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Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls
2010 Posts
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 Posted -
28/05/2004
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16:33
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LANCASHIRE TEXTILE PROJECT
TAPE 78/AI/04 (Side one)
THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON APRIL 26TH 1979 AT 13 AVON DRIVE BARNOLDSWICK. THE INFORMANT IS STANLEY GRAHAM WHO WAS THE ENGINEER AT BANCROFT MILL AND WHO HAS BEEN THE INTERVIEWER ON MOST OF THE TAPES..
As I am comparatively young and not a native of Barnoldswick and have no first hand experience of the early days in the mill I have decided that the best way for me to do my share of the Bancroft tapes, is to do a quick run through the questions relating to social items and then go through the Bancroft folio and give a complete description of all the pictures in there. It seems to me that this'll be the most useful way of conveying my experience and in some cases perhaps, filling out the descriptions given by other people of pictures in the folio. So we shall start by going through the
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questions in the standard list of questions that I used for the other informants. I feel it’ll be too stilted to repeat all the questions to myself and so I shall just run down the questions and give the answers to them. It should be perfectly easy for anybody with a copy of the questions to follow which questions I was actually answering. I should point out before we start that in common with my recordings made with other people I have not strangled the budgie, he is sat in the corner and no doubt you just heard him then and a very fine clock which belongs to my mother and which she has had for some 50 years is ticking merrily away on the sideboard. I hope that these things won't distract anyone who is listening to these tapes from the information contained in them. So, we'll start then with the household. I was born on 14th February 1936, it's now April 1979 so simple arithmetic gives you the fact that I’m 43 years old. I was born at 38 Norris Avenue, Heaton Norris, Stockport and I lived in that house from the age of - well from when I was
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born until I was about 9 years old. We then moved to 6 Napier Road, Heaton Moor, Stockport, where I lived until the time I left home to go farming. The reason why the family made these moves was, very hard to answer really. I think that probably Heaton Moor was just a better district and my father and mother decided that they wanted to move up there. There were no great reasons as I remember, for the move, it was just a question that we’d got fed up of living in Norris Avenue which was as I remember, it was a very humid area, of course this is one of the reasons why Stockport was such a good spinning town. And at times we used to have water running down the walls but of course this was in the days when the modern family painted the walls with gloss oil paint which of course did
(5 min) (150)
lead to condensation.
My father was born in Australia, at a little place called Rocky Creek in New South Wales. The reason why he came to Britain is quite interesting really. He ran away from home at the age of 14 years old, and travelled all over the world, he was quite a man. At the beginning of the 1914 war, he was down and out in the West Indies but decided that He’d go and volunteer, join the army, and so he went home and volunteered and joined the Australian army, the Anzacs. He came over, fought in the first world war, went through Gallipoli, right the way through the worse that France could offer and eventually finished up at the end of the war in a tented camp in Britain, I think somewhere in the South of England, waiting to be repatriated to Australia. I should say here that I have a full set of tapes made by him up to the period during the war. The reason why I finished there was because talking about the Great War made him so ill. It must have been a terrible experience being in the thick of the fighting in the Great War and especially Gallipoli. And it gives some indication of the interest I have had in collecting Information from all the people, and the fact that I made these tapes some 8 or 10 years ago. His descriptions of Gallipoli in particular, are horrifying, that's the only word for it so it's easy to understand why it upset him so much. He was a fair age when I made them, and as I say it made him poorly so I stopped, and I never did complete those tapes which is a shame in many ways. But there were other things to do at the time and I am afraid I let the opportunity slip. He is of course dead now. When he was in this tented camp in the south of England after the first world war he told me that they were treated very badly, they were on low pay, they were housed under very bad conditions and there was nothing for them to do. And many of them left the camp and took civilian jobs outside. Of course this was technically desertion and father being a bit different than the others didn’t just leave the camp, he went to Manchester. And, I once asked him why Manchester and he said that there was no particular reason, it was just that Manchester was a name that had always stuck in his mind. So he came to Manchester, got on the maintenance staff at Armstrong Whitworths and lived quietly and comfortably in Droylsden as a batchelor quietly working his way up, and gaining in estimation of his employers at Armstrong-Whitworths. Some while after the war had finished he was sent for by the police who of course knew that he was what was then technically an alien, even though a son of the Empire, and he was told that there was a scheme afoot whereby all the
