father used to say that a man who goes into the army is not fit for anything else,’ he recalled. ‘“Once a soldier, never a man,” that’s what he said.’
George’s father, also called George, worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and walked three miles to work every day, and then three miles home in the evening. According to George the only time his father would take the tram was if he’d been bell diving and come up with the bends. He was a tough, taciturn man and he was tough on his son.
‘I think he was a bit disappointed in me,’ George recalled. ‘He would say, “Give him another basin of sop, we will never rear him.”’
George’s grandmother on his mother’s side was Annie Ovenden from Cork in the south of Ireland, the same part of the country from which Edward’s family had come. His father’s family also had Irish roots and George liked to think of himself as Irish. He was very close to his grandmother and would visit her whenever he could.
‘I used to go straight from school and she’d be waiting at her gate,’ he said. ‘She used to cuddle me up to her and always smelt of snuff and peppermint. Sometimes she used to send me to the pub to get a gill of gin for sixpence: I knew then that Father Laws was coming to see her.’
Although his mother left his father when George was five years old, and his father didn’t seem like the warmest of men, George appears to have had a happy childhood. As youngsters he and his friends would play and bathe by Shakespeare’s Cliff.
‘The trains used to come through the tunnel there from Folkestone’, he recalled. ‘When we heard a train coming, we used to come out of the water and dance, and the old ladies would pull down the blinds.’
Young George even witnessed, practically on his doorstep, one of the great moments from history when, one morning in 1908, he and his brother Walter got up early, walked to North Fallen and watched Louis Blériot make a bumpy landing to complete the first air crossing of the English Channel.
Dover has always been an important place geographically and strategically. The imposing castle still overlooks the town and George was always keenly aware of the military, especially the Navy. The Fortunes lived at Clarendon Place in a working-class area in the west of the town, and one of their neighbours was a naval seaman.
‘Whenever he came home on leave he set the street alight. He would hire a barrel organ in town and park it outside his house. He would have everybody dancing and singing,’ said George.
Soldiers had been a common sight in the streets of Dover since before the Napoleonic Wars, and they were equally visible during the first decade of the twentieth century. One hot day George was drinking from a horse trough on the Folkestone Road when a horse galloped up and arrived next to him.
‘I saw a bundle of khaki on the ground hanging from a stirrup,’ George recalled. ‘It was a soldier who had been thrown from his horse and dragged about a mile.’
It wasn’t all hapless horsemen and innocent mischief, though. On his way home from the cliffs one day George came across the body of a soldier with his throat cut. The boys raised the alarm, but not before George secured himself a souvenir.
‘I took his hat,’ said George. ‘He was in the Buffs [the Royal East Kent Regiment] and I played soldiers with it. My brother Walter told my dad I’d pinched the soldier’s hat but all he said was, “Well, he won’t be needing it any more.”’
Things changed for George a year or so before war broke out when his father was badly injured at work. Going to school one day he’d seen George senior on a tram and, given the time of day and the fact that his father was proud of how he walked everywhere, he knew immediately something was wrong.
‘He was sitting, leaning forward,’ George recalled. ‘He’d had an accident and broken some ribs. There were always accidents and people killed at the harbour. It was dangerous work. He never went back to work at the harbour and I don’t think he got a penny from them.’
George was sent to live with his grandmother while his father recovered. When George senior was well enough he found a job at the local convent repairing boots for fifteen shillings a week. Meanwhile, having been rejected by the navy because his chest measured an inch below the minimum, Walter, whom George looked up to like a hero, joined the army.
Times were hard for the Fortunes and George left school at fourteen for a job as a lather boy at a local barber’s shop. For his 3/6 a week George worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, and then 8 a.m. to midnight on Saturdays. As well as the lathering, he had to clean the windows, sweep up the hair, clean the copper urns in which the barber heated the water and he even had to clean the boots of the barber’s entire family. He was harshly treated, certainly in today’s terms, but this elicited little sympathy from the elder Fortune: ‘The barber was a little man, about five feet tall, half German, and he was horrible to me. I told Dad about him swearing at me and he said, “It will do you good; you need someone to wake you up.”’
When the war came in August 1914, the talk among the young men of Dover was all of joining up and fighting the Hun. Fuelled by boyish bravado the talk might have been, but George’s friends soon began disappearing to training camps and then to the Front. Still only fifteen years old, George tried to enlist: ‘All the lads were joining up so I tried and said I was nineteen. I was a big boy but I failed the doctor, who said I had a hernia.’
The army doctor referred him to the local hospital for an operation to the remove the hernia, but when he arrived George found the place overrun with wounded men from the Front brought home by ship from Dunkirk. Reluctant to go under the knife, the youngster instead set about making himself useful.
‘The hospital was full and I helped the nurses,’ recalled George. ‘I was in there three weeks and they forgot who I was: I was like a hospital orderly. I had a fine old lark with the wounded men. I used to jump right over their beds for a bit of fun. Then one day the house surgeon was walking round. He saw me and said, “What’s this fellow doing here?” I told him and he said, “Right, we’ll have him on the table.”’
After the operation George was flat out for ten days, in constant pain. No one visited him except a priest, and when he was well enough to leave he had to walk the mile and a half home. Soon afterwards his sister Cecilia, aware of the fractured nature of the Fortune family in Dover since their father’s accident and mother’s departure, took him to London while he recuperated from the operation and found him work with her plumber husband in West Hampstead.
‘Ciss was a godsend to me,’ he remembered. ‘I was ill and she brought me back to health. Then I went to work as a plumber’s mate and I loved the work.’
This fledgling apprenticeship was brought to an end all too soon, however, when George’s brother-in-law joined up and went off to war. George moved on to Highgate to live with his mother and found a job on the Underground. Once settled he wrote to his father but never received a reply – he found out later that his father had emigrated to Australia, taking one of his younger brothers with him. George never saw either of them again.
By 1916 George was working as a gateman at Hammersmith Underground station and living with another older sister, Gladys, whose husband was also away at the Front. Feeling a little like an imposition as Gladys brought up two children in cramped conditions, George decided it was time to try to enlist again and attended the recruiting office at White City: ‘The doctor hardly looked at me this time and I was passed A1. I told the railway and they said they couldn’t keep the job open for me. I didn’t worry much as I was going to be a soldier.’
William
