by Knight, Lynn
Neither of my great-grandparents were church-goers, although Dick regularly knelt to say his prayers, a gentle murmur rising from the bedside as he did so. The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away. These were just words, as far as Betsy was concerned. Religion offered her scant consolation.
Two years later, my great-grandparents were living on the opposite side of Chesterfield. Dick was tending engines still, currently employed at a brickyard, literally helping to build the town. Two years is no time at all, but an eternity if, like Betsy, you are twenty-eight years old, mourning a child and watching your neighbours’ children grow. Dick’s new job brought a new address, but, most importantly, 1892 was the year my grandma was born.
Betsy wanted the very best for her new daughter and so she was christened Annie, after her ladylike aunt. She had Richard’s birth name too, or a version of it, at least, as had Mary, to keep the name Dorance in the family. A photograph taken some years later shows them: Betsy, dark hair, dark blouse; twenty pearl buttons counting down to her slim waist, standing proud and erect in the doorway of their home, though it’s merely another workman’s cottage (one of several they came to know), with rough shutters at the window, a dank privy down the yard and no running water, which only underlines how hard Betsy worked to maintain their snowy window nets and dress Annie in her white lawn frock fashioned with a dark ribbon sash. Dick sits beside them. Whatever his day has been up to this point, he looks polished clean, and rests his foot on a kerbstone as easily as his daughter places her small, trusting hand on his knee. Their Jack Russell is alert in the foreground (there was always a small dog about somewhere).
Betsy’s cinched waist and Annie’s lace look out of place in their humble surroundings, but this was a best-dress occasion – a birthday, perhaps – posed for the camera, for keeps. And if Annie’s ribbon sash was broader than was strictly necessary and her bodice comprised the most complicated lacework Betsy’s fingers could achieve, then behind my grandma, always, was the ghost of the child who had not survived.
Annie had her mother’s nose, ‘the Ward nose’ as it was known within the family, though it was not especially prominent. She had her father’s thick brown hair. She inherited her composure from them both. Even as a small child (a solemn child in photographs), Annie appeared self-contained, as sure of herself as of her two small feet planted firmly on the ground in the new button boots in which she started school. No clutching at a toy boat or rag doll, like some of her classmates, or making an appeal with her smile. My grandma always knew who she was.
By the early 1900s, Dick was appointed foreman of the men constructing Chesterfield’s third and final reservoir at Linacre, with some twenty workers under him. Far better to be a foreman directing men and overseeing machinery than tackling the back-breaking work of digging out the new reservoir and excavating tons of earth. Parched and exhausted at the end of their long shift, Dick’s men headed for the Crispin Inn. Beer was downed in enormous quantities, eight pints a night being not uncommon for labourers who’d worked up a thirst. Dick became such a good customer himself that the landlord gave him a kissing cup, one of three silver tankards discovered in the cellar. He hoped it would bring Dick luck (and many more return trips to his pub).
My great-grandfather’s job came with a cottage at the edge of the woodland site; their only near neighbour was the town’s bailiff and his family. Annie played games of tag-and-chase with his young sons and idled with them on the way to school. On summer days, they walked down narrow lanes where overlapping branches made a dappled canopy. Come winter mornings, Annie was bundled into a thick woollen shawl which criss-crossed her chest and held her fast as she tried to balance on the spangled paving stones.
In 1933, ‘Chesterfield’s D. H. Lawrence’, novelist and poet, F. C. Boden, wrote lovingly of the beauty of ‘wood, water and sky’ at the Linacre reservoirs. You could ‘lie at the top of the Linacre wood watching the sinking sun burn on the stretch of water… listening to the sweet chiming of the Old Brampton bells’. This undisturbed haven became a place to escape from the town’s industrial clamour. Though less glorious during the construction of the reservoirs, to walk through the deserted woods in the early morning, especially during springtime, when bluebells crouched in the long grass, or at late evening, when your footfalls released the scent of wild garlic, was to enter a perfect green world. My great-grandfather loved it.
It was a beautiful spot, but an isolated one in which to bring up a child and Betsy missed the sound of children’s games and women’s voices ricocheting around backyards. It was hard to have just one neighbour, however reliable and well-liked, and Betsy missed her sisters being nearby. Five miles might as well have been the other side of the county, given the number of times they managed to meet.
