When Beggars Dye

by Peter Hey

  ‘It’s much, much easier searching on a computer,’ contributed Jane while Margaret took another sip of tea.

  ‘So I understand, dear. I get talking books from the library in Matlock. The librarian, he lives locally. Nice man, awful wife. Well, he was telling me that with the Internet you just type in someone’s name and all their details pop up. Simple as that.’

  Jane was tempted to ask what was wrong with the librarian’s wife, but resisted the diversion. ‘It’s not always quite that easy, but the Web has totally transformed family history research. And new information is being put online all the time.’

  Jane had earlier noticed a somewhat battered hardback ledger, bulging with papers, on a small side table. ‘Does the notebook have all your records and findings in?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, dear. Caroline dug it out for me. There are two pages for each ancestor. I wrote down anything I discovered and stuck any certificates or other documents between the pages. It probably looks scruffy, but it worked well enough. At the front there should be a large sheet of paper, folded up, with the full tree drawn out.’

  Jane reached for the book, carefully opened the cover and pulled out the sheet. It unfolded to A1 size. She looked around and then laid it on the carpet next to her chair. She knelt down next to it and smoothed it out. After studying it briefly, she looked up at Margaret. ‘You got a long way. Well done.’

  ‘Yes. It took years, off and on. But I was helped by relatively uncommon surnames and families that tended to stay in one place, well apart from one big move. I got further on my mother’s side than my father’s, but that’s where we need to focus.’

  ‘Your mother’s family tree?’

  ‘Yes. You see I was talking her through all her ancestors, pleased with myself at how clever I’d been, and she said… Well, I can’t remember her exact words. She’d always been a bit funny about the whole thing and she made it clear there was a mistake, an omission. Then she clammed up. She said something like: “I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. You’re better off not knowing. It brought shame on my family, disgrace.” It was definitely “my family”, but she wouldn’t say any more. Part of me always thought I should respect her wishes, leave it be. But she’s been dead a long time now and it’s nagging away at me. I really want to know, disgrace or otherwise.’

  Jane thought this was an appropriate time to express her concern. ‘There’s a good chance that whatever it was died with your mother.’

  ‘I recognise that, but I definitely got the impression that it was something tangible that I’d missed, something that was there to be found in the official records, if only I’d looked more carefully.’

  Encouraged by this revelation, Jane spent another hour being talked through the tree and getting to understand Margaret’s method of filing and recording information. Having spent so long working on it, the older woman’s recollection of the ledger’s contents was still helpfully clear. As well as her trips to the London Family Records Centre, it transpired she had also visited county record offices and several towns and villages from her ancestral past.

  Jane learned that Margaret’s mother’s family, the Dyes, were originally farm labourers in Norfolk, but had moved to mine coal in Derbyshire in the mid 1800s. There was no suggestion of descent from blue-blooded nobility or landowning gentry. Jane would not be needing Burke’s Peerage on this project, unless of course, the hidden secret was one of impregnation by a wayward aristocrat, though that seemed fanciful.

  Margaret also brought out the family photograph albums. These were harder for her to navigate, but fortunately the images were annotated and largely self-explanatory. The focus was on the older black-and-white pictures, of course, but Jane was intrigued to see the young Julian Stothard in school uniform. He’d certainly been a good-looking boy.

  Margaret allowed Jane to take the ledger with her when she left. It would have been impractical to copy so much information and Margaret shared her son’s trust of an ex-police officer, particularly when it was the charming young woman she’d just spent a morning with. She was more reluctant to let Jane take the irreplaceable photo albums, so Jane snapped a few pages with her phone. She thought it might be useful to visualise at least some of the people she was researching.

  Jane left the bungalow and began descending its steep steps. The day was still bright and clear, and had she looked behind her she would have seen a trio of cable cars silently climbing the cliffs up to the Heights of Abraham. When they reached the pylon, as on every journey, they stopped and began to rock in the gentle wind.

  At the same moment, Jane was also brought to an abrupt, swaying halt.

