THE TYLER FAMILY TREE
Few attentive residents of the planet Earth can fail to have noticed that, almost exactly a decade ago, it was briefly but devastatingly invaded by several million Daleks and Cybermen. Mercifully they were soon dragged into a nearby Void, but not before they’d exterminated and deleted several hundred thousand souls and caused considerable inconvenience to the survivors. As the clear-up operations began after the Battle of Canary Wharf, the roll-call of the missing grew daily. Among them was a former shop assistant from South London whose previous history of unexplained disappearances had already piqued the interest of Britain’s top investigative reporter. Now, ten years on, in an exclusive extract from his forthcoming book The Tyler Code, former BBC3 archaeology correspondent Sir Alistair Fergus ponders the final disappearance of Rose Tyler, and spills the beans on some unexpected skeletons lurking in the can of worms that is her family tree…
And so the quest was on. On the distaff side, I could make little headway beyond discovering that Rose’s cousin Mo Prentice had recently moved to the Peak District to marry a man called Hancock; apparently they had adopted a double-barrelled surname and now spent their leisure time watching old episodes of Space:1999 and listening to the music of Weber and Shalamar. Pursuing the Prentice-Hancocks clearly wasn’t going to get me very far, so instead I concentrated my efforts on the father’s side of the family. Parish records confirm that Rose’s father, one Peter Alan Tyler, had died in a road accident in 1987. Peter was a failed inventor whose interest in solar energy and other fields of technology had been greatly influenced by his father, a noted research scientist with a string of Cambridge doctorates. My first major breakthrough came when I discovered that this man, Rose’s paternal grandfather, was still alive.