Tre'r Ceiri

I'm never happier than when I'm on an archaeological site and given time to explore and then to sit and imagine what motivated the people who constructed it - and this site is a beauty.

It is Tre'r Ceiri, an Iron Age hill fort on the Llŷn peninsula in Gwynedd, north Wales. The name, meaning 'town of the giants', is appropriate: it was built on a huge scale.

Within its massive walls lie some 150 stone buildings, all with thick walls of stone. They would have had roofs of either turf or thatch supported on wooden beams.

The earliest remains are of a Bronze Age cairn but during the Iron Age Tre'r Ceiri became a fort housing about 100 people in round houses. In Roman times it was expanded to become a large fortified village with some 400 inhabitants. Over time the style of building changed, from round to rectangular houses, some of which were subdivided into rooms. The site was abandoned towards the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, around 400AD.

Many thanks to Rachael and Ben for taking me to see Tre'r Ceiri, and for organising a day of very un-Welsh weather.

The Savan Incident 1918

On 12th March 1918, shortly after 4.40am, while proceeding west past Portland, Captain Haylett's ship, the Savan (above, in her wartime camouflage), was torpedoed on the starboard side. The engine room and hold number three, aft of the bridge, began to fill with water and the ship settled by the stern. Captain Haylett ordered the crew to abandon ship, but they kept the boats tied to her until, at first light, they could see that she hadn't settled any further, so Captain Haylett, the pilot, the Chief Officer and ten crew returned to the ship and, with the assistance of trawlers and tugs, managed to beach the Savan in Portland harbour.

Sadly, the second engineer, who was on watch in the engine room at the time of the torpedoing, was lost. A greaser, the last person to see him, suffered burns.

Ernest Haylett's full report of the incident can be downloaded by clicking here.

Captain Haylett was awarded a Lloyd's medal for his actions that day, as well as £100 by the Admiralty - a substantial sum in those days. The pilot, and some of the officers and crew, were also awarded sums of money.

The award was presented at Scrutton's offices in London. The above is the letter written by Ernest asking them to thank Lloyd's for the award.

I'm not sure why Ernest acknowledges an award for £50: the citation clearly states £100!

Surfing

This is Rhosneigr Beach, Anglesey, Gwynedd, on a glorious April day. Being the Friday before bank holiday it should have been impossibly crowded but it wasn't so....

....the surfers were able to practise their craft without having to worry too much about decapitating passing swimmers.

We stood on the beach to watch Rachael and Ben as they tried to gauge whether an oncoming wave was one which they could catch and surf all the way in to the beach.

Sometimes they chose the right one and managed to ride it in, and one could read the elation in their faces; and sometimes, however perfect the wave...,

....something went wrong.

A few years ago I might have felt envy; or I might have said, "I've done that - well, not on a big board but one of those body boards we had as kids"; or I might have believed that, despite my age, I could go out and give it a go - probably with calamitous results. I didn't feel any such thing. Rather, I felt huge pleasure in watching someone enjoy themselves, someone who was pitting their skills against nature and, sometimes, winning. More, this sense of pleasure was enhanced by knowing that one of the surfers we were watching was a child of ours, a part of us.

Ernest Haylett

Ernest Haylett (born 1871), was Walter’s third child. He did not join the family business but went ‘deep sea’. My father told me that this was frowned upon, that the tradition was to stick with the herring fishing. Ernest must have had a reason for his decision. Perhaps he knew that his father’s business was in trouble. Certainly, the family lost all its boats, many of which were destroyed while being used as inshore minesweepers in the First World War. My father told me that the family never received any compensation.

Ernest, seen here in the garden at Belgrave Road, became a captain with a firm called Scrutton & Sons. As master, he had a book which contains copies of his letters to the company at 9 Gracechurch Street, London. The letters are very bare, a typical one being that of 1st February 1912, from Belize,

Gentlemen,

I beg to inform you that we arrived at this port on the 29th at 7am after a passage of 5 days 5 hours from Trinidad to Half Moon Cay, distance 1583 miles average speed per day 304.4 miles. We were fumigated after arrival and the same afternoon took in 10,000 cocoanuts. We commenced loading mahogany yesterday morning and tonight have on board 640 logs and 40,000 cocoanuts for broken stowage.

I am in receipt of your letter of 12th ult and note contents re deck load

E Miners Apprentice, who was landed by shore doctor at La Brea for Opthalmia, is ashore here in hospital for continued treatment, his left eye being affected.

Mr Dredge has informed me he has 150 tons of wood at Libun River for us. We will go for this early next week.

