Still breathing, still making progress …
Life’s a funny old game. Having written a sporting biography about a decade ago, some three years later, together with my brother and a friend – as it were having randomly backed into the subject by chance – we devised ourselves a little hobby project.
This involved a huge amount of research at the Public Records Office at Kew, at one point including a needle-in-a-haystack task of sifting through a total of 98 WWI military unit diary files looking for a specific document that we believed must have existed but which to our knowledge had never been unearthed before.
That aspect alone took two years to complete albeit that is a relative statement when you’re only engaged upon it on the odd occasions that any or all of you find yourselves with both the opportunity and the inclination to travel to Kew for the purpose.
Let me put it another way – if I’d been given a middling salary and the opportunity to work full-time on the project it could probably have taken me only about four to six weeks.
However, the sum of it is that at some point during those two years we hit the jackpot in the form of a copy of an official team list (including reserves) stashed away in a most unlikely administrative file.
Again, here I perhaps need to expand slightly. When you’re trawling through a mountain of files looking for something which may or may not be there you inevitably operate with a methodical scheme of some sort, whether that be of your own devising or alternatively some librarians’ classically-taught version.
To continue with the mountaineering analogy, you need to take with you all the necessary crampons, climbing equipment, ropes etc. in order to undertake the climb, but also to record which route up the mountain you’ve been going – both so you can recognise how to descend to ground level again, but also so that you don’t repeatedly climb the same section of the rockface and/or record the same facts over and over again.
And of course as you progress you may ‘hit the jackpot’ in the first hour of Day One – or you may never hit it, however long you apply yourself.
Then there are the occasions when you think you might have hit a – if not the – jackpot – but later discover you haven’t. Or at least, not the one you were thought you had, or were hoping for.
I should estimate – indeed any researcher, professional or amateur, would probably tell you similar – that this occurs about 8 to 9 times out of 10. That’s why, even when you discover something (anything) of this nature, you deliberately keep a tight rein on your elation.
But eventually, after years of plodding, we did find this team list and it set us off upon a quest to investigate the players on it.
One interesting input was later supplied by our resident genealogist. Having researched the regimental and unit lists of all the named players, we discovered there were two whose names did not appear anywhere in their regiment’s or unit’s administrative files.
This was very frustrating – how could this be?
One morning whilst sitting in the coffee shop at Kew one sunny day, prefacing this with the comment that he’d been thinking about this problem for several weeks, our genealogical guru said he thought he might have the answer.
In both cases, he began, there were other soldiers – who had played this particular sport to a senior enough level to have been potentially eligible for selection for the match in question – with names marginally similar but in reality quite different.
His next thrust was a jump – but also possibly a stroke of genius.
He pointed out that the captain of the team in question was as native of a specific area of Northern Ireland where the local accent was particularly strong. He had at first begun to wonder whether – and now felt convinced he was right that – these men were in fact the same people as our two targets.
How so?
He demonstrated by speaking the names.
The first was ‘Hockaday’. (There were no Hockaday in the records). But there was a ‘Hackaday’. If you say ‘Hackaday’ with a thick Northern Irish accent – I cannot do this within any proficiency myself – it sounds like ‘Hockaday’.
We tried – it did.
He continued with his theory.
In choosing and then presenting his team to the authorities, the captain would have dictated the names to a soldier-typist in an office. If the latter was not familiar with the accent of the captain, he might type ‘Hockaday’ when the captain had actually said ‘’Hackaday’.
Ditto with the other example.
‘Cagney’ spoken with a strong Northern Irish accent might tend to sound to some like the ‘Kegney’ that had appeared on the team sheet.
To this day – though it remains to be proved conclusively – I am convinced this theory is correct.
It just so happens that three weeks ago I attended an official lunch at which a guest speaker mentioned the name of a specific player from the pre-WW1 era. It rang a bell with me and when I got home and looked up my research I discovered that it was similar to that of the name of another of missing solder-players I had been researching.
I have subsequently managed to trace and get in touch with said guest speaker. He replied to me by email over the weekend, not only confirming that his player and mine were the same man, but attaching copies of various data records and a team photograph in which he appears.
These days such things please small minds – and you have to hold on to them as tightly as you can when you’re over halfway through your seventh decade!
