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Frank's Life story.

In my woolen swimming cossie!My memories are like snapshots off an old Brownie Box camera.  They are there, they get reinforced but I’m not sure they are accurate at all.

After starting to investigate family history, I tried for ages to get all the older members of the family to write their own life stories. No one would do it and I believe you shouldn’t ask people to do something you wouldn’t do yourself. Too few people write about the vast majority of normal peoples lives. The famous, the rich & all leaders of the world are well documented. I would like to have heard about being a lead miner in the 1800s, an early charabanc and transport driver who survived the great war. One uncle survived WW2 after being a slave worker down a mine for Adolph's Third Reich. Living in America in the teen years of the nineteen hundreds. One grandparent went off to fight in the Napoleonic Wars.

I don't think your kids are going to be too interested but I wish my grandparents & great grandparents had done this for me.1952 and in long pants.

In days of old when I was very young, things were different too in their own way! I looked like a small child, even when I got my first long pants around 13. I was raised during a time when adults had the belief that "Children should be seen but not heard". I am sure it infected my whole life. (1)

I started life with an outlook gained, mainly, from my mother, who was over protective. A dad, who was away most of the time, and seemed incapable of knowing what to do with a small boy. Like his father before him, he had his humour gene removed. My parents were short of money & lived in the slum area of Moss Side in Manchester. I got a lot of my morals & outlook on life at Sunday school. This was a Wesleyan Methodist Church on the corner of Great Western Street. (2)

I think my views on life would be definitely tinted from an early age! Because I was an only child for the first nine years and that my mum followed in the Victorian footsteps of her mother & grandmother, plus, normally, parents explained nothing then, I think she shielded me an awful lot from real life. Maybe I became a dreamer in a world of my own. I don’t seem to have questioned what went on around me and obviously wasn’t as curious as I am today. 

 

 

 

 

(1) “Children should be seen and not heard”
 I tried hard to find where this saying came from and all I got was ~ Proverb of Unknown Origin! It was certainly practiced by all the adults that I knew, parents, teachers and by church. You were passed down knowledge but you were not meant to question any of it. Any demonstration of too much enthusiasm was looked upon as showing off. I always thought the saying was left over from the Victorian age but I am sure it goes much further back in time.
John Wesley.(2) “Wesleyan Methodist Church” John Wesley was famous for his preaching. He travelled on horse back the length & breadth of Great Britain. Clergymen, magistrates and, at times, mobs of people, persecuted him. Feeling, however, that the church failed in its duty to call sinners to repentance, that many of the clergymen were corrupt and that souls were perishing in their sins, Wesley regarded himself as commissioned by God to bring about revival in the church; and no opposition, or persecution, or obstacles could prevail against the divine urgency and authority of his beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley.