CHAPTER 6. WEST MARTON DAIRY 1963 TO 1969

[Stanley]

WEST MARTON DAIRY 1963 TO 1969

At the end of 1963 I left Billy Harrison and the tramp and went back to West Marton Dairies. David Peacock was the managing director, Bill Mills was the manager and Colin Barritt was the dairy manager. It was the beginning of a period of big changes at West Marton. I think by the time I went back there they had been bought out by Associated Dairies who had plans for the future role of the dairy. However, for the time being, things were much the same as when I left. Davies Dairy at Bradford had been bought by Express Dairies as part of a rationalisation amongst the big dairy companies so the bottling load had been reduced.

The Milk Marketing Board were picking up the farm milk with the exception of the local milk round the triangle which was brought in by a West Marton wagon. My long time mate and rabbiting partner Ted Lawson drove this and did a load to Holts at Nelson as well. I was given a new Ford 4D five ton wagon and took over Settle School Milk. My job was to deliver one third of a pint bottles of milk to all the schools from West Marton northwards as far as Settle and Kirby Lonsdale. After this, I delivered a load of bottled milk to Holt’s Dairy at Colne. During the school holidays I did odd jobs like taking a tanker of skim milk to Marshall’s piggery at Bradley or further afield. Marshall’s was a favourite job because they slaughtered pigs as well and I could always get a parcel of fresh pig’s liver from there and we had some good breakfasts at home.

We had an old AEC Monarch with a tank on it and I used this for skim deliveries for a long time. It was a rough old motor but had a big engine in and was a ‘proper’ heavy wagon. It had a great big four speed crash box and the joke was you allowed two lamp posts to go by when you were changing up and one when going down. It was dreadfully slow but would climb anything in second gear. I delivered skim to Bingley, Crawshawbooth and Bradley on a regular basis for pig feeding. Marshalls used to use it fresh, they mixed it with pig swill from the school canteens and schools and barley meal and boiled the whole lot up in a large open boiler with an agitator in it. This made a lovely smelling porridge which was pumped directly into the rearing houses. The pigs were wonderfully clean and content.

Apart from the pig liver there was another perk at Marshall’s. Every now and again they would have to drain the big open boiler and clear the bottom out because the level of bones and other debris had built up until it was interfering with the smooth running of the agitator. One of the items causing the trouble was cutlery which had found its way into the swill bins at hotels and canteens. They used to sort this out from the bones and there were sacks of the stuff. Vera and I were hard up for cutlery so I asked if I could have some. They were glad to get rid of it so I took about three sacks back to the dairy, emptied them into a 12 gallon kit and boiled them up first with detergent to clean them and then hypochlorite to sterilise them, I finished up with a good boiling and took the kit home. We had everything from ladles and knives down to forks and spoons. The only thing that wasn’t in there was tea spoons, I suppose because they never got near the swill. We never bought any other cutlery all the time we were married!

Some of the other places we delivered to were not so good. Patersons at Birstall kept their pigs in sweat boxes and fed them on all sorts of offal from the food preparation industry. Broken biscuits, scrap chocolate and misshapen liquorice allsorts were staples. The pigs used to get covered in whatever they were feeding on and it was like a scene out of hell. Other feeders put formaldehyde in the milk to stop it curdling in the pipes. Given a choice I’d have been a pig at Marshall’s any day rather than the other customers. Mind you, I’ve taken many a bag of mis-shaped chocolates or liquorice allsorts home with me from Birstall, they tasted just as good as the perfect ones!

Early in 1964 Tony Midgeley went to work at Whitewell Dairy at Accrington which had been taken over by Associated Dairies. This left Wallace Neave short-handed in the garage and I became a jack of all trades for a while. I’d give Wallace a hand with servicing the wagons, do an odd load of skim and any light haulage that wanted doing. At this time Clover Dairies from Hull were building a big new creamery at Settle and I think as part of the rationalisation, AD agreed to shut Barbon Creamery down, the a dairy they had owned for years. At the same time they bought Birstwith Cheese factory near Harrogate and I think Colin went up there for a while to learn about cheese making. We owned another cheese factory (Dugdale’s) up at Sedbergh and the cheese maker there was Fred Taylor, he was to come to Marton eventually and worked there until he retired.

All these changes meant lots of funny little jobs like taking tanks and machinery out and bringing them down to Marton. I remember once being sent up to Barbon to bring a square stainless steel tank down. Jack Brown, the plumber from West Marton was up there helping John, the Barbon fitter to drag it out and they had rigged up a set of sheer legs in the yard at the back to lift the tank high enough to back the wagon underneath. Jack was a happy go lucky bugger and I recall as we were stood under the tank, pulling on the fall of the chain block to get the tank as high as we could, one of the legs of the tackle started to slip outwards. I shouted a warning to Jack and ran like hell up this heap of loose coal which was adjacent. As fast as I ran, the coal slipped back behind me and I was making very little progress. At last I reached the top and safety and when I turned round Jack was still stood under the tank laughing at me. Luckily the leg had hit a bolt which stuck out of the concrete and went no further. Jack hadn’t even realised the danger, he was too busy laughing at me! We loaded the tank and took it to Marton and Jack was telling the story about me panicking for days afterwards.

Funny how coincidences and linkages occur. Barbon was the family seat of the Shuttleworth family,, Lord Charles was the current holder of the title and I was to come into contact with him later in different circumstances. The nearest village was Cowan Bridge, the Barbon Estate Office was there as was the school where the Bronte Sisters were educated and which had the famous outbreak of cholera. There was to be a link with this also.

One funny thing about Barbon was the drainage. They had been running the dairy for years and had the best sewage disposal system I have ever seen. The waste water from a dairy or cheese factory is horrible stuff to deal with. I was to have lots of experience with this later when I was put in charge of the West Marton sewage treatment plant for a while. At Barbon they had no trouble at all because in the back lot behind the dairy there was a cleft in the ground. They found out in the early days that whatever was poured down this cleft vanished forever. All the sour milk and waste water went down. It’s limestone country up there and I’ve often thought that one of these days some cavers are going to explore a new system and get the shock of their lives!

Plans were announced for converting Marton from a creamery to a cheese factory. This wouldn’t affect our employment but was to mean a change of jobs for almost everyone at the dairy. Colin had already gone off to learn cheese-making and gradually our old functions were taken away from us as demolition started and the new dairy and cheese store rose on the site.

At one time, Marton had been run by a steam engine with steam provided by a Cornish boiler. The engine was long gone, it had powered the whole of the buildings including the Gledstone Estate workshops and mortar mill. Gledstone were just moving out when I went back there. I remember two things about this; one day Bill Mills the manager asked me if I’d do him a favour before I went home. He wanted me to sweep out the old workshop which the estate had vacated. I went to it and found that they’d spilled nails and screws all over the floor. I got a twelve gallon kit and filled it and took it home. It took me years to get them sorted out but I didn’t buy a screw or a nail for twenty years so I reckon it was a well paid job. My mate Newton Pickles told me a story about the engine at Marton. It had broken down one day and Newton’s father’s firm, Henry Brown Son and Pickles was brought in to set it right. Walt Fisher was doing the job and at some point David Peacock sent Bunty Heaton, who worked in the office, to ask Walt what was wrong with the engine. After a while he realised she hadn’t come back so he went into the outer office and there was Bunty sat at her desk working away as if he had never asked her to do anything. He asked her if she had spoken to Walt and she said “Yes, but I’m not telling you what he said, it was rude!” He digested this and asked her if she would write it down for him. She agreed to this and a couple of minutes later went into David’s office and put an envelope in front of him. He opened it up and it said “Mr Fisher says the governor’s balls have dropped off.”

Part of the alterations involved taking the old engine beds out. I was given the job of breaking them up with a pneumatic hammer and they were as hard as the hobs of hell. I found out years later that the reason was that part of the mix when they were poured was cast iron borings and granite dust. It was like breaking solid glass and I had to keep getting Jimmy Thompson to sharpen the bits for the hammer.

We were still using the old Cornish boiler right up to the conversion. Len Pitts used to fire it and he had the best job in the dairy. Mind you, it was a temperamental old bugger, short of draught and undersized but Len had it down to a fine art, there was seldom any shortage of steam while he was firing. I remember he had the same thing for dinner every day. When he got in in the morning he would get a can of Machonochie’s Irish stew out of his bag, spike a hole in it and put it on top of the steam cylinder on the Weir pump which fed the boiler. By dinnertime it was just right and that was what he had every day.

The big trick with the Cornish was to clean the firebars without putting the fire out. When coal burns at high temperature in a boiler furnace the ash melts and solidifies on the bars as clinker. Eventually this builds up to the point where it chokes the spaces between the bars and cuts down the amount of air available to support combustion. If nothing is done, the fire loses efficiency and steam pressure will drop. Len used to make sure he had a good fire going and then he’d open the door, split the fire down the middle and turn the burning coal from one half of the fire on to the top of the other. Then he’d rake the clinker out of the uncovered side, drag some burning coal back on to the clean firebars, throw about three shovels of coal on and bang the firebox door shut. After a minute or two he’d open up again and put more coal on the side he had cleaned. When he was sure he had a good bright bed to work with he would repeat the operation with the other side, then he’d give it a good firing and steam would hardly drop.

When Len had a day off Jack Brown would fire the boiler and he never quite got the hang of cleaning out. Frequently the fire went out but Jack knew his limitations and always had some bits of timber and oily rags about so he could do a quick re-light. I was talking to him one day and he asked me to open the firebox door and have a look at the fire. The door was low down and had a foot pedal arrangement for opening it. I trod on the pedal, there was a muffled explosion and a flame shot out fifteen feet into the yard. Jack had stuffed the box full of oily rags and knew that there was a good chance of an explosion when the door opened and the air hit the smouldering rags so he got me to do it!

Len had a blue Hillman car which was his pride and joy, he always had it parked in the boiler house yard where he could keep an eye on it. Percy Graham, who used to work with Vera on the bottle washers, was turning his little Commer wagon round in the yard one day when he had a little mishap. He was carrying a twenty foot length of two inch galvanised pipe at the time and it stuck out over the back about six feet. When asked later he admitted to having ‘touched’ Len’s car. Len knew nothing about this until he was driving home that night. He couldn’t understand why he had a draught on the back of his neck until he pulled up in front of Crow Nest mill to pick his wife up. She got in and then asked him why there was a hole in the car! Len got out and had a look and found a hole right through the metal in the pillar between the rear window and the side of the car. Percy had ‘touched’ it all right! He was about 75 years old then and had been driving all his life.

The first thing the contractors did when they came to the dairy was build us a new boiler house and chimney. We had two automatic, oil fired economics installed and I was put in charge of them for a while. All I had to do was keep the burners and boiler house clean and push the right buttons in the morning. There was one slight problem when the brickies were building the chimney, the chief brickie on the job made a batter board, a piece of wood notched for the plumb bob and which was shaped to the correct batter or taper on the chimney which was one inch to a yard. When a batter board is made like this it is good practise to plane the outside edge in a curve so that it is always used the right way. As it was only a small chimney and he was the only man working on it the brickie didn’t bother. This was all right until he was off work for a fortnight with flu and when he came back he found his replacement had used the wrong side of the board and the chimney was as bent as a dog’s hind leg. It had to be pulled back almost half way down. To save money the flue brick liner was left intact but all the bonding key bricks had to be cut. It was rebuilt without them and I always said that the only thing that held it together was the cap stones at the top!

I was working in the garage one day when Raymond, the foreman builder came in to ask me whether I’d cut a water pipe for them in the yard. I went down with the gas bottles and there were two pipes in the hole, a new one and an old one, both steel pipes which was unusual. I asked him which one he wanted cutting and he said the new one. I asked him if he was sure and Jack Brown, who was overseeing the job said that it was the right one. I started cutting and had to warm it a lot before it got hot enough to cut but I put this down to the fact that it was probably still full of water. I got it hot and started cutting and a jet of water about twenty feet high shot out and drenched everyone. As I scrambled out of the hole I could hear Jack saying to Raymond, “That’s it, it’s the other one, I remember now!” The dairy was stopped for about an hour while they drained the pipe and I welded it up again!

The bed of the old mortar mill was a bit of a problem. It was solid concrete, about twelve feet square. Raymond had the answer to this, he brought a mate of his down from a quarry in Halifax and they drilled it and put a pill in it. The police came and guarded all the entrances while he blew it one evening, it was a lovely job, a dull thud and the block shattered into small pieces. The bobby on the road didn’t even hear it go off and he was only about 75 yards away.

As the work on the new buildings progressed we lost the bottling and had to tank all the milk out. We had a couple of tanks already driven by Danny Pateman and Colin Wallin who left shortly afterwards. Paying out for private hauliers wasn’t David Peacock’s style and so he went out and bought another dairy, J.E.Hall at Lancaster. They had two AEC Mercury tankers numbered JEH 28 and 29, all Hall’s motors were numbered JEH. It was a Staffordshire registration and Hall’s had got JEH 1 to 30. These two motors came down to Marton and Bill Mills asked me whether I’d take one of them and go on to tanking full time. I told him it would suit me down to the ground but I wanted to be on the same motor all the time then I could get it comfortable. This is what happened and from the middle of 1964 until I left the dairy in 1969 I had JEH 28 and carried milk depot to depot.

