Grandad John Young wore a black waistcoat and trousers when he was not dressed in his railway uniform. From the lowest pocket of the waistcoat hung a large, gold watch on a thick, gold chain. His hair was sparse, but he had a bushy moustache, which sprouted under pale, soft cheeks. He had courted my grandmother, Sarah Ellen Hambledon from Leek in Staffordshire for many years before they married and his stiffly-correct postcards, signed simply, 'Jack' came to her with military precision. The pictures on the front of the cards were of old Manchester, of county towns, of churches long gone and views unknown.
He married his Sarah in 1908 and he bought the cottage at Dunhampstead in the Twenties, when the great Galton estate was sold. The garden of the cottage was his greatest delight and his favourtie flowers were roses, for growing which he was famous locally. My mother told me that the first rose he ever budded, shrivelled as if it had been burned on the day he died. |
