BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS (4)
Posted: 10 Mar 2026, 02:43
BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS (4)
28 May 2001
If you had happened to be in Westgate on Christmas Eve 1924 you might have seen a eight year old lad staggering up the road with a turkey over his shoulder that was so big its head was dragging on the ground behind him. That’s right, it was our Ernie!
I can hear you saying, “Hang on a minute, the last we heard he was on his chin strap”. You’d be right, but sometime late in 1924 Margaret found out that she was entitled to a War Widow’s Pension and so she claimed it and got back pay as well, Ernie said it was a great day when this happened. The first thing she did was take him to the indoor market that was held daily in the Majestic and buy him a scooter. He was so excited he was riding it round in the market and the Market Inspector was going to turf him out until he found that it had only just been bought.
Ernie reckons that the pension was about £2 which was a small fortune as far as they were concerned. I’m not too sure about this amount. All I know is that my Grandma Challenger only got 26/3 [131p.] in 1917 for herself and three children when my Granddad was killed in the war. I suppose it might have gone up in the post war years.
Margaret was still unable to work because the youngest lad Wilson was only three years old but even so, things were a lot better. One of the first improvements was a clothes rack in the kitchen that could be raised up to the ceiling by ropes running over pulleys. This was a great improvement when washing had to be dried on a wet day. They got a wringing machine as well and this found a home in the parlour. Ernie tells me that one of his jobs if he was about was to wind the wringer for his mother. He told me he has never forgotten winding like hell one day so he could get finished and get out to play. They were doing sheets and when it got to the end the handle slipped out of his hands and spun round and hit him between the legs, he said he’d never been right since!
Their standard of living went up and they could afford to patronise Bob Hudson’s fish cart which came round daily except for Sunday and Monday. All the fish used to come into town by rail in those days and Monday was always a fishless day because there was no refrigeration and no deliveries because fish wasn’t landed on a Sunday, I can remember when I was a lad that fish and chip shops were always closed on Monday for the same reason. Ernie said that Bob always had a crowd of cats following him because when he cleaned the fish he put the scraps in a bucket hanging on the back of the cart and the cats used to jump up and steal bits out of it.
Another thing which helped was that Ernie got a job as a lather boy in Billy Demeline’s barbers shop next door but one to the Seven Stars where Woodworth's watchmakers shop used to be. The hours were long, he went in after school at four o’clock every day and he could be working up until ten o’clock on a Friday and Saturday night but it brought 3/6 a week [17p] in to the house. It cost twopence halfpenny for a shave [1p] and a lot of customers would give Ernie the odd halfpenny so he finished up with a bit for himself as well. Their regular customers were the tramp weavers who lodged in the Model down Butts, where Briggs and Duxbury’s are now.
Fred was a milk boy for Taylforth's at Calf Hall Farm and brought in another 3/6 a week. They did two rounds, one at night and one in the morning because the milk went sour so quickly. When Fred got to working age, Ernie took this job over from him. He remembered that the horse was called Captain and it used to fart as it went along!
Another little job that cropped up at this time made Ernie a bit for himself but was totally illegal. In those days off-course betting was a crime and if you wanted to place a bet you either had to find out where the bookie lived or give the bet to a runner who would take it for you. The barber’s shop was just the place to study form and write a betting slip out and who better to pop round to the local bookie but Ernie, the lather boy.
The bookie was Isaac Levi who lived in the end house on the row in Wapping where the butcher‘s shop is now, Billy Blackburn used to live there and I think his widow still has it. Ernie told me that at one time there was a fiddle going on with some of the runners, they would write a slip out of their own and stick it to the back of the genuine one with a bit of spit. When the slip was accepted and thrown in the box with the others the spit dried out and the false slip fell off and counted as a genuine one. It didn’t take Isaac long to twig this but Ernie reckons that it cost him money before he realised what was happening. Isaac lent money as well and Ernie said he had a very good reputation, he never heard anyone cry Isaac down. This must be fairly unusual for a back street moneylender.
By this time the three eldest children were going to York Street School and Ernie was doing well as a scholar. I can well believe this because I was always struck by the fact that you could have a conversation with Ernie about any subject under the sun and he knew something about it, he must have read every book he could get hold of. Funnily enough he once told me he had never been to the library, he said he didn’t like reading a book unless it was his, he had to own it.
Life wasn’t all work and school, they had plenty of time to get up to mischief. Ernie said they had a gang called the Wapping Shin Crackers and they spent quite a lot of time defending their territory. In summer a favourite occupation was swimming in Calf Hall Shed dam. Ernie was still regarded as a delicate child and wasn’t supposed to do this, he remembers that one day the fun was in full swing behind the shed when his mother turned up with a picking band (a leather strap about eighteen inches long that connected the picking stick to the picker on a Lancashire loom). Someone had told her that Ernie was swimming! She dragged him out of the dam, picked his clothes up and made him walk naked down Calf Hall Lane. Every few yards she caught him a crack on his bum with the strap and Ernie said that he gave swimming a wide berth after that!
