Why can't I find things?

I know for a fact that I own a hacksaw and a ball of string, and they would both have come in handy today (for reasons that I'm going to leave tantalisingly unelaborated-on), but I couldn't find them. It's no good, I'm going to have to spring-clean the flat. I hate tidying.

May-mory

That's a play on the word 'memory', but I realise now that it wasn't very obvious. Anyway, I did an hour cards practice this afternoon, for the first time in a very long while. I've been doing speed training for the last few days, but if I'm to have any chance in the world championship I need to be regularly doing marathon practice from now until October (or whenever it is. I should check.)

Cards has always been the marathon discipline I've found easiest to get into without my mind wandering, probably because of the constant moving of my hands as I juggle the cards between them. If I can follow this up with an hour numbers practice, and then get into the habit of doing them both (and half-hour binary too), then I'll be all set.

I still need a new system for numbers, but that might have to wait until next year.

Rory McLeod's grandmother was right

The wind is really getting stronger around here just lately. It's blow-you-off-your-bike kind of weather, especially if you're as thin as I am nowadays. Well, was until I had a big pub lunch yesterday, anyway - that's probably piled all those pounds back on again.

Hooray for me!

I'm the best othello player in the world! Well, to put it another way, of the four people who came to the Cambridge regional today, I was the best. Which is just as good. And they were good players, too, not just some bunch of idiots I dragged in off the street and forced to play me at othello.

The Cambridge regional used to be the one that got the biggest turnout, but just these last two years it's started to be in danger of dwindling out of existence. I'm not sure exactly why, but the Cambridge MSO was almost small enough to not really count as a thing this year, so it's not attracting new people that way. Anyway, we did have David Beck, Iain Barrass, Roy Arnold and me to play othello, and Adelaide to organise things, and what more does any competition need?

So we had a double round-robin, and I won five games out of six, and played reasonably well in all five of them, so that the one game where I was rubbish and was soundly thrashed by David didn't matter (since he obligingly lost to Roy in another game). Wins in othello tournaments are very rare for me, and this was probably my most impressive result ever. I should probably retire now at the peak of my success, because it'll only be disappointing to everyone when I come last in the next one.

That was fun!

I should do that more often. I've been to Frankfurt lots of times, but only the airport and train station on my way somewhere else. It turns out that there's a city, too, and it's a nice place.

Anyway, I'm home again now, and the next week is going to be full of memory training. I've decided.

To heck with staying at home!

I found some extremely cheap flights and hotels, and I'm going to Frankfurt for the weekend. Just because I can. It'll be nice to see some sights of Germany without having a memory competition getting in the way! Also, this will be an interesting test of whether I can go for a quick holiday without resorting to my usual junk-food-eating ways...

Psychological secrets of Zoomy

I have recurring dreams about my teeth falling out. Not regularly, maybe once every six months or so, but often enough to be puzzling. Clearly this is something that my subconscious mind is deeply worried about, but I can't imagine why. My teeth are entirely healthy, I haven't seen a dentist for about twenty years and I never have so much as a toothache unless I accidentally use toothpaste with super whitening power (I think I'm allergic to the stuff, or else it's just generally bad for the teeth). I have got a missing tooth around the back, but that's because I never had a permanent tooth there, and the milk tooth eventually fell out. The baby tooth in the same position on the other side is still there, which I've always been impressed by. I've also never had wisdom teeth, which might explain my occasional unwise tendencies.

Anyway, as best I can tell, considering that I'm not working and never have occasion to check a calendar except for football schedules, it's the Easter weekend. I was thinking of going away somewhere, but everybody else is also going away somewhere, and they've booked all the hotels. I'll maybe stay at home and go for an Easter holiday some time after all these bank holidays, when all those other suckers are back at work. And send them postcards.

Toffee Crips

I've not really missed all the unhealthy snacks I customarily eat for this past week of dieting, but today in Nottingham I had a fierce and strangely specific craving for a Drifter. But then I went into two different shops looking for one (because I firmly believe in giving in to these kinds of urges immediately) and they both didn't have any! So I'm still officially on the diet, until I have a moment to go to the Co-Op down the road and see if they sell Drifters.

