All Posts - Malcolm Sinclair

Aubers Ridge, France, May 1915, looking across No Man's Land to the German position

Sapper Sinclair’s War – Lest We Forget

November 11, 2023 / Malcolm

It is the morning of 9th May, 1915, on the Rue du Bois, Aubers Ridge in Northern France. Under heavy fire, 27 year old Jimmy Sinclair, a Sapper in 23 Field Company, Royal Engineers, climbs out of the trenches with his party of infantry. With shells exploding everywhere and bullets flying all around him, what he does next will be announced, in front of all the officers and men on parade in Newark a few weeks later, as “remarkable”.

On that May morning, in spite of receiving injuries so severe that they require an immediate return to Blighty for the rest of the war, Sapper Jimmy Sinclair stays on in the attack, at great personal risk, to protect his fellow comrades, and continues with the work of clearing wire in No Man’s Land. For this action, he is recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal. His Field Company have been fighting in France since the first week of the war, and two of Jimmy’s fellow Sappers, McClean and Stander, are killed that day during the attack in which he displays such heroism.

Lest We Forget.

Published to coincide with Remembrance Weekend 2023, this tells the story of my great grandfather Jimmy Sinclair’s military service, with a particular focus on his time in France with the British Expeditionary Force at the start of World War One. For background information on Jimmy’s early years in Caithness and his adult life in Edinburgh please click the following link to read a blog summary published simultaneously with this piece: Jimmy Sinclair 1887-1964.

After leaving Caithness as a teenager, touring around the country as a painter and decorator, and starting to settle in Edinburgh, Jimmy enlisted in the Royal Engineers, at the age of 21, on 1^st March 1909. After six months initial training in the skills of being a Sapper, his first posting was in September 1909 to 30 Company. They were based in Plymouth, and specialised in submarine mining and maintaining searchlights in ports. He spent a year with them before receiving the first of three overseas postings that he would have in his military career. Allocated to 43 Company, he set sail for the other side of the world – Mauritius, a small island in the southern Indian Ocean, off Madagascar and the East African coast.

Jimmy Sinclair, late 1920s, with his three youngest children: May (became May Garton), Joan (became Joan McCall) and Hughie Sinclair

My Sinclair Ancestry – Jimmy Sinclair, 1887-1964

November 11, 2023 / Malcolm

Jimmy Sinclair, my great grandfather, was born in Caithness in 1887 and died in Edinburgh in 1964. This short summary is the first of two posts I shall publish, at the same time, about his life. The other piece, Sapper Sinclair’s War, will focus on his military career and above all his heroic action in World War One. To read that article please click here: Sapper Sinclair’s War

The previous post on this site (click to read): My Sinclair Ancestry – The Mystery of James Sinclair the Ploughman, described the numerous searches that I have undertaken to try and discover the identity of Jimmy’s father. James Sinclair, who was around at his birth in Wick, Caithness, in 1887. In the future, I shall also explore how I am still using DNA to try and identify who James and his forebears were. He remains a mystery, unlike his son Jimmy, whose war medals, letters and postcards are some of my proudest family possessions.

Caithness Childhood

All Jimmy’s early life was spent in the far north, mostly in the town of his birth, Wick, on the east coast of Caithness. He grew up there under the guardianship of his uncle, William Simpson. Nothing is known of his father, James Sinclair, other than the fact that he signed the registration of Jimmy’s birth in November 1887. The story of James remains a mystery. Family rumour has it that he was drowned in the Pentland Firth soon after the birth was registered. Perhaps because of this, Jimmy’s mother, Margaret Simpson, soon left Wick and returned to her work as a servant at Barrogill Mains, a farm on the north coast in the estate of the Castle of Mey, which still exists today.

My Sinclair Ancestry – The Mystery of James Sinclair the Ploughman

October 26, 2023 / Malcolm

Where does my Sinclair surname come from? The simple answer, as with most Sinclairs from Scotland, is Caithness in the far north. But the detailed answer is far from clear. This is the first of several articles I shall be publishing about the search for that name, who it came from, and what is yet to be discovered.

This blog will describe the search for the earliest known Sinclair ancestor of mine, who can only be identified back to 1887: James Sinclair. I do not know where he came from before that year, nor do I know what happened to him after that year. He is a complete mystery. The second piece, which will follow this one, will tell of the life of James’s son, my great grandfather, also named James but known as Jimmy Sinclair, born in Caithness in 1887.

