Click here to register on OneGuyFromBarlick|2|1
Author Previous Topic Topic Next Topic  
Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls


2010 Posts
Posted -  17/05/2004  :  16:17
EPILOGUE.
At this point I stopped recording. It was a particularly murky November in the North of England and Father got one of his frequent chesty colds which rapidly became bronchitis. He was quite ill but we were used to this as he had always had a weak chest, the result, of having been gassed in the Great War and a steady diet of 60 cigarettes a day for most of his life. So I went on with my life and waited until he was well enough to carry on.

My Mother collared me one day and said “You know what’s making him ill don’t you? Haven’t you noticed that he’s always ill in November? It’s Remembrance day and it brings back memories of the war.” Mother’s Father had been killed in the Great War and it suddenly struck me how powerful the memories of that time were to their generation. “Do you mean that talking about the Great War is likely to make him ill as well?” She said it did and she would be much happier if I stopped. So I did. I waited to see whether he would raise the subject of the tapes again but all he said when he recovered was that he thought Mother was right and so I left the subject alone.

With hindsight I regret that we didn’t finish the tapes but am quite sure that it was best not to. We stopped taping in November 1965 and he lived until August 1973. However, all is not lost, Father and I did a lot of talking and I shall set down what I know of his life after the point we reached in the tapes. It won’t be anywhere near as detailed as his account but at least it won’t leave anyone who has had the patience to read this far hanging in the air wondering what happened afterwards.

*******************************

One puzzling thing about Father’s account of his childhood is that he makes no mention of having had tuberculosis and having had to go to a convalescent home on Mt. Kosciusko where he said he first saw snow. He definitely told me that he had been there but I never followed it up.

Father and I spent a lot of time talking about the Great War. The most vivid impression I got was the change that was wrought in him by being forced to endure the four years of hell that he was thrown into. Like so many others, the brash young man who went into the war came out with a complete education.

On the subject of Gallipoli, he was very angry with what he saw as the ineptitude of the people who had put them in there. He said that the idea was alright but the execution was bloody horrible, and that if people working for him had shown the same level of expertise, he’d have sacked the buggers.

On the war in general, he was appalled by the pointless waste of the whole thing. All that effort and sacrifice in foul conditions to no purpose whatsoever. He didn’t dwell on the monstrosities, in fact, most of the things he told me were about the amusing incidents that can happen in the worst of circumstances. I suppose it was some form of a defence mechanism at work. Anyhow, here are a few of his War stories.

He found Uncle Stan in France when he got there, Stan was working on a light railway unit running supplies up to the front, usually under the cover of darkness. At one point, it being Christmas, Stan was given the job of running a train up carrying the Christmas supplies for the troops. A very important part of these supplies was the rum ration and Stan decided, it being a cold and snowy night, that he deserved a nip of rum for his trouble. Father said that when Stan’s train didn’t arrive, they sent a search party out and eventually found it stopped on the line and Stan asleep under a tree, covered in snow, with the rum bottle by his side. I can’t remember whether he was punished or not.

Another subject that occupied their time a lot was the constant fight against vermin. Father’s particular hate was lice. He said he couldn’t understand how they could survive, they used to wash their blankets and clothes and hang them out. Many a time in winter they would freeze like boards, yet when they were dry and they started using them again, the lice were still there.

One thing that particularly incensed him was the use of horses at the front. Having worked with horses all his life it devastated him to see them killed or struggling through the mud, under fire and frightened out of their wits.

He never talked much about the fighting but he had a big scar on the back of his neck which he once told me was caused by a “jerry bayonet”. It must have been quite a wound and it was obvious from the shape of the scar that it had never been stitched. You could see the mouth of the scar was stretched open just as if it had been freshly cut. We found out later, when he was given another honour by the British government, that he had the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He never talked about it but I do remember him once saying that it was a matter of luck who got the medals, they were really for everyone concerned in a particular piece of action and one name was more or less picked out of the hat.

Father went right though the War until the Armistice, I think I have heard him mention Ypres and Vimy Ridge but I can’t be any more certain than that. What I am certain about is that, after the Armistice, his unit was brought back to England and they were put in a tented camp to await shipping to take them home to Australia. He said they were kept in lousy conditions with bad food, no facilities and nothing to do. It wasn’t long before some of them decided they’d be better off with a civilian job than rotting waiting for transport. Father was one of the ones who did this and became, technically, a deserter. He took Graham as his surname and headed North.

If you remember, when in South Africa he was asked where he came from, he said the first thing that came into his head, Manchester. The city must have had a good press in Australia because when he deserted, he headed for Manchester and very shortly got a job on the maintenance gang at Armstrong Whitworth in Trafford Park. He lodged in Droylsden and he once told me that at first he thought all the people went to work on horses because as he lay in bed in the morning he could hear all these horses going down the street. What he was actually listening to was the mill worker’s iron shod wooden clogs clattering on the stone pavement as they poured down the street to the local mill which started earlier than the engineering works.

I got the impression he enjoyed working at Armstrong Whitworths. They were one of the most important heavy engineering firms in the world at the time and were responsible, amongst other things, for making many of the heaviest naval guns. He once told me about them making the guns for the battleship King George the Sixth. At the time they were made, they were the most powerful naval guns in the world, in fact I believe that when the King George the Sixth was scrapped the guns were re-used on the Vanguard which was built after World War II. Anyhow, one of the stages in making the gun barrels was heat treatment. This was done by heating the barrels up and then quenching them in huge vats of whale oil. During the course of his work as a maintenance man he fell in one of these vats. Luckily, the oil was fairly cool at the time. He said the only ill-effect was the stink, it took him about a fortnight to get rid of it.