It's a chocolate bar, if you're foreign and think I'm eating vagabonds. Check it out on Nestlé's official website, which not only tells us that "on average, it takes one hour to make a Drifter bar from start to finish", which I find hard to believe in these modern times, but misspells Toffee Crisp as "Toffee Crips Biscuit" and claims that Breakaways are famous for their advertising slogan, 'Everyday should have a Breakaway'.

I've never heard that slogan in my life! If they're famous for anything, surely it's 'Don't take away my Breakaway'? Or am I just getting old? Anyway, that website is rubbish. I almost regret googling it now, but I thought it was important to keep my bloglings properly informed.

Speaking of bloglings, someone found me by googling "013457689014658757562987032105-5" - and if you don't remember what that number was then you'll never be the World Memory Champion - which reminds me how extremely sad it is that Elisabeth Sladen has died. And with Doctor Who coming back on Saturday, too.

The wheels are in motion

I've been memorising all day! I did the full works - binary, words, numbers, spoken, images, names, cards, dates. And cycled into Long Eaton and back in the afternoon, cooked some really fancy (and tasty!) stuffed tomatoes for tea and then in the evening cycled to Nottingham and walked half the way back because I'd got a puncture. It'll keep me fit.

Actually, I'm feeling really great at the moment. I'm still enormously fat, but I have good reason to believe I'm gradually getting thinner, and my memory performances are abject, but I'm confident that I can get back to world-championship-winning standard in the fullness of time. World-championship-2009-winning, anyway, and then when I've got back to that level we'll just have to see about 2011...

As a fiddle

Whether it's the diet or the just not-workingness, I've been doing a whole lot of cycling and walking this last week or so. I'm downright energetic, which I know is very unlike me. I really am going to make an effort to sit still and memorise lots of things tomorrow, though, because let's face it, I'm never going to be the world cycling champion. That's a real thing, and you have to have one of those expensive bikes to be one.

Also, somebody found my blog today by googling "beard good or bad for face". It's good, whoever you are. Extremely good.

Memory training? I didn't say anything about memory training.

The weather was too nice today, I'll start my intensive training regime tomorrow instead. Or, if I go for a day out in Sheffield/Birmingham/Manchester/somewhere-along-those-lines tomorrow, as I've already decided to do, I'll do it on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, let's talk about cooking. Being on a diet that involves a lot of vegetables, I find that I've previously only thought of veggies as something you have with a roast dinner - boil them in a pan and plonk them on the plate. So it only took three days for me to get tired of having cabbage with dinner and conclude that I need to do something new. I had a really quite nice semi-casserole-kind-of-thing with beef, peppers, mange tout, broccoli and tomatoes tonight, and I'm feeling like a real proper chef. I've even bought herbs. Also, Worcestershire sauce.

Anyone got any cooking ideas that I can do with the kind of veggies that are low in carbohydrates and GI? (GI stands for something, I can't remember what, but I'm fairly certain that in this context it isn't an American soldier.) Because this diet is proving to be quite fun, and if I can find ways to keep the meals interesting, I'm probably not going to get bored with it and return to my chocolate-scoffing ways for another month or so at least. I get to eat as much rhubarb as I want! And while technically I've always been free to eat as much rhubarb as I want, I've never really availed myself of the opportunity until now. Rhubarb is great.

Meanwhile, another thing I've been meaning to mention is the Cambridge Memory Championship. I've had a few inquiries about it, and I want to gauge public interest in the idea. Please can you let me know if you would definitely/possibly/under no circumstances (delete as applicable) come to a memory competition in Nottingham, probably, in July, say. Email me or comment here, or shout at me if you happen to be passing my flat and notice that the window's open (warning, I might not hear you). I believe the current plans are to have the UK Championship in August, German in September and World in October, so this would be a good way to warm up. I can promise (well, not promise, but at least express the hope) that the room will be infinitely bigger and quieter than the one we've had for the last couple of years, but that the beginner-friendly and pleasantly social atmosphere will be better than ever!