And Betsy wanted to be doing something herself. A few years earlier, an industrial accident, a blow to the head, had put Dick in the Sheffield Infirmary. She could still picture his workmate, standing, breathless, ashen-faced, looking anywhere but at her, while he explained where they’d taken Mr Nash. Neither Dick nor Betsy spoke of that desperate time: the worry of it all and of the state he would be in, if he survived; his long, slow, painful recovery, with no money coming in except a pittance from the insurance. Amazingly, Dick recovered fully, a dent in his forehead the only legacy of those dreadful months, but its presence served as a reminder of what might have been and could still be. Industrial accidents happened daily.
Betsy was busy with the chores for which there were no short cuts then, but she still had time enough to make plans. At night, while she sat threading the ribbons that edged Annie’s petticoats, nightdresses and bodices, and which had to be rethreaded with each wash, her mind considered all the possibilities before her. She was nearly forty now and wanted an occupation, but not one at someone else’s bidding. Betsy hankered after a shop. Her sister Annie, a widow now, ran a beer-off (not the most ladylike of activities) and seemed to manage by herself pretty well. If Betsy ran a shop while Dick was working, they’d have two incomes coming in and she’d have a role that would suit her. She asked sister Annie to keep an eye open for somewhere close by, though not on Annie’s doorstep, which Betsy could inspect for herself. And, around 1905, she found it: the corner shop at Wheeldon Mill.
2
Brasso and Dolly Blue
Only one photograph of Wheeldon Mill appears to have been taken during all the years my great-grandparents lived there, its singular status confirmation of the area’s insignificance. The picture shows an overcast day, circa 1908, and does the place few favours, the photographer keener to foreground the man crossing the canal bridge with his decrepit donkey and handcart than the surrounding houses. Its most prominent feature is the poorly surfaced road the hawker stands on. Unless you know that the tiny white slab, barely visible through the trees, is a doorstep, you may not even realise the corner shop is there. The picture was sold as a postcard but would hardly encourage visitors. It looks a pretty dismal spot. Wheeldon Mill: the last place God created.
My great-grandparents’ new address was 150 Station Road, Brimington, but, as anyone who walks the mile uphill into Brimington proper knows, Wheeldon Mill and Brimington are not one and the same. For all the years my family lived at or visited ‘the Mill’ – those in the know tended to drop the ‘Wheeldon’ – a distinction was made between the two. Wheeldon Mill, as described to me, was the little clutch of houses at the bottom of and either side of Station Road, a short stride from the Chesterfield Canal, just above the Sheepbridge and Brimington Railway Station with its pastry-cutter edging and wooden stairs. It comprised no more than forty houses and stood about a mile north-east of Chesterfield town centre, and a quarter of a mile from the racecourse.
The area grew up piecemeal, a handful of stone cottages probably dating back to the eighteenth-century water-powered mill for which the place is named, others to the opening up of the canal and railway. Its brighter redbrick terraces, including that with the corner shop, came later, in celebrati
on of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. There was nothing twee about these two-up two-downs, with their night-soil middens, communal backyards and strips of front garden. They were not, however, the tight back-to-backs of industrial legend, but short, stubby rows, bordering the road or canal, some comprising no more than half a dozen houses.
Today, summer visitors are drawn to the pub beside the refurbished Chesterfield Canal. This seems about right: for as long as my family was connected with the area, beer played a vital role in this small community. Church and schools were higher up the hill; how much more convenient to have the Great Central Hotel – an ordinary pub – on your doorstep. Corner shop and pub stood at right angles to one another, the rough ground between them serving as a makeshift playground for local children.
The uppermost limit of Wheeldon Mill was its Plantation – a grandiose name for a small copse. There was a brickyard nearby, a sewerage plant (odourless by the 1930s, but historically more iffy), and a small colliery, whose seams were worked for a short time during the 1900s and again in the late thirties. Numerous small open mines and footrills showed how the immediate area had been mined for coal and ironstone intermittently since the nineteenth century. Some two miles north-west stood the Sheepbridge Company, that bulwark of industry (and sometime employer of my great-grandfather) whose fortunes and enterprises expanded year on year. Two miles north-east, with its own collieries and ironworks, and interlinked activities with Sheepbridge (plus houses built for its clerks on Gentleman’s Row), the Staveley Coal & Iron Company reigned supreme. Beyond these dark chimneys and stark colliery wheels, in the distance always, and close at hand, lay the deep green folds of the Derbyshire hillside. Industry might scour and plunder, but harvest reports continued to appear alongside accounts of mining accidents and fatalities.
