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Readers' Memories

I get many fascinating emails.  I love this piece of social history from Muriel in Australia?
I have read all your books, and I am in the middle of reading your new one Putting on the Style.  I am originally from Cheetham Hill in Manchester yes the slums, then we got posh and the council moved us to Wythenshawe. I must admit reading your books brought back memories and places that I had forgotten about, also some of things that have happened to your people in the books I can honestly relate to.

I was the youngest of three two boys and me when my father decided he would go off with someone else and left my mother to bring us up, the two boys were taken to an approved school for not attending school, that left me and my mum, in those days you didn't get help from the state or at least it wasn't much. Mum had a shift job 6 - 2 and 2 -10. I was eight years old, so I dragged myself up.  I had Jewish Godparents who were very good to me, they kept me fed most of the time.  But I remember going out and cleaning people houses at that tender age, and one Jewish woman use to give me half a crown for cleaning her bathroom stairs and steps and laying the fire for her, and if I finished before the hour was up she use to send me to the shops.  Another time she would put pennies under the carpets to see if I had cleaned there and to check that I handed them back.

Looking back I don't think it has done me any harm, just makes me appreciate more what I do have now. But I really enjoy your books especially when you mention a place that I recognise such as Pauldens Store in your book.  I remember going home to Wythenshawe from Town when the bus I was on got diverted because of the Fire you could see it for miles around.  Also playing on the banks of the mucky River Irwell, and of my mum having to go to the Pawn Shop for one of the posher neighbours, because the lady wouldn't go herself.

Is the Champion Street Market you speak about a fictitious place or is it real?  I cannot remember any market of that name.  The markets we used to go to was Grey Mare Lane, Rochdale and the fish market near Tib Street in Manchester where there used to be a lovely pet shop.

Regards, Muriel

Thanks Muriel, for sharing your memories with us.  Yes, Champion Street is entirely fictitious, but the life within it, revolving around the various stallholders, is based on other markets, and as real as I can make it.  My own grandfather used to sell umbrellas on Burnley market back in the dark ages when I was a lass.

And how about this one from Margaret in Cumbria:

My mother worked at number 87 Oldham Street at White's shop from 1915 until she married in 1927.  I have her diaries for that period . . . and to me they give a real feel of the time.  My mother left work when she married and in 1933 opened her own shop in Cheetham Hill.  Later to be followed by two more in Stretford and Urmston.  What strikes me most about her day to day life as a young girl was the long working hours and the fact that they did so much walking - sometimes catching the "car" (tram) but usually getting everywhere on foot.  Also how much they enjoyed themselves with simple activities like the cinema and talking to the choir boys from the Cathedral!

I often interview people when I'm working on a book, and they readily find time to talk to me and share their memories of times past, the work they used to do whether in the mill or munitions, farming or forestry, in war or peace.  I thought you might be interested in reading snippets of some of these.

Timber Girls:  (Gracie's Sin)
Betty joined the Women's Timber Corps because she was too young to join the WRNS.  She recalls that her first job was to plant larches and Scots Pine, one spade length and one foot and put the tree in, with three lots of acorns between each tree.  After that she went into felling, taking mature trees down with a crosscut saw.  Stumps had to be flat to the ground so that no one would trip over them, or a tractor bump into them.  And with a war on, every inch of cut wood was valuable.  These were for pitprops.

But before any felling was done, Betty first had to select the trees.  She used calipers to get the diameter and would estimate the height.  Large, medium and small.  She would put a white blaze on each tree due to be felled using a 5lb Ellwood Felling axe.  The girls were trained by foresters too old to fight, and they were allowed only a matter of weeks in order to learn how to do the job.  Betty helped to fell a stand of trees on the far side of Loweswater.  There was oak along the edge of the water and larch above.  They built a chute to send the felled trees into Loweswater so that they could be towed across by boat.  These were probably for telegraph poles.  Betty said the forester was in charge and you did as he said or you were in trouble.  The trees had to be lopped and topped, then peeled and all the knots taken off with a draw knife.  Lastly they burned the brash, which includes the leaves and smaller branches.  If you don’t do that, Betty said, it encourages bugs which would ultimately infect the trees. 

For loading logs on to the lorry they had a three legged crane with wires.  It worked like a pulley.  The tractor would be fixed to the wire, draw away and it would lift the timber and Betty would stand on the wagon and guide the logs on board, checking that they were stacked evenly and didn’t fall.  She was only small but learned the task through common sense and practice.

