Sex, lies and ancestry: Harriet’s tale

Recently a new poetry pamphlet was published by Hedgehog Press. It is called Ninja Virgin. The title poem originated after my husband misheard “image of the Virgin”. His poor hearing has its uses. The last poem in the pamphlet, “Prayer to the Lares and Penates”, has me appealing for help to a few of my ancestors. I picked on those I felt had not helped my family in real life.

My father’s parents were unhappy about his marriage, perceiving my mother as a gold digger and climber. His mother died at the shock of losing one of her sons. Her other son, Andrew, never married and fell out with my mother once she turned 40, as he didn’t like women over that age. I received occasional letters from him which painted a picture of a lonely old man once his money ran out and he could no longer pull young women.

Nellie Reed, the grandmother I never met, was a specimen of a generation of idle women who never worked once they married. She didn’t even do anything domestic as they had servants. I would have felt nothing in common with her. Her husband, Victor Pitt-Kethley came round to my mother in time. I would probably have liked “Old Vic”, but he died when I was a baby. He edited the Wide World for 50 years and wrote ripping yarns under various names on the side. He was also a talented painter, woodcarver and gardener.

I knew my mother’s family better and I adored my maternal grandmother. After she died, I learned that she had a complicated secret. She was illegitimate and felt rejected by her birth parents. Taking her version of this, I have been rather unfair to her mother in this poem, Now I am delving into my ancestry I realise that the real story is more complicated and rather sadder.

Both my mother and grandmother believed that they never lied. But there is evidence that they did. While I got on well enough with my mother, I saw faults of snobbishness and racism in her make up. She also had a dislike of everyone with dyslexia. I once asked her jokingly whether she would be more upset if I married a person of colour or a dyslexic. She had to think about that for a long while before replying: “I think I could stand someone slightly blackish…”

The lies that emerged from my research on family ancestry mostly involved her concealing professions she thought were common. “Common” always seemed to be the biggest insult she applied to people, and she always did that behind their backs. I knew that most of the men in my Welsh ancestry had been preachers, but in most cases the reality was that they preached on the side of other jobs in the steel or tin industry in Swansea and Llanelli. The censuses record these other non-preaching professions in every case. The grandfather I knew was a very clever man who taught himself Greek but started in that way. A teacher at my mother’s school sneered when she heard he was at the tin works and my mother’s snobbery was born. When she learned that her mother had been adopted, she began to spin dreams that she came from a better background and had come down in the world. She got me to check old censuses and birth records, but because she had the name of her mother’s mother slightly wrong, nothing emerged. My grandmother had also claimed that she had no birth certificate and had to swear an affidavit about her age to collect her pension. Her adoptive mother also did all she could to annihilate evidence on this score. The illegitimacy seems to have spawned a network of lies.

The grandparents I knew were Plymouth Brethren and practiced an extreme form of Christianity, giving away any spare clothes and other possessions. On paper they were cousins, but not genetically so because of the adoption. My grandmother told my mother her origins. She said she was the child of someone called Harriet Richardson (slightly wrong) from Clifton, Bristol, by a German who said he was a poet. She did not want to know more as she believed her parents had rejected her and thought of those who adopted her as her real parents.

This adoption was, however, not a legal one. She was literally snatched from child minders in a scruffy area of Swansea by a woman who had lost her own child. My mother thought of herself rather than her mother as a kind of changeling and always assumed that the other background was something better. She embraced the idea of German blood. She was the oldest child, and her brother and sister did not hear the full story till later, but all learned German which was unusual at that time in Wales. They gave up after a year, but my mother took her degree in English and German and subsequently worked for Military Intelligence during World War II. She was blonde and embraced the idea of Aryan blood, ignoring the fact that her sister, Dorothy, had black hair and black eyes and her brother, Alex, had auburn hair. My mother assumed that Harriet, her real mother, was someone aristocratic who had parked her baby with childminders. The truth turned out to be very different.

Recently my Welsh cousins got interested in tracing this and other family history. Lucie, the daughter of one of them, proved to be fantastically good at genealogical research. My grandmother was christened Ernestine Wilhelmina, a clunking name that made her birth certificate more traceable in computer searches. It was swiftly changed to Cissie by those who adopted her. My grandmother was lovely and fun, but died when I was eight and her husband followed her a year later. In spite of their Christian ethics, she must have told one big lie when she said she had no birth certificate. Recently, Lucie found that certificate.

The birth date is right, as are the German names. Harriet Richens, her mother, turned out to be a parlourmaid. More research tells us that her family were not the posh people my mother had envisaged. Her father was sometimes a soldier, sometimes an agricultural labourer.  Poor Harriet gave birth to her child in St. Pancras workhouse and seems to have gone back to being a servant thereafter. She stayed single and lived into her nineties, so we could all have been in touch with her had we known. All this would have been a blow to my mother’s fantasies. And Harriet’s own mother was Irish, a nationality my mother was prejudiced against.

