WHEN THE FAMILY ARCHIVE WAS ALIVE

Some of my earliest memories of the wider family are of my great-great-aunt Mary’s house in Canonbury Place, a few minutes’ walk from the Canonbury Tavern.

I cannot now say with confidence whether it was No. 2 or No. 3. More than sixty years later, my uncle Len does not remember either. I remember only that it was one or two doors from the end of the terrace.

The uncertainty over the number seems appropriate in an article about memory, because the things I do remember are far more vivid.

To a small child the house seemed enormous: three or perhaps four storeys, high ceilings, long corridors and flight after flight of stairs. My young relatives and I ran through it, made too much noise, explored, raided the pantry and were periodically reminded by the adults that children were supposed to be rather less conspicuous.

I remember it with great fondness.

It was more than Mary’s home. It was one of the places where the extended family assembled. Weddings, christenings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and other family occasions brought different branches and several generations through the same doors.

Nobody sat us down to teach us family history. They did not need to. The people who carried the history were in the room.

Mary was among the most memorable. She was already elderly when I knew her in the early 1960s: a woman of formidable frame and equally formidable personality. I remember being clipped around the ear for being cheeky, and learning that particular lesson rather more quickly than some of Grandfather’s.

I cannot now say precisely when she died. It was sometime in the early or middle 1960s. Yet I can still see what I wore to her funeral: grey shorts, a matching jacket and cap.

I have no idea why that detail survived when the date did not.

Memory preserves what it chooses, not necessarily what the historian would prefer.

Mary’s nephew, my paternal grandfather Alfred Windmill [2], was the finest storyteller I have known. Long before Rodin taught me anything about seeing [1], he was teaching me through stories.

The stories came on Sunday afternoons. The roast beef would be carved, the gravy passed round, and the plates cleared. Then he would reach for his Old Holborn.

There was a small ceremony to it. He tapped the packet once on the table and rolled a cigarette by hand, slowly, without looking at it. Then he struck a match. When the first smoke rose, the room went quiet, because we all knew what came next.

He was also, I eventually realised, not always an entirely reliable historian.

Mary featured in one of his favourite stories. As he told it, when he was a young man she took charge of finding him work, and quite literally dragged him from one prospective employer to the next. At each door she announced that the previous employer had offered a little more. Eventually she, on his behalf, accepted an offer from a glass and mirror business.

Whether the dragging was quite as literal as Grandfather maintained, I cannot establish. Having known Mary, I have never found it implausible.

What mattered was what followed. He joined the firm as an employee; within roughly ten years, he was running the business.

He never spelled out the lesson; that was the point. But it was there: Mary could negotiate the entrance. He still had to do the work.

Some of his stories were wartime ones. My favourite concerned a guard duty. He and five or six men were ordered to guard a sewage works. By his account it was the least glorious posting the Army ever devised. They stuck it for a week: the smell, the boredom, and the certainty that the war was happening somewhere else.

Then, as he put it, he reconsidered the tactical position. The defensive perimeter was moved to the pub down the road.

The locals were delighted. For weeks, he said, the section was fed, watered and made much of, until orders moved them on. He would finish, tap the ash off his cigarette, and lean back looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

I have no idea how much of it is true. “For weeks” seems generous. A sewage works left unguarded for that long seems unlikely to have gone unnoticed. Perhaps the details improved over successive Sunday afternoons.

But I know exactly what he was telling me.

His heroes rarely won by being stronger, richer or more important than anyone else. They won by reading the situation, making the best of it, and getting the people on the other side on their side.

As I grew older I noticed that more and more of his stories could not have happened exactly as he told them. Occasionally the metaphor had plainly overtaken the history.

That does not make them worthless. It does require us to keep two things apart. A story can carry a true lesson about behaviour without every detail being historically true. The trouble starts when we confuse the two.

One family story, for example, concerns the glass reflectors used in the early cat’s-eye road studs. Grandfather never claimed to have invented the cat’s-eye; that achievement belongs to Percy Shaw [7]. The family story was narrower: that the glass and mirror business Grandfather later ran handmade the first few hundred glass components used in an early trial.

I remember being told the story. That is evidence that it was told to me; it is not, by itself, evidence that it happened as described. Family memory deserves preservation. It does not deserve exemption from scrutiny.

What strikes me now is that this process had already been operating for generations before I became conscious of it.

My paternal grandparents had themselves been raised substantially within the wider family rather than exclusively by their parents. Aunts, uncles and other relatives took a direct part in their upbringing.

My father, Ronald, and his younger brother, Leonard, in turn spent considerable time when very young with Jonathon and other older relatives [5][6].

My sisters and I then spent time with our paternal grandparents and with surviving members of earlier generations.

This was not simply parents passing information to children. Knowledge moved vertically between generations and laterally between different branches. Older relatives reinforced, contradicted and sometimes corrected one another. Children encountered different personalities carrying overlapping versions of the same history.