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volunteers who had fought in the war who were deserters or absent without leave, there was an amnesty for them. And if they'd report back to the campy they’d be shipped back to Australia and all would be forgiven. However the police inspector that told my father also told him that what would happen would be that he’d be received back with open arms and put on the boat, taken back to Australia but as soon as he stepped off the boat he would be charged with desertion, fined the amount of any back pay owing to him and then turned loose. In point of fact, what the Australian government were doing, they wanted to get their able-bodied young men back to the country because they were scattered all over the world and they were short of fit young men. And the inspector said that seeing as father lived a quiet, decent sort of life he could suit himself whether he took notice of this amnesty or not. In the event he decided not to go and stayed in this country. He met my mother who lived in Dukinfield and then moved across to what was then General Gas Appliances, which was on Corporation Road in Audenshaw, which was bought up by Allied Ironfounders and which is now part of the big Glynwed Group. He finished up as works general manager there. My mother was born in Dukinfield, she worked in the mill as a lass, she is still alive, she is 74, she was one of the aristocracy in the mill, a beamer and strangely enough can remember making up beams which would come to a strange place
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called Barnoldswick in Yorkshire. Of course she arrived in Barnoldswick for the same reason as my father. She and my father, when he retired he bought a shop in Earby and when I came out of the army I came to work with them because my father was going blind at the time and eventually we sold the shop and I bought a house in Barnoldswick and everybody moved up here with me. And that's the reason why I came to be in Barnoldswick. I had one brother and one sister both younger than me. My sister Dorothy still lives in Stockport, in 40 Norris Avenue, the house next to where we were born. The reason for this is that while my father was living in Norris Avenue he did what seems to have been a common thing among weavers and people like that in this area and bought the house next door for a bit more security. When my sister got married he sold it to her at an advantageous price and she still lives there. My brother Leslie who is 6 years younger than me, I should say that my sister was 13 months younger than me, and my brother is 6 years younger than me, my mother says that he was a bit of a shock when he was born. He started his career up here by going down to Silentnight and working there as a trainee executive, seemed to get fed up with the
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ethos of the shop floor and the young executive and went into mental nursing. From there he progressed to St Thomas’s in London where he was the first male student nurse and reached, quite rapidly reached the post of nursing officer. In point of fact he has just left the nursing profession temporarily at the moment to take a job in outside industry, in computers, sort of a sabbatical, and is now working down at Brighton on the south coast. Obviously none of my brothers and sisters died as babies, or children, and I can’t remember any relations living with us when we were young. Of course one of the reasons for this is that all the relations on my father's side were 12,000 miles away. One thing that I should mention about my father and about the fact that he deserted was that when he deserted he took his mother’s maiden name which was Graham. His name wasp actually Leslie MacDonald and he took his mother’s maiden name and became Leslie Graham in this country which is the reason why I am called Stanley Graham. In point of fact I should have been Stanley MacDonald, the family were of Scots ancestry basically, they were Scottish immigrants to Australia. My mother’s maiden name is Challenger and it's always been one of my regrets that 1 didn’t receive two names and got the name of Stanley Challenger MacDonald. I think that would have been a fine name to have taken through life.
[Back to what I remember about Norris Avenue. Sorry, I was rambling a bit!] We never had any lodgers. For
(15 min)
one thing we had three children and only three bedrooms, the house was full, but there was never any need to take in lodgers; we were never that hard up.
