Winchester City Museum Talk

Thursday 23rd of June 2023, was a particularly warm evening, 24 degrees in the middle floor of The Winchester City Museum, and it was here that the Museum Staff had set up for the talk I was giving in aid of the Museum.

The Middle Floor of the Museum where the talk was taking place looks out over a Tudor style Inn on one side, and the Cathedral Gardens on the other, and is set in a bustling and pleasant area of Cafes, restaurants, and Inns, that despite modern shopping and hospitality venues actually sits immersed in Mediaeval , Tudor, Georgian, and Victorian buildings, walls, and cellars. The modern being housed in echoes of the past.

The scene was set with two fans in constant operation to give some relief from the heat to the audience, nestled among the cases of exhibits. Including the state of the art wooden toilet seat below.

The Audience Came from Both Near and Nearer

The audience were friendly and I’m glad to say inquisitive about all aspects of the talk, they ranged from the very knowledgeable like Tony Sinclair the Organiser of the Winchester Group of the Hampshire Genealogical Society, to people who were completely new to the subject, which of course allowed for a good exchange of knowledge from one to the other.

Most of the audience were local from the Winchester area, with a few people from Basingstoke. The person who had travelled from further afield (other than me) was a surprise ‘guest appearance’ by one of my sons, Ross, who not only paid for a ticket, but once I knew he was there was also coerced into acting as my roadie and technical assistant and occasional heckler.

It was nice to meet some of the people I speak to online on various Facebook Genealogy sites, always nice to put a face to a name! Needless to say there was room for a welcomed discussion on points of interest at various times in the talk.

Anyone who has seen me on TV either in my early appearances on ITV Meridian, or on the top rated ITV programme DNA Journey will know that I like to inject a bit of mirth and unconventionality into my appearances, and the evening at the Museum was no exception, I like to think of my Talks as “Stand-up Genealogy” which I believe is a first for both the Genealogy and Stand-up Circuit! (And will probably be rejected by both camps).

I’ve always found that passing on snippets of knowledge attached to an anecdote or funny remark often makes the memory of the facts far more ‘sticky’ in an audience’s mind than a list of dry facts and dates, it also acts as an antidote to audiences falling asleep in a very warm room.

Being a South London Cockney of dubious heritage myself, I like to explain my patois to the audience, for example that ‘ph’ ‘th’ and ‘f’ all get pronounced the same by me unless I really think about the word before saying it, otherwise everything comes out as an ‘f’, and I tend to leave a trail of dropped ‘h’s and glottal stopped ‘t’s scattered across the floor of the room.

How I began

Despite being elocutionarily challenged, we covered a lot of ground, the initial part concerning how I got into Family History, ranging from how I started life in a backstreet slum in Peckham just off the Old Kent Road, with a curiosity about why our family were so hard-up for most of their lives, to the possibility of predicting an adult male’s hairline based on a picture of me aged about 6 months in 1956 compared to now (on the face of it quite accurate as a methodology), to gaining ‘unconventional, but nothing that would stand up in court’ access to the London Metropolitan Archives in the 1980s, to gate crashing an Archaeological dig, distracting a house painter from his work to prove I could trace anyone’s family from scratch, to cold calling Radio and TV personalities to get broadcast, and a suspected scam telephone call in Tenerife that got me onto the DN A Journey Programme.

DNA Journey

It was a pleasure to talk a bit about the TV show, it’s put together by Voltage TV, and broadcast by ITV, and there is a huge amount of behind the scenes work that goes into the making of the programme by the crew, the onscreen experts (like me), the offscreen experts at Ancestry ProGenealogists (also like me), the wonderful Directors, and the Production Team and Execs, not to mention the Celebs, who put themselves up for a leap into the unknown, with no idea what we will discover about them.

Many people don’t realise that the show is unscripted, so what we say is generally what you get, there are no falsely setup ‘surprises’ what you get are the real reactions to previously unknown information, sometimes heart warming, sometimes slightly shocking. And we don’t pick the celebrities based on previously researched trees, we find out who we’ve got and then do the research, so the types of stories are not known before we start researching, and any coincidences that come up on screen between the paired celebs’ that we have on the programme have appeared during the research not before the celebs are paired up, so we all get to genuinely share the surprise at different points.

It really is a great show to work on and a great team to be part of.

Winchester Tales

We spent a bit of time talking about Winchester and how it appeared on Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan’s episode of DNA Journey. Rob’s Family Story gave a good insight into crime and punishment in Georgian and early Victorian Winchester, his forebears having suffered, quite justifiably, at the ‘Long Arm of the Law’ in the early 1800s, before his particular ancestors broke free of the poverty of their upbringing by joining the Royal Navy and Travelling the World.

This lead to showing various sites in Winchester that are either still there today or had a particular significance at the past, including some of the Old Streets, Buildings, Mill, and Gaol, as well as the history of the River Itchen that runs through Winchester, and by the granting of rights by King Charles II became a navigable canal all the way down to Southampton and therefore to the rest of the world. It was a the precursor of the M3 Motorway and Heavy Goods Railway that we see today as far as trade and commerce was concerned.

We even took a trip back to late Roman Winchester and a skeleton that made me want to find its story when I saw it being excavated, and now resides in the Museum itself!

I also revealed the secret passages under the Museum itself,not generally seen by the public, that had in the past every use from a Bakery to a Gentleman’s Urinal (but not at the same time).

Of course we also had the opportunity to mention Public and Private Whippings, fights between the Becketts and various members of the early Winchester City Police Force, and Rob and Romesh’s reactions to the stories

Archives and Research

Using various examples from research I’ve been involved in we covered, DNA, Birth, marriage, and Death Records (BMDs), Censuses, Local Archives, Local History Societies, National Archives, Military Records, Ship’s Logs, Museums, as well as Social Media like Facebook, and what happened to Irish Records.

Much of this was illustrated with anecdotes, and indeed experiences from the audience, including the Royal Navy’s involvement in Breaking the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a very Bad Soldier who turned out to be a very Brave Soldier, The Kray Twins, and a letter from the wife of a Vampire. This culminated in my explaining DNA by answering the question:

‘Which came first the Chicken or the Egg?’

But I’m afraid to find the answer to that you’d have to come along to one of my talks!

My special thanks to Paige Kayla-Beggs and all the Staff at the wonderful Hampshire City Museum for making this possible.

And after, on a lovely warm summer’s night, Ross and I retired to the King Alfred Pub Garden naturally in Saxon Road Winchester – where else would it be? And not content with making Ross buy a ticket, act as roadie, techie, and virtual page turner on the Power Point, I then got him to buy me a pint as well. It was a very nice evening.