Foundations

 Foundations 1:52

The first prompt for 2022 is Foundations. 

I am the foundation of my family tree. It begins with me and goes back exponentially: my dad, Ted Jackson, his dad, Frank Jackson and his mum, Grandma; my mum, Mary Wibberley, her dad, Grandpa, and her mum, Dari and so on and so on. The tree branching out on either side: the Bridlington Yorkshire family, mariners; the Princes from Liverpool and the Roberts from Carnaevon; the Wibberleys from Derbyshire, the Bests from Devon, the Hunts and the Hobbs from Wiltshire and the Rickmans from Sussex. We get to Peter Godlee and Margaret Burwood, the Quakers in Southwald.

I look at my life today in Forth, Tasmania in 2022, and I see the threads passed down from my family. If I take a day, today, the 2nd of January, I can look at all the strands that are my inheritance. 

Firstly, this: writing: Family History. Sarah née Godlee Rickman, my 2nd great aunt, compiled the Rickman/Godlee family tree and one of her nephews or nieces,  my first cousins 3 times removed, typed it all up and deposited it in the East Sussex Records Office. I accessed it at The Keep in 2019. Sarah transcribed her father’s life story and that was copied and passed down to her brother, John Godlee, the Australian migrant. So it came to me. Sarah’s great niece, my grandmother, Dari, saved all the letters and they too came to me. The obsession with family history is a plank in my foundation. 

As I write I am eating Christmas cake. I can’t claim it was an ancestral recipe, but I’m pretty sure generations of women in my family have produced Christmas cakes, going back to the Yorkshire and Lancashire branches: The Yorkshire Jacksons, grocers; Grandma Jackson, solidly associated with Christmas cakes and mince pies; Charlotte Hobbs would have made Christmas cakes; my mother sent a Christmas cake to Aunty Mary Godlee when she was in Europe after the war.  It was the taste of family, a taste of home. 

Before I sat down to write I practiced the piano. I was practising a piece by Bach. Did  Wibberleys and the Godlees play that piece? Great grandfather, the Rev Brian Wibberley, wrote a book on Music and Religion. He preached at the Kent Town Methodist Church at the time when the compiler of The Children’s Bach, Harold Davies, was the organist at the same church. Grandpa collected recordings of classical music. All the Godlee girls practised the piano and the next generation, my mother and her cousin Lassie, continued, Lassie professionally. I was taken to concerts with my mother. Season’s tickets to the Australian Opera were a feature of my teenage years in Melbourne. Music sings through the foundations. 

Before piano, my breakfast was berries, picked this morning from the garden. Growing food comes down to me from the Hobbs, ag labs in Wiltshire who came to Adelaide in the 1840s and started market gardens. Jonah Hobbs, his sons Harris and Frank, involved in the founding of the Produce Markets in East Adelaide, brought boxes of fruit and vegetables to Charlotte Godlee and the family in Leighside. Charlotte also grew fruit, apricots and plums and made it into jam. When I learned that the Hobbs had grown fruit and vegetables after I first started investigating my family history I felt a strong connection with this line and some shame that my garden doesn’t match Jonah Hobbs and it concerns me that he and Uncle Harris would be critical of my lazy life style and weedy garden. 

And then there’s religion. I did Meeting for Worship by Zoom today. John Jackson, my father’s great grandfather, became a Wesleyan town Minister in his 60s. He and Frances née Nightingale, were commended for their care of cholera victims during the epidemic in Hull. On my mother’s side, great grandfather Brian Wibberley was teaching in the Primitive Methodist Sunday school in Derbyshire when he was 12. At 19 he was shipped out to Australia as Missionary. He married Maria Ann Hunt who’s father was William Hunt, another Primitive Methodist missionary and who’s mother was Elizabeth Best. Her father was Joseph Best who was a Primitive Methodist minister in Cornwall and Willtshire.  And to the Godlees and the Rickmans, Quakers since 1600 and something. The women, Elizabeth Best, Charlotte Godlee, Dari, Grandma Jackson and Aunty Ginnie, they were deeply involved in their local church and Sunday schools.. Religion, Protestant religion be it Methodist or Quaker, runs down the family tree on both sides, drenching us with Spiritual riches.

Before Meeting, I read, as I do every morning. Reading and books is basic. All the family letters are full of books, whether camping out in north western Australia, as a stockman by the light of a campfire, (great uncle John Godlee) or in the trenches in the First World War, (Grandpa) or in the 1920s in the family home surrounded by domestic tasks, (Charlotte Hobbs) they were writing to each other about books. I love to take up their suggestions. 

Today has not included any social or political engagement but that too is part of my family legacy. The Methodists and the Quakers had strong social justice concerns. The Jacksons as well were associated with unions and the Labour party. Frank Jackson’s sister, Emily, married a bricky’s labourer who was the first Labour candidate in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Dad himself taught me the importance of unionism and political action. The migrant John Godlee was a union organiser for the Railways union and was a key organiser of the Eight Hour Day movement in Adelaide. 

And the other item in my life that today has not touched on but which is a foundation is needlework. The Guy sisters, the Godlee great aunts in Sussex, my Adelaide great aunts, my mother, all needle workers. I’m off now to work on an embroidered hat band, featuring Australian native flowers.