When you are ten ………. and the days are full of sun and adventures

When you are ten, away from your friends and spending the long summer holiday with your grandparent’s, time can hang heavy, especially as they had yet to own a TV.

I remember endless hours spent playing beside the ornamental ponds imagining them to be a series of secret lakes which hid mysterious monsters.

Or looking down into the apparently bottomless well in the greenhouse with the pungent odour of growing tomatoes and wondering who would rescue me if I fell in.

But these were as nothing compared to what greeted me in the hay loft above the barn at the bottom of the garden.

There was still a powerful lingering smell of hay which combined with the heat from the slates and the fustiness of the crumbling mortar made this a place with a difference.

If I were particularly daring I would open the loft hatch allowing fresh grass scented air to invade the room and look out across the fields. This was daring given the drop to the lane below seemed enormous.

On other days I just walked the country lanes, empty of everything but the occasional bird. There can be no greater sense of freedom than to be alone with just the hum from the telegraph wires and the blistering heat.

I don’t ever remember getting lost, but then I don’t suppose I ever went too far and never underestimate the homing powers of a ten-year-old who had not eaten since breakfast. Not that I remember many of the meals.

Our bread was baked at home on a huge black range. It was strong brown bread which granddad buttered before he cut a slice. The vegetables were also home grown and more than anything I remember her peas which Nana cooked using cloves which was fine until you ate one by mistake.

They had bought 170 and turned into bedsits with their living accommodation at the back of the house. I however got to stay in the front room and can still remember what seemed the long and scary walk from their kitchen.

The candle I took with me cast small pools of dim light and I was never quite sure what lurked in the corners of the passageway. True there was some safety when I got to the light switch by the front room but then there was still a night of darkness to endure punctuated only by the headlamps of passing cars.

Despite my nighttime fears this was a good place to grow up, and a world away from how my grandparents had lived close to the centre of Derby. In their two up two down terraced house in Hope Street people lived on top of each other, knew each other’s secrets and were even aware when they visited the outside lavatories in the back yard.

Chellaston and in particular 170 Derby Road were different. Our neighbour kept pigs at the bottom of his garden, there were fields behind us, and everywhere there was grass, trees, and open land.

 But I suppose these very things that had brought my grandparents to the village also brought others. They were in fact partly responsible having sold two of the three fields behind the house to a local builder who quickly filled them with houses.

The summer of 1961 was my last holiday there. I have to say the intervening years have wiped my childhood memories. The trolley bus terminus at Shelton Lock is fenced off and the disused weed infested canal has gone, and 170 Derby Road is no more.

We were lucky to visit just before it was demolished. In its empty, abandoned, and neglected state it seemed much smaller than I remembered. Nor did the garden seem to stretch forever while the stables had shrunk.

But I guess that is why we treasure those long ago memories belonging as they do to a time when the sun always shone, our grandparents were always cheerful and the worst that could befall a ten year old was a Sunday when it rained.

Location; Chellaston, 1959

Picture; open spaces, and secret hideaways, 1960-2018, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Rumours of war from Germany on a winter's night in Derby

Two of her nephews

12 Hope Street, Derby seems a long way from Berlin. But perhaps not for my grandmother who in the 1930s listened to the news from her native Germany.

With the family out or asleep listening to the broadcasts on the shortwave was her link with that other life, away from the grime, and poverty and making do in a two up two down cottage just off Traffic Street hard by the canal and railway station. It took her back to a more privileged and comfortable world in a large timbered house near Cologne.

Of course that idealised life had been shattered first by the Great War, and then the terrible period of inflation where money became valueless, and people like my great grandfather lost everything. In the late 1920s Germany had recovered but then was hit by the great depression, mass unemployment and the rise of the Nazi Party.

My great uncle Richard

It was this which increasingly occupied her mind when she listened to broadcasts from Germany, and in particular the speeches of Hitler whose ranting hatred and threats were all too real as first he destroyed democracy, turning on anyone who offered up opposition and finally all who were just different.

Sitting alone in the backroom with the heat from the stove, the familiar sounds of Derby streets the promise of what might come was unnerving.

No one else in Hope Street spoke German, and there were few she could confide her own deep feelings of anxiety to.

In the early 1920s she had suffered persecution in a country still adjusting to the losses from the first war with Germany and now the shadow of another conflict was clear in the words that poured from the radio.

 The near hysterical assertions of racial superiority, the call for military arms to readdress the defeats of 1918, and the mass applause and unthinking adulation were only softened by the way the broadcast would fade and come back depending on the atmospherics.

And for a generation that had lived through one war, seen family and friends disappear for the Front, the prospect that it might all happen again was a fearful thing. All the more so as both her children would soon be of military age as would her nephews away in Cologne.

Our family like countless others paid the price. Her son died in an enemy POW camp and her daughter was invalided out of the services. In Germany her brother had suffered at the hands of the Nazi Party and she had been unable to be with her father when he died in 1942.

It would be another five years before she could return to Germany. The drab, war damaged streets of Derby were nothing to what greeted her in Cologne.

