you notice while you were at the castle’, she turned to us ‘that marble statue of a little girl, lying down and playing with a kitten?’ ‘Yes, it was on a table against the wall in the countess’s day room’, Jenny replied. ‘We could hardly miss it’, I said. ‘It holds pride of place in, right beneath the huge portrait of the king’. ‘And so it should’, the old lady replied, ‘because the king commissioned it for her birthday – when your grandmother would have been about the same age as the child it portrays – in the hope that it might comfort her a little in her grief.

‘Oh, isn’t it sad to think’, sighed Jenny, ‘that our grandmother never knew how much her parents loved and missed her’. ‘It was tragic’, the old lady sighed. ‘And so, to me, is the fact that, even in death, they must rest apart – the king with his royal ancestors in the cathedral at Roskilde and his beloved Louise here in the parklands of “Jaegerspris”, while their children lie in separate graves upon a foreign shore, their daughter even unaware of her brother’s existence’. ‘But surely their spirits are united now’, Jenny murmured, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘I certainly like to think so’, I said. ‘And you believe it, too, don’t you?’ I added, turning to the old lady. ‘I do, my dear’, she replied. ‘With all my heart I do’.

I can almost nothing of the journey back to our hotel that night. I only know that neither of us spoke much and it was very late when we arrived. We had the long journey home to face in the morning and all our things to pack, but we just sat on the edge of our beds with a stiff drink and gazed into space. ‘Did it really happen’, I murmured at length, ‘or have I been sleeping and dreamt it all?’ ‘Perhaps we both have’, Jenny sighed. ‘There we were, thinking we should have nothing much to report to Bob - and now we’ve learned so much in such a short space of time that…’ ‘That you’re afraid we might not it all?’ ‘Well, yes.’ ‘Well you needn’t be’, she replied, ‘because I let the “General Public” in on a lot of it.’

Just before we set off for Denmark, Bob had handed us a personal tape recorder, which he had borrowed so that we could capture our impressions of everything we found and saw and did. It was an excellent idea and had proved very useful but, being inexperienced, we had both found, at the outset, that we were shy of our own voices. So to cover our embarrassment, we had made a joke of “having a few words with the general public” and somehow the name had stuck. Now Jenny appeared to be telling me that she had recorded at least some of our conversation with the old lady. ‘Oh, Jen’, I exclaimed, ‘how on earth did you manage it?’ ‘I fetched it from the car while you were helping to wash the tea things’. ‘But you didn’t know, then, that she was about to tell us such amazing things’. ‘No, but I had a sort of gut-feeling that she might say something worth recording so I fetched it just in case. Do you want to hear it now?’ I hesitated. ‘Do you know, I don’t think I do. My mind’s too full of it already.’ ‘I know what you mean’, she said, ‘It’s the sadness of it all that haunts me. Those poor parents - not only having to exile their child, but losing touch with her, too – never knowing how she fared, or even whether she was alive or dead, while all the time, there she was, our grandmother, over in Britain, in total ignorance of the love they felt for her – and even of the fact that she had a brother and that he was there in Britain, too. Oh, what a sad tale!’ ‘So it is’, I said, ‘But you have to that, as far as we can tell, Elizabeth never suspected that John and Ann Wynn were not her biological parents - even though we have since discovered from the 1841 census that John had already died more than ten years before she was born – and so it’s likely that, once she had been united with Ann, Elizabeth was probably quite content. ‘Our father, on the other hand, was not’, I continued, ‘and therefore, in my opinion, it was he who suffered most from all the intrigue. We know for a fact that, all the time he was growing up, he fretted for news of his parents. And even after he had been put in touch with his father’s kin, he remained desperate to discover his mother’s - and yet found himself thwarted at every step of the way’. ‘No wonder’, said Jenny, ‘for we know now what was at stake!’

