The family group photo in 1897:

The only very clear formal ‘whole family’ group photo I have. They are living at 7 Tackley Place, Oxford, off Walton Street/Kingston Road, since about 1886 (pba to check date). The photo is so valuable. My grandpa William is aged 19 or so and Ernest is about 23. This is 3 to 5 years before William marries Lizzie Gilder, and he is apparently working at this time for his mother’s brother Edwin Albert Reed at his paper factory at Kaisersveer and/or Raamsdonksveer. So this formal photo is taken during a return home visit. They all look so smart, don’t they? It must be a special occasion, mustn’t it? Or was this merely ’Sunday best’ for attendance at Walton Street Methodist chapel, where Daddy presumably took the service at least occasionally, as a local lay preacher. (Added 25.10.2014, about 116 years after this photo was taken): And Ernest, William’s elder brother is about to, or has just, married Maria Geertruida van Dongen in Raamsdonk, Holland. The first wedding in the family in this generation - the eldest boy, Teddy, having died of ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis), in 1888, about ten years earlier. So, there is a very strong ‘Dutch connection’ in the family at this time. Very understandable, as it arose from the fact that ‘Uncle Albert Edwin’ (Reed), who was Mrs Olive Emma Archer’s brother, had bought a paper mill at Raamsdonk in Holland, and was running it and providing employment and training opportunities for his nephews Ernest and William Archer. And Ernest remained in Holland, living in Bilthoven until his death in Bilthoven on 20.11.1953. William retained his knowledge of Dutch, learned during about 6 years work in Raamsdonk at the turn of the century, occasionally demonstrating it in the 1940s and 1950s to Dutch classes at ‘Oxford Polytechnic’ in Headington, Oxford, (later Brooks University), and to his grandson Philip, when he wanted to make the point that Philip was not speaking clearly enough: ‘that’s what you sound like to me’, he would say. A telling point! (from the days before hearing aids were effective).

qaa© Philip B Archer 2014