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Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Forums > Ripper Discussions > Police and Officials > Individual Police Officials > Littlechild, Chief Inspector John George > Metropolitan Police Minstrels
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Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 10:13 AM
I see over on jtrforums that A. P. Wolf has made the startling 'discovery' that Littlechild was a member of the Metropolitan Police Minstrels. This, of course, is a well known fact. A. P. also reproduces an illustration of Littlechild from Moonshine which he doesn't think has been seen before. This illustration of Littlechild in Moonshine was discovered some ten years ago by Nick Connell and Nick and I use it in our book The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper, 2000, as plate 13. Here is an 1882 Police flyer showing Littlechild as a member of 'The Minstrels' -
10067
apwolf
5th January 2008, 10:51 AM
Thanks for that original, Grey.
You know you should really make sure those grapes are ripe before you have 'em for tea.
I expressed 'suprise' at Littlechild's antics in blacking himself up as a minstrel, social suprise that was; and I thought it highly relevant that such information about the character and imagination of a senior police officer from the LVP would be useful to students who wanted to investigate the man further.
Of course as we now know that Littlechild was not directly involved in the investigations into the Whitechapel Murders it's a bit of a moot point.
My suggestion that the 'Moonshine' image may not have been seen before was a tentative one, of course, but as you know I like to see such images widely available to the maximum audience at no cost to themselves, rather than squirreled away in some obscure rag or book that will cost the audience hard cash to view.
We move and operate in a different fashion, Grey, our audience best left to judge our motives and ambitions.
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 11:32 AM
Thanks for that original, Grey.
You know you should really make sure those grapes are ripe before you have 'em for tea...
My suggestion that the 'Moonshine' image may not have been seen before was a tentative one, of course, but as you know I like to see such images widely available to the maximum audience at no cost to themselves, rather than squirreled away in some obscure rag or book that will cost the audience hard cash to view.
We move and operate in a different fashion, Grey, our audience best left to judge our motives and ambitions.
And a happy New Year to you too Mr. Wolf. On the contrary, the sourness seems to be on your part rather than mine.
As a published author your comments are often surprising. Your above statement with regard to the way 'we move and operate' and 'our motives and ambitions' are astonishing. The amount of material that I have freely shared, helped others with and indeed published on these boards makes a nonsense of what you appear to be suggesting.
As usual you, rather than any grapes, have left a sour taste in my mouth.
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 12:05 PM
Research in the computer age is now very easy when compared with the old-fashioned version that required much legwork and expense. As we see with A.P., searching old newspaper archives is now simple with the newspapers being digitalized and word-searchable.
As regards researching the character of a police officer such as Littlechild there is quite a bit easily available (and now being found by A.P.) as well as Littlechild's own book The Reminiscences of Chief Inspector Littlechild. So the keen researcher wishing to know more about him should have no problem, despite the machinations of the likes of me having 'squirreled' away the material.
Here is an extract from an interview about Littlechild's recollections that shows that he actually founded the police minstrel troupe and took great pleasure in raising money for the Police Orphanage. He was also a lover of opera.
10068
robert
5th January 2008, 12:14 PM
Grey, he reminded me there very much of Anderson.
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 12:22 PM
Grey, he reminded me there very much of Anderson.
Hi Robert, yes I had noted that some time ago, but it was (and is) a fairly common trait amongst police officers that they know the identity of the authors of certain crimes but lack the legal proof to do anything about it.
That said, Littlechild worked with Anderson for many years and was one of the Chief Inspector departmental heads at Scotland Yard from 1883-1893. He was thus at the Yard with Anderson from the latter's appointment in 1888 until Littlechild's retirement in 1893. He would have also been involved in working with Anderson prior to 1888 as Anderson was involved the Secret Service and anti-Fenian work. However, we know that Littlechild did not appear to agree with Anderson's Ripper theory.
katbradshaw
5th January 2008, 03:25 PM
I don't think that in this case it is refering to Black and White minstrels type minstrels. The term has been used since the middle ages to describe a group of singers and musicians. Medieval banquets often had minstrels playing. So I don't think we should assume Littlechild was some sort of racist yet.
m_w_r
5th January 2008, 04:09 PM
I don't think that in this case it is refering to Black and White minstrels type minstrels. The term has been used since the middle ages to describe a group of singers and musicians. Medieval banquets often had minstrels playing. So I don't think we should assume Littlechild was some sort of racist yet.
