Tension builds to fan the kipper

Christmas Eve in Waitrose: people were crawling over the shelves like locusts in one last manic rush. We called at the butcher's for the turkey and a joint of pork and I drove over to Guildford to get some flowers. I like doing the flower arranging at Christmas.

By 10.30am everything was done. The sales had already started in Guildford. It's as if people can't wait to get things over with before they move on to the next thing. Christmas is a time to savour things, to take time out and have some long conversations that shouldn't need to end in a hurry.

Yet, according to some reports, some 3.7m people will be shopping online on Christmas Day. I can understand how some get itchy feet on Boxing Day after 24-hours with the relatives, but there really ought to be a law against shopping on Christmas Day.

Tension is building for our annual "fan the kipper" contest. Will the silver rabbit go to Yorkshire this year, or will it stay in Surrey?

Otherwise, after getting rid of the mother of bad moods that has made life miserable for the rest of the family these past few days, I am beginning to mellow. The dog is clean and white and all is well with the world. That just leaves me time to wish all those in blogging land, wherever you are, whatever your persuasion, my best wishes for Christmas and the New Year. If there is anything you have missed in that last trip to the shops, forget it, it doesn't matter. The best things in life are improvised.

Postscript: The Silver Rabbit resides again in Surrey after various protests of foul play against the eventual winner (me) were rejected by the organising body (also me). There were fears that uncertainty over the outcome could drag on in to the next year, undermining the sport of kipper fanning, but the organiser chose to draw a line under this year's controversies reminiscent of the damaging kipper knobbling scandal that marred contests in the late 1990s. In a brief statement, I said: "The future of the sport is more important than any petty squabbling."

Finding a match

You don’t come across many Donkins. There are some people I know who would regard that as a good thing and I don’t blame them. But there are one or two Donkins I have met over the years, such as this chap. There is even a town called Donkin in Nova Scotia.

This week I’m sad to report the passing of two Donkins, one quite well known and one, my uncle Cyril, who would have been known by all those on his Bradford postal round before he retired.

As a young child I thought uncle Cyril was super human because of his handkerchief trick. He would hand over a matchstick that he would ask me to place inside his handkerchief. He would then ask me to snap the match within the cloth. Opening the handkerchief in a flourish, he would reveal a whole matchstick. This trick (it's great with very young children) had me puzzled for years. Uncle Cyril had a great sense of humour and I’m sad that he’s gone.

I was also sad to see that Mike Donkin, the BBC journalist, had died. Many, many times over the years people have asked me if I was related to “that Mike Donkin” on the TV or radio. We spoke on the phone once or twice over the years when our reporting interests had coincided, but we had no relatives in common.

We did, however, share a love of news reporting. He was a good journalist as this obituary testifies. The BBC needs people like Mike Donkin.

Enough of Donkins, I’m thinking, but I have one last note. I was contacted a week ago by an Alfreda Doonkeen who lives in Oklahoma City in the US and who wanted to know if I was descended from a cattle farmer in South America.

Some time in the 19th century, she says, an Alfred Donkin arrived in Mexico. She is wondering if he might have been related to her grandfather, Alfred Doonkeen and whether I might be “sharing some of his DNA.” I have no idea. I haven’t found any Donkins in my family history who have lived outside Yorkshire, apart from a few of those in my generation, not that I’ve looked very hard.

But this Alfred Donkin intrigues me. I can imagine him turning up in Mexico, to be greeted by the locals as Meester Doonkeen. As a Donkin (anything to make life easier could be a family motto) he most probably changed his name to go with the flow. I can see him now sitting in the dust with his poncho and sombrero, a handkerchief in one hand, a matchstick in the other.....

Thiepval Monument and the Somme

Returning from a weekend in Normandy we called at the Thiepval monument to the 72,000 British dead who died with no known grave on the Somme in the First World War (1914-18).

Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, it towers over the battlefield and today has an interpretation centre to put the battle in context for new generations of visitors.

The list of names is staggering. Imagine your telephone directory pasted page by page on a wall. I counted three Donkins: a Thomas Donkin from Durham, a Harry Donkin from East Yorkshire, and a Stanley Donkin from Cornwall, none related to me as far as I know.

