BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS (2)

[Stanley]

BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS (2)

27 May 2001

We ended last weeks piece with the outside closet, we might as well continue on this exalted level and look at the rest of the household waste. I used to spend quite a lot of time in Laneshawbridge and there was one place in a field there next to the beck where for years, all the dustbins from the village were emptied. Over the years the beck had changed course and started to cut into the tip and as it fell away all sorts of interesting things came to light.
The first thing I noticed was that the tip was mainly ashes from coal fires and the only other things you found in there were rusty tins, small metal or glass objects and broken pottery, in other words things that wouldn’t burn. This gives us some clues about waste disposal at the start of the 20th century. Actually, I didn’t need these clues because I’m old enough to remember what we did at home in the 1940’s and things hadn’t changed that much.
The first thing to remember is that there was hardly any packaging like there is today. The only things that were wrapped at the grocers was sugar, flour, tea etc. that had to be sold in a bag. Butter and lard was wrapped in greaseproof paper as was bacon and meat but just about everything else was unwrapped. Nobody would have thought of wrapping vegetables or bread, they just got dropped in the shopping bag or basket so there was hardly any waste from food packaging and what little there was would burn on the fire.
Food waste like potato peelings or pea pods also went on the fire. This damped it down and saved coal. Nearly everyone banked the fire with soft waste of this sort just before they went to bed, with a bit of luck the fire would still be in in the morning. At the very least, the grate would be warm and easy to light.
You might be wondering about left-over food. There is a simple answer to this, there wasn’t any! You ate everything that was on your plate without fail and if something was going off a bit you ate it anyway. Remember that in the early years everyone in Ernie’s home was under-nourished. Ernie said that his mother looked like a ‘skinned rabbit’, she only weighed about six stones and even if there was more food than usual, she made sure the kids got it so there was never anything left on the plates.
A word about fire lighting wouldn’t go amiss here. I watch these ‘survival’ programmes on the TV and never fail to wonder at the mess that the participants get into when asked to light a fire, even if they have matches they struggle to get a flame going. Every child of my generation knew how to light fires and so did all the generations before me. First one up lit the fire and one of the earliest things my mother ever taught me was how to make fire-lighters out of newspaper. I can’t show you here but you rolled the paper up into a tube, then flattened it and then plaited it into a sort of lump and finished off by tucking the loose end in, ask the oldest person you know and they’ll show you how to do it. If you made about four of these, placed them in a clean warm grate and carefully packed some knobs of good coal round them all you needed was a match and in ten minutes you had the beginnings of a good fire.
Nearly all the grocer's shops sold bundles of kindling for the well-to-do customers and there were even special fire-lighters that were a bundle of creosote soaked shavings held together with four sticks and some wire but these were beyond Mrs Roberts’ pocket!
In 1921 when George Roberts died, Margaret was at rock bottom. She couldn’t work because she had a child she was still nursing and she must have been badly advised because she didn’t seem to realise that her husband’s death was due to war service and she was eligible for a pension. There was only one thing to do, go ‘on the Parish’. In other words, she had to apply to the local relieving officer for a hand out from the Poor Rate, the workhouse in other words. She got 25/- a week and this was delivered every Saturday morning by the relieving officer. I know his name but I’ll keep that to myself because he may still have relatives in the town. Two years after she started on the Parish the relieving officer was found to be embezzling money from his clients. Margaret should have been getting 35/- a week, not 25/-. The man was tried at Skipton and given nine months in the second division, that is without hard labour. Ernie reckoned that this was nowhere near the punishment he had inflicted on his mother for two years and I tend to agree with him.
Be that as it may. Margaret had a hard two years and so did Ernie and his brothers and sisters. The first problem was that there was never enough to eat, they lived from hand to mouth. There was a small shop opposite John Street run by a lady called Mrs Matthews and Ernie said you could get anything there for a penny. You could get a small twist of tea or sugar or an onion or apple. If you went in with a penny you would always get something. Savages were in business on Church Street by now and Mrs Yates had a greengrocer’s shop on there as well. There was no such thing as refrigeration in those days so the aim was to sell everything that was perishable late on Saturday night and this was the time when people like Margaret went hunting for bargains. Church Street at ten o’clock on a Saturday night was the place to be, nothing was wasted, the bad bits were cut out of fruit and the good parts sold cheap, a bone from Jack Tomlinson the butcher was the basis of many a Sunday dinner.
