by Knight, Lynn
Dick was like a child discovering his mobility, inching his way around the table, and from the table to the piano to his chair. A long time passed before he felt able to tackle stairs. As soon as he could, the back bedroom was made over for his use and Eva went in with Betsy. He could not bear to have anything or anyone pressing on his injured foot. Neighbours said it was just as well the accident had happened now, and not years earlier, which was true in many respects – Dick was in his sixties and nearing retirement – but of insufficient comfort. Dick would never be fit enough to work again and would limp for the rest of his life. The future appeared to be shrinking.
The timing of my great-grandfather’s accident was particularly unfortunate, sandwiched as it was between the miners’ lock-outs of 1921 and ’26, two of several stoppages over pay and working conditions during that decade. With each dispute, miners’ wives held their breath and wondered how long their men could hold out – three weeks in 1920; three months and more in 1921; six months in 1926, following on from the May General Strike.
As in previous strikes, lean times for the neighbourhood meant lean times for the corner shop. By 1926, Betsy felt she had managed a whole calendar of stoppages but, this time round, Dick’s ill health made the family’s own circumstances more precarious. The money paid from sick clubs did not stretch that far, and there were now three adults to feed. At least with Eva working alongside Betsy, they could assess the situation together. Now, more than ever, they needed to hold their nerve.
For some, the General Strike was a nine-day wonder, the sight of volunteers driving buses and carts recalling the Great War and a sense of pitching in, but for miners and their employers the strike reopened bitter arguments and old wounds.
‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day,’ colliers insisted. Associated trades were quickly affected. Within a week, the Staveley Coal & Iron Company shut down its Devonshire Works, putting nearly 1,300 men on to the streets. The closure of the Sheepbridge Works added another 1,000 to their number. By the end of the first month, some 5,000 miners had sought relief from Chesterfield’s Board of Guardians. In response to a delegation protesting at its slow distribution, the Mayor went to the Guardians’ offices to see things for himself and found some three to four hundred men standing in line. Most had been waiting a long time; some had fainted. The strike still had six months to run.
‘Big strong men cried like babies for sheer want and frustration. The women didn’t cry. They suffered in silence. But what silence! It cut through a man sometimes.’
– Veteran Collier, Coalville, Leicestershire, quoted in Gerard Noel’s The Great Lock-Out of 1926
Mildred Taylor and Nora Parks had seen it all before. Their whole married lives had been punctuated with stoppages, albeit shorter ones than this. Now, they watched the strike from the sidelines and from the perspective of their sons. Men whose earliest experiences of a strike had been as a lark and a skive – a welcome glimpse of life without school or work – were now married with young children. By 1926, Mildred’s son, Albie, a pit man still, though no longer a daredevil pony driver, had six and another on the way. His wife looked heavier and more exhausted by the month. ‘I might as well sit on these, Mrs Nash,’ Ellen said, coming into the shop and sinking on to the sack of potatoes. ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to buy them.’ She was asking the same questions her motherin-law had asked years before.
According to Mildred, who liked to make her opinions known, her daughter-in-law was a good lass, though a lass was something Ellen had barely had the chance to be. She’d been her mother’s unpaid housemaid, nursemaid, and the rest, well before she reached fourteen. Now she had children at two-year intervals (and sometimes with a shorter gap), the fruits of a marriage made in the immediacy of wartime and endured ever since, her husband expecting his due in all things and food on the table the minute he came home. ‘I mustn’t stop, Mrs Nash. I’ll have Albie doing the great-I-am.’
Some women grumbled about men getting under their feet, the smaller complaint going some way to alleviate the tension of how to make two ha’p’orth of nothing feed a growing family, other neighbours complained that their husbands were down by the canal, a favoured spot for gambling. Crouched over a game of pitch-and-toss in the half-light cast by the bridge, with someone posted up above as lookout, it was easy to lose a hour or two, and their remaining coins. Betting in all forms was a constant source of anxiety. ‘He’s gone to put a bet on,’ – conveyed to Betsy in a hushed voice by many a woman at the end of her tether. With money scarcer than usual, parcels went in and out of pawn so fast they were hardly worth unwrapping. Mrs Driver joked that, if she’d nothing left to pawn, would Johnny Dodd pay out on brown paper and string?