Hi Kat,
Nick Tosches, in his book Where Dead Voices Gather, finds that minstrelsy - in the sense of the Black and White Minstrels to whom you refer - emerged in the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century, tracing its roots from linked genres such as comic opera and caricature. Following the rise to popularity of the Virginia Minstrels, in the early 1840s (Tosches refers to a performance in New York in 1843 for which the advertising referred to them as "the novel, grotesque, original and supassingly melodious Ethiopian Band"), the term "minstrel" became attached to all "blackface" performers.
Tosches notes that "like most subsequent emanations of American culture, [minstrelsy's] vogue soon spread abroad to England". He describes the popularity of minstrelsy in England as "immediate and great", and notes that "blackface" performing survived in England "long after it had been suppressed and forsaken in its native America".
Since it goes outside his main purpose, Tosches doesn't provide any more information regarding minstrelsy in the UK. Still, however, we can assume that, if the "minstrel" tag got generally attached to "blackface" performers in or around the 1840s, then this antedates the early popularity of the genre: minstrelsy, under its previous sobriquet[s], could have been in existence as a popular performance genre in London from the 1830s, if not before. By 1882, perhaps forty or fifty years after minstrelsy arrived in the UK to "immediate and great" public enthusiasm, I would suggest that no theatre-goer who saw that "minstrels" were listed on the bill could possibly have expected anything other than "blackface" performers. The use of the term would have been, by then, quite specific and unambiguous.
Regards,
Mark Ripper
m_w_r
5th January 2008, 04:24 PM
Further to the above, the Metropolitan Police Minstrels are also discussed on p.275 of Martin Fido and Keith Skinner's The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard. They remark that the Minstrels, founded in 1872, "performed instrumental solos and ensembles and sang negro spirituals, popular ballads and songs" in "evening dress and black-face make-up". The troupe was wound up in 1933.
Mark Ripper
robert
5th January 2008, 04:48 PM
"Pick-Me-Up" May 25th 1889
Sam Flynn
5th January 2008, 04:57 PM
This from "Observations of an Orderly: Some glimpses of life and work in an English War Hospital", by Lance Corporal Ward Muir, published 1917. Public domain text, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. I make no apologies for the "quaint" expressions that were in use at the time.
CHAPTER XI - THE RECREATION ROOMS
Yesterday, a ****** troupe visited the hospital. To be exact, they were the Metropolitan Police Minstrels ("By Permission of Sir E.R. Henry, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I., Commissioner"); but no member of the audience, I imagine, could picture those jocose blackamoors, with their tambourines and bones, as really being anything so serious as traffic-controlling constables. That their comic songs were accompanied by a faultless orchestra was understandable enough. One can believe in a police band. One is not surprised that the police band is a good band.
To believe that the ebony-visaged person with the huge red indiarubber-flexible mouth who sings "Under the archway, Archibald," and follows this amorous ditty with a clog dance is - in his washed moments - the terror of burglars, requires unthinkable flights of imagination. As I gazed at this singular resurrection of Moore and Burgess and breathless childhood's afternoons at the St. James's Hall - the half circle of inanely alert faces the colour of fresh polished boots - the preposterous uniforms and expansive shirt-fronts - the "******" dialect which this strange convention demands but which cannot be said to resemble the speech of any African tribe yet discovered - I found that by no effort of faith or credulity could I pierce the disguise and perceive policemen.
