Brian Cousins (1930-2024)
Brian Cousins, a long-standing member of the Society and former Treasurer, passed away in May 2024.
Brian was born on Friday, the 13th of June 1930, in Newbury Park, London. He stayed in London throughout the war and attended the Ilford County High School for Boys. Brian left school at 16 and entered the civil service open competition. He performed well and subsequently had his pick of departments to work in. He decided to join the Foreign Office. In the evenings, while working full-time in Westminster, he pursued an intermediate university-level degree.
Later, in his early twenties, he moved into the District Audit service and studied for (and again did rather well at) the ICSA (company secretarial) and the CIPFA (public finance) examinations. His first audit embraced Burnham on Crouch, and, for his last, the whole of Greater London was ‘his.’
[fg]Fig 1: Brian Cousins[/fg]Brian’s interests ranged from history and genealogy to the wider world and its social organisation. The earliest handwritten documents that he produced were still in existence and related to his study of his family tree. He began this work shortly after he left school, already working six days a week and studying three evenings. His parents could not explain his origin, so he worked it out himself. The work is immaculate, detailed, and thorough. Nobody explained to him how records worked or how to track from one document to another. He did not stop with the family tree but worked on all the contexts involved, from the structure and functioning of a Parish through the laws attached to record-keeping, the laws attached to living at the times in question, the social and environmental backdrop, the nature of ordinary people’s lives, and the structure and functioning of authority and government. After his death, his home was found to be overflowing with an estimated two million pieces of paper, most of which related to his studies.
A theme in the above passage may not be immediately apparent. Brian enjoyed metaphorical digging rather than physical digging. He relished the search for evidence and always sought to place evidence in its context. The District Audit service involved sifting through financial and legal records, checking propriety, and looking for inappropriate transactions. Similarly, his genealogy work involved searching records and establishing connections. However, it always required putting records in their proper context and verifying their accuracy.
For him, archaeology offered another way to add context to the records of people’s lives. If you can touch the physical earth, which provides evidence of how people lived, then those lives become more real. Combining this reality with the accompanying written evidence creates a multi-layered picture of what life was like back then. For example, if he found out that a specific person ran a particular public house for a set period in the eighteenth century, he would want to see what remains of that pub and the road it was on. He would study the licensing laws of the time, the physical changes to the pub, and anything else contributing to the history of the building and the people who lived and worked there. Always focusing on the evidence and consistently challenging its accuracy.
Sometimes, the search for records led him down rabbit holes. His research into a family called Whitechurch led him to an engraver whose engravings hang in the Senate Library on Capitol Hill, without context about the engraver but with much context from US history. He started a book on Robert Whitechurch but found that Robert’s daughter, Mary Frances, was an enthusiastic animal rights and children’s rights campaigner during the second half of the nineteenth century. A new book is started!
On May 15, 2024, Brian Cousins passed away at 93. At the time of his passing, he was conducting research on a family named Dillon. Brian had accompanied Napoleon on his 1812 march to Moscow. Within the extensive collection of documents, there are numerous records from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the French Grande Armée. These records are primarily from the perspective of a single French officer of Irish descent who had married a daughter of Robert Whitechurch.
And yes, this summary ends suddenly because that is how death works; active studies are truncated and left incomplete.
By Alan Cousins