FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Wendyf]

I could have, but it's too cold and wet and windy to be outside taking pictures!

[LizG]

While we were cleaning out boxes and cupboards at Mum and Dad's we found a whole lot of photos that would have been taken from 1961 to 1967. The thing the people all had in common was that they worked at Yorkshire Plush.

The ones with names underneath are;

Clarrie Dalby, Jud Shepherd, Ken Nutter, Len Walling, Kurt Holz, Bill White, Margaret Mackowski, Joseph Mackowski, Marjory Greenwood, Anne ???, Lotti Boven, Fred Boven and Hester Walling. There's also a couple that are un-named.

Are any of these people or their relatives still around in Barnoldswick, and is it likely that anyone would want copies?

[Stanley]

This hayrake used to be in a field at the bottom of Folly Lane. I don't know if it's still there. What strikes me is how incredibly old-fashioned it looks and yet I have worked with them and horse-drawn at that! This one has been converted for use with a tractor.

[PanBiker]

It's still there Stanley, a few more brambles but you can still see it from the lane, walk past it yesterday. There is another abandoned one on the moor opposite the track end from Prospect on Lister Well Road.



I took this picture on my phone on a fairly dull day.

[Stanley]

And I'll bet that if you gave it a bit of TLC and polished the tines up it would still do the job!



Here's a pic of garden games at Hey farm in 1976. The object of interest is the donkey rake or Rover parked in the flower bed on the bottom left. Note that the tines are turned down! These rovers were the hand equivalent of the hay rake above and were used for the final gleaning of a hay field in the days when times were hard. Usually used by the women or children, they were dragged over the ground covering the whole field and collected a surprising amount of good dry hay. It was a Forgotten Corner in 1976. I suspect that if anyone made a child use one today they'd be prosecuted for cruelty. How times have changed.....

[Bruff]

That’s my dad in the photo of the kids in North Street in 1952 on the previous page.

He’s the lad in the white shirt at the back by the wall. His arms look folded. He would be 13 and a pupil at the Grammar School in Skipton.

He’s dead now, and seeing this has made me quite emotional and brought back memories. But then that’s fine as that’s in part what sites like this, and threads like this, are for.

Richard Broughton

[PanBiker]

That's nice Bruff, it's a bit like me stumbling across a photo of my dad at a camp kitchen in Iceland in 1940. This is featured on the blog site of a bloke form South Africa who's dad is also featured on the photo. We have exchanged information on our dad's service experiences and I learned that Skipton Camp that the lads built and named after their local district was situated right outside the hotel where we stayed when we visited Reykjavik a few years back. T'internet tends to shrink the world sometimes.

Duke of Wellingtons 1/6th in Iceland 1940-42

[Stanley]

Glad it tweaked you Bruff. Joyce Lawson gave me the pic. I've always liked it, playing out in days gone by..... Seems to have died out now, we all had gangs and were off together whenever we were let loose. Many a time our mothers gave us a butty wrapped in margarine paper and didn't expect us back all day. Nobody ever rang the police... That's a forgotten corner in itself. (When I think of some of the things we got up to.....!)

[Bruff]

When he got wed he only moved across the road and so when I was growing up, we were ‘playing out’ in the same spot. The corner of the bottom house on James Street (across the road more or less from that photo) was our ‘relievo’ point for hide and seek.

The parents of some of the other children in that photo were still there, in the same houses: the Bracewells and another lot of Broughtons. Plus my grandma hadn’t moved.

Richard Broughton

[Tizer]

That's great, Bruff finding his dad in a photo; reading his post even gave me an emotional moment. In the 1920s my dad lived in a street on the edge of Blackburn and played in a field across the road. Where he made dens with his pals there were six council houses built in the 1930s. I was born and brought up in one of those houses, so we were more or less living on top of his old den. Then I played on the next bit of land beyond the council houses and now my dens are under a school. Like Stanley, we kids disappeared for ages, only returning for meals or when it was getting late. And we didn't have mobile phones. We looked after ourselves and if we had a serious problem we just asked an adult to help (there always people on the streets and out in the fields in those days). We weren't scared of adults and the most likely danger from them was a slap for being cheeky or naughty.

[Stanley]

Richard, I think it was Sidney Bracewell who Joyce always referred to as 'Little Friend'. In his latter years he spent most of his time in his chair watching out of the window and I always waved to him as I went past. I have an idea it was outside his house where the pic was done. Indeed, he might have taken it.



This was one of our favourite haunts, Heaton Mersey Loco Shed. We wandered round all over it and nobody ever stopped us... Those were the days. Is it any wonder we all grew up wanting to be engineers?

[Bruff]

Mr and Mrs Bracewell were my dad’s next door neighbours. I say ‘Mr and Mrs Bracewell’ as that is how I always referred to them and still do when reminiscing with my mother. Every Christmas Day morning they would call into our house on the way to their spending Christmas Day with one of their daughters. They even called in when we moved away from the North Street area. It was if you like a ‘tradition’. They would have a sherry. I used to go and collect brandlings from Mr Bracewell's allotment off Crow Foot Row for fishing. I recall he also had a magnificent cigarette card collection, that fascinated me.