A lot more is known of Jimmy, who held me, as a baby, in his arms in Edinburgh where he lived for most of his adult life, married to May Jane Maguire. A future post will explore how I have used DNA, and particularly YDNA (that of the male chromosome handed down only from fathers to sons), to try and find the truth of my Sinclair past. That past is still a mystery. I hope by sharing these stories, of lives and of research, that someone, somewhere, may help unlock this mystery. If not, these articles will stand as a record for all that I know, and eventually be published in a book about my family history. To go to the blog about the life of Jimmy Sinclair, son of James Sinclair please click:

My Sinclair Ancestry – Jimmy Sinclair, 1887-1964

Of the Sinclair pieces coming out on this site, this first one will of necessity record the most detail of research that has been undertaken. As will be read below, it sadly becomes a list of one area after another which has been examined in depth but with no answer found. Such, sometimes, is the nature of genealogical research. The only solution is to keep going. I had desperately wanted to solve this mystery for my Dad’s sake whilst he was still alive, but did not manage to – he died in 2019. Yet breakthroughs can sometimes occur out of the blue, so I shall never give up.

The facts from 1887 are as follows. My great grandfather, Jimmy, was recorded as being born James Sinclair, on 2 September 1887, in a house in Wick High Street. His parents were named as James Sinclair and Margaret Simpson. They signed their names to that effect. The birth was assisted by Jimmy’s grandmother, Mary Simpson (maiden name Cook), who was a midwife. It took place in a dwelling where some of the Simpson family were living, having moved away from the Isle of Stroma off the northern coast, where they originated.

Augustus Pugin’s Salisbury Period

October 13, 2023 / Malcolm

This blog provides a brief summary of a longer article published in November 2023 by the Sarum Chronicle, a detailed publication planned for the future, and a Masters Dissertation on 2022, regarding Augustus Pugin's time in Salisbury, early in his career, where a number of significant achievements were to prove the foundation for so much of what he went on to achieve.

Augustus Pugin was England’s most influential architect and designer of the mid 19th Century, and the early leader of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Early in his architectural career, during the winter of 1834-35, Pugin moved to Salisbury in Wiltshire. He spent around three years living and working there

During the time he spent in the Wiltshire city, Pugin lived in his first designed and built residence, changed faith to Roman Catholicism, worked on competition-winning plans for the new Houses of Parliament, and published the first edition of what was to be his most controversial and influential book, Contrasts. As will be shown in my forthcoming 2023 article and 2024 publication, his achievements during his time there were so significant that they merit consideration as being more explicitly identified as a defined period of his work: Pugin’s Salisbury Period.

The Dauntsey Doom

October 12, 2023 / Malcolm

Wiltshire's Medieval Doom Board Painting

Probably dating from the mid 15th Century, the Doom at the Church of St James the Great in Dauntsey, North Wiltshire, is one of only five such paintings on wooden boards in England. Portraying The Last Judgement, the Doom was restored in the 1990s and sits where it was first positioned around six hundred years ago over the rood screen between the nave and chancel of the church.

Wiltshire has two significant Doom Paintings, one at Dauntsey, the subject of this blog, and the other in Salisbury. Whilst the latter is the county’s most artistically impressive Doom, painted on the chancel arch of St Thomas’s Church, it is the Dauntsey Doom that is for me the more interesting of the two. Having studied it during my recent Masters Degree in Medieval Studies, and also having given a public talk on it at the church in 2023 to nearly a hundred people, I wanted one of my first posts on this website to be about the Dauntsey Doom.

Memento Mori – the gift that keeps on giving.

October 11, 2023 / Malcolm

Some of my future blog posts will be tagged as relating to Memento Mori. Translated from Latin, this means remember death, or remember you must die. In art, literature, and funerary monuments, it has a more specific meaning, referring to particular symbols, such as hourglasses, skulls, bells and coffins. These are often used in paintings, memorials and gravestones to represent death.

For me, such morbid representations are often the most interesting finds in any church I visit, along with the contrasting beauty of stained glass. Occasionally of course, both combine, when death is represented in glass, with most windows memorialising someone who has died tending to show Biblical scenes or saints, with a smaller inscription in memory of the dear departed. Such use of windows for remembrance became popular in Victorian times, often replacing the larger carved tablets on the walls of churches (see below for examples of these).

How Green Was Their Valley?