I remain, Gentlemen,

Your obedient servant

E. Haylett Master.

Ernest Haylett (on the right in this photo) commanded three of Scruttons’ ships, Sargasso, Sarstoon and Savan. In 1920, after a war in which they lost many of them, Scruttons’ five remaining ships were bought out by Thos & Jas Harrisons and renamed, Ernest’s Savan becoming Speaker. Captain Haylett is quoted in the book 'Harrisons of Liverpool' (page 138) as being disgusted with the way the change of ownership was handled. Nevertheless, he became a good servant of his new owners, transferring to the Actor and, later, to the Defender, his last ship. Many years later my father took my brother Richard and I on board the Defender when she called at Mombasa.

My father was always keen to point out that Captain Haylett’s Certificate of Competency as a ‘Master of a foreign-going ship’, dated 1901, which hangs on the wall of my study, qualified him to command a square-rigged sailing ship. His square-rigged ticket came through his training, which started....

....before the mast on the clipper Hesperus* - seen here in the Adelaide River, Australia - and then on....

....the private sailing yacht Sunbeam*, owned by Thomas Brassey. On this ship he studied for his second mate's ticket. My father wrote, "Lord Brassey always insisted on a first class crew and was always helpful to seamen who studied for tickets."

* - pictures courtesy Wikipedia.

Walter Haylett

Walter Haylett was my grandfather. Sadly, we don't have a picture of him although I know there used to be one of him aboard one of his drifters on the wall in The Ship pub at Caister.

Walter was born in 1840. He went in to the family's fishing business and by 1872 was master of his own drifter, the main catch being herring. In 1868 he married Jane Real from Kessingland.

On 26th October of 1872 he he rescued the crew of the Dutch schooner Blyliam when it foundered off Great Yarmouth, for which he received a certificate and a medal from the king of the Netherlands. I have the medal but not, sadly, the certificate.

Both Walter’s brothers died at sea, James, in 1885, in a ‘yawl disaster’, and John, ‘drowned at sea as a boy’. Despite these tragedies, Walter went on to own a large fleet of drifters, operating out of Great Yarmouth, which followed the great shoals of herring round the coast of Britain. Again, I have no pictures of any of Walter's drifters but the George Albert (top) is an example of a Yarmouth drifter - photo courtesy Imperial War Museum. Walter had a large family, seven sons and three daughters, many of whom were involved in the family business.

Although there is no picture of Walter, we do have a letter of his.  It was written from Caister on April 21st 1918 and addressed to his son Ernest, my grandfather, who was in Portland following the mining of his ship, the Savan, on 12th March off Portland Bill. The letter can be downloaded from Dropbox here.

Part of the letter reads, Edwin started off by train for Oban yesterday to join his boat there. He sent his crew to Stornoway to fetch her to Oban to commence the herring fishing there. The nets and gear went by train so he will be there when the boat arrives. Some Yarmouth boats are fishing there now & doing well. Herrings are fetching £7 or £8 per cran. The boats all done well at Stornoway.

Edwin was Walter’s fifth son, born 1877. Another son, Alfred (born 1883), is described in the letter as leaving London the previous day, and planning to stop in Yarmouth Roads for the night before proceeding on to fish off Leith. It is interesting to imagine Hayletts fishing in Scottish waters a century ago!

Walter died in 1920.

Haylett Roots

The Hayletts come from the Norfolk coast, from the area between Happisburg (above) and Great Yarmouth. The earliest Haylett in our family tree, Robert Heylett, is recorded as dying in 1468 at Lessingham, a village just inland from Eccles. Many but not all were fishermen: callings such as ‘husbandman’, ‘yeoman’ and ‘blacksmith’ are mentioned. However, from the beginning of the 18th century, as our line of the family moved south to Winterton, Palling and, finally, Caister, the sea dominates. They were ‘mariner’, ‘fisherman’, ‘lifeboatman’ and, with Walter Haylett (1840-1920), my great-grandfather, ‘Drifter Owner’.

Even in summer, the Norfolk coast where the Hayletts lived is a bleak place. The beaches are wide and sandy, often backed by windblown dunes. The sea may seem placid on a warm day but turns wicked in stormy weather. Offshore, there are shifting sandbanks and tide races, and the southerly narrowing of the North Sea funnels wave and tide against the shore. Making a living from fishing is always dangerous. Life, in the days of our forebears, must have been terribly hard. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Norfolk men also exploited the disasters which overtook others. The Hayletts were beachmen, men who watched from lookout points on the dunes and cliffs and raced out to ships in distress. At worst, they pillaged them, ignoring those whose lives were in danger. Better, they asked payment for their help, or worked to help the castaways and salvage the wrecks. James Haylett, the famous lifeboatman, when asked if it was not true that Caister men profited from other people’s misfortunes, replied, “No, their mistakes.”

