Old newsreel footage reveals a familiar face

I recently saw my grandfather, despite the fact that he passed away more than two decades ago, and what was even more incredible was that I saw my grandfather as a young man. It happened purely by surprise as I was browsing through some videos of historical newsreels on the internet.

A video of a 1942 British newsreel had appeared in my subscriptions. It seemed like quite a typical one from the time, about a meeting calling for the opening of a "second front" in Western Europe in the war against fascist Germany.

The meeting in question was in Glasgow and was addressed by Harry Pollitt, the longtime general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. My grandfather can be seen around the start of the video, among the crowds of people waiting to hear Pollitt speak.

You can imagine the amazing surprise I got when I saw that brief image of the young man standing in the line outside that Communist Party meeting in 1942, and realizing that it was my grandfather.

The other interesting thing is the particular year that this short piece of film is from, as 1942 was also the year that my grandfather, who was a profound political influence on me in my youth, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In fact, 1942 was a year in which the CPGB enjoyed a record recruitment of new members, with tens of thousands joining, many of them inspired by the Soviet army's fight against fascist Germany on the Eastern Front, eagerly responding to the CPGB's call to open a Western Front against Hitler's forces as soon as possible.

My grandfather and all my other grandparents faced many grim challenges in their youth. Their childhood was in the years immediately following the carnage of World War I, and my grandmother told me stories about how she often saw disabled war veterans when she was a little girl, men who were scarred for life both mentally and physically.

Then my grandparents, as they were heading toward their teenage years, had to cope with the consequences of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and just as they were approaching adulthood, World War II began.

So much tragedy and so many trials were packed into the first two-and-a-half decades of their lives, including the near destruction of their hometown of Clydebank in Scotland by German bombs. All of this by the time they were around 24! No wonder they were all very tough and resourceful people. These were people who could cope with literally everything life threw at them.

I was very close to all of my grandparents when I was young, and listened to stories about their own childhood and also many tales about their wartime experiences. Seeing that short piece of film footage of my grandfather from 1942 brought many of those memories back to me, stories and memories which I will eventually pass on one day to my own grandchildren.

Every family has its own amazing stories, and it is the job of the younger generations to listen, understand and learn from those stories, and pass them on to future generations. In this way, a little part of those departed generations will live on forever.