Origins – My Parents

 

           

My origins lie in southern England's rural heartland – in tiny villages west of Newbury in Berkshire, on the Berkshire/Hampshire border.

 

            My Father

 

            My father, Frederick Charles Hall – always known as 'Charlie' - was born in West Woodhay on 23

rd

May 1882.  His father (my paternal grandfather) had been a gamekeeper.  He died of pneumonia while my father was still a child.  The story is that he developed it after being out all night in the rain pursuing poachers.  My grandmother, still a young and (so I am told) attractive woman, was left a widow with two young children, my father and his younger sister Emily, whom I always knew as 'Auntie Sis'. My grandmother married again, a small farmer near Enborne, just a few miles away. His surname was Hutchins but his Christian name I have never known.  They then had two sons, Bert and Bill, my father's half-brothers.

 

            Sadly my grandmother then also died. My father and his sister were totally orphaned while still children.  They were, to a large extent, brought up by a widowed aunt living nearby. She was Emily Paulin, a widow living with her son Ernest, after whom I was destined to be named, and her unmarried sister Anne Attewell.  Ernest Paulin, whom my father had regarded as a brother, was killed in World War I. As a child my father's two aunts were always known to me as Auntie Tem and Auntie Annie. They never failed to remember me at Christmas and on my birthdays.  They both survived, in their comfortable thatched cottage near Enborne, till well after the end of World War II, and I was pleased to be able to take my wife Heather to meet them soon after we were married.

 

            On the death of his stepfather, my father's half-brother Bert, took over the family farm while Bill secured the tenancy of a farm in Rutland.  Bert married another Annie Attewell, a niece of my father's Aunts Annie and Emily, and they settled together on the farm but remained childless.  My father remained in touch with them.  They were a very likeable couple and I visited them at the age of 17, with my parents, in 1938.

 

           

Into the Army

 

            My father seemed destined for a life as a farm labourer on his half-brother's farm.  It was not a destiny that appealed to him. He was 'good with horses', so in 1901 at the age of 18, he enlisted as a trooper in the 17

th

Lancers, a prestigious cavalry regiment that, less than fifty years earlier, had taken part in the famous 'Charge of the Light Brigade' in the Crimean War.  He was thus briefly, one of Queen Victoria's 'Redcoats'!

 

 Quite unlike his son I'm afraid, my father had a distinguished military career. He served briefly in South Africa in the aftermath of the South African War and was a member of the British Expeditionary Force in France within weeks of the declaration of war in 1914.  This was the force referred to by the Kaiser as 'General French's 'contemptible little army'.  It was a designation that was accepted with pride.  One of my father's proudest possessions was the bronze medal that marked him as one of General French's 'original Old Contemptibles'!

 

           

In September 1915 my father was granted leave to come back to England and marry my mother, Emily Clark, formerly of Enborne.  They were married by special licence in Enborne Church – which, with my son, daughter-in-law and grandson – I was able to visit on Boxing Day 2007.

  

 

Because of my father's skill with horses he was transferred to the Royal Army Veterinary Corps and served in Egypt, in Palestine and finally in Salonica.  He  rose through the ranks from Trooper to Corporal to Sergeant to Staff Sergeant to Warrant Officer, finally reaching the rank of War Substantive Warrant Officer Class 1 – Regimental Sergeant Major, as far as any soldier who had no aspirations to become an 'officer and a gentleman' could go.  He held six campaign medals among which was the French Medaille d'Honneur, in silver with laurel leaves, that was accompanied by a certificate signed by the then French President M. Poincaré.  One of my deep regrets is that I was never sufficiently interested to ask my father what he had done to earn this rare honour.

 

            At the end of the war my father was posted to Tidworth on Salisbury Plain.  It was in the Military Hospital there that I was born on 18

th

May 1921.

 

           

Back into Civvies!

 

           

In 1922, when I was one year old, my father was discharged from the Army.  He had served 21 years and was entitled to a small pension.  If he had stayed on he would, at least for the time being, have lost his wartime substantive rank of Regimental Sergeant Major and reverted to Staff Sergeant.

 

            I feel that in later life he must often have regretted his decision to leave the army at that time.  Certainly he never again enjoyed the status of being the senior non-commissioned officer in a small garrison town – nor, I think, did he ever earn as much as he was receiving before his discharge.  As I grew into my teens I realized that he did have a certain bitterness and feeling of failure – it would have been astonishing if he hadn't – but he certainly never took it out on my mother or myself.  I couldn't have wished for a better father, or one more determined to make sure that I did better than he had.

