What an amazing memory, and a story that current servicemen and women serving overseas, or folk whose jobs take them away for long periods will find interesting. It is not often we hear about these heart-warming events from the child’s perspective. Your mam was obviously very wise and loving.
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Diolch. I actually become more aware of that when telling memories like this. Mostly, I resented the fact that she raised me to be nervous of doing anything remotely risky because she didn’t want me damaged before my dad saw me. She was also a terrible snob. Her background will come clear from my next episode!
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‘Don’t cry man, we’ll manage–something will turn up, you’ll see…’
It was 24th December, the year my dad had a series of heart attacks. After coming out of a coma, but spending months in hospital he was being allowed home for one day–Christmas. Little did he know, his sick pay had run out completely, but while my brother and I were content to go without any presents, mam could not hide our financial predicament from dad when she had no money to buy groceries, let alone the usual festive goodies.
Determined to put a good face on it, my brother and I wrapped toys we already had, and made daisy-chain decorations from coloured paper.
It was late afternoon when the strangest things started to happen, just after I’d told mam that something would turn up. Firstly, we heard something come through the letterbox–too late for the last post, even with extra Christmas deliveries. What could it be?
On the mat was a small brown envelope–the kind that used to be used when people were paid in cash. And that is exactly what it was–a man down the street had posted his unopened pay packet through our door with the words ‘Happy Christmas’ scrawled on it in pencil. When mam tried to return it, his wife said they knew we needed it more and would do the same for them. Yes, that was the kind of place it was–where neighbours looked after one another.
With the shops about to close the butcher was auctioning off what he had left, so we ended up with a huge ‘bird’ and the grocer added all kinds of extra fruit and veggies to the list I had given him, saying he had a fresh delivery due after the holiday.
By the time dad arrived in the ambulance, a fire was lit and delicious cooking smells filled the house. But strangest of all, he didn’t come home empty-handed–there were some parcels piled on top of his stretcher, including the guitar I had always dreamed of having. Apparently the man in the next bed to dad at the hospital had a son in a rock band…
It seems Santa comes in all shapes and sizes.
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Brilliant! Is it true?
Oh yes, it’s true.
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In that case it is very beautiful!
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I am putting this here although it involves a long time leap and I’ll have to go back to the War another time!!
There is a programme on BBC2 “Back in Time for the Weekend”, showing how leisure activities have changed. The first episode covered the 50s.
It wasn’t like that for me!!!
Oh, I had to wear dresses and skirts in 1950/51 and early 52, but I walked miles, I was a ‘tomboy’ and so were all my friends! OK, I was 8-9-10-11 not 16, but I never became constrained by ‘expectations’!!
I suppose it’s true that I only got ‘proper’ riding lessons because I (totally innocently) took my Mam to the start of a race at York. We had walked across to the course, it wasn’t far!
Mam heard the words used by the jockeys. “Oh,” I said, “They always talk like that. It’s just their way!” It was years before I realised that this must have led to my Dad saying something along the lines of, “We can’t keep her shut in. She’ll go and ride the trainer’s son’s pony, whatever we say!”. Which led to them scraping money to send me to a ‘respectable’ riding school, which led to jodhpurs and me wearing skirts strictly for school and church!!
I do remember wearing circular skirts with paper nylon petticoats when I was about 15 to go out, but mostly I lived a life like that of the little boy in the TV series, NOT his sister!!!
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The 40s
I’d better cover this before I get on to the 60s!!
We lived in a rented terrace house, probably Victorian. My mother made much of the fact that it didn’t open straight on to the pavement! Our’s had a narrow ‘forecourt’ separated from the pavement by a low wall. In that was evidence of railings that had gone to help with the War effort. Whether wrought iron was any real use, I never found out! It was good for morale for people to make a contribution!! This was my gran and grandad’s house, site of the first memories mentioned above.