She worked most of the war at Grizedale close to the German POW Camp.  The POWs used to march up and down the road for exercise.  They’d make comments to the girls and the guard would shout at them, 'Eyes front.'   There was a machine gun trained on them the whole time from a nearby hill but they objected. ‘We are German Officers and if we say we will not escape, we will keep our word.’  They were under supervision the whole time they were out.  If there were problems they would be taken up to London in blackout cars for interrogation.  One POW who arrived knew the area well because he used to work there in the tourist industry before the war, so had to be watched with especial care.  There were several escape attempts but they were all caught later on the fells in a sorry state.

Betty remembers that you had to have a pass to get through the camp gate to reach the forest to work.  There was a sentry on guard who would say: ‘Halt, who goes there?  Friend or Foe?’    
    ‘Friend.’
    ‘Advance friend to be recognised.’
    So Betty would show her pass and be allowed through.

She was concerned about her mother in Yorkshire and sometimes got a lift to the station at Ulverston to go and see her, which wasn't often as they got little time off working 8 till 5 most days and rarely allowed a full weekend off.  They were given four weeks a year leave overall.  Her mother was a seven shilling widow.  Betty earned twenty-eight shillings a week less insurance. Fourteen shillings went on board and lodging at the camp and she sent her mother five shillings.

After the war she worked in 22 different counties in three years from 1947-49.  Then stayed on as a cartographer.  She was supposed to do a rough copy but did them so well her maps were used for publication and she made a career of it.

Her memories are happy ones and she can still wield a 5lb axe even though she is now turned eighty.

Here is Betty, first in line, when she
joined the Women's Timber Corps
aged just 17.

Although Gracie's Sin is pure fiction, the work described in the book is exactly as she, and the other Timber Girls I interviewed, remember it.

Mill Girls Memories: (Watch For The Talleyman)
Dolly:
Dolly started in the mill as a doffer at 14.  ‘Marvellous it were in t’mill,’ she told me.  First of all she learned how to piece up, how to change slubbings or rovings.  She was shocked when I asked if she was ever in bare feet in the spinning mill.  'Nay, we wore clogs to protect our feet from travellers.'  (Travellers were little brown things on the end of a spindle which could fall off the bobbin and hurt bare feet.)

'You could hear them coming a mile off up from the mill.  Clattering on the setts.' 

Dolly wore a pinny with a long pocket in front in which she carried the tools of her trade: sheers, for cutting the ends off; a piker, which was a long implement with a hooked end and used to get the travellers out.  And she  always carried a sharp knife to slip down the bobbin to get to where it was threaded.  These were tied onto a string round her waist, or in her pocket, making her look permanently pregnant. 

The cotton started off in bales brought into the card room where it was broken up and then onto the frames, and then to the weaving.  They tested the quality of it with finger and thumb.  Some of it was rough with fleas in it which would get spun and woven in with the cotton, though finally come out in the bleaching process later.  She earned 12/6 a week.  Some gaffers were hard taskmasters.  Do this.  Do that.  Cotton dust everywhere.  No time allowed even to go to the lavatory, often eating their dinner while they were working, and they had to clean and oil their own frame.  There was a natural rivalry between spinners and weavers.  ‘We did all the hard work and they just had to mek it up.’

There was always a danger of fire with all the inflammable cotton and grease and Dolly remembers the mill caught fire once.  'Flames were shooting sky high and people were weeping.'

She remembers Gracie Fields coming to the mill during the war.  'Come on girls, let’s sing,' she would say, and they did.  Gracie was a spinner at Rochdale and as Dolly sang in a band, she would imitate her.  Her real name is Mary Ann but in the band she was called Dolores.  She was more affectionately known to her family and friends as Dolly because she was so small.  'I were the scrapings up off t'mill floor,' she told me, chortling with glee.  She used to climb down the drainpipe with her dance frock over her arm, which her mother used to get made for her.  Being so small she felt was put on a bit, so felt the need to prove herself.  Later, she had to stop being in the band because her husband objected to her attracting too much attention from other men.

Dolly’s mother couldn’t write.  She’d had a hard life looking after her brothers and sisters when her own mother died, and then spending the rest of her life minding her own children.  There were seven daughters and three  sons who were all taught to read and write, and play the piano or sing.  Two went to Canada, then one on to  Connecticut where he later died.  This was in the depression years when he couldn’t find work.  One brother got killed in the war.  Dolly says she got away with not doing too many chores as she was the youngest.  Her mother told her not to have owt to do with anyone from Manchester, but to stick to boys that she knew in Middleton.

