Seeing It Through: The Story of a Teacher and Trade Unionist

By Andy Ballard

Andy Ballard comes from quite a humble background; being a working class boy from a council estate at a middle class grammar school left its marks. A career teacher with nearly twenty- ve years in state education, he forged a second very successful career as a local, regional, and national of cer of his trade union. His story includes how his work at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers would secure the future of ATL and lay the foundations for the formation of "The Education Union". Ballard describes the interplay between his private and professional lives, and bares his soul when the pressures of a lifetime of commitment brings his story to an unexpected conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
• Release date: Jan 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912262670

Andy Ballard

Andy Ballard is a retired teacher and trade unionist living in Somerset .

Book preview

Seeing it Through

One Man’s Story Of Success And Failure

My family background and my time in school and college

So it began, on 31st May 1954, when I was born. Second son to Raymond Ballard and his wife Yvonne, younger brother to Ronald who had been born on Christmas Eve 1951. I was born at Kenchill nursing home, very close to Tenterden. Most of my father’s family were from East Kent with his forbears coming from villages south and east of Ashford at Ham Street, High Halden, Bethersden.

In this opening section I want to collect together information about my parents and grandparents; this is where I have come from and this will have contributed to the man I was to become.

My father, born in February 1926 in Tenterden, Kent, was one of two boys, the sons of Fred and Ethel Ballard. His younger brother Norman was born five years later in 1931

My paternal grandparents lived a life fairly typical of working class people born in the 1890s. Fred had little education and got a job as a journeyman gardener, but this was a dead end and like many other young men in Kent, he made his way to Chatham dockyards and signed on in the Royal Navy. He spent a total of 30 years as a stoker; sea sick every time his ship left port, rarely to see anything except the business end of a hold full of coal and the door of a furnace. He had an enforced break in service but was retained as a reservist, and was called back up when Herr Hitler’s rearmament began to cause sufficient alarm. Tours of duty were long, and conditions for ordinary seamen harsh.

The life of a stoker must have been pretty grim. When the ship docked the stokers would be expected to move the coal from the dockside into the hold and probably a good deal of this would be done by men with shovels. Their day’s work consisted of shovelling coal into the furnace and removing the ashes. They worked deep in the bowels of the ship in stinking conditions and excessive heat; probably OK if your ship was on North Atlantic duty, but dreadful if you were touring the tropics. If a ship was hit by a mine or a torpedo the stokers’ chances of getting out would have been minimal. Apart from being so far inside the ship, it would often be the furnace and the boiler which would blow, resulting in rapid sinking of the vessel. If that were to be the case, the stokers would be trapped in a maelstrom of super-heated steam and wicked fragments of metal.

The family verbal history has it that Fred went to sea on a tour to China on HMS Amethyst when my dad was very young, and he didn’t get back for five years. Interestingly the accounts that were given to me never included that Fred was sentenced to 45 days in military custody following being returned to his ship after deserting. The navy must eventually have forgiven him – perhaps there were extenuating circumstances – but in any case he was promoted to leading stoker in 1919 and was awarded a long service and good conduct medal, which is on display with his other service medals in a frame in my house. I never met Fred. I was told he was a gentle and quiet man. Perhaps he was quiet because he had spent so much of his life facing the real and imminent threat of death in the most horrible fashion. He died of throat cancer about 1950. Almost certainly all those years of breathing in coal dust cut his life short.

Ethel was the daughter of a groom, and at the age of 12 school was over and she went into domestic service as a scullery maid. She worked long hours and had very little time off. Her closest friend, my dear aunty Rachel, was a tiny Welsh child from near Merthry who was a chambermaid. Ethel was a few years into service and comforted the frightened and weeping Welsh child, and they became the nearest and dearest of friends. Their only relaxation was a trip on their one Sunday afternoon off a month when they went to the music hall in Ashford. The songs they learnt were relayed to me in place of nursery rhymes. In turn, I sang them to my daughter and she now sings them to her son. Ethel worked hard, as was expected, and she was valued and rose to become housekeeper. The family for whom she worked would not countenance her marriage and she was 32 before they finally relented and allowed her to marry Fred.

