On my grandfather’s 141st birthday, the silence he carried, and where it came from
Victorian psychological inheritance is rarely visible in the archives. It surfaces in silence, in distance, in the things families do not say.
This photograph was taken around 1974, in the narrow passage between the houses on Edmund Street in Sheffield. My grandfather is holding Felix, his rescue cat. I am standing beside him in a hand-knitted cardigan and white knee socks, grinning. He is not.
Walter Parker was born on 18 April 1885 in the Fenland village of Upwell, the third child of Stephen and Ann Parker. Today would be his 141st birthday.
Walter fascinated me as a child. I wanted him to share his life with me, to illuminate a time of profound social and political change, when a working-class Englishman could become a landowner in Canada. But in the face of my naïve compulsion to connect with him, Walter remained mostly inaccessible. As an eleven-year-old, I was delighted when he came to live with my family in 1974. At last, I would hear the longed-for stories of his Victorian childhood and his adventures as a bachelor homesteader on the Canadian prairies. Yet no matter how hard I searched for a key to unlock his silence, the door to his past remained firmly shut. I desperately wanted to attach, to feel close to him, but his emotional distance defeated me. My mum gently explained Granddad was a Victorian fossil, that his decades on an isolated homestead had interrupted his growth.
A year later, Granddad died. He had told me he would live to be a hundred and get a telegram from the Queen. I was furious. I avoided the room in which he had died, packed away the heartache and buried my anger. Life moved on. The feelings and my unresolved questions lived beneath the day-to-day. Then in therapy, which I undertook as part of my counselling training, I unpacked that distressing time. I came to believe that alongside my own desire, I had absorbed my mum’s unmet, painful need to connect with her father.
Finding Thorney
In the summer of 2013, I unexpectedly found myself near Thorney, the village where Walter had grown up. Imagine my delight to find that the house in the Tank Yard where the Parkers had lived was now the Thorney Museum. Incredibly, the volunteer steward, Jeremy Culpin, overheard my interest in the Parker family. He asked if I wanted an introduction to a lady whose mother was a Parker. It had never occurred to me that I could meet people who knew my grandfather.
My Cousin Phyllis Mary Skells, known as Mary, was Walter’s niece and lived in nearby Peterborough. She was born in 1918 and had grown up in the village. At our first meeting, I discovered that family stories I had carried since childhood were still alive in another branch of the family, stories significant enough to have been passed down independently through two estranged lines. I did not yet have the language for it, but I was beginning to trace a Victorian psychological inheritance.
The joy of finding living family encouraged me to seek more. I sent a letter to the Fenland Citizen in March 2014 asking for information about the Parkers of Upwell. Days later, I received an email from Cousin Sue Oldroyd, whose grandfather Joel was Walter’s first cousin. When I introduced Sue and Mary, they discovered they shared a love of figures, had both worked for the council in financial capacities, and lived near each other in Cambridgeshire with mutual acquaintances. Despite all of this, they had never met. Mary, her youngest sister Rene, Sue, and I had a few delightful years swapping stories.
During these meetings, the yearning for a deeper understanding of Granddad rocketed back to the surface. What had made this man? I set out to discover the answers to the questions which had burned in me through the decades.
Ann’s losses: the origins of a Victorian psychological inheritance
To understand Walter’s silence, I had to begin with his mother.
Ann Catherine Bates was born in 1856 in the small village of Alconbury-Weston in Huntingdonshire. Her father James was a labourer who had once worked as a ratcatcher. Ann first lost a sibling when she was two. Her mother died a slow death in 1860, aged only forty-two, from phthisis, more commonly known as consumption or pulmonary tuberculosis. Ann was four years old. The roots of a Victorian psychological inheritance were taking hold.
Modern research tells us that the death of a parent can lead to social withdrawal, anxiety, and lower self-esteem, and that a quarter of children develop serious psychological issues following a parent’s death. It seems a forlorn hope that Ann’s environment was more protective than our own.