  Her mouth parted and her breathing stopped. Her limbs locked solid as if her brain had lost interest and switched off the power.

  Only Jane’s eyes continued to move.

  On the far side of the road, she could see a tall, powerfully built man with wild black hair falling down to near his shoulders. He was smoking a cigarette and walking slowly away. Despite the distance, Jane felt sure she could smell the tobacco in her nostrils. In her mind it mingled with a long-forgotten but familiar aroma, perhaps cologne or hair oil, sweet, pungent and masculine.

  Jane continued to stare, fighting the impulse to call out a name. Her rational self knew it wasn’t him, couldn’t be him, but her emotions had overridden sense and reason. She was transfixed like a scientist witnessing a demonstration of the paranormal, at once convincing yet utterly preposterous.

  Jane’s eyes remained set on the broad back and the mane of curls. Suddenly, there was a shout and a little boy rushed up from behind to take the man’s hand. A wide, bearded face was briefly turned in Jane’s direction.

  The spell was broken. She began to breathe again.

  After a long pause, her pulse rate settled and she regained her composure. She continued down to her car, unlocked the door and lowered herself in. Twisting the rear-view mirror, she gazed at the letterbox of her reflection.

  ‘Silly, silly girl’, she said.

  A Derbyshire mining family

  Jane drove home using the more direct route via the motorway and eventually managed to put the incident outside Margaret’s house to the back of her mind. The nagging voice of self-criticism was drowned out by the rallying call of enthusiasm. Jane’s first case was strangely intriguing and she wanted to get started on her research. It was going to be fun, even if it did turn out to be a wild-goose chase that Julian Stothard would refuse to pay for.

  She was briefly diverted by Margaret’s suggestion that her son had described Jane as ‘attractive’. She quickly dismissed the thought. His mother was charming and pleasant; the man himself was not.

  15 minutes after walking through her front door, Jane had already rattled off an email to update Tommy. She kept it brief because she intended to get as far as she could without his help. She wanted to test her own skills and save his expertise for when it was really required.

  Jane was now kneeling on her own living room carpet. She had a stack of documents to check and the expanse of floor gave her space to spread out. On her left side, she’d unfolded the large sheet showing the summary of the family tree. On her right, she had her laptop and a fresh pad of A4 paper. The bulging ledger was directly in front. Margaret’s research had been meticulously recorded and she’d been particularly zealous in ordering birth, marriage and death certificates, which were inserted between the leaves at the appropriate point. Handwritten copies of census returns were also included, but these were less complete because of the difficulty of searching through the old, geographically organised microfilm records.

  Each individual ancestor had a pair of facing pages, beginning with Margaret herself and her late husband, John. The sequence then worked back, the allocated space necessarily doubling with each generation. Jane realised it was a system that worked well for recording direct lineage, but was restrictive if you wanted to expand sideways to include siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins. A limited amount of effort had gone into researc
hing John’s family. It looked to Jane that Margaret had simply recorded what he might have known personally: details of his parents and grandparents and two great-grandparents. It was Margaret’s project and she’d clearly devoted her time to her own line of descent. Even then, Margaret’s father was of Irish extraction and the trail had gone cold when the O’Keefes were back in their home country. The majority of names in the ledger therefore belonged to Margaret’s maternal line, the Dyes and the families with whom they intermarried.

  Margaret’s mother had indicated that the disgrace she sought to hide lay buried somewhere amongst those names. Jane picked up the notepad. Up close, shame could feel overwhelming, but she reasoned, everything shrinks and fades with distance, before eventually disappearing into the haze. Jane wrote down her first heading.