Later, public subscription funded local lifeboat companies, there being boats at both Yarmouth and Caister. From that time, the Hayletts were closely associated with the change in emphasis from wrecking to saving life at sea, and with the service created when these local efforts were brought together under the auspices of the RNLI. Photo shows the Caister lifeboat Beauchamp at the time of her building in 1892

The Hayletts involved in the Caister lifeboat disaster of 13th November 1901 do not appear to be in our direct line of descent. Old James Haylett was 77 at the time, which means he was born in about 1824, so he was probably a cousin of our Walter Haylett, the drifter owner. What happened that night is fully described in many books, including ‘Saved from the Sea’ by Robert Malster. The Caister lifeboat was called out to a ship in distress on the Berber Sands. After over two hours of trying the Beauchamp was launched into the vicious nor’nor’east gale, but was overturned in the surf and thrown back onto the beach, with the crew pinned beneath the capsized hull. James Haylett and his grandson, Frederick Haylett, heard the cries and managed to save three men, including another grandson, Walter Haylett, and James’ son-in-law, Charles Knights. At the inquest on the nine men who drowned, James Haylett was asked why, in such terrible conditions, the men had not given up the rescue and returned to shore. His reply is famous: “Caister men,” he declared, “never turn back.”

Picture of memorial courtesy Evelyn Simak

Fatu-Hiva

Thor Heyerdahl is best known for sailing across the Pacific from South America to the Tuamotu Islands in 1947 to prove that these remote Pacific islands were populated from the Americas and not from the east. He did this on a raft which he called Kon Tiki but the reason for his expedition goes back to an earlier adventure which he recorded in this book, published in 1974.

At that time we were living in Jamaica and it was given to me by Bob Morris, the school's drama teacher - see earlier post here - and the Christmas referred to must have been the Christmas of 1974.

It's an almost incredible story, of how, in 1936, Heyerdahl chose a young woman, Liv Coucheron-Torp, to accompany him on an experiment - to live on a remote island away from civilisation with none of the benefits of modern life.

The island they chose was Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas group, a place which had suffered a drastic decline in its population, mostly due to European diseases, and which therefore offered space for them to return to nature.

In fact they were ill-prepared for their experiment and would have been unlikely to survive without the generous help of some of the local population who, for example, showed them how to....

....to build the small house in which they lived for the first part of their stay.

In many ways it was paradise. Fruit was abundant, they had breadfruit trees to provide carbohydrate, they caught crayfish in the streams, and their friends brought them fish. But in the rainy season the food ran low, the mosquitoes ate them alive and Liv developed large tropical sores from their bites. They had to abandon the experiment and recover on a neighbouring island before trying once more, choosing a valley on the east coast which had less insects and which was....

....inhabited by the last local to have eaten human flesh.

They were very happy there but what finally drove the out was the very thing they had tried to escape: humans. Many of the local people turned against them and they ended their days on the island hiding in a cave before being rescued by a passing schooner.

However, the artifacts they collected convinced Heyerdahl that the island had been settled by immigrants from South America and spurred him into organising the Kon Tiki expedition to prove his theory.

Hayletts & Wilsons

My father was a Haylett and my mother a Wilson. Both are proud families, the former Norfolk fishermen and farmers who have been traced back many generations, the latter members of Clan Gunn who settled at Bannockburn and found fame and fortune from the design and weaving of tartans. Over the next few weeks I plan to record a brief history of these families.

Researching family trees is a popular pastime but I have had to do little to satisfy my curiosity as both families have been researched by earlier family members. My father's uncle Bob, who retired early from the police force, spent many years researching the Hayletts and had good access to parish records which, in those days, were kept in the churches where they originated. In the Wilsons' case, research was carried out by a cousin of my mother's, and my mother then simplified the wealth of available information when she wrote my father and her own biographies.

We have visited the areas where the two families were based. The Hayletts are very localised, their home territory running from Happisburg in the north to Great Yarmouth in the south, largely along the Norfolk coastline. The first written record of the Hayletts is from Lessingham, above, a Robert Heylett, who was recorded as dying in 1468. The Haylett name is now found in many parts of the world but all these people are likely to be descended from men originating in this area.

Such is not true of the Wilsons. The name came from an abbreviation of the name William, so Will's-son, so it arose in many areas independently. It is common in England but relatively even more common in Scotland. Our Wilsons are descended from men who were members of Clan Gunn - collectively these Wilsons have been described as a 'sept' of the clan. The Gunns are a small clan based in Sutherland, in the northeast of Scotland, one member of which, John Wilson, is recorded as living in Stirling in 1727 though the family soon moved south to the Bannockburn area (above).

A Chinese Visitor

Our back garden looks out across a large field which is, this year, down to winter wheat. At the height it has now reached it is usually empty of life except for the occasional uncontrolled dog, but last night we spotted something moving in it

It was a Chinese water deer, a species which we've seen once before but never as close to human habitation.