Rachel was not so lucky. The story according to my family was that as a young woman, she was stepping out with a nice respectable young man from Tenterden, all under proper scrutiny and all properly chaperoned. He went away to war, as did all the other young men, and he did not return. Rachel never found another man to love. They were in short supply, she was in service, and in any case her heart had gone to this young casualty of the great war. She never married. She was a regular visitor to my family and I have pictures of her with my dad when he was an infant, with me in my turn and with Bethan. This last one was taken in Bleadon and Rachel was in a wheelchair. She had been found lost and vulnerable, in Tunbridge in Kent near where she had worked, by my father who brought her to live out her final days in a care home where we could visit her. I’m pretty sure that my parents contributed to the cost of her care, and also my brother. I would have too, but my circumstances were constrained; but she would have been welcome to it. We were really the only family she had and her memory is blessed. She was always so kind to us all, she never forgot a birthday or Christmas and she was very generous with what little she had. She remained in service all her long working life. One year she came to see us on Christmas Eve and gave my brother, my sister and I an envelope each. We were told to open it straight away and I remember looking in and seeing five brown notes. My goodness, Aunty Ray has given me 2 pound 10 shillings, I thought. More money than I had ever held. But her gift was far greater: these were £10 notes. She had given me £50. Given that my Dad earned less than £20 a week, this was indeed a princely gift. I had to save it in a Post Office account straight away, as did my brother and sister. Ron bought his first car with it. I can’t remember what happened to mine, probably the same fate.

My father was brought up by his mother, as Fred was so often at sea for long periods. He went to school in Ashford and grew up when the world was an uncertain place. Employment prospects were bad, and no wonder that his mother remained in service, whilst Fred took all the Royal Navy service he could get. Anything, I guess, to keep an income coming and to put food on the table. Despite remaining in employment Ethel had an abiding fear of the workhouse and of destitution. No doubt my father did his best in school because of this undercurrent. He was 13 when war broke out and he told me how as a boy, he and his friends would go out into the fields to watch the dog fights between the Luftwaffe and the squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes. At night he could hear the drone of the heavy German bombers as they made their way from the coast to bomb the Medway towns and to wreak havoc and destruction in London. With no street lighting he told me that they could see the glow of London burning, although they lived some 40 miles to the south.

As the war progressed, and following the Battle of Britain, a new horror was unleashed in the form of what my Nanny Ballard called ‘Doodlebugs’. Mostly these passed over Kent, being aimed at London, but one fell short. Apparently you would know when it was going to fall as you could hear the engine stop. One night this happened over Tenterden and the V1 rocket came down and hit Beacon Hall, the house where Nanny was housekeeper. Fearing for the lives of her employers, she raced to the house. The V1 had caused extensive damage when it hit the ‘Garden House’ but there was no record of any casualties. The family were grateful for nanny’s help and gave her a painting (purchased at Drury’s sale in Tenterden on 19.8.1919 by Mrs Sands of Beacon Hall, Benenden), which was always on the wall in our living room at Maidstone. It had a lovely old gilt frame, that my dad ruined by trying to smarten it up with some gold spray paint. It has since been re-framed and is now on the wall of my study. It was painted by W.B.Beldorney and is called ‘On The West Lyn Stream’. On a visit to Lynton and Lynmouth, Rebecca and I went to try and find the spot where the artist must have sat, but of course all the trees have grown; but we were pretty sure we were in about the right location. It is probably worthless but I gazed at that picture and dreamed myself inside it on so many occasions as a child. I am really pleased to be looking after it as it was always one of Nanny’s treasured possessions and was a permanent feature of our home in Maidstone.

As soon as my father could, he engaged with the military and learnt some drawing skills from local servicemen who were preparing maps. When just 18 he joined up. Turned down by the RAF, he joined the infantry and was sent to Northern Ireland for his basic training. He told me almost nothing about this time but did tell a story about a football pitch used by the locals which had a starling that had learnt to mimic the referee’s whistle and caused sporting mayhem. This was where he was introduced to boxing. I don’t know if he was any good at it but he loved it. His active service began in France just weeks after the D-Day landings. His unit turned north from Normandy and pursued the retreating Wermacht. I pressed my Dad for details of this, but he was very reluctant to talk about it. I’ve had to guess what happened to him from the tiny clues he let slip. One story of hitching a ride on a tank as they made their way down a country road, only for the turret to turn suddenly without warning and hurl Dad into a ditch, gives an indication of how his unit made their way. He must have walked most of the way through Belgium and into Holland and there must have been lots of interaction with the retreating German army. Villages and towns were probably won as a result of close quarter fighting. Panzer divisions were also retreating through the same region, and there was very likely fighting with them as well. Like so many of his peers my father would not be drawn into detail. Perhaps it was all so horrible, but he never boasted of his deeds or sought vainglorious recognition for his actions. This is in keeping with most men who in those days did not talk about their experiences in order to lay ghosts to rest but kept it bottled up, burying their experiences as deep as they could. Writing this over 70 years since it all happened I wonder what impact this behaviour, this insistence on hiding away from reality, on burying the awful, has on my own life and am left reflecting that I too have sought to bury troubles only for them to come back and have a seriously detrimental impact on my life.

