The Time of my Life

Book details

Title: The Time of my Life
Genre: Autobiography
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1904976-08-0
Price: £6.99

Synopsis

The author has led a varied and interesting life and has decided to leave an everlasting record of his achievements by way of this book. When his daughter-in-law’s father passed away recently, she and her whole family realised they actually knew very little about his early life - a situation that probably manifests itself in the aftermath of many other bereavements. Harry decided at that point that he would document his whole life for the benefit of his family and anyone else who might be interested. The fact is that we all play our part in contributing to the history of the world but in most cases nobody finds out what part we actually played because we kept it to ourselves. Yet old photographs and written words can be of interest, not only to historians, but to anyone who has a desire to learn about their forefathers and understand what motivated them. This is the result of Harry’s effort to document the part he played.

Extract

Time of my Life It was a different world then in Scunthorpe where I spent the first twenty years of my life. It was one of the many agricultural villages of North Lincolnshire until the mid-nineteenth century when a local landowner, Rowland Winn, who was out with a shooting party near the village, tripped over a piece of rock. Some men would have cursed the rock and walked on but Mr Winn was of an enquiring mind; he picked up the rock, thought it looked interesting, and decided to have it investigated. The analysis showed that it was, in fact, iron ore. Having not only an enquiring mind but also an eye for the main chance, Rowland Winn leased the land to the Dawes brothers who built a blast furnace and produced the first iron in 1864.

As a result, Scunthorpe became a boom town; more iron and steel works were built and population growth soon absorbed the surrounding villages of Frodingham, Crosby, Brumby and Ashby. In 1936 Scunthorpe became a borough and took for its motto “Refulget Labores Nostros Caelum” - The Heavens Reflect Our Labours – a reference to the lighting up of the whole sky when the molten slag from the blast furnaces was tipped on the slag heaps.

But enough of Scunthorpe for the moment – what of me? I was born in Scunthorpe in 1921 to Allan and Lily Threlfall and when I was very young, probably in 1924, I was adopted by my mother’s aunt and uncle, Margaret and Ernest Brown. I never queried this arrangement, but just accepted it. For the next three years of my life I lived in a fair-sized terrace house in Home Street in the centre of town together with the Browns (“Memmy and Unk” to me), my mother’s cousin, Connie, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, Ann and Henry Hollingsworth.

This may seem a complicated arrangement but extended families living together were not unusual in those days. The house was big enough - it had obviously been built for Henry Hollingsworth as his initials and the date ‘1888’ were engraved into the front façade - and everyone lived happily together.

A few words about family arrangements before the social reforms which were introduced after the Second World War. There was never any question of old people having to move into retirement homes - such places did not exist. It was customary for one of the children – usually a daughter – to stay in the family home and look after her parents when they became old. The only alternative for destitute old people with no relatives to support them was the workhouse - a dreadful institution in which men and women were separated and slept in dormitories. The regime was like that of a prison.

The nearest workhouse to Scunthorpe was at Brigg, eight miles away, and the expression ‘going to Brigg’ (said with fingers crossed!) meant suffering the ultimate degradation of being taken to the workhouse. That was the Welfare State of the first half of the last century. There had been some relief for old people in 1908 when David Lloyd-George introduced the Old Age Pension which paid out five shillings a week (later increased to ten shillings a week) to people over seventy years old. Ten shillings was the equivalent of fifty pence in modern money but it represented almost a quarter of the average labourer’s wage. One often heard the expression going to the Post Office to collect my Lloyd George!

Most houses in towns were built in terraces, in a continuous block that is. They usually had very small gardens. Number 21 Home Street, where we lived, had an alley between it and its neighbour with a front gate. On Friday and Saturday evenings men from some of the villages, especially Winterton about five miles away, would pay a few pence to park their bicycles there. Either there was no bus service or the parking fee was less than the bus fare! But to the residents it was an early example of private enterprise.

The kitchen was the hub of activity in the house. Cooking was done on a Yorkshire Range - a black monster which had to be ‘blackleaded’ regularly to keep it shining, rather like polishing black shoes. The range heated the kitchen and the oven, but there was no piped hot water supply and no bathroom. Baths were taken in a tin bath in the kitchen with hot water heated on the range – quite cosy, but not very glamorous! Each of the three bedrooms had a jug and washbasin for morning and evening ablutions and, of course, a chamber pot. There was no lavatory in the house but an earth closet in an outhouse ‘down the yard’. This raised problems if anyone was ill and I remember that when I had an attack of measles I was provided with a commode. If you don’t know what that is look it up in the dictionary!