  Focus area: 3 GENERATIONS of Margaret’s maternal line

  Mother:

  ANNE HANNAH DYE (married William O’Keefe)

  ~ 1 child (i.e. Margaret herself)

  Grandparents:

  REUBEN DYE & MABEL BUTLER

  ~ 4 children. 1 boy (killed World War II), 3 girls

  Great-grandparents:

  THOMAS DYE & HANNAH BOWER

  ~ 14 children (incl. 3 from 1st wife, Hannah Fox)

  DAVID BUTLER & MARY PADGETT

  ~ 3 children

  Having identified where she should concentrate, Jane continued reading and scribbling notes to flesh out the people who took Margaret’s family back into the 19th century.

  Margaret’s mother, born Anne Hannah Dye in 1925, had one older brother, Kenneth, who never married and was killed in World War II. Her two sisters were younger but were now also deceased. Margaret had contacted their children, living in Wales and Australia, but any family secrets known to their mothers had died with them.

  Margaret’s maternal grandparents were Reuben Dye and Mabel Butler. Reuben was a Derbyshire coal miner and Mabel had been a housemaid before their marriage. Reuben was the last of 14 children, 12 of whom survived to adulthood. His father, Thomas Dye, was also a miner in the same Derbyshire pit village of Dowley. He married twice. His wives were confusingly both called Hannah, the first dying after producing Thomas’s first three children. The family was raised in a two-up two-down terrace, the overcrowding eased by a 30-year age difference between the oldest child and Reuben. Reuben had, apparently, a rather broken relationship with his eldest siblings, a divide forming partly through age but mainly through maternity. The second Hannah was little more than a child herself when she was married to raise her older husband’s motherless children. That she did, but in the harsh poverty of Victorian working-class life, she was unable to love them.

  The last observation was clearly conjecture rather than a statement of fact. In the ledger, Margaret had credited it to her own mother based on ‘impressions from conversation with her father, the late Reuben Dye’.

  Margaret’s maternal grandmother, Mabel, came from a smaller family of three children. Their father, David Butler, was described as a farm labourer on his daughter’s birth certificate. His wife, Mary, gave birth to Mabel in a farmhouse on the outskirts of a different Derbyshire village. Calling up an online Ordnance Survey map, Jane could see that Mabel’s village was perched on a high hilltop, some three miles from Dowley. The route between the two was by a succession of narrow lanes which snaked down, across and up the far side of a wide valley. For Mabel and Reuben it would have been a peacefully isolated country walk. Today it was interrupted by an eight-lane barrier of tarmac and speeding vehicles, the M1, the main artery linking London to the cities of the North. It was a section Jane recognised, and apart from the motorway, the area was still distinctly rural and untouched. The constant, rumbling traffic ran along the valley floor between a sprawl of irregular fields whose hedgerows were planted at least another century before Reuben courted Mabel around the time of the First World War.

  In her early teens, Mabel had gone into service working as a maid for the local doctor who had brought her into the world. Jane wondered exactly how the young serving girl had met the miner from the village a few miles distant. It wasn’t recorded in the ledger and reminded Jane of the potential futility of the exercise she was undertaking. It was information that had surely died with the people concerned. Perhaps mother had told daughter of her parents’ first encounter, but she had now passed away too. The circumstances of that meeting, of love at first sight or initial indifference, were lost forever.

  Jane realised she simply had to trust Margaret’s conviction that they were looking for something more concrete, something that would have been recorded. As Jane sat back and scanned the family tree in front of her, her initial suspicions fell on one section in particular: the divided family of Reuben Dye. Was it just a stepmother’s coldness or could something more sinister have caused the rift? Jane brought up the mobile phone images she had taken of Margaret’s photo albums. There had been a single studio portrait of Reuben’s parents, Thomas and the second Hannah. Mounted on thick, somewhat battered card, it showed the couple sitting rigidly upright and surrounded by eight of their children. Margaret had dated it to before Reuben was born, and at least one of the children depicted would not live to adulthood. Unsmiling formality was the norm in photography at the time, but was it Jane’s imagination or was there a darker tension in the sepia faces staring back at her?

