TALES FROM THE ENGINE HOUSE. 2
Posted: 09 Feb 2026, 03:05
TALES FROM THE ENGINE HOUSE. 2
Written 22 November 2000
I’ve just finished writing the first Tales From the Engine House and I find that my mind is full of Ernie Roberts and I don’t want to stop so I’m going to crash straight into another.
Ernie had a hard life. He was reared in a two up two down back to back on John Street up Wapping and his father was an invalid. He’d been gassed very badly in the Great War, couldn’t work and only lived a few years after he came home. I once asked Ernie what his religion was and he said Salvation Army and Pawnbrokers. He told me about one Christmas when they had nothing in the house to eat and the Sally Army turned up with a box of vegetables and an old hen for them. He said that you never forgot things like that.
As for the pawnbrokers or ‘Pop Shop’, this was Jimmy Wraw's on Church street. For the benefit of the younger end, I’d better explain what a pawnbroker was. If you were hard up you could go to the pawnbrokers with something like a gold watch or your best suit, anything that had a resale value. You handed the article to ‘Uncle’ as many people called him and he would make you an offer of a loan against the article which was known as a ‘pledge’. Say it was five shillings for a suit, (that’s 25p in today’s funny money), he would deduct 6d (2½ p) for his fee, give you the four shillings and sixpence and off you went to spend it. Next pay day you went and ‘redeemed your pledge’ by paying Uncle five shillings and off you went with your suit which you needed to go to church or chapel on Sunday. Monday morning you’d happen be down there again with the suit and so it went on.
If someone pledged an article and never redeemed it, after a certain period of time it became the property of Uncle and he could sell it as an ‘unredeemed pledge’ so Jimmy Wraw's was a good place to go for second-hand goods of all descriptions, they also sold new working clothes. When I was a lad in Stockport all my school clothes came from a pop shop called Lekerman's in Underbank and like Jimmy Wraw's it had a back door which could be used by people who didn’t want to advertise the fact that they were paying a visit to Uncle. Ernie had nothing but praise for the system because he said it was fair and it meant you could always get a few bob when you needed it. Have you ever heard the song ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’? Hatters used to use a tool called a weasel in their trade and popping the weasel means pawning your tools for booze or food at the end of the week.
The family had to be quite enterprising in getting free food. His brother had an old muzzle loading shotgun and used to go out and see what he could knock off for the pot. Ernie said they were sat in the house one night wondering what they could have to eat. The problem was that Fred had a charge of powder for the gun but no shot. Ernie thought for a bit and then went off into the town. He found a bike parked at the back of the Commercial so he whipped the front wheel out and pinched the ball bearings out of it. He went back home with them, Fred loaded the gun and went out. Twenty minutes later he came back with a rabbit and they all had a good tea! Ernie said that Fred was always a 'good provider'.
Youngsters nowadays aren’t going to believe what I’m going to tell you now but I swear it’s true. I once asked Ernie what his favourite food was and he said roast starlings! He said they used to catch starlings under a net and then roast them on the back bar of the fire, he said you didn’t pluck them or anything, just cooked them and picked the flesh off them. He said they were ‘Reight sweet and juicy!’ Bit of a contrast to these days isn’t it, instead of going into the Co-op for two bags of monster munch you catch a few birds and roast them!
Another source of food was country walks, they used to collect whatever was in season, hips and haws, blackberries, bilberries, watercress and a particular favourite was earth nuts. I’ll bet a lot of you don’t know what these are, it was Ted Waite that showed me. Sometimes in a meadow you’ll see a small plant that’s just like a couple of very slim daffodil leaves sticking up. If you dig down there’s a bulb on the end and this is the earth nut. If you want to try this, find someone who knows what they are first or you might make a mistake and poison yourself!
If there were no berries in season there was another kind of fruit that made a useful addition to the diet, hen fruit! This is what some of us used to call eggs. Ernie said that all the farmers kept their hen huts locked up because they knew it was hard times. When Ernie and Fred went for a walk they would take a baby with them that could crawl. They had it trained so that when they popped it through the bob hole into the hen hut it would rob the hens and pass the eggs out to them. I raised my eyebrows a bit at this but he swore it was true and I believe him. Another port of call was the railway goods yard, they used to slip over the fence and pinch a bucket of coal for the fire.