Miners’ children rode Chesterfield’s buses for free; collections were made to alleviate hunger. Men swapped home-grown vegetables for shoes soled or a haircut, women exchanged half a cup of sugar for half of flour. The backdrop to these long days and even longer months was the weather. The summer of 1926 was glorious, heat stretching into the autumn. Boys released from dank service underground swam in the River Rother; neighbours stood on their back steps, drawn to the door by nothing more than the balmy evening.
Neither strikers nor the authorities wished to be regarded as weak. When an angry group of colliers smashed the windscreen of a lorry carrying slack, the Mayor sentenced the ringleader to two months’ hard labour. Two witnesses, fellow strikers called in the man’s defence, found themselves marched out of the courtroom and straight back in again, and this time, placed in the dock. Admitting their own presence in the mob earned them a month’s hard labour apiece.
Outbreaks of violence continued throughout the summer and grew even uglier when, following an approach by the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire pit owners, some colliers went back to work. By the end of August, most Derbyshire mines had reopened; extra police were drafted in to protect the returning men. During one court session the following month, magistrates dealt with forty-four charges of strike-related incidents at one sitting.
Miners and colliery owners finally came to terms in November. (‘It was not a fair deal,’ was one miner’s understated response.) The Staveley Coal & Iron Company began preparations to re-open, though, in a pattern repeated elsewhere, not all workers were immediately re-employed. Some men never returned to the pit; some miners were completely broken by the strike. At least one Chesterfield collier committed suicide.
In some mining districts, even wholly unrelated trades collapsed under the weight of industrial action. Small shops went under, dragged down by customers unable to buy goods or repay old debts. Thankfully, the corner shop survived. My great-aunt always found the sound of boots striking cobbles reassuring. Now, I understand why.
The 1926 strike may have helped my great-grandfather reach a decision. The accident that looked like a catastrophe was actually his salvation. Some eighty yards up the hill from the corner shop stood the Wheeldon Mill Plantation, the small copse you could see from the house. This four-acre wood was private property and therefore inaccessible, but Dick had walked past the entrance so many times, he could describe the trees nearest the road with his eyes closed. Oak, ash, elm, silver birch. He had seen them grow in stature, knew the spreading green of their branches and the beauty of their winter silhouettes. For almost twenty years, he’d heard birds sing in trees he could see but was forbidden to sit beneath, and watched the woodland floor flush mauve with violets whose scent he could never get close enough to catch. If Dick rented the wood, he could raise chickens and sell their eggs. He could also sit beneath those sheltering leaves.
My great-grandfather had spent his earliest days outdoors; he did not have to think for very long. He approached the owner, a retired farmer, and a deal was struck. Keeping poultry satisfied a practical need; the wood took Dick back to his beginnings.
By the 1920s, a cat’s cradle of relationships criss-crossed Station Road and its adjacent terraces. Married siblings were raising families a short
stride from one another; cousins’ games stretched across their neighbours’ doorways; an aunt was close in age to her niece; a brother and his wife were bringing up his sister’s sons. Grandmas took in grandchildren; older children came and went. Courtships flourished in doorways, setting up new allegiances between families. Unlike earlier generations at Wheeldon Mill, these families were mostly Derbyshire-born, one man’s nickname ‘Sheff’ (as in Sheffield), branding him forever as a foreigner, an outsider. But not everyone lived hugger-mugger with their neighbours. Some kept themselves apart, called for their groceries, said ‘Good Day’, and went away again; others brought the smallest details of their lives into the shop.
