Woman on the trail of distinguished kinsmen

But she's working on it.

While the dictionary of quotations is open at Sir W S Gilbert, let's add that Mrs Gardner has a little list of her forebears which, though it does not include a Ruler of the Queen's Navee, offers one of the founders of the Royal Australian Navy.

She was pleased to see that gentleman, her great-great uncle, given honourable mention in the Past Lives a few weeks ago about the evocative graveyards of Whitby.

He was Vice-Admiral Sir William Clarkson, who died in Australia in 1934 and whose ashes were brought home to be buried in the family grave just across the path from the door of St Mary's church. The memorial is in black marble, the better to survive the clifftop elements that have obliterated the sandstone lettering on many of the neighbouring graves.

He came from what seems to have been a comfortably-off Whitby dynasty, with a great-grandfather in shipping or ship owning. Grandfather was an ironmonger, father was a draper and he himself, born in 1859, the sixth of ten children, went to a private school in the town before taking an engineering apprenticeship with Tyneside shipbuilders R & W Hawthorn.

By 1884, he was an engineer lieutenant with the South Australian Naval Service, arriving in the colony on the HMCS (C for colonial) Protector, the ship in which 16 years later he was to have a role in the suppression of China's Boxer rebellion. He was steadily promoted and, after spending some years studying naval shipyards in the US, Japan and Britain - where he stayed on to oversee the building of destroyers for Australia - he returned in 1911 to join the board of the just-formed Royal Australian Navy.

By the time of his knighthood in 1918, says the Australian Dictionary of Biography, "he was without peer in Australian maritime affairs" and during the First World War he did much to give the country a large naval shipbuilding capacity, modernised and extended under his guidance during the next few years.

His reputation was high in the British Admiralty, no mean feat for "an ex-colonial" at this time, says the ADB in a phrase (written some decades ago) that indicates the significance to Australians of the dominion status given in 1901.

l My previous Whitby piece also brought a postcard from Mr Malcolm Orr, of Harrogate, retired editor of The Yorkshire Evening Post at Leeds, who gently points out that Henry Freeman, sole survivor of the 1861 lifeboat disaster, is not buried at St Mary's, as I assumed, so is not at risk from the cliff falls that afflict the churchyard.

His 1904 grave, unmarked until a Whitby school raised money for a headstone in the 1980s, is well inland at Larpool cemetery. As Mr Orr says, if Freeman's bones are forfeit to the sea, so too will be most of the North Riding.

CLEARLY, for Mrs Gardner, of Boldron Lane, Startforth, Barnard Castle, Sir William is a landmark in her genealogical research. But her ancestry a generation further back is also interesting: his father, James Nicholson Clarkson, had married a woman who brought into the bloodline some reflected glory from an even more distinguished sailor with an Australian connection.

Mary Dixon, the admiral's mother, was the daughter of the man who built the Captain Cook memorial high on Easby Moor a couple of miles outside Great Ayton, where the explorer went to school.

Built, that is, in the sense of mixing the mortar and of physically wrestling with the mechanics of hoisting the 60ft obelisk into place; someone else - see below - commissioned the monument, but Valentine Dixon, who had his business at Stokesley at the beginning of the 19th century, did the hard work on the bleak plateau which the Cleveland Way links to Roseberry Topping four miles away.

Indeed, the job ruined Valentine. This I have in the handwriting of Mrs Gardner's grandmother, though I haven't been able to find out why nor to confirm her belief that the monument soon blew down. The inference is that he had to rebuild it.

Perhaps he was the victim of a fixed-price contract that cost him wildly more than his estimate. The plinth bears a plaque which, with its stirring words about the explorer's deeds and personal qualities, was unveiled in July 1827.

The monument has been restored at least twice, in 1895 with money raised after an appeal to the Teesside newspaper, the Gazette, and then after it was damaged by lightning in 1960.

The man who footed the original bill half a century after Cook's voyages of exploration was John Campion, a shipowner and railway pioneer in Whitby (responsible for the 1836 horse-drawn railway from Pickering) who ran a bank founded in that independent little seaport by his mother in 1787. The family, which also imported timber from Russia, lost its fortune when the bank failed in 1840 and Campion's son became a clergyman.

NOR does Dixon's brush with posterity exhaust the romantic potential of the family tree Mrs Gardner would like to complete. Her husband, David, a newly-retired sales manager, is the great-grandson of Joseph James Burton, a major figure in industrial Teesside for half a century until his death in 1931.

JJ was a polymath, as we shall see, a tycoon with a social conscience who was also a painter, geologist and naturalist. Moreover, he is the man charged with creating the distinctive cliff-face of Roseberry Topping. Today, we quite like it that way, but when it changed nearly 90 years ago the ironstone mine he owned on Roseberry was blamed for destroying a familiar conical profile.

Roseberry mine was first worked in 1881 but was abandoned after six years and not thought worth re-opening until 1907 with Burton's son as manager. It was mothballed in 1926 and finally closed in 1931. The hill is riddled with tunnels and much surface evidence survives, such as concrete foundations, brick remains and track bed.

Burton, whose father farmed at Huby, near Easingwold, was aged 15 when he arrived in Middlesbrough (pop 20,000) in 1863. His first job was at the coal docks owned by the Stockton & Darlington Railway, but he soon began a 41-year career with Swan, Coates and Co, blast-furnacemen - later the Cargo Fleet iron company - as accountant, secretary and director.

He joined shipowner Sir Christopher Furness in the mine venture, which employed 302 men at its peak in 1914. Ironstone was brought down from just under the cap for loading on to trains at a siding of the railway from Great Ayton and to speed things up a tramway was later laid to the north side of the hill. By 1912 two wagon trains a day were carrying the stuff to Middlesbrough.

In August that year the north face of the cap fell into quarry workings below. People in the tiny village of Newton under Roseberry were in fear of their lives. That no-one was hurt owed more to good luck than good management, it was said. Work continued, with JJ investing his reputation as a council member of the Yorkshire geological society in a declaration that rock faults were to blame. There was another fall ten years later.

A polymath, I said. The word was used last week to describe Giuseppe Sinopoli, the maestro (also novelist and degree-holding physician and Egyptologist) who died suddenly, mid-Aida, in Berlin.

Amateur geologist Burton, professionally a leading member of that formidable breed, the ironmasters of Cleveland, got his other sparetime kicks as follows: founder of Cleveland sketching club; founder secretary of Cleveland naturalists' field club (his obituary in the speciality's journal was a many-columned thing); creator of a noted alpine garden within the several acres surrounding Rosecroft, his Nunthorpe home; founder of Middlesbrough seamen's mission and many years its secretary; a St John Ambulance "knight of grace"; for 19 years member of Stokesley rural council ... and so on. He was prominent in the campaign to build workshops for the blind at Newport, Middlesbrough.

His OBE falls short of the honour awarded the Australian admiral who, posthumously was to become an in-law, but it will have been given partly in recognition of important iron-and-steel positions he held during the Kaiser's War, including an Admiralty appointment to control iron exports.

Admiral Clarkson's knighthood certainly took account of his 1914-18 role in Australian warship building. He will have been in the market for iron; remember, too, his pre-war years spent gaining dockyard expertise back in the old country ... at which point I pass to Mrs Gardner the detective work that might establish a direct link, a meeting even, between her distinguished twain.