ODDS AND SODS

[Stanley]

ODDS AND SODS

01 May 2002

One of the consequences of the interest my readers take in these articles is that I find that every now and again I need to update some of the themes we have been pursuing.
‘Medical Matters’ struck a chord with quite a few of you including one reader who doubted whether the picture with the article was Arthur Morrison. I promise you that it was indeed him, I caught him unaware and for once Arthur was at a loss for words, he said it was the first time anyone had snapped him at work. This probably explains his expression!
‘Then and Now’ down on School Lane at Earby also triggered off some responses. I’m grateful to Mike Crewdson for setting me right about the picture house, of course it was the Empire! I lived in Sough for three years and should have remembered this. Mike also said that he thought the tin tabernacle might have been moved to Skipton. I went up to Broughton Road Community Centre and had a look. It’s certainly a corrugated iron building but I can’t see any resemblance between it and the building at Earby. I’m intrigued by this one and am chasing it further, if any of you have any ideas, please let me know.
On the matter of the police communications, I got a reply from Pat Clare’s office (Our Chief Constable) saying that the matter had been passed on to the Superintendent in charge at Burnley, no word from him as yet. I had a visit from one of the new Community Beat Officers the other day but was out at the time, he left a note to let me know he had called but the space for the telephone number to contact him was left blank. My opinion is that there is still some improvement to be made in the field of communications with our police force.
I’ve been doing some work on the tapes I made with Ernie Roberts twenty five years ago and the last ones covered his army service in the Second World War. I was reminded by his experiences that there are people walking round this town today who are still suffering the consequences of their service in the forces. In Ernie’s case it was the after effects of Black Water Fever, a very serious form of malaria and I know that this affected his daily life right up to his death. My point is that we make a big effort to remember the war dead once a year in November, perhaps we should make an effort to remember the survivors for the rest of the year. One of the matters that emerged from the latest tape of Ernie was the transition from war service to Civvy Street. When Ernie and his mates joined the army they were home town lads, in Ernie’s case, the furthest he had ever travelled was to Blackpool for a day out. After his war service during which he visited South Africa, India, Burma and Ceylon, he returned to Barlick and a job weaving in the mill. This was a totally different Ernie and I asked him what difference it made to his attitude towards the bosses, he said that the main difference was that when he went away he was a ‘proper little wage slave’, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. When he came back after seeing the world and a lot of danger and sudden death he wasn’t going to put up with the conditions he had accepted before the war, he wanted something better.
This got me to thinking about the effect that these men and women must have had on the employers. I think it must have soon dawned on them that things had changed. Weavers were in short supply and in the words of the slogan we heard so much in those days, ‘Britain’s Bread Hung by Lancashire’s Thread’. Attitudes had to be changed, the tramp weavers had vanished and there was no longer a queue of weavers waiting in the warehouse at starting time to take the looms of anyone who was late to work. Cloth and weft carriers were introduced to help the weavers become more productive and wage structures altered. If you had bad warps before the war it was possible to go home at the end of the week without a wage. This all changed and no matter how bad the weaving everyone was guaranteed a basic wage.
Country-wide these same forces resulted in the Labour election victory of 1945 and the implementation of many of the recommendations of the Beveridge Report leading to the NHS we enjoy today. It seems a paradox that such a terrible event as a world war could be a catalyst for change and lead to some of the most significant improvements in society of the whole of the 20th Century.
I noticed this week that there is some debate as to whether the names of people who have died in conflict since 1945 should be added to our war memorials. Of course they should! Ernie died very soon after he retired, a victim of a hard upbringing and the damage done to him during the war. He hasn’t got a memorial, his ashes were scattered on the moor behind Bancroft. He isn’t the only one and we would do well to remember them, not just once a year but every day.

01 May 2002