Family Trees

Monday 29 December 2008

The Seventh Son

Christmas is lovely, a welcome break before winter sets in properly and lots of glitter and lights to cheer me up (not to mention chocolates and Christmas cake), but it's not a good time for delving into the family histories. There are just too many other things competing for priority, not least of all the day job.

When the latest clutch of certificates arrived on my doormat this morning it felt like a welcome return to "the good old days"! I had been particularly keen to discover whether my grandfather, Jim Salthouse, really was "the seventh son of a seventh son" - to which he attributed his luck in life. I had found two births in the indexes which were most likely to be his brothers. The certificates duly confirmed that Richard Salthouse (1880) and Henry Salthouse (1888) were both the children of William Salthouse and Janet Braidwood. My grandfather, born in 1897, was now confirmed to be a Seventh Son.

But he was not the seventh son of a seventh son. His father was certainly one of seven sons - but he was the first son, not the seventh. So grandfather could easily have said, for all we know, that he was 'the seventh son of seven sons'. Did this make him lucky?

Perhaps his near-claim to a charmed life resulted in a near-lucky life? He was the youngest of 10 children, born when his mother was 46 years old and with a gap of seven years between him and the previous child, Janet. When Jim was of school age the family moved to Ditton, Widnes, possibly in the hope that the eldest brother, 'Our Will', might recover from TB, but 'Our Will' died in 1906 and in 1912 Jim's father, William Salthouse, died of bronchopneumonia. Jim appears to have had engineering in his blood and he studied at Widnes Technical School and obtained an apprenticeship at Widnes. The first World War internvened and, when the family returned to Liverpool, he was able to transfer his articles to another engineering company. His apprenticeship completed, he immediately went to sea, eventually becoming a commissioned officer. Unluckily he was torpedoed twice, luckily he survived relatively unscathed.

After the war he married Maud Ralston. Sadly their first child died after a few weeks of life. When my mother was born the depression had set in and Jim was unemployed. He obtained work in Southport and had to walk from Liverpool to Southport every day. Presumably he accepted lifts if he could but he said that the depression was so bad that there were few vehicles on the roads. Eventually he got work as a driver with Jarvis Robinson Transport (JRT) in Liverpool - he got the job because of his engineering background as much as for his driving skills, and he drove their best lorry, a Scammel 8-wheeler, between Liverpool and Hull. His luck ran out, though, when one of his vehicles, which was supposed to have been repaired overnight, went out of control and he was badly burned in the resulting fire.

Although the build up to WW2 created new opportunites, Jim was probably considered to be the wrong side of 40 to rebuild his engineering career, but he did get better jobs and was also the sergeant in the Home Guard responsible for keeping the Home Guard and Volunteer vehicles running throughout the war. In the late 40s he went into semi-retirement in North Wales but he never stopped working on his passion - motorbikes - and was well known in the Llangollen area for the work he did with vintage motorcycles.

So, was he lucky or not? He might have hoped for a better career had the wars and the depression not intervened, but he did well to survive two wars, unemployment in Liverpool and that awful accident.