I am thankful to Chris Robinson for donating this remarkable, historical record by Cyril Tyler, offering valuable insights into Ossett during the early 20th century.

Cyril Tyler was born in Ossett on January 26 1911. What follows is a look at his life: his family, chapel, coal-mining, the places he grew up and the people he knew. His often humorous narrative paints a portrait of an Ossett now long gone.

I’ve included additional information and images, many of which were first shown on Ossett Through The Ages (OTTA). I’ve also included census records and more.

All errors are my own.

Anne-Marie Fawcett

May 2024

SLIDESHOW

INTRODUCTION
My three children were all born in Reading into a middle class home, while I was born in the industrial North into a working class family. I have therefore set down for their instruction and occasional amusement a description of my life in the North in the early part of this century and, by contrast, life in Cirencester in the late 1930s. The year 1939 gives a natural break to my story because in that year Moyra and I were married, we moved to Reading and the war began. One day I may find time to continue the story.

Occasionally my memory may have misled me, but the general picture is accurate.

CYRIL TYLER
September 1980

1. FOREBEARS!

On the main Ipswich to Norwich road there is a small Suffolk village known as Stoke Ash. Like so much of Suffolk it remains unspoiled and out of the main stream of life. In 1972 I stood in the old churchyard of that village and the years rolled back as I pictured my paternal ancestors toiling in the surrounding fields and walking those quiet lanes, for it was here that they lived and died.

In the churchyard there is a gravestone with its inscription still clear and readable, Charles Tyler, born 1803 died 1853. He had a son, Robert John, and he, in turn, had two sons, the elder Charles Ephraim; the younger John.

John stayed in East Anglia, ultimately farming in the village of Bressingham near Diss, at Clay Hall and later at High House. Charles, on the other hand, moved away from the area and from farming to the railway and journeyed north to work on the old Great Northern line.

Charles married Mary Jane Todd, a true Yorkshire woman from the area around Halifax, but that is all I know about her and I have been unable to trace her forebears.

[Mary Jane Todd was the daughter of Henry Todd and Hannah Hassle. She was born at Wortley, Leeds in 1857. She was one of four children, the others being: Richard, Clara and Anne. She married George Charles Tyler (formerly Charles Ephraim Tyler) on November 25 1875.]

CHARLES TYLER & MARY TODD

This couple spent their married life in Ossett, a small town about half way between Dewsbury and Wakefield. They had a number of children, one of which was John, my father.

[John Tyler was born on September 8 1886 and baptised at Holy Trinity Church, Ossett on November 8 1886. The family address on his baptism record is ‘Intake Lane’ and his father’s occupation is recorded as that of ‘gate keeper GNR’.]

Aunt Hannah was the oldest. She was married to Johnnie Scorah and had no children. He was a great Socialist, but had not the brains to carry it off, so all his talk was regarded with amusement by the rest of the family.

[Hannah Todd was born in Leeds on September 21 1874 to Mary Jane Todd. She married John William Scorah on 18 May 1901. In the marriage register, Charles Tyler is named as her father.]

The next child was Robert, a miner in Featherstone, married to Jane, with a daughter, Blanche, about 10 years older than me. They visited Ossett very infrequently and I remember going there only once when I was grown up and Uncle Robert already dead.

[Robert married Jane Teall of Little Town End on February 22 1896. Their daughter Blanche was born in 1902.]

Next came Aunt Jinny [Sarah Jane], who was married to Arthur Goodson, a railway worker, living in Leeds with their two daughters, Lily and Edie. They too only rarely came to Ossett and I have no recollection of visiting them.

[Arthur Goodson was the son of Clara Todd and Benjamin Goodson. Clara was Jinny’s maternal aunt. Jinny and Arthur were married on July 27 1907.]

Rachel, I believe, came next, but she died before I was born. There were two childen, Daniel and Alice, children of Fred Ward, whom I do not remember meeting although he lived long after his wife died. Daniel and Alice lived in Ossett and Daniel worked in the pit with others of my relatives.

[Rachel Ward née Tyler died in 1910 when Daniel was 9 and Alice was about a year old. Fred Ward was a Territorial Soldier (4th KOYLI) and enlisted in 1908. He was mobilised on August 4 1914 – the day that Britain declared war on Germany. He was discharged from the Army in 1916 with chronic nephritis caused by his war service. He died in 1919; he is commemorated at the Ossett War Memorial.]

[There was another sibling of whom Cyril appears to have been unaware. Alice Tyler was born in 1884 but died aged just 19.]

John, my father, came next, then Emily. She married John Bainbridge and was considered to have moved up in the world, since he was in the family firm of wholesale and retail confectioners. Their children were Mary and John and they lived fairly close to us in the later years that I was at home.

[John Tyler became the Mayor of Ossett! Emily Tyler was 27 when she married John Bainbridge in 1920. She died in 1938. The Co-op on Dale Street, Ossett now stands on the former site of Bainbridge’s shop.]

Uncle Charlie was next and he too worked in the same pit as father [Westwood’s]. He married Florence Robertshaw, who was the mother of Marjorie, and after her death he married her sister, Doris. Uncle Charlie was always a bit different from the rest. He painted in oils and he tried to educate himself, but conditions were against him and he never escaped. His painting ceased and although he read widely that was as far as he got.

Finally came Florrie, never Auntie Florrie. This caused a great deal of mystification and even when I was in my forties I put my foot in it by asking for my cousin at a neighbour’s house. Florrie was the daughter of Jinny before marriage but was reared with the rest. She married Willie Robinson, a boiler maker and later a railwayman. They had one son, Albert.

[Florrie Tyler was born on March 6 1899. When she married on Christmas Eve 1921 she gave the registrar no details of her father.]

ELI RADLEY & MARIA WALSHAW WHITE

My maternal grandparents (Radley) are even more mysterious in their origins and there is little to tell. My grandmother (Maria) came from ‘across the water’ or more correctly ‘across t’watter’. In Ossett this did not mean from abroad, but simply from the other side of the dirty mill-soiled river known as the Calder. I know even less of my grandfather (Eli).

[Maria Walshaw White was born in Horbury. She was the third of six daughters of John White and Clara Walshaw who were married in 1840. Maria was 18 years old when she married Eli on February 26 1870. Eli signed the marriage register as ‘Eli Farrar’ and his father’s name was recorded as ‘Benjamin Farrar’. The 1871 census records Maria and Eli Farrar, with their 10 month old daughter Ellen, at Fosters Mill Yard in Horbury. By the time the next census was taken in 1881, they have added ‘Radley’ to their surname and have four more children.]

These grandparents were both of Yorkshire stock and their truly Yorkshire children included Annie who was the youngest. She was my mother.

The remainder of the family comprised Ellen, John Arthur, Fred, Clara and Lydia.

Ellen was married to Joe Thurlow, who worked in the pit and they had two daughters, Elsie and Alice, the former being nearly as old as my mother. Elsie was quite a heroine when she joined up as a WAAC in the first world war and she repeated this in the second world war, on both occasions as a cook. She lost her boy friend in the first war, but later married Eddie Hargreaves who worked in the offices of a timber firm. Again, because he was not a pitman the family regarded him as much superior, but this was not his doing, for he was a friendly and happy man. Alice did not marry until late in life [she was 26!] and then she married Jack Steele. He was from a genteel Scottish family, had been in the Grenadier Guards but ended up as a grave digger! An amusing character.

[Elsie Thurlow was awarded the Victory and British Medals as she served in a Theatre of War during WW1. Official records show that she served with the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps on the Western Front in France and Flanders from January 30 1918 to May 17 1919. I dont know her WW2 service. Alice Thurlow married gardener John Allison Steele (Jack) in 1922. Before his marriage, Jack did join the Grenadier Guards but was discharged ‘within three months of enlistment, considered unfit for service’. In March 1916 he re-enlisted, this time with the KOYLI. He filled out his attestation papers, stating that he had recovered. Three months later, he was discharged again as ‘unfit’. His service record has revealed that he had lost his hearing due to ‘middle ear disease’.]

John Arthur was married to Emily Salisbury, daughter of a man with a wooden leg. They had three daughters, Edie [Edith], Nellie [Mary Ellen] and Freda. Nellie, the oldest, never married [she was a bookbinder by profession], Edie married Norman Hancock, a plumber, and Freda married Stuart Wilson. She was the beauty of the family and a playmate of mine.

[When John Arthur Radley died in 1951, this notice appeared in The Yorkshire Post:
“The death has occurred of Mr. John Arthur Radley, Colliery House, Ossett, who spent 53 years in the service of collieries formerly owned by the Westwood family, Ossett. He was 76. He was under manager for 26 years at Greatfield pit, which he helped to sink. He was a member of Queen Street Methodist Church choir for 50 years, a local preacher, and superintendent and secretary of the Sunday school. He leaves a widow and three daughters.“]

Then came Fred, married to Mary Ellen Brook, and very much henpecked. Their adopted daughter was Eva, another beauty.

[Fred was a wheelwright at the same pit. The 1911 census recorded Fred and Mary Ellen at 9 Marlborough Street, Headlands. The couple had been married for 8 years. Living with them was 62 year old Hannah Brook (née Dews): Fred’s mother in law.]

Lydia was a war widow, having been married to Harvey Wainwright. Then she married Bob Sims, a ginger-headed tearaway whom she tamed. She had no children.

[Harvey Wainwright died, aged 36, after being wounded by a shell. He is commemorated at Ossett War Memorial. On December 29 1917 The Ossett Observer printed this obituary for Harvey Wainwright: A well-known Ossett man, Private Harvey Wainwright (36), whose home was at 15, Westfield-street, Headlands, Ossett, was killed on December 8th, somewhere on the Italian front, within a little over a month from leaving the country. The news was contained in a letter received from an officer, who said that Private Wainwright’s death was caused by a shell. Before joining the forces in May last, deceased had worked for many years at Messrs. Eli Townend’s mill at Healey. He was actively associated with the Primitive Methodist Church, Queen-street, being a member of the choir and a Sunday school teacher, and at one time, secretary of the Christian Endeavour Society, Interested in ambulance work, he had also been a member of the Ossett Ambulance Brigade.]

[Benjamin Robert Sims (Bob) was 44 years old when he married the 45 year old widowed Lydia. At the time of their marriage, Bob lived at Holly House on Queen Street. The house was demolished c1966.]

Finally came Clara, widow of Allan White. Previously her two children had died young. Of all these Auntie Clara was closest to me, because a while before I was born she lost her husband in a tragic accident and she seemed to find some comfort in me. She was simple-minded in the best sense of the term, shy and retiring with a fund of harmless jokes and riddles. When roused she could get very cross as my father occasionally found if she thought that he was punishing me unfairly.

[Clara Radley married Allan White in the the spring of 1896. Born in Ossett, Allan was the son of William White and Alice Sykes. He died in 1908 and Clara returned to the family home. She never remarried. In later years she lived with her sister Annie and her husband, John Tyler.]

Like so many Yorkshiremen I am proud of this crown or brand, whichever it is, but my true full-blooded Yorkshire friends regard me as only three-quarters of a Yorkshireman. In mathematical terms this is the upper limit, because it must be admitted that each of the three Yorkshire grandparents may themselves not have been pure bred Yorkshire people. But what does it matter? My qualification would be sufficient to satisfy the definition used by Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Indeed, I can claim that this was put to the test and proved in 1935 when I was invited to the Headingly nets to appear before those immortal gods who at that time scoured the Broad Acres for cricket talent.

My paternal grandfather, Charles Ephraim, was an awkward, frightening character. Awkward, as I discovered later because for some reason only known to himself he always used the names George Charles, a pleasantry which led to considerable problems when he died and it was found that his birth certificate bearing the names of Charles Ephraim failed to tally with the many legal documents on which his name appeared as George Charles. Frightening, because he had lost an arm in some accident on the railway and from the empty sleeve there protruded a vicious-looking steel hook. For some time he was gate-keeper at a level crossing in Ossett and my father was born at the gatehouse, but later he had a different post at the railway headquarters in Leeds.

From time to time, even as now, goods waggons became lost in sidings and it was my grandfather’s business to travel the goods yards as far south as Peterborough, searching for the lost waggons. In those days of religious fervour it is not surprising that he was known as ‘The Good Shepherd’. Such is life that my own son, Jonathan, did a little of this work when he first joined British Rail.

I know nothing of what my paternal grandmother did before she was married so I must now turn to my other grandparents.

My mother’s father was already frail when I knew him and he died when I was six years old. He had been what we called in that part of the world a teamer: a man who drives a horse or horses with a cart or waggon. It was my ambition for many years to be just this, but the motor car stole away my livelihood before I could even start on it. I remember that one of my favourite toys was a beautiful horse and two-wheeled cart. The horse had harness and the cart tipped up. I suppose I grew too big to play with such things but one day I came home from the Grammar School, so I must have been over eleven, to my find that my mother was burning the old horse and cart. I cried my heart out.

This grandfather too had a physical defect, namely a glass eye, so neither grandfather was entire, but fortunately the missing parts were not such as to prevent my own later procreation. It was said of this grandfather that he would leave his glass eye on the table when he went out, so that the children continued to behave, knowing that they were still being watched. Another thing I recall about this grandfather was that he seemed to live on pigs’ trotters and cockles and there was quite a lot of **** and smells in the street outside their house. This was only possible because they lived in the last house in a cul de sac and the road was merely beaten earth at that time. I wonder if in the distant future some archaeologist will find these remains and build some wonderful theory of an ancient village.

The only positive thing which I know about my maternal grandfather’s interests was that he kept rabbits. In the early part of the century he was a rabbit fancier and once won a prize at the Crystal Palace Show with a rabbit named ‘Ossett King’. I remember seeing the silver medal **** he won and also the notepaper which my grandmother still had after his death. It was yellow, blue or pink and, in addition to the heading showing his name and address, there was the picture of the prize-winning rabbit.

I was six when he died and I remember my cousin, Freda, and I running down Runtlings Lane to meet Freda’s sisters coming home from work. As we ran we shouted ‘Grandad’s dead, Grandad’s dead!’ After all, exciting news. A few days later I was taken to the funeral but all I can recall is riding in a horse-drawn cab: the horse had a large black plume on its head.

The most dominant, most loved and most colourful of my four grandparents was my mother’s mother. Tall and handsome, not pretty, with a full ranging knowledge of the Bible and the ways of her own little world, she was unofficial midwife, layer-out of the dead and general friend to all and sundry in the district and greatly trusted by the doctors. I remember her so well, dressed in her long black frock and blouse, glistening with beads or sequins, a short cape on her shoulders reaching to her waist and a bonnet tied with ribbons beneath her chin. Black **** head to foot but with a regal walk that would put a queen to shame.

When not dressed up she wore a long, heavy grey skirt and a grey blouse and when going out she draped a heavy shawl about her head. She had many old sayings and spoke the true Yorkshire dialect. A saying of which she was very fond was ‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen would flay (frighten) the devil out of his den’. I wonder if this had anything to do with the fear of sexual aberrations? Her conversation was peppered with such words as minny-non (snack), peff (a little niggling cough), chuff (pleased), tew (toil), thoil (afford), rispands (wrist bands – shirt cuffs) and shakles (wrists). Thus she would say ‘Roll thi rispands up an’ wash thi shakles’.

One of her favourite little songs which she sang to us children was as follows. I have only been able to write it phonetically.

Coimi naro killed cock caro, coimi

Am stam stiddle with an ar upon a ring

With a ring dong bully dim a coimi.

I believe that this may have been the chorus of a song, because I also have a vague feeling that ‘a lily white duck’ came into the song somewhere. My son, Jonathan, has kindly searched for and found the origin of this song. Briefly, it is based on the frog and mouse courtship first mentioned in 1549 and the “coimi naro’ is a nonsense chorus. My attempt of a childhood song compares well with a fairly recent version which Jonathan found.

Coy-me nero kill-to-care-o

Coy-me nero coy-me

Plim-strin slammer-diddle, laddle-bull-a-ring-ling

A ling-dum bull-a-me-a-coy-me.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

It’s difficult to read the occupation of 14 year old Mary Jane Dodd, seen here on the 1871 Census. Please get in touch if you’re able to decipher it! Contact me.

The 1881 census shows the family living at the Gate House at ‘Kaye Lane’.

In 1885 Charles Tyler was mentioned in the local press, providing further evidence of the family’s whereabouts. Note that ‘Kaye Lane’ has been renamed ‘Intake Lane’.