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We were always on the borderline of being short of money but we always had enough. My father's job when I was born was work's general manager at General Gas Appliances Audenshaw, Denton near Manchester. As I have already mentioned the jobs he had before that was on the maintenance staff at Armstrong Whitworths in Manchester and when he was at home and when he was moving round the world, he worked in civil engineering, construction and mechanical engineering. He was 82 when he died and of course I was grown up, it was only a year since. My mother's job of course was working in the mill, she was a beamer, she never worked outside the home after she was married apart from a short spell when we we’d moved to Napier Road in Heaton Moor when I think we were rather short of money due to this house purchase. She worked part-time in John Williams grocer’s shop on Heaton Moor Road. And if 1 remember rightly did about 4 or 5 hours a day while the children were at school. Nobody ever looked after us as children because she was always at home when we were at home, and of course she is still alive. Yes, my brother and sister did leave Barnoldswick, or rather Earby, we were living at Earby then. I must get this right, in the case of Dorothy we were at Earby, in the case of Leslie we were living at Barnoldswick and I have already mentioned were they went to. We come on to the next section
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now, housing and housework. I remember both houses that we lived in very well indeed, and I’ll start off by talking about the house at Heaton Norris in Norris Avenue. It had three bedrooms, a bathroom, a front room, hall and stairs, a dining room and a kitchen. I can remember the furniture very well, in fact some of the furniture is what I'm sat with now in the front room of my mother’s house in Barnoldswick. The main item of furniture in the parlour was of course the sideboard which is sat beside me now, and which is typical 1935 oak veneered sideboard with two drawers and a large cupboard underneath with the clock sitting on top. The front room, we didn’t call it a parlour, we called it the front room, it also had the obligatory three piece suite in hide. The front room was used for entertaining at week-ends, high days and holidays, and was always taboo, we didn't go in there unless we had a particular reason for going in. The only things which were stored in there were the best china and glass in a cabinet and it was an occasion when we used it. We had our meals in the living room or dining room, which was at the back of the house and my mother did the cooking in the kitchen. Of course she also did the washing in the kitchen. In the
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kitchen we had a wringer or mangle which folded down and turned into a table, these were quite common at the time. I can't quite remember how she did the washing, I think she did it in a dolly tub, wrung it in the wringer, and then dried it on a line outside in the back yard.
It was a fairly big back yard, this house had a garage with it. It was built in about 1935 and was bought brand new by my father. As I say it did have a bathroom, the usual three piece suite, bath, washbasin and a lavatory or toilet, and of course we had baths in there. And in common with I think everybody else in Lancashire Friday night was bath night. The water closet was of course the usual water flushing toilet, with a high level cistern. The house did have piped water and we did have a stair carpet and I think just about all the neighbours had one at that time. If anybody didn't have a stair carpet well then I didn't know about it. The floor coverings on the rest of the floor, well if you were well off you had fitted carpets right up to the wall but we just had oil cloth or lino over the whole of the floor, with a carpet square on the top in both the living room and the front room. The bedrooms were oil cloth on the floors and a small mat where you got out of bed to put your feet on so that you weren't struck with frostbite first thing in the morning. Curtains were all of fabric, we had no blinds, either spring blinds or Venetian blinds and 1 remember that they were religiously drawn on the edge of dark. The neighbours had
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very similar. I can't remember anybody not having curtains because this was a fairly, I should think what you'd call high working class district. They were all new houses and people didn’t tend to move about much in those days and if you could afford to buy the house you could afford to furnish it reasonably as well. There was some donkey-stoning went on in Norris Avenue and Bankfield Avenue which was part of the same complex, but it was limited just to probably the edges of the door steps. And I have noticed since that it, oh I don't know, degenerated is the word, it degenerated into a painted line round the edge of the door step. I think it was considered slightly below their station for most of these women to use donkey stones, they'd moved out of that sort of area and bought themselves new houses and were trying to get away from the old donkey stone and swilling the flags era. All these houses did have small front gardens which of course was another influence against donkey stoning the door step because if you had a hedge nobody could see your door step anyway. And really that was one of the main reasons for donkey-stoning, which was to let people know that you were keeping your house clean. You wore doing some work. The house was lit by electricity and the household rubbish was disposed with in the same way that we do nowadays in a dustbin. As I have already said my mother did the washing, I can't ever remember a hand washing machine. I’m talking about Norris Avenue now of course, and she did it in a dolly tub with a copper posser and she did it once a week. In common with her mother, and her mother before her, it took her all day. Monday was washing day, she dried it outside and ironed it with an electric iron and the thing I can remember most clearly about washing day is that she had very little time for anything else that day.
