Grandad's Story | An Introduction

Welcome, grandchildren. I have constructed this web site to tell you about something I have written called 'Grandad's Story', of which each of your mothers has a copy on a computer disc.

Why have I done this? Well, I didn't know either of my grandfathers, and I often wonder what they would have been able to tell me about their lives, especially when they were young, if I had had a chance to ask them. This is my chance to tell you something about my younger days, in the hope that one day you yourselves will be curious enough to have a look at 'Grandad's Story'.

When I was born my parents named me James Anthony Young. The James was not surprising, as many of my relatives were called James (and still are!). But where did the Anthony come from? It was actually the name of my uncle Tony, who had died a hero in the First World War. There are a couple of articles towards the end of 'Grandad's Story' which will tell you more about him, but in the meantime here is an old photograph of him taken in 1915.

Uncle Tony was killed in action in 1916. I was born 15 year later, on 30 July 1931, in Drum Cottage, just outside Larbert, in Scotland. Some years later my family moved to East Lodge, and just before the Second World War started we moved again, this time to 41 Plantation Cottages. Here are some photos taken of me during those early days.

If you would like to see some more photos of your ancestors and hear about what I did in my young days, let me know and I will point you to another web site.

To send me an email, just click on the following link:

oldbore@googlemail.com

Sponsors

INTRODUCTION

"WHY DID THEY WALK SO FAST IN THE OLDEN DAYS, DADDY?"

My children used to ask me that question when they saw old newsreels on the television, as all the pedestrians seemed to be going along at a hundred miles an hour, to say nothing of the cars and buses. Actually, they were not really going that fast, they only seemed to be. The reason was that the early cameras worked more slowly, so that when the old films were run on modern equipment everything seemed to be moving much more quickly than it actually had been. I believe a technique has been developed to compensate for this, so you seldom see any of these fast walkers nowadays.

The films that Susan, Carol and Helen were watching were made when their grandparents were young. They were able to ask Granny Alexander herself about the olden days, as she did not die until 1995, when she was eighty years old. My own grandmother, Kate Ginnell, was 89 when she died. My other grandmother, Mary Ann Young, was also quite old when she died. The only time I saw her, she was in bed and too ill to recognise me. I did not know either of my grandfathers. They were both dead by the time I was born in 1931. One was James Young, a horse trainer, of Derreen, Cloneygowan, Ireland, who died in 1905 at the age of 38 as a result of being thrown from a horse. The other was James Ginnell, a farmer, who is buried with his wife Kate in Fore churchyard, County Westmeath. I doubt if any of these grandparents of mine ever saw a film. They would certainly not have seen a television set. I wonder what my grandchildren will see that I will not: excursion trips to the moon?

One advantage my grandchildren have is to be able to see and hear themselves on video film, as I was lucky enough to be able to buy a video camera on my sixtieth birthday, and I hope that it or its successors can be handed down through the family. Another technological miracle I have been able to acquire is a word processor, which, now that I am retired, I am using to record memories of my own younger days in the hope that they may be of some interest to my grandchildren, and perhaps their children as well. I shall not blame them if they are not interested; I am sure no one else will be, since as far as I know neither I nor any of my ancestors have been famous in any way, except perhaps my uncle Tony, who was killed in action in the First World War, and in memory of whom I was given my second Christian name. Before his death he took part in an heroic exploit which earned him both the Distinguished Conduct Medal and a mention in Rudyard Kipling's book 'The Irish Guards in the Great War'.

According to various cousins, our grandfather James Ginnell (1861 - 1926) was either the brother or the cousin of Laurence 'Fighting Larry' Ginnell (1852 - 1923), Member of Parliament for Westmeath and member of the First Dail (Irish Parliament), in which he was appointed Minister for Propaganda. The Irish have a great devotion to their 'Heroes of the Revolution', but from the information I have gleaned about him, Laurence seems to have been something of a 'bolshie' character, even among revolutionaries, and perhaps for that reason never seems to have attracted, even in death, the same devotion as colleagues such as De Valera or Michael Collins.

James Anthony Young

CHAPTER ONE

"WHAT WAS IT LIKE WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG?"

I have only a very vague recollection of living in Drum Cottage, the house in which I was born on 30 July 1931. I was still quite young when we moved from there to East Lodge, which I remember much more clearly, as I was about seven or eight years old when we moved again to 41 Plantation Cottages, from which I went to do my Army service and then to the Civil Service and England. All three houses belonged to the Stirling District Mental Hospital, in which my father worked, East Lodge actually being within the grounds, next to what was known as the 'Back Gate', which was kept closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, although the staff were able to come and go through a little wicket gate to which they had a key. My sister Marian and I were able to play quite happily on the road at those times. It didn't bother us that we were actually playing inside the grounds of a mental hospital. Our lives were in fact very much tied up with the hospital. My father and mother had worked there before they met and married. Like many other young Irish people they had come to

Scotland to find work. I still have the letter that was sent to my father on 24 February 1927 offering him his job at a salary of twenty-five shillings and nine pence per week with free board and lodgings. Both he and my mother came from large families and there was not enough work in rural Ireland for everyone. He was called James, as was his father, and he called me James too, although he gave me the second name of Anthony, after my Uncle Tony, and I was always called Tony at home.