Little of the centre of the city was left standing after the allied bombing and it was hard to navigate around the streets when there was so little left. In places faded signs announced to anyone who cared to read that such and such a family had been bombed out and were now living with Cousin Otto. Some also included messages for loved ones returning from the battle fronts with the hope that soon all would be reunited.

In this desolate city she did have my grandfather’s letters, which were sent every few days. They were full of familiar people and everyday life back in Derby. Tales of meals eaten, rationed food swapped for other items, a local scandal and in the middle of one letter, the news that “a fire engine has just raced by down Traffic Street and people are running about

Pause for excitement.”

Nana on a Derby street

It was a strange turn of events. She had left Cologne in the early twenties with two small children and now back in the city of her birth there was the regular comings and goings of Hope Street and Derby.

Pictures, Family members in Germany circa 1939, great uncle Richard, 1930, and Emilie Hall in Derby circa 1930s from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Forbidden bits of history ……….

Now even for writers there are the places we choose not to go and it is of those forbidden bits of history that have exercised my mind to day, sparked in part by a reflective piece on another blog.

Uncle Roger and mum, circa 1939

The other piece is from my old friend Lois Elsden who was musing on what triggers her writing.*

I have always classed myself as a jobbing historian, and so I will write about what ever takes my fancy along with requests.

And often the stories arise out of a document, photograph, or an event someone has shared or will bubble up from a research project.

And in return for looking into the history of a house or a lost relative l get to write the story.

So, we all win. They get a bit of their past uncovered and l end up with a piece for the blog.

Over the last thirteen years I have written about coins on Reynard Road, a picture of a dad on Stockton or the sad account of an RAF bomber crew buried in a wartime Dutch grave.

It all works well and to steal that old catchphrase the blog is “open all hours”.

But there are yawning gaps with subjects l can't go near.

Capture, POW record, 1942

They are usually linked to family. 

And the most obstinate one is my uncle who died in a Japanese POW camp in 1943. 

His early life in Cologne and Derby presents no problems nor his time in the RAF up to his capture. 

We have a wonderful 26 handwritten account of his journey from outside Manchester during the Christmas Blitz to a journey by sea to South Africa, through the Suez Canal and on to Greece where he escaped just before its fall to the Axis powers. 

The letter finishes in Basra and is supported by a series of photographs he took.

All of which is fine, but his period of captivity is a stumbling block. I have newspaper account of his “missing in action” the confirmation of his incarceration and  the stark official news of his death.

Added to which we have the replies to letters grandmother wrote to anyone who she thought might have known him in the camp.

News of his death, 1945

It is harrowing story which l can never do justice to. But nor can l summon up the will to read or write about the Japanese war.  

It extends to avoiding the classic films from David Lean's account of the men forced to build a bridge to the umpteen Hollywood accounts.

All of which means while I know the details of the European war I never go near the war in the East.

And when confronted with another family tragedy which befell the brother of my great grandmother l just blanked it.

I suspect it is a bit of wanting to avoid the unpleasant coupled with an acute sense that to do so places me as a bit of a voyeuristic tourist picking up a deep family tragedy.

And it was, for neither mother nor grandmother ever talked of the events, other than to call down insults on Winston Churchill who they believed knew from intelligence that the ships carrying the RAF personnel were heading directly into Japanese occupied territory.

So forbidden history.

Pictures; photographs and other documents of Roger Hall, 1940-45 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the POW record from findmypast.co.uk

*What triggers my writing, https://loiselsden.com/2024/02/07/what-triggers-my-writing/

Letters to Germany ........ from Derby in 1947

Union Street near Hope Street, late 1940s

What did my grandfather do on a muggy Monday evening in 1947?

Well there were plenty of cinemas in the town but I doubt that he would have bothered with a film.

Alternatively there was the pub of which there were lots more within walking distance of Hope Street where he had lived with my grandmother for over twenty years.

But while he liked a drink Monday was some way off from pay day so on that Monday evening of October 13th he took to writing a letter to my grandmother who had left for Germany the week before.

It was the first time they had been apart since they returned to England in the early 1920s.

This was the first of a number of letters he sent during that October. They were full of the ordinary things that happen to couples, a mix of gossip, local news and the mundane trivia which kept grandmother in touch with a familiar world.

Nana and granddad mid 1930s

Uppermost was the story of how the Corporation had “made a fellow give up his bungalow under the Town Planning Scheme” for a pittance only to allow a local Councillor to move in after it had been renovated. There were also the usual references to the weather and the comings and goings of relatives, friends and neighbours.

But it was food that featured most consistently through the letters. There was the Sunday meal of “stewed steak with peas and onions, stewed apple with the top of the milk bottle for dinner and bread, cheese, tomatoes for tea,” along with the references to the absence of sausage meat and the promise to try and get hold of some coffee to send to Germany.

It is easy to forget that food was still rationed and that during 1946 and ‘47 this had been extended to include bread and potatoes. Apple crumble that mainstay of school dinners and quick puddings had evolved in the war. Due to strict rationing the ingredients needed to make the bases of pies contained too much flour, fat and sugar while a crumble mixture used less.

