EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION… From Poverty to PhDs OR

My maternal Grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Perry, was born on 6th May 1870 in a Victorian Workhouse: Clifton Union Workhouse Stapleton, Bristol, to a single 16-yearold unmarried mother, Maria J Perry, (1854-1930). The Workhouse records were all destroyed in a later fire, so it proved impossible to trace her ancestry, especially of her mother, Maria Perry, any further.

At the age of 21 she married my Grandfather, George Francis Taylor (born in 1872). He was the result of a liaison between two eighteenyear-olds: a young horse drover’s daughter, Sarah Jane Ga(i)ter (born 1853 but later almost untraceable) and a young man, George Meacham (1853-1931). Though my Grandfather was baptised Meacham, Jane and George did not marry, though Jane later married a John Taylor and young George Francis took the Taylor surname.

George Francis Taylor almost certainly never went to school. As an adult he worked as a leadsman and later in a galvanized steel works and never learned to read, but Eliza was literate and I sometimes saw her reading the newspaper to him when I was about 5-10 years old and they were in their late seventies.

They had a very large family, eleven children, between 1891 and 1912, when my mother (the youngest surviving) was born on September 24th. Most are shown below in the ‘colorized’ 1915 B/W photo. My mother is the youngest, next to her mother. They lived in a tiny terraced house at 12 Beaufort Avenue, Barton Hill, a poor part of Bristol that expanded tremendously with the advent of the Great Western Cotton Factory in 1838 – still active until it closed in 1935. How they were all accommodated is still a mystery.

On my father’s side, my Grandfather, James Hendy, (18811968) was a 60-year-old shopkeeper when I was born. He had variously been described as a Cotton Spinner in the 1901 Census, later a steel erector (all over Europe) and a fishmonger in Bristol, before turning to the tobacconist’s trade. His estranged wife, Emily Flay (18861964), was a butcher’s daughter.

They had three children: my aunt Violet May (1912-1965), Alfred James (my father, 1913-2012) and my aunt Ivy Violet, (1916-2019) who lived to her 103rd birthday. Their portraits were extracted from a ‘colorized’ B/W photo that was taken around 1921 (above).

Although her sisters almost all went to work in one of Wills’s cigarette factories, my mother left school at 14 to become a Florist. My father worked in his father’s tobacconist shop in Barton Hill. A tall boy, at the age of 12 he was already wholesaling tobacco and cigarettes all over Bristol on a butchers’ bicycle. But he was ambitious and always had plans to have his own shop by the time he was 30. He was also interested in literature: He read Oliver Twist to us when I was only 4½ and I found a copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin and English in his bookshelf after he died.

I was born in 1941 and, after several Wartime house-moves, my parents put me down for Bristol Grammar Preparatory School, which I entered in 1949 aged 8. My first ‘creative writing’ (How I escaped from the Cat) was published in the School Chronicle Vol XXV No.10 dated Dec 1949. I still clearly remember the Headmaster announcing to the Lower School that George VI had died.

About 1950 or ’51 some Sixth Formers wanted to put on a performance of ‘Trial by Jury’ by Gilbert & Sullivan and came looking for succour (suckers?) in the Lower School choir whose voices had not yet broken, to play the female rôles. I ended up as one of four Bridesmaids, in a pink crinoline frock with newspaper stuffed down the front by eager Sixth Formers to add realism. When we sat down, the wire crinoline hoops forced our skirts up into the air, showing our legs to the audience.

I entered the Upper School in 1952, later joined the CCF RAF Section and won a National Flying Scholarship, gaining a Private Pilot’s Licence in 1958 a year before I could drive. In the Sixth Form I studied Sciences, with ‘A’ levels in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Botany and Zoology. I was never keen on team sports, but instead joined the School Fencing and Rifle teams and two school plays.

In a Sixth Form Physics visit to the Royal Fort I was captivated by their new Electron Microscope and knew I wanted to do that, but with a solid Biology background the only route would be via

Microbiology. There were only 4 Universities offering that course of study, one being Bristol. I was accepted there and when the first Term started in 1959 I merely crossed University Road to begin studying Botany & Chemistry. In the Botany Laboratory (which had been easily visible from the BGS Sixth Form Biology Lab’s window) I met Susan Denning, who later became my wife.

The Degree came and went and via a University contact I got a job in the Public Health Dept of the University of Amsterdam, learning the techniques of Electron Microscopy. After 6 months and an ultra-cold winter I returned to Bristol University Botany Dept as Research Assistant in Mycology (the study of Fungi). My first publication in 1963 was probably the first on the ultramicroscopic fine structure of germinating fungal spores (more of that later under Coincidences).

Susan and I were married in 1965 and in 1966 we moved to Carshalton to set up an Electron Microscopy Laboratory within a Toxicology Research laboratory, measuring the safety-in-use of food additives, colourings, antioxidants, stabilisers etc. and sponsored 50:50 by Government and manufacturers. After 4 years and several publications it seemed obvious to me that to gain a higher position I needed to have a PhD. After an unsatisfactory year in the USA I returned to the same lab and was allowed to pursue a PhD part-time, which took me 7 years. Doctored at last!

Now as a trained Experimental Pathologist I moved further east to a post at Shell’s Agrochemical Research Centre in Sittingbourne, Kent. By then we had two small boys and the schooling situation in Canterbury was excellent, with 2 Grammar schools, 3 Private schools and 2 Universities. The boys both went to Simon Langton Boys Grammar School and both ended up on the Honours Board, thanks to rigorous instillation of the work ethic from my Biology teacher wife.

Both sons got into Cambridge (one got his own PhD there) and later both studied for MBAs in America, at Columbia in New York and MITSloan Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. The older one married a Chinese lady and the younger one (with the PhD) married a Japanese girl.

Coincidences

In 2001 we had a new neighbour –a widow with two children whose late husband had been a Senior Master at Dulwich College then Senior Master at Eltham College. We were at BGS at the same time and were even listed in the same 1955 Prizegiving programme.

I said earlier that I was one of the first in the world to study the internal fine structure of the germinating fungal spore. My younger son’s Japanese father-in-law is a retired professor who has also published several papers on fungal spores –another astonishing coincidence!

When my mother died in 1993 after 55 years of marriage my father was devastated. To fill his time I gave him a stack of typing paper and asked if he would write down his early life experiences. Three months later he gave me back 80 pages of small neat handwriting, which I typed up as ‘A Life in Business’. I believe we should all record our youth for our children, who invariably forget to ask these unique, important questions until it is too late. I am doing this, and so is one of my sons.

Robin Hendy OB 1959