I was born in a little street consisting of ten, two up and two down
terraced houses that ran from Dean St mission square to Shelton Old Road.
They backed to the Fowlea brook which in the 1920s to the 1950s was
foul indeed, the smells to put it mildly were obnoxious at times especially
when Etruria gas works turned the effluent into the brook from their gas
producing plant, it made the water black with an oily surface with streaky
colours as oil does, lots of other stuff went into it in addition from
potbanks as well. All this completely polluted the river Trent as far as
Burton-on-Trent and further.
This was the area of my childhood.
"Fowlea by name and foul by nature"
The
Fowlea brook (2000) as it runs at the bottom of
Leason Street in Stoke. On the left
the brown building is
part of the Spode factory and in the middle the blue building is an
industrial electrical factory on Elenora Street. The Fowlea Brook
runs through a culvert under Elenora Street
Liverpool Road, was a busy road and I can recall that
there were about forty businesses in this road almost all of them privately
owned excepting the Burslem co-op plus their large emporium where one could
get a clothing cheque worth one pound and pay it back at a shilling per
week.
There
were eight pubs, four chip shops, three newsagents eight grocers green or
otherwise, two barbers and various others, I could name them all but better
not.
Even in our own street there was plenty of activity there was an oatcake
baker a small shop who made their own ice-cream, a backyard barber for the
kids a cobbler and a lady who made herb beer, from nettle flowers I think.
The
side streets were fairly free from traffic in those days so they were our
playgrounds and many and varied were the games we played, never wandering
very far from home unless it had been pre-arranged, my father made it a
strict rule that we always told him where we were going and when we
would be back; it was a good rule and saved some worry for him and mother.
In our house meal times
were rather strictly observed being the last born in the family it will be
realised that my parents and elder brothers and sister were of the Victorian
and Edwardian era so we were kept to certain rules.
In the local streets there was most days some activity, like traders and
buskers a fish monger on Tuesdays and Fridays, or an
occasional knife sharpener with his tricycle-come-grinder, crockery man and
many rag and bone men inciting the kids to hurry
home gather any rags or scrap to give in exchange for a balloon or maybe
a goldfish.
The
buskers many of them good musicians and singers were mainly ex service
men from the 1914 war who were disabled or out of work because of world
depression. There was a disused potbank near to us that the
Salvation Army had the workshops adapted as dormitories for the homeless men
and the workhouses were still taking people in. If they
wanted any money from the authorities they had to go to what was called the public assistance office and usually all they got was some
vouchers to take to a food shop to exchange for goods, a very demeaning system.
So, I can count myself as one of the lucky ones to
have had a loving family and four meals a day.
The Poor Rates
Department building still stands (2000) in Hanley
The wording above the windows and doors reads:
"Parish
Offices"; Poor Rates Department"; Relief; Vaccination
My father had been working at Shelton Bar since 1912
apart from the four war years. He was a shunter and later a driver on
locomotives in the thirties. The works were in production 24
hours per day and so that the men could change shifts and have a
week off periodically. One of the men on each section had to work a
double turn every third Sunday from 6am-10pm, on the Sunday that my
father did that my mother used to put
fathers lunch in a basin tie a red spotted kerchief over the top of it to form a handle and this we took to dad.
The
reward for this was a ride on an engine I can smell the oil steam and smoke
now, The kerchief was always the same and most of the other men had the same
as if it was a tradition.
In 1935 my brother
Alan, who was working at the Co-op bakery near the canal
at Burslem, used to bike along the tow path from Stoke. One morning as he
passed a barge horse it kicked towards him Alan thought that it had caught his rear mudguard so turned round to
look but by doing so he bumped into a post used to tie the barges to, he
went over the handlebars and landed on the towpath and fractured his femur
bone which naturally put him in hospital for three or four weeks. The reason
that I relate all that, is because Alan and I were so
close to each other I felt very lonely and to placate me my father allowed me to spend one or two Sundays with him on his
engine, therefore the seeds were sown for me to get the urge to do the same work
when I would be old enough.
next: working
at Shelton Bar
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