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It was a busy day. The wonderful Noel, the fencing man, came with his team of lads at dawn (7.55) to fix our broken fences and gates, as they have done for the past fifteen years. Now all the gates, over-nudged by horses (yes, YOU big Johnny!), crushed by chipping machines and tree-cutters tanks, open smoothly, and we have a nice new fenceline to separate the acres of ex-forest, which our Nigel -- the peacock catcher -- has metamorphosed into a lovely green paddock, from the yet-to-be-cleaned bit. Yes, Johnny, you are going in there. But leave the new fence alone!
Then the man came to service the ageing heat-pumps ... it wasn't a day to settle down to serious D'Oyly Carte business ... so, I've been in that photo box again ... and here are the people whom I've pulled out. They range from a peer's bastard to the holy and the learned to a nasty con-person ... I didn't pick them for any reason but that they had names on the back ... they could have been anyone at all ... but the addition of the testamentary wealth of a few of them is staggering. Well, there are two 'nobility' amongst them ... one real and one a byblow ... some inherited money, some 19th-century-made ... there are two composers, one known and the other not ... the children of a surgeon, an insurance man, a miner's agent, a silk mercer ...
Four of my ten left more than 50,000L ... the son of one left half a million, which in the 1920s was a helluva sum, the grandfather of another left 300,000 as far back as 1869 ... of course, the criminal, 'of independent means' is nowhere to be found in Britain thereafter ...
So which of the ten were were the wealthy ones? Which was the criminal? Who were the children of the nobility, and who of the self-made men ...
Have a guess
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| Sophia |
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| Alma |
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| Rosalind |
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| Lucy |
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| Margaret |
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| Anne |
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| Oswald |
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| George |
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| William |
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Arthur
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Answers tomorrow ...
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