MORE WEST MARTON MEMORIES (3)

[Stanley]

MORE WEST MARTON MEMORIES (3)

Written 23 February 2001

As I have often said, there are worse places to live than Barlick and the surrounding area. As I walk round the town I get buttonholed by people about these articles and this week has been no exception. I got a nice email from Phyllis Addyman’s granddaughter Rachel to say that her grandmother is still alive and really enjoyed seeing Harry mentioned last week so I’m going to bow to pressure and do a bit more on West Marton. By the way Rachel, will you please let me know where you are? Another request, will the bloke who I was talking to on the canal bank who worked with Percy and Vera please give me a call as I can’t remember his name. Sorry!
When I first started driving for the dairy they had three wagons of their own on bottle delivery. In those pre-Thatcher days every school child got a third pint bottle of milk free at break time every morning and West Marton delivered this milk to all the schools from Keighley across to Barlick and up the dale as far as Kirkby Malham. I always said that there was no finer thing to do with milk than pour it down children’s throats. The dairy wagons delivered this to the schools first thing in the morning and then took milk to depots at Colne, Nelson and Burnley in the afternoon. Harrison Brothers picked up all the farm milk and took the bottled milk to Skipton, Keighley and Bradford depots.
The standard wagons we used then would make any modern driver laugh. They were Bedford petrol wagons which were nominally built for five tons but we used to put seven and a half tons on them as a matter of course and many a time more, especially on the can job from the farms. All this on 7.50 X 20 tyres and with a 28hp six cylinder petrol engine and four gears! No heaters, no power steering, one headlamp and one windscreen wiper! All this was perfectly legal in those days, we were allowed up to 14 tons on two axles and I can’t ever remember us having an accident.
Eddie Lancaster from Sough and his brother Eric from Kelbrook drove two of the dairy wagons and the third was run by Keith Byers from Skipton. I first started my career at Marton doing days off for Eddie and Eric and then started full time for Harrison’s when Ernest Hartley gave his notice in. At that time apart from me, Billy Harrison drove a wagon, Jack, his brother drove the Neville conversion Bedford and Harold Stone ran the Queen Mary. The Queen Mary was an ‘S’ type Bedford with a 35hp petrol engine and was bought specially for picking up the Bashall Eaves milk, the former Fattorini farms, and doing a load of bottles to Davies Dairy in Bradford every afternoon.
A word about the Queen Mary. Once again, modern drivers would be amazed by what we did quite legally. The wagon was bought and immediately sawn in half in the middle and a Bayko Flitch put in. This was a kit which lengthened the chassis and drive shaft by about four feet which was what we needed to get the Bradford load on to one wagon. Harold Stone was given this vehicle new and on the first day it was loaded with crates stacked five high right to the back and the middle three rows made up to six high. When Harold got back he pointed out that the wagon had bent slightly in the middle and so the load was reduced to five high all round! Even so, as you drove it you could feel it flexing as you went down the road! Again, all perfectly legal.
Any of you who know my predilection for all things mechanical might be getting a bit worried at this point. Relax, that’s enough about wagons, well nearly, they might crop up again!
The bottle dock at Marton was right next to the road where the gardens are now. It was presided over by Frank Whalley while I was there. He was a mild-mannered man with a little quiff of white hair that was permanently stuck up on his head. His job was to check all the loads as they went out and make sure that private enterprise was kept to a minimum. It was an accepted fact that there were always one or two breakages and so we used to put ‘riders’ on some of the crates. This was simply an extra full bottle laid on top of the crate. Frank was always complaining about the number of riders that I put on but as I pointed out to him, they were essential, I had three growing children! I think that the wage then, in 1957, was £17 a week so a gallon of milk a day came in handy, one thing is certain the kids all grew up strong with good bones! Jim Marsh used to be bottling manager but he was in charge of the Skipton depot in my time and later went to the new filling station at Snaygill.
