The story below is about my great grandad, Geoffrey Langdale Stebbing. He’s my mothers, mothers dad 🙂 the story below is an extract from a hook but unfortunately we don’t know the source:

In 1916 Francis Stebbing moved to Stannington as Vicar, and there he remained for 47 years, retiring in 1963 to Royston, where he died in 1970. Stannington was then a village a little way beyond Malin Bridge, where Sheffield ends. It is on top of a hill and beyond it are the beautiful but windy Darbyshire Moors. Even now Stannington is a cold place when the wind blows. The rambling vicarage where Francis reared his large family must have been icy in winter. There Lily contracted tuberculosis and died leaving Francis with one young son, Geoffrey Langdale. He married again when Geoffrey was about 12 and had six more children — Audrey, Eric, Douglas, Celia, Margaret and Peter — but Geoffrey did not get on well with his step mother. His children were told how badly she treated him. In fact her own children and grandchildren loved her dearly and one wonders if Geoffrey was simply difficult in the face of a new mother. At any rate he did not do well at school (King Edward’s in Sheffield) and when he found it difficult to get a job.

An uncle, who does hot seem to appear in the family tree was out in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and promised to find Geoffrey a job learning to farm in Rhodesia. Thus in 1927 the young 19 year old Yorkshire boy found himself stepping off a train in the night at a siding in Bechuanaland to be met by this uncle, then sent on to Rhodesia, where he worked first on the farm of Godfrey Huggins (later Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia and architect of the Federation) at Arcturus.

Huggins was a good doctor but not much of a farmer, so after—six months Geoffrey left Arcturus and moved to a paw paw farm near Hartley where he stayed, rather unhappily for another 18 months. He did what so many did then and found a job first in the Bank, then in the Civil Service. It was while working in the Mines and Works Department that he met Dorothy.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with the story of Dorothy Stebbing 🙂

Image is from Jeffery and Dorothy’s wedding 🙂Blog: 228/365Song of the day: Nothing’s Wrong – Muse