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Uncle Jack (John Henry
Knowles1) was born January 13, 1902, and died February
13, 1990.
Jack served with the Yorkshire Light Infantry for seven years in India. Coming home, there was some trouble with the family and Grandad Knowles threw him out. Muriel, who was aged 12 at the time, says that Jack struck Jerry (aged 10). Whatever the facts of the case, I recall Jack as a taciturn, good-natured fellow in a Post Office uniform — he worked as a mailman.
He was in love with, and eventually engaged to, a girl called Daisy; but she jilted him and he married Gwen Bailey on the rebound.
Gwen (Gwendolyne, August 4, 1908 to July 12, 1999) was a pastrycook. I recall her as a large, jolly woman with a fund of jokes, riddles, puns and Spoonerisms.
Jack and Gwen had two children: Terry (Terence John, born October 22,
1936, died March 3, 2002) and Vicky (Victoria Betty, born May 24, 1944).
Next to Muriel and Uncle Bill, and of course my mother, Jack was the Knowles we saw most of as children.
Partly, no doubt, this was due to his living in Cannock, and was therefore convenient to drop in on when visiting Grandad and Grandma.
Perhaps it was also because he had a child the same age as ourselves. Vicky was very pretty, in
the Shirley Temple style
— golden curls, dimples. After some years of marriage to one Michael Birch she ran away with a fellow (John Sharp) who owned a pub.
They ended up in Malta where in late 1999 they were still living. From the first marriage
Vicky has Glenn (born 1971) and Lindsay (1972). Lindsay moved to the U.S.A. in 1993 and in early 2002 was living in South Salem, New York.
Terry, of whom I saw very little as a child, lived in King's Stanley,
Gloucestershire at the time of his
death (which was from spinal cancer). He too was twice married: first to Marian Burton, and then to Henni Schultz.
His children are Belinda Jane Knowles (married name Shelly) and Darrin John Knowles, who married a girl called
Keely-Ann Humberstone.
Belinda Jayne's children, Adam Christopher Shelly and Philip John Shelly, are my first cousins twice removed.
Jack lived to a good age (88), dying at last of emphysema. He had been a heavy cigarette smoker.2 The last time I saw him was in the early 1980s, when I was living at home in Northampton. Jack and Gwen came to visit us. I could hear the sound of his breathing all the way up the front path.
[This photograph shows my sister Judith, Vicky and myself, around 1950. The location was either Abington Park in Northampton, or the nearby Wicksteed Park.]
Notes
1. It was not until their sixth girl — by which time some sort of onomastic exhaustion must have been setting in — that Grandad and Granny Knowles re-used Granny's name, "Esther"; nor until their third boy that they recycled "John Henry". (My mother wanted me to be named "Peter", I don't know why. Dad was not enthusiastic. Soon after I was born, while Mum was recuperating, he went off to Northampton Town Hall to register my birth. Coming home, he announced that he'd named me "John". Mum complained that she had been under the impression they had settled on "Peter". Replied Dad: "I am called 'John,' your father's called 'John,' and your brother's called 'John.' It's an honest name. It'll serve him well.") In the Derbyshires, by contrast, the second daughter was named after the mother, the first boy after the father. I do not know the significance of these patterns. Probably there is none. And I note that actually two of my mother's brothers were called "John."
2. Grandad Knowles smoked cigarettes, too; but he only took it up in middle life, during the Great War. Prior to that war, cigarette-smoking was mainly restricted to women and certain subgroups of the military. (See Tissot's painting of Frederick Burnaby.) During my childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, most of the men in my family smoked cigarettes. The principal exception was Fred Littlehales.