Jack Whitehall is a lot of fun - and his Who Do You Think You Are? episode with dad Michael made me laugh.
While their family's history was a lot less posh than I was expecting, there was also some serious money involved in latter generations!
Jack & Michael's episode was another that examined uncomfortable truths about the past - uncomfortable for Jack anyway, Michael was less bothered!
We started off with a tale of syphilis and early death, before moving to look at another side of the family.
Jack & Michael's ancestor, Thomas Jones Phillips, was on the wrong side of history, and generally came across as... an unpleasant sort of person.
When the Chartists in Newport* - those beloved Welsh heroes and martyrs - were attacked, and in some cases killed, by the military, Phillips was very much on the side of the establishment.
*The Wikipedia 'Newport Rising' link is useful, but its description of the WDYTYA? episode, at time of writing, confuses Sir Thomas Phillips with Thomas Jones Phillips - two different individuals.
Welsh research is full of completely different people with the same name!
It's strange to think, now, that the idea that people (or, at the time, men, as this was long before the Suffragettes,) should be allowed to vote regardless of whether they owned property was a radical one.
Many saw it as a highly dangerous idea - in the 19th Century many thought that the place in which you were born in society was pre-determined by God. Therefore, God had placed the upper classes in a position to decide what was best for the lower classes; the lower classes were too stupid to make decisions for themselves, and should not be educated as this would be too much for their brains to handle (the same arguments that were used against women for centuries.)
Thomas Jones Phillips was what Jack described as a 'massive Tory' and it was quite refreshing to see how irritated Jack was with what Phillips had done.
My favourite part of the episode, though, was Jack and Michael trying to decide whether the word 'mandrills' meant that the Chartists were trying to take ducks to the Uprising!
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