ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on parents who sent their sons to Ellesmere College, Shropshire, between 1929 and 1950. It focuses upon small group of parents, among them businessmen, professionals, farmers, clergy and widows who sent their sons to Ellesmere College between 1929 and 1950. The 1930s was a period of seemingly insoluble political and economic problems and contradictions in which Britain enjoyed at best indifferent political leadership. The chapter concerns the making of manhood and socialisation processes in their families and school through which a small group of boys were transformed into young men. It represents a small but nonetheless very interesting group, which reveals much about bringing up sons among a section of middle classes during a period of climacteric change in the lives of young men. The experience of Second World War was less often about loss of men at the front and more about wearying effects of restrictions, disruption and bombing of homes and work places.