Their daugher Moira, who died recently and was remembered on here, was a very good friend of my dad’s when they were all growing up as children and into teenage years (as all the sisters were).

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

It all seems like a lost world doesn't it Richard. We all had our interlocking social orbits and that's why old pics like that have such fascination for me. I'm not wearing rose coloured glasses when I say I remember them as good days and my daughters still remember the same circumstances. I'll bet you know who this is....

[Tripps]

That bacon looks good. Reminds me of a similar corner shop we used when I was young. I recall you always asked for rhodey, or rhoded bacon. I was never sure what it meant.
A quick google shows broadly, that neither really does anyone else.

[Tizer]

That photo brings back other types of memory for me, seeing those food brands on the shelves. Two of them immediately catch my eye because I have worked for the companies that made them. Trex was made by J. Bibby & Sons edible oil refiners in Liverpool and Atora suet was made by Rank Hovis McDougall. One thing I particularly recall about Atora was when one of the non-technical managers wanted us to develop a fat-free version of the product. It took some time to help him to grasp the fact that if you took away the fat it wouldn't be suet and wouldn't do the job it was intended for! But they did eventually get a lower-fat veggie version made with vegetable oil instead of the animal fat.

[Stanley]

I'll bet Richard remembers Mrs Brown.....
Here's another pic of a shop interior from when I was open all hours at Sough. Click to enlarge, some more brand names for you!



My sister Dorothy in the shop in 1955.

[Stanley]

Every picture contains information.... It's 1957 outside Sough Bridge Mill. The Rover car belonged to a local councillor, I think his name was Greenwood. It was one of the last to be fitted with a freewheel in the transmission, driving one of these when you were used to the engine providing braking when you lifted your foot off the accelerator was quite unsettling! At this time the mill was fully occupied, Bristol Tractors had the main part. Kelbrook Metal Products had this end of the mill and at the back the Forecast Foundry was in full swing. The box on the wall with the apex roof was the St John's Ambulance laying out board. These were common at one time, if someone died at home the first thing to do before rigor mortis set in after three or four hours was to get them laid flat on something like this board. I've seen doors taken off and used for this purpose. You couldn't get hold of an undertaker as fast then as you can now.

[PanBiker]

There is a St John's laying out board clearly visible on the photo of all the folk gathering at the bottom of Jepp Hill for a Whit walk or similar in the 30's. It was on the wall next to the Cross Keys.

[Wendyf]

We have spotted one in an old Earby photo, but I can't remember where it was...it might have been on the side of the Conservative Club. I'll have a search for it.

[Bruff]

Yes I well remember Mrs Brown. It was a well-worn path up to Mrs Brown’s for a pint of milk….

This is the thing: it was Mrs Brown. As it was Mr and Mrs Bracewell. I would never have referred to these people by their first names. That’s probably why on here I invariably refer to Mr Cameron or Mr Corbyn. It amuses me watching ‘Endeavour’on TV when Morse addresses his bosses daughter as ‘Miss Thursday’. It’s exactly the formality I had I guess and still do to an extent outside of family and very close friends.

Richard Broughton

[Stanley]

All my kids, who used to visit the shop regularly, called her Mrs Brown. That was about 50 years ago Richard, you may well have run into them.....



The shop had closed down in 1978 when I did this pic.



The Jepp Hill pic Ian referred to.

[Wendyf]

Spot the laying out board in Earby...I think that's the Con Club.

[Stanley]

Nice one Wendy.... When I was doing the interviews for the LTP I was struck by the fact that a lot of the older end could remember the coffin in the front room with a bed sheet draped under it to hide the bucket containing disinfectant underneath. The bodies were not embalmed then and I seem to remember Harold Duxbury telling me he was the first person in Barlick to qualify as an embalmer and bring the technology to the town. When they first opened their Chapel of Rest at the Model Works it was unused for a long time because people still wanted to keep the body with them until the interment. Stories of mourners having to dismount from Singletons horse-drawn carriages at the bottom of the steep rise up and over the original bridge at Coates on their way to Gill Church because the horse wasn't equal to the load. Then the gradual introduction of cremation.... Harold is well worth searching if you are interested in how we used to deal with death.

[Stanley]

Another forgotten corner that the LTP flagged up was that in the early part of the 20th century the old custom of having all burials on a Saturday was still the rule. It was the only weekday that they could get time off. Harold said that this caused problems at times particularly at the end of WW1 when the Spanish Flu was killing so many people. He said that there was often a queue at Gill on Saturday morning as one internment followed another. Another thing he told me was that the usual vehicle used as a hearse to carry the coffin wasn't the fancy glass sided vehicle one often sees even today. It was a simple long black box on four wheels often followed by families and friends on foot because they couldn't afford Carriage hire. The main source of carriage hire was Towers Singleton who had premises in Commercial Street above the old Shambles.

[Stanley]

Singleton was in this range of buildings, I think the arched doorway is a clue. When Towers Singleton left the premises it was taken over by Paul Brydon who was a rag and bone chap, a 'marine store' as they called them then. He later moved onto the land reclaimed from the old lodge at Ouzledale.