I tried to hint to my Dad, it doesn't pay to be too brainy

It is strange where the mind takes you, following a thread through various connections and memories of those days, reminded me that when I tackled those sums, I was taunted with the great arithmetic skills of great-uncle George.

Remembering that and before I knew it, I was recalling the tracing of my family history.

While a retired schoolteacher researched my family, I was coming to the conclusion that we did not have anyone famous, infamous or notably successful in the family background. As it happened, Watford FC were departing on a pre-season tour in the west country, which enabled me to cover them and, in my spare time, check out various addresses that had been thrown up by the research.

I spent some time at Falmouth, where my father’s ancestors were pilots, bringing ships into harbour, and I checked out Plymouth where the family was supposed to have has significant connections in the Royal Navy - connections that had been deemed unlikely by my researching friend.

It was a pleasant detour but I had also been informed that my mother’s mother did not have quite the genteel Kentish origins that she experienced. My Gran would tell me about her life in Hoo as a girl, such as going down to Rochester in a pony and trap and getting measured for shoes, which were then made for her. She did indeed live in a big house close to the church in Hoo and they did have a family vault.

But her father, my great-grandfather, had started off life as a brickyard worker and a bargee. His rise in circumstances could be traced through the 19th century census, until he owned brick works and cement-making concerns by the time my Gran was born.

It would also appear that apart from having some 15 or 16 children, he also took a gooseberry from another bush, as they used to say in far-off days, and fathered a son by another woman. So, there was another, illegitimate line to the family, but I decided not to break this news to my mother.

Upon my return from the West Country, I was delighted to open another bulletin from the researcher. Yes, there was a Rear Admiral George Whittle Phillips CBE and he was a mover and shaker. The doubts as to his existence were based on the fact he was an engineer and significant promotion from that side of the Navy was such a rare event, my meticulous researcher deemed it unlikely.

His letter had arrived with a full apology but the records revealed great uncle had been made a Captain in 1925 at the age of 42, which rendered the family claim, he had been the youngest captain since Nelson, as improbable. He had retired from the service at his own request in 1934. Did I have any idea why he had retired somewhat early?

Yes, that fitted in with the family history I had heard over the years. In the 1930’s, the introduction of the orange Belisha Beacons to high streets was very controversial in as much as they were regarded as an ugly blot on the landscape.

Apparently the citizens of Plymouth awoke one morning to discover several of these orange balls had been dislodged from their poles or smashed. Uncle George had a breakdown it would appear and so opted to retire, or jump before he was pushed, after police had caught him in the act.

His subsequent career involved being a technical adviser at de Havilland’s but, as a boy, I took much comfort from my father’s telling of Uncle George’s breakdown.

My father would write out a host of sums for me to tackle in my school holidays and I would face a morning working out what 4798639 x 5290786 would equal, along with a number of other similar multiplication sums and equally complicated long division: all of which had to be worked out mentally, with the aid of scraps of paper in the days before calculators.

As I laboured through these sums, often struggling, my father would remind me once again: “My Uncle George could multiply sums like 78695 x 59786 in his head. We used to test him and he always came up with the right answer.”

To which I would mutter sullenly: “And look what happened to him: went off his bloomin’ head.”

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