EARBY, AFTER THE GREAT WAR. (2)

[Stanley]

EARBY, AFTER THE GREAT WAR. (2)

16 October 2002

We left Arthur Pollard his wife and Jim their son firmly established in Red Lion Street where they had a backstone bakery. Arthur and his wife ran the bakehouse together but this didn’t mean that the housework got neglected. Jim’s mother did all the shopping and washed and baked twice a week. They had some hens at the back which were fed on the waste from the bakehouse mixed up as a hot mash. This was a very popular way of feeding hens, you put all the dry ingredients in a bucket, slopped some boiling water on and mixed it up into a dry, crumbly paste. If you really looked after your hens you would put some Karswood’s Poultry Spice in. It smelt wonderful, the hens loved it and the eggs tasted good with deep orange yolks.
The eggs were used in the house and as the hens came to the end of their useful life, they ended up as roast chicken. Their favourite meat was pork and his mother bought that at Edmondson’s shop at the bottom of Riley Street. They got the milk at the farm opposite, Jim used to go for it and it was lifted straight from the milk kit using a lading tin. This was raw milk of course and whilst I appreciate the danger of drinking raw milk, particularly in those days when bovine TV was endemic in the cattle, I have to tell you young people that unless you have drunk milk warm from the cow you’ve never tasted proper milk! Arthur didn’t use milk in his baking. Twice a week when he got older Jim was sent to Wilkinson’s at Booth Bridge Farm, Thornton-in-Craven. They made butter and Arthur wanted the buttermilk which was left over when the butter was churned to make his milk cakes.
As I write this, I am suddenly aware that many younger people won’t know how butter is made. The raw milk from the cow is ‘separated’ into skim milk and cream. This is done by a centrifugal machine, a separator, invented about 1880 by Gustav de Laval. Before this, and for a long time afterwards if you couldn’t afford a separator, the milk was allowed to stand in shallow dishes overnight and the cream rose to the top. This was skimmed off with a shallow spoon and put into a separate container. The milk that was left was pale blue in colour and was, not surprisingly, called skimmed or skim milk. This was used for drinking, baking and even making very durable whitewash! When you had sufficient cream, and it was never churned fresh but allowed to ripen, you put it in a butter churn and agitated it until the butterfat separated out and clumped into a lump. This was lifted out, sprinkled with salt and patted with wooden paddles to drive out any remaining buttermilk. When weighed up into pounds it was sold. Most farmer’s wives (it was usually their job to make the butter) had a wooden stamp carved with a design like a flower or a cow and just before they wrapped the butter in greaseproof paper they stamped this on to the butter as a trade mark.
So, Jim was sent to Booth Bridge to get the buttermilk. Strapped on his back was a flat tin which was shaped to fit his back, this was called a back kit, they were made in various sizes from five to ten gallons. When he got to Thornton this was filled with buttermilk for the bakery. Mrs Pollard got her butter from Wilkinson’s as well and every year at Christmas, a turkey. Mrs Pollard did most of her shopping at the Co-op. The attraction there was the ‘divi’. How this worked was that you bought one share in the Co-op, it cost you a pound, in return, you were given a number and you quoted this every time you bought something at the Co-op. You were given a small slip the size of a postage stamp which recorded how much you had spent and you stuck this in your Co-op book. At certain times of the year, most people waited until just before the Wakes Week, you could take your book to the Co-op office and have it added up, you were then paid a dividend calculated on how much you had spent, Earby Co-op regularly paid out 2/6 in the pound in those days. In other words, for every pound you spent you got back twelve and a half new pence, not a bad discount!
One feature that we have lost nowadays is the ‘corner shop’. These were small local shops that sold the most common household items. Jim said that there was a house shop at 49 Red Lion Street run by Mrs Lois Eastwood who sold butter, tea, sugar, washing powder and dry goods like that. Further down, roundabout number 37, there was bigger shop run by Slater’s. They did a bit of oven baking and sold a greater range of goods. These small shops sold goods at about the same price as the Co-op but didn’t give any divi. Some of them however had a much more useful service, they would sell on credit, on Red Lion Street, Mrs Eastwood did this but Slater’s didn’t. How this worked was that you had a shop book and everything you bought was noted down in it. When you got paid, usually Wednesday if you were in the mill, you went down to the shop and cleared off your debt. Many poorer people worked like this and were never in credit. This was an advantage to the small shop as they had a tied customer, this practice was called ‘strapping’. There was another credit system which many of my older readers will remember, a regular caller at many houses was the ‘Provident Man’. This was a system run by the Provident Insurance Company, their man used to call and if you wanted to buy a large item for the household like a piece of furniture or clothes you could get a cheque off him and use this at an approved retailer to buy whatever you wanted. You paid the money back in instalments each week when the Provident Man called. The disadvantage of this was that many shopkeepers charged higher prices for goods bought on a Provident cheque. More next week about Earby in general and Red Lion Street in particular.

16 October 2002