A while back, in a Marion and Kristoph story called Kandika IV, I named Marion’s father as a Michael Rimmer who owned a string of small hotels on the Wirral Peninsula and was a not especially likeable man. Kristoph never told his wife that he knew who her biological father was. Marion never asked him about it. He fulfilled her need for a strong, protective and caring male in her life and she never needed to know about her only living relative.

The feedback from readers was much stronger than I expected. They all wanted to know if Chrístõ would ever find out about his grandfather, and would they meet. I knew there wasn’t a full story to be had about him, but the seed of the idea of Who Do You Think You Are began to germinate. Tackling the Gallifreyan side of the family first gave me chance to think about how to approach the Human side.

I decided to make Michael Rimmer a little more of a sympathetic character this time. Chrístõ manages to reach through the bitterness and the hardness and finds a connection with his Human grandfather, but he is dying and it is too late for them to have a real relationship now. The false memories planted by his father allow him to enjoy a deeper connection to him for a little while.

All that was fine and straightforward. But in the middle of considering this storyline, before Christmas 2008, the Press was full of speculation that the next Doctor would be black. It seemed almost inevitable. All the actors being put forward as frontrunners were black. So it seemed to be that exploring Chrístõ’s background would be a good opportunity to suggest a black gene in his Human side of the family. I had thought of an idea that brought him right back from Liverpool to the tobacco plantations of the Deep South of America and the slaves and slave owners. The only problem was I didn’t know a whole lot about that sort of thing and it would be difficult to make it authentic.

Then they announced that Matt Smith, a young man who almost perfectly fits my image of Chrístõ with his dark hair and pale complexion and expressive brown eyes, was going to be the Eleventh Doctor. There was less urgency about the issue. The possibility of a future Doctor being black still remains, though, so I decided I might leave part of the idea in there.

So although the Marion and Kristoph story never mentioned it, and the description of Chrístõ meeting Michael Rimmer doesn’t mention it, Chrístõ afterwards mentions, just in passing, how surprised he was that his grandfather isn’t white. His father explains that Michael is what used to be called a ‘mulatto’. One of his parents was black.

Originally, it was going to be his father, Chrístõ’s grandfather, who was black. But Rimmer is a Liverpudlian/Irish name so that didn’t really fit. Instead I introduced the scene with Michael as a baby and his mother, Elizabeth Rimmer, a black woman whose late husband was a sailor. The mystery is thus solved.

Setting that scene in the Cotton Exchange was a bit of a shot in the dark. It is where the registry office for Liverpool is based now, and it is a very old building, but I don’t know if the registry of births was based there in the second world war. That’s a bit of a guess. If it wasn’t, and if anyone has any information about where the registry was based, I would really like to know and I can amend that part of the story.

The HMS Aphodel was a real ship that was sunk in the latter part of the Battle for the Atlantic. I wanted to give the story some veracity by using a real ship. The Asphodel was nothing famous, nothing special. Just a corvette escorting merchant navy ships with supplies for the island nation of Britain. It was sunk by a German U-Boat and most of its crew were drowned. A sad statistic from that part of World War II. I hope any living relatives of the victims or survivors won’t mind me paying respect to their sacrifice by including it in Chrístõ’s family history.

The idea that World War I ended just like that at a pre-determined time, and that people were shooting each other right up to that moment always seemed strange to me. I’m not sure if there is any other way of calling a ceasefire between thousands of men all at once, but it always seemed to me rather tragic that people were dying right up to that minute, and there must have been some who almost made it but were killed in those last minutes. A story in which Chrístõ and his father manage to prevent one such death felt right. I think it works.

Then back to Liverpool, and Chrístõ connects with the last of his ancestors I wanted to go into detail over. Michael Joseph Rimmer is perhaps not the most heroic of his forebears, but stopping him from being responsible for a tragic and fatal mistake during a pub brawl was a heroic act on Chrístõ’s part. The two newspapers mentioned, the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Daily Post, are authentic. The Echo still remains as the local evening paper, but the Daily Post is no more.

The story was going to finish with a much longer sequence in which Chrístõ thinks about everything that happened back in his house on Beta Delta and his father says goodnight to him in an emotional way. There was a nice piece with his father talking about his two sons and saying he was going home to spend some time with his younger boy. I decided it was all quite unnecessary and left the story with Chrístõ renouncing any claim on Michael Rimmer’s will and letting his gold digging widow have his way.

http://hmsasphodel.co.uk/asphodel.htm
http://www.roll-of-honour.com/Ships/HMSAsphodel.html