‘I wanted to find out a bit more about my past, but also my dad’
In the rush of everyday life, it’s rare that we take the time to think about the ancestors whose life circumstances, decisions and experiences made us who we are today, writes Rachael Davies. But when we do take a look back through the generations at the lives of our predecessors, truly fascinating stories can be unearthed – as celebrities discover in each episode of the popular BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are?.
The programme sees celebrities trace their personal histories back through the generations with help from expert historians and genealogists. Tales of lost connections and extraordinary histories are uncovered as they go on an incredible journey through their own family tree.
Tracing her family history this series is comedian and TV presenter Sue Perkins, best known for her partnership with Mel Giedroyc and for formerly presenter of The Great British Bake Off.
What’s it been like for her to unearth her history, and what are the biggest discoveries she made along the way? We speak with Perkins to find out.
WHY DID IT FEEL LIKE NOW WAS THE RIGHT TIME IN YOUR LIFE FOR YOU TO DO ‘WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE’?
I’ve been thinking about it since I lost my dad. I think when you lose a parent or a family member, it feels like the hot air balloon that you’ve been flying in, suddenly, someone’s snipped one of the cables. And so there’s a sense of precariousness.
For me to recalibrate, I guess, I wanted to find out a bit more about my past, but also him. Why am I the person I am? What impact has my ancestry had on my emotional peccadilloes, my ways of thinking, my patterns of behaviour?
They helped me put together the jigsaw puzzle of my life.
YOU FIND OUT A LOT ABOUT YOUR GRANDFATHER IN THE SHOW, AND YOU SAY WHAT HE WENT THROUGH WAS QUITE DICKENSIAN. WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?
I associate the Victorian period with something remote – it’s something I studied, something we read, and it’s not touchable. Because my grandfather was 60-plus when my dad was born, of course, he’s very much a child of that time, but I never really fully embraced the fact that that was where he was from.
The workhouse, which is where he was an orphan, is for me an unimaginably antiquated thing, and yet just two generations back, there he was.
It was incredibly shocking.
Just the word “workhouse”, it’s emblematic of a level of poverty and suffering that you hope we’re beyond, although perhaps not.
He went from being this rather stern, bearded, ancient man in photographs, this lost figure from another era, to being really fleshed out, and me having a lot of sympathy for him, feeling so heartbroken at the level of loss he sustained when he was just a child. He lost three sets of parents in the end – a step-mum, a mum and a dad – and was then kept apart from his other siblings.
Just two generations back, that’s how people were living. And that’s the degree of pain they just had to become immune to.
YOU FOUND OUT THAT MANY OF YOUR ANCESTORS WERE INTERNED OR INCARCERATED AT VARIOUS POINTS IN HISTORY, INCLUDING YOUR GREATGRANDFATHER ON THE ISLE OF MAN. HOW DID IT FEEL TO DISCOVER THAT?
For me, his story is extraordinary, because it tells the tale of
a very ordinary person caught up in extraordinary geopolitical events.
I think going to see the concentration camp was… it made a lot of sense to me.
I have things that I do, emotional tics, and I wanted to see if they were based on anything from my past: I can’t stand being incarcerated, it’s not full claustrophobia, but I have to move all the time.
Then you look at that programme, and you look at a paternal grandfather who was incarcerated in a workhouse and then in service, you look at my grandma, who was in service, you look at my grandfather, who was in a camp, and then my great-grandfather was in a camp. My great-grandmother’s family were all in camps, both German camps and Soviet camps.
It might be a stretch, but also it might not, to say that they know that stress and grief and things like that are hereditary, and, perhaps, my sense of frustration at confinement comes from that. Pretty much all of them at one point were interned in some way or another, which I found extraordinary.
WHAT LESSONS DID FINDING OUT ABOUT YOUR FAMILY TEACH YOU?
For everyone that’s bereaved, you struggle to make sense of the world. And actually, for me, the way that I’ve come to that reckoning is to take the things that they gave you that were helpful and made you better and work on them and amplify them.
I know that my great-grandma crossed, horrific, grim mudflats for an eternity and then got on a boat, and then came to London and lived in a slum and started a brand new life and survived when her husband had been sent away for years.
She did that. And that’s in me. And I should rise to every challenge I have and be grateful, because I don’t have to live in that environment.
You’re shown what you can do with your biology. And if you’re lucky, you get to aspire to it. I feel lucky, because I think they were inspirational folk.
DID YOU FIND IT TO BE QUITE AN EMOTIONAL PROCESS?
I’m very emotional and sensitive and private, but I have huge respect for this programme. I knew that they always handled things in an incredibly well intentioned, decent and thorough way.
I did it knowing that I might get emotional, and I have no shame in that. I think it’s very important, whenever you’re in television, to show the truth of something.
But it was so overwhelming. My own story just reminds me to try and have better agency, and I’m sure your stories would say exactly the same thing.
They could take you all over the world and to very different parts of the world, but they’d be the same thing: somebody would have got caught up in some terrible (circumstance) that wasn’t their own fault, and paid the price for it because of their class, or status, or religion, whatever it might be.
It was a ride. It was a really heavy, brilliant, painful, extraordinary ride.
Sue Perkins’ episode of Who Do You Think You Are? is on BBC One at 9pm on Thursday.