Emilie Bux..............a German bride in post war Derby in the summer of 1923

I remember my grandmother as a stiff, serious woman who rarely smiled and got cross at what she thought was frivolous spending.

Nana, date unknown

These are childhood memories and people I talk to remember her differently. To them she was a warm funny woman who was very intelligent.

But she had a lot to contend with. Emily née Bux Hall was born in Germany moved here in the years directly following the end of the First World War.

She came from a prosperous family, grew up in a large timbered house and settled in a two up two down terraced house on Hope Street in Derby.

She faced the prejudice of people who had suffered during the long years of war, lost loved ones and could not quite understand how my grandfather would want to marry a German.

All their frustrations and anger settled on my Nana, who had her washing smeared with mud. There were the mutterings behind her in the shops and perhaps worst of all there was the way they took it out on her children who had been born in Germany.

Nana and Uncle Roger, 1929

Mother was beaten with an ebony ruler across her knuckles for speaking German in school and my uncle was called names in the playground and constantly had to defend himself in the street. It upset both of them but also filled them with a desire to do well. In the case of Uncle Roger this led from Traffic Street School to a scholarship at the Bemrose School.

12 Hope Street was a traditional terraced house with two rooms downstairs and two up with a small lean to at the back, beyond which was a shared yard and the outside lavatories.

You stepped off the street into the front room. 

The fireplace was off to the left and on the same side on the far wall was the door to the kitchen. The staircase to the bedrooms was at the back of the kitchen. It was a steep and enclosed staircase and I remember it as very gloomy and a little scary.

Nana, 1934

During their thirty years or so living there my grandparents softened what was a simple and basic place. They personalized the yard adding flowers and herb borders, but it was a small area and was overshadowed by tall buildings at the back.

Nana also had to live with the knowledge that her own family back in Germany had not been happy at the marriage. But she was a woman of immense resilience and she bore this with a stoic determination to make the best of whatever life threw at her.

Nana and grandad, date unknown

Early in the marriage she had to make her own way from Germany to England with a newly born son and a two year old daughter. Grandfather was demobbed in Belfast in 1922 and there are no records to suggest the army brought her and the children home as well.

This would have been no easy journey involving a train to a German sea port, and after an arduous sea crossing, an equally long train trip in a foreign country with two little children. But she met the challenge.

She faced up to the long periods of my grandfather’s unemployment during the 1930s, when news of a job ten miles away had him walking to the site only to discover a long queue of men already patiently waiting for the chance of employment.

Mother and uncle Roger, 1938

Somewhere along the line, possibly after the second war, she managed to scrape together some capital, and either bought or rented a tiny corner shop.

I have no memory of the shop, or when she gave it up and nor do I now know exactly when she and granddad left Hope Street for a grand semi, in the village of Chellaston, and now there is no one left to ask.

Mother, 1942

No one who can fill in the gaps in my memory and the research I have done in the last decade.

But one abiding piece of knowledge is that for all the prejudice she faced in the communal backyard in Hope Street in the 1920s, she saw both mother and father serve in the RAF in the Second World War, and had to be reconciled to the death of her son in 1943, aged just 21 in an enemy Prisoner of War Camp.

Pictures; Emilie Bux circa 1918, with Roger Hall, 1929,  walking through Derby in 1934, in the backyard of 11 Hope Street, date unknown,  mother and uncle Roger, 1938, and mother, 1942, from the collection of Andrew Simpson