A Lancashire Past

About the Book

This book concerns a vanished world. From 1926 birth, the year of the General Strike in the UK, the life of, and significant influences on, a working-class boy. Industrial Lancashire location bordering the Yorkshire Dales. Family struggles in the cotton industry and a World War I diversion. Active participation in Trade Unionism and local Labour party by Father and Grandfather. Father, ex officio. Three siblings, all soon initiated into the connection between work and money, coupled with the necessity for food production from hens, allotments and the countryside. Parental marriage breakdown. Rescue by loving, extraordinary grandparents. Overcrowding and a nomadic lifestyle. Father, increasingly politically active. Secretary of local branch of Communist party. Author, soon a trusted messenger. Surreptitiously collecting correspondence ‘officially’ considered seditious and earlier feared intercepted by 1930s’ Special Branch. Family habitually and totally committed to the open air and associated rural pursuits. Rambling, cycling YHA. And at a time long before total motorised domination and ecological concerns. Blessed with an above-average brain, selected at ten years for grammar school education, in a pioneering wave of local working-class children thus ‘privileged’. An educational system and atmosphere unprepared for and unwelcoming to the children of artisans.Enthusiastic sporting commitment, mirroring the wider family involvement. A stubborn adolescent, determined to resist family wishes and pressure to follow higher education, joining the war-time labour force aged sixteen.

About the Author

Working-class Lancashire; born 1926 in a cotton textile town. Original family was of flexible character, possessed sporting abilities, and held free-thinking social values, passed down to descendants. A childhood of rural wanderings in Lancashire/Yorkshire borders. A scholarship grammar school education was abandoned at age sixteen to join the World War II workforce. Engineering apprenticeship, on the, then, secret and revolutionary Whittle jet engine. Higher education continued by day-release and extended night classes. Married at twenty-one to talented local dancer spasmodically attached to London blitz escapees, Sadlers Wells Ballet Company. A marriage lasting sixty-two years. Together shared thirty-five years life of developing progress at successive RR factories to senior management level. A family of one daughter and one son. Left RR for directorships at the UK base of a Swiss company of precision machine tool manufacturers. Simultaneously an evening, senior visiting lecturer in management subjects at a nearby college of further education. Disillusioned departure from industry, to share with wife the purchase and eleven-year operation of a small, private hotel in Cumbria. Sold the hotel and for seven years jointly operated a business of antiques and collectables. Associated wide caravanning tours of the continent seeking stock for the home business. Despite two years of devoted parental home-nursing of daughter, lost to leukaemia. Wife, devastated, relapsed into Alzheimer’s. For five years, nursed at home by author. Widowed 2008. Cathartically wrote this story. Son and daughter-in-law, both graduates, with one daughter. An accomplished dancer, including ballet, she is following in the footsteps of her grandma.