Stories behind the pictures .....Hope Street in the 1930s

I have no idea when this picture of my grandparents was taken but it will be sometime in the 1930s.

They are standing in the backyard of 12 Hope Street in Derby.  This was their home from the early 1920s to 1960.

We all have these pictures in the family album.  If we are lucky they have a date, a location and a name.

But in this case there is nothing and if I didn’t recognise them and know where they were it would just be another of those lost images which once had meaning but whose significance is gone.

Of course if there is an interesting feature in the background it may just make its way to a specialist collector but not so this picture of William and Emilie Hall of Derby.  Their fate would I fear have been a rubbish tip.

And yet this is still something that this photograph yields up.

It is clearly a backyard of some description given the washing line, the dividing wall and the entrance to a shed.

They are in everyday clothes and just possibly he is in his work clothes.  Look closely at his upraised arm and that shirt sleeve looks as if it has been cut away the result of an accident which left the sleeve torn and not worth saving.

It looks to be summer judging by the leaves on the tree behind them and the bushes.

But these are mean bushes and the tree looks pretty unimpressive which is as you would expect from the backyard of an inner city area.

And that was exactly where Hope Street was, situated not far from the railway station, canal and a whole host of factories, forges and a printing works.

The outhouse to their right was next to the outside lavatory and I still have a vague memory of these being shared with next door.

Sadly I have no way of proving this to be the case, but William’s grandmother had grown up around the corner in Whiteman’s Yard which was one of those closed off courts faced on three sides by one up one down properties.

In the centre of the yard were three privies used by the occupants of the thirteen houses which faced them along with the water tap.

My grandparent’s house faced out on to Hope Street but the yard at their back was another closed area which you entered down a passage way built into the houses.

So in that sense their experiences were not so different from those of the family Whiteman’s yard a full fifty years earlier.

And they were the common experiences of countless working families from the early 19th century will into the middle of the 20th.

12 Hope Street has gone and to my knowledge there are no detailed plans of the place or even a photograph of the frontage.

I am left with my vague memories and a hand drawn plan of the house opposite by Sid who lived in Hope Street in the 1940s, and knew my family.

Sill it’s enough to start with.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson