Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill Read Free Page A

striking resemblance to my brother, Alec. I was introduced to my audience, on this occasion, by the present MP for Bath, Don Foster. Later, he very kindly researched Thomas Phinn for me in the archives of the Houses of Parliament.
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    Thomas Phinn. Hall – Staircase, Inner Temple, London. 41 St James’s Street, London. Brook’s and Reform. Born at Bath 1814, the son of Thomas Phinn of Bath, Surgeon, by Caroline, daughter of Richard Bignall, Esq. of Banbury. Unmarried. Educated at Eton and Exeter College, Oxford where he was 1st class in Classics 1837. Was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1840 and joined the Western Circuit.
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    The impressive entry in The Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, Volume 1, 1832–1885 continues to describe the glittering, if rather curtailed, political career of Thomas Phinn, QC, Liberal Member of Parliament, Secretary to the Admiralty, who was fiercely in favour of ‘vote by ballot and the fullest development of free-trade principles’. It was he who voted for an inquiry into Maynooth, the Irish seminary from which so many missionary priests came over the water to England, so I guess he must have had some Irish connections.
    The entry in The Times , 1 November 1866, announced, with great regret, the sudden death of Thomas Phinn:
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    He was yesterday apparently in his accustomed excellent health and spirits, but on returning to his chambers in Pall-mall about 7 o’clock he complained of a pain in the region of his heart, and after a few minutes expired.
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    Much as I would like to claim the eminent Thomas Phinn as an ancestor, and perhaps lay claim to his fortune and that wonderful marble bust, my sister Christine, guardian of the family archive (a few scribbled letters, birth and death certificates and a battered album of faded sepia photographs), gave me the low-down on our branch of the Phinns. On the distaff side of the family, I am descended from the Brothers of Portumna, County Galway, whose notoriety was that they made coffins for the victims of ‘The Great Irish Potato Famine’. On my father’s side were the Macdonalds of South Uist, who eked out a living on that bleak island of great melancholic stretches of heather-covered moors and bog land in the Outer Hebrides. The headstone of an ancestor, one Ranald Macdonald, is somewhat ambiguous in its dedication. Perhaps he had a reputation for untrustworthiness or was a noted sheep-rustler, for the inscription on his gravestone reads:
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    Let all the world say what it can,                  
    He lived and died an honest man.
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    I felt it politic not to delve further into my ancestry.
    A Father of the Old School
    â€˜Education, education, education.’ This was my father’s mantra well before Tony Blair made it his clarion call. My father, a steelworker for most of his life and with little formal education, but with a sharp intelligence and lively sense of humour, was ruthless in his determination to provide for and protect his family. He recognised that the central factor in achieving any sort of real advancement in life was ‘a good education’.
    My father once told me that he had passed his scholarship examination to attend grammar school, but his step-father felt it was best for him to leave school. Like many a youngster at that time, largely because of lack of the necessary money to pay for books, equipment and the uniform, he was denied the opportunity to continue his studies. At fourteen, when his mother died, he went to live on an uncle’s farm, before joining the army on his seventeenth birthday to become a despatch rider. Although he never said so, I guess my father deeply regretted not having had the opportunity of a good ‘schooling’, but he never saw education as a possible route to better things for himself. He perhaps knew by the age of thirty, with a wife and young family, that it was too late for