Childhood
Cradock’s family background was one of respectable middle-class trade; her ancestors included the Pecheys (corn merchants and churchmen), the Vallentines (distillers) and the Hulberts (cabinet makers). She was the daughter of the novelist and lyricist Archibald Thomas Pechey and Bijou Sortain Hancock.
Cradock’s birth was formally registered in London, in the district of West Ham. Fanny was given the name ‘Phyllis Nan S. Pechey’. The ‘S’ was for Sortain, a name that had been passed down through her mother’s family.
A plaque, with her name misspelled in the London borough of Leytonstone records at Fairwood Court, Fairlop Road, London E11: "Fanny Craddock 1909-1994. On this site until 1930 stood a house called Apthorp, birthplace of the famous TV cookery expert Fanny Craddock; born Phyllis Pechey." Her birthplace was named after Apthorp Villa, in Weston, Somerset, where her grandfather Charles Hancock had been born.
Cradock’s parents did not manage their money well, her mother, Bijou, spent extravagantly, and her father, Archibald, had sizeable gambling debts, many run up in Nice. In attempting to keep their creditors at bay, the family moved around the country, going to Herne Bay in Kent, then to Swanage in Dorset, and on to Bournemouth (which was then in Hampshire), where Archibald’s brother, Richard Francis Pechey (1872–1963), had become the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church in 1912. Whilst in Bournemouth the 15-year-old Fanny attended Bournemouth High School (now Talbot Heath School).
Archibald moved the family again to Wroxham in Norfolk, c. 1927, where his creditors caught up with him and by 1930 he was appearing in Norfolk's bankruptcy court faced with debts of £3,500.
Read more about this topic: Fanny Cradock
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
““O what unlucky streak
Twisting inside me, made me break the line?
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“But no matter how they make you feel, you should always watch elders carefully. They were you and you will be them. You carry the seeds of your old age in you at this very moment, and they hear the echoes of their childhood each time they see you.”
—Kent Nerburn (20th century)
“... all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion, the church, the parsonage, the graveyard, and the solemn, tolling bell.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)