On the Sunday he had met up with my mother and passed over her ration coupons before returning home to trade some of the family food. “Mrs Rushton brought me some tea, sugar and margarine which was traded for eggs.” Despite this he still managed “bacon eggs and toast for breakfast” on Sunday, all the more remarkable given that eggs were in such short supply and that the weekly allowance of bacon per person was just 113 grams [4oz].

Amongst all the trivia came a more serious note. Away in Germany something had gone wrong. It is not clear from his letter but it is enough to know that he “thought it was a rotten thing to happen” and he asked that grandmother “give my expression of sympathy to Liesel,” and pondered on what could be done.

Mrs Bux, one of my great aunts, date unknown

“It is only a suggestion of course, but would it not be possible for her to come over here, under this foreigners Scheme, perhaps work at Cleanese or somewhere and live with us.”

The scheme which had begun in 1947 was a Government response to the need to find workers for essential industries, including agriculture, coal mining and textiles.

They were recruited from the millions of east Europeans who had been ripped from their home to work for the German war machine.

Now as they languished in Displaced Persons Camps across Germany and fearful of returning to what were
Soviet controlled areas, they were offered one year contracts to come to Britain. They were known as European Volunteer Workers and it was this scheme that grandfather pinned his hopes.

It seemed to come to nothing. Liesel remained in Germany and grandmother returned. But it would be to a changing landscape. Her daughter, my mother had moved to London, and my grandmother would within a few years exchange the two up two down in Hope Street for a fine big house in Chellaston and grandfather would retire.

Picture; Union Street near Hope Street, late 1940s, from the collection of Cynthia Wigley, my grandparents, mid 1930s, and one of my great aunts, in Cologne, date unknown, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Poverty, TB, and a declining trade ........... Derby 1848

“The poor you will always have with you”*

Jane Lowe, circa 1870s

So might have begun any one of countless sermons in churches across Derbyshire in the summer of 1848. Its message would not have been lost on the family of George Lowe who had died aged just 37 in the June of that year.

 He left a wife and four children and had worked in a declining industry where wages were falling, and job security was increasingly uncertain. His death must have pitched the family even closer to the poverty line. Of all my families theirs seems to have been lived at the hardest end.

George was a framework knitter. This had been a well paid and secure occupation in his youth. In 1800 there had been 45,000 knitting frames in the country with most of them concentrated in the East Midlands with Derby as the centre of silk knitting.

The family lived in Leper Street and he may have worked from home or in one of factory units set up by enterprising businessmen who rented out machines to framework knitters. The knitting machine was a little taller than an upright piano. It was operated by foot pedals and by the nineteenth century machines could knit five or six rows of knitting with 288 stitches a row in a minute.

There is a lot of tosh written about the working lives of men like George. To the opponents of the new factory system he was his own master, free to work when he wanted with his family around him in surroundings which were very different from the noisy and dangerous factories. But he had to buy in candles, heat the workroom and was at the mercy of those he supplied his finished work to.

Nevertheless George might well feel confident that his was a secure future. Unlike cotton and wool the silk industry was slow to move over to factory production. Both framework knitters and their employers resisted industrialization.

This was partly because both believed that the factory product was inferior but also because the employers had invested a lot of capital in the machines they rented out to men like George.
But fashions change and just as the demand fell away the number of framework knitters had been on the increase. Some now only worked for two or three days a week but George was still expected to pay the full rent on the machine.

At the beginning 1848 he developed tuberculosis. Not that he would have needed a doctor to tell him. The symptoms were well known and feared in the 19th century. The cough and the tell tale blood stains were a give away, and then there were the fevers, night sweats and weight loss. The family would have been alerted to the first signs in January and by June he was dead.

This was a real tragedy in many ways. Maria was now faced with stark choices of how to make ends meet. She could ask for help from the Guardians of the Poor Law, but the new regulations introduced just fourteen years earlier were harsh and impersonal. Help would only come if she consented to go into the Workhouse, and here she would be separated from her children. If she were lucky she might be able to take the two youngest children with her but Mary who was thirteen and George who was eleven would be placed in other parts of the workhouse.

How she coped in the first few years after her husband’s death in unknown, but by 1851 she was working as were two of her children and she had taken in a lodger. Even so these were hard years and during the next twenty years she worked at a variety of jobs. At one time she was working in the silk industry, later still she was a charwoman.

It was an unremitting life of toil for little money, and for many like Maria and her children it was lived against that backdrop of having finally to seek relief in the workhouse. Their diet was poor and living conditions grim.

So we should not be surprised that all three Lowe women died young. Maria succumbed to TB aged 62 as did her daughter Maria who was just 43 and Mary her other daughter at 46. Both daughters left young children. Mary had left three and Maria seven.

I tried find where they lived recently but as you can expect there is little trace. Leaper Street where the family lived in the 1840s has been redeveloped and Clover Street which was between Watson and Leyland Streets had vanished completely. The poor are indeed always with us but the record of their lives, their contributions and even their thoughts do not often survive. Which I guess is a salutatory lesson to any family historian.

