Day One

I no longer know what this story is about.

This family history began simply enough as an attempt to discover why my father, John  Leslie Fitzmaurice Creighton, and his elder sister were made to swear by their father never to return to Crom Castle, the ancestral seat of their family,  the Earls of Erne,  nor attempt to discover the truth of the thing that had happened there.

For many years I have carried  from place to place a number of  old leather cases filled with family papers. Within these were the usual collection of faded  family photographs and newspaper cuttings; albums, scrapbooks, files of official documents and personal letters and those odd little mementos of lives richly lived and fondly remembered.

Also here were the genealogies of the Earls of Erne, some of these copied from the official peerages of Great Britain and Ireland; others, differing in their details, carefully handwritten by aging aunts and cousins eager to pass on to me their knowledge of our family's past. Amongst this collection is also a small golden seal , with the Creighton crest engraved upon it.  This was given to me by my father and came, so I was told, from Crom Castle many years ago.

I had looked through those leather cases only occasionally, amused, only half interested.  Sometimes I added some new snippet of information that I had come across. In recent years I began using the internet to fill in gaps, but for the most part these things had remained untouched, ignored. Their secrets lay sleeping and the seductions of the present outweighed the mysteries of the past.  Once I had  attempted a telling of the family story.  I started a book. I  named it The Sons of Abraham for it seemed that the central mystery concerned a Creighton of that name, possibly the second Earl of Erne, who had been declared insane  and incarcerated for forty years by his father John Creighton, the First Earl. But again, more immediate concerns drew me away.

Tonight,  it seems those voices from the past call once more.  I have decided to go back, although time has swept so much away, memories are gone,  facts  are covered over or forgotten or retold,  records lost or destroyed.  In the twenty first century the historical narrative is dead.  There are only glimpses left now.  Therefore each day I shall make a record of one of those glimpses. 

So this now is a chronicle of glimpses, of mere fragments, of disconnected moments recorded in no particular order then flung out into the social networks of this age.  There will be resonances, associations, interpretations, myths, patterns, coincidences, breakthroughs, dead ends and even perhaps some facts.

But there will be no story, for that would conceal the truth.

Let's start with the easy stuff. I was born on 1 November, 1951, the son of John Leslie Fitzmaurice Creighton and his second wife, Jean Cordingley, in St Luke's Hospital, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney.

I was christened John Michael Windsor Creighton at St Marks Anglican Church, Darling Point , where this photo was taken.


I was named John after my father and after his father and after many John Creightons over many, many years.  I was named Michael in memory of Michael Coombs with whom my father had flown in the Royal Flying Corp during the First World War.  And I was named Windsor after my mother's mother's mother who was the the sister of Thomas Other Windsor who inherited the title Earl of Plymouth in 1903,  This Other Windsor  family I knew very little bout  though not for want of my mother trying to impart her knowledge.  I had always felt I was a Creighton first and foremost and that I had little need of knowledge of another ancestral line of blue bloods.  One mob of them quite enough, though there had much discussion around the family dining table about how the current English royal family had somehow "nicked" our  family name  in 1914 to hide their Hanoverian bloodline.  I thought it was a load of cobblers and totally ignored it.  I would compile The Creighton Chronicles,  my male bloodline stretching back one thousand years.