Dad’s unit eventually made their way into Northern Germany and following the surrender and the end of European hostilities dad was part of a vast army of occupation. It had to be controlled and policed and dad volunteered for the military police. It earned him an extra stripe and six weeks back in the UK at the Roussillon Barracks in Chichester. He returned to Hamburg as a red cap. The MPs had to do everything that a civilian police force would do and more until the local German police could be re-established. So sentry duty; directing traffic; keeping order between rival groups of soldiers; and keeping the local civilians in order, although they were very subdued. Dad did tell me that he often gave away his ration of chocolate to one of the many starving German children. It must have been utter chaos. At one time we did have some bank notes printed in German marks after the occupation began, but they were for thousands of marks as the currency devalued at an astonishing rate and inflation rose. Dad did say that a woman had gone to buy bread with a basket full of money. The money was rejected and she paid for the bread with the basket!

His most important role, however, was to be brought to my notice in February 1990. I was reading my Sunday paper, and in particular an account of how 70 Allied prisoners of war had escaped from Stalag Luft III, the famous ‘great escape’ that has been enshrined in film. These men had been hunted down by the Gestapo and executed in contravention of any interpretation of the rules of war. The SS officers responsible for the murders of these men faced a war crimes trial held in Hamburg. As I turned the pages I sat bolt upright – there was a picture of a notorious group of German SS officers in the court, and behind them, standing smartly to attention, was my Dad.

His job was to convey these men from the prison to the court and back and to ensure that they were kept under lock and key. I’m sure that Dad will have behaved perfectly correctly, but he must have shown some compassion for these men who were all facing the death penalty and they made some small gifts to him. I remember a small pair of officer’s field glasses and a field compass being amongst Dad’s possessions. I remember playing with them, without a thought for where they had come from. I have no idea where they are now.

When he was off duty, he would go to the NAAFI for a cup of tea and a chat with other service men. Here he met my mother, who was in the ATS and stationed in Hamburg. Together with a group of friends they would meet up, go dancing, or go to the cinema. I have no idea how innocent or otherwise this arrangement was, but in due course my Dad’s mother put these two back together. I do remember the dancing of my mother and father and apparently they could perform a pretty nifty jitterbug even when my brother and I had come along, and they still went to the occasional dance.

The war crimes trial was in 1947 and shortly after this my dad went to Freetown, Sierra Leone, seconded to the West African Rifles. By then he was a sergeant and his role was to help establish police control in that troubled country. He was demobilised, came home, married his childhood girlfriend and moved to Watford as a civilian policeman. His new bride died suddenly from polio, and my father was informed of this by his duty sergeant when he came in from his beat. He was given compassionate leave but never went back. He returned to the family home and took up employment in an electrician’s shop. Ethel believed that her son would find happiness again if he sought another partner, and she encouraged him to write to that nice young woman that he had met in Hamburg. He did as he was told, and a relationship grew. My mother came to visit in Kent, and Ethel took to her immediately.

Mum and Dad were married at St Stephen’s Church in Bath and they settled with Ethel in Tenterden. Ethel was very kind to my mother and encouraged her in cooking and managing the household. She stood by my mother during my father’s infidelity and forced him back onto the straight and narrow. Ethel ruled her own household with Victorian, Methodist strictness. There was no drinking and little laughter. She was unusual in owning her own home but sold up, and moved to Maidstone to live with my family when Dad got employment with Kent County Council.

Ethel lived with us in Maidstone and continued to have very significant influence over the way our family behaved. She never lost her view of the world in which she knew her place and looked up with reverence to her betters. Her deference to what she called the gentry would turn out to be a significant factor in my own, very different perspective.

My mother’s parents were from similarly humble backgrounds. Her mother, Mary Brown, was the daughter of a bookbinder, who although skilled was nevertheless an ordinary working man. I remember great Grandad Brown with his shock of white hair and his awful pipe. When we played outside my Grandmother’s house, we could hear his radio as clear as day as he listened to music, and news, especially of test matches, at incredible volume as he was very nearly completely deaf. Mum’s father Edwin was a chauffeur to some rich businessman. Edwin learnt to drive in the army when a kindly sergeant volunteered him away from the trenches and into a driving job, lorries at first and then later staff officers’ cars, well away from the horror of the combat. He had seen plenty of it, and, like most men of his age would not willingly speak of it. He did however talk of ‘Wipers’ which I later found meant that his regiment had seen action at Ypres.