The animal is taking a risk as the field is bounded on one side by public football fields, much used by dog walkers, and on two sides by footpaths, so it wasn't surprising that....

....the animal was constantly interrupting its enjoyment of the farmer's wheat to look around.

While we were watching it a dog walker passed quite close. The deer's reaction was to bob down until the danger had passed before resuming its meal.

A close look at the pictures suggests that the deer has an injury on its right flank, perhaps the result of an encounter with a large dog.

This wasn't quite as exciting as watching buck from the Saadani hide but it's good to see wildlife venturing close to human habitation. Certainly, its visit gave us some pleasure.

Buck at Saadani Hide

The waterhole at the Saadani hide - see earlier post here - brought in a number of different antelope species, of which the most frequent visitors were waterbuck. Some magnificent bulls came to drink, usually alone, and usually extremely warily - so they would stand around a few metres from the edge of the pool for some time, watching and sensing the air, before they approached it to drink.

Female waterbuck tended to arrive in small groups with their young but had the advantage that some could drink while others kept watch.

As their name suggests, waterbuck are found around water and on one occasion a young bull took a swim in the pool - but then had considerable difficulty in getting out again.

The buck were right to be wary: lion also used the waterhole. We never saw them but their tracks were not infrequently visible round the pool.

Bushbuck are timid animals which prefer a forest habitat. I only saw two in the many hours spent at the hide and both seemed ill-at-ease. They have a strange, hunched-up posture and rely more on camouflage and keeping a low profile than on speed to avoid predators.

This one is a female seen in evening light.

If bushbuck are difficult to see then the sitatunga, or marsh buck, is an even more unusual sight: this one was the first I had ever seen. It shouldn't have been here at all. While it is found in Tanzania, it's an inhabitant of swampy places and operates mainly in the half-light of dawn or dusk, and in the night, yet here it is at the waterhole in a dry area at five in the afternoon.

Trucks & Trains

Heaven knows why we brought these with us when we moved from Scotland but we rediscovered them the other day in a box in the big cupboard in the spare room. They aren't in bad condition, except for the articulated car carrier which has tractor and trailer by different manufacturers.

We had a considerable collection of cars - Dinky and Matchbox - as well but they didn't come with us.

In the box with the trucks is this little collection of railway stock.

We don't particularly want to keep any of this - we have plenty enough clutter already - so, unless someone screams, we'll probably dispose of all of it.

1992

Many of the relatively few pictures we have from the early 1990s don't have dates on them but I think this is 1992. It shows the extended family in the conservatory at Lodge Road, with my mother at left, Gill's mother Bea next to her, and Gill's father Don at the back on the right, with Lizzie's Tom at the back.

Rachael was already being trained to play soccer and cricket, with David her coach. While she never pursued cricket, she continued to play football for many years, and I'm quite sure that David's encouragement set her on the road to the enjoyment she still has of all kinds of sports.

The Mantel Clock

This mantel clock belonged to George Albert Rogers, Gill's grandfather on her father's side. The story is that, at some point in his career, he was a travelling salesman and he swapped it for some of his wares. George Rogers went on to own a company called Phoenix, which had a factory in Stoke-on-Trent which made tiled fire surrounds, and he did very well out of it.

We had the clock at Lodge Road where it sat, very appropriately, on the marble mantelpiece in the front room. When it was there and, later, at Matenderere, we had the chimes working, and there was something very homely about their sound - except if you were trying to watch television or lying in bed listening to them on a long, sleepless night.

In our present small house the clock sits forlornly on top of the sideboard in the sitting room because it doesn't really fit anywhere else, so it's too out-of-reach to wind up. Even if we had it working I don't think we'd want it chiming: we'd never get any sleep.

The Photograph

When I trim my beard I do it at my work table in the garage where there's a convenient power point and plenty of light. The mirror I use came from my father. I'm not sure how old it is but I'm fairly certain he had it in East Africa.

By the time I've finished the trim there are hairs all over the mirror and caught between the mirror and the frame, so I clean them off with a small paint brush. Perhaps I was doing this unusually vigorously yesterday because the brush excavated, from between the mirror surface and the wood frame at the bottom of the mirror....

....a small piece of a negative from a black-and-white photograph.

It shows the wheels of an old aeroplane on what looks like a dirt runway and, beyond them, what is almost certainly a man in a calf-length dark coat and long trousers.

The picture is of no huge interest except that it raises all sorts of questions, few of which are likely to have an answer - like, was the photograph my father's, where was it taken, what sort of aeroplane is it, and why should it have been so important that the negative was kept in a bedroom mirror?