As mentioned in my previous two posts, Mike Chapman is a volunteer for both the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Bletchley Park who has helped clear up a murder mystery about my Great Uncle Roddy. Short version, is that he died as a result of injuries sustained in car accident (as we had originally believed), rather than being possible victim of a murder (see here).
That possible murder mystery has now morphed into more of WW2 Intelligence Officer or spy one, and their combining has all the makings of a great fictional yarn. I’m grateful to Mike for helping me better understand the ‘murky’ world that Roddy inhabited, what he was doing in it and how he might have ended-up there in the first place. That’s been fascinating and very much appreciated but as added in my last post, not least for helping ensure that Roddy is now remembered via both the CWCG and Bletchley Park Roll of Honour sites, i.e. ‘less we forget.’
Mike also shared a link to the video above that shows cine footage discovered a few years ago of some of the people who worked at Bletchley Park. It’s interspersed with Geoffrey Pidgeon, author of ‘The Secret Wireles War‘ and former MI6 officer who played a pivotal role in the D-Day landings and was awarded Legion d’Honneur in thanks. As an aside, I found an obit for him here and couldn’t help think he seems like someone worthy of having his own Wiki entry.
As well as Pidgeon working at Whaddon Hall, his mother and father worked there too and he identifies them in the video above. Mike doen’t think its known exactly when the film was made, but you will see that there’s several shots of young men in uniform. Who knows, maybe Great Uncle Roddy is one of them.
There’s lot of other original source material that Mike has sent me that’s akin to the Jackdaw History folders (‘Jackdaws’) created by former war correspondent John Langdon-Davies, which I loved as a child, including the Battle of Britain one I still own:
Mike has kindly offered to talk through the detail of the various documents he has sent and I look foward to it. I mention this because it is linked to the purpose of this blog and what I am trying to do with it.
Primarily, I am now trying to help my support my cousin Hamish with his more genealogical joining of mutiple families trees over on the Ancestorium.com site I helped set-up, which now has over 170,000 records. The idea being to make all of that publicly available and for free. And without making any claims about the veracity of all entries, but at least attempting to show where they are from/sourced (when known). It’s just that this blog gets better indexed on Google than the genealogy database at Ancestoroium.com, so I am using posts here to signpost visitors there and because my mentions of those on here helps with its indexing on Google.
At the same time, I am experimenting with different ways of storytelling that is linked to my day job (in theory). And that includes using different material to tell those stories, not unlike the Jackdaw History Folder shown above and in rare occassions videos like the one Mike has shared. That material includes family anecdotes that can cause grief.
For example, I have an ex-military cousin who can get quite biligent about these or at least when not aligned with official accounts he has sourced – even though they aren’t something I can share on here. The irony being my mother has a PhD, and along with my father is only living relative of that generation who lived through the war that’s still compos mentis. She can get no less annoyed that her recollection of what was understood by family is somehow seen as less valid than what is on military record.
Her point being that those testimonials are not necessarily neutral given careers are at stake, along with other factors like what has been sanctioned/hasn’t, been made publicly available and so on. This is not the place to get into the relative metrits of the different epistemological and ontological underpinning of research methods in the arts and humanities of which history is part of. Suffice to say, I am left piggy in the middle.
Apologies for another Shandean shaggy dog story with Great Uncle Roddy’s one being an example of what keeps me engaged with this blog, as it is also a diary-like journal of what I discover and how stories change as I find out more, along with my reflections on all that like this one. I am trying to stoicly see any grief as small bump in otherwise smooth and enjoyable road,.
a tale of downward social mobility 