Grandparents Day 2025

As part of Grandparents Day (Sunday 5 October), Age UK Norfolk volunteer David Wakefield reflects on the unique role grandparents play in family life. Drawing on his experiences as a granddad, and the lasting influence of his own grandmother, he highlights why these special relationships matter so deeply.

His grandchildren are now 21 and 18 – but Age UK Norfolk volunteer David Wakefield looks back on a family role that still gives so much pleasure.

I’m just a granddad – pure and simple. I count myself fortunate as there is never a guarantee in one’s life that this honour is to be bestowed. But I don’t kid myself; in the general scheme of things, we play second fiddle to grandma.

Granddads are good for playing the fool – in the early days of grandchildren’s’ lives anyway. The phrase “Silly Granddad” is emblazoned on one’s heart. As time goes by, we’re quite good at the school run, and an easy touch for sweets and ice cream at the corner shop (funny, there usually is one near to a school!). We like to think of ourselves as the fount of all knowledge and the go-to person for advice – which is true to an extent. I recall being asked by grandson Luke in 2014 how the first world war started, and I hope I managed a convincing explanation.

But grandma is the shoulder to cry on, the safe haven, the provider of food and drink at all hours, and the achiever of the seemingly impossible. Grandmas always seem to be relevant. I know this to be so through my own grandmother, who was an ever-present in my life and, in her 105 years of life, a staunch presence and defender. She was my only grandma (my mother’s mother died long before I came into the world) and, as time went by, I realised just what an incredible human being she was.

Ethel Jane Wakefield lived through dreadful world conflicts and a general strike. She was in her twenties when the Titanic went down and might well have known some of the victims as some lived in an adjoining street. She was widowed in 1949 and lived on for an incredible further 43 years, much of it on her own until she reluctantly moved in with my aunt and uncle, and then eventually going into residential care in her 90s.

The care home was always our first port of call when my family and I visited from Norfolk, and it was from there she celebrated her 100^th birthday. I will never forget the young reporter who came to interview her on that day and asked what she remembered about the war. “Which one?” she replied.

A couple of years later she came to Great Yarmouth with other residents for a holiday. I was working there at the time and, knowing her great love of horse racing, arranged for her to go to Yarmouth races. Even better, the borough director of entertainments, an old cricketing friend, arranged for her to meet her great hero, Lester Piggott. Needless to say, she backed Lester’s rides all afternoon and came away well in profit.

We often wondered how she reached such a great milestone. Stubbornness played a part, as did a sense of service in the local community; but that was largely how things were at that time. This was a generation that just got on with life the best they could. I can never recall her ever being ill. She even survived a bad fall in her late nineties, breaking a leg, but got through that as well. She was a very caring person and seemed to see the good in everyone. We chuckled when, on our care home visits, she would often point to another resident, perhaps 25 years younger and maybe not in the best of health, and say, quietly, “look at her – poor old soul”, but never seeing the irony.

So many memories, and most of them happy ones. Her biggest sadness was outliving her son, my father, who died the year before she did. In many ways she was the complete grandparent – always there when needed, a tower of strength when times were bad.

It’s what we modern-ish grandparents try to do and I can’t think of a better role model than my gran.