Working class attitudes to servicemen of the Second World War

[Puddy_Tat]

having done a bit of searching, sounds like mining wasn't a reserved occupation at the start of the 1939 war, so some miners would have been called up, and they weren't stopped from joining the services until 1941.

by 1943, the government realised it had a problem, hence the conscription of 'bevin boys' in to mining.

a few resources -

BBC Wales - History - Themes - The Coal Industry in wartime (mainly from a s wales perspective)

Mining during Wartime | National Coal Mining Museum for England

In both World Wars, with the demand for coal and for mining skills running high, the mining community played an important role in serving their country

www.ncm.org.uk

Fighting the War from the coalface - exploring the history of the Bevin Boys - | Culture24

www.culture24.org.uk

 

[krtek a houby]

Not heard of it happening in the UK, but Irish soldiers who fought in the first war were shunned. For quite different reasons, obviously.

Ireland’s first World War veterans: Shunned, ostracised, murdered

 

[Sprocket.]

My dad’s eldest brother was a miner but also in the Territorial Army so he was off with the BEF very early in the war. My dad had been working in the mines as a mechanical fitter for about ten months before he volunteered for the RAF in mid 39. His reason was he didn’t want to end up in the trenches like my granddad did. Though my dad was transferred from the RAF back into the mines in September 1943. There were two veterans in our village and because of the psychological damage they suffered they were quite violent and neighbours avoided them for years. I suppose understanding such conditions was a new experience for many working class areas.

 

[bellaozzydog]

Single anecdotal family narratives are notoriously filtered

I have two strands of family history, grand parents and parents which are being unearthed and are absolutely 180 degrees from reality. Adoptions that weren’t adoptions, mystery circumstances explaining socially unacceptable situations. Whole families migrating for reason W but finding out the reality was XYZ

fascinating stuff, but total rewrites based on who controls the story

Just this year my 73 year old Australian aunty met her 58 year old British daughter for the first time
The previous reason they went to Australia was shady enough but seen as an acceptable lesser of two evils (so lies on lies)
but Good luck

 

[bellaozzydog]

Dp

 

[JuanTwoThree]

It's not impossible that one of the violent people that Sprocket. mentions is Dark Knight s grandfather. Yorkshire, mining, post war.

 

[Sprocket.]

It's not impossible that one of the violent people that Sprocket. mentions is Dark Knight s grandfather. Yorkshire, mining, post war.

It’s possible, there is a huge family called Knight in my hometown.

 

[Sprocket.]

One of the poor ex soldiers that was avoided around the village was well known for beating his wife and children when having an episode. His explosive nature was a problem at work in the local colliery, but his workmates did look after him.
He had been a POW in Changi, he was allegedly a recipient of the Military Cross too.

 

[JuanTwoThree]

Doncaster Knights too

 

[kebabking]

I think my initial view might be to let sleeping dogs lie...

Like pretty much everyone else I've not heard of any kind of community wide ostracism just because someone joined up - which suggests it was personal, and the long standing and community wide nature of it suggests it was pretty bad.

The professionals (existentialist leaps to mind, he's pretty good..) might be able to give a more educated view on whether it's best to know something bad, or to not know and have it unresolved, but my concern is that you're going to dig out something pretty unpleasant, which may then cause you further issues around how you see your previous relationship with that person/identity.

Perhaps 'ostracised by the community because he joined up instead of going down the pit' is a comfortable cover story that your family told themselves to avoid looking at a nasty wound. Perfectly understandable, and given that they were the people who were there, with more information than you/we have, I'm tempted to think you might be best off following their cue.

ATB.

 

[dessiato]

Families can be very reluctant to talk about wartime experiences. My family had a very mixed time and are willing to talk about my father’s father (unable to serve due to diabetes, but joined the fire service, died after catching pneumonia) my father’s stepfather (police and fire service during the war, not sure why both) and my mother’s father (army, Dunkirk, Far East) But when I asked about my mother’s step father the response was “he became a boilermaker because he was too much of a coward to join up.” He was also Home Guard. Nothing else has ever been said about him.

My family history WW1 is complicated more because my mother’s grandfather was an admiral in the german navy, and were Jewish. My father’s side seems to have no direct connections to WW1, or none that were ever spoken of. This is probably due to them being immigrants to the U.K. between the wars. My father was half Spanish and half Canadian.

I’m sure there are stories if only they were told.