Oh, and one more important thing! Did you know that Kinder eggs are illegal in the USA? And not just that they don't sell them there (like pretty much every kind of edible chocolate snack except Twixes), they're properly banned, you're not allowed to import them or send them to Americans who might want them! There are laws about having an inedible object inside an edible product, apparently, and also the small parts are unsuitable for children. I think this is disgraceful, and I'm going to set up a smuggling racket immediately.

Back to business

Okay, so the corpore sano thing is all sorted (I've lost three pounds since I weighed myself on Wednesday, although that weighing was immediately after a big lunch so as to give myself the heaviest possible starting weight), now let's focus on the world of memorising things.

I've slacked off on the training in a big way for the last couple of months. I've also slacked off on the blogging about memory competitions, so here's a brief summary of the little opening salvos of the 2011 memory season - I was basically rubbish at the Welsh championship, while Christian Schäfer won the North German Championship ahead of Johannes Mallow, and Simon Reinhard won the South German [I may have mixed up the two parts of Germany, but I don't think I did] with a really extremely impressive kind of performance. Nowadays you have to consider what the Chinese people are doing, too, but to the best of my knowledge they haven't been doing anything lately.

So if I'm going to have even the slightest outside chance of winning my title back, I should be working hard at it right now. Starting tomorrow, I'll grind my way back into training, and give you all daily updates of how I'm getting along. That way you can all jeer at me, and it'll motivate me to get good again.

A delicious, nutritious shake for breakfast...

I'm on a diet. It's the kind of concept that I'm normally quite scathing about, but on the other hand I can't avoid the fact that I've got gradually heavier over the last couple of years, so in the spirit of 'doing something new', which is my defining philosophy at the moment, I'm doing Tony Ferguson.

That's the name of a diet, which seems to be founded and run by someone called Chris Ferguson, and which they sell at Boots. Just to divulge a bit of confidential information now that I don't work for them any more, it didn't sell as well as the people in charge of setting the budgets expected (I think this is more of a reflection on the budget-setters than on the diet), but someone in our department lost a huge amount of weight very quickly on it, and didn't put weight back on afterwards either, so I thought I'd give it a try. My fridge is full of vegetables. It ain't natural.

It's day two, and I'm not noticeably slenderer (I don't own a set of weighing scales, so I haven't measured my progress), but on the other hand cutting carbohydrates and sugary treats out of my food intake hasn't killed me yet either. If it doesn't kill me by next weekend, I'll weigh myself on the machine in Boots or somewhere, and see how much good it's done. If it works, I'll celebrate with cake and cherry coke.

If only they still sold that miracle soap from the adverts in yesterday's blog entry.

Douglas Fairbanks Junior's Gay Love

I'm sorry I've been a non-blogger for so long. You deserve both an apology and a full explanation of what I've been up to for the last couple of weeks, but I'm afraid you're not going to get them. Instead, let's talk about the June 1933 edition of "Happy Mag", which I found in London some time last year and have been meaning to blog about ever since. And the absolutely hilarious 'Just Williams' comic in the latest issue of Viz (in which the Archbishop of Canterbury has an adventure in the style of Richmal Crompton's 'Just William' stories, including a perfect imitation of William's trademark dialogue - it's a must-read, believe me) reminded me of this old ambition, so here we go:

It's actually "Happy and Sunny Mag", having recently absorbed a less-successful sister title, but the cover sets the tone for what's inside - your sevenpence gets you a hundred pages of humorous drawings, jokes and stories, most of them romances. And there are also some fascinating adverts featuring the latest products and services that the buying public of 1933 really need.



"LET ME BE YOUR FATHER" bellows the rather sinister-looking Mr Bennett, who promises to give free fatherly advice and (for a few shillings monthly) instruction in practically everything. If you're not the academic type so much as the kind of person who goes out playing cricket and ruptures himself, then I recommend "Brooks Appliance" - "Write now for our free trial offer sent in plain sealed envelope." Or if you're short (which judging by these adverts a whole lot of people in 1933 were), take a box of Challoner's tablets and become miraculously taller! The sheer quantity of different ads in this issue of Happy Mag for ways and means to increase your height is really quite fascinating.



