My Father

[The photograph seems to date from about 1907 or 1908.  John Robert Derbyshire is the child at furthest right in the back row, next to the schoolmistress.]

While he was still a child, sometime around 1908, the family moved to Oakengates in Shropshire.  His father worked in the coal mines there.  Not as an ordinary collier, though:  he had some kind of supervisory position, and eventually I believe rose to be colliery manager.

John Robert seems to have been a difficult child.  He did not do well at school.  In his own stories of his childhood he roamed free and wild in the lanes and hedgerows of Shropshire, some of the most beautiful countryside in England, celebrated by (amongst others) the poet A.E. Housman.  Like Hednesford fifty miles away, Oakengates was much more rural than industrial, in spite of the collieries.  I think Dad's childhood probably resembled very closely the one described in the first part of George Orwell's novel Coming Up for Air.  Dad was physically big and strong, always so I think.  He had much of the bully in him, and seems to have grown up thinking that pugnacity and brute strength will get you anything you want in life.

Dad joined the King's Shropshire Light Infantry (this was some time early in 1915) and was sent to Ireland for training.  Ireland at this time was part of the United Kingdom; but the Irish Republicans had been agitating for separation, and had been on the point of success (or thought they had) when the War started.  The British government put its Irish policy on hold for the duration of the war, to the great frustration of the Irish (thousands of whom nonetheless enlisted in the British Army).  This frustration boiled over in the Easter Rising of 1916, though I think Dad was out of it by then.  He often spoke of his spell in Ireland.  He was too young to see the larger picture, of course, and I think never really grasped it.  His talk was all impressionistic, and strongly prejudiced against the Irish. "They lived like animals," he would say, "in filthy cabins- pigs, poultry and people all thrown together."  There were some clashes with the extreme Republicans:  "They shot one of our lads coming out of church."  Yet his main prejudice was not against the Irish people so much as against their religion.  Dad was an atheist of the militant sort, who believed that religion was all nonsense; but he had a special loathing for Roman Catholicism.  Often he would say: "The Irish are all right, till their priests get at them.  We used to see them going to mass of a Sunday morning.  They'd smile and call out to us as they passed by. Then they'd go into the church, and the priest would whip them up, and they'd come out howling blue murder."  Dad's anti-Catholicism was a bit odd, considering that his own mother was a Catholic; but he sorted it all out in his own mind somehow.

After his training Dad was sent to France to fight in the trenches, in what — like most of his generation — he always referred to as "The Great War."  He must have spent at least two years on the Western Front, but spoke little of it to us.  From the little he did say, I believe his most enduring impressions were:

• The randomness of death in the trenches. I had a conversation with him a few months before he died, in which he said: "I've always wondered why I was spared when men were shot down on each side of me."
  
• The stupidity of the general staff.  "Bloody fools," he used to say with great bitterness, sixty years after the event.  "They made the same damn fool mistakes over and over again, thousands of men dead each time."
  
• The cowardice and venality of the French.  In this he was surely very unfair.  French losses were terrible; but that all happened hundreds of miles from Dad's sector of the front.   All he saw of the French were the peasants who sold bad wine to the troops, brothel-keepers (I suppose), and the kind of civilian riff-raff that will attach itself to an army in wartime.  Whatever the cause, he carried a deep detestation of the French with him to the end of his life.  Contrariwise, he rather admired the Germans, who fought bravely and (he said) with much better leadership than ours.

Dad seems to have deserted at the end of the war — not an uncommon course of action in the allied forces.  I think he actually decamped from a field hospital, where he was laid up either with wounds (he had white knotty shrapnel scars up the side of his leg), or from the influenza epidemic that raged through 1918, seeing off more people than the war.  He found his way back to England with some comrades, and demobilized himself.  He was, however, awarded the standard medals for all who served in the armed forces during WW1:  the Victory Medal and the British Medal.  These are recorded on his card in the files of Britain's National Archives, now online.

Sometime soon after the end of the war Dad left, or was retired from, the Air Ministry.  He tried to go into business with a man called Smith, but it failed.  He had a number of jobs, none of them for very long.  I have memories from our earliest years at Friars Avenue (which is to say, the late 1940s) of Dad coming home in the daytime, slumping down into his chair, and Mother bursting into tears. He had resigned again, or got the sack.  "He couldn't take orders from younger men," was Mother's explanation.  I don't think Dad could ever take orders from anyone, actually.  "A difficult man," was what everyone said about him.

Sometime in the early 1950s Dad got a job as a repo man for Jay's, a furniture company in Northampton.  People were just beginning to buy furniture on the installment plan (called "hire purchase" in England).  When people applied for this kind of credit, someone had to check out their references, which I think were usually local tradespeople.  And when they defaulted, someone had to repossess the furniture, and go to give evidence in court. 

This work suited Dad, as much as any work could have done.  He got a little car and spent all day driving around the countryside of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire checking out people's credit references.  He was on his own and set his own schedules.  The repossessions satisfied his taste for physical violence.  Many of the defaulters were farm laborers — strapping great beef-fed men who did hard manual work all day long.  To get into the house of one such, grab a large sofa, and remove it, required courage and strength.  Dad was, I think, perfectly fearless in matters physical.  (He had assistants he could call on to help with moving the furniture out.)  The work was badly paid; but then, he was over fifty and without marketable skills.  He did this work until he retired in 1964.  But when he had to fill out the "occupation" box on a form (when I applied for a government grant to go to university, for example), he always wrote RETIRED CIVIL SERVANT.  In Dad's own mind, the Air Ministry job was the summit of his working life.