On birth certificate, he is listed as Ernest George, not George Ernest.



Marjorie died in 1970, and Pop came to Cromarty to live with us. Being a very keen gardener, he had an allotment at Anita Jonhstone's garden, and was great friends with her mother - even considered re-marrying, I think. Sadly, as his eyesight failed over the next 10 years, he was unable to see individual seeds, and could no longer do gardening. This must have been very upseting for him, but he always tried to have an optimistic outlook.

He always had an annoying habit of checking to see if fresh tea was made by reaching out to grasp the tea-pot, with both hands wrapped around it. Helen in particular seemed to find this annoying, and kept saying that he'd burn himself this way. However, his hands were horny and calloused from years of gardening and woodwork, and it didn't seem to affect him.

He was a very courtly man, and very popular with the elderly ladies in Cromarty. Very polite, very old-fashioned, very considerate.

I believe that when he was young he had suffered some kind of accident and had badly broken his arm (right I think). It had set badly and the elbow joint was never able to rotate properly. A minor hindrance at work, this probably saved his life. Too young to serve in WW1, he wasn't called up for WWII because of this disability.



‘Pop’ was and old-fashioned man. He believed, for instance, that the Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher at the time) was above criticism. She had been elected, and we should do as we were told and let her get on with her job. He was still very much of the generation when young men went off uncomplainingly to the trenches and machine guns because their betters told them to do so, and knew better than them.

He was polite and curteous to the point of being irritating to we impatient teenagers, who were also constantly infuriated by such habits as his of saying ‘five and twenty to six’ instead of ‘twenty five to six’. He always used to make Alison furious by welcoming her each morning with the latest news from the radio - an horrific plane or train crash, or an explosion at an oil refinery - and seemed to take a most untypical glee at hearing about these events on the radio ot television news. I’m sure that had they been ‘real’ he would have been shocked, but getting them second-hand from the media seemed to make them merely relishable make-believe entertainment.

At bottom, he was a very nice man with no pretensions to being better than his working-class birth, despite, I believe, his wife Marjorie’s aspirations to middle-class status. He was a very affectionate person, very demonstrative and liked nothing better than to give a young woman a good hug - in a completely innoffensive and unthreatening manner.