We could feature here the stories and legends that are handed down. Did it really happen? Was it embellished for effect? Does it matter? It’s what families are made of since people became families. You couldn’t make it up; it’s the stuff of legend.

Ian writes:
John Brown

The house we lived in from about 1937 had been bought new in 1908 by mother’s Auntie Annie and her first husband; she was my grandmother Emily Raybould’s sister (both neé Brown). Auntie Annie herself had a close relationship with Auntie Pumphrey, another, older family relative: Pumphrey was her husband’s name. I knew Auntie Annie well, and saw her frequently (she lived nearby with her third husband, poor thing; no children from any of them, and the third was a miser); Auntie Pumphrey died in 1924; my father was an executor; I think Arthur Short senior was the other. Her will, made a few days before her death, was in handwriting on a page from a lined exercise book.

My mother used to tell me how she sat at her aunties’ knees and listen to them reminisce. One story: a little girl (probably the Pumphrey) was taken to see – Adderley park is it, where they used to make railway carriages? – the Royal Carriage newly built for Queen Victoria; she was given as a memento “a piece of blue cloth” which had been part of the making of the carriage. John Brown took her, as a special treat, because he was her great-uncle, and I was told he was my great-great-great-great-uncle. After my father died I came across a small oak box. In it were sewing things from way back; there was a once-white envelope; it contained a rolled-up blue ribbon, held in its little roll by a thick black woollen thread through it; carefully unrolling it I saw that it had been creased, partially twisted, as it would have been as a ribbon tying a child’s hair.

Does this prove that John Brown, who had no children but had a brother, was our distant uncle? Ask me another. The stories so impressed my mother that she got books from the library on Queen Victoria and John Brown, and we compiled a family history based on what she read and what she had heard from her aunties. It also involved a little ditty around the Aston area about local brewers and inn-keepers: “Smith’s Brown Stone Jug”. Somehow it involved some of the Brown family (or a Brown family?) coming down from Scotland and settling as hoteliers in Warwick, though I believe my mother was born in Aston.

Harry writes:
Working from the known to the unknown, Queen Victoria was the first monarch to travel by train. Prince Albert was an enthusiastic proponent of the railways, which at that time were spreading across the country. An urgent request went out to the Railway Companies asking for a “Royal Train”, and it was manufactured in very short order. The first royal train journey was from Slough to Paddington on 13/6/1842. So the carriages must have been built prior to that, and Auntie Pumphrey was born in 1833, so she would have been a little girl of 9 at the time of the journey.

QV’s second journey was to Birmingham and it is possible that the train was stored in the sidings at Saltley whilst the visit was made, thus providing a second opportunity to see it.

Carriage building moved from Saltley to Wolverton near Milton Keynes where the mark II train was built. The first WC on a train was fitted for Queen Victoria, Albert then insisted that 5 were installed so that QV did not share with her servants.

JB was known to travel by train with her and on one journey he went down the platform at Wigan, to tell the driver to slow down. A semaphore system was later installed.