Growing Up In Lancashire in the 1930s

I was born in a Lancashire town called Kirkham, a few miles from the Fylde coast.

I thought of Kirkham the other day because I was having lunch in the White Horse pub in Shere (in Surrey where I now live) and got chatting to two old chaps, two brothers. I noticed they had Lancashire twangs to their voices even though, like me, they'd lost most of their accent from decades of living in the south of England. They turned out to have had childhood friends in Kirkham and we reminisced a bit about what the town and surrounding area were like before and during the war.

Kirkham had one main street with a few shops, a cinema, a municipal swimming pool and an ancient Grammar School for boys. My family moved to the neighbouring town of Wesham (pronounced Wessom) before I was old enough to remember the house where I was born. In those days women tended to have their babies at home. My mother also gave birth to a boy some years earlier, my brother, but he had spina bifida and died not long after he was born. It was seen as perfectly normal to give birth at home in the same bed where your babies were conceived. It was years later that it became normal for women to give birth in hospitals. Certainly it was pretty normal by the time I had my first child in 1953. That was in America. My second was born in 1956, in England, also in hospital. I wonder if the old house where I was born is still standing, like me, 81 years later.

Wesham was a much smaller town, with just a handful of shops and a railway station and at the bottom of the town a weaving mill where most people from Wesham worked. The cotton mill, to me as a small child, was a really fearsome place full of noise and the clanking of the weaving looms. No-one could be heard in the din of the mill machinery and the only way the workers could communicate was by sign language - which was called me-mo-ing - or by lip reading. My mother was a weaver in the Wesham mill.

I only ever got to go right inside the mill once. It was probably in 1934, when I was about five. My mother had recently gone back to work there and I don't know who was supposed to be looking after me but I was found crying for my mother outside the mill. I was taken in and reunited with her and that was the end of her return to work! From then on she stayed at home.

My father was a labourer with the Water Board and earnt a bit of extra money helping with tasks like haymaking on local farms.

I had 3 aunties and 1 uncle. Auntie Polly was the eldest, then Auntie Nellie - who was deaf and dumb following an attack of scarlet fever when she was two - my mother Isabella was next and then Auntie Lizzie, who suffered from epilepsy.

Auntie Lizzie worked in a café in St Annes and on Saturday nights would bring round to our house a bag of cakes that were left over, unsold. This was one of the highlights of my week. Sometimes if I was lucky there would be vanilla slices or cream crisps; other times there were only bath buns.

Auntie Lizzie had no children and her husband, my Uncle Jim, worked as a signalman on the railyway. This was a lonely occupation, sitting alone waiting to work the signals for the trains, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown, having first tried to commit suicide by gassing himself. Fortunately, my cousin Joe Lambert, Auntie Polly's son, called round, found him and rescued him and poor Uncle Jim was carted off to the local mental hospital where he remained for many years.

As well as my aunties and uncle and a lot of cousins I also had both my granddads. My mother's father, Granddad Gillett, was pretty fearsome to me. He seemed about ten feet tall and had a grim face with a large hooked nose. He had apparently ruled his children, including my mother, with a rod of iron. None of them got married till they were thirty - he wouldn't let them. They all lived at home and I gather he took a good proportion of their wages off them as he retired early and even went on holiday to Spain with Monsigneur Rockliffe, our parish priest - a thing unheard of at that time in Lancashire society. The Monsigneur obviously squirelled money away somehow - when he died he left enough money to buy everyone in the parish a prayer book. All the books had a dedication to him inside them. I've still got my copy. He disapproved of books that weren't religious. He came round one day and saw that my Aunt Polly had bought a romance. He threw it on the fire!

Granddad Gillett allowed his children out on Saturdays once they were grown up, but they had to be in by 9pm. Granddad would be standing by the door with a cup of cold water from which they all had a drink before going up to bed.

Auntie Lizzie finally broke ranks and got engaged and then Auntie Polly and my mother followed suit. My father and mother courted for seven years before marrying, partly because Granddad was so strict and partly because my father - who used to come into Wesham on Saturday nights to seee my mum - suffered from an inability to get past the Swan Hotel where he used to put up his bike. After seven years my mother issued an ultimatum: we either get married or it's all off! They got married and I never knew my father to go into a pub or take a drink, except perhaps at Christmas or just a glass beer after helping with the haymaking.

