General Chat

I don't know if I have mentioned this before but my grandfather was sent a white feather in the first war.

Born in 1874, he would have been forty at the outbreak of that war and he would have been a shepherd for thirty-three years. The farms were running with a tremendous shortage of young men and the country needed to be fed.

Although he was still single at that time, he didn't fight, he stayed to feed the country.

Did he deserve a white feather? I don't know.

No-one deserved a white feather! :-(

Agree with Maggie.

Agree with Maggie and Rose it was a horrible thing to do especially because it was done with no knowledge of circumstance

It was a horrible thing to do to him!

But single men age 40 or 45 were liable to call up, which could partly answer why someone thought it a "good" thing to do. It was a nasty thing.


My grandfather was born in 1884 and was called up to be enlisted in December 1915, when he was almost 31 years old.

He was married with 2 children and a 3rd on the way.

He was actually mobilized in August 1916, went through basic training and was then transferred to the newly formed Machine Gun Corp. He ended up in what is today's Iraq, but details are hard to find as it seems that all the records for the MGC were destroyed by a mysterious fire after it was disbanded in 1920.

Because he was called up, my mother (the eldest) had to leave school at age 12 instead of taking up a scholarship to continue her education. Grandmother was apparently not the best at handling money!


My father's eldest brother joined up at age 19, served all through WW1, was wounded, on a small pension and never able to do more than the most menial of jobs. When WW2 broke out, he was 45, married with 6 children between 7 and 16.

He was liable to be called up .......... until he managed to get a store keeper's job that counted as Restricted Occupation (firm was making war materiel) with the help of my father.

My father wanted to join the RAF, but was rejected on medical grounds. Apparently he had a patch on his lung, which meant that at some stage in his life he had suffered from TB. He had been totally unaware of this and it was a bit of a shock.

Because he looked quite healthy, some neighbours thought he was shirking his duty - I don't know if he was actually sent a white feather, but I know the woman next door refused to speak to my mother, because her husband was away fighting and my father was safely at home.

I mentioned on another thread, how the father of my grans best friend was in his pub when it was hit by a bomb, and he moved out of Southampton, to Totton.
The papers of the time castigated Southampton residents who moved away, to live on the outskirts, sometimes just at night time, sometimes permanently.
My question is, why not?
Surely if you can get a decent night's sleep, you'd work better the next day!