I was born in 1947 in Moorlands
Maternity Home in Rawtenstall, Lancashire. The building was formerly
the infirmary of Haslingden Union Workhouse and seventy four years
earlier, my ancestor Henry Heys, had died there.
I was the
first child and we lived in Whitewell Bottom, a small village about
four miles north-east of Rawtenstall. My mother's family, the
Goldsworthy's, who had been Cornish tin miners, had migrated to this
part of Lancashire in the 1870s, when tin mining declined in
Cornwall. Initially, they had worked in the stone quarries of the
Rossendale Valley, quarrying stone for the many factories and houses
that were being built in Rossendale during the industrial revolution.
The next generation moved to being, factory workers themselves,
working in the cotton mills and shoe factories in this part of
Lancashire.
Although the factory in which my father worked
was only two miles from our house, it took two bus rides and
sometimes three for my father to get to, and come home from work. The
high moors between our house and his work no doubt offered an
opportunity to walk in the summer but it would not have been possible
to walk to work in the winter.
When I was two years old my
brother Stuart came along, although my earliest memories of him are
not in Whitewell Bottom, but in Rawtenstall where we moved when I was
four years old. I have no clear memories of our house in Whitewell
Bottom but it seemed to be damp and I suffered with pneumonia in my
early years. My mother and father both smoked heavily as people did
in those days. My father had a bad smoker's cough throughout his
life, and also worked in the corrosive atmosphere of the plastic
works at Reedsholme.
In those years after the second world
war many items of food and clothing were still rationed. My father,
along with all the other workers in the factories wore wooden soled
clogs with U-shaped clog irons on the bottom. The irons sometimes
sparked on the flag stones as he walked along.
In the early
1950's only a few people had televisions and we only had an old valve
radio which received two or three stations broadcast by the BBC. In
fact we did not own a television until about 1957 and at first only
one channel was available, on a small black and white screen for
three for fours each day. The technology was new and pictures needed
to be adjusted constantly to prevent them rolling vertically or
horizontally and remote controls were decades away.
In 1951 we moved to a post war prefab
in Rawtenstall, at the edge of Chapel Hill, where Stuart and I shared
a bedroom and we had the luxury of a fridge and an antique washing
machine. The house was small and primitive by today's standards, but
it was a luxurious when compared to the place we had come from. It
even had an indoor toilet and bathroom. I think the council house
rent was about £1.00 per week - no doubt the rent books can
still be found in the archives of Rossendale Town Hall.
We had
a large garden, but my father, who worked long hours and almost every
Saturday morning, did not have enough time to keep it all under
control and it resembled an unkempt field most of the time. Although
there were occasional summers when some order was maintained and
flowers grown.
We had an outdoor coal shed and the coal man
delivered about four hundred weight sacks of coal every two weeks or
so. As neither of my parents were in when this was delivered he came
round on Friday nights to collect his money. The small front room
fire with back-boiler powered a hot air heating system that produced
little or no heat but did heat the water for the bathroom and
kitchen.
We never locked our doors in the fifties, there was
little or nothing to steal and neighbours could be relied on to keep
an eye out for any trouble. There were ten other prefabs on our
street and lots of open countryside in which the many young children
around at that time, could play.
When Stuart was five years
old and he started to got to school, my mother returned to work. This
time at Hirst's Slipper Works (Shoe Factory) at Waterfoot. She
probably knew many of the people there as it was close to where she
grew up.
As we were at the edge of the countryside we spent
happy hours and days playing in the fields and walking the hills
around our home. One winter we jointly received an old Norwegian Army
sled as a Christmas present. As there seemed to be plenty of snow in
every winter and the sled could easily carry six or even eight kids,
we spent our winter days hurtling down the hills around our home.
To be written
To be written
We lived close to Waingate farm and Stuart became friends with the farmer and his family. When he was about thirteen he started doing weekend milk rounds and helping out around the farm.
To be written
To be written
To be written
My Crawshawbooth ancestors had been Calico Printers for nearly 200 years. When I left school in the 1966 I initially followed in their footsteps at Loveclough Print Works where my cousin Jack and his father (also Jack) were working. I didn't realise it at the time but the trade was declining. By chance I moved away from the traditional ancestral occupation and into the rapidly changing business of telecommunications, this wasn't a comment on Calico Printing but it was fortunate that I chose a path which could be sustained for my working life.
When I joined Cable and
Wireless it was run on very old fashioned military/diplomatic service
lines. Bachelors lived in a bachelor's mess with servants and all
sorts of archaic rules.
