"Brexit - not in my name" !!
My Family History (as I see it !) might go some way to explain it.
And the misinformation from the Leave campaign might also ! The 350m figure was never factually correct and the money was never going to the NHS you can forget that ! These people believe in Private Healthcare so they are destroying our NHS as fast as they can so we cry out for private !!
And .. now it seems we never lost our sovereignty - the "CALL" of another 1/3 of the Brexiteers - "We want our Sovereignty Back " even though they cant spell it and neither can I probably ! (This excerpt from the Brexit White Paper this week)
Now to get on to my family history.
Firstly many of the Brexit main players appear to not be entirely British themselves - now this is interesting - many have backgrounds from elsewhere yet they appear to have become more British than the British themselves !!
No doubt some British people are purely from way back "stock" - some may well have farmed in an area and never interbred - maybe they are indeed pure Pict or pure Scot or pure Anglo Saxon or Breton. But I think you'd be hard pushed to be such pure stock nowadays !
Most must have mixed with incoming Romans, incoming Norsemen and women (if Vikings TV prog to be believed!) and it carried on from there with the Norman invasion which led to many terms in English being French terms as they seemed to become the ruling class. My history is very poor - this is how I see it !
My own family history includes Hugeonots from France who fled persecution there and settled in Lanarkshire as Lace Makers - so we do have refugees in our history. There are also a few Irish who presumably fled the potato famine or its aftermath - and settled in Glagow. I am proud to say there are a few inter-marriages in my family history - catholic/protestant - which in those days were really not a "done thing".
And we have a few branches who emigrated to Canada over the years so we are indeed world citizens in our small ordinary Scottish family !
But in fact we have quite a few heroes - or reluctant heroes in our family. Again I hate to say it but some of the politicians now spouting about WW2 or WW1 surprisingly either didn't live in the country then or seemed to avoid fighting ! Funny that.
What I do know is that the people who did fight etc then they never ever spoke about it. So in fact we never heard anything about it. We have pieced the stories together from old documents in family boxes or from stories from Uncle's who wrote some of it down. So here is a list of what my family and husband's family got up to in the war ... and I guess how the war sort of ruined what our family might have become ...
My grandfather fought in WW1 - including I know of Gallipoli - Mons - he rode a horse through the deserted and ruined streets of Amiens in Northern France etc - no doubt he fought in many of the battles - he had a gun carriage - and became a Captain having signed up along with all his brothers some of whom were under-age. I think they all survived so we have that to be thankful for. But he got the Military Cross and I know he did realise the horrors - you just have to read this - but I also know he went about designing an improved tank and submitted that to the military. He had a business selling car accessories which passed down our family tree to my cousin. But he never spoke about it - and my uncle who had a VW campervan had to park it round the corner as you can imagine so he wouldn't see it !
Anyway moving on, a Great Uncle got a Military Cross twice and also the Croix de Guerre from Buzancy, where the Scots had fought alongside the French and the French erected a memorial to them.
Before the war this Great Uncle had joined the army - which was unusual as the family had Irish history - but for whatever reasons he joined the British Army and became a great horseman - he joined the Hussars and the story goes he jumped a horse over the officer's table without knocking over a wine glass ! I think it was maybe a thing they do as I have a photo of the Hussars doing this. He was due to jump at the White City when war broke out. But here he is forming part of the Escort for the Kaiser of Germany who was on a visit to I think Kent as he was Commander in Chief or something of the Hussars. His horse is marked with a star - its in the middle in first two rows but we cant quite work out for sure which one it is !
This is my Great Uncle Jack Kelly ...
Moving on ... another Great Uncle reluctantly fought - not sure which war - but he was a pacifist but fought so his mother would not be ashamed.
Other grandfather failed the health check but took children away to the Highlands.
A Great Aunt was stationed in the Highlands to check soldier's mail - even checking the mail from a soldier she had met on the train who had written to his mother to say he had met a nice girl on the train - how sad is that to think of ... I got the feeling she had not met him again ... but lets hope she did. Poor guy. But she also had in her circle of friends a woman who was arrested as a Germany spy - she had been entertaining the offices and trying to get stories out of them ! Apparently a very flamboyant woman .. I think blonde ...
Those are the exciting stories - another great uncle was an ambulance driver during the Clydebank Blitz and my Uncle who had inherited the Car Accessories shop took leather gloves to help rescuers at the Blitz.
An Aunt worked at Bletchley Park having passed the crossword test you see in the Alan Turing film ! But they were told to never speak about it. It was the "goose which laid the golden egg but never cackled". Her family really only fully discovered the story after she had died. They had to say nothing for 50 years.
And my grandfather was a Prisoner of War camp commander (well we were told commander ..) inWW2, presumably as he was too old to fight by then but was trusted having made Captain in WW1 and receiving military cross. We recently realised he had been at the Trent Park secret Listening Camp where the senior Nazis were held. Maybe he was the mysterious Lord Abernethy who has never been identified ! ... but my mother assures me he would never have passed as a Lord !!
He also ran the camps on Isle of Man.
This is my Grandfather !
(A boat made by one of the prisoners - "Grandad's boat")
Another Uncle had suffered mustard gas poisoning in WW2. My husband's Uncle had come through the war after flying goodness knows how many flights as a gunner in Lancaster Bombers.