Like most of its neighbours, 150 Station Road was a two-up two-down, one of the ‘downs’, in this instance, comprising the shop with its katy-cornered door on to the street. A contemporary trade directory lists ‘Richard Nash, grocer’, though everyone knew the corner shop was Betsy’s. Dick was still at Linacre when they secured the tenancy; his working life always happened elsewhere. The corner shop was definitely hers.
Its windows were smeared with dust when she first set eyes on the shop, and the shelves and floorboards needed a good fettle, but it did not take Betsy long to set the place to rights. Sweeping brush and mop chivvied every corner, the large wooden counter was thoroughly scrubbed and oiled, and the panes rubbed with damp newspaper and a splash of vinegar. By the time she turned the ‘Open’ sign on the shop door, my great-grandma had everything organised.
A bank of tiny drawers concealed all manner of things such as matches and gas mantles, clay pipes, nit combs and string. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held every tin and packet you could think of, from mustard powder, pickling spice and candied peel, to Horlick’s Malted Milk and Brasso. Bags of poultry spice and pig powders stood near a vinegar barrel fastened beneath a thick, heavy lid; cans of paraffin were grouped nearby, out of the way of sacks containing potatoes, sugar and flour. Cheeses cooled on a marble slab behind the counter, next to the bottles of Pikanti and A1 Sauce.
Betsy opened the door each morning wearing a starched white apron which, like her skirts, practically brushed the floor. Though the apron was often grubby by the end of a long day – in the early years of business, the shop stayed open until ten or eleven p.m. – its crisp white linen was part of her authority: ‘I run this shop,’ was the message it conveyed. ‘The corner shop doesn’t run me.’
There were generally two or three people in the shop at any one time (more, at weekends): neighbours like Florrie Stokes, who came with her toddler and new baby while her other four were at school, or Kathleen Driver, who wanted to inspect the new shopkeeper and pick up a loaf while she was there.
Bread came high on every woman’s shopping list. For some of Betsy’s customers, bread provided breakfast and tea: bread and jam, bread and scrape, bread and dripping, bread and treacle, bread-and-you-just-be-thankful, if that’s all there was to eat. My great-grandma traded in half loaves as well as whole ones, stale bread as well as fresh and, sometimes, reluctantly, if someone was particularly desperate, two or three slices at a time.
Potatoes were also a priority, and the only vegetable the corner shop sold. Aside from an onion to provide flavouring, potatoes were the sole vegetable in some Edwardian diets. Other quantities might rise and fall or be crossed off a shopping list altogether, but the pounds of potatoes usually remained secure. Other frequent purchases were tea, sugar, biscuits, currants, flour. Bottled relishes added spice to a grocery list as well as to a husband’s plate, a spoonful of mustard pickle enlivening a nice piece of ham.
Boiled ham, brawn and hazlett, plus bacon by the slice, were delivered by the butcher, and stored in a meat safe which did not exactly keep meat fresh, but at least kept the flies off. The butcher also supplied ha’penny ‘ducks’: pieces of chopped liver and other intestines stewed in a seasoned gravy. These arrived as a dark, not-quite-solid rectangle faintly quivering on a tray, and were cut into wedges by Betsy, a task she accomplished while holding her breath. (My great-grandma might sell ‘ducks’, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat one.) As with the relishes and boiled ham, bacon was usually destined for the man of the house, his wife and children making do with bread and dip: the fat that had fried the bacon, mopped up with a slice of bread.
The women of Wheeldon Mill were Betsy’s chief customers, their purchases revealing both the pattern and the detail of their lives, their days determined by the occupations of husbands and sons. The majority of the men were manual labourers, many employed as miners. Mining accounted for the largest portion of Chesterfield’s workforce, but there was also a whole vocabulary of skilled and unskilled foundry men, plus general labourers, railwaymen and brickies. Whatever their occupation, the result was the same: most of the men were engaged in filthy work; collar-andtie chaps were the exception.
