Our starting point in exploring the background to Neville Bradshaw's life were the basic facts that appear on this website from school documents, some letters written during his retirement and the short obituaries that appeared in local newspapers in 1975. None of these sources provided anything of substance about his origins and life before coming to Lewes. My appeal to members asking for information about him drew an almost complete blank! In biographical terms we knew just the following -
Full name -- Neville Rowland Joseph Bradshaw.
Graduate of Merton College, Oxford.
Was a housemaster at Taunton School in the twenties immediately before Lewes.
Had several hospitalisations in the early forties when the School was run by Mr Jarvis.
Lived in a handsome house called "Withypool", off the Newhaven Road at Kingston, Lewes.
Often referred to as "Plonk".
Owned a pre-war dark-green Armstrong-Siddeley.
Wife Dorothy Mary (died 2/8/1994 aged 91).
Three daughters, Susan (died 31/12/01, aged 69). Bridget and Caroline, and one son, Robert.
Keen vegetable gardener and kept an allotment.
Sat on Navy Selection Boards at Portsmouth and Dartmouth.
Member of Lewes Rotary which met on Thursdays at the White Hart.
Retired July 1960 age 64.
Went on several Hellenic cruises after retirement.
Died 13th April 1975 age 78. Buried Kingston churchyard, Lewes.
The information available gave almost no insight into his origins or his life prior to his arrival in Lewes in 1930. There may perhaps be something at the Sussex Record Office in the Education Authority's archives that relate to the references he gave when he applied for the job of headmaster but for practical reasons that was not easily available for scrutiny. In any case it would only have revealed information that he would have chosen to give his potential employers.
Our first port of call was the website that allows one to search the 1901 Census data. This had only been available to the public for a few months due to the 100 year confidentiality law. This website allowed us to search the 1901 census data for the whole of England using name, age and gender, etc.
Inserting his name, age and gender gave an immediate hit. There was only one four year-old boy with the name Neville Bradshaw in the whole country in that year. From this source we were able to get an image of the original census data covering his house and family. This is the page where the local enumerator extracted data from individual returns and entered it onto the sheet for the area. By scrolling the image below you can see the part pertaining to the Bradshaw household. You can also see who their neighbours were and their occupation.
From this starting point it was straightforward to obtain copies of NRB's birth certificate and those of his parents from the central records in the same way that people research their family tree. From the data on these certificates one could then see the names and birthplaces of the previous generation.
As it so happens the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, has a massive on-line ancestor tracing website at www.familysearch.org where one can search the English 1881 Census and download the data free. This enabled us to find the whereabouts of NRB's parents in 1881, when they were school-children, and find information about their parents and siblings (NRB's grandparents, aunts and uncles).
With this census and birth certificate information the basis structure of his family tree was established. We did not go back another generation due to the amount of work and cost involved especially as most of the census information from that period was not available on-line.
Besides these major sources about his family other sources were investigated to see what was known about NRB's education. We knew he was at Merton College, Oxford after the Great War. A very helpful Old Lewesian with Oxford connections asked both the College and the University Archivists if they had any information on NRB during the 1919-1922 period. From this information we found about his previous education and also a little about his war service record.
Having discovered that he had been at Halesowen Grammar School and Birmingham University before the Great War we searched the internet for information about these institutions. The school no longer exists under that name but we traced a former pupil of the school who had written and published a history of the Grammar School from its earliest days and were given access to a cache of documents and photos relating to the period when NRB attended the school.
Knowing that Halesowen was in Worcestershire during that period (it is now part of the West Midlands) we searched the archives of the Worcester County Record Office and found a small collection of documents and two bound volumes of the Minutes of the School Governors over a long period (around 1880 - 1920). These gave some interesting insights into the running of the school and a few leads to other sources - such as the fact that NRB's younger sister was admitted to the Grammar School after winning a free place from Knowle primary school which is only a few yards from the family home in Springfield Road. This would suggest that NRB himself would also have come from the same primary school a few years earlier. We know the whereabouts of records for this school but have not yet had the opportunity to examine them.
We approached the archivists of Birmingham University to see if they had any data concering NRB covering the period from 1914 to late 1915. Much to our surprise they could come up with his home address, birthdate and next-of-kin (which we already knew by this time) and all of his examination subjects and marks obtained. There was also a little relating to his subsequent war service. It is quite amazing what there is mouldering in the dark recesses of such institutions after ninety years! One can only marvel that some well-intentioned cleaner or clerk had not binned it!
One fine Sunday morning in April my wife and I travelled up the M5 to have an on-site exploration of the area that was NRB's home for the first nineteen years of his life. We visited Knowle, Springfield Lane, the Industrial Heritage Site, Bumble Hole nature reserve, the Netherton canal tunnel (two miles long and so straight you can see from end to end), Windmill End and the surrounding area taking photos as we went. We then headed south to Halesowen to examine the site of the former Grammar school. Due to faulty intelligence we failed to identify it and being a Sunday there was nobody to help.
Luckily the Worcester County Record office is only ten miles from my home. An email enquiring about records of Haleowen Grammar School (Halesowen was in Worcestershire pre 1972) brought a positive reply and I was able to visit and read through the two bound volumes of the Minutes of the School Governors. This gave lots of interesting background detail about the school's rapid development in the period of interest. There was no explicit mention of Neville Bradshaw - it would have been surprising if there was for Governors are not usually concerned with individual pupils. However, one of NRB's sisters is mentioned at one point in a list of children gaining a free place.
At about this time I ran internet searches for "Halesowen Grammar School" and discovered that it had, over the years been integrated into what is now The Earls High School. From this website, which is I fear rather out of date and neglected, I managed to trace an old boy from the last years of the Halesowen Grammar School, John Billingham, who has written a substantial booklet on the history of the school (I now have a copy) including the period of interest to us. He is also a Governor of Earls High School and gave me an introduction to the present, very busy, headmaster Tom Johnston.
Tom Johnston invitited me to visit the present school to see the 1908 building and to sift through the rather dusty collection of documents and photos in the school archive. Luckily these had survived a major fire in 1952 when part of the 1931 building was gutted. Some photos were singed at the edges! It is from this collection that most of the HGS photos you see here on the website have come.
There were in this collection a few items going back several hundred years written on vellum with original seals concerning the early endowments of the school. There is the original copper-plate handwritten and leather bound 21 page judgement of the Charity Commissioners from 1864 laying down how the endowments could be used. Fascinating stuff but I will spare you the details!
Information about Robert Bradshaw at Cambridge was found by one of our members at Cambridge but this is mostly Robert's academic record held in the university archives. There may be more in the college magazines of St Catherine's College but these are not readily accessible.
There are still a few ongoing threads of research that are being followed up and any significant further details will be added to this account of Neville Bradshaw's life in due course. The information we have now gives us a sketch of his early life but it does not have the insight that would come if there were letters and other personal accounts dating from the period. As far as I am aware no such documents exist. The jigsaw will have to remain unfinished.