Lunch at Sandringham

In March 2020 I was in Melbourne for work, on the road with my company running events across Australia and New Zealand, and on the Saturday a cousin came to collect me from my hotel. Sue Dammery of the Melbourne branch: a cousin I had never met, from a line that had corresponded with my father for years without either side ever shaking hands. She drove me down to the yacht club at Sandringham and we had a wonderful lunch: great venue, great views over the bay, and the kind of weather Melbourne saves for showing off. The date was the 14th of March 2020, and the timing now reads like the closing pages of a thriller. The grand prix had just been cancelled and half the world was trying to get home at once; I caught the last flight out of Melbourne that evening through a proper scrum of an airport, landed back in the UK on the Sunday evening, and by Tuesday night the shutters were coming down across Britain. It was the last possible moment for such a lunch, and neither of us knew it as we ate it.

Sue knows both ends of this family's map. In her youth she worked in London, in the obstetrics unit at Guy's Hospital, and in 1972 she visited the old country itself: the family album has her at the Tullyglass farm, the very ground her great-grandfather Edward left for Australia in 1863, standing with Edward and Samuel of the family that still farmed it then. Her grandparents, John and Edith Dammery, are here too: John, born in Windsor, Melbourne in 1871, was the son who carried the family after the emigrant Edward died young, and he lived to be ninety-seven.

And now Sue has done the family history a service that earns more than lunch. Her annotated copy of the old family tree, together with the certificates that followed it across, settled the biggest question the Melbourne branch had: this week Edward the emigrant's join to the Irish line became documented from both ends, his Melbourne marriage registration of 1867 naming Tullyglass and his parents plainly. The Melbourne Dammerys are no longer a story the family tells; they are on the tree, in the records, where Ted Dammery, who wrote their history first, always said they belonged.

Thank you, Sue. Next lunch is on me, whichever hemisphere it lands in.