Foreign News: Pruning Time

Far more important than Who’s Who in the eyes of many blue-blood Britons is the deeper question : Who was who? For years, the responsibility of cataloguing the ancestors of noble families in Europe and Great Britain was shared by Saxony’s famed Almanack de Gotha and Britain’s Burke’s Peerage.* Of the two, the Almanack was the older and more conscientious, but in 1946, the unfeeling Red army marched into Saxony and put it out of business for good, though carefully carting its presses and files off to Moscow. The burden of keeping Britain’s pedigrees straight thereafter fell squarely on the shoulders of Burke’s newly appointed editor, Leslie Pine.

Last week, in preparation for Britain’s coronation—the greatest genealogical event of United Press the postwar era—Editor Pine was hard at work on a new and more painstaking edition of Burke’s Peerage, and Britain’s proudest family trees were losing ancestors like autumn leaves. “Sir Bernard Burke,” says Editor Pine, “was the greatest genealogist of his time, but he had a keen sense of romance.” Where Editor Pine could find no justification for Founder Burke’s romancing, he ruthlessly pruned.

Shorn Trees. The Sussex Ashburn-hams, described in the earlier Burke’s as “a family of stupendous antiquity,” dating back well before the Norman Conquest, were cut off in the new Burke’s without a single pre-Norman ancestor. Sir Fleetwood Ashburnham, 83, present patriarch of the family, was unmoved. “My ancestors,” he humphed, “had other things to do during the Conquest than keep their archives straight for Burke’s. They were defending England.”

Viscount Gage, who claims descent from a supporter of King John’s in his war with the barons, had his pedigree lopped by 200 years. The best proved ancestor Pine could give Lady (Harriet Kathleen Grace) Thompson, whose family had for generations enjoyed descent from Odo, brother-in-law of William the Conqueror, was one Oliver Grace, a 16th century M.P. from Tipperary. “I’m challenging Burke’s to show by what authority they make our family suffer this indignity,” said the outraged Lady.

Older Roots. As the galley proofs of the new Burke’s appeared, however, a few fortunate families found themselves tied to a past they never suspected. Sir Edward John Chichester learned from conscientious Editor Pine that one of his ancestors was knighted in the 13th rather than the 14th century. Earl Howe, three of whose lordly antecedents fought Washington in the American Revolution and whose family never dared peep behind Henry VIII for forbears, learned that his line went right back to Richard I, second of the Plantagenets. “There is a very great probability,” said Editor Pine last week of the Howe family, “that one of their ancestors came over with the Conqueror . . . I may trace a direct descent from him even before the coronation.”

The third great bluebook, Debrett’s Peerage, concerns itself less with genealogy and more with cataloguing present nobility.