Ernie was a tackler all his life and the early part of his career coincided with the hard times in the 1930s and the run down of the industry after the war. He had his share of hard times and was ‘woven out’ four times. Weaving out is the process of closing a mill, the warps in the looms don’t all run out at once, some last longer than others. The way it worked was that the weavers carried on until they had perhaps only a couple of warps left and these were moved into another weaver’s set. As your looms were emptied you got your cards. Eventually all the warps had been consolidated in one tackler’s set and shortly after that there was only one loom running, when that warp finished the mill was closed. This was the process we went through at Bancroft in 1978 and I can tell you it’s a thoroughly depressing exercise, I'll talk more about that at a later date.
During the war Ernie served as a signaller in the army, he said he never fired a shot in anger. He was in Burma and saw some terrible things but when he talked about them he always leavened the tale with humour. He said they were all called out on parade one day and asked to volunteer for service with a special group in the jungle. His mate got quite fired up by the speech and when the time came to step forward he was definitely up for it. Ernie grabbed the scruff of his jacket, “Stay where you are, this bugger’s mad!” Was he ever right, the speaker was Orde Wingate and the unit was the Chindits! If you read your history you’ll find they marched off into the jungle and many of them were never seen again.
Another day him and his mate were cowering in a slit trench under heavy fire. During a lull in the action has mate said “Ernie, what does blood smell like? Ernie said “I don’t know, why?” His mate said “If it smells like shit tha’rt wounded!” This was Ernie’s way of lightening the end of this story because five minutes after he left the trench to deliver a message his mate was killed by a direct hit. A friend of mine once asked me why when things get bad I start telling jokes. It’s the same syndrome as Ernie, if you have to confront something that’s really bad, a joke can soften the blow.
Later in his army career Ernie got a bad dose of Black Water Fever. This is a nasty disease and stays with you for the rest of your life. It’s hard to imagine but as you walk round the streets in your daily life you can quite easily be passing someone who is still suffering from the consequences of having fought in the war and it needn’t be something as simple as an arm shot off. As Ernie said, the worst thing about Black Water Fever was that you had what he graphically described as ‘Bootlace Diarrhoea’ for the rest of your life. When he got it he was sent back to a casualty clearing station and one of the things he had to do was provide a sample of his stool for testing. He said there were two other blokes in the latrine tent on the same mission and when they saw his sample they asked what it was. Ernie said “This is what you call a Blighty Ticket! If you get this you go straight home.” Five minutes later they all came out of the tent, each carrying a sample provided by Ernie at 5/- a throw! They all came home on the boat together.
Ernie’s luck didn’t improve when Bancroft closed. He retired and shortly afterwards developed a brain tumour and died a horrible death, he wouldn’t even let us visit him he was in such a bad state. I still miss Ernie and I reckon that someone somewhere must have a funny sense of humour, if anyone deserved a long and enjoyable retirement it was Ernie but this was not to be.
You might think we have moved away from the engine house but this isn’t so. Ernie used to tell me these tales at dinnertime or if he had a spare few minutes he’d come in and have a smoke with me while I was running the engine. Frank Bleasdale the winding master would come down as well and give me a haircut and weavers would come to tell me their troubles, usually because the shed was too warm or too cold! As I’ve already said, running the engine at Bancroft was the best job I ever had.
Let’s end with another of Ernie’s tales. A tackler moved into Barlick with his wife and after they’d got settled in he asked her one day how she liked Barlick. She said “Oh, it’s nice and the neighbours are really friendly!” “Is there anything you need, are we short of anything for the house?” he asked. She said “Well, I’ve noticed that everyone here has a lavatory brush hung on the toilet door, can we have one?” “How much are they?” “6d down at Elmer's.” He said, “Thee go out and get one Love, I’m not having you going short of anything you want!” So she got one and a few weeks later they were sat having their tea and the tackler asked his wife how she was going on with the new brush. She told him it was a great improvement. He said, “Well, I’m glad tha thinks so but if you don’t mind Love I’m bahn to ‘ave to go back to t’paper, that brush is playing hell with me piles!”
