Family detective: Jeremy Vine

Nick Barratt's investigation into our hidden histories. This week: Jeremy Vine

Jeremy Vine is an increasingly familiar presence on television and radio as one of the BBC's main political commentators. He joined the BBC in 1987, having trained as a journalist at the Coventry Evening Telegraph, and from 1989 reported regularly for Radio 4's Today programme.

He gradually moved into television as a political reporter and rose to prominence for his commentary style during the 1997 General Election. He presented Newsnight on BBC2 from 1999 and then The Politics Show (2003-2005).

He is perhaps best known for fronting BBC Radio 2's lunchtime show and Panorama on BBC1; he also inherited the infamous Swingometer from Peter Snow during the 2005 General Election.

Aside from his radio career, Vine has an interest in music, having played the drums in a band and let off steam as a punk.

Who is he related to?

Jeremy was born in 1965 in Epsom, Surrey, to Guy Vine and his wife, Diana Tillett. The couple married in 1964 and Jeremy has two younger siblings, the comedian Tim Vine and painter/actress Sonia Vine.

The paternal side of his family stayed in London for a couple of generations, mostly in north London, and Jeremy's great-grandfather, Harold, settled in Wood Green with his wife, Margaret Elizabeth Barbrook, to manage an art needlework warehouse.

It is clear that the Vine family was fairly well off. Harold and Elizabeth could afford to employ a domestic servant, Mary Bridges, and Harold's father, Thomas Vine, was a mercantile clerk in the late 19th century, living with his wife Rachel and children in Godolphin Road, Hammersmith, where the 1871 census records that they also had servants in residence.

Yet this picture of an urban bourgeois family needs some revision, particularly if we look into the background of Jeremy's paternal grandmother, Betty Vrint, who was born in London in 1915. This unusual surname is of Dutch origin, coming from Betty's father, Pieter Vrint, a violin repairer who moved to London in the 1870s with his parents and married Edith Shepherd - Jeremy's great-grandmother - in 1913 at the age of 46.

Pieter first appears in the 1881 census as a 14-year-old, with his father Conran Vrint, a musical instrument maker from Amsterdam, and family. By 1901, at the age of 33, Peter was looking after his widowed mother, Anne. He followed in his father's footsteps, mending and making violins for a living. Conran had passed away in 1898 at the age of 67. Perhaps this side of the family is where Jeremy's musical affinity is derived.

The family of Jeremy's great-grandmother, Margaret Elizabeth Barbook, hailed from Stowmarket, Suffolk, and on the surface were also of middle-class, or at least professional, standing. Margaret's father, William Oliver Barbrook, worked as a commercial clerk in Stowmarket, but it would appear that this was a fairly recent rise in society. His origins - like so many in rural Suffolk - lay on the land.

His father, William senior, found work in the 1850s as an agricultural labourer and previous generations of Barbrooks were similarly tied to seasonal work back into the 18th century.

CLASSOMETER

On the surface, Vine's background appears to be solidly middle-class, with some bohemian-artistic and overseas blood to spice up the mix. But there is also a hint of a working-class element that may give him the ability to connect with the man on the street.