Extraordinary LIVES
HAVE you lost a relative or friend in recent months whose life you’d like to celebrate? Our Friday column tells the stories of ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives. Email your 350-word tribute to: lives@ dailymail.co.uk or write to: Extraordinary
WITH an engine driver father and a signalman grandfather, it’s little wonder Dad joined the railways. The eldest of three children, he went to Chesterfield Grammar School and gained a number of certificates for life-saving. During the war, he spent four years in North Africa, Italy and Austria. He was nearly killed on the day he landed in North Africa. His platoon were marching from the ship to their quarters when a German dive bomber dropped its last bomb. If it had not landed behind a wall, the platoon would have been wiped out.
On leave in Cairo in 1944, Dad won a diving competition. The cup he was awarded survived the rest of the war without a dent and had pride of place on our mantelpiece when I was a child. When he was in Italy, he would exchange his rations of tins of bully beef for local fruit, veg and the occasional bottle of wine. His book of wartime sketches and drawings is a treasured family heirloom. Dad worked for 20 years on the railways in freight accounts in Chesterfield and Sheffield. It’s where he met his wife Mary in 1947. Apparently, she got his attention by pinching his hat from the cloakroom! When he went
looking for it, he was directed to her desk. He became a teacher, a lifetime ambition, and ended up as deputy headmaster in a local junior school. He taught hundreds of children to swim and organised dozens of school trips, including skiing in the Alps. One of his proudest achievements was to come up with arrangements to allow a child with spina bifida to be taught alongside the other children in his age group. This was the 1970s when children with disabilities were routinely sent to special schools. He was the kind of teacher who would spend break time in the playground with the children, rather than in the staff room. Dad continued to swim and ski well into later life. He was active in Dronfield and Chesterfield Swimming Clubs and the Derbyshire Amateur Swimming Association, acting as a race timer in galas. He was a treasurer of Dronfield Model Railway Society, a keen gardener, collector of stamps and coins, and continued to sketch plants and flowers. He lived in the same house for 69 years before moving to a care home. I visited him on
March 21, the last day before the home locked down, and then sent him letters two or three times a week. He tested positive for coronavirus in May, yet when I saw him again, he had no symptoms. I concluded that, just like the Nazis, he had beaten Covid-19. Sadly, he passed away two days later, exactly 76 years after his best pal Ron Hird was killed in action in Italy around the time of the battle of Monte Cassino. We had visited his grave together in 2004.
ALBERT HODGSON, born January 20, 1923; died May 21, 2020, aged 97.