KYQ4: Parent's 75th Wedding Anniversary

1947

25 May 2022

It would have been my parent's 75th wedding anniversary today. How times have changed since 1947. Integrity, honour and respect have been demeaned and replaced by avarice, corruption and social media.

My father had been demobbed after five years in the Eighth Army in North Africa, Greece and Italy during which time he had acquired many practical skills that he used with great effect in civvy street. He met my mother during his single leave during his time in the forces. She came along with her friend who was dating his brother who was also on leave from the RAF. My mother had left school during the war and trained as a nursery nurse, she was just 21 years old when they married. They had a honeymoon in the Langdale Hotel in the Lake District, it was their first and last hotel holiday until 1980. This was after their three children were adults and they made their first trip abroad, a train journey to Italy to revisit some of Dad's wartime locations, he was positively inclined towards both Italians and Greeks.

Like most couples of their generation, it was a life of hard work and tight budgets. For their first five years, they shared my grandparent's 2 bedroom terraced house with no bathroom or inside WC. They lived on rations, saving for the council house they were waiting for and Dad cycled 16 miles to work and back every day. They bought a tandem so that they could visit the countryside or go to Lytham for outings to escape my grandma's strict house rules and regime of mealtimes.

They had been married five years before they were allocated a council house on a new housing scheme at the edge of town. On the moving date, my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my sister who was six weeks premature. They spent a few weeks in hospital before being allowed home, I stayed with my grandparents whilst Dad prepared the house for us all to join him. The estate had about a thousand houses mainly occupied by young families. It was served by a bus every seven and a half minutes and facilities were limited to two wooden huts, one a newsagent and tobacconist and the other a greengrocer.

My father used his gardening skills, he had left school to work in a market garden, to create a fine garden that people would come to admire. My parents had bought some good quality austerity furniture including armchairs that Dad had designed with bookshelves in the arms for Dad's collection of war paperbacks. He built a radiogram, installed fluorescent lights to save electricity, and converted the fires to burn coke, a smokeless fuel, that he obtained at a discount from the gasworks. Dad had a modest wage at the local gasworks and added to it by working as a DJ at the weekend, taking his amplifier, loudspeakers, microphone, twin record dacks and boxes of 78rpm records to work's dances, garden fetes and Christmas parties. He also had a printing machine and made tickets or cards for weddings, dances, funerals and parties. Whether these activities paid for the equipment, let alone the records he bought most weeks was a moot point.

They always managed to pay the rent, the food bill from the coop was £1.60 a week and that gave a 5% dividend that was used in the summer to buy shoes and school clothes. Another £1 was spent at the market for fruit, vegetables, cheese and fish, all grown, made or caught locally. Dad resoled our shoes, Mum darned our socks, Auntie Elsie knitted our jumpers and in summer our vegetables came from the garden. The only luxuries were a packet of 10 Capstan for Dad every day, the Army had a lot to answer for this habit, and Mum had two packets of a tipped cigarette every week. They drank very little, a bottle of Mackeson for Dad and a Babysham for Mum about once a month. Life in the 1950s for the working class was on the edge of poverty but inequality was far less evident than today or at least it appeared so as conspicuous consumption was more discrete without the amplification of social media.

We had good neighbours and the street was filled with people working at English Electric (British Aerospace), Courtaulds, the cotton mills and nationalised industries like the Post Office, British Rail, Gas Boards and the building industry. The estate was filled with post-war baby boomers - 57 children living in the first 20 houses in our crescent. No one had a car although 2 houses had Bond Minis in their front gardens. They were usually mounted on bricks because the front wheel would collapse regularly. Our next-door neighbour who was a post office telephone engineer was the first to acquire a real car in 1956, a pale blue Standard 8 convertible. We borrowed it for our only holiday in 1957, a camping trip to North Wales; it rained, people spoke Welsh, Mum wanted to go home and I was chased by geese.

All other summer holidays involved either a visit to my father's brother in Northumberland or King's Lynn or wherever he lived at the time as a test pilot in the RAF or a couple of day trips on a coach to the Lake District or North Wales. Dad would occasionally hire a car for his DJ activities on Saturday night and keep it for Sunday when we would visit Mum's numerous relatives in Yorkshire. My grandma was one of 12 children, some of her brothers had been killed in the Great War but it was still a fast waltz around Denby Dale to see them all. We also had trips to the Lake District and to Oswestry to visit Auntie Elsie, my paternal grandmother's sister, who spent a couple of years in the Orthopaedic Hospital with a spinal injury.

