I never knew my grandfather, because he died at the age of 52, before I was born – he
died in 1933, from I think leg wounds sustained during the war – it was phlebitis and he
died, I suspect, because of those wounds, but he was a presence in the house, because
my father was very proud of what he’d done. He was my father’s father. And I know that
he had a lot of photographs of his father, both getting his medal, which was the military
medal for bravery in the field, but also for his singing ability. And there were quite
a lot of photographs of him dressed up in a fine dress suit or, I’m afraid, as a black
and white minstrel, which he did in various clubs around Lancashire. He was known as the
Lancashire Nightingale. So, my grandfather was a presence around – even though I never
actually met him.
Yes, my grandfather enlisted, he volunteered to enlist in 1916, and he went into action
in 1917 at a hill, the hill of Loos, which I understand was a terrible massacre really
of people – I understand there are about 20000 unnamed soldiers who are buried there
with just a memorial. So my grandfather was on the hill of Loos on July 24th I think it
was in 1917 and he was manning a gun – I think it was a howitzer gun and he stuck to
his gun for 8 hours – I believe all night to try to repulse a German attack. Now he
wasn’t, as far as I can make out, wounded then – he was wounded, ironically, a month
later in August and that’s when he was shipped back to England with a terrible injury to
his left leg and then he was in convalescence for quite a while and then he was given a
pension of 22 shillings a week and then went back to his former job, which was as a waterman
on the moors of Darwen but there would not have been much money in the family, I suspect,
when he was invalided out of the army.
My grandfather received the military medal and he would have received the military cross,
had he been an officer but he was a bombardier, a private soldier, so he only got the lower
order of the medal. I think he, from what my father said, felt a little bit offended by that.
My grandfather was presented with his military medal in Darwen Town Hall when he came back
from his injuries and he was presented with his medal by the mayor of Darwen, and the
mayor was very complimentary about him and my grandfather was very stoic about the medal
- and made some comment about not being in favour of strikes – I think he said something
like, ‘there are no strikes out there, my friends’ – because he felt that people
shouldn’t be striking at a time when the country was under such strain and stress.
The psychological impact, as I understand it from my father, was quite dramatic. My
father said that he went around in his nightmares shooting Germans, and shouting out in his
sleep – until he died. And there also quite a lot of sad effects because the family had
lost quite a lot of the possible income – my grandfather always said to his children, there
were three of them, ‘you will never go into the mills, I will not let you go into the
mills.’ And of course – they had to. They all went into the mills at the age of 14 because
there was not enough money to pay for their education so although my father was apparently
a very clever child, he never went on to higher education – to secondary education. So there
were all kinds of aftermaths of it, which were, I think, very sad.