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Frederick William Maclean (1868-1902)

My great grandfather was born in 1868 in West Hartlepool. After the end of his education, he entered the army, and held the position of Captain when he married Lucy Jane Pyman on 27th March 1894 at Christ Church, West Hartlepool. (See here for a contemporary newspaper cutting, which also includes the entire list of wedding presents!) This would have been a significant match for the Maclean family. The Pyman family were already well-established as very prosperous merchants and ship owners in Hartlepool. 

Roy Pyman Maclean was born in 1895. In around 1896, however, the young family moved to Wales, taking up residence at 12 Archer Road, in the Penarth suburb of Cardiff. George Pyman had established an office here as a result of the purchase of local agency Watson & Co. Frederick William appears to have joined this firm, and it was in Penarth (at 57 Plymouth Road) that my grandfather Donald Pyman Maclean was born in 1897. 

Sadly, while on what was presumably a business trip on one of his own ships, Frederick William died in 1902, aged just 34. He is buried in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago. Lucy returned to West Hartlepool. She was supported by other members of the Pyman family, and appears to have had comparatively little further contact with the Macleans. In 1911, she and her two sons were living in the Pyman family home of West House, now headed by her older sister Lillie (Elizabeth English Pyman). She eventually settled at "Penarth", a house in Park Road, and died in 1924, reportedly from cirrhosis of the liver.

Poor Roy contracted polio as a child and was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life. He married Mabel Barrow. It's thought she had been an ambulance driver in the later years of the First War, or just afterwards, and this is how they met. They enjoyed a long courtship: there are photographs of them together in early 1920, but they didn't marry until four years later. They had one daughter, Jill Pyman Maclean. Sadly, Roy and Mabel both died in 1949, within a few months of each other. Jill had two daughters, whose lines continue today. 

My grandfather Donald Maclean married my grandmother, Vera Rippon Clark (b 1900, West Hartlepool), in 1920. This union maintained the connection between the Maclean and Pyman families, albeit in a looser form, since Vera's father Captain John William Clark had been an employee of the George Pyman & Co shipping firm since the late 1870s. 

Don and Vera Maclean settled in what was then the village of Sleights, near Whitby. Donald served in both wars, and then became a gentleman poultry farmer in Sleights. Their house in Birch Avenue was (and indeed still is) named Penarth after Donald's birthplace. They had two daughters, Jean Pyman Maclean (known always as Pym), and my mother Audrey Mary Maclean. Pym married the actor Ian Carmichael, and had two daughters, Lee and Sally, my cousins. Pym died in 1984. Ian married again, and died in 2010.

My mother Audrey came down to London in the late 1940s, becoming a secretary to Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont, the legendary theatrical impresario whose HM Tennent company dominated the stages of London's West End from the 1940s to the early 1960s. In the mid-1950s she moved to ATV, one of the country's first commercial television broadcasters, as a trainee production assistant. On the evening of 22 Sept 1955, she helped to launch independent television in Britain as assistant to light entertainment producer Bill Ward. Subsequently she met, worked for, and in 1959 married another of ATV's leading producers, Brian Tesler, my father. My mother gave up work to raise me. My father went on to enjoy a stellar career as one of foremost executives in commercial television until his retirement in 1994. Some of this, and much of his own family background, is covered in his books Before I Forget and The Best of Times. Sadly, my mother died in October 2008.