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I like to keep this history section a little bit personal so, on May 14 of this year, my dad popped into the world. He was born in Battersea, in London. His parents were not, like my mother’s, particularly well-off. His father was, at the time of his wedding in 1905, shown as a clerk at the Board of Agriculture. By the time of my father’s birth, a year later, his father was shown as a draughtsman at the Board Of Agriculture and he remained, in various roles, as a civil servant for his whole working life. A civil servant is someone who works for the government. My father's mother, and therefore my grandmother, was born in York and started working life as a teacher but, weirdly, in those days, married women could not teach so when she married she stopped teaching. Both she and my grandfather were examples of the large families that people had around this time. Both of them had 9 sisters or brothers.
My father had three sisters. Here, though, tragedy enters the story, as the next born died at an early age, after falling from a table where my grandmother had briefly sat her. My father gained a scholarship to Emanuel School in Wandsworth, left there aged 18 and went to London University, Kings, where he got a BA in Classics. It appears that he had to re-sit his final year as he had spent too much time with the Gilbert and Sullivan Society.
He was a very fine piano player but I recently learnt that he could play most instruments, being particularly good with any from the woodwind section. From university, he went straight into the civil service, where he remained for over 40 years. Toward the end of his life, once I had moved into working with young people, he told me he had always wanted to be a teacher but felt he needed to experience the real world first. Unfortunately, that was where he stayed and whilst I would agree that a life going from your own school, through university and then back into school is not the best of training for teaching, the danger is that if you don’t do it immediately you may get stuck in a rut. He did; I was lucky.
Knowing your own family history can be really interesting and you can find out so much of how life was all those years ago.
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