(600)(25 min)
My mother cleaned the house as quickly as possible. She was never a woman that you could call houseproud. This isn't to say that the house wasn’t clean and we weren’t kept clean, we were, but I think she begrudged the time that she had to spend in keeping the house and us clean and chose the way to do every job which gave her the best results in the shortest possible time. For instance, I can never remember her spending a lot of time polishing furniture or floors or anything like that, a quick rub over with the mop, make sure that everything was dusted and that was the housework. And she didn't really pay special attention to anything for this reason. I don’t think she had much interest in housework really and still hasn't, which again, isn't to say that the house isn’t tidy, it is, but she doesn't do any wore than she has to do and 1 have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. We didn't have any regular jobs, there were certain jobs that we had to do for ourselves, cleaning shoes, running errands, we used to do these, my brother and my sister and I. We were very close together my sister and I so we more or less grew up with each other and I can't really remember us doing much to help Leslie, because my mother was always at home. My dad did quite a bit of work in the house. He was very good with his hands, good at mending, decorating, I can remember in particular him painting the front room once, it had a fairly ornate plaster frieze, and there was some swearing done when he painted that, it was a job. I can't remember him ever doing any shopping, or really looking after the children though I’d say he did his share. I think really anything that a person of my age, or his age, wouldn’t regard as woman’s work he’d do it but women’s work was women’s and we tended to keep away from it. We did own the house, it was bought brand new and I can’t really say how much they paid for it, it sticks in my mind that it was
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about £500 in 1936 but I can't really say. My mother never did anything in the home to earn a little money, and 1 can't remember anybody in the neighbourhood doing these things, apart from the odd woman who did a bit of dressmaking, or sewing, or would run some curtains up, but this was done more as a sort of service to the neighbours rather than from any absolute financial need. And that house is still standing, as 1 say my sister lives in the one next door to it.
Now the section on food and shopping. My mother cooked on a gas stove. She had a gas stove from when she was first married. A very good reason for this was the fact that General Gas, the place where my father worked, did manufacture gas stoves and she was privileged in the fact that whenever a new model came out we used to get one on what I believe was called ‘Area Test’. Which meant of course that we always had a very modern gas stove at very little or no expense. She made her own bread occasionally but not very often, it was easier to go and buy it. And she'd bake oh possibly once or twice a week. She didn't seem to have a set day for baking, she'd look in the tins, and if they were getting down a bit she'd bake something. She was a very good baker and cook, and still is in fact. And she baked pies, fruit pies, she made jam, marmalade. She made pickles, never made any home made wine or beer, yes she did make her own medicines, the favourite was lemon and glycerine and honey for coughs and tickly throats. She also made, I don't know if it could be strictly called a medicine but she also made a hand cream and she made that for years from gum Tragacanth and I think water and a bit of scent, I'm not really sure. And she didn't make this to use on the hands, she made it because my father used to use it as a hair cream. Because it dried when you put it on, and when it dried it stopped, it kept your hair cleaner longer, it didn't allow oil and muck to get into your hair so he used to use this as hair cream. And it set, it never needed combing during the day, and it always looked tidy. Of course we are talking about the days of the short back and sides, when to get anywhere in life you had to have a close hair cut. We usually had what you might call the standard English breakfast, bacon and eggs or sausage and eggs or sausage and bacon or a kipper, something like that. Sunday dinner was always the set meal of the week.