Tanking milk was right up my street. We used to load raw milk in the early afternoon and take the tanker home ready to set off at whatever time was necessary the following morning. We went to every dairy between Sanquar in Scotland and Ashby de la Zouch in the Midlands. We had about three or four hours drive out and back and had to be at the receiving dairy in time for them to bottle and process the milk ready for morning delivery. This usually meant a five o’clock delivery so we were often away at one in the morning in order to be sure of getting there on time. We would get back about lunch time, load up, get the next days destination and then the rest of the day was our own. This gave me time for jobs at home and time with the kids and Vera. It was a clean job and the only hard work was cleaning the tank out after tipping. We used to climb in to the tank with a hose and a bucket of detergent, wash the milk off then scrub with the detergent, swill down and then steam for about half an hour before driving home with the lid propped open to cool the tank down. All the lads used ODC but I favoured some pink, cold water detergent. It turned out in the end that it was a good choice, an alarmingly large number of people had bad stomachs or died of cancer and I always thought it might be something to do with the ODC.

We ended up with five tankers on the road, the two AECs, an old Albion with a glass lined tank, two Leyland Comets, and a Seddon which used to belong to Macfarlane’s who were based Bentham way. This last wagon was very fast and had a beautiful red bucket driver’s seat. When we sold it and put its tank on to a Ford 6D chassis I swapped the seat out of my AEC for the Seddon seat and put a sheepskin cover on it. It was wonderfully comfortable and lasted me out. Incidentally, when we put the Ford on the road my Mercury was in dock for repairs and they asked me to take the new wagon and run it in a bit. It was very fast but an uncomfortable cab made worse by the fact that the garage at Kirkstall Road in Leeds had mounted the tank too far back. It was very light on the front end and played hell with your diaphragm when you went over a ripple on the road. I had a word with Wallace and we slacked off the holding down bolts and jacked it forward as far as it would go, this cured it and it was OK after that but never a favourite. I remember the first day I had it I was fiddling with the plastic cover in the centre of the driving wheel as I was going down the road and it came off in my hand. There was a folded piece of paper inside and when I opened it out it had only one word written on it; ‘NOSEY!’, I put it back.

At one point we had another tanker, a BMC and it was without doubt the worst wagon ever built as far as the driver was concerned. The springing was hard, the cab tinny and the noise was incredible. I remember being called out to it down the country while I was in the garage with Wallace. The driver complained of loss of power and when I got to it I had a look round and then cleared the dirt and stones from behind the organ pedal type accelerator. A complete cure! Two hours drive back up to Marton and a good laugh at the driver.

The old Albion or Albino as we called it was an antique. Legend had it that it was the first wagon Johnson, the transport manager at Kirkstall Road, had driven when he joined Associated Dairies just after the war. It had the Albion four cylinder oil engine, a four speed box, a square wooden cab and a Neate winch type hand brake that when applied, effectively blocked the way out of the driver’s door unless parked in the forward position. It had a top speed of 32mph. and no brakes at all. When the 1968 Transport Act came in and all wagons had to have minimum brake efficiency figures, the Albion failed miserably, the hand brake was better than the footbrake. Johnson at Leeds said we should have told him, all I can say is that if he had driven it himself he must have known how bad they were. Incidentally, we had tried to get rid of the Albion. I drained all the oil out of it into a drum and drove it from Ilkley to Marton with a dry sump. It did it no harm at all! Eventually the engine burst and we reported this to Leeds. We were told to send a van over as they had a spare engine which they’d bought from Leeds Bus Department years ago. We put it in and it was slower than the original. Nobody was sorry to see it go but it should have been preserved it was so old.

Being on tankers meant there was a very important perk to the job. When I got home at night I used to run off a gallon of blue milk out of the tap at the back, most of the cream had floated to the top. The kids and Vera got through this gallon of milk every day, we must have lived on rice pudding. At weekend, when I got up early in the morning I would open the lid and take a quart of cream off the top. I know this was stealing but ever mindful of my bible studies I made it a rule not to muzzle the ox! Besides, it was to feed the kids and Marton got it out of me in many other ways.

Milking the iron cow reminds me of when I broke down on the way back from Uttoxeter with half a load of Jersey milk. This was a regular job at one time, I used to do a load out and then pick up this Jersey milk and deliver it to Leeds the following morning. I would then go back to Marton and load for Uttoxeter again for the following morning. Anyway, I was coming up the M6 one evening, flat out and doing 42mph. when one of the fan belts broke, dragged off the other two and tore the dynamo off the block. This meant I had no cooling so I pulled off into the café at Lymm on the A56 and rang AEC Service at St Helens. They came out with the tow truck and took me into St Helens where the night shift fitted a new dynamo and bracket. At one point they were bemoaning the fact that the day shift hadn’t left them any milk! I told them not to worry and fixed them up with a gallon. The service manager was pulling my leg about breaking down in a café car park, I told him that this was the mark of the experienced driver, it was only sprogs who broke down miles from anywhere!

Our really busy times were at Christmas and strawberry harvest when the demand for cream went right through the roof. Remember that in those days strawberries were seasonal, there was a window of about four weeks when everyone wanted cream. At Marton we used to tank just about all the milk out to Queens Road Dairy in Halifax where they separated it. We loaded back to Settle Creamery with skim and then went to Marton to reload with milk. At times we just about ran day and night. Sometimes we ran short of milk at Marton and would take it from Settle back to Halifax. I remember one time in winter when this nearly killed me. I was going to Halifax with a load of milk and had gone over Queensbury because I knew the Denholme Road was bad. I got snowed in about a mile past Black Dyke Mill and tried to dig my way out. I realised in the end it was useless and started to walk back up the road to the mill. When I came to I was naked in a hot bath at the mill and a nurse was pouring hot water over me. I had collapsed in a snow drift and had been found because a girl fell over me in the dark as she was going for her dad’s evening paper, the boy hadn’t delivered it because of the weather! Talk about luck! They thawed me out and by that time the plough had reached the wagon. I went back out climbed in and delivered the milk at Halifax. We must have been mad!

This reminds me of another incident. It was New Year’s Morning, just after midnight and I was booked into Lincoln and Carleton dairy for 0530. This was a bottling dairy and as it was an iron frost and a chance of snow, I left early. Just as I was turning the corner off Gisburn Road on to Skipton Road in Barlick my near side front spring broke clean in two. The axle dropped back and it was obvious I wasn’t going much further. I drove to Marton, caught David Peacock just before his New Year party finished, got the keys to the garage and changed the front spring by myself. Then I got going again and delivered the milk on time. True story and I can’t quite believe it myself, but that’s what happened.

These were happy days, good work, plenty of it and everything going well at home. Margaret and Susan were growing up, Vera was happy and mother and father were well. Things could be worse. I remember Vera and I standing in the porch one day and watching Margaret and Susan. I had a Manchester terrier crossed with a Lakeland in those days and it was lay on its back on the lawn with its legs splayed out, a characteristic of Lakelands. Susan was pointing at the dog and asking Margaret questions. “What’s that?” That’s its bottom where it does its business. “What’s that?” That’s where it wees from. “What’s that?” Long pause then Margaret said “I don’t know but daddy’s got one!”

SETTLE CREAMERY
Settle Creamery deserves a chapter of its own to do it justice. It was built on a green field site in Settle by Clover Dairies from Hull and was a large, manufacturing dairy. They evaporated milk and skim and dried skim milk to make powder. Later they were one of the first dairies in the area to make UHT cream. The dairy was full of the latest equipment but they had to train all the staff and in the early days things didn’t always go to plan!

One of the dangers when unloading tanks is that if the manhole on top isn’t opened, a vacuum is created inside the tank and it will collapse. So at Settle they put a sign on the wall that said ‘Manholes must be lifted before switching pumps on.’ I watched one afternoon while a bloke struggled to lift a cast iron manhole in the concrete apron and in the end asked him what he was doing. He pointed to the sign and I had to give him a quick course on tank emptying.

They were very hot on hygiene and one day an Express Dairies tank from Manorcroft at Dewsbury came in to load and the dairy manager came out to inspect the tank before it was loaded. He didn’t just shove his head in but climbed down inside. When he reappeared, Norman the driver asked him if it was clean. The Manager said it was OK. “You mean it was before you climbed in!” said Norman, “I want it washing out again before I load!” The manager started to argue and Norman went to the valve in the dairy wall that the milk was pumped through. These lines were cleaned by circulating detergent solution through them. Norman unscrewed the top of the cock and pulled the plug valve out, it was green mould round the ‘O’ ring and in the bottom of the body. “If I were you I’d see to this as well before we go any further”. Norman never had any trouble again with Settle Creamery. He was right of course, he knew his job and did it well and the manager should have known that.

There were some lads working at the dairy who came from a large mental institution at Giggleswick. They were a happy bunch if somewhat limited and we got on well with them. One day one of them came out at dinnertime with a fishing rod and climbed up on to the boiler house roof. He baited the hook and threw it into the water tank which supplied the boilers and the non-potable water services in the dairy. We were stood there having a quiet chuckle at him when he pulled the first trout out. In quarter of an hour he had a dozen good fish. We had stopped laughing! We worked it out in the finish that the dairy was short of water so they were illegally pumping directly out of the river into the tank during the night. The pump they used was a diaphragm pump and so passed the trout without injuring them. Once in the tank they were short of food and would grab anything that was thrown in.

There was another water incident at Settle. I was washing my tank out one day and couldn’t understand why I was not getting any results. You can see the milk on the stainless steel, it looks brown. I popped my head out of the lid and played the hose on to the concrete below. The charge hand was having a smoke in the doorway, that is he was until I told him he’d better go and have look at the water supply, there was milk coming out of the hose! It transpired that a diaphragm had burst on a wash down valve in the evaporator line and the machine was forcing evaporated milk back up the line and into the tank on the boiler house roof. This meant that the boilers were contaminated as well. All they needed was five tons of Nescafe and they could start the biggest espresso bar in the world!

The main line railway passed through Settle on its way up the ‘Long Drag’ to Carlisle. Steam haulage had given way to diesel in 1956 but there were still occasional runs by preserved locos in summer. It was an art firing a loco for this run. By the time the train came through Hellifield the stoker had to have a full boiler, steam up to the top limit and a big clean fire roaring in the grate. Ideally the boiler would start blowing off for high steam as the train passed through Settle and he’d be firing all the way to Ais Ghyll. I was stood there waiting for the tank to empty when I heard this beautiful sound, it was the Flying Scot with a full load of thirteen coaches storming up through the valley on full expansion and with steam blowing off from the safety valve. Somebody had got it just right and it was a wonderful sight. It roared up the hill and vanished but I can see it in my minds eye now. I don’t know what it is about steam but it fascinated me.

There was a funny incident in the canteen one day. The staff at the dairy had regular breaks and weren’t allowed to go into the canteen at any other time. The tanker drivers had no such restrictions because we weren’t running to their timetable, this applied to the staff in the laboratory as well. One of the girls was called Valerie. I was in the canteen having a cup of tea with her and she went to the toilet. When she came back I took one look at her and said ”I know what you are thinking.” She laughed and said “you can’t even guess”. I said “You forgot your knickers this morning didn’t you.” She coloured up immediately and then started laughing. She said I was right, she’d heard of other people doing it but never thought it was possible but what she wanted to know was how I’d known. I couldn’t tell her, all I know is that when she walked in that room I knew what she was thinking. I’ve never worked that one out.

They were accident prone at Settle for a while. One of the lads from Giggleswick was washing out the cellar under the skim dryer one night and when he went home he forgot to turn the hose off. This wouldn’t have been so bad but there was a plastic bag down there which floated over the grid and blocked it. The cellar filled during the night and when they turned the dryer on the following morning the large electric motor in the cellar was half submerged. It blew out completely and stopped them for about four days. Another night two of the lads were separating milk for cream and forgot to shut the valve in the tank which had been set up to allow the wash water to run away to the drains. As they separated the milk the cream was flowing straight out to waste, they both got sacked I think. It was a silly mistake but more a product of bad training than anything else.

Mind you, we used to slip up as well. I remember once at Marton I was loading for Halifax in strawberry time and we were under pressure. I was stood on the ladder watching the milk level rise into the neck of the tank. When it was full I shouted and Colin turned off the pump, shut my valve and shouted to me to take the pipe off as he had another tank just coming up to the top. I never heard him. I leapt off the ladder, jumped in the cab and started off full chat up the yard. The hose held and pulled me up but I bent all the pipes. Colin said not to worry because in the long run I must have speeded the job up as I’d dragged the dairy two yards nearer to Halifax!

