Williams Family Tree

from Emrys Williams <private>
to Margaret Wells <private>
date 1 March 2009 14:50
subject Info from Ivor Fielder
mailed-by gmail.com

Dear Margaret,

Today, 1 Mar 2009, I called Ivor Fielder on <private>. He remembered me and was delighted to hear from me. It was a real pleasure talking to him, I found. I wish I had a phone recorder for these talks but they're £150!
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=219205

He said:

May and Jimmy married 1917-10-19
Ivor was born 1925-6-11
Brenda was born 1919-10-19
Ivor has May's original birth certificate (somewhere!) and he swears it says on there that she was born in 1890, not 1891. ????

Ivor married Peggy Purvis 1950-10-19
His eldest son died after a few days in 1953.
Barry Fielder born 1955-11-7
Stuart Nicholas Fielder born 1957-10-13

I think he divorced, but I'm not sure.

Ivor married Maureen chambers 1984-10-5
Has son with her Ian Fielder born 1971-5-7 but I don't know the exact relationship there.

Ivor was something to do with bombers in the RAF immediately after the war and then worked for Imperial Tobacco.

Brenda married David Webster. He lost both legs in Operation Market Garden and then was hospitalised. Brenda may have divorced him - was he comatose? - but he died after a couple of years. They did not have children.

Brenda married Leslie Mackney in 1952. He's still alive now.
They had a son Vincent Mackney who is still alive and very successful from his work on the stock market.
Vincent Married Erica <somebody>.
Vincent and Erica have 2 children
Karen who is married with 1 child
Perry who married Danielle, with 4 children, one of whom is an actress. (Would that be Maia Mackney?)
Brenda died 2007-11-5.

I'm putting all that into gramps and I'm going to post it to Ivor to fill in the gaps. He was keen. His son Ian still lives with them and has email, but I don't know the address yet.

He also said:
Reg Wood was in the navy. He doesn't think Reg and peg married, nor Peg and John Smith. Reg was about 2 years older than Ivor. Actually, that makes no sense. What he actually means is that Alan Wood was 2 years older than Ivor was. And Alan was in the navy, we know. I think he mixed them up.

Blanche was a "real gipsy". Whether he meant she was of Roma ethnicity or merely embraced a devil-may-care lifestyle, I don't know! He pronounced Nona "nonna" and said that that was how he was taught to say it as a child.

JTW started out life as a butcher and he doesn't know how he turned into a carpenter.He was Clerk of Works on the Royal Exchange building (wherever that is) and May inherited a small Venus de Milo in a glass case which was a prototype of the full scale marble statue which is there now. He thinks Brenda inherited the model which was by then broken. May spent the first 12 years of her life on a farm with, he thought, Annie's parents, but we know they lived in merthyr and not on a farm so it may have been someone else. (That doesn't explain the 1901 census which shows her in Hackney, either.)

This royal exchange:
http://www.theroyalexchange.com/
doesn't seem to have had any big works going on during JTW's life.

JTW actually disappeared for some years, and the rest of the family frantically hunted for him. (Was this in 1917?)
JTW did inherit. There were some cousins in Merthyr who ended up owning a slag heap. In time the slag became valuable and they sold it off and died rich. There were two old men. Ivor thinks JTW's share was £10K (!) and JTW drank the lot. He was an alcoholic. Towards the end of his life, he slept under a bench in his workshop, with no separate home. He made very beautiful furniture. He was taken to Homerton Hospital and staff from there came searching for May (to pay the bill?) two weeks before he died.

May told Ivor that Annie had 18 pregnancies with JTW, 5 of which were stillborn or miscarried.

Well, that was a fruitful phone call! I'll be writing to Ivor this week.

Emrys