Once more, Science aids short people, this time with a book rather than tablets. And deaf people are completely cured by The New Patent SOUND DISCS ("Are the same to the ears as glasses are to the eyes"). But I'm sure every reader's eye was drawn to the full-page advert for the new story, "Gay Love", by movie star Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, which apparently chronicles the adventures of Phil and Peter, whose philosophy is "Enjoy life - be gay!" This is the kind of situation where any further comment from me would just be redundant.



Over the page, we have two more tried and tested means of increasing your height - the Stebbing System and the Ross System. Mr Ross seems more convincing, since he's personally increased his own height to six foot three-and-three-quarters.



And just for completeness, the ads on the back cover, although there's nothing too funny about these ones. I'd snigger at the use of the word 'gay', but Douglas Fairbanks Jnr has exhausted my puerile-humour quota for the next couple of weeks. The "Span" Bracer that "supersedes belts & braces" is a wonderful idea, though. I'll have to get one, although it looks like you need to wear your trousers pulled up to your nipples in order for it to be effective.

The actual stories are a mixed bunch - they're mostly very similar in theme, almost all of them chronicling the adventures of working girls who end the story by marrying a rich and handsome man and thus not needing to work for a living any more. Particularly noteworthy are Doris in "A Lesson For The Boss", who takes the blame for a costly error of judgement by a handsome young man, since it doesn't matter if she loses her job, because she won't need a job when they get married, and Tessie in "Not Afraid Of Lions", who gives up her circus lion-taming job at the end of the story when "She's the wife of a country gentleman now, and has no time for such things."

The rest of the stories are all essentially the same kind of thing, except for "William and the Love Test", which is a very good one, and a funny-comic adventure of "Mr Rabbit and his Baby Bunnies":



It's unoriginal even in 1933, but nicely drawn and fun to read, so I thought I should share it here.

Anyway, I'm intending to return to daily bloggery from now on, so thanks for sticking with me.

Baseball and beef jerky

These are things I only experience when I go to America, but that there should be more of over here. Actually, I'm sure you can find jerky in Britain if you know where to look, I'll have to check it out.

Still, I'm back now. Today was a getting-over-jetlag day (I hate overnight flights, they completely destroy my internal clock), tomorrow is officially the start of whatever I'm going to do with myself for the next couple of unemployed months. I haven't really decided yet, but it's going to be fun.

Las Vegas was completely awesome, if I really need to point that out. It's changed a bit since the last time I was there, with a couple of new hotel/casinos on the Strip which look much too stylish and contemporary to fit in around there, so I don't think they'll last long, but the basic grooviness of Vegas is still very much there. I saw the Cirque du Soleil's "O" for the second time, and it's still completely amazing. There's also a really great magician called Dirk Arthur, who performs in the shabbiest and nastiest casino in town, but has a very close-up and intimate act full of completely impossible magic tricks with minimal equipment and special effects and only a handful of lions and tigers appearing out of nowhere (that's the Las Vegas equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat - no magic show is complete without at least one real tiger). It's not a spectacle like David Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy (who I saw back in 2002, before they retired), but it's somehow even more cool because it looks real rather than like a showbiz performance.

Also, it was baking hot! As I might have mentioned before, whenever I go to America, I always get the hottest weather - everyone told me that it was unseasonably warm all of a sudden, even by Las Vegas standards. Charlotte, North Carolina, where I changed planes en route, was also extremely hot, but in the humid kind of way that you don't get in Vegas. And it's been scorching hot back here today, too! Summer's here!

Viva!

God, I love this city. It's six o'clock in the morning here, and I've already lost $15 at video poker but won $100 at blackjack while waiting for breakfast to open. Everything about Las Vegas is awesome - the gambling, the lights, the artificiality, the fact that you can come downstairs at four in the morning and find a bustling casino full of gamblers, the serious electric shocks you get from touching anything, the weather, the internet kiosk that's a new innovation since last time I came, the fact that I've still got enough self-control so far to stop playing blackjack for the moment and not bet all my winnings on the next hand...

