Documental

MY NEW PASSPORT was delivered by courier less than four days after I posted the application for a new one, and my almost-outdated passport, in our village Post Office-cum-Bookstore, to a processing centre in Peterborough.

Peterborough is some distance away, a few hours by fast train, an hour by air. I suppose, perhaps six hours in a van. I don't know how my application and the cheque for £72 got there, or how the British Passport - which has above United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the front cover two words which I despise: European Union - got back to me so very quickly.

When the courier, who was driving a white van, knocked at my door and handed the envelope to me I thought there must be some problem with my application. However, it was just a case of efficient service. Amazing what £72 can buy in January 2009 when a pound is worth but a groat.

I not only received my new passport, but one of the two photographs I had sent to Peterborough (as requested on the forms) was returned to me, along with a couple of pamphlets on travel and currency matters. As the only foreign currency I expect to encounter is that in Scotland, I popped the pamphlets in my file, along with my old passport.

Ten years ago, my passport photograph featured a white-haired gentleman that I still hardly recognise. Said old codger had, and has, a white moustache (a feature since he was about seventeen when The Beatles grew theirs in imitation of his - Sgt Pepper and all that Summer of Love business). I didn't wear my bifocals in the latest picture as the fellow showing me how to use the digital photo-booth in the village thought glasses might give off a reflection. So, steel-grey eyes under white brows. Damn, I'd look pretty tough except for the wattles.

Facially, I've not changed so much. I looked this bad a decade ago. And I remember getting that passport picture taken in 1999. I had it done in a little shop in Bermuda called Kit 'n Caboodle. What I didn't know on that day I had it done was that a couple of years later I would be the passport photographer in that shop. I spent two years in hell in Kit 'n' Caboodle taking passport photographs, making photocopies and selling newspapers and fags. Ugh!

I don't have much of a history, or paper trail, compared to some. Blogging is increasing the chances of someone noticing my effort to make a mark on the world. That's the sort of mark that many might treat much like shit on their shoes: They want to be rid of it before it marks something else and they are held to blame.

My new passport doesn't say much about me, not even if one could read the computer chip embedded in it. A quick visual inspection shows the same old face, my full name, my citizenship and place of birth. That's about it. And when the passport expires, which might not be when I do. If I were travelling, I suppose the chip would have some family and residential details when scanned. So would my right eye, if examined appropriately. I had that photo-scanned at an airport a few years ago; it must be in computer databases. I believe the patterns on a retina are unique. I had to remove my glasses to have that scan done, of course; otherwise there would be unique fingerprints in the computer databases too.

The only other documents I have that identify me quite legally are my birth certificate, which is filed somewhere safe in the flat (can't think just where, it's that safe) and my bus pass, which has the same picture as my passport, it happens. The photo-booth spat out four photos for £5.

I'm identified on records such as my utility bills, bank statements and cards, club memberships, medical records and Cailean's medical records, but not legally, I'm guessing. I couldn't claim an inheritance by showing Cailean's castration bill, or my Visa card. And no end of these blogs will enable me to travel overseas through a customs and immigration checkpoint. Google up Ross Eldridge won't win the Lottery.

I have a few hobbies: The latest and most consuming is genealogy. I work many hours each week on my Family Tree, and I have over 700 names that I'm fairly familiar with. Eldridge is the least of me. I am King, Witney, Crow, Moon, Proctor, Clough, Heys, Stockdale, Lancaster, Driver, Lee and Geldard, and more. Those are blood lines that flow in mine. If you prick me, am I not Hustwit and Sherwood and Conqueste as well? It's a fascinating thing to look into all this.

The folks, my folks, in my Family Tree, are faintly represented in the world: Census and BMD reports. The Mormons have many, many church and registrar records available for Family History buffs. The Mormons do their research to dig up names (not bodies) to have proxy baptisms for the dead. Kind of creepy if you are a Jew exterminated at Auschwitz to have a Utah housewife being dunked for you. One can find old telephone books, wills and legal documents, photographs and correspondence.