One last incident at Settle, and this was a big shock to everyone. There was a bloke called John Grisedale who was the mechanic at Barbon. He got the same job at Settle and was nicely settled in their. One lunch time they were all sat about in the workshop having a pint of tea when he fell off the packing case he was sat on. They said afterwards he was dead before he hit the floor. He was a nice bloke and his death pulled everyone up short, life is a terminal disease.


BACK TO MARTON

We had a sudden death at Marton, It must have been the winter of 1964, I was helping Wallace in the garage and we had a very sharp frost. All the steam pipes in the garage were frozen up because Jack Brown had done a job the day before on the pipe work and had left a section in the extension hanging down. The condensate had trapped there and frozen and I had to crawl under the bench and thaw it out before we could get steam through. It was dirty, freezing and I’d banged my head a couple of times. I remember saying “Wait while I get hold of that bugger Brown, I’ll murder him!” I heard Bill Mill’s voice, “You’ll have a job Stanley, he died in his chair last night.” Evidently he’d been playing draughts with his wife and she’d gone upstairs to put the electric blanket on, when she came down he was dead. Jack was sorely missed, he was a good bloke and always had a joke for everyone. I think the best illustration of Jack’s character was when David Peacock buttonholed him one night outside the office at going-home time and said “Wait a minute Jack I want a word.” Jack always picked his wife up at the mill where she worked and after waiting a couple of minutes he went. The following morning David went looking for him “I thought I told you to wait for me last night.” Jack said “That’s right, tha did, but I’m more fleyed of the wife than I am of thee!” David had to leave it, he was on the verge of laughing. It didn’t strike me until later that John and Jack had been the two blokes I had been working with that day up at Barbon when we shifted the square tank. Little did I know that within a year they would both be dead. We know not the time or the place.

As near as I can reckon it we went over to cheese full time round about the end of 1964. I know I was there during the building and I was still with Harrisons until the end of 1963. There were a lot of changes in the dairy but a lot of the old hands stayed on. Donald Heslop was still there only a few years ago. Ian Beck, our resident comedian stayed as well but left later on for a very good reason, he won the Lottery and became a millionaire! Life can be strange and if anyone had told us that little Ian would have a stroke of luck like that we wouldn’t have believed it. Joe Demain came to the dairy as tipper in 1959 to replace Jack Boothman who retired. He carried on tipping as long as milk came in. We used to call Jack Boothman ‘Wry neck’ because he carried his head to one side and he once told me how it happened. He was haymaking at Broughton Hall farm when he was young and after a hard day went for a swim in the mill pond above Broughton Mill. He dived in straight on top of a rock and broke his neck. He crawled up over the fields to Sulphur Well Cottages and he said they took him to Skipton Hospital on a hand cart. Eddie Lancaster was still there, he made the transition from bottles to cheese and had many years more at Marton.

It was about this time when Percy Graham, who had worked with Vera on the loading end of the bottle washers got cancer. He lived with Mrs Graham in the bottom of the two cottages below the dairy. George Parker and his housekeeper lived in the top one. Percy had worked for the estate in the old days and once told me that when they were building new Gledstone, before the war, the estate used direct labour and his job was to pick them up with a motor wagon every morning. He was reported by the police for “driving at a furious pace” in Earby and fined five bob! A builder in Barlick, Harold Duxbury told me years later that the fact that Gledstone Hall was built by direct labour showed. He said the standard of building was bad and was the cause of many maintenance problems in later years. Nobody in the village could understand at the time why a new hall was being built. There was another Gledstone Hall on the opposite side of the road, only the stables survive now, and the locals said it was a lovely building. Sometime in the thirties, Sir Amos Nelson, who had made his money in cotton manufacturing in Nelson, decided he wanted a new house so he hired Sir Edwin Lutyens to design it for him. He set the process in motion and went off on a world cruise. When he got back he was appalled at the scale of the works and stopped the contract. The grand drive out towards the Gargrave Road never got built and the gatehouses still stand in the field with no apparent purpose. At the time the blacksmith in the village was called Hoggarth, Jimmy Thompson was his apprentice. Hoggarth made the big iron gates and overthrow which still grace the front of the Hall. Jimmy once told me that all he did for the first three years he worked with Hoggarth was sharpen mason’s tools on a portable forge down at the building site. Hoggarth built the big wrought iron overthrow in front of the hall and Jimmy told me that they had made a drill which cut square holes in the cross bars to speed the job up. I saw this drill and it was a wonderfully simple piece of kit, it consisted of a hardened die and a square bit that fitted loosely in it on a hinged joint. To work it you drilled an inch diameter hole in the bar, mounted the die on it and spun the square bit round in the hole. As it bounced around in the hole it chipped the metal away until it reached the limits of the hardened die. All it needed then was a bit of cleaning up with a file and you had a perfectly square hole. Percy worked on this contract as a wagon driver and then when Gilbert Nelson started the dairy and piggery he moved up to working at the dairy.

George Parker in the top cottage also worked for the Estate all his life. He was a woodsman and gamekeeper and one day while patrolling the woods he came across Sir Amos and his secretary Harriet in flagranti delecto. George backed off and never said anything to anybody about it. However, shortly afterwards when Sir Amos had divorced his wife and married Harriet, he thanked George and told him he could have his cottage rent free for life. This was confirmed when Lady Harriet died, there was a clause in the will which said the same. Percy told me about this. Incidentally Percy’s daughter, Dorothy was married to Eddie Lancaster. When Percy got cancer he was very ill and in Skipton Hospital. Eventually it was decided that as he had very little time to live they would send him home and his doctor, Arthur Morrison, would control the pain until the end. George Horton was an ambulance driver at Barlick at the time and he and his mate got the job of taking Percy back home. As they climbed the hill at East Marton, Percy raised his head from the pillow and asked where they were, George told him they were just climbing Marton Brow and Percy asked if they could stop and have a Guinness in the Cross Keys. George said they had to take him home but the upshot was they got him dressed and gave him a lift back to the pub on their way back to Skipton!

Percy didn’t last long and was buried at Gisburn Church for some reason. The funeral was a shambles, the coffin fell off the hand cart as they were going through the lych gate and at the grave side Mrs Graham kept pointing at Arthur Morrison, who was at the funeral, and shouting “It was him that killed him with that needle!” Somehow it was all par for the course for Marton in those days.

There was to be another death from cancer and it was a great loss for the village. Harry Addyman, who kept Marshall’s pigs in the piggery behind the old garage, was a wonderful character. He was always playing practical jokes and having a crack. I remember standing with him at the top of the yard one day and we were watching Ted Lawson having a crack with Myra Midgely who was sat on the side of a hay trailer swinging her legs. Ted finished his conversation and came up the yard towards us. Harry started pulling his leg about the reason why Ted had a broad smile on his face, “Th’art a bugger! Th’as just seen the promised land asn’ta!” Ted had to smile because it was a hot day and Myra often managed without knickers! She died later on from cancer as well. I saw her at the time and was commiserating with her on her bad luck, I asked her what she was going to do, she said “die a good colour!” She did, she hit the whisky bottle and died shortly afterwards. Terrible luck but wonderful spirit.

Anyway, back to Harry. We heard one day that he had cancer. A small lump had appeared under his tongue and within six weeks he was dead. It was a terrible shock for all of us, he was universally liked. His funeral was arranged at East Marton Church and on the day, I got home early, had a bath and changed into my one and only suit of clothes, my wedding suit actually, and went round to pick Ted up, he lived in the bungalow behind the Dog at the time. When I got to the house his dog bit me, it hadn’t recognised me out of my overalls! We went to the service, arrived in good time and sat in the church. By the time the service started the church was full to overflowing and there were more Rolls and other expensive cars than I have ever seen in one place in my life parked outside. Harry was a poor man and had never bought a friend in his life and it was wonderful to see how people from all walks of life turned out for his burial. I remember turning to Ted as we walked out of the church after listening to a marvellous oration over the coffin, “I wonder if anyone told him while he was alive? Marton was a quieter and sadder place without Harry.

I had an accident of my own about this time but it was entirely my own fault. Ted and I were down at the Cross Keys at East Marton one night having a drink with some of the other lads after a cricket match. Somebody, I think it was Colin Barritt, started feeding me whisky and I drank them as fast as they turned up. By the time we left I was in no fit condition to drive but then neither was Ted. We set off home via West Marton and Southfield, this road hadn’t been altered then and both it and the Thornton to Barlick road were just narrow lanes with a steep bank on either side until you got to Ghyll Brow where it had been widened. When I got to the T junction with the Thornton Road I never turned the corner, I just drove straight into the bank! Ted went through the windscreen and finished up on the bonnet. I remember that all I could see of him was his boots and I asked him a silly question like “Are you all right Ted?” He climbed over the bonnet, opened the nearside door, got back in and said “Can we get home?” I put the Land Rover into low range and we drove crab wise up the road and got back to Hey Farm. We went in and had a good fry up and went to bed. When I went out the following morning to go to work I was horrified. The motor’s near side front corner and chassis were completely demolished, the windscreen broken and the front axle pushed back. How we had avoided injury and got home I’ll never know. I rang Jack at Morphett’s garage at Kelbrook and he came up for it and took it away. I remember it cost £188 to repair it and my dad was as mad as a wet hen because the Land Rover was his toy even though it belonged to me! This taught me a lesson and I never drove in that state again.

It’s probably time I described West Marton Village properly. It lies 7 miles from Skipton on the A59 where the Barlick to Gargrave road crosses the main road. Most of the village is on the Gargrave side of the road. On the cross-roads itself there is a barn on the Skipton side of the Barlick road. This was the place where Gott’s Garage originally started, it’s in Barlick now and they still service my van. On the opposite side of this road was the village institute, built by the Estate and behind it, towards Barlick are several houses, one of which was inhabited by Chris Johnson and his wife. He was the farmer of Marton Hall Farm which lies beyond the houses. On the side of the main road next to the institute is the post office which was run by the Allan Cryer and his wife Mabel Southwell as was. Joyce Lawson told me that when Mabel died she left over a quarter of a million pounds. She was the last surviving Southwell and none of them had children so she would finish up with the joint estates, Allan her husband who was the postman was a bit of a dabbler on the stock exchange so that might have helped as well. The other two Southwells were Cecil, the gamekeeper and expert on left-hand threads and Cissie who worked with Vera and Percy on the bottle washers. Jack Brown had a soft spot for Cissie, there was never any funny business it was just a very nice friendship but we all pulled his leg about it. They usually had their lunch together at work. On the opposite side of the road to the barn was the village shop. This used to be run by Mrs Beech, she left and it was taken over by Harry’s wife.

I’ve just remembered a funny story about a woman and a dairy driver who’s names had best be omitted. He and I were going down through Foulridge in a wagon when he pulled in to the side of the road and said he had to see someone. He took me in to the house which was where this lady lived. He and the lady went off about their business and as he went out of the room, he took a bottle of beer off a shelf and gave it to me, “Sup that, I won’t be long.” I got the top off the bottle of King’s Ale and sat there drinking it. It was thick and very strong. They came back in eventually and when the lady saw the empty bottle she went spare. It was an original bottle of King’s Ale brewed at Massey’s Burnley Brewery on the occasion of a royal visit!

On the opposite side of the road to the institute was the estate office and a private house, then there was Bale Farm which was farmed by Clifford Ashworth and beyond that the dairy and the two cottages lived in by George Parker and Percy Graham. These have been converted into one house now. On the opposite side of Gargrave Road to the dairy there was Yew Tree Farm where Richard and Ursula Drinkall lived with their four children, John, Richard, Katherine and Allison. Much more of this family later. Next down the road was Yew Tree farm man’s cottage occupied at that time by John Henry Pickles, Ivy his wife and Stephen their son. Next to this was the arch leading to the forge where Jimmy Thompson was blacksmith, then there were four cottages, Wallace Neave and his wife in the first, John Hayton and his wife Jennie (Parents to Ted Lawson’s wife Joyce) Jimmy Thompson and Katherine his wife and in the end one, Tony and Myra Midgely. Just down the road was the entrance to Mire House Farm where Clifford Chapman lived with his housekeeper. Cyril Richardson who farmed at Little Stainton next to John Earnshaw once told me a good story about Clifford and his love of cheese. They were in a hotel somewhere and had just finished a good dinner. The waiter came with the cheese board and asked if they wanted any. Cyril asked for a slice of Stilton but Clifford fancied some of the Baby Wensleydale. The waiter spiked a wedge already cut out of the cheese but Clifford stopped him, “I was thinking of having the other piece.” The waiter looked at him and spiked the remainder of the cheese and put it on his plate. He turned to go away but then stopped and came back. “Here you are Sir.” he murmured, “You might as well have the rest of it!” Cyril said that Clifford ate the lot! Down the road towards Gargrave was Gledstone Hall and the Lodge to the Old Hall and stables. There were two large houses on a green behind Yew Tree, one was lived in by the Gotts and the other was where David Peacock lived.

