I've been bitten by the ancestry bug

Spectator

a day ago

Although a historian, until very recently I have been curiously incurious about researching my own slightly peculiar family. How was it, for example, that my grandfather, originally a penniless Welsh peasant, sired a dynasty that in three generations has spread to three continents and includes a squillionaire who founded a multinational club business with 75 branches in 42 cities around the world? And on the dark side of family secrets, why did my father marry a dying woman just released from Holloway jail after killing her own child? What diseases did my immediate ancestors suffer from, and are they likely to kill me too?
While the answers to some such questions still elude me, now that I have been bitten by the modish ancestry research bug, I have plunged down a rabbit hole from which there seems to be no easy escape. And I have only just started on my paternal family. The rather more aristocratic antecedents of my mother's Norman clan, the Beauchamps, remain unresearched, untilled virgin soil, although I'm proud to claim the Kiwi short story writer Katherine Mansfield as a distant aunt.
My grandfather, Thomas Bowen Jones, was born in 1851 in a tiny mid-Welsh hamlet called Cefn Gorwydd. The place is so remote that you hardly know you're there when you get there. A handful of houses and a disused chapel are all that make up this small settlement in the midst of the beautiful but largely deserted countryside of Breconshire, which is now called Powys.
It's hard to trace the provenance of people when every third family in the area bears the same surname, particularly when they were primitive Methodists and don't show up on parish records. About all I know of them is that they were typically dirt poor hill farmers and Methodist ministers, and that one of them died of cancer after being gored by a bull. How Thomas managed to magic himself from this tiny and narrow Welsh world into owning a chain of London gentlemen's outfitters shops by the time he died in 1927 remains a mystery.
In 1878, Thomas married my grandmother Alice Hazell, a London milliner who he must have met through his business in the rag trade. Over the next two decades they had 11 children, of whom nine – six girls and three boys – survived into adulthood. Only the oldest, Maud, who never married, and the youngest, Ernest, who was killed in the first world war aged 18, failed to reproduce, which explains why my family is so large, even though I know very few of them. The girls in the family, my aunts – Edith, Ethel, Beatrice, Elsie, Gladys and Phyllis – all made successful marriages with middle-class men, and some migrated to breed distant branches of the family in South Africa and Australasia.
My family is generationally out of sync because my father was in his sixties when I was born, therefore he and many of my relatives have long since gone to their long home. When I was at school, some of my contemporaries had dads who had fought in the second world war, but I was unique in having one who had been in the first world war. Among my acquaintances active today, only the journalist and historian Simon Heffer shares this unusual distinction with me.
My father survived the war to spawn me and my two half-brothers because, like me, he was myopic, and though volunteering in 1914, he luckily spent the war in chateaux miles behind the front lines, taking down the battle orders in shorthand from generals such as Douglas Haig. His younger brother, Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, was a rifleman with the London Rifle Brigade and was killed near Ypres in July 1915. Their elder brother Tom had emigrated to Welsh Patagonia on the eve of war, and spent his working life in the meat business there, becoming British consul in Punta Arenas, the world's southernmost city.
In January 1917, my father took time off from the war to marry Gladys Paris, a music hall singer. I have no idea how their paths first crossed, but in 1920 she gave birth to my half-brother Ivor. It is a peculiarity of my family that though I was born in the 1950s, my sibling Ivor fought throughout the second world war and drove a tank in the desert campaign in Egypt against Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. He then entered the rag trade like our grandfather, selling shirts as a travelling rep. His daughter, my niece Angela, carried on the family tradition, owning a chain of ladies' fashion shops in East Anglia.
My father, meanwhile, became a PR man in the motor and aviation industries, handling publicity for 'speed kings' such as Malcolm Campbell, and meeting the likes of T.E. Lawrence 'of Arabia' in his later role as a humble aircraftsman. When Gladys died of uterine cancer, he went on a restorative holiday in the Isle of Wight, where he met the woman who became his second wife.