Inside, a narrow passage stretched straight on. To the left, a door to the front parlour. Half way along was a gap in the wall to the left and the stairs led straight up between two walls. There were two bedrooms. Each had a washstand with bowl and big cold-water jug, tooth mug, soap dish etc. A Towel rail stood nearby. Mornings and nights, boiling water from the kettle was carried upstairs in an enamel jug with a lid and used for washing. Even an adult could wash all of him/herself in sections. Dirty water was poured into a bucket below the wash stand and taken downstairs with the empty hot water jug next time someone went down. Once a week, adults bathed in the kitchen in a galvanised iron tub filled with water from the copper which resided in the scullery. While I was small, I got bathed in a small tub pretty well every night, air raids permitting. When not in use, the tubs were hung on hooks outside in the narrow yard behind the kitchen window.
Oh. the kitchen was at the end of the passage! Just before you reached it, another door to the left led to what my gran called ‘the middle room’, but which was actually the living room.
The one tap was in the scullery. Ty bach was outside, but not down the garden!! You just turned right outside the kitchen door and there was the door to the toilet, which was p\art of the house and had a flush! Hands were washed in the scullery in the only sink in the house. You will realise we had no bathroom!
In the country, we would have been very lucky to have a tap or a flush toilet or electricity!! We wouldn’t have had gas!! I know because we lived in the country later when my dad was looking after POWs.
No building work or home improvements happened during the War. Very little happened between the Wars! (At least, not for ordinary working people!) Nobody like us had telephones. We had no electrical devices except the lights and the radio, which was enormous and provided the Home Service and Light Programme. I believe the BBC actually broadcast the Third Programme a well, but we never listened to such high brow offerings!
Please note: after the War, the Government had to pay a huge War Debt to the USA for materials like Bombers which had been shot down, weapons which had been used to fight etc.etc… All the holes between houses, full of rubble, where bombs had fallen (there was one three or four houses wide behind our house) had to be cleared and money found to build new. On top of that, there were real slums, ten or so families sharing one tap or water pump and one toilet which led to a filthy smelly cesspit. So they had to be knocked down and decent ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ built!!
Hence we had rationing into the 50s and no ‘modern’ equipment. We had a growing National Debt. We also had a National Health Service and nobody died because they couldn’t afford a doctor! We had decent education and I could go to University when I was old enough.
I believe that Debt with Interest, was finally paid off in 2006!!
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I’m a little younger than you @henddraig but I can just about remember seeing ration books in our house. (And National Dried Milk of course and that official looking orange juice in big glass bottles). When I visited Smithfield market some years ago, I noticed a plaque on the wall which talked about the problems caused by meat rationing, and it said meat was the last thing to come off the ration, in 1954 I believe.
We bathed once a week in a zinc bath in front of the fire (when it wasn’t in use, the bath hung on a nail on a wall in the back-yard). This went on until 1961 when we were moved to a different town because my dad got a new job. The job came with a house which had a bathroom. Luxury!
I went back to the street where our old house used to be (and in which I was born … the NHS existed then, but places in maternity wards were scarce) and sadly our old house had gone, replaced by modern terraces. But only a few houses had been replaced. The rest of the street looked identical to how it had always looked! (I think our house might have been weakened by nearby bomb damage, as the houses opposite must have been flattened - the area was a school tarmacced playing field / playground in our day. It now seems to be a public children’s playground.
That was not a slum area then (although a friend of mine upset me by calling it just that), and it isn’t now either. It was just how a lot of people (perhaps most) lived then. We had a small but nice back garden, and mains water and drainage. Housing was in short supply after the war, and my parents were overjoyed to get that house (some time around 1946 I think). Nowadays, at least in some areas, streets like that are “gentrified” and sell for a small fortune.
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Exactly!! My gran never had a bathroom, all her life. Neighbours had them put in by changing the coal hole and toilet (which backed onto each other behind the scullery) into a bathroom. but Gran never wanted the hassle!!
A lovely old chap in our village who was re-homed into a new terrace of cottages in the village in 1936 (when running water was paid for by subscription by villagers who could afford it) never had electricity or a tap or a proper toilet. He died in about 1974!!
When the councils were building in the 50s, people used to say, “Why give these people baths? They’ll keep the coal in them! They won’t know what they are!” (I am nearly spitting now, remembering it!!) They called working people “the great unwashed”! Of course, before running water, they.… the ‘upper class’ had servants like my ancestors to carry their water up and down stairs for them and bath them too!!!