Although these photos of Intake Lane, the level crossing and the goods sheds, were taken in the 1960s, they offer an insight into this part of Ossett where the Tylers once lived.

https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/queen-marys-army-auxiliary-corps

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2. PARENTS

My father was born in 1886 and from the photographs of him when he was young it is evident that he was small and thin, but in all my memories he was fat, with a great paunch. His arms and legs were like steel and even as a young man I found that in a friendly tussle I was weak and like putty in his iron grip. This grip of his thumb and forefinger applied just above the knee or elbow made me scream. He was almost bald, often went without a hat when this was regarded as a strange quirk of fashion, and was rarely seen without a walking stick, except when going to or coming from work. He had no skill at games, but neither had any of my relatives on either side. Occasionally, when I was aged around 12-15, he would play cricket with me in the yard for a short time during a Bank Holiday, but his bowling and batting were very ordinary. He was always too busy at other times to pay much attention to us. He worked in the pit and studied at night school in Batley, which meant a journey of some three or four miles by train after work, on two or three evenings per week. Presumably he carried out the usual tasks in the pit of digging out the coal at this time, since his purpose in attending night school was to qualify as a deputy.

Once he became a deputy he was put in charge of some sixty men underground and he had to be there first in the morning to make sure that the workings were safe and then he had to allot the daily tasks to the men. This meant that he had to be up at 5.00 a.m. and off to work at 5.30 a.m. When he got up he always brought my mother a cup of tea, then she went back to sleep again. My Uncle Fred, mother’s brother, lived about 50 yards away and he came and whistled to make sure that my father was up and they went off together. Father always took bread with pork fat, never butter or margarine which turned rancid with the heat of the pit, and a bottle of cold tea for his mid-morning snack and these were prepared the night before by my mother. He carried the parcel and the bottle in the capacious pocket of the old coat he wore.

When he came home at about 2.30 p.m. he had his dinner first with mother hovering over him, then he sat on a tiny stool or on the floor with his head against the wall and fell asleep. Some- times he fell asleep in his chair, immediately after dinner. Finally he woke and washed his arms, face and body and then changed; his dirty pit clothes being bundled into the cupboard, or in our second house into a large box kept under the kitchen table and used specially for this purpose.

If he was going out about tea time he dressed fully and was away to his meeting, but if he was not due out until the evening he remained without collar, tie or coat and slept again. Then after tea he dressed and went to his meeting. He was a busy man and was out nearly every evening and often on Saturdays at some meeting or another.

Most of the time which I can remember he was a deputy and, to the best of my knowledge, he was a good one. The men respected him for his ability and his authority but I do not think that they loved him. In this respect my father’s attitude to strikes is of interest. He would not strike even when all the men were out in the whole district or nationally. He maintained that the deputies had a duty to see that the pit remained safe in readiness for the return of the men, but he also believed that strikes were wrong. This attitude made him wery unpopular and he was labelled as a blackleg. However, this did not have any repercussions on us children, as it had in some other areas.

Meetings claimed a great deal of my father’s time as long as I can remember. He was a great committee man and delighted in being chairman and talked a lot about points of order. Perhaps it was all this that was to come out in me later. He went to a number of meetings connected with the local chapel and was also concerned with work for the Band of Hope Union, but his great love was the Independent Order of Rechabites. He became Secretary of the Work and Win Tent (name of the Ossett Branch) on the day I was born and I was his first member, unable to protest at this infringement of my rights. I was to remain a teetotaller for nearly 25 years, after that I tried all kinds of alcoholic drinks and found them unpleasant so I am still almost teetotal. I wonder if the unpleasant taste of these drinks to me is still a fear of my father’s wrath? He gradually rose up through the ranks of Rechabite officers and in the 1920’s occupied the most senior office of the Bradford District of the Order, when he became District Chief Ruler, an office held for a year. I remember his regalia consisting of a long V-shaped silk collar with gold tassel and painted on it various emblems of the Order. These emblems were part of my life for not only did my father, but other members of the family, have great framed scrolls indicating service rendered as a Rechabite. In my own little way I too served the cause by getting new members and being given a scroll and miniature silk collar with tassel. On one occasion I walked through the streets of Wakefield in procession, carrying one of my own paintings designed to show the dangers of drink and the merits of being a little Rechabite.

The Rechabites were a registered friendly society who for small weekly subscriptions offered funeral benefits, sickness benefits, maternity benefits and endowment policies at good rates because their members, being teetotal, were statistically longer-lived. Now that there is the welfare state with its National Health Service the Rechabites and other similar societies have gone into a sad decline, but there can be no doubt that in their day they did splendid work. We may laugh at their temperance principles and their insistence that all alcoholic drinks, however small in quantity, are dangerous, but with drinking at the level it is now and alcoholism being worse than drug addiction, were they wrong?

Father was an absolute fanatic as the following stories will show. Long after I was married I asked about an old acquaintance of mine and he reported that the man had gone to the dogs: running off with his firm’s money and another man’s wife. He shook his head over these and other horrors, yet ended his story by saying ‘But whatever he might have done he is still a teetotaller’. The final blessing! One evening my father met one of his Rechabite members carrying a large jug. This could mean one of two things, either the man was going for beer or for some hot peas which were sold in shops at that time. My father was very strict because he believed that members who got good terms on their endowment policies because they were teetotal, should in fairness remain teetotal, so he followed the man, who went to the pea shop. This process occurred three times in the next few weeks and finally the man turned on my father and said ‘I am resigning from the Rechabites, I cannot eat any more bloody peas.’

Nevertheless, there was considerable misunderstanding about alcohol. One of the great teetotallers in the town was accustomed to brew his own very potent wine from nettles, rhubarb and similar homely materials. He stoutly maintained to the end that these were non-alcoholic because he only added sugar and yeast!

The other great interest in my father’s life was hospital charities. This was in the days before the National Health Service when hospitals had to rely on charity. My father was for a long time Chairman of the Ossett Hospital and Convalescent Association (OHACA) Committee, which was a body of about twenty people drawn from all sections of the community who schemed for the week-long Ossett Carnival.

This comprised water galas, concerts, operettas- on-water and many other money raising efforts culminating in a mile- long procession of bands, scouts, guides, floats, comic characters and anything and anyone else. The local bands were of two types: Ossett Borough Gawthorpe Brass Band and Ossett Military Band, which included woodwind. In addition, there was a comic band made up of unemployed men, dressed in bizarre costumes and mostly playing tommy-talkers. My father was the marshall and he ruled the show with a rod of iron, always boasting that as the Town Hall clock struck two the leaders of the procession moved off: it was never once late. The other side of this coin is the remark of one lady in the procession to another apropos of my father: ‘Brussen bugger’. (Brussen = full of over- weaning pride: bursting with it.)

These enormous labours produced a lot of money, but expenses were heavy so that the net gain was poor. In fact, it was scarcely worth it except for the sense of power or the fun which was got out of it. However, my father began a new scheme in which he visited all the local pits, mills and factories and finally persuaded each worker to pay a penny per week into a fund. By this means far more money was collected with practically no effort and the carnival slowly died. The advent of the National Health Service finally removed any need for such contributions.

My father worked in three pits in Ossett and as one closed he was transferred to the next owned by the same firm. They were all small pits and were very close-knit concerns. Old Henry Westwood owned them when my father started working and he also owned about twenty houses where many of his workpeople lived. Mr Westwood was a pillar of the Primitive Methodist Chapel which we attended and I vaguely remember him as a rather frail old man. When he died the pits passed to his three sons and the houses to his two daughters, one of whom was married to a bookkeeper and the other to a representative of a flour firm. It was the latter, a spruce, dapper gentleman named Eli Lucas, who collected the rents.

The three sons who owned the pits were a mixed lot. Thomas and Harvey worked in the pit offices, the former outgoing and cheerful, participating in the affairs of the town as a Councillor, practising as a lay preacher, and growing his beloved roses. The latter, pleasant but quiet and staying at home most of his time. The youngest son was Edwin: he shared with my Uncle Fred the task of engine winder at the pit. Every morning he went to work and every afternoon he came home and he was never seen outside again, summer or winter, until next day. It was said that his war experiences in Egypt had so upset him that when he returned home he had no wish to go about again.

Many of the congregation of the chapel worked at these pits and I could claim as workers in the Greatfield pit my father and his youngest brother as deputies, my mother’s two brothers, John Arthur as under-manager, that is the manager underground, and Fred as one of the winders, who lowered and raised the cages. In addition, my mother’s brother-in-law, Joe Thurlow, was a collier and a nephew of my father, Daniel Ward, dealt with the tubs at the bottom of the pit. So coal was my life and I knew little of those mills which seemed relatively clean, safe and even effeminate.

My mother, born in 1887, was small in height, but on the basis of comparison her family always said that she was tall for the simple reason that her brothers and sisters were puny. She had fair hair when young and was considered to be good looking, but by the time I was old enough to notice, her hair was mousy, her good looks had gone and because of much toil her body was tired and her face had taken on those lines of hardness drawn there by the unending battle against everything. As a young woman she had followed the trade of rag- sorter like so many women of the district, but after getting married she stayed at home.

Money was always in short supply and the battle against dirt was unending for those like mother who refused to give in. Each week she had to put money aside for the rent or mortgage, for the gas and rates, for the insurance and for the clothing club, and hope to have enough left for food. Her working week was carefully mapped out: washing on Monday, baking on Tuesday, cleaning on Wednesday, baking and cleaning again on Thursday, cleaning outside the house on Friday morning, shopping on Friday afternoon and general tidying up on Saturday morning. Then a rest until Monday morning except for cooking the Sunday dinner. Further, each of these days started at 7.00 a.m. and rarely finished before 10.00 p.m., including no break except for meals. So she struggled under the burden and in so doing she developed a grimness which was almost unbelievable. Many are the examples of this. She considered that any young married woman who dressed well and went out in the afternoon must be a slut in the house, summed up by ‘fur coat and dirty finger nails’. She disliked certain hymns and if one of these was sung in chapel she stood there in full view of everyone with book and lips tightly closed.

She once went to chapel and outside met an acquaintance from another chapel. She enquired why he was there and he replied that he had come to preach as a substitute for the expected preacher who was ill. She replied ‘Well, if that is the case, I am off home’, and she went. On another occasion she answered the door at Christmas and the man standing there touched his cap and said ‘I am the man who empties the dustbins and she replied, closing the door, ‘I’m the woman who fills them’. My mother was physically tough and I do not remember her ever having a serious illness, but she did suffer debilitating headaches at regular intervals, perhaps five or six in a year. When mother was not up early, we knew what was wrong, she had a splitting headache and, at intervals, was violently sick. These affairs always terrified me, but gradually as the day wore on she improved and by the time she asked for soda water and a cream cracker biscuit we knew that recovery was not far away. The following morning she would be about her work as if nothing had happened. The pattern was always identical and she never developed a headache during the day.

My parents went to the same dame school as tiny children, then to the same local day school in the old Wesleyan Chapel Sunday School where the headmaster was Mr Howden, and to the same local Primitive Methodist Chapel. They were married at this chapel, known as Queen Street, on Christmas Day 1908 at eight o’clock in the morning and their celebration meal had as its main dish a ‘beastart’ (beast or cow’s heart). I never knew why this was selected but it led to a tradition which was kept up until their silver wedding 25 years later.

At Christmas we never knew the taste of turkey, the glory of a goose or the fineness of a foul for many years, but always the everlasting heart. The cardiac muscle never seemed so tasty as the muscle of a true joint and the fat was of such a consistency that it congealed around the inside of the mouth. At the time I could not describe this phenomenon, but now I know that it felt just like the mouthful of material that the dentist puts into the mouth when taking a cast for a new dental plate. So the whim of that Christmas wedding breakfast led to the annual fat-bound mouths of our family for many years.

Father and mother could not move into their own home immediately so they spent a few years with my mother’s parents in a largish house on the outskirts of the town. It was one of a number in a leafy lane, Runtlings by name, which led to the fields and the river Calder.

I was born there but can remember nothing of it.

However, I always looked with interest at this almost palatial house in which I had been born and which was so much beyond what I had ever known afterwards.

The 26 January 1911 was my birthday and at birth I weighed 12 lbs and some ounces. This was not due to any abnormal size in my parents, who were both quite small, but I suspect arose from the fact that some ‘old wife’ had told my pregnant mother to take a table-spoon full of olive oil every day. The result was that I must have been more like a porpoise than a baby.

Despite this I prospered and became a normal-sized youngster with very fair hair and a neat white jumper and skirt: all the outward apparel of a little girl.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The 1911 Census shows a full house at Runtlings Lane!

Runtlings Lane from Stephen Armitage’s Family Archives

I have a particular fondness for Runtlings Lane where my grandparents (Frank & Elsie Armitage), lived at ‘Maple Villa’ before they retired to York in the mid-1950s. By the time I was three, I knew the way to their home so well that one day I ‘took off’ on my tricycle from our Brook Street home and pedalled happily via Prospect Road, Queen Street and West Wells Road turning up unannounced in Runtlings Lane. My mother had been frantically seeking my whereabouts, whilst I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about! Here are some photographs taken over the years showing the changes. The barley twist gas lamp bases and the old railway bridge at the bottom of Westfield Road are of fond memory.

STEPHEN ARMITAGE 2018

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3. OSSETT

To many the West Riding of Yorkshire, it will never be West Yorkshire to me, spells beauty; the beauty of the lovely dales and to others it spells filth; the filth of the pits and the mills. Until I was an adult I never saw the dales and even then only rarely so I must concentrate on what I knew for the first 24 years of my life: the pits and the mills and the engineering works. It is true that there are all these things in my part of the West Riding, but this is not entirely true of Ossett, my home town. Here the pits were not large and deep, but small and not very deep. In fact, some were known as ‘day oils’ (day holes) and did not have vertical shafts but merely a sloping tunnel in a hillside, so shallow that the old workers talked of miners having their hats knocked off when the farmer working above ploughed a little too deep.

In Ossett the mills were not turning out their miles of cloth but instead were slowly tearing old dirty rags to pieces, destroying their adulterating cotton with sulphuric acid and winning back the original wool fibres to be used over again as shoddy, a name with unfortunate connotations, a trade dependent upon the price of new wool, for if new wool was cheap, shoddy was not worth recovering and the mills lay silent. If new wool was expensive the mills once more sprang to life. There was a supporting trade, essential for the working of the shoddy mills. This was the rag trade. From all corners of the country and from abroad, rags, filthy and flea-ridden, came to Ossett and, in innumerable dark and dirty warehouses, the women worked. It was their job to sort out the never-ending stream of discarded clothing into piles of different qualities before they were passed to the mills and, equally important, to cut off all buttons and other gadgets which might constitute a danger to the machines. For the cutting work they used shears, which were sharpened every week and I remember taking Auntie Clara’s shears to be sharpened by Walt (?) Moss who lived opposite to us.

The women usually stood at benches with a wire mesh top, known as riddles. The dirt fell through to the floor and the rags were thrown into large sacks according to their properties. These sacks when filled and sewn up were bales. Huge piles of these were carted on flat four wheeled wagons drawn by one horse. Sometimes when the load was very heavy a second horse, the trace horse, was in front. It was chiefly from this reclamation of the wool from rags that Ossett Borough got its motto: Inutile utile ex arte. In Ossett there were no large engineering works but only one or two small ones.

Any young person reading this paragraph will regard us as utterly filthy but it is important to remember that to us it was a fact of life which had to be accepted because nothing could be done about it. I refer to fleas. I have just mentioned that a large number of the local women worked as rag-sorters in flea-ridden conditions. Inevitably fleas got on to them and they were brought home or into concerts or the cinema. We were not immune and I rarely went a week without having at least one flea up to the time I left home. If it was day time the flea moved about and raised lumps as large as old sixpences all over the body. These itched intolerably and it was almost impossible to maintain the social respectabilities. Once home, garments were taken off one at a time and thoroughly searched. If the flea struck in bed it was rather simpler. As a small child I remember that often in the night I called for my mother and she came and literally stripped me and the bed until the offender was found. It then met its fate by being squeezed between my mother’s thumb nails. The result was a dead flea and surprisingly large amount of one’s own blood with which it was engorged.

So Ossett was in some ways a place apart. The pits fed the coal to the mills, the rag warehouses fed the rags to the mills and this was Ossett. Any other work paled into insignificance beside these labours. Of course, the tall chimneys of the pits and mills belched out their smoke but in addition there were the sulphuric acid fumes from the carbonising process which destroyed the cotton in the rags. This quickly destroyed the vegetation in the vicinity of the mills and trees and hedges looked like fossilised remains. Further from the mills where the acid fumes were less concentrated there was still soot and to climb a tree meant that one would be covered with it. It also meant that all clothing and even indoor linen and curtains required very frequent washing.

The town of Ossett had a population of about 15,000 and has grown very little in the past 60 years. There are no pits left and most of the mills are closed or used for other purposes. However, at the time of which I write there was a main street opening half way along into the market place which was triangular in shape and on one side of which was the Town Hall. The first part of the main street was Bank Street and beyond the market place another main street, Dale Street, led past the side of the Town Hall. The only other road with any number of shops was Station Road, which led from the market place at right angles from the other roads. Of course, there were dozens of small shops all over the town, particularly at street corners. The shops in general were reasonably good, but for better shopping one went to Dewsbury or Wakefield or even occasionally to Leeds or Bradford.