Anyway, I'm going to go and watch cartoons until breakfast time, then go out exploring. And yes, I could have earned more than $85 by going to my job today, and not paying for expensive flights and the super-cheap but wonderful Gold Coast Hotel, but it wouldn't have been so much fun. See you all next time I drag myself away from the gambling!

Las Vegas ahoy!

I'm out of here! No more work, lots more play, I'll see you when I'm back in the country!

Census Day

The 2011 census is a 32-page booklet, full of questions about everybody in the household. A hundred years ago, it was just one sheet of paper, with instructions on the back, and a form to fill in on the front. Census day in 1911 was April 3rd, but I'll be away from the computer then, so this seems as good a time as any to subject you all to one final exhaustive summary of the Pridmore family. If nothing else, this is a good place for me to compile all my notes about them...

My great-grandfather William Thomas Pridmore (02/08/1855 - 02/05/1932) and his offspring are the family members who fascinate me the most in all of my family-tree research. For one thing, William's ancestors are easier to trace than usual, just because there aren't many of them - William was illegitimate, whether or not he knew who his father was I can't say, but I certainly don't, and there seems to be no way we're ever going to find out. His mother, Eliza Pridmore (c1835 - August 1886) was also illegitimate, and her father is equally unknown to posterity. William thus has only one grandparent to trace, rather than the usual four - Jane Pridmore (1816 - 1870s). We have to go back as far as Jane's parents, James Pridmore (1777 - 1848) and Elizabeth Ward (1787 - 1867) before the family tree branches out any further. And with the big generation gaps in my own branch of the family tree (I was born 121 years after William), the Pridmores obligingly give me much fewer 18th-century ancestors to research!

Furthermore, William was the one who moved the family in around 1880 to the industrial city of Sheffield from the tiny farming village of Pickworth that he grew up in. And he produced a vast legion of offspring who almost all stayed in Sheffield for the rest of their lives and produced hordes of children themselves. William had 13 children and 36 grandchildren, though he didn't live to see all of them born, and researching them has been no end of fun.

They all seem to have individual personalities bursting from the dry records of births, marriages and deaths, so much so that I almost feel like I know them. There are plenty of things that the records just don't tell us, obviously - given the time and place that he lived, I'd say William was probably known as Bill to his friends, but there's no record of that. I don't know if it was his idea or Eliza's to move the whole family to Sheffield, just that they all lived there together for a while; Eliza, her husband and her four children, including William who had grown up with his grandmother while Eliza moved away with her new family. The records tell us that William struggled to find work for the first few years in the city, was a boiler firer at the ironworks for eight years, spent a few more years floating from job to job and then settled into a successful and long career as a bricklayer, but I don't know whether that was the job he'd always wanted or something he ended up doing without really meaning to.

I do know that William outlived the majority of his children. Three of them - Beatrice (06/05/1887 - 01/04/1889), George Richard (06/11/1890 - 29/09/1891) and Percy (16/07/1898 - 28/07/1899) - died in infancy, then four sons were killed in the First World War, followed by William's wife, a daughter and another son in a pneumonia epidemic of 1920-21. Just four out of thirteen living to old age is a low ratio even by the standards of Sheffield in those days.

Here's his census form from one hundred years ago:

The Pridmores had only recently moved into 34 Hunt Street, within the last couple of years. A five-room house was something of a luxury compared to the places they'd lived while bringing up their large family. They'd got it, I'm guessing from circumstantial evidence, with the help of the money of the Palmer family William's daughter Florence married into. It remained the family home until at least the forties, passing to Oswald (he being the only child of William's who had never married and left home) after the parents died.

William and Sarah had married in the rural wilds of Rutland when he was 21 and she was 17. She was also five months pregnant at the time - this seems to have been the rule rather than the exception in all the marriages I've seen in that area at that time. How well they got along is something we can only speculate, but Sarah continued to have a baby every couple of years on average until she was over forty years old. She died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 59.