Everybody in the village knew everybody else, there were few secrets, if somebody was bothering with someone else we soon got to know about it. Working at the dairy we became a part of the village and in those days we all knew everyone, I doubt if that applies now. I remember a bit of a stink while I was at the dairy when there was some dispute over a wedding present. I have an idea it was when David Nelson got married. Chris Johnson from Marton Hall caused the problem by proposing that there should be two subscriptions, one from the upper classes and one from the ‘cottagers’. This went down like a lead balloon and was indicative of a form of class division that really vanished in the Second World War. There were two sons at the hall, David and James. James worked for the dairy for a while at the time when we had bought Townshends Dairy at Blackburn. I remember there was once had a strike down there and the unruly workers had Bill Mills locked up in the office, he had to call the police to get out! We bottled all the milk for them that day and I can still see James Nelson driving up the yard in one of their wagons with blue smoke pouring out of the cab windows. I forget what was wrong with the motor but James had driven it from Blackburn regardless. It wasn’t much and we soon fixed it. I remember at the time thinking that his enthusiasm reminded me of the people who had taken over running buses and transport during the General Strike. James really did believe that hard work was great fun.

We were always having a laugh at something that was happening in the village, usually retailed by Harry I should add! There was the time when Jimmy Thompson went round to Myra’s one lunch time to return something they had borrowed. He knocked on the door and got the shock of his life when he went in, Myra was ironing in the nude, Jimmy dropped whatever it was he was returning and fled! On another occasion there were ducks waddling round the village with Union Jacks fastened to their tails! I never got to the bottom of that one but think it was Harry helping Clifford Ashworth celebrate his wedding anniversary!

Wallace had a bit of bother once with cats keeping him awake at night, there were a lot of feral cats in the village but nobody bothered much because they were keeping the rats down and there were plenty of them because of the dairy. Wallace loaded a couple of 12 bore cartridges with mustard seed and vowed he would give the cats something to think about. The cottages were very low and the ground behind them rose up so there was a stone lined path behind the cottages then a breast wall and the gardens were almost on a level with the upstairs window. This particular night he was woken by the cats, climbed out of bed, shoved two cartridges up the spout and let fly at the cats out of the bedroom window. God knows what Mrs Neave thought! As soon as he pulled the triggers and let both barrels go at once he realised he had made a mistake because of the kick. He had picked the wrong cartridges up in the dark and blew most of the windows out of his greenhouse! Wallace was noted for being a bit fiery, I got on with him all right but I remember Ned Town, a retailer in Barlick, telling me that he once asked Wallace for an extra crate when he was delivering Barlick milk and Wallace threw it at him! Not only that but he booked it and Ned had to pay!

Wallace and I were trying to start a diesel one day in the garage, it was one of the contractor’s concrete mixers and Wallace had me swinging the handle while he squirted Easy Start in to the manifold. Easy Start was basically ether under pressure in an aerosol and after about 10 minutes the air in the garage was white with atomised ether. We were both smoking and it dawned on both of us at the same time that we weren’t feeling well. We got outside and coughed our lungs up for a while. Later I found out that if you draw ether fumes over burning tobacco there’s a chemical reaction and a poison gas is produced, I think it was phosgene. We were both smoking at the time and no doubt that was what it was.

When I went on the tanks regular, Wallace got another helper in the garage, a bloke from Stainforth called Ronnie Chapman. He had been mechanic for the quarry transport up there and was a good fitter. I once went boozing with him up the dale and we landed back in his house late at night for a coffee before I drove back. We were all sat there acting the goat when I heard a cat yowling but couldn’t make out where it was coming from. I mentioned it and his wife gave Ronnie a clip round the ear and called him a daft bugger. She opened the oven door of the fireside range and the cat shot out. Ronnie had a habit of kicking the door to and what had been a comfortable haven for the family cat suddenly became a very uncomfortable place! My grandma always kept a couple of bricks in the fireside oven, wrapped in an old piece of sheet they made a good bed warmer on a cold night. I’ll bet that cat could have warmed a bed!

We had one or two incidents with gas at Marton. Colin Barritt used to have a regular job topping up the ammonia side of the refrigeration plant in the cellar. Some gas always used to escape and it didn’t seem to affect him. He would stand there laughing at us while we all coughed fit to bust. This reminds me of a trick that Colin had with the compressors. The compression side of the cycle was fitted with a ‘bursting disc’ which acted as a safety valve if dangerous pressures were produced in the cylinder head of the compressor. It was a thin metal disc that burst under excess pressure and allowed the ammonia to by-pass back into the suction side. Colin found out that the foil closure of a Nescafe tin, if cut out carefully, made a perfect substitute for the official spare part, it was a bit stronger too so he had less trouble!

Ted Lawson unwittingly put several people in hospital for observation one day. At the end of the week Ted would drain then caustic solution out of the bottle washers by knocking the manholes in and letting the hot liquid run over the floor of the dairy. This cleaned the floor as well. One day he decided to give it a really good do and poured the spent acid from buttermilk testing in the laboratory on to the floor as well. I don’t know what the reaction was but the result was a dense cloud of green gas. This was chlorine, the same gas that was used as a weapon in the trenches during WWI. Vera was one of those who got a lung full and everyone affected had to go to the hospital for observation. Mind you, the floor was as white as snow afterwards.

As I’ve said, Joyce was the daughter of John Hayton who lived on the cottages across the road from the dairy. John was disabled all the time I knew him. In 1944 he was haytiming and was following a load of hay from the field to the barn. Someone had left a hay fork on top of the load and the vibration shook it loose, it slid down and one of the tines caught John in the eye. It caused internal bleeding in his skull and this partially paralysed him. Joyce was 11 at the time.

Ted once told me that when he and Joyce first came to Marton they lived in the cottage at the Kennels at the back of Old Gledstone. On his way home at night Ted used to pass a heap of something in the field and soon found out that it was coke which had been used in the filter beds of the Old Halls sewage plant. He used to pinch a bucketful every night as he passed in winter and it kept the home fires burning for a long time! This was the way we lived then, you never walked past anything lay on the floor which might be useful. Ted saw a green door on the tip at Marton one day and decided it would make a good wash house door for home so he threw it on top of the cans on his wagon and took it home. Several days later a message came from Mr Peacock that he’d really appreciate it if Ted would return the door. Ted took the hint, the door went back to Marton but his life was made a misery by everybody whistling Frankie Vaughan’s latest hit “Behind the Green Door”!

Mark Graham used to work on the bottling plant. At one point he was bothering full time with Mary Agnes, Vera’s mother. He had the capping machines down to a fine art and whenever he had a day off he used to change the tension of the spring that actually placed the cap on the bottle top before sealing. The following day whoever ran the plant had trouble with the capping machine and of course everyone used to say what a great man Mark was with the plant and how they couldn’t do without him. In the end Ted Lawson sussed this one out and used to put an extra rubber band on the flap when Mark wasn’t there. The plant ran perfectly.

The bottle dock where the wagons loaded for despatch was the province of Frank Whalley. I can still see him in his brown smock and with a little wisp of white hair sticking up on top of his head. I remember when I did days off there was a bit of a fiddle being worked and I was expected to keep it going. It involved stealing 50 pint bottles of milk every day! I remember once loading this 50 bottles on the back of the wagon and Frank looked at me and asked me what I was doing with them. I told him he knew bloody well what I was doing and he did. I always thought that everyone knew there was fiddling going on but the dairy was allowed a percentage of the throughput for spilt milk and I reckon the pilferage came within that. If it kept the wage bill down all well and good. Let’s put it another way, I can’t believe that the management were so stupid that they didn’t know about it. This changed later on as we shall see.

Frank didn’t do any work on the bottle dock. The main horse power there was George Dillon who lived in Salterforth and married Ann Hayton, Joyce Lawson’s sister. He once told me that he came to the area from London in the 1930’s when the New Road from Barlick to Kelbrook was being built. It was a project designed to give work to the unemployed. He never went back, married Ann and worked at the dairy all the time I was there. He used to have his own way of dealing with damaged crates. The last lot of milk to be bottled at night was the third pint school bottles. We used to get very short of crates for these as the schools were bad at putting the empties out. In consequence Ted would be forced to use crates that had gone soft and needed to be repaired. These were bad to stack and if George thought he was getting too many of them he would make his point by throwing them over the edge of the dock as they came down the conveyor.

The bottle washers were painted with special paint to withstand the effects of caustic. It was a very particular shade of blue and going through Salterforth one day I realised that George’s house up School Lane was looking particularly smart. It was entirely painted in Dawson Blue!

When we finished bottling the dairy sold the washers back to Dawsons at Heckmondwyke and one day two old blokes turned up in a Morris Minor pickup truck with some tackle in the back. They were followed by a wagon that delivered a large load of railway sleepers and odd pieces of dunnage. It transpired that these two blokes were going to lift the bottle washers out of the dairy! This involved lifting them up five feet, moving them twenty feet out of the dairy and then lifting them over the sloping empty bottle dock and putting them on the side dock ready for picking up by a crane. These machines must have weighed about 30 tons apiece and I watched the two men over the next few days and learned a lot about moving heavy weights. It’s amazing what you can do with some jacks, timber and a Trewhella winch. I never saw them rush but by the end of the week they had the first washer out and the other soon followed.

The dairy had it’s own milk round in Barlick run by a bloke called Harry Tudor. He had a horse and float and when he had a holiday either Jack Brown or Ted Lawson would do the round. Joyce Lawson came to me one day and asked if I could make sure that Ted went to get his teeth fixed. Ted was, like me, frightened of the dentist. A lot of us were in those days because all we had ever had from dentists was pain. I arranged it so that I was in Barlick and at the appointed hour, met Ted and took him into Pinder’s on Park Avenue. We tied the horse up to the lamp post outside and went in. While we were waiting Ted was telling me how hard-bitten the horse was, he kept getting the bit between his teeth and you had to haul back on the reins to get him to stop. I got him into the chair and waited outside. After about 20 minutes they helped him out, still groggy after the general anaesthetic. OK I asked? “No way” said the dentist, “We got him in the chair and put him under but all he did was grit his teeth and shout “Whoa you bugger!”, they were frightened of damaging his mouth and after trying to get it open decided to give up. Ted had been driving the horse in his dreams!

I had a bad tooth ache one day. It had got to the stage where I had bursts of red light behind my eyes so I gave in and went into Atkinson’s who, at that time, practised in Croft House on Station Road where my accountants is now. I went in and there was nobody else there. I told him what the trouble was and he had a look in my mouth and said it was rotten and wanted to come out. I asked him how much it was and he said five shillings or two and six. I asked him what the difference was and he said that for five shillings he would inject me with cocaine, wait for the gum to go numb and then pull it, for two and six he would just pull it. I only had four and six so I went for the half dollar treatment. I sat in the chair and his wife cupped her hands over my head and forced me down with my head back. Atkinson was straight in and grasping my tooth, first pushed it down, then screwed it round each way to loosen it and then pulled it and threw it into the corner of the room. I supposed that he had done this so I couldn’t see it in case any roots had broken. That was it, one fraction of a second of violent pain and then blessed relief. As I swilled out he went in the back and I heard a bottle neck clink on a glass. When he came in I gave him the four and six, he asked me what the extra two bob was for, “Give me some of whatever it is you have in that bottle at the back!” He came back with a glass of rum and told me to wash my mouth out with it and spit it out. I washed my mouth out all right but I didn’t spit!

Occasionally I still did Barlick milk with Eddie Lancaster if the regular bloke was off. We went to do it one day and on our way out of Barlick we were overtaken by Tony Midgely on his scooter. He came off just at the bend in the road where the Rolls Welfare was. In those days the road through Greenberfield locks was the main road, the new road hadn’t been built. As he came off he hit the back end of Laycock’s Skipton bus and when we got to him he was lying there and there were teeth all over the road! Eddie leaned him up against the side of the bus and we gathered up his scooter and bits and pieces. As we were doing this the bus drew into the side of the road and Tony flopped back and his head gave a sickening thud as it hit the floor! I don’t know what did him the most damage, the accident or our assistance! We got him in the cab and his scooter on the back and took him into Marton. He seemed all right but couldn’t remember a thing afterwards about the accident.

All told, Marton was a wonderful place in those days, It was a very happy environment and I can’t remember any trouble at all. The worst job I had, just before I went on the tankers was when I was put in charge of the new sewage plant down the lane to Mire House. It was a state of the art installation. The basic thing about the type of sewage we were dealing with was that in order to get it to break down we needed to promote an aerobic reaction so we pumped air through the primary treatment tank to encourage the right sort of bacteria. When it was working it was a miracle and the water flowing out was as clear as gin. Unfortunately you could have it like this one day and the next day it would be running out like grey porridge. The smell was awful. Nobody ever blamed me for the failures, they all knew how hard it was but I got fed up of trying to cope with a process which was virtually uncontrollable.

Harry Addyman once told me about another disposal problem they’d had at Marton in the early days. They had an outbreak of swine fever at the piggery and had to slaughter all the pigs. They were all buried on the spot where the can dock was built later on. If anybody ever excavates their they’ll find all sorts of weird things buried! Their was an old lime kiln in the delph above Stainton House and this was full of sheep bones. In the bad winter of 45/46 all the dead sheep from the area were thrown in there and it was full to the top at the time.