Picking milk up from the farms was a hard job but the great consolation was that you got to know most of the farmers very well. I have a bit of a problem here because I feel like saying that we don’t have the same ‘characters’ about today, but I suspect that is simply an old man’s point of view, we certainly had them then! Clifford Chapman at Mire House, just below the dairy was a nice quiet man until the dairy sited a new sewage treatment works at the top of his lane. Relations got a bit strained at times after that! At one point I was put in charge of this plant and I have to admit it was a bloody mystery. One day it would be fine, the water would be running out into the beck as clear as gin, the next day it would be like porridge, I was glad when the job was taken off me!
Cyril Richardson once told me that he was in a hotel with Clifford having a meal and the waiter brought the cheese board. There was a baby Wensleydale on offer and Clifford indicated that he’d have some of that. The waiter cut a generous wedge out but when he offered it to Clifford he asked for the other piece! The waiter gave him the rest of the cheese and was turning away when he stopped, spiked the remaining piece and said "You might as well have this as well!" Cyril said that Clifford ate the lot, he really liked his cheese!
The next farm down the road was Stainton House. This was farmed by Johnny Spensley and his son Malcolm who had a car spares business under the Majestic at one time. They were famous for being late with their milking, it was nothing unusual to see the lights on in the shippons at midnight as you were driving past. One night, another local farmer was driving past at about two in the morning on his way home from a dance and saw that all the lights were on. The following day he saw Johnny and said "You were about late last night!" Johnny said "What time was that?" When the other bloke said two o’clock, hoping to get a rise out of him, Johnny deflated him by telling him he must have been mistaken because they were late up that morning!
I was once at Johnny’s delivering a load of hay and he asked me if I’d like some sausage for my lunch. I went into the kitchen and was horrified when I saw him cut some black things down from a string hanging from the ceiling, he brushed the dust and cobwebs off them and threw them into the pan. You’ve never smelled anything as wonderful in your life, they were home made Cumberland sausages, stuffed full with home fed pig meat and spices and they were the best sausages I have ever tasted in my life! God alone knows how long they had been hanging there in the kitchen.
Lady Harriet Nelson was still at the Hall in those days and had some funny ideas about Sunday observance. She could be seen progressing through the village every now and again in an ancient Rolls Royce and woe betide anyone who had washing out on a Sunday! Being off-comed uns, we drivers never had anything to do with her and she was more an object of curiosity than anything else. I think we all realised that she was a symbol of a way of life which had had its day.
As I’ve mentioned before, when the Milk Marketing Board took over the milk pick up from the farms, Harrison Brothers lost their contract and I went away for a few years as Billy Harrison’s only remaining driver on the tramp looking for work. That episode is different story and I’ll leave it for another day but eventually I came back to the dairy and asked David Peacock if he had a job going. He set me on straight away and I drove bottle wagons until the dairy stopped bottling, I then went in the garage with Wallace Neave.
Wallace had a temper on him but I usually got on well with him. We did all sorts of jobs and it was good experience for me, Wallace was one of the old school of mechanics and knew all the tricks. He also knew a lot about ratting and we had many an exciting evening with my little Manchester Lakeland cross terrier wreaking havoc amongst the local rat population. He had a hen hut at the back of the old stables at the top of the yard and we once got a big bag of rats out of there. I thought we had finished but I heard a noise in the hut and when I went in Wallace was laid on his side with his arm under the dropping board at the back of the hut and was using some terrible language. I thought he’d fallen and hurt himself at first but it soon became obvious there was one rat left and Wallace was after it with his penknife! He got it. Hard man!
I have one sad memory of the garage. It was a freezing morning in winter and the steam pipe in the garage was cold because Jack Brown had done a repair the day before and left the pipe sagging in the corner. It had collected condensate during the night and frozen and I was laid on my side in the muck and freezing cold, trying to thaw it with a blowlamp. I wasn't pleased and was muttering to myself, "I’ll kill that bloody Brown when I see him!" and a voice came from behind me, it was Bill Mills the manager, "You’ll have a job Stanley, he died in his chair last night." It was one of those occasions when you realise that you should have kept your mouth shut, I felt so ashamed. Ah well, we all have ‘em.


23 February 2001