 

            My very earliest memories are of living in furnished rooms on Plumstead Common near Woolwich at the age of three.  We were living with a Mrs Cotter and her daughter Bertha.  As far as I was concerned Bertha was simply 'a big girl' but whether she was six or sixteen I have no idea!  My father had a clerical job of some sort at the Woolwich Arsenal.  I was an only child (it never occurred to me that I might one day have a brother or sister) and my parents were keen that I should 'mix' with other children.  They therefore spent money that I'm sure they couldn't afford on sending me to a tiny private school (really not much more than a day nursery) called Miss Peckitt's where I did indeed mix with other kids.  It was there that I first discovered my ability to remember and retain in my memory pieces of verse – without even trying to learn them!  Here's one that I picked up at Miss Peckitt's – rubbishy doggerel, that try as I might, I can't erase from my brain!

 

 

The bison's a kind of buffalo,

Not found in our own land you know,

But in the Rocky Mountains strange

That great American mountain range

 

It isn't even true!  Nowadays the bison is found only in zoos and wild life parks and, in any case, it was a plains animal wasn't it?

 

            In 1926, when I was just five, my father really felt that he was being given a second chance.  The Territorial Army in Ipswich wanted a permanent staff instructor to, among other things, teach riding and the care of horses.  He applied for the job and, not surprisingly, was successful.

 

            He was back in uniform again – with only a sergeant's stripes but nevertheless doing what he did best.  When I was just a bit older, eight or nine perhaps, I would be playing out with my friends on a Saturday afternoon ('in the bad old days', kids were free to play unattended more or less where they liked!) and would sometimes see my Dad on horseback in the outskirts of the town, in uniform, proudly leading his troopers as they exercised their horses and gained experience in horsemanship.  The TA went to their 'annual camp' at Landguard Fort, Felixstowe (near where the new container port is situated).  My Mum and I went to Felixstowe on holiday at the same time and met up with my dad when he was off duty.

 

Those were happy years.  Dad was 'someone' again.  We moved from furnished rooms into a small terraced rented house in Ipswich's Bramford Lane.   It was a modern jerry-built house that left a lot to be desired but it was the first

real

home my parents had had since leaving the army.  We became active members of the local church and made new friends.  My Dad who, in the army, had learned to play any stringed musical instrument, formed with others a small dance band connected with the church.  We were members of a community.

 

It didn't last.  In 1931, the Territorial Army was modernised, downsized and rationalised. My dad lost his job.  He tried for a number of posts. As well as being, by then, '

very

good with horses', he could type and write fluent, grammatical and properly spelt letters and could keep accounts – but he was by now nearly 50 and considered too old.  In the end rescue came from his former Commanding Officer in the TA – a Lieut.Col. Castle, who in civilian life, was senior partner in a local veterinary practice.  He offered my dad a job as Clerk, Dispenser, Veterinary Nurse and general dogsbody.  The pay wasn't good and because dogs and other animals that were hospitalised had to receive attention, the hours were erratic and often unsocial.  With his army pension though it was enough to keep us just a shade above the poverty line and to allow me to carry on at the Northgate Secondary School in which I had secured a place.

 

And that was the job that my Dad did until his death in November 1939.  He had attempted to volunteer for a local Anti-Aircraft Battery on the outbreak of war but was rejected because of his age.  He was certainly pleased that I was in the army – and I was glad about that.  It really didn't take me long though to realize that there was no way I would emulate his army career! 

 

For several weeks his doctor treated him for 'severe indigestion' before he died, quite suddenly, of a coronary thrombosis.  He was only 57 – I am now 30 years older than that!   The doctor wrote Angina Pectoris on the death certificate.  That, of course, only named the symptoms, not the actual cause of death.  They were symptoms (acute chest pain with a pain radiating down to the left elbow) that only a few years later I would have recognised as being angina – and I would have thought the doctor should have recognised them then!

 

However, there was a war on – even if it was at that time only a 'phoney' one – and we all had other things to think about.   In a way I'm glad that he didn't live to know that I was a POW (he wouldn't have known that I was a natural survivor!) and that I came out of the army with the same undistinguished rank with which I had enlisted.

 

He would have been  proud though of his two grandsons, and of his  daughter-in-law (Heather's) prowess as a wife and mother despite physical frailty.  He would certainly have been astonished to learn that his three great-grandchildren were all university graduates and that two of them were prospering overseas!  I was always supposed to be a 'delicate' child 'with a heart murmur'.  He certainly wouldn't have expected me to be still around at 87 – an age that very few people attained in his day.

 

My Mother

 

My mother was born on 18

th

March 1888, the sixth child of a family of ten, five boys and five girls, all of whom survived into at least late middle age.  Her home was one of a pair of thatched cottages standing alone in a lane within the parish of Enborne, a couple of miles outside Newbury.

