My Great Grandfather moved from rural Hampshire to London sometime in the late 1870’s, during the course of which he changed his surname first from Prater to Cannon, and then to Canning. We don’t know the reason why, but I suspect a family rift of some sort. Whatever the reason, from that point onwards our family were Cannings, rather than Praters.
Great Grandad pictured in 1904 in East Ham, London.
So really, my name should be Mick Prater.
But it isn’t.
Does it matter? In any way at all?
Of course it doesn’t.
And this, I think, illustrates the absurdity of those – primarily men – who think it is of paramount importance that the family name is continued. I know this supposedly gives a kind of spurious immortality to family members but, really, it’s a nonsense.
Silbury Hill, located a few miles from Avebury in Wiltshire, is the largest artificial mound in Europe, roughly the same size as the contemporaneous Egyptian pyramids, although it puts me more in mind of the Mexican pyramids. At 39m high and 160m wide and built of chalk, it was a colossal undertaking for the time – it was completed approximately four thousand four hundred years ago. Yet its purpose remains unknown; apparently it contains no burial, although folklore ascribes to it the final resting place of King Sil. Other theories connect it with the Goddess, and others yet suggest it as an observatory or sundial, although since Stonehenge was already in existence at the time of its construction, albeit in an earlier form as a henge monument, it seems highly unlikely that so much effort would have been put into the building of a mere mound, no matter how huge, if that was intended as its sole purpose.
Archaeological evidence suggests it was constructed over around a hundred years and there was probably a track spiralling around the hill to the top – used both in its construction and then afterwards to access the top of the hill which appeared to originally be flat. And that there was a constant tweaking of the shape over the following years, as though succeeding generations each felt the need to make their mark on the site.
Allowing for the fact it would have been a little higher due to the effects of weathering over the last four thousand years, it would have been as high as the nearby hills, Waden Hill and Knoll Down, but the difference would have been striking, since this perfectly shaped mound would have been dazzlingly white. The effect of the hill on anyone approaching would have been remarkable. Imagine it gleaming like a snow-covered mountain in the sunshine, or glowing mysteriously at night in a thin moonlight.
This isn’t something a tribe decided to do because they had some time on their hands – they’d had a good day’s hunting and the roof had been fixed, so why not? And not something just done on a whim – ‘You know, I like this place, but I really rather fancy putting a large hill just over there.’ This was a long term project, literally a lifetime’s work. And it was intended as one heck of a statement. Like a Medieval cathedral or Trump Tower, it was intended to be seen from a long way away and admired and talked about, although which of those two did it resemble? Was it the narcissistic project of an egotistical power-hungry madman or was it intended to glorify something greater than them?
On balance, I suspect the latter. Even if the project was begun by one strong-minded individual intent on somehow making a name for himself, it wouldn’t have been completed until long after his (or her) death, suggesting there was still a strong driving-force to complete the project.
But this is an area absolutely heaving with ancient monuments. Although Stonehenge is some twenty miles to the south, West Kennet long barrow is less than a mile away, Avebury Henge and stone circles only slightly further, and within the immediate landscape there are any number of burial mounds and standing stones. By any standard, this is a prehistoric landscape, and the visitor here must be looking at the evidence of ancient societies for whom memory and ritual were of great importance and significance.
I said earlier that there is no evidence of burials in the hill, yet all that means is that surveys have not revealed any chambers within the mound, or back-filled tunnels that might have been used to access the same. Yet I do wonder whether the entire structure might have been raised over the burial of an important personage. Perhaps future generations will find out.
…not anything I wanted to be, because that’s not true. Like everyone else, I have my limitations. Plenty of them. I’m sure we all play this game sometimes, even if it’s only in the form of ‘I wish I’d done so-and-so instead of the boring / hateful / planet-destroying job I’m doing now’, but it’s rather pointless wishing one had trained as an astrophysicist when one is aware one left school at sixteen after barely scraping through their GCSE’s. Or wishing one had become a Premier League footballer when one knows perfectly well they have no real aptitude for the game and aren’t particularly agile. I’m not sure whether I’m guilty of over-thinking this, but I get annoyed by the plethora of adverts nowadays aimed at both children and adults proclaiming ‘You can be whatever you want to be!’ or ‘There are no limits to your ambition!’ or the like, and I think a lot of people are just being set up for failure, or to think they are failures, which is frequently worse.
Yeah, I guess I might have been a bicycle rickshaw driver. Who can say?
But let’s change tack a little, here. While a tiny part of me does wish I’d knuckled down and made an attempt to become an established folk musician (post 1), I’m not sure I’d ever have really wanted to be a tramp or a monk in this lifetime. Although I can certainly see the attraction of being a hermit! But I am relatively happy with the various jobs I’ve ended up doing, and looking back if I could have picked another career path, I’m not sure what would have been my chosen one (from my perspective of now). I reckon I’d have been happy as an archaeologist, a stone- or wood-carver, or some other sort of artist. But these choices obviously reflect my current interests. Ask me again in ten years time, and I might well give a different answer.
And you knew it was coming, didn’t you? What would be your ideal career if you could go back and do it all again?
