It's Been A While

 It's been over a month since I last posted. Sorry about that. I've been off work with mental health issues, then back in work, then off again with he same issues. Add to that a week in Bucharest. The good news is that I've kept going with the sketches even though I haven't been posting them. Here's the latest 

A significant number of drawings in this sketchbook relate to my personal family history. I started working on researching it over 20 years ago and have found out a decent amount about all sides of my family. The drawing above related to my father's mother's father. Edgar George Bennett was killed on the first day of the 3rd battle of Ypres in 1917. This one shows the utter devastation visited on the city.

My mother's mother's family owned a prosperous tailors in Windsor for a lot of the 19th century. The premises are still there, but they are now a Lloyd's Bank.

My mother's father's great grandfather John Joycewas the village blacksmith in the charming village of Chilton Foliat near Hungerford, Berks. 

John's son, my 2x great grandfather, did rather well for himself. He picked up an education somewhere, and became a clerk. At one time he ran the village school in Fernhurst in Sussex before returning to London and clerking, eventually settling in Ealing, where I grew up. 

Away from Family History for a bit. This was one of a small number of sketches that I made during a city break in Bucharest. I love metros and trams and whenever I go to a city with either, or both, I always try to make a sketch of them.

A church in the centre of Bucharest Old Town. There was a massive line of people around the front and so I found a wall to sit on around the back and made this. It wasn't very cold, but I was frozen and my arthritis was aching when I got up. 

The older style of Bucharest tram - I prefer this sort. 

Another Family History picture. My great, great grandfather Peter Clark was a stoker in the early days of steamships. When he met my soon to be great great grandmother he came ashore and spent the rest of his working life as a stoker in a steelworks in the Dundee area. 

Old London Town. Apart from growing up in West London, one arm of my family lived and worked in the Covent Garden area and would surely have been familiar with this particular view of Fleet Street looking towards Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's Cathedral.

Not family history this time. This is he Mumbles tramway, which was the first ever passenger railway in the whole wide world, when it opened in 1807. Then the wagons were horse drawn. This is from the fifties, when the largest trams ever used in the UK were used. Sadly the tramway was bought up by the bus operators. The trams were scrapped and the tracks pulled up. The building in the picture that housed Blackpill tram station still exists and is one of very few tangible reminders of the tramway. 

Hanwell Broadway, Ealing. I grew up specifically in Hanwell, and this shows the Broadway as it looked just a few years before I was born. 

This particular one relates to a 3x great uncle, Jabez Rainbow. Jabez was in the army, and he got so off his face on laudanum that he cut the throat of his mistress in a pub in St. Albans. He was sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen's Land for fourteen years, although he ended up spending the rest of his life there. His descendants live in Tasmania to this day. The Edwin Fox is, I believe, the last surviving convict ship in the world.

My father, George Clark, joined the Army immediately on leaving school, and he was still in the army several years later when he met my Mum. In the army he learned his trade as a motor mechanic. He was a good one too when he was taking time and trouble, concentrating, and sober. Sadly the days when he was like this became fewer and farther between. Still, I remember him working in a succession of garages just like this one when I was young. 

The earliest Clark ancestors I have yet managed to trace were my 3x great grandfather James and his father, my four x great grandfather George Clark. George owned a boat in the small coastal town of Panbride. I don't know for certain that they were fishermen, but it was very much a fishing community at the time, so I think it's a fair bet. 

----------------------------

I have five more pages to fill in the sketchbook I was given on Christmas Day. I want to try to finish it off so that I can say that all of the sketches are pretty detailed, and representative of the best that I can do. Not far to go now.