‘Exactly’, I replied. ‘We know now - but he didn’t know then and his frustration must, at times, have been overwhelming’. ‘Didn’t that favourite old “aunt” of his once tell him that some people were looking for him and that when they found him he’d never have to work again?’ I nodded. ‘Well it set me wondering, when the old lady mentioned the Eider Danes today’, she continued, ‘whether they, or someone else here in Denmark, might have got wind of Elizabeth’s birth’. ‘And it was they who had been looking for dad, you mean? It could have been, I suppose. Or it might even have been Elizabeth’s brother, dad’s uncle Carl Jacobsen. He was here in Britain and he would have ed how their mother had fretted in vain for news of her daughter. But I can’t imagine that even the “aunt” knew who it was - any more than Harriet Stamp would have known to whom she was referring when she told mother “they’re big people”. In fact, I wouldn’t mind betting that Ann Wynn was told little more than that she would be doing a great service for the Reverend Bonnor by ing Elizabeth off as her own - and her best guess would probably have been that Elizabeth was from the wrong side of a Welsh blanket - either a Bonnor’s or a Williams Wynn’s.’ ‘Wasn’t it that “aunt” who left dad a legacy that he never received?’ ‘Yes’, I replied, ‘it was. And, after all that we have learned today, it is not hard to imagine that those who were monitoring him would have been at pains to ensure that he didn’t obtain sufficient funds to enable him to dig deeper for his roots. There must have been people still alive in North Wales then, who could have given him information that might have set him on the right path. And who knows but what his “Vicka-Lewis” enterprise was scuppered for the same reason? That is why I believe that dad was the one who suffered most – who paid the price of peace. In saying that, I don’t mean to detract in any way from all that our greatgrandparents suffered. The loss of their baby daughter was tragic in the extreme for them both, but at least they were aware of the reasons for her exile; had even decided upon it and instigated it themselves - albeit for the most valid of reasons. But our father knew nothing of the reason for all that happened to him, nor why

there should have been a conspiracy to prevent him from discovering his roots. He only knew that there was one, and that he suffered very badly at the hands of certain people, and he could never imagine whatever he had done to deserve it’. ‘Oh, if only he had lived to learn the reason for it’, Jenny murmured ‘I know’, I sighed, ‘it’s my greatest regret. And you know, in spite of all his suffering, I am sure that, once he became aware that it had all been done in the cause of peace, he would have forgiven them, for he was a pacifist at heart. ‘Do you think he knows now?’ Who can tell? I said. ‘But if he does, then he’ll know, too, that the centre of our jigsaw puzzle is at last complete - and that, after all these years, I have kept faith with him’.

AFTERWORD

More than thirty years have elapsed since our extraordinary meeting with that elderly lady in Denmark, and I now feel able to tell this story without fear of hurt or embarrassment to her (who, together with her forbears, had kept our family’s secret so faithfully and well for so very many years) or, indeed, to any member of her family.

Even after finishing the book, several new pieces of our jigsaw have come to light – namely:

On obtaining a certified copy of Carl Jacobsen’s British Naturalisation papers, we found that, just as his daughter, Alba, had said in her letters to Robert Neiiendam, he had stated his parents as “Nils and Ane Jacobsen”. So the birth record of my grandmother, Elizabeth Wynn, was not the only legal document that was falsified!

In July 1989 and after a search lasting many years, Bob and I were successful in making with the only known surviving great-grandson of Countess Danner’s son, Carl Jacobsen. Peter and his wife, Pat, received us most cordially and, having heard from us about all we had discovered, they welcomed my siblings and myself as Peter’s cousins. He told us that, until a few years earlier, he had been completely unaware of his Danish origins. In fact, it was only on clearing out his mother’s home after she had died that he had stumbled upon them.

We were able to supply him with a great many details about the early life of his great-grandfather and when he showed us a Danish photograph album he had inherited from his mother, we identified portraits of his great-great-grandmother, Louise Countess Danner, and the king. Later, when he and Pat came to stay with us, he most generously brought me a gift that I shall always treasure. It was one of his heirlooms: a silver-handled knife bearing the initials “L.R” – those of Louise Rasmussen, before she married the king.

A few years ago, I learned from a television programme that a lady of over one hundred and seven years of age was living in Llansantffraid and, on making with her son, he most kindly arranged for Jennifer and me to visit her in her home. Mrs Kathleen Beard was a delightful lady with all her faculties and as sharp as a tack. Unfortunately, she was just too young to have lived in the era of my grandparents, Elizabeth and Owen Lewis, but she vividly recalled how, as a child, her father used to tell her all about two young boys who had been killed in the village. One had sadly met his death on the railway lines, she told us, and the other had died after falling into his father’s open grave!

Just a few months ago I published my first e-book,’The Price of Peace – A conspiracy of Silence’ (a historical novel firmly based upon the facts as revealed by our research). Following this, Mr Ben Hamilton, sub editor of ‘The Copenhagen Post’, most kindly drew my attention to a quotation from a book by Danish author Morten Meisner. Of Louise, Countess Danner, Mr Morten writes that, following her not-very-public marriage to the king on 7th August 1850, she retired from public life and did not make her first official public appearance until Spring of the following year.¹⁸ Elizabeth’s date of birth was ed in Wales (as Mary) as 2nd March 1851!

Singly, these small pieces do not reveal a great deal, but once slotted into our jigsaw, each plays a vital part in revealing the whole amazing picture.

© copyright Irene Lewis Ward 18th October 2014