Sorry about that! That’s it for this week. Don’t forget, if there’s anything you want to know about or any comments you want to make, you can always call me.
22 November 2000
Written 22 November 2000
I’ve just finished writing the first Tales From the Engine House and I find that my mind is full of Ernie Roberts and I don’t want to stop so I’m going to crash straight into another.
Ernie had a hard life. He was reared in a two up two down back to back on John Street up Wapping and his father was an invalid. He’d been gassed very badly in the Great War, couldn’t work and only lived a few years after he came home. I once asked Ernie what his religion was and he said Salvation Army and Pawnbrokers. He told me about one Christmas when they had nothing in the house to eat and the Sally Army turned up with a box of vegetables and an old hen for them. He said that you never forgot things like that.
As for the pawnbrokers or ‘Pop Shop’, this was Jimmy Wraw's on Church street. For the benefit of the younger end, I’d better explain what a pawnbroker was. If you were hard up you could go to the pawnbrokers with something like a gold watch or your best suit, anything that had a resale value. You handed the article to ‘Uncle’ as many people called him and he would make you an offer of a loan against the article which was known as a ‘pledge’. Say it was five shillings for a suit, (that’s 25p in today’s funny money), he would deduct 6d (2½ p) for his fee, give you the four shillings and sixpence and off you went to spend it. Next pay day you went and ‘redeemed your pledge’ by paying Uncle five shillings and off you went with your suit which you needed to go to church or chapel on Sunday. Monday morning you’d happen be down there again with the suit and so it went on.
If someone pledged an article and never redeemed it, after a certain period of time it became the property of Uncle and he could sell it as an ‘unredeemed pledge’ so Jimmy Wraw's was a good place to go for second-hand goods of all descriptions, they also sold new working clothes. When I was a lad in Stockport all my school clothes came from a pop shop called Lekerman's in Underbank and like Jimmy Wraw's it had a back door which could be used by people who didn’t want to advertise the fact that they were paying a visit to Uncle. Ernie had nothing but praise for the system because he said it was fair and it meant you could always get a few bob when you needed it. Have you ever heard the song ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’? Hatters used to use a tool called a weasel in their trade and popping the weasel means pawning your tools for booze or food at the end of the week.
The family had to be quite enterprising in getting free food. His brother had an old muzzle loading shotgun and used to go out and see what he could knock off for the pot. Ernie said they were sat in the house one night wondering what they could have to eat. The problem was that Fred had a charge of powder for the gun but no shot. Ernie thought for a bit and then went off into the town. He found a bike parked at the back of the Commercial so he whipped the front wheel out and pinched the ball bearings out of it. He went back home with them, Fred loaded the gun and went out. Twenty minutes later he came back with a rabbit and they all had a good tea! Ernie said that Fred was always a 'good provider'.
Youngsters nowadays aren’t going to believe what I’m going to tell you now but I swear it’s true. I once asked Ernie what his favourite food was and he said roast starlings! He said they used to catch starlings under a net and then roast them on the back bar of the fire, he said you didn’t pluck them or anything, just cooked them and picked the flesh off them. He said they were ‘Reight sweet and juicy!’ Bit of a contrast to these days isn’t it, instead of going into the Co-op for two bags of monster munch you catch a few birds and roast them!
Another source of food was country walks, they used to collect whatever was in season, hips and haws, blackberries, bilberries, watercress and a particular favourite was earth nuts. I’ll bet a lot of you don’t know what these are, it was Ted Waite that showed me. Sometimes in a meadow you’ll see a small plant that’s just like a couple of very slim daffodil leaves sticking up. If you dig down there’s a bulb on the end and this is the earth nut. If you want to try this, find someone who knows what they are first or you might make a mistake and poison yourself!
If there were no berries in season there was another kind of fruit that made a useful addition to the diet, hen fruit! This is what some of us used to call eggs. Ernie said that all the farmers kept their hen huts locked up because they knew it was hard times. When Ernie and Fred went for a walk they would take a baby with them that could crawl. They had it trained so that when they popped it through the bob hole into the hen hut it would rob the hens and pass the eggs out to them. I raised my eyebrows a bit at this but he swore it was true and I believe him. Another port of call was the railway goods yard, they used to slip over the fence and pinch a bucket of coal for the fire.
