When I Was Young – Memoir of Norman Wimbush
Mark Todd

In late Victorian Birmingham the Wimbush family with their three children gain their livelihood and maintain their respectability in a small café and confectionary business in the centre of the city. Their son Norman, writing in middle age in the 1940s, recalls their everyday life and his parents’ contrasting personalities in painstaking detail, and also his life in local schools and as a clerk at the firm of Nettlefolds, from where his studies at night school eventually enable him to go to University. Re-development of the city centre in the early twentieth century destroys his father’s business and contributes to his early death. Other chapters describe the world of Norman’s grandparents – grandfather Wimbush a tenant farmer in rural Oxfordshire and grandfather Hill a baker in Birmingham Horsefair – and some of the characters of their children, Norman’s uncles and aunts, including his young uncle Ambrose Wimbush as he takes the first steps in developing his bakery business. In the opening chapter Norman tells the story of his mother Annie’s journey as a teenager in the 1870s with her sister and brother-in-law Minnie and Frank Jackson as they emigrated to USA to live and work in Boston, Massachusetts.
Published: May 2019
Paperback: 180 pages
Price: £10.00
ISBN: 9-781912-419647

£10.00 (+ £2.50 postage)
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