This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Delving into his family history for the new series of Who Do You Think You Are?, Ross Kemp was surprised and touched to discover his ancestors shared his wanderlust
As a child, EastEnders actor and award-winning documentary-maker Ross Kemp was fascinated by family stories of war, derring-do and even shipwrecks. So when the 60-year-old agreed to delve into his family history for the genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are?, he expected to uncover a colourful history.
What he hadn’t anticipated was to get quite so emotional: “Like any family, the stories change as they pass down generations, like Chinese whispers.” he says. “Unravelling the truth was very moving.”
Kemp travelled to Morocco to learn more about his maternal great-grandfather Arthur Chalmers – or Pop as he was known, thanks to him being a sailor with muscly arms like the cartoon character Popeye.
Kemp is also told about an ancestor he had known nothing about: his great-great-great-great grandfather on his father’s side, Jeremiah Whall, who became a Royal Marine drummer in 1803, aged just 13, beating vital semaphore messages to other Allied troops as they protected colonial trade interests at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1809, he was involved in fierce combat, helping to capture the island of Martinique from the French.
[image id="2250222" size="full" title="511390,TITLE:The Graham Norton Show S32" alt="Ross Kemp wearing a blue suit, smiling ahead as he sits on a red chair." classes=""] Ross Kemp.“Both Pop and Jeremiah were men who didn’t like to sit still for too long, so maybe I get a bit of that from them,” says Kemp, talking over Zoom from his home in Berkshire, where he’s preparing to take his four children to Disneyland.
As a child growing up with his younger brother Darren in Essex, Kemp was regaled with stories about Pop, who loved drinking and gambling and was said to have been shipwrecked at least twice.
“Apparently, he walked as if he was still on the ship – one step forward and two steps sideways,” says Kemp. “He tried to pawn his watch to the milkman a day before he died to put money on a horse.”
When Kemp tries to discover whether there is any truth to the tales of being shipwrecked, he is told that Pop’s troop carrier, Duchess of York, was bombed in July 1943, 300 miles off the coast of Portugal en route to Algeria. Dozens lost their lives and the ship sank, but Pop was rescued and taken 700 miles to the nearest large port under Allied control – Casablanca.
Kemp has qualified as a commercial diver and has explored shipwrecks such as the Mary Rose. Learning what happened to Pop made him tearful and put his own experiences at sea into perspective: “I’ve been on my own in the water for a period of time and it’s frightening – you start to hallucinate. I’ve been lost at sea twice when I was diving and got separated from the boat. The second time, I spent nine hours in the water with a crispy head from the sun.
“Of course, it’s nothing like what Pop would have gone through, with the horrors of oil in the water, flames, dead men floating around you.”
Kemp, who has spent weeks at a time in hostile environments filming documentaries such as Ross Kemp on Gangs and Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, also felt a connection with the fact that Pop spent most of his life at sea, first in the Navy and later working on cruise ships, far from home.
[image id="2099715" size="full" title="Ross Kemp: Mafia And Britain" alt="Ross Kemp standing by the river, wearing a flat cap and scarf, with a blurred cityscape and bridge in the background." classes=""] Ross Kemp: Mafia And Britain.“I felt a sadness that Pop hadn’t been there for his wife and daughter,” he says. “He left at the start of the Second World War in 1939 and didn’t come back until 1946, because part of his job after the war ended was to load tanks back onto ships and get them back to the UK.
“I’ve spent too much time away myself and it makes you feel slightly selfish, even though I’m doing a job, as was Pop.”
Learning about his ancestors made the actor, author and presenter think about where his own love of water and travel came from.
“Jeremiah visited more countries than I have, and that was 300 years ago, long before the jet plane, so no wonder I love travel,” he says.
“And I’ve always loved being at sea. As a child, I loved a bath and to make me get out, my mum would say, ‘You’ll go down the plughole and end up in Australia!’ That didn’t scare me; I liked the sound of that.”
On a darker note, Kemp discovers that Pop’s older brother, Albert, was also in the Navy. But after being discharged he was arrested multiple times for drunk and disorderly offences, even threatening to cut his own mother’s head off with a kitchen knife. Albert was put on the “blacklist” of the 1902 Licensing Act, meaning he was banned from all licensed premises.
Given the Chalmers family lived in a pub at the time, it’s hard not to draw comparisons with Kemp’s EastEnders alter-ego Grant Mitchell and the famous catchphrase of his mum Peggy (the late Barbara Windsor): “Get outta my pub!”
“People shout it at me all the time! I didn’t think of that comparison because it was such a sad story. Albert was a rogue, an addict. There must have been something that sparked that.
“I know soldiers who’ve tried to self-medicate. Even I would come back from Afghanistan and the first place I’d stop was often a pub.
“You’ve been dry for three months, you experience a lot of s**t, you want to get it off your shoulders. Coming home takes some adjustment.”
[image id="2184973" size="full" title="EastEnders Grant Mitchell 2025" alt="Ross Kemp poses in a black jacket in front of the Walford East Tube Station as Grant Mitchell for EastEnders." classes=""] Ross Kemp is back as Grant Mitchell in EastEnders.Although Kemp travels less these days, he’s busier than ever, having returned, albeit briefly, to EastEnders for the 40th anniversary in February, after nine years away from the soap.
His game show Bridge of Lies, in which contestants have to avoid lies to win a cash prize, is also returning later this month for a new run and ten celebrity specials (from Saturday 3 May).
I can’t imagine him ever retiring. “You and my wife, both!” he replies. Does Bridge of Lies give him a chance to show a more showbizzy side of himself than in his hard-hitting documentaries? “Of course. We all have more than one facet and this is a way of showing that… skipping across the bridge and dancing with everybody!
“As for EastEnders, it was wonderful, but you come away from it slightly fried. Grant comes back and within a minute he’s fighting, he’s crying, he’s making love, then he’s crying about it, then he’s fighting again. He’s never just sat in the launderette.
“The first scene in the anniversary was me breaking into the Arches and wrestling a Beretta 9mm off my brother, so it wasn’t like going to the café and saying, ‘Can I have a bacon roll, please?’. I think a part of me is Grant, and part of Grant is me. It was great to put the leather jacket on again, and also a relief that I could still get in it!”
Kemp observes that he has another thing in common with his ancestors: an inability to take it easy.
“Where I am now is not where I imagined I would be,” he says. “I thought I’d have hung my boots up by now. But I never have a boring day.”
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[image id="2250124" size="full" title="RDT2517100_V02" alt="An Easter edition of Radio Times, with two rabbits on the cover stood above a banner that reads 'Happy Easter'." classes=""] Radio Times.Who Do You Think You Are? begins on Tuesday 22nd April at 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer.
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