He told a story about an engine that they had a lot of trouble with at the time. The company made its own electricity using high speed steam engines direct coupled to generators. There were several of these sets and the flyshaft bearings on one of them gave continuous trouble, overheating and stopping the generating set. After one or two attempts to cure the fault without stripping the engine down, it was decided that the only cure was going to be to take the shaft out, re-finish the journals and make fresh bearings for it. They did this and Father said they went to a lot of trouble to get the best finish they could on the shaft and the bearings. The whole lot was put back together, started up and the bearings immediately overheated and stopped it.

This was serious trouble and the top brass gathered around the offending piece of machinery for an inquest. At some point during the conversation, an old labourer who was sweeping up nearby chimed in with “It never will bloody go like that!” The foreman of the gang who had done the job turned round and gave the old bloke a mouthful about minding his own business but the manager said “Hang on a bit. Let’s hear what he has to say.” Father said that the old bloke used to be a top fitter but he had hit the bottle and eventually finished up as a sweeper in the works. The manager must have remembered this because he asked the old bloke if he could cure the fault. He said yes and was sent off for his tackle. He said he wanted the flywheel and shaft lifting out so that the journals were accessible and he’d come back that evening when it had been done.

They lifted the shaft out and got all ready and the old bloke turned up. Father said he was in a suit and had had a wash and a shave, he looked like a different bloke. He got on some steps and surveyed the beautiful finish on the journal. Shaking his head he dipped into his bag and produced what Father described as the “biggest, nastiest blacksmith’s rasp I’ve ever seen in me life”. He set into the journal with this making long scoring marks across the beautifully finished face. The foreman saw this and tried to stop him but the manager said “No, let him be, I can see what he’s about.” He did both journals and left them to clean up the faces with a smooth file. He then looked at the brasses, pronounced them alright and told them to put it back together again as it would be alright. They did this and the machine ran perfectly.

Father told me this story to illustrate a point he was making to me about lubrication of big bearings. I was following in his footsteps and was in charge of a big stationary engine at the time. He said he’d learned a lot from this old bloke.

I don’t think Father stayed on the heavy gang for long as he told me once that the most interesting jobs he had at Armstrong’s was helping to make the propellers for Sir Henry Seagrave’s boat Miss England for the attempt on the world water speed record. He said he learned more about cavitation doing that job than in the whole of his career to date. Another job was doing experiments on large steam piping to determine whether there was any advantage in using swept bends as opposed to right-angled joints.

Somewhere around this time Father set up as a bookmaker. He told me he was doing well in his spare time taking bets in Armstrong’s and other factories round about. At that time, off-course betting was illegal and street bookmakers and their ‘runners’ were the only way a working man could get a bet on. Father was doing well until one day he got a lot of bets on a horse he knew couldn’t possibly win. Normally he would have laid this off with either another bookmaker or the Victoria Club in Manchester but this day he decided to back his judgement, the horse came in first, he was cleaned out and that was the end of a promising career as a bookie. Years later Father was still bemoaning the fact that he had held on to those bets. He reckoned we would have been a very wealthy family if he’d used his head.

Sometime whilst he was at Armstrong’s the Australian government issued a general amnesty for all deserters. For some reason the police knew that Father was a deserter and a sergeant came round and had a word with him. He told Father about the amnesty but said “It’s all a trick to get you back to Australia, if you go for the amnesty you’ll be treated alright and put on a boat for Australia. However, when you get back, you’ll be arrested, charged with desertion, fined any amount the Australian government owes you and then turned loose. You can please yourself whether you go for it or not. We’re quite satisfied with your behaviour and as far as we’re concerned you can stay here.” Father decided to stay but I know that in later years he missed home and always had a yearning to go back even if only for a visit but it was never to be.



Sometime in the late twenties he must have moved from Armstrong’s and taken a job at General Gas Appliances on Corporation Road, Audenshaw near Manchester. I say this, not from direct knowledge but because I know that it was at General Gas he met my Mother who was working there as an enamel sprayer at the time. She was born in Dukinfield and had polio as a child which left her with a club foot. They must have got on well together because by February 1936 they had bought a brand-new semi-detached house in Heaton Norris, Stockport and I was born there on St Valentine’s day. Father would be 42 years old at the time.

My early memories are of this great big man who used to go off early in the morning to some mysterious place called ‘work’ and never came back before I went to bed. The first major event which sticks in my memory is of Father getting the next door neighbours Arthur ..... and Walter Pitcher to help him dig an enormous hole in the back garden next to the garage. It was for an Anderson Shelter. This was a heavy corrugated iron construction which was designed to be buried in the ground, covered with earth and used as protection during air raids. Father had decided that rumours of war were true and was making sure that his family had some protection from enemy bombers. This was before the war began and I can remember them getting their legs pulled by some of the other neighbours. When the raids started the shelter was a very popular place!