Granddad Gillett died when I was 8. We had a sort of lying in state where Granddad was propped up in bed with 6 big candles burning, 3 on either side of him, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins gathered round saying prayers for the dead, with our parish priest in attendance. I was positioned at the bottom of the bed, peering up at my dead granddad. I have never forgotten the experience. I was bought a new grey coat to go to the funeral. In those days everyone went into deepest mourning when a close relative died and mother and the aunts all went to Preston, the nearest town, to buy their black. My mother apparently tried on a dress which looked a bit peculiar round the collar but the sales assistant assured her "it's the latest cowl collar, madam." It wasn't. Mother had put the dress on back to front. In spite of granddad's recent death apparently all my aunts fell about laughing.

It was a nice day for the funeral, sunny but cold, and everyone cried by the graveside. Afterwards the whole family went to the Swan Hotel - I think it was the only pub in Wesham - and had a funeral breakfast. Salad and boiled ham at that time was a great luxury.

Another memory, apart from seeing my grandfather dead in bed, is the way my aunts and their husbands, having been weeping at the graveside, were now all laughing and joking and making merry. I was shocked by this. I've been to enough funerals now, at my age, to know this is often the way, but then, with the logic of an 8 year old, I felt it was not right!

The tradition of wearing black when you were in mourning for a close relative persisted up until the late 1940s. When my mother died in 1949 I was 19 years old. We were told she died of pernicious anaemia. Young people then, unlike today, didn't wear black clothes. My father wanted me in black from head to foot and I was appalled. One of my aunts prevailed upon him at least to let me wear a white blouse with a black suit, which I did.

I was by myself with my mother when she died. It was a beautiful June morning and my father had gone to fetch the doctor. We had a little car by that time but no telephone. My mother, who had not had good health for years, became ill in the night and father wakened me at about 5.30am to sit with her while he drove to fetch the doctor from Wesham. She died whilst he was gone. I had read about people having a 'death rattle' and it was true with my mother.

Like granddad, my mother stayed at home in her coffin until the funeral.

At first, I was nevous about this and was necessarily in the house alone with her whilst my father went about making arrangements for the funeral . But then I got used to it and would go in and see her and give her a kiss and talk to her a bit.

I'm jumping ahead of myself here though and will go back to our life in Wesham when I was a small child.

Our house was an end-of-terrace but on the 'top road', not down near the cotton mill, which was reckoned to be a bit more elite! The front door opened right onto the pavement, with a little hall called a vestibule before you opened the door into the living room. We had just one living room, a fairly big kitchen with a walk-in pantry, and 3 bedrooms. There was no fridge back then. The pantry was just cold. There were shelves where my mother kept butter, milk, cream and meat. They were all covered to protect them from flies. She made cakes and plum and damson preserves for the winter. We had no bathroom or indoor toilet. The toilet was up at the end of our small garden but was at least a water closet and not one of the old type privies which were all they had on my aunties' and uncles' farms out in the countryside.

We had chamber pots under the beds for night time use. My mother and father had a splendid one, black with pink roses all over it, which had been a wedding present.

For baths, every Saturday night a tin bath with a high back, which hung on a nail outside the back door, was brought in and set before the fire. I was then bathed by my mother and put into a clean nightie, with my clean clothes laid out ready for Sunday. I wore a vest which always had a St Christopher's medal pinned to it with a little gold safety pin. Why my mother thought this was necessary, as St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers and I never went anywhere, I don't know. After the vest I wore a garment called a liberty bodice, a sort of sleeveless jacket with buttons up the front. I wore navy blue fleecey knickers and long brown woollen stockings, kept up with garters made by my mother from pieces of elastic.

I suppose all these garments were necessary because we had no heating except for the coal fire in the living room. The coal man used to come round with his horse and cart, and coal on the back and my father would buy sacks of coal. Also, we had no electric light, just gas light. The lights had mantles made of gauze and you pulled a small cord to get the gas to flow. Then we lit the mantles with lighted tapers. Outside our house was a street light and that was also gas. A little man used to come along in winter with a long pole and a taper on the end to light it.