Picture Archive, Stockton-on-Tees

Stockton on Tees is a small town near to Middlesbrough. My mother was born and grew up there, but although she would say she came from Stockton she actually came from a small village just North and West of there called Norton. My mother, Kathleen, was the youngest of five children - a Catholic family.

Recently I skimmed a Fabian tract on a shrinking birth-rate written by Sidney Webb in the early years of the 20th century - he was so concerned that only the Catholics and Jews were still having large families, but he needn't have worried! These are segments of society that take life seriously, when you think about it, and the children would do well. But he was a racist - he couldn't help it: he thought that the Anglo-Saxon race was about to be overwhelmed by the Jews and the Irish and that this was a terrible thing.

Early in the 20th century my Irish-named great grandfather, Michael O'Grady, was working on shipbuilding in Newcastle. In the census he specified that he worked on both iron and steel ships, I can imagine him being dogmatic about it; and the census return  shows he kept a servant as well as a wife, Isabella, and a daughter, also Isabella, and two sons. Perhaps at a time when there were fewer ships to build he did a strange thing: he left his wife and children and went to Australia. Did he promise to send them money? Did he write? I don't know. One of his sons fought and died in the Great war. The other went to visit him and eventually settled in Hastings, New Zealand, where he had a second-hand clothing shop that did quite well. He married a widow with two daughters and was comfortable. He often wrote to his sister, Isabella O'Grady the second, back in Stockton-on-Tees, and when my mother wrote to him he always sent her a Postal Order for five shillings. My mother remembers a little shrine by a window on the stairs to her other uncle, who joined the Durhams (the Durham Light Infantry) and died in France, along with rows and rows and rows of others. A photo, some medals, a prayer. His name is on the Menin Gate.

Isabella O'Grady married a veteran of the First World War. I think she might have thought herself lucky to get him, with the shortage of men about the country. His name was Harry Walker, a native of Stockton, and I think they met through church. She told my mother that he was always asking her to marry him, and she refused several times, until one day in 1919 he said to her, "You might as well marry me, you're not doing anything else." The truth of it hit home. She was already thirty one! She didn't have a job - perhaps she just helped her mother keep house, and went out each day to buy the meat and vegetables, flour and fat. They made cakes and bread; they didn't buy those. Once she dressed up in her best costume and had her picture taken, She wore a two piece costume in a light colour, a large hat, a rather vacant expression, and her Holy medals. He had been through the war and had been invalided out, gassed. He had a raking cough for the rest of his life. At this time he worked as a shop assistant, I think in a gentleman's outfitters, but the cough became a problem, and later he had to work as a gardener where the cough didn't matter so much.

After they married, babies came quickly. First Moira, a bright little girl, then three boys, Terence, Austin and Dennis. Then my mother, born twelve years after Moira, when her mother was about 45. So Isabella the second had the five children, a husband, her elderly mother, Mrs O'Grady living at home, and to make it more difficult, a prolapsed womb. My mother said she didn't think her mother paid much attention to her when she was a baby, because her mother was so busy, and that she was cared for by her Grandma and by Moira, that as soon as she could be pushed out in a pram with the other children, it was Moira who pushed her. The children, of course, played in the road, and at the end of the road was a council park, and they played there too. At night she slept with her grandma, a very pious Catholic, because, my mother said, she was a convert, "more Catholic than the Catholics". Grandma sang to her the "Guardian angel from heaven so bright" song as a lullaby.

Moira passed an exam and won a place at a posh school. She might have gone into an office to work after that but war broke out so soon after she joined the ATS. I imagine she was very good at the work she was given. What Terence did in the war I don't know. Terence and my mother didn't like each other. He was good at bursting other people's bubbles, and she wouldn't have liked that. Austin joined the Navy, until he had a nervous breakdown. Whatever happened to him in the Navy was deeply traumatic and he was never able to lead a fulfilling life afterwards. Dennis, the next brother, turned out to be C3 - he had a damaged ear-drum, and became very deaf later in life, but he was also reliable and always employed. I don't know what he did during the war. My mother was a schoolgirl in the war, and it was during this time that she became her mother's companion and pet, and she got all the attention she had wanted, and not had, from her in her early years.

