The Register

 I've got back in the mood for family tree research lately, and splashed out on a cheap temporary access to the 1939 Register. So to follow up on my posts about the 1911 census and the 1921 census, let's have another look through the register of 29 September 1939 for that wonderful Pridmore family - since I wrote about it a few years ago, some of those 'officially closed' records (people born less than a hundred years ago who haven't been marked off as deceased) have been opened, and there are many interesting things to be seen!

My great-grandparents William and Sarah Pridmore had died in 1932 and 1920 respectively, and most of their thirteen children had predeceased them, in infancy, in the war, and of pneumonia shortly afterwards. There are three particularly significant houses in Sheffield on the 1939 register, starting with the family home.

34 Hunt Street had been the Pridmore family residence since around 1909. Bachelor son Oswald had never moved out of his parents' house, and was now the head of the family, joined by his widowed sister Lilian (her husband John May had died in 1927), her two daughters Flo and Mary Ann, and James Palmer, the son of the other Pridmore sister Florence (who had died in 1920).

Five singles living together in the house. Oswald married in 1944; I haven't found any record of the younger three ever getting hitched. Lilian didn't remarry, but she did relocate to Droylsden before she died. Pridmores didn't tend to move away from Sheffield, except when the army sent them.

10 Brough Street had been the home of the sisters Lilian and Florence, and at least briefly brother Wilfred, since 1918. As I mentioned last week, five of the residents died in the space of just over two years in 1920-22, but it was still occupied by the family in 1939. The house seems to have been officially divided into two homes - there were two separate census forms in 1921 (one for the Palmers and one for the Mays), and two separate entries on the 1939 register. But now one half of the house is inhabited by Florence's widower John Palmer and his second wife Fanny, and the other by John and Florence's daughter Jennie and her husband Alfred Dalziel, plus their blacked-out baby daughter Patricia.

Mr Palmer is calling himself John again, after being James on and off over the years. And it's hard to read the name at the bottom there, but it really doesn't look like "Jennie", does it? The date of birth and the husband match, so it's clearly her...

And the other significant Pridmore home was 72 Robey Street, where youngest son Sydney and his wife Catherine had been living since at least 1926. In 1939 they're there with their eight children (and a ninth on the way) - Mick and Bernie are still blacked out. It's not a big house, and I always wonder how they managed to fit so many kids in there.

Uncle Ted (Arthur E, line 4) was known to quip that most people married and moved out because they'd got a girl pregnant - he married and moved out in 1946 because his mother was pregnant yet again!

The other survivor of the thirteen Pridmores was eldest brother Ernest. His wife Elizabeth had died in 1928, and by 1939 he'd moved into 164 Southey Green Road to live with his oldest daughter Nellie, her husband Joseph Pearson and their children Desmond and Maureen. The 1939 Register kept being updated over the years when people changed their surnames, and Nellie seems to have remarried twice over in the years to come.

Ernest's other four daughters were also married and starting their families at this point:

98 Boynton Road gives us Lilian Littlewood, her husband Raymond and sons Raymond (junior) and Keith. Someone felt the need in later years to clarify which Raymond was the senior and which the junior, though you'd think it was obvious.

At 85 Adkins Road are Elizabeth Stacey, her husband John and the blacked-out lines will be their sons John and Roy. Roy, sadly no longer with us, gave me that wonderful comment on the 1911 census post, reconnecting my youngest branch of the family tree with his the oldest.

86 Dykes Hall Road is home to Hilda Parkinson, her husband John and their daughter Renee.

And 114 Wood Road houses Ernest's youngest daughter Rose Chappell, her husband Charles and newborn baby Dawn.

Ernest's son William, meanwhile, lives at 92 Allen Street with a Lucy Hall, who's married but not to him, and two officially closed records. I don't know what the domestic arrangement was there.

Albert Pridmore died in 1917, leaving a wife and four children. His wife Margaret died in 1931, and their children all have something unusual about their 1939 register forms. George here at 33 Havelock Street had only married Ellen in August of this year, 1939, so it's strange that they have at least one, probably two, children with them and using the name Pridmore. Were they Ellen's, from her previous marriage, and renamed after their new stepfather? Or was it something like Albert and Margaret, who for some reason lived together for thirteen years before they officially got married? It's a thing for future research.

Albert's next son Ernest has defied family tradition and moved down south. We find him here at 21 Sheila Close, Romford, Essex, with his wife Charlotte and behind the black bar will be their first son John. They'd go on to have daughters Pat and Barbara, who also got in touch after that 1911 census blog!

And Albert's other two children are living together at 8 Boundary Road, back in Sheffield. Strangely, youngest daughter Mary is top of the list as if she's head of the household, while her older brother Harold, his wife and two children, are below her.