I've been looking at my grand-uncle James Arthur Lancaster's military papers, in particular his medical records. James Arthur, my grandfather William Lancaster's older brother, was 21 when he volunteered to fight in the First World War, and had his medical on 5 May, 1915. The medical was certified and he was signed on that same day by a Justice of the Peace, H.H. Heys, who may have been related if James Arthur had lived long enough to see his brother marry into the Heys family.

On 5 May, 1915, James Arthur Lancaster was 5' 5 ¼" tall, weighed 128 lbs, had a fully expanded chest of 35 ½" (the expansion being 3") and he was 21 years and 4 months old. He was right-handed. He was, up until that moment (and had been from the age of eleven) a weaver in the Queen Street Mill. He was a member of the Church of England.

In May of 1918, James Arthur Lancaster was hospitalised near the battlefield, twice for diarrhoea, and was also treated for scabies. I've looked up scabies: They are mites that burrow in between one's fingers and toes, in armpits and groins, in the cleft in the buttocks. They are easily passed by direct person-to-person contact, or from surfaces, and are still commonly found. Well, one hopes James Arthur got his from a hooker, but it was probably a dirty towel. (Same thing, you might say.)

2 September, 1918, poor young James was killed in action, all of 24 years old. That was not recorded on a new certificate, just scribbled onto an old form. I guess paper was scarce with all the trees going to prop up the trenches.

I found out more about my grand-uncle's proportions, in some ways, than you could easily find out about me. I'll confess here that I'm taller and heavier than he was, and wear a 42" jacket if you want to send me one. I'm partial to tweeds and corduroys.

Should one go looking for one's kindred dead? Mormons are told they must, for they cannot be saved without them. My excuse is just as selfish: I'm looking for myself.

My next passport, due in 2019, might feature in its embedded device a family tree back to Adam, every document of any importance that ever featured me, the contents of this blog, and several photograph albums.

Of course, I might be dead in 2019 as the average age of members of my family hardly extends to 70, and I sneezed several times this afternoon. No telling what I'll look like next go around. I might be in an urn. Some great-nephew of mine might be wondering what to do with my dust.

FOXHOLES

Queen Street & Mill, Harle Syke, 1910

Military Record for James Arthur Lancaster, 1918

Wancourt British Cemetery, France, 2008

War Memorial, Harle Syke, 2008

Queen Street Mill & Museum, Harle Syke, 2008

A certain scribe came, and said unto him, Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.
And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.
But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.
St. Matthew, 8:19-22

My little dugout, my home these last two or three days: I am in a narrow trench about four feet deep, and my dugout is a hole scooped out of the trench side and roofed over with a piece of corrugated iron. When, at night, we settle to rest, and hang up oilsheets at the openings, and light our candle, we are quite comfortable, and happy.
Lance-Corporal Frank Earley, 1 September, 1918. (He was killed the next day, aged 19.)

I DID NOT KNOW of Lance-Corporal Frank Earley and his death in battle on the Western Front on 2 September, 1918 until I read the Imperial War Museum publication "1918 - Year of Victory" penned by Malcolm Brown. I was looking for information on my grandfather's older brother, James Arthur Lancaster, who was killed on 2 September, 1918, fighting alongside the Canadians as they smashed through the "Drocourt-Quéant Switch" offshoot of the Hindenburg Line.

There are only five sentences in the book about the battle for the Drocourt-Quéant Switch, and four of those are reflections on the use of names with Wagnerian connotations by the Germans for the lines in that area. They called the Switch "Wotan". I do not know how many hours the battle lasted, or exactly how many men died and what exactly killed them, or how much firepower was expended during the battle on either side. What was the ground like? Were there any trees left near Arras by 1918? Was it raining? Had the Tommies had time for breakfast? Were prayers held? Did anyone sing "God Save the King" (or even think it)? Did anyone try and run away? Did my mother's uncle die immediately, and was his body quickly removed to a morgue? Was he bagged or boxed? Was he missed?