It is at least twenty years since I met a ****** minstrel in the flesh. Vague ghosts of bygone persons and of piquant anachronisms seemed to float approvingly in the air: the Prince Consort, bustles, the high bicycle, sherry, Moody and Sankey, the Crystal Palace, Labouchere, "Pigs in Clover," Lottie Collins, Evolution, Bimetallism: hosts of forgotten images, names and shibboleths came popping out from the brain's dusty pigeon-holes, magically released by the spectacle of the ****** troupe.
Yes, I was indeed switched into the past by Mr. Bones, Massa Jawns'n and the rest. And yet the present might have seemed more emphatic and more poignant. One felt, rather than saw, an audience of several hundred persons in the dim rows of chairs. And laughing at the broad witticisms of the ******s, or enjoying their choruses and orchestral accompaniments, one forgot just what that half-glimpsed audience consisted of; what it meant, and how it came to be here assembled.
Of course when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads, arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her "boys." It was a family gathering. I descried no strangers, and no one not in uniform--unless you count the men too ill to don their blue slops: these had been brought in dressing-gowns or wrapped in blankets. No mere haphazard audience, this, of anybody and everybody who chooses to pay at a turnstile! Entrance to this hall is free ... but the price is beyond money, all the same.
A family party it was, decidedly. Thick fumes of tobacco smoke uprose from it. (Shall we ever abandon the cigarette habit, now?) Orderlies continued to arrive and stow themselves discreetly in corners: by some strange providence each orderly had found that for a while he could be spared from ward or office. Staff-Sergeants, Sergeants, Corporals - mysteriously they made time to leave their various departments. Even a bevy of masseuses (those experts eternally on the rush from ward to ward) had peeped in to see the ****** minstrels. And everybody was pleased: every jest and every conundrum got its laugh, every ballad its applause. Not that we ever "give the bird" to those who come to amuse us. Offer us skill in any shape or form - pierrots, ******s, pianist, violinist, conjurer, ventriloquist, dancer, reciter: any or all of these will be appreciated warmly.
Yesterday, for the ****** minstrels, there were no empty chairs. Until, in the midst of Part II ("A Laughable Sketch" - vide the programme - wherein female roles were doubly coy by reason of the masculinity of their falsetto dialogue and remarkable ankles) a messenger stole hither and thither, whispering to the orderlies, who promptly tiptoed from the room.
A convoy of new arrivals demanded our presence.
The silent ambulances were gliding up to the entrance of the hospital. Orderlies, fetched from their jobs and from the entertainment, lined up in the rain to take their places in the quartettes of bearers who lifted out the stretchers. The Assistant Matron, standing in the shelter of the door, checked her list; the Medical Officer handed out the ward tickets; the lady clerks from the Admission and Discharge Office took the patients' particulars. And the bathroom became very busy.
As I started to wheel a much-bandaged warrior to his ward, the recreation-room door opened and a burst of music-cum-essence-of-****** emerged on his astonished ears. I was a little doubtful as to whether our new guest would not think his reception somewhat flippant in key. The poor fellow was visibly suffering, and the sound of tambourines and comedians' guffaws seemed a scarcely proper comment on his condition. I might have spared myself these misgivings.
"Say, chum," he interrogated me feebly, "what's that noise?"
"****** minstrels, old man."
"Golly! Have I got to go straight to my bed?"
Alas, he had to. It would be long before he could be well enough to be taken to one of our entertainments. But, had he been given his way, he would have gone direct from his fatiguing overseas journey into the Old Rec. to join the family party and chuckle at Mr. Bones and Massa Jawns'n.... No doubts assailed his mind as to whether it was right to "waste bed-space" on mere frivolities. A ****** minstrel show was to him a deal more important, in fact, than his wound. And perhaps, in instinct, he was not far wrong.
(Full text here (http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenb...655/17655.htm). It seems an interesting read.)
Simon Wood
5th January 2008, 05:06 PM
Hi All,
Can anyone confirm that Minstrel Inspector H. R. Willson was the Robert Willson whose son, Robert William Willson, married Gertrude Frances, Littlechild's youngest daughter?
