Sadly Gone and Much Missed.

I have long since lost all my grandparents and great (grand) uncles and aunts.....

I lost my maternal grandfather in March 1968 when he was just 54 years old (I was sixteen months old at the time). He was a very good man, a good father to my mother who was an only child, and a good husband to my Gran. He died due to heart failure brought about by chronic asthma which he had suffered since his early twenties. He was also unable to work from the age of 29 due to the particularly severe nature of his chronic health condition. My Papa was a house-husband before the term was coined, and a Freemason. Before his illness he had been an active man, a Rugby player for the Gala reserves (he came from Galashiels in the Scottish Borders), an amateur boxer, and a Lieutenant in the Boys Brigade. I have no actual cognitive memory of my Papa when he was alive. However, I was named after him and my mother always held his memory up to me as an example of of a good father and grandfather. I therefore grew up feeling a strong emotional connection to his memory and example. As my mother once said to me when I lamented his (and my Gran's) early death, 'what mattered son, was that they knew you and your birth brought them a lot of joy and happiness.' When my father informed them that my mother had given birth to a boy (me) and we are calling him *****, my Papa turned and wept into his pillow. Throughout my childhood I always felt that both he and my Gran watched over me from heaven.

My maternal grandmother died later that same year in December 1968 at the age of 58, (I was just two years old), She also was someone who suffered much of her life from poor health. My Gran was almost blind with myopia and had been born with a hole in her heart. In her youth she had sung with the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, and was a great Socialist being involved with the ILP (Independent Labour Party), growing up in Glasgow during the era of 'Red Clydeside'. Her adolescent heroes were the ILPers', Jimmy Maxton, Manny Shinwell, John Wheatley, and Davie Kirkwood. My Gran was a small shopkeeper, who was in the drapery buisiness. She was the youngest and most rebellious of three sisters. Her two older sisters who remained spinsters all their lives were like extra grandparents to me after my mother's parents died. No memory of my experience of dearly loved and lost grandfolk would be accurate or complete without them. They were sweet indulgent old ladies who looked after my sister and I often until my Auntie Mary died in 1977 (aged 75). Thereafter Auntie Jean lived with us and in some ways I helped look after her, as much as she looked after us. My Auntie Jean died in 1980 (aged 79) when I was 13. I was very fond of my 'aunties', and they are still in my dreams all these years later.

I lost my paternal grandfather in December 1986, when he was almost 81 (I was 20). My Grandpa was a friend and confidant of my adolescence (my sense of connection to him is also strong but of a different nature to my maternal grandfather). He had been a career soldier having run away to London and enlisted in 1926. He rose through the ranks in the Infantry (East Surrey Regiment) to become an RSM (Regimental Sergeant Major) before being commissioned in 1943 as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. During the Second World War all commissions were temporary for the duration of hostilities, but he passed his Regular Commissions Board in 1946, and received the King's Commission in the Regular Army (King George VI). My Grandpa retired from the Army in 1953 with the substantive rank of Captain. In our extended family he was nicknamed 'The Colonel' because of his career, bearing and manner. He had his faults and was an overbearing father and often unreasonable to my Dad as a child and young man, but as a grandfather he was a fine venerable old gentleman. He was also a Freemason and a yachtsman, before he had to give up his sailing boat in his declining years.

I lost my paternal grandmother in 1999, when she was 84 years old (I was 32). She was a strong willed character bordering on egocentric. Trained as a Princess Louisa Children's Nurse (a nanny) in Edinburgh. After my Grandpa left the army she got into breeding pedigree dogs (registered with the Kennel Club of Great Britain). She was good with them and worked hard but she was always obsessed with saving money and economising to the point she became a bit of a miser, especially to herself. She was always kind to us, as her grandchildren, and helped us all out at various times in our lives. I loved my Granny, but her ego and her behaviours sometimes made it difficult to like her or feel sympathy for her lonliness in her last years. Her conduct towards me and my sister (I was then 28, my sister 25 - we were not children) when my mother received her terminal diagnosis and at the time of my mother's death was extremely presumptious, selfish and self-important. I forgave her before she died but I will never forget it or the righteousness of my anger (despite my anger I kept my own counsel as my father didn't need the aggravation at the time). These were the behaviours that made my Granny a difficult person to like.

Between my grandparents and my maiden great aunts (my maternal grandmother's older sisters who in many ways took over as my maternal grandparents following their early deaths), I learned a lot, and their stories of their parents, families, childhoods and early adult lives was instrumental in stimulating my interest in history and making me the man I am.