GROWING UP IN BRIGG PART 5: TIN BATHS IN FRONT OF THE FIRE

Continuing the life story of Cliff Turner, now aged 91 and living in New Zealand, who grew up in Brigg during the 1920s and 1930s. This extract will certainly bring back some memories for a good many Brigg Blog readers, we are sure...

The wash house had a copper - a large iron cauldron set in a brick surround and having a fire grate under the cauldron. So on wash days (usually Mondays) the copper fire had to be lit and if it did not go at the first attempt my mother would get very frustrated.
Friday was bath night; this involved dragging a galvanised bath indoors from its hook on a wall in the back yard and filling it from large pans of water heated on the fire or the gas ring. After we children had gone to bed my parents would have their weekly bath. We had no sink in the house; every drop of water used indoors had to be carried into the back yard and poured down a drain.
My mother never had a gas cooker; all cooking was done in the coal or wood fired oven or boiled or steamed on the gas ring. Downstairs lighting was by gas; upstairs, although there were gas lighting fittings, candles were almost invariably used. Electricity did not come to Brigg until the mid-1930s so I can well remember the streets being dug up for the cables to be laid by Yorkshire Power, a private company. I can recall only one substation; it was in Grammar School Road. Going by knowledge gained much later in life I think the transformer, which converted 11,000 volts to domestic voltage, would only have been of about 300 kVA. Today a transformer of that capacity might be enough for about 80 homes.
The local manager was Alfred Haddock; I learned this many years later when I worked for the Yorkshire Electricity Board in Sheffield, where Mr Haddock was the Area Manager. I think I only spoke to him once and that was at one of our annual engineers' dinners. He asked me where I came from and he then told me he had been manager in Brigg when the town first had electricity. I think he was astonished when I said that he must have been the optimist who put up a TV aerial at his house in Grammar School Road when television started in England in 1936.
He admitted that he had indeed been the optimist. In 1936 there was only one TV transmitter in use; at Alexandra Palace in north London. There was no hope of the signal reaching Brigg. The embryo TV service was closed down at the outbreak of war. I cannot remember when it restarted but by the time of the Queen's coronation in 1953 it was receivable in the Brigg area from a new transmitter at Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands.
I made my appearance on 21 March 1925. I was told that it was a Saturday and that it was snowing at the time. 

My brother Charles Kenneth followed on 29 September 1926 but I cannot remember when I first became aware of his existence.
I have few memories of my pre-school days but know that sometimes when my mother visited her parents at Spalding I would be left there for a while. One definite recollection is of bursting into tears on one occasion when my mother and father left to catch the train back to Brigg. I also remember going pea picking with one of Mum’s brothers. The town crier used to go round town telling the public where pea pickers were needed and some people, although they had daytime employment, would go in the long evenings to earn an extra shilling or two. A large bag had to be filled for a shilling. On one occasion I ate so many peas that I was sick before we went home to Granny.
At that time I am almost certain that my Auntie Nancy and uncles Harry, Joe and Dick were still at home so it must have been a full house.
Some other pre-school memories are of our neighbours Aggie and Alf Draper and Clara and Harry Bedford. Aggie and Alf had only one son, Len, a few years older than me, and Clara and Harry were childless. Perhaps that is why I was a bit of a pet at both houses and spent a lot of time with these neighbours before I went to school.
It was at Aggie's house that I was first exposed to "art"; she had on her living room wall reproductions of The Gleaners and The Angelus by the French painter Jean Francois Millet. Alf worked at the Yarborough Oil Mills where cow cake for winter feeding of cattle was made, with linseed oil as its main ingredient, and consequently their house was pervaded by the odour of linseed oil. He was also the first person I ever saw rolling his own cigarettes.
Probably because she had no children Clara Bedford lavished attention on her terrier Tiny and Kitty her cat. They slept together in the same basket and at Christmas Clara used to give them each a chocolate fish.
I think I started school on my fifth birthday, at Brigg's only infants school in Grammar School Road. My mother had taken me there earlier to enrol, but on the big day I was taken by a slightly older boy, Peter Lyon, who lived near to us. My mother met me at midday and on the way home bought me a present at Albert Nettleton's shop. I forget the nature of the present.
School was a mile away but I walked that distance alone four times a day, as I went home for the midday meal. This meant crossing the A18, a major road connecting South Yorkshire with the ports of Grimsby and Immingham at the mouth of the River Humber.
That may sound horrifying to today's parents but in the early 1930's there was little traffic. Close to the school a farmer called Mundey milked a herd of cows twice daily. The cows were pastured during the summer months about a mile away in a field on Westrum Lane and so the cows walked about four miles a day, crossing the A18 road four times and leaving abundant evidence of their passage splattered on the road.
School was a large wooden hut divided into three classrooms. My first teacher was Miss Kennington who lived until I was well into my sixties. Not many memories remain of my early schooldays; one I retain is of a girl called Phyllis Drayton persistently calling the teacher "Lady" and being told "Don't call me Lady, call me Miss." I also recall learning songs about Christopher Robin wanting a rabbit and going to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard. I did not know then that Christopher Robin was a real person but in about 1960 I met him in his bookshop in Dartmouth, Devon.
The teacher of the next class was Miss Wilson and I have no memories of the time spent in her class before moving on to the top class taught by Mrs Twidle. During my time in that class Mrs Twidle retired and was replaced by Miss Hodson. Of the four teachers I suspect that only Miss Hodson had been formally trained as a teacher. Many teachers at that time had been pupil-teachers who learned their trade 'on the job' by listening to and helping older teachers who had probably started in the same way. About the only thing I remember of that class was learning about the Eskimos and I found that fascinating.

Keep watching Brigg Blog.... many more memories from Cliff still to come.