EARBY LIFE BETWEEN THE WARS

[Stanley]

EARBY LIFE BETWEEN THE WARS

(29 November 2002)

The last time we looked at Jim Pollard’s life in Earby he was going to Riley Street school, he’d started there when he was three years old. His mother and father were running the bakery in Red Lion Street. In 1921, when he was five, Jim transferred from Riley Street to Alder Hill School.
I asked him what sort of school it was and he told me that he thought it was a good school and discipline was very strict. In those days ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ was still the rule and beatings with the cane were quite common. If it was a minor offence, a couple of strokes on the hand in the classroom by the teacher were sufficient but for any serious misdemeanour, he was taken down to the woodwork room, laid across a bench and given what he called ‘a proper walloping’. He also told me about a time when he was hit by the headmaster with his walking stick as he was leaving for home one night, his mother saw the bruise on him and went down to berate the master. Jim didn’t know what the outcome was but it never happened again.
Listening to Jim, I was reminded of my own schooldays when we were under a similar code of discipline, like him, I can’t see that it did us any harm. What is certain is that there was no cheek, teachers had control of their classrooms and there was very little vandalism. Jim was very scathing about the comparison between this regime and the one his daughter was educated under in the late 70s at New Road School as it was then. Still, what do we know about things like this, we have to bow to the ‘experts’ who tell us this is damaging.
As for academic progress, Jim admitted that while he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the box, he was educated well. He was good at arithmetic, reading and writing and in 1929, at the age of thirteen he passed the entrance examination for Ermysted’s at Skipton, but these weren’t his main interests. If Jim was passionate about anything, it was sport.
Alder Hill was where Jim first came across physical training. An ex-rugby player called Hindley was their master and he was helped occasionally by the PT instructor from Ermysted’s, a man called Taylor. It was at this point that Jim realised that the most important thing in life was sport! I have to admit at this point that when they handed the sports gene out, they missed me completely! I reckon Jim must have got my share as well as his own, he started to spend all his time playing football on a field near the Punchbowl hotel in winter and cricket in summer and it wasn’t long before the school realised they had a prodigy on their hands. Jim rapidly progressed to the first team at school and stayed in it as long as he was at Alder Hill.
There was another interest in Jim’s life, as long as he could remember he had wanted to work in the mill. As his older mates left school and got in the mills he would go and visit them at work when school was finished. He used to reach in for the loomer and help with cloth bundling in the warehouse. He was up at Sough Bridge Mill one day and was surprised when they came out to find a lot of bobbies chasing people up the road. He had unwittingly got himself mixed up in part of the More Looms disputes and workers from Earby were picketing Sough Bridge Mill. Jim says that they all scattered, some running over the railway line and escaping across the fields. He said that the police weren’t local, many of them came from Doncaster and they were hard men obviously picked for their size.
In 1930 he left school at 14 years old and even though he had qualified for grammar school, he decided not to go but to work in the bakehouse with his father until he could find a job in the mill. Remember that these were bad times for labour and unless you had a very good connection, your chances of a job were virtually nil.
Because they started early in the bakehouse, he was free in the afternoons and so divided his time between working with his mates and going up to Earby Cricket Ground two days a week to practice. At that time Earby was cricketing mad and Jim had hopes of getting on the team but they didn’t think he was big enough so he tried at Thornton in Craven and got in. He hadn’t been there very long before Earby realised what they were missing out on and so in 1931 Jim was in the Earby team and seventh heaven!
Good though this was Jim found that there was bit of friction in the club. When the long summer holidays came round the lads from Ermysted’s Grammar School at Skipton became available and were given precedence in the team over the local lads, a sort of ‘gentlemen and players’ situation. This wasn’t Jim’s idea of fair play but before he could get really wound up about it, Colne Cricket Club approached him in November 1931 and offered him a team place in the 1932 season, he was 16 years old when he started playing for them.
So, in 1932, it was quite obvious to everyone that there was a budding talent here and everyone expected him to go a long way. Next time I’ll tell you about the invitation from Lancashire County Cricket Club at Old Trafford and what transpired. Speaking as a historian, what I’d like to remind you of is that we are looking at a young lad, in the middle of a depression, being offered a way out because of his natural talent. If this came off he was assured of a glittering future and who knows how far he could go. A great contrast to life in the mill with all the uncertainty that was going to entail.

(29 November 2002)