WßD ~ Chapter 7 Winding the Clock Back to 1928-1929 (Revised Edition)

Windsor Street Days

Chapter 7

Winding the Clock Back to 1928-1929

This semi-formal family photograph, we think is around 1928-1929 because my sisters and I feel that our father (Des) is about eighteen months.

Uncle Ken - Kenneth Ernest Webb (7) Grandma - Isabel Alice Webb (41) Dad - Desmond Budd Webb (18 months) Grandad - Horace Arthur James Webb (41) in the Gardens in Cheltenham (1928-29), possibly Pittville, but they could otherwise be the town gardens, with the photo being taken by Uncle Arthur (14).

I’m guessing late summer 1928 on account of Dad being about 18 months. 

This is my favourite family photograph. It came to light only after our parents had passed. We catch a glimpse of Grandma and Grandad in their prime, a glimpse too of Dad and Ken and the bond between them. It’s possible that Dad isn’t too happy, and Ken is having ‘a Jack with Finn’ moment, and telling Des to stop grizzling(!) because elder brother Arthur (14) is doing a Sam - telling everyone to keep still as he takes the photo, with only Isabel showing the restraint for which Grandma is famous. Yes, you’ve guessed it, my great nephews, now approaching 16, 12 and 18.

I like it too because I see my sisters Carol and Vanessa in Grandma, and I see my nephew Chris - Christopher JM -  in Grandad. I always have done. In the same way, his eldest son has the wonderful countenance of his Great Gran M, as well as seeing his parents in him.

As Arthur takes the photo, we see in his father, that same jovial smile in 1949 when another photograph is taken, outside St Peter’s Church.

*

And that then flies me back to a very young Horace at the time he was courting Isabel, and the proud owner of a bicycle too. On the back of this wonderful photograph, Isabel has written:

Horace November 1910 and then adding, beautifully, Horace asked me to be Engaged to him April 14th 1912 had my Ring April 19th 1912, Friday. Left Rockliffe May 1912.”

I can so, so see my sole nephew in this photograph of his great grandfather. You know, this is the thrill of writing. I do not write to publish. Rather, just for myself and for the family; so I paused just now, put the kettle on and replenished the pot!

Horace Arthur James Webb - November 1910

It also makes me so, so proud of Dad. 

So, the family must not bemoan seeing old photos in my home - I am not living in the past - I’m very much in the present but with the ability and creative imagination to reach way, way beyond the lens.

This is what happens when one becomes an archivist. I’m also a Webb, the last, so this home is very much the Webb family home, and this is of such importance I cannot emphasise enough. An eclipse always takes time to comprehend; in just the same way as it takes time to realise it is time to step back a pace and into the shadows.

I look and see what lay ahead of Ken and cannot adequately put into words my awe at what he did not flinch in doing, and stepping up to the plate when he had to. Likewise with Harry Marshall across town.

Somewhere in the archive is a piece transcribed by Ken (i.e. not written by him but copied out), probably in around 1937 at Grammar School, entitled Because He Was a Jew. Although it was centred upon the figure of Christ, it was written in order to alert the world to what was happening in Nazi Germany to the Jews.

I saw it when Grandma was alive, for Grandma gave it to me to read in the front room at 25 Windsor Street. Then it was put away, but I think I came across it again in the 1980s in Mum and Dad’s loft. It was with the poem written by Ken – I can only remember the first stanza 

There are five in the family to which I belong

Some are fat and thin and long.

Arthur with his greasy hair

Desmond with his unwashed face

Mother with her …

Father with his ….

And then the memory is blank. But I’m confident it will one day turn up. It was a real howler for sure! 

***

I look ahead and see what lay ahead of Dad and all that he accomplished, and that Dad too stepped up to the plate and would brook no argument with racism and antisemitism - in exactly the same way as his elder brother - when Dad faced down his police colleagues on the Wakefield Detective Training Course in 1966-1967 and invited the black and coloured police officers home for a couple of weekends, as well as Ralph Misfud from Gibraltar, and despite the openly racist comments by Dad’s fellow so-called ‘white’ colleagues, in their criticism of him.

But he maintained course, and one of my favourite photos is this one … his shift is paraded, and Inspector Webb, now a senior officer, is answering questions being put to him by HM Inspectors of Constabulary.

Bamfurlong Traffic Centre, Gloucestershire Constabulary

I look ahead and see Des’s letters to his mum; his anguish, his temper tantrums he speaks of, and apologising for them, and being so thankful that Nancy is now part of my life and I hope I do not mess it up, Mum. And I can so easily hear his mum’s quiet words of encouragement and support, and which now resonate with our mum’s own recollection of her first night at Windsor Street, Grandma sneaking in and thinking Mum was asleep, saying “oh my little duck!” and stroking mum’s long hair. Our mother was still recalling that in 2016.

