As moving out to France has been a staggered business over the last five years and the priority always was to get the business up and running there are a whole lot of unfinished jobs which are only now , and that very slowly, being tackled.
As we are planning to escape to Provence for a few days next week I decided that this was the moment that I should make a start of the 15 large cardboard boxes of books which are in the attic with an eye to getting together a bundle of long ago read (and now forgotten) books for the holiday- which we have promised ourselves will be a very lazy one.

I managed to go through three of the boxes and from got about a half dozen of suitable books for next week.
Among them was Tristram Shandy author Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy which he wrote in 1768- nearly 250 years ago.
This I thought would certainly show some of the changes that these years had brought about in these countries. It was a book which I had no idea I possessed and had no idea where it came from.
I opened up the flyleaf and was immediately struck by the name written there ;
R. Whitaker , Oxford 1933.

The flyleaf also has a very competent pencil sketch of a cabriole leg from a table and a medallion topped with a swag , was the talented Ruth Whitaker also an artist ?

Suddenly whole pockets of forgotten information came flooding back to my mind. This was a book belonging to Ruth Simcox (nee Whitaker) which was part of a bookcase of books which my family had bought in the fifties , and thereby hangs a tale.

The Simcoxes were a family, much like our own , of prosperous Cork Merchants.
They had a large bakery on Patrick Street which employed a lot of the people of Cork.
That they were Protestant seems to have made very little reason for separation, even matrimonial separation, from the Catholic middle class of Cork. Ruth’s brother Sammy was married to my mother’s sister Rosemary (their child was raised a catholic) and her sister Gladys was married to Tom Crosbie, also a Catholic and proprietor of The (then) Cork Examiner .
The Crosbie family lived next door to us- in that our gardens touched and a simple scramble over the wall made visiting possible between the children.
The Crosbies however lived in a much grander style than us in a rather fine Country House called Woodlands which had a marvellous ballroom with huge windows looking down the Lee to Cobh.

The Simcoxes themselves lived in an also rather grand house in nearby Montenotte which was (I think) called, for obvious reasons, Lee View.

Now I have absolutely no idea of what happened but at some stage in the early fifties the Simcox bakery went bust, totally bust and the family ended up without a penny.
It was at this stage that they auctioned off the house in Montenotte, and the contents, and that my family acquired the little book by Sterne.
That this did not solve their financial problems was evident by the next development.
It was decided that Ruth would attempt to earn a living for the family by giving ballroom dancing lessons in the ballroom of her sister’s house in Woodlands.

I remember Ruth Symcox well at these classes. Even though I was considered too young to learn dancing my older brother and sisters were strongly encouraged to attend so I was often permitted to sit at the edge of the ballroom and watch the proceedings.
Mrs Simcox was a tall elegant and beautiful woman who wore for the classes a magnificent black silk dress with ( I now realise) all the trappings of Dior’s “New Look ” :- layers of petticoats making the skirt stick out like a short, but mid calf length, crinoline.
The dancing thought was not of course the sort of stuff seen nowadays in “Come Dancing ”
The dances taught by the elegant Mrs Simcox were the Waltz, the Quickstep and maybe the Foxtrot, dances that the youth attending were likely to have to perform at Christmas Parties and Birthday Soirees.

After a year or so it was realised that despite the attendance of the whole of the Jeunesse Dore of Middle Class Cork at these classes that this was not sufficient to keep the wolf from the Simcox door and then and astonishing decision was made. The Simcoxes decided to leave Cork and applied for and obtained employment as butler and housekeeper to a titled family in England .
And there , as far as I know, they lived out their years.

I also remember my mother telling me when I enquired about them that Ruth declared herself entirely happy with her new life.

Somewhere along the line I had obviously purloined the little book which of course also poses another question .
Was the beautiful , elegant and talented Ruth Simcox also a graduate of Oxford ?
If so then her final career was even more unexpected.