Kate Read Free Page B

seven, and Norman, five – but eventually he was forced to enlist. In March 1916, the British government, in response to the rising losses on the Western Front – Britain lost 75,000 men at ypres and 60,000 at Loos – and the dwindling number of volunteers, introduced conscription for single men between the ages of 18 and 41. By May, the order had been extended to married men. It was just two months before John Harrison’s 42nd birthday, an accident of birth that would change the course of his descendants’ lives.
    John enlisted with the Duke of Cambridge’s own Middlesex Regiment in the neighbouring town of Houghton-le-Spring. The 43-year-old corporal was killed in the trenches just three months before armistice, on 24 August 1918, one of 201 soldiers from Hetton-le-Hole not to return from the battlefields. His name is inscribed on a war memorial outside the working men’s club in the town – a granite plinth and statue of a soldier resting on a reverse rifle with his head bowed. It bears the inscription: ‘Erected by the members of Hetton and District Working Men’s Club in memory of fellow members who died for their country in the Great War 1914–1918’.
    The conflict finally drew to a close at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. That day, a declaration of peace was read to the community of Hetton-le-Hole. Thomas was 14 years old. His world had changed irrevocably. Spurred on by his father’s death, he was apprenticed to his maternal grandfather – now the only male role model in his beleaguered family – and became the first Harrison to learn a trade.
    Not long after the war’s end, the royal family suffered a bereavement of their own. While Thomas lost his father, George V lost his son. Prince John, his sixth and youngest child, died of an epileptic seizure on 18 January 1919. He was a year younger than Thomas. The Queen wrote to her husband: ‘The first break in the family circle is hard to bear but people have been so kind and sympathetic and this has helped us much.’
    The interwar years were not good ones for the North-east. The war had damaged Britain’s trading position with regard to exports such as textiles, steel and coal. Heavy industry went into decline and mining bore the brunt of the slump. In 1923, 170,000 miners were employed in Durham alone. Over the 16 years before the outbreak of the Second World War, many of them lost their jobs as demand for coal decreased. A series of strikes crippled the country and Britain slumped into a depression. Miners concerned about dangerous working conditions, reduced pay and longer hours took part in the 1926 General Strike in support of the Trades Union Congress, as well as holding two national coal strikes. Finally, the 1929 stock market crash brought the Great Depression. Demand for British products collapsed and levels of unemployment increased from 1 million to 2.5 million. The industrial areas of the North were hardest hit, especially the collieries. Mining was no longer a job for life.
    However, there was a huge building boom after the war – a third of all houses built before 1939 were erected in the previous two decades – and tradesmen were much in demand. Grateful for his grandfather’s carpentry training, Kate’s great-grandfather Thomas spent the years between the wars moving around the north of England to find work. By 1934, the 29-year-old house joiner was living in the village of Easington Lane, a few miles away from Hetton-le-Hole, and going out with a girl from Tudhoe, a village just south of Durham. Elizabeth Temple, who was a year older than Thomas, was the daughter of a farm worker who had turned his hand to gardening after the war. A ‘fallen woman’, she had an illegitimate daughter, Ruth, from a previous relationship.
    Even so, times had changed and the young couple would have enjoyed a very different romance from their parents and grandparents before them, travelling to Durham and Sunderland for dates, going to dance halls and jazz