MEMORIES PART 2

MY DAD WAS A SCAB !

At the height of the depression, with no work and a wife and three children to feed, Dad eventually set of and walked to Barrowford to get a job at Berry’s, a non-union mill. He must have  been a social outcast having, in effect, broken the picket lines. Maybe this stigma was the reason that many textile workers were known by their place of origin. My Dad was known as ‘Clitheroe’ and I can remember him referring to fellow workers as ‘Blacko’ and ‘Barley’.

He lived for a time, separated from his family, in lodgings in The Square, which I remember as an area of the village you tried to avoid. I am sure things had improved by the early 1930s but about 1900, Nelson was trying to absorb Barrowford and a letter written to support this plan stated

“With the exception of the main road through the village most of the streets are ankle deep in mud, with stagnant pools of water standing in them. Most of them are impassable in wet weather. All the houses in the Square (Old Row - now River way and Fountain Square) look onto privies, there are young men and girls waiting their turns to go in: perhaps a hundred people to use the three closets, and there is the overflowing besides”. 

At the edge the Square was the Gormless (Or Gaumless) an old drinking well that had been replaced in 1913 by the Coronation Fountain. This was a drinking fountain for both people and horses, a lower trough for the animals and a tethered iron cup by water inlet on the upper trough. The water had a high iron content and to a small boy tasted absolutely foul. One snatch of dialect I recall was “Tak no gaum of ‘im’ (Take no notice of him) suggests to me that the Gormless might have been the place where public notices were placed but I stand to be corrected.

Eventually, the family all got together in rented accommodation on Gisburn Road. I wonder if my parents did a ‘Moonlight flit’ from Clitheroe?. This was a fairly common practise for hard pressed families where belongings were loaded onto a cart and the tenants left the house at night to avoid paying rent. 

gisburn road

So there we were on Gisburn Road, in a rented house almost opposite the bottom of Rushton Street. Between two of the terraced houses there was a ginnel  (an enclosed passage) which led from the main road to the unpaved road by the side of the river. This rough road would have been the original road through Barrowford, before the Turnpike was built in 1804. (That brings back phrases which one heard “Aye, they were laikin’ an’ spent most o’t day camping in’t ginnel’. Roughly translated that means there was no work, so they were ‘Laiking’ (Playing as apposed to working) and with little or nothing to do, stood under cover in the ginnel ‘Camping’ or gossiping.) The village used to be described as “All on one side”. One one side of the road was the village, on the other side the river.

On the opposite side of the road are the roads and houses of Broadway Place, Oaklands Avenue and Higher Causeway. In the days when I lived on Gisburn Road there were green fields which stretched up to St Thomas’s Church and beyond. Quite recently I stood with my old mate Bill Ainsworth on the Motorway bridge at Newbridge, looking out over the village. We decided that two thirds of the Barrowford we could see had been built in our lifetime. If urbanisation spreads at an ever increasing rate, what will Barrowford look like in another seventy years - will there be any green at all?

Under the sink

We always imagine we can talk over the heads of small children without them understanding what we are talking about but here is one snippet of conversation which comes back to me from the Gisburn Road days, and remember I am four years old at the most!. My Mother relating to Dad, when he came in from work, that the lady who owned the house and from whom my parents rented rooms, had hidden under the kitchen sink when the a debt collector had called.

Other than that I can’t remember much of the time at Gisburn Road apart from my sister Dorothy making peep-shows in old shoe boxes. She cut away part of the lid and covered it with blue translucent toffee paper. In the box she made a sand covered mound to represent a desert island, painted sky and palm trees on the inside of the box scene and turned a model butcher from a toy butcher’s shop I had been given for Christmas, into a pirate.  It doesn’t seem possible in these days of videos, and computer games but I spent hours peeping through a small hole in the shoe box and weaving fantastic stories of shipwrecks and one legged pirates.

Later we acquired a toy movie projector which was powered by a candle. We would insert a clipping of cinema sized film and wind the handle watching the picture on a piece of white cloth. The only film I can remember was a couple of minutes of yellowish brown film which consisted of a title “The Way of an Eagle by Ethel M Dell” it then showed a woman walking into a room - that was it!  How on earth do I remember something as trivial as that? Could I read the title or Did Dorothy or Vernon read it out to me? And how about Health and Safety? That nitrate film was highly inflammable, could even spontaneously combust and there we were with a candle!

I have just looked up “The Way of an Eagle” on the Internet. The book was written in 1910 and the film made in 1918.