BARLICK LIFE, 1900 ONWARDS (3)

[Stanley]

BARLICK LIFE, 1900 ONWARDS (3)

28 May 2001

It’s 1921 and last week we left the widow Margaret Ellen and her family living in 1 John Street on 25/- a week parish relief. It was a hard time for all of them and not surprisingly, a lot of Ernie’s memories of that time are about food.
I asked him about birthdays and Christmas and whether he could remember any presents. Birthdays were ignored apart from getting his hair pulled by everyone and Christmas wasn’t much better. He said that the only present he could remember was getting an orange for Christmas, the next time you’re doing the Christmas shopping for your kids you might bear this in mind, but I don’t think you’ll be very popular.
Ernie can remember the Christmas after his father died, it was Christmas Eve, there was no food in the house and they all went to bed early. At about ten o’clock there was a knock on the door and Margaret got out of bed to go and see who it was, when she opened the door it was the Salvation Army delivering a basket full of food for them. Ernie says he has never forgotten that kind gesture, it made all the difference to them and he remembered it as one of the best Christmases they ever had.
Of course there were times when all resources failed them and Margaret would have to make a visit to Jimmy Wraw’s on Church Street. As I remember it, Wraw’s used to be somewhere near where Barclay’s Bank is now but if anyone can tell me for certain I’d like to hear from them. For the younger ones, Jimmy Wraw’s was a pawnbroker’s shop, ‘Uncle’ as everyone called them. A pawnbroker was a moneylender but they only gave loans for security. This could be anything from a wedding ring to a piece of furniture, you took whatever it was into the shop and left it as a ‘pledge’ against the money you were lent for it. You could go back and redeem your pledge at any time for twelve months and Ernie thinks that the interest charge was a halfpenny a month for every 2/- you borrowed. This worked out at 25% per annum which sounds high but is actually less than most credit cards nowadays.
If you couldn’t afford to redeem your pledge within twelve months it became a ‘forfeited pledge’ and the pawnbroker was allowed to sell it so Wraw's was a good place to go if you wanted anything second-hand from a wedding ring to a piece of furniture of course. They also sold new working clothes as well. Both Ernie and I were trying to remember the name of the little bald headed bloke that used to be the manager there but we failed, if anyone knows please let me know. Ernie said that the manager was a good man and very fair. He had nothing but good to say about Wraw's, it was always there when you needed it and he said they looked after his best suit better than they could have at home!
This statement raises an interesting point about the conditions that Margaret and her family lived in. Imagine a house with a badly fitting door which allowed draughts to blow in all round. The window frames would have been little better and the roof slates had no under-drawing or pointing. There was no insulation in the roof at all and consequently the house would have been, to our central heating conditioned systems, cold, draughty and damp. These are the ideal conditions for wildlife like cockroaches, silver fish and moths.
Right up to the fifties, any wardrobe or drawer that had woollen clothes in and wasn’t protected with moth balls was infested with moth larvae, these had only one purpose in life, to eat wool! I suppose a lot of people will use the phrase ‘moth-eaten’ to describe something that is tatty and ragged and yet don’t realise where the phrase comes from. The moth balls were small balls of camphor, about the size of an aniseed ball and they gave of a heavy, sweet scented vapour that deterred moths and clung to the clothes. In later years they were shaped like Polo Mints so that they could be hung on a string on the coat hanger and called Mothaks. I grew up with the scent of moth balls but now we nearly all have dry centrally heated houses, moths are almost a thing of the past.
You might wonder what the effect of these conditions were on the family. I suppose the short answer is bad. Remember that there was no refrigeration, almost all the food they ate was either contaminated because of age or because of the dust that drifted in from the street and settled on uncovered plates. Almost everyone suffered from a permanent low level infection of the stomach that gave them constant mild diarrhoea. In addition, Margaret’s system was weakened by child-bearing and malnutrition and her condition was even worse. Like many other women in those days, she swore by Beecham's Pills. These were small balls of medicine screwed up in a scrap of paper, I think there were about six in a twist. Margaret, like my mother and hundreds of thousands of other women wouldn’t dream of going to bed without taking one.