The Town Hall was a typical Victorian structure with a central clock tower sticking up like a bandaged thumb. On Fridays the market place in front of the Town Hall was filled with stalls lit by kerosine flares after dark. Here every conceivable bargain could be obtained and every deceit practised, but on the whole it served the people well.

The centre of the market place was occupied by a large marble fountain. The fountain no longer worked but the rain kept the four basins below the plinth full of water. Horses no longer drank there and in any case the surface was usually covered with floating tram tickets, cigarette packets and other flotsam. Beneath the fountain were public conveniences.

Transport at this time was good. Trams ran between Ossett and Dewsbury, with a branch line to Earlsheaton, and between Ossett and Wakefield but because there were two companies there was no through service although there was a continuous track.

The ride to Wakefield, despite the frantic swaying of the tram, was uneventful, but travelling by tram to Dewsbury was an adventure. Part of Ossett stands on a hill overlooking the valley in which Dewsbury lies, so that the last quarter mile of the journey led down a steep incline in a cutting of jagged rocks ending in Dewsbury market place. The tram track also ended here. More than once a tram has careered down this incline, continued beyond the end of its track and usually finished up with its front end embedded in a shop.

The old Great Northern Railway also served the town, the line running from Wakefield via Ossett to Dewsbury and on to Bradford. To get to Leeds it was possible by selecting the right train to go in either direction from Ossett, one line branching off before reaching Wakefield and the other branching off just after passing Dewsbury. There was also a little-used branch to a colliery, which earlier had supplied a passenger service to Chickenley.

Ossett possessed a Public Library, various schools, including a Grammar School, and many churches (chapels). Because of its division into two parishes, there was a North and a South Ossett Parish Church, but I can scarcely recall anything about them because I so rarely went inside.

There was also a Congregational Church, a Baptist Church and three Methodist Churches, Wesleyan, Primitive and United. Add to this a Temperance Hall and a Gospel Hall, and there was ample gratification for any kind of soul. Most churches had outlying units on the fringes of the town too. Public houses abounded and the wealthier class patronised the Liberal or the Conservative Club. There were also two Working Men’s Clubs.

In my childhood Ossett boasted a cricket club which played in the Heavy Woollen League and competed for the Heavy Woollen Cup: a never failing source of amusement to my own southern-born children who found it difficult to visualise the texture of such a utensil. How were they to appreciate that it signified a textile district?

Despite the industrial nature of the district there were plenty of open spaces near at hand with their trees and hedges and rather poor grassland. We could therefore go for walks in a variety of directions. Birchin Hills was fields at the top of Headlands Lane but beyond that was Love Lane leading to more fields, which being on a steep slope were made accessible by a set of wooden steps, twenty-six in number, which were always known, for obvious reasons, as the ABC steps.

At the other side of the town were the golf links and these were approached past Greatfield pit, where my father worked, down a very uneven, narrow lane known as Tumbling Close and under the railway arches. This was a very pleasant walk ending in Flushdyke, an outlying part of Ossett. There were also fields running from Runtlings right down to the riRver Calder.Our gang of boys played cricket in the fields down Runtlings as well as those on Birchin Hills. We also caught sticklebacks, frog spawn and newts in the cattle ponds often found in such fields. However, we had always to be on guard when playing in or wandering about these fields because we were liable to be chased by angry farmers. Thinking about this now I find it rather surprising because all the fields were tumble-down grass with rarely much stock in them and they were so large that we were never likely to disturb this stock. Was it a sense of selfish ownership or just sheer cussedness which led farmers to do this?

One of the highlights of the year in Ossett, as in other towns, was the Feast. This was the annual fair and was held in a large field known as Gedham. Later, the field was cut through by the new road known as Kingsway, but by then the fair was smaller and the remaining part of the field could still hold it. The equipment began to arrive on the Thursday after Whitsuntide and by Friday evening everything was ready. Saturday and Monday were the big days and things began to peter out on the Tuesday. This was the weekend when relatives and friends came for their annual visit and great high teas were prepared: it did not necessarily follow that the visitors went to the fair. There were always cricket matches for the Ossett Xl on the Saturday, Monday and Tuesday and the crowds in my childhood days were very large. I am not quite sure, but I believe that Wakefield were always the visitors on the Saturday and that Sheffield United came on the Tuesday.

The fair itself consisted of galloping horses, helter-skelter, crukswalk (?), chair-o-planes and swings, with bumper cars coming later. The cacophony of sound from the various organs, the roar of the diesel engines and the shining mirrors and multicoloured equipment left theses numb but happy. In addition, there were side shows for trying one’s skill at knocking over coconuts, shooting at balls supported on jets of water, darts and a game that always fascinated me: cover the circle. A red circle was painted on a table and the player was given five circles of tin, each the same size, but smaller than the red circle. To win you had to place these circles so that when all five are down none of the red circle was visible. It was possible, as the stall holder repeatedly showed, but I never saw any player do it.

The other class of side show were circuses in miniature with varying degrees of skill, daring or naughtiness. My childlike mind was always Intrigued by Lulu who, for sixpence, offered to let you see her teddy bear! I was forbidden to go into such shows. Finally, there were stalls selling a variety of foods, the main delicacy being brandy snap.

There was always an air of danger about the feast, because the fair ground people were considered at best to be disreputable or at worst gypsies. I was never allowed, as some of my friends were, to go to watch the fair being erected nor dismantled: this was the time when little boys disappeared. It may be that in our family this was due to two experiences which my mother had when a little girl. The first concerned a negro who ran a side show and he apparently took a fancy to the little girl with flaxen hair and wished to buy her. The second arose when a monkey in one of the shows bit my mother. I suppose it was not surprising that she was nervous of the feast.

I, too, was nervous for an entirely different reason. Although I loved the noise and bustle and glitter I was unable to enjoy a turn on the various roundabouts and swings for I always lost not on one but on both. I was always sick!

No town is complete without its odd characters and Ossett was no exception. Alfie Chapman was a tiny man who came round with a horse and cart selling firewood. From time to time he disappeared because he went to prison for not paying his rates. This was deliberate policy on his part for when he came out he always said that he had had a nice rest, good food and a bath. Another character was Dan Berry, a simple-minded deliverer of newspapers. One of the jokes played on him was to offer a sixpence and a penny and he always took the penny, much to the amusement of the superior joker. One day someone asked him why he took the penny and his not-so-simple reply was that if he took the sixpence people would cease to make the offer. Finally, there was John Willy Whittle, a poor lad with a twisted face and badly deformed legs. He was an errand boy who delivered groceries on a large two-wheeled sack-cart. Somehow or other, despite his deformity, he would run with this loaded cart at an incredible speed. It was a familiar Ossett sight to see him tearing along with ungainly legs flying in all directions, dodging pedestrians and traffic and never coming to grief. On winter Saturday evenings he put his speed to good effect by running to the outskirts of the town selling ‘Sports Echoes’: for there were no radios then.

Another annual event was the Maypole procession on the first Saturday in May, when it always rained. Gawthorpe, an outlying district of Ossett, boasted a maypole and on the great day children danced an intricate dance around it. In addition, the elected May- queen rode on horseback at the head of a procession through the town. I remember, many years after I had left home, the local newspaper reported that the current year was to see a great coincidence for the May-queen and her horse came from the same family, meaning that the horse belonged to the May-queen’s father.

Such is a brief description of my background: this was my territory, my playground, my life until I was twenty-four years old. Now I can turn to a more detailed account of my home.

4. WESTFIELD STREET AND HEADLANDS ROAD

Ultimately, when I was about two years old, we moved into Westfield Street, which was no more than about 400 yards from the house in Runtlings Lane. This, like every other street in the town, was known to the residents as t’street and many years later when we moved away it was still referred to as t’street. In fact, mother, when remarking about my sister’s birth, always said that she was ‘born on t’street’. My first wife, on hearing this, thought quite seriously that mother had been caught out and had given birth before she could get indoors: but my wife was not a northerner. We lived at Number 13, but superstition never raised its head, such fatalistic numbers were not omitted from the sequence of street numbers in those days as they so often are in these days of wider education and greater enlightenment.

At this stage it might be as well to pause and consult the diagram of our little area of the town, otherwise any description of the layout of the houses and their significance will become interminable.

The main collection of houses of which I shall write consisted of four blocks arranged in the form of a letter E and attached to the end of the top arm was a stable in which two horses were kept which drew the coal carts for Westwood’s pits. The houses too were all owned by Westwoods. All the houses were connected by a continuous space, the underdrawing, which ran between the bedroom ceilings and the roof proper. Nowadays we would refer to this as a loft and use it for storage, but it would have needed a gymnastic feat to get up there because the rooms were so high. The houses facing on to the road had stone fronts with the backs of brick and those facing into the yards were all brick. At one time the stables were infested with rats, which could make their way along the under-drawing for the whole length of this continuous run of houses, but they could not descend into the houses themselves and, in any case, all the food they needed for their ample stomachs was in the stables. Nevertheless, either through perversity, boredom, or for sheer fun, these rats ran the full length of their territory and skipped and fought. Often I have lain awake at night and heard the scuttling of the hordes. A Hamlin without a Pied Piper.

At intervals between the houses were gaps at the ground floor level and these were known as entries which gave access to the yards, or if the yard was private the entry was blocked up, but the passage behind it remained. These entries made it possible for the house on one side to have an extra bedroom over the entry and naturally enough this was always known as the entry bedroom. Thus while most of the houses had one downstairs room and two bedrooms, the favoured few had a third bedroom. At one stage a lean-to, single storey kitchen was built on to each of three of the houses projecting into one of the yards. This took their occupier another step up the social ladder.

At the upper angle of the letter E two houses, one with an entry bedroom, had been knocked into one and made into a shop, Armitages. There was John, the father, and Frank, the son, when I first knew it and they sold confectionary and groceries. They were helped by a girl in the shop, Ethel Jowett, and a man, Clifford Ellis, who drove the white horse and cart delivering groceries. One house was the shop and the other the warehouse and since it was only about 20 yards from my home I knew it well. I remember the rows of sweets in bottles, the open tins of biscuits: with the broken ones sold to us children when the tin was nearly empty, the shining bacon slicer, the sacks of flour and hen corn. What a lovely smell and so many spice (sweets) for a penny.

The delivery of supplies was fascinating. Horse-drawn vans, chain-driven vans (Trojan?), early lorries and, finest of all, the great steam lorries with their sacks of flour, puffed and grunted up the road to the shop. They did puff and grunt in those early days for Headlands Lane at that time consisted of a narrow pavement at one side, and hedgerow at the other and in parts the lane was two feet below the pavement and the hedge. The lane had two parallel sets of paving stones, originally to take the cart wheels, and cobbles between to give a grip for the horses’ feet. It was deep in mud in winter and so marrow that carts and lorries could not pass.

We bought most of our spice at this shop. These included aniseed balls and gob stoppers which, on sucking, changed from one colour to another so that it was necessary to remove the ball at intervals with sticky, dirty fingers to enjoy the pkaleidoscope. Another type of spice still available today were mint imperials. These were also bought by adults and were known to us as chapel spice because they were purpose-built to slip quietly into the mouth during the sermon. The adults sucked theirs quietly, but we children were sometimes in disgrace because we ‘champed’ them and created a noise which could be heard over most of the chapel. Preachers have been known pointedly to draw attention to the lack of reverence implied by the eating of sweets in chapel. We children also bought a kind of lozenge, which was rectangular and about the size of a postage stamp, but each corner was cut off. It was khaki in colour and contained, I believe, coltsfoot and chlorodyne, which were dangerous when eaten in large quantities. The forerunner, I suppose, of the various things which children eat and sniff these days. We also bought sherbert with a liquorice tube for sucking it up. If one sucked too hard one choked. Liquorice was also available as boot laces and straps. If the boot lace was tied in numerable knots it lasted longer when chewed.

Ossett was not very far from Pontefract and occasionally we would buy the roots of the liquorice plant in greengrocers’ shops. This was excellent for chewing but when all the flavour had gone the mouthful of fibre had to be spat out. Liquorice in another form was made into hard sticks about 6 inches long and 1 inch or so in diameter. This was known to us as Spanish juice, but I cannot say why. We smashed it up with a hammer, for it was hard but brittle, put the pieces into a medicine bottle and filled the bottle with water. By vigorous shaking for hours a black liquid was obtained which from time to time was drunk.

Occasionally we could buy carob or locust beans at the greengrocer’s and these were like flattened, wrinkled black bananas. The brown flesh was exceedingly sweet and tasty, but the hard seeds constituted a hazard because, according to our elders, if eaten they would block the intestine. In fact they would resist the digestive processes but would pass right through without causing any harm. Another health danger was chewing gum which, if swallowed, wrapped around the heart and caused death. At that time I was too young to know that chewing gum or anything else that was a lump of material would find it impossible to get from the digestive tract to the outside surface of the heart. Tiger nuts, whatever they were, could sometimes be bought. They were little wrinkled nuts with a sweet taste.

Finally, mothers could be persuaded at times to mix oatmeal and sugar and put this mixture into a bag. The method of eating was to dip a moistened finger into it and suck off the material, before returning the finger for another load.

Mother shopped at Armitage’s for most of her groceries. Earlier she had shopped at the Co-op, but on buying a pound of sugar which was yellow with cat pee she decided to change her grocer. She never tired of telling this story.

I shall not describe all the other houses in the area, but those on the opposite side of Westfield Street to us and those further down the street were mostly larger and grander, though a few were smaller and meaner. A few were detached and stood in splendid isolation. Of these, three in Headlands Lane are worthy of note. Immediately below the stable was a pair of large iron gates, painted green, and inside was a short drive. On the right of the entrance was a railed off area, perhaps 10 yards by 3 yards, in which stood a few trees of different sizes but quite mature. Then came a large house butting on to the stable, with a railed off garden and coach house, used for washing and storage. At the other side of the entrance was a railed off area about 30 yards by 15 yards, consisting of badly worn grass and a few trees around that part of the perimeter away from the drive, which opened out at the end to a large space in which stood two other detached houses. Their backs faced on to this space but everyone visiting went to the back. A gap between the two houses led to a garden which must have been 150 – 200 yards long and 30 yards wide. The fronts of the houses faced this garden but I doubt if the doors were ever opened. Henry and old Harvey Westwood together, and Thomas Westwood separately, the owners of the stables, the other houses and the pits, occupied these two detached houses, the third being occupied by the Mottrams, the manager of the local gas works and his family, and later by Dr Chapman, the Headmaster of the Grammar School and his family. I remember Mr Mottram as a well dressed man and his wife wore large hats, fine frocks with high lace collars and white gloves.

The area of gardens and the three houses was known to all and sundry as ‘Greengates’ and was one of our playgrounds when no one chased us away. Here we climbed the trees and did somersaults over bars pulled from the railings and supported in the forks of trees, or hung head downwards, gripping the bar with the backs of our knees. Across the road at the end of Westfield Street was another strip of trees known as the Plantation, and again we climbed these and played our games, so we were not short of space.

Westfield Street where we lived from about 1913 to 1922 was one of the strangest and most exciting streets I have ever known, despite the many claims of the north in this respect. It started off from Headlands Lane at right angles and horizontal in the direction of its course but one side was some four feet lower than the other even though it was only about 20 feet wide. Thus it was necessary to walk up hill when crossing the street! Just beyond our house it began to slope down its length and the cross slope disappeared, while further on still it became so steep that it was truly dangerous for horses and carts. Its surface in those early days consisted of loose, green stones, shiny when fractured, but now it is surfaced just like a thousand other streets. At the bottom of the hill the street ended. Then came a railway bridge. At this bridge the line branched, one branch to Dewsbury, the other to a colliery. Then came Runtlings Lane where I was born, and so to the fields. Thus, despite our industrial town, there were plenty of places to adventure into.

Headlands Lane (later Headlands Road), off which Westfield Street ran, and where we were later to live, was bordered by houses and gardens on one side, but on the other, as already mentioned, there was a border of trees at the top end, while lower down was a field, later to become allotments and finally to be built on. Down Headlands Lane led to the town and the shops, but up the lane the trees and houses finally petered out and gave way to extensive fields, known as Birchin Hills. But, of course, there is nothing but houses now, where in our childhood we watched the horses and the cows, picked flowers and played our games. It was from Birchin Hills we could see a great stretch of the Calder Valley from Horbury to Dewsbury and beyond the hills of Emley and Thornhill and Flockton. The valley was pincushioned with dozens of tall chimneys, little toy trains ran on the old Lancashire and Yorkshire railway and almost at our feet we could watch the trains toiling up the curving gradient from Earlsheaton to Ossett on the old Great Northern Railway. There were many church spires and a polka- dot green handkerchief on Saturdays when the Chickenley cricket ground was in use. Yet, despite all the industrialisation, the smoke blew away, the view was marvellous and the wind was strong. But whatever its stark charm it was an industrial panorama, of which we were so proud, but oh so different from the Cotswolds which God did not create for me until many years later. So we lose beauty and gain wealth, but unfortunately not all of us share that wealth and thus some double their loss: having no beauty left to them and no money with which to go to find the end of the rainbow where it still exists: not even a few shillings to get to the Yorkshire dales. Thus out of grim surroundings are grim men. Can it be wondered at that we turn a game of cricket into a fight?

