“I have always been one to support the underdog, maybe it’s ingrained in me,” Wayne Hemingway tells me down the phone. It’s Friday morning, and he’s rifling through family trees at his Sussex home, where he has a plaque for his grandparents, Colin and Ida Hemingway, in the garden.
He’d like to learn more about their sides of the family – whom he knows little of, except that many were coal miners – and a possible link to Ernest Hemingway, who had Yorkshire roots. “Nan and Pops were like parents to me,” he says. “My mum had me out of wedlock, which was unusual for Lancashire in 1961, so they helped raise me.”
The HemingwayDesign co-founder’s story could be described as “unusual” from conception. His mother, Maureen, was a croupier in Morecambe when she met touring heavyweight wrestling champion, Billy Two Rivers, a First Nation Canadian Mohawk. The rest is history: “They met and I resulted,” he says matter-of-factly.
Billy Two Rivers (right)
Billy stayed in the UK until Wayne was three years old, before returning to Canada to continue wrestling and later star in films.
When Wayne founded Red or Dead with his wife Gerardine in 1982, he became the first man on his mother’s side not to work as a labourer.
As I start digging on Ancestry, I begin to understand why he feels a rooted desire to champion the underdog. There’s Thomas Ellaway, his great-great-grandfather on Colin’s side, who at just 14 years old was sentenced to six weeks in Usk prison for larceny in 1849. Ellaway died at 60, and the census taken four years before reveals he was a miner, crammed into a house with his wife Adliza, their seven children, and a family of four who were boarding.
In 1909, Wayne’s great-grandfather on Ida’s side, miner Seth Wilson, 32, was sentenced to three weeks for debt inside HMP Wakefield, now known as “Monster Mansion” for its notoriously sinister inmates. He was married to Annie, who would have been pregnant with Ida at the time, and parent to three children under 10. It wasn’t uncommon to be jailed for debt – nearly 11,500 were in 1910.
Nan and Pops
One of the most compelling family members I discovered on Ancestry is Annie Wilson’s father, Wayne’s great-great-grandfather, Michael Moran, who was a bricklayer’s labourer. Born in 1846 in Roscommon, Ireland, he was in Yorkshire by 1860, as the next record shows that at only 14 he was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to six months’ hard labour in HMP Wakefield. Ten years later, he spent two days in a workhouse, likely due to unemployment. Entering a workhouse at this time was seen as the ultimate degradation, as conditions in these buildings were so repugnant that it was seen only as an option of last resort.
There’s a hint of scandal in November 1872, when he marries Annie Rowe, who already had a six-month-old daughter, Mary Rowe. There’s no record of Mary’s exact place of birth, except it was in West Riding in Yorkshire, meaning that there’s a chance that unmarried Annie gave birth inside a local workhouse. The following year there’s a modified record for Mary, this time with Michael named as the father and her surname changed to Moran.
In 1888 Annie, by then a mother-of-three, died aged 35. The only record of her death is the date and that it happened in Barnsley.
Michael never remarried and in 1901 was living with Mary, her husband John Purcell and their seven children, as a lodger. By 1911, he was 66 and boarding in a household of 18 people, including his daughter and some of her family, while working as a bricklayer’s labourer. He was 68 when he died, in the workhouse infirmary in Barnsley on 12 August 1913.
Maureen (second right) at Brubeck’s Cafe
It’s the connection to the workhouses that immediately strikes Wayne, when I call a week later. “I’m currently working on a children’s workhouse in Shrewsbury that’s been left to rack and ruin,” he says. “So that’s a real coincidence.”
He was unaware of his family’s criminal records, but the poverty that afflicted them doesn’t surprise him. “I knew they were poor, but I didn’t know about prison and workhouses. My grandparents and mum struggled. Nan scrubbed steps of houses – that’s where the word scrubber comes from. You don’t do that unless you’re from a hard background.”
His voice filled with pride, he adds: “They all worked ridiculously hard to own a house, and I was the first Hemingway to own a car.”
We may have drawn a blank on connections to Ernest Hemingway, but the writer’s words ring true of the other Yorkshire Hemingways: “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
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