I switched from watching Newcastle losing at Man United 2.0 in the League and all in glorious 3D to experience the ancestors of William Roache, the longest serving actor in a dramatic and comic serial entertainment in the UK, in the latest edition of Who Do you think you are? If he continues to play Ken Barlow in Coronation Street for the next couple of years he will become the longest performing actor in the same role anywhere having started in 1960. He served the army for his National Service and suffers from trinitus from a mortar explosion. The Wikipedia mentions that his paternal grandfather was a Freemason interested in spiritualism, theosophy, esotericism and homeopathy. There is no mention of his maternal grand mother and her husband and these were the subject of the programme. What was uncovered for him proved the most interesting of all the subjects to date and the way the programme was presented maintained interest from start to finish.
His grand mother had the Christian name of Zillah Waddicor and re remembered as a child visiting her at the restaurant and tea rooms she ran in part of Alton Towers in the 1930’s which she had commenced shortly after the large countryside home of the former Shrewsbury Family was sold. Revisiting the now derelict Country house he was able to remember the room where he placed on his tricycle. He discovered that in fact a quarter of a million people visited the gardens which local business had developed from the grounds of the estate and that his grand mother had owned and managed a business which could provide up to a thousand meals at a sitting with arrange of sixteen lunchtime menu meals from 2 to 4 shillings. She had then developed the Old Mill by the station into a second restaurant. She was of only a handful of women who owned and managed businesses of this size given that after World War 1 the emphasis was on finding “ bread winner” jobs for the men, something which was ingrained in working class politics until the later 1970‘s.
The second extraordinary story is that he then discovered that she and her husband had run a small shanty shop on the Golden mile at Blackpool selling ices and soft drinks. Somehow she made sufficient money from this business to open the business at Alton Towers although the programme failed to explore how she made the move, given that until then the business was in his her husband name. In fact it emerged that the great grandfather had also operated the shanty shop as a medical electrician using the new interest in electricity given that homes and street lights used gas to provide gentle shocks to the hands and arms which was believed to have a beneficial effect on nervous conditions. In addition he had practiced the cult of phonology reading the bumps of the head. He had done this until this kind of seaside business was banned by the local council. He had then moved into the purchase of properties now several used a hotels so that when he died he left an estate of over £4000 worth as much as half a million in today money and more in terms of property values.
The interesting aspect is that the Will left his estate to one of his three grand daughters and this was explained that she lived with him and not with her parents. William then was told that his own mother had gone to live with an aunt when she was only three months of age and this helped him to understand why he regarded her as a cold person unable to express feelings about and to him. The mystery of this appeared to be explained by family understanding that the grandfather who described himself as a gentleman in one census never participated in the subsequent business and was rarely spoken of within the family. The belief was that he drank alcohol excessively and the fact that two his children were almost immediately placed with relatives suggests that he was abusive/ violent or something which made his wife give up direct care of her children despite appearing to William as a kind and loving person as well as he now discovered an amazing business woman.
There were many more questions I would like to have answered but this remains the most interesting of the latest series so far. I can even forgive Roache for being a public supporter
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