Her attitude to bosses was that she wouldn’t ‘humble to ‘em.’

'They were only folk, same as we were, trying to earn a living.  They were always saying - don’t do this and don’t do that - but we got them round to our way of thinking in the end.  We larned em.’  Though she did get caught by the owner of the mill once when she sneaked a little sit in his Rolls Royce. 

Dolly became a lollipop lady after she retired, and loved to stop all the gaffers on their way in to work.  When she saw their cars coming, she’d think, ‘Eeh, I’ll get me own back and mek 'em wait.’  Her daughter, who still worked at the mill told me that her boss said, ‘For God’s sake, will you tell your mother to stop stopping me.  I’m coming in late to work every day.’  

Grateful thanks to Dolly, who gave so generously of her memories and allowed me to use her name in Watch For The Talleyman, and I hope some of this ninety-one year old's fine spirit rubbed off on to my fictitious heroine.  

Alice:
Alice was in gas winding.  She worked on a long frame that had little pullies on it.  She pulled the cotton down fast in a figure of eight and it started winding on to the bobbins, going over a gas jet.  'If you do it quickly it keeps on going, if you do it too slow it burns all the ends off.'  She also did cone winding, where they used wax to make it shiny and easy to use.  Alice says she worked in the most modern mill in Europe.  Her first pay was thirteen shillings.  She wore clogs all day which were so good for her feet she could dance all night.  They had a strap and a button and were made of soft leather.  She learned to lip read in the mill and laughingly told me she has to put her glasses on to hear what people are saying.

During the war she worked at Risley Munitions, taking a train from Trafford Park every day.  The train stopped at every little station and many service men got on, all giving her whistles and wanting to talk to her.  She said it was good for her morale.  She told of accidents in the munitions factory caused by changes in temperature if they got too cold, or the detonator could just go off and you'd lose your arm, or your life.

It took her an hour and a half to get to work, having to get up at four to leave at four-thirty to catch a train to Risley.  The local policeman used to watch her down the streets.  She was fifteen years old.  When she arrived at the munitions factory she got frisked for cigarettes then had to change into special clothing.  White coats and brown leather shoes with WD on it, which stood for War Department.  She called them 'forever shoes' as they never wore out.  The men wore jacket and trousers and pork pie hats.  No glass buttons as they could create friction with gunpowder.  No metal either for the same reason.  'Everything was tied up with ribbons and things like that.'  Her job was putting washers on detonators.  Any that didn’t work she had to put in a can with oil in and a man would come round who they called him the reject man.  He had an oil can and would squirt oil on the rejects and take them away.  Her friend worked at filling bombs and shells, using a sort of hopper.  Alice says she was never frightened even though people got blown up. 

At the end of the war, they all got a note that said their services were no longer required.  They were on the dole.

Irene:
'It was hot in the mill, the temperature around 70 degrees for the cotton in the winding room.  The cotton had to be just right, damp but not too wet or too dry.  Bad cotton, which kept breaking, lost them time.  If the women were given bad cotton and bad weft or something, God help us, we’d be ticked off.  The older women would keep feeling it and choose the best for themselves, as they were more dependent on earning good money than we young girls.  It was noisy but some rooms worse than others.  Not as bad as the weaving sheds.'

The machine was only stopped once a day for cleaning, five or six minutes with a little brush.  'And you had to train yourself not to need the loo.'  Nor were they allowed to smoke.  It was a sacking offence.  No time was allowed away from their work for a brew.  Someone had to mind the frame for them.  No time to go home for lunch unless they lived near.  They could take their dinner in a pot with a plate on top and put it on the boiler  and it would keep it hot.

If they were late they had to go in through the office and they might get their pay docked, which to Irene was a disaster. 

Irene said that during the time of the Means Test when her father was off work if she earned 13s 3d in a week, 10s would be deducted from his dole, so they were no better off.  And that was when she’d worked from 7.15 – 5.15 every day; plus 7 –12 on Saturdays, and all she'd got left of her wages at the end of the week was three shillings and threepence.  She also had to pay for her own overalls, the cost of which was deducted at so much each week.

She tells of not being able to afford a penny for the Christmas party so she took a jelly instead.  The nuns took it from her but left her in a back room with the dirty children who'd had their heads shaved.  She didn’t get to go to the party.

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