Your house sounds like my Gran’s which seems to have survived, despite the row behind being flattened just before I was born! My Uncle was home on leave from the RAF and, being unused to bombing, was in the shelter when everyone else thought it was so long since any activity that the Luftwaffe must have gone! A lady from one house and the chap next door met out the front and asked each other, “Must be over surely?”. WHAM!!
The man found himself across the street. The lady was no more. My Uncle couldn’t get out of the shelter for rubble he couldn’t see sealing the door. Later, my gran and grandad found a huge pile of bricks on their bed!
My family moved when I was about 6 into a house that had been where my father had grown up, when his real Mam was alive. It was furtjher up the class structure… lower middle? We had a bathroom upstairs and a cellar for the coal, but the toilet was still outside at the back, built within the house, but accessed from outside. I think this had been seen as ‘more hygenic’ maybe???
Another memory - early 1952
I can date this to Spring of that year because I am pretty sure it was the year my Dad had ‘volunteered’ to organise the TA Ball.
He joined the TA (Territorial Army) immediately after being ‘demobbed’ after the War. There were too many Majors, so he went back to Captain, until he finally left when he had some sort of paper saying he was really a Major!!
Anyway, this Ball entailed very pretty ‘Invitations’ cordially requesting the company of… These were actually tickets people had to pay for and Dad was selling them.
One evening, he came in and, virtually as he entered, called to my Mam and me, “Come and look at this!” I thundered down the stairs from my bedroom and my mother came from the kitchen drying her hands in a towel (never a pinny for her!). My Dad was holding up a fairly large sheet of white paper. “Look,” he said, “It’s a five pound note!”
“It’s a bit dull!” I thought. “But the writing’s nice!” (It said Five Pounds and a lot else, in lovely italic script.)
My mother was worried, “Oh goodness! Suppose it gets stolen! Where can we put it safely?”
“It’ll be safe enough for one night!” my Dad said, “I’ll take it to the Bank in the morning!”
I am posting this story because I was involved in questions about how to type powers of ten and the most we can manage is 10³³, but nothing between 10³ and 10²°. I was thinking about all those billions mentioned all the time on the news and house prices… and I remembered our awed reaction to that fiver!! I wanted it to be bright and colourful to advertise its incredible value!
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Not a memory, but factual.
In the previous posting, I mentioned my Dad’s rank and people may think, “There’s fancy! An Officer!” Well, this is how that came about!
My Dad’s father’s family were originally stone cutters getting stone from quarries for buildings. One of them worked out that actual building work was better paid, had better hours and might be safer! My grandfather’s father decided that his son should become a joiner instead, as their work tended to be indoors! Hence my grandfather’s occupation!
During the First World War, somehow or other, he managed to get a job either building wooden seaplanes or advising on the best wood. (I know he advised in WW2!). He never went to War! He married a pretty little Welsh girl, possibly the daughter of the man he’d been apprenticed to! They had a girl and a boy and a baby on the way when his pretty wife began to cough and was diagnosed with TB. She ended up in a Sanatorium and the baby (a little girl) had TB too.
When his wife died, my Grandfather was suffering from food poisoning caught at a fancy dinner to which he had been taken by his new boss, a builder and fellow member of the Masons. I suppose my Mam-gu’s Mam looked after the children. I don’t know.
After the funeral, the builder approached my Grandfather and said, “Look, you can’t be expected to look after three children, one only a baby and sickly. She should be in the country and I have an aunt living in a nice village, who will gladly look after her for you. As for you, what you need is a wife. Someone trained to look after the house and do the cooking. My elder daughter is no oil painting, but she’s well trained. I have no hope of some lad fancying her if he sees her sister, who is a pretty lively girl. Marry my Gwen and I’ll make you my partner in the firm and I’ll give you a new house for a wedding present. We are building a couple in a really nice area and some garages opposite, so you could have a car too! You don’t want to stay where you are, that house will always remind you of poor Gladys.”
So he did. And ended up pretty well off. And my Dad had a step-mother a bit like Cinders’, and I had a step-Grandmother to whom I never referred in any other way! (“Nothing to do with us!”, my Dad and I would say!)
