Gran Young

Lily Young, 1900-1990, was my wife’s grandmother on her mother’s side and was known in our family as ‘Gran Young.’ She was born in Gurnard in 1900 when it was still a quiet country village and grew up playing in the surrounding fields and farmland. She left school at thirteen and like so many young girls at that time, entered service for various employers eventually going to work on Dottens Farm at Woodvale Road, Gurnard when she was just 15. Gran’s detailed recollections are a vivid and lively portrayal of a way of life that no-one will ever experience again. Her life began with no electricity and water from a well, and ended with a man on the moon and computers. Her sharp, well-observed account of childhood 120 years ago is as poignant as it is humorous. I recorded Gran in 1983.






Lily, Gran Young, photographed by me in Cockleton Lane in 1975, when she was 75. A lovely lady.
Home was ‘Florence Cottage,’ 67 Church Road, Gurnard. This a 1905 postcard which actually shows her house (arrowed). Who knows - she may even be one of the little girls in the photograph.

This photograph of Dottens Farm, in Woodvale Road, hung on Gran’s wall throughout her life. Gran worked there from age 15 to her early twenties. “At Dottens you had all the house cleaning to do and when you’d finished that, there were the dairies and the stone floors in there. During the winter I had to be on a crosscut saw. Never an idle moment!” The farmhouse remains unchanged today, but in 2023, the adjacent land in Baring Road was built on.
This is Gran in a 1906 Gurnard School photograph. She is the cheeky looking girl in the centre on the top row. Over 100 years later, Gran’s great granddaughter, Leah, went to the very same school and sat in the very same classrooms that Gran had. The school was demolished a few years ago and housing now stands on the site.

Gurnard was a busy self-contained village when Gran was a child, with its own pub, bakery, butcher, post office and grocer. This is the village square as
Gran would have known it.