Albert Ivan Gardner

Dad was born in Lincoln to Albert and Gladys Gardner.  He was mainly brought up by his maternal grandparents and a string of maternal aunts and uncles who either lived in the same house as him or lived in the same street.  He remembers both his Mum and Dad being very strict parents.  He used to get some hidings from his father but also knew he often deserved them given the fact that he started smoking when he was nine and was often caught sneaking cigarettes out of the house.  He used to earn money by running errands for the family.  They were quite poor however, and after his father left them, his Mum had to work full time to bring in an income.  His uncle Sidney was not able to work due to heath problems.  Sidney and Les – both of whom never married – lived in 10 Cromwell Street as well. 

Dad worked nights in a Foundry from the age of fourteen.  The Foundry was  in Brayford in Lincoln and he was seen as an essential worker and kept from enlisting in the forces for as long as possible.  He was fourteen when his parents split up.   He always said that his father told him that he was to join the RAF and take after him, and so Dad went and joined the Army on 31/8/1944 to spite his father more than anything else! In the four years that Dad was in the army, his record chart shows that he served in the Royal Lincolns; the Royal Norfolk; Royal Hampshires; and then the Royal Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Regiments.  He started basic training in Wrexham Barracks in 1945 (which is how he met Mum).  He went absent without leave (AWL) on a few occasions, disciplined for insubordination several times and shipped off to Greece in 1946.  He must have settled down at some time since his records show that he was promoted during his time in the army.

Once he was released from the Army, Dad began to look for other work and a home for him and Mum to live.  He settled for the first job offered to him – that of a bus conductor.  But moved on to being a bus driver once he got his PSV Licence.  He left the bus company in 1951 to get a better paid job working down the pit at Bersham Colliery.  He was a miner working the coal face as a Hewer, one of the most dangerous jobs in mining, but it was top money and free coal.  He used to come home completely covered in black coal dust.  I can vividly remember him being involved in a landslide when he worked down the pit and he was taken to hospital.  He was lucky that he didn’t lose his legs.   He was off work for a long time and for many months later we would often seen him trying to dig tiny pieces of grit out of his legs. 

He stayed at the coal face for ten years and then got a job with British Celanese on the Wrexham Industrial Estate.  He worked in the Plastics Extrusion Department and, instead of coming home covered in coal dust, he used to come home covered in white plastics powder.  Dad also had a window cleaning round that he did to supplement his wages, with Rob and Geoff helping to clean the windows and all of us helping to collect money from his round.

Dad retired when he was 65 and I will never forget the depression he went into, he was convinced he would die soon after he retired.  He didn’t really have any mates that used to come to the house – his family was his life.  But it was so clear that he was going to miss work a lot.  He said he just did not know what he was going to do.  He eventually looked after Denise, putting her on a Dialysis Machine three times a week, and then also looking after Mum once she was diagnosed with cancer. Dad was never the same after Mum died.  He was only 69 himself but he became a recluse.  He looked after himself, kept the house clean and himself well fed, and looked forward to visits from his kids and grandkids. He tried going on holiday with Cathy, Kevin and the kids but missed Mum being with him and  eventually he just refused to go out anywhere.  He then got cancer himself when he was 79 and died just one month after his 80^th birthday.   

Main World Events in 1925 – the year that Dad was born

• UK – The male half of a courting couple could expect to pay 5d for a pint of beer in 1925 – the modern equivalent of about 73p today, using the retail price index. A small bar of Cadbury’s chocolate was more expensive – £1.45 in modern money. The average male weekly wage was about £5, roughly £103 nowadays, and a pint of milk cost 3d (44p)
• Italy – Benito Mussolini assumed full dictatorial powers.
• Russia – Leon Trotsky was fired by Joseph Stalin and effectively placed under house arrest.
• UK – In sport, England’s most prolific batsman, Jack Hobbs, scored his record 2,000th test run at the age of 42, and Sheffield United won the FA Cup.
• UK – By the end of the year, the first-ever television transmitter had been created by Scotsman John Logie Baird
• UK – March 13th – Daylight Saving Summer time , in the UK, made permanent by parliament.
• USA – April 4th – A tornado went through 5 states and in particular Murphysboro, Illinois, it killed 800 people and injured 3000
• USA – May 25th -John Scopes brought to trial in Tennessee, USA, for teaching about evolution.
• South Africa – June 29th – Colourbar made legal in South Africa with work ban for the blacks.
• Germany – June 18th – Hitler’s personal testament, Mein Kamp (‘My Struggle’) published.
• East Africa – Mr LSB Leakey’s British Museum Expedition in Tanganyika which had set out to obtain bones of a Giganotosaurus
• UK – So many cars on the road in the UK that there were suggestions for a three tier system for cities – pedestrians above, cars at ground level and railways below as the dazzle of car headlights was a continuing problem
• UK – Malcolm Campbell breaks the world land speed record.