The photo above is of my maternal grandfather William. He was born on 19 April 1895 in East London to a relatively poor working class family and was the eldest of ten siblings. I am not certain when he left school but it would have been in early teenage and he got a job at a bank (Comptoir National d'Escomte de Paris) in the City of London as a junior working his way up. In 1914, as a 19-year-old, he was called up to the Royal Horse Artillery in the First World War. The photo is of him in his uniform.
As a child, I used to hear him speak of Mons, Ypres, the Somme and Passchandaele, but it meant very little to me until I grew older. All I know is he fought in all those battles and must have seen many horrific things, but rarely spoke about the detail. He preferred to practice his French on me, when I started learning it at school, saying that he had learned it as he passed through Belgian villages asking for food.
In the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, he was badly wounded. He had a leg wound and lost an eye. He used to speak more of his concern for the gun carriage horse Smiler who was killed by the blast alongside him. He was moved back to England and into a military hospital until he recovered. He had a glass eye - his original one apparently donated to a museum in Northampton (so I am told). I used to have terrible trouble as a child knowing which eye to look him in, when I spoke to him, as it didn't occur to me that the glass eye was the one that didn't move.
After the war, he returned to the bank in London to take up duties there again. However, he had to add up long columns of figures (no calculators in those days) and the strain on his good eye made it hard. One day, walking across London Bridge, a piece of grit flew into his good eye and he got a very bad eye infection which made things a thousand times worse. In the end the bank had to dismiss him, as he could no longer do the job. It was the early 1920s and the economy was not great. He moved his wife and small child (my mother) to Essex, where he set up a small-holding with goats and chickens, hoping to sell the eggs for a living, but times were hard and they often had no money coming in at all. Eventually he worked in his younger brother's electrical firm earning a pittance as a storeman. I recall he used to get very bad headaches as the shrapnel moved around his body and he was as thin as a rake. He never earned enough to afford his own home, so rented until the day he died in 1977 aged 82.
I always think of him on Remembrance Day and the sacrifices he and so many like him made. But for them, we would not be living the life we live now.
3 comments:
My grandfather, also born 1895, was gassed and had an awful cough. They never talked about it. It is terrible to think we could be heading towards that kind of thing again.
I remember meeting your grandfather when he and your grandmother were staying with your parents (1968-1969).
He was such a cheerful, friendly gentleman, I was so unaware at the
time of all that he had endured in his life.
Iam so glad to have met him. Another unsung hero. I remember he was so proud of you.
I salute William. To lose an eye is an awful thing but I guess that he was just glad to come out of that war alive - like my two grandfathers who both fought at The Battle of the Somme though they never met each other.
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