We are 'Only Human'

UNDERSTANDING HUMAN EMOTIONS

As anyone who knows this Blog reasonably well will recognize, I am a great believer in trying to understand human behaviour.


And I draw a lot on the concepts of ‘genes’ (the ‘hard-wired responses that come from our genetic adaptations) and ‘memes’ (the accumulated memories of our family and collective unconscious).

I was interested then in a recent report (quoted at the bottom of this article) on the Emotional Lives of Animals. I have prefaced this with a brief review of the more conventional concept of ‘Fight or Flight’.

In some ways what is said about animal emotions is almost obvious. And, growing up on a small family farm, I have never been in any doubt that animals of the same species, like pigs and cows, have their own individual characters.

But I think that there is also a point worth picking up about human beings.

Maybe one of our defining emotional characteristics as a species – the intense range and diversity of our emotions – draws a lot from our frightening vulnerability in our pre-weapon, pre-fire existence on the shoreline and the edges of the forest.

Not surprisingly, when we finally managed to relieve our anxieties by banding together, communicating and arming ourselves, our flight instinct easily switched to aggression – particularly for the males.

And the female genes and memes that fostered women (who were predominantly gatherers) led to the development of a different emotional repertoire.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves then about the endless problems that we seem to share in getting our act together as social beings.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT (borrowed from Wikipedia)

Animals respond to threats in many complex ways. Rats, for instance, try to escape when threatened, but will fight when cornered. Some animals stand perfectly still so that predators will not see them. Many animals freeze or play dead when touched in the hope that the predator will lose interest.

Others have more exotic self-protection methods. Some species of fish change color swiftly, to camouflage themselves. These responses are triggered by the sympathetic nervous system, but in order to fit the model of fight or flight, the idea of flight must be broadened to include escaping capture in either a physical way or in a sensory way.

Thus, flight can be disappearing to another location or just disappearing in place. And often both fight and flight are combined in a given situation.

The fight or flight actions also have polarity - the individual can fight or flee against or away from something that is threatening, such as a hungry lion, or fight or fly for or towards something that is needed, such as the safety of the shore of a raging river.

A threat from another animal does not always result in immediate fight or flight. There may be a period of heightened awareness, during which each animal interprets behavioral signals from the other. Signs such as paling, piloerection, immobility, sounds, and body language communicate the status and intentions of each animal.

There may be a sort of negotiation, after which fight or flight may ensue, but which might also result in playing, mating, or nothing at all. An example of this is kittens playing: each kitten shows the signs of sympathetic arousal, but they never inflict real damage.

As for human beings:

In prehistoric times when the fight or flight response evolved, fight was manifested in aggressive, combative behavior and flight was manifested by fleeing potentially threatening situations, such as being confronted by a predator. In current times, these responses persist, but fight and flight responses have assumed a wider range of behaviors.

For example, the fight response may be manifested in angry, argumentative behavior, and the flight response may be manifested through social withdrawal, substance abuse, and even television viewing.

Males and females tend to deal with stressful situations differently. Males are more likely to respond to an emergency situation with aggression (fight), while females are more likely to flee (flight), turn to others for help, or attempt to defuse the situation – 'tend and befriend'.

During stressful times, a mother is especially likely to show protective responses toward her offspring and affiliate with others for shared social responses to threat.

PATH TO UNDERSTANDING ‘EMOTIONAL LIVES’ OF ANIMALS

[by Lesley Richardson, Press Association, Wednesday, 4 August 2010]

A framework to understand the emotional lives of animals was revealed today.

Animal choices can be assessed objectively as evidence of pessimistic or optimistic decision-making which indicates their long-term mood.

Professor Mike Mendl and Dr Liz Paul, from the University of Bristol, and Dr Oliver Burman, from the University of Lincoln, looked through papers by experts from Charles Darwin to Paul Ekman and Jaak Panksepp to create the framework which can be used in the field of animal welfare and neuroscience.