At the college in Porthcurno we had to
wear a jacket and tie every day and we weren't allowed beards or
moustaches. We ate breakfast and lunch at fixed meal times and dinner
was a formal affair where everyone had to be present before the meal
was served - I can't remember whether we said grace or not. No-one
could leave until the mess-president handed out the ashtrays. As the
mess president was a student elected by the other students he came
under great pressure to hand the ashtrays out as we all wanted to get
away to swim or play some of the other sports that were provided.
Meal times were therefore an incredible race where 100 students - all
formally attired - were served a three course meal and all the debris
cleared away in fifteen minutes. We even had immaculately dressed
waiters who served our meals.
Sport was very much encouraged
and Porthcurno had soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, squash, hockey an
incredible beach and many other attractions. In the summer the famous
Minack Theatre put on productions of Shakespeare, Sheridan and more
modern authors, by some very professional companies, at the wonderful
open-air cliff top theatre that still exists. At that time only three
TV channels existed and only one of these could be received at the
remote location - therefore we spent a lot of time amusing ourselves
and even putting on our own "Valley Varieties" show each
year.
We were paid a meagre amount, about £5 per week,
reduced to £4 10shillings, after we joined the pension scheme
after a probationary period of six months. As literally everything
was provided and few of us had cars we lived an idyllic life at the
western tip of the UK only escaping to the wonderful metropolis of
Penzance on Saturdays.
Although there were more than a
hundred of us at Porthcurno, when we went overseas the formality was
less, due to having to work shifts and the tropical lifestyle. Even
in Gambia, where there were only three bachelors, we had a cook, a
night-watchman, a maid and a gardener.
The Company made it
difficult for persons under 23 to marry. If anyone chose to do that,
then the Company would not provide a house until the member of staff
reached that age. They even paid married men more than
bachelors after they reached the age of 23. The rulebook said that
juniors had to have their alcoholic drinks bills approved by the mess
president. I never saw this implemented but no doubt it had been in
the past.
In some large branches they must have provided
a hundred houses or more and they provided all the hard and soft
furnishings. In some of the older locations they had cutlery with
embossed initials, plated napkin rings with initials on, and even
chests of drawers with the plated handles also embossed - and all the
other trimmings.
When I achieved the dizzy heights of
senior Cable and Wireless representative in Ankara in 1978 one of the
less pleasant parts of the job was being in charge of the Company's
spare inventory of household items. Literally everything from
bed-sheets to brooms, dusters, nutcrackers, cheese graters -
everything. The wives of my staff made this part of my job a misery.
With little else to fill in their time they made a pastime of
claiming their last knife and fork or spoon and trying to score
points on the other wives by getting more stylish patterns on the bed
sheets or more wine glasses or whatever. I had a little shed in the
grounds of the British Embassy in Ankara (we were attached to the
military attaché there) full of pots, pans and all sorts of
other goodies. As there was also a swimming pool at the embassy, if
any of the wives saw me heading that way they tried to waylay me to
get a good snoop of anything that caught their eye. I think the
allowances for furniture etc. were even linked to the grade of the
member of staff. Therefore the more you progressed, the more chairs,
sideboards etc. etc..
The rulebook was also out of date
on the matter of travel to Cable and Wireless locations. It was
stipulated that the standard method of traveling to a location was by
sea. Where this was not possible you were allowed additional leave to
compensate for the loss of traveling time. This could be considerable
as some of the locations were in the Far East or even the Pacific.
The Company eventually bought out the right to travel overseas by
sea, by offering a cash payment to all entitled staff based on the
number of opportunities that remained in their careers, to exercise
the option. I was paid about £1,000.00 in the early 80's, for
relinquishing this right.
There was also a formula for
the amount of leave you could earn between overseas tours. Some of
the more pleasant places only three days per month served, while the
more unpleasant places, where I spent a lot of time before marrying,
were granted six days per month. The one thing about the higher leave
factor places was that the overseas tour of duty was shorter, usually
18 months or two years. These tours could result in considerable
lengthy leave in the UK as the allowance only covered working days
and not weekends - I regularly came home to spend four, five or even
six months at leisure.
A friend of mine, who had a
girlfriend in Cornwall, was posted to Trinidad, an easy place, for
four years when he was twenty. He never wrote or spoke to his girl
friend in that time but when he returned they picked up the romance
again and have been married for over thirty years.
This page last updated 25 Nov 2006