And you thought fans were tedious to maintain

Yesterday was Becky's birthday; usually this is celebrated with something disproportionately energetic in a forest near Thetford, but this year we went here:

and saw things like

The splendid bit of brass here is the device for automatically oiling the worm-gear which transfers rotation from the main drive-shafts to one of the twelve time-multiplexed sets of Enigma rotors in a bombe; a single bombe wardrobe contains thirty-six of these hollow brass pentapodes, and by the end of the war Dollis Hill was producing six bombes a week.

Grandma's 90th birthday

The Saturday before last, my grandmother Betty had her ninetieth birthday. The clans gathered from Derbyshire to Macclesfield to Blackpool, and proceeded to Clare Hall for a mighty feast. The weather was superb.

The food was copious and splendid (Betty is cutting a chocolate cake in the bottom photo)

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Betty was in great form; she has an excellent collection of brothers and cousins, who I see only at this sort of family event but tend to vow to make excuses to see again after each such event. Her brother Anthony has seven children and twelve grandchildren, most of whom we saw in Macclesfield for Betty's cousin Evelyn's birthday earlier in the year, but Betty's own offspring have been unaccountably inefficient in arranging great-grandchildren for her ...

By an implausible stroke of luck, nearly all the people in the photo have different first names, which means I can abbreviate the labelling. Everyone here is either a descendent of Mary Elizabeth Cole 1851-unk, or related by marriage to such a descendent.

[ many thanks to the several family members who proof-read this labelling: amongst a plethora of other errors, the first draft recorded my father as my mother's wife ]

Top row: Ben son of Joanna, Marian wife of James, Helen wife of Anthony, Eleanor wife of Philip, and Frieda wife of John Lyon.

Middle row: Richard son of Dick Woodcock, James son of Joanna, John Hodges son of Geralyn, Geralyn wife of Tom Hodges, Susannah daughter of Geralyn, Daniel son of Geralyn, Thomas son of Joanna, Philip son of Betty, and John Lyon son of Donald.

Bottom row: Valerie wife of Dick Woodcock, Anthony brother of Betty, Joanna daughter of Betty, Betty, Thomas son of Joanna's loud waistcoat, Evelyn cousin of Betty, and Michael husband of Joanna.

Sadly missing from the picture are Dick Woodcock (Evelyn's brother) who died about three years ago, Tom Hodges (Betty's other son) who died suddenly on 21 September last year, and Donald (Betty's other brother) who is still alive but not well enough to travel.


This entry is non-obviously linked to the one preceding it; Betty's husband Laurie, who died in 1988, worked at B.P. during the war, and I keep thinking I must sort out the logistics to show Betty around the place.