Family photo

Today I went to lunch with an aunt then took her to visit my dad's brother, the last one left from eleven brothers and sisters. He has just moved into a house next to his daughter so it's good that he'll have someone to keep an eye on him.

He loves looking at photos with a big magnifying machine as he's almost blind, so I took a pile of old ones for him to look at. This is one that I took - it's of the older children from his family so he wouldn't have been born then. My dad is second from the left. It would have been taken in the early 1920s and we assume that it's a school photo. No-one had told them to smile or perhaps there wasn't much to smile about.

Left to right - George, Tom (my dad), Norah, Arthur and Dolly.

Their father, my grandfather, died from pneumoconiosis (an industrial disease caused by coal dust as he was a miner) aged 41. He left eleven children including a 6 month old baby. I've no idea how his wife coped as there were no benefits then. The proceeds from a smallholding wouldn't have been much. In this day and age we have a lot to be thankful for although some still fall through the net.