“A Household Inside the Movement: The O’Briens of 106 Cadogan Terrace”
A carefully researched account of the O’Brien family of Bow and their links with East London radicalism, women’s suffrage and socialism. Drawing on archives, family papers and inherited paintings by Sylvia Pankhurst, it traces Minnie O’Brien’s work within Pankhurst’s movement and the family’s connection with George Lansbury, while distinguishing documented evidence from family memory and open questions. This is my major research project at the moment and still very much a work in progress.
My Father in the Navy during WW2.
A researched account of my father, Charles James “Jim” Partridge’s Second World War service in the Royal Naval Patrol Service. It follows his survival of the sinking of HMS Mollusc, boom-patrol duty at Scapa Flow, and more than two years aboard the minesweeper HMS Unst in the Mediterranean, while distinguishing firm evidence from family memory and questions still to be resolved.
My Mother’s father in WW1
A researched account of Edward Charles “Charlie” Rendell’s First World War service with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It traces his likely enlistment as a teenager, service on the Western Front, capture during the German offensive of March 1918, and imprisonment within the Stendal camp system, while carefully separating established records from informed inference and unresolved questions.
Charles James Partridge
A researched account of my great-uncle Charles James Partridge, a Regular soldier in the Essex Regiment who served in India and South Africa before the First World War. It follows his role in the Gallipoli landings, his wounding at the Second Battle of Krithia, and his death aged twenty-seven in 1915, while placing his brief life within the wider realities of imperial and wartime service.