But again if I can point out - none of this was EVER spoken about. It should have been.
So ... when various minor MPs and Boris Johnston and such like use Nazi or WW2 symbolism then they have no right. This week we had an allusion to Dunkirk - as though Brexit was "our Dunkirk moment". How ignorant is that... OMG ... I just searched for Dunkirk - there is a 2017 film coming out about it - oh dear - it was a heroic and awful time - but the film will just stir up all those Brexiteer passions again!
Here is the History of Dunkirk - heartbreaking - but for European Unity please read the sections "Retreat to Dunkirk" and "Evacuations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dunkirk.
So ... on from that ... in fact this post was originally to be a listing of how many Europeans I know who are now integrated in my life - and how many UK people I know who live abroad.
I must not forget also my Aunt who worked as a doctor in Kenya for a good few years - in Nairobi.
In my family my father worked at a famous engineering company who built gas turbines into power stations all over the world. But in the end Thatcher's Government was the end. The pound was too high due to oil money so British exports were expensive. Norway took the best option at this time and save their oil money so it didn't influence their currency ... (my summation of economics !) ... But our exports were expensive to the rest of the world by then ... it was not the fault of the British companies it was the fault of the level of the pound over valuing ... and other countries gave financial support to the competitors - it was maybe breaking the rules in some way but they managed it. So the Scottish company failed to get a deal in Kenya as the Kenyans could get the power station for free from the US. But I remember my father visiting Colombia, Argentina, Norway, US, India. He no doubt visited elsewhere too but his main job was engineering design back in the UK.
So from that ordinary background one brother became an Engineer and studied as part of his degree via Erasmus in France then worked in France for a number of years, becoming fluent in French. Another brother being a true citizen of the world and a computer expert who used the internet in its very very early days, made a good friend with a guy from America and also his wider friends too. They have become family friends. But when he first came to visit it was with trepidation that we waited as I don't think you even got to see photographs of people in early internet days !
Anyway so here is a listing of people I know - in my not terribly large circle of friends this is how global people are.
School friends
C ...still in UK !
J ... lives in the US
K ... back in UK but lived in Bahamas for a long time
F ... still here but has visited US, Pakistan
D ... lives in Peru
University
A ... lives in Sweden with her family - all UK citizens but have now taken out Swedish passports this year after Brexit !
H ... lives in Geneva
C .... still in UK
A ... lives in UK but lived in US for a long timeL ... lives in UK
S ... lives in UK but lived in New Zealand a while with her partner
A ... lives in UK but travelled world for a bit
S ... lives in UK but also in New Zealand and Hong Kong
J ... lives in Australia
Work life Dundee
L ... Grew up in East Germany but must have come to UK minute the wall came down and is I think still here !
M .. same as above
L ... from Greece but probably back in Greece
there was guys from Spain, Iraq, Libya, Iran also in that department - some stayed and some went back but these were people who were either working full time in NHS or studying...
Granted there was also a terrorist who was found to have come from Dundee at the time but there was also a home grown one too from there ... but people are all so different - you cant judge one person by how another is. The rest were trying to cure diseases or learn how to improve scanning techniques !
S ... a friend from Argentina who I hope is now in America - I haven't heard from her now for a few years. But she introduced us all to films of what a beautiful country Argentina is.
And I guess for balance there were probably 50 other ordinary Dundonians or UK people in the department but it was always a colourful mix of different nationalities from what I remember. And I remember the lovely Tapas meal the guy from Spain or Tenerife made for us all when he left !
Recent family life
One family have a husband who had to take a job in Sweden for a couple of years - in IT - he is back here now - the family probably didn't see much of him in those years- the occassional weekend - not easy.
Two other families I know have had long parts of their careers as engineers in Germany or Holland
I have a friend who is from Belgium and lives here - fluent in 5 languages yet could not get a job easily at all and is working in a shop and loving it !
Another friend lived here for a while - they were a French family and I am still in touch with them.
I have a friend now who is married to someone French and they live here. I hope they are able to stay - they have been here a while.
It goes on and on ...
A relative lives in Germany with his Spanish wife !
A friend also had a grandfather who fled Germany in war - this has led to four out of five of their family managing to obtain German passports this year and by this means - EU citizenship too..
There was a Netherlands family at our Toddler group ..they are in Wales now I think.
My neighbour's grand-daugher is working and living in Paris - not sure as what but she has just picked up jobs while travelling and is now settled in Paris. Nice !
A friend's son is working as an engineer in the south of France - at an Aerospace place I think - but he is a UK citizen - so what happens there !
Many friends have houses in France and I speak French with groups of people like this - through French classes and meetup groups.
One of these friend's daughters now works in Marseille.
Another friend's sister is married to a French guy and they live in south of France near Perpignan.
An acquaintance I know is about to marry a Spanish guy - sounds fabulous.
A friend's son is working as a ski instructor in France.
I could go on ... and on ...
We are European ... and we are Global too .... and young people are even more Global ...
Where I live we are just so used to people being a mix of nationalities from EU - its great. And it benefits us as we have access to jobs across the EU.
I will never ever agree with Brexit - and I will never ever agree with the way some of our politicians are dealing with it and talking about it.
Signed Jennifer Wilson
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