Regards,
Simon
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These search terms have been highlighted: casebook metropolitan police
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: minstrals
Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Forums > Ripper Discussions > Police and Officials > Individual Police Officials > Littlechild, Chief Inspector John George > Metropolitan Police Minstrels
PDA
View Full Version : Metropolitan Police Minstrels
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 10:13 AM
I see over on jtrforums that A. P. Wolf has made the startling 'discovery' that Littlechild was a member of the Metropolitan Police Minstrels. This, of course, is a well known fact. A. P. also reproduces an illustration of Littlechild from Moonshine which he doesn't think has been seen before. This illustration of Littlechild in Moonshine was discovered some ten years ago by Nick Connell and Nick and I use it in our book The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper, 2000, as plate 13. Here is an 1882 Police flyer showing Littlechild as a member of 'The Minstrels' -
10067
apwolf
5th January 2008, 10:51 AM
Thanks for that original, Grey.
You know you should really make sure those grapes are ripe before you have 'em for tea.
I expressed 'suprise' at Littlechild's antics in blacking himself up as a minstrel, social suprise that was; and I thought it highly relevant that such information about the character and imagination of a senior police officer from the LVP would be useful to students who wanted to investigate the man further.
Of course as we now know that Littlechild was not directly involved in the investigations into the Whitechapel Murders it's a bit of a moot point.
My suggestion that the 'Moonshine' image may not have been seen before was a tentative one, of course, but as you know I like to see such images widely available to the maximum audience at no cost to themselves, rather than squirreled away in some obscure rag or book that will cost the audience hard cash to view.
We move and operate in a different fashion, Grey, our audience best left to judge our motives and ambitions.
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 11:32 AM
Thanks for that original, Grey.
You know you should really make sure those grapes are ripe before you have 'em for tea...
My suggestion that the 'Moonshine' image may not have been seen before was a tentative one, of course, but as you know I like to see such images widely available to the maximum audience at no cost to themselves, rather than squirreled away in some obscure rag or book that will cost the audience hard cash to view.
We move and operate in a different fashion, Grey, our audience best left to judge our motives and ambitions.
And a happy New Year to you too Mr. Wolf. On the contrary, the sourness seems to be on your part rather than mine.
As a published author your comments are often surprising. Your above statement with regard to the way 'we move and operate' and 'our motives and ambitions' are astonishing. The amount of material that I have freely shared, helped others with and indeed published on these boards makes a nonsense of what you appear to be suggesting.
As usual you, rather than any grapes, have left a sour taste in my mouth.
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 12:05 PM
Research in the computer age is now very easy when compared with the old-fashioned version that required much legwork and expense. As we see with A.P., searching old newspaper archives is now simple with the newspapers being digitalized and word-searchable.
As regards researching the character of a police officer such as Littlechild there is quite a bit easily available (and now being found by A.P.) as well as Littlechild's own book The Reminiscences of Chief Inspector Littlechild. So the keen researcher wishing to know more about him should have no problem, despite the machinations of the likes of me having 'squirreled' away the material.
Here is an extract from an interview about Littlechild's recollections that shows that he actually founded the police minstrel troupe and took great pleasure in raising money for the Police Orphanage. He was also a lover of opera.
10068
robert
5th January 2008, 12:14 PM
Grey, he reminded me there very much of Anderson.
Grey Hunter
5th January 2008, 12:22 PM
Grey, he reminded me there very much of Anderson.
Hi Robert, yes I had noted that some time ago, but it was (and is) a fairly common trait amongst police officers that they know the identity of the authors of certain crimes but lack the legal proof to do anything about it.
That said, Littlechild worked with Anderson for many years and was one of the Chief Inspector departmental heads at Scotland Yard from 1883-1893. He was thus at the Yard with Anderson from the latter's appointment in 1888 until Littlechild's retirement in 1893. He would have also been involved in working with Anderson prior to 1888 as Anderson was involved the Secret Service and anti-Fenian work. However, we know that Littlechild did not appear to agree with Anderson's Ripper theory.
katbradshaw
5th January 2008, 03:25 PM
I don't think that in this case it is refering to Black and White minstrels type minstrels. The term has been used since the middle ages to describe a group of singers and musicians. Medieval banquets often had minstrels playing. So I don't think we should assume Littlechild was some sort of racist yet.
m_w_r
5th January 2008, 04:09 PM
I don't think that in this case it is refering to Black and White minstrels type minstrels. The term has been used since the middle ages to describe a group of singers and musicians. Medieval banquets often had minstrels playing. So I don't think we should assume Littlechild was some sort of racist yet.
