Lorna's father

Please meet Lorna's father Albert. Born in 1882, he would have been about 50 at the time that this photo was pasted into the family scrap book for 1931/2. At that time he was a steel and metal merchant living in Sheffield with his wife Topsie (Lorna's mother) and his two children (Lorna's brother Theo, and Lorna herself).

Although he looks quite kindly in this photograph, his grandchildren, now in their seventies, remember him as a rather severe character. We also know from one of the early war diary entries already published in this journal that he and Lorna clashed.

By the 1930s Lorna's father had already served in two wars: in South Africa between 1901 and 1902 (wounded in October 1902), and in the Army Corps in France during the First World War (mentioned in despatches in November 1915, November 1917, and April 1918). Just a few short years after he selected this picture for the family scrap book, he went to war again.