EARBY, AFTER THE GREAT WAR. (1)

[Stanley]

EARBY, AFTER THE GREAT WAR. (1)

14 October 2002

Twenty four years ago this month I sat down with Jim Pollard the weaving manager at Bancroft and talked to him about his early life. This means I can give you a snapshot of a small corner of Earby, Red Lion Street to be exact, in the years between the wars. Memory being what it is there is always a chance that some mistakes can creep in but on the whole it will be accurate account.
At the end of the Great War Arthur Pollard and his wife were living in Cottontree at Colne and weaving in one of the mills there. Arthur had a bad chest, he had been gassed in the war, and they decided to get out of the dust in the mill so they moved to Earby taking their baby son Jim with them. They bought 53, 55 and 57 Red Lion Street, almost opposite the Red Lion pub. The two houses at 53 and 55 were knocked together into one dwelling but 55 was a backstone bakery and it was in this trade that Arthur and his wife intended to make their living.
My younger readers will never have heard of backstone baking, it is a trade which finally died out in this area when Stanley’s Crumpets closed a few years since. These bakeries didn’t have an oven, they did their baking on a backstone which was in fact a thick iron plate with a fire underneath. It was used like a large skillet and on it you baked crumpets, muffins, milk cakes and most popular of all, oatcakes. The oatcakes could be eaten soft, in the condition they came off the backstone, but many were dried on the airing rack in the kitchen and eaten as ‘hard’. At one time, every pub in the area sold ‘stew and hard’ or, less popular, ‘cheese and hard’. I was eating this in the Craven Heifer at Kelbrook in the early sixties but haven’t seen it since.
Arthur and his wife didn’t have a shop, they employed men to go round the town selling door to door carrying a basket of baked goods. This door to door selling was very common in those days because most people were out working, nobody had what we would regard as proper food storage facilities, so it was important to have fresh food as often as possible. The Co-op had a horse drawn van which went round selling greengroceries and they had competition in the form of Harry Hart from Colne who came round once a week selling fruit and vegetables, he was cheaper than the Co-op. Jim said they bought their tomatoes off a man called Louis Lodge who had some greenhouses further up Red Lion Street. A man called Laurie Nichols used to sell fish off his cart. Jim said he remembered Laurie particularly because he had a wooden leg and Arthur’s Staffordshire Bull Terrier used to jump up and bite it where it stuck over the side of the cart! When bilberries, blackberries or watercress were in season unemployed men used to go gathering them and sell them door to door to make a bit of beer money.
Anyone moving into a house nowadays takes running hot water, a bathroom and an inside toilet for granted. In 1918 they were far from common but 53 and 55 Red Lion Street had hot water and a bathroom. Jim says he can only remember an inside flush toilet there but I suspect that might have been a slightly later addition. Jim’s mother had another advantage, there was a covered glasshouse at the back of the house which had a cast iron stove and they used it as a washhouse and kitchen for the house, most housewives would be doing their washing in the backyard in those days.
I asked Jim to try to describe what he would regard as common sights in the town when he was a small boy. He said that there were still some old ladies wearing long dresses with pinafores and shawls, he could remember them bringing a buffet out of the house and sitting there gossiping with their neighbours. Remember that in those days there was nothing else to do in an evening or, if you had the time, on a pleasant afternoon. Some of these old ladies smoked clay pipes and a jug of beer from the outdoor department at the nearest pub would always be welcome.
Jim said that the deliveries of flour, brought by Greenwood’s and Appleby’s, were on motor lorries and he thought they came from Preston. All the other deliveries in the town were by horse-drawn vehicle. Can you remember Edmondson’s cart delivering meat in the picture we saw a while ago of School Lane?
The overall picture Jim gave me was of a tightly knit little family making a decent living on Red Lion Street. Their world was small, Colne, Skipton and Barnoldswick were the limits of their world. If you wanted to go anywhere else it was by rail and was a major enterprise. Apart from the flour deliveries, everything they needed was bought in the town. The wellspring of all wealth in the town was the cotton mills and the small trades and retailers which catered for the mills and their workers.
There was a small pension for anyone over 70 but anything else was up to you, basically if you didn’t work you didn’t eat. Medical care was rudimentary and if you had to be taken to hospital it was likely you would be taken to the station on a handcart, the nearest hospital in terms of time was by train to Skipton. The shadow of the workhouse at Raikeswood still hung over the workers so it’s important that while we may look back at the simple life with nostalgia, we mustn’t forget the drawbacks.
More about the life in Earby next week. My picture is of the three houses in Red Lion Street as they are today. They are still one house and the big fireplace that held the backstone is still in place in the end house, notice the big chimney in the gable end.

14 October 2002