2021 – Page 2 – I Walk Alone

The Southampton Tram Project

When we strolled across an eerily beautiful and somewhat misty Common in early October 2021, I had no idea that Commando had another bit of time travel up his sleeve to surprise me. As far as I was concerned, it was just another ordinary Saturday morning watching parkrun and having a wander in the Old Cemetery. My head, as usual, was full of the book I was plotting, listening to the voices of my characters clamouring for attention. The fifth book in the series revolved around a tram driver and his conductor friend. The first draft was written, but despite extensive research about Southampton trams, I’d never actually been on one. The last Southampton tram ran on 31 December 1949, more than ten years before I was born.

Its all in the name, Hailey

Time was always going to be against us on our whistle stop tour of Witney but we packed a lot into our one afternoon. The one thing we hadn’t managed to do was visit Hailey, the place where my great great grandmother, Mary Ann Beechey, My great grandfather Elijah Haley and my grandfather’s brother Harold were born. It is also the place that gave us our family name, Haley. The spelling may have changed over the years, although many of the old records are spelt Hailey, like the place, but this really was where my family story began. Commando had a trick up his sleeve though. As Hailey was less than four miles from our hotel, he decided to make a little detour on our homeward journey. I was unreasonably excited when I saw the sign saying we were entering Hailey but traffic meant we couldn’t stop for a photo. Undaunted, I whipped out my phone and took a rather blurred and wobbly picture through the windscreen. It would serve as proof that we had actually been there.

Church Green and the Leys

More by luck than judgement, we found ourselves back where we started. There was a little assistance from Google Maps in there somewhere too but the sun shining on my phone screen didn’t help matters. By now it was almost four O’clock, and apart from our short lunch break, we’d been walking since midday. As several of the Witney locals were lounging about on the grass in the sun, we decided to rest our weary feet and join them. This also gave me the chance to peruse my list of family members. Thomas Haley, my great great great grandfather had lived on Church Green.

The River Windrush and a surprise blanket factory

It was late afternoon when we left Crawley Road and headed down the footpath I’d spotted on the map. I wasn’t entirely confident that I knew where I was going but I was keeping quiet about that fact. We passed a row of picture postcard cottages. There was a grassy field to our left and the track was wide and mostly paved. It must lead somewhere, even if that somewhere was not where we wanted to go. I hoped where it led was not a wild goose chase because we’d been walking more or less constantly for several hours at this stage and Commando might like to run marathons, but he’s not so keen on walking them.

Holy Trinity Church Witney and a missing house

The first thing we noticed about the Holy Trinity Church at the top of Narrow Hill, was the shut door. It had been a short but steep walk from the house where my great great grandfather Thomas Haley lived with his family. The land for the church was gifted by the Bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Marlborough in the 1840’s and the church was built between 1848 and 1849 by architect Benjamin Ferrey of Christchurch. After our earlier good fortune at St Mary’s, the shut door was a slight disappointment.

In search of Narrow Hill

We left The Angel Inn refreshed and eager to see as much of Witney as we could in the short time we had. We’d seen the houses of Corn Street where Alice was born and we’d seen the church where several of my ancestors were baptised, married and buried, even if we hadn’t found any graves. I knew that my great great grandfather, Thomas Haley junior had moved from Corn Street to Woodgreen by 1861, but the only address on the census was Private House. Ten years on, he’d moved to West End but there was no address I could trace. By 1881 though, he was living on Narrow Hill and, due to a stroke of luck, I knew exactly which house he’d lived in. After a quick stop to take a closer look at the Town Hall, we set off to find it.

St Mary’s church Witney, an angel and a cursed stool

They say there has been a church in Witney since the tenth century but St Mary’s, standing at the far end of a long, wide expanse of grass called Church Green, is not the original church. In fact it was built in the twelfth century on the site of previous Norman and Saxon churches. It has also undergone many changes over the years. The tall spire, rising one hundred and fifty six feet into the blue sky, was added in the fifteenth century. It dominates the Witney skyline, so it was hard to miss, even for strangers like us. Such a large and imposing church shows that Witney was a wealthy and important town in medieval times. This was where many of my Oxfordshire ancestors were baptised, married and buried. As we walked towards the church I was hopeful that I might be able to find some Haley graves.

Before the beginning

My Grandfather, Thomas John Haley, the man who inspired my novel, Plagued, was born in Witney, Oxfordshire on 27 October 1887. It was the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. His father, Elijah, was born in 1862, in Hailey, just outside Witney, and was a woollen blanket weaver. His mother, Esther Brodrick, was born in Filkins, about 9 miles away, in 1865. Thomas was their first child. I knew all this from research into my family tree, and I’d heard Pappy talk about Witney, but I’d never been there. So, on 26 September 2021, with the book in the process of being published, Commando and I went on a little trip into the past. It felt like a trip I should have made long ago.

Southampton docks and Southampton dockers

Research for my second book A Land Fit For Heroes, took me to Southampton Docks during the General Strike of 1926. It should have been easy. In my time working for a cruise company, I’d donned the obligatory hi-vis jacket and wandered around the docks more than once. The problem was, the docks I’d seen in the twenty first century were a far cry from the docks I was writing about. In fact, a lot of the docks as we know them today didn’t exist back then. The western dock had not been built and the sea still lapped at the platforms of Southampton station at high tide. There were no hi-vis jackets back then either. Health and safety wasn’t something the dockers of the mid 1920’s worried about too much.

Family Research for dummies

When I first started to research the book that would eventually become Plagued, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was a lack of information. It was always going to be a book heavily influenced by my grandfather’s story but the facts were thin on the ground. I knew he’d been shot, I knew how it happened and I knew a little about his journey across France to safety. The problem was, the first hand story was told to me when I was a child. I didn’t ask the right questions because I didn’t know what I’d need to know. So how exactly did I go about finding out more and how can my experience help other would be family historians?

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