The Dissolution of Identity

What distinguishes the Owen branch of the Eldridge family tree is that it is genuinely British in its make-up, with family, relatives and attachments from all four home countries. The children of Hetty Jane Owen may have considered themselves above all to be English but they carried in their veins the blood of the Welsh, the Normans and the Irish as well as the Anglo-Saxons, and as far as the concept of 'Britishness' can be connoted to represent this mix, they certainly fell into this pool, as indeed, one suspects would most people living in the British Isles.

Same place. Different World. The West India Quay in Docklands Today – From the Telegraph-

Of course, identities both evolve and are subject to social and political engineering, as well as personal decision making. Hetty Jane's son thought nothing of making throwaway, disparaging remarks about the 'Welsh'. A full quarter Welsh himself, he had no difficulty in discarding these links in their entirety and adopting an entirely English persona. In just a couple of generations, and with some geographical relocation, Welsh culture had no claim to make, and no apparent gravitational pull to exert that might impact on the identity of Hetty Jane's descendants. And as with so many others, the notion of 'Britishness' did not really have a prevailing appeal beyond a more superficial attachment to the United Kingdom as a political entity, and an attitude towards Europe that might best be described as disengaged.

So there we have it. As we move into 2018, 'England's' cricket team has just lost the Ashes, with a pool of players freely constituted from all home nations. Meanwhile, those same home nations still enter international football competitions as independent nations, even though they are no such thing, and then the same nations happily pile off to the Olympics as Team GB, forgetting entirely that Northern Ireland is not actually part of Great Britain. As far as sports might be one of the most obvious means of developing a wider sense of social cohesion and shared identity, they have rather signally failed to do so. 

Whilst there may be something endearingly schizophrenic and shambolic about the freedom within which these curious compromises emerge, they certainly do little to encourage a wider sense of European identity, and they certainly owe a great deal to the political representations of identity that are forged by a subtle but nonetheless distinct process of selection of what in our past is to be remembered, what is to be forgotten, and what is to be reformulated to meet the needs of the day. What is interesting to observe in family history studies is that families themselves by and large operate to the same tune.

And yet, and yet... collective memory is a strange beast. It is striking that Hetty Jane Owen’s son, Harold Eldridge grew up with a love of the sea, a passion for wildlife, with reptiles being high on the list, and a fondness for Biblical history, as well as music, all characteristics that seemed to come through from the Wombwells, Robinsons, Bradleys and Owens rather than his Eldridge side. It was on this side of the family too, going back to Ireland that doctors had emerged to practise in both Ireland and Scotland, again, unknown to all concerned. It had always been assumed that Harold was the first practising Doctor in his family. It was not the case though. And from about the age of five, one of Hetty Jane Owen’s grandchildren insisted on being taken again and again to Trafalgar Square, there to stare up at Horatio Nelson, as if there was something up there, silhouetted against the grey London sky that was asking to be absorbed and taken forward into the future. And so, on that curious epigenetic note, this tale draws to a close.