ABSTRACT
During a competitive debate in The Times about the longevity of family memory in 1897, William Crookes wrote to the editor asserting that his family memory stretched back to the days of the Great Plague. As a boy, Crookes’ father had listened to family stories told by his great-grandmother when she was over a hundred. She had heard them from her grandfather, who had lived through the plague year of 1665:
Unfortunately, despite this remarkable example of the longevity of memory in the Crookes’ family history, very little of it was recorded for posterity. At the suggestion of the publisher Fisher Unwin, Crookes had planned to write an autobiography, but like his intention to write an account of psychic research, this was stalled by his grief on his wife’s death in 1916. Consequently, we know very little detail of Crookes’ family background, or his childhood and education. From the quoted reminiscence, it is clear that his forebears on his father’s side hailed from Derbyshire, where the surname Crookes is still common, and worked on the land. The surname is also common in south Yorkshire. Crookes’ granddaughter, Mrs Marjory (Crookes) Francis, who emigrated to the West Indies, recalled a family tradition that the earliest known members of the Crookes family had been crusaders who became wealthy Yorkshire landowners around the village of Crux, now Crookes, a suburb of Sheffield. Although this tradition cannot be verified, it was undoubtedly the reason why Crookes later took ‘Ubi Crux, Ibi Lux’ [Where the cross is, there is light] as
his motto and heraldic device. Crookes’ father, Joseph Crookes, was born in 1792 at Masborough, an industrial village close to Rotherham famed for its huge eighteenthcentury ironworks. Joseph’s father, another William Crookes (1734-1814), made his living as a tailor, and this may well have been the profession of Joseph’s grandfather, John Crookes (b. 1660), who was elected Mayor of Hartlepool, County Durham, on three occasions between 1691 and 1703.