October 10, 2023 / Malcolm

In the late 19^th Century, fate drew four of my great great grandparents together in the village of Glyncorrwg in the Welsh Valleys: Frederick Hill, Elizabeth Aucutt, Charles Thomas and Elizabeth Peters. They had moved there, drawn to the excitement and growth of the industrial revolution, travelling to the end of the new railway line in the Afan Valley in South Wales. In Glyncorrwg and then the next village of Cymmer, they and their descendants made lives for themselves, and it was in a house in Cymmer that my maternal grandmother was born, Annie Aucutt Thomas, who subsequently married my grandfather, Bill Maloney of Aberkenfig.

These four, Annie’s grandparents, moved to Glyncorrwg in the 1860s primarily for employment. They stayed there to work, and also for love. The Afan Valley was, and still is, an area of outstanding natural beauty in which to raise a family, although today the loss of previous industries has almost sent the area backwards in time.

It was the 1860s when they arrived there. Across Britain, the landscape had been changing for decades. Rural life was on the decline. People moved where the work was. In their tens of thousands they gravitated to the new industrial heartlands. More than half the world’s coal and iron ore was supplied from Britain at that time, and much of it was starting to come out of Glamorganshire in South Wales, due to the deep seams of iron and coal in the many valleys there. As more collieries were set up, new railways were built to link the coastal ports to the mines, and to bring in men from all over Britain to work in them. Around the main stops for each new line, communities started to flourish. One of these was Glyncorrwg, high up in the Afan Valley.

With my Mum, in a kilt and a very straight fringe in the mid 1960s

This was My Cultural Life

October 9, 2023 / Malcolm

Welcome to my new Website. As this is the first post on here, and likely therefore to be at the bottom of the pile, few people will see it let alone read it. But, for me, it gives a chance to provide some personal artistic and work background, and a description of youthful influences on my interests today – history, literature, music, art, politics, social justice.

History, Books, Film, Music & Art

I grew up with a fascination for both history and literature, which has never left me.

When I was young, the history was all about Bruce at Bannockburn, Knox in his pulpit, Mary Queen of Scots, the Bonnie Prince, Wellington vs Napoleon’s Marshalls in Spain, and the Scots Greys at Waterloo. At school, this transferred into themes such as the Reformation and Counter Reformation, The Thirty Years War, Nineteenth Century Military, Social and Cultural History, and inevitably on to Marxism, Revolutions and the World Wars. I would fight battles in my bedroom, focus on history at school, and argue vociferously with anyone I could find on the need for a fairer socialist utopia for all to live in.

The literature interest when young was of any novel I could get my hands on, at home or in the Caterham Hill public library. So many come to mind. Initially it was the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott books my Dad had inherited, before I moved on to war related fiction, living so close to a Battle of Britain airfield (RAF Kenley), including Paul Lund’s PQ17 Convoy to Hell, numerous Alistair MacLean books, and Nevil Shute.

Other books were SciFi, triggered by a love of tv shows like Lost in Space, Star Trek and Blake’s 7. First such novels were by HG Wells, Aldous Huxley and above all John Wyndham, then Arthur C Clarke and Michael Moorcock. Alongside SciFi was American crime fiction, ranging from Donald Westlake to Mario Puzo. In my mid teens, JRR Tolkien changed everything for a couple of years and led me down a fantasy route and ER Eddison, before University life brought me to classics like Catcher in the Rye, On The Road, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, Catch 22 etc., then on through to anything from Camus, Kafka and Sartre, and broadening to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Dalton Trumbo, JG Ballard, Graham Greene, Hanif Kureshi, Vikram Seth & Anthony Burgess. The list was endless.

Film interest ran alongside the reading for a while, triggered by seeing Polanski’s Repulsion at the University Cinema Club, and then a fascination for European art house movies by directors such as Bergman, Cocteau and then later Kieslowski, Almodovar and almost anything French.

Music was always important in these years, especially Two Tone (Madness and Specials) and New Wave (Joy Division, Cure, Bunnymen & Nick Cave) and then my Art interest grew, especially Impressionism, Fauvism and Expressionism, with Chagall, Munch, Turner, Dix and Roualt being particular favourites.

But then, many of these interests were frozen, for years, as adult life, parenting, and an all-consuming career in the NHS, took over. Some literary fiction stayed the course with me, such as Alice Munro, AS Byatt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, AL Kennedy, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Iain Banks, but only recently has my reading finally picked up pace again, with Julian Barnes, Ursula K Le Guin, Amor Towles, Margaret Atwood and Iain M Banks taking the main plaudits recently.

