"Lay Gently on the Coals" by Art Cockerill

"When your family is as large as Arthur Fulthorpe’s, life is never going to lack noise and colour, and when a world war demands the active participation of most of your siblings, nor will it be without drama and incident either. Art Cockerill’s novel begins in 1937, the opening chapters of Lay Gently on the Coals painting a nostalgic picture of a close-knit working-class family, at the heart of which are Jack and Margaret Fulthorpe and their seven children (three more will join them in due course). Arthur, nine years old in 1937, is the fifth in line. Jack is working as a stoker at a gasworks in Northampton at this stage in the family’s history, yet the Fulthorpes have a strong sense of military identity. For not only is Northampton a garrison town, but Jack was once a soldier who ‘fought in the trenches of the Western Front and served as a soldier of the British Raj on the North West Frontier’ until leaving the army as a sergeant in 1927. Indeed, it is because they are a ‘military family in need of the army’s charity and benevolence’ that Arthur is admitted to the Duke of York’s Royal Military School in Dover, Kent, in 1939." --- Clare Gibson

 

(NB.  The old Army Technical Schools were, of course, the forerunners of our Army Apprentices Schools.   Art Cockerill (the author) is an Old Boy of both the Duke of York's Royal Military School, Dover and the old Army Apprentices School, Arborfield.  JAO)

Photograph courtesy of Art Cockerill and Clare Gibson