I can't find 'honorary Pridmore' John William, Margaret's illegitimate son born in 1919, on the register. Possibly he was in the military already, or just transcribed wrongly. I'm fairly sure he was still around.

John Thomas Pridmore died in 1914. His widow Harriet had remarried, been widowed again, and now lived alone at 10 Kyle Close, where she remained for the rest of her life. Their three children all survived childhood, and had places of their own by 1939.

John's oldest son Ernest William (Bill) was at 14 Lamb Road with his wife Lilian, and officially-closed daughter Jean. Jean would go on to give birth to Mick, who wrote the invaluable family history book "Infantrymen" - check it out, if you haven't already!

Daughter Gladys Nicholson has moved to York, living at 15 Kitchener Street with her husband Norman, and children Norman, Alan, Mavis and Sheila.

And back in Sheffield, other son Frederick is at 39 Dryden Road with his two children Maureen and Kenneth, but his wife Doris isn't with them.

She's in the City General Hospital at the time the register was taken. Her daughter Sylvia was born in early 1940, so whatever put her in the hospital can't have been too serious.

Some other branches of the Pridmore family had died out by the time of the register. Arthur Edward Pridmore died in 1914, and his wife Annie in 1934. Wilfred Pridmore died in 1921 and his wife Chloris in 1933. Neither couple had children.

George Harry Pridmore, who died in 1918, also didn't have children, but his wife May went on to have a big family. She had an illegitimate daughter, Barbara, in 1922 and then a son, Ronald, in 1926 - he was blacked out the last time I looked into the register. May might actually have been in a long-term relationship and not able to remarry without losing her war widow's pension (George was an officer, so it was a good bit of money), but she did eventually marry Leonard Elliott and in 1939 is living at 555 Herries Road with him, her two children and her brother Harry Foster.

Now, if only the 1931 census hadn't been destroyed in a fire during the war, we could be looking forward to seeing that released in a few years' time and maybe filling in a few gaps in the family history. But maybe I'll find some more records to dig into, some day...

I like nerds.

Re-watching The Muppet Show has really brought back to me how big a crush I've always had on Scooter. And the continuing talk of bringing back a new series of the classic show has made me really want to be on it.

I mean, even if Disney hadn't apparently given up on the revival idea (what do you mean "difficulties with deciding on a premise for the series"? Are you all idiots? Just make more episodes of The Muppet Show!), I do appreciate I might not be the first choice for celebrity guest star unless I do something a bit more notable. I can see how "won the World Memory Championship three times, the most recent being seventeen years ago" doesn't put you quite at the top of the Hollywood A-list. But it's still a dream that feels like it might not be entirely impossible to happen one day.

I just want to give Scooter a hug, gosh darn it! Is that such an unreasonable thing to ask? Someone arrange it for me, please!

He-Man and the cowardly horse

Quite some time ago, in a charity shop, I found a Ladybird book called "He-Man and the Memory Stone". What with the memory connection, and already liking both He-Man and Ladybird books (and not actively disliking stones, either), it was an automatic purchase.

Then I noticed that instead of being a story book, it was an "adventure game book", and decided to play through it when I had the time. Fast forward to the year 2026, and I noticed the tiny book in my bookcase where I'd put it the day I bought it and never looked at it since. So I really had to give it a go.

Before you start choosing your own adventure, the book tells you you need a die to roll and a pencil to keep track of He-Man's twelve life points. We're making the choices for He-Man here, the book isn't written in the second person like the classic style. The book's previous owner seems to have had a lot of games and lost a lot of life points. But as it turns out, that wasn't really my experience with the book...

The story starts by telling us that Skeletor has got hold of a "brain-draining stone", and intends to use it to wipe He-Man's memory, from the safety of his lair. But "the stone was not perfect" and it's Man-at-Arms whose mind gets blanked. Skeletor's slaves, the Skelcons, feature in a lot of Ladybird's He-Man storybooks, incidentally. In at least one of the books, Man-at-Arms has his own similar horde of "servants", called the Nerlins, but they don't seem to be around in this one. Indeed, since every single vehicle and machine owned by the heroic warriors immediately stops working the moment Man-at-Arms is out of action, he really might want to think about training an assistant or two. Anyway, He-Man has to set out to confront Skeletor and fix things, and we get our first choice of the book. Do He-Man and Battle-Cat [who isn't normally hyphenated, surely?] leave immediately, or wait until nightfall?

Which is actually not a choice at all, because if He-Man tries to leave immediately, Stratos tells him he'd better wait until nightfall after all, and you're redirected to paragraph 69 anyway.

But now we get a wider range of choices. And I figure that He-Man tells Battle-Cat to plunge through the undergrowth.