All this is being written in 1999 on the cusp of the Millennium celebrations and even though they are all my memories and my frame of reference is that of a contemporary I am constantly struck by how different life was then. Reading what I have written about West Marton I begin to wonder whether what I am describing is essentially hindsight through rose coloured glasses. I find myself wishing I could go back to that era with all its hard work but all its compensations as well. Life seemed very simple then, I had a family, they needed feeding therefore I had to work. Seeing as how work was inevitable, I might as well enjoy it. Was all of this rich tapestry of acquaintances and events simply a form of self-deception? Or was there something that we have lost nowadays, a deep interest and concern in the lives of others which gave us an intimacy in our dealings with each other that enriched us?

I’ve been giving this some thought and am sure that whilst there definitely was an element of making the best of what could have been seen as a hard situation, there was also a rich seam of intimacy with people which gave us such a rewarding foundation for daily life and work. We had no distractions, we had all been reared in a world where there was no TV. Most of our interest and entertainment was outside the house in the company of our peers and this led to shared experience which reinforced whatever intimacy was forced on us by, for instance, working together. We were all in the same boat and it was sensible to row together. It strikes me as well that none of us was ambitious, we weren’t trying to climb over our mates to get a better job, we were satisfied with what we had. So, after due consideration I can assure you that life and work at Marton was just as attractive as the picture I have painted so far.

Earlier on I had my moan about London and how I hated it and the fact that most of this antipathy was triggered by the attitudes of the people down there. This being the case, forgive me if I describe some more people before we move on from the dairy to other matters.

Back at the farm we had become well established. Vera, Margaret and Susan lived their lives in company with mother and father. With hindsight I have little doubt that there were occasional small frictions caused by, for want of a better description, two women in the same kitchen. I was aware of this at the time but my impression was that on balance, Vera gained more from the shared situation than she lost. She had enough sense to be able to recognise the advantages of having an experienced child rearer at hand for advice when she needed it and she and father got on like a house on fire. Vera’s father, Miles Mason had, as far as we know, deserted her mother when Vera was about 3 months old. She had never known what it was to have a father and my dad filled a hole in her life. I didn’t recognise this at the time, it took a lot of experience before this became clear.

Looking back, I don’t see how anybody could have been a better mother and wife than Vera. The house and kids were spotless and well adjusted, she could turn her hand to anything in the house, with the stock, managing our finances and even the odd bit of cattle-dealing! True, she had a sharp word for me at times but only when I deserved it, I had my faults and wasn’t always the most understanding of husbands. Here again, I think she made a very pragmatic assessment and had come to the conclusion that while I wasn’t perfect, I could have been a lot worse!

Father looked after the stock, went to market at Gisburn and Skipton and was, in his own way, very happy. This didn’t mean that I always got on well with him, I didn’t. Now and again the Old Bull and the Young Bull clashed horns and it wasn’t very comfortable. I’m sure most of it was my fault but at the time I hadn’t got the experience to know how to deal with it. One occasion that sticks out in my memory is the time I papered the front room. This was a large room, roughly twenty five feet square and it had acres of wall. I hadn’t done any papering before but with Vera’s help I had a go at it. I remember father coming in and criticising the way I was doing it and we had a flaming row, I was so upset because I was doing my best and actually, it wasn’t a bad job at all. Later, when I had finished we realised that I had put the paper on upside down, all the flowers were pointing towards the floor! Vera used to tell me that she often sat there and counted the flowers on the wallpaper for something to do when she was on her lonesome.

I remember having a brainstorm one day and deciding that we needed a new wireless set. I had taken note of the fact that new frequencies were being introduced and so bought a set which could receive FM transmissions. What I failed to appreciate was the fact that there was only one programme available on FM at the time, this was the equivalent of today’s Radio 2. I have an idea it was the Light Programme in those days. So, we were condemned to one radio station and in the days when I was on the tramp and setting off on Sunday night I used to go off down the road listening to 100 Best Tunes while Vera was condemned to listen to Sing Something Simple. She hated it and I remember years later Ted Lawson happened to come into the house one Sunday and heard the programme in the front room. He commented on what a good programme it was and Vera went for his jugular! Eventually it became a joke and other programmes switched to FM but I doubt if Vera has ever forgotten that programme. I had a shock the other day when I heard the signature tune and realised that it was still being broadcast!

One of my regular calling shops at this time was Alf Watson’s at Southfield. This farm was on the Barlick to Marton road just past Dodge Carr barn and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Alf farmed cows and grass but his main passion in life was horses. He owned or trained a succession of race horses, all of which were incredibly unsuccessful! Life at Southfield was bad to weigh up, there was always a bevy of young ladies in working gear bustling around looking after their own and the farm’s horses. One of the assets of the farm was an old Irishman called Bill Brennand who lived in an ornate wooden hut in the stable yard.

Bill was a wonderful character. He had originally come to the district in the 40’s as I remember, as a labourer on the building of a concrete grass silo at Marton Hall Farm. When this was finished he stayed in the district and very shortly afterwards became horseman at Southfield. He had been married at some time because his daughter used to visit him occasionally and I have an idea she was a school teacher.

When I knew Bill in the 60’s he was retired but still lived in the hut in the yard and did odd jobs around the horses. Every day he would walk into Barlick, buy himself a piece of steak and whatever other food he wanted and have a Guinness at one of the many town pubs and clubs. Then he would walk back. I first struck up acquaintance with him when I used to give him a lift into town on my way home with my load of milk for the following day. He walked for economy not exercise and would always take a lift if offered, especially if it was raining.

Bill used to mow the grass on the canal bank with a scythe and make it into hay by hand. I introduced him to my dad because it seemed to me we could buy it off him. The two old-timers got on like a house on fire and it soon became apparent that they had a shared past! It’s wonderful how coincidence keeps rearing its head isn’t it!

In his early days in Manchester, father had been a street bookmaker. Bookmaking was illegal then unless conducted by account with a licensed bookie who wasn’t allowed to tout for trade from the punters on the street. This led to a proliferation of illegal bookmakers and what were called ‘runners’. I can remember when I was working with Sid in Bradbury’s bicycle shop on Heaton Moor he would study the paper and then send me off on my bike to a council house at Green End where I would hand in my slip of paper and money through a trapdoor in the back door.. The authorities knew all about this but in general, left the street bookies alone. Rather like prostitution, not much point stamping it out because it would only start up again and it was far better to know where it was going on because then there could be an element of control.

Father’s essay in bookmaking was while he was working at Richard Johnson and Nephew, the wire makers. He once told me that he had quite a thriving business going but he got too cocky and spoiled it all. How it worked was that you took every bet that was given you and then weighed up the state of the book. If you had a dangerous exposure on a horse, say a large bet on an outsider, you ‘laid off’ this money with a licensed bookie by making the bet yourself on the same horse on your established account. The licensed bookies ran the same system but did their ‘laying off’ with the Victoria Club, a sort of bookies co-operative which functioned as a broker for these bets in Manchester and at the end of the year either paid out a dividend to its members or called for a subscription to cover any shortfall. This way the risks were spread among all the licensed bookies. Anyway, father was in a position one day where he had a lot of money on a horse that he was certain was a loser so he stood the bets himself and didn’t lay them off. The horse romped home first and father was cleaned out! He always said that he could have been a wealthy man if it hadn’t been for his own gambling streak.

Being in the trade so to speak, father was a regular attender at the White City dog track and nearby horse races. He also went to the illegal race meetings which happened every now and again. Evidently, even in those days there was an interest in harness racing or trotting as it is more commonly known. There were no official venues for the sport so it was conducted in an illegal and semi-secret manner at remote locations. They were called ‘flapping’ meetings. One regular venue was at the Flouch Inn on the moors between Manchester and Yorkshire and father used to go there. When he and Bill got talking it transpired that they both went to the trotting at the Flouch and knew many of the same people. They came to the conclusion that they must have met 40 years before up on the Pennine Moors! Bill was a regular, if not frequent visitor to Hey Farm and father bought his hay for about three years.

Sometime in early 1963 another bloke started to visit Hey Farm on a regular basis. This was while I was working for Harrisons and away from home a lot. His name was Ted Waite and he was the batchelor son of a well known farming family in the district. At this time he would be in his mid-fifties. His father was John Waite and he had at least two brothers who worked on the bins in Barlick. John Waite had been a notable character. He used to farm at Little Stainton next to the farm owned in my day by Cyril Richardson. He sold out to the Earnshaws after WWII and the story retailed by Ted was that old Johnny Earnshaw and John Waite fell out over the amount of in goings to be added to the sale price. When you bought a farm you agreed a price for the farm and then negotiated the ‘in goings’, these could include amounts for manure, enhanced fertility, any fixed equipment and stocks of feed left by the vendor. It was fixed equipment which proved the stumbling block and in the end, Earnshaws refused point blank to pay anything for the new concrete sheep dip that John Waite had installed. He gave in but went back one night with a mate from the quarry and they pilled the dip and blew it to pieces!

I think their next farm was Hollins up Esp Lane in Barlick. John pursued his individual way up there too. He entered into a fight with the Council over who was responsible for the paving and upkeep of Esp Lane. The Council said it was ‘unadopted’ and therefore the responsibility of the individual users. John disagreed with them, fought the case and won and to this day, Esp Lane is tarmac right to the end.

I have a vague memory of meeting Old John once, he was a short rotund man and completely different than Ted’s build. By this time they weren’t farming and I’m not quite sure what Ted did for a living. He did have a job at one point at Lontex in Barlick but I think most of his time was spent in doing a bit of dealing and odd jobs. He always had a wad of notes that would choke a pig in his back pocket. This came in handy many a time when we were short. Ted was always good for a loan! Ted got on well with father and his advice with the stock was a big help to him. Ted was an expert at gelding pigs and bullocks, we never had the vet. for this but used to do them ourselves. I have an idea that Ted was living with John, his brother at the time but in the course of a conversation one night we came up with a different solution. We decided that if Ted bought a caravan, we would park it illegally in the garden behind the farm house, run an electric cable to it from the house and Ted could live there rent free. There was water available in the wash house on the end of the farm house and a manhole into the sewer so it was an ideal arrangement. Ted moved in and lived their for at least ten years. He was a marvellous asset both to us and to the kids. They used to spend hours with him in the caravan and he taught them rude songs and cooked them fried eggs in his burnt pan. Ted frying eggs was a sight to see, the pan wasn’t considered hot enough until it was on the point of bursting into flames. Blue smoke used to pour out of the windows and you could smell them on the road! Ask any of my daughters about their memories of Ted even now and their eyes light up with enthusiasm. He was part of their early years and a good influence.

Looking back, in these enlightened times when most men are frightened to even touch a child for fear of being branded a pervert I often wonder what the hell has happened to us. In those days Vera and I made a judgement, opened our children’s world to a new influence and all was well. Ted was wonderful with them, he would stand looking over into the field with Margaret and Susan (Janet wasn’t even a gleam in my eye then) and have the most complicated discussions with them about calving dates, pig breeding and matters agricultural in general. We got the boar in one day to brim a sow and received a complaint from a ‘lady’ who lived across the road, she thought it was ‘disgusting’ that not only did we allow this depraved activity to take place in a field next to the road but our children watched it. I can’t remember what our reply was but I’ll bet it was short and to the point. What better way for kids to learn about life, sex, death and disease than to be intimately concerned with the management of stock. Looking back on my days at Burrs Mount before the war I was convinced that this was the best way to rear kids.

Ted liked a drink and one Sunday he got a skinful at the Dog and on his way back to the caravan he called in at the pig sty to check on an old sow who was near to her time. I saw him go in but after a while he hadn’t emerged and I went up to see that all was well. After looking in the door I went for Vera and took her up to see what Ted was up to. The old sow was laid out on a clean straw bed snoring away and Ted was laid alongside her with one arm over her. He was snoring too! We crept out and left them to sleep it off.

Apart from my contacts with farmers round Marton I still managed to keep my hand in. I would give Cyril a hand with some bale carting or tractor-driving down at Little Stainton and in return, when he killed a pig we would always get a lump of spare rib. Cyril used to let his pigs run loose round the farm. He fed them on milk and barley meal and grew them to a good size, as I remember about 20 score. (400lbs.) You don’t know what pig meat tastes like until you have had spare rib of a pig fed and reared like that. I can taste it now.

At one point a friend of his, Ken Barrett, bought Hill Clough Farm at the top of Esp Lane. Due to circumstances outside his control he got in a position where he had both hay harvests to take at once. Cyril told him not to bother, he would see to it. I took a tractor and mower and mowed all the meadows in my spare time, Cyril saw to the conditioning and baling. This was the way things happened in that society. Neither I nor Cyril got any pay for this, it was just something that had to be done to help a friend.

