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

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/

More stories from an industrial landscape

I suppose I am on a roll and have slid into a series of stories about that industrial landscape many of us grew up with.*

In my case it was the narrow rows of terraced houses, mills and foundries bounded by London Road, Traffic Street and the railway.  This was where my grandparents lived, and it was where every summer holiday I went until the age of 11.

They lived in Hope Street, one of a series of long roads of densely packed two up two downs which all seemed to have a pub on the corner and lead to a noisy big place of work.

Now child hood memories are supposed to be of long hot sunny days without a rain cloud in the sky, but mine are of those grimy streets which seemed to go on forever and dank cold entries which led from the busy road into the communal yard at the back.

And because I was sometimes packed off from London in the winter I remember those wet and cold days when lazy palls of smoke from countless domestic fires and factory chimneys hung over the roof tops giving off that sooty smell and adding another layer of grime to everything including the few trees by the Royal Infirmary and Arboretum.

No matter how many times I was told I always got seduced by the challenge of climbing them and was always surprised at how the stuff came off on your hands and clothes.

All of which you accepted and took in your stride.  This after all was how we lived and the idea that there could be places without noisy factories or that an open space was more than just a small pocket of tired looking grass didn’t even occur to me.

Looking back it is the way that so much industry existed side by side with where you lived.  Tucked away behind a row of houses were the yards where men repaired things with hammers and torches, at the end of most roads was a factory or mill of sorts and there was always the railway with its long lines of shunting yards whose locos worked long into the night.

For some the railway station was that magic place offering the promise of journeys to faraway places, but for us in Hope Street it meant that distinctive clunk sound as another loaded wagon was pushed and sent to its destination in the far corner of the marshalling yard.

Of course the upside was that you were never far from work.  No long bus ride or expensive commuter journey for my granddad and his neighbours. Work was just minutes away and like as not was a journey made in the company of the men who he spent the working day with.

And they were the same men who you would drink with and see at football matches and around the town. There is a story that during one shipbuilders strike in the North East the pubs opened early so that the striking men had somewhere to go to play darts, drink tea and fill the day in the place of work in the ship yard.

But let’s not over romanticise the picture.  Places like Hope Street in Derby and Butterworth Street hard by Bradford Colliery were no rural idyll and if the sun shone on a bright spring day it was accompanied by the noise of factories, and illuminated the canal side and gasworks.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson


*Industrial Landscapes,  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Industrial%20landscapes

The Classic Slum, Salford stories from 1900

When you get to my age whole swathes of your childhood landscape have gone.

Many of the homes of friends have vanished under slum clearance plans along with the corner shops, small factories and builder’s yards.

Some have been replaced with social housing, but many more by prime state of the art flats for young couples with plenty of disposable incomes.

I guess it’s what comes of growing up in what had become shabby run down parts of our towns and cities which more recently have been rediscovered and gentrified.

Or they have become car parks which was the fate of the houses and streets where my mother’s family lived in Derby from the 1840s through to the 1970s.

Not that this is a nostalgic ramble of warm memories and cosy stories of a world that was better than today.  I have always been suspicious of that repackaged brand of history.  True people did share, and doors were left unlocked but that had more to do with the pitiful amounts of possessions that people possessed.

Open air markets like Flatiron on Chapel Street in Salford may look quaint to us today but were places where “poverty busied itself”* and almost any item of second hand clothing was available for a price.

And it is that remembered phrase that has drawn me back to Robert Robert’s powerful description of growing up in Salford in the first quarter of the 20th century.

You won’t find any romantic tosh of lives of happy poverty.  People constantly battled against the grime, the vermin and the damp which threatened to invade their homes, in mean and often dark streets and courts where fresh air and sunlight rarely penetrated, and with the ever present threat that bad luck, ill health or unemployment might pitch the family into the workhouse.

Not that people gave up.

“On Sundays the artisan in his best suit looked like the artisan in his best suit; no one could ever mistake him for a member of the middle classes.  But any day at all the poor looked poor.  With us they wore, irrespective of fit, whatever would hide indecency; clogs or blutchers [Derby shoe] on their feet and about the neck a muffler – white, if possible, for the Lord’s Day.

Those in greatest need found even the old brokers’ shop too expensive ; they bought everything from the local Flatiron Market”

Now in recent years there has been a real attempt to turn the pawnbrokers shop into something respectable, something without the taint of poverty, and in the words of one friend “into a place for today, where bargains can be found and deals done to avoid using the credit card.”

But for me they will always be places where desperate families pawned possessions including treasured wedding rings to eke out the weeks income and just because it was part of the regular routine as much as seeing the dawn rise and the night fall it was no less demeaning.

In my own childhood in that “you have never had it so good" decade it was the tally man who brought the consumer goods and the essential clothing at ten shillings down and four shillings a week, and like all credit deals meant that you were often still paying for items which had worn away.

Not that you can compare life for most us in the 1950s with the existence described by Robert Roberts, where “Cheap Sunday boots for children were the bane of young lives.  Hard and ill-fitting, they rubbed the skin off the heels and toes without getting one’s sympathy much sympathy from adults who often were plagued themselves with corns, callouses, ‘segs’ and bunions.  In any crowd of workers on the move a sizeable number would have been seen walking badly”**

And it was also in the faces of those pre NHS generations.  Seldom do you see working class women smiling in photographs because to do so would reveal the extent to which a poor diet and lack of professional dental care had wrought havoc on their teeth.

Still in the 1930s it was possible to have a bad tooth pulled for a small fee in the open on Ashton market and in rural areas by the blacksmith.  And the surprise expressed by some at the huge numbers of spectacles and prescriptions issued in the first year of the National Health Service was less about the exploitation a free service but was an indication of the very real need for medical care which decades of poverty had meant were out of the reach of vast numbers of people.

So the Classic Slum is essential reading covering everything from possessions, to food and drink, manners and morals and high days and takes the story of the poorest parts of the city on from the writings of Dr Kay and Frederick Engels in the 1830s and 40s, and acts as measure for how far things have improved in the first quarter of our own new century.

*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, 1971, Pelican edition 1973

** ibid Robert Roberts

Pictures; Union Street Derby, 1950, from the collection of Cynthia Wigley, and Flatiron market Salford, Samuel Coulhurst, 1894, m59571 & m59569, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, and Bradford Power Station and Stuart Street, circa 1970s from the collection Eileen Blake