Norman Wakefield

1930 - 2020

Service

Greenacres Heatherley Wood, Grayshott. 7th May 2020. Tribute written and read by Ed Hardy

funeral

Music

Nocturne op 9 no 2 - Chopin. Listen on YouTube

This was on Norman's frequently played tunes on his iPad.

Tribute

Norman's life began on Sunday 6th April 1930 when a boy was born to Elizabeth and Albert Wakefield at number 53, Buller Street, Walney Island, near Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Elizabeth had trained in sewing soft furnishings and Albert worked in a furniture store: Norman was their first child, and he would be followed a couple of years later by his little sister Marjorie.

The family moved from Walney Island to Barrow Island literally the day before Norman started at Barrow Island Infant and Junior School. He later told Anne he remembered when it was lunchtime on that first day, all his classmates went home for their lunch and he was left crying on his own at the school gate – because he didn’t know where to go home to!

After a while a man came up to him and said, ‘Aren’t you the little boy that’s just moved into my street?’ and proceeded to tell the five-year-old Norman the way home. You might think his mother would have been pleased to see him, but all Norman could remember was that she told him off for being late! Life was certainly different back in the thirties.

Norman told Anne he had the happiest memories from his childhood. The family was a large one – his father Albert was one of a very large family and his mother Elizabeth also had three siblings, so the young Norman spent a lot of time visiting his aunts, uncles and cousins in Barrow, the Lake District and further afield.

At the end of the garden there was a bowling green, and Norman was in the habit of sitting on top of the dustbin shelter to watch: when games finished the caretaker would lift him down and let him play with the jacks on the green. One time he remembered being disturbed by an odd popping noise from above: looking up he was amazed to see a huge airship flying overhead – which turned out to be none other than the Hindenburg, the famous German Zeppelin. The story isn’t as unlikely as it seems: the Hindenburg made no fewer than seventeen Transatlantic journeys from its Frankfurt base in 1936 and indeed there was speculation that routes over the UK were altered to allow photographs to be taken of key strategic locations – such as the Vickers Shipyard in Barrow, for example. Did the six-year-old Norman Wakefield witness a Nazi spying mission? Sadly we’ll probably never know.

As the thirties came to an end Elizabeth began to worry about the deteriorating political situation in Europe, concerned especially that the Vickers yard would be a potential target for German bombers if war was declared. With this in mind the family moved again just before the war started, away from Barrow Island and into Barrow itself: the house on Lyndale Avenue had an Anderson shelter in the back garden. Elizabeth was of course absolutely correct to think the shipyard would be a target for bombers – Barrow came under heavy attack a number of times during the war, with some six hundred houses being destroyed completely and another fourteen hundred suffering bomb damage. Ironically enough while the house the Wakefields had left behind on Barrow Island survived the war unscathed, their new house on Lyndale Avenue was hit a number of times: Norman remembered watching his ‘Mam’ putting out an incendiary bomb fire in the garden once, and another time the house was so badly damaged the family had to go and stay with an aunt in the Lake District while it was being repaired.

Barrow’s proximity to the Lakes of course made it a great place for a boy to grow up. Norman would cycle off to the Lakes to go fishing, and the family also had a weekend hut which they’d use on a regular basis, the whole family driving up on, and in, Albert’s motorbike and sidecar. Norman had many happy memories of fishing, or shooting rabbits with his dad and his dad’s friend Tommy, and the three of them racing the motorbike down scree slopes.

Norman’s education continued during the war, with Barrow Infants being followed by Oxford Street School and finally Barrow Grammar School. He was an able pupil and did well at school, taking no fewer than nine subjects for his School Certificate, and doing very well in all subjects. These days he would have been a clear candidate for higher education, but post-war Britain was a very different place and University was still only for a tiny percentage of the population – so after leaving school at the age of sixteen Norman started at his first job, in an optician’s in Barrow.

He didn’t work there for long though, soon securing himself a position in the civil service, at the Public Trustee’s Office in Manchester, a hundred miles or so from home. Sixteen-year-old Norman Wakefield found lodgings in Manchester and settled into his new job – until little more than a year later, he was called up for National Service. Norman found himself in the army and initially posted to the Royal School of Artillery at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire where he trained in the process of flash-spotting, which was a method of detecting the position of enemy artillery based on the flashes of light reflected in the sky when guns fired at night. His keen mathematical brain came in useful for the calculations involved and he enjoyed the work very much.

Later he was transferred to the Royal Army Education Corps and posted to Lüneberg in Northern Germany, where he was based right on the main Square in the centre of town. His work involved assisting the head of the RAEC in the area and again he enjoyed the experience, particularly relishing the opportunity to see something of the world beyond Cumbria. Unlike many of his fellow National Servicemen, Norman very much found his time in uniform to be a positive influence on his life – as well as being the source of many of the stories he was later to tell about his early life.