Mental Health, Jazz, Writing & History

I worked for the NHS for 33 years in Mental Health, Addictions and Community Services: as a Psychiatric Nurse and Clinical Specialist in Substance Misuse in Surrey; a Drugs/HIV Trainer and Diploma Leader at the National Addiction Centre & Institute of Psychiatry in London; an Operations Manager in South-East London and then the Isle of Wight, and finally a Director of Mental Health Services and Strategy in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Avon. This career started in an old fashioned Mental Asylum outside London, transferred to the streets of Camberwell, Peckham, and Brixton, dealing with the chaos of heroin and crack use, and evolved into a series of missions to open new hospitals and develop innovative services for mental illness in much of South West England. This included running the first integrated NHS & Council Mental Health Service in Wiltshire & Swindon, leading the development of a new hospital site in Salisbury to replace the Old Manor Hospital there, managing the development, design and building of the Victoria Hospital in Swindon, and successfully leading work on the country’s largest competitive tender of mental health services in Bristol.

After 33 years of full time work in the NHS, I took early retirement nearly 10 years ago due to becoming the carer for my father at the end of his life. For a few years, I promoted his jazz photography, running exhibitions at the Royal Albert Hall and in Paris amongst other venues, connecting with numerous well-known and very supportive musicians, and working closely with the London clubs whose walls are covered with his images, such as Ronnie Scott’s, Pizza Express Jazz in Soho, the 606 in Chelsea, and with the London Jazz Festival. I also set up a website with a friend about Dad’s photography to help him sell his images all over the world. After his death, the archive was too large for me to keep at home, and I wanted to ensure long term visibility of his legacy, so I took the decision to pass the entire collection on to Getty Images/Poperfoto, who were delighted to have it and paid a small fee too (only about 5-10% of what they would have paid before recent digitisation of photography).

At the same time as dipping into the jazz world, I also undertook some advanced courses with Penguin Random House on Creative Writing and Novel Writing. I have dipped in and out of this ever since, completing but not publishing one novel and intending to write more soon. I am a member of an excellent Writers Group which tries to meet monthly in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, to critique each other’s work.

The fiction writing was put aside for a few years when from 2019-2023 I undertook a Masters Degree in Medieval Studies, including a Dissertation about Augustus Pugin, for which I received a Distinction. This in turn led to an increased fascination with gothic and religious art, stained glass, memorials, and the Reformation’s destruction of so many of these, which I have pursued since. through talks, writing, and continued visits to churches and other historical buildings, particularly in and around Wiltshire. Recently, I became a member of the Editorial Board of the Sarum Chronicle, a local history journal located in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and due in 2024 to expand its main area of coverage to Hampshire, Dorset and all of Wiltshire. The next Edition of the Chronicle, to be published in October 2023 will open with a 6,500 word article from me on Augustus Pugin’s Salisbury Period. A separate and much more detailed publication about Pugin’s time in Wiltshire, based on my Dissertation, is due to be published in 2024 under the aegis of the Pugin Society.

Alongside all this, I have, for the past decade, had a major interest in family history. This, as with almost everything on this website, originated from my parents. Both researched their ancestry in depth, although my father came up against a couple of brick walls in doing so. My mother self-published her own book about it, A Welsh Childhood, and this has been my inspiration to one day do my own version of that, but in a less autobiographical way and more connected to a number of cousins who share the same interests and with whom I have discussed from time to time doing shared writing on our collective past.

What the future of all these things holds, I am not quite sure. But, hopefully, his website will provide an indication of my intentions, as well as a vehicle to achieve some of them.

Malcolm. October 2023.

PS. I shall hardly mention immediate family at all on this website. That is for a simple reason: I am still learning in life that what one gives to family is about actions, not words.

Malcolm Sinclair

Sapper Sinclair’s War – Lest We Forget

My Sinclair Ancestry – Jimmy Sinclair, 1887-1964

Caithness Childhood

My Sinclair Ancestry – The Mystery of James Sinclair the Ploughman

Augustus Pugin’s Salisbury Period

The Dauntsey Doom

Wiltshire's Medieval Doom Board Painting

Memento Mori – the gift that keeps on giving.

How Green Was Their Valley?

This was My Cultural Life

History, Books, Film, Music & Art

Mental Health, Jazz, Writing & History

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