Maud Cartwright and her family, newcomers before the First World War, were now firmly ensconced in the neighbourhood, and Maud a regular back-door visitor as well as a customer via the front. Though now in her fifties, she had a late-born daughter at home. Ten-year-old Pearl was her darling. Everything Pearl said and did was worth repeating; her clothes were a matter of particular pride. Maud took great care with her own appearance too. Unlike those neighbours who shopped in their pinny, with a coat pulled over the top, this small, trim woman ventured out in nothing less than a skirt and blouse. Maud’s appearance was secondary to Pearl’s, however. With her older children now in work or off her hands, Maud had time to lavish attention on her youngest daughter, and long tales of Pearl’s achievements to relate to Betsy.
Back-door visiting was now such a strong part of life at the corner shop that a hard chair was permanently positioned on the threshold. Activity in the house was frequently overlaid with neighbours’ talk, whether brief interruptions for a forgotten packet of rice or tin of peas, or a tale that was long in the telling. Even the voices of those who remained standing carried into the room. Evenings and Sunday afternoons were especially liable to interruption; Sunday was also the day when friends and relatives visited, sometimes all arriving at once.
Zoe Graham, a mother now, living higher up the hill, brought little Georgie to see them, and Eva’s friend Carrie walked five-year-old Harold round from Newbridge Lane. Ethel visited too, catching two buses from the other side of the town to show off young Rolly, the spitting image of his dad and just as much of a handful, she said. When Ethel walked through the door, it was as if she had never left. She’d throw off her coat and start clearing the table or tackling the pots straightaway. ‘Oh, you make me feel starved,’ Betsy would say, shivering at the sight of Ethel’s sleeveless cotton frock. This less upholstered generation only had to stand in front of my great-grandma to raise her goose bumps.
Cousin Charlie visited with his doting wife Edie and their young children. Though fleshed out since his wartime convalescence, Charlie was an invalid nonetheless, his rasping breath the legacy of the gas attack that finally brought him home; Edie was constantly alert to any alteration in his breathing while trying to pass it off as of no consequence.
There was a regular parade of Betsy’s sisters, including stately Auntie Annie and Betsy’s youngest sister, Liza, with her dry turn of phrase and even drier tales of her married daughters, Emily and Annie, who might be sisters but were as alike as chalk and cheese. Dick’s family called too: Uncle Dick was a great favourite among them. His nephew Will, an army regular, had fought in the Boer War and could still spin suspenseful tales of Ladysmith and the Relief of Mafeking. Annie could remember Union Jacks fluttering in people’s doorways when she was the tiniest thing, and was fascinated by Will’s stories. His son Will (a third generation William), had worked with Dick at the brickyard – ‘and we’re still speaking,’ he liked to say. Young Will broke the family tradition by calling his son Richard, after my great-grandfather.
Once or twice a year, there were other visitors: Eva’s sisters, Kitty and Margaret. After some twelve years at the Industrial School, they were delivered into the world of work. I don’t know if they started out as domestic servants or if they escaped that particular fate altogether, but by the 1920s they were Manchester mill workers, sharing digs and working at full pelt to satisfy their ramping looms. Neither sister married; after the childhood they’d endured, Kitty and Margaret were pleased to look after one another.
Another welcome visitor was George. George came through the war unscathed and with pips on his shoulders: his wounds were of a different order. Within a few months of hearing of Annie’s marriage, he found a bride – I’m sure there were plenty of takers for a charming young man and a brave one at that, who was making the best of his disappointment. Though he no longer lived in Derbyshire, George visited Betsy and Dick when he could – and still called them Mam and Dad – and sometimes brought his wife and small daughter. Mostly, though, he came alone, a Sunday-afternoon caller, catching the train and alighting at Wheeldon Mill. Sunday was the only day available to a busy school teacher, but it was also the day Annie was there.
Seeing George now was comforting and chafing, a reminder of something whose value Annie had always understood but could not help rejecting in favour of Willie. In idle moments, walking up to the Mill on the Sundays she knew George would be visiting, she contemplated life as a teacher’s wife: their quiet conversations of an evening and the poetry they’d read together. Even as Annie laughed at herself for inventing such scenes, she wondered which verses of Longfellow she’d choose. George would have liked nothing better than to return from the war to a home that was ready and waiting, whereas Willie barely seemed to notice the bedroom suite and the silver you could see your face in. Annie was beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake in providing Willie with a ready-made home. Not knowing the striving that went into its preparation, he seemed unable to appreciate its worth.