Starting with the youngest, the ten surviving children of the marriage were:

Sydney Pridmore (06/05/1900 - early 1982), called 'Sidney' above, but changed it to Syd by the 1920s, determinedly followed in his father's footsteps by living and working in Sheffield his whole life, first as a general labourer like most of the rest of his family, then becoming a railway porter in 1923. He stayed with the railways forever after, by 1940 moving from porter to shunter. Also in the early twenties, he and his wife Catherine (nee Millership) moved to 72 Robey Street, which became the family home for decades. He followed the Pridmore tradition by having an army of sons, the last of whom was my dad, and also one daughter just to show that the Pridmore y-chromosome isn't completely infallible. After Catherine died in 1960, daughter Cath took over the 'woman of the house' duties. Syd passed a passion for trains onto his offspring, and must have been a pretty contented man, all in all. He died when I was five, I just barely remember him. His children, without the hardships and diseases of the first couple of decades of the century, lived long lives - with the exception of Philip, who died of diptheria aged five, they all lived to see the 21st century.

They were: William Thomas (Bill, born 18/09/1922), Arthur Edward (Ted, 08/11/1923), Sydney (Syd, 07/03/1926), Catherine (Cath, 24/07/1927), twins Michael (Mike) and Philip (02/11/1929), Lawrence (Lol, 27/01/1931), Samuel Bernard (Bernie, 08/03/1934), Cyril (08/01/1936), Robert (02/01/1940) and George (28/09/1946).

The reason behind the names is intriguing. William Thomas was obviously Syd's father's name; the traditional way to follow it would be to call the second son Sydney, but instead they went for Arthur Edward, who I suppose must have been Syd's favourite older brother - one of the four who died in the war. It's not a Millership name, certainly. Then, after Sydney junior joins the family, we move on to Catherine junior and then a more random selection of names for the subsequent sons. Samuel Bernard was one of Catherine's brothers, while George was another of Syd's. Whether it was a deliberate naming or just for want of any other boys' names left that hadn't been used, I don't know, but I think it was appropriate. Both Georges were the brains of their families, from what I can see.

George Harry Pridmore (23/06/1896 - 31/08/1918), who was in what seems to me the awkward situation of being named after a dead brother (recycling of names of dead infants was very common in those days), an errand boy in 1911, later became a labourer at the steel works, but only until he was old enough to join the army. The first world war broke out shortly after his eighteenth birthday, and it was both the making and the death of him. He was on the front lines from 1916, quickly promoted to corporal, was wounded in action and was then sent to Scotland for officer training, while the rest of the family remained in the rank and file. On leave in 1917, he went back to Sheffield and married May Foster, then was commissioned Second Lieutenant and posted back to the fighting in France. He might have gone on to life in an altogether higher social circle than the Pridmore family had experienced before, but he was killed in action, aged 22, two months before the end of the war.

Oswald Pridmore (18/12/1893 - 24/10/1967) was a bachelor boy. While his brothers and sisters married and moved away from home one by one, Oswald kept on living with his parents, a single man. Whether he fought in the war, I don't know. He would have been called up in January 1916, like all single men, but two-thirds of the army records from that time were destroyed during the second world war, and the paperwork that would tell us whether Oswald was fit for military service seems to have gone up in smoke. He worked at the gasworks for most of his life. After his mother died in 1920, he and his father were left to rattle around the big house in Hunt Street for another twelve years. When William died in 1932, Oswald inherited the house and lived there alone.

Then, in 1944, at the age of fifty, Oswald married Annie Askham, a 42-year-old spinster. What persuaded them to take the plunge at that late age I can't imagine, but the marriage lasted until Oswald's death 23 years later. After the war, they moved to the Park Hill Flats, finally leaving the Hunt Street house behind.

Wilfred Pridmore (12/03/1892 - 08/03/1921) moved around from one job to another for all his short life. A labourer in 1911, a carter when he married in 1913, a soldier for a short time before leaving the army on a pension, presumably in ill health, then a file stripper at the time of his death from 'pneumonia and asthenia' just before his 29th birthday. Wilfred married Chloris Gertrude Moorhouse at the age of 21 - she was the daughter of a jeweller with a penchant for unusual names; she had a sister called Dacier. They had no children. I'm assuming that it was because of Wilfred's poor health that his death certificate records him as living with his sisters' families at 10 Brough Street, while Chloris (who registered the death) was living on Silver Street, but it's not impossible that they had separated. Chloris also died quite young, of cancer in 1933.