General Gas went on to war work and Father’s hours grew even longer. Sometimes he never came home at all. The factory was making flare cases, bomb cases and later in the war, in collaboration with the Planet Foundry next door, frigate decks. They reached their peak of ingenuity late in the war when they made complete landing craft. These were ‘launched’ at General Gas on an Edward Box low-loader, taken to Manchester Docks where they were lowered into the water and given their ‘sea trials’ on the Manchester Ship Canal on their way to be handed over at Ellesmere Port. A ‘naval person’ used to come up to supervise the trials and I went with them on occasion. I remember the man who usually inspected them was Lt. Charles K Warren. He was a pugnacious little man with a beard who later took Holy Orders, was vicar at Leytonstone and eventually became a high cleric in Tasmania. You would never have thought this could be his future vocation if you had heard him swearing at the bridge keeper at Barton Dock swing bridge when the landing craft hit it whilst on trials. I was there and I swear he didn’t repeat a single curse as he berated the man for what seemed to be an eternity. I remember being awestruck at the time, I often thought that if he put half as much passion in his sermons he would go far.

On the Home Front Father was a member of the G.G.A. Platoon of the 51 County of Lancaster Battalion Home Guard. I can remember being convinced that my Dad was 51 years old because the shoulder flash on his uniform was ‘MAN51’. He was also an Air Raid Warden, one of the dreaded band who used to go round at night checking that people had blacked their windows out properly and that no light could be seen. The uniform for this was a dark battledress, a gas mask and a black tin helmet with A.R.P. on the front in white. The only war injury he got was whilst in the wardens. He walked round a corner one night and ran into Arthur ...... from next door who was also a warden. Trouble was that Arthur was so short his helmet brim was in just the right place to catch Father on the bridge of his nose and it cut straight through and broke the bone. I can remember our old doctor Tommy O’Connell telling Father the “No, it can’t be left open even if it does make it easier for you to breathe!”

Tommy O’Connell and Father seem to have known each other from way back. Father once told me about the time him and Tommy bought a greyhound. They seemed to spend quite a lot of time at the White City greyhound stadium in Manchester and had this dog in ruinously expensive training but it never did anything. The trainer told him that he could get ,50 for this animal so Father and Tommy decided to sell. Next time out, the dog ran over the hurdles and was placed in every race it entered. Father said the trainer had seen them coming and taken them for a ride. He’d always told them it was no good over the jumps but eventually it got sold for an enormous amount of money into Ireland.

As with any family doctor, Tommy figured large in our lives. I can remember Father getting very worried about the size of my head and making Mother take me to the doctors. Tommy examined me and in his lovely Irish Brogue told Mother “Tell Mac not to worry, he’ll grow into it!”

During the war all food was rationed except bread and potatoes. Father often arrived home with extra food obtained from clandestine sources known in those days as ‘the black market’. This was strictly illegal but speaking as a growing lad at the time, very welcome. He had two mates who were occasional sources. One was Harry White who was a signwriter in Stockport. He was a great bloke and I used to visit him in his house on Heaton Moor ostensibly to help him but actually to have a bloody good feed. His wife Lal used to play the accordion and Harry had guns in the house which he allowed me to fire in his back garden under strict supervision. This may not sound very exciting to someone born in Australia but was very unusual behaviour in a suburban garden in the North of England. Harry was always mixed up in something, I think this was the attraction of him to Father, it seems to me that Harry would have made a good out-back man in Australia. I have an idea that he and Father first met in France but this is only a vague recollection of a conversation I overheard when I was very small.

Another great pal of Dads was Mac Parker who was the manager of the Carlton Cinema in Stockport. He had, in his gift, free seats at the cinema and we used to go every Thursday night for years and always had the best seats in the circle. Even during the war, Father used to try to get home so that he could go with us. For some reason that I never could fathom, Mac could always get hold of fresh fish. We had many a good feed on this, what Father was doing in return I don’t know.

In 1945 the Second War ended and life became more normal for us. We bought Harry White’s house off him and moved up to Heaton Moor. Father took up gardening and General Gas gradually got back into its original role, making gas and solid fuel cookers. Father bought a 1939 Vauxhall ‘14’ car and we settled down to being a normal family.

One day in June 1946, Father got a letter from the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, not one of his usual correspondents. It was to inform him that he was a candidate for the M.B.E in the forthcoming Birthday Honours for war services and would this be alright? Father accepted but didn’t go to London for the ceremony, he got the medal by post.

It was about this time that we had to call on Tommy O’Connell for emergency aid. One of my jobs was to scrub Father’s back when he had a bath. I always had to be careful because he had two polyps close together on the small of his back and I was always admonished to “Mind you don’t catch those bloody things!” One day, whilst I was scrubbing his back he told me to get his razor and “Cut the bloody things off.” I got his cut-throat razor and did as I was told. Well, you’ve never seen as much blood in your life as came out of his back. The water in the bath turned red immediately and even Father got the wind up. “Ring Tommy O’Connell up and get him out here as soon as you can.” Luckily, Tommy was in and he told me to get Father out of the bath and hold a towel over the wounds until he arrived. When he arrived he played hell with Father and got him down into the kitchen. He then took great satisfaction in cauterising the two holes. This stopped the bleeding alright but Father never forgot it. The good thing about it was that I’d made a good job of cutting them off. A couple of months later you could hardly see where they had been.

