My Dad, Ronald Croft, was born on 24 April 1928 in Stockton on Tees, County Durham. He was the son of Florence Croft, who was an 18 year old single mother, at a time when young women who had ‘bastard’ children were too often incarcerated in institutions. Florence stayed with her family, but Dad grew up with the lie that Florence was his sister and that his grandparents, Fred and Elizabeth, were his parents.
It wasn’t until he was 11 in 1939, and his grandparents both died within months of each other, that he found out Florence was his Mum. I was also 11 when I found out about his history when I had to do a ‘family history’ project at school. Dad gave me a list of his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ – Mary, Grace, Tom, Beatty, Harold, Emily, Ivy, Freda and Florence – and then suddenly revealed, ‘well, they were my aunts and uncles really, and Florence was my Mum’. He never knew who his father was.
My only record of his early life was the story he told my for my family history, which as I wrote it reads a bit like a Hovis advert:
‘He remembered his first day at Norton Infant School when he was five years old, and there was a shelf the children put their lunches on. At the bottom of the small hall there was a police station. Times were quite hard when my father was a boy in County Durham. His family worked hard, trying to make ends meet. Most things were homemade, like meals and clothes. At the junior school they did a lot of basket weaving. At nights, their entertainment was having a good sing-song around the piano and making peg-mats and basket weaving. The community was very closely knit, as people were friendly and helped each other out much more, but this was because they were very hard times then.’
That’s it. A stripped down, sanitised snippet of my Dad’s memories, mediated by my 11 year-old self, careful of what went into my school project.
Early life
I have my own memories, of course, and other things I found out about his life, mainly through my Mum. Florence got married and had four other children, and my Dad went to live with them in Enfield, north London, immediately after his grandparents died. But his step-father rejected him and made his life very difficult (shame/scandal/’not his blood’). Dad was evacuated to Harpenden during the war, living with a foster family who he described as ‘cruel’. I remember his tales of how he was made to get up at 5 in the morning to light all the fires, and was given all the heavy household tasks to do.
The picture above shows Dad when he was aged 16, sitting in one of the village greens in Harpenden. Dad left school when he was 14 in 1942 and started a series of unskilled factory jobs, which he would do for the rest of his life, except for the brief period he did National Service at the end if the war in 1946. When he was 15 he had a big row with the father of the family and run away, sleeping on park benches and living rough for a few weeks. Eventually, his friend Bob Rolt persuaded his family to take him in, and he lived with them for several years, as his mother and step father refused to let him come back ‘home’. His ‘new’ family, the Rolts, had their own troubles. Bob’s sister, Beryl, was raped when she was 16, suffered a nervous breakdown, psychiatric hospitals, shock treatment, drugs. I remember Dad saying that ‘they all blamed her’ for what had happened.
Dad used to often tell the story of a trip to France in the 1950s, his only holiday abroad. See the picture below. He and the group of friends he was holidaying with walked out of a bar because the bar tender had refused to serve their friend who was black. He was so proud of this story, and used to repeat it every time he had had a few drinks – despite at the same time holding some pretty backward views on race.
Part of the union
He spent most of his working life as an unskilled worker in the packing/finishing section at the Skefco Ball-bearing factory in Luton. He was a proud ‘union man’, at various times shop steward and joint convenor of the AUEW, and helped to lead various disputes, including a long-running one over equal pay in the early to mid-1970s. He never stopped talking about the union at the tea table at home, and his union talk formed a verbal backdrop to my years growing up. He used to proudly sing the Strawbs’ ‘Part of the Union’, not knowing that it had originally been written as an anti-union song. Later, when I became active in socialist politics, I felt like I had absorbed all his union talk, that it had become embedded in my psyche. He was much more right wing than I would become. He was a fan of Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle, and thought Tony Benn (even in the mid-1970s) was too left wing.
He was also a very flawed character personally, and like most of us a bundle of contradictions. He saw himself as an anti-racist, cheered on the first big ANL carnival (on the TV news – he had stopped me from going) and yet used the foul racist language of the 70s. He fought for equal pay, and yet treated my Mum like a skivvy. Whenever I think of him I can see him sitting in the armchair, drinking endless cups of tea with a packet of 20 Piccadilly Tips by his side and barking out orders to my Mum to fetch this and fetch that. He was an argumentative character (a trait I developed myself) and I remember the year leading up to his death in 1978, when I had got into punk and rebellion, as being one of endless slagging matches with him. He didn’t hit me often but there was one time I will never forget when he totally lost it and lashed out at me. The Goodies was on the TV, and for years I had recurring nightmares of him slapping me over and over while that inane theme tune ‘Goody Goody yum yum’ played in the background.
I mostly remember him fondly these days, and have usually posted positive recollections on social media on his birthday, the anniversary of his death and fathers’ day. But family life is rarely an uncomplicated or wholly positive experience, and my memories are both good and bad. His death from stomach cancer – his body ‘riddled with cancer’ according to his death certificate – had a profound effect on me. My last memory of him was visiting him in intensive care at St. Albans Hospital. It was a shock to see him lying there inert, his body pale and flabby, connected to a ventilator and hard clumps of dried blood around his lips. Dad, who had been so animated – laughing, shouting, scowling, grimacing. I recoiled from touching him, which I regret. I had defied the nurses who had thought it would be too upsetting for me to see him. I will always be glad I defied their wishes. I knew it would be the last time I saw him. But I wished I had flung my arms around him, told him I loved him, said I was sorry for being such a contrary and argumentative daughter. But I was silent, and only kissed him in my mind’s eye. I have often thought of trying to trace his family background – I never met any of his family – and to tell his story properly, without frills, just like he always tried to tell things ‘as they were’ and I really hope to one day.