Hi Kat,
Nick Tosches, in his book Where Dead Voices Gather, finds that minstrelsy - in the sense of the Black and White Minstrels to whom you refer - emerged in the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century, tracing its roots from linked genres such as comic opera and caricature. Following the rise to popularity of the Virginia Minstrels, in the early 1840s (Tosches refers to a performance in New York in 1843 for which the advertising referred to them as "the novel, grotesque, original and supassingly melodious Ethiopian Band"), the term "minstrel" became attached to all "blackface" performers.
Tosches notes that "like most subsequent emanations of American culture, [minstrelsy's] vogue soon spread abroad to England". He describes the popularity of minstrelsy in England as "immediate and great", and notes that "blackface" performing survived in England "long after it had been suppressed and forsaken in its native America".
Since it goes outside his main purpose, Tosches doesn't provide any more information regarding minstrelsy in the UK. Still, however, we can assume that, if the "minstrel" tag got generally attached to "blackface" performers in or around the 1840s, then this antedates the early popularity of the genre: minstrelsy, under its previous sobriquet[s], could have been in existence as a popular performance genre in London from the 1830s, if not before. By 1882, perhaps forty or fifty years after minstrelsy arrived in the UK to "immediate and great" public enthusiasm, I would suggest that no theatre-goer who saw that "minstrels" were listed on the bill could possibly have expected anything other than "blackface" performers. The use of the term would have been, by then, quite specific and unambiguous.
Regards,
Mark Ripper
m_w_r
5th January 2008, 04:24 PM
Further to the above, the Metropolitan Police Minstrels are also discussed on p.275 of Martin Fido and Keith Skinner's The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard. They remark that the Minstrels, founded in 1872, "performed instrumental solos and ensembles and sang negro spirituals, popular ballads and songs" in "evening dress and black-face make-up". The troupe was wound up in 1933.
Mark Ripper
robert
5th January 2008, 04:48 PM
"Pick-Me-Up" May 25th 1889
Sam Flynn
5th January 2008, 04:57 PM
This from "Observations of an Orderly: Some glimpses of life and work in an English War Hospital", by Lance Corporal Ward Muir, published 1917. Public domain text, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. I make no apologies for the "quaint" expressions that were in use at the time.
CHAPTER XI - THE RECREATION ROOMS
Yesterday, a ****** troupe visited the hospital. To be exact, they were the Metropolitan Police Minstrels ("By Permission of Sir E.R. Henry, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I., Commissioner"); but no member of the audience, I imagine, could picture those jocose blackamoors, with their tambourines and bones, as really being anything so serious as traffic-controlling constables. That their comic songs were accompanied by a faultless orchestra was understandable enough. One can believe in a police band. One is not surprised that the police band is a good band.
To believe that the ebony-visaged person with the huge red indiarubber-flexible mouth who sings "Under the archway, Archibald," and follows this amorous ditty with a clog dance is - in his washed moments - the terror of burglars, requires unthinkable flights of imagination. As I gazed at this singular resurrection of Moore and Burgess and breathless childhood's afternoons at the St. James's Hall - the half circle of inanely alert faces the colour of fresh polished boots - the preposterous uniforms and expansive shirt-fronts - the "******" dialect which this strange convention demands but which cannot be said to resemble the speech of any African tribe yet discovered - I found that by no effort of faith or credulity could I pierce the disguise and perceive policemen.
