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I know a little about my father's generation. He was nearly 46 years older than I was, while my mother was 37½ years older, and the enlarged generation gap occasionally caused difficulties in mutual comprehension. My knowledge of what boys of my father's generation wore is very limited. I don't ever remember discussing it with him, and I have very few photographs to go on. This is somewhat odd, as my father's father was a keen photographer, who processed his own films and prints. Unfortunately, his skill did not match his enthusiasm, and many of the photographs are now in very poor condition. Apart from the one of my father, they've been edited a little, but only to remove blemishes. I know very little of the chilhood of either of my parents, but I've been able to find a little about my father.
My father's family lived in London: for some years they lived right in the centre and then, when my father was quite young, moved out into the Northern Heights. When he was 18, they moved again, out into the Chiltern Hills - "Metro-Land" - to the house where I grew up. The big garden started off as rough hill pasture, but by the time I knew it, this had long been tamed. The hills are of chalk, which occasionally comes near enough to the surface that a field will have white patches in it. We were lucky, in that we had about eighteen inches of soil above the chalk: but the soil was full of flints. The story was told of one of the neighbours who had (expensively) had all the flints removed from his garden. It rained, and when the soil was dry, it was absolutely solid - "like concrete", my father put it. The only solution to the problem was for him to buy a lot of flints and (even more expensively) have them put back! The contrast with the London Clay must have been enormous - I now live on clay so I have some understanding of the issues, though our clay is less sticky than that in London!
My grandfather worked in central London: his job must have been well-paid, for him to be able to afford a large four-bedroomed house in "Metro-Land". Getting to the office would have taken him a little over an hour: 10 - 15 minutes walk to the station, half an hour into London and then on the Bakerloo line to get to his office in Westminster. My father initially worked in London: he didn't go to university (I never discovered why not) and worked with sheet metals for a few years before he could get the job he wanted, in electronics. He passed on some of his considerable expertise in soldering to me: I've never been as good with my hands as he was. Not very long after they moved into the big house, my father wanted to set up a radio aerial, which was to be a long wire from one of the bedroom windows to a pole in the garden: as the garden was steeply sloped, the wire was almost horizontal and the pole only 6 feet high. My grandfather objected to this proposal, because it required making a hole in a pane of glass to get the connection from the wire into the room. "You're not making a hole in my pane of glass!". My father's solution to this problem was to buy himself a pane of glass of the requisite size, and then fit it into the window. He could do what he liked with his own piece of glass. How he drilled the hole, I don't know, but the aerial was still there when we moved out in 1970.
The only image I have of my father as a boy is the studio portrait shown here (figure 1). He looks to be about 5 years old which means the portrait was taken about 1910. Father is wearing a white round-necked (turtle-neck) jersey (sweater) with some buttons on the left shoulder. I rather doubt that there were any buttons on the other side -- such clothes tended to be asymmetrical. Notice that he is wearing white. I think that means that even though it was a long-sleeved jumper, it was for spring-summer wear. Britain can have chilly springs and sometimes cool days in the summer. Notice that his trousers are also white. What he wore for school uniform I have no idea. He attended University College School (UCS), in London, in the years shortly after the end of World War I. We used to have some old school magazines from UCS, but unfortunately these didn't survive a house-move in 1970.
My father had two cousins who were, I believe, a few years older than he was. Their father and my paternal grandfather were close friends, and went on cycling holidays together. I have a few photos showing my father's cousins. My grandfather was an avid amateur photographer so we have some early family snapshots and not just studio portraits. His snapshots thus provide a good idea about how boys' in father's generation were dressed.