My mother was named for an officer who took a shine to Ted Miller and employed him after the war at his home in France. My mother hated her first name and was always known by family and friends as Toddy, from Todd, her middle name. My mother was always very scathing about her father – He drank, you know, although I never saw him drunk. Who knew what demons he brought home from France? He was always kind to me and called me ‘Sonner’ in his broad Bath accent. He was an outwardly unremarkable man, but one who spent the depression years unemployed and kept food on the table by poaching. He earnt a few coppers teaching ice dancing and roller dancing, though where he could have learnt such things is a mystery. I remember him entertaining us outside their council house on Lansdown, opposite the racecourse, doing cartwheels at the age of seventy. He was a dapper little man and looked grander than anything I’d ever seen in his grey chauffeur’s uniform with peaked cap, riding breeches and button-up kid leather boots. He polished the Rolls as if it were his own and, to be fair to his employer, he did use it to pick us up from the station. On one occasion he was allowed to pick us up from Maidstone and take us all the way to Bath. I don’t suppose my council estate peers had ever got that close to a Silver Shadow before.

I grew up with my parents and my father’s mother at the helm. I was very familiar with her and her ways. She was strict and had a hard hand but was devoted to the work she set herself. She was desperately keen that my brother and I excelled at school, and it was she who taught me to read. I remember being allowed to sit on her bed as we read the various books that she had bought, or my father had picked up from the local library. I cannot remember not being able to read, and I have her to thank for my love of all books and my ability to get lost within their pages. She spent every waking hour doing something productive, and even when she watched the television which she had bought for us all, she would knit constantly. I’ve spent hours holding up skeins of wool which had been dyed battleship grey as she wound balls. Jumpers that wore out at the elbow were recycled and the wool boiled and hung in skeins and rewound and reknitted into school jumpers.

All my clothes were hand-me-downs or home-made. Shirts that had been my brother’s, with tucks in the sleeves to get them to the right length, hand-knitted school jumpers. We were not unusual and many of my peers at primary school were similarly dressed. It wasn’t until I went to grammar school that I had a new blazer, several sizes too big, and I can smell the odour of the new material to this day. Money was in short supply and birthday and Christmas presents were mostly what one needed: new pyjamas, a dressing gown, socks, and just like the Weasleys a new hand-knitted pullover, always an orange and maybe some chocolate. All very modest but we knew no different and were of course thrilled as we opened each present. But even given our relative low income we often went off to school with a few pennies squeezed into our hand by Ethel. I met a different level of income when I went to grammar school, but more of that later.

I knew my mother’s parents much less well but I was lucky enough to spend time in the summer holiday staying with Granny and Grandad Miller. I didn’t know the full story until much later, and am sure that my stays on Lansdown were to take me away from the strained circumstances at home. I knew nothing of it of course and for me the most disturbing thing was the arrival of my sister Susan.

Prior to the birth of my sister there was a significant hiatus in my family, which I knew nothing about until I was 46 years old. My father had been working as a volunteer at the local Methodist youth club where he played tennis, sang and took part in other activities. One of these, it seems, was to get involved with a young woman and he got her pregnant. I would have been about two or three at the time. How the truth of this came out, and the full extent of what happened next, is all hidden in the past. I only found out about it when a lovely lady called Lin Simpson contacted me, having found my name on the electoral register. She asked if I had any knowledge of a Raymond S Ballard born in Ashford in 1926, which of course was my father. I spoke with Lin on the phone and we discovered that she was indeed my half-sister. She had not seen my father since she was four and wanted to understand why he had abandoned her. I approached my father and got a version of the story which doesn’t match. He confessed that he had had an affair and the result was a child. The girl had moved away and the condition placed upon him was that he would never see the girl or the child again. Compliance would mean that he would be able to stay with his family and there would be no further fall out. My mother and family members who were in the know all understood that this is what had happened. Lin’s story is a bit different, and she was able to show me black and white photos of herself with my father. She must have been at least three years old in the picture and in any case could remember her father coming to visit. In her words, she could remember running down the hallway when he got to the door. So my father continued to see the mother of his illegitimate child and he continued to see the child for some time. I suspect that he thought his subterfuge had been rumbled and he did then abandon any further visits.

I asked my father to write to Lin, at least, and explain. After all, it was not her fault, and she had spent years filled with self-doubts, and had never met her father again. My father refused and I’m quite sure that he knew that if he had any contact with Lin, then his visits to her when she was little would come to light. I was very deeply saddened by his recalcitrance on this matter. A letter could have meant so much to Lin. I went to meet her whilst at a conference in Brighton and later my brother and I went to visit her, mainly to break the news to her of my father’s death. There is a huge irony in his refusal to acknowledge or have anything to do with Lin. Both my parents doted on their grandchildren. There are four, all girls, and my parents generously accepted into that group my lovely stepdaughter Natasha, and they treated her no differently from their other granddaughters. But how they yearned for a grandson, and I know my mother asked Rebecca when we would be planning to have children. Lin has two lovely children. Her elder child is Emma and her younger a