We reach out to all, regardless of Race, Colour, Creed or National Origin, with support for researching family and documenting cultural inhertance
DearAncestor,-Your tombstone stands amongst the rest, neglected and alone
The names and dates are chiselled out on polished marble stone
It reaches out to all who care, it is too late to mourn
you did not know that I exist, you died and I was born
Yet each of us are cells of you, in flesh, in blood, in bone.
Our blood contracts and beats a pulse entirely not our own
Dear Ancestor, the place you filled one hundred years ago
spreads out amongst the ones you left who would have loved you so,
I wonder if you lived and loved, I wonder if you knew
That someday I would find this spot, and come to visit you.
IMPORTANT
We are suspending operation of the LAWS FAMILY REGISTER
from June 30, 3016
We will work on our LAWS FAMILY TREE
This Blog will continue
All LAWS Enquires arw still welcome
We have excluded records of living people to protect their Privacy -we are not showing births after 1920 or marriages after 1940 these are only available to members of the register
If you are interested in anyone listed here, email us with the name, date and reference number, and we will happily do a look up, you might even get a whole tree!
This blog will also appear on our Facebook page, please come visit us, We will be happy to help with your LAWS/LAWES research, and in certain instances we may be willing to undertake private research on your behalf.
registrar@lawslamilyregister.org.uk
Family Events
1650 - Birth: Bathea LAWS, Stepney MDX UK
1798 - Birth: Fielding LAWS, NC USA
1813 - Birth: Elizabeth LAWS, Shadwall MDX UK
1824 - Birth: George LAWS, Edmondsham DOR UK
1842 - Marriage: Joseph LAWS (Master Baker) and Elizabeth Margaret GILHAM (Dressmaker) , Great Yarmouth NFK UK
1845 - Birth: William LAWS (Cathedral Timekeeper) Chatteris CAM UK
1847 - Baptism: John LAWS (Farm Bailiff) Chatteris CAM UK
1848 - Death: Americus Gaston LAWS,
1858 - Baptism: Elizabeth Mary LAWS, Whitby NRY UK
1858 - Birth: Sarah LAWS,
1861 - Occupation: Francis LAWS, (Steward on Ship)
1904 - Birth: Janet Stuart LAWES,
1904 - Birth: Flora Eva LAWES, Norwich NFK UK
1915 - Birth: Doris Lilian LAWS,
1920 - Death: Robert Murray LAWES (Barrister) Grosvenor Place MDX UK
1940 - Death: Thomas Edward George LAWS (ARP Messenger) Portsmouth HAM UK
1947 - Death: Alfred William LAWS, Colchester ESS UK
1965 - Death: William LAWS Bountiful UT USA
1965 - Death: Edith Ruth LAWES, Portsmouth HAM UK
1984 - Death: Charles William LAWES, Honour MI United States
2004 - Death: Betty LAWS, Burnsville, Yancy Co, NC USA
2011 - Burial: David John LAWES, Halesworth SFK UK
2011 - Death: David John LAWES,
2015 - Death: Michael Bernard LAWS,
MISC
1756 - Baptism: Daniel DAWKINS, Hursley HAM UK
1895 - Birth: Sarah Jane CHARTERS, Wortley WRY UK
1906 - Birth: George Charles VINCENT, Lambeth SRY UK
1933 - Death: James BLANEY (Miner)
2004 - Burial: Alma MURPHY, Burnsville, Yancy Co, NC USA
2004 - Burial: Alma MURPHY, Burnsville, Yancy Co, NC USA
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A CHILD OF THE 1920's
AS SEEN FROM THE 1990's
by
John Robert Laws 1921-2008
Part 8.
In the High Street there were those who
offered oddments from doorways, matches and lemons spring to mind. Along the
gutters the sandwich board men, walked, enclosed in their advertising matter or
calls to repentance, sometimes singly sometimes in threes or fours in a
straggling crocodile. Occasionally there was an organ grinder on the corner of
a side street, winding his handle and his mechanical music would add to the
general street noise. There is an impression of noisiness in the High Street.
Apart from the street traders there were trams clattering on their steel rails,
horses were iron shod and so were the wheels of most of the carts. Lorries vans
and cars were less well silenced and there was even the occasional Steam
traction engine. However there were no motor scooters and the few motorbikes
did not roar around.
One faint memory of Green Lanes is of the
buses with their cabs shrouded in wire netting to protect the volunteer drivers
during the National Strike of 1926. What a good job there were no television
cameras to encourage the attackers.
As well as the main shopping area in Green
Lanes there were a few little shops around the railway station. The sweet shop
was to me the most important and in those impecunious days many sweet shops
kept a halfpenny and farthing box with a selection of sweets at those prices
for kids with pocket money. It is a sign of changing times that as I type
this computer throws out the word Farthing as not being in the dictionary.
The dress of the period is familiar from
photographs but the black and white of these photos does not tell us how much
to colours changed. These monochrome photos are perhaps appropriate to the
rather drab colours of every day wear. Grey, black and white was definitely
favourites except for special occasions. Green was thought unlucky by some
though my mother had a brilliant green evening dress for one special occasion.
Red tended to be associated with the immoral so one was left with brown and
blue and usually dark at that. Even holiday wear was much less colourful, white
flannels and a navy blue blazer being about the height of seaside fashion for
Pater families. The ladies did much better with flower patterned fabrics. For
better or for worse the mini skirt hadn't been invented and bikini was still
the name of an unknown Pacific island.