I am now sorry for her. She was sold to get her Dad an heir and it didn’t work because my Dad would have done anything to avoid working in the building trade! She couldn’t help her looks. She was kind to a lot of people, as we found out after she died. The marriage was destined from its beginning to be empty of any emotion but resentment.
Oh, her pretty sister married, had one daughter who married a Roman Catholic postman for love! They had one girl and about 6 boys and were poor and happy! My step-Grandmother had no children of her own and may well have been a Lesbian.
My dad got a Grammar School education when that cost money. He joined the Cadet Force. In 1938, sure that War was coming, he volunteered, His dad. knowing about the recession, had got him work in an office at the Town Hall -’ the only sort of job that’s safe!’ My dad hated it and was very,very keen to escape to the Army! The Cadet Force meant he was made Second Lieutenant virtually at once. Hence he had time to work up to Major by 1946!
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Ours was similar (no bathroom though). It was built within the structure of the house, but with only an external door, so you had to to out of the back door to get to it. However, a largish shed had been built, attached to the back of the house, which enclosed the door to the toilet (and also the coal hole next to it) which meant it wasn’t quite so cold out there, but a bit dark.
This is one end of a terrace block that used to include my house (40 Napier Street, Gloucester).
Google Streetview doesn’t always behave, but if you sort of move it along, you will see the old terraces on the right give out and have been replaced by modern houses (I had remembered them from when I visited a few years ago as being modern terraces, but they look more like semis, but with connecting garages - my house would have looked much like those remaining old terraces.
…ok, the direct link I originally had here isn’t going to work, but just go to
and input “40 Napier Street, Gloucester” and then go to “streetview” and you will get the general idea.
They seem to have done a lot of rebuilding in Raglan Street*, but if you turn around and go back along Napier Street, past the Sinope Street junction (you will see an old School building on the left), that all looks much as I remember it, although there were many fewer cars in those days.
Some other streets around there, like Widden Street, look much as I remember them as well, although a little smarter now I come to think.
- G maps is showing it as "Raclan Street, but that’s wrong - just checked with RM postcode finder - I assume it’s named after the Lord of that name, who was a Crimea War general.
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Our house with cellar and bathroom had the toilet door to the house side of the kitchen door, not the garden side. Atually, I think the ‘kitchen’ door was off what had been the scullery and that sort of wrapped round the toilet.
All this made me think of
Contrasts
I have tried to find pictures and failed, but I had a chance, later to find out how ‘the other half’ lived - not that it was actually half! Most people were working or lower middle class, I think!
When I went to Harrogate, I got the name/address of an agent from my new employers and. from them, possible flats to rent. I was in no position to buy! Well:-
- I had no deposit saved. London was too expensive to live in!
- I am female and in 1969, the idea of a single woman getting a mortgage was laughable!
I was very taken with the first and only one I viewed. It was the whole first floor of what had been a large house. The kind of house my recent ancestors had worked in as servants!
The most fascinating aspect was the toilet! Inside! It had been built that way in, I think, the Edwardian or very late Victorian era. I always made sure to show it to any visiting friends, even if they didn’t need to use it. I didn’t take its picture because I’ve never been good with a camera and I didn’t even own one then!
Its cistern was a large mahogany casket with lead interior. It was low flush! It was operated by an elegant metal push device and inside were enough moving parts to run the Flying Scotsman! I never quite worked out exactly what it did, but it always flushed perfectly and never leaked. It was in a small room off my hallway, which had been the upstairs landing, first floor.
The house had been converted into flats in, I would guess, the 1920s! The original small bathroom next to the toilet with stained glass windows for privacy and a large airing cupboard, had been stripped of bath and basin and can only have been the servant’s bedroom. I know there was a servant because the bell-box with switches showing which bell had rung was in my kitchen. The bells referred to my flat, not any other part of the house. (The front door was included as relevant.)
In the back garden had once been a large square pond. Someone had built a summer house in it. But the toilet was still the most interesting aspect of the establishment!
The sheer size of my flat, the ceiling height etc. made me see how those my people once served had lived!
The Victorians had, I think, some funny ideas about toilets, but also some good ones I believe.
I seem to remember their toilet technology was somewhat ahead of their sewage technology, so rather than “solving” the problem of waste disposal, they just moved it on a bit.
However, once they got the idea, they did a good job with that as well.
