When our grandfathers are gone, what will become of us?

Rummaging through the attic the other day, I was ecstatic to come across a couple of photos of my late grandfather who passed on over 20 years ago. As you can see from these 1948 shots, he was a somewhat tall and handsome man and dressed most appropriately to the times. No he was not a lawyer or a banker, he was a miner and then a lumberjack - what you were made no difference to how you dressed in public. Lawyer or lumberjack, you wore your Sunday best to town.

My father said he could be frightingly stern and strict at times growing up, but what I remember most about my grandfather, an Englishman born in Wales during the Edwardian period, was his quiet humility, his happy and peaceful acceptance of who he was and where he stood. As far as I could tell, he was only latently Christian and monarchist, meaning that it wasn't apparent, but you knew deep down he was, because that's just the way life was. I think if you had to summarize in a single word the general malaise of society today, if you had to explain what was sorrily missing in the West and what one characteristic was in need the most, I do believe that word and characteristic would be humility. The thing our grandparents had in spades.

As far as I'm concerned, our grandparent's generation, the ones who well remember Emperor George as young men in the 1920s and 30s (the Duke of Edinburgh represents the tail end of this generation), was the last to courageously possess all the attributes of moral virtue in working condition. How will we find our way when they have all gone?

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