Graham shows no signs of slowing down at age 100
GERALD Humphries of Ashbourne is celebrating one of his biggest - if not the biggest - milestone in his life; his 100th birthday.
Born in south Manchester and brought up in Didsbury, now a gentrified suburb for young professionals, he has called Derbyshire home for the last forty years.
For some, that’s a lifetime, but for Gerald, it is just one aspect to his fascinating life.
“My first wife Jean and I moved here in 1984 for the walking - she and I were great walkers”, he said, “we had both retired and we came so we could walk in the southern half of the Peak District National Park.”
Having been brought up in the rainy city during the Second World War, Gerald remembers the Manchester Blitz, two consecutive nights of bombing from the German Air Force from December 22-24 in 1940.
“I remember it was a Sunday night, and we were just finishing our tea”, he said, “it was at around 6pm in the evening when we heard the fire alarms going off, and by then we could hear the bombers flying over the city - it was obvious then that the city centre was being attacked.
“We had a window on the landing - we lived in a semi-detached house - where we could look out towards the centre, so I went up there and looked between the blackout blinds and I could see the whole city on fire. There was so much smoke and it was all in different colours because so many different materials and buildings were on fire.
“The following night they came again dropping incendiary bombs and high explosives. The next night they could see exactly where to bomb because the city was still on fire.
“Although there weren’t as many people there who would’ve been in the daytime, hundreds of people still sadly lost their lives.
“I remember not really feeling anything in particular because we were used to being in wartime, and being about 16 years old I didn’t know the value of property and infrastructure then.”
After leaving school at 16, Gerald started working at a machine tool factory making tools for all manner of machinery. At the time, he was required to have a second job thanks to the Essential Work Order (EWO) introduced by Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin in 1941. So, to fulfil this requirement, he worked as a special constable. With the role came two beats in Withington. A couple of years later, between 1942 and 1943, Gerald moved to a Royal Ordnance factory.
“I was then working on tanks - and checking the Sherman tanks that were provided by the Americans, which we had to then adapt for the field.
“The next big thing was VE Day (May 8 1945), and we were given the day off work. Some people made a bit of a fool of themselves and others didn’t but it was a great time, but we then learned the day immediately after that we were all sacked!”
Gerald then moved to Metropolitan-Vickers, a heavy electrical engineering company that employed tens of thousands of workers at the time. Gerald became a final inspector and a certified electrical engineer before then being called up as an air mechanic.
“My time as an air mechanic was a joke really, after four months of technical training we were sent up to an air repair yard on the eastern coast of northern Scotland.
“All we did was see the planes come in, they would line up, and after having waited for an admiral to come over we were then told to destroy the lot - that was all I really did there.”
After being demobbed in 1947, he was back working at MetropolitanVickers, and married his first wife Jean on April 1, 1950: “It was the day after Jean’s 23rd birthday and at that time men married before April 5 were given an income tax rebate that we used to help pay for our honeymoon in Cornwall. In the 1950s we bought our first house and our three children were born.”
For the rest of his working life, which took him from Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham, Gerald worked for the National Grid after achieving further qualifications, and was part of the commissioning team for the Ratcliffe-onSoar power station. After retiring in 1985, the family then moved and settled into life in Ashbourne, enjoying the beautiful countryside of the southern Peak District. However, it was in their retirement that Gerald and Jean saw much of the world. “We went to America for the first time in 1975 and went to the Rockies, the Grand Canyon and San Francisco and became besotted with the place”, he said, “we hired a campervan and drove to Arizona too. After that, the next trip took us to Iowa, then to the Mississippi where we followed that to New Orleans - I remember the Dixieland jazz scene there.
“There was one time where we crossed Mexico by bus, only using public transport, but we had a bit of an incident in the city of Chihuahua; I was stood at the station with our bags and Jean went up the stairs to a hotel to ask about rooms, but quick as a flash she came downstairs and said ‘it’s a brothel!,’ so we hot-footed it out of there and made our way to Mexico City.”
On another occasion, they were on a cruise which took them from Lisbon to Cape Verde, then across the Atlantic and 1000 miles up the Amazon, where they then came back down and across the Azores. Things went well until the Bay of Biscay, where tragedy struck: “After leaving the Azores and reaching the Bay of Biscay we hit the mother of all storms”, he said.
“A passenger was actually killed after a huge influx of water came through a tiny window. They then had to be helicoptered off and the cruise came to an end a little earlier than planned.”
In 2009, Gerald’s wife and travelling companion of several decades, Jean, sadly passed away. Five years later, he found love again with Val, who has remained with ever since. Despite his age, Gerald still finds new things out about himself: “In 2012 I had a problem with my hip, so I went to see the doctor who’d noticed my walk”, he said.
“He asked me to walk across the room - so I did - and he asked if I’d ever been bitten by a dog. I’d answered saying I had when I was 7 or 8.
“I was told then that I had a bone disease called Paget’s. [Now] when I buy a new pair of shoes now I have to have one sole built up.”
The next couple of weeks will see Gerald attend several celebrations in his honour filled with families and friends. He may be 100, but he shows no sign of slowing down.
It was the day after Jean’s 23rd birthday and at that time men married before April 5 were given an income tax rebate that we used to help pay for our honeymoon