Picture; Jane Lowe, one of the daughters of George and Matria Lowe, born in 1844, by kind permission of Josephine Read, in the collection of Andrew Simpson

*“The poor you will always have with you”, Matthew 26:11

Leaving your mark, the lot of my family in the 19th century

How easy we take writing our name. Even in an electronic age we still sign for things at the door, commit to a legal agreement and perhaps even sign a letter.

Mark of Maria Lowe, wide of George Lowe, 1848

All of which made me think again about my family and how such a simple task was denied them.

In the summer of 1848 George Lowe died of TB. He was the grandfather of my grandmother which takes me back in an unbroken line to the mid nineteenth century.

His death plunged a family already on the edge of poverty into real hardship. His wife Maria was just thirty one and she had five children the youngest of whom was just twelve months old.

No records have survived of how they coped, but I know she took in lodgers and the children all went into the textile industry as soon as they could. She had a series of jobs including collecting old linen and later in her later 50s as a charwoman.

Marriage mark of Maria Lowe, 1864

Maria was illiterate as were all her daughters. They each left their mark instead of a signature on official documents. In the summer of 1848 Maria had left her mark on the death certificate of her husband and twenty-seven years later Mary her daughter also put a cross when registering the death of her mother Maria.

All of the girls had each left their mark on their wedding certificates.

As shocking as this seems to us today it was not unusual. In 1840 when Maria was bringing up her daughters over 30% of men signed the marriage register with a mark.

The level of literacy was in part measured by the test of the marriage mark. The authors of the 1851 census on Education fell back on this simple test of how many people were able to sign their name on the marriage certificate as against those who put a cross or mark as a judge of the level of literacy.

Mark of Eliza Bull, 1864

They were gratified that the number who put a cross had been falling but felt that it was still not good that well over a third of the population accented to marriage with a cross.

Here in Derby there were sixteen schools in the 1850s ranging from those catering for the well off to those aimed at catholic and Methodist families. But for the rest it would be a National School. These were church schools and provided elementary education for the children of the poor based on teaching of the church.

There were two of these not far from where Maria lived. On Edward Street was St Alkamund’s and on Curzon Street was St Werburgh’s on Curzon Street.

What was offered was fairly basic ranging from reading writing and arithmetic and maybe languages, music, drawing and geography.

The degree to which these were taught varied from subject to subject, and there was a gender split, so while almost all boys and girls were taught the ‘three Rs’, few studied modern languages. Boys were more likely to be taught mathematics than girls while more girls than boys were instructed in industrial occupations.

Nor were these gentle places of education. There was strict discipline and lessons were delivered with the help of monitors who were trained on the job, and much of this would focus on learning by rote. Standing outside the school the passer-by would have heard the repetitive chanting as row by row the children repeated the prepared text.

And if he had strayed inside, hanging from the walls around the room were embroidered verses extorting the virtues of thrift and hard work.

Working in a Derby silk mill, 1843

All of which I guess meant there was not much incentive for the girls to attend. And attendance was a problem, so while in the private sector the number of children attending on any particular day was over 90% in public schools which catered for the labouring classes the number it was much less.

For families like the Lowe’s the priority was bringing money into the house and so inspectors often commented that children were away from school and at work.

Not until 1870 was there universal provision for primary school education for working class children and even then it was still possible to gain exemption for even this limited schooling.

Listening to my mother’s experiences of school things had not changed over much by the 1920s. She had attended Traffic Street School as did my great grandmother sixties years earlier. Traffic Street School had been built in 1879 one of the new Board Schools of which many are still around today.

They were grand constructions, well built of brick, with high windows and were warm in winter and cool in summer. By comparison their replacements which went up in the 1950s may have looked better but had plenty of their own problems.

Traffic School, 1991

The huge amounts of glass in these new wave schools made classrooms very hot in the summer and cold in winter and presented us with all the distractions due to being able to look out and see the passing world.

But as grand as Traffic School was it did not impress my family. Mother was regularly hit with an ebony ruler across her hands as an infant and during grandmother’s time attendance still only stood at 89%.

Still my mother came out of Traffic Street able to read and write and later wrote plays which were published. The descendants of the Lowe’s went on to University and some have become teachers. How easy it seems for one generation to make a living in a world denied to earlier members of their family.

Picture; the mark of Maria Lowe on the death certificate of George Lowe, 1848, the marriage mark of Maria Lowe in 1864, daughter of George and Maria 1864, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, pictures, of women at work in a silk factory, A Day in a Silk Mill, Penny Magazine, 1843, and Traffic School, 1991 from the collection of Cynthia Wigley

Images of our industrial past ...... nu 2 working the metal 80 years ago

I am back with two more “lost images” from the family collection.

I have no idea who this man was and can only guess that it was either my grandfather or one of his work mates.

Moreover I cannot date the pictures or offer up a location, other than that they will be over 80 years old.
If it is my grandfather then it will be Derby and a rare moment when he was in full time work.