Their favourite occupation was roaming round the countryside., they would set off and walk miles just to see what they could get up to. I remember doing exactly the same thing when I was a lad and often think how much modern children miss by not being allowed to do this because their parents are afraid for their safety. I saw a statistic somewhere recently that said that only 8% of children walk to school today. From the age of four I had to go a mile and a half each way by myself to school and when I got to grammar school it was seven miles in each direction. Mind you, when I think of some of the tricks we got up to I cringe, there must have been a guardian angel looking after us.
By 1925 Wilson was four years old and was accepted at Church School. This meant that Margaret was free to go back to weaving and so the income rose again. She started at six in the morning and worked Saturdays until noon, 48 hours a week. She had four looms and Ernie reckons she’d have a pound a week. Standard hours in the mill were 55 ½ up to 1919 and then it was reduced to 48 hours. The Amalgamated Weavers Union census of wages in 1913 gave an average of 26/3 for a four loom weaver. In 1924 the Ministry of Labour census for the average manual wage was 36/10 a week. Weavers would be well under that so she might have been on 30/- a week maximum.
When Margaret went back to work, Fred was in charge until they went to school and in the evenings an aunty used to come in and do a bit of cleaning and make tea for 2/6 a week. Not everybody could afford to do this, or even stay out of the mill if they had a small child. Many women acted as child-minders. Ernie said that his mother had told him that some young mothers used to take their babies into the mill and have them in a basket by their looms because they were still breast-feeding them.
There were no school dinners in those days but there was a pie shop called Holmes’s on the corner of Westgate on the Seven Stars side. Ernie said that his mother had a standing order there and they used to go in each day and have torpedo and peas or pie and peas, threepence a time, his mother paid every Saturday afternoon. Other working mothers did the same and Ernie said the shop was always packed out at dinnertime.
I’m not too sure what age Fred was but it would be about this time that he started work as well. He would start by going half time, that is half a day in the mill and half a day in school so there was another small wage coming in. Ernie said that his mother splashed out on a new iron. It was what they called a box iron, it was made of cast iron and was hollow. You heated blocks of cast iron up in the fire and popped them into the iron with a pair of tongs. While you were using that one, another was warming up in the fire. All the ironing was done on the big square table and his mother did this in the evenings, this was one job she wouldn’t let the kids do for her.
So, we’ve reached 1926 and Ernie is ten years old. We’ll have to leave it now but don’t worry, there is more to come. Thanks for reading so far.
SCG/28 May 2001
28 May 2001
If you had happened to be in Westgate on Christmas Eve 1924 you might have seen a eight year old lad staggering up the road with a turkey over his shoulder that was so big its head was dragging on the ground behind him. That’s right, it was our Ernie!
I can hear you saying, “Hang on a minute, the last we heard he was on his chin strap”. You’d be right, but sometime late in 1924 Margaret found out that she was entitled to a War Widow’s Pension and so she claimed it and got back pay as well, Ernie said it was a great day when this happened. The first thing she did was take him to the indoor market that was held daily in the Majestic and buy him a scooter. He was so excited he was riding it round in the market and the Market Inspector was going to turf him out until he found that it had only just been bought.
Ernie reckons that the pension was about £2 which was a small fortune as far as they were concerned. I’m not too sure about this amount. All I know is that my Grandma Challenger only got 26/3 [131p.] in 1917 for herself and three children when my Granddad was killed in the war. I suppose it might have gone up in the post war years.
Margaret was still unable to work because the youngest lad Wilson was only three years old but even so, things were a lot better. One of the first improvements was a clothes rack in the kitchen that could be raised up to the ceiling by ropes running over pulleys. This was a great improvement when washing had to be dried on a wet day. They got a wringing machine as well and this found a home in the parlour. Ernie tells me that one of his jobs if he was about was to wind the wringer for his mother. He told me he has never forgotten winding like hell one day so he could get finished and get out to play. They were doing sheets and when it got to the end the handle slipped out of his hands and spun round and hit him between the legs, he said he’d never been right since!
Their standard of living went up and they could afford to patronise Bob Hudson’s fish cart which came round daily except for Sunday and Monday. All the fish used to come into town by rail in those days and Monday was always a fishless day because there was no refrigeration and no deliveries because fish wasn’t landed on a Sunday, I can remember when I was a lad that fish and chip shops were always closed on Monday for the same reason. Ernie said that Bob always had a crowd of cats following him because when he cleaned the fish he put the scraps in a bucket hanging on the back of the cart and the cats used to jump up and steal bits out of it.
Another thing which helped was that Ernie got a job as a lather boy in Billy Demeline’s barbers shop next door but one to the Seven Stars where Woodworth's watchmakers shop used to be. The hours were long, he went in after school at four o’clock every day and he could be working up until ten o’clock on a Friday and Saturday night but it brought 3/6 a week [17p] in to the house. It cost twopence halfpenny for a shave [1p] and a lot of customers would give Ernie the odd halfpenny so he finished up with a bit for himself as well. Their regular customers were the tramp weavers who lodged in the Model down Butts, where Briggs and Duxbury’s are now.