I put a few photos of Venice up on here a long time ago. Today I fancied putting up a few more. We’ve been to Venice just the once, and really enjoyed it. We saw it in the sun and in the rain. Both were beautiful. We should probably go again before it sinks.
In February 1600 Will Kemp Morris-danced his way from London to Norwich, a distance of approximately a hundred miles.
Kemp (or Kempe), born around 1560 and died, probably of the plague. in 1603, was an actor, dancer and all-round clown. A member of Shakespeare’s company, Chamberlain’s Men, he regularly played the role of the clown in Shakespeare’s plays. He undertook his famous dance after some sort of disagreement within Shakespeare’s company as a result of which Kemp took his shares and left. Although we don’t know what form this disagreement took, it is widely assumed Kemp was very much a scene-stealer who was apt to improvise during a performance – possibly Shakespeare was alluding to Kemp when he has Hamlet declare ‘let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them’. Kemp also had a tendency to dance jigs at the end of a performance that critics declared ruined the mood of a tragic performance.
Afterwards he described his dance as a ‘nine daies wonder’ in a booklet he published, although it actually took him twenty eight days to accomplish as he rested up for a while between each day dancing,
By the time he had joined Chamberlain’s Men, he was already famous for his acting and dancing. He had toured the Low Countries (now referred to as Benelux) and Denmark 1585-86 as a performer with the Earl of Leicester’s Men, performed frequently as a solo dancer and actor – usually performing clownish parts – and his improvised jigs were renowned for being frequently both ridiculous and lewd, which might go some way to explaining the rift with Shakespeare’s company, who by then were attempting to attract a more refined audience.
The dance from London to Norwich was performed as a publicity stunt and also as a way for Kemp to raise money by betting on himself to complete the journey. He was accompanied by a Thomas Slye, who played both the tabor (a small drum) and a fife to accompany the dance steps, and George Spratt who acted as overseer to the spectacle. Kemp wore a feathered cap, a slashed doublet with streamers attached to the shoulders, slashed breeches, and with clusters of jingle bells around his ankles and calves. A large crowd assembled to watch him set off from London at seven in the morning on February 10th 1600, and he continued to attract great crowds the length of his journey, which he completed on March 9th. He wrote the booklet later, as a riposte to those who doubted he had completed the journey.
This isn’t the origin of the phrase nine days wonder, incidentally, that goes back to at least the early thirteen hundreds.
The tune Kemp’s Jig appears in John Playford’s The English Dancing Master of 1651 and is attributed to John Dowland, but it is known that Kemp himself composed some jigs – four examples survive today. Whether Dowland (if it were he) wrote the jig to honour this journey, however, or whether it was a more generic tribute, we don’t know.
The journey, though, was quite an achievement.
I know this is all a bit niche, but having bought myself a sweatshirt featuring the image, I decided to learn a bit more about Mr Kemp and this is the result of that. I already knew about his dancing from London to Norwich, but I knew little about him beyond that.
My wife often says I’m in touch with my inner vagabond. I’m taking that to mean that I enjoy walking, unless she’s referring to something else. My dress sense, for example. But yes, I love walking, especially long distance walking, but most of all I like to simply wander. There is a tremendous pleasure to be had by just setting off for a long walk without any particular destination in mind. Taking the more interesting-looking path as we go.
Of course, it’s not always possible to travel this way. We need to have some sort of destination in mind unless we’re prepared to just settle down to sleep wherever we find ourselves at nightfall. Usually we don’t have the time and the freedom to travel like this. Some people may also find it unnerving not to have board and lodging all planned in advance.
I’ve only done it occasionally, I must admit, but found it remarkably liberating when I did. There was no pressure to reach a particular destination by nightfall, I just had the freedom to wander along at my own pace until I felt I’d had enough for the day.
Even then, of course, some planning had to be done. Would I carry food or rely on reaching somewhere I could get a meal of some sorts? Would I carry shelter? Extra clothes?
But that is not exactly tramping, of course. It is just an exercise to be enjoyed (or otherwise) for a short period. It’s not a permanent lifestyle.
I’m sure that very few folk have deliberately chosen tramping as a lifestyle, but I’m aware there are some who have. This leads to the obvious question – why? I suppose all of us, at some time, wonder what is really important in life? Riches and property are, indeed, a burden in many ways, as well as conferring the obvious advantages in life. Some people just didn’t want that lifestyle. Some didn’t want the responsibilities of a settled life, with or without a family. There were always some folk who could just never settle anywhere for long. Most, though, would have ended up tramping through loss of employment and / or home.
Certainly I understand the difficulties of the tramping life, especially when one is no longer young. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be trying to survive as a homeless person in a city – rightly or wrongly, I think of tramping as a rural phenomenon. The whole point of it was to be on the move, rather than staying in one place. I doubt it would be possible today, with so many laws against that kind of lifestyle. There were, of course, laws against it in the past, too, but almost certainly much harder to enforce. I think, too, society is just ordered differently today. We think differently to how we did fifty or a hundred years ago. A tramp turning up at a farm today looking for a couple of hours work in return for a meal would get short shrift, and I can’t imagine any householder regarding one with anything other than hostility.
