The Thompson Brothers: Generations Special

15th Century Thompsons
My father’s cousin Robert Thompson did a family tree for us a while back. He managed to get it back all the way to the 15th century. There was a spinster in the family quite a few hundreds of years back who ran a greengrocers shop in Lincolnshire until she was eighty years old. Fancy that, hey? It seems a remarkable coincidence given that we’re both bachelors too.

Peter Thompson (1932-2020)
Our father started as a parks apprentice at Woodthorpe Park when he was sixteen. He’d gone to a grammar school and his father wanted him to work in the bank, but he wanted to be a gardener. He studied agriculture at Brackenhurst poly and got very good at it. But there were rules back then that to work in the parks and gardens service you had to be single. So after he met our mother he resigned on the Friday and married her on the Saturday. He later became head groundsman at Notts County and spent 37 happy years there.

Future Thompsons
We’re both single men with no children. However, our two sisters have six children between them. Elizabeth has a boy and a girl and Rosemary had four girls. None of them are interested in running the greengrocers shop though. We work long hours and don’t get many holidays, most people would think we’re mad! So after we go it will probably be another few hundred years until the next Thompsons Greengrocers.