Guest Editorial: My Family Ancestry by Richard Osman

When the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? first invited me on to the show, I wondered whether diving into my family history might be foolhardy. Who knows what you might find, eh? But my Mum is the heart of the family, and I knew she wanted to know a little more about her ancestors. We are not a family that has a crest and a country home and a history going back generations. So I said yes, and I’m very glad I did. 

I told the producers of the show that I’d rather discover a pirate than a duke in my bloodline. My brother wanted a highwayman or a Suffragette. I think my Mum secretly wanted to be descended from royalty. We were all to be disappointed in those requests, but we found so much more that we would ever have imagined.

I’m from Brighton, on the South Coast of England, my family are from Brighton, and I wanted to believe that my connection to the place would prove to have real meaning to my ancestors too. Obviously, I’m also very interested in crime and the underbelly of the world as well, but I couldn’t imagine the ways it might feature in my family history.

My search began with my grandfather, Thomas ‘Fred’ Wright, a man who represents to me the power of kindness, strength and education, and who I loved very much. I knew he had joined the army as a very young man, but I had never known exactly why, until a military historian showed me an old newspaper article from 1936 reporting that one Thomas Wright was arrested charged with the theft of a bicycle as a young man. He stole it to head North and find work. The magistrate dismissed the case on the condition that my Grandad would join the army (he was fifteen at the time but faked his date of birth on his enlistment papers). I remember him telling me the army was the first place he ever had three meals a day. It also allowed him to finish the education he’d had to abandon at the age of fourteen. By 1944 he was a Regimental Sergeant Major in charge of 1,000 men.

(As a side-note, one of his nine brothers, Eric, emigrated to Australia after the war, and there is now a thriving Australian branch of the Wright family!)

The amazing thing about exploring your ancestry is there are so many different routes you can go down. I wanted to go even further back and delve deeper on my mother’s side of the family and their roots in Brighton. I was able to search through the records of St Nicholas parish church, where my great grandparents Gabriel Gillam and Mary Shrivell were married and their children were baptised. It turned out that Gabriel worked as a fisherman during a time of change in Brighton, when the city was increasingly popular as a holiday destination for the wealthy.

While there may have been wealthy tourists, the local fishing communities lived in grinding poverty. In 1852, Gabriel was arrested for smuggling. At some point I will uncover a relative who hasn’t been arrested for something, but I was pleased that he had found a way to make some extra money in appalling times.

But what really shook me took place even earlier, in 1831, when Gabriel Gillam, his wife Mary and his mother Elizabeth were involved in the discovery of a body in one of Brighton’s most notorious murder cases. The three of them teamed up to investigate a suspicious disappearance, and they eventually uncovered the body of Celia Holloway. Gabriel was the key prosecution witness, and his testimony lead to Celia’s husband being sentenced to death in a sensational trial reported across the country. 

Isn’t that extraordinary? Here I am, writing the Thursday Murder Club books, about four unlikely sleuths solving murders, and years back in my past the very same thing was happening in my own family. It won’t surprise any student of British history to learn that Gabriel ended his days in the workhouse. If you are born poor in Britain, you usually stay poor, however hard you work. I think some people still don’t really understand that.

From Gabriel, who was given no opportunity in life and had to scrabble hard for what little he could get, to my Grandad who grabbed an opportunity he was given by a Magistrate to find an education and a career that could easily have passed him by, to me, born into the opportunity these men passed down to me. I hope they are proud of what I have done with it. Their strength and their heart, and the understanding that we come into this life with the dice already loaded, will remain with me always.

— The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman (Penguin) is out on the 15th September.

The Bullet That Missed

The Thursday Murder Club: Book 3

by Richard Osman

The third book in the record-breaking Thursday Murder Club series from British national treasure Richard Osman.

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