Back in the UK after National Service Norman initially returned to his old job at the Public Trustee’s Office in Manchester, but he was intelligent and ambitious and so arranged to take the Civil Service Exam, traditionally the gateway to a high-flying career in the Service. He did well – coming in the top five per cent of candidates in his year – but when he asked about his prospects of promotion, he was told there were none for the foreseeable future. This jarred somewhat with Norman, whose feeling at the time was that ‘If you weren’t in the job you wanted by the time you were twenty-one, you were sunk’. He gave notice to the Public Trustee’s Office and promptly secured a position at the Guardian Royal Exchange in Manchester: he started at his new job on the first of January 1952.

By that time he’d already met the woman to whom he was to be married for nearly sixty years. Celia Wharton also worked at the Public Trustee’s Office in Manchester and the two had first met when Norman was back in the UK on leave from the army. They became an item soon after Celia’s twenty-first birthday, in the Summer of 1951, and spent happy times going to the pictures, going dancing, having lunch together and taking long walks. They were married at St Catherine’s Church in Heald Green, Stockport, which is where Celia’s family was from, on 2nd July 1955, and immediately afterwards moved into their brand-new marital home at number 10, Syddall Avenue in Heald Green. They were twenty-five years old, the war was long behind them, they were both in good jobs and they had their whole life together ahead of them: as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would soon tell them, they’d ‘never had it so good’.

Norman enjoyed his work at the Guardian Royal Exchange, which involved advising businesses on corporate pension schemes. Celia had stayed on at the Public Trustee’s Office for a time after Norman left, but eventually she too left, taking a job with Barclays Bank. She gave up work for a while when Anne was born in 1963, eventually returning to work as a part-time book-keeper after Anne started school. Away from work Celia loved to cook, to read and to sew, and Norman kept the garden immaculate, as well as continuing to enjoy the outdoor pursuits he’d come to love as a child in Barrow; fly fishing and shooting. The family took regular holidays around the UK as well as to various destinations abroad, including France and Spain: Anne has a lot of very happy memories of her childhood, with Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Rupert completing the family unit.

In 1986 Norman and Celia sold the house on Syddall Avenue and moved to Congleton in Cheshire: Norman had transferred to GRE’s Wilmslow office and he continued working for the GRE until he retired in the Summer of 1991, at the age of 61. Retirement suited them both: Norman had more time for his fishing, and developed his fly-tying skills even further, while they both enjoyed holidays to places like the United States, Switzerland and Portugal as well as frequent days out together. They were both very happy in each other’s company.

Anne had left home to go up to university in Manchester in 1981, settling in Farnborough in Hampshire after graduating. She married Michael in 1990, and had Stephanie in 1997 and Ben in 1999. Norman and Celia loved to spend time with their grandchildren – so much so that once Ben had come along they decided to sell up and move a bit closer. They found a nice new bungalow in Verwood in Dorset, and made the move South in 2000. They soon settled in and were happy together in Verwood, enjoying exploring the local area and visiting the seafront, but before long Celia’s health began to falter and over the subsequent years Norman focussed on caring for his wife: Celia sadly died in 2014.

I asked Anne what Norman was like – as a father, as a husband, as a man. She read me some of the remarks his family and neighbours had made to her about Norman: every single one of them said that he was a lovely man and that they would miss the time they spent chatting with him. As a father and a grandfather he was fun, warm-hearted and supportive. He was a kind and compassionate man; clever, and generous too: he always wanted to help people, including those far younger and more capable than he was. Caring for his wife in her last years was not easy but he would have had it no other way. Even after the pain of losing Celia, Norman remained cheerful, fun to be with, entertaining and always enthusiastic, whether it was growing tomatoes and raspberries or fishing for trout which he invariably gave to friends and neighbours.

Anne is going to miss the phone calls which always started off, ‘It’s the Old Man…’.

Reading

Instructions by Arnold Crompton

When I have moved beyond you in the adventure of life,
Gather in some pleasant place and there remember me
With spoken words, old and new.
Let a tear if you will, but let a smile come quickly
For I have loved the laughter of life.
Do not linger too long with your solemnities.
Go eat and talk, and when you can;
Follow a woodland trail, climb a high mountain,
Walk along the wild seashore,
Chew the thoughts of some book
Which challenges your soul.
Use your hands some bright day
To make a thing of beauty
Or to lift someone’s heavy load.

Though you mention not my name,
Though no thought of me crosses your mind,
I shall be with you,
For these have been the realities of my life for me.

And when you face some crisis with anguish.
When you walk alone with courage,
When you choose your path of right,
I shall be very close to you.
I have followed the valleys,
I have climbed the heights of life.

Music

Magic Moments, Perry Como. Listen on YouTube

When Anne was a child, she remembers Norman whistling this tune all the time.

Photos

This is a collection of photographs that span Norman's life.

Lake Dsitrict
Norman and Marjorie
1950 something
Mid 60s with Anne and camel
table tennis
Lake District, Mother's house with wheelbarrow
Fishing catch
In uniform
Overlooking river
1950 something
Another fishing trip
Relaxing in the USA
National Service Salisbuty Plain
Picnic
With Rupert
Norman and Celia
Norman castle
Norman and Marjorie
18 year old recruit
18 year old recruit
18 year old recruit
Norman and Celia