By 1947 I was going to the local grammar school and had a Brother and Sister, Dorothy, who was born thirteen months after me and Leslie who was born in 1944. Father was still works manager at General Gas who, by this time had been taken over by Allied Ironfounders together with the Planet Foundry next door. My life revolved around school, my Meccano set and Saturdays with Father. On Saturday morning I used to go to General Gas with Father and spend the morning with him while he went round the works. There was usually something exciting to play with there and I think that it was on these trips that my love of machine tools was first awoken. In winter we used to go home and Father would go to the football match, he supported Manchester United. In summer, if Lancashire were playing at home, we used to go into Manchester, have lunch at Stevensons near the cathedral and then we went to Old Trafford for the afternoon to watch the cricket. Father was a member and I was a junior member. I wasn’t allowed into the member’s pavilion but this was no sweat. I used to buy a packet of fags and go off and smoke myself silly while watching the cricket.

Things went on like this for a few years, we had regular holidays and Father took up gardening. He had built a flat roofed garage at the bottom of our back garden and later built a greenhouse on top of it. I’ve never, before or since, seen this done but it was very successful. He was a good gardener, we built a pond and a rockery and it was a credit to him.

Father had a particularly rich circle of friends in Manchester. I suppose he had met many of them due to his work at General Gas. This was certainly true of Eddy Clark who used to be heavy haulage manager for Edward Box, a famous firm of hauliers in Manchester, They used to move the landing craft from Audenshaw to the docks and I have no doubt that Father met Eddy then. Later, when Edward Box was taken over by Pickfords, Eddy did the same job there. Eddy was a Catholic and it was through him that Father met Father Sewell and Jimmy Fitzsimons. Father Sewell was a noted priest in Manchester and Jimmy was a councillor and eventually Lord Mayor of Manchester. What I remember most vividly is some of the pub crawls they went on, sometimes with me as a passenger. I remember being intrigued by the fact that when he had got one or two down him, Jimmy used to knock on the windscreen rather than use his horn. What amazed me was that it seemed to work. Jimmy was one of the leading lights in promoting Ringway Airport which later became Manchester Airport.

In July 1950, Father applied for British Citizenship. I have an idea that what triggered this off was the fact that in 1949, when asked by his firm to go abroad, he applied for an Australian passport and only got a temporary one with great difficulty. The problem was that they wanted proof that he was an Australian citizen and he had none. The situation was complicated by the fact that no birth certificate existed for him. After a long correspondence he got evidence of the registration of his birth at Dubbo Presbyterian church on 25 April 1993 and an affidavit from Uncle Stan that he was Father’s brother and that the entry related to him. It was during this correspondence that I realised that Uncle Stan’s full name was Stanley Graham McDonald so Graham was a family name and this perhaps explains why Father took it as his new name when he deserted from the army in 1914. He was granted citizenship on 7 September 1950.

In 1953 I was seventeen years old. I had done pretty well in my exams at the Grammar School and the teachers there were expecting me to go on to university. However, I knew we were short of money at home and I was fairly sure that we couldn’t afford this course of action. We were always short of money at home, it never stopped us having good Christmas presents and holidays but we were always aware that the finances were tight. I decided that it would be better if I left school and got a job. This was an attractive prospect to me but I felt I had little hope of pulling it off. However, I decided to tackle Father.

When I asked him if I could leave school I got the shock of my life. He said “What do you want to do if you leave?” I said “Go farming.” (I still don’t know where this sudden yearning to farm came from.) He said “Right. Well the best thing you can do is to find yourself a job.” So I got the Farmer’s Weekly and went through the adverts. The second job I picked out was down in Warwickshire living in on a farm at Whatcote with Lionel and Addy Gleed. Within a fortnight I was down there having the time of my life. Years later I asked Father why he had agreed so quickly to let me leave school. He said it was because he always felt he had missed out by not going away to Sydney to college when he had the chance. He felt that his Father had stood in the way of what he wanted to do and there was no way he was going to do that to me.

Whilst I was farming I reached 18 years old and was conscripted into the army, I joined the Cheshire Regiment for my initial training and after six weeks we went down to Colchester to await embarkation for Berlin where I spent the rest of my service.

It was whilst I was in the army that things started happening again to Father. The first major event was that my cousin, Pat Crawford, who I assume was Mae’s son, came over with the Ashes team. He stayed with us for a while and I knocked about with him a bit when I was on leave from Colchester. He stayed over here after the tour and played Lancashire League cricket, as professional for, I think it was Church. He met a lass called Sheila who lived in Blackburn, and they got married and had one child but on a visit to Australia by himself, Pat disappeared and was never heard of by us again. I got most of this story in running instalments during letters from home. We all thought it was a lousy trick.

Six months after I arrived in Berlin I got a letter from home giving me a change of address. Instead of having Napier Road as a home I now lived at 99 Colne Road, Sough, Earby, West Yorkshire wherever that was! Evidently Father had left General Gas and had bought a grocer’s shop and the whole family had moved up to Yorkshire. About six months later I got some leave and Father told me the full story.

Shortly before I joined the army, I remember Father having a colleague called Jimmy Braine who had come up from one of Allied Ironfounder’s southern factories to give Father a hand with some project or other they had on at General Gas. He was a frequent guest at Napier Road and he and Father seemed to get on very well. Later, when I had gone abroad, Jimmy Braine came to Father and told him a strange story.

