Emotional journey as David delves into family’s past
COMEDIAN and TV judge David Walliams discovers emotional stories of “unimaginable horror” as he delves into his past. “I think about the family I came from. I’d like to know my place in that story. I’m excited, I feel like a detective,” says the 49-year-old at the start of the process.
What follows is the discovery of two particularly heartrending tales of his ancestors that leaves the Britain’s Got Talent star amazed and unsettled.
David begins by investigating the artist behind some watercolour paintings that were left to him from his beloved granny.
He finds out that the artist was his great-grandfather John George Boorman, who heroically fought in the First World War and suffered from shell shock. John’s traumatic experience on the battlefields of France and Belgium left him with such severe symptoms of PTSD that he could never return to peacetime life with his young family and spent the rest of his days in what was then described as a lunatic asylum.
Meanwhile, on his mother’s side, David unearths the story of a great-great-grandfather, William Hanes, who became blind as the result of pioneering eye surgery in the 1880s.
David is astonished to find out that, like him, his ancestor became an entertainer – first a street musician and then a travelling showman, running fairground attractions with the help of his wife and children.
David says: “It’s emotional because these lives are so different from my own and so difficult, too.
“Neither life was enviable.”