Tom Greenwood Memoirs – Chapter 13 1947 – Everything Changes

Tom Memories Chapter 13,

1947, everything changes

1947 was the year that not quite everything, but almost everything changed.

We became British subjects.

We changed our name from Grünwald to Greenwood.

We got our first car, a 1938 Hillman Minx, registration number DWT 68, bought second hand from Cecil Snook. And my dad passed his British driving test.

I changed schools and became a boarder at L.R.G.S. (Lancaster Royal Grammar School).

Jimmy was born on 21 April, so I was no longer an only child.

We had central heating installed at home, and the coke-burning stove in my bedroom was pensioned off.

Round about 1947, probably partly also in 1946 and 1948, we got all mod. cons., a telephone (Darwen 1097), a fridge, a vacuum cleaner, a new stair carpet… Also at that time , we had the shipping container at the end of the drive converted into a garage for the car.

My parents moved into my bedroom, the Kinderzimmer, and had it redecorated and completely refurnished, to be a very nice bedroom, (the first one they’d ever had).

I was moved to their rather smaller bedroom which I had to share with Jimmy.

Dad got established in his job, running C Walker Litherland Ltd., and we began to emerge from being very hard up.

We had the back garden extended into the field behind the house, in line with our neighbours.

The end of “our gang”.

This must be the place where I have to write about Dad’s job situation after the war. British servicemen all had their job security guaranteed, and so could go back to their previous job when they were demobbed (demobilised). However, there were no guarantees for people who had served in allied armies such as the Czech army. And the war-time boss of Dad’s pre-war company (a Richard Fitzgibbon, a Londoner, globally speaking, (anyway he had a not-so-posh south of England accent) decided that he didn’t need my dad, and when Dad got back to Darwen he was told there was no job for him.

My dad felt this was a great injustice and  – well I don’t know what he did, whom he contacted, or anything – but there was quite a fuss, the story, and photographs of my dad, some of them with my mother and me, were in the national press, and BIG in the local press – I can remember that, but the outcome was that Dad didn’t get his job back, and we didn’t have a very good opinion of Fitz, as we referred to him. But fortunately, as Dad made inquires about finding work among among the contacts that he’d had, he came across the Litherland brothers, Bert and Jack, who owned a business making wooden umbrella sticks in the Manchester area and they got to discussing the idea of going into the business of making umbrella handles, and giving my dad the job of setting up and running a factory in Darwen for this purpose.

This went ahead, Dad was made the managing director, but he only owned I think 5 or 10% of the company (clearly he had very little money to put into it), and he was paid I think £5 per week  plus a bonus at the end of the year if things went well. So they found suitable premises in Falcon Avenue, Darwen, – I used to walk along Falcon Avenue on my way to and from Hollins Grove School, and off they went. They bought the necessary machinery, Dad was very familiar with all that, started small, made some samples, and Dad went off, seeing his former customers, all the umbrella manufacturers in the UK, and so managed to get orders and to deliver them so that the business took off. He hired some of the better people who had worked for him at Celco, and the business did well. One of the first people he hired, I think from Celco, was called Raymond Eccles, and he was made factory foreman. He was the first person I knew who had asthma. This must have been happening in 1946.

And here I should also add the story that Dad told me, and anyone else who would listen, ad nauseam. How he had to start earning a living from having nothing three times. First in 1928 after his father died and the factory went bankrupt, then in 1938 when he arrived in England, and a third time at the end of the war. No doubt it must have given him some frantically worrying times, and I suppose it did sear his soul, but even so, it got repetitive.

I never realised just how much changed in our lives in 1947 until I stopped to think about it as I was writing down these memories. After I started at Lancaster in September 1947, I really changed all my friends; I just didn’t see my primary school friends any more, and the gang just melted away. You know how it was when you left Ravenbank/Altincham Prep. The thing is, being at boarding school, I was very lonely at first in the school holidays. In my second year, one of my friends at LRGS, David Smith, always called Doc Smith because he was D.R.Smith, told me that a friend of his from near his home town (Clitheroe) had just moved to Darwen. That was Roger Walkden. His dad had just been given the job of starting up a branch of Barclay’s Bank in Darwen. (Till then there was a Lloyd’s Bank, a Midland Bank, a District Bank and a Martin’s Bank). And amazingly, it turned out that the Walkdens had bought a house just down the road from us in Earnsdale Avenue. In no time, I was knocking on their front door, introducing myself, and quickly becoming friends with Roger. His parents sent him, and his younger sister Joanne to a school in Kirkby Lonsdale (Queen Elizabeth’s School I think), as boarders, a co-ed boarding school, the lucky things.