What followed was worse. Ann’s father James could not escape crushing poverty. He remarried, but he, his second wife Martha, and their young daughters were admitted to the Union Workhouse at Huntingdon at harvest-time in August 1873, and again a few weeks later. Further admissions show a family in crisis. James died in the workhouse in March 1875, aged fifty-six. Martha died less than eight weeks after her own readmission in 1876, at the age of thirty-four. Ann’s half-sisters were just eight and six years old.
By the time Ann married Stephen Parker in December 1880, only four of her nine full siblings were alive. She was twenty-three. Their first-born, Lily Ann, died a painful, slow death as a toddler. Ann was five months pregnant with her next child when she lost her. With new life growing inside her and a family to feed and care for, it is unlikely she had the chance to grieve.
There is a common belief that our ancestors were less affected by loss than we are. But as Julie-Marie Strange, Professor of Modern British History at Durham University, has convincingly demonstrated, poverty increased rather than deadened the anguish of the poor. It would be understandable if Ann emotionally distanced herself from her surviving children to cope with what she had endured.
Walter arrived on 18 April 1885. Only weeks after his birth, his second cousin Mary Parker, who lived close by, died of measles and diphtheria at the age of five. All three of Mary Parker’s siblings also died before their parents. Death was woven into the fabric of this family.
The whisky bottle
I believe Ann suffered from what we would now recognise as crippling depression. Freud, who was her contemporary, described the condition as an incomplete form of mourning. Genetic research shows that the same genes and neural pathways that make us vulnerable to depression are also involved in anxiety, alcoholism, and suicide. Ann’s misuse of alcohol may have been an attempt to self-medicate untreated grief. Research has shown that alcohol use disorder is predated by either anxiety or depression in forty-five per cent of sufferers.
Unavoidable, inescapable, and overwhelming suffering in childhood can weaken resilience and lead to depressive episodes. Ann’s life had been such that we could predict she would struggle. And depression is commonly passed from generation to generation: genetic factors influence the risk, in part, by altering our sensitivity to the depression-inducing effect of stressful life events.
When the Parker family moved from Upwell to Thorney, a smaller village controlled by the Duke of Bedford’s estate, Ann may have found the isolation drove her closer to the whisky bottle. It is also possible her husband, Stephen, a successful builder, took employment and moved the family so he could better keep an eye on Ann. We cannot know for certain. But we can ask the questions.
Victorian psychological inheritance
When my mother described Walter as a ‘Victorian fossil’, she was reaching for a cultural explanation for his emotional absence. What I came to understand, through years of genealogical research combined with my training as a counsellor, is that his distance had roots not in an era but in a family.
Before our birth, we are influenced by our ancestors and the mental, emotional, and behavioural patterns of the family around us. This phenomenon is known as psychological inheritance. Walter grew up with a mother who, through no fault of her own, may not have been able to meet his emotional needs. His father Stephen worked until dusk. The coping mechanisms Walter developed as a child living with a depressed, alcoholic parent shaped the man he became, and the father and grandfather he would be. It is the distance of a Victorian psychological inheritance, that produced three generations of unspoken grief.
I call my approach geneatherapy. It combines family history research with psychological insight, drawing on attachment theory, adverse childhood experiences, and epigenetics, to recover not just the facts of our ancestors’ lives but the emotional truths beneath them. The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that our psychological inheritance need not define us. Even without professional intervention, positive development can continue throughout our lives. Insight into our upbringing and emotions allows us to bring to light the invisible threads that were hidden in shame or kept as secrets. It can enable us to break the chain and pass on a healthier legacy.
The photograph again
Look at that picture from Edmund Street one more time. A man holding a cat. A girl beside him, wanting to be close. The gap between them is not physical. It is the distance of three generations of unspoken grief.
I wrote A Victorian’s Inheritance to close it.
A Victorian’s Inheritance is available here.
The handwritten recipe book kept by Mary Allott/Parker, Ann’s sister-in-law, survives and is available as a facsimile reproduction. Mary’s own remarkable story of abandonment, scandal, and survival is the subject of my next project. Sign up to become an advanced reader or be the first to hear when the boxset launches.
A shorter version of this essay was published on my Substack on 18 April 2026.