George wrote to Annie, care of the shop; she could reply via his school. Even in the late 1920s, George was still paying court, scribbling a pencilled note on paper torn from an exercise book; the pencil both less permanent and more secretive than ink, his casual scrawl belying thoughts he’d obviously shaped beforehand. His affectionate words accompanied a medal won for some amateur sport, a game of tennis or cricket (George was made for cricket whites).
‘My dear,’ his note begins, ‘Will you accept this?’ George was sending a love token, a knight wooing his distant lady. His friendly greeting is full of warmth, but, more telling to me, is the way his letter closes: ‘Ecrit, si’il vous plait.’ Equally telling, is the fact my grandma kept it.
Annie always said how hard Willie worked at the bakery. This was not something he minded. He was happy to start early and work late into the night if this helped further establish the business. But though Willie was working hard, he was not always well. The malaria he developed in Palestine kept on at him and frequently returned to rough him up. Each time it struck was like a bad dose of ’flu; it took Willie days to recover. He thought a tonic might be the answer: the newspapers were full of advertisements and tales of their beneficial effects.
‘A spot of Phosferine always puts us right,’ said Mr Frank Gray, who had driven 3,000 miles across Africa. There was Gray and his fellow driver, in pith helmets, sitting on the bonnet of their car. ‘When we were in bad patches in Africa, and were worn out and had lost heart and faith, we said: “Let’s have another spot of Phosferine. It always put us right…”’ Phosferine: the Greatest of all Tonics for Influenza, Debility, Weak digestion, Lassitude, Neuritis, Brain Fag, Anaemia – the list went on and on – but there, near the bottom, was the word Willie was looking for: Malaria.
You could buy a bottle of Phosferine from the chemist, but Willie was used to combining ingredients and so set about preparing his own mixture. Somewhere among the recipes for drop scones and Victoria sponges is the following: 18 grains of quinine; 3 drops of tincture of steel, 1oz phosphoric acid. Take 10 drops in water 3 times a day.
Around this time, the bakehouse moved to larger premises on Whittington Hill, though the cake shop remained where it was. Willie now had a half-hour walk to work, but he used the journey to plan how things would be when he had a share in the firm. O
ne of the things Willie most wanted was a car. He had never shaken off the excitement of seeing his first car as an impressionable lad: he had wanted to drive for as long as he could remember. His enthusiasm had reached fever pitch in America and showed no signs of abating on his return. Though Willie spent far more time baking than making deliveries in his early years at the bakehouse, he’d defined himself as a driver on his marriage certificate. Back in 1916, the word sounded more up-to-the-minute than his regular, old-fashioned trade. Perhaps Willie also hoped that by describing himself thus, he’d have a better chance of keeping out of the trenches. (And if so, he was correct.)
Willie had fallen in love with a world in which you could make something of yourself and gain respect, a world in which everyone had a shining chance and it was fine to want things, unlike during his parsimonious upbringing in which everyone had to be stripped down to size. He had not forgotten his father chopping up Jim’s new shoes. The feeling Willie had on the day Jim hired the tram was the kind of feeling he wanted: not a seat on the district council, he’d no political ambition, but a simple pride in a job well done and hats raised in greeting, and a good suit, a nice linen suit with fine detailing, and an elegant pin to fix his tie, and Annie in a silk hat and gloves. And a car, of course. Not forgetting the car.
There were now many more cars on the road. Jim drove a car, as did their brother Bernard, courtesy of a generous father-in-law. Cars were coming within reach of a much wider audience, albeit predominantly middle-and upper-class. Chesterfield’s first Ford saleroom, opened in 1923, had garaging for 500 vehicles, plus a repair depot and a shop selling spares.