Fred was a milk boy for Taylforth's at Calf Hall Farm and brought in another 3/6 a week. They did two rounds, one at night and one in the morning because the milk went sour so quickly. When Fred got to working age, Ernie took this job over from him. He remembered that the horse was called Captain and it used to fart as it went along!
Another little job that cropped up at this time made Ernie a bit for himself but was totally illegal. In those days off-course betting was a crime and if you wanted to place a bet you either had to find out where the bookie lived or give the bet to a runner who would take it for you. The barber’s shop was just the place to study form and write a betting slip out and who better to pop round to the local bookie but Ernie, the lather boy.
The bookie was Isaac Levi who lived in the end house on the row in Wapping where the butcher‘s shop is now, Billy Blackburn used to live there and I think his widow still has it. Ernie told me that at one time there was a fiddle going on with some of the runners, they would write a slip out of their own and stick it to the back of the genuine one with a bit of spit. When the slip was accepted and thrown in the box with the others the spit dried out and the false slip fell off and counted as a genuine one. It didn’t take Isaac long to twig this but Ernie reckons that it cost him money before he realised what was happening. Isaac lent money as well and Ernie said he had a very good reputation, he never heard anyone cry Isaac down. This must be fairly unusual for a back street moneylender.
By this time the three eldest children were going to York Street School and Ernie was doing well as a scholar. I can well believe this because I was always struck by the fact that you could have a conversation with Ernie about any subject under the sun and he knew something about it, he must have read every book he could get hold of. Funnily enough he once told me he had never been to the library, he said he didn’t like reading a book unless it was his, he had to own it.
Life wasn’t all work and school, they had plenty of time to get up to mischief. Ernie said they had a gang called the Wapping Shin Crackers and they spent quite a lot of time defending their territory. In summer a favourite occupation was swimming in Calf Hall Shed dam. Ernie was still regarded as a delicate child and wasn’t supposed to do this, he remembers that one day the fun was in full swing behind the shed when his mother turned up with a picking band (a leather strap about eighteen inches long that connected the picking stick to the picker on a Lancashire loom). Someone had told her that Ernie was swimming! She dragged him out of the dam, picked his clothes up and made him walk naked down Calf Hall Lane. Every few yards she caught him a crack on his bum with the strap and Ernie said that he gave swimming a wide berth after that!
Their favourite occupation was roaming round the countryside., they would set off and walk miles just to see what they could get up to. I remember doing exactly the same thing when I was a lad and often think how much modern children miss by not being allowed to do this because their parents are afraid for their safety. I saw a statistic somewhere recently that said that only 8% of children walk to school today. From the age of four I had to go a mile and a half each way by myself to school and when I got to grammar school it was seven miles in each direction. Mind you, when I think of some of the tricks we got up to I cringe, there must have been a guardian angel looking after us.
By 1925 Wilson was four years old and was accepted at Church School. This meant that Margaret was free to go back to weaving and so the income rose again. She started at six in the morning and worked Saturdays until noon, 48 hours a week. She had four looms and Ernie reckons she’d have a pound a week. Standard hours in the mill were 55 ½ up to 1919 and then it was reduced to 48 hours. The Amalgamated Weavers Union census of wages in 1913 gave an average of 26/3 for a four loom weaver. In 1924 the Ministry of Labour census for the average manual wage was 36/10 a week. Weavers would be well under that so she might have been on 30/- a week maximum.
When Margaret went back to work, Fred was in charge until they went to school and in the evenings an aunty used to come in and do a bit of cleaning and make tea for 2/6 a week. Not everybody could afford to do this, or even stay out of the mill if they had a small child. Many women acted as child-minders. Ernie said that his mother had told him that some young mothers used to take their babies into the mill and have them in a basket by their looms because they were still breast-feeding them.
There were no school dinners in those days but there was a pie shop called Holmes’s on the corner of Westgate on the Seven Stars side. Ernie said that his mother had a standing order there and they used to go in each day and have torpedo and peas or pie and peas, threepence a time, his mother paid every Saturday afternoon. Other working mothers did the same and Ernie said the shop was always packed out at dinnertime.
I’m not too sure what age Fred was but it would be about this time that he started work as well. He would start by going half time, that is half a day in the mill and half a day in school so there was another small wage coming in. Ernie said that his mother splashed out on a new iron. It was what they called a box iron, it was made of cast iron and was hollow. You heated blocks of cast iron up in the fire and popped them into the iron with a pair of tongs. While you were using that one, another was warming up in the fire. All the ironing was done on the big square table and his mother did this in the evenings, this was one job she wouldn’t let the kids do for her.
So, we’ve reached 1926 and Ernie is ten years old. We’ll have to leave it now but don’t worry, there is more to come. Thanks for reading so far.
SCG/28 May 2001