You don’t know Jack

September 2, 2024

Growing up, I was an only child and spoiled beyond imagine. I had (And still do) great parents, two grandmothers and a great grandmother. I never had a concept of a grandfather because the one on my Mum’s side died the year before I was born, and I never met the one on my Dad’s side up until very recently in 2024. Because of the attention I was getting, I never felt any void of missing a grandfather, so as you’d assume from any self absorbed kid, I never really asked many questions about my grandfathers.

As I got older though, I started getting more and more curious, I’d start hearing so many amazing stories about my grandfather Jack on my Mum’s side of the family, especially when it came to the charity work that he used to do. It turns out, he was a bit of a local legend!

Researching

I’ve always been a bit of a researcher, it’s probably one of the very few things I’m extremely good at. If you ask me to find something/someone, I can usually do it or get pretty close as long as I have some basic details. I saw a newspaper article about my grandfather in a box several years ago, and it started making the cogs in my head turn slowly over time. I bet there was more out there about my grandfather Jack, and maybe other members of the family.

I saw that he did something called “The Billy Butlin Walk” in 1960 and there were several photographs laying around. I started off with the intention of writing an article about his journey doing the walk, even contacting a local newspaper to try and get it published (To no success sadly). I got books on the subject, taking tons of notes, finding lots of articles… until it became clear that there was A LOT more about Jack out there than just his time doing this famous walk.

I ended up writing an entire life story (The parts that are known) about Jack. I almost had TOO much information. Considering I hadn’t met him in my life, this was information overload and I knew 90% of what I was digging up was unknown to the family. I got the family itself involved, met up with them, did a local family history meetup, read lots of materials… it really felt like I was an actual researcher at one point, it really ate up lots of my time.

Most of the stuff I found out about him was incredible however, some of it reveals the horrible childhood he lived through.

Website and Design

Because I can’t help myself, I began making this a lot bigger than it needed to be and became super hyper focused on it until it was finished. I bought the domain https://price.rip (Which I think is pretty damn nice and I’m surprised it wasn’t taken) and started working on it. I knew almost immediately that I wanted a Wikipedia looking page, something SUPER basic that reminded me of the early internet. Thankfully those designs are usually the easiest, and so I had it done pretty quickly.

The Article

You can view the article/website here. It was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget 🙂

Tools

• Google Gemini – Quite honestly, if you’re not using AI to help you code, you’re slowing yourself down. Everyone looks up how to do things on Stackoverflow, why not ask AI to round up the info for you? As long as you’re not asking it to generate content, it’s an incredible tool.
• Notepad++ – Nothing beats coding a website in text.
• Essential Audio Player – Took me quite a while to find a minimal Audio player alternative to HTML5’s audio player. Amazingly, the default audio player does not allow resizing, even on mobile layouts.
• FancyBox – The best lightbox gallery I could source, very lightweight too.