My mother's name was Ethel Rosa Sporne. She was one of seven children all born in the East End of London (Clapton/Hackney/ Homerton). The others were Ada, Winifred, Florence, Bert, Frank and Ruby. Only Ruby is still alive - she must be well over 80. She had been a Nurse in St George's Hospital, Tooting, South London, before she married Jack Kiff who worked in the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey. (My mother had worked there during World War 1, and one day when a Zeppelin came over and started dropping bombs she hid under a railway wagon for safety. Afterwards she found out that it was full of live shells). Jack once fell into a vat of acid and lost all his skin. Luckily he kept his eyes shut or he would have been blinded. He was a key worker and when part of the factory was sent up to Irvine in Scotland just before World War 2 he went up there. Whilst I was stationed in Scotland I sometimes went over to their house for the weekend. Marjorie and I spent our short honeymoon there in 1945.

The Coat of Arms belongs to the Spornes of Lavenham in Suffolk, and is carved on the Sporne Parclose, a private enclosure in the East side of St Peter's Parish Church, Lavenham. There is no concrete evidence that we have a connection because there are a lot of gaps over the 400 years since the Parclose was built. However, the family history handed down by word of mouth over the last 100 years is that:

1. Our Spornes are descended from French Huguenot refugee weavers.
    
2. The original Thomas Sporne of Lavenham in 1524 who built Parclose was a weaver.

This seems to make some kind of a connection, but there is a serious hole in the theory. Huguenots were Protestant exiles from France and Belgium well after 1600, and England in the time of Thomas Sporne was a Roman Catholic country, so it is extremely unlikely that Thomas Sporne would have been granted a Coat of Arms, let alone build a Parclose in the Church. The only possibility I can see is that our Huguenot Spornes might have been related to him and fled to England under his protection. There was a great interchange of French and English people in those mediaeval days. I have photographs of the Parclose and the Weavers' Cottages nearby, where the 'Flemish Weavers' came to live.

Thomas Sporne would have been an important and powerful man in Lavenham in the 16th Century because it was the centre of the English Weaving Industry. Also in the Church on the West side is the Spring (Sprynge) parclose, built by another important weaver. There are several small towns within a radius of 25 miles which were also noted for weaving, notably Monks Eleigh, Brent Eleigh, Cockfield, Sudbury, which all need looking into. It may be necessary to go to the Record Offices in Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich to do the research.

According to reference books, Sporne, Spourne, and Sporné, which are variant spellings according to my Mother, Aunt Ruby and my cousin Joan Power, are not English surnames, but French. This may indicate that Thomas Sporne may have had French blood and a French Coat of Arms, as would many English families of that period, perhaps deriving from intermarriages and immigration since the Norman Conquest. The College of Arms in London (a part of the English Court) have not been able to identify the Coat of Arms as being English, even though it is referred to in Burke's General Armory, and has been in Lavenham Parish Church for more than 400 years.

I have two cousins about my own age, both born in 1919 like me. Bert Sanderson (mother Florence Sporne) paid a visit to Dad in Hunmanby, and was a bit of a nuisance according to Lillian. He was a butler in a large Yorkshire house. Joan Power (mother Ada Sporne) is married to Martin, an Irishman, and they live in Abbotts Langley near Watford. Her parents used to have a seaside boarding house in Hibernia Street, Ramsgate, Kent. We used to go there for holidays until 1933 when they moved to Abbotts Langley, father Will having got a job in a Watford Factory. Ada got a job on the Ovaltine Egg Farm and eventually cousin Joan worked there, retiring a few years ago as Personnel Officer, being fairly academic.

She regularly visits one of her sons in South Africa. Marjorie and I visited her in 1987 and she seemed quite well but has some back trouble. She confirmed all the family legend about the Huguenot background of the Spornes and gave me the address of a second cousin, Len Sporne who lives in Bridport, Dorset, and another cousin, Ted Sporne who lives in Broadway, Worcestershire. I have visited both of them.

Ted turned out to be a first cousin. His father was Albert Edward, my mother's brother, who married Connie Jones and lived for some time near Theobald's Railway Station but moved about the country finishing up at Harlow New Town in Essex. I had some vague recollection of Uncle Bert and Aunt Connie, and had actually met her at Jack Kiff's funeral, although at the time I had no idea who she was.

Len Sporne's father was a brother of my mother's father. During the War he had been an Officer in the Royal Navy and had stayed on to become Lt. Commander. He, too, has been carrying out research into the family and had found that an original Sporne came to England in the early 1300's when a group of Flemish weavers came to Lavenham. Thomas Sporne was descended from them and was entitled to use a French Coat of Arms which is the one in the Parish Church Parclose. This explains why the English College of Arms told me that the English Court had never granted it. The presence of the pair of dolphins is typically French.

A second group of French weavers came over at the time of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, 24th August 1572, when probably 50,000 Hughenots perished. Most of them went to London and Suffolk. We don't know which of the two groups contained our forbears. The family legend handed down by my mother and her sisters and brothers is merely that we are descended from the Huguenot weavers.

There is a record of another Thomas Spourne who married Mary Scotney in 1715 at St James' Church, Duke's Place, Aldgate, East London, but we know nothing about him.

I have had correspondence with the Huguenot Society but they have not been of any help, there are some very big gaps in the story to be filled.