(30 min)
The joint, vegetables, probably two sort of potatoes roast and boiled and during the week we used to go home for our dinner and there was always something cooked for dinner. I’ll always say that for my mother, we generally got three cooked meals a day including tea. There was generally something warm for tea if it was only cheese on toast, or something like that you know, a sort of a light snack but it was a cooked snack. We weren't much for supper, a biscuit and a glass of milk or something like that. We did have a garden, I'm talking about Norris Avenue again, my father was never a really keen gardener, but quite liked to keep things tidy and grow a few flowers. He didn't grow any fruit or vegetables, apart from a few spuds at the back but at the beginning of the war when we put the Anderson shelter there that did away with the vegetable patch. And we ate everything that we grew unless he gave something away if we had a lot of something we’d give it away and somebody else would give us something in return. We had no animals, hens, pigs, ducks or goats. Puddings, yes we had a pudding every day for dinner. They varied, very often milk puddings, sometimes sponge, occasionally for a treat suet pudding, spotted dick, something like that. And we got through a fair amount of milk, I should say probably, oh three pints a day, two or three pints a day. Milk then, of course, had got past the stage where it was delivered as loose milk in kits, we always got it in bottles however 1 can remember the farm milk still coming round. I think it was
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Hancocks from Heaton Moor coming round Heaton Norris with the trap, with the kits in and ladling milk out. I can remember that going on, that was going on up to the beginning of the war and during the war, during the second world war. We had butter yes, margarine yes, we had that as well and dripping, we liked dripping, I still do like dripping. The fruits we ate most often, well of course I was three when the war started and a lot of fruits we didn't see during the war. I mean 1 didn't see a banana or I think a grapefruit, until after the war but we have always been ones for eating a lot of fruit. Any fruit in season, my mother used to buy it. Vegetables, almost anything that was in season or about. The list of foods, bananas, as 1 say we never saw those until after the war. Rabbit, we had rabbit quite often, fried foods yes, fish, yes. Cod, haddock, Finnan haddock, smoked, kippers, and 1 remember pickled herrings, soused herrings, cheese cooked and uncooked, corned beef, sometimes we used to get steak and heel pies, sometimes tripe. I can't ever remember having trotters at home, but black puddings yes. All these things came from the famous chain of Lancashire shops the U.C.P. United Cattle Products who now seem to be defunct. Eggs, yes but of course during the war, again, these were rationed, you didn't see so many of them. Tomatoes whenever they were about. But one thing that's worth remembering is that nowadays we are used to seeing tomatoes all the year round. Well of course in these days that I am talking about they were only there when they were in season. Grapefruit, as I say I can’t remember seeing a grapefruit until after the war finished. Sheep's head, we never had it, the only one, the only sheep's head I ever saw was what we used to boil up to feed the dog. And we did have tinned food, quite a lot. Of course there again, during the war you had to take what you could get, it wasn't a question of what you’d like to eat, you had to have what was available
(800) (35 min)
and a lot of it was tinned food of course, from the Commonwealth. All sorts, tinned meat, tinned fruit, tinned fruit especially, and I can’t remember ever having ever having a bad tin. We drank mostly tea, sometimes cocoa or sometimes coffee but nearly always tea and I remember we had a lot of milk. Christmas dinner was the traditional Christmas dinner. Nearly always a turkey, even during the war we seemed to manage to get hold of a turkey from somewhere, if not a chicken. Favourite foods when I was a child? I don't really know. We were always brought up to eat what was put on the table in front of us and I suppose that some things were more acceptable than others but I can't really recall any special favourites. The only thing that I can remember is that I had two things that I didn't like, one was spaghetti and the other was junket but I still had to eat them. And really the next question doesn’t apply because even though things got hard at times we never had to skimp on what we ate. My father only had a bit of breakfast at home, and then his dinner when he came home in the evening because he had a meal at work during the day so he didn't take anything to work to eat and we never went in to take his food in because of course he worked seven miles away. And he didn't always have the same food as the rest of the family, but that wasn't really because he was having something special, it was because he ate at a different time than us. We used to have our tea when we came home from school and my father generally didn't get home till about half past six, something like that and so his meal was cooked specially. And I can't ever remember that we were ever so short of food that anybody had to go short. My mother usually did the shopping. Most of it once a week, but the thing to remember is that then when we were living at Norris Avenue there were no fridges and it wasn't possible to keep some things for so long during summer. So really you can say that anything that’d keep it’d be bought once a week, probably Thursday or Friday, and other things would be bought as they were needed from the
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corner shop down at the bottom of Norris Avenue. Vegetables were bought at a greengrocers, meat was bought at a butcher's, usually the same one each week. Groceries were bought at the same grocery shop each week and there was a good market in Stockport and very often we used to down there on a Saturday, and go round and buy stuff there. It’s hard to say why, not necessarily because things were cheaper but because it was a bit of an occasion going to the market anyway. Stockport market is still going, it’s still a big, open market and there is something very satisfying about going round the stalls. We did shop at the Co-op sometimes but we weren't really what you would call big Co-oppers. And the difference in prices, service and quality between the local street-corner shops and those in the middle of the town was really very small, the thing was that in the middle of the town you had more choice. We were close to the centre of Stockport, and it was very often possible to get things there and get them fresher than you could at your own corner shop. This had its own effect in that corner shops tended to stick to those things which they could do better than anybody else. In other words stuff that wasn’t going to go off quick or stuff that needed to be got every day like bread or milk, or stuff like that. Because it was easier to go to the corner shop than it was to go down into the town centre and prices probably were just a shade higher but not much. In these days I’m talking about, 1940-45, we still hadn’t got into the price wars that we have got into now. I have no doubt that the shops that we used did give credit but I can't ever remember my mother getting it. The only thing that we used to do in later years was have a monthly account, and pay for the stuff once a month which I suppose is a form of credit. I think this was mainly due to the fact that my father was on monthly salary cheques instead of a weekly wage and it made things easier. And I know nothing about pawn shops when I was young because I didn't even know where there was one and we never used them. I don’t know anybody that did. This question about whether anything you ate when you were young which is no longer possible to obtain. I can remember two things, one of them was fresh liquorice root, not dried, fresh liquorice root, we used to get it at a shop down at the bottom of Huntsman’s Brow at Mather’s greengrocery shop. The same people owned the big pet shop in the market place
(900)(40 min)
and occasionally they'd have this liquorice root, and even during the war. And the other thing was locusts which used to be sold in, I can remember them selling them in Woolworth’s instead of sweets when sweets were short, you could buy locusts. They came in of course for animal feed but the locusts pods are very sweet and they are not bad at all to chew.