Our immediate neighbour on one side was Aunt Lydia with Uncle Harvey before he went to the war, and on the other side was a very old couple with a daughter, the Gawthorpes. Next to the Gawthorpes lived Uncle John Arthur and Aunt Emily with their daughters, Nellie, Edie and Freda, so it was quite a family affair. John Arthur played the violin and kept rabbits.

The house in which I lived for about nine years was one with an entry bedroom. Downstairs one stepped straight off the flags (Flagstones = pavement) into the house. If the door was locked then no fancy yale key on a delicate ring was produced but a great, heavy key, fit for the Tower of London, a key which if carried regularly in the pocket would have given one a permanent limp.

Immediately on entering the house and closing the door one was in an area about three feet square, behind was the back of the street door with coat hooks, in front was the door, up two steps, leading to the rest of the bedroom stairs, to the left was a blank wall with more coat hooks and to the right was a thick red plush curtain hanging from bamboo rings threaded on a bamboo pole. The space was considerably diminished by the fact that here was one of the few places where regularly used outdoor clothes could be hung, but in addition to coats at present in use, there were coats recently discarded and even coats which everyone had forgotten. Indeed, looking back I get the impression that nothing was ever thrown away. This arrangement produced two problems. The first arose when a member of the family who had been in the house for some time wished to go out. It was then necessary for him to remember which hook his coat was on, because it could not be seen and then, having remembered or guessed, to peel off the upper coats until, at last convinced of his error, he proceeded to attack the layers on another hook. Hats and caps and scarves perched precariously on the top of this sartorial excrescence only added to the fun. Of course, this problem was small when the family was small, but it grew as the family grew. The second problem was one presented to the postman who had to fight hard to push the letters through the letter box, so effectively was it blocked by coats at the other side. It was easier to knock and deliver. This gave the opportunity for our postman to report on his deliveries, as when one day he handed my mother a postcard, saying ‘I see that your visitors won’t be coming’. Of course, this was only possible when we had the same postman for years and far more interesting than the present anonymous and ever-changing postmen.

The second stage of entrance to the house was the drawing aside of the veil of the temple for, once that was done, you were in t’ouse. In other words, there was revealed the single downstairs room, which is worthy of a full description. On the same side as the door was the window, large and of the sash type. On the next side, moving in an anti-clockwise direction, was the wall which carried first the sink, then the set-pot, then the fireplace and finally the cupboard. The third side was blank and so was the fourth, apart from a single door next to the third side, which led to the cellar. Under the window was a bamboo table and standing on this was the only possible plant that could ever occupy such a position: an aspidistra. Its leaves shone with the weekly wiping over with milk, but its purpose was not to bring beauty into the house, nor to show mother’s skill with house plants. No, it served to allow the inmates to peep out without being seen, but prevented outsiders from seeing in. The window itself was draped with lace curtains swept back in their centre with bows and at night a roller blind was lowered.

Between this table and the sink was the washing machine: a device of such gigantic proportions that it took a strong man, or woman for they come like that in Yorkshire, to lift its front end and so to push or pull it a few inches on its two back wheels. The machine itself consisted of a pair of rollers, turned by a large iron wheel with a handle and this part rested at the back of a square tub which gave the whole device a grotesquely pregnant appearance. A device consisting of two long handles with cross-pieces at the top and bottom and another a third of the way up, had in addition vertical rods between the two lower cross-pieces, forming a gate-like structure! This device was suspenned by two metal lugs in grooves at each side of the tub and by pulling the top part forward it was so pivoted that the bottom part, the gate, moved backwards and by pushing the handles backwards the gate moved forward. The tub was filled with hot, soapy water, dirty clothes were put on either side of the gate and the act of pushing and pulling the handles began. This allowed water to pass through the gate with some force and agitated the clothes: it was known as ‘swilling’. When the clothes were heavy and dirty and needed a lot of swilling it could be a very exhausting job. Mother generally did this, with sometimes help from me, but I do not remember father being enrolled for it. In this he was no different from the other men and indeed the women themselves would pour scorn on a husband who helped his wife in this way. After the clothes had been swilled enough they were passed between the rollers of the mangle and mangled so that the excess water was squeezed out and ran back into the tub. After mangling the clothes were thoroughly rinsed in cold water, at the sink, then mangled again with an enamel bowl set above the tub to catch the cold water and thus prevent it from cooling the hot water in the tub.

When all the clothes, perhaps half a dozen tubs full, each swilled separately, had gone through the mangle and been rinsed, the tub was emptied, by means of a tap at the bottom into a bowl which then had to be lifted up to the sink and the water thrown away. No one thought of hoses for filling or emptying the tub. Finally the wheel was taken off the machine, the gate was taken out and a lid put on the tub and a cover on the part holding the rollers. The top above the rollers then became a shelf while the top of the tub was a side table. Soon both were filled with newspapers, jugs, jars and cups so that the machine almost disappeared until once more it reappeared on wash day and was stripped ready for action.

After drying the clothes on a ‘wintredge’ or winter-hedge (clothes horse) or on a creel (laths suspended from the ceiling) capable of being raised or lowered, they were ironed and put away.

Continuing on our tour, we now come to the sink, not, repeat not, the wash basin. It was of stone and shallow and possessed only a crude cold tap and a drain hole, but no plug, which led the water straight out into the ‘saar oil’ (sewer hole) by the outside wall of the house. I doubt if there was a trap in the pipe. The sink was not glazed and its rough surface was sometimes as good as pumice for getting stains off the fingers. At the sink we washed ourselves in an enamelled bowl, washed up the dirty crockery in the same bowl, filled pans and kettles as needed, and the wash tub. Here we poured all liquids which could be poured, including stinking cabbage water, dirty washing up water and our own washing water. Next to the sink was a brick contraption into which was set a metal pot rather like a war time mine on the outside, with its top cut off. The pot was firmly cemented into the brick casing, hence it was a set-pot as distinct from a free pot. Under the pot, which held about 10 gallons, was a small cavity with a grate and a door. A fire could be lit in this and thus the water was heated. This was used for boiling clothes which needed more attention than just swilling. At the appropriate season it was also used for boiling Christmas puddings, which were boiled in cloths for hours until all their goodness went into the water, later to be discarded. When not in use the fire was cleaned out, the water removed with a piggin (a large enamel pot, shaped like a pint pot, but holding about a gallon) and a painted board put against the front and a lid on top. This lid was covered with oil-cloth and its surface provided a stand for a gas-ring, the soap-dish (an old plate), the dishcloth, the floor cloth, the flannel and sufficient space on which to drain washed crockery. The flannel was the equivalent of the modern face-cloth, but there was only one for the whole family and it was made from an old towel.

Above the sink and set-pot was a shelf holding pots and pans, stores of soap, washing soda, salt and the like. Beneath the shelf was a row of hooks for cups and pots.

At the other end of the wall having the sink and set-pot was the cupboard, occupying the same length. It stood about 3 ft high, was about 2 ft deep and about 6 ft long. It had a flat top, doors and a shelf in each half. The top shelves were used for food storage and crockery and the bottom of the cupboard contained toys and games in one half and father’s dirty pit clothes in the other. On top of the cupboard was usually a fancy, embroidered ‘runner’ cloth and there stood hideous ornaments, photographs of relatives and, very occasionally, a book.

In the centre of this wall, between the sink and the cupboard, which were really built into alcoves, was the fireplace, or range, the front being flush with the cupboard and the set-pot and sink. The fireplace consisted of three sections, all of iron, polished to mining blackness with black lead. In the centre was the fire grate itself, with an ash pit below and a ledge at the front for kettle and pan. At one side was the oven, which when not in use had no fire under it, and a vertical metal plate prevented fire from getting under. On days when the oven was required the metal plate was lifted by pushing the poker into a hole at the top and the coal-rake was then used to push live coals into the space under the oven. Baking under these conditions meant more than reading a recipe and adjusting an oven setting. It meant being an expert in knowing one’s own oven, because each one had its own characteristics. When cooking was finished the fire was raked out from underneath and the metal plate put back in place. At the other side of the grate was a deep metal box with lid and the top of this could be used for pots and pans not in immediate use on the fire. I believe that its riginal purpose was to produce a constant supply of warm water, but I never saw ours used for anything except for drying kindling wood.

The fire itself rarely went out, even on the hottest day, because heating water and cooking food on it, as well as using the oven, had to go on. At night the fire was ‘raked’, that is to say, fine coal and coal dust were put on to it to keep it smouldering all night, then a good poke in the morning quickly brought it back to life. The kettle and pans, when requiring full heat, had to be precariously balanced on the live coals of the fire and when merely to be kept hot they sat on the plate at the front. The fire was the sacred centre of the home and anyone who let the fire go out was regarded as having sinned.

About once a year the chimney sweep came. The fire was out the whole range cold so he started by putting sacks over the walls. The brush head was screwed to a rod about four feet long which he then pushed up the chimney, leaving only an inch or two projcting from a small hole in the sacking. He then screwed on another rod, pushed this up and so continued until we children in great excitement reported that the brush was out at the top of the chimney. (Always a chimley.) He then withdrew the rods and unscrewed them one by one, collected up the soot and departed. Occasonally he could not come when wanted so mother took matters into her own hands by putting a squib (fire-work) up the chimney, lighting it and hoping for the best.

Over the whole length of the fireplace was the mantleshelf, five feet from the ground. It was usually decorated with an inch deep layer of velvet complete with pom-poms hanging down the edge of the shelf. On the shelf was a clock, a vase or urn, tapers, our scanty correspondence, a box of matches, and various other items awaiting another home.

On the side of the fireplace nearer the sink was a hook carrying towels; the harding towel for handling hot things, the towel for wiping the crockery after washing up (not a tea towel) and the towel used by all the family on which to dry themselves after washing. All three usually lasted a week between washings: and we were not by the usual standards of the day, a dirty family.

Suspended underneath the mantleshelf was a cord and small items of washing, especially socks, hung there to dry. Empty stockings were put there on Christmas Eve so that Santa Claus would spot them as soon as he came down the chimney and before depositing the bigger presents he filled the stocking with a new penny, a few nuts, an orange and a spice (sugar) pig. I acquired one of these recently (1977) and shared it with my sister: we found it sickly and revolting, but we ate them happily as children. Perhaps our habits and tastes change more than we imagine because in the last few years I have tried as an experiment to chew gum and that too I found nauseating, whereas, as a child I enjoyed it.

The next wall was almost filled with an ornate sideboard, whose drawers contained smaller things like handkerchiefs and ties and larger things like table cloths. This sideboard belonged to Auntie Lydia. In addition, the rent book and small piles of money for different payments were kept there. The cupboards held our best china. Ornaments adorned its top and tiny mirrors reflected the rest of the house, which was too poor to be worthy of this duplication. An upright chair, upholstered in coarse cloth, with too much wood for comfort stood on each side of the sideboard.

On the fourth wall was the sofa, not the settee: big brother to the upright chairs and equally uncomfortable, having wooden rails at the back.

In the centre of the room stood a square table, its polished legs belying its coarse deal top, covered by a faded oilcloth and on special occasions by a velvet table cover which, like so many other articles at that time, could not be bought without pom-poms round the edges. The polished legs were covered with footless woollen stockings, which modern psychologists tell us had some symbol of sexual shame about them, but I prefer to believe the simpler explanation that our mothers preferred to protect their beloved furniture from the hob-nailed boots of their ruffianly offspring.

On either side of the table was an arm chair to complete the suite: an arm chair because it had arms, not one of the modern variety which engulfs the body in a sea of ease, but one whose wooden parts were a constant reminder that elbows should be kept well in and that a head allowed to fall too far back received an almighty crack, softened only by the dainty lace cover and bow which adorned the ornate wooden top of the back.

The floor was of uneven stone flags which would have ruined a carpet in no time, even if my parents could have afforded one. So, instead, there were sundry bits of carpet, linoleum (oil-cloth) and hand-made rugs. These were made by stretching canvas on a wooden frame and threading ‘lists’ through. Old clothing of every colour was cut up by means of special rag-sorter’s shears into strips about an inch wide and four inches long, but with cross-cut rather than square ends: these were the lists. A hole was forced between the threads of the canvas with a brodder (skewer) and the list pushed half way through from below. A second hole about an inch from the first was then made and the upward projecting list was pushed down through it. The two ends now projecting downwards were adjusted to the same length and pulled tight. So gradually the whole canvas was filled and a rug was made. Rugs were about 4ft by 3ft and anything smaller was a mat.

It is interesting to note that the basic system for rug-making has now developed into a booming trade with multicoloured wools, patterned canvasses and special cutting and threading gadgets for the lists. The factory of Readicut is in Ossett.

So we come to that mysterious door in the fourth wall. Open it and turn sharp left and you fall down eight dark stone steps. Enter with caution, accustom your eyes to the dim light or, betterstill, take a candle and then you will see what there is to be seen. On the right is a set of four or five shelves acting as a larder with food on open plates, or cakes and biscuits in an assortment of tins. The higher shelves contain things that are rarely, if ever, wanted. On the floor, under the lowest shelf is a metal pail (round bucket) for slops, a metal skep (oval bucket) for coal and an old wooden box for potatoes, turnips, swedes, carrots or any other earthy vegetable. Hanging on the wall facing you is an old fashioned bill-filer: a round wooden base with a metal rod, curved at the top, rising from it. Paid bills were speared on to this. Ours always seemed to be full of bills which were years old, covered with the grease and dirt of ages, quite unreadable and never thrown away. This arose because of the fear in the working classes that someone years later would demand payment of an already paid bill. I have to confess that even now I harbour this worry and am disturbed by the modern system where receipts are rarely given.

Downwards from the left led about eight damp stone steps and as I grew older it was necessary to stoop as one went down or else one’s head bumped against the underside of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. The right hand side of the steps were flanked by the wall of the house next door so at the bottom one could only turn left under our own house. The clothes props were kept against the right hand side of these steps when not in use. The cellar itself was a semi-circular tunnel about 5 ft high. To the right was a long stone slab, always cold and damp and here lay in earthenware bowls or on plates all those foods which would now be stored in a refrigerator. Under the stone slab was junk; empty jam jars, bottles, innumerable spiders and occasionally a mouse. The only light came from a small window partly over the stone slab and with its lower ledge about 3ft from the stone flagged floor. Since it was below ground level, the window had a rectangular wall outside it, about three feet by one foot and about three feet deep. The opening on the pavement outside was protected by a strong barred, iron grating. Plants grew in this well, stones and paper fell down it and occasionally money or keys. It was only possible for a small person to get down the well and invariably a child had to retrieve money or the keys or just clean it out.

On the opposite wall to the slab was a small recess which was was filled with empty bottles, but, being in a temperance household, I ever knew whether or not this recess was supposed to be used for bottles of Satan’s brew. Before Christmas the Christmas puddings were hung from a walking stick held horizontal in the cellar.

At the far end of the cellar was a brick wall, in the centre of which was a door about four feet high. This led into a further short continuation of the tunnel, but here was complete darkness. A candle revealed this to be the ‘coil oil’ (coal hole) and here the coal was stored and fetched up in the coal skep as the need arose. The coal hole had a sloping shute which led to the pavement outside and normally this was closed by a solid grate with a chain on the inside. This chain led down the shute and was firmly fixed to a hook in the wall of the coal hole, otherwise this could be an easy means of access for petty thieves.

When a load of coal was delivered, not in dainty hundredweight bags but a ton at a time in a two-wheeled, horse-drawn cart, the grate was removed, the cart backed on to the pavement and near to the wall, then it was tipped up and the coal shovelled, pushed and levered down the hole. And woe-betide the driver who left too many valuable bits of coal on the pavement. On the occasion of a delivery it was necessary to bar the door of the coal hole so that the dust and even lumps of coal did not get into the cellar itself.

Incidentally, we received miner’s coal at a cheap rate once a month because father worked in the pit. It was not the best house-hold coal graded by size, but a mixture of every size from dust to pieces twice as big as a football. It also contained pieces of ‘slate’ (stone) and if one of these evaded mother’s eagle eye and got on to the fire it heated up and finally shattered with a loud crack, sending pieces of hot stone and burning coal over the hearth and into the room itself.

