The Hall family BritBrats

Introduction

My childhood was spent in an army family and, like most other kids I knew, I took the way of life for granted. It was not until I began to grow up that I started to understand that our itinerant way of life was in any way unusual. Now that I'm in my mid-seventies I've reached the point (which will no doubt seem familiar to people of a similar age) when I start to look back on those formative years. 

My father too grew up in an army family. It was not until I reached my forties and he was into old age, that I began to take an interest in his experiences, both as an army child and as an army parent. Oh, how I regret not begging him to tell me more, but for reasons I have never fully understood, my mother, discouraged such conversations. 

On my parents' deaths I inherited my father's photograph albums and his unfinished memoir and began to delve into the past, looking more generally at family history through Ancestry and getting copies of my grandfather and father's Service Records.

Background 

My paternal Great-grandparents were Thomas Hall and his wife Fanny nee Lea. Originally from Lydney in Gloucestershire family legend has it that they eloped to Gretna Green where they wed before moving to London and married life in Silvertown, north of the river Thames in the teeming docklands area of the East End. Thomas spent his working life at the Tate and Lyle Sugar works, not far from the family home in Gray Street.

Thomas William Hall

c 1858 -

                                                    Fanny nee Lea

                                                    1857-1934

My Grandfather Thomas William Hall was born in 1891 and grew up the only boy in a houseful of sisters (6 in all.) 

Thomas William Hall 1891-1975

At the time of his birth my great-grandparents were living, according to the 1891 census, in Gray Street.

Gray Street in the 1970s

Granddad Hall started his working life as a fitter, employed at the local Siemens factory and at the age of 19 married my grandmother, Mabel Tinton on Christmas Day 1911.

Before the outbreak of WW1 he, in common with many young men, joined the local Territorial Army, so that by the outbreak of war in 1914 he was already quite an experienced young soldier.

Thomas and Mabel had 3 children - Thomas Jesse (born October 1911) Mabel Lillian (born July 1913) and my father, Arthur Alfred William (born1916).

Both my father and my aunt wrote memoirs (my father's sadly unfinished) and in the next episode I will be publishing an edited and annotated version of my father's account of growing up in an army family between WWs 1 and 2, and his subsequent experience as a boy soldier and army apprentice.