A Drift In The Deer Park

A DRIFT IN THE DEER PARK

STORY OF AN ENGLISH CHILDHOOD

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Chapter 1: Ancestral Anecdotes

Chapter 2: Sherwoods of Sutton Coldfield

Chapter 3: Napiers of Merchiston

Chapter 4: From Scotland with Love

Chapter 5: War Babies

Chapter 6: Steam-Hauled to Princes Street 

Chapter 7: A Drift in the Deer Park

Chapter 8: Boyhood Memories    

Chapter 9: Land of Elgar

Chapter 10: Pigeons Patrol       

Chapter 11: Under Northern Lights

Chapter 12: Heretic in Perthshire      

Chapter 13: Highland Games 

Chapter 14: An Accountant from Birmingham

Chapter 15: Rolling on the Sea 

Chapter 16: A Pleasant Form of Work    

Chapter 17: Undergraduate Unleashed

Chapter 18: Idylls on the Isis

Chapter 19: The Wander Years

Chapter 20: Alpine Adventures

Chapter 21: Young English Males       

Chapter 22: A Child No More

FOREWORD

Munching dark chocolate , sipping red wine and being massaged by a beautiful Thai woman are my three favorite indulgences. Fortunately, I can enjoy all three without leaving the comfort of home. This may be due to having been born in the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, said to be the luckiest of signs. In any case the path leading to this happy situation from the shadow of a Second World War barrage balloon is the subject of my story.

The first part (this one) opens with some ancestral background followed by the tale of a happy and peaceful English childhood up to the end of my student years. The events it describes took place more than half a century ago, so it should be no surprise if they seem a world apart from present times. They are!

A sequel, Cold War Road Warrior, tells the story of an international business career exporting state-of-the-art technology. This covers twenty years exploring Europe East and West in the midst of the Cold War. A final part, An Accidental Immigrant, describes thirty years of round-the-world travels and a new home in the United States.

The story is written mainly from memory supplemented by personal notes, letters and diaries, all of which are notoriously unreliable. Where possible, I have checked independent sources, but these are few and there are many gaps in the record. So, while the events described here are as I recall them, the descriptions may not be entirely accurate.

This book is dedicated to my wife and children, who have been urging me for years to put pen to paper, or preferably fingers to keyboard so that they can read the results. In particular my beloved, wonderful and never to be underestimated spouse has occasionally muttered with a half-stifled sigh: We heard that story a hundred times before. Why don’t you just write it down?

With that in mind, let’s get started.

CHAPTER 1: ANCESTRAL ANECDOTES

Cartwheels on the Lawn

Our story begins on a frosty morning during the otherwise mild and rainy English November of 1939, a little over two months following the start of the Second World War.

It was about dawn in Oakengates, a tall, red-brick Victorian nursing home on Lichfield Road in the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, when Elizabeth Jean Morrison Seton Jill Sherwood, formerly Napier, gave birth to the first of her three sons. Had it been a girl, my name would be Margaret.

After making sure mother and baby were safe, her husband G. M. Jim Sherwood drove about a mile to the house of his old school friend Geoffrey Colman. There he performed cartwheels on the front lawn while Geoff and his wife Barbara gazed in astonishment from their breakfast table.

At this point you may well ask who were these Sherwoods and where did they come from. This calls for a brief detour in search of answers.

The earliest known records show our family as farmers in Staffordshire in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. During most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they lived in the rural parish of Hamstall Ridware, where some of them served as churchwardens, including Richard Sherwood in 1599, Thomas Sherwood in 1612 and Robert Sherwood in 1635.

I wonder whether a Sherwood helped build or watch the beacons lit across the country in 1588 to warn of the coming of the Spanish Armada. The little village of Hamstall Ridware lies on low ground close to the River Trent, but just across the river rise the wooded slopes of Cannock Chase, from where a beacon could be seen many miles away. Possible sites include Castle Ring, an Iron Age hill fort 795 feet above sea level.

Lord Abbot of Lambspring

AT SOME POINT AT LEAST one of us migrated westward across the county, settling a few miles from the small town of Penkridge on the far side of Cannock Chase. My father told of a legend that the family lived for a time in the nearby village of Boscobel on the borders of Staffordshire and Shropshire. Boscobel House played an important role in the flight of King Charles II after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

The legend claimed that a Sherwood helped the King escape from his enemies before fleeing the country himself, taking holy orders and becoming a monk in Germany. It also claimed that he somehow received and kept the bloody shirt the king wore while escaping from the battle. We children thought this legend was mostly fiction, but it made an intriguing story nonetheless.

The legend is, however, confirmed by the King’s own story dictated in 1680 to the diarist Samuel Pepys. While hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel the King apparently wore a rough garment known as a hogging shirt. Pepys recorded that Father Hodlestone, a priest who had helped in the escape, later sent the shirt "to Mr. Sherwood, now Lord Abbot of Lambspring in Germany, a person well known to the Duke, who begged this shirt of Father Hodlestone".

