EARBY, AFTER THE GREAT WAR. (3)
Posted: 04 May 2026, 01:16
EARBY, AFTER THE GREAT WAR. (3)
(16 October 2002)
Last week I was telling you about some of the credit systems that supported people on low incomes. There was another line of credit that was a bit more specialised, itinerant tailors would call and offer to sell you a made-to-measure suit on credit. They measured you up in your home and the next time they came round delivered a well-made suit. You could pay for it outright or by weekly instalments, the common name for these callers was ‘Scotchmen’. Funnily enough most of them round here came from Leeds or Bradford so where the name came from is a bit of a mystery.
There was a pawn shop on Victoria Road, it was three doors up from what used to be Barclay’s Bank. This was run by Isaac Levi, he also sold new furniture and lent money, it later became Simmonds the electricians and when I lived at Sough was Banham’s cycle shop. I asked Jim if he knew anyone who used the pawn shop and he said one of their neighbours did, she was a widow and Jim said they knew she was poor because she had newspapers instead of curtains in her windows. This might be a good place to point out a major difference in respect of clothes between the world we are looking at and the position nowadays. The root of the change is that there was virtually no advertising in Jim’s younger days. The age of the ‘designer label’ hadn’t arrived, clothes were bought with an eye to durability and not ‘fashion’. Fashion is the con trick that the modern industry, bolstered by blanket advertising, has foisted on people today to persuade them to ditch perfectly good clothes and buy new ones, there simply wasn’t the money about in those days to support this. I can hear murmurs of envy from any mother who has been subjected to pester power by their children who are obsessed by street or playground cred! I asked Jim what he wore for school. Short grey flannel trousers, a shirt and a jersey and a cap with a badge on were standard wear. Quite unusually his mother knitted his vests but he told me that the thing he really hated was his mother making him wear a scarf in winter fastened at the back of his neck by a safety pin! His footwear during the week was clogs with irons on. These were made by the clogger at the Co-op, Mr Lord who carved the soles from blocks of willow wood. Jim had a blue pin-stripe suit for Sunday best, with this he wore shoes from the cobbler at Kelbrook, Newton Pickles. Other callers at the door were Gypsies selling clothes pegs and scraps of lace, Asian gentlemen with turbans selling dusters and other household textiles and pedlars selling all sorts of small items from pins and needles to little machines for darning socks. The butcher’s or grocer’s boy with his delivery cycle was a common sight and the newspaper boy. Because the Pollards lived opposite a farm they went for their own milk but most houses were served by the milkman. In those days the milk wasn’t bottled, the milkchap drove round in a two-wheeled trap with a couple of large kits full of milk, every house left a jug on the doorstep and the milk was ladled out with measures called lading tins. These were inspected regularly by the local Weights and Measures Department of the council and tested for accuracy. If you ever see an old one you will see a blob of solder on the outside stamped with a crest, a bit like a hallmark on a silver spoon. There were two numbers as well and this was the date of the test. A big difference we should remember here is that milk went sour very quickly, it was not as clean as modern milk and there were no refrigerators. In winter one delivery a day was sufficient but in summer milk was delivered night and morning.
Arthur Pollard liked a drink in the evening after his tea so he’d pop across the road into the Red Lion and have a couple of pints. Jim says that he never saw him drunk and he never went to the pub on a Sunday. This doesn’t seem to have been out of any religious scruples, Arthur didn’t go to church. Mrs Pollard never went to the pub, her relaxation seems to have been the Spiritualist Church. Jim said that when she came back she would start to talk about it but his father didn’t want to hear any of it.
What strikes me about our story so far is that it was possible to lead a very self-contained life on Red Lion Street. Arthur had his family, his work and his entertainment all within a 50 yard circle. Mrs Pollard had no leisure activities beyond the odd woman’s magazine and the church on Sunday. How strange this would seem to young people nowadays, no electricity, no TV or computers, gas lighting and coal fires, one change of clothes a week and one bath, I suppose it must sound like prison. Balanced against this were things like the fact that even though standards of hygiene were lower the Pollards were eating a good basic diet and had no processed food.
Possibly the thing that would strike us most forcibly would be the absence of noise, there was no motor traffic, no loud music, no aircraft flying overhead. The loudest noise in the town would be the occasional train passing through and the low growl of the weaving sheds during working hours. Some of the mills had steam whistles to alert the workers when it was time for work and at weekend there would be the sound of boilers being blown down to clean them but apart from that, in the evenings, all you would hear was birdsong. I think we’ve lost something there.
