Alan Bennett Family History

Alan Bennett was born on May 9th, 1934 to Walter and Lilian Bennett in Leeds, Yorkshire.  He was the younger of their two sons.  He attended Christ Church, a Church of England School at Armley in Leeds, and Leeds Modern School.

Then, like all men of his generation, he did his national service. He was sent to train with an infantry platoon in Pontefract going out to the war in Korea.  He did not want to go.  Everyone at his school knew that a possible get-out for bright boys was a Russian language training course.  Alan successfully applied for that course and stayed at home.

In 1955, at the age of twenty-one, Alan won a scholarship to study at Exeter College, Oxford.  He graduated there with a first-class degree in medieval history and stayed on for a few years.  He then decided that he was not really suited to the academic life.  Something else beckoned.

Finding His Niche.  While at Oxford Alan had performed some comedy for the Oxford Revue.  In August 1960 Alan Bennett – together with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook – became famous after their appearance at the Edinburgh Festival with the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe.  This show then headlined in London and New York.

His first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968.  Many TV, stage and radio plays followed, as well as screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose, and many appearances as an actor.

He is beloved by many because of his depicture of Yorkshire life as it was and is, its character and foibles.  Yet since his early rise to fame he has lived in London, first in Camden Town and then in Primrose Hill.  He has, however, maintained a second home in the village of Clapham in the Yorkshire Dales, the same village to which his parents retired.

Alan in his nineties has outlived all the contemporaries who had performed with him in Beyond the Fringe in the 1960’s.

Yorkshire (and Lincolnshire) Ancestors

On his father’s side there were the Bennetts, on his mother’s side the Peels.  Going back in time, they were farm hands, industrial workers, cloth weavers, and clothing shop managers, not really jobs that required any sort of education.  How then did Alan get to write his books and his plays?  Oxford probably.

The Bennetts.  For three generations and possibly more, these Bennetts were farm laborers in Rauncey, a small rural village four miles north of Sleaford in Lincolnshire: 

• George Bennett (1779-1839)  
• John Bennett (1801-1876)
• William Bennett (1838-1924)

William was in his later years a shepherd in North Rauncey.

It was his son Henry, born in 1865, who left rural Lincolnshire for work in Leeds.  In 1895 he married Fanny Noble from the Leeds Holbeck district.  Her father had been a gas fitter there and he found work as a gas stoker (someone who stokes the furnace at a coal gas plant).

Their son Walter, Alan’s father, was born in 1903.  The 1921 census showed Walter as a butcher’s apprentice.  He later worked as a butcher for the Co-operative Society.  He married Lilian Peel in Leeds in 1928.

The Peels.  If the Bennetts were from Rauncey in Lincolnshire, the Peels came from the parish of Elland cum Greetland, about two miles south of Halifax, in the Yorkshire West Riding.  During the 19th century this parish was a hub for textile weaving and, later, for textile mills.

Three generations of Peels were to be found there:

• William Peel (1814-1850)
• John Peel (1844-1933)
• William Peel (1869-1926)

William was a cloth weaver, but died young.  His son John worked initially as a twister in a textile mill before starting up, around 1880, as a draper and milliner.  This business was wound up in 1912 and John retired.  He died in Halifax in 1933 at the age of ninety.

John’s son William had married in Halifax in 1896.  He moved with his family to Leeds around 1912.  His son Clarence, who enlisted in 1915, died on the Western Front two years later.  After the war William had been a clothing shop manager in Leeds.  But sadly in 1925 he lost his job and, depressed, took his own life by drowning in the canal.

Our Clarence

Alan’s Grandma, the widow whose name was Mary Ann Peel, had three daughters – Kathleen, Lemira and Alan’s mother Lilian. Clarence, born in 1896, was the eldest and her only son. Whenever he was talked about, he was always ‘Our Clarence.’

Clarence had worked as a draper’s assistant in Leeds before enlisting to fight in July 1915.  But he was found to be physically unfit. He voluntarily underwent an operation and afterwards was declared fit. He joined up as a rifleman with the 18th Battalion King’s Royal Rifle Corps in September of that year.  He arrived in France in May 1916.

Alan said that Clarence was always twenty during his childhood – because of his photograph that stayed on the piano at Grandma’s house in Leeds. He had sat for the picture in his uniform and puttees (long bandages wrapped around his legs) at Mr. Lonnergan’s studio down Woodsley Road.

The picture was taken shortly before Clarence left for the Western Front in 1916.  He was killed at the Third Battle of Ypres in October 1917.

In 1986 Alan was able to find the cemetery in Flanders where he was buried.  There was a stone, not a grave, in a row backing onto a railway with the following inscription:

• “Known to be buried in this cemetery
• C7/044
• Rifleman C.E. Peel
• King’s Royal Rifle Corps
• 21 October 1917
• Their glory shall not be blotted out.”

The last line came from the imperialist Rudyard Kipling.

Walter and Lilian

Alan Bennett in his books seemed to have a bottomless well of stories about his parents and his growing up in Leeds.

His mother Lilian for instance was phobic about germs.  She thought open-necked shirts gave you tuberculosis and sharing a bottle of pop spelled immediate death.  His long-suffering father Walter was a butcher who played the violin.  He briefly took up fishing as a hobby, but never caught anything.

Critics of Alan’s 1975 play Sunset Across the Bay have seen its plot as essentially the story of how Walter and Lilian left Leeds to go and live in Clapham in the Yorkshire Dales on retirement in 1966.

Alan did accept that “Mam” and “Dad” were not unlike his parents, but argued that ‘whereas in the play their lives are lonely and unhappy and their expectations from retirement unfulfilled, Mam and Dad’s retirement – even with Mam’s depression – was one of the happiest times of their lives.”

However, his play’s sad plot development did make Alan worry about prophecy – as if he was bizarrely in some way responsible for his own father’s heart attack.  This took place in August 1974, between the writing and the filming of the play.

Lilian lived on for another twenty years.

Alan Bennett’s Family Tree

• Lincolnshire
• George Bennett (1779-1839) m. Susannah Barker (b. 1781) in Waddington, Lincolnshire in 1801
• – John Bennett (1801-1876)
• – plus ten other children

• John Bennett m. Elizabeth Coulin (1814-1885) in Rauceby, Lincolnshire in 1832.  After John’s death Elizabeth rem. William Pykett in 1877.
• – William Bennett (1838-1924)

• Maternal

• Yorkshire
• William Peel from Yorkshire (1814-1850) m. Mary Akroyd (1822-1889) in Elland cum Greetland in 1836
• – John Peel (1844-1933)
• – Betty Peel (1846-1907)

• John Peel from Elland cum Greetland m. Elizabeth Eastwood (1847-1930) in Halifax in 1868
• – William Peel (1869-1925), took his own life
• – Norris Peel (1872-1962) m. Louisa Robinson
• – Eveline Peel (1893-1960)

• William Peel from Elland cum Greetland m. Mary Smith (1870-1951) in Halifax in 1896; moved to Leeds around 1912
• – Clarence Peel (1896-1917), killed on the Western Front during World War One
• – Kathleen Peel (1900-1974) m. William Roach
• – Lilian Peel (1904-1995) m. Walter Bennett (1903-1974)
• – Amy Peel (1907-1967) m. Stanley Rogerson