This information points researchers to London's East End and at the Bishopsgate Institute, Charles is able to find out more about his Gold line in his family tree. From the 1901 Hackney census on TheGenealogist we can find Marion in her parent's household where their occupations were that of a laundryman and laundress.ġ901 Hackney, George Futvoye Gold and family Michael is able to provide Charles with the names of their maternal grandparents and these were James Perks and Marion Gold. One of the skeletons that was in the family cupboard was that the two brothers had different fathers - something that she only revealed later in her life. In a meeting with his elder brother Michael, who is 10 years older than him, they recall that their mother was very good at keeping secrets.
"There's nothing aristocratic about me – at all" he said, explaining in the TV programme that his mother was a servant from below stairs who started work from the age of 13. Despite this he has no delusions of grandeur as he knew that his mother was from humble stock. The maternal lineĬharles Dance has very often been cast in a posh or aristocratic role in his acting career. After Charles's father died, his mother remarried the next year to Harold Burfield in Bromsgrove. This marriage may have been the cause of a family rift that meant that Charles knew nothing about his elder half sister and never met her before she died in South Africa in the 1990s.
Using the marriage records on TheGenealogist we can then go on to find Walter marrying Charles's mother Eleanor in 1938 within the Islington district of London. Shortly after their return in 1932, however, it was Louie who died - as can be found in the death records on TheGenealogist. Walter and his first wife en route to South Africa 1924 The photograph that Charles had seen before of Walter in uniform was not taken in the First World War as he had once believed - it turned out to be from the Boer War, at the outbreak of which Walter had signed up on 'Short Service' and went out to fight in South Africa. This displays a very different side to Charles from what we are used to seeing in his onscreen roles of stern officials and sinister villains.ĭelving more into his father's past we discover that Walter had a military background. Finding out that he had two half sisters, Norah born in 1898 and Mary born 1903, was quite an emotional experience for Charles. What Charles had been completely unaware of was that the marriage had brought two daughters into the world.
By using the marriage records on TheGenealogist we are able to discover that Walter's first wife was Louie Rowley Morris and that this wedding took place in The Strand district of London in the last quarter of 1897. Walter Dance's death record in 1949 on TheGenealogist reveals his age to be 75Ĭharles had known that his father had been married before he had met his mother.