Lilian May Pridmore (12/05/1889 - 02/06/1968) was a servant in 1911. Many women of her class and generation were already married and a mother several times over by the age of 21, but Lilian was 28 before she married John Charles May in 1917. They must have known each other for many years before that - John's older sister had been living with Lilian's older brother since 1900 - but their first child was born a respectable ten months after the Christmas Day wedding, so there was no urgent need to tie the knot at that time. John was thirty and not in the army, so he must have been unfit in some way.

Lilian May May, as her marriage renamed her, had four children: Charles William (04/11/1918 - the birth was registered on Armistice Day), Florence (08/11/1919), Lilian (31/03/1921) and Mary Ann (25/10/1922). The Mays lived at 10 Brough Street along with Lilian's older sister Florence and her family, also taking in younger brother Wilfred. They moved away in 1926, I don't know where they went, but by the time of her old age Lilian had left Sheffield and even Yorkshire behind, and was living in Droylsden, Lancashire when she died at the age of 79. Her daughter Florence was still in Sheffield to witness Oswald's late wedding in 1944, so I assume the big move to Lancashire came after the war.



Florence Pridmore (08/04/1885 - 13/05/1920) married John (or maybe James) William Palmer at the age of 23, and he seems to have been quite a catch. The Palmers lived at first at 34 Hunt Street, all five rooms of it, before apparently swapping houses with Florence's parents and going to the slightly smaller house on Daisy Walk that the Pridmores had lived in before. Four rooms to themselves was still above the norm for Florence's siblings.

Florence's husband, with the unusual profession of 'mineral water carter', seems to have had a strangely fluctuating name. He was born John, was married under that name, but at the birth of their first child nine and a half months later, had changed his name (and that of their son) to James. He's still James in the 1911 census, but by the time their second son was born, later the same year, he's John again, remaining a John until 1914. He joined the army and fought in the war. Florence moved into Brough Street with Lilian, and James (as he was now calling himself again) joined them there after the war was over, working as a stableman. Their children were James William (17/05/1909), Norman (17/10/1911) and Jennie (17/06/1914).

Florence died of pneumonia in May 1920, aged 35, just seven days before her mother died of the same illness. James and the children continued to live with Lilian and her family, even after James remarried in early 1926.



Arthur Edward Pridmore (01/04/1883 - 18/10/1914) was a soldier. It was something he did for his whole life, from joining the army at 18 to fight the Boer War, to dying at Ypres at 31 years old. His active service and career as a recruiting sergeant took him away from the family home in Sheffield - when he married the widowed Annie Ashworth in 1909, he was in barracks in Southampton. Maybe it was the distance from the rest of his family, maybe it was the fact that Annie's father had been a sergeant-major, or that he was Irish, maybe it was just a creative imagination, but Arthur gave his father's occupation as 'master brewer', as opposed to 'bricklayer', on the marriage certificate. They had no children. Soldiers of his rank marrying was tolerated by the higher-ups, having children was unofficially somewhat frowned upon - distracts them from their duties, you know. Who their baby visitor recorded on the census form was, I have no idea. But when war broke out, Arthur was in the British Expeditionary Force and in the thick of the first fighting. Sadly, though, he didn't last long.



John Thomas Pridmore (23/02/1881 - 14/10/1914) seems to have struggled to find a direction in life. He was the first of the family to join the army, and fought in South Africa throughout the Boer War. Despite his 1899-1902 medal, he never moved up the ranks like his younger brother Arthur. Posted to York in 1907, he met and married Harriet Annie Myton (in the register office, the first non-church wedding in the family), leaving the army after the birth of their first son. He took his wife and baby back to Sheffield, moving in with his ever-accommodating oldest brother Ernest (after whom the baby had been named) and drifting from one job to another rapidly over the next few years - railway labourer, porter, steelworker and then soldier again when war broke out. Still a Private, he was among the first British soldiers killed as the army slowly advanced towards Ypres.