Two or three years ago a photograph of the husband of one of my wife’s aunts was found. He was an SS guard on the railways. He always claimed he didn’t know what was going on. No one talks about it. (Both he and his wife died several years ago)

My family has stories to tell about being Jewish in Germany between the wars. I would like to hear more and to collect them before it is far too late. But there’s a great reluctance because some are hard to revisit.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

My grand-parents on my Dad’s side of the family came over here from Clonakilty in Eire in 1923. Among the tales handed down was this one. My grand-dad’s brother was standing outside his front door one day when some Black and Tans drove through the village and shot him dead, completely out of the blue. No reason for it at all. This was during the Irish Civil War.

Fast forward many decades and my grandparents are dead. So’s my dad and all his siblings. A cousin starts doing some historical family research and discovers that the old boy had been shot by the IRA for being an informant. Possibly true, although the compensation paid out was not the full compensation paid to the families of actual informants. But it also transpired that he had been going into British Army bases disguised as a woman.

So did my grandparents move to England because of the shame of having an informant in the family, or the shame of having a cross-dresser? We shall never know.

But it underlines that family stories cannot necessarily be trusted.

 

[WouldBe]

You could also get his service record.

Get a copy of military records of service

Get military records of service for the Royal Navy (including Royal Marines), British Army and Royal Air Force - who can apply, how long it takes, cost, how to apply.

www.gov.uk

I've tried that for my grandad but they come back with no record even though he has a pretty unique name. I know he was in the army because I've got his war medals with his name on them and seen photos of him in uniform.

 

[discokermit]

“he became a boilermaker because he was too much of a coward to join up.”

to be a boilermaker then would mean starting at fourteen or fifteen and doing an apprenticeship for something like seven years.

 

[newbie]

FWIW, by way of contrast to the op, my father was a teenage apprentice in a protected occupation (making bits of tank), so didn't fight. Both my parents were in London throughout the Blitz, he was an Air Raid Spotter. He's always been reticent to talk about it, particularly in the company of ex-services types, my impression being that he feels they thought he didn't really do his bit. She joined the army as soon as she could and was incredibly proud of her service

 

[kebabking]

I've tried that for my grandad but they come back with no record even though he has a pretty unique name. I know he was in the army because I've got his war medals with his name on them and seen photos of him in uniform.

There was a huge loss of records in WW2 caused by a bombing raid on the old war office - something like 1 in 10 WW1 records went completely up in smoke, with many others damaged - there was also a loss of WW2 records, and some people had huge problems with getting pensions and stuff. Often they'd have to trawl through unit field pay records to work out.

It's also a thing that many people joined up - particularly in the early part of the war - using false details/identities: people who wanted to leave their previous lives behind. If the ostracism was pre-war/joining up, that could be a possibility.

 

[Pickman's model]

I've tried that for my grandad but they come back with no record even though he has a pretty unique name. I know he was in the army because I've got his war medals with his name on them and seen photos of him in uniform.

there's loads of cock-ups in records, so they may have been destroyed, they may have been lost, he may (as kk says) have joined under a different name. when you think that a surprising number of people on rolls of honour from ww1 actually survived the war anything's possible. if you know what regiment he was in, they may have records of which you'ree unaware.

 

[kebabking]

Absolutely as Pickman's model says - government administration is utterly shit at the best of times, add a war and it gets magnificently worse.

If you can identify the regiment/corps, and have snippets of information like based at X on Y date, the Regimental Association and archivists should be able to dig something out.

 

[Pickman's model]

Absolutely as Pickman's model says - government administration is utterly shit at the best of times, add a war and it gets magnificently worse.

If you can identify the regiment/corps, and have snippets of information like based at X on Y date, the Regimental Association and archivists should be able to dig something out.

depending on the medals it might be easier by searching the london gazette. if they're campaign medals it will be a bugger. but if it's a military medal or other award for gallantry / courage / foolhardiness it will be easier.

eg here i went to the london gazette https://www.thegazette.co.uk/
and searched for military cross
and this is what came up (first result of about 7,300)
so if you pop your man's name in then you might be taken to a page which will list his regiment

 

[Sprocket.]

depending on the medals it might be easier by searching the london gazette. if they're campaign medals it will be a bugger. but if it's a military medal or other award for gallantry / courage / foolhardiness it will be easier.

eg here i went to the london gazette https://www.thegazette.co.uk/
and searched for military cross
and this is what came up (first result of about 7,300)
View attachment 219488so if you pop your man's name in then you might be taken to a page which will list his regiment

Thanks for this, I just found something else out about my uncle he never told anyone. I’ll ring his son later to ask if he had any idea. Though he is 86 and a bit forgetful.