These cellars were filthy places at the best of times but the housewife did her best and once a year they were ‘whitewashed’ all over. As a schoolboy in my teens I earned 2/- per cellar and became quite an expert. Of course, we did not use the modern gentle whiteners, but real slaked lime which was fetched from the yard of a builder and plasterer. This was mixed into a thick cream which burnt the hands but also shrivelled up the spiders and other insects at a touch. So for a few weeks the cellar looked and smelled bright and clean.

The bedroom stairs, as already indicated, led off from behind the house door. There were two steps then a door, then the rest of the stairs, about fifteen in all and very steep. At the top a left turn led directly into the ‘entry’ bedroom, that is the extra bedroom over the entry to the yard. It was of medium size containing one bed, one broken chair, sundry boxes, an orange box on end for a cup- board and an old chest of drawers.

A right turn led to the large bedroom containing a glorious brass double bed, with knobs at each corner and mother-of-pearl inlays. Occasionally one of the knobs fell off during the night, but I was too young to understand the significance of this. The room also contained a wardrobe and a wash-hand-stand with water jug and basin, but these were very rarely used. In the cupboard underneath were various gadgets and books on health which I was forbidden to look at. There was also a dressing table and one or two chairs. The floor was covered in linoleum, plus a mangy sheep skin rug by the tiny fireplace, which as I recall never had a fire in it. If, on reaching the top of the stairs, one made a right hand U-turn one passed between the wall of the large bedroom and a bannister which protected the stair well. This ‘corridor’ gave access to the little bedroom, which contained a bed, a chest of drawers and a chair. If the drawers were open you could not get into bed and if you were a big lad your feet rested on the window ledge.

The outside of all the houses in our part of the row looked alike: one door and one downstairs window and two windows upstairs, or three for those with an entry bedroom. As already indicated there was a cellar grate, a coal cellar grate and a sewer grate for each house. My mother, like all her neighbours, washed the ‘flags’ (pavement) to a width of about two feet from the house. These were ‘ours’ and the rest of the pavement was for passers-by. Anyone who walked on ‘our flags’ was in for trouble, not only because he might dirty them, but also because he might look through the window! The grates were black-leaded and the edge of the door step and window sill rubbed with a white stone to give them a neat white edging, standing out from the remainder of the stone which was almost black, a colour which was supposed to be maintained by rubbing in a little milk. An alternative to white was ochre, commonly known as ruddle, but my mother thought this common and unrefined.

On warm days the upstairs windows were opened a little way, but no matter how hot, the downstairs window was never opened: the aspidistra might die! Indeed, it was impossible to open this window without a hammer and chisel because successive layers of paint had sealed up all moving parts and made it not only water- tight, but air-tight as well.

Having a bath was a difficult operation in this kind of house. After all, the tin bath was in the cellar and had to be brought up: a feat of some complexity. Then, pan after pan of water had to be boiled on the open fire in order to fill the bath and when one large pan provided only about an inch of water it is not surprising that this was almost cold before the next one was ready to make it two inches. Never has Newton’s law of cooling been so well illustrated. To achieve any depth of water at all took a long time and this incon- venienced the rest of the family who had to go out or go to bed to prevent them seeing the nakedness of another. Even father, working in the pit, was only able to wash down to his waist each day and the rest had to wait for a longer period. All this bother amazes me now when I think that my first wife and I and the children never made any attempt at hiding our nakedness and so the children grew up with far less inhibitions about sex than I had.

Because of the inconvenience we were occasionally sent to my maternal grandmother’s for a bath because they had hot water and even in my teens I had baths there in a large tub or barrel. By standing on a stool I could lower myself into it and the rim came up to my middle, but I could scarcely bend my knees. However, by a series of contortions it was possible to have a successful bath.

The reader will have noted my failure to mention a toilet.

In the first place I must plead that at that time I did not know the word toilet: the word was ‘nesse’ (the necessary) or just closet, and the process was known as ‘going across t’yard’. This I will now explain. The houses possessed no dustbins and no indoor lavatories so the buildings for the receipt of human waste of all kinds had to be built in the yards formed by the branching rows of houses.

Each building usually consisted of two lavatories with a dividing wall and the seat was simply a wooden board with a hole in it. Behind the two lavatories was a further single chamber separated from the lavatories by a wall which reached down to the level of the seat, but then was supported at intervals by brick pillars. The front wall of this chamber had a door divided horizontally, the bottom half kept shut and the top half open.The occupants of at least two, and often more, houses shared one lavatory and twice this number shared the other section into which was thrown all kinds of household waste from tins, bottles, food, ashes from the coal fires and slops from the nights’ excretions, for one did not go ‘across t’yard’ in the middle of the night.

On receiving a call, the procedure was as follows: pick up an old newspaper, the more interesting the better, collect the key suspended by string and complete with old cotton reel (bobbin), from the nail beside the door and sally forth. It was obvious to everybody where one was going so there was no false modesty: if it was fine you walked, if it was raining you hurried, if it was diarrhoea you ran.

All this was well organised but on arrival at the door, twenty yards away from the house, there might well appear the sign of enemy occupation: not a neat ‘Engaged’ sign, but an identical key, a similar cord but a different cotton reel. It was amazing how one could tell which household was in occupation by the slightly different shapes and sizes of the cotton reels and with growing experience one could tell how long one might have to wait. Even so, it was not done to hang about, so back to the house and another attempt five minutes later, sometimes to find that yet another cotton reel was in occupation and one had been pipped at the seat.

However, assuming that the trouble was not diarrhoea one could hang on and ultimately get a turn. If the closets had recently been emptied things were not too bad, but if they were due for emptying the pyramid of excreta and paper reached nearly to the level of the seat and suitable manoeuvres were necessary.

Similarly, the other compartment, known as the ash pit, filled up at intervals and had to be emptied. The first sign of this was the arrival of two dustmen who opened the bottom half of the ash pit door, stepped inside in boots, not Wellingtons, and proceeded to shovel the accumulated filth into the yard; as they progressed they reached the holes in the back wall, which enabled them to deal with the human excreta and this was thrown out too. Their job done, they moved on to the next edifice and they were later succeeded by two more men with a horse and cart. The pile of muck was shovelled into the cart, a dirty tarpaulin fastened over it and off they went to the local destructor (incinerator?), after sprinkling a thin layer of pink disinfectant powder where the heap had been. Within minutes the yard was in use again and we were playing around the unpleasant area, quite oblivious of, and I believe impervious to, any questions of dangerous bacteria and general hygiene.

These lavatory blocks were nearly always built facing a blank wall so that one went up a passage to reach the door and in this way the door was not visible from the houses, instead the houses overlooked the ash pit door.

The yards, which have already been mentioned, formed the focal points for our games, but we roamed the streets and fields as well. The yards, however, did produce difficulties because the adults had adopted a system whereby one belonged to the yard which housed the lavatory one used. This was the territorial sign and it was with much misgiving that one dared to play in a yard which was not one’s own. Our house was on the street and not actually in the yard and this produced difficulties of definition: could we use the yard for play if our lavatory, but not our house, was in the yard?

Another purpose of the yard was a place for drying clothes. My descriptions will have made it clear that there were few facilities inside the house except on a wet day or for the final airing. There facilities consisted of a creel: a contraption of four six- or seven- foot rods in parallel which could be festooned with damp clothes and hauled up to the ceiling. Even so, they wiped one across the face. A second facility was a piece of cord stretched below the mantle-piece and capable of taking socks, handkerchiefs and other small items. The third facility was a ‘wintredge’ (winter-hedge or clothes horse): a gadget much used on wash days, which, standing in front of the fire, successfully cut off all heat to the room, filled the air with dampness and made life miserable.

On fine days the wet clothes were taken outside. The yard had a number of clothes posts firmly fixed in the ground, standing about seven feet high and with four pegs projecting horizontally and at right angles near the top. There were also hooks in the walls of the houses and the lavatory blocks. Each household had a definite territory for its run of clothes line: from this hook to that post, back to another hook, then across to a second post end so on. Thus the line crossed and recrossed like a giant cat’s cradle. There was hell to play [sic.] if any woman used the wrong hooks or posts, or overstepped her territory. Similarly, some women did their washing on Mondays and some on Tuesdays and they were expected to keep to their own day. Another problem arose on washing days when a load of coal arrived for one of the houses. The coal cart could not be driven under the clothes without dirtying them and in any case coal dust would fly everywhere, so the alarm was raised and the women with washing out had to come and take it all in until the coal had been delivered and the cust had settled. This, not surprisingly, did not help tempers.

Westfield Street 1960s ©️ unknown

Westfield Terrace, at the corner of Westfield Street ©️ Phil Waud

T’shop. ©️ Shaun Gothard 2018

1916. John Armitage (1861-1942) with his father Joseph (1833-1925) to his left. To his right is his son (my grandfather) John Frank (1888-1975) and on his lap is my father Sidney Edward (1916-2002). My father ran our other family shop in Station Road and was a founding member of Ossett Rotary club.

Stephen Armitage 2017

5. 1911 – 1922 EARLY YEARS

As already remarked, I was born on 26 January 1911 in the house of my maternal grandparents in Runtlings Lane, Ossett: area known to all locals as ‘down Runtlings’.

I can remember nothing whatever of the first two years of my life, but I understand that King George V and Queen Mary visited Ossett when I was six months old. Not, of course, specifically to see me. Neither do I remember much about the next few years when we first lived on our own in the house at 13 Westfield Street. There is a vague memory of a row with a visiting little boy over some toy, but it is so vague that it could well have been in some previous incarnation.

In 1915 when I was four my mother produced her second child, Phyllis, who had some defect in her throat at birth and who died after about three months of useless and hopeless existence. I remember little of this either, except for the whispers, the tears and a tiny wooden box.

Between my fourth and fifth birthdays I was sent to school. Two friends of my own age, Aldred Nichols and Edgar Graystock, and I one day found our way into the stables near where we lived and climbed the Jacob’s ladder into the hay loft above. To climb such a ladder, which was a single, vertical plank with foot holes, was no mean feat for children of four, but the next stage of our adventure was even more gratifying to us. In the loft was a chaff cutter consisting of a trough into which long hay or straw was fed and at the end of which two wheels gripped the hay and squeezed it into a tight mass, at the same time propelling it through a narrow opening.

As the hay emerged it was met by a razor-sharp knife attached to a spoke of a wheel turning across the line of the hay and so the hay was cut into short pieces: chaff. A second knife on another spoke repeated the process so that as the wheel was turned by hand the blades flashed and the chaff fell into a basket. So three little boys merrily fed in the hay and turned the wheel and only a miracle guaranteed our safety from decapitation, de-arming or at least defingering by these whirling scimitars, which delighted our little hearts. Such is innocence.

When we were finally discovered and our respective mothers realised the potential danger of our play they acted promptly and as soon as possible we were sent off to school. So my education began and as I write this over sixty years later the process of learning still goes on.

The school was known as Southdale Council School, usually just Southdale. I suppose it was about half a mile from home, but the last 100 yards was up a very steep hill; marvellous for sliding when it snowed. One day going up this hill in the snow I slipped and fell on my face, breaking off a front tooth level with my gum. It was years before my parents did anything about this despite the fact that the exposed nerve gave me agony when anything too cold or too hot touched it. Nor did my gappy appearance worry them. Finally, I was taken to a dentist by my father. I had ‘gas’ which was a great adventure, the offending stump was removed and at a very early age I acquired a plate with a false tooth. Later this was broken and I did not have another for many years.

The school consisted of an infants’ section and an elementary section, both of which were mixed, but the boys had one playground and the girls and infants shared the other; the two playgrounds being separated by the school itself. I believe also that the infants and girls kept to their own areas of their playground.

As befitted my age, I was in the ‘baby class’, a class devoted to play under the gracious eye of Miss Goldsmith. She had ginger hair, wore a white blouse and dark skirt and was very old, at least 25 I would guess. We played with toys, we had a sandpit in the classroom and school was wonderful. The one incident and the only one which I can clearly remember was one that amazed me. A little girl wet her knickers. She grew up to be a very beautiful and charming girl, whom I knew for many years. There should be a moral here but I am not sure what it is.

I graduated over the next few years through the various classes of the infants’ school but again my memory is dim. The war was on and we made models for war charities, we subscribed to the war effort and we behaved patriotically under the guidance of our teachers, but I can recall little else. Miss McAdoo was the headmistress, tall, gaunt and very old, but probably short, pleasant and well under forty, such is the unseeing eye of childhood, The only other teacher I can recall was ‘little Miss Gledhill’, so called because she really was a midget, but she could put the fear of God into the toughest child and used a big, thick stick when God was not about.

During this period I began to attend Sunday School regularly, from the age of about five, I suppose. In the mornings I went from 9.30 until about 10.20, then when small I went home, but later I attended Chapel from 10.30 until about mid-day. We went to Sunday School from 1.30 until 3.00 in the afternoon. When very young I did not go to the evening service in Chapel, but stayed at home with my father, who helped me to build models with my Meccano set and to play with my Hornby clockwork train while mother went to the service. In the mornings father went and mother cooked the Sunday dinner.

All the children in Sunday School sat in pre-determined rows of forms, the youngest at the front and boys and girls were segregated, also going in at separate doors. We had hymns and prayers, then filed into our respective classrooms, where untrained but kindly teachers listened to us reading from the Bible and followed this with a brief and simple discourse. Sometimes we were naughty and were punished by being sent back into the main hall, there to be admonished by the Superintendent. When older boys were ill-behaved their teachers, usually older men, punished them physically. The Sunday School closed with a general homily from the Superintendent and a hymn. One day I went home and asked who was Silas. I had further to explain that the Superintendent had kept us in and had said that he was waiting for Silas (silence). We each had small attendance cards known as ‘Star cards’ because twice each Sunday they were stamped with a star (asterisk) in the appropriate squares. Those obtaining above a certain percentage of possible stars during the year received a prize of a book at the great Prize Day distribution in January.

For its day our Sunday School was very modern with a main hall, flanked by classrooms and with other rooms used for a variety of purposes. During the first world war the Sunday School was taken over to house Belgian refugees, but I do not remember much about them. We then had to use the ‘old’ Sunday School which was actually the ground floor of the Chapel. This was very poor in facilities compared with the ‘new’ Sunday School. One of the most charming features of the ‘new’ school which I recall vividly is that every spring about half-a-dozen crocuses loomed in a tiny strip of garden in front of the school: it was like something out of another world.

The Chapel and Sunday School stood on opposite sides of an unmade road with a steepish incline, known as Queen’s Terrace, but for some unknown reason everyone referred to it as Monkey Terrace.

I continued to attend Sunday School, finally as a teacher, up to the to the time I left home. In those days and particularly in the 1920’s Chapel was the centre of our lives for nearly every Saturday in winter there was some event or other. Sometimes it was a service in the Chapel taken by a famous preacher, sometimes it was a concert in the Sunday School, but in each case preceeded by a tea. These teas were great affairs with mountains of food, all home made by the women of the Chapel. We sat at long trestle tables with about 20 on each side and three or four such tables. The younger women waited on, the older women attended to the tea urns at the end of the tables and about half a dozen women cut and buttered bread and tea cakes in a vestry which was always known as the buttering vestry: an indication of clear priorities. To be a butterer was the height of achievement, striven for by the tea pourers and waiters and only attainable when a butterer died.

The only occasion when tea was not served at long tables was at our bazaars when classrooms were thrown open and tea was served by waitresses at tables for four, with proper menus for ordering what looked cheapest but most tempting. For obvious reasons this sort of tea was referred to as ‘café style’.

The concerts were typical of the time; songs and duets by our own members or members from other Chapels, the singing of part-songs and glees by the choir and occasionally a humorous monologue.

The average performance was not high, but there were highlights from an occasional good singer, but we enjoyed it and what else was there to do on a Saturday evening? Occasionally there was a Social, when it was permissible to let the hair down, and as a small boy I remember staid members of the Chapel playing kissing games with surprising relish.

When a bazaar was on we often had one-act plays as a side-show and later these were given as the second half of a concert. They were very corny but great fun to prepare for. As I reached my late teens I took part in a number of these and thoroughly enjoyed giving more than a stage kiss to a girl who was otherwise unattainable at that time. Later she proved to be less unattainable.

During my time in Sunday School I was expected to take part in local examinations on Biblical topics and once won a prize for getting 96 per cent on questions relating to the Journeys of St Paul. I had an unfair advantage here because I was doing the same subject at the same time at the Grammar School. I also won a ‘Lord Wharton Bible’, which I still possess, for being able to recite certain passages of the Bible as prescribed by Lord Wharton centuries before.

One of the great events of the Sunday School year was the annual School Feast or walk. All the churches and chapels had their appointed day and ours was the last Saturday in June. About a month before the event we began to practise the set of specially selected hymns on Sunday afternoons, instead of going into our classrooms. Then on the last Sunday before the walk the Gawthorpe Victoria Prize Band sent a small group of their members to practise with us so that we could get accustomed to the brass band accompaniment. What a glorious blare of sound in that confined space: what rapture for a little boy. The great day finally arrived and we gathered the Sunday School at about 1.30 pm: there the procession formed up, first the band, then the leaders of the church, then each class in order with its teacher.