White feather

Both of my grandfathers were in the artillery. Grandad Donkin did not join the Army until he was conscripted in 1917. I'm quite proud of him for sticking it out when there was tremendous pressure to volunteer. It's probably the reason I exist. Young women would hand white feathers to young men they saw in civilian clothes. I wonder if that ever happened to my grandad? If so, I wonder how he handled it?

At Fricourt we visited one of the perfectly maintained British cemeteries. Almost all those buried there were members of the West Yorkshire Regiment and all were killed on July 1, the first day of the Somme when the British and Commonwealth losses ran to almost 20,000 with another 40,000 wounded. That's a football crowd, gone in a single day.

Mass Graves

There are more than a thousand British WWI graveyards in France but very few German graveyards. No more than a fifth of the German dead are buried there in marked graves. Some were removed after the first war and others after the Second World War when the dead were either repatriated or deposited in mass graves.

When I first went to the Somme nearly 30 years ago there were few visitors. Almost every farm you drove past had its stack of old munitions ploughed up from the fields. Yesterday at the Lochnager site where a large mine was exploded (60,000 pounds of ammonol completely destroyed a German redoubt) there was a young chap selling brass shell casings and old nose cones as mementos. Nearby there is the Old Blighty Cafe.

A good way to visit the Somme is to start from Albert, then head towards Bapaume on the D929 which intersects the battlefield. You can see the ridge line in which the Germans had dug their trenches, supported by deep underground shelters that enabled enough of their troops to survive an otherwise devastating bombardment.

Withering fire

Once the shelling had finished, whistles blew and the British troops, many from the same streets and villages, climbed their ladders and set out across no-mans land. Meanwhile the German defenders were rushing up from their bunkers to reach their firing positions from where they were able to rake the khaki lines of slowly advancing troops with withering fire.

One of them was the father of an old friend of mine, the late Godfrey Golzen. As a machine gunner, Godfrey's father must have mown down hundreds of the advancing British. Later he would lose an arm before returning to his home town of Berlin at the end of the war.

Holocaust survivor

Mr Golzen senior was a well respected Justice of the Peace who lived peacefully in Berlin with his family, including Godfrey, throughout the Second World War. What makes this remarkable is that he was a Jew, one of about 200 in Berlin who avoided transportation and survived the Holocaust.

Godfrey explained that his family were assimilated and felt as German as any other Berliner. Not that that would have made any difference to the Nazis; but his neighbours and friends stayed loyal throughout the war. Another thing worth noting is his family's attitude to Eastern European Jews. "They weren't liked by those who had assimilated as we had done," said Godfrey.

Footpath idea

The WWI sites are so important to Europe's heritage that they should be made more accessible. I would like to see a Front line footpath that follows the trench system at a certain date - say the morning of July 1 1916 - from it's beginning on the coast to the border with Switzerland.

Very little of the trench system has been preserved but a modern footpath would enable visitors to appreciate the enormity of this terrible war in a way that differs from simply turning up to a site in the car and reading a plaque. The access would need to be purchased but that should be possible. The farmers get enough as it is in EU subsidies. Why not attach a few conditions for those whose farms cross the battlefields?

Postcript: Since writing this I have been contacted by Thomas Golzen, Godfrey's son, who points out some innacuracies. I could edit them in the text but prefer to publish his note instead because it shows how stories can get mangled even given the best intentions of the author. But I also think it gives a different perspective on events where certain stereotypes have emerged. I wonder what the Nazi hierarchy would or could have said to the Jewish German highly decorated war hero?

Here is Thomas's note:

I can see from your blog that you knew my dad, Godfrey, and that you seem to have heard some family history. It's very strange for me to think that I'm only a generation or two away from all that. Actually, it was my gandmother's sister Susi who survived the war in Berlin as a Jew. My dad's family (father, mother and younger sister) managed to escape to Switzerland in 1939 and made their way to the UK from there. I also seem to remember being told that my grandfather had been mostly up against the French during the Somme. His recollection of the first day was climbing out of the dugouts after a week's bombardment with their machine guns and shooting all the attacking troops.

I never met him - he died before I was born - but I got the impression that he rather enjoyed the war. As a Jew, it gave him the chance to be treated on an equal footing with ethnic Germans, and to show them that Jews could be good soldiers too. He was highly decorated before he was invalided out.