 

Her parents, my grandparents, were James Clark and his wife Alice, formerly Alice Blackwell.  I have heard recently from a Canadian distant relative (the grand-daughter of my mother's oldest sister!) that Alice had, in fact, formerly been a Miss Alice Crosse-Blackwell, which suggests some connection with the pickle and canned foods firm.  She was, so my Canadian 'cousin' claimed, the daughter of a well-to-do family in the area, who had disowned and disinherited her when she had eloped with the son of their gardener!

 

Some credence is given to this story by the fact that James and Alice were only 22 and 20 respectively at the time of their marriage in 1877 and that their first child and eldest daughter Annie, was born in the same year.   I would like to think it is true.    It would add a little romance and colour to an otherwise not-very-exciting family tree.   I do know that my grandfather was a staunch Liberal supporter, unusual in the depths of rural Berkshire in Victorian times, and that he had no time at all for the 'hunting' set.   One of my mother's possessions (that I disposed of after her death!) was the stuffed head of a fox mounted on a wooden plaque, which she had inherited from her father.  It was one that – to the disgust of followers of 'the hunt' – he had shot and proudly displayed in his home.

 

My Canadian 'cousin' also claimed that her grandmother (James and Alice's eldest daughter), who had emigrated to Canada on her own at the end of the nineteenth century, had earned the money for her passage by regularly 'mucking out' her posh grandparents' stables!

 

James died in 1925 and Alice in 1927.  My parents and I had lived away from the area since my birth and, although I was taken to see them as an infant, I have only the very vaguest memory of a stone-flagged floor, oil lamps – and of my grandfather playfully pretending that his walking stick was a rifle with which he was about to shoot me!

 

My mother went to a village school and left to go into domestic service at the age of 12.   It must have been a very good school though – and she must have been a diligent pupil.  In later life she could do all the arithmetic that, as a housewife and mother, she needed.  She could and did write properly spelt and grammatically correct letters and she had an astonishing familiarity with much Victorian and earlier poetry and with several of Shakespeare's plays not to mention sentimental and somewhat sanctimonious ballads she had learned from the 'Band of Hope' (a child temperance organisation) of which she had been a member.

 

It is, I am sure, that it is from her that I have inherited my own love of poetry and ability to remember verse.  As a child she would have me in tears with her rendering of Prince Arthur's speech in King John 'Would you put out mine eyes? those eyes that never did, nor ever would, so much as frown on you ……' and enthral me with Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice 'The quality of mercy is not strained…..' or Mark Antony's from Julius Caesar 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen ..'

 

Her knowledge of history and geography was a bit sketchy – but she certainly wasn't so abysmally ignorant of these subjects as some contestants on today's popular tv quiz shows!   She was a first-class cook (she had, after all, been a professional!) and a more than adequate 'make do and mender' but hadn't been a great success with needlework as a child.  I had a 'sampler' that she had attempted to embroider as a child – it was stained with blood and tears!

 

I don't know a great deal about her early life 'in service' but I do know that she had a job, presumably at the very lowest level, in 'the vicarage'.   Again, she must have had a very good tutor because by the time she was in her twenties she was holding the post of 'cook' in a London Suburban Edwardian household – at The Priory, Blackheath, a 'very desirable residence' if not quite a 'stately home' that I understands still exists today.  Thus, like my father, she had risen as high as anyone with no pretensions to 'gentility' could hope to go.  I was and am very proud of both of them.  I fear that my sons haven't as much reason to be proud of me – though I know they are of their Mum.

 

My  mother's health declined as she approached her eighties. I realize now how very much she must have missed my father during those closing years. Very different from the competent, active and loving woman that I remembered for most of my life, she became prone to illness and suffered from a degree of dementia.  She died in hospital on 8

th

March 1978, just ten days before her ninetieth birthday. Heather and I had visited her, and found her in a coma, earlier in the evening.

 

My elder son Pete drove Arlene and I to Enborne on Boxing Day 2007.  We visited Enborne Church in which my parents were married by special licence, on 23

rd

September 1915, the little school (still functioning) that my mother and her siblings attended, and we saw the cottage in which my mother was born and had been brought up.  This had now been united with the adjoining property, extended and modernised to create a 'very desirable residence' worth, I would guess, almost half a million pounds.  My grandparents would have been totally astonished.

 

We also were able to pay a visit to Margaret Waterman, the widow of one of my cousins, who was still living in the neighbourhood.

 

Photos of the church, he school and the now-renovated cottage are to be found on 'my photos'.  Just click on the tab and search the photos.

 

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