John Woodcock

This evening, in a piece about right-wing rioting in the FT, I came across one John Woodcock, Baron Walney. I wondered whether there was any connection with George Woodcock, late general secretary of the TUC, at a time when that office was a good deal more important than it is now, who wound up in the same road in Epsom that we now live in.

John Woodcock comes from a Labour family from Sheffield, in Yorkshire. A politician whose recent career has been complicated.

George Woodcock came from another Labour family, but this one from Bamber Bridge. just south of Preston, in Lancashire. Top left in the snap above while Sheffield is bottom right, on the other side of the Pennines.

Gemini declined to answer the question on the grounds that it does not do politics at this time: 'I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now. While I would never deliberately share something that's inaccurate, I can make mistakes. So, while I work on improving, you can try Google Search'. All a bit of a jumble.

Copilot was not so squeamish, and was happy to deny that there was any family connection, although it is hard to see how he could be so sure about this. When prompted, he explains that what he meant was that there was no connection to be found in that part of the public record that he had been trained on. And he did provide handy summaries of the lives and careers of both men.

Maybe I need to talk to a family history buff.

PS: a quick foray this morning suggests that family history is a paying business. There is lots of stuff out there, but you don't have to get in very deep before you are invited to flash the plastic. That said, the page snapped above is offered, gratis, by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormons, to be found at reference 3 (where there are no Woodcocks). I also learn from some part of the Oxford publishing empire that there are around 10,000 Woodcocks in the GB. Also that a lot of family names are patronymic in origin, often ending up with a suffix of 'son', or just 's', presumably as in 'Edwards'. Not much further forward.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Woodcock,_Baron_Walney.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Woodcock_(trade_unionist).

Reference 3: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/England_Surname_Frequency_and_Geography_-_International_Institute.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic_surname.