up “in a manner suitable to their station in life” the two sons until they were twenty-one, and the two daughters until they were twenty-one unless they married earlier. But there was a proviso: if Catherine remarried, the estate was to be divided among the four children, who would then provide to their mother an annuity of £200 ($20,000 today). Catherine did in fact remarry, so my mother and her three siblings shared their father’s small fortune.
But it was mostly gone within a generation. My Uncle Will married and emigrated to New Zealand before the First World War, probably for reasons of health, taking his share of the family money with him. Uncle George, apparently fleeing from gambling debts, moved to Canada before the First World War. The family tree shows George as unmarried, but there was an Aunty May; my father told me she had been the wife of the local pub keeper before running away to Canada with George to live on Vancouver Island. George lost a leg while serving as a dispatch rider in the Canadian army in First World War and drew a pension for the rest of his life. He remained a racing man, and between the wars tried unsuccessfully to introduce harness racing in England. When grandmother Catherine remarried, she moved with her new husband to Weston, taking with her my mother-to-be, Diana Blanche, known as Blanche, and Jessie, known as Babs because she was the baby of the family.
I interrupt here to deal briefly with family names. My full name is George Anthony, making me the fifth George in the line beginning with the romantic, or perhaps careless, George Potter. I regret that when my wife and I named our own children it did not occur to me to continue the tradition. As we were both journalists, we thought naturally of names that would look good in a byline, short, snappy names. It would have been awkward anyway to give them long family names because when they were born in Britain in the 1950s ration books and identity cards were still printed on austerity paper on which a pen nib could easily catch while trying to write the full name on the five dots provided. One blot, and a whole identity could disappear. So we called our children just Dan and Tracy. But all is not lost; our younger granddaughter is Annabel Woodroffe Westell.
To return to my story, it was in Weston of course that Blanche met and married the young insurance man, Wes Westell. She was from a proud family in genteel decline, with traces of eccentricity, a weakness for gambling, and a tendency to emigrate. He was from a middle class family not long risen from the slums, twenty-three when the First World War began in 1914. He served in the Royal Engineers, rising to the rank of corporal, and survived perhaps because his unit was transferred from the Western front slaughter house to reinforce the Italians in their battles with Austrians. Right in the middle of the war, in 1916, my father and mother married in Weston, and his address on the marriage licence was British Expeditionary Forces, France. Mother must have been a lively young woman; my father liked to tell the story of how she was booed when promenading on the amusement pier at Weston wearing trousers, or rather, a sort of divided skirt she had made herself.
Babs was devoted to her older sister and heartily disliked her brother-in-law, Wes. She was family-proud and perhaps thought her sister was marrying below her station — marrying a man whose grandfather had been a servant to gentlemen like her father and grandfather. Or maybe she resented losing her beloved sister. Years later when my mother died, having named my father and Babs as executors, this rift created real problems. Wes finally won his way by threatening never again to allow Babs to see we three children, her nephews and niece. Pretty rough stuff. But Babs was eccentric, possibly with a lesbian inclination. She smoked Woodbines, the working man’s cigarette, had a hairy face, and dressed in what were in her time mannish clothes, often a suede golfing jacket, slacks or a heavy tweed skirt, and flat shoes. Although well off, she rented part of her small house near the sea front at Weston and shopped in cheap stores. But she fed we children handsomely when we visited. I remember as a small boy having a whole can of sardines for tea; when we went home and my father met us at the train station my short pants were so tight on my thighs that he drove me straight to the tailor who cut them off with a long pair of scissors.
Babs eventually married a retired sea captain but they never lived together, sometimes meeting on the sea front for a walk. I put this arrangement down to her eccentricity until I saw my grandmother’s will. As explained above, she had forfeited to her children her husband’s fortune when she remarried, so she had not much to leave her children anyway. But she provided that Babs would enjoy the income from the small estate until she married, when the capital would be divided among three of her four children, Will having taken his share in advance when he emigrated. What that meant, of course, was that George and my mother could receive nothing until Babs married, so I assume Babs’ marriage to the captain was strictly one of convenience, a generous gesture to release a little money to siblings.
When Babs fell ill, apparently because she was starving herself on some mad diet, she hired a nurse to look after her. Then the nurse fell ill and Babs looked after her. The two ladies lived together for years, but whether there was more to the relationship than friendship I cannot say. Not surprisingly, Babs doted on her sister’s firstborn, my brother John. I thought I was at least acceptable as a nephew until she died in 1968. She had lived all her life on inherited money, but still managed to leave about £65,000 after death duties, perhaps $1.5 million today. My sister got the house in Weston with the contents, some of which were antiques which went to auction in London, and my brother got most of the money. I got £100 because — according to what Babs told my sister — I had not been sufficiently attentive. Well, I have already admitted that I lacked social graces, but I did not know it was going to be that expensive.
My mother had inherited the same small fortune as Babs but when she died at age forty-two she left only a few thousand pounds, including the family home. Like her brother George in Canada, she liked to go horse racing, which no doubt accounted for some of her lost capital. But she also lost money in a famous financial scandal. A promoter and public figure named Clarence Hatry went to jail for fourteen years in 1930 when he admitted forgery, causing thousands of investors to lose large sums. But my mother at least learned her lesson. Having inherited early herself and not made good use of her money, she provided in her will that her children should not inherit until each reached the serious age of twenty-five. I was twenty-five in 1951, and had been married for a year. My share of what was left of her share of the Smedley/Woodroffe money was no fortune, but it enabled us to furnish an apartment and then to make a down payment on a house, a leg-up just when we needed it and the foundation on which we have built whatever security we enjoy today. So I have no right to complain.
So there you have the gene pool from which I emerged, and which helped to shape the journalist I became. I like to think I owe most to solid, striving, respectable Westells, working their way up in the world. But as my career will show, I can make reckless, almost irresponsible, decisions, and the reader may easily find some of my ideas eccentric, all of which I probably owe to the Woodroffes.
~ Chapter 2 ~
Growing Up in the Old World
Shortly after the end of the First World War, my father got a job as an insurance agent and inspector in Exeter, the capital city of the county of Devon in the rural southwest — one county up from Land’s End. My brother, Woodroffe John, was born there in 1921,1 in 1926, and my sister, Diana Wescombe, in 1930. I grew up in that old city and it was part of my nurture. It has a city wall, part of which was built by the Romans, a Norman castle built by William the Conqueror, and a Gothic cathedral built by generations of craftsmen on the site of an earlier Anglo-Saxon church. Translated from Latin, the inscription under the cathedral clock warns, “The hours perish and are reckoned to our account.” More cheerfully, it is said also to be the clock in the nursery rhyme:
Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock;
The clock struck one
and down he run
Hickory, dickory dock!
John Graves Simcoe, first
