Since the excellent Right Angle on Mr Kenny, America’s new dad, I’ve found my thoughts drawn to fatherhood, its nature and importance. On the eve of Father’s Day, I thought I’d write some of these thoughts down. This is not a scholarly piece, but I hope you find it of interest.
Four Fathers
The role of father is not restricted to your actual dad. Teachers, coaches, other relatives can all play a part in forming the adult you become. For me, three men other than Dad stand out.
First, of course, is my Dad. In a comment on the Right Angle episode I mentioned him, how he was a man whose life was devoted to providing and caring for his family but could be somewhat distant. He worked night shift all through my childhood, which had an impact, as did his upbringing in the Exclusive Brethren. When he was growing up his family didn’t have a radio and he wasn’t allowed to go to the movies because of their religious beliefs. The first radio programme he heard was when family went to neighbour’s house to listen to the coronation of the King Emperor George VI in 1937. The first movie he ever saw was when he was conscripted into the Army ten years later. Imagine growing up without radio or films in the 1940s. He never quite lost the feeling of being on the outside looking in, but he was a good and upright man who worked hard for his family. I’m very different to my Dad, but apart from giving me life, he gave me my sense of duty.
Next is my maternal grandfather. I grew up in a council house and Grandad lived with us, or rather, we lived with him, as the house was in his name (Dad bought the house under Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy scheme in ‘80s). Grandad was quite an influence in my early years, he would often pick me up from school, usually dropping into the local bookmakers on the way back. Looking up at the drawn, sad, hopeless faces certainly inoculated me against gambling at an early age. I watched a lot of TV sitting at his knee and I’ll never forget watching a programme about the lead up to the Second World War. I would have been about eight I guess and already knew a lot about the war, but I’d never heard about Oswald Molesley’s “Black Shirts”, the British Union of Fascists. This was very much at odds with my idea of Britain, I was shocked and asked Grandad if there had been any in our area. He said there’d been a few. I asked what did people do? He let out a snort and replied. “Ha! We laughed at ‘em. Struttin’ about like they was something special. Wankers!” He was not one to be overawed by pomposity or thuggery. Like I said, quite an influence.
The next was a teacher. I went to a standard state school but was lucky enough to have some very good teachers, back then we were still being taught how, rather than what to think. One who was a great influence was the drama teacher, Steve Hammond. He was a rare thing, a teacher who combined a degree of modernist informality with his own version of old school discipline. He gave us creative leeway but was big on teaching us the basics first. I learned from him that it’s pointless (and frankly callous) to just “allow kids to express themselves” without giving them the tools to do this, without teaching them the groundings of our culture. For all his informality, he knew you must have a framework to build on. He was also very protective of the drama studio’s polished woodblock floor. You had to put your school bag and street shoes on a table next to the door. His rule was “If it’s on the floor, it goes out of the window.”. And he meant it. The studio was above the school hall and about forty feet up, it wasn’t unusual to see a sports bag come sailing out of the window, at the start of term anyway.
The last is from my early years working as a printer. I left school while still sixteen and started a four-year apprenticeship six months later. Again, I worked with and learned from many guys, but the first, and one I remember with great fondness was “Wee” Georgie Carlin. A short, stout Glaswegian, plain spoken and with a great sense of humour. In the ‘50s he’d been in the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders fighting communist insurgents in Malaya. He taught me technical stuff of course, but also about work itself. Small but important things like “First, make a cup of tea.”. He and the other guys also taught me about the pub. Not just drinking; that comes quite naturally, but about how you do, and do not, behave in pubs. Having had first-hand experience, he also educated me about just how callous and vicious commies are.
Forefathers
I’ve long been interested in genealogy; and had done quite a bit on my Mum’s side of the family, having some of the line back to the 1840s. Frustratingly I’d never been able to make any progress on Dad’s family.
I never knew my Dad’s dad. He fought in the Middlesex Regiment on the Somme in 1916 and later in the war was caught in a gas attack. He survived; but was invalided out of the Army. He had pulmonary difficulties for the rest of his life to which he succumbed well before I was born. Dad knew his own grandad’s details but nothing of his family before that. There was a vague family tradition that we’d once had double-barrelled name and had been Scott-Packer. That was all I knew.
Online services have made the research much easier but even here I’d struck out and left it alone for some years. Then one night I tried again and hit a rich seam. I found another user who’d done a lot of work on the Packer line. I checked each link, generation by generation and each link was sound.
In a few hours I’d gone from knowing my father’s line for three generations to knowing that my great x8 grandfather was Thomas Packer and that he married Alice Gray in a church in St Albans in 1664. I’d seen Jeremiah Packer’s Will, my great x5 grandfather who died in 1805 and ran The George, a coaching inn in Uxbridge, on the western edge of Middlesex, less than seven miles from where I grew up. He married Hannah Weston at St George’s Hanover Square in 1777. The Scott-Packer name? Jeremiah’s son was Thomas Scott Packer, it was a middle name, not a double-barrelled surname. Interesting how family history can preserve but garble things over time. It was great to be able to introduce Dad in his final years to his ancestors from centuries ago.