Wives fought a constant battle against dirt, not just the dirt in poorly ventilated houses but the muck their men brought home. Betsy’s stock described their unequal struggle. Borax, Rub-a-Dub, Dolly Blue, Carbosil, Fairy Flakes, Sunlight Soap, Reckitt’s Blue, Robin Starch, Persil – she sold every brand of laundry soap and washing soda you could think of, plus donkey stone for whitening sills and doorsteps, and peggy legs for pummelling wet clothes.
Coal dust was particularly pernicious. These were the days well before pithead baths, when men came straight from the mine. There was kettle after kettle of hot water to boil and heavy clothes to dry for the next day. Even the moleskin trousers miners wore were stiff with perspiration by the close of a long shift, sweat and dust intermingling, each rearrangement of their steaming bulk, as they dried before the fire, releasing further coal dust into the room. It was impossible to keep a baby clean with a collier in the house and, no matter how hard you scrubbed them, there was no such thing as clean sheets. Coal dust ground its way into the very grain of the cloth.
Colliers’ wives were as wedded to the pit as their menfolk, the timing of colliery shifts setting the rhythm of domestic life: one steel cage descending as another ascended towards daylight, with the expectation of hot water at the ready and the stew pan simmering nicely regardless of the hour. Those with husbands and sons working opposite shifts could be on their feet from dawn till nightfall, a coat pulled over their nightdress at both ends of the day when they stumbled out of bed to stoke the fire.
Betsy’s neighbour Nora Parks had four sons follow their father down the pit. Five loads of pit clothes to darn, wash and dry; five colliers working a mix of shifts, five men requiring hot baths and food; Nora sluicing water into the tub (and out again, once the bathers were through), her skirt and apron splashed with filthy water, perspiration running down her face; the whole room steaming and condensation puddling on the sills. If they were in from school, her daughters Lil and Edna were called upon to swill their brothers’ backs, in anticipation of a future lik
e their mother’s.
In the early years of the corner shop, at least until the First World War, most wages kept purchasing to a minimum: 3s 3d was the going daily rate for a foundry labourer, while skilled foundrymen might earn the same as a curate or junior clerk. In 1906, the average coalface worker earned £112 a year, approximately £2 a week, though there were frequent slips and stoppages. The majority of shopping lists varied little from one week to the next. Requests for two ounces – of cheese, butter or flour – were commonplace: most customers bought food in small quantities. Many women shopped daily, especially those whose husbands were paid by the day. Weekly wages were easier to manage, but with basic foodstuffs sold loose and weighed out by hand, it was easy for Betsy to adjust quantities to reflect people’s needs, or, rather, their purses. ‘Just do me that corner of hazlett, Mrs Nash, and a mouse-size piece of cheese.’
Trade was conducted in pennies and halfpennies more often than shillings; a half sovereign was something to change down into more useful coinage. You could buy a surprising amount with small coins: a quartern loaf cost approximately 6d, a pound of tea one shilling; a halfpenny could buy quite a lot. Even so, it was impossible to run a corner shop without offering credit; several neighbours relied on tick by the end of the week. But there was nearly always someone willing to risk a little splurge and, for the better-off, temptation came round each Saturday in the form of the few iced fancies Betsy displayed on a tray.
It must be remembered by those who are convinced that the working man can live well and easily on 3d a day, because middle-class people have tried the experiment and found it possible, that the well-to-do man who may spend no more than 1s 9d a week on food for a month or more has not also all his other expenses cut down to their very lowest limit. The well-to-do man sleeps in a quiet, airy room with sufficient and sanitary bedding. He has every facility for luxurious bathing and personal cleanliness. He has light and hygienic clothing; he has warmth in the winter and a change of air in the summer. He can rest when he is in; he has good cooking at his command, with a sufficiency of storage, utensils, and fuel. Above all, he can always stop living on 3d a day if it does not suit him, or if his family get anxious. When his daughter needs a pair of 6s 6d boots he does not have to arrange an overdraft with his banker in order to meet the crisis, as the poor man does with his pawnbroker. He does not feel that all his family, well or ill, warm or cold, overworked or not, are also bound to live on 3d a day, and are only too thankful if it does not drop to 2½d or 2d, or even less, should under-employment or unemployment come his way. It is impossible to compare the living on 3d a day of a person all of whose other requirements are amply and sufficiently satisfied, with the living of people whose every need is thwarted and starved.