Pepys was referring to the Duke of York, the King’s younger brother, who had fled to the Continent in 1648 and eventually succeeded his brother as James II. The Lord Abbot was Joseph Sherwood of the Diocese of Ghent, believed to be of English parentage, who professed at Lambspring, 5th June 1653, and dying at Hildesheim 26th June 1690, his body was conveyed to Lambspring for interment.

The English Benedictine monastery of Lambspring in Germany, founded in 1621, was a well-known refuge for English Catholics fleeing persecution in their homeland. The famous shirt was apparently preserved there in a case until the monastery was dissolved by order of the King of Prussia in 1803. What happened to it after that we do not know.

The Chronicle of the English Benedictine Monks, published in 1709, eulogized Joseph as: A most industrious, indefatigable and successful man. He was often in England, sometimes as their Agent, sometimes as their envoy to King Charles II. He was acceptable to the princes of that country and to the Bishop of Munster, who employed him. He was a great lover of learning, much given to hospitality and notwithstanding his great expenses about the great new-built Church, he left fewer debts when he died than when he was chosen Abbot.

Clearly Joseph was an impressive character. Taking monastic vows in Germany in 1653 would fit with departure from England in or soon after 1651, although whether he left descendants behind in Staffordshire remains unproven.

A family business

NINETY YEARS AFTER Abbot Sherwood’s death, my direct ancestor John Sherwood was a tenant farmer at Down House Farm near the village of Bradley, six miles north of Boscobel. The farm still stands, a tall red brick house in traditional Staffordshire style with substantial outbuildings set well back from the road.

In about 1800 during the Napoleonic Wars his son John, then aged twenty-three, quit the farm to seek his fortune in the industrial city of Birmingham, which was booming at least in part because of the war. There he became partner in a coppersmith business in Newton Street. Sometime between 1810 and 1820 he founded his own silversmith business, John Sherwood & Son in Lichfield Street, which remained in the family for four generations.

The company advertised in 1856 as a patent electro-plate and spoon and fork works with a branch in Thavies Inn, London, offering an extensive and well assorted stock of coffee services, communion services, candlesticks, pie carvers, nutcrackers and every other description of manufactured plated goods.  The products in silver or silver plate were hallmarked JS&S accompanied by a beaver and crown, sometimes also an anchor to represent Birmingham.

In 1886 the expanding company moved to larger premises in Regent Street, Birmingham. It exhibited at the British Industries Fair in London in 1922, but was sold to a firm in Sheffield soon after that. You can still find its products in antique markets around the world, while some remain in the family.

Soon after arriving in Birmingham John married Sarah Cowley, who bore him six sons and four daughters and lived to the ripe old age of seventy-seven. Their third son, also called John, was born in 1807 and started helping his father manufacture copper kettles at the age of seven. Years later he told his grandson Wilfred with a chuckle that even at that tender age he had a boy working under him.

Their fourth son Isaac established a brass foundry business Isaac Sherwood & Son, later known as Sherwoods Limited, of Granville Street, Birmingham, which also lasted for four generations. Their fifth son Jacob appears to have been involved with his younger brother James in a competing silverware business in Spencer Street.

In due course the younger John’s sons George and William took over the family business. Their partnership was dissolved in 1879, apparently after George took to drink. He died two years later, while William remained in charge for another twenty years. William’s son Wilfred then took over and ran the company until selling it and retiring in about 1922.

As a young man William had spent a year as an apprentice seaman on the sailing clipper Margaretta. Somewhere in the family there is said to be a tobacco jar from his shipboard days bearing his name.

Jackarooing

WE HAVE NO RECORD OF his experiences at sea, but my cousin Richard Sherwood in Australia showed me the diary of his grandfather Frederick, son of William’s cousin Isaac, who also went to sea as a young man. The diary described being sent up the mast to the Crow’s Nest as punishment for misbehavior as well as shore leave in the recently founded city of Sydney, Australia.

Frederick liked Sydney so much that he later named his son after it. In due course young Sydney inherited Sherwoods Limited, manufacturing paraffin lamps, stoves and other brassware products, which he ran until his death in 1973. We used Sherwoods’ lamps and stoves at our mountain cottage Troed-y-Bryn for decades before electricity came to the valley.

Sydney’s son Richard had no wish to follow his father, but instead tried his hand at sheep farming in North Wales, where his portrait was painted by his neighbor and friend, the artist Kyffin Williams. In 1951 he emigrated to Australia and married an Irish Australian girl named Patricia Reed, whom he had met on the ship from Tilbury. In Richard’s own words, a very pretty girl with lovely dark eyes and hair, her eyes almond shaped, and bright red lips.

