I was born in 1965.
The world I grew up in has already vanished once — and is disappearing again.
My great-grandfather, John Hinton, was born in 1865, exactly one hundred years before me. The coincidence is neat; the contrast is extraordinary.
John was born on 5 December 1865 at Wigland, near Malpas, a rural corner of Cheshire shaped by farming, trades, and long-established routines. Two days later he was baptised in Malpas church, the son of Dicken Hinton, a butcher, and Mary, the daughter of a publican. Their livelihoods depended on physical labour, local reputation, and serving the same community day after day.
The year of John’s birth belonged to another world entirely. The American Civil War had just ended. Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. Britain was ruled by Queen Victoria, and most people lived close to where they were born. There were no cars on Britain’s roads — because cars did not yet exist. Travel was slow, communication slower still, and the future was shaped more by circumstance than by choice.
When I was born in 1965, Britain was emerging from post-war austerity into a world of mass education, television, and consumer culture. The Cold War framed global politics, humans were preparing to leave Earth, and popular culture was exploding. My parents’ generation defined itself not by inherited trade, but by music, movement, and experience.
John entered a world powered by muscle, horses, and hand tools.
I entered one increasingly powered by machines, electricity, and screens.
Yet despite the century between our births, we share a place in the same family line — a reminder that immense historical change is often carried quietly, from one generation to the next, by ordinary lives.
Childhood and Family
When John’s mother Mary married Dicken Hinton, the shape of their family life was already defined by work and responsibility. Mary’s father, John Lee, had died in 1853, leaving his widow Margaret Lee to keep the Wheatsheaf Inn running. Marriage did not mean leaving that world behind. Instead, the young couple would have joined an existing household where home and work were inseparable.
In the 1871 census, Margaret Lee was recorded as an active publican, a woman running a business at the centre of village life. That same census records Dicken Hinton as a scholar, a small but telling detail. Education mattered, even in working households, offering children skills that extended beyond physical labour.
The Wheatsheaf Inn today
John grew up in a large family. He had nine siblings, and his childhood was shaped by shared space, shared responsibility, and constant company. Privacy was limited; family life was communal.
My own childhood, a century later, was quieter. I was one of two children, growing up in a world where smaller families had become the norm and childhood was increasingly individual rather than collective.
As John moved through early childhood, the wider world shifted too.
When John was four years old, the Suez Canal opened, transforming global trade and shrinking the distances between continents. It was a vast event, largely invisible in a Cheshire village, but one that quietly reshaped the world he would grow into.
When I was four, humans had just walked on the Moon.
In both worlds, childhood was grounded in family. What changed was the scale of the world pressing in around it.
Leaving Home and Learning to Work
By his teens, the direction of John Hinton’s life was becoming clear. In 1881, aged 15, he was still recorded as a scholar, but extended youth was not an option for most rural children of his generation.
By 1891, aged 25, he was living at Bronington, working as a general labourer at Crab Mill Farm. The farm was owned by John Shone, a cattle dealer and a distant cousin — a reminder of how work, kinship, and opportunity often overlapped.
Crab Mill Farm
When John Shone died, John Hinton remained at the farm, taking on the role of bailiff for the widow, a position of trust and responsibility. His brother Frederick later joined him there, reinforcing how closely work and family remained intertwined.
After Mrs Shone’s death, John continued at Crab Mill Farm as a tenant for a further five years. Only then did he move on, taking up a tenancy at Tyn-y-Coed Farm, in Abenbury.
My own transition into working life followed a very different path. At 16, I began a pre-nursing course at a technical college. In 1983, I started nurse training in my home town, qualifying in 1986. I have worked at my local hospital ever since.
Where John’s work demanded physical endurance, mine demanded emotional resilience and responsibility for others’ lives. His skills were learned through repetition and experience; mine were formalised through training and qualification.
In 1984, while still training, I bought my first house for £11,200. John’s independence came through live-in work; mine came through ownership at a young age. That contrast speaks volumes. In John’s world, being a tenant for life was normal. In mine, buying a house at eighteen felt possible. Yet in the decades since, this is one area where progress has quietly reversed. For many young people today, buying a first home is far harder than it was in the 1980s — a reminder that change does not always move in a straight line.
Yet beneath the contrasts lies a shared aim: independence built through work and responsibility.
Marriage and Family Life
John married Lizzie Parry in 1906. He was forty; Lizzie was just twenty. Before their marriage, Lizzie had worked as a servant at Crab Mill Farm, meaning husband and wife came from the same working world and the same place. Marriage did not separate work from home — it bound them more closely together.
Their family grew quickly. Blanche, their eldest child, was born just six months after the wedding, and in total eight children followed between 1906 and 1917. Large families were typical of the time. Children were part of the household economy, and family life was crowded, noisy, and interdependent.
My own family life followed a different pattern. I married at 27, had two children, and returned to work. Where John and Lizzie shared a workplace as well as a home, my working life and family life were largely separate. Smaller families, choice, and planning shaped a very different domestic world.
That difference mattered. John and Lizzie’s eldest daughter, Blanche, died of tuberculosis in 1932, aged 32. TB was one of the great killers of the time — far less common today, though never entirely gone.
Family mattered just as deeply in both worlds. What differed was scale — and certainty.
John Hinton Lizzie Hinton nee Parry
A Century Between Us
John Hinton died on 20 May 1933, aged 67, at Tyn-y-Coed Farm near Wrexham. The cause was carcinoma of the prostate, a condition for which there was little effective treatment at the time. In John’s world, illness was often endured rather than cured.
A century later, when I was born in 1965, assumptions about illness, survival, and old age had changed almost beyond recognition. Antibiotics were routine. Childhood survival was expected. Death still existed, but it no longer stood so visibly at the centre of family life.
After his death, Lizzie remained at Tyn-y-Coed, and their eldest son John took over the running of the farm with her. Staying put was not a choice so much as a necessity. Just as Mary and Dicken had moved in to help Margaret Lee run the Wheatsheaf Inn, the next generation stepped in where they were needed. This is how families functioned — obligation before independence.
In the year John was born, 1865, the wider world reflected both progress and fragility. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published; the Ffestiniog Railway officially opened; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became Britain’s first female doctor; a yellow fever outbreak struck Swansea; and a ship called the Mimosa carried Welsh settlers to Patagonia.
A century later, in 1965, the world I entered was shaped by different forces. That same year, the Rolling Stones released “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. The Cold War framed politics. Humans were preparing to leave Earth. Popular culture reshaped identity. The pace of change had accelerated — and expectations had changed with it.
Yet when the noise of history fades, what remains is surprisingly constant. John worked, raised a family, endured loss, and left something behind. I have done the same, in a different world, shaped by different forces.
One hundred years separate our births.
Far less separates our lives.
Linda EYE on the PAST
Related Reading
Haughton Hinton: From Hanmer to Hobart — A Convict’s Troubled Life (1803–1868)