Harry Walker, my mother's father, who coughed terribly, became very ill with his chest, and was hospitalised at intervals. In 1945 Isabella visited him in hospital and he said to her "I've always loved you, you know." My grandmother did not say she loved him. She had always refused to visit his family. My mother remembered walking to Thornaby with him to visit his sister, of whom he was very fond. On these walks he taught her the song of the Durham Light Infantry "We are the boys" and he also taught her music hall songs, such as - "You Can't Play in Our Back Yard Anymore" and "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep". I think he sang well. He had at times tried to lay the law down to Isabella, and she had somehow or other turned all his children against him. Although people said she was "a lovely person", my grandmother Isabella seems to me to have been spoilt and resentful. Anyway, after this hospital visit, my grandfather died, and Isabella regretted that she had not said anything kind to him, even, "I loved you, too." She had just made a face and a scornful noise. This is what she told my mother at the time, and my mother told me. He was 53 when he died and my grandmother got a war widow's pension, I believe. He has no memorial.

At some point the old lady, the first Isabella, contracted gangrene of the foot and couldn't be cared for at home any more, so she went into a hospital for old people. I don't think it was a workhouse, but it was like one. There were long wards full of the elderly. One day they visited her and there was an old lady looking miserable with a black eye and bruises. Mrs O'Grady nodded towards her and said: "She attacked one of the nurses". Nothing more was said. Mrs O'Grady was liked and respected, and was well-known in her Church. She died soon afterwards.

I look at the pictures that come up in the picture archive, Stockton-on-Tees, because I am interested in the world that my mother grew up in, and I see that the people who were her contemporaries, whose lives were documented in their schools and church outings and football teams, were amazing, cheerful people, somehow harder and sharper than we are, and it seems to me that my mother must have missed them all her life, these people who made up a society with a real sense of itself, defined in time by wars and other hardships.

Mr Britling Sees it Through by H. G. Wells

I couldn't read the last Book Group choice. It was Dr Thorne by Trollope and I struggled through about three chapters and gave it up. So I missed the meeting.

Instead I took up a book which has been on my shelf for ages. In fact, I think it was on the grandparents' bookshelves in Walton-on-Thames. (Do you remember we grew up in my grandparents house? They had gone, but when we moved in their books were still on the bookshelves and their old coats and hats were in the cupboards, old tennis rackets and hockey sticks in the hall. They were proper people with a history. But maybe I haven't written about this here.)

The book is Mr Britling Sees it Through and it is a novel, but one with no real plot; it is more like a thinly fictionalised record of how it felt to live through the first two years of the First World War. The main character, Mr Britling, is a writer like H. G. Wells, and he has a certain fame and a certain degree of comfort, and he fools around with women who are not his wife and tells himself some good reasons for this philandering - only, of course, he never calls it philandering; but he admits these serial relationships are a kind of game. A game of ego on two sides.

As well as a wife and another woman a motor-ride away, he has a young secretary, who has a young wife and sister-in-law; Mr B also has a teenage son and two younger sons, and a live-in German tutor for his son. And at the outset, he has a visiting American who is keen to gain understanding of the British way of life. All these people are caught unawares by the war and the drama comes in the way the war treats them all. The book was published in the deepest days of the war before the United States came into it. I shall type up some extracts but I believe it is all worth reading. There is a freshness and vividness about Wells, an honesty that's fresh air in a fuggy room; a shot of hard stuff.

