Ancestry

Where Tony came from: the Hancocks and the Becketts of the Potteries. It starts with the one document we have for his parents, their marriage certificate, and grows as the family adds to it.

Tony was born in Stoke-on-Trent on 23 August 1933, the first child of William Hancock, a tailor’s traveller, and Evelyn Beckett, who had married at the parish church of Fenton six months before. They went on to have five more children. When he and Liz built their own house in Camberley in 1968 they called it Fenton. The marriage certificate names both his grandfathers: James Hancock, a potter, who had died by then, and Albert Beckett, retired.