Part IV · THE YEAR THE FAMILY BROKE APART · Chapter 14

Not Irish by Blood

The Slieve Bloom Mountains, Dublin, and London · c. 1957–1963

In the record Maj. Herbert Manifold Mitchell · M.C. (d. 1963/64) · Félice Mitchell (née Knight) · Al Krewson (b. 1943) · Glenn Krewson (b. 1943) · Margery Krewson

"Our blood line is not Irish," Al Krewson wrote to his nephew in June 2002, answering a question about how the family had crossed the Atlantic. "I went to my grandparents in Great Britain and finished school in Dublin … I get to claim an Irish heritage because I was raised and educated there as a teenager … BUT NOT BY BLOODLINE" [1]. He was correcting a family belief, and he was proud of the correction, and both halves of it were true. The Croesens were Dutch. Al was the one Krewson in eleven generations who grew up somewhere else, and where he grew up was a house in the mountains of central Ireland that belonged to a man who was not, by blood, his grandfather at all.

The major

His name was Herbert Manifold Mitchell, and the grandchildren knew him as Grandpa. He was Félice's second husband — she had divorced Alfred George Marshall, the research chemist of Purley, some time after Margery's birth in 1922, and married an officer of the British Army [2]. What the family knows of him it knows from two letters: Al's of 26 June 2002, and one from Michael's father, Glenn, of 22 August 2000, written in answer to the question "What was the name of your grandfather who was the British governor of Kenya?" [3]. Neither brother saw a document. Both had lived in his house.

Granny's explanation of the silence, given to a teenager who had asked, is the sentence Al carried the rest of his life and quoted back to Michael after his own war: "one of the best ways to tell if a person was ever in battle or not is this … if he brags about what he and/or his unit did, he most likely never was there" [1]. Glenn's account of the same man, two years earlier, has the same medal and the same lone survivor, and adds what killed him: "he died of shrapnel wounds received on the battle field that shifted, and then cut him internally and he bled to death" — forty years and more after the wound [3]. India; Kenya, where he "spoke Swahili … and two other African languages" and, in Glenn's telling, "was a military Lieutenant governor, or what might now be likened to a military overlord, in cases of martial law. They traveled continually in Kenya, in effort to keep the peace" [3]. Al, asked about the governorship, doubted it: "I don't see how he could have been a Governor there because of being in the military, because a Governor is a civilian position. But Granny told me that as a Major there, he carried a lot of clout" [1].

Here the book has to do what the family's own record already does, which is to say that the medal story cannot be right as told. Both brothers place the action in the Boer War. Granny "told me that he … won the medal in the Boer War" [1]. But the Military Cross did not exist until 28 December 1914; it was instituted for the First World War and first gazetted in January 1915 [4]. A man who was a company officer in South Africa in 1900 and still serving in 1915 is not impossible — he would have been near fifty by then, old for a major in the line but not for a staff or intelligence officer — but the medal in the glass case was either won in a different war from the one the family remembers, or was a different medal. The likeliest reconciliation is the ordinary one in families: a real Boer War wound, a real Military Cross won fifteen years later, and sixty years of retelling that fused them into one battle. No citation for a Herbert Manifold Mitchell has yet been found in the London Gazette; the search is on the book's list [4]. What is not in doubt is that a man with medals in a case would not talk about them, and that both the boys who lived with him remembered that first.

The house in the mountains

"My grandfather had his estate in the Slieve Bloom Mountains in central Ireland," Al wrote. "My grandmother was from London, and lived there except for a few weeks in the summer. She had bad rheumatism which was badly affected by the Irish damp climate … except for the summer months" [1]. So the household the boy was taken into in the late 1950s was two households: the major's, in the mountains, and Granny's, in London, with the summer weeks the one time all three were under a roof together. Two photographs survive of that roof, or its garden: "Granny Mitchell and Lawn, August 1957" — a woman in a rockery garden with a dog — and "Grandpa Mitchell and Lawn, Ireland, 1961," the same garden, the same kind of dog, four years on [5]. A third, "Al Krewson, Dublin, age 17," puts the boy in the city in 1960, where he "finished school" [5].

Glenn, who visited in 1963, gave the property a different address. "He had EXTENSIVE property holdings in Ireland, he is buried at the foot of the ruins of the castle Kiltubrid, property that went way back in family ownership/history" [3]. The family's record has spent some effort on that sentence and reached no bottom. The Slieve Blooms straddle the Laois–Offaly border; the one ruined castle Michael has been pointed to on a map, Tubbrid Castle at Barna in County Kilkenny, is a fifteenth-century tower house forty kilometres to the south-east, a roofless ruin from about 1900 until a private restoration in 2016–19, with no Mitchell in its recorded ownership; and Kiltubrid, spelled as Glenn spelled it, is a parish in County Leitrim, a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north, whose only castle ruin is Castle John on Lough Scur [6]. The book cannot say where the house was. It can say what would settle it: Herbert died without a will, so the Irish Calendar of Wills and Administrations for 1963 or 1964 should carry a grant of administration in his name, with his last address and the value of what he left — and that the entry exists in the National Archives of Ireland's catalogue and would not open when Michael tried it [6]. A letter to the Archives is the next step. Until it is answered, "an estate in the Slieve Bloom Mountains" is Al's phrase and the book uses it.