It’s probably time here to mention the ‘hunter-gatherer syndrome’. If you are hungry enough there are lots of ways you can get hold of things to eat. Ernie had an uncle Ernest who he was named after and he was an expert at trapping starlings. Ernie says they used to skin them and then roast them on the top bar of the coal fire. He says they were 'reight fatty and sweet'. Rabbits were a great standby. Fred, Ernie’s elder brother was a good man at trapping and shooting rabbits and as Ernie said if you had a rabbit an onion and a bit of salt you were all right. His mother would soon make either a stew or a rabbit pie.
While we were on the subject of rabbits we both agreed that we’d gone off the idea of eating them since myxomatosis had been introduced into them to cut the numbers down. Ernie said that it was ‘an invention of the devil, pure greed, just because they were eating the farmer’s grass’. I told him the thing I had against it was the cruelty of it, the virus is a terrible thing and the poor animals get tumours and go blind and die a horrible death. There are plenty of rabbits about at the moment but many of them have ‘myxy’. If you’re hard up and want to know how to decide if they are fit to eat I’ll tell you, look at the liver, if that’s healthy the rabbit is OK.
The lads spent a lot of time walking around the fields and if there were mushrooms about or blackberries that soon found them and took them home. Ernie admitted to raiding the odd hen house at times, he said the farmers had got wise to this and locked the huts up but they had a secret weapon, a child small enough to squeeze through the bob hole of the hut and pass the eggs out. I asked him about coal and he said that if they were short, a trip down to the railway yard with a bucket at dead of night could usually cure that deficiency. All right, it was stealing, but if kids are hungry or cold I reckon the rules change a bit, sorry about that.
I asked Ernie about his mother’s cooking and not surprisingly he said she was a ‘bloody marvellous cook’, she would have to be when you think about it. He said that the thing he missed most was lemon curd and rice and currant tarts. I’ve never come across the tarts myself but I’m going to find out about them and have a crack at making some, if anyone knows the recipe, give me a ring!
I asked Ernie about clothes and whether his mother made any for them and he burst out laughing, he said his mother might have been the best cook in the world but she was the worst seamstress! He dreaded her darning his stockings because it felt as though he had a lump of coke in his clog! Most of their clothes were hand me downs. Jumble sales were a good target but this didn’t help with footwear. He said that he spent most of his childhood ‘witchered’. I’ll bet a lot of you have never come across that word have you, it’s a corruption of ‘wetshod’ and means having boots that leak and wet feet.
He told me a story about old Mr Slater, the owner of Clough Mill. He said that him and Fred were walking down Manchester Road one Saturday and they came across Mr Slater in the street. He weighed their footwear up and said ‘Come with me’. He took them to a clogger called Barlow at the bottom of Manchester Road and told him to make the lads a pair of clogs apiece and to make sure they knew that if they broke an iron they must go back to Barlows and have it fixed, Mr Slater would take care of the bill. Ernie said he sat in the clogger’s shop all day Saturday until his new clogs were ready, he said that the man was a saint and he’d never forgotten this kind action. He had an idea that Margaret might have worked at Clough at one time and this was how Slater knew about them. Often Slater would take them into Mrs Yates and buy them an apple or slip them sixpence for their mother.
Ernie and Fred were what we would call today ‘street wise’. They never missed an opportunity for getting something for nothing or earning a halfpenny, they had a regular series of customers who they ran errands for. Ernie said that one day he went to Mrs Yates for a donkey stone for an old lady who lived on Colne Road. Donkey stone was the name for a small block of soft stone that was used to put decorative lines on the edge of a scrubbed doorstep or on a kerb edge. You could get hard or soft and they came in white, yellow and orange colours. Well, Ernie was given a half penny and went for the donkey stone but when he delivered it the lady never gave him anything. He set off down the street but then went back and asked her, ‘Was that donkey stone hard or soft?’ The old lady grinned and said ‘Oh dear, I never gave you the half penny for going did I’ as Ernie said, ‘I must have been cute even in them days!’
Right, we’ve run out of space for this week. More about Ernie and Wapping next week. Always glad to hear from you especially if you know the recipe for rice and currant tart!

SCG/27 May 2001