Professor Mike Mendl, head of the Animal Welfare and Behaviour research group at Bristol University's School of Clinical Veterinary Science, said: "Because we can measure animal choices objectively, we can use optimistic and pessimistic decision-making as an indicator of the animal's emotional state which itself is much more difficult to assess.

"Recent studies by our group and others suggest that this may be a valuable new approach in a variety of animal species.

"Public interest in animal welfare remains high, with widespread implications for the way in which animals are treated, used and included in society.

"We believe our approach could help us to better understand and assess an animal's emotion."

An animal living in a world where it is regularly threatened by predators will develop a negative emotion or mood, such as anxiety.

Conversely, an environment with plenty of opportunities for survival resources creates a more positive mood state.

The researchers argued that these emotional states not only reflect the animal's experiences, they also help it decide how to make choices, especially in ambiguous situations which could have good or bad outcomes.

An animal in a negative state will benefit from adopting a safety-first, pessimistic response to an ambiguous event, according to the review which is published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

An example includes interpreting a rustle in the grass as signalling a predator compared to an animal in a positive state with a more optimistic response which would interpret it as signalling prey.

The Tea Party, the American Constitution, the Jacobites & the Deep Homology of Memes

IS THERE A DEEP HOMOLOGY OF MEMES?

As reported by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times of 26th April 2010:

"Dr Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumours by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working.

Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast.

“On the face of it, it’s just crazy,” Dr. Marcotte said. After all, these single-cell fungi don’t make blood vessels. They don’t even make blood. In yeast, it turns out, these five genes work together on a completely unrelated task: fixing cell walls.

Crazier still, Dr. Marcotte and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of other genes involved in human disorders by looking at distantly related species. They have found genes associated with deafness in plants, for example, and genes associated with breast cancer in nematode worms.

The scientists are taking advantage of a peculiar feature of our evolutionary history. In our distant, amoeba-like ancestors, clusters of genes were already forming to work together on building cell walls and on other very basic tasks essential to life. Many of those genes still work together in those same clusters, over a billion years later, but on different tasks in different organisms.

When scientists started sequencing DNA, they were able to find homologies between genes as well. From generation to generation, genes sometimes get accidentally copied. Each copy goes on to pick up unique mutations. But their sequence remains similar enough to reveal their shared ancestry.

A trait like an arm is encoded in many genes, which cooperate with one another to build it. Some genes produce proteins that physically join together to do a job. In other cases, a protein encoded by one gene is required to switch on other genes.

It turns out that clusters of these genes — sometimes called modules — tend to keep working together over the course of millions of years. But they get rewired along the way. They respond to new signals, and act to help build new traits.

In an influential 1997 paper, Sean B. Carroll of the University of Wisconsin, Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and Cliff Tabin of Harvard Medical School coined a term for these borrowed modules: “Deep Homology.”

This set my mind spinning in its usual elliptical fashion on the possibility of a Deep Homology of Memes – in particular those inherited patterns of thought that manifest themselves in modern politics.

And I set myself to apply the concept to advancing my understanding of what, for nearly all non-Americans, is a virtually impenetrable, imponderable and incomprehensible issue – the appeal of the TEA Party.

THE TEA PARTY

In an article in the New York Times of 16th April, ‘Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless’, Kate Zernike makes the following comments:

‘It makes sense that people would take to the streets to protest government spending and enormous deficits during the Great Recession, when they are feeling economic pain most acutely. But the Tea Party supporters now taking to the streets aren’t the ones feeling the pain.

In the results of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, they are better educated and wealthier than the general public. They are just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good.

Yet they are disproportionately pessimistic about the economy and the nation. A breathtaking 92 percent said the country is on the wrong track.

What accounts for this gap between how they are faring and how they feel the country is faring? History offers some lessons. The poll reveals a deep conviction among Tea Party supporters that the country is being run by people who do not share their values, for the benefit of people who are not like them.

That is a recurring theme of the previous half-century — conservatives in liberal eras declaring the imperative to “Take America Back.”

“The story they’re telling is that somehow the authentic, real America is being polluted”.

