I’ve recently been browsing the 1939 Register on Find My Past. This is the national register of about 41 million civilians living in England and Wales taken on 29 September 1939, less than a month after Britain declared war on Germany. Its purpose was to enable the authorities to issue identity cards, organise rationing, and manage other administrative tasks associated with the war effort. There’s more on its rationale and importance on the Find My Past blog.
The register has been available for a while and to be honest I didn’t take much notice of it when it was first released. I haven’t had much time for research lately and tend to get sucked into pushing my family tree further back rather than focusing on more recent periods of history. 1939 is within living memory, it’s my grandparents’ lifetimes, and I suppose I didn’t think such a recent record could tell me much I didn’t already know. However, as with any area of research, making assumptions tends to be unwise!
The one person I really wanted to find, my paternal grandfather Leo King, has in typical fashion remained elusive. I’ve written about Leo in previous posts. I’ve found more information than I thought I would on his early life but the years between 1918 and his marriage to my grandma in 1940 remain a mystery I have yet to solve. I had better luck with my paternal grandmother, Leo’s second wife Sarah Dodsworth. Sarah was born in 1915 in Middlesbrough to her father George, a bin man, and mother Minnie. She met Leo during the Second World War when she had joined the WAAF and he was stationed with the RAF in the North East. Despite the age gap (he was 17 years her senior) they married during the war and had my dad in 1947, their longed-for and adored only child.
I remember grandma talking about her upbringing when I was a child. She was the middle one of three siblings with an older sister Ida and a brother Raymond who was five years her junior. Their mother died when grandma was 21. She often told me that, after her sister had left to get married, she lived with her father and brother and had to ‘keep house’ and look after them. She made it sound like a hard life with a lot of responsibility for looking after others.
The 1939 register gives a slightly different impression. When I first looked at the transcript I was not surprised to find a household with George, Sarah and Raymond living at 196 Linthorpe Terrace in Middlesbrough. What did surprise me when I looked at the original image was to find three further people at 196 Linthorpe Terrace whose details have for some reason not been transcribed. There is another Sarah Dodsworth, who is my grandma’s own grandmother born in 1860. There are also two of my grandma’s aunts, Sarah’s daughters Eva Dodsworth and Florence Norman. Sarah Senior and Florence both have ‘unpaid domestic duties’ written in the ‘personal occupation’ column, while Eva’s listing says ‘Nurse (S.R.N). A potential household of six begins to look very different from a household of three.
Of course it’s dangerous to infer anything about people’s personal relationships or feelings from one single factual record, and indeed these women could have been visiting rather than living at the address. However this does cast at least some doubt on grandma’s account of her youth. For her part, her occupation is given as ‘Shop assistant (Head Sales, fancy-furnishing dept)’ which is a lovely level of detail to have. Grandma was often nostalgic about her time working in a department store before she got married. To her, stores like Marshall and Snelgrove in Leeds were the height of glamour. She was very proud of being a head of sales on the glove counter and even in her old age always prided herself on her nicely kept leather gloves.
Grandma’s story isn’t the only puzzle my family have thrown out from 1939. My maternal grandparents also appear in the register. Mum’s mother Irene was 17 in 1939 – she married my grandad a year later, in September 1940. In 1939 she’s listed living in Leeds with her parents Ernest and Hilda Brayshaw and her younger sister Joan. What’s puzzling about this entry isn’t my grandma’s details but her father Ernest. I’ve got quite a few records for Ernest including the parish register entry for his birth, on 12 April 1900, and his baptism the following January. I was therefore puzzled to find his date of birth on the 1939 register listed as 13 April 1898, almost two years earlier. This seemed strange. I’m as confident as I can be that the parish register wouldn’t be wrong, so why did Ernest give the wrong date of birth to the registrar? Could it be possible that he didn’t know his own date of birth? I’m used to erratic ages and dates from 19th century records but hadn’t expected to find it in 1939.
Then I got to wondering whether there might be a reason for Ernest to deliberately falsify his age. I read a bit more about military service and conscription in 1939. According to the UK Parliament’s webpage, “the National Service (Armed Forces) act imposed conscription on all males aged between 18 and 41 who had to register for service”. A man born in April 1900 would be eligible for military service in September 1939. A man born in April 1898 might just avoid it.
Was Ernest’s entry in the 1939 Register an honest mistake or a deliberate attempt to avoid the draft? I’ll never know. I don’t have any evidence of Ernest serving in the Second World War, and he was just young enough to miss the First World War, so he was one of those lucky men of his generation who missed both of the 20th century’s global conflicts. Whether this came about by accident or design is impossible to tell.
In Search of Kings 