They had six children, who in turn produced a healthy brood of grandchildren. He described his early life in his memoirs Random Recollections, published in Sydney in 2006. Richard’s book is what inspired this one!

After years working on other people’s farms – jackarooing as he called it - Richard bought a ranch at Upper Bingara in the New England region of New South Wales. In that rolling green landscape he raised Merino sheep and Hereford cattle as well as – inadvertently – large numbers of kangaroos, wallabies, wild pigs and feral goats. He eventually retired to the pleasant country town of Tamworth, self-styled Country Music Capital of Australia, where he died in 2009.

Richard and son Rory at their ranch

The Royal Town

MEANWHILE, AS THE FAMILY silverware business thrived, the younger John moved his family to the rural suburb of Kings Norton in Worcestershire, perhaps for the sake of a healthier environment, and lived there until his death in 1897. His son William later moved his family across town to Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire. Both places have since become part of Birmingham.

The Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, received its royal charter from King Henry VIII in 1528 and appears in Shakespeare’s play King Henry IV Part I (Act IV, Scene 2). The town continued to flourish independently until local politicians sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and allowed it to be swallowed up by its big city neighbor in 1974.

Around the time of his retirement in 1899 William built a handsome Tudor-style villa, Sunnycroft, which still stands on tree-lined Wentworth Road in Sutton’s newly laid out Four Oaks Estate. As a child I lived a quarter mile further along that road and walked past Sunnycroft to catch the bus to school.

William’s design in 1899  Sunnycroft in 2019

WITH A FEW SHORT GAPS, Sherwoods continued to live in or near this estate for more than a hundred years. The estate consisted of the wooded grounds of Four Oaks Hall, a large manor house built around 1680 close to where the imposing Carhampton House on Luttrell Road now stands. The land was developed as a racecourse in 1881, but less than a decade later was divided into spacious residential plots. The Hall itself fell into disrepair and was torn down in 1898.

Race-goers and residents could arrive by train at nearby Four Oaks Station, opened in 1884 on the Lichfield branch line, now known as the Cross-City Line. Commuting to  my first job in Birmingham in 1958-59, I came to know this station well. Although reduced from its original Victorian splendor to the size and style of an overgrown bus stop, it still serves as a turn-around point for local trains today.

The Welsh Connection

WILLIAM WAS NOT ONLY a successful businessman but also a skilled amateur artist and determined hill-walker. He took his family for extensive tours by train and bicycle in the mountains of Wales and Switzerland and created beautiful leather-bound albums containing pen and ink drawings of mountain and countryside views for his children. At least three of these albums have survived – I have the one given to his son Nigel, who later emigrated to Canada, as well as several of his Alpine watercolors.

William married Christine Griffiths, born in London of Welsh descent. Her father Herbert was himself an accomplished amateur artist and we have several of his paintings in the family. Christine bore William eight sons in eighteen years from 1861 to 1879. Despite all that effort she thrived well into her eighties, passing away in 1927, seven years after her husband.

Their eldest son William Herbert, born in 1861, emigrated to Australia and started a photography business somewhere in the outback but never married. After receiving a legacy from his father’s estate, he apparently commented that for the first time since leaving home he could finally afford a real bed!

The second son, Guy born in 1862, trained as an architect and also emigrated to Australia. In 1900 he married a widow, Ada Emilie Adams, in Melbourne. While in Australia he apparently did research on different types of gum tree. He was recorded in 1906 as traveling alone by sea to San Francisco, but what he did there we do not know.

Guy reportedly served in the First World War and later retired to the sunny Mediterranean climate of what was then the French colony of Algeria. Ada had died in Melbourne in 1925. Both her husbands’ names are shown on her headstone, so Guy may have moved back to Europe after her death. Crossing the Mediterranean on a voyage to India in 1937, his brother Wilfred wrote in his journal Algiers mountains look beautiful across deep blue sea. About 7 p.m. think of Guy buried somewhere there.

William’s third son Ernest, born in 1864, sailed in December 1888 on the SS Celtic from Liverpool to New York. He settled in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was employed as a foreman with the Gorham Electroplate Corporation, became a US citizen in 1894 and in 1930 owned a home at 210 Lexington Avenue. Today that large, handsome building is divided into apartments and it is not clear if he owned all of it or just one of the apartments.

In 1889 he married Addie Emma Herdman, also of British origin, born in Alvechurch, a few miles from Birmingham. She bore him two daughters. The elder, Lilian, married Arthur Scribner from New Brunswick, Canada, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and died childless. The younger, Frances, married Romaine Hathaway from Wichita, Kansas. He reached the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy and paid a surprise visit to my parents sometime around D-Day in 1944, but they lost contact with him after that.

Romaine had a son Richard by his first marriage but no children with Frances, so Ernest’s