Rick Shenkman, a history professor at George Mason University, said in some respects, he is inclined to take the Tea Party supporters at their word, that they see themselves like the founding fathers in fighting an ideological battle.

Conversations with Tea Party supporters often wind their way into nostalgia. Even those out of work aren’t mourning the loss of a job so much as what they see as a loss of an era.

Perhaps, the most telling evidence that these avowed critics of big government are really mourning an America of the past is in their shifting attitude toward George W. Bush. Only a short time ago, he was reviled on the right for his spendthrift ways (his Medicare expansion), his federalizing of education standards (No Child Left Behind) and his creation of a vast new government agency, Homeland Security.

At rallies, Tea Party supporters often nod to President Bush’s role in creating the deficit. Yet in the poll, 57 percent of them view Mr. Bush favourably — about the same percentage in the general population that has an unfavourable view.

In the new world led by President Obama, Mr. Bush is apparently a figure these new populists can pine for.

THE AMERICAN JACOBITES

Noting the common themes of indignation, nostalgia and reaction, I then started to play with the fanciful notion that there were links to the British Jacobites who pined, plotted and bungled for the return of the Stuart branch of the British royal family in the 18th century.

To my enormous surprise, this was not entirely off the wall as far as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were concerned. Others had made tentative steps to identifying a Jacobite strand in American politics.

This strand apparently can be traced indirectly in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson who idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of republican virtues, distrusted cities and financiers, and favoured states' rights and a strictly limited federal government.

But as a political philosopher, Jefferson was also a man of the Enlightenment and as such was influenced by the ideas that emanated from contemporary Scotland – of which more later.

Daniel Larison writing about American Conservatism on the Eunomia website in 2006 under the heading ‘Onward Jeffersonian Jacobites’ makes much of the ideas of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (16 September 1678 – 12 December 1751).

Bolingbroke was an English politician and philosopher who contributed substantially to the development of the concept of a loyal parliamentary opposition, even though his sympathies lay with the restoration of the Stuart dynasty.

As such, he can be seen as one of the founders of the English Conservative or Tory Party, though he himself used the term Country Party.

He instructed the members of the Country Party to "Wrest the power of government, if you can, out of the hands that employed it weakly and wickedly"

In the late 20th century, he was rediscovered by historians as a major influence on Voltaire, and on American thinkers, especially John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

It seems that his works were widely read in the American colonies, which were generally loyal to the London government throughout the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Rebellions in Britain but which also shared concerns about the commitment of Westminster to plurality and power sharing.

Taking up the story, Larison has the following to say:

"The Country opposition finds its first definite exponent in Bolingbroke, who had inherited the ideology of resistance of the Jacobites after the 1715 rising collapsed in defeat, and who drew on the thought of Harrington to support his critiques of the Hanoverian dynasty and Whig establishment in terms of the establishment’s “corruption” (in this time the term referred specifically to the Crown’s buying of men in Parliament and more general attempts to create a network of placemen and patronage that would provide the Court with trusty lackeys).

'For those loyal to these ideals of widespread landownership by middling landowners, the mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy and republican government, and the diffusion of power, 1688 was a black year that virtually signalled the permanent exile of men with Country sentiments from positions of influence within England.

'This will seem counterintuitive to those used to remembering 1688, if they remember it at all, as a blow against absolutism (when it was, in fact, nothing more than the empowerment of a Whig oligarchy and the end of any possibility of Catholic revival in Britain with the abdication of James II), but there should be no doubt that the victory of William III and the party of treason simply secured the concentration of power in a different set of hands far more likely to abuse it.

'The colonies, for their part, were naturally predisposed to embrace the Country view, as they were as far removed from the metropole and the Court as could be and saw any greater concentration of power in London as a threat to their own rights.

'First the Antifederalists and then the Jeffersonian Republicans took up the same themes in their hostility to consolidation, with the Jeffersonians particularly fearing the collusion of finance and government and the power of the “moneyed interest” during the clashes with the Federalists in the 1790s over the creation of the Reserve Bank.