According to my mother like many men during the period he faced long bouts of unemployment which only really came to an end with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Sadly there is no one left I can ask who could tell me about the pictures, and I of course never bothered to ask what he did during the interwar years.

So we are left with just one man at work, sometime in the 1930s in all probability somewhere in Derby.

But that said I am drawn to them, not least because both carry fingerprints which were left on these two negatives.

Not that I will ever be able to discover who they belonged or why the prints have long since vanished but the these negatives survived.

But then that is often the case.

The prints get handed around or put into a book while the negatives are stored away just in case they are needed.

Of course that is seldom the case, but that simple decision means they will survive long after the cherished print has gone.
Pictures, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A mother’s loss

The continuing story of my family over 200 years


My grandmother’s war diary finishes in September 1943 which is rather an odd time to finish. But it may just be that the seven pages covering the period December 1940 to September 1943 are all that has survived. Or it might be this is all there ever was.

It would be another two years before Victory in Europe was celebrated in May 1945 and Victory over Japan in the August and it would be even longer before the troops including those in Japanese prisoner of war camps returned home.

I can only guess how Nana had got through the long years of waiting for news of my uncle. He had been captured in December 1942 and apart from one short letter and some official communication she had nothing to go on. The wait continued until the November of 1945 when the cruellest of news arrived in the form of a telegram from the Air Ministry.
“DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON 575348 AC= 2 ROGER JULIUS HALL IS REPORTED TO HAVE DIED WHILST PRISONER OFWAR IN JAPANESE HANDS ON 8TH JULY 1943 THE AIR COUNCIL EXPRESS THEIR PROFOUND SYMPATHY”


This was followed by a letter confirming his death from dysentery in Kanburi, Thailand and was buried in Paper Mill Cemetery, Kanburi. It is hard for any a parent to be faced with such news. He was just 21 with a full life ahead of him and in the words of the official letter dated December 2nd “the news will be particularly grievous at the present time, when you must have been hoping that you would soon see your son safe at home again.” What followed was the letter from the King and his medals.

Nana went onto write to anyone who may have been in the same camp. Some were there at the same time but in another part while others had just been passing through. The replies continued to arrive through into 1947, but none could shed any more information, “I fear I can tell you nothing in the way of news about your son’s death. I’m so sorry ........ he was in quite a different Unit from me, in the beginning and there were some 35,000 British personnel split up into 5 main Groups up and down the railway.”


The letter confirmed what I had long suspected that Uncle Roger was one of the allied prisoners who built the Burma-Siam railway which the Japanese began in October 1942 and finished the following December. 13,000 prisoners of war died during its construction and were buried along the railway. An estimated 80 to 100,000 conscripted civilians also perished.

His remains along with all those who died in the jungle camps were moved by the Imperial War Graves Commission to the Paper Mill Cemetery. Today it is possible to view the place online, Nana had to content herself with an official letter from the Imperial War Graves Commission dated May 1955 that along with permanent war memorial across all theatres of war the Kanchanburi War Cemetery in Siam was completed.

I would like to think that this letter closed the story. Nana could now look at a map and know where her son was buried; she had his medals and some if very few of the letters he wrote during his war service. But there had been a sting in the tail of how a grateful nation treated the mother of a serviceman killed fighting for his country.

In January 1946 she received a letter from the Air Ministry which pointed out that “as his Royal Air Force pay ceased on the day of his death, the voluntary allotment which you have been receiving has been substituted by a temporary allowance of equal amount, to which you are entitled under the regulations.”

But this to would cease on February 21st 1946, just ten days after what would have been his 24th birthday. I don’t suppose the money was ever the issue. The payments were no substitute for having her son home and watching him grow into maturity. Nor in a sense can you fault the logic which requested she return the payment book “to this Department as soon as you have cashed that order.”

But every time I read the letter I wonder how it must have torn at my grandmother’s heart.

Pictures; a message from the King, and the site of his war grave, in the collection of Andrew Simpson

When the Markheaton Brook burst its banks, May 1932

My mother never spoke of the Sunday the centre of Derby flooded.
It was 1932 and she would have been 12, but neither she nor my grandparents ever mentioned it.

And yet at the time it was a big event, flooding some houses to a depth of 7 feet causing £400,000 worth of damage and topping the level reached in the Great Flood of 1842.

 I suppose by the time I was visiting Derby in the 1950s it was ancient history and another one of  those events like the War which were best forgotten.

But the event is fading from living memory and soon there will be few left who have vivid memories of the Sunday morning the Markeaton Brook which runs through the centre of Derby flooded the shops and houses around the Corn Market, St James’s Street and the bottom of St Peter’s Street.

In an attempt to prevent a similar flood to the one of 1842 a huge culvert had been built which fed the brook into the River Derwent.  But during the previous few days there had been heavy rain which caused “an avalanche of water such as human ingenuity was powerless to control.”

And the sheer speed of the event is what I expect was the most frightening and took the town by surptrse.

In the low lying parts of “the town it gathered quickly and by ten’o clock shops in the Corn Market, St James’s Street and the bottom end of St Peter’s Street  were immersed half way up the windows”.

