BRIGG THEN & NOW: CHAPEL YARD

Many substantial Brigg town centre properties from the late 18th and early 19th centuries survive today - the majority now been in commercial use. However, dozens of cottages that once occupied the courtyards nearby were demolished long ago.
A praiseworthy exception is the row seen above in Chapel Yard - between Old Courts Road and Wrawby Street.
Looking likely to suffer the same fate as the others in the early 1980s, instead they were tastefully restored to provide town housing.
Brigg Urban District Council successively bought up old cottages in what were known as 'the backs' between the 1930s and the 1970s and cleared the sites - creating space for the extensive car park.
Many residents were re-homed on new estates like Newlands and Springbank, built by the UDC.
Today's Chapel Yard domestic properties have 'all mod cons' but original cottages throughout the town centre were basic.
To begin with, many housing families were without water, and supplies had to be drawn by bucket from communal pumps.
Piped water was made available to many cottages in the latter half of the 19th century, with one tap provided just inside the front door for those lucky enough to be included.
Toilets were either located outside in the rear yard of the cottage or people had to share use of a row of privies on land at the end of their courtyard. Some of these were near the Town Drain - the route now followed by the A18 along Barnard Avenue. That meant quite a walk for cottage dwellers of all ages.
Those households fortunate enough to have toilets in the rear yard had a grim ritual to perform - carrying 'the contents' in its container through the cottage to the frontage for collection by the hardy 'night soil' crew and their horse-drawn cart.
There are still be people today who can rememember the Dilly Men touring the town centre. We think this practice continued into the 1950s and possibly even the early 1960s on a very limited basis.
Can anyone say when the last collection was made in Brigg?
A few years ago Cliff Turner - a member of the well-known Brigg family of butchers - shared boyhood memories of growing up in our town during the 1930s and early 1940s.
In Cliff Makes us Privy to the Days of the Dilly Cart, he recalled: "In the small back yard there was the lavatory and wash house. The lavatory consisted of a seat with a hole; under the hole was a large bucket which was emptied by Council employees in the early hours of Saturday mornings into a large horse-drawn tank known as the dilly cart."
Cliff and other Brigg youngsters used to sing:   
The Corporation dilly cart was full up to the brim
The Corporation driver fell in and couldn't swim
"Perhaps it is just as well that I have forgotten the rest of the ditty," he added.
In the period when dozens of Brigg town centre properties were served by the Dilly Men, collections started late at night and, as Cliff outlined, continued through to the following morning. This was known locally as Long Friday. On hot summer evenings it must have proved an ordeal for residents and the collection crew!
An excellent book about the Courtyards of Brigg, edited by Nick Lyons, appeared in the early 1980s. Members of a local history group contributed and the memories of elderly Brigg residents who knew the courts when many people still lived there were included. We still have a well-read copy.
Chapel Yard extended back from Wrawby Street towards what is today Barnard Avenue. Thirty Chapel Yard cottages once housed well over 100 people. But the book noted that, in 1983, "most of the land remains derelict."
Final demolition of the cottages in the northern and central parts of Chapel Yard had taken place in the 1960s, it explained.
PICTURED: The surviving cottages in 1983 before restoration and as they look today.