'If we brought together the entire Country tradition under another label, my preference would be to call those who adhere to it Jeffersonian Jacobites, capturing at once a hostility to consolidation and the Whigs of the 17th and 18th centuries.

'Understanding the Constitution as a mechanism for restraining state power, as Dr. Wilson wrote of the Populists, is one of the things that all real conservatives share – no doctrines of implication and construction for us, thank you very much.

'This hostility to consolidation and centralising elites has nothing to do with “libertarianism” (which has no American representatives before the 20th century and is almost entirely a transplant from central Europe) and everything to do with loyalty to family, community and the states which have been the real countries of Americans for most of our history.

'Separately, those who belittle the revival of this American Populism and the Country tradition in this country mark themselves out as friends of the forces of consolidation and enemies of the decentralist, agrarian and conservative traditions of this country.

'That Bolingbroke and his Opposition appeared to later radicals with a radical face is neither surprising nor difficult to reconcile with his basic conservatism.

'Part of the ideological dynamic of his politics was “populist,” even though an early and most aristocratic populist manifestation, and inherent in populism is a force at once intensely radical and reactionary. It is always “the people,” be they yeoman farmers, urban small traders, or failing gentry who are being victimized by the small conspiratorial financial interests.

'Bolingbroke’s conservatism stands not only as the fons et origo of Country-Jeffersonian-Republican agrarian resistance to the new Court of the Federalists and Whigs, but perhaps even as the core of the entire Anglo-American populist tradition.

'I will go so far as to say that, as good as Burke can be, it is the Viscount Bolingbroke and not the Irish Whig who represents the real source of Anglo-American conservatism. It is especially to him that we should look as “the reactionary imperative” becomes ever more imperative.

'Bolingbroke’s reactionary radical combination of defending the people and their liberties against the usurpations of the government and the moneyed interest, the Opposition’s rejection of the standing army, and its aversion to war and foreign entanglements all anticipate many of the themes developed by American agrarians in their arguments and taken up again by their latter-day populist inheritors.

Look homewards, America – and look to Bolingbroke".

Not surprising perhaps then that although the ‘Jacobite Lament’ is monarchist through and through the best modern version has been done by a republican group, the Clancy brothers.

IDEAS THAT ENDURE

Well, with respect to the American Constitution, I guess we have to filter out some of the meme DNA that originated with the Scottish Enlightenment - entangled as this is with the romanticism of 'the true King across the water'.

Brian Skea [“Tension of the Opposites in the Cultural Self of Scotland: Polis versus Ethnos” (2006)] notes that:

‘The Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were “nostalgic yearnings for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her ordained place and stayed in it”. A constantly changing and capitalist society offers opportunity and individual freedom, but is anxiety provoking and competitive, with not everyone succeeding'.

But the romantic side of the Scottish character was both the inherent subject of study by rationalist fellow Scots and a tendency that needed to be checked and balanced - with reason forging passion into an instrument of progress. Walter Scott put it this way: “The Scottish mind is made up of poetry and strong common sense, and the very strength of the latter gives perpetuity and luxuriance to the former.”

Skea draws heavily on Arthur Herman’s book, 'How the Scots Invented the Modern Mind' (2001), noting that:

The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history; that human character is constantly evolving, shaped by environmental forces. These forces are not arbitrary but follow discernible patterns.

Thus the study of man is ultimately a scientific study, and Herman considers the Scots as the true inventors of what we today call the social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, history and economics. For example, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed in Edinburgh in 1768.

Even before the American Revolutionary War many Scots had emigrated to the Colonies and Canada. They were soldiers, clergymen, government officials, physicians, teachers, farmers and merchants.

During the war some fought with the British, some with the rebels. One third of the signers of the Declaration were of Scottish or Ulster Scot extraction.

Drawing on Herman’s work Skea suggests that the Scots had a profound influence on the American Constitution, citing the writings of Frances Hutcheson, Lord Kames, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson.