I know next to nothing of this woman apart from her name – Mary or Marie – and her nationality, Romanian. But her story was tragic. She had married an Englishman named Clarke and had a child. One day she had come home and found her husband hanging in the hallway. In despair, she decided to take her own life too, along with that of her baby. She barricaded herself in the kitchen and turned on the gas. She was discovered and revived, but her child had died, so she was tried for the manslaughter of the infant.
Justice in the 1930s being harsher than it is today, although defended by the leading KC Sir Patrick Hastings, Mary was jailed in the insalubrious Holloway prison, where she contracted tuberculosis. Not wishing to have her death on their hands, the authorities freed her, and she travelled to the Isle of Wight to try to restore her health. Here she met my father, and a whirlwind romance led to their marriage. Almost immediately she became pregnant with my other half-brother Keith, but succumbed to the TB soon after giving birth. Strangely, the sparse details that I have gleaned about my dad's second marriage did not come from him. He never spoke about a subject that was still too painful to revisit.
Fortunately for my father, he then met, wooed and wed my mother, his third wife, who was a secretary in his Fleet Street office. After their deaths I found a moving love letter scribbled on a train in which he pleaded with her to marry him and overlook the quarter century age gap between them. I owe my existence to his Welsh eloquence overcoming her doubts.
I admire Dad for bringing up his two motherless elder sons who both led successful lives. Keith was an Olympic-standard athlete, and a brilliant rugby and cricket player – skills which have somehow passed me by, along with his financial success as an insurance broker. He made a happy and lifelong marriage and fathered four children, the third son, Nick, far surpassing his father in commercial acumen: he progressed from owning a tapas bar to founding the Soho House private members' club in 1995. It grew into a worldwide money-minting empire, making my nephew into a billionaire. Like most Joneses he is fecund, and has fathered several children by his two wives, the second being the TV presenter Kirsty Young.
Although not a Soho House member myself, I did once benefit from Nick's generosity when my partner and I spent a weekend at his Somerset country club, Babington House, so that I could introduce the Tom Cruise film Valkyrieto guests at the club's cinema. The hospitality was lavish and the setting delightful.
That weekend made me muse on the arbitrary nature of genetics: why have I so sadly missed out on the money-making gene that has benefited so many other Joneses? And why am I completely uninterested in cars, business and sport – areas of life in which they have so excelled? On the other hand, why are so few of them keen on those subjects that fuel my life: history, politics and literature?
There are a couple of exceptions to this rule amid the tangled roots of my family tree. Tom Price Jones, my aforementioned uncle who founded the Chilean and Argentine branches of the family, wrote a memoir, Patagonian Panorama, and became an authority on Napoleon because St Helena was on his beat as a consul. And I set off on the twisting path of researching my family after meeting for the first time my second cousin Stuart Doughty, an actor turned TV producer, responsible for such household names as Poldark, Emmerdale and Heartbeat. Stuart also writes and self-publishes crime thrillers set in the art world that he sells via Amazon, thus neatly combining our business and artistic genes.
When we met at my club (a more conservative establishment than Soho House), Stuart handed over a detailed family tree compiled by another cousin, Hazel Mitchell, in 1992. Anyone wondering about the global population explosion in the 20th century should study this tree: there were at least 100 direct descendants from my grandparents living in 1992, and that figure has probably doubled again by now. It is replete with tantalising hints about our far-flung brood. The late Hazel seems to have been obsessed by eye colour (often blue) and disease, since she lists all the ills that we Joneses have suffered and/or died from. Asthma, angina, brain tumours, various cancers, diabetes, duodenal ulcers and 'heart trouble' feature fairly frequently, but encouragingly, dementia is missing, and several ancestors made it into their nineties, with one even reaching 105.
In a chilling foreshadowing of our present problems with water pollution, one cousin, a particularly beautiful young woman, perished from polio in the 1950s after ingesting raw sewage while swimming in the Solent. One unwelcome family heirloom that I inherited from my father was my grandfather's silver and amber cigar holder. Even after a century it still smelt strongly of the tobacco that caused the throat cancer that killed the paterfamilias of our dynasty aged 76.