Cyril used to have a lad working for him who came from Settle and was called Robert Newhouse. I remember him because he was wagon mad and when driving the tractor used always to make a noise like air brakes when he pulled up. Years later his passion has fulfilled itself and I regularly see a big Scania Articulated wagon with ‘Robert Newhouse , International Haulier’ across the headboard. He was cab-happy all right and has fulfilled his ambition.

Time marched on and early in 1965 Vera informed me that we were going to have another increase later in the year. This time I was going to be at home!

In mid 1965 we had an upset at home. There was serious friction between Vera and my mother and it rebounded on all of us. It wasn’t Vera’s fault or my mother’s, just a natural consequence of us growing as a family and putting pressure on each other. I think the reason why it flared up between them rather than me and father was quite simply because Vera was there all the time, I did at least get away for ten hours every day out on the road! I’m quite certain that if it had been the other way round me and father would have come to blows long before. It built up for a long time and Vera had made it very clear to me that something had to be done but I suppose I was hanging on to see if there would be any improvement. It meant we needed another house and as far as I could see it was up to me to find it. I had a bit of a problem!

It finally came to a head over something or other, I’ve forgotten what it was and father and I were having a bit of an argument about it. I lost the plot and said “Right, there’s only one cure for this, we’ve got to get out.” By this I meant we had got to find a resolution and it was in the back of my mind that someone had to move. Father, God bless him, immediately cut through the knot and said “You’re quite right. It’s time. Me and your mother will apply for a council house.” And that was what they did. There was no recrimination, everybody realised it was inevitable and by about August they had moved to 13 Avon Drive on the Coates estate and on the whole, were very happy there. They had a good view out over the canal and some very good neighbours. I was down there the other day and a lady recognised me and spoke very warmly of mother and father. There was no long term ill feeling, I visited regularly and it’s significant that when they moved down there I got close enough to them to record father’s life story and eventually to ask the question about whether they were married. I think we proved we were communicating!

Things changed at the farm. When mother and father moved out they took their furniture of course and this left the front room empty. It was to be a play room for the kids for years before we could afford to do anything about it. We settled down to the new order and on the whole it was much better. I don’t think anyone had realised what a strain had been gradually building up. As I recount these events now I am very aware that we tend to put our own gloss on these things. I’m not sure how reasonable or helpful I was in the event. At the time I felt terribly guilty, I had thrown my mother and father out of their house! It wasn’t like that of course, if it hadn’t been for me working 100 hours a week nobody would have had anywhere to live. All I am sure of is that it was the right thing to do and that in the end it all turned out for the best. Vera helped me by reassuring me it was all for the best and she settled down to the last few weeks of her pregnancy.

In the last ten days or so, mother moved back up to Hey Farm to help Vera and Dorothy came over to stay with father and look after him. I got home on the 28th of September and Vera was scrubbing the scullery floor. This was a good sign, you can laugh but a woman close to her time starts to act from instinct, a pig will start scratting straw up and making a bed, cats will make a nest somewhere out of the way and Vera started tidying up! I made sure we had the midwife on tap and on the 30th. Vera went into labour upstairs. I remember I was about as useless as any bloke can be at a time like this. I kept the Rayburn stoked up and sat with Nurse Hunt who was the local rabbit catcher at that time. All I can remember is we were having a discussion about pregnancy and I happened to remark that there were a lot of similarities between the parturition process in cows and women. Nurse Hunt was outraged and scolded me for comparing my wife to a cow! I kept quiet after that. Unlike the movies there were no calls for hot water but the nurse did give me one or two newspaper wrapped parcels to dispose of. I lit the incinerator in the back garden and burnt them.

I can’t remember the time exactly but it was about eleven o’clock when the nurse came down and told me I had another daughter and could go up. Vera was tired of course but in her arms she had our third, and last, bundle of fun. Janet had joined the family. We knew this was to be the last one, we had decided a long time ago that three was a nice number and two years apart would be fine. Given the hit and miss state of knowledge about contraception in those days I think we did well, the birth dates were: Margaret October 9th. 1961, Susan 30 October 1963 and Janet 30 September 1965. Only problem was that birthday presents were to be a strain on the finances from then on as they all fell together!

The next four years were unremarkable except for the normal milestones in a young family. Margaret started school in 1966 at the Church School about 300 yards away, Susan followed her two years later and Janet in 1970. They all did well, we had no serious illnesses and very few accidents. Having said that, there was one incident I remember. Margaret fell while carrying a plate and cut her eyelid. Dr Chapman came straight up and stitched it up for her. He said she had been very lucky as it cut right through the eyelid but missed the eye. As I think of this I realise it must have been while mother and father were with us as Vera held her in her arms while sat on the sofa in the front room while the doctor stitched it. I’ve consulted with Margaret and she says this will be right as she was about 3 years old.

Susan had a fall at the same time, she was only about two years old so it must have been just after Janet was born. She had woken up and was coming downstairs for a hug and she slipped on some coffee in the hall at the bottom of the stairs (God knows how that had got there) and fell through the glass panel in the bottom of the door. She got one or two cuts but nothing serious. I don’t think she needed stitches. I put a piece of plywood in place of the glass and that’s how it stayed for years, we didn’t want any repetition!

I had more time to spare at home, I was always home round about lunch time and started to do jobs around the house. I had a workshop in the end two rooms of the house where the wheelwright’s shop had been. We always said that it was a shame using this room for this purpose because it had an original fireplace in and a beehive oven. Upstairs in the roof was a flywheel with a small crank on it. The wheel was an old cart wheel and I reckon it was the driver for a wood turning lathe at one time. Gradually over the years the stock of tools, benches and equipment built up and a lot of good work was done in there.

In 1965 Ted Waite and I had gone to have a look at a farm sale up Esp lane, I think it was at Hollins, and I bought a blue roan heifer for £40. We took it home on a halter and what a job we had with it. It was as wild as it could be, we had to tie it to a lamppost once or twice while we had a rest and a smoke but eventually we got it to Hey Farm and turned it into the field. Until 1969, apart from going inside in winter it never left the field again because every time we tried to shift it to some better grazing it jumped the fence or the hedge and got back in! In the end we gave up and left it there. We got it in calf but found it was impossible to milk so we suckled calves on it. It got called Bluebob by Ted and the kids

In 1967 I came home one day and found that Vera had sold Bluebob, a black and white cow and one we called Plum to a bloke who had turned up with a Land rover and trailer. I never knew why he had come, I suspect Ted and Vera had taken things into their own hands. Vera had done the deal and drawn £200 which was a good price then. I was scared stiff the blue cow would be chucked up when they tried to milk it but we never had any trouble. It sticks in my mind that Ted saw the bloke somewhere and asked how they had gone on with the cattle. The bloke had told him they were OK but the blue one was ‘a bit lively’! Evidently he was a better man than we were!

I spent a lot of time with Ted Lawson, he and Joyce were living in the bungalow down Crow Row (Longfield Lane) behind the Dog. They had two children, Sandra and Philip. Sandra was to die of cancer shortly after she got married but I still visit Philip and his wife Julie and they look after my dog when I’m on my travels. Ted and I did a bit of rabbiting. I had a ferret and some nets and we used to pop off on Friday afternoon if he could get away early from the dairy. We’d go up the dale and net a few rabbits and then sell them in the Dog when we got back. This gave us some beer money. I can’t remember where I got the ferret from, I think it was from Marshall Duerden at Sough but it was a beauty. I called it Winnie because when I got it I thought it was a female. I later realised it was a dog ferret and so it became Winston but always called Winnie.

Ferrets are much maligned animals. Anyone who has ever kept one properly will know that they are very intelligent, clean and loyal. If you build the hutch right with dark sleeping quarters and put a three inch hole in the floor covered with chicken wire next to the cage door where it is light they will do all their muck through the hole and all you need is a bucket underneath. Their smell is their own and you have to get to like it but if kept clean it isn’t oppressive. I had Winnie for a long time and he grew bigger and bigger. I never had him on a lead or muzzled him and he always came back out of a warren, I never had to dig for him. When we went rabbiting I just used to put him down on the ground and let him sort out where the rabbits were. When he went to ground Ted and I would net every hole in sight and wait for the action. They would pop up into the nets and we would kill them.

Occasionally, Winnie would get a rabbit banged up in a dead end. Rabbits have no defence against ferrets except flight and if cornered they will just shove as much of their body as they can into a dead end and hope for the best. The ferret scrabbles at them and pulls fur out of their back end but usually gets fed up and leaves them. On occasion you would hear Winnie squealing with frustration down the hole and every now and again he would emerge from the warren and run round on his hind legs chattering with fury. You could tell he had one holed up, his front claws would be full of fur. He would dive in again and have another go and Ted and I would just laugh at him. Eventually he would either bolt it or give up, we always let him decide when he had had enough. We used to gut the rabbits and examine the livers. If the livers were good the rabbit hadn’t got mixie. We’d always keep a couple for ourselves and I’d give Winnie the livers out of these and then shove him inside my shirt. He would coil himself round my back next to the skin and go to sleep.

I remember we got back into the Dog one evening after a profitable night out and we were having a couple of beers before going up home and frying some home cured ham. One thing I have always known is that no matter what field of human endeavour you are operating in, there’s always some clever bugger who knows more than you. On this particular night, Old Sid Demaine was in the pub and started to tell us about his ferreting days. He said he used to have the biggest ferret anyone had ever seen and I asked him how big it was nose to tail. He put his hands on the bar to illustrate the size and I said “I’ve got one that’ll beat that” and, reaching inside my shirt, brought Winnie out and laid it across his hands! Winnie was full of liver and half asleep and displayed no aggression at all but Old Sid went rigid! It was quite evident he had never held a ferret in his life. What was even more interesting was the reaction of every one else in the bar. The landlady, Lily, jumped on a chair and started screaming. Every woman in the bar tried to get in the ladies toilet at once and most of the blokes were laughing. There were glasses flying all over the place and you could safely say we had caused a stir! The upshot was we were barred for about four weeks and it cost me 30/- in breakages!

Ted and I once went with his brother John to buy a couple of ferrets from a farmer at Airton. They were in a 17 gallon conical railway kit and when John asked how much they were the farmer said he could have any he could get out of the kit for nothing. John reached in and stirred them up with his hand. When he pulled it out there were three ferrets hanging off his fingers, “I’ll take these!” The farmer couldn’t believe it and we left with three free ferrets. John was a hard man!

Winnie was more than just a working ferret, he was one of the family. I used to bring him in the house and give him a bath in the kitchen sink. Ferrets hate water but if they get used to it, love a warm bath. I used to rinse him off under the tap and then holding him by the neck, run my fist down him to squeeze off the excess water. When you do that you are always surprised by how thin a ferret is, it’s about the same as a piece of ¾ inch water pipe. Then I would let him run around until he was dry. A clean ferret is one of the most beautiful animals on earth. They are creamy white and have lovely inquisitive faces. He used to sit on my shoulder grooming himself, chattering and nibbling my ear. The kids had no fear of him and played with him as well. Visitors used to be amazed that we let such a dangerous animal loose round the children, they thought we were mad but the same people would think nothing about having an Alsatian in the house!

Eventually, when I went to my next job, I hadn’t time to go out rabbiting and so gave Winnie to the local bobby at Foulridge. He had just moved to the country and was interested in field sports. I took him out and showed him how to use the ferret, gave him the hutch and the nets and left him to it. About three weeks later I was passing and popped into the backyard to see how Winnie was going on. He was dead in the hutch and had obviously never been fed, watered or worked since he had left me. I left quietly but was so angry with myself. It was a horrible way for a lovely mate to end his days and affected me just as much as if it had been one of my human friends, perhaps even more. I have never forgotten this and faced with a similar situation not long ago, put a dog down rather than risk it being ill treated.

Working at the dairy we had regular holidays. I used to work mine, we were still hard up. I think my wage was about £28 a week by 1966 but can’t be sure. I worked my holidays by doing some driving for Richard Drinkall at Yew Tree Farm in Marton. Richard was the eldest brother of three, David farmed at Rimington and Keith at Church Farm at Gargrave. They were in business as cattle dealers, this was started by their father and they traded under the name of E A Drinkall and Sons. I think the initials EA were his mother’s, she was alive and well and living at Gargrave.

Their business was buying high class milk beasts and selling them locally. They took good calves up to Scotland and bought in-calf heifers and shipped them back down to private customers and local markets. Richard did most of the cattle buying in Scotland and in spring he would go to the lying-off sales in Paisley and nearby markets. Lying off cattle were cows which were in calf and had come straight out of winter quarters in the byre. They were usually fat, often heavy in calf as some were very near their time and soft due to lack of exercise during the winter confinement. I’ve seen Richard buy up to 200 of these and for about a fortnight they were under full pressure as they brought them down for the spring sales. They had their own Leyland wagon but no driver. David and Keith used to do the driving, David to Lanark on Monday and Keith to Ayr on Tuesday. Having me to do a fortnight non-stop on the Scottish markets was a good thing for them and it became a regular thing.