The links that have been observed are as follows:

Francis Hutcheson postulated that all human beings are born with an innate moral sense, and not just as coerced by strict religious or political laws. “It is expressed through our feelings and emotions. The most important is love, particularly love for others, which is the starting point of all morality. Love also proves man is not inherently selfish. The happiness of others is also our happiness, such that self-interest and altruism do not have to be at odds.

This “pursuit of happiness” would show up in the American Declaration of Independence when Jefferson added it to his list of inalienable rights of man. Underlying such pursuit of happiness was the concept of the right to universal freedom, that the desire to be free survives, even in the face of the demands for cooperation with others in society.

Lord Kames looked at the need for laws from a historical perspective in his Sketches of the History of Man. He organized human history into four distinct stages:

• the hunting/fishing/gathering stage, (family units)
• the pastoral /nomadic stage (clans and tribes)
• the agricultural stage (cooperation of specialists, ploughman, carpenter, blacksmith etc, feudal hierarchy, landlord/tenant, master/slave), and
• commercial society (from village to market town, city and seaport, involving manufacturers, merchants, bankers and lawyers as well as trades people).

Kames therefore provided the basis for claiming that the common laws of England and its unwritten constitution were outdated and that the American Colonies needed a clear overarching constitutional document and codified laws as it became a commercial society.

David Hume stressed that learning by studying cause and effect develops into habitual modes of finding ways of meeting our needs. Self-interest, the desire for self-gratification is the most basic human passion, and is the basis for any system of morality, and any system of government. Instead of plundering ones neighbor, why not open a bank! The Golden Rule is: I won’t disturb your self-interest, if you won’t disturb mine.

In his Political Discourses (1752) David Hume wrote that “in all governments there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty, and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest.” Liberty preserves individuals, while authority preserves society. Absolute authority as in a totalitarian state destroys society, while absolute individual freedom creates anarchy. Balance and mutual sacrifice is required.

In drawing up the Constitution Madison is held to have relied on the writings of David Hume above all others, in creating a system based on gridlock, checks and balances between the institutions of power, thus preserving liberty at the private level.

Adam Smith coined the term “fellow feeling”, a natural sense of identification with other human beings, as ‘society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world’ and he was well aware of many of the problems that arise out of a narrow focus on self-improvement through material acquisition.

Of course he made a strong case for the natural creation of wealth through the development of economies of scale and specialization, guided by the invisible hand of the free market but this was ultimately dependent on the pursuit of enlightened liberalism by government. And he saw that a moral life is a matter of imagination such that a society that impoverished its citizenry would not be one that could rally effective citizens to its defence in times of threat.

Thomas Reid was associated with the philosophy of “common sense” which tells us that the more we know about that outside world, the better we can act on it, both as individuals and as members of a community. He coined the term “self-evident truths” which was taken up by Thomas Jefferson, and used in the Declaration.

Finally, Adam Ferguson stressed the need for free societies to develop a heroic spirit of honour, valour and self-sacrifice as an antidote to materialism, proposing in his ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ that “free people needed to keep and bear arms in order to defend their liberty”.

SUMMING UP

So the American constitution was a pure product of the Enlightenment?

Perhaps - but as we have seen, there is also some evidence that true blue British conservatism from the shires played a part in its parentage - fostered by the romanticism of the Jacobites.

Having sifted and centrifuged the memetic DNA that contributed to the American Constitution, we may be left with some that harks to a less enlightened, more rustic and Tory origin. Perhaps the Tea Party does draw some of its memes quite legitimately from this source - feeding its themes of indignation, nostalgia and reaction.

But as for Bolingbroke, the British verdict is that ‘his writings and career of make a far weaker impression upon posterity than they made on contemporaries. His genius and character were superficial; his abilities were exercised upon ephemeral objects, and not inspired by lasting or universal ideas.’

Let's leave it there.

Genes & Memes - Family Trees & the Undergrowth

I have been thinking for some time of writing about one of the shakier boughs in my Family Tree – the Kenyons.