Why Al

Granny had told him, when he was old enough to ask why his brother and sisters had not come too, that "this wasn't possible, but she could have one of the grandchildren. She told me she chose me because I got the worst end of the deals back in 1946 and 1948, and she was trying to make this up to me" [7]. That is the whole of Al's account of why he crossed the Atlantic at fourteen or so, and he seems to have accepted it. He had, by the time he left, seen his father once more and exchanged letters with him, and he took those letters to Ireland and left them in Grandpa's keeping — the last chapter told what became of them [7].

Glenn's account of the same departure is the hardest passage in the family's archive, and the book has to decide what to do with it. His 2000 letter says that Al "lived with him for a while, since he had a personality disorder, and was in a mental institution" — Camarillo, the California state hospital — and that "Grandpa and Granny tried desperately to help him"; that "they were both so very much relieved to know I was not like my brother"; and that others had told him "Al also seems to have inherited this angry, mean spirited disposition" from their father [3]. Al's own letters, written five years later to the same nephew, mention none of this. They say polio, and the worst end of the deals, and Granny's guilt.

The book does not adjudicate between two brothers, both alive when they wrote, each describing the other to his nephew. It records that the two accounts exist, that they were written to the same person within five years of each other, that neither brother appears to have read the other's, and that on the one thing they both witnessed — the major, his medals, his silence, his dog on the lawn — they agree. The family's genealogist, asked in 2005 why the Krewsons never built up what other families did, answered that the rifts went back to the 1600s and that "no one was talking about what they were" [7]. He was one half of the rift he was describing, and this is as close as the archive comes to saying what it was.

The piano

One thing in this chapter is not from a letter. In 1987 or so, in California, Michael — sixteen — sat at a piano with his Uncle Al, who was trying to teach him Vangelis's theme from Chariots of Fire: the slow, repeated figure in the left hand, the melody that comes in over it [9]. It did not take, he says. But it is the one place in this family's whole archive where the boy from the train and the boy who would write this book were in the same room, and what Al was doing in it was the thing he had been made for in Ireland.

None of that is documented, and the book marks it so. The London Symphony Orchestra has no salaried pianist — a pianist appears with it as a guest or on a particular piece — so "seven years with the LSO" is not a thing that can be checked from the outside, and may be a family's compression of something true and smaller: a young man in London in the early 1960s, playing, and playing well. The locked room "in some castle" is Glenn's ruined castle and Al's house in the mountains heard through a child, and if it is true it is the other side of what Granny meant by making it up to him. A woman who took a Cambridge honours degree for granted and had married a major with an estate would have seen to it that the grandchild she chose was educated the way she understood education, and eight hours at a piano is what that looked like. Whether it was a gift or a sentence, the boy came out of it able to play, and thirty years later was still trying to pass it on. The archive has no recording. The book has this paragraph.

1963: the visit Al missed

In 1963 Glenn — twenty, a sailor in the United States Navy — went to see Granny in London and then on to Ireland to meet Grandpa. The two of them, by his own account, "got along so well, I really grew to love him, and he got to really love me" [3]; it was on that visit, he believed, that the major settled on him as the heir to the Irish property. Al was to have met his brother at Granny's in London, and could not. He was a soldier in the American garrison in West Berlin, twenty-two months after the Wall went up:

When he did reach London, almost a year later, Granny "was very upset with me that I did not come see her and your Dad, and let me have it without minced words. She felt that because your Dad could make it from the Navy all the way there from America, I could make the few hundred miles from Berlin. The difference was that your Dad didn't have a Wall or Iron Curtain in his way" [1]. Two brothers who had knelt together at the back window of a train in 1946 were, in 1963, a sailor in the Pacific Fleet and a soldier behind the Wall, and a grandmother in London was angry that they had not managed to be in the same room. They would not manage it, so far as the letters show, until Al came home. The Wall, the ship, and what the major's death did to the estate are the next chapter.