He told Father that his main purpose in working at General Gas wasn’t to help with the project but to get enough dirt on Father to enable the firm to sack him. For some reason which I never quite understood, after a big change of top management inside Allied, Father, as one of the old guard, was seen as dangerous. I suspect that this might have had something to do with his close links with some of the top men as he had trained them at General Gas. In particular, there was a man called H.C.Wilson-Bennets. Father reckoned it was simpler than that, he said it was because he knew too much. Be that as it may, Jimmy Braine told Father that he was sent up to gather information and add it to what they had already.

It turned out that Jimmy’s main qualification for his job was the fact that he said he’d been with Naval Intelligence in the War. He told Father that a security file on him existed and that he had access to it. I suppose this file had him marked down as a deserter but apart from that, Father knew there couldn’t be anything else particularly terrible on it. Anyhow, Jimmy said that, having investigated Father and got to know him, he was certain that there was no case against him but that he would have to make his report to his masters. He gave Father some clues as to what direction the attack would come from and who, at General Gas, would be behind it. With this, Jimmy bade goodbye to Father and retreated south.

In May 1955, the blow struck. Father was summoned before the Board of Directors at General Gas and accused of stealing from the firm. Fore-armed by Jimmy’s warning, he had receipts for all the items he was accused of stealing and the case against him collapsed. He had the upper hand and demanded immediate leave of absence, his pay made up to the end of the year and his pension rights paid up so he could start to draw it. He left General Gas that day and never returned. When he got home, he and Mother sold the house and bought the grocery shop in Yorkshire. The idea was to get away to fresh pastures and have a way of making a living for all of us.

Father was flooded with letters from his friends and colleagues in industry, without exception, they expressed regret and astonishment that he had left G.G.A. so precipitately. I don’t think I ever got the full story, there was more to it than met the eye. I have an idea that it had something to do with the exit of a man called Shaw who was chairman of Allied Ironfounders whilst Father was works manager at Audenshaw. Whatever the reason, it left Father very bitter about the way he had been treated. He always used to say to me, “Never trust big business. They’ll walk all over you if it suits their purposes.”

By late 1955, Father was settled in at Sough with Mother and Dorothy helping him in his new trade as general grocer. Leslie was at Skipton Grammar School and I was in the army in Berlin. The old Vauxhall car had gone and was replaced by a Bedford van and the Graham family set out to make a mark on the retail trades.

Round about this time Father realised he had another problem. For years, his right eye had been bad, ever since he tried to blow up the ducks on the pond at Eumalga. Now, the sight in his left eye began to fail. This was particularly serious as part of the business of the shop was running a mobile grocery service to outlying farms in the district. I found out about this when I came home on leave late in 1955.

I was due for demobilisation in July 1956 and the failure of Father’s eyes plus the fact that Dorothy was getting married and going to live in Stockport persuaded me that I should come home rather than resume farming with Lionel and Addy Gleed. In July 1956 I came back to Sough and settled in to help run the shop.

When I got home I realised that everything wasn’t as it should be. The shop was losing money slowly and no matter how much we tried to get the profits up, we slid slowly backwards. It wasn’t really our fault. The fact was that it was a very bad time for such businesses with the rise of the supermarkets and a shop the size of Sough would have had difficulty keeping three people even in the best of times. The bank was uneasy with the fact that Father was carrying the debt and was going blind. The plain fact was that the overdraft was almost as big as the value of the business. In the end, they agreed to carry on the account if the debt was signed over to me instead of Father so we did this. It was at about this time that I went mad and bought a Philips four-track tape recorder. At the time I was simply fascinated by the technology and had no inkling of how I was to use it later.

I went out and got a job wagon-driving, I hadn’t any qualifications for anything else apart from blowing things up! I worked full-time driving at the local dairy and the rest of the in the shop and on the van going round the farms. We survived and Father went in to have one of his eyes operated on at Burnley. This was a success and his sight was greatly improved but we decided we wanted out of the shop and put it up for sale.

We were very lucky, we got a customer for the shop at a price which cleared the overdraft and found a seven acre farm for sale in Barnoldswick, about four miles away, for ,2,200 so I bought it with a loan from the bank.

We moved into Hey Farm in 1959 and I got married the same year and brought my bride Vera home. Father had his works pension and his state pension and I had regular work as a driver. The financial pressure was off and on the 9 October 1960, Vera had a girl, Margaret, who immediately became the apple of her grandparent’s eye. We had a few calves and pigs and I bought an old Land-Rover. I think this period was the happiest Father had been for years. He had the animals, the gardening and his family and no worries. There were to be problems with us all under one roof but on the whole, it was a very good time for everybody.

Shortly after we moved into Hey Farm, Father had his right eye operated on. It wasn’t the success that his right eye had been, it was too severely damaged, but there was a definite improvement and he could do all he wanted to.

It was round about this time in the early 1960’s that I first really got to know my Father. I was settling down and moved into a phase where I neither hated or pitied my Father. I say this because, like most young men, I went through phases where I hated the Old Man because of the authority he had over me and pitied him because he was so ignorant. To paraphrase a famous quotation, it was marvellous how much he improved round about 1960!

We actually started talking to each other and gradually became good mates. It was to be like this until he died. I used to spend hours listening to him talking about various parts of his life and eventually it dawned on me that he had a good story to tell and that it would all be lost when he died. I remembered the tape recorder and about 1962 started making the tapes which are the basis of this life story.

