The pot under the bed …… and other stories

I have been thinking of what one item marks my childhood off from our kids and it is the chamber pot. 

My chamber pot, date unknown

My Wikipedia tells me it is “a portable toilet, meant for nocturnal use in the bedroom.

It was common in many cultures before the advent of indoor plumbing and flushing toilets”*

.Now I am open to all sorts of suggestions for alternative “things” of which computers, the internet, CD’s, social media, and mobiles could be considered, but I still go for the chamber pot.

At which point I must confess that at home in Peckham we did have “indoor plumbing and flushing toilets”, but not so my grandparents who had lived in Hope Street in Derby from the mid-1920s, and finally left for a posh house almost 40 years later.

And for them a visit to the loo meant the outside lavatory which had been a shared affair until sometime in the 1940s.

There will be plenty of people who are quick to shout out their experiences of sitting in all weathers while listening to the daily doings of neighbours in the shared yard.   What ever the time of year it was not the best of experiences and one which might be shared with the odd spider and curious cat.

Granddad and Nana in the back yard circa 1940

But in the middle of the night, especially in deepest winter, like the rest of the people in the street the alternative to the outside lavvy was the chamber pot.

It resided under the bed at night and was emptied as one of the early morning tasks.

Mine in Hope Street was made of porcelain and when I was very young was something I was expected to sit on, which was fine if you got your balance just right.

And in the dead of night was always cold to the touch.

Of course, chamber pots still exist even in the most up to date houses and are the main stay of those childhood steps from nappy to lavatory, and in different guises, shapes and materials can be found in hospitals and nursing homes.

But the idea that under your bed would be a “portable toilet”  to avoid the trip to the yard  is not something our children ever experienced.

On the odd occasion that the topic has come up I am met with a mix of disgust, and incomprehension.

But that is what comes of having been born in the first half of the last century.

 Happily my childhood chamber pot has long since gone, but back in 2009 in the company of my old friend Joe Callaghan we came across a much battered and corroded enamelled metal one lifted from the archaeological dig in Miller Street.  

To the bafflement of the archaeologists, I made a bid for it along with a brick from the excavation.

Joe, two archaeologists and the Miller Street Dig, 2009

The houses dated from the late 18th century, but I have no idea how old my pot was.

Suffice to say the team bad me and Joe a fond farewell as we made our way towards the cathedral each now in possession of a hand made 18th century brick, wrapped in plastic bags pondering on the story we would give to the police if stopped.

I have never asked Joe what he did with his brick, and mine is still somewhere in the cellar.

Alas the tin potty was eventually discarded, and all I have is a slightly out of focus picture.

Still it's a link with my past.

Location, My childhood, Hope Street, Derby and Miller Street, Manchester

Pictures, my chamber pot, date unknown, Granddad and Nana in the back yard of Hope Street, circa 1940, and Joe, two archaeologists and the Miller Street Dig, 2009, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Chamber Pots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot

** A planned archaeological dig in Hulme and two retired teachers, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/planned-archaeological-dig-in-hulme-and.html

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

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

When there are no clues left to the identities on a family snap

Now I will never know who any of these men are.

I am guessing they were friends and work mates of my grandfather and I think I can identify him but the others are lost in time.

And the images themselves could very well have also been lost.

I came across them in a collection of old photographs, letters and bills.

Of course on one level there is nothing special about them, most of us will have similar collections tucked away half forgotten and pretty much a mystery.

Most of us never take the time to write a name and add a date on the back and within a generation the identity of the people and the significance of the event are unknown.

More so as in this case these images were not even prints, instead they were negatives, which I scanned with little expectation that they would amount to much.

More so because they will date from the 1930s.

The best I can come up with is that they are Derby where my grandparents settled after the Great War.

There may be a clue in the shop name which I managed to reverse in scanning and in the large painted sign.
Four or five years ago someone suggested a link to a factory in Derby but I never followed it up.

So now these men stare back at me stubbornly providing no clues as to who they were, or when they posed for the camera.

All of which makes this I suppose one of those “non stories” but then it is family and that continues to exercise my interest.

And reminds me of that simple but most important point that you should always name and date a picture.

But then I am as guilty as my parents on that score.

So having done the public announcement I shall leave you with these images of men at work sometime over 80 years ago.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Floods and disasters

I have been drawn back to the Derby flood of 1932, and in particular the suffering any such disaster brings.*

On that Sunday morning most were taken unawares and as ever those who lost the most were those who could not afford to.  Many families in the low lying areas lost everything and without insurance cover this was a real catastrophe.

Opposite; families in the Chester Green Road, watch the rising flood water, while the Lord Mayor made a flood appeal.

Pictures; from Souvenir of the Derby Floods In Aid of the Lord Mayor Flood Fund, May 1932

*When the Markheaton Brook burst its banks, May 1932, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2019/11/when-markheaton-brook-burst-its-banks.html

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

Cynthia ..... and stories of family revealed

I have been thinking of my friend Cynthia and how she brought me closer to my grandparents and the uncle I never knew.

Cynthia, 2000

We came across each other purely by chance almost a decade ago when I was writing a series of family stories for the Derby Telegraph.

She read them, recognised the names and got in touch and then for a few brief years until her death we spoke and corresponded regularly.

She was an amazing woman full of wit, knowledge and as our friendship grew revealed a wealth of stories about my family.

Like them she had lived on Hope Street, first as a child and then later with her husband and children.

Now Hope Street is pretty central to our story.  My great grandmother Eliza, great uncle Jack and great aunt Dolly lived on the street and sometime in 1922 my grandparents set up home at 12 Hope Street, which is where they brought up my mother and uncle and where I visited during summer holidays until they moved in the late 1950s.

My memories of that house and indeed the area are those of a child and had become shot through with doubts about the veracity of what I remembered.

Uncle Roger, 1937

But Cynthia confirmed much of those memories and more than that added to the store of family detail.

From her I learned the degree of prejudice shown to my German grandmother which ranged from cold stares to having the washing in the communal yard thrown in the mud.

And that prejudice extended to mum and Uncle Roger who were born in Germany.

All of which is ironic given that grandfather, his brothers and indeed my great grandfather served in the British army during the Great War, and mother and Uncle Roger were in the RAF during the Second World War.

I never knew my uncle, he died aged 21 faraway in a Japanese prison camp and my memories of Nana are of a woman who was in her sixties, but Cynthia knew them when they were young.

Nana, 1934

In the case of Roger there was she admitted with a wry smile more than a bit of romantic interest but sadly it was not to be, and in 1938 he enlisted as a boy recruit in the RAF.

Nana she remembered was a humorous and caring individual who by the 1930s had not only come to be accepted by her neighbours but was respected.

Now these tiny snapshots are important because they offer up an impression of my grandmother which seemed at odds with the stern no nonsense woman I knew a full two decades later.

12 Hope Street, 1963, marked with an X

And in the case of my uncle Cynthia’s comments brought him out of the shadows.

More than that she also supplied details of Hope Street and the surrounding streets which again confirmed what I vaguely remembered.

Nor is that quite all because just a little after Cynthia and I made friends another near neighbour from the late 1930s made contact in a course of letters supplied information about the houses on Hope Street, but that is for another time.

Location Derby

Pictures; Cynthia Wigley 2000, courtesy of Cynthia, Uncle Roger 1937,  Nana, 1934, Hope Street, 1963 the Derby Evening Telegraph, from the collection of Andrew Simpson