'Shaky' - not that I have anything specific against them – more that I can’t quite place them in terms of achievements and attitudes.

I think we all have families in our backgrounds like that – we are not quite sure whether the oral history is simply putting a good face on things or possibly masking something.

And this set me thinking about the thoughts, thought processes and drives that cascade down from generation to generation - going ‘Into the Woods’ as it were.

Just as we are a mixture of the genes that we have inherited from our ancestors, our personal attitudes and the family cultures that we build for our children draw upon the ‘memes’ of those who have gone before.

Memes are chunks and strands of thought processes. A couple of definitions:

‘A meme (rhyming with "cream") is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another’ at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memes

‘meme: a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation)’ at:
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn.

I started thinking about this back in 1990 when I happened to be on a business trip in London, on behalf of my employer the Manila-based Asian Development Bank. I met up with my sister and brother in law and we went to see Stephen Sondheim’s Musical ‘Into the Woods’.

In the Sondheim Musical several parts are doubled. Cinderella's Prince and the Wolf, who share the characteristic of being unable to control their appetites, are played by the same actor.

Similarly, the Narrator and the Mysterious Man, who share the characteristic of commenting on the story while avoiding any personal involvement or responsibility, are played by the same actor.

Granny and Cinderella's Mother, whose characters are both matriarchal characters in the story, are also typically played by the same person, who also gives voice to the nurturing but later murderous Giant's Wife.

The show covers multiple themes: growing up, parents and children, accepting responsibility, morality, and finally, wish fulfillment and its consequences.

William A. Henry III wrote that the play's "basic insight... is at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong — which is to say, almost everything that can — arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions."

Stephen Holden writes that the themes of the show include parent-child relationships and the individual's responsibility to the community. The witch isn't just a scowling old hag but a key symbol of moral ambivalence.

James Lapine said that the most unpleasant person (the Witch) would have the truest things to say and the "nicer" people would be less honest. In the Witch's words: "I'm not good; I'm not nice; I'm just right'.

And as the stories meld together and cascade through time, characters go from hero to zero - and then on to legend if they are lucky. Just life real life and the subjects of real family histories then.

But Sondheim also made the point in one of his songs that we can actually inherit thought processes and patterns from our forebears. This of course is genetic rather than imitative but then Nature and Nurture are often Siamese Twins.

It is in some senses a comforting thought for posthumous or dislocated children like me who have never known one or both of their parents but in other ways perhaps a disquieting notion.

My sister and I recently had a related conversation when I was back in England on a trip late last year.

We tried to decide the genetic provenance of the abrupt and scathingly direct and often highly inappropriate interjections that sometimes exploded into family conversations. Generally, they were apparently ignored and life went on as before but pock-marked with shell holes.

My mother who suffered with this, referred to it as ‘nast’ using a Cheshire dialect term (i.e. a noun back-formed from nasty). And occasionally people would be admonished with ‘less of the nast’. She also used to talk about women who had ‘It’ – exhibiting a kind of histrionic and aggressive form of nagging.

Well, we couldn’t quite pin down the genetics but we did eliminate some of the possible candidate families.

But there were other subtler forces at work shaping our attitudes.

We definitely have an aristocratic streak. At the farmhouse where I grew up, there was a ceremonial front room that we called the ‘Green Room’ (even after it underwent an otherwise complete transformation into rusts and pinks).

As with many ‘front parlours’ in Northern English houses, it was almost entirely for show. And prominently displayed in a little antique magazine rack, for the occasional posh visitors, were relatively recent copies of upper crust magazines like ‘Cheshire Life’, ‘Vogue’, and ‘The Tatler’.

There is little doubt where the memes behind these aspirations come from. They stem from the Salters.

Asked whether she would like to be among a very select group who would be able to meet Prince Charles when he ‘saddled up’ for the Cheshire Hounds at my brother-in-law’s farm, my mother tutted and then declared that she would have attended for the Queen Mother but was not prepared to stir for the Prince.