Thus we marched to martial music which kept our little legs going. It is of interest to remember in this connection that it was in the next township of Horbury that Rev. S Baring Gould wrote ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to encourage the children to march bravely up one of the steep hills during their walk. The procession stopped at about four key points in the area, including the market place and there we sang our hymns before large crowds.

We were back at the school by about 4.00 pm and there awaiting us was the tea of the year: long buns and hot, sweet tea. A long bun was about 8″ long, 3″ wide and 1″ thick, filled with fruit and well buttered. The number of buns was unlimited and we ate in our classrooms until we were nearly or truly sick. The adults looked after us and then had a more prosaic tea. When the tea was over we made our way to a field hired from a local farmer. The band played their instruments, we played our games and the teachers organised a series of races, which we managed to run despite our full stomachs. So the evening passed and another school feast was over.

One of the week-night meetings of the Sunday School was the Band of Hope and as a member of an abstaining family I had to attend; also my parental [sic.] grandfather helped to run it. Here we sang temperance hymns and learned what alcohol could do to a drunkard’s stomach. Occasionally we had magic lantern shows, when brightly coloured slides were shown accompanied by a story read by one of the adults. These stories were always about a drunken father who kept his wife and children in poverty, and the wallpaper was always peeling off the walls. As I think back I wonder why the drink problem was always shown as a problem of the married working class. My cousin, Daniel, was older than me and had left the Band of Hope before I attended, but the story is told that on one occasion when the meeting sang ‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone …’ he burst into tears and never wanted to go again.

Closely connected with the temperance aspect of our life was my first appearance on the stage. The local branch of the Rechabites, of which father was secretary, put on an operetta named the ‘White Cat’. I was the Spider Elf with only one line to speak, but with the key action to the whole play. The drunken giant was in command, but I slipped some potion into his drink and he became teetotal at once! I believe that after that the white cat changed into a handsome prince.

Some time during the war I was taken to a play-cum-tableau in Ossett Town Hall in aid of the war fund. The play had been written by a local lady and was called ‘Amor omnia vincit’. I had no idea what it meant, which was a foretaste of my total lack of ability at Latin, destined to show up later. During the performance it was announced that a Zeppelin was in the district so we all went quietly home in utter darkness; I trembling with a fear communicated to me by the adults and perhaps with some excitement. One of the actors was the curate of Holy Trinity Church and I was to meet him years later in Reading where he was Anglican Chaplain to the University.

In 1917 my sister, Mary, was born. At this time I knew nothing about the origin of babies and any alteration in my mother’s figure passed unnoticed. However, on a lovely September evening when the cockchafers were flying in their clumsy manner and summer was gently dying, I was told that I must sleep at my grandmother’s house that night. This arrangement was not unusual, so it gave rise to no childish speculation, but next morning I had a sister, but again I did not speculate.

My maternal grandmother lived in a bungalow with Auntie Clara and later with Auntie Lydia when the latter became a widow. It was always exciting to go there and as a small child I went often because it was only two minutes walk across the allotments. There were five bungalows, each occupied by very old people, but they were not almshouses. They were in a quiet cul-de-sac and each one consisted of a living room, bedroom and scullery. They had hot water in the living room, heated by a boiler installed at the back of the fire grate, an outside flush toilet, a small larder/scullery and a little garden back and front. All this was very superior to our house. The two aunties slept in the back bedroom together in a large bed, while grandmother slept in the ‘shut up’ bed in the living room. This bed consisted of a large wardrobe-like structure, which when the doors were opened, revealed a bed which could then be let down across the room and was held horizontal at the bottom by folding legs. Bedclothes stayed on the bed and were folded away with it in the morning. It was a great adventure to sleep in this bed with grandmother because there was a canopy over the head, wooden sides to make it cosy and two little shelves for one’s property: these for some unknown reason were known as ‘dog shelves’. The scullery had in it a large stone container holding about 4 gallons of water in its top half, the bottom half was a piece of porous stone. The water slowly trickled through this and could be drawn from a tap at the bottom. It was the coldest, most sparkling drink, even on the hottest day, that I have ever tasted.

Although I enjoyed going to grandmother’s, partly because I was spoiled by them and given sweets and money, there was nothing exciting to do except play in the tiny garden or read the ‘Christian Herald’ or the ‘Sunday Circle’. There was no daily newspaper and no books.

I scarcely ever went to my paternal grandfather’s house, partly because it was further away, but also because my father did not get on well with his father. However, when I did go there was always the excitement of watching the trains passing on the high embankment. They lived in a tiny stone cottage with one room up and one down. My grandfather, being a railwayman, knew the times of all the trains and, whenever one was due, I ran out to see it go by.

Ultimately, the war ended and as the guns fired on Armistice Day bonfires were built and we children marched up and down the street singing songs and rejoicing over something we did not understand. Perhaps there were many non-combatant adults who did not understand either.

The small town lost a number of its young men, but the only one I knew well was the husband of my mother’s sister, Lydia. They lived next door to us and I recall Uncle Harvey as a gentle soul who worked at one of the mills, sang in the chapel choir and rarely spoke. He had an enamel can for his tea, which had a lid which acted as a cup and a basket for his food with a lid on either side of the handle. He took his meals in these when he went to work and these are more clear in my mind than the quiet uncle himself. During his absence various men visited my aunt, men who gave sweets to prying children, but again my childish innocence led to no questions and it was not until many years later that questions rose in my mind.

Sometime around the end of the war I moved into what we called the ‘big school’, but again memories are vague. I can remember little about my teachers until I was well up the school. Indeed my first real memories begin when I was in Standard 5, with Mrs Hinchcliffe as our teacher. She was a large, tough woman who stood no nonsense from anyone but she was kind and she was an excellent teacher. The class consisted of all types from the very poor to the respectable, from the fit to the deformed. There were boys who terrified me with their surliness and their eagerness to fight at any moment, but they held no qualms for Mrs Hinchcliffe, who sometimes had to deal with them physically. There were also some pretty, clean girls in this class but I was not in the competition for their favours for I was a nonentity: no scholar, no good at sport, nothing to recommend me. To all and sundry I was Squash because of my supposed squashed nose.

However, it was in Mrs Hinchcliffe’s class that the first gleam of light began to show. We were able to glean marks for our performances in both mental and written work and a prize was to be awarded at the end of the year. Each week the marks were read out and to my surprise I found myself amongst the leaders. It was a breathtaking contest but in the end I won, beating Stanley Ellis, who ultimately became a carpenter in his father’s business.

Mrs Hinchcliffe gave a prize which I still have: the only academic prize I ever won at any level. So the time passed and a selected group was ultimately to be prepared for the scholarship examination, referred to as the County Minor. I was one of those favoured few and we were given special lessons in English and arithmetic by the headmaster. Mr Rusby was a small, thick-set man with a violent temper, who chewed pencils when he was cross. I suffered agonies in these classes because every question turned me to a quivering jelly and every answer became a non-event and so the accumulated fury descended on me and I was finally told that my chances were nil.

Nevertheless, early in 1922 at the age of 11 I went to school with the others and also with pupils from elsewhere and on that fateful Saturday morning we faced our future: a paper on English and one on arithmetic. Finally it was all over and the papers were sent to Wakefield where the process began of sorting us out for the whole of the West Riding of Yorkshire so that the successful ones could go to one of the various Grammar Schools.

Meanwhile we returned to school and continued our education. Only two things stand out, namely that we drew endless maps of the different regions of the world by simply copying from maps provided. What this was supposed to teach I do not know. On Friday afternoons we were allowed to make line drawings from cartoons in old copies of Punch, but again the educational purpose eludes me.

Finally the results of our almost forgotten examination were announced and I was one of the fortunate ones, despite the headmaste predictions.

As a special treat we were now introduced to the joys of algebra but I failed utterly to understand it.This may have been the teaching, because in a few months’ time I was to find it a great thrill and an easy subject.

And so in July 1922 I said goodbye to Southdale Council School and to those friends who were not going with me to the Grammar School. My friend of the hay loft, Aldred Nichols, came with me, but the other one, Edgar Graystock, did not. Already a few of the Headlands gang had gone there. The boys and girls who did not go to the Grammar School stayed on until they were fourteen, but we were leaving at eleven. It was not surprising, therefore, that we made little impression on the athletic and sporting side of the school. It was indeed little enough, consisting only of a soccer and a cricket side, with the former taken seriously. In fact there was great local interest amongst boys and adults in the local schools soccer competitions, but I was not stirred to the fervour that some achieved.

Of course I participated in the more mundane games which cast their spell at their appropriate seasons. I had the usual iron hoop with the hook to run it with, but unfortunately I lost that. I took part in games of marbles but I was never any good. In our game a given number of marbles were thrown all together at a hole dug in the ground at the foot of a wall. The boy who got most marbles in at one attempt then threw everyone’s marbles and retained all those which stayed in the hole. The second boy then had his chance until there were none left. Each year some boy would win huge numbers of marbles until his pockets burst and his mother had to make a special bag in which to carry his spoils. I never had a bag, for my one pocket was always big enough. With regular use the holes developed gulleys and special ‘knacks’ so that the sharp boys knew how to take advantage of these, but again I did not understand these things. I must have been very slow in those days.

The alternative game was played by two boys. One rolled his marble along the gutter, the second boy then rolled his and attempted to hit it. If he succeeded the marble was his, if not the first rolled his marble from where it stood and tried to hit the other one. The game continued in this way until a marble was hit and claimed by the victor. The advantage of this game was that it took a longer time to lose a given number of marbles; the disadvantage was that, although theoretical progress along the gutter was forward, it was often backwards and this led to late arrival at school, with the added crime of filthy hands and knees.

The girls played hop-scotch and skipping, sometimes joined by boys in the latter pastime. Shuttlecock and battledore, a form of badminton patience, that is for one person, was regarded as a-girl’s game, but whip top was played by both sexes I believe.In whip top a wooden cylinder tapering to a cone at one end and flat at the other was, with a nail hammered in to the point of the cons, the top. The whip had a wooden handle and a leather lash with a piece of string at the free end of the leather. To start the top spinning the lash was wrapped around the top up to its limit. The top was then placed on the ground and a sharp pull of the whip set the top spinning. At intervals a lash from the whip kept it spinning and this could be kept up for some minutes. It was possible to move the top along the pavement and in this way to cover quite a distance. Tall, narrow tops were called ‘monkey tops’. A form of rounders was known as pizeball.

We played other games; flicking cigarette cards until one dropped on another then the thrower took the rest. There was also legitimate swapping of cigarette cards to make up sets for it was only the spare and dirty ones which were used for the game. I well remember asking all and sundry for cards so that I would get my sets and I even remember the sets and the tit-bits of information at the back. In gardening hints I learned how to trap earwigs in inverted plant pots and in the ‘Do you know’ series I learned why horses get up front feet first and cows hind feet first. But I liked the series on birds best even though we saw few of these birds in our neighbourhood and it was not until many years later that I realised that house sparrows really did have some colour in their plumage.

Another game was kick out’can. Here an old tin can was placed on a brick and a circle a few feet across was drawn on the ground around it. One boy was selected as ‘it’ and another boy kicked the can out of the circle, then we all ran off to hide. ‘It’ had to replace the can and then catch one of us who, in turn, became ‘it’, but the snag was that while ‘it’ was hunting for a victim some boy would sneak up and kick the can out of the circle again. ‘It’ had then to return and replace the can before he could once more search for a victim.

Shin-pie crust was an odd game, in which two sides were selected. The leader of one side bent down and held his head against a wall as if in a rugby scrummage. The rest of the team then formed a sort of single file scrummage, one behind the other. The opposing side then in turn ran and leapt as far as possible along the line of backs, making sure they did not fall off. Obviously, the best jumpers went first, but even so it often happened the last one had somehow to leap on to the back of his own predecessor. When this phase was complete the upper layer of bodies wriggled and shook, while the bottom layer tried to stand firm until finally the whole edifice collapsed in a heaving mass of very smelly bodies.

This was also the period when a few of us told childish, vulgar stories before we graduated to dirtier, but I hope, more subtle ones. On dark nights, wet or fine, a few of us gathered at the scratching shed of a hen oil (house) owned by the father of one of us. There, in the light of a guttering candle, sitting on bits of old sacking, we repeated each night our litany of vulgarity: the black mass of a vanished childhood.

At this point it might be well to describe the gang of boys who lived in our little area. In all there were about 15 of us, varying in age from about 8 to 14. We were rarely all together at one time, but there always seemed to be a group of us. We were a mixed bag. Edgar Graystock and Aldred Nichols were nearest to me in age and were the ones who shared the adventure In the hay-loft with me at the age of four. Edgar was a chubby, red-haired, fiery-tempered boy who would be your dearest friend one minute and your deepest enemy the next. The only things I can remember about him was that it was his hen house that we sat in to tell our childish, dirty stories and that on the rare occasions when we saw an aeroplane he always referred to its ‘repeller whizzing around’. His father was a miner like mine and earned a little extra money by doing a turn at local music halls and clubs. Aldred Nichols was his opposite, quiet and even-tempered, good at all games and at school. He enjoyed the reflected glory of an elder brother who rode a powerful motorbike with a devil-may-care attitude. The Nichols were considered to be a cut above the rest of us because the father was a traveller for one of the mills and secretary of the town cricket club, while his mother was a professional dressmaker and enjoyed the patronage of some of the wealthy townspeople.

There were three sons of Edwin Westwood, but Harry, the eldest, was reaching the age where he no longer joined the gang. He was a strangely sadistic boy who giggled delightedly at anyone’s misfortunes. Donald, the next, was a boy of many talents. He was very knowledgeable on natural history, especially birds, and was a very good cricketer, but never seemed to develop it seriously. The youngest of the three was Arthur who had talents like Donald, but again never seemed to care to develop them to their fullest. A fourth Westwood, Norman, was the youngest son of Thomas, the others being far too old to belong to our gang. Norman was not very good at anything but was a born exaggerator, rather like a dilute version of Billy Liar.

Walter, the elder, and Horace, the younger, Hall were sons of a war widow. Both were good at games but my outstanding memory of them is their incredibly vicious fights with each other. These were regular occurrences and usually led to blood and tears. I never saw either of them fight anyone else.

There were three Tukes, but Jack, the eldest, was just passing out of the gang stage. When he occasionally joined us he told mystifying tales about his adventures with girls and swore until the air was Prussian blue. Frank and Fred were quieter characters.

Norman Stephenson was another member of the gang, who was a first-rate athlete but otherwise quiet. His popularity rested on the fact that his father drove one of the new lorries then gradually replacing horses.

Sidney Smith was known to all as Punch because of his nose. He possessed no outstanding qualities and was only on the fringe of the gang. The only time I ever had a fight of seriousness was with Punch. We fought for a long time with spectators and both of us were badly bruised, but I have no dea what we fought about.

Two other boys came into the picture but not as members of the gang. Harold Hall lived opposite us in Westfield Street and for a while he and I played a lot of cricket together in the street lunch time and after tea. This now seems odd because he never took it seriously after that. Harold’s next door neighbour was Jack Milner with whom I had an odd friendship. He was a scholarly boy who never played games, yet we walked to the Grammar School and back every day for years; talking seriously about what I do not know.

I cannot end this section without mention of my cousin, Freda. She was about two years older than me and in many ways we were like brother and sister. A few girls in the area joined our games from time to time, but Freda was ever-present, taking part as the heroine In our cowboy/Indian and cops/robbers fantasies. She was always being captured, tied up and rescued. She once almost reached the level of male dominance when she swore and had to have her mouth washed out with soap and water by my mother.

The parents of all these playmates, other than Westwoods and Nichols, were miners, lorry drivers or millworkers, so I grew up in a good cross-section of a northern community ranging from mine-owners to mine-workers.

The group played the games already mentioned as well as cricket or football in one of the yards described earlier and received encouragement from our parents, but not from the other neighbours who had no children or whose children were grown up. From time to time a window was broken and we collectively had to pay for it. The yard had houses on three sides and the fourth side had a wall about eight feet high with a large garden at the other side. When the ball went over this wall it was easy to climb it because of the worn sandstone blocks of which it was made, but the competition was keen as to who should go, especially when the apples were ripe. When we moved to Headlands Road I spent a lot of time hitting a ball against the wall with my cricket bat or rushing up and down the yard dribbling a tennis ball. This certainly improved my cricket and football skills.

We acted as a full gang as 5 November approached and went ‘chumping’ for wood. This wood consisted of dead branches of trees, live branches when no one was about and on one occasion a door from a house being built. All this wood was piled in the yard and so built that we could crawl into the middle of it and sit there on guard in case of a raid from another gang. To while away the hours we talked and boasted and told unbelievably dirty stories which seem now to be utterly forgotten or only slightly crude. Such a practice saved us when the owner of the stolen door suspected us and there we sat in our hideout innocently answering all his questions and flatly denying any knowledge of the door, while we sat on the very thing itself.