I don’t know how much house-keeping money my mother had, we never had anything
to do with money. During the second world war food was short and I do
remember rationing, we had to queue for everything. Rationing was on of course
and I remember it was a big thing if you went to the pictures, taking your coupons with you to get sweets if there were any. I think we used to get two ounces a week, I am not sure. And I can't really say whether we were better fed during the second world war than before, because of course my memories date from during the war.
We get on to the bit about clothing now. The only clothing that my mother used to make was she would occasionally do some knitting. We didn’t have a sewing machine, and mending clothes was limited to tears and the occasional patch and of course the old stand by in those days, darning stockings which nobody ever does now. And I can't remember having any passed on clothes, but I think it’s possible I might have had. And when we went to buy any clothes, I’ve been thinking, I said I didn't know where there was a pawn shop, but I do because my clothes were bought at a pawn shop, Lekermans, very often, down in Underbank in Stockport. And I have an idea that they were pawn brokers as well. Old clothes. As a matter of fact my mother is sat here with me now while I am making this tape and she has just pulled me up sharpish to point out that during the war at the clinic, which was the health clinic for the children's health clinic. They used to have 'Make do and mend' classes where young housewives were taught how to make clothes for their children out of larger clothes you know, out of cast off clothes. And I can't really remember what happened to my old clothes, I don't think they were passed on to anybody, I think you more or less wore them out. In those days you had the best suit at week ends,
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and when it got a bit shabby you wore it for the rest of the week. When I was at school for the first nine years of infant school, well it was the usual thing boots, or good shoes, socks, short trousers, underpants, vest, shirt, pullover, and not very often a hat, sometimes a hat but not very often. Sunday best was a dark suit, black shoes, and a good shirt and if a hat was worn at all it was a cap. Not the flat cap but a school boy type cap made in segments on top, with a button on top and a peak.
My father wore business suits for work, always, and usually a trilby hat but he did occasionally go without. And my mother wore for housework just normal everyday clothes, plus an apron and she'd wear these clothes when she went shopping but never the apron, the apron always came off. And women's hats varied, they could be all sorts, usually felt, but there were some quite amazing creations. My dad never mended our shoes and I can't ever remember having more than two outfits at any one time, weekend and weekday. And clean clothes? Well, I can't say just exactly how often we had them, but we certainly had them in plenty of time, we never went round wearing clothes that were dirty, we've always made sure that we changed our shirt and underpants, especially before they got heavily soiled. I suppose because it made them easier to wash. I can't ever remember my mother belonging to a savings club for clothing; if there were any at that time they'd nearly sure be run by people like either Provident, or I have an idea that Lekermans might have run one of their own or at least a sort of a Christmas Club for clothing. And the question about the clothes that my father's foreman or boss wore don't apply really because he was the boss, and anybody that was above him wore a business suit the same as him but probably a bit better quality, and changed a bit more often.
SCG/04 September 2003
6,251 words.
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Stanley Graham (Engineer & Researcher) Tape 04
