“I love and hate history, because what is dead keeps coming back to life the more you think about it.” Eleanor Waverley
2620 BC – The game of Senet is included in a painting of the third dynasty tomb of Hesy, the oldest known record of the game’s existence.
2500 BC – The Sphinx is built on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt.
1400 – 1200 BC – The approximate date of the first known reference to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and the Greek goddess of spring.
1086 – The first recorded reference to Tollgate in the Domesday Book.
1851-2 – Sir John Everett Millais paints Ophelia.
1854 – Michel Eugène Chevreul demonstrates his pendulum experiment.
1860 – The original version of board game The Game of Life is created by Milton Bradley.
1865 – Lewis Carroll’s Alices Adventures in Wonderland is published.
June 1888 – Construction of The Signal House on the crest of Station Road in Tollgate is completed. The Davenports move in the following month.
31 August 1888 – The mutilated body of prostitute Mary Ann Nichols is found in Whitechapel, London, the first victim of a serial killer who would become known as Jack the Ripper.
3 September 1900 – Elsie Waverley dies in child birth. Her daughter, who would come to be called Elaine Waverley, is orphaned.
15 June 1908 – The first edition of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame is published.
12 December 1914 – Mary Ann Davenport dies of heart failure.
31 January 1920 – Geoffrey Oscar Davenport dies from choking.
28 February 1920 – Eleanor is born, daughter to Charles and Elaine Mintower. She would later change her surname to Waverley, in honour of her mother’s maiden name.
November 1920 – The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats first appears in the literary magazine The Dial.
1935 – The Box of Delights by John Masefield is published.
1 March 1958 – Eleanor Waverley moves into The Signal House.
22 March 1963 – The Beatles release their debut studio album Please Please Me.
28 November 1966 – Truman Capote hosts the Black and White Masquerade Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in honour of The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.
26 June 1967 – Ellen Waverley is abducted and murdered on her way to school.
1970 – Mathematician John Horton Conway creates Game of Life, a new zero-player cellular automaton game.
30 October 1975 – Wilma McCann, a 28-year-old woman from Chapeltown in Leeds, becomes the first victim of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.
30 September 1978 – Roger Porlock and Elisabeth Graham are wed.
3 May 1979 – Margaret Thatcher is elected as the UK’s first female prime minister.
4 May 1979 – Roger and Elisabeth Porlock move into The Signal House.
17 August 1980 – Michael Sebastian Porlock is born in The Signal House.
23 October 1982 – Sebastian Porlock is born in The Signal House.
9 November 1989 – The Berlin Wall comes down.
10 November 1989 – Elise Porlock is born in The Signal House.
19 May 1998 – Eva Cassidy’s Songbird is posthumously released.
January 2002 – Elisabeth Porlock begins writing A Personal History of Tollgate.
18 December 2004 – Marion and Lucy Butler leave their house at the bottom of Station Road for the final time.
27 March 2005 – Elise Porlock is last seen in The Artery.
5 April 2012 – Eleanor Waverley dies of cancer at the age of 92.
28 April 2012 – Sebastian Porlock and Danielle Oliver are wed.
4 May 2013 – Michael Porlock and Madeline Everard are wed.
1 September 2013 – Profluence: The Magic Quality to a Happy Life by Michael Porlock is published.
October 2013 – Elisabeth Porlock stops writing A Personal History of Tollgate, with only one third of it complete.
30 May 2015 – Roger Ivan Porlock retires from a 30-year career as a commercial airline pilot.
27 March 2016 – The Porlock family gather for the final time in The Signal House on Easter Sunday.
Game of Life 