On the evening before Bonfire Night we celebrated Mischief Night, when we all sallied forth to plague the lives out of the neighbours with a certain sad brutality out of the more elderly ones. We ??? on windows with suspended buttons moved by cotton thread twenty yards long. We tied opposite doors together and then knocked both and so one door was opened, then the opening of the second alarmed the first. We put drawing pins daubed with mustard on latches so that when a visitor pricked his thumb the sucking of it was not too pleasant. We scrambled on to low roofs and dropped turves down chimneys. Not very funny, perhaps, but certainly not in the class of present-day vandalism.

On Bonfire Night we had our fire in the yard and let off our various fireworks: some had many and others had few and one father lacking in child psychology always argued that it was cheaper but just as good for his children to watch the fireworks of the other children. We all carried a piece of wheel-band, a piece of rope whose end burned like a cigarette and which we used to light our fireworks. I do not know what this special rope was. The fire was a roaring, leaping, sky-seeking mass of flames for a short time, before settling down into a comfortable heap of rosy red ashes. It was on these that we roasted our potatoes, the ambrosia of the gods with rich, hot mealy centre surrounded by a black and charred, thick outer crust. Our mothers always baked Parkin or moggy on 5 November.

In those days we had a proprietary interest in fireworks because there was a firework factory in Ossett: Rileys. However, there was an explosion there one day and people were killed and this was the end of Rileys. I still recall exactly where I was when the great thunder crack occurred, but of course we had no idea at the time what it was.

Writing of all these adventures on winter evenings recalls to mind the fact that our parents allowed us out to roam the streets until eight or nine o’clock at night. They never seemed to worry about us but now as I look back I find it difficult to understand. My own children were never allowed such freedom: was it because we were afraid to let them out or was there more to do indoors?

I must not give the idea that we never did stay indoors. Very occasionally we went to each other’s houses in the evening and played with what toys there were, but often I stayed in and read. My reading was not calculated to instruct, or inspire, but I believe that, within reason, it matters not what is read at that stage so long as the habit of reading is developed as much as possible. I read the schoolboy magazines, the ‘Gem’ and the ‘Magnet’, Sexton Blakes and Football Favourite and comics like Chips and Film Fun, the adventures of these people were so marvellous. I occasionally went to the Public Library but read very few of the books available there: they were too long. Further, the system of obtaining a book was such as to try one’s childish patience. First you looked in a catalogue under a particular author whom someone had mentioned. You then found a title by this author and its corresponding number. The next stage was to go to a large, glass-fronted case with column after column of numbers. Your eyes travelled down the appropriate column and as you neared the required number the mouth went dry and the body tensed. Would it have a white line under it or not? If it had it was available and so you timidly gave the librarian the number and lo and behold the white line disappeared from under your number and the book was yours.

Unfortunately, the method of choice produced as many failures as successes and many books were returned unread. The librarian at that time was no doubt a kindly man, but we always felt that he did not like children and that the last thing he wanted them to have was a book. Perhaps he belonged to that breed of librarians, now fortunately very rare, who were only happy at stock-taking when all the books were where they should be: on the shelves.

Another place of more happy memory was the Friday market in Ossett Market Place. Here was colour and life. The stalls, lit by kerosine flares which gave off an unforgettable smell, were attended by characters out of Dickens and selling everything from fruit to chamber pots, and shoes to beads. We loved to listen to one Harold Stevenson (Stephenson), a small, fat, shiny, moon-faced man given to wearing light coloured suits. He just never stopped talking as he sold one pair of shoes after another and with each sale the shoe boxes were tossed aside until they formed a mountain. I never saw anyone try on the shoes, the talk was so persuasive that so long as the shoe was the correct size the buyer seemed not to bother about a good fit.

The travelling shoe salesman always had his stall in front of the picture house, another of our haunts. We went to the Palladium usually on Saturday afternoons when for one or two pence we could get a place on a hard-seated, hard-backed bench in the front area, known for some odd reason as the ‘chicken run’. There we sat, cheering and booing and ever ready to warn Tom Mix that his enemy was behind the door. We saw Mary Pickford strapped to the railway line as the train approached and there she lay in an agony much less than our own for a whole week until the next instalment of the serial always brought relief, yet again to put us on the rack to await another week. Later I could never understand why the villains were so dim that they always fastened the heroine to the railway track beyond the points, so that a switch of the lever sent the train roaring down the other line. Why did they not fasten her to the track before the points, then nothing could have saved her? I was very susceptible to these pictures and most of all to a gruesome serial called, I believe, ‘The Hooded Terror’. I can still recall actual scenes from this film which I saw nearly sixty years ago. It fascinated me but it also frightened me badly and for years I was afraid of the darkened room and I always walked up the middle of our darkened road.

In the summer holidays the gang of boys often decided that we would walk to Coxley or to Thornhill, so we took packed meals and set off for the day. Coxley was, I suppose, about two miles along the bank of the River Calder away and our walk took us about half a mile. I was always terrified of this part of the journey, having suffered all my life from a fear of water and never having learned to swim. Coxley was a wooded valley in those days with a stream running through it. I never knew who owned it but it was free and open to the public so that it was a marvellous place for us to play in: climbing trees, damming the stream, jumping it and occasionally falling in. Thornhill was quite a different spot, but it was not part of the main Thornhill village. We again went down to the river but turned off in the opposite direction and then along the canal bank to a disused quarry beside a railway. This was private property and we were sometimes chased out but it was great fun climbing dangerously about the broken rocks still left in the quarry and it was exciting to talk to the friendly bargemen who sailed past down the Aire and Calder Canal in their brightly painted boats drawn by a horse. We always hoped that two barges would pass near us because then there was the added interest of seeing the manoeuvre to get the horses past each other without entangling the ropes. Both these walks took us past the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and here we were always thrilled to see goods trains of up to 100 waggons, a sight we never saw on the Great Northern Line through the town.

On Bank Holidays a more staid but longer trip was sometimes arranged by the mothers in our area: fathers very rarely went. The destination was Bretton, a tiny village about six miles away across the river, where one of our neighbours had a father who kept a farm. Not far away was Woolley Edge, an expanse of moorland covered with heather. Our means of transport were horse-drawn, flat, four- wheeled waggons, usually two or three, borrowed from a mill and normally used to carry huge bales of rags, shoddy or wool. Sunday school benches with backs were lashed to the waggon facing Inwards to form a square. The mothers sat on the seats with the bigger children and the tiny ones sat on the floor within the square. Bigger children often jumped off and walked beside the horses and it was also a thrill to be allowed a turn sitting by the driver. The seat was level with the upper legs of the horse so the view was one of steaming, rhythmically moving flanks which were almost hypnotic to watch, but the spell was broken at intervals by a bubbling, rumbling passage of wind which brought polite laughter from our mothers and red faces to us.

We usually had lunch at the farm and were allowed to run around and see the animals and whatever work was being done. These were amazing things to us but one thing sticks in my mind and that is the number of beautiful, previously never seen, swallows which threaded their way on predetermined lines of force, for ever swooping, turning and flying in gay abandon. I clearly remember one occasion when corn was being cut and the last few square yards were alive with rabbits, waited for by men with sticks and dogs, but few were caught.

Most of these trips passed off without serious incident, but on one occasion, returning down a steep hill, the iron hoop came off one of the front wheels of our waggon and preceded us down the hill. It took a long time to find the blacksmith in the next village and by the time he had repaired our waggon it was late. Many anxious fathers avaited our return.

It was on these walks and rides that we got to know a few wild birds. I have just mentioned swallows and on our walks by the water we found sand martins nesting in the banks and saw peewits and skylarks in the fields. We also knew a stretch of old railway line where yellow hammers nested. Apart from these our only birds were sparrows, starlings (known to us as sheps), blackbirds, thrushes and crows. Just once a corncrake nested infield opposite our house in Headlands Road, but I was not impressed: its nightly ‘craking’ nearly drove us all mad.

It was as a small boy during this period that I, like all my friends, believed in magic and miracles despite every failure on the part of the people who organised such things. We collected tram tickets, or fancy stones, or odd flowers and put these in a sealed jam jar in the cellar, wishing for something wonderful at the same time. It was essential that we did not look at the jar for so many months or else the spell would be broken. I never looked but my little heart felt cheated because my wishes were never fulfilled.

In addition to playing our games in the yard we found at this time an area where we had more space. Not far away there were allotments and beyond these the ground fell away steeply and then flattened out again. I never understood why this land was neither farmed nor built on but it was not so, and we took it for our own private cricket and football field where in the holidays we played matches which never seemed to end. We did not possess cricket stumps but we had two alternative kinds of wicket which were proof against any cheating and did not require any umpire’s decision. The first kind was about eight bricks piled on top of each other, giving a structure roughly the size of three wickets. They were very precariously balanced and the lightest touch of the ball set them wobbling so you were not only out but you had to move so that the bricks did not fall on you. The second wicket was one of those enamelled metal advertising sheets, long since discarded. We propped this up with a stick and if the ball just touched the edge it gave an unmistakable ping, while if fully hit it gave a resounding crash.

In those days I could already hit a ball further than most of my friends but never lasted a long innings and as a bowler I was exactly like all my pals; fast, furious, erratic and without a single idea as to what it was all about.

At this time I remember my first visits to watch the local Ossett side. They had many good players; Frank Armitage who batted with such power and grace and was like a god on Saturdays and who yet became a man and served in his father’s grocer’s shop at the corner of our street during the week; Joe Radley who bowled with an odd round arm action but who took many wickets and was renowned for his preparation of the Ossett wicket for he was the untiring groundsman: Dolly Denton, a little ball of a man, who took a few steps and with his left arm tossed the ball slowly and gently, so luring batsmen to their doom; Herbert (?) Mitchell who hit huge sixes out of the ground, further than anyone else could possibly hit them. Little did I realise that years later on that same ground I would hit sixes further than Herbert Mitchell ever did and in my own fashion would take as many wickets as Dolly Denton. It is well that the future tragedies of our lives are hid from us, but it is equally well that our future glories are also hid, for my small boy’s joy would have been nothing but ashes if I had known that one day I too would be one of the gods, as good as, or better than, those gods whom I worshipped.

The greatest hero of them all was a young man who came from miles away to play for Ossett, indeed, so far away that he was sometimes late. He bowled very fast from a very long run and he took a lot of wickets. I believe he only stayed one season and that was 1920, for the next season he was playing for Yorkshire. His name was G.G.Macauley and he proved to be a very great bowler for Yorkshire and England. Tough and uncompromising, for him the match was never lost until the winning run had been hit. For it was always possible that the whole side could be bowled out without another run being scored. Victory was always on. Not surprisingly he was one of my great heroes, but again little did I guess that, although I was never in his class, I would be the next Ossett player to achieve a place in a county side.

So, at this time, my love of cricket was born. I watched Ossett, I played morning, noon and night through the summer holidays but no one taught me anything about the game and my father and my uncles had no idea of it. I sometimes wonder what they thought about my passion because in the end I proved to be the only games player in three or four generations on either side of the family.

I played a little soccer at this time too, but it never appealed to me like cricket. Being fairly big for my age I was always put at full back and from there I booted the ball high and hard and far, but that was all. There was none of the thrill of cricket.

I was a bit of a weakling as a child, up to about eight, for I remember that every winter there seemed to be something wrong with me and I was off school with coughs and colds and the more usual childish ailments. The main treatment was banishment to bed in a cold bedroom and the fare was ‘pobs’: pieces of bread dropped into hot milk. We did not possess hot water bottles but used the oven-plate. This was a solid sheet of iron which formed a removable shelf in the oven. It was taken out, wrapped in newspaper and put at the bottom of the bed. There was no doubt about its heating properties but its disadvantage was that it was very hard and one’s ankles and heels became sore.

Apart from my childish ailments I had one accident during this period. I possessed a wooden engine with a truck which my Uncle Fred had made for me. It was quite a superior toy, having cast iron wheels and small door knobs for buffers. One of my pleasures was to lie on my tummy on the engine and paddle it along with my hands and feet until I came to the slope of the hill where it then travelled under its own momentum. On one occasion I ran over my own paddling hands and the cast iron wheels cut the first two fingers of each hand wery badly so that I carried the scars for a long time.

I also recall one hospital visit when I was about five. My tonsils and adenoids had troubled me so I was taken to Leeds General Infirmary to have them out. My mother and an aunt took me by train to Leeds for there were no buses then and at the Infirmary I found myself among dozens of other children with their attendant mothers. We sat on benches and one by one we were taken through a door. Once through that door we were given an anaesthetic and lost consciousness and our tonsils in a very short time, then out through another door where we sat again on benches in rows vomiting and recovering. When I was considered fit to go I was pushed to the station in a borrowed push chair, then home by train and so to bed for some days.

Talk of illness reminds me of our doctor, a good old fashioned family doctor by the name of Rene wood. This was an exotic name for a doctor in the wilds of Yorkshire, but I understand that his mother was French. He took great care of us when we were ill, visiting us in his small, two-seater car which I believe he drove himself. We always felt that he was closer to our family than to other families because he often sent for my maternal grandmother when a baby was to be born or a dead person to be laid out.

Dr Wood went away to serve as a soldier/doctor during the war and his substitute was a Dr Hale. I remember that he was less benign, but still a good doctor. It was during his time that my Father was ill with what was called VDH. I did not know at the time either the initials or the full name, valvular disease of the heart. Neither did I learn until many years later that my father nearly died at that time.

I have said that Dr Wood was a good family doctor and at one time he treated me for many months for a very inflamed and swollen area at the side of my knee. There was also an associated swelling ofthe lymph gland in my groin. It was treated with a variety of ointments, plasters and poultices but it showed no improvement over months and I hobbled about with it heavily bandaged. Then in the summer we went to visit my great uncle and aunt in Norfolk. My great aunt took one look at the sore on my leg and prescribed a poultice of ragwort. By the end of the fortnight the swelling in my groin had gone and the wound was clean and had begun to heal. Finally it healed up completely, leaving only a scar the size of a shilling on which no hairs ever grew again. I cannot explain why my aunt achieved in fourteen days what the doctor could not achieve in months, but the fact remains.

6. 1922 – 1929: GRAMMAR SCHOOL.

The next phase in my life covers the period at Ossett Grammar School, where I went in September 1922. A few months earlier we had moved into another house and there my brother, Arthur, was born.

The house was in Headlands Road but was actually in the same run of houses forming the letter E as was 13 Westfield Street. Once more we had an entry bedroom, but in addition this house was superior because at some date a single storey lean-to kitchen had been built on in the yard at the back and we also had a lavatory of our own, but still out in the yard. The kitchen now contained the range and the sink so that the ‘room’ was free of these and instead had a ‘modern’ low fireplace suitably tiled. The kitchen also had the table and the washing machine, leaving again more space in the ‘room’. We lived in the kitchen and although we used the ‘room’ more than most people it still did not get a great deal of use except at weekends and holidays. The upstairs rooms were an exact replica of the three at the previous house and there was still no bathroom. There was also the cellar. My father bought the house on a mortgage for £250 and this was regarded as somewhat arrogant and haughty action for a working man.

I mentioned that we used our ‘room’ more than most, because many people only used their second room a few times a year or even only at a death, as a place where the body lay until the funeral. Even those with only one room were often very careful of it, for I remember one of our neighbours had a brass fender and fire irons which were highly polished and put in place on Saturday at lunchtime. They were taken out again on Monday morning and for the rest of the week they rested on top of the cupboard covered by a layer of newspaper.

Our neighbours at 19 Headlands Road were the Fosters. Mr and Mrs Foster and their two girls, one a little younger than me and the other my sister’s age. My sister and the two girls were very good friends and remained so, but I was already a Grammar School boy and had moved on from playing with little girls. Later, they left and were replaced by George and Lilian Fox and Mrs Fox’s mother. They were a young couple without children and we got on very well with them. Lilian had a beautiful soprano voice and one of the joys of the year was New Year’s Eve when she threw open the doors, played the piano and sang appropriate hymns and songs.

I only mention neighbours on one side because our neighbours on the other side had their house door in Headlands Road, whereas ours and the Fosters’/Fox’s faced each other in the yard. We therefore rarely saw the Moorehouses except when they passed on the way to the lavatory!

In July 1922 my brother was born at home. This time I was not sent away, but stayed in my own bedroom, while mother gave birth with the usual noise and coming and going. Despite the fact that I was eleven-and-a-half I knew nothing of what was going on, nor had my mother’s change of shape attracted my attention. The result was that I was greatly surprised when I was shown my new baby brother the next morning.

As already noted I went off to my new school in early September on a wet and cold morning, walking about a mile. I came home and went back again at lunchtime and home in the evening and there were no fond parents to give me a lift or to make sure that I got there safely. Many others had a further distance than me to walk.

