Diana Dennis - Finding a Way: Self-discovery through family research

We shall not cease from exploration,

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding,

The Four Quartets, 1942

Tiger of the Stripe Richmond

mmxxi

First published in 2021 by

Tiger of the Stripe

50 Albert Road

Richmond

Surrey TW10 6DP

United Kingdom

2021 Diana Dennis

All rights reserved

isbn 978-1-904799-72-6

Typeset in the United Kingdom by

Tiger of the Stripe

Introduction:
Taking Every Opportunity

A friend made a comment to me not long ago which has stuck in my mind. He told me how proud he was of what I have achieved in life. It pleased me, but it took me by surprise, as I do not consider, in the great scheme of things, that I have achieved much. I grew up as a vicars daughter, completed four years of nursing training, and worked for two years as an air hostess before marrying a British lawyer in Hong Kong in 1962. Dick Dennis (19262007) and I were married for forty-five years. Our family life started in Hong Kong, before we lived for many years in Kent raising our three wonderful boys. I spent my husbands last years with him at our flat in Mayfair until his death in 2007. Since then, I have continued to enjoy the excitement of life in central London, and I have travelled extensively; so perhaps my friends compliment was not so surprising after all. In expanding on his comment, my friend said something else: You take every opportunity coming your way. I am inclined to agree.

Taking every opportunity was not always possible. As a child I felt somewhat oppressed by the conservative world of my parents, John (Jack) Charrington (19011985) and Vera Sartin (19151994), and I could not wait for the more adventurous life which I then enjoyed as a young woman and which led me to Hong Kong and to meeting Dick. The joy of my married life came, inevitably, with its restrictions, but when my husband retired in 1984, I decided to do something with my life and not to fall apart as my mother had done when my father retired fifteen years earlier. Sadly, she lost her identity as a vicars wife, a role which gave her every opportunity to be outgoing and fun, and she became disengaged from life.

In contrast, I became strongly motivated to live life to the full. I enrolled for A-levels in my forties and gained a place to read English at the University of Londons Westfield College. I took A-levels and studied for my degree at the same time as my oldest son. After gaining my BA, I decided to take a break from academia, though I was slightly tempted to do an MPhil in Elizabethan pamphlets, as suggested to me by my tutor in the Development of the English Language. I had done particularly well in this subject. Common sense prevailed, however, and I avoided all those long hours reading about an obscure subject. By then I had developed an interest in the ideas of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (18751961), and I applied to train as a Jungian analyst, which, perhaps, was harder. It took me six years. I found my extrovert personality not entirely suited to this mode of life, but, once I had got through the training, I enjoyed working with my many patients from 1994 until soon after Dicks death in 2007.

Since my husband died, I have certainly taken every opportunity that has come my way, recovering that sense of adventure I had as a young woman. I have kept myself active and continued a journey of self-discovery which was first developed through my interest in astrology in my thirties and was given a new boost through Jung and my time as a mature student. I even returned to further study, taking an MA at City University in Creative Non-Fiction Writing. The motivation for this was that I was intrigued by Dicks early years in North China in the 1930s. I felt that even though we had been married for forty-five years, there were still mysteries about his life that I wanted to research and write about. My research and my MA led to the publication of my first book, essentially about Dick, published in 2015 and titled All I Ever Wanted.

The impetus for this second book came, curiously enough, from the launch of my first. Richard Bond, my late cousin Anthea Charringtons husband, came to the book launch at the Grosvenor Chapel and bought half a dozen copies on the mistaken understanding that it was about the Charringtons. Two years later, at a dinner party, Richard asked the question, Diana, when are you going to write about the Charringtons? Looking back, he said it in quite a forceful way, perhaps something to do with having been the senior partner of a large London law firm. Anyway, I took the bait, and was glad I had another project to get stuck into as I entered my eighties.

Fan chart for Diana Mary Charrington.

My interest in the Charringtons had been stoked some years ago by the fascinating family tree drawn up by my fathers brother, Harold. I still enjoy unrolling this two-foot-long document, as if unravelling an ancient scroll. It shows my family lineage going back to Nicholas Charrington (15301591), a farmer who leased Bures Manor, near to where Gatwick Airport is now. It shows the links between my fathers branch of the Charringtons and the better-known branches who achieved notoriety and wealth in brewing as well as in the coal and oil industries. Jack and Harolds father, my grandfather, Francis Charrington (18581947), was a member of the London Stock Exchange but his share of the family wealth was lost by unlucky investments. The family tree shows his father, Thomas Charrington (18191894), was on the Coal and Oil side, and that his mother, my great-grandmother Emma Menet (18211902), was of Huguenot ancestry. Somewhere on the Menet side, Harold had noted a family connection to the famous Cecil Rhodes (18531902). All of this fascinated me.

I also discovered that my mothers family tree was not without interest and intrigue. I made a deliberate effort, therefore, to explore her side, not least because it was rarely spoken about when I was growing up. I am glad to record some of it in this book. I am also delighted to have learnt more about my diverse roots, including my Huguenot ancestry, and to share how I discovered more about it through visiting places associated with the history of the Huguenots in London and France.

It is easy to share family history as the achievements of great men, but I became increasingly curious about the women behind these men and the things they achieved and endured to contribute towards the success of their husbands. Take Emily Richardson (18051849), one of my great-great-grandmothers on my fathers side of the family. She died at the age of forty-five having given birth to fifteen children. On her death, the newspapers simply described her as her husbands beloved wife, but I was determined to uncover more of her story, and I am proud to be sharing it within these pages. Emily, like many women in my family tree, lived in the shadow of her husband, as I had done to a certain extent myself when Dick was alive. I told his story in All I Ever Wanted; in telling my story in this book, I have tried to honour the women who, to a greater or lesser extent, have made me the woman I am today.

I admit, however, that it was Emilys husband, my great-great-grandfather Thomas Dale (17971870), who most captured my curiosity. The family tree shows how he was the father of Frances Josephine Dale (18371910), the mother of my paternal grandmother, Kathleen Clara Newman (18691943). Dales name was more than familiar to me, for as well as the tree compiled by Uncle Harold, I own a portrait of him which has looked down on me for many years in my flat in Mayfair. Before that it was at Island Farm in Biddenden, Kent, where we lived as a family for thirty-four years. For a long time, I did not know anything about him other than the fact that he was a clergyman, but I was hanging his severe portrait in the flat, shortly after we gave up our Kent home in 2004, and I saw on the back a piece of paper attached by Sellotape in my Uncle Harolds handwriting. It said simply: Thomas Dale. Dean of Rochester 1870. He died three months after his appointment. My interest was partly due to discovering another clergyman, like my father, in the family tree. I later discovered how different they were, and of all my ancestors, I have come to admire Thomas Dale most. There is quite a lot about him and the Dales in this book, but I make no apology for the chapters on Thomas and his immediate family being longer than others: he really was a remarkable man.