And as ever it was the least well off who faced the full force of the flood.  “residents in the poorer districts in some cases lost their all.”  And  these were the very people who could not afford insurance.

It was an “amazing spectacle of the main shopping district of a modern industrial town turned into a lake.”  The electricity failed and along with it  the telephone network.

Now Hope Street where my mother and grandparents lived was just a few minutes away and I guess they would have visited the site during the course of the day and may have been one of the countless hundreds of spectators caught on camera.  But it never featured in anything they ever said to me.

All of which makes me reflect that even recent events can be lost.

Pictures; from Souvenir of the Derby Floods, Published by the Derby Branch of the Y.M.C.A., in aid of the Mayor’s Flood Fund.

* Souvenir of the Derby Floods, Published by the Derby Branch of the Y.M.C.A., in aid of the Mayor’s Flood Fund. May 22nd 1932

Secrets from a century ago ………

Now I say secrets, but if I am really accurate, they are less so and more a confirmation of what I really knew mixed with stuff that takes the family story just a bit further on.

Hope Street, 1900

And yes, this is family history story and I am acutely aware that one person’s family stories are another person’s yawn, but this is linked to the release of the 1921 census, which has been eagerly awaited by many.

Not only does this release take us all a decade on from the 1911 census but will be the last available until 1951, because the 1931 census was destroyed and the 1941 census never took place due to the war, leaving just the 1939 Registration document which acts as a sort of census.

If I am honest, I was going to leave accessing the 1921 census in the hope that it would in time become free to use on Findmypast which is the only genealogical platform where it can bee seen.  Although if like me you live in Manchester you can access it via the Central Reference Library for free.

William Hall circa 1930s, my grandfather

But on a cold day with the rain coming down like stair rods, I chose to pay to see the entry for my great grandmother and pay again to see the original form, which altogether cost just over a fiver.

That said what price finding your family from a century ago?

And found them I did, where I knew they would be in 1921 which was at Court 5 2 Hope Street, Derby and almost opposite the property my grandparents moved into sometime two years later.

The electoral address in 1921 recorded that great grandmother Eliza, and  two of her children were living there, but that was it, so the census has filled in the gaps.

And these are important because soon after the census was taken her son Jack had moved out to get married and her daughter Laura emigrated to Canada.  

Which left my grandfather still in uniform in the British army of occupation in Germany where he met my grandmother, got married and had two children one of whom was our mother.

Jack Hall, circa 1950s

Eliza remains a shadowy figure, who didn’t always walk with reality.  In her twenties she took up with my great grandfather travelled the country before settling in the south and then leaving him to have our great aunt Laura in the Derby Workhouse in 1902.  

Aged just 22 she was brought up in court for a brawl with a policeman, at 39 her children were taken into care, and a decade later she had been committed to the Derby Asylum.

So, 1921 does seem to mark a stable moment in her life, living with two of her four children, with the prospect of being reunited with another son, a daughter in law and two grandchildren, leaving just her son Roger who opted to be migrated to Canada in 1914 by the Derby Union rather than stay in care.

We know that she had made efforts to get all the children out of care, and so the census offers up some valuable information to both my family here in Britain and the Canadian grandchildren of Laura.

Jack the eldest son had been apprenticed to a blacksmith and Laura sent north to work in “service”.

By the time of the census Jack was employed at George Fletcher Company and Sons, on Letechurch Lane who were “Sugar machinery manufactures” while Luara was a “Tasle Maker” for the Textile Manufacturers, E Dould & Sons at Spa Lane.

Laura Pember, nee Hall 1968

Neither company now exists, and a walk down Letechurch Lane, and Spa Lane is a grim experience on a January day with little left of the original industrial buildings that once fronted these two streets and no indication if what are left are linked to our workplaces.

That said that wonderful site, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History has a timeline and pictures of Fletcher’s, which was established in 1838, and went through a series of mergers during the 1950s and 60s.

And we do have a testimonial from E Dould & Sons when Laura left in 1925.

All of which confirms much of what we already knew, but the census also offers up an intriguing reference to our great grandfather, who was a Montague Hall, and never actually married Eliza.  In the column headed Marriage or Orphanhood, the entry reads “Husband missing not known whether Dead”.

In fact he had died in 1916, but I rather think Eliza would not have known this as they separated in 1902, with him remaining in Gravesend, and going on to get married and have another family.

Great aunt Laura's testimonial

Eliza appears to have only given her children the vaguest of outlines of their father, and in correspondence written in the 1970s Laura wrote that there was little they knew about her.

But then I suspect she was a family secret, and continued as such until 2008 when I stumbled on her in the course of working on our history.

All of which leaves me to comment on the census itself.  

Like it’s 1911 predecessor it is a single form recording the inhabitants of the family home, rather than those for the street, and requires more information about any children under the age of 16 but omits a reference to how long a couple have been married.

Plan of 5 Hope Street, 1947

And for me there is Eliza’s signature which is the first time I have come across her handwriting, all of which brings me a little closer to her.