I've never seen a photograph of James Arthur Lancaster as an adult. He was only 24 when he died fighting for his country, and, as he'd volunteered in 1915, I imagine he did care about his country. He'd been 21 when he signed on, and would have started working in the Queen Street Mill in Harle Syke, Lancashire, ten years before. Of course, that would only have been part-time when he was eleven years of age, he might have had another year with some schooling before becoming a full-time weaver. Perhaps, after ten years in the Mill, the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, and the likelihood of some foreign travel, even under fire, appealed to the young man.

I have seen a photograph taken, I'd guess, in about 1905, picturing James Arthur Lancaster, then aged eleven, his sister Maud, who would have been about nine, and my grandfather, William Lancaster, four or five. The boys looked much alike, their hair cut to a stubble, dressed in identical outfits that may have been borrowed or hired for the occasion, as I doubt that the Lancaster children had much need for fine-cut, black, velvet suits with white, lacy shirts with enormously wide and high collars that seem purely decorative. Not even as useful as linen antimacassars, and the family would not have had those either. The boys looked a bit flash, to be honest. Maud had been dressed as I'd have expected a girl to have looked in her circumstances: plain. However, plain did mean many layers of unattractive cloth, set off by drooping ringlets. That sort of plain takes some work.

The Lancaster children had been posed amidst some grand furniture in front of a photographer's backdrop, a brocade curtain. And that is my picture of James Arthur Lancaster, the only one that might approach the real thing. He looks a good deal like his brother, so he may have grown up to look like my grandfather did, and I have seen photographs of my grandfather at the age that James Arthur was when he was killed in the Pas de Calais. James Arthur must surely have been taller than my grandfather to have been able to enlist, for my grandfather was only a very few inches over five foot. If like my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, he would have tended to be stocky, though I cannot imagine he managed to stay very plump in the trenches. His face would have been narrow, not a very good chin, and he would have been a bit bow-legged, small feet, but not unattractive.

James Arthur was sent to France in October of 1917. I don't suppose anyone in the family had crossed the English Channel in living memory. My father's people, the Eldridges, were sailors in the Royal Navy going back many generations, but my mother's relatives had been farmers and weavers and I have no record of even a distant cousin of some sort putting on a uniform. And we didn't have the money for holidays on the Continent.

I have a number of James Arthur's military records now. It is interesting to see his rather poor penmanship, as if he struggled when signing his name to his Attestation documents when pledging allegiance to His Majesty, King George V. King George V had the family name Saxe-Coburg Gotha, he was the first cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II of the Hohenzollern family. Lancaster was the name of an English Royal House, long before those Germans got involved.

One of the last of the papers that have come my way is shown above, and one can see James Arthur was "In the Field", which might have been fairly accurate. Or in a foxhole in the field. He was taken to a rest station a few times suffering from diarrhoea, and I imagine it must have been more severe than that one gets after a dodgy curry on a Friday night.

And, on 23 September, 1918, someone has made a memo on the records to show that the soldier was "Killed in Action". The memo was entered three weeks after James Arthur Lancaster died, and then the page seems to have been stamped and signed.

My great-grandparents, Harry and Elizabeth Lancaster, received word of their oldest son's death at their home in Harle Syke. Who answered the door? I wonder. It was just a few weeks before the War ended, my grandfather, turning 18, had been called up (fortunately, he contracted the influenza virus and was not caught up in the madness, he got to stay in the Queen Street Mill).

Another document, dated 4 May, 1919, has my great-grandfather signing for two medals awarded to his dead son. The War and Victory Medals. I have no idea where they might have gone.

The exact whereabouts of James Arthur Lancaster's grave was not known in my immediate family until five years ago when, through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, I located him in the Wancourt British Cemetery in Northern France, not far from where he died. His grave reference is VIII H. 10. His name is on two memorials in Harle Syke, Lancashire, and I've shown the one by the town's bowling green. I wonder if he bowled.

The Queen Street Mill in Harle Syke is now a tourist attraction, a museum, boasting the only remaining steam-powered looms in the world. It has free parking, a gift shop and a café.

11 November, 2008, was commemorated as the 90th Anniversary of the Armistice that ended the War to End All Wars. Two Royal Marines were killed in Afghanistan today, squabbling with dusty people over some real estate that they want for their own people and we wouldn't know what to do with if we could take it from them successfully. So it goes.