There was no electricity in the house and downstairs rooms were lit by gas mantles. I can still recall the distinctive small explosion as the gas jet ignited and the increasing light as the silk mantle heated up. Each bedroom was lit at bedtime by a portable oil lamp. All this domestic detail may sound very primitive but my family were by no means poor and these conditions were fairly common among the working and lower middle classes. The absence of any space for a garden in terraced housing was often compensated for by an allotment. My family had one a few hundred yards from the house and there was never any need to buy vegetables or flowers.

Other food supplies came from the Co-op grocery shop, again, almost on the doorstep. The Scunthorpe Co-operative Society was quite a force in the town with several grocery shops and, later on, a department store … and even a cinema. Its main competitors in the town were branches of national grocery chains such as Maypole, Home and Colonial and Melias. But one of the attractions of the Co-op was its ‘Dividend’. Every member of the society had a ‘dividend number’. When you bought anything at the Stores’ you quoted your number which was recorded with your purchase on the cash machine. I still remember our family numbers: 10726 and 11625! Every year a dividend was declared – usually two shillings (i.e. 10 pence) in the pound (=10%) which was paid into your account.

How the Co-op prices compared with those in private shops I have no idea but the Co-op and its ‘divi’ were certainly very popular. Supermarkets were unheard of. A customer in a grocery shop went to the counter and gave her order to the assistant who fetched most of the items from the shelves. Sugar was weighed out from a large container and put into 1lb or 2lb bags. Butter was taken from another bin, weighed, patted into shape and wrapped in greaseproof paper. The assistant wrote out a bill, the customer paid in cash, put the groceries in her shopping bags and left.

Home Street was only a stone’s throw from Scunthorpe Church St John’s) which was the centre of the old town. There was a horse trough close to the church and although motorised delivery vans and lorries were increasing in number there were still horse-drawn vehicles on the streets including milk floats where you took your jug out to the milkman who filled it from the large milk churn carried on the float.

When great-grandfather Hollingsworth died in Scunthorpe Hospital in 1927 his body was brought back to the house, as was the custom, to lie in his coffin in the ‘front room’. The funeral hearse was a magnificent glass-sided vehicle drawn by four black horses with black plumes. The open marketplace was also quite close to Home Street but in the opposite direction from the Church.

A market was held every Friday and Saturday. In the evening all the stalls were lit by naphtha flares – roaring naked flames fed from gas cylinders similar to the modern butane cylinders … but much more exciting! We had a personal interest in the market because Unk used to help out on a sweet stall owned by a Jewish family from Grimsby. Eventually, even our dog, Jack, grew tired of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate!

A few more aspects of life in Home Street: wireless, as it was then known, was in its infancy and there was only one broadcasting studio, which was in Savoy Hill, London. Its title was 2LO and it was owned by the British Broadcasting Company. Earlier radio sets relied on what was referred to as a cat’s whisker – a delicate wire which, by dint of much fiddling, was coaxed into contact with the correct spot on a crystal to detect the incoming signal, forming a sort of primitive diode or microchip. There was little, if any, amplification and certainly not enough power to operate a loudspeaker, so the solitary ‘listener’ to a ‘crystal set’ had to use headphones and request silence from everyone else in the room!

We had a crystal set in Home Street, and it was considered miraculous to be able to hear in Scunthorpe the voice of someone speaking in a ‘posh’ accent nearly two hundred miles away!

A couple of a hundred yards away was a repertory theatre, the Empire, where I was sometimes taken by Memmy to see old favourites – mostly melodramas - such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and East Lynn (“Dead! Dead! And never called me Mother!”)

I have no recollection of any cinemas or magic lantern shows at that time. The family had no interest in public houses nor, I’m afraid, churches. Evenings were generally spent gossiping round the fire in the kitchen or reading the newspaper, especially the local weekly Scunthorpe and Frodingham Star. Perhaps once a week Memmy, Unk and I would go round to a neighbour’s house to play rummy or whist – both very good for improving an infant’s arithmetic abilities, it has to be said!

My reading matter was limited to Chick’s Own followed by Tiger Tim’s Weekly, all bought from Westoby’s newsagents at the bottom of Home Street. When I was about five, I had a Hornby train set. I say ‘train set’, which sounds rather grand, but it consisted of one clockwork engine, a tender, two passenger coaches and a circular track. Not the best train set in the world but it meant a lot to me.

The only illness I recall suffering from at Home Street was measles which was quite serious in those days. There was never any question of being admitted to a hospital – I just stayed in bed and had daily visits from the old family physician, Dr ‘Johnny’ Walker. (I would love to have known how he travelled on his rounds but, unfortunately, I never shall!) The only pain I still remember from those days occurred when I was taken across the road to see Fred Mee, the barber. The absence of electricity meant that the clippers Fred used on the neck and sideboards were operated by hand and, if Fred lost his concentration, they were liable to pull out the hairs by the roots.

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The Time of my Life by Harry Threlfall

Book details

Synopsis

Extract

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