Happy Birthday to Herbert Jollyman
Looking through our Jollyman family history documents, I came across a little birthday book. It was given to my great grandfather, Herbert Jollyman, on his thirteenth birthday in 1890, to keep a record of birthdates for his family and friends. Birthday books are always of help to family history researchers, but I found this birthday book particularly interesting, as for each date, it gives a short quotation.
Herbert’s birthday, 9th January, has the following quote from George Chapman, an English dramatist and poet:
A High Aim.
And so, good friend, safe passage to thy freight,
To thee a long peace, through a virtuous strife
In which let’s both contend to virtue’s height,
Not making fame our object, but good life.
This struck me as particularly apt in his case. Herbert had strong Christian faith, so did have ‘A High Aim.’ and certainly had ‘a virtuous strife.’ Like most men of his generation, he was called up to fight in the Great War. He did his duty and remained faithful to his wife Hepsie while he was away, writing a wonderful series of almost 200 letters home over the years: The Jollyman Letters.
Peace came at last, and during the years that followed, Herbert certainly fulfilled the rest of the quotation, doing his best to live a happy, virtuous, ‘good life.’
Naturally, I turned immediately to my own birthday, 16th August, to see what fate had in store for me.
Labour and Sorrow.
I see how plenty suffer oft,
And hasty climbers soon do fall;
I see that those which are aloft
Mishap doth threaten most of all,
They get with toil, they keep with fear;
Such cares my mind could never bear.
EDWARD DYER
Um… hang on! Doesn’t that mean, “I can’t be bothered to work, it’s not worth it!”? Even if I take it as meaning that ambition is not worth the struggle (which is often true) it’s still defining me by what I’m not, rather than what I am. I think I’ll follow my great grandfather’s example instead, and look for a good life.
