IN THE BEGINNING...

I began my research into the history of our family out of simple curiosity about the past.  As the story began to unfold, I realised that I needed to do it myself, because my three lovely daughters, Miranda, Sona and Diana had all been born outside England, and knew little of our background. So what could they tell their children about their origins if I did not tell them how we all began ? When I had finished compiling the comprehensive family tree, which took me about eight years, I realised that all I had constructed was a data base. Nobody reads a data base. There was no alternative but to put the history into book form, which future generations would be able to read it. Public records can be examined by anyone, but there is so much more that only I know, and I have many personal memories that I would like to record while I can.  Unfortunately there is so much else that I could have asked my parents and grandparents, and didn’t. Anyway here, as complete as I can make it, is my story. There are no famous names in this story, but there are some really interesting people. Through the miracle of DNA, I share some part of every one of them, and ultimately so do you.  Although this is our story, it is also in many respects the social history of England.   I began to write on 26th July 1997, and finished the first draft in June 1999. When I put down my pen, my dear wife Julia suggested that I should add a few chapters about my own life, which she thought that future generations would find equally interesting. These chapters on my own life were written separately and some time after the earlier book, and now seem to take up almost as much space as the historical chapters. And they are (of course) unfinished! In July 2004, after the publication of Men of the Ninth, I decided to complete the story from where I had left it (December 1984), and to undertake a major revision. This was inevitably interrupted by the writing of From Law to War, and I did not return to the task until January 2005. Then I was recalled to full-time military service for two years, and that, together with ‘Tis but the Time kept me busy until June 2007, by which time I was 65. So I made a concerted effort to finish it before another book intruded. I failed, because there is always another book to be written.  So the last chapters have been written in a rather episodic manner.

I decided that I would begin the story with my four grandparents (three of whom I knew), and trace their individual backgrounds as far as I could.  My original aim was to go back six generations. A simple calculation will tell you that I have 128 great great great great great grandparents, and had to find 252 individuals.. In the event, I reached the six generations with comparative ease, and in some directions went as far as 10. If any one of you daughters wishes to place herself at the centre of the genealogical wheel and thus add another generation, you will have to find as many antecedents again, since your mother also had four grandparents You will be lucky to fill in any of the blanks that I have left, but in this kind of research, there is always an element of luck, so never stop looking.  You never know what you will find.

 Among our antecedents, I must particularly mention Auntie Hattie, my great aunt Harriet Board. I remember her only vaguely, as one of the “Board Aunts” who lived at Blagdon near Bristol, and later at Clevedon in Somerset. Auntie Hattie died in 1948 when I was 6. She left a memoir of her childhood, and of the Board family in the last 20 years of the 19th century. It is an amazing record of life in the age before the motor-car, the aeroplane, and modern medicine.  I would be flattered if in another hundred years, some of my grandchildren or great grandchildren were to get as much pleasure from reading my account of their ancestors. When Hattie’s family moved to Clifton in 1880, their neighbours included a family called Platnauer, who were jewellers. One of the children, then 9 years old, was Maurice Platnauer, later Principal of Brasenose College Oxford, and my tutor in Greek for my first two terms at Oxford. Small world indeed !

 My grandparents were John Longhurst Likeman, who married Gladys Lilian Wood, and Arthur William Board, who married Agnes Mary Florence Allison. These four families are represented by the four main chapters of this book. Both my grandfathers led most interesting lives, and I have devoted a whole chapter to each of them. Another person to whom I have devoted a whole chapter is Tom MacGregor Allison, my great uncle, who was the only member of the family to be killed in World War I.  My grandmothers appear both as members of their own families, and in the chapters about their husbands. I have also written a whole chapter about my parents.

Perhaps one day I shall find time to write about some of the “other” Likemans, those not in our direct line of descent. Several served their country in the Armed Forces when the British Empire was at its height: Alfred Likeman (b 1836) served in the 53rd Regiment of Foot and received the Indian Mutiny Medal. William Henry Likeman (b 1848) was a seaman in the Royal Navy, and became Captain of the Foretop on HMS Victory, but long after the Battle of Trafalgar. Another William Likeman joined the Royal Artillery in 1882 and served in South Africa after the first Boer War, and later on St Helena (but not guarding Napoleon).  These and many others are in the data base which I collected.  In my research I did not try to follow the Likeman history after 1910. That year was the cut-off point because it was the year in which my father was born, and because I thought that the modern records should be easier to follow. I would like to try and produce a complete history of the Likemans, and bring it down to the present generation. If I don’t manage to do it in my lifetime, someone else may like to try.

 I hope that the opening quotation and title from Gray’s Elegy does not impart a gloomy tone to the book. Contrary to what the modern cult of personality would have us believe, many great lives are lived in obscurity. These are just a few of them.

Click here to be taken to Chapter Two... The Likemans