Again, I can’t imagine anyone choosing that lifestyle through the winter. But tramps used to learn of places they could settle for the winter, often carrying out odd jobs in return for permission to sleep in a shed or a barn and the odd meal. In this post I’m talking specifically about Britain, but I suspect it applies equally to hobos in America, swagmen in Australia, and possibly others I’m not aware of elsewhere.
And it would be unlikely to be a long life. But there were always some who chose it as a way of life rather than being forced into it by circumstances, and in another time I might possibly have been one of those.
It seems unbelievable (to me, that is), but it’s now fifteen years since I last visited Nepal. This is just a selection of some of my favourite photos from my trips there. Some you’ve already seen, some you haven’t.
I have finally got my family history book formatted and printed, and I reckon it looks quite decent. So all I need to do now is to get it posted out to family members.
While researching all this, I naturally made a lot of discoveries. Some were certainly more unexpected than others, though. From previous research my father had done, we already suspected that my great grandfather had changed his name, possibly on a whim, from Prater to Canning. I was able to confirm this by, amongst other things, a comparison of various dates of birth in his family. This immediately removes the possibility of my searching back to see whether my name has any noble / famous / important roots. This is something that matters a lot to some people, although obviously only along the male line, which is why it seems to matter much more to men.
Although I turned it up too recently for the book, I have learned details about my father’s life in WWII which I would otherwise never have come to know. I had no idea – and seemingly nor had anyone else in the family – that from 1940 until joining the regular army in 1943 and being posted to India and Burma, he had been part of what had been dubbed ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’, soldiers trained to operate behind enemy lines in the event of a German invasion of Britain. Fulfilling the same role as the French Resistance, they would have carried out acts of sabotage and hit-and-run attacks to slow the enemy advance. it was only after that threat had receded that he joined the ‘Regulars’.
And then, less unexpectedly, there were the stories of extreme hardship: the early deaths, the poverty, the workhouse, tuberculosis and pleurisy…
Of course, if it was possible to search back far enough, we would all find we had a common early human ancestor, which gives the lie to the importance of race.
Does any of this research really matter? Well, in some ways, no. Does it sound crazy if I say that despite all my work, it does not matter that much to me? I’m very much in two minds over this. A lot of this felt more like an intellectual exercise than a personal quest. It was interesting to find out where my great grandparents and their parents had lived, for this felt just close enough to be a part of me. But before them? And especially when I could discover nothing more than their names and some vague dates? No, not really. Throughout this project I have been especially keen to be able to put names to old photographs, for this seemed the only way to make these people come alive again, or at least begin to. That I’ve been able to positively identify some of them feels more satisfying than pushing a line back another hundred years, although I do have nearly every branch back at least to the 1700’s, but in every case it is the stories I’ve found out about these people that matter.
But back to my question. Does any of this research matter? I do think it has the potential to bring us a little closer to our families by emphasising our shared history, and I’ve greatly enjoyed long discussions with cousins about our various researches and discoveries. But beyond that? Well, I’ve enjoyed learning the social history involved with my family, the realities of how people actually lived in the towns and countryside over the last few hundred years. And as well as emphasising my connection to my extended family it has also, as I wrote a few month ago, given me a greater sense of connection to the land where I live.
I have enjoyed exploring the past, but I’m not going to live there.
Yes, you heard me correctly. a monk. Regular readers of this indulgence will know I pour scorn on organised religion, but also that I have a hankering for the simple life and for solitude. I would love to be disciplined enough to do without fripperies, but I never quite seem to get there. Obviously social media would also have to go if I was a monk. In fact, even if I didn’t become a monk, I think perhaps social media should go. That would be good for me.
But not books, of course. They’re Important.
In another time, a time when belief in the predominant religion was a given, I would have had no problem in becoming a monk. But since I don’t have that belief, it sounds like a contradiction to say that to me the spiritual side of life is extremely important, but the spiritual is, to me, separate from religion. I view the spiritual side of me as being that part that yearns for simplicity, for art, for the minimum possessions required for life, and to be surrounded by nature. Incidentally, I also understand that monks are given a daily ration of beer or wine.
That also sounds good.
And because I was fortunate to have been born in an age of scientific enquiry when most people no longer blindly accept religious dogma, but are generally prepared to question it, I am free to make choices based on my own conscience and on what I consider important.
But I could almost, under certain circumstances, become a Buddhist monk, even in this life. I have said before how I am attracted to Buddhism, although as a philosophy rather than as a religion. I like the way the emphasis is on yourself to make your best life. Gods don’t have to be involved.
I have twice spent a week in that sort of environment – one time a week of Zen meditation, which was very hard work but left me with a great feeling of clear-headed calm, and once on a retreat at a Benedictine monastery where I made a point of attending a simple morning service each day and spending the rest of the day in thought and writing and painting and gently wandering around the extensive grounds. As a panacea for the stresses of modern life it was difficult to beat. I could, as I said, see myself in another life settling into the routine there on a permanent basis. But not in this life.
Mick Canning 