We were a happy family in the 1950s, the house was in a good location, facing south, just a hundred yards away from the woods that ran down to the river Ribble and provided the space for all sorts of adventures. The new primary school had won design awards and had great facilities. Shops were built, the houses were well maintained, a park was created with tennis courts, a bowling green and a putting green, a new library opened, the bus service was always reliable and there were jobs for everyone. The first UK Motorway was opened beyond the local park and every new British car would appear to be tested on it in the days before speed limits. We had never had it so good with friendly neighbours and lots of friends. As a family, we were well integrated into the community.

Dad became obsessed with fishing and I would be dragged to Arnside for sea fishing with his workmates on a flat back lorry that was used for coal deliveries or taken to the river to catch roach and chubb. He briefly held the record for the largest chubb, caught in Britain with a bait of Kraft cheese slice that he had taken out of his sandwich. Fishing was not my scene, sitting on the riverbank waiting for a float to bobble or lines to tangle was time wasted. It disappointed him that I preferred playing or watching football and cricket, cycling, exploring the outdoors or worst of all train spotting. They were more sociable activities and friends were abundant on the estate.

My brother was born the day I received a letter saying that I had passed the eleven-plus. Things began to change, most of my friends went to the local secondary school. Dad was transferred by the Gas Board to work in the distribution of gas appliances. He was becoming heavily involved in local politics so his fishing was restricted apart from during our camping holidays to Scotland that became regular in the 1960s. Dad would hire a van, and load it with tents and equipment from the Army and Navy Stores. We would tour the Highlands on single-track roads camping on small sites with few if any facilities. Dad fished and cooked mainly tin food or occasionally the trout he had caught whilst Mum read books and walked. Foreign travel or hotels were elusive dreams and we never even got to Butlins.

Our mother looked after the three children until my brother started primary school when I was sixteen. She returned to work as a teaching assistant for maladjusted children in a classroom at the local primary school that had only half the number of children from when I had attended. After her mother and father died in 1966 and 1968 respectively when I was at University, my parents were able to buy a 1930s semi-detached house about a mile away. It was on the main road and not really much of an upgrade. However, with two incomes, a house and a car they were able to enjoy the fruits of their hard work until Dad was made redundant in 1975 when they regionalised the distribution of gas appliances.

He had been offered redeployment to Bolton but the travelling was too great so he set up a company selling gas appliance spares at the age of 52. Over the next twenty years, it grew to a company employing twenty people with a turnover of several £m per annum. It was all-consuming and my brother, sister and mother all spent some time working for the company. My parents bought their first new car, and the tent was swapped for a trailer tent and then a caravan. They also had the income to take an annual holiday on the Greek island of Chios, an island Dad had been involved in capturing from the Italian occupying forces. He met Greek acquaintances from the war and they became good friends during several subsequent visits

Mum did what she had always done, the most important thing any parent can do, being there for everyone. She read lots of books, looked after elderly relatives, saw her five grandchildren and tidied up after Dad. My brother was running the company and Dad could take time off but it was hard persuading him to retire. He was well into his seventies before this happened and he returned to politics, campaigning against the Iraq war and leading a campaign to save the local bus station. He ran the Gas Board pensioner's club outings and the British Legion poppy appeal. He became active on the community council ensuring that all pensioners had burglar alarms and he had the audacity to try and solve the drug problem in the area.

They had been married 55 years when Mum died after a short and unexpected illness. The surprise was that Dad outlived her by six years. He remained stubbornly principled in his beliefs as he became less mobile and declined with age. Without the quiet but sensible influence of Mum, life was hard for him. My sister, brother and I found it difficult to witness as the house was filled with clutter and he began to have accidents whilst driving his car. He was 86 when attacked by burglars and then spent 5 weeks in hospital recovering from his fingers being cut off and the resultant heart attack. He became an amateur detective to identify the burglars and through his connections in the community pieced together who they were. The grandmother of one of the attackers had been at school with Dad.

He returned home determined to have the burglars prosecuted and they were a couple of months after he died. He was accidentally gassed by a carer who left the hob on and had to be moved into a care home. He had always said he would never go into a home. I visited him the next day at the care home where he had suffered food poisoning along with the rest of the inmates. He asked me to bring him a pork pie and a packet of cigarettes, which he had given up many years earlier, I obliged knowing that his time was probably up. As I left him on a Sunday afternoon to drive home he called me back and told me what things to take out of his tool shed. I received a phone call the next morning, he had died in his sleep.

We arranged the funeral with a celebrant and I prepared the eulogy, I was told to keep to 2000 words maximum. I managed to restrict it to 3000 as I edited a longer version on the morning drive with the family to the midday service. It was a life well lived and there were well over a hundred people at the crematorium including his good friend from schooldays, Tom Finney. We had selected some of the music he played during his DJ days but it was Ella Fitzgerald singing Every time we say goodbye that filled the service with nostalgia.