(16 October 2002)
(16 October 2002)
Last week I was telling you about some of the credit systems that supported people on low incomes. There was another line of credit that was a bit more specialised, itinerant tailors would call and offer to sell you a made-to-measure suit on credit. They measured you up in your home and the next time they came round delivered a well-made suit. You could pay for it outright or by weekly instalments, the common name for these callers was ‘Scotchmen’. Funnily enough most of them round here came from Leeds or Bradford so where the name came from is a bit of a mystery.
There was a pawn shop on Victoria Road, it was three doors up from what used to be Barclay’s Bank. This was run by Isaac Levi, he also sold new furniture and lent money, it later became Simmonds the electricians and when I lived at Sough was Banham’s cycle shop. I asked Jim if he knew anyone who used the pawn shop and he said one of their neighbours did, she was a widow and Jim said they knew she was poor because she had newspapers instead of curtains in her windows. This might be a good place to point out a major difference in respect of clothes between the world we are looking at and the position nowadays. The root of the change is that there was virtually no advertising in Jim’s younger days. The age of the ‘designer label’ hadn’t arrived, clothes were bought with an eye to durability and not ‘fashion’. Fashion is the con trick that the modern industry, bolstered by blanket advertising, has foisted on people today to persuade them to ditch perfectly good clothes and buy new ones, there simply wasn’t the money about in those days to support this. I can hear murmurs of envy from any mother who has been subjected to pester power by their children who are obsessed by street or playground cred! I asked Jim what he wore for school. Short grey flannel trousers, a shirt and a jersey and a cap with a badge on were standard wear. Quite unusually his mother knitted his vests but he told me that the thing he really hated was his mother making him wear a scarf in winter fastened at the back of his neck by a safety pin! His footwear during the week was clogs with irons on. These were made by the clogger at the Co-op, Mr Lord who carved the soles from blocks of willow wood. Jim had a blue pin-stripe suit for Sunday best, with this he wore shoes from the cobbler at Kelbrook, Newton Pickles. Other callers at the door were Gypsies selling clothes pegs and scraps of lace, Asian gentlemen with turbans selling dusters and other household textiles and pedlars selling all sorts of small items from pins and needles to little machines for darning socks. The butcher’s or grocer’s boy with his delivery cycle was a common sight and the newspaper boy. Because the Pollards lived opposite a farm they went for their own milk but most houses were served by the milkman. In those days the milk wasn’t bottled, the milkchap drove round in a two-wheeled trap with a couple of large kits full of milk, every house left a jug on the doorstep and the milk was ladled out with measures called lading tins. These were inspected regularly by the local Weights and Measures Department of the council and tested for accuracy. If you ever see an old one you will see a blob of solder on the outside stamped with a crest, a bit like a hallmark on a silver spoon. There were two numbers as well and this was the date of the test. A big difference we should remember here is that milk went sour very quickly, it was not as clean as modern milk and there were no refrigerators. In winter one delivery a day was sufficient but in summer milk was delivered night and morning.
Arthur Pollard liked a drink in the evening after his tea so he’d pop across the road into the Red Lion and have a couple of pints. Jim says that he never saw him drunk and he never went to the pub on a Sunday. This doesn’t seem to have been out of any religious scruples, Arthur didn’t go to church. Mrs Pollard never went to the pub, her relaxation seems to have been the Spiritualist Church. Jim said that when she came back she would start to talk about it but his father didn’t want to hear any of it.
What strikes me about our story so far is that it was possible to lead a very self-contained life on Red Lion Street. Arthur had his family, his work and his entertainment all within a 50 yard circle. Mrs Pollard had no leisure activities beyond the odd woman’s magazine and the church on Sunday. How strange this would seem to young people nowadays, no electricity, no TV or computers, gas lighting and coal fires, one change of clothes a week and one bath, I suppose it must sound like prison. Balanced against this were things like the fact that even though standards of hygiene were lower the Pollards were eating a good basic diet and had no processed food.
Possibly the thing that would strike us most forcibly would be the absence of noise, there was no motor traffic, no loud music, no aircraft flying overhead. The loudest noise in the town would be the occasional train passing through and the low growl of the weaving sheds during working hours. Some of the mills had steam whistles to alert the workers when it was time for work and at weekend there would be the sound of boilers being blown down to clean them but apart from that, in the evenings, all you would hear was birdsong. I think we’ve lost something there.
(16 October 2002)