A Somerset Lad

‘Who is that?’ asked a cousin last week.

‘That’s our great grandfather, Albert Luxton. His uniform was from when he was in the military police after the First World War.’

Born in 1880, he was the youngest among his siblings to serve in the 15th Hussars. Along with Albert, there were older brothers William, Henry and Richard, each enlisting with the Corps of Hussars, each being assigned to the 15th Hussars, each being assigned to other units later in their career.

Military service seemed to have come with severe hardships.

Richard was deemed unfit for military service at the beginning of 1900, but was called back to the colours that summer and was despatched to South Africa to join the battle against the Boers. His health did not improve in the decade that followed and he died at the age of 42 in 1914.

Born in 1869, Henry was three years senior to Richard, and perhaps set the pattern for his younger brothers, enlisting at the age of eighteen. Henry completed the twelve years for which he enlisted and was transferred to the army reserve. Back at home in Aller, his wife died just before the First World War, and Henry returned to army life at the age of forty-five. Great great grandmother Luxton became the guardian of his children, a woman whose reputation for severity has been passed down through the generations. Henry’s attestation has ‘United Kingdom service only’, written across the top. He served as squadron sergeant major in a number of military depots. It was 1920, when he was fifty-one, before Henry returned to civilian life.

The answer to why the four brothers joined the army, facing hardship and risking death, was not hard to find. The occupations listed on the papers are manual work, one is a gardener, the others are labourers. Work was scarce, pay was poor, army life was a better option than remaining in Aller in the hope of improvement.

On returning from the Western Front in 1919, Albert found himself facing the situation common to hundreds of thousands of other soldiers who were being demobbed.  He had been a soldier for twenty years and had no other trade. He rejoined the army and was sent to Ireland where the War of Independence had begun.

For years there was a fear in the family that he had served with the Black and Tans. Only in recent months did I discover that he had served with the Military Provost Staff Corps. He had the unenviable task of trying to police soldiers, many of whom, like himself, were still in uniform because they could find no other work.

One of the recollections of him among older family members was of him having a serious drink problem in latter years. Such a comment prompted a sharp response on my part. ‘Can you imagine serving as a cavalryman throughout the Great War and you come home and no-one wants you? Would you not have started to drink? Can you imagine the PTSD he must have suffered?’

A suggested video on a social media site was of a yellow-fronted diesel locomotive approaching a railway station.  The briefest of searches would have produced thousands of such images from lines the length and breadth of Britain.

Is there any nation in the world quite as fascinated by railways? Much of the fascination is not with railways that operate Twenty-First Century rolling stock as part of the national rail network, but with railways which were closed more than fifty years ago. These are the lines where volunteers run trains on lengths of track which may sometimes be miles from the nearest line of the network. Stations which may have been used by a handful of passengers in British Rail days may now attract hundreds of visitors at weekends and holidays.

It has been noticeable that diesel locomotives now feature more and more among the engines. Diesels were once despised by steam railway enthusiasts, they are the villains in the Thomas the Tank Engine series of books by the Rev. W. Awdry. Perhaps it is a practical decision, the boilers of steam locomotives require regular inspection and expensive maintenance; perhaps it is an economic necessity, railways run on a shoestring are able to more readily run diesel engines.

The appearance of diesel engines on steam railway lines suggests that nostalgia is flexible, that something that was once cold-shouldered could become something that was much loved.

If blue and yellow former British Rail diesel locomotives are evocative of the past for people in 2025, then what things are there in 2025 that will become objects of nostalgia in fifty years’ time? In 2075, what will people preserve and restore as symbols of the past?

Perhaps there will still be railways, perhaps the sleek dark green locomotives of the present Great Western Railway will have found homes for retirement on preserved lines where the use of a carbon fuel will still be tolerated. But what else will there be?

Visit antiques centres, and much of the stock is the everyday miscellany of former times. Growing up on a farm where my grandfather milked a herd of twenty cows, the churns and the buckets were so commonplace as to be unworthy of comment, yet such items are now to be found on sale as antiques. Kitchenware, furnishings, clothing, garden tools, machinery – there seem to be few things that will not find a buyer. Even tins for biscuits, sweets and cleaning compounds will now be found for sale.

If the everyday of fifty years ago has become the nostalgia of today, then how much of today’s everyday will appear in antiques shops? Will there be air fryers, microwave ovens, coffee machines, Dyson vacuum cleaners, desktop computers and iPhones and countless other consumable durables from 2025? What that we have will be worthy of nostalgia?