Looking back, there were things which he told me in these conversations which never got on the tapes. I’ve covered a lot of these already but there was one big question that he always shied away from and which was never resolved. This was the question of whether he was old Alec’s son or not. The one thing I am sure of is that he desperately wanted to be. I think he convinced himself that he was in the end but I have doubts about his certainty. Apart from the fact that Jim was certain he wasn’t, and his Mother’s refusal to discuss the matter, I always remember something he said to me when we were discussing whether I was to stay on at school or go away to work on the farm. He told me that he had once wanted to go away to college in Sydney (This would be Mr Sweeney’s offer to take him to Dulwich College at Solihull) but ‘his stepfather wouldn’t let him go because he didn’t want the neighbours thinking he had got rid of him’. I can remember this conversation very clearly and for this reason have always had my doubts about Father’s certainty that old Alec was his Father. The funny thing is that it never came up in any of the letters from Uncle Stan and Auntie Dos in Australia during my long correspondence with them or in any of their letters to Father. I don’t suppose we will ever get a definite answer to this one now but on the whole, I think that Father wasn’t old Alec’s natural son.

By late 1965, Vera and I had two more daughters, Susan and Janet and Hey Farm was bulging at the seams. Father made the decision that he and Mother should move out into a rented council house in Avon Drive not far away, leaving Vera and I ruling the roost at Hey Farm. They moved down there and Father set to to do the garden and live his life out quietly. This he did until 1973 when a combination of diabetes, his bad chest and old age got to him. He died peacefully in Airedale Hospital after a short illness on 22 August 1973.

There was another great mystery that was solved before Father died. For many years, we children (Dorothy, Leslie and I) had been puzzled by various small matters inside the family. I remember when we were at Napier Road, there was the occasional letter for Mary Bowker which always disappeared as soon as Mother got hold of it. Now this was strange as we knew that Mother’s maiden name was Challenger. Another strange thing was that we never celebrated any sort of anniversary as a family, even birthdays were very low key. At the time, I always put this down to the fact that we were poor but in later years I began to suspect that there was more to it. I don’t know what eventually triggered my curiosity but one day, while I was visiting Mother I asked her “Are you and Father married?” She jumped as though she had been shot and said “No, we never have been.” I said “Why didn’t you tell us years ago?” and she said “I don’t know.” We sat down with a cup of tea and the whole story came out.

When Mother was a child she had what was then known as ‘infantile paralysis’, this was what we call polio nowadays. It left her with a withered left leg and a club foot and to the day she died, she couldn’t stand the smell of neatsfoot oil as the treatment she had was to rub the leg twice a day with it. As she grew up, she was very conscious of her disability and at the back of her mind doubted whether she would ever get wed because she would be seen as a cripple. The consequence of this was that she took the first chance she got to get married. This was to a bloke called Bowker. They hadn’t been married long when he got into trouble with the police and was gaoled. At about this time, she met Father and they started living together. She had never got divorced and was still technically Mrs Mary Bowker.

Well, this explained a lot of things. I had a word with Father and told him what Mother had told me. He said “Thank God you know!” I said “Why didn’t you tell us before?” He said “Well, it’s a funny thing to tell your children but I suppose things are different nowadays.”

This wasn’t the end of it because when Father died, Mother didn’t qualify for a pension because her husband was still alive and working. We asked the Social Security people for help and they sorted it out for us. Amongst other things they told me that this bloke Bowker had been claiming allowances as a married man and that Father had never claimed for either a wife or children. This explained a lot about why we had always been short of money in the early days. It also explained why there had always been a barrier between Mother and the society that Father moved in. She was never invited to any functions connected with G.G.A. because they all knew about her as she’d worked there. Over the years, it must have been a cause of much hardship and distress but they just soldiered on with the job of minding their own business and rearing us children.



***********************





Well, that’s about it. I set out to tell you what I knew of my Father’s life because I think it was exceptional. I never had any doubts that I was my Father’s son and my Uncle Stan said that I was old George Johanstone all over again. My Brother Leslie is more my Father’s build, I don’t know who Dorothy takes after.

My feelings about my Father are all good. I’m glad I knew him and his story. He was a good man and a fighter, I never saw him stuck for how to do a job, he had had experience of just about everything. He had faults, he was human, but I still miss him even today. If the priest in Jamaica was right, he will come back to a very good life in his next incarnation, I hope so.

Perhaps the best way to finish this story is to tell you what happened when I went to Australia. When Father died he asked that his ashes should be taken back to Australia and scattered on the McQuarrie opposite Eumalga. I went out there in 1986 for the first time and headed for Dubbo. When I got there I had no surprises, I had spent that long listening to Father that I was at home straight away. I visited Eumalga and saw the old Serisier homestead where Father had spent his early days and the owner of Murrumbidgerie Station, Paddy Driver, took me to a spot on the McQuarrie and we put Father’s ashes in the river. It was very satisfying for me to do this and I think the Old Man was pleased as well, at last he was on his way down to Clancy country, the reed beds of the Overflow.





7,697 words.


TTFN - Doc


Due to the current economic climate, the light at the end of the tunnel has now been switched off.
Click here to make a donation and help support this site and keep it advert free 

 
Author Replies  
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 14/03/2010 : 06:39
I can't find the topic where I told you all about the later research we did as a family and when we looked at father's service record we found that he had been telling lies bout his war service and worked out that he had invented a legend for himself to make him more employable when he deserted in 1919 and went to Manchester. It worked and he never went back.