The first time I went to Paisley for them I was very apprehensive. The driving didn’t bother me but I had enough sense to realise that there was more to hauling cattle than met the eye. I didn’t have the best start in the world because when I set off for my first load the wagon was mucky, it hadn’t been cleaned out. All whoever had had it last had done was strew some straw down on top of the muck and leave it at that. I went to Paisley, loaded 13 big cows and set off for Marton.

What a trip. I soon became aware that all was not well in the back of the wagon. The cattle were panicked and sweating and were having difficulty keeping their feet. By the time I got to Shap village things were serious and I called in at a farm there and tipped the cattle out into a croft while I cleaned the wagon out, gritted it and put fresh straw down. There was no problem with the farmer about this because he knew the firm and they had a good reputation. One of the cattle was worse than the others so I left it with the farmer in a loose box and told him Richard would arrange to have it picked up when it had recovered. I set off again and had no trouble. I soon realised that the secret was a clean floor, plenty of grip and a smooth ride to lull them to sleep almost. With hindsight, HYG had a fault in that the body floor sloped down a bit at the back to help with loading and the floor was Keruin, a hard wood which made it very slippy. This was a bad thing as it put the cows at a disadvantage. Try working on a greasy, sloping floor yourself and you will soon realise what the problem is. The spring sales became an annual event for me and all the time I was on the tanks at Marton I did this fortnight for Richard.

My earlier mention of David Drinkall who eventually moved to Newsome near Gisburn reminds me of another Newsome connection. Because of our friendship with Ted Waite, we got to know Fred Norcross and his wife Betty who farmed at Newsome also. I think there was some relationship between Ted and Fred but I have forgotten it now. Fred and his wife became regular visitors at Hey Farm and he told me one day about how they used to amuse themselves before the war. The railway crosses the road next to Fred’s farm and there was a station there. When they were haytiming in summer, if they finished in decent time, they would get washed and changed and catch the train to Blackpool, have a drink and a couple of dances in the Tower Ballroom and be back at Newsome before midnight. In those days there were two bus services passed the door as well so they didn’t need to run a car. Contrast that with today, the station is closed, there are no buses and if you haven’t got a car you are marooned. I’m sure this story could be repeated all over the country and it illustrates the damage that car ownership has done to public transport.

Back at Marton the conversion of the dairy to cheese-making was complete and the workers settled down to new practises and jobs inside the dairy. The milk intake and tanking went on as usual, the distribution of milk was controlled by the MMB from a small office in Newcastle under Lyne by two blokes one of whom was called Bishop. I once called in there out of curiosity and the whole shebang was run by these two and a secretary out of a cubby hole of an office. Their job was to take in estimates of demand for milk the following day, relate this to the production figures for the current day and decide on the allocation of milk throughout the whole of the Midlands and north of England including some of the dairies in southern Scotland. Their priority was to make sure the liquid milk market had enough supplies and then allocate the rest to the manufacturing dairies. Many factors governed this calculation, Time of year and weather decided production. Holidays and seasonal demand in holiday resorts governed demand in industrial towns and seaside resorts. Available storage capacity in dairies had to be taken into account and all the answers depended on availability of transport. In spring particularly when there was a flush of milk as cattle went out to grass milk sometimes had to be tanked round the country simply to get it out of the dairies as they couldn’t hold the surplus. I remember once taking milk to a dairy on the same day that dairy tanked milk into Marton! We sometimes couldn’t see rhyme or reason in the movements but knew that there would be a good explanation for it if we knew all the facts. At one point in the early days of computerisation, it was decided that this could all be done by a computer programme. This was duly installed and tried out but the result was a glorious cock-up and they went back to Bishop and his mate with telephones and a couple of sharp pencils! Reassuring !

I only ever remember one slip up that could be directly associated with Mr. Bishop. I took a late load one day to Scunthorpe and when I got there they looked at me as though I was daft. They hadn’t ordered any milk. I got them to ring the MMB and because we were on the boundary of the southern area, they rang the wrong branch of the MMB and I was diverted to Ipswich which was even further south. I set off and arrived there at four o’clock in the afternoon. The manager came out and told me he had booked my digs in the town. I told him that was very nice of him but I was due back in Marton at ten that evening to load for an early delivery at Lincoln and Carleton dairies at 0530 the following morning. Remember I could only do 42mph. so that turned out to be a long couple of days! Colin came in to the dairy to load me that night and I remember how concerned he was about the hours.

Other memories flood back about this time. Allan Parker, driving the Albino which would only do 32mph found himself at the Co-operative Dairy in Hull one morning when he should have been at the Co-op in Nottingham. Some silly bugger, because of a take over, changed the name of the dairy at Upton on the Wirrall to ‘Express, Upton’ on the load sheets. They didn’t realise that Express had another dairy at Upton near Doncaster and this was a cause of much hilarity until common sense took hold. When the bottling stopped, Eddie Lancaster was put on the tanks for a while but he had no knowledge of roads beyond a radius of about ten miles from the dairy. He and Danny Pateman were loaded into Crudgington in Cheshire one morning and they arranged that the first one to get to the lay-by at Samlesbury Aerodrome would wait for the other and they would go down together as Danny knew the road. Danny waited for half an hour but Eddie never appeared so Danny went by himself. When Eddie finally arrived back at Marton three hours later than Danny he had burned 27 gallons of diesel against Danny’s 17! God knows where he had been, it’s doubtful if he ever knew.

I had to go to a new dairy for me one day, Wright’s at Warrington. Eddie had been going in there regularly, Colin had decided that as he knew the way he would send him there as often as he could. I asked Eddie directions and he said that as I descended this hill I would see a block of flats in front of me at the bottom and that I should turn left there. I found the dairy OK but never saw the block of flats. It wasn’t until years later I was going to the same place and realised that Eddie’s block of flats was actually a cargo boat on the Manchester Ship Canal! Eddie took Danny’s AEC one day and when he came back he mentioned that there was something wrong with the overdrive. Intrigued, I quizzed him about this because there wasn’t any overdrive on the wagon! It transpired that what he had been trying to do was engage the power take off on the gear box for the skim pump that this tank was fitted with. We had to put a new power take off box on it, Eddie had stripped the gears.

I had my own adventures. One morning I was on my way to Lincoln and Carleton Dairy where it was always a half past five tip in the morning. On this particular morning in early autumn I got to Bawtry and as I dropped down on to the plain I ran into dense fog. This wasn’t industrial fog, it was nature’s best, white, thick and consistent. I crept along at about 4mph. All I could see was the kerb about ten feet in front of the wagon. I soon realised I had a companion, another wagon was following me and had enough sense to let me do the work. Shortly after Bawtry there is a steep climb to Gringley on the Hill and the fog vanished as we climbed. From the top you could see an unbroken sea of white stretching as far as the eye could see and we plunged into it again. I crept along in this fashion for about an hour and a half and in the end I pulled up to rest my eyes and neck muscles. I got out of the cab and the driver behind jumped down as well. We agreed that it was a lousy morning, that I had done a wonderful job and that it was time he got in front and gave me a rest. “Where are we?” he said. I told him I reckoned we were somewhere near the Sheffield road end and that if I was right there was a big ‘rhine’ or drain on the left near the road. “We’ll soon find that out.” He said and picked up a two inch stone from the side of the road and threw it into the fog. There was the most horrendous crash of breaking glass that seemed to go on for ever! I looked at him and he looked at me and he said “Christ, what do we do?” I told him that I didn’t know what he was going to do but I was going to piss off as fast as possible. I jumped in the cab and set off for the dairy. Later that morning on my way back empty, it was a beautiful sunny day and as I passed the point where the rhine bent away from the road I saw a bungalow with the front window boarded up with new plywood! God knows what the inhabitants thought had happened. I hadn’t thrown the stone and it seemed silly to interfere so I drove on. Years later I was having a cup of tea in the Coategate Café at Beattock and I realised that a driver on the other side of the room was watching me. In the end I got up and went over and it turned out to be the same driver that had broken the window. He was with some mates and we had a happy half hour retelling the story.

Another morning I was coming back from an early morning tip on a Sunday in Stafford. I decided to travel up the old A34 as the motorways were iced up and there was an economy drive on and little salting was being done. I reckoned if I had trouble with icy roads there was less chance of damage on the old road than the motorway. All went well until I got into Manchester and was navigating the new roundabout that had been built at White City. The road was well salted and there were no problems until I got half way round. I saw this bloke waving at me but took no notice, it turned out that he was warning me of a problem! The council must have run out of salt half way round the island and all of a sudden I found myself on shot ice and sliding towards the flimsy railing that separated the road from the black, oily waters of the dock. I managed to get a bit of lock on and slid down the railings with the back end of the wagon hanging towards the dock. The spare wheel carrier was catching the railings and as it bent the posts the rails were catapulting over the pavement and into the dock. I was sliding directly towards the dock gate and eventually came to rest about four feet from them.

At this moment a bobby appeared behind the gate, opened them and said “You’ll want to turn round?” I did so and stopped at the gate where he was surveying the wreckage. “They won’t be pleased, they only finished it on Friday.” He said. I asked him what we were going to do about it. He looked at me and then tapped the badge on the front of his helmet. “Dock bobby, not City.” he said. “I’m going for my breakfast, what you do is up to you!” I thanked my lucky stars, got back in the cab and drove away. We never heard anything about it.

One day I had a load to take to Nestles at Ashbourne. No big sweat but I had had all my bottom teeth taken out the day before. Now my AEC was the best motor in the world but it had the worst heater, it was virtually useless. On a hard frosty morning like it was that day the inside of the cab window used to freeze up as your breath hit it. My dad had warned me not to get frost in my jaw and by the time I got to Ashbourne I realised he had been right, I was in agony. The pain had gone right round the back of my neck and it was like an iron band. When I got to the tipping point I had a word with the lads and they said they’d tip me and wash out while I was with the Nurse. They had a nurse on duty in the ambulance room day and night with it being a big firm. She took one look inside my mouth, got four aspirins down me and a hot drink and then she spent half an hour massaging my gums with oil of cloves. I was still in pain when she’d finished but nowhere near what I had felt when I arrived. It wore off a bit on the way home but I told father about it, he had been quite right.

You might be wondering why I had had all my bottom teeth extracted. I had gone to Mr Pinder, the dentist in Park Avenue, with a very bad bout of toothache and he told me they all needed to come out, they were rotten. This doesn’t seem to happen nowadays, probably due to better food and health care but in those days it was quite common to have all your teeth pulled. I’ve heard of young women being given money to go to the dentist and have all their teeth out as a wedding present. This sounds crazy now but in those days it was a passport to a pain-free future. This was certainly how I saw it. Once my bottom jaw had settled down a bit I went back to Mr Pinder and he pulled all the teeth in my top jaw and temporarily fitted my teeth. The idea was to wait until the gums had totally healed and then go back for the final fitting. After putting up with the temporary teeth floating round in my mouth for about three months I went back and got the final set. Mr Pinder said at the time that if there was such a thing as a prize for having a good mouth for false teeth I would stand a good chance of winning it. Whether this was true or just something he said to all his patients I don’t know. All I can report is that forty years later I am still wearing the same set of teeth and apart from the bottom set cracking and needing an emergency repair once, I’ve had no problem with them and haven’t had any pain either in my mouth or my wallet!

On the way into Ashbourne there was a very steep hill and if there was any ice about it was a death trap. Experience taught us that in circumstances like these, the best thing to do was to put a wheel off the shoulder of the road and let the wagon steer itself down the hill in the deep rut made by countless other wagons who had done the same thing. Over the years the council had stoned the bottom of the rut and it was a very efficient road safety device. One day the electricity board decided to put a pole in and sited it in the rut. The next frosty morning that came, some poor bugger did the usual and all of a sudden found himself running into a pole that hadn’t been there the last time. The lads took the hint and a new pole was put in well away from our life saver!

Talking about ice reminds me that modern day wagon drivers will find it difficult to believe that most wagon’s had no heaters and those that were fitted were afterthoughts and generally useless. The AEC had an apology for a heater but it might as well not have been fitted. To compound the problem, the air cleaner for the engine intake was inside the cab and this, together with the windscreen, used to ice up as you were driving down the road. We had all sorts of useless remedies for this but one thing that did seem to work was to rub the screen, inside and out with half a cut lemon. The juice must have been a higher freezing point than water and didn’t blur the view through the screen.

I nearly caused a major accident on the railway crossing at Snaith one morning. You’ll have to pay close attention here if you’re going to understand this one! I was empty and going over the crossing in third gear. Now this level crossing was anything but level. Over the years the height of the tarmac between the lines had risen until it was like a ridge and furrow field. I think this was a deliberate ploy to slow traffic down. As I went over the crossing the vehicle in front stopped suddenly and when I went for the brake and the clutch, the hydraulic pipe to the slave cylinder burst, I lost my clutch and the engine stalled as I had my foot on the air brake. I must have lifted my foot off the brake and the wagon rolled down off the top of one of the ridges of tarmac until the rear wheels ended up in the furrow. Because the wagon was still in gear, this torqued the transmission up and made it impossible to get out of gear. Normally there would have been no problem, I would have shoved the motor in first gear, pressed the starter and away we would have gone but I was stuck in third and the starter couldn’t shift the wagon, it was too high a gear.