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We went for a short and innocent walk, but I was disturbed by a constant tinkling of bells. The girl ultimately told me that these were on her garters, but being backward in these matters I never found out whether this was true or not. We arranged to meet again the following day, but knowing the attitude of school staff we had to be circumspect, so we met at 6.30 a.m. when each of us went for a bucket of drinking water to a farm. In this cold, bleak early morning light I found that romance had shrivelled and so ended yet another ‘love affair’.

During the whole of this time there always seemed to be a lot of family quarrels, which I am told is not unusual in large families. My father never seemed to be on speaking terms with all his family at once, neither did my mother, but the outcasts constantly changed, and I never understood all that was going on. No doubt most quarrels arose from small beginnings but they were real. Part of the trouble on my father’s side seemed to spring from the mutual dislike of my father and grandfather and father never tired of tracing this back to the day when he told his father where he stood. My grandfather was a keen gardener and insisted that my father should help in the garden on Saturdays, both afternoon and evening. The crunch came when father started courting mother and one day he insisted that he would leave off gardening at tea time. This he did and he was never really forgiven.

Despite problems we had a family party at Christmas when a tried and trusted small group met together on Christmas Day. My maternal grandmother and aunties Clara and Lydia came for the day, starting with a huge Christmas dinner at mid-day. Florrie and Willie then came in the afternoon and joined us for high tea with ham and tongue, jellies and trifle, Christmas cake and other cakes at 5.00 p.m., then a supper of cold meat, pickled walnuts, bread and butter and mince pies at about 9.30 p.m. To ensure that we did not starve, in the intervals we ate oranges, apples, nuts, sweets and chocolate. As I look back it seems to have been a revolting orgy, but I was never once sick, nor was anyone else.

In the evening we played games, the favourite one of Auntie Clara being a game called the Minister’s Cat, requiring a choice of adjectives covering ultimately all the letters of the alphabet and applied to the minister’s cat. It was on these occasions that my aunts brought out their favourite riddles of immense subtlety which never failed to produce a great deal of laughter. What is most like half a cheese? Which of the Disciples wore the biggest hat? Why does a chicken cross the road? How innocent, how happy we were and how we cried when Auntie Clara recited ‘Little Jim’.

A word must be said about a practice which grew up when we lived at Headlands Road and which persisted for a number of years, but for which I never found a rational explanation. That was the keeping of a dog. We were fond of these dogs in our own way, but none of us could be called dog lovers and the house was too small to keep a dog in comfort. Our first dog was Mac, a thoroughbred Airedale, which father bought with money that I suspect we could ill-afford. He was large and handsome when he grew up, but he turned out to be the daftest animal I have ever known. Once he got outside the house no enticement, not even hunger, would get him back and many was the time when half the men and all the children in the neighbourhood were chasing him until finally he was caught and brought home. The only certainty about this capture was that it would lead to another escape. Sometimes the escapes were more serious and he would travel miles before being caught. Even so, he was quite harmless and appeared to laugh at all his escapades. Finally father took him to a man who claimed that he could bring to heel any awkward dog, but after a time Mac defeated him and I do not know what his final fate was.

Our next dog was a bitch: Lassie. She was a fox terrier and very well trained, the only trouble with her being that when she was on heat she had to be taken out about four times a day on the lead and this job was usually mine. We would proceed up the road into the fields, followed by all the dogs in the neighbourhood, then when out of sight of the houses I would encourage one of the dogs to approach Lassie. Just as he had reached the stage where he felt that his desires were to be satisfied I would frighten him away with my stick. No doubt this was psychological cruelty to a dumb animal, but it helped to pass the time. Later, Lassie became vicious and bit us once or twice so she had to go.

Finally we had a male fox terrier who was bright, perky and manageable and perhaps he did win our hearts, but unfortunately he was soon knocked down by a motor-cycle and killed. Certainly we all cried and that was the last of our dogs.

Mention has already been made of the start of my courtship with Florence and this progressed steadily and to the same weekly routine until October 1932. It was at this time that I was sent to St Annes to recover after my operation for appendicitis. The Convalescent Home was run by the Rechabites and, my father being a leading member in our district, it was natural that I should go there. The other inmates at the time were mostly middle-aged and elderly but there was one girl there of my own age, Laura, from Brighouse. I cannot even recall her surname now. Gradually we paired off and during the second week we began going down to the promenade shelter in the evening. Developments occurred and reached the ‘kiss and hug’ stage but certainly no more. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to make me realise that there were other fish in the sea and that I had been foolish in allowing myself to be dragooned into courting Florence.

When I returned home I did the honest thing and told Florence that I had no wish to continue our friendship. Then all hell was let loose and I must here insist that what comes next is a true account because modern youth will scarcely believe it possible. My parents considered me to be a swine and interviews were arranged between them and Florence’s parents at which all possible solutions to this problem were discussed. Florence and I were friendly with a man ten years our senior and he was brought in and spent hours talking to Florence and to me separately. The situation at home was very unpleasant and although I continued with my plan of University work it was very difficult. In desperation I decided to go to see the girl from Brighouse and finally met her at the home of a couple in Bradford who had been at the Convalescent Home with us. My father threatened to go to them and denounce them for their wicked encouragement of his evil son and the evil son himself was threatened with expulsion from home. I met the girl once more and discovered that she was nice, but not for me and left it there. However, I was given no peace at home and so, to save my sanity and my degree, I asked Florence to meet me again in February 1933. She agreed and everyone was delighted. One concession was won by me from my parents and that was that Florence and I should occasionally be allowed to be in my home alone. This was a bitter pill for my fearful parents to swallow, but swallow it they did and Florence and I did nothing which could possibly have produced ‘a baby’; the dread thought of my poor parents. The courtship of Florence once more continued smoothly until Easter 1936 but this story must be left until a later chapter.

The fear of illegitimate children was ever present with my mother and up to the time of her death she did her best to hide such sexy skeletons as existed in our family cupboard. On one occasion a relative of ours married and a baby was born seven months later. My mother bravely maintained that it was premature yet in the next breath boasted incongruously that it weighed ten pounds at birth.

It was, and still is, the custom in the Methodist Church of the 1930’s to have Local Preachers (Lay Preachers) to help the overworked Minister of a Circuit. In 1933, after acting as a completely inept and ignorant Sunday School teacher for about four years, I was prevailed upon to start training as a Local Preacher. The argument was that I attended Chapel and had a University training and so was ideal material. The fact that I knew no theology and had no skills in speaking was of no consequence. Perhaps my reconciliation with Florence was the spur, particularly since I greatly admired her father, who was a Local Preacher. The upshot was that I started going along as a trainee with him to all his services. At first I was allowed to announce the hymns, 1ter I read the lesson and once or twice I had to say an extempore prayer. There was no training: I just watched and listened. The theoretical work came from a compulsory study of all John Wesley’s sermons and one or two other books, which I cannot remember. I found Wesley’s sermons incredibly dull and theologically beyond me. Even worse, much of the wording was meaningless jargon to me.

I gradually progressed, however, until I was allowed to preach sermons and then things began to happen. The young folks found my sermons, which were chiefly social documents, helpful, but I trod on a number of old toes. However, I came at last to my examination which consisted chiefly of a set of questions which I could answer in my own time. At this distance away I cannot recall the questions except that they were of the type ‘Discuss the question of justification by grace through faith’. I’m afraid I had not developed at all along these lines despite reading Wesley’s sermons and in honesty I had to admit that this sort of phraseology was a meaningless jumble to me. The alternative would have been to give a parrot-like prepared answer.

My paper upset the examining body consisting of our Minister and three senior Local Preachers. I appeared before them and they were very kind: the Minister understood my problems but the divide was never crossed. However, they recognised that I was a successful preacher with a particular appeal to the young people and so a blind eye was turned to my theological shortcomings and I was ‘ordained’ in October 1934. At this ordination service I had to make a speech which was a cross between a sermon and a personal statement. It was fairly harmless but not sufficiently so for one of the examiners and this lay preacher followed me and in his address gave me a public warning, ending with the hope that I would soon see the error of my ways and that I would mellow with time. From then on I was a fully qualified Local Preacher in the Methodist Church and I received invitations to preach in many churches, not always Methodist, in the district as well as addressing a number of Sunday classes of various kinds.

In connection with Church and Sunday School I also helped with floats to parade in the Ossett Carnival. These were built on either lorries or flat-bottomed horse-drawn waggons and could be either simply decorative or tableaux. For the Queen Street Church I designed a scheme of hoops and poles and chains to be covered with green and gold tissue paper and with small children inside dressed in similar colours. The committee thought my design was splendid but all the mothers wanted pink and white: so dainty! I felt that green and gold was, and still is, a marvellous combination and that pink and white is gutless, but I lost: so it was pink and white. However, we won second prize in our class, but I never found out whether it was the design or the colours or both which lost the day.

For the same day I designed a tableau for the South Parade Church. This represented the parable of the Good Samaritan and I had the special job of using grease paint to depict horrible wounds on the arms and legs of the victim. This, so different, effort also won a prize.

About this time I must have had visions of grandeur in the creative sense because I also wrote a play! South Parade Cricket Club, for whom I played at the time, had an annual concert at which we received trophies and medals from the England and Yorkshire cricketer, Herbert Sutcliffe. It was for this concert that I wrote my play in the form of a series of scenes depicting the development of cricket from the Stone Age. It was full of horrible puns, Biblical references to full pitchers and the like. It must have been awful.

During this period I was also an active member of the Ossett Branch of Toc H. We were a small group and we met in an upper room of an old warehouse belonging to one of our members. The friendliness and the somewhat mystic atmosphere at the close of each meeting appealed greatly to me at the time and I never hear the words ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old…’ without recalling that room. At that time, or possibly earlier, I had been deeply affected by the film of R.C.Sherrif’s ‘Journey’s End’ and I believed that pacifism was the only answer. It is not surprising, therefore, that I became a member of the Peace Pledge Union. However, I took no active part in it, once I had signed my name.

In these days we hear much about how uncultured the modern student is, but I have never been able to say much on this topic, since by so doing I would be a hypocrite. When I look back to my student days I can recall buying books for my studies and indeed all the family who bought me books for my 21st birthday kindly bought me text books. Apart from these I bought a few devotional, rather than theological books, but nothing else. Perhaps I was too busy to read more widely than this and there were few books in the house. We had a gramophone at home, but the records were chiefly good light music such as ‘In a Monastery Garden’ or comic pieces by ‘John Henry’, the Yorkshire comedian. I had never been to a theatre, except one visit as a schoolboy to Wakefield to see a Shakespearean touring company (Frank Benson?). Similarly, ballet and opera were unknown to me and remain almost so to this day. With this experience of mine, which I do not think was rare in the North, it is naturally impossible for me to condemn present-day students. Later I shall write of my education in matters of books, the theatre and music.

We did not have a wireless at home until father was presented with one in 1932, but I remember nothing about the programmes, except that my younger brother loved to have it blaring out ‘jazz’ whenever he was at home.

Before ending this section I feel that some remarks may be made about food with reference to the whole period. Althoughmy father was on the dole for a long time during the 1930’s I cannot say that we were under-nourished, but we may have been malnourished. I find it impossible to remember what our diet was like in detail over the whole period but certain facts can be recalled. My mother baked every Tuesday and Thursday and this baking consisted primarily of bread and tea-cakes. The bread was always white and in 2 lb loaves, the tea-cakes were about 6″ in diameter and 1″ thick, also white and sometimes with currants in. In addition she made ‘little buns’ by the dozen: these were a variety of small items such as macaroons, jam and lemon curd tarts and similar sweet concoctions. Occasionally she made a fruit cake, very pale in colour and unlike the dark Dundee cake, but very delicious. Then, on very special occasions, we had chocolate cake filled with cream. Mother’s greatest achievement, however, was a sponge cake: These were made in a round tin about 5″ deep and 8″ across the top, with sloping sides and a funnel in the middle. No jam or cream was put into the finished product because Mother maintained that they were too good to spoil and many people thought so because she baked dozens to sell to other people. It was always said that the secret lay in Mother’s special ability in beating the mixture. However, I must confess that I found them dry and tasteless and like a piece of flannel to chew, but then I had odd tastes. Once in a while Mother had a failure and the fruit cake or parkin or whatever collapsed in the middle: they were said to be sad. Such failures delighted me because the cakes were then very moist and sticky and I enjoyed them, much to Mother’s disgust.

In November my maternal grandmother came to assist Mother with the making of Christmas cakes (spice cake) and puddings. I have already mentioned the puddings which were boiled in water and the riches of the water thrown away. The Christmas cakes were made in 2 lb loaf tins and only one large round one for icing. About a dozen were baked and they lasted until February, usually being started on Christmas Eve, with a glass of home-made ginger wine, totally non-alcoholic.

Grandmother had her own specialities, which were common spice cake and oven cake. The former was a fruit cake made with dough and was very nice indeed: the latter was a bread dough mixture baked in the form of a rough round cake about 12″ in diameter and about 11″ thick, eaten with or without butter. When offered a piece Grandmother always said ‘Rive (tear) a piece off’. It was never cut and the piece was also riven (torn) open to put butter on.

Turning to meals; I can dismiss breakfast and tea very easily because they never varied. Breakfast was jam and bread or pork fat and bread with tea, no cereal, no marmalade, no coffee and bacon and egg, only on Christmas morning. We might have had coffee at Christmas too but it was almost certainly Camp coffee essence. Tea consisted of one of the large tea-cakes, plastered with pork fat, usually ‘mucky’ fat, that is – fat containing speckles of gravy and jelly. This tea-cake was cleaved to take the fat, then closed up again and attacked as a whole so that one’s ears were often daubed with fat which squeezed out at each bite: a ‘dish’ fit for the gods, washed down with a pint pot full of sweet tea and followed by two or three ‘little buns’, or more if Mother was not watching.

Dinner, never lunch, was at about 12 noon or a little later and on Sunday was always a roast joint, very rarely anything but brisket. We started with Yorkshire pudding, bearing no resemblance whatever to the Yorkshire pudding served in hotels and restaurants. Motherput a thin layer of batter, just enough to cover the base of a greased tin 9″ x 9″ and cooked it in a very hot oven for a very short time. It came out crisp and brown and was served with gravy before the main course. Sometimes we had currants in it, or seasoning, but it was always served first with gravy. Very occasionally it came as the third course with sliced apples in it, then we added sugar. The Yorkshire pudding when ready was cut into squares about 3″ x 3″ and we usually had two each while Mother cooked a second one. We had some of this too and Mother had what was left. This was followed by roast beef, boiled potatoes, rarely any other form, and a vegetable, which in my possibly faulty memory was nearly always soggy cabbage. Then for sweet we had rice, sago or tapioca pudding or some form of suet pudding.

On Mondays Mother was washing clothes and we had cold meat, bread and pickles which always seemed to taste of soap since the ‘dining’ table had piles of washing on it. Tuesdays and Wednesdays brought some kind of stew, using up the last of the meat, while Thursday, being a baking day, usually saw a meat (corned beef) and potato pie and possibly an apple tart. Friday and Saturday were makeshift days and we had baked beans or fish and chips or boiled ham. The evening meal, usually between 8.00 and 9.00 p.m., was supper and was a very simple, variable meal but plenty of it: sometimes fish and chips, sometimes bread and jam, sometimes tripe, followed by the ubiquitous ‘little bun’ and a mug of tea.

Most of the above description refers to the 1920’s and 1930’s but as teenagers small groups of us would go into the back room of Jock’s fish shop and have fish and chips or collops [sic.].The latter were two slices of a large potato made into a sandwich with flaked fish and fried in batter, thus we got the fish and potato for a lower price. The local fish friers always used beef dripping and not vegetable oil and I have never tasted fish and chips in the south remotely resembling those of my childhood. An alternative to fish and chips at Jock’s was hot peas and tripe at Ollie Oakes or Bentley’s. The peas were always brown and very hot, while the tripe was ice cold. I only tasted boiled tripe once and it was horrible. We ate it cold, although of course it had been boiled during its preparation. The art was to pick it up with one’s fingers, dabble it in the vinegar swimming on the plate then bite quickly before too much of the vinegar ran off.

Perhaps once every two or three years we went to a proper restaurant in Dewsbury or Leeds. There we sat in awkward splendour at a table with a clean, white cloth and were actually served by a waitress. Invariably, and like all similar visitors, we had a pot of tea, bread and butter, fish and chips and a plate of cakes. We never got beyond this despite the fact that we had fish and chips regularly at home.

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Sadly, this is where Cyril Tyler’s memoirs end. However I have found a little about him that he hasn’t told us.

I found this in my own files. It’s a cutting from the Ossett Observer. This is Cyril Tyler’s father, John, who was the Mayor of Ossett in 1950.

Anne-Marie Fawcett May 2024