John and Harriet had three children: Ernest William (13/03/1908), Gladys (03/05/1910) and Frederick (14/07/1913).



Albert Pridmore (01/05/1879 - 22/06/1917) wasn't married, despite what the census form says. He had been living with Margaret May since 1900, she was known as Margaret Pridmore, and they had had six children, but they had never tied the knot. Margaret (and her younger brother John, who married Lilian) were born Richardsons, out of wedlock, and changed their surnames to May when their mother married. Perhaps that's why she and Albert didn't see it necessary to get married. Nonetheless, in December 1913, with Margaret seven months pregnant with their seventh child, Albert belatedly made an honest woman of her in the register office. Why then, after thirteen years of common-law marriage, I can't imagine.

Their children were: Albert (24/03/1901), Frederick (16/08/1903), Lily (22/11/1904), George (11/01/1907), Ernest (04/11/1908), Harold (13/12/1910) and Mary (05/03/1914). Frederick and Lily died in infancy, and Albert junior met a tragic end in 1915. At the age of 14, he was working as a wagon greaser on the railway when he was run over by a train and killed. The death certificate records "Accidentally killed, his leg being cut off by his being run over by a railway engine or a goods train." That they didn't know which train had done it, and the nature of the injury, makes me think the death wasn't quick or pleasant. This makes me wonder about my grandfather Syd - although he and Albert were uncle and nephew there was less than a year in age between them, they lived in the same area and their fathers had worked together as bricklayers. Syd's life on the railways came after losing his close relative in that way when they were boys.

Albert senior thus had a more tragic Great War than most. He joined up shortly before his son's death - at the age of 36, with a wife and five children to support and his two brothers already killed, I can't imagine he was enthusiastic about it. When he died, it wasn't even quick; he was wounded on 2 May 1917, shipped back to Bradford hospital for treatment and died on 22 June. Margaret, with her four remaining children still all very young, worked as a charwoman, and in 1919 had an illegitimate son, John - who carried on the name Pridmore, despite not being a blood relative. Who his father was I don't know, but I hope he at least helped Margaret out with some cash.



Ernest William Pridmore (28/07/1877 - 06/10/1948) seems to have been a well-respected oldest brother - Albert and John both named sons after him. Unlike his brothers, he came through the war without joining the fighting, probably for medical reasons. He was within the upper age limit for conscription, just, but throughout the war and afterwards worked at the steelworks. His school records twice show him absent for long periods due to medical certificates, but whatever his infirmity was, it didn't stop him producing a big family. The juggling act of fitting all his children and various boarders into his three rooms doesn't seem to have bothered him either - the lodgers shown on the census are his wife's father and brother, and the previous year he had accommodated his own brother John and family when they returned to Sheffield. That small house on Shepherd Street had been their home for nearly ten years, and Ernest remained there until at least 1928.

He and his wife Elizabeth had eight children: William (29/12/1901), Eliza (04/11/1903), Nellie (06/03/1906), Lilian (20/07/1908), Elizabeth (06/06/1911), Ernest (02/06/1914), Hilda (28/02/1916) and Rose (02/07/1918). The preponderance of girls, unlike the usual Pridmore boy-centric families, makes me wonder if Elizabeth was cheating on him. Eliza and Ernest junior died in infancy, but Hilda just passed away last year, at the age of 94.

Which seems like a positive note to end on. I really like this family!

Clean me

Working where I do, you see a lot of dirty lorries and vans. Why do people always write "Clean me" and the like on them? One time I saw "All I want for Christmas is a clean", which is really tugging on the heartstrings to an unnecessary degree.

The thing is, nobody writes "Clean your van", or "This lorry is really dirty". It's always first-person, written from the point of view of the vehicle. I suspect that the lorries exert a hypnotic influence over passers-by, and compel them to write these messages.

Note - I saw David Cameron and Nick Clegg today, and the above is the most important thing I can think to write about.

Normal service

Once I'm satisfactorily unemployed, I'll resume posting something trivial, long and fascinating in this blog every single day. Well, after I'm back from Las Vegas, anyway. Thanks for sticking with me until then!