Patrick’s eldest son, William, enlisted in July 1940, a month before his 20th birthday. This was just after the evacuation of the Army from Dunkirk, and in the early stages of the Battle of Britain. He joined the Royal Air Force. Furthermore, he volunteered for aircrew duties. (All aircrew were volunteers.) The Military Training Act…
All posts tagged Great War
A father’s dilemma (2)
In the Great War, Patrick spent long enough at the front line (just over two years in three separate spells, from August 1914 to May 1918) to have formed definite opinions about which branch of the army should be avoided to maximise chances of survival. When he was conscripted back in to the Army in…
1938: A father’s dilemma
The Great War was sometimes called “the war that will end wars”. The phrase was first used by HG Wells in an article that appeared in the Times (of London) in August 1914. Variations of the original version have been used by many writers and commentators over the years. By 1938, it was clear that…
Time in the Reserves
As a Section B reserve, Patrick received a retainer of 3 shillings and 6 pence (3s 6d) per week. This is roughly equivalent to £25 in today’s terms. He could only be called upon in the event of a general mobilisation. He was required to attend an annual training camp of three to four weeks.…
Shells
Some, perhaps most, of the statistics in WW1 are difficult to comprehend. With the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to say that things should have been done differently. Of course they should. In the words of the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Politicians…
A legal matter
Family folklore records the visit to Brighton of (still unidentified) relatives of Patrick ahead of his proposed wedding to Edith in 1920. The story is that they endeavoured to ensure that Patrick’s bride-to-be would convert to Catholicism and that subsequent children would be raised as Catholics. The exact nature of Patrick’s response is not known.…
A good theory – while it lasted
First published in 1687, in Latin, the ideas contained within ‘Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ are better known as Newton’s Laws of Motion. These laws work extremely well in most cases. Over time, certain minor discrepancies began to be noticed. For example, the orbit of Mercury does not quite accord with the theory. Einstein came up…
The quick and the dead (and the living)
I have been unable to find any evidence that there was a formal training scheme to help disabled ex-servicemen become hairdressers. The most usual route into the profession was to be trained by a skilled man. I have a picture of Patrick standing outside his place of work. The Gloster Toilet Saloon was situated at…
Labourer to hairdresser
The fact that Patrick is missing from the 1921 census (see The Irish Pimpernel) is doubly frustrating due to the amount of information recorded on that occasion. The occupation and place of employment are both part of the census return. For example, his brother-in-law Ernest Delves worked as a Suction Gas Plant Attendant at John…
From Dewsbury to Brighton
Following my visit to the back-to-Backs in Birmingham, I started to think about Patrick’s accommodation in both Dewsbury and Brighton either side of the First World War. In 1911, Patrick, following eight years’ service in the Army, was living at 20 Elmwood St, Dewsbury. He shared the house with his widowed sister Mary Muldoon and…