East Lodge was an old house even when I lived there. It was all on one floor, though the attic was converted into a large bedroom, in which I slept. The main living room had a kitchen range on which my father used to make toast, using one of those old-fashioned toasting-forks which you could lengthen when your hand got too hot. I remember him once giving me a slice of bread spread with brown sauce, which I thought was delicious. There was a smaller room in which I remember my parents boiling a kettle on a Tilley stove, which you had to pump to keep going. At the other end of the house was a bathroom, reached by a long corridor on which I had great fun with a large clockwork crocodile which someone had given me for Christmas. Another Christmas present I remember was a plywood cut-out of a log with Wait Disney's seven dwarves walking along it. You had a little pop-gun from which you fired corks at the dwarves to knock them down. This was before the Second World War, during which such elaborate presents would have been no longer available. I suspect they were lavished on me by friends of my parents among the nursing staff.

Leading off the corridor on one side were two smallish bedrooms, and on the other side was the 'parlour', which we did not use very often until my father acquired a Philco radio, which we always called the 'wireless' - I could never understand why, as it always needed a wire aerial which ran from the house to the top of a long pole erected at the bottom of the garden. I remember sitting in the parlour listening to the reports of Mr. Chamberlain's visit to Herr Hitler in Munich to try and avoid war. A plane flew over the house and my father said 'That will be him coming back now'. He must have made quite a detour to fly home via Larbert!

Kathleen, the younger of my two sisters, was born in East Lodge. All I remember about that event is my mother being in bed in the day-time, which was unusual, and various people calling at the house. Perhaps it was some of those visitors who sent me to the hospital shop to buy ice cream. It was a

/ cont.

warm day and ice cream was dripping freely by the time I got back with my hands full of cones. 'The baby', as we called her for some time afterwards, was christened Kathleen Pauline after our maternal grandmother Kate Ginnell, and because she was born on 29 June 1936, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Marian had been born three years earlier, on 5 November 1933, her name being derived from those of our paternal grandmother, Mary Ann Young. Marian's second name was Bernadette, after the patron saint of our parish, St. Bernadette's, Larbert.

Going shopping from East Lodge was quite an expedition. We had to walk the length of the hospital grounds, out past the front lodge, across the Tryst golf course down Tryst Road and into 'The Village', which is the name we gave to Stenhousemuir, where there was quite an extensive Co-op. and other shops. Fortunately our pram was one of those low-bodied ones you see in old photos, with three slats, the middle one of which could be removed so that two of us could put our feet in the space when we got older. However, when there was shopping to be carried the older ones had to walk.

Another memory of East Lodge is of sitting having breakfast and my father calling out 'lt's the half hour!'. Half past eight was the magic time by which I had to be out of the house to catch the bus for school. Assuming school started at nine, I don't know how I was ever on time, as I had a long walk to the front gate of the hospital and along Bellsdyke Road to the top of Tryst Road to catch a bus to take me the four miles or so to St. Francis's School in Silver Row, Falkirk.

St. Francis's was an old school. It was lit by gas lamps, and in the infant class we used slates and slate pencils. I remember my fellow pupils laughing at my pronunciation of the word 'three', which I pronounced as 'tree' like my Irish parents. I was told it should be pronounced 'free'. Our teacher, Miss Malley, was an elderly, motherly person, unlike those in the higher classes, especially Miss Silcock. who seemed to have it in for me, especially if I did not know my multiplication tables, for which offence she made me stand in the corner.

One of my memories of St. Francis's is of the 'banana incident', as my grand-daughter Jenni calls it. In those days there were no school lunches and we had to take sandwiches etc. in our school bags. As we were trooping out at lunchtime one of the teachers held up a banana and asked if anyone had dropped it, but no one claimed it. We must have been an honest lot, as bananas were quite a delicacy. When I got home that night my mother asked if I had enjoyed the banana she had put in with my lunch as a special treat. I hadn't, but I bet the teacher did! Another 'special treat' was to be given a slice of Christmas pudding, the strong, tantalizing smell of which clung to the inside of my school bag for a long time afterwards.

After a few years at St. Francis's, I progressed to Meeks Road School, also quite small but more modern, and with the advantage of being near the Falkirk Public Library, which had a very large children's section. I made full use of this, even once committing the crime of returning a book on the same day that I had borrowed it, much to the annoyance of the two elderly assistants who made it clear to me that I must not read a book in less than a day. My first teacher at Meeks Road was Mr. Fitzpatrick, an avuncular but no-nonsense man who rewarded myself and a classmate for some essay or other by arranging for us to have a trip to the town incinerator.