As does the knowledge that the property was a two up two down, exactly like the one opposite which was inhabited my grandparents and where I stayed.

So that is it, I guess I will be returning to 1921 to look up dad, and in the fullness of time track others.

Location; Derby in 1921

Pictures; grandfather, circa 1930s, great uncle Jack, circa 1950s, and great aunt Laura who we called aunt Dolly, circa 1968, from the collection of the Simpson Pember families, Plan of 5 Hope Street, 1947, Syd and Pamela Dilkes, and Hope Street, Derby, 1900, from the OS map of Derbyshire, 1900, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

* Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/George_Fletcher_and_Co

My pacamac and a day in August 1957

When you are nine years old and spending the summer in the village of Chellaston, time can hang heavy, especially when it’s raining.

They say you only remember the sunny summer holidays; well this is true only up to a point.

Given our English weather all too often I woke to a wet morning. And as if to rub salt into the wound
it would still be hot which made it a double whammy.

Hot enough to go out in just shorts and shirt which in August is how it should be but so wet that there was no fun in being outdoors.

To make matters worse Nana would insist I wore my pacamac which was ideal for summer showers. But they were a cruel invention. Despite being light and flexible enough to be squeezed into a small bag they smelt awful and were a nightmare to wear.

It didn’t take long before the warmth of the body trapped in a sheet of clinging plastic made you sweat and the more you walked the hotter and more uncomfortable you became. Which meant you had a choice, wear it and suffer or take it off, get wet and suffer later when Nana discovered that this act of rebellion had got me soaked.

Now their garden was a big one, which they had lovingly restored. The ornamental ponds had been repaired and once again water trickled from one to another down one side of the garden. They had replanted the Japanese bushes and tamed the overgrown trees.

All of which was fine on a dry summer day, but after a night of rain and some brief but powerful morning showers, the bushes and trees held the water like a reservoir. And I never seemed able to avoid them. Even if I took care not to brush up against the bushes which would smother you in wet clinging leaves there was the ever present danger from trees, any one of which could send an avalanche of rain drops on to the back of your shirt or worse still down your neck.

All of which meant you were forced back into the house. Now my grandparents didn’t have a television back in 1958, and with grandfather out at work and Nana doing something, the long morning from breakfast stretched out before with little hope that the tedium could be broken.

The house was large or so it seemed to me, but it had been turned into bed sits and so I was confined to the kitchen, scullery and the posh front room. There was also my grandparent’s bedroom which was off the kitchen but this held little mystery and any way was their private place.

So it had to be the posh front room which was like a grave yard. The furniture was the “best” and never used and so the room had an air of being forgotten. It also had an odd smell which I suppose came about because for most of the year it was never used and not even aired properly. Nana kept it spotless but it somehow smelt dusty. Nor was it much fun to be in. The clock on the mantel piece ticked away and emphasised that it was the only thing in the room that regularly did anything.

This just left the landing with a fine old massive oil painting hanging from the wall. When all else fails a gigantic depiction of some historical event is guaranteed to pass the time. There were days when I sank myself into the picture reliving the event and acting out the story. And there were other days when I tried copying some of the detail. Eventually my grandparents took advice, had it cleaned and sold.

The same fate befell the suit of Japanese armour which had somehow been left by the previous owner. It fitted perfectly but even at nine I was aware that it might have been valuable and so it became something to put on and then take off. Sadly I never remember fending off fierce Samurai warriors or saving a young girl from the hands of an oriental dragon. On the other hand the army holster from the Great War was something different. It had that strong leather smell and was perfect for the Roy Rogers cap pistol. I kept both in a draw in the cupboard beside the kitchen range.

And more often than not when the posh room and the landing had been exhausted it would be the kitchen I sat in.

Thinking back I am amazed at how my grandparents lived in just two rooms.

There was their bedroom and the kitchen. The kitchen doubled up as the main living space, work area and of course the place we ate. But then they had spent almost their entire married life in a two up two down in Hope Street.

So nothing had changed except for the garden. Here they spent much of their time. Granddad in the greenhouse with his tomatoes and Nana pouring over the vegetable patch.

Even now sixty three years later the memories of that green house are powerfully vivid. Nothing prepared you for the heat as you entered or that pungent smell of tomatoes or the damp. Behind all that glass it was a silent place and for a nine year old it held my attention for about ten minutes.

Which was about right, because summer showers eventually go away and are replaced by sunshine. And that of course is another of those experiences of summer that has never left me, that damp warm smell of wet grass which you know soon enough will be dry and offers the promise of hot carefree afternoon under an August sun.

Location; Chellaston


Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, circa 1957-2020

Of a cattle market iron foundry and dye works ..... Derby in the 1950s

I never thought it was odd that just a short walk from Hope Street there was a cattle market despite it being so close to iron foundries, dye works, and timber yards while to the east and north of us had been the print works, a silk mill and the railway.



Today the idea that you could have had an agricultural market surrounded by heavy industry doesn’t quite fit.

All that farming stuff belongs in quaint market towns, which go quiet once the farmers and their animals have moved off.

