Soap - (Green)

When I was a child in the 1950's we used to have a bar of green soap in a soap dish by the kitchen sink for washing our hands.  It used to get a white deposit on it once it had been used and was drying.  If my memory serves me right it was a bar of Fairy Soap.

For washing woollens, by hand of course, my Mum would use Lux Soap Flakes which were marketed in the 1899 by Lever Bros. and rebranded as Lux Soap Flakes in 1900 .  We also has Lux toilet soap to use for hand and face washing as well but not exclusively.

These were some of the other soaps we would sometimes have:  Cousin's Imperial Leather which was often favoured by men, my father among them; Sunlight Soap which was a yellow bar soap; Wright's Coal Tar soap which was an orangey colour and an antiseptic soap and finally Pears soap which was a translucent honey coloured soap bar that reminded me of my Nan and the soap she used to use.

Sheep

 This writing prompt instantly took me to my father's biological father that he never knowingly had met but had apparently been visited by him when he was very young and living with foster parents.

Frank Grieve Jackson has been mentioned before on my blog here

Born in Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire he had been a Romney Sheep breeder since moving to Kent after World War One.  He is in the 1921 census at Wytherling Court, Molash, Kent which is just 6 miles from Ashford.  He died there in 1947.

He entered many local cattle shows and this newspaper clipping from 1927, which I have only just found; he was a tenant farmer and had a winning entry in the Ashford Cattle Show.

He sold the farm and the farm implements and tackling were sold by auction on the farm in September 1944.

He was 71 when the farm was sold and died 3 years later.

Journeys

Journey No 1.  I have been keeping a document in which I keep the daily writing prompts from Natalie Pithers of Genealogy Stories fame and she can be found on social media site Bluesky.  I have decided to write on this blog weekly using one of her prompts.  This in itself is a new journey for me.  I have tried the #52 ancestors way and fail dismally in keeping up so am now determined that no matter what I will try to keep up with this one...watch this space.

Journey No 2.  Strangely I was only talking about this journey the other evening and this is that golden opportunity to get it down on paper.

We were talking about the Great London smog of 1952 and I remembered a family journey in the late 50's when Dad drove us from Hertfordshire to East Sussex to visit grandparents; least that was the intention.  We had travelled as far as South London but the smog got thicker and thicker until Mum was leaning out of one car window to keep an eye on the kerb and Dad was leaning out of the other window to keep an eye on the white line in the middle of the road.  The car lights faintly glowed in the yellow thick swirling fog and couldn't penetrate enough to see clearly.  It finally reached a point where the strain was too much and Dad decided the best thing to do was to turn round and go home.  I wonder whether my sister and I, as young children,  sensed the tension and kept quiet or whether we weren't helping matters by squbbling or aaking a child's favourite question of "Are we there yet" or "When are we going to be there?"

P is for .......

 A U3A family history group I go to is currently progressing through letters of the alphabet as a topic for their monthly meetings.  We can either talk about some sort of genealogical resource/record/event/location etc or find something from our personal family history to talk about.  

Last month we reached the letter P.  Some very obvious topics sprung to mind but to avoid duplicating what someone else might talk about we often try to find an obscure reference to the letter.  I deliberately ignored the obvious ones of Parish Registers, Poor Houses, Poor Law, Paternity, Proof standards, Probate and Petty sessions, to name but a few and chose a name.  So, what did I choose?

I chose the name Peggy and where it came from.  I found it was a mediaeval variation of Margaret.... Margaret, Meggy/Peggy Maggie/Peggie and Meg/Peg.  It has been used in may cultures and races around the world and has a name day on December 12th in Norway.  With the formal information quickly out the way I moved on to my ancestor called Peggy or Peg.

Peggy or Peg as she was often called, wasn't in fact a Peggy but a Margaret and even then it wasn't her first name of Edith but her second name.  She didn't know who she was named after but her mother didn't like the name and she was given a second name of Margaret her mother insisted she was called Peggy and not Edith or Edie.  I looked a little bit further in her ancestors and found Peggy had an Auntie Edie, her father's sister in law.  Was that the link?  Looking further I found she had a great aunt Edith as well, also on her father's side of the family; was that the link?  The name Peggy was beginning to grow in popularity when she was born in the mid 1920s but it didn't peak until the middle of the next decade whereas the name Edith hd peaked a decade or so earlier and was quickly falling even further.

Margaret?  Did the name have a particular significance to Peggy's mother?  Unfortunately I will never know.  There are several Margaret's amongst Peggy's ancestors, the most likely being her mothers great grandmother, Margaret Ann Hoad who had married Dick Douch Clark who I have blogged about before.  Much more unlikely is her mothers great x5  great aunt, Margaret Christmas back in the 1600's, her great x 6 great grandmother or her great x 6 great uncle's wife.

It made me wonder who I was named after, I will never know!

Twelve

 The blog prompt for today, from a person I follow on Bluesky, was TWELVE.

I quickly went off to my family history database as I new I had some large families amongst my ancestors.  Sure enough I have a few families with twelve or more children.

Today I am going to share about my 2x great father, Richard Douch Clark, who I have posted about before.

He married Margaret Anne Hoad in 1863 in Udimore and this is the list of their children.

Do you have any links to these children or indeed to Dick and Margaret?  I would love to hear from you if you do

#On This Day 25th December

On this day .!!!   .....  I thought I would share a few more memories of mine but relating to Christmas other than memories that I have mentioned last year which you can find here.

https://sussexheritage.blogspot.com/2023/12/advent-calendar-day-24.html

https://sussexheritage.blogspot.com/2023/12/advent-calendar-day-20.html

We always had christmas crackers at the tea table on Christmas Day.  I know a lot of families had them with their lunch. Our crackers used to be wrapped in coloured crepe paper and had a snap inside so that you pulled the cracker with a partner and when it went "bang" (like cap pistols used to ....oh another memory!!) the paper tore and out would fall a small present like a jumping frog or a cellophane fish that would curl in your hand, a coloured paper hat and a joke.  We loved the jokes as kids but I am sure the adults must have inwardly groaned at the same jokes year after year, as we do now!!

Boxing Day meeting at Battle Abbey.  You might find this offensive/cruel but it was part of normal life in the 50's and 60's.  The huntsman dressed up in their red jackets and the fox hounds at the horse's feet were quite a sight as they came through the archway. 

A Boxing Day meet of local huntsman (ai generated)

Crepe paper paper chains were twisted and hung in our dining room and living room.  It went from the corners to the central ceiling rose and then across to the other corner.  Then the two remaining sides were done to match.  We also had opened out folded decorations in the shape of  bell and a star.  We had other styles too in the 1950s

           

We always had a live Christmas Tree that was planted in a bucket of soil that we kept damp.  We would drape red or green crepe paper round the bucket and then put a bow round using the opposite colour to the bucket.  There were quite a few ornaments we weren't allow to hang as children because they were old and made of glass and woud have broken if they had been dropped.

Finally a memory from my late teens in the late '60's, when we were living in Radlett and I rang bells in the parish church.  I joined in with other bell ringers to go round carolling with handbells.  We called at Una Stubbs' house and given mince pies each.  We got quite a few mince pies by the end of that night!!!