Yes, I think it might be a trap.

And here we reach the point where I resent the book giving me a heavy hint as to what to do. I don't care that Castle Grayskull doesn't have much time (and indeed, we'll see later that it really has quite a lot of time before anything drastic happens), so I'm going to have He-Man attack from both sides, darn it!

But it turns out that doing that only sends you on to 40 anyway, so it didn't really matter.

Which then sends you on to 77, making this paragraph pretty redundant, really.

And then to 108...

And then to 15. Is this a choose your own adventure book, or just a book that you read in a funny order?

Aha, action at last! Although it wasn't very exciting action, because I rolled a 5, which instantly wins. Incidentally, if you roll a 1 it doesn't lose you a life point, it ends the story right there and then. He-Man doesn't die, but we're told it will be a while before he recovers from the poison, and to go back and start the book again.

And now we're off on our very linear travels once more.

He-Man's looking for a horse now? That's the first I've heard of it. I wondered if the direction to paragraph 81 was some kind of typo, although He-Man did mention before the monkey spider that he's hoping to find a quicker mode of transport than poor old Battle-Cat. Bur I'm not a fan of this mysterious horse with a man's mind, and I don't want Battle-Cat to leave, thank you very much.

And on we go. This really is more of a travelogue than an adventure.

No, I'm not going all this way just to send Battle-Cat home and go back to 139 like it said two paragraphs ago! I'm definitely not a fan of Thunder Horse now, but let's call out to him.

Thunder Horse just looks stupid. And if he's too much of a wimp to come near Battle-Cat, what use is he going to be as a mode of transport? I'm not turning to 139, however many times you suggest it.

Thunder Horse is just a big baby. Good riddance, I say. Let's stick with Battle-Cat and turn to 73.

See, we didn't need Thunder Horse - we're just trudging through the plains perfectly fine without him. But we get an actual choice! I decided to hide in the trees.

And so, having scared Beast-Man away earlier without a fight, now we just avoid Screeech entirely. On to 53!

Ah, here are the Sands of Time that Thunder Horse was going to carry He-Man across. And Battle-Cat has decided to go home anyway. He obviously never wanted to be here in the first place. Is it too late to call Thunder Horse back?

Oh well, He-Man's fine with a long walk. He's the most powerful man in the universe, after all. I just can't help feeling I'm missing all the really thrilling parts of this book.

Oh, it's not a choice this time, it's a roll of the dice to see who's coming. I got a 2.

Ah, it's Zoar, not Screeech. Easy mistake to make - they're the same toy, just painted differently. I notice that the text avoids specifying Zoar's gender - in the earliest He-Man media he's male, then later she became the Sorceress in bird-form. Incidentally, if I'd rolled a higher number, the exact same thing would have happened, except it would have been Stratos bringing the food and drink and then flying away again. And we'd still be turning to 79.

Good thing Castle Grayskull isn't under attack or anything, isn't it? Time doesn't seem to be an issue, even without a Thunder Horse to ride, though it's been at least a day and a half now since Skeletor wiped Man-at-Arms's memory.

And this one again made me wonder if there was a typo. It talks about "the hole" as if it's been mentioned before, but it's news to me. Still, He-Man's down the hole now, and we have no choice but to go down the tunnel. This book isn't very generous with its choices.

I can't even remember the last time I had to make any kind of decision.

At least I get to roll the die again. I got a 5, this time.

If I'd got a lower number, it would have led to a scary giant worm, and maybe even an actual fight, but as it turns out we just get a friendly-looking giant mole.

I don't really think the Skelcons are particularly worm-like, but I'm not going to argue with a giant mole. Not that I get the option to argue, of course, just an instruction to turn to 91. And I note that the mole is a 'he' at first, and then becomes an 'it'. Zoar's gender-confusion is contagious.

We're nearly there, apparently.

Skelcons are afraid of moles. They're even bigger babies than Thunder Horse!

And now it's the final confrontation with Skeletor, Lord of Destruction! Clearly we made our final choice of the entire book a couple of dozen sections ago.

This battle was slightly more prolonged than the monkey-spider. I rolled a 3 and then rolled a 6. What an epic conflict.

And that's the end. He-Man saved the day, without losing a single life point or even having a fight with anyone except Skeletor and a monkey-spider. What a rubbish adventure all round.

Flicking through the book, I see that it's possible to clash with Webstor, Whiplash, Trap-Jaw, Evil-Lyn, Beast-Man, Screeech and other monsters too, but I seem to have bypassed all of that, possibly as a result of refusing to go for a ride on Thunder Horse. The moral of the story is that if you see a horse who's such a big wuss that he's scared of cats, let him carry you across the Sands of Time. It'll maybe be a bit more exciting for you.