Among the street people with distinctive
dress the policeman stood out. A big man in his navy blue tunic and trousers, a
leather belt around his middle with a bull’s-eye torch at the rear and his
outfit completed with a proper Bobbies helmet on his head and big black boots
on his feet for pavement pounding. Just occasionally his whistle might be heard
shrilling as he chased some malefactor down the road. More often he was seen
but not heard as he came by on foot or on his bike with his rain cape neatly
folded over the handlebars.
Our family doctor lived just across the
way in a sizable corner house. I saw him from time to time when I had various
childhood ailments but his likeness escapes me. My mother always thought me
thin and needing fattening up but rather doubting when the doctor included pork
in his dietary recommendations. Anyway I ate like a horse the only dislike I
can remember was the kidney in steak and kidney pudding. The doctor had
installed a machine for 'sun-ray treatment' and my mother took me over to him
several times for a dose of the beneficial light. It was some sort of ultra
violet light emission which would no frighten a quack silly today but in small
doses probably did neither good or harm.
INOVATION
The twenties and early thirties were a
period of innovation in the home. Discoveries made in earlier decades started
to come to fruition as household hardware, consumer durables stated to flow
into the home. It was only the first wave of course; the flood was released after
the war onto the earlier infrastructure.
The first innovation in my world was the
gramophone which ousted the piano-player largely on account of size I suspect
as the reproduction from the brittle single sided records was less than good.
We must have missed a couple of stages in this development as I did not see a
cylinder playing phonograph until friend produced one from a
junkshop a year or two later. Nor do I remember a Gramophone with a big horn on
top. Ours had the horn hidden away in its polished woodwork and the only music
from it which struck a chord in my memory was Toseelli’s Seranade.
The radio seems to have come at the same
time as the gramophone not true of course, but a childhood impression. The
crystal set was impressive hardware then even if the output that came through
the earphones all the way from Daventry was erratic and to me uninteresting ,
Fiddling with the ‘cats whisker’ to try and coax the best reception from
the as of yet untamed crystal was much more to my taste.
The crystal set was not with us long; Soon
battery powered sets with varying numbers of mysterious glowing thermionic
valves took over with better reception and more to go wrong. Aerial poles
sprouted at the foot of most gardens, harbingers of the later ugly skyline rash.
Two batteries were needed to work these sets, a large HT battery which just
wore out and had to be replaced and a lead acid accumulator which had to be
recharged at the shop down the road, all this power made the use of a
loudspeaker possible. It stood on top of the cabinet housing all the bits and
its curly metal horn was now really audible.
For me change began with the coming of
electric light, just the tip of the innovation iceberg as the electric supply
network built up. In with the electric light came the electric points as we
called the outlets, only one in a room to start with just for a reading
lamp perhaps. The radio, which we called the wireless with a wry smile, it had
more wires than any other previous domestic item, was now released from the
tyranny of the accumulator as mains powered sets arrived. The voice from the
trumpet of your loud speaker no longer started to fade as the battery power ran
down. It is odd to think that a considerably later innovation the replacement
of the valve by the transistor, brought back the rechargeable battery but in a
small and convenient form.
With the plugging in of the new radios the
electric supply had started on its trail of removing chores from the household.
The next arrival after the radio was the electric fire which rapidly penetrated
into every home with electric supply and brought quick warmth. More flexible
than the older gas fire was, it was even more useful before central heating
became commonplace.
Following it up the front steps came the
vacuum cleaner salesman, the first and probable the greatest beneficiary of the
small electric motor in the domestic field, except the housewife of course. No
longer were the clouds of dust raised as the bass broom worked its way down the
stairs and through the hall to the back door. The volume of dirt in the house
was reduced but the battle could not be won until the open coal fire was on the
way out.
Somehow progress was slow with the
electric cooker which did not really become controllable until my childhood was
well into double figures. Gas and solid fuel cookers continued to spread dirt
in the home but were the easiest and cheapest stoves to use and even now hold
material portion of the market.
The only other innovation to compare with
electricity was the motor vehicle. It had been invented some thirty odd years
before, but development and cost reduction took time, and I was about four
years old when my father bought his first car, a bull nosed Morris, built like
a tank but a troublesome beast. It was 1925 and there were not a lot of cars on
the road, the speed limit was 20 mph and although this lasted very little
longer my dad managed to get fined for exceeding it before it was changed.
Houses had no garages, and the car was housed about half a mile away where a garage
proprietor had a few lockup garages besides his scruffy workshop. The Morris
was only used at weekends and holidays and although it was a lovely toy for my
dad I thought it a bit of a bore and escaped from it as soon as I was old
enough to ride a bike on the road.
Perhaps the most innovative thing about
our car was that my mother learnt to drive it, scarcely the done thing at that
time. By the time I was ten she had one of her own, a little open topped Singer
which was far more to my taste and could be pushed up to 60mph “Don’t tell your
father!” There road system was getting some improvement in the twenties and a
few new roads space was left for a second carriageway, often it got left for
another thirty years.
At some point my father changed his Morris
for a Chrysler which went much father, too fast in fact to get round the
Anglo-Saxon corners of East Anglia, where he wrote it off and landed himself in
hospital for a day or two, seat belts were a much later innovation, after that
he got a sedate Hillman which lasted the rest of his days.
Lord, help me dig into the past
and sift the sands of time
That I might find the roots that made
This family tree of mine
Lord, help me trace the ancient roads,
On which my father's trod
And led them through so many lands
To find our present sod.
Lord, help me find an ancient book
Or dusty manuscript,
Thats's safely hidden now away
In some forgotten crypy.
Lord, let it bridge the gap that haunts
My soul, when I can't find
The missing link between some name
That ends the same as mine
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With grateful thanks to Simon Knott for permission to reproduce his photographs on this site see :-http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/
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