And when John originally took the tenancy of the beautiful farm, nestled next to Cholmondely Castle, my grandmother commented, gazing at the elegant three-storey Georgian farmhouse ‘This is more what we are accustomed to!’

Well it was, in a manner of speaking.

But in 1881 the Salters, like 16 percent of the national workforce of England and Wales (including 1.3m women) were in domestic service. My great, great grandfather Joseph Salter was a Liveryman who helped run the Stables at Upham House, the ‘seat’ owned by the Hornsley Family in Hampshire.

[In 1881, according to Mrs Beeton's revised 'Book of Household Management', a man on £1,000 a year could afford five servants. Mind you, it was possible to hire a cook for as little as £15 and a maid for as little as £9 a year – and the 'General Report' of the 1881 Census commented on 'the increasing difficulty of finding suitable servants'].

So, given half a chance, the adopted, cross-spliced Hornsley memes kicked in downstream as the family prospered.

Well what about the Kenyons?

The legend there is that they were rich but that they were cruelly robbed by fate of their birthright.

The story goes something like this. My great grandmother Sarah Clarke (nee Kenyon) was the daughter of a wealthy businessman in Oldham. The family had built a street of tenanted houses there – Kenyon Street. However, there were problems with business partners and inheritances, and an unscrupulous intervention by a man with the name of Ormerod led to the loss of the family fortune.

And possible links were hinted to the family of Lord Lloyd Kenyon of Gredington, Flintshire and Kenyon Peel Hall, Lancashire. [During his long career at the Bar, Lord Chief Justice Kenyon was concerned with many interesting cases: as advocate he led the defence of lord George Gordon in 1780 ; as judge , he presided over the trial of Stockdale for libel, in 1789 , and, for a period, over the trial of Warren Hastings].

Trouble is I can find no inkling of this in the available data.

This is what I wrote in my Family History (blending census data and oral history):

‘My maternal grandfather David Clarke was born around 1888. David Clarke’s father (my great grandfather) was also called David and was born on 26th August 1842. Old David Clarke was a relatively wealthy accountant who made his money providing auditing services to the cotton milling industry.

He married a much younger woman, Sarah Kenyon on the 9th April 1882. Sarah was born in 1862. In the 1881 Census she was recorded as being 19 years old, and was then working as a dressmaker living with her married sister Elizabeth Nicholson at 119 West Street, Oldham).

The Marriage Certificate for great grandfather David Clarke and Sarah Kenyon records David as an Accountant. It confirms Sarah's address as 119 West Street, Oldham and her married sister Betty Nicholson was one of the witnesses. The other witness was George / Georgie Kenyon (presumably her brother).

Sarah's father Oliver Kenyon was already dead by the time she married (which may explain why she was living with her sister). We can't be at all sure of Oliver Kenyon's occupation. It clearly was not a common one that can be easily deciphered from Minister John Barry's quirky handwriting. [I am now pretty positive that it was ‘Provisioner’ (i.e. wholesale trader)].

There is a photograph in Roy Jenkins’ biography of Winston Churchill of Churchill speaking at the Shambles, Manchester before WW1 and the shop in the background has the inscription “Kenyon – Wines and Spirits” (the owners of this establishment may well have been relatives).

The data on my Clarke – Kenyon family that can be gleaned from the 1901 Census is as follows. They were then living at 20 Whitehouse Lane, Wistaston, Nantwich. By that time, my great grandfather David had already died and Sarah was the head of household, aged 39. She had been born in Oldham, Lancashire.

Her children are given as: Florence (Florrie) 17 dressmaker, born Oldham [never married]; Rossela A. (Rosie) 16, Teachers School Assistant, born Wermeth, Oldham; Lillian Annette (Nettie) 14, Teachers School, Assistant, born Wermeth, Oldham; David Kenyon 13, born Nantwich (my grandfather); Francies A. (Frankie) aged 5.