(I seem to be using a few double-entendres here…not intended, honest! 
).
(Maybe the period I am thinking of was slightly before the Victorians actually)
Well, for years, all the sewers in London were built (dug and lined) by the Victorians. A few may been refurbished since and new estates may have new ones, but the great sewer providers were Victorians.
If our village in Gower is anything to go on, well, cesspits until 1980ish! (I forget the exact year… oh there was a miners’ strike, so sometime between '84 and '85. I don’t think it was as early as '74!)
One of the men putting in the drains down the road had a brother who was a striking miner. Lovely lad with lovely mates. They all arrived and offered to connect everyone’s houses to the new drains. All but one!
“Sorry Butt! My brother says it’s solid rock between your house and the drain. We don’t have the equipment to get through it!”
We never found out how much it cost that man to get his drains connected!
Anyway, based on us, villages had a pretty long wait to catch up with towns and cities!
I think the worst for getting it off the premises and not caring after that were those rich Normans in castles who had privies in turrets with the waste just going down and landing on anyone who was passing!
Talking of miners and the other underground workers who built the UK’s sewer and drainage systems… Have you read the nail-biting accounts or seen any of the BBC documentaries on the tunnellers in WW1? Because of the various ground conditions, they needed specialists both from the mines and urban sewer projects (especially those knew how to work in clay). As an engineer, having worked both on huge city sewers and in underground mines, I find the stories riveting–and the challenges fascinating.
I have loved following your conversation–thank you!
Marilyn
Oh dear. I have been suffering a surfeit of WW1/2 Memorabilia and a tad of vexation that my Dad’s poor mates in Burma rarely get a mention. I was fascinated by a documentary about a Grandad who seemed to be everywhere my mam’s Dad, my Tad-cu was, including Gallipoli. I think it was on S4C, but I forget who was the presenter. We rarely get much about that campaign because it is presumed to be mostly Anzac forces!
Anyway, I vaguely noticed something about tunnels, but not being an engineer and being not fond of dark places with spiders, I avoided the programmes! I’ll see what I can find on iplayer!
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Don’t like dark spaces with spiders you say. I’m with you in my dislike, bordering on fear of spiders, but I have never seen one deep underground in the mines–on or near the surface yes, but never in the depths.
Except in the main working or haulage areas, many mines have areas with no lights–hence the need for headlamps. Friends have asked if it feels claustrophobic, but quite the opposite, because if you cannot see anything other than what is in the beam of the lamp, it is as if you stepped into infinity–or eternity.
Another of the beauties of being ‘down there’ is the amazing camaraderie and certainty that everyone is looking out for your safety and welfare. Sure, mining has its dangers and its ‘dark side’ (so I have heard) but all the folk I have met have been marvellous–like your da’s old chums.
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My only remotely relevant experience has been visits to pretty caves as a kid, Wookey Hole and Cheddar, England, and visits to Dan yr Ogof and The Big Pit as an adult. In the latter we were briefly plunged into darkness to get an idea what it was like for the little boy or girl employed to ‘man’ that particular door, opening it and closing it as needed and with no candle. I realise I did not see a spider on any of these occasions! (My sympathy for the little kids was great, however!).
But, the camaraderie is famous! When my ‘auntie’ had her drains connected during that strike, we asked the lads in to have their dinner with us, which seemed only right, but they were much too grateful to be an advert for the hospitality available in general! I asked them if they thought they might get a job out of the pit, if they didn’t get what they were fighting for.
“Don’t want to, Lovely! Mate of mine got a job with Hoover in the factory and he hates it. Chap with a clipboard, Supervisor like, watching him all day long. Has to ask permission just to…er… use the gents. Down the pit, we all know we can trust each other with our lives. We all work hard together. We rely on each other. We don’t need some chap with a clipboard telling us what to do!”
That’s obviously a paraphrase of what I remember from 30+ years ago, but it catches the gist! I think I may have asked about Max Boyce’s “Diw it’s hard!” because he may have hated the factory atmosphere, but did not regret leaving the pit, but if I did, our miners didn’t want to change their place of work!
p.s. Failed to find the tunneling programmes, but will keep looking! And I still admire you for your choice of career and success therein!