Through the eyes of my Grandpa

By Holly Malins

My Grandpa was born on the 22^nd October 1924.

My Grandpa’s name is Ralph Elgin Tunna. He was born in a district of Liverpool called Anfield but when he was about six he moved with his mother, father and two sisters to another part of Liverpool called Walton. My Grandpa has a sister called Glenda and another sister called Rita who both now live in Canada with their families.

On 1st February 1943 when he was 18 he joined the RAF (Royal Air Force) to start pilot training.  The training went on for about a year.  My Grandpa learnt to fly in a type of plane called a ‘Tigermoth’. 

After learning on a Tigermoth my grandpa went from planes with one engine to planes with two engines, and the first plane with two engines he piloted was the ‘Cornell’.

 When my Grandpa finished his training he went over to Egypt and Palestine (now called Israel) for training on Wellington Bomber planes.

Technology

When my Grandpa was young there were no computers of any sort. The newest invention that affected ordinary people was the television and the first channel was the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).  They first had a mast at Alexandra Palace in London but this could not be received more than fifty miles away. Other areas gradually followed like Sutton Coldfield for the Midlands then Holme Moss for the North of England. Very few people had televisions in their own homes until the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 when many people crowded into each others homes to watch the tiny screens.

My grandpa had a gramophone in his house that had to be wound up to play. 

Music

The most loved type of music by people when my grandpa was young was swing and jazz. The people that were big in that department were Benny Goodman and Glen Miller, the both of them played mainly woodwind and brass with the rest of their band playing along to them. In the evening people would gather round their wireless and if you were lucky and you lived in the city you could go to theatres or night-clubs to see them perform live. This sort of music was often in films and when my grandpa was young he spent a lot of time at the pictures.

Because my grandpa lived in the city, he and his friends would go to the pictures a lot because they were surrounded by them and because they were so cheap. The pictures cost about thruppence which would be roughly 2p nowadays.  Amazing !

 FASHION

During my grandpa’s school days short trousers and a school cap made of cloth with a badge on was compulsory.  All boys wore short trousers until their teens in those days.  It must have been cold in the winter. Roundabout 1948, my grandpa spent most of his time in his RAF uniform because he was still in the service, but when he was off-duty he would wear short sleeve shirts and shorts because he was in Rhodesia and the Middle East where it was hot. In England my grandpa would wear sports jackets and grey flannel trousers with turn-ups and wide baggy legs.  Jackets were usually double-breasted with wide lapels.

The fashion for ladies during the war was skirts just on or below the knee and quite slim fitting, as there wasn’t much material about to make clothes.  Everyone would ‘make do and mend’ by re-using fabric, cutting clothes down to fit children or even using curtains.  After the war it was quite common for brides getting married to have their wedding dresses made of parachute silk left over from the army.  If you married during the war, like my Dad’s parents, you usually wore an ordinary suit or dress because there wasn’t the material around for a nice wedding dress.  The men were nearly all in the services, so they’d wear their uniforms.

Ladies hair styles were often curled under all around the back,

sometimes with a hair-net to keep it in place.  The front would be curled up and round your finger with lots of grips to keep it in place.  The men would go for the short, back and sides look.  If you were in the services, you would have to keep it short. 

Transport

When my grandpa was in his youth he lived in the city of Liverpool. The city had lots of different forms of transport that were cheap, frequent and public. My great grandpa never learned to drive a car, only a motorbike and my grandpa could only ride a bike so the city trams and buses helped out a lot with the to and fro with his friends. The other good thing was the fact that the trams and the buses could hold my grandpa and all his friends when a car probably couldn’t. In any case most working class families at that time could not afford to run a car.

There were also lots of train stations so my grandpa had the chance to go to lots of different places in the country and to the seaside on day trips with his school or church.

When my grandpa was in the RAF and living in Stroud in Gloucestershire, in 1954 he took his driving test and bought a second-hand car, an Austin 10.   When my grandpa came out of the RAF he bought his very own new Ford Anglia.

Home life

When my grandpa was young there were no televisions but every house had a radio. There were radio stations running from morning till night and the BBC owned all the stations. There was a wide variety of programs to suit all tastes. There were children’s programs from 5 till 6 p.m., historical plays, nature and a vast quantity of different quizzes and music broadcasts.

There were not very many cars and those that were lucky enough to afford one would spend loads more money to keep it  running. Children would go and visit their friends to play cards because there were no electronic games to play on your own.  Kids were always playing in the street in working class areas because mothers would not want them hanging about inside getting the place untidy.  No-one worried about the traffic so much because there wasn’t much about. When everybody was off work at the weekend they would visit each other’s houses and sometimes drop in quite unexpectedly because there were not many telephones in homes to call each other easily and arrange things beforehand.

Rationing

During the war there was a lot of rationing of different things like food and clothing. Meat, butter, sugar, chocolate, tea and dairy produce were the main foods that were rationed.  People were issued with coupons to buy things in the shops, so that they did not get more than their ration.  It meant that they had to make do with a small amount, but people were generally healthier for eating less.  If you lived in the country or had a garden you were lucky because you could grown things for your family to eat.  You were not allowed to keep chickens or animals unless you were proper farmers.

Power was also rationed and you were asked to use a low power light bulb and not waste electricity.  There were posters and adverts urging people to switch off lights, etc.  Clean water was another thing that was not to be wasted because you were only meant to have about 5 inches of it in a bath. Coal was rationed because power stations had to have enough to keep the generators working to keep the factories producing things for the war. Every thing that was made of metal was recycled into guns, aircraft etc. My grandpa’s local park had its railings pulled out to be melted down into scrap.

When my grandpa was away in service there was a big, long power cut in the winter of 1947 that my grandma told me about. All the power in England failed and I think a lot was to blame on the miners for going on strike in the middle of winter and because people had coal fires they couldn’t light them unless they had access to wood.  This really meant only country people.