Ron and Les as toddlers. With Alf dead, their mother Maude had to run the shops with very little help. The children were sent out to board.
The grave in Earlsfield. Click to enlarge.
Broken shards
Although she would have prepared for the worst, it does not take much of an imagination to realise how deep the blow Alf’s death would have been to Maude when she read the telegram.
After receiving the scant details of Alf’s death and news that he had been properly buried from Lt Young, Maude had to manage Alf’s business affairs as best she could. Fortunately Alf’s business partner was on hand to help. She still had to run the shops, however. Maude’s situation must have been daunting: this was still an age that believed a woman’s place was in the home. Ron and Les, her two young boys, were sent out to boarding houses, which Les years later revealed as a soul-destroying experience.
Somehow the family kept afloat.
In the 1920s financial calamity stuck as the family’s savings were lost in a series of banking collapses. The details are sketchy, however. A few years later, Les was old enough to take over the shop and, despite his youth, managed to keep the family business going through the grinding years of the 1930s and then horrors of World War Two and the Blitz.
A year of pain
What Les was seemingly unaware of all his life – he was probably too young to remember – were the other tragedies that rocked the family in 1917.
Logging on to the War Graves Photographic Project (TWGPP) database, Alf’s final resting place was listed as Earlsfield, which was clearly not the case. Intrigued, my mother and I made a small donation and received an image of grave – Eliza and Constance’s – Alf’s mother and sister. Both died in 1917. Listed at the bottom was Alf’s name recording that he had fought and died in the Great War. The wording is ambiguous and led to the understandable confusion with the TWGPP.
What then had happened to Constance and Eliza? Tuberculosis.
What a terrible year it must have been for Alf’s father, Wilf. A wife, a daughter and a son gone forever within the space of six months…