Stuart McLeay

Category: Kindred spirits

  • Letters to Lizzie (WW2)

    DRAFT IN PROGRESS. The wartime letters transcribed below were written by my father Ted McLeay to his mother Lizzie between 1939 and 1945. This first batch (the first 53 out of 160) covers his initial RAF service in England 1939/42. The letters that have yet to be transcribed were sent when Ted was on operations…

  • Locating the Romany Camp at Claremont

    A note on the possible site of the Cooper family’s camp, and the history and layout of the Claremont estate. See also The Romany Family at Claremont. Victoria’s diaries tell us that the Romany camp at Claremont in December 1836 was by the Portsmouth Road — a number of her diary entries describe how the Cooper…

  • The Romany Family at Claremont – Part 1

    Part 1 – The Cooper Portraits Based on the informative articles by Sarah Murden in All Things Georgian (2016) and the helpful contextual discussions by Janet Keet-Black (2006), Eric Trudgill (2010), Jeremy Harte (2016, 2023), Alan Wright (2017) and David Cressy (2020), Victoria’s portraits of the Cooper family and her related diary entries are investigated…

  • Canal Chronicles

    Keywords: Argie, Bargie; Pub crawl, Downfall; Keeper’s Daughter, Fetch the Water; Athenaeum, Carpe-diem; Lumps of Coal, Down the Hold; Joe and Ben, Last Boatmen. The six stories that are recounted here took place in 1847, 1848, 1850, 1861, 1877 and 1888. Each is based on a true account, or at least as true as the…

  • Collage

  • Letters to Lizzie: The Repercussions of War

    When Lizzie’s husband Edward died of his WW1 wounds, she found that she did not qualify as a war widow. Lizzie challenged each bureaucratic obstacle until the Minister for Pensions ruled in her favour, following which many other women in a similar position also received a widow’s pension.

  • The Benefactor

    Hop-pickers in Kent by Charles Corke (with mother and baby in the foreground) This is a story about my great great grandmother, Alice Ayres, who was the eldest of nine children in a Romany family. Her father was a basket maker and dealer from Hampshire by the name of Morris Ayres, and her mother was…

  • What it was like to be at the 1966 World Cup Final

    In July 1966, one of my school friends was given two tickets to the World Cup Final, so we went up to Wembley and — quite fortuitously — witnessed the greatest match in England’s footballing history. Michael and I had left school a year earlier, in 1965, having travelled together each day on the 29…