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Chapter one - page 3 You may be surprised that I put ostrich feathers before the railway in importance, the trade to Europe in feathers was more valuable than wool and second only to the discovery of gold and diamonds. Every woman in Europe wore huge and elaborately decorated hats, decorated with ostrich feathers, their gowns and wraps were decorated with them, the demand for them was insatiable. Oudtshoorn must have seemed like the promised land, until women’s fashion changed. could it have been this that drew James Henry? You have been introduced to my grandparents, my story is about two of their children, Claude the son of Alfred and Catherine Keen and Ruth, daughter of James Henry and Katherine Morris, for now we will leave our new Cape colonists and return to the grime of London. LONDON 1898

Katherine Morris with her first child, Elizabeth Gwendoline. The photograph was taken in Oudtshoorn.

September 1898 and Lord Kitchener defeated the Khalifa at Omdurman, Gordon was avenged and the British were secure in the Sudan. The previous year Dr. Jamieson had made his ill-fated raid into the Transvaal Republic and the history books now his chief Cecil John Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape was heading head long towards what would become the Anglo Boer War. It was the London of Charles Dickens, of Little Nell and the Old Curiosity Shop. Samuel Pepys would have walked confidently down familiar streets passed buildings he had watched rise from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666 to the plans of his old friend Sir Christopher Wren. It was an age of both elegance and ugliness, for the fortunate few prosperity but for most grinding poverty. Victorian London controlled much of the world’s trade whilst ruling an Empire upon which the sun really did never set.

Cobbled gas lit streets, crowded with horse drawn cabs, carts and drays and some odd looking contraptions that spluttered and coughed their way through the commotion, that was London. In the air the aeroplane still awaited the Wright brothers, at sea, whilst steam was firmly established the beautiful windjammers were to be seen off the Downs beating their way up and down the English Channel

The month of October was the herald of winter’s fog, a dirty brown blanket, the pawl from thousands of coal fires that hung over the capital; thick dirty choking mists seeped into every nook and cranny, into the lungs and chilled one to the very bone. Occasionally the sun would break through, then nannies could be seen wheeling well wrapped charges through Regents Park in their perambulators, perhaps stopping to watch a troop of the Household Cavalry jog past in jingling, moustachioed magnificence.

Whilst blushing young ladies were admiring this troop of horsemen there may have been a far less spectacular scene witnessed in one of Hackney’s streets. Number 253 in Mare Street would have been indistinguishable from thousands of identical terraced houses in identical streets; none of them exist today, at the end of the last war with Germany (1939-45) so little was left after the bombing that what remained bulldozers cleared away. London’s row upon row of back-to-back terraced houses, ‘two up and two down’ without benefit of bathroom and sharing common toilets were replaced by faceless blocks of council flats, but at least they had a bathroom.