 

[WouldBe]

depending on the medals it might be easier by searching the london gazette. if they're campaign medals it will be a bugger. but if it's a military medal or other award for gallantry / courage / foolhardiness it will be easier.

eg here i went to the london gazette https://www.thegazette.co.uk/
and searched for military cross
and this is what came up (first result of about 7,300)
View attachment 219488so if you pop your man's name in then you might be taken to a page which will list his regiment

Nothing found for my grandad on there.

 

[Pickman's model]

Nothing found for my grandad on there.

 

[nogojones]

It's much easier to find stuff out now thanks to the internet, it's just how deep do you want to go. I always knew my dad fought for the Germans as a Ukrainian in WW2, but he never really went into much depth about it. Given that almost all his family died in the conflict I couldn't blame him. It's only in the last couple of years that I've managed to piece some things together and found out which unit he was with 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) - Wikipedia

I can see why he kept that quiet

 

[equationgirl]

I've tried that for my grandad but they come back with no record even though he has a pretty unique name. I know he was in the army because I've got his war medals with his name on them and seen photos of him in uniform.

Might not be available, might have been lost or damaged.

 

[equationgirl]

It was only when I became an adult that more detailed narratives about what my grandparents did in WWII came to light. One grandfather was a mechanic in the RAF, his father had survived the trenches of WWI so like the poster above, I suspect he also sought to avoid trench warfare. My other grandfather was a soldier captured early in the war and sent to a POW camp in Poland. He definitely came back with PTSD, yet no help was ever given as best I can tell.

At least two women relatives 'entertained the US troops' which I didn't know until I was much older. One of my grandmothers worked in munitions until she had my dad.

Dark Knight I would put money on other factors resulting in the homelessness and ostracism. PTSD may be a part of it but I would be curious about an underlying condition such as schizophrenia playing a part. I find it personally unlikely that he was ostracised just for being a gunner and killing people, given others were doing the same across all the forces. He may have joined up because his friends who weren't miners joined. He may have joined up to get away from a shit family situation - census records from the time may help give you some background to his family circumstances.

Interestingly there's a lot I don't know about my parents' lives before they married. Like my dad saw multiple dead bodies at an aircraft crash site after a training flight went wrong, that only came out a few years back. Or that he was a tower in a rowing club.

You may have to come to terms with not knowing the full facts. I wish you the best, urban is a great place so please stick around.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

I've tried that for my grandad but they come back with no record even though he has a pretty unique name. I know he was in the army because I've got his war medals with his name on them and seen photos of him in uniform.

there's loads of cock-ups in records, so they may have been destroyed, they may have been lost, he may (as kk says) have joined under a different name. when you think that a surprising number of people on rolls of honour from ww1 actually survived the war anything's possible. if you know what regiment he was in, they may have records of which you'ree unaware.

indeed. Styles of hand-writing have changed over the years, and transcription errors when digitising old records are by no means unknown, mum-tat tracked down an ancestor by trying a few alternatives.

u / o confusion is fairly common, a / u is not unknown, as is any combination of n, r or s - the cursive r is a pain in the tail for researchers - i found a photo or two in the museum of london archive listed as 'deptford' that was of somewhere in dartford (i did drop them an e-mail), and i've read something that must have been transcribed from a victorian author's manuscript where one character is referred to either as Thornton or Thurston...

 

[kebabking]

^^^this^^^

I've got a stream of ancestors who lived in a small village in Dorset - proper banjo strumming stuff - from around from 1600 to 1900. In the 100 years from 1800 to 1900 their surname was spelt 3 different ways, to the point where they would be spoken differently, and you would assume they were different families.

 

[Hollis]

I dunno anything in particular about this topic but two recent books that came out that are very highly rated and may cover it are:

Daniel Todman - Britain's War - two volumes
Jonathan Fennel - Fighting the People's War

 

[equationgirl]

Dark Knight I don't know if this will work but there might be a possibility that your grandfather was admitted to hospital at some point after he came back, so you could see if there are any available records for searching. You could also try looking for his death certificate if you don't already have it.

 

[Dark Knight]

Dark Knight I don't know if this will work but there might be a possibility that your grandfather was admitted to hospital at some point after he came back, so you could see if there are any available records for searching. You could also try looking for his death certificate if you don't already have it.

Good idea, thanks.