I've started to get his story together to publish it as a book and in the process set the record a little straighter than it is at the moment. The bottom line is that we have found a wife he never mentioned and that he spent virtually the whole of his war service in hospital with Gonorrhaea! The big problem, and I know it's one that many family researchers face is making sense of the mass of records. So, I started yesterday constructing a timeline based on all the evidence I have. I'm taking every date I can find and laying all the evidence out in chronological order. It's working, I can already see that the precis of his army service done by the Australian army is wrong in some respects and I'm really looking forward to seeing what it tells me when I've finished it.

In case anyone is wondering, I don't feel any different about my dad. If anything I think it's a wonderful accident of history that we are all probably here because of a chance encounter with a 'professional lady' in Glasgow one July night. It doesn't get much more surreal than that!


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
Tizer
VIP Member


5150 Posts
Posted - 14/03/2010 : 10:37
I had an uncle who had told many people, including his wife, that he flew in Lancaster bombers during the war and they thought he was a gunner. The truth is that he was in one of the RAF teams that deployed the barrage balloons to protect airfields. It doesn't sound as heroic but he would have been a target for the enemy aircraft and he served later years in Burma and ended up with malaria.


Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 14/03/2010 : 16:54
If you look at Jim Pollard's story in the LTP he had much the same history but on Ack Ack guns. He was invalided out after service in Africa with very nasty fever which almost killed him. Ernie Roberts similar but he was in Burma and got Black Water Fever and had what he called bootlace diarhaea for the rest of his life. We forget about these things.....


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
belle
VIP Member


6502 Posts
Posted - 15/03/2010 : 09:27
Blimey Stanley, a topic marked Epilogue, with docs name next to it, is just a tad alarming!!!


Life is what you make itGo to Top of Page
tripps
Senior Member


1404 Posts
Posted - 15/03/2010 : 09:33
That's what I thought too. Hardly dared open the topic!!!  Good to hear all is well. 


Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 16/03/2010 : 05:48
It dates back six years to when Doc started the site. I gave him a CD with a lot of stuff on, LTP, my memoirs, father's story, BET articles and about 500 pics and he is named because he posted them all to start Oneguy. It took three days to get it all on and launch the site.


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 16/03/2010 : 05:51
I've altered the title to remove the ambiguity.


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 15/08/2011 : 06:35
Brought this back up for Gloria. I'll look for the original memoir.


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 07/10/2011 : 04:08
I got mail a while ago from a lady called Trish who had noticed discrepancies in Father's original story. She approached me very sensitively to alert me and was relieved to hear that we had sussed the Old Man out. I recommended she get 'Australian Story' and read it. She did and here's her reply which might interest you....

Dear Stanley

Thanks for the info.   I bought a copy of ‘An Australian Life’ and really  enjoyed your Father’s story and the sub-story of your work to unravel it all.  As I said in my earlier email, he was a great story teller  (listening to the tapes was almost better than reading the book, he had a great sense of pace and timing).

 

If I can take up a bit more of your time, I thought I’d share a couple of bits of info on the same track that you might find interesting.

First, re your comment ‘don’t judge him too harshly’, I should say that I don’t judge him negatively at all, and not just because I enjoyed his story telling so much.

Without sounding as though I’m implying that all Australians are liars, (I think I told you I’m an Aussie)  his embellishments are an Australian tradition of that era. Tall stories - part fact, part hope, part joke - were a huge part of bush culture.  It wasn’t just to entertain or to impress (although entertainment was a big part of it) I think it was also a sign of Australian society back then.  Many in those days were the grandchildren of convicts, poor Irish bonded servants, Aborigines, prostitutes, whatever  - all fashionable ancestries in Aus today, but as you’d know, at that time a massive social disadvantage.  So families and individuals who were working their way up to respectability drew a veil over less respectable elements, and often concocted brilliant and colourful alternate histories.  I know this  is not specific to Australia, but I think in Aus in that era the  sheer numbers were much higher than in more settled societies.  

And  my feeling is that it  wasn’t done only to save face, but also to stop others feeling awkward, and your father says as much when he tells the story of the girl with the illegitimate baby - he asks his mate to tell a cover story that will save everyone from feeling embarrassed. 

And of course I think that many of the men who came back from WW1 found themselves almost embarrassed by what they perceived were the expectations of the next generation for exciting stories of heroism - as an aside, my grandfather (the grandson of a convict re-packaged as an English shopkeeper) was at Gallipoli, but the story he told in the 1940s & 50s was that he had been an Australian Light Horseman in the desert. His war record shows that he was an infantry gunner at Gallipoli and then the Western Front. It  also shows that his only ‘war wounds’ were a couple of stops in hospital for VD. I imagine it seemed better to tell his kids stories about riding in charges across the desert with an ostrich feather in his hat than to tell them that war was not only terrible, but it was also frequently uncomfortable and a bit grubby. 

