Family Tangle

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 45, 24 February 1936, Page 2

Family Tangle

FIVE TIMES MARRIED ■ i yAIN SEARCH FOR BROTHER SCOTT EXPEDITION MEMBER His first leisurely visit to London in 10 years of wandering the world over revealed to Mr W. I. Weller not only such architectural alterations that made tho city of his birth almost unrecognisable, but also the existence of so large a number of step-brothers and step-sisters that, after tracing a few of them- and learning from each that more existed, he even abandoned the search for his only full-brother, whom he has not seen since they were children. Mr Weller had written an account of his adventurous life, which he took to England last June to submit to British publishers. His book is to be published shortly. When he arrived in London ho learned that his father, retired superintendent of tho London Fire Brigade, had died five years ago at the age of 95. Ho had been married five times, and had a large family by each wife. By inquiry through the Post Office, Mr Weller ascertained that a son and a daughter of his father's first wife, of whom ho was also a son, were still living, but the same inquiry also revealed the existence of step-brothers and step sisters whose numbers made him Teel.

“I myself first ran away from home at the age of ten,” said Mr Weller. “I left then a brother a year older than myself, who, I have learned, joined the Navy and is now living, retired on a pension, somewhere in Ipswich, and a sister, with whom I renewed acquaintance when I went to London, after wo had been strangers for fifty years. I hope soon to return to London and bring her back to New Zealand to live. "When my mother died, about 18S5, and my father remarried, I ran away. He was in those days superintendent of the London Lire Brigade, and, as all the firemen were ex-sailors, I was full of sea stories. So naturally when I Tan away I went as a boy in a coaster. When the vessel was wrecked in the Bristol Channel I was sent back to my father in London, but I ran away again.

‘‘During three years in an Arctic whaler, in which I was shanghaied out of ’Frisco, I learned a good bit about Eskimo sledge dogs, and when Captain Scott was organising his Arctic expedition in 1901 he sent mo to Archangel to buy dogs. I wa3 in charge of the dogs during his 1901-4 expedition, of which I am, I think, the only member now alive. Only once in my lifetime of Toving round the world did I return to London. That was during the war, when my visit was so brief that I had no time to trace my family.”