Ernie himself was a very sickly child. He reckons he was on seven death beds before he was three years old, he always had something wrong with him. He remembers his mother once trying to dose him for a sore throat, she had got some flowers of sulphur and loaded it into a piece of rolled up paper. The idea was that she was going to blow the powder down his throat but Ernie blew first and his mother got the dose! He says she nearly choked and when she recovered, gave him a good hiding and sent him to bed. Home made remedies like this were common because people couldn’t afford to go to the doctor. I can remember having a sweaty sock wrapped round my throat when I went to bed to alleviate a sore throat, the theory was it kept you warm and the ammonia healed your throat. Another cure for sore throat was to gargle with salt water. A solution of borax was good for mouth ulcers and a dose of sulphur mixed with black treacle was essential in spring to ‘clear your blood out’. Tonics of all sorts were in vogue, any chemist would sell you a bottle of Easton Syrup which was mostly quinine and incredibly bitter. I know it used to make my teeth go all funny. Fenning’s Fever Cure was another great standby I remember well, the main ingredient of that was nitric acid!
Even life threatening diseases were treated at home. If a child had Whooping Cough the cure was to take them down to the gas works and get one of the workmen to take them up to the top of the retorts and expose them to the sulphurous fumes, some people reckoned that the fumes off a tar boiler in the street were just as good. These boilers were full of gas tar and this was heated up and poured round the stone setts in the road to seal them. In hot weather the tar melted and the kids would collect it and use it like Plasticine to make models. When it stuck to your hands the only thing available to get it off was lard, there were no detergent hand cleaners in those days.
Ernie told me another story which reminded me of my grandmother. Fred had an old muzzle loading shotgun that he used to use to get rabbits for the family. Uncle Ernest used to keep them supplied with gunpowder and one day Ernie was experimenting with this in the kitchen, throwing small pinches on the fire. He slipped up and threw the whole packet on and there was a serious explosion. Apart from burning Ernie’s face and bringing down clouds of soot from the chimney, it frightened the old lady next door so much that she jumped out of bed. The interesting thing about this was that she was what they called ‘bedfast’ or ‘bedridden’. You never seem to hear of this now but in those days anyone who was so seriously ill that the doctor couldn’t cure them took to their bed and stayed there, in my experience it was usually women. My grandmother was ‘bedfast’ for 17 years before she died, I have little doubt that in today’s world she would have been up and about. Anyway, Ernie ‘cured’ the woman next door!
There’s lots more to tell about Ernie and his life but can we just pause for a moment and look at what we have described so far from a 21st century standpoint. Margaret and her family weren’t alone in their poverty, there were many more families and widows like them. Because Wapping was an old part of the town housing was cheaper there and the proportion of poor people was higher. The equivalent in Earby would be the ‘Dockyard’ behind Victoria Mill. These people were living in cold, draughty, run down property and they are all malnourished. In short they are in poverty. Shortage of money affected their lives in many ways. They couldn’t afford decent health care, clothes, footwear and certainly not holidays. Because they were forced into debt they had to support high interest payments. What benefit system there was, The Parish, turned out to be corrupt in Margaret’s case. General standards of sanitation and hygiene were appalling and this imposed even more strains on them and their health.
No matter which way you look at it, these were not the ‘good old days’. Ernie can laugh when he looks back but it was a bottomless pit of human misery and the only escape was by seeing the bright side or dying. It was no wonder that when men were in work drink played such a large part in their lives. I’ve talked before about men saving up and ‘striking t’rant’, going out and boozing until they were broke. The women didn’t usually have this escape because that’s what it was. There’s a book called Classic Slum by a man called Roberts and it describes exactly this scenario in Salford, he says ‘The quickest way out of Salford was four pints.’ The same thing applied to Barlick. The wonder of it all is that they survived. How they did it and what happened to improve their situation will have to wait until next time. As usual I’m always glad to hear from you.

SCG/28 May 2001

[Gloria]

Very interesting Stanley, it brought back many memories and made us chuckle.