Grandfather Shaw

Grandfather Shaw

By John Graham Shaw

In startling contrast with the stature and character of my maternal grandfather Newmarch, at barely 5’3” in his thick-soled working boots, my paternal grandfather Shaw was well below average height and was naturally self-effacing. As if to compensate for these disadvantages he deliberately cultivated a dignified, upright deportment, and affected the deeply resonant voice of a much larger man.

            Being a skilled machine fitter and lathe turner, he enjoyed an upper working class status, which, in those Victorian days, entitled him to wear a top hat between his house and his workplace.

            Before her marriage, his wife, my grandmother Shaw, as Louisa Trublood, had been on the vaudeville stage, with the comedy troupe of the great Dan Leno. Her professional life had peaked as a principal boy in a series of successful pantomimes.

            My father, John, was the first of their offspring, followed in quick order by uncles Charlie, Bill and Jim, then auntie Louise. Without exception the members of this family were naturally musical, and all could perform on a variety of instruments, including piano, violin, mandolin, banjo, one-string fiddle, and mouth organ. Just like their mother, all the children loved to entertain their guests with the latest romantic or ribald songs of the day, at their frequent house parties.

            Grandfather Shaw was a sound tradesman, who was never unemployed throughout his working life, as he moved between industries in need of his services to fit up or maintain their manufacturing equipment. His longest and most important period occurred in the employ of Merryweather, a firm specializing in the design and fabrication of fire engines and fire fighting apparatus, for distribution throughout the civilised world.

            He was also a very talented artist, well known for his black and white renditions of full-masted sailing ships, on realistically turbulent oceans. This ability had been passed through my father, who could draw a little, to me and my related careers in graphics and architecture; then much more fully realized, during my present retirement, in oil painting, watercolour painting and calligraphy. My own son, David, and his daughters, Florence and Holly, all possess this same natural artistic gift, most probably from these same genes.

            Unfortunately there is a dark side to this family saga, entirely the result of excessive alcohol consumption, characteristic of so many men of that era — including my own grandfather.

            This addiction, shared to a lesser degree by his wife, caused an accelerated impairment of his reliability and performance as a skilled, sought after artisan — so he descended into the swelling hordes of the hopeless unemployables of London.

            The status of the family declined rapidly, and poverty driven debts led to a drastically reduced domestic budget, with the pressing need for the children to leave school as they each reached the mandatory age of fourteen years, and were sent out to the first job they could get, to contribute their meager earnings to the household expenses.

            Frustrated by his continuous unemployment, sad and unable to control his chronic alcoholism, he became subject to violent fits of ungovernable temper, directed at his wife and her alleged deficiencies as a cook. After unflattering comments on the dish set before him, he was known, on more than one occasion, to fling the plate, complete with its offending contents, into the fire place or at the dining room wall.

            His children were appalled by this treatment of their long-suffering mother, and after her early death, in her mid-fifties, they all rejected him utterly, and left home to start their own family units … each an avowed, life-long teetotaler.

            Sadly, circumstances did not improve for the abandoned old man, and he slowly spiraled down, below the stages of chronic unemployment, into the “down-and-out” category. He was rescued from utter destitution when uncle Charlie and his wife, auntie Rose, took over the debt-ridden house, allowed him to occupy a small back room, with many stipulations to ensure his sobriety and future good behaviour.

            Soon after this, the rest of his children relented somewhat, and each gave him a small weekly allowance and with the cast off clothing from his sons, he regained a measure of respectable appearance.

            As one of his teenaged grandsons, the occasional sight of this little old man, strutting down the high street towards his beloved public library, clad in vastly oversized garments, and sporting an incongruous black homburg hat at a rakish angle, always caused me to intercept him and discuss the latest views of a very alert, well read and extremely intelligent close relative.

            At that stage he deserved some compassion and understanding, as a gifted individual, who was a victim of the Victorian edict of the unchallenged superiority of the male as the head of the household, the availability of cheap alcoholic beverages, and the incurable inferiority complex caused by his diminutive stature.

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