Canonbury mattered because it provided somewhere for that to happen. Sunday lunch mattered because it provided another. The stories mattered because they made experience memorable.

For several generations, the family did not need to think consciously about preserving its institutional memory.

The archive was alive.

We tend to speak of inheritance in financial terms. Yet much of what one generation passes to another sits elsewhere: knowledge, relationships, institutional standing, ways of thinking and accumulated experience [3]. The Six Capitals framework I use elsewhere attempts to give some structure to that broader inheritance [4].

As a child, of course, I would not have described Sunday lunch with Grandfather as the transmission of knowledge capital. That would have been both pompous and absurd. I thought I was listening to stories. Only much later did I understand that I was receiving an inheritance.

Grandfather’s sewage-works story was not a lecture on adaptability, stakeholder engagement or tactical pragmatism. Mary dragging him around prospective employers was not a seminar on negotiation.

That is probably why I remember them.

Then the pattern weakened.

For reasons that seemed entirely reasonable at the time, my own children, Roger and Dominique, spent much less time with my parents than my sisters and I had spent with our paternal grandparents. They received fragments of the family stories rather than being immersed in the people who carried them.

My grandson, Phoenix, is another generation removed.

Nobody decided that the stories should stop. They simply did.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Modern families disperse. Marriage brings different families and histories together. Careers move people geographically. Houses are sold. Grandparents die. Children grow up and have children of their own.

The relative who knows why an apparently insignificant object matters dies before anybody thinks to ask.

Within a surprisingly short period, living memory becomes family history. Family history becomes genealogy. Eventually genealogy risks becoming little more than names and dates.

Something is lost at each transition.

The obvious response might seem to be to write everything down. It is not quite that simple, and Grandfather illustrates why.

I would not want an archive that converted every one of his Sunday-afternoon stories into historical fact merely because nobody remained alive to challenge them. Nor would I want an archive that discarded those stories because they could not be independently proved.

Both approaches destroy something. The first turns family memory into mythology masquerading as history. The second throws away part of the family’s cultural inheritance because it fails an evidential test it was never intended to pass.

There is a better distinction:

“This happened.”
“I remember this.”
“My grandfather told me this.”

All three may deserve preservation. They are not the same category of evidence.

That principle increasingly informs the way we approach the family record through Windmill Family Office [3]. Preservation should not require credulity. Equally, intellectual rigour should not require us to erase memories merely because their provenance is oral.

Sometimes the fact that a story was repeatedly told is itself historically interesting. It tells us something about the storyteller, the family and what one generation considered important enough to pass to another.

I would not want to romanticise Mary’s Canonbury house. Families were no more perfect then than they are now. People disagreed. Memories conflicted. Some relatives were easier company than others.

The value lay not in an imagined golden age but in continuity. Once that continuity weakens, preservation has to become deliberate.

That is one reason Windmill Family Office has gradually become concerned with rather more than financial assets [3]. Capital can exist in forms that never appear on a conventional balance sheet. Knowledge, relationships, institutional standing and intellectual creation can be accumulated and developed [4]. They can also disappear.

Stewardship therefore cannot mean simply putting everything inherited into a box and ensuring nobody touches it. It requires judgement: what should continue; what should change; what can be evidenced; what remains uncertain; what should be preserved precisely because it is uncertain; and what should be passed onwards.

I cannot now put Roger and Dominique back into those rooms. I cannot introduce Phoenix to people who died before he could know them.

But I can write down what remains. I can preserve photographs, documents, objects and recollections. I can distinguish what we know from what we remember, and what we remember from what we were told. I can leave enough provenance that those who come later can question the record rather than merely accept it.

Perhaps that is simply the modern version of something Mary, Alfred, Ronald, Len and others were doing without giving it a name.

For several generations, our family did not need an archive. The archive was alive.

Today, stewardship requires us to build one. Not so that future generations are told what to think about their family, but so that they have the opportunity to know it.

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[1] Steven Windmill, Art, Judgement and Capital.
https://lnkd.in/p/enCGNghH

[2] Windmill Family Office, Alfred Windmill.
https://windmillfamilyoffice.com/leadership/#alfred-windmill

[3] Windmill Family Office, Four Centuries, One Continuing Duty.
https://windmillfamilyoffice.com/

[4] Windmill Family Office, Six Capitals.
https://windmillfamilyoffice.com/six-capitals/

[5] Windmill Family Office, Ronald Windmill, Leadership & Stewardship.
https://windmillfamilyoffice.com/leadership/#ronald-windmill

[6] Windmill Family Office, Leonard G. Windmill, Honorary Chairman, Leadership & Stewardship.
https://windmillfamilyoffice.com/leadership/

[7] Wikipedia, Percy Shaw: the inventor of the reflective road stud (cat’s-eye), patented 1934.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Shaw