Thursday 8 August 2019

Other Cousins

This family tree appears in most editions of Dornford Yates's ten Berry Books, except that it is wrong as shown here. Daphne Pleydell marries Jonathan Mansel. That is correct. However, the family tree as shown here makes Jonathan Mansel a son of Bertram Pleydell and does not show Daphne as a daughter of Bertram, which is obviously wrong. 

As I wrote in The Five, Boy winds up married to Jill and there are no great-grandchildren of the first Bertram listed here.

In And Berry Came Too, CHAPTER VI, Berry claims that he himself bears the name of a great-great-uncle, Bertram, although the family tree shows us that he also bears the names of his own father and grandfather. Thus, he, Berry, should be listed as Bertram/"Berry." Otherwise, "Berry" might have been construed not as an abbreviation of Bertram but as an independent name. See here. Similarly, the texts of the books confirm that "Jonah" is an abbreviation of "Jonathan."

Thus:

Berry bears the name of his father, grandfather and great-great-uncle;
Berry's first cousin and wife, Daphne, bears the name of her aunt;
Daphne's brother, Boy, bears a name that reads like a shortened version of his own father's name, Bois;
their first cousin, Jonathan/"Jonah," bears the name of his father.

In Berry And Co., CHAPTER VI, Boy, the narrator, has another cousin, Madrigal.

In Berry And Co., CHAPTER X:

Boy, the narrator, describes Berry and Daphne as second cousins;
there is yet another set of cousins, Vandy and his sisters, Emma and May;
Vandy and Co. would have inherited White Ladies if not for the birth of Berry;
Vandy wrote The History Of The Pleydell Family;
in 1652, Nicholas Pleydell was succeeded by his only child, William.

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