Off The Record
Alan Crosby considers his family’s very different experiences of the 1920s
One family’s very different experiences of the 1920s
What images does the phrase ‘the 1920s’ conjure up? Flappers and open-topped touring cars, perhaps? Or lounge lizards wearing two-tone shoes and with gleaming slicked-back hair, young people dancing the night away, early Agatha Christie novels and copious cocktail drinking? Was it really like that, I wonder? Perhaps for the golden privileged few, but not for my family.
The young men had come back from the First World War, leaving millions of comrades behind to lie in those foreign fields that are forever England. But now they were beginning to look forward, as the horrors receded slowly into the background, and the scars both literal and metaphorical started to heal. For some the healing never came – their lives were changed beyond repair by injury and mental breakdown. For others, there were reasons to hope.
It’s really difficult to imagine your grandparents as young, smooth- cheeked, lively young people, unmarried, childless, vigorous and relishing their freedom. My maternal grandparents were 22 and 23
‘My grandfather went on the run from Canada to the USA and then to Australia’
in 1920, and came from two Manchester families that were very close geographically and socially. Indeed, my grandfather’s sister got engaged to my grandmother’s brother, so that after both couples were married the families were tied by a double knot of love and deep friendship.
In those romantic times at the beginning of the 1920s the four of them, together with cousins, friends and younger siblings, used to go on holidays to Frodsham in Cheshire, where a cousin of my grandmother had a smallholding with a cottage and a barn. They’d go for walks and revel in the fresh air and countryside, helping on the farm and eating simple, hearty food. At night the girls all slept in one room in the cottage, the young men being relegated to the barn. There, as my grandfather long afterwards remembered with a deep chuckle, they shared the straw with teeming tiny livestock – fleas that bit them so much that in the morning their faces were bright red and swollen. The world they knew is lost – their rural landscape now chopped up by motorways and dotted with refineries, chemical plants and sprawling commuter estates.
For my other grandparents, though, happiness was elusive. In August 1919 my grandmother Crosby travelled alone from Liverpool across to Quebec by steamship, then across Canada by train to Calgary. There she married my grandfather, a soldier wounded in the First World War. She’d met him while nursing in a convalescent hospital.
She was 26, very immature and sadly naive, and the 1920s broke her heart and ruined her life. Early visions of romantic marriage, the promised prosperity in a little town on the prairies, and the love of a talented husband, all proved to be illusions and delusions. Six years later, now with a little daughter and a baby son to care for, she took the same train journey and ocean voyage in reverse. Her marriage had disintegrated, she had not a penny to her name, and for the rest of her life romance was a cold and bitter memory. She was never happy again.
Her husband, my grandfather, made different use of the 1920s. A gifted lawyer with no sense of morality or honesty, he committed fraud and went on the run from Canada to the USA and then to Australia. In Sydney he contracted the first of several bigamous marriages and created a new identity for himself, with a false name and a reworked life story. One ended the 1920s as a sick and weary woman in a cold, sad house in Buxton, Derbyshire. The other saw the end of 1929 in the Australian summer, a couple of miles from Sydney Harbour Bridge. Meanwhile, in a tiny terraced house in inner- city Manchester, was a loving couple in their early 30s with three children… one was my mum. A child of the 1920s, she died in 2019. For her, it was the happiest of childhoods.