Grandparents & Memories

 

Herbert Christopher Pemberton Barker:

Ladysmith, 1900

I missed out on grandparents through childhood and adolescence. Two were dead before I was born; a third was alienated by a quarrel that divided the family; only my mother's father was present in family life. Granddad Moore would come for Christmas and on odd visits to see us during the year. He said nothing about the seven operations under chloroform to save his leg, nearly lost in the trenches; and never mentioned his dead wife. He was avuncular and kind; and would tip my brother and I half-a-crown apiece as he left.

My mother said grandma Moore would have loved me. The thought of love I might have had deepened my unspoken awareness of absence and loss. Now I'm a grandfather myself and have many friends with grandchildren, I understand better the warmth, care and family stories my grandparents might have given me. Important links with ancestors were lost with their deaths, leaving survivors as isolated individuals, self-reliant but not knowing the pattern to which they belong. My grandparents' stories are almost extinct and the people themselves are all but unknown to their grandchildren and great grandchildren. 

DNA is there all the same, invisible spirals reproduced in every morsel of us that enables a laboratory to identify family members over time and estimate their relative closeness to us. We inherit traits and dispositions, whether we like it or not; and live with the consequences of our ancestors' decisions, whether we are conscious of them or not. What chances brought Grandma Moore from her fishing family in Great Yarmouth to London; how did she meet Granddad Moore, a sports loving postman, son of a Walworth boot-maker? Their daughter Bessie, my mother, was born in October 1913, so her existence was secure before her father signed up with the London Rifles and headed for the Western Front.

Suppose, however, that he had been killed rather than wounded. Grandma would have been left with two children and no job and rent to pay. The survivors would have been derailed, with every expectation and option upturned. Much better that Granddad Moore lived another fifty years, steering them all to prosperity with their own home in Blackheath (London SE3). One single difference in events, decisions and their timing might have life-changing consequences. If grandparents had been apart on the night of our conception, we need never have been. Someone else would have become the apple of our parents' eyes.

I grew up in that Blackheath house, living in a comfortable lower middle class family with access to a brilliant education. If Granddad had died in 1916, it would never have been ours; if Grandma hadn't died of a brain tumour in 1943, my parents would not have bought the property from Granddad. We should have had proper grandparents to visit in their nice London semi. We should have continued to live in Surrey, a county where comprehensive education never happened. And my comprehensive education, the formative influence on my life, wouldn't have happened either. 

Thoughts like these have driven me, like so many others, to search for my grandparents and to discover all that I can about them. My motives are not complicated. I have a keen historical interest in the lives of every day people; and believe passionately that ordinary families like ours are as valuable for our knowledge of the past as those of the elites who have tended to dominate the history books. But there is an equally important emotional need behind this desire. 

I never visited grandparents in their own homes; have slight memories of only one grandfather (my mother's) and one grandmother (my father's). I want to recover them, however impossible that may be, to live with them for a while in my imagination and to recreate, if only on paper, the reality of them as brave, sentient people who struggled for better lives and in so doing helped grandchildren they barely knew. I don't want their stories and knowledge of them to disappear beyond recall, to become inaccessible to family members, now and in the future.

The more I have chased the shadows through family documents, archives, websites and libraries, the greater my interest has become. This biographical account of Herbert and Amy, my father Chris's parents, is a determined effort to rescue them from oblivion and bring them alive for the next generation. Herbert's life turns out to have been remarkable. Born into family disaster and violence he became an orphan, a runaway and cabin boy. He served as a soldier in the Boer and First World Wars, rose to the rank of Regimental Sergeant-Major, and was a postman between wars and after them. Herbert married Amy in 1905, while based in the Curragh. Together they raised four children and supported them fiercely, as we shall see. Then he fell in love.

There is another, powerful dimension to my sustained efforts to research and understand these missing grandparents. Like the celebrities on the BBC programme, my fascination with family history comes from a desire to know who I am, where I come from and how my present existence connects with Herbert, Amy and their ancestry. I was sent to one of the earliest comprehensive schools; won an exhibition to study history at Caius College, Cambridge; and a state scholarship to study the early years of the Labour Party at York University. I became the first comprehensive pupil to become head of a comprehensive; and later was a professor of education at the University of Leicester. I have written a dozen books and a lot of articles. How did Herbert's life-struggle, as a workhouse orphan and soldier, lead in two steps to my esoteric career as a teacher-intellectual, with personal circumstances not remotely connected to his? What is my inheritance? What has happened in society to make such a leap possible?

I feel well-placed to write their story; and believe that if I weary of the task it will be difficult, if not impossible, for someone else to take over the work. This is partly because you would need to be a close relative to be bothered; and partly because the circumstances of my life are the result of particular historical conditions that have enabled children from working class backgrounds to write as well as their more privileged peers. We have become privileged ourselves in terms of our access to the time, resources, education and experiences needed to make a study like this possible. I am deeply steeped in history and education as academic and practical disciplines and have learned the methods over a life-time. I hope to make as good as a job of the writing as my abilities permit. 

In addition to this good fortune, I had my father (Chris) as a vital resource; someone who lived through the years the study is about and knew most of the characters intimately. Over a period of about 40 years my