Home life in the 30s and 40s

My oldest sister Winifred started school in the village, she must have been a quick learner, encouraged by Mum, for she was only three and a half yet knew her letters and

could scratch her name on a slate. When we moved though, she had to wait until she was 5 before they would let her start at the Crosland Moor Council School.

A family story goes that when we moved to Crosland Hill, in December 1925, Dad had quite an altercation with the removal men. They had agreed that the family could

ride in the back of the van, which was not too uncommon those days, but objected when asked to load the van with about 12 sacks of coal he had bagged ready. Dad loaded

them himself, the girls and Mum nursing me, perched where they could near the tailgate and off we went. Dad rode in the front cab, to show them the way, and when we got to

No. 83 he must have talked the men round for they happily delivered the furniture and the coal safely, tipping it down the coal chute for us. This episode was called to mind

when 28 years later, I moved my family from Digley to Poulton-le-Fylde with Mum nursing the kids in the back. She looked on such things as ‘adventures’.

Our move to the Huddersfield area at the end of 1925 was a propitious one regarding keeping a wage coming in. Whether Dad had forecast that the miners’

situation was unlikely to improve or not I don’t know; or whether Grandad Mellor had persuaded Harry to find Dad a job here, and a house, was never mentioned. Most

trades and craftsmen were being squeezed by the employers to lower and lower standards of living and 1926 was a bad year. The miners had been on strike at many

pits and on 12th May the TUC finally called a General Strike, but about a week later, the 12th May they called it off, breaking their agreement with the miners, and leaving

them to battle on alone. Even Winston Churchill called miners “the enemy” and sent troops into Yorkshire to quell riots.

No. 83 Crosland Hill Road was part of a stone-built terrace of back-to-back dwellings. To me as a bairn it was large, but purely one living/kitchen room with a large

cellar and two bedrooms, with one sashed window to each of the three rooms and a small window in the cellar half below ground level borrowing light via a brick boxed and

grated ‘well’ in the garden. As the ground floor was 4 or 5ft. above pavement level there were steps in the path to the front (and only) door, and similarly steps to the

through passage built into the structure between ours and No.81. This passage about 3ftx7ft, was the access to the wash-house and lavatory buildings in the backyard that we

shared with a neighbour. The wash-house had a big copper boiler built into one comer with a brick chimney, a cold water sink under the window, a table, dolly-tub, possers

etc.. The lavatory was an improvement on Grimey, as it was a more modern water flushed closet with an overhead cistern and a pull chain. It was one of a block of 4

shared by 8 families. Ours was kept locked with only us and the Browns having a key: not for security but that other people were not perhaps as clean as ourselves, and it was

kept clean with scrubbed flag floor, whitewashed walls and painted door, behind which was a hook holding torn squares of newspapers, (softer than a dockleaf in a field)...

A trip to the toilet on a cold Winter moming (and other times too ), meant putting a coat on over my nightshirt, clogs or boots, down the stair steps, pick up the key, (one

soon learnt not to forget the key), through the front door and across the large stone slab that covered the coal-place, taking care not to slip on the metal manhole cover of

the chute, down some steps and out through the wrought iron gate to the pavement, along the paving for the width of the garden and into the passage entrance, up more

steps into the long passage proper, across the hard earth backyard and yout’e almost there, hoping it isn’t occupied by a neighbour. Toilet times soon became habitually

adopted to when one was up and about. During the night of course we did have available under each bed a poe or chamberpot, sometimes called a “gezunda”, Each morning they had to be carried round the back, emptied down the toilet and washed out in the washkitchen, or if it was just urine they would be emptied down the outside

drain, which was often my direct urine toilet, being a boy. We referred to the motions as pee or mess, but at school were encouraged to call them No.1 and No.2. Some

neighbours would save some of the urine and use it when ‘swilling the flags’, washing down the entrance steps and pavings, saying it added a certain lustre to the clean finish

but we used a disinfectant, and finished off the nosing of each step with an orange coloured donkey stone. If the coal delivery men had been careless, the pathway would

get an extra sweep and swill, often left for one of the children to do.