***

Reading Des’s letters I see now how much the loss of Ken meant; I see his rebellious backlash with the LMS (London Midlands South Railway Company) with whom he was employed on a ‘reserved occupation’ as a 16-17 year old apprentice fireman on the huge steam locomotives operating out of Cheltenham, when the RAF board suggested he join the Air Training Corps, and that he should perhaps think that it might be too much for his parents to have him join the RAF so soon after they lost their son. A reserved occupation was not our father’s idea of fighting the war.

And that fills me with pride. I remember Dad explaining that to me in my teens. I’d lost my brother, and I wanted to hit back, so I wanted to get onto aircrew. But my maths let me down Ken. And to be honest, they were right!

I also remember saying to Dad along the lines, well dad, if you had you wouldn’t have met mum and we all wouldn’t exist. And dad laughed just like Grandad did … ah, yes. You’ve got a point there!  In truth our father did not need his son pointing that out. He knew anyway.

*

Working through the family archive is a privilege, although at times, the enormity of the task can be daunting. However, no ‘stats’ to worry about, no spreadsheets, just quietly working through at my own pace and using my writing skills and the skills I learned in four professions. I’ve discovered this already – one has to be something of a librarian to know where things are, in what files, under what names, and so forth. Much of it I’ll develop myself. But it has to be done right.

*

Chapter 7 seems the right moment to pause, to see the points change on the railway tracks, to see the signals alert the driver and fireman to fire up the great locomotive, easing her out of the sidings onto the mainline. 

Windsor Street Days is by no means ending but it is changing track slightly. Few writers have the privilege of calling upon works their fathers have written. 

The famous Cheltenham Flyer - similar to that which our father worked as a fireman on the footplate; our grandfather Frank Marshall was also a fireman on this very train and his name rests upon an Engraving at Swindon

I am indeed fortunate. 

In the family archive, in my father’s study, shortly after his death in 2012, I came upon a manuscript typed on the family’s Imperial Typewriter and written to Dad’s granddaughters – Suzie and Caroline (twins) - for their school project. 

I was caring for our mother at the time - and as that wretched illness – Alzheimer's & Dementia - causes things to be accidentally misplaced or misunderstood, surely that troublesome pair - loss or destruction - linger close by. 

So I cleared a black brief case that Dad had taken over from me when I moved to Liverpool; it became the manuscript’s safe haven. 

I learned to type on this aged 11, and it is only as a result of archiving that we discover that this was not merely our father’s typewriter, but it had actually been bought in the 1930s, for his elder brother Ken types his letter to Mum, Dad and Des in Burnham-on-Sea in 1938 assuring them that he is going to join the RAF and regardless of how many news cuttings you send to me Mum! This was at the time of the Munich Crisis 1938.

Our mother passed away at home, just along from the study, in May 2016 and had survived to see the apple blossom on the now huge tree they had planted as a sapling 40 years earlier. 

On a cold Monday morning - January 27 2017 - I turned the key one last time at the family home of half a century, recalling as a 15-year-old cutting the self same lawn I now looked at for the last time, and carried the briefcase to the car and drove up into the country to stay with my sister and brother-in-law while we set about selling my apartment on the Liverpool Waterfront, and did that which ten years earlier I had not thought possible nor even intended, and fulfilled the title of my next (fourth) anthology : From City Boy to Shire Lad. 

The saying absence makes the heart grow fonder is accurate. More deeply, we do not realise the importance of our roots in the hectic schedule of life in the fast lane … but how odd it is, that we so often find ourselves wending our way back from whence we came. And it is an altogether good feeling. because we find we now have two homes. That which we have left behind - in my case, Liverpool - we do not let go. Instead, we keep popping back and maintaining friendships and holding on to streets and boulevards and docklands and coastline that have become the very lifeblood of our existence and, for me, my raison d-etre.

*

In 2018 I then decided to use audio dictation; after all, I had had secretaries arguing over who would do my tapes ... but why girls?

Because we like your voice. It’s clear and crisp, like that BBC lot, and you talk with us and make us part of the files, and we don’t hear you mumbling like the others as they eat and maul at their baguettes!

But what I had not expected was to hear my father’s voice as I spoke his words! That was quite something.

My father has a distinctive writing style, different to mine, and as I was writing Chapters 5 and 6, it was clear. 

It was indeed -“all change, all change” - and that Windsor Street Days Part II would be by Desmond Webb. As I say: a huge privilege for me.

But don’t get me wrong. I’ll step back in when we come to Part III … in the meantime, I confess, it’s a lovely thought to think that all I need do now is to faithfully transcribe our father’s own words.

Desmond Budd Webb 1927 - 2012

END OF WINDSOR STREET DAYS - PART I

WINDSOR STREET DAYS - PART II

by my Father

Desmond Budd Webb

23 April 2024
All Rights Reserved


LIVERPOOL

© 2024 Kenneth Thomas Webb

Last published 24 May 2022

Let us step forward with confidence and a spring in our step … the author 2020