I love the picture of the Georgians before the war - the world of rose gardens and no central heating, when women were struggling for the vote and exhilarating in a degree of independence. It's the moment that Mrs Dalloway's daughter (Mrs Dalloway: Virginia Woolf) catches a bus on her own and goes riding up the Strand just because she can; and suddenly freedom is just possible for her... she starts to envision possible careers, possible professions...

Anyway, to set the scene there's a terrific description of a hockey match involving both sexes, very like one of those old school stories, and you imagine what fun they had in the days before we all got scared of being outside.

After the war breaks out, the people of the village start a run on the village shop (Hickson's), amongst them the well-to-do neighbour Mrs Faber.

" And would you believe me," she went on, going back to Mrs Britling, "that man Hickson stood behind his counter - where I've dealt with him for years, and refused absolutely to let me have more than a dozen tins of sardines. Refused! Point-blank!

"I was there before nine, and even then Hickson's shop was crowded - crowded, my dear!"

Mr Britling is just disgusted with women who just want to be dramatic, like this. But then he starts to worry that there will be "a tremendous change in values"; he worries that all his investments will be worthless and there will be bankruptcy. He tells his wife that they may have to leave home and go somewhere safer. But he, too, is as excited as the neighbour.

"Now I am afraid - and at the same time I feel that the spell is broken. The magic prison is suddenly all doors. You may call this ruin, bankruptcy, invasion, flight; they are doors out of habit and routine ... I have been doing nothing for so long, except idle things and discursive things."

"... Writing is recording, not living. But now I feel suddenly that we are living intensely. ...There are times when the spirit of life changes altogether..."

"They speculated about the possible intervention of United States. Mr Britling thought that the attack on Belgium demanded the intervention of every civilised power, that all the best instincts of America would be for intervention. ...

"It would be strange if the last power left out to mediate were to be China," said Mr. Carmine. "The one people in the world who really believe in peace .... I wish I had your confidence, Britling."

For a time they contemplated a sort of Grand Inquest on Germany and militarism, presided over by the Wisdom of the East. Militarism was, as it were, to be buried as a suicide at four crossroads, with a stake through its body to prevent any untimely resuscitation."

Then there are reports of the atrocities in Belgium. Mr Britling's American visitor, Mr Direck, has been on the continent to see for himself, and has returned, shocked.

 "They have started in to be deliberately frightful. You do not begin to understand ... Well....Outrages. The sort of outrages Americans have never heard of. That one doesn't speak of.... Well... Rape. ....They have been raping women for disciplinary purposes on tables in the market-place of Liege. Yes, sir. It's a fact. I was told it by a man who had just come out of Belgium.

 Meanwhile, the British are unprepared and unarmed. Germany expects to win the war in weeks. Direck says:

"Germany today is one big armed camp. It's all crawling with soldiers. And every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his kit."

"And they're as sure of winning as if they had got London now. They mean to get London. ... They say it's England they are after, in this invasion of Belgium. They'll just down France by the way. ... They know for certain you can't arm your troops. They know you can't turn out ten thousand rifles a  week."

So Mr Britling's thoughts take a different turn. He stops being excited at the new world order he dreams of. The English start retreating in disorder. There are rumours of corruption in high places. And Mr Britling decides his country needs him and takes the train to London where he has contacts; he tries hard to find a role in the war machine. He wants to be of service to his threatened country, and finds that he is not alone; other men men of thirty-eight and fifty-four proclaim themselves fit enough to serve and lobby to learn to shoot and use a bayonet. But they are not wanted: the war machine can't cope with them. They have nothing to do. They feel "left out."

"The great "Business as Usual" phase was already passing away, and London was in the full tide of recruiting enthusiasm. That tide was breaking against the most miserable arrangements for enlistment it is possible to imagine. Overtaxed and not very competent officers, whose one idea of being efficient was to refuse civilian help and be very, very slow and circumspect and very dignified and overbearing, sat in dirty little rooms and snarled at this unheard-of England that pressed at door and window for enrolment. Outside every recruiting office crowds of men and youths waited, leaning against walls, sitting upon the pavements, waiting for long hours, waiting to the end of the day and returning next morning, without shelter, without food, many sick with hunger; men who had hurried up from the country, men who had thrown up jobs of every kind, clerks and shopmen, anxious only to serve England and "teach those damned Germans a lesson."

