"The past is a foreign country.."

Earlier this week I received a surprise parcel in the mail. It was from my uncle in Sydney, who has been tracing the family history. The parcel contained one volume of that project, which concerns ancestors and relatives of my father.

I open the book and dive into a world that is my blood but which I never knew existed...

A many-times-great grandmother born in about 1694. Lived till nearly a hundred in that world long before penicillin or basic concepts of hygiene. Generation upon generation after her never leaving the borders of Northamptonshire in the English East Midlands.

Perhaps all the generations before her never leaving it either.

Reading and reading... I am reminded of tales like Wuthering Heights or Far from the Madding Crowd. Small, parochial worlds in the quiet English countryside, punctuated with eloping couples, deaths from vanished illnesses, and ever and always the fight for inheritances.

I get chills looking at the photographs.
One of a young lady in late 19th century clothing, sitting very formally. She's my great-grand mother.
But for the clothes and darker hair she's a replica of my sister. Down to my sister's habitual tilt of the head and facial expression.

Many of my father as a boy in wartime England.
Photos I think are of him as an older man, till I realise they are actually of his cousins who I have never known.

I remember my grandmother as stern, proper, old, extremely English, mind-bogglingly set in her ways, for whom everything was right in the world if we'd just sit and have a pot of tea... and there she is: circa 1953, wearing daringly short shorts, with a cheesy grin and leaning indecorously against a gate post.

And the stories...
A grandparent's half brother who was at Gallipoli and in British-occupied Palestine, having emigrated to Australia decades before anyone on my father's side that I had known about. He never married and "went bush", meaning he lived in no proper abode and just lived off the land he owned in the middle of what was then nowhere, till one of my grandfathers built him a house with his own hands and connected it to a generator.

"There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration."

- Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Does anything really change? Or do the seasons just come and go?

Unsinkable Sam

Do you hate those movies where whole cities get blown up but the narrative manages to focus on the family pet?

Well I do. "Civilisation might be ending but the dog's okay... hooray, pass the popcorn." Annoys me no end. And yet...

It's an impressive story of survival when it happens for real (and I want to preface this tale by saying I don't want to trivialise the fact that bloody events surround it, it's just a remarkable story).

It begins - as far as we know - in the port of Gdynia in Poland, then a German naval base which the Germans called Gotenhafen. From there the much feared German battleship Bismarck left port on March 18th 1941, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen.

The Bismarck was sunk in the mid Atlantic after a frantic mobilisation and much loss by the Royal Navy on March 27th. Only 115 men out of over 2000 survived the sinking.

Heading back to base, the British destroyer HMS Cossack picked up one more survivor - a black and white cat.
It had belonged to an unknown member of the Bismarck's crew and was found clinging to a bit of debris. The Cossack's crew named him "Oscar" and made him the ship's mascot.

HMS Cossack served as a convoy escort in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, and Oscar remained aboard. Presumably he looked for mice and played with the crew. On October 24th 1941 the German submarine U-563 torpedoed HMS Cossack. The hit caused a massive explosion in the forward section which killed 159 of the crew. Oscar was rescued with the crew who were transfered to HMS Legion, and taken to the British base at Gibraltar.

By now this cat had a reputation, and started to be known as Unsinkable Sam.

The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal had been a key vessel in the hunt for the Bismarck, and it became Unsinkable Sam's new home. It is my guess that Unsinkable Sam would rather have remained at Gibraltar.

On November 14th 1941 the Ark Royal was torpedoed by another German sub, U-81, on the way back from Malta. The sinking was slow and nearly all the crew survived, and... found floating on a plank in the middle of the sea... was one supremely pissed-off cat.

Unsinkable Sam was described as "angry but quite unharmed".

Sam was transfered to HMS Lightening and then HMS Legion (again). Both were later sunk.

Someone took pity on this poor feline, who had presumably started life in Poland, had travelled the Baltic, North Sea, North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, been as far east as Malta, and had had three ships blown up under him and ended up floating in the sea twice, and he was sent to the office buildings of the Governor General of Gibraltar to do mouse-hunting work.

Sam survived the war and was sent to the United Kingdom, living out his days in a seaman's home in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He died in 1955.
For all we know... he might have just been picked up on a whim off a street in Poland by a German sailor all those years previously.

The portrait is a pastels painting of Unsinkable Sam, called "Oscar, the Bismarck’s Cat". It is at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich England.

Howard Fogg

My father was a railway enthusiast. Or "railroad" in American English.
He was British-born, but was especially interested in the US railroads of around 1950 - most of all the Denver and Rio Grande Western. He was a prodigious collector of brass model locomotives.

A favourite railroad artist of his was Howard Fogg, who was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1917, later settling in Boulder, Colorado where he lived until he passed on in 1996. I don't know any more about Mr Fogg than that.

The era of steam has a romance all of it's own, and Fogg's paintings are utterly exquisite. I've put just a few here, but if you'd like to spend an evening in the enchantment of rail in days gone by.... put "Howard Fogg" into your search engine and you will find all you need.

Enjoy.