The ground it happened on

Period-general, as in every chapter: the country, not the household. The Slieve Bloom Mountains are the oldest in Ireland — a low, rounded range of Old Red Sandstone over Silurian slate, rising to a little over five hundred metres, capped with blanket bog and heather, cut by glens where the Barrow and the Nore have their sources [8]. In the 1950s their lower slopes were sheep grazing and small mixed farms; the bogs were cut for turf, by hand and, from that decade, by Bord na Móna's machines; the state forestry service was beginning the conifer plantations that now cover much of the range. A "big house" in such country was typically a Georgian or Victorian farmhouse or a former landlord's residence with a walled garden and a few hundred acres of grazing and bog, kept by one or two people and a dog — which is what the two lawn photographs show. Dublin in 1960, where Al finished school, was a city of six hundred thousand at the bottom of the emigration decade, the year after Seán Lemass's programme began to open the economy; a boy from Los Angeles in a Dublin secondary school would have been a curiosity, and would have learned Irish [8]. London in the same years, where Granny lived except for those few summer weeks, was still rebuilding from the Blitz; the "Roof Gardens" of the 1961 photograph are almost certainly the Derry & Toms roof garden in Kensington, opened in 1938 and one of the sights an Englishwoman would show a visiting grandson [5].

1. Al Krewson to Michael, two emails of 26 June 2002 — family-history-uncle-al-2002-06-26.htm ("Our blood line is not Irish …", the 1963 visit, Berlin) and great-grandpa-and-grandpas-history-uncle-al-2002-06-26.htm (the major, the medal case, Kenya, Granny's Belgian birth and languages, her move to Málaga after "Grandpa died in 1963 or early 64"). The family record's story "Not Irish By Blood."
2. Félice Marshall, "formerly Knight," and Alfred George Marshall, research chemist: GRO birth certificate of Margery Knight Marshall, 21 April 1922, 62 Foxley Lane, Purley (Application No. 4934606-1). The divorce and remarriage: Al's letters; no decree or marriage record on file.
3. Glenn M. Krewson to Michael, 22 August 2000 — herbert-manifold-mitchell-glenn-krewson-2000-08-22.htm: the Kenya "military Lieutenant governor," the "EXTENSIVE property holdings," "buried at the foot of the ruins of the castle Kiltubrid," the intestacy and the USS Robison, the shrapnel death, the Military Cross and the refused Victoria Cross, and the passage on Al and Camarillo. Quoted as written. The family record's story "Major Herbert Manifold Mitchell, M.C."
4. The Military Cross was instituted by Royal Warrant of 28 December 1914 (first awards gazetted 1 January 1915); it was not available for the Second Boer War (1899–1902). The family record's medal note of 3 August 2026 says the same and lists the nearer Boer-era decorations (a Distinguished Conduct Medal, a Mention in Despatches). No London Gazette citation for Herbert Manifold Mitchell has been found in a general search; a systematic Gazette search is an open task.
5. Photographs in the family archive: "Granny Mitchell and Lawn, August 1957"; "Grandpa Mitchell and Lawn, Ireland, 1961"; "Al Krewson, Dublin, age 17" (c. 1960); "Granny Mitchell at Roof Gardens, London 1961"; "Granny Mitchell in London, 1962." The Derry & Toms identification is the book's inference from the name and the ivy-covered terrace, not a caption.
6. The family record's location note on Herbert's card (3 August 2026): Tubbrid Castle, Barna, Co. Kilkenny (52°42′44″N 7°29′34″W; 15th-century tower house, roofless c. 1900–2016, restored by the Campion family 2016–19, National Monument; no Mitchell in its documented ownership) versus Kiltubrid parish, Co. Leitrim (Castle John, Lough Scur); the University of Galway Landed Estates Database (no Mitchell at either); the National Archives of Ireland's Calendar of Wills and Administrations 1923–1982 (the 1963 entry listed but not opening when tried; the Archives' documented 2024 outage of the same PDFs; query@nationalarchives.ie as the fix). A 1:08 video of Glenn narrating the castle exists in the archive and has not been transcribed.
7. Al Krewson to Michael, 21 January 2005 (the second email): "she chose me because I got the worst end of the deals back in 1946 and 1948"; the letters left in Grandpa's care; "Seems like the whole Krewson line all the way back to the 1600s had these problems with rifts …" (20 January 2005). See chapter 13.
8. Michael's own memory, told to Claude 12 September 2026: Al trying to teach him Vangelis's "Chariots of Fire" (1981) on the piano, c. 1987; and what he was told of Al's playing — the London Symphony Orchestra, "seven years," the locked room, "master pianist, extremely talented." First-hand for the lesson; family legend for the rest, and marked so. The LSO's constitution (a self-governing orchestra of string, wind, brass and percussion members, with pianists engaged per concert) is why the seven years cannot be verified against a roster.
9. The Slieve Bloom Mountains (geology, bog, forestry, the Barrow and Nore sources), Bord na Móna's mechanised turf-cutting from the 1950s, Dublin's population and the 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion, and the Derry & Toms roof garden: general histories and reference works; stated as period-general, not as a record of this household.