 

Anyway, I’m sure there’s nothing there you wouldn’t already know, I just wanted to stress that I’m a long way from passing judgement. If I can keep going a bit longer, I have a couple more hoax stories I’ve discovered while researching Turkish POWs that might give you a laugh:

The first concerns the Imp War Mus and I must say that the LG memoir is not the wildest bit of fiction they have on their shelves about prisoners of the Turks.  (and you’re right, someone should tell them ;-)  )   When I first started this research I went through their reading list, which recommends a memoir called ‘The Legion of Marching Madmen’ by W.J.Blackledge.  The book  is about a soldier captured by the Turks after the Siege at Kut, and his amazing escape.  It makes the LG story look quite tame – the narrator is an American in the British army who, in between fighting for the Empire,  goes to seedy Arab gambling dens, has affairs with Turkish dancing girls, one of whom offers to help him escape from Kut via a tunnel under the desert (what is it with tunnels? ) . The narrator refuses, because only a rat would abandon his fellow soldiers, and is captured at the surrender. After a gruesome march into the desert, he pulls out the pistol he’d kept hidden in his shirt, and has a wild shoot out in which he kills a dozen or so Turks. But tragically his lovely dancing-girl  girlfriend  (who is so devoted she followed him into captivity) is also killed. He later  escapes by riding all the way across Turkey clinging to the roof of a speeding train.   

The book contains several photos of Kut, which has persuaded a number of libraries as well as the IWM to classify it as a ‘personal narrative’ .  I expect if it had been illustrated with hand drawings of dancing girls dodging bullets, and soldiers in Stetsons with six-shooters clinging to the roof of trains, (and if anyone had actually read it), they might have discovered  that Blackledge was a popular author in the  1930s who also wrote ‘Death squads in Morocco’ ,  ‘Hell’s Broth Militia’ , ‘Peninsula of death’ and many other exciting novels.  

Mind you, I don’t blame them, its much easier to suss these things out in the era of google than it was a decade ago, but it’s a cautionary tale for people who think that oral history is unreliable, and that printed stuff in a museum is always dinkum.

 

The second story is a bit more like your father’s case, in that it was a ‘real’ story by a real soldier.  Alexander Sast was a Russian-born  Australian soldier, who turned up in Archangel in June 1916, claiming to have been captured by the Turks at Gallipoli, escaped into Bulgaria, walked up the frozen Danube and then all the way across Russia so that he could hand himself in to the British consul in Archangel and get back to the lines.  The Australian War Memorial gave me his name (as a genuine ‘escapee’) so I got hold of his file.

Sast  was certainly at Gallipoli, and then went wounded to Egypt in June 1915, which was the last he was heard of until he turned up in Archangel a year later.  His file also has the records of his interviews by Military police in England and the story is full of obvious holes. He says he was captured in one location, but his unit (who haven’t seen him for a year) say they were never there, and he cant recall the names of any of any men he fought with or his commanding officer at the time. He says he was captured after a hand to hand fight with a Turk who bayoneted him but then changed his mind and decided to take him in alive. (In an amazing coincidence the scar from this wound is in exactly the same place as the shrapnel wound which his medical file says took him to hospital in Egypt.)  Like Blackledge, Sast describes being tortured by the Turks, strung up by the wrists on a pole until he faints, and then sent off to a labour camp.  After more cruel treatment he manages to bribe his way out of the prison camp, with a bag of 20 gold sovereigns that he very fortunately had concealed around his waist at the time of capture (lucky those coins didn’t fall out when he was bayoneted, nor when he was strung up by the wrists and tortured!),  and for the rest of his story that bag of sovereigns gets him out of one single sticky situation after another.

Reading the file, the MPs were obviously very doubtful about his story, but couldn’t prove anything, and Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert Murdoch, and just as fond of a good story to sell papers) interviewed Sast and publicised the story very widely in Aus.   Australian papers christened Sast ‘the Slavanzac’ , and Murdoch made much of his ‘true Australian sincerity’, his ‘openness and honesty’ etc . Apparently you only had to look into his ‘clear blue eyes’ to know that every word this fine young Australian spoke was ‘true’.  I wont go into the million details that (with the benefit of today’s access to military records) are obviously false , you get the idea. 

Sast and your Dad would have given each other a run for the prize as best story-teller. I suspect that  Sast deserted in Egypt after getting out hospital, got a job on a ship which took him to Archangel, (he’d been a seaman before the war),  then got sick of that and decided to go back to the army.  The interesting thing about Sast is that even though his story was big news in Australia during the war, afterwards when other soldiers were writing books and making speeches about their amazing escapes, Sast the Slavanzac went quiet, and never mentioned it again. I wouldn’t be surprised if a story he told to get out of a tight spot and explain his year AWOL  got away from him , and later on he preferred to let it die down rather than face questions from his mates.   

 

Anyway, I’ve taken enough of your time, I just wanted to write and thank you for the tip on the book. 

Cheers

Trish

 

 


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page

Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 28/11/2011 : 05:17
I got mail from a lady called Sue Paton in Sydney this morning. She went looking on the internet for James Prince, one of my uncles and tripped over the stuff on OG which blew her away. I'm talking to her and have copied her mail to the other members of the family and friends who helped me research An Australian Life.

Tinternetwebthingy is wonderful!


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 28/11/2011 : 07:06
Just realised as I do my morning trawl of the site that Sue is the lady who posted about James William Prince, my uncle Jim!

Mail me Sue! Use the address at the bottom of my post (Substitute @ obviously)


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart


36804 Posts
Posted - 29/11/2011 : 06:43
Sue is plugged into the LG network. She's going to find a lot of lost relatives. Brilliant!


Stanley Challenger Graham




Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk Go to Top of Page


Set us as your default homepage Bookmark us Privacy   Copyright © 2004-2011 www.oneguyfrombarlick.co.uk All Rights Reserved. Design by: Frost SkyPortal.net Go To Top Of Page

Page load time - 0.469