All very interesting for me, much less so for you, apologies for the detour through the tangled roots of my family tree. I wanted to explain the scale of my sudden new knowledge of my ancestors. The phrase “coming from an old family” has long irked me, obviously we all come from equally old families. We all have a line of ancestors stretching back into antiquity, but for the most part they are theoretical to us. To have their names, where they lived, what they did, it makes them real people and it places you at the top of this human pyramid of ancestors. It places you in the continuing story of your family and your country. I went to bed that night with my head spinning.
For Fathers
All of the above is my own clumsy way of saying how important the role of father is. Any fool can father a child; but being there, being a father, providing, protecting, guiding and teaching is quite another thing. For all children, but especially for boys, the importance of having a strong, positive, male role model cannot be overstated. If boys are not shown how to be men, there’s a good chance they won’t become men, just larger, stronger boys. Our society today too often dismisses and undermines the role of father. In popular culture today dads are usually ineffective, hapless, bumbling idiots. Sometimes they’re abusive monsters, only rarely are they shown as what they should be, and most are. The state, in the US and the UK, has acted as surrogate father for far too many kids and we’re reaping the horrible harvest of that now.
In a world where the very concept of patriarchal authority is under attack, fathers, and the role of father, need and deserve all the support and recognition that they can get. To all of you that are dads, from a gay chap who is not, and will not be a father, you have my deepest respect and admiration. To those of you who are yet to become fathers, remember, it is the noblest and most important thing a man can do.
I’ll be raising a glass to all of you tomorrow. Happy Fathers’ Day.
4 replies on “Four Fathers. Forefathers. For Fathers”
Thanks Davey,
True stories are food for the soul. Knowing others stories helps me to see the world and my own story better in perspective. When I say that I am a fatherless and motherless, I do not mean that they were not there or that they were not very good parents, at least as far as the world judges things. They were both hard working and scrupulously honest and fair. I have not a bad thing to say about them, really. What was lacking was that I never had a converstation with either of them. My dad was raised Methodist, but he called himelfe a humanist, but he believed in God. My mother was a firm Catholic. I never heard a word from either of them about what they believed or why. I never heard a word about sex, or dating, or anything. In short, there was no relationship. They were aloof as aloof could be. I am not sure, but I think they followed the new pedagogy that was a reaction against the old pedegogy of Watson’s behaviorism. The kids would say in school about parenting that the most important thing was to not impose your limits upon you children. Nature had all it needed to grow up free and flourish. Active parenting would only put that into a strait jacket. Parents should just stand back and watch as their children blossom. How many other kids, good kids, I knew from equally good homes and with equally good parents found themselves like me, floundering.
All human beings are flawed, and all fathers are flawed. If one considers the Bible, all the patriarchs were deeply flawed fathers raising deeply flawed sons. I learned that you cannot reduce a person to his flaws, and neither can you reduce him to his virtues. Take the whole man.
Thanks for the insight, Davey!
My own father died just over a year ago (he was ‘overripe’ at 93), and I miss him a lot. Yes, fathers are just as important to girls growing up as boys. Very necessary!
That was well done Davey, Your comment “If boys are not shown how to be men, there’s a good chance they won’t become men, just larger, stronger boys”. is so true.
Thank you for that. As an unappreciated father, one who is typically vilified for his best qualities rather than for his flaws, I appreciate every defense of fatherhood I come across.
My own dad was a good man, firmly – if often without true understanding – on the side of what he was sure was right. I learned that from him and, though I’ve come to disagree with his views on many things, it was his sense of right and wrong that gave me the basis of how to live by mine.
Most of what he taught me was through sports. He was an excellent athlete in his day, an opponent and friend of legendary basketball coach Pete Carril of Princeton, and a member of the Gettysburg College Hall of Fame. Later, he became a very good coach, and he taught and trained me into being quite a good athlete myself. I got my strident belief in fair play from him and it lodged In my principles and has never wavered. On the other hand, he did teach me the importance of sometimes bending the rules to near the breaking point and, though he never intended it that way, it contributed greatly to my continual refusal either to conform or to blindly accept authority.
He had his problems, the greatest being unable to hold up against lifelong badgering by my clinically narcissistic mother. That eventually came to his becoming a shell of the man I knew in my youth. The later ravages of his serious affliction with Parkinson’s disease left him nearly unrecognizable by the end of his life. But he is gone from all that now and I hold to the memories I have of the younger man who provided me with much of the base upon which I have built my outlook on life.
Happy Father’s Day to all.