Johnny Ball may no longer sport his Beatles-style moptop, but at 88 years old, he retains his remarkable mental arithmetic skills. While assisting his daughter, DJ Zoe Ball, in tracing her family tree on the programme Who Do You Think You Are?, he performed rapid calculations as they examined census records to determine ages and birth dates.
"My grandmother was 38 in 1908, so born 1870," he declared, while Zoe was still pressing calculator buttons. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ball hosted shows like Think of a Number, where he creatively made mathematics both engaging and accessible. He combined exuberant energy with numerical tricks that helped viewers memorise times tables and understand concepts like square roots and pi-r-squared.
There is nothing similar on the BBC today, and there hasn't been for years. It is not merely that the broadcaster's commitment to education has waned; basic numeracy, along with spelling and grammar, is now often viewed by the Left as elitist and a form of intellectual snobbery.
The irony is that Zoe's research uncovered working-class ancestors on both sides of her family for whom even basic education was an unattainable dream. One forebear, a Cornish miner turned greengrocer in Northumberland, could not write his name; legal documents were signed with "the mark of James Temby."
Born illegitimate, James endured severe hardship. His mother, Julia, who worked with her sisters in the copper mines near Redruth, was taken to court for fighting with another woman. Her sentence was six weeks in prison or a fine of two pounds, fourteen shillings, and sixpence (equivalent to £2.72 and a halfpenny, a sum that tests mental arithmetic).
In 1851, when workers like Julia earned about a pound a month, that fine was impossibly harsh. Comparing the penalty with other cases in a large leather-bound ledger, Zoe realised her four-times-great-grandmother had been treated unfairly, likely because she was an unmarried mother. Julia served her time in Bodmin Jail, with her toddler son in the stone cell beside her. Zoe bravely spent a night there too, though more comfortably, as the prison is now a hotel.
Another branch of the family, 400 miles north in Glasgow, also suffered brutal poverty. They shared a four-storey tenement with about 50 people crammed into a dozen rooms. Disease was rampant, with a single toilet in the yard. Death certificates revealed ancestors dying from tuberculosis to laryngitis, and many children did not survive beyond a few months.
As always with this series, it is not only the individual stories that captivate but the way they combine to form a broader social picture—the sum of history.