The only clue to the father lies in a German surname inserted in the birth certificate. The name is Mainzer. It is a fairly uncommon German surname and is in fact usually Jewish. I wonder how my mother would have reacted to that. I never heard her say anything antisemitic, but I think this possibility had never entered her consideration. I had hoped there would be some Jewish element as it would perhaps preserve descendants from some family wiped out in the Holocaust. I said this to Elaine Feinstein when we chatted during lunches in Toronto during the Harbourfront Poetry Festival. What I did not take on board was the self-segregation of Jews in the pre-Holocaust history of Germany. As I start to look at the family of the particular Mainzer who was probably responsible for getting Harriet pregnant, it is obvious that his entire family was Jewish, including the woman he went back to Germany to marry at about the time Harriet was giving birth in St. Pancras workhouse.

My grandfather, the Plymouth Brethren preacher, would have been delighted to find his wife was half Jewish. He was a philosemite who knew the Bible by heart and saw them as the chosen people. He at one time had a Jewish friend who taught him to mend clocks and watches. Thus, he always mended the clocks in any chapels in Wales or Devon when he went to preach. It was all part of the service.

My mother’s work in Military Intelligence during WWII was mainly collating and translating information taken from soldier’s letters, documents and magazines. Eventually everyone in her office was handed sections of the Nuremberg Trials to translate. Perhaps the horrors she read deterred her from visiting Germany. She spent her entire life without a passport so didn’t travel abroad.

My mother was probably the only person from a working-class background in that office. One of the Bonham Carters worked there. Her closest friends there were a Mrs Pocock, whose husband was a British Museum curator, and Professor Frederichsen, a world expert on Gothic. She seems to have had an affair with him, which was not completely consummated judging by his letters which I found after her death. He was married but separated. He was ethnically German but a British citizen due to being born on a British ship going round the Horn during a storm.

Everyone in that office was a lover of German culture and had the problem of having to come to terms with the horrific facts that were emerging. The office was decorated with looted German signs. The signs had instructions like: queue here. My mother was often amused to see US visitors of German ancestry obediently queuing without showing any surprise at there being signs in German in the War Office in London.

One oddity in my grandmother’s life is a curious document that shows she visited the workhouse where her mother gave birth. Considering she spent most of her life in Swansea and had little money, this is strange. Cissie was working as a housekeeper in Swansea and must have taken the train to London and been admitted and spent a day there when she was 18. In the record she was defined as hysterical and temporarily disabled.  My mother never knew of this and I only found it out recently.

Cissie (otherwise known as Ernestine Wilhelmina Mainzer Richens) told my mother that she did not want to know her real parents as they had given her up. Harriet visited her when she was small but was asked not to by Cissie’s adoptive mother. All letters and photos were destroyed. Perhaps Cissie just had those few hours of empathy with her mother before shutting off. In her old age she visited the workhouse in Swansea to give small gifts like cigarettes and sweets. But this was just part of her Plymouth Brethren Christianity. Alongside her fun side she had a vein of cynicism. About the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, she said in scathing tones: “They know who he is…” When she visited a zoo with my mother and looked at a rather human-looking monkey, she came out with the gem: “Some men are very wicked.” I got a poem called “Evolution” out of that remark.

The DNA element in ancestry makes research more interesting, so I took a test as did others in my family. The name Richens came up amongst various distant cousins even before I had put Harriet Richens on my chart. I do not yet have a Mainzer link by DNA but it may come soon. It is very much dependent on who has taken tests.

As there were few Mainzers in Britain in the late nineteenth century, suspicion falls on one called Wilhelm Wolf Mainzer who became a British citizen. DNA may confirm this in time, but it is also just possible that some other Mainzer paid a flying visit to England and met Harriet. We have traced Wilhelm Wolf Mainzer’s ancestry too, which is comparatively easy thanks to all the info on Jewish graves. There are many Mainzers buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Mannheim. This one came from Lorsch. The census defines him as a “Marble Pavement Manufacturer” at the relevant stage in his life. A few years before Harriet gave birth, Wolfe, the name he chose to naturalise under, was prosecuted in Middlesex and at the Old Bailey for fraud. He was acquitted in both cases. Quite possibly it was just a mix-up, but the story reveals that diamonds worth £450 were involved in the case. The use of a middleman as buyer, one who already owed him money, complicated the situation. He may not have been fraudulent, but he was certainly rich. £450 in those days is equal to about £70,000 now. Marrying Harriet may not have been on the cards, but he could have saved her from giving birth in St Pancras workhouse. The family who adopted Ernestine and changed her name to Cissie were poor. Some help could have been given perhaps too. At one stage the father who adopted her was imprisoned for debt.

One of Wolfe’s brothers married a Rothschild. Wolfe’s marriage to Clara Nathan ended in separation in 1912. They had two daughters, one of whom married a writer: Max Rittenberg. I read one of his novels online and it was not uninteresting, probably better than those of my grandfather Vic. The daughter and Max Rittenberg both had journalistic and scientific interests and their son, David Ritson, went on to be an acclaimed physicist and professor in the US.

Wolfe or Wilhelm’s 1921 census entry lies about his country of birth. He was probably a glib character. It would be interesting to have photos of both him and Harriet. Maybe some very distant cousin will turn these up in the future.

Lies, lies and more lies, that’s what turns up when you open the can of worms that is ancestry. But I find the contents of the can rather interesting and will always wonder how my mother would have taken it.

Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s poetry pamphlet Ninja Virgin is published by Hedgehog Press at £10.99.

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