"Everywhere there were the flags of the Allies; [in London] in shop-windows, over doors, on the bonnets of automobiles, on people's breasts, and there was a great quantity of recruiting posters on the hoarding and in windows.. There were also placards calling for men on nearly all the taxicabs. "

Later on the German population in London come under suspicion and some are badly treated, but not so badly, it seems, as the English population in Germany. Mr Britling is really shocked when he reads a bale of German comic papers in the study of a friend in London. They were filled with caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of the English...

"One incredible craving was manifest in every one of them. The German caricaturist seemed unable to represent his enemies except in extremely tight trousers or in none; he was equally unable to present them without thrusting a sword or bayonet, spluttering blood, into the more indelicate parts of their persons. "... "But it's blind fury - at the dirt-throwing stage."

His friend points out: "They want to foam at the mouth. They do their utmost to foam more." and Wells incudes the lyrics of a "Hymn of Hate" which the Germans sing about England. It is extraordinary - but Britling's friend points out that this is war. "We pretend war does not hurt. They know better..."

The important character at this point is the German tutor who had taught Britling's son Hugh before the war, and had been an earnest and loveable character in the household - whenever Britling is inclined to hate the Germans he remembers Heinrich (who has gone back to his country), who "became a sort of advocate for his people before the tribunal of Mr. Britling's mind." He also remembered happy holidays in the hospitable village of the Odenwald. And then he is told of young German soldiers who have shot women and babies. In short, Mr Britling tries hard to be reasonable and understand the Germans, but at the same time the war becomes more and more savage; there is the torture of "gas", the use of flame jets...

I think I won't write more - all this is prelude to the moment that Britling's son Hugh goes to fight at the age of seventeen, and the forthright letters he sends home about the experience of fighting in the trenches form a large part of the middle of the book.

But this book has been written to record the truth as Wells saw it and felt it and experienced it; he meant it to be representative, and he meant it for posterity. It was published a hundred years ago and it still has interesting things to say. I recommend it. I shall be pressing it one everyone. It's not a great story or a great book - but there is a boldness to it that makes it remarkable. Good old Wells! what a long time he lived and how hard he worked.

Exhibition - New Zealand Hospital Community Tapestry - Mount Felix

I walked down to the Riverside Barn Arts Centre to work on the tapestry (embroidery) in the gallery, where it is on display. There was lots going on - a few people coming in to see the exhibition and quite a few stitchers working on panels. Linda showed me how to do a nice, flat stem stitch and I got on with our third panel (the Plunket family) and Linda got on with our second (the last one showing the barn and some leaves with the names of the stitchers). Here are some pictures from the exhibition.

This is the exhibition with lots of information and photographs.
 

The designer came down from Scotland to look at our progress.

Linda and Helen working in the gallery

Rydens School is working on this panel showing a "lemon Squeezer"- shaped hat with a Kiwi dreaming of Cooktown.
 

Our finished panel: Gallipoli

Detail from our finished panel (I did this bit)

A really lovely design showing Christmas at the hospital
 

Nurses with the Old Manor House - some were billeted there

One Kiwi soldier married a local girl - Miss Rosewell of Rosewell's boatyard - they met over an ivy-clad wall.

The King and Queen came to visit Mount Felix hospital (an expert sewer did this - it's amazing).

I was working on this one today - it shows the Plunket family and their servants - Michele did this. I don't know what the flowers are.

Linda is working on this one - trying hard to make the clinkers and tiles look interesting

A community tapestry is a great idea - I feel part of a community - a Walton community rather than a Weybridge one, but never mind.

Here is a link to a site with the history of the hospital