At this point I realised that the gates were closing, there was a train coming! I baled out straight away and ran off the crossing. The signal man came to his window and shouted something at me but I shouted back that I couldn’t move. He vanished inside the box and seemed to be doing half a dozen things at once. Then I heard this roaring, screeching noise and I saw a train coming round the bend with all it’s wheels locked! There were sparks flying out from the wheels and I watched as it slid right up to the crossing and eventually stopped about 15 feet from the gates. The police arrived and the inquest started. The first thing the police did was call a breakdown wagon but the nearest one would be half an hour before it reached us. This cause consternation until I told them I could shift it myself in five minutes if they’d let me get on with it. I got my jack and lifted a back wheel until the torque spun out of the transmission, then I jumped in the cab and popped it into first gear. Out again, drop the wheel on to the ground, chuck the jack in the cab and press the starter, hey presto, with one bound Jack was free! This impressed the Old Bill no end and by the time I’d managed to explain to them what had happened they let me go on my way. Shortly afterwards they tell me that the crossing was smoothed out. Good job too! I drove back without a clutch and back at Marton we simply fitted a new hose to the slave cylinder.

I had another clutch problem one morning. I was going to the Co-operative Dairy at Hull and as I hammered up the wold out of Market Weighton I realised the clutch was slipping and I wasn’t going to make it. I turned round and went back to a garage on the other side of the village where I knew they had a couple of heavy tow trucks. I knocked them up, explained the problem and asked them to tow me into the dairy in Hull. I said I thought I could get back all right empty because it had only just started going. The owner went round the back and returned with an ex-US Army Diamond T six wheel wrecker. He put me on a rigid towbar and whistling his Alsatian dog up, jumped in the cab and away we went. I’ve never been as frightened in my life! I’ve been towed before but never at this speed, we went up the wold faster than I have ever been before in that wagon. Remember it would only do 42mph flat out. We were doing 60mph uphill! We went even faster down the other side and all I could see was the dog’s head stuck out of the driver’s side window. He did so well that we were only about ten minutes late at the dairy and I was a nervous wreck. I asked him if he always went that fast and he said that he thought it was important to get there before the milk went sour! I rang Marton and they had a new clutch plate and pressure unit waiting when I got back.

I had one road accident while I was on the tankers. I was doing a late load into Leeds and had pulled up at the lights outside the Golden Fleece pub just this side of Otley centre. The lights turned green, I set off and a car coming the opposite way decided he could get into the pub car park before I blocked the entrance. He swung across the road to dive in front of me and ran straight into the front of the wagon. I had very little damage apart from a few scratches on the massive chrome bumper but it was fairly obvious his car was a write-off. All the doors had sprung open and wouldn’t shut by a mile. He was playing hell but I nailed a witness and rang the police. I refused to move until they came and it was an open and shut case. I was called as witness at Otley Court because he had pleaded not guilty but at the last moment he changed his plea and I didn’t have to testify. I was doing a late load to Grimsby that day and collected a fiver for witness expenses as well, good day out!

There was another strange incident which I don’t class as an accident but did involve damage. It was the 29th of December 1968 and I was coming back empty from a late load to Darlington. It was the Christmas and New Year holiday of course and there was quite a lot of traffic on the road. I was dropping down towards Skipton past Skibeden Quarry, this was before the by-pass was put in and it was still a narrow and twisting road. Because I was slower I was heading a line of traffic and a grey Mercedes came round the bend travelling the other way, he was moving very quickly and had veered over on to the crown of the road. It was obvious he was going to hit me and I got as far over to the left as I could to the point where my nearside wheel was climbing the bank at the base of a high stone wall. The Mercedes hit my rear wheel a glancing blow and I saw he had caved in the drivers door and the rear door but he didn’t stop. My first thought was that he would report that I had hit him and kept going and would make a claim against the dairy so I stopped and got the names and addresses of the two cars behind me who both saw what happened. I went on into Skipton and called in at the police station.

I went in, reported what had happened and asked them to take a statement off me. The police don’t like you doing this because it means more paperwork for them but it’s a good thing to do in circumstances like this. They came outside and inspected the wagon, I had no damage except a crumpled wing which bore traces of grey paint, the tyre had taken most of the impact and being a tanker, there was no bodywork to damage. We went inside and while we did a statement the sergeant got on the ship to shore to a patrol car on Blubberhouse Moor. Before we had finished the statement he came back in and told me that they had stopped the car and asked him if he had hit anything, he said the damage was a week old but the patrol car driver told him they were taking paint samples and the driver caved in. When they got him to the station they got the police surgeon in and took a blood test, I don’t think they had the breathalyser then. It came out later that he was well over the limit and lost his license. He was a haulage contractor from Blackpool and should have known better!

In 1968 there was a major change in road haulage which has been largely forgotten nowadays. The Labour Government, under the Transport Minister Barbara Castle, brought in the Road Traffic Act. This was a piece of legislation that was long overdue, it brought in minimum standards of maintenance and annual tests for all heavy goods vehicles. The standards set were very high and many old wagons were simply put off the road, the Albino at Marton was one of them. It’s hard to imagine now just how bad vehicle maintenance was in those days. Not only that, but new vehicles were put on the road with braking systems that were entirely inadequate, this was a matter of design, not negligence. Even firms like Leyland Motors were putting heavy, quality vehicles on the road which still relied on the ancient vacuum assisted brake system. They were forced to move to modern air brakes with dual systems and fail-safe designs. I have always said that the single major improvement in braking was the spring brake. This worked on the Westinghouse Principle in which the air pressure held the brake off, any loss of pressure meant the brake came on automatically and couldn’t be taken off from the cab until air pressure was restored. In the old days, hard pressed employers sent drivers out in motors that were literally death traps and if there was any complaint, sacked them on the spot. This legislation didn’t cure all the problems but at least it made sure that on at least one day in the year the vehicle was perfectly maintained! This was a definite improvement and must have saved many drivers from death and injury. We weren’t bad at Marton, our vehicles were well maintained but even we had our problems at first. When we tested the Albion it had better braking figures on the handbrake than the footbrake and was put off the road immediately. My AEC had air brakes and passed easily but even so, the system it worked on would amaze drivers nowadays. There was a gauge to tell you what pressure you had in the reservoir to work the brakes but the warning was a red flag in a casing on the base of the windscreen. If pressure dropped for any reason the flag rose out of its case with a warning cut into it marked ‘STOP’! Simple but efficient.

The years rolled by and early in 1969 Drinkalls bought a new wagon, it was the latest Leyland Comet with the 401 engine and the ergomatic cab. It had a new Houghton body and was coach built and varnished. A nice motor. I was admiring it one day when Richard Drinkall came up the yard. He told me that they had just set John Lancaster on as driver, he was a mate of mine from Barlick. I played hell with Richard and asked him why he hadn’t come to me. He said that as I already had a job he hadn’t thought I would be interested. I told him that he was mistaken and if the chance arose again to ask me first.

I was really upset about this. I could have had a new wagon, a fresh job, £4 more a week basic and have been working with a bloke I liked and animals too. I went home and Vera commiserated with me. A few weeks later Richard sought me out and told me that John hadn’t stayed the course. He said if I wanted the job I could have it but I had to get David Peacock’s permission to go across the road as Richard didn’t want to be accused of poaching drivers. I went to see David and he was very good about it. He told me that if I wanted the job I should go if I thought it was the best thing for me and that if I ever wanted a job at the dairy he would find one for me. He said he’d have a word with Richard so I gave a weeks notice. The following Monday I was off up the road to Lanark at three in the morning with David Drinkall as passenger in the cab and about 30 calves in the back. I had a new challenge, fresh roads and men and a lot to learn.

I know this may sound strange but one of the hard parts about leaving the dairy was losing my old friend, JEH 28. People often have great problems understanding the bond that can build up between a man and a machine, I can understand that. With the old Mercury it was even worse, it had been my home for 12 hours a day! Add to this that it had provided us with a wage and a gallon of milk a day and we have a serious Life Event! I was never one for reckoning up every mile I’d done but I must have covered between 300,000 and 400,000 miles with that motor. It still had the original engine and gearbox and, even though I say it myself, it was a credit to me. I forget who took it over when I left but they reported to the management that the motor was rubbish and within six months it had been run into the ground and scrapped. The tank still sits on a plinth outside the dairy as I write, it’s used in connection with the processes in the factory. I often look at it when I pass and think of all the milk I shifted with it.

I look back at the wagons I have had and without doubt, the ones that were cheapest to run were the ones which were given to a driver and he treated it like his own. It’s hard for a non-mechanical person to understand but a piece of machinery gets used to being handled in a certain way and the older they get the more any variation affects them. How else do you explain the fact that JEH was a good motor all the time I had it but was useless when I left. There’s something wrong there.

One last milk story! I always had a reputation for a clean tank. We used to do bacteria counts on the interiors at regular intervals and I wasn’t always the best but usually had a good low count. Other dairies recognised this and when I delivered to East Lancs Dairies at Strangeways, Manchester, my milk was always chosen by the Rabbi for bottling for kosher milk. I used to open the lid and he’d climb the ladder, put on his prayer shawl and say a few prayers over the milk. I asked him one day what difference it made. He looked at me and said, “That is a matter between the milk and God!” Not a bad answer when you think about it.

Looking back on my time at Marton Dairy I am very grateful that I was lucky enough to work there at a time when it was a very human scale enterprise. We were all friends, indeed, in my case with Vera, a lot more than that! The steady work and unlimited milk made our first eight years at Hey Farm possible and many a time, enjoyable. I have no regrets about the time and if given the chance would go back and do it all again tomorrow. On top of this I left on a high note, it’s a matter of pride to me that if I had gone back any time while David Peacock was in charge he would have made a job for me if there wasn’t one available. He knew, and so did I, that I had done my best and nobody can give more than that.
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[Gummybear2]

The site Forman for Marshall&Rushworth builders who b did the conversion in the early sixties was Ray Swift.
I was the apprentice bricklayer/stone mason cum dogs body.
The driver of the 10 RB crane/excavator was Les Taylor and after pouring the concrete roof it was fitted out as a Dragline to excavate for the new concrete tanks for the new sewerage works down the road.
I clearly remember the balls up with the chimney.
In the left rear corner of the boiler room was a blowdown tank with a brick dividing wall I built the divider.
In the refurbished stone building opposite the boiler house we did a lot of underpinning and I had to go across the road to the village blacksmiths every morning to collect small steel wedges he’d made the day before.
I unfortunately didn’t learn much about bricklaying but it was very interesting non the lest and I enjoyed my couple of free pints of Jersey milk each day.
John (Gummybear)

[Tripps]

Evidently, even in those days there was an interest in harness racing or trotting as it is more commonly known. There were no official venues for the sport so it was conducted in an illegal and semi-secret manner at remote locations. They were called ‘flapping’ meetings. One regular venue was at the Flouch Inn on the moors between Manchester and Yorkshire and father used to go there.

All good stuff - lots of detail and worth reading. Must put my two pennorth in though.

There are some misconceptions about 'flapping tracks' - Dogs and Harness Racing - Trotting. They weren't illegal, and were licenced by the Local Authority just as the 'official' ones were. The difference was that they operated outside the control of the (self apponted) body the NGRC (National Greyhouind Racing Club). Now superseded by the GBGB.

The whole dog game is on its last legs, but the flaps still continue on a far smaller scale.

I never heard of The Flouch but google says the paint faded on the sign for the Plough, and transformed the name. I like that.

Similarly the trot I went to occasionally in Droylsden. There seem to have been others over the years around the Audenshaw area

Droylsden Trot.jpg

[Stanley]

John, that's nice! Good to hear from you. Ray Swift, thanks for reminding me of the name. And thanks for remembering the dog leg chimney, nice to have someone backing me up!
David, I like that explanation for the Flouch. All I knew about the flapping meetings was what my dad told me and he said they were 'illegal' but never told me why. His works, General Gas Appliances was on Corporation Road in Audenshaw so another connection with trotting there possibly.
Nice to see Stanley's Story having a trot out. Lots more good stuff in there.....

[Tripps]

All I knew about the flapping meetings was what my dad told me and he said they were 'illegal' but never told me why.

I think the participants got a bit of a buzz about being anti 'powers that be'. Perhaps another example of 'self othering'. Like Rugby League, or voting Tory in the Red Wall last year, and voting to leave the EU.

That's all a bit fanciful, but it's nice to get the chance to write it.

[Whyperion]

If there was betting, that would have been illegal I presume, being outside of powers of control the 'on-site' bookies presumably would not have been under control as the greyhound and horse-racing ones were.

[Stanley]

I think you're right Davis. They seemed to have some rum characters attending them! I knew two of them!