Oral family history is slippery stuff. When I was back in England recently, my cousin again mentioned a supposed legacy that had slipped out our hands when my great grandmother Sarah Kenyon [born 1862] fell victim to the machinations of an unscrupulous interloper with the name of Ormerod.
I can find nothing so far that might corroborate this story.
In the 1881 Census Sarah is recorded as a 19-year old living with her married sister Betty Nicholson in modest circumstances in Oldham. Betty was also a witness to Sarah’s marriage to my great grandfather David Clarke on 9th April 1882 – the bridegroom was 39 years old.
It seems that Sarah’s father Oliver Kenyon was a publican and small-scale ‘provisioner’ [i.e. wholesale merchant] and that both Oliver and his wife had died before Sarah reached adolescence. The Kenyons left two sons and three daughters – and little evidence of wealth – though Oliver did come from an interesting family which ran pack-horse trains across the Pennines from their farm near Middleton.
I suspect that Sarah, as an orphan and later wife of a much older and relatively successful man, had developed something of a fantasy about her origins that none could contradict as she had moved from her native Oldham in Lancashire to settle in then distant Nantwich, Cheshire. On the other hand as orphans the children may indeed have been prey to skulduggery.
In the case of my father’s family the ‘Johnsons’ almost nothing cam down to me by word of mouth, as my father had been killed before I was born and his immediate relatives had either died or dispersed to as far away as Canada by the time I became interested in our origins.
There was though one snippet, which had slipped through to my mother - surviving my grandfather’s change of name from Shorrocks to Johnson to gain anonymity and his reluctance to otherwise provide facts and links. This was that the family [or now I would add one successful member of the family] had operated a pub [and now I can clarify that it was in fact a hotel on a very grand scale].
It seems that James Henry Shorrocks, the eldest brother of my great grandfather Robert Edwin Shorrocks, became a very successful dance hall operator in Manchester - he had a ballroom for example in Chorlton-on-Medlock. Building on his success, he purchased a large country house at the end of the 19th Century in Bispham on what became Blackpool’s North Shore which he eventually converted from a private residence into the Norbreck Hydro Hotel.
Initially, the clientele must have consisted largely of the managerial class of the mills, mines, shops and enterprises of the towns of North West England. One can imagine that during the Wakes Weeks, in which whole towns in Lancashire shut down the cotton mills to give their workers a week’s holiday, opportunities were taken by the upper middle class to exchange business information, undertake transactions and arrange dynastic marriages. A sort of Northern version of the aristocratic plot hatching, mate-matching and gossip-dispatching that used to take place at Bath a hundred or so years earlier.
And it seems that the Hydro was later patronised by nobility and the British upper class, in addition to being a venue for the top stars of stage, screen and radio.
[And as Wikipedia reports:
‘In the late 1970s, the hotel's disco became the venue for a number of concerts by punk rock, new wave and Mod revival bands. Those who played there included the Angelic Upstarts, Penetration and the Purple Hearts. The venue also saw gigs by two bands before they became famous. Adam and the Ants performed there when they were still a punk rock band in March 1979, a performance which One Way System drummer Dave Brown, listed in his top five gigs. And on 15 March 1979, The Pretenders played one of their first ever gigs at the Norbreck.
In 1988, the hotel was the venue for a conference where the Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party merged to form the Liberal Democrats. Writing in the New Statesman about the merger, the writer Jonathan Calder said of the hotel, "Blackpool’s Norbreck Castle Hotel does not lift the spirit at the best of times, and in January 1988 its Soviet ambience was enhanced by the trams and melting snow in the streets outside."]
So hearing my long-lost relatives mention ‘Uncle Jim’ at our recent reunion in Silverdale, during our July UK holiday] added to my commitment to make a sentimental journey to Blackpool and take some relief from the unerringly beautiful countryside of the Lakes, Dales and Forest of Bowland.
As a kid, I went to Blackpool year after year in the autumn when the harvest was over at the farm [my stepfather was a devotee of the Variety Shows that played at the three piers and the Winter Gardens]. And of all the places that I revisited on my trip, I think that Blackpool is the least changed in ambience, though the substitution of car parks for front gardens in the forecourts of the boarding houses and small hotels has even augmented the sense that man has paved limbo and settled for fish and chips and beer in despair of reaching heaven.
Nonetheless, we made our pilgrimage to the Norbreck Castle Hotel and sat for awhile drinking shandies and coca colas in what remains of the old sun lounge, soaking up the sense of times past and frayed grandeur. I won’t be unkind but have to remark that I would not like to be landed with the bill for totally remediation.
So I have since set about chasing Uncle Jim up again on the Net and found to my delight that, like me, he was prone to putting a bit of stick about with the local Council on the question of the Rate Burden! It seems that here the genes and memes are gyring back and overarching in a lazy double helix.
