Welsh Journals

eighteen years. Seven years after the break with his mother, my father was fatally injured on board his ship. He had served in India; and in China under Gordon, during the Taiping rebellion. The medal pinned to his coat by the intrepid general for 'a deed of conspicuous bravery' is a heirloom I cherish. He was thirty-six when he died leaving a widow and three boys: George, aged five, William, four years old, and myself nearly two. In the only photograph of him that remains, he seems tall, well-proportioned and has a full beard.My grandmother did not acknowledge her son's wife and refused all appeals for help. Yet she bought a grave and paid for my father's funeral at St Peter's Churchyard, Cockett. But when my mother died, just ten months afterwards, the mother-in-law refused her body burial at Cockett. Consequently my parents lie in different graves. Jealousy did not stop at the cemetery gates. It was to me that my grandmother expressed her genuine remorse for the triple tragedy wrought by her pride and prejudice. She had deprived her son of his patrimony, broken my mother's heart, and penalised a young girl for following the dictates of affection. Her last pathetic wish was to be buried with the son she had disowned. Divided in life we attempted to reunite them in death; but even in the grave she would not meet her son's wife.2 J. H. Howard tells that his father was replaced as heir by 'a girl cousin of ours' on whom 'was lavished the affection and wealth denied to a son'. After a good education she was sent on a world tour with a paid companion and given a country residence of her own. Her aunt was about to have her presented at court when she casually informed her guardian and benefactress that she had been married on the previous day at a Registry Office. In her turn she was disowned and disinherited and he name never mentioned again but the three grandsons were not given their proper place in their grandmother's will or love. James Howard's description of his boyhood opens with the words, 'Heaven did not lie about my infancy. My earliest memories are of hunger, loneliness and the exasperations of an unwanted child in the various homes of my mother's poor relatives who must have lived in the hope of my grandmother coming to their financial aid.' The orphaned boys were left in the care of their mother's relatives for six years, when their grandmother relented, claimed the two older brothers and placed them with certain rich friends at Kings Lynn. When they proved 'refractory', she apprenticed them to sea. George deserted his ship in Australia and William did the same in Cuba. After being regarded as dead for two years, each wrote to grandmother asking for money for their passage home. 'William added a characteristic note to his request saying that