  Jane got to work checking the names, dates and relationships that Margaret had unearthed 20 or more years previously. Whereas Margaret had taken days and months, the Internet allowed Jane to find the same information in minutes and hours. She started at Margaret’s mother’s generation, searching for births with a family name Dye and a mother’s maiden name of Butler. Anne Hannah Dye and her three siblings were immediately revealed, all registered in the Derbyshire district which included the village of Dowley. Helpfully, all four children had been given two first names, so tracking their subsequent lives was made easier. The three sisters had married in this country, but one had subsequently emigrated to Sydney in Australia. As she had died less than 30 years ago, the New South Wales website declined to reveal any record of her death, but Jane knew Margaret was still in touch with that branch of the family so reasoned the date in Margaret’s ledger was reliable.

  The brother, Margaret’s uncle, had been killed in World War II. Margaret had written that he was a stoker on HMS Hood and one of over 1400 men killed when the ship was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in 1941. Margaret had no official documentation relating to his death, and Jane felt vaguely sceptical that it had occurred in probably the most well-known British naval loss of the war. Any thoughts she may have had about Kenneth Reuben Dye having survived the conflict and being the source of the family disgrace were soon quelled. She found him on a website devoted to the memory of Hood. It included a photograph of a handsome young man, in truth little more than a boy, wearing a new uniform and the confident smile of one about to embark on the huge battlecruiser, seemingly invincible pride of the Royal Navy. It was the same picture Margaret had in her album. Jane searched further and also found him on a site dedicated to Derbyshire war memorials. It included a picture of a weathered bronze plaque mounted in the lychgate of Dowley parish church. Some of the names were indistinct, but beneath the picture was a list of each serviceman commemorated. When Jane clicked on K R Dye, further details opened up confirming that this was indeed Kenneth Reuben Dye, Stoker 2nd Class, RN, who died on May 24 1941, son of Mr and Mrs Reuben Dye of Dowley.

  Jane had one last try with this level of the family tree. She looked for illegitimate children born in Derbyshire with Mabel’s maiden name in the years before her marriage. Finding no skeletons there, she decided she could finally move on to the previous generation. It was here her suspicions continued to rest, and she hoped something untoward would reveal itself, despite the passage of a century or more since their births.

  Jane spent several hours in the long-dead company of Thomas Dye, the Hannahs and their 14 children. Census data being restrict
ed for 100 years, both the 1901 and 1911 surveys had been released since Margaret did her research. Jane was also aided, of course, by modern search technology and had soon confirmed and expanded on Margaret’s work. She filled out the lives of all 12 of the Dye children who survived childhood, following them through their own families to their final ends. The elder boys had moved 40 miles north to the coalfields of South Yorkshire, one of them subsequently dying in the mud of a World War I trench. That conflict cast a wide shadow, and Jane was particularly touched by the fate of the oldest girl. The only daughter of the first Hannah, she had stayed in Dowley, married and had three sons of her own. All three joined the army, and one by one, all three fell, to be buried near different battlefields as the Great War stuttered and flared across northern France and Belgium. Jane looked again at the website showing the lychgate war memorial and there they were: T Oakley, W Oakley and G Oakley, finally reunited.

  Jane couldn’t find any trace of Margaret’s grandfather, Reuben Dye, having joined up. The majority of World War I records were destroyed by a German bomb in the second war, but the medal cards were spared and nothing had been awarded to anyone with his name. Campaign medals were given to all combatants, so this seemed noteworthy as Reuben would have been the right age for service and a single man at the time. But he was also a miner. The government considered the extraction of coal vital war work, and being in a reserved occupation, he would have been exempt from the draft. But many of his contemporaries would have volunteered nonetheless. Jane pondered whether this could have been the reason for the family schism. His brother and his nephews did their duty and paid the ultimate price while Reuben stayed at home. Had he been ostracised? Jane felt it was also significant that Margaret’s mother didn’t seem to know about her cousins who died in the war. She certainly hadn’t told Margaret or surely she would have taken her researches sideways down that branch of the family tree? Or maybe that was the point. Maybe this was the shameful family mystery.