Apparently, the family was very well-respected and Sarah was offered the opportunity to become a Justice of the Peace - very rare for a woman at that time. There are also oral history memories of the family have a carriage / trap pulled by 2 white horses (today's equivalent of a Rolls or Jag).

However, inflation and children gradually ate into Sarah's resources and the family became quite impoverished.

My father ‘Jay’ was appalled in the late 1930s to find the family using old man Clarke's book collection for toilet paper’.

[I used to have a Box Brownie 'snap' of her at this time - sadly lost - that showed her as a rather stout Russian Doll with pinned back braids].

Census Records and BMD searches provide the following additional data:

In 1841, my great, great grandfather Oliver Kenyon was 23 years old and he was running a small farm with his elder brother Robert at New Springs in the Ashton & Oldham district.

Apparently, his father George (60) was still on the home farm at Higher Boarshaw in the Ashton & Oldham district, with his wife Esther (55) and their eldest son Major. There were also two daughters, Esther aged 14 and Mary aged 8.

Oliver Kenyon married Sarah Robishaw and in the records of the marriage (27th May 1844), Oliver is recorded as a Carter and his father George Kenyon as a farmer.

Sarah's father James Robishaw does not give his profession - in fact Robishaw is a very rare and specifically Oldham name and a subsequent Robishaw records himself as 'Squire Robishaw' in the 1881 Census (almost certainly though this is a rogue forename not a 'title').

The marriage of Oliver and Sarah took place at Oldham St Mary's, Oldham and my great grandmother’s sister Betty Kenyon married William H. Nicholson at the same church in 1876.

However, neither Oliver nor his bride Sarah Robishaw could write their names in 1844 - they signed with crosses.

It appears that Sarah senior had died before the 1871 census and as her youngest child in the 1871 census was Sarah junior, aged 9, she probably died in Oldham some-time between 1862 and 1871. A possible is a Sarah Kenyon who died in the June quarter of 1870 aged 42.

The basic family in 1871, as reflected in an earlier censuses comprised parents Oliver and Sarah plus Robert, Esther, Elizabeth, Major [again a repeat of the unusual forename] and Sarah Junior [the ancestor].


So there we have it - tales of fabulous carriages drawn by white horses, lost wealth and the buffets of fate. Or maybe, Sarah after her husband had died and being well distant from Oldham, decided to petit point a little embroidery on the family tapestry?

After all, she had a father who was illiterate and it is very unlikely it seems to me that a woman of her limited education would have been considered as a JP – particularly in an era when women could still not vote.

So what memes have come down to us from the Kenyons?

Maybe we get some story-telling capabilities from them; a preoccupation with inherited wealth; a certain chip on our shoulders; and even the risk of becoming ‘strangers to the truth’ if we don’t keep our feet on the ground.

I obviously get my respect for books and the written word from another source!

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NOTES ON THE NAME

Kenyon is one of those locally common South Lancashire locative surnames. Like as not, a well-populated male-line ydna surname study would show that many of the families are directly related.

My Kenyons come from Middleton in Lancashire near Oldham – not far in fact from the site of Kenyon Peel Hall in Little Hulton.

The small hamlet of Kenyon is south of Wigan in South Lancashire. It is a place-name that apparently was originally Cruc Einion in Welsh, meaning Einion’s Mound.

It is possible that it was the capital and subsequent burial place of Einion Yrth, a Celtic chieftain in post-Roman Britain who may have been the leader who combined his forces with those mobilised by St Germanus to defeat Irish intruders around 470.

Einion Yrth’s son Cadwallon Llawhir is credited with finally dislodging the Irish from North Wales and Anglesey around the year 500.

There have been suggestions that Einion Yrth was one of the Dark Ages heroes whose exploits contributed to the legends of King Arthur. And that the River Douglas near Kenyon is the River Dublas that, according to Nennius, was the site of one of Arthur’s twelve famous battles.

The stories place Kenyon clearly in the Welsh-speaking Old North (Yr hen Ogledd), whose inhabitants were also known as the Race of Cole (Old King Cole no less – who as we all know was ‘A Merry Old Soul’)