But back in the 1950s it was one of those regular places my grandparents took me to on market days.  I still have vivid memories of the noise, the smell and the excitement of seeing the livestock.

And it got me thinking that this was not such an odd thing.  It made perfect sense to site the industry of the late 18th and 19th century in places that already served the surrounding countryside.  Here after all would be an existing population with good transport.

The River Derwent was made navigable in the early 18th century and Derby had its own canal by the 1790s, and a railway under fifty years later.  And the river also provided power for cotton mills.  From Matlock  all the way to Derby was a stretch of industrial development.

So the mix of agricultural and industrial is not so odd.  My family worked in the mills and on the railway and before that some were framework knitters and before that had farmed the land..  Others served the wealthy as servants built the grand shops and houses of Derby and later some earned a living at Rolls Royce.

But it was  the cattle market that  won out.  Long after the mills and foundries have closed and the canal built over, the market is still there.

Now they say you should never revisit the places of your past and there is something in that.  12 Hope Street is a car park, and the home my grandparent’s moved to in Chellaston was demolished and is now an anonymous sprawling estate on Derby Road.

We went back a few years ago and caught the place just before it vanished and as you do tried to find the trolley bus terminus at Shelton Lock.  Back in the 1950s the canal was an over grown weed infested place.  It has gone as have the trolley buses, but the terminus is still there and the pylon beside it.

But that is about it.

I hesitated to visit the cattle market.  Although the prospect of seeing the model of the calf I sat on back in May 1954 is an intriguing one but like the canal and the trolley bus will have long since vanished.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and a detail from the OS map of Derbyshire, 1896-1900, courtsey of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Emilie Bux..............a German bride in post war Derby in the summer of 1923

I remember my grandmother as a stiff, serious woman who rarely smiled and got cross at what she thought was frivolous spending.

Nana, date unknown

These are childhood memories and people I talk to remember her differently. To them she was a warm funny woman who was very intelligent.

But she had a lot to contend with. Emily née Bux Hall was born in Germany moved here in the years directly following the end of the First World War.

She came from a prosperous family, grew up in a large timbered house and settled in a two up two down terraced house on Hope Street in Derby.

She faced the prejudice of people who had suffered during the long years of war, lost loved ones and could not quite understand how my grandfather would want to marry a German.

All their frustrations and anger settled on my Nana, who had her washing smeared with mud. There were the mutterings behind her in the shops and perhaps worst of all there was the way they took it out on her children who had been born in Germany.

Nana and Uncle Roger, 1929

Mother was beaten with an ebony ruler across her knuckles for speaking German in school and my uncle was called names in the playground and constantly had to defend himself in the street. It upset both of them but also filled them with a desire to do well. In the case of Uncle Roger this led from Traffic Street School to a scholarship at the Bemrose School.

12 Hope Street was a traditional terraced house with two rooms downstairs and two up with a small lean to at the back, beyond which was a shared yard and the outside lavatories.

You stepped off the street into the front room. 

The fireplace was off to the left and on the same side on the far wall was the door to the kitchen. The staircase to the bedrooms was at the back of the kitchen. It was a steep and enclosed staircase and I remember it as very gloomy and a little scary.

Nana, 1934

During their thirty years or so living there my grandparents softened what was a simple and basic place. They personalized the yard adding flowers and herb borders, but it was a small area and was overshadowed by tall buildings at the back.

Nana also had to live with the knowledge that her own family back in Germany had not been happy at the marriage. But she was a woman of immense resilience and she bore this with a stoic determination to make the best of whatever life threw at her.

Nana and grandad, date unknown

Early in the marriage she had to make her own way from Germany to England with a newly born son and a two year old daughter. Grandfather was demobbed in Belfast in 1922 and there are no records to suggest the army brought her and the children home as well.

This would have been no easy journey involving a train to a German sea port, and after an arduous sea crossing, an equally long train trip in a foreign country with two little children. But she met the challenge.

She faced up to the long periods of my grandfather’s unemployment during the 1930s, when news of a job ten miles away had him walking to the site only to discover a long queue of men already patiently waiting for the chance of employment.

Mother and uncle Roger, 1938

Somewhere along the line, possibly after the second war, she managed to scrape together some capital, and either bought or rented a tiny corner shop.

I have no memory of the shop, or when she gave it up and nor do I now know exactly when she and granddad left Hope Street for a grand semi, in the village of Chellaston, and now there is no one left to ask.

Mother, 1942

No one who can fill in the gaps in my memory and the research I have done in the last decade.

But one abiding piece of knowledge is that for all the prejudice she faced in the communal backyard in Hope Street in the 1920s, she saw both mother and father serve in the RAF in the Second World War, and had to be reconciled to the death of her son in 1943, aged just 21 in an enemy Prisoner of War Camp.

Pictures; Emilie Bux circa 1918, with Roger Hall, 1929,  walking through Derby in 1934, in the backyard of 11 Hope Street, date unknown,  mother and uncle Roger, 1938, and mother, 1942, from the collection of Andrew Simpson