Ernie was a tackler all his life and the early part of his career coincided with the hard times in the 1930s and the run down of the industry after the war. He had his share of hard times and was ‘woven out’ four times. Weaving out is the process of closing a mill, the warps in the looms don’t all run out at once, some last longer than others. The way it worked was that the weavers carried on until they had perhaps only a couple of warps left and these were moved into another weaver’s set. As your looms were emptied you got your cards. Eventually all the warps had been consolidated in one tackler’s set and shortly after that there was only one loom running, when that warp finished the mill was closed. This was the process we went through at Bancroft in 1978 and I can tell you it’s a thoroughly depressing exercise, I'll talk more about that at a later date.
During the war Ernie served as a signaller in the army, he said he never fired a shot in anger. He was in Burma and saw some terrible things but when he talked about them he always leavened the tale with humour. He said they were all called out on parade one day and asked to volunteer for service with a special group in the jungle. His mate got quite fired up by the speech and when the time came to step forward he was definitely up for it. Ernie grabbed the scruff of his jacket, “Stay where you are, this bugger’s mad!” Was he ever right, the speaker was Orde Wingate and the unit was the Chindits! If you read your history you’ll find they marched off into the jungle and many of them were never seen again.
Another day him and his mate were cowering in a slit trench under heavy fire. During a lull in the action has mate said “Ernie, what does blood smell like? Ernie said “I don’t know, why?” His mate said “If it smells like shit tha’rt wounded!” This was Ernie’s way of lightening the end of this story because five minutes after he left the trench to deliver a message his mate was killed by a direct hit. A friend of mine once asked me why when things get bad I start telling jokes. It’s the same syndrome as Ernie, if you have to confront something that’s really bad, a joke can soften the blow.
Later in his army career Ernie got a bad dose of Black Water Fever. This is a nasty disease and stays with you for the rest of your life. It’s hard to imagine but as you walk round the streets in your daily life you can quite easily be passing someone who is still suffering from the consequences of having fought in the war and it needn’t be something as simple as an arm shot off. As Ernie said, the worst thing about Black Water Fever was that you had what he graphically described as ‘Bootlace Diarrhoea’ for the rest of your life. When he got it he was sent back to a casualty clearing station and one of the things he had to do was provide a sample of his stool for testing. He said there were two other blokes in the latrine tent on the same mission and when they saw his sample they asked what it was. Ernie said “This is what you call a Blighty Ticket! If you get this you go straight home.” Five minutes later they all came out of the tent, each carrying a sample provided by Ernie at 5/- a throw! They all came home on the boat together.
Ernie’s luck didn’t improve when Bancroft closed. He retired and shortly afterwards developed a brain tumour and died a horrible death, he wouldn’t even let us visit him he was in such a bad state. I still miss Ernie and I reckon that someone somewhere must have a funny sense of humour, if anyone deserved a long and enjoyable retirement it was Ernie but this was not to be.
You might think we have moved away from the engine house but this isn’t so. Ernie used to tell me these tales at dinnertime or if he had a spare few minutes he’d come in and have a smoke with me while I was running the engine. Frank Bleasdale the winding master would come down as well and give me a haircut and weavers would come to tell me their troubles, usually because the shed was too warm or too cold! As I’ve already said, running the engine at Bancroft was the best job I ever had.
Let’s end with another of Ernie’s tales. A tackler moved into Barlick with his wife and after they’d got settled in he asked her one day how she liked Barlick. She said “Oh, it’s nice and the neighbours are really friendly!” “Is there anything you need, are we short of anything for the house?” he asked. She said “Well, I’ve noticed that everyone here has a lavatory brush hung on the toilet door, can we have one?” “How much are they?” “6d down at Elmer's.” He said, “Thee go out and get one Love, I’m not having you going short of anything you want!” So she got one and a few weeks later they were sat having their tea and the tackler asked his wife how she was going on with the new brush. She told him it was a great improvement. He said, “Well, I’m glad tha thinks so but if you don’t mind Love I’m bahn to ‘ave to go back to t’paper, that brush is playing hell with me piles!”
Sorry about that! That’s it for this week. Don’t forget, if there’s anything you want to know about or any comments you want to make, you can always call me.
22 November 2000