EARLY YEARS & LINEAGE

0020 My Grandfather 1890  

One most important influences in my young life was my grandfather. 

He was born, in the late 19^th century, to a very different style of life; as the son of a tenant farmer near Swaffham in Norfolk.  One of half a dozen or so brothers, his middle-class family was relatively privileged for the time. Even so, in his teens he ran away from home. As a result, he lost track of almost all his brothers in later life.

Just one was kept in touch with; Percy, who against his middle-class origins ended up as a sales floor assistant in the Gamages department store on High Holborn in London and lived in a minute rented flat in St Margaret's in London. We visited his family, essentially as a place to stay in London, every few years.

My grandfather was intelligent and so, when he ended up in Leeds where his children were born, he eventually became the General Secretary of what was then called a friendly society.  This was in the late 1800s, when ‘friendly societies’ were becoming the precursors of modern unions.  Accordingly he was something of a radical, indeed an activist, and told me about the union demonstrations he had been involved with and the police actions against them -- again, I guess, influencing or at least colouring my future views of life.  

At the end of the century, though, he moved on to become a teacher. He met my grandmother when he was studying at the equivalent of teacher training college (perhaps more the equivalent of university these days) in Leeds. He was then in lodgings with her cousins, Herbert and Lily, and that's how he came to meet her.

After teaching short term at various sites in Yorkshire, he moved to Liverpool to a young offenders institution, called in those days a reformatory and later a Borstal.  This was where my mother spent her childhood. Her early memories are of their house, built into the corner of the institution, with the inmates acting as houseboys.  It was I guess a very Victorian institution, and certainly was a very Victorian house.  My mother in particular describes one room off the main staircase which was furnished with very heavy furniture and heavy drapes which she crept past at night because, to her, it had ghostly properties. 

My grandfather was, in effect, both teacher and warder; and often had to travel round the country to recover the boys who had escaped and had been detained by police forces in remote places. My mother, though, had a more direct experience. One of the boys, Charlie, was brought into the family to be fostered.  So, along with her own brother and sister, she gained this boy as another brother.  His own mother was a prostitute who couldn't look after him but my grandfather, helped by my grandmother, brought him into the family and he grew up effectively as part of that family.  Unfortunately, as a teenager he left to join his mother in London. He eventually died on the Burma Railway, having joined the RAF and been shipped out to Singapore just before it fell. 

My mother was born in the middle of the First World War.  We now remember the deprivation of the Second World War, with its rationing etc, but the First World War was for many people even worse. For my mother it was nearly disastrous, in as much as her brother, slightly older than she, developed an illness which required him to have various operations and to be looked after very carefully. This meant that all the decent food that was available was given to him, and my mother was deprived of it. 

As a result, again in common with many other children at the time, she lacked the calcium needed for a balanced diet and developed rickets. This left her bow-legged, and probably contributed to her arthritis later in life.  Her brother Sid, though, survived to a ripe old age despite having been given a few weeks to live when he was young. Her sister, though, was significantly older; eight years older actually.  As such she was not seen by my mother as being part of her immediate family.

The memories my mother passed on to me about those days are quite vivid, but fairly limited.   

When my mother first went to school she made friends with the one girl in the class who had no other friends.  She was called Mi Li and, unfortunately, in those days mixing with people of other races was not encouraged.  Accordingly, despite the socialism of my grandfather, my mother was removed from the school the next day and sent to another one.   But she always remembered Mi Li fondly; and I guess inculcated that in my own education, so that later I came to be one of the founders of the student anti-apartheid movement.  Other memories she talked about were doing her homework in the cloisters of Liverpool Cathedral. In those days the area around the Cathedral wasn't the slum it has since become but was full of quite upmarket housing, indicating just how much the suburbs of cities change over time.

My grandfather then moved to teach at a local school, at Bromborough Pool; which is also where I later lived.  This was the village owned by the Prices chemical factory later taken over by Unilever.  I'll describe that separately, but it was a company village and in effect it was a company school.  My mother passed on few memories about the school itself, though she hated the fact that she had to attend it herself when her father was a teacher there -- since this marked her out from all the other children.

She did though remember the house, where they lived; one of the company houses, a terraced house in York Street.

Again, my mother’s memories of that period were of sunny summers, in the 1920s, and of gardens laden with apple-blossom; and meeting my father.

Eventually my grandfather went to teach at the Higher Bebington Primary School. There he taught the remedial class. He was never happier than seeing these backward children grow in stature. Much in keeping with his social view of his role, he also coached its very successful football team.

At the same time the family moved to a rented house, the typical three bedroom semi of the time, in Higher Bebington. 

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