It is at least twenty years since I met a ****** minstrel in the flesh. Vague ghosts of bygone persons and of piquant anachronisms seemed to float approvingly in the air: the Prince Consort, bustles, the high bicycle, sherry, Moody and Sankey, the Crystal Palace, Labouchere, "Pigs in Clover," Lottie Collins, Evolution, Bimetallism: hosts of forgotten images, names and shibboleths came popping out from the brain's dusty pigeon-holes, magically released by the spectacle of the ****** troupe.
Yes, I was indeed switched into the past by Mr. Bones, Massa Jawns'n and the rest. And yet the present might have seemed more emphatic and more poignant. One felt, rather than saw, an audience of several hundred persons in the dim rows of chairs. And laughing at the broad witticisms of the ******s, or enjoying their choruses and orchestral accompaniments, one forgot just what that half-glimpsed audience consisted of; what it meant, and how it came to be here assembled.
Of course when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads, arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her "boys." It was a family gathering. I descried no strangers, and no one not in uniform--unless you count the men too ill to don their blue slops: these had been brought in dressing-gowns or wrapped in blankets. No mere haphazard audience, this, of anybody and everybody who chooses to pay at a turnstile! Entrance to this hall is free ... but the price is beyond money, all the same.
A family party it was, decidedly. Thick fumes of tobacco smoke uprose from it. (Shall we ever abandon the cigarette habit, now?) Orderlies continued to arrive and stow themselves discreetly in corners: by some strange providence each orderly had found that for a while he could be spared from ward or office. Staff-Sergeants, Sergeants, Corporals - mysteriously they made time to leave their various departments. Even a bevy of masseuses (those experts eternally on the rush from ward to ward) had peeped in to see the ****** minstrels. And everybody was pleased: every jest and every conundrum got its laugh, every ballad its applause. Not that we ever "give the bird" to those who come to amuse us. Offer us skill in any shape or form - pierrots, ******s, pianist, violinist, conjurer, ventriloquist, dancer, reciter: any or all of these will be appreciated warmly.
Yesterday, for the ****** minstrels, there were no empty chairs. Until, in the midst of Part II ("A Laughable Sketch" - vide the programme - wherein female roles were doubly coy by reason of the masculinity of their falsetto dialogue and remarkable ankles) a messenger stole hither and thither, whispering to the orderlies, who promptly tiptoed from the room.
A convoy of new arrivals demanded our presence.
The silent ambulances were gliding up to the entrance of the hospital. Orderlies, fetched from their jobs and from the entertainment, lined up in the rain to take their places in the quartettes of bearers who lifted out the stretchers. The Assistant Matron, standing in the shelter of the door, checked her list; the Medical Officer handed out the ward tickets; the lady clerks from the Admission and Discharge Office took the patients' particulars. And the bathroom became very busy.
As I started to wheel a much-bandaged warrior to his ward, the recreation-room door opened and a burst of music-cum-essence-of-****** emerged on his astonished ears. I was a little doubtful as to whether our new guest would not think his reception somewhat flippant in key. The poor fellow was visibly suffering, and the sound of tambourines and comedians' guffaws seemed a scarcely proper comment on his condition. I might have spared myself these misgivings.
"Say, chum," he interrogated me feebly, "what's that noise?"
"****** minstrels, old man."
"Golly! Have I got to go straight to my bed?"
Alas, he had to. It would be long before he could be well enough to be taken to one of our entertainments. But, had he been given his way, he would have gone direct from his fatiguing overseas journey into the Old Rec. to join the family party and chuckle at Mr. Bones and Massa Jawns'n.... No doubts assailed his mind as to whether it was right to "waste bed-space" on mere frivolities. A ****** minstrel show was to him a deal more important, in fact, than his wound. And perhaps, in instinct, he was not far wrong.
(Full text here (http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenb...655/17655.htm). It seems an interesting read.)
Simon Wood
5th January 2008, 05:06 PM
Hi All,
Can anyone confirm that Minstrel Inspector H. R. Willson was the Robert Willson whose son, Robert William Willson, married Gertrude Frances, Littlechild's youngest daughter?
Regards,
Simon
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