Contribution from Joan Salmon.......
"I was born in the Potteries at 118 Abbey
Road, Hanley, Stoke on Trent, on the 10th November 1941; it was wartime
but my father was not yet in the army and off he trudged on a winters
night to fetch the midwife, Nurse Boot, who delivered me at 2 am, and
there being no cot ready to receive me, placed me in a drawer of the
dressing table well padded with blankets. Shortly after, my father was
drafted into the Royal Engineers, serving in France, Holland, Belgium and
Germany, and apart from compassionate leave when I was 18 months old and
almost died from pneumonia, I didn't see him again until I was five years
old.
This sounds an inauspicious start, but in fact my childhood was a very
happy one; during the following war years my mother and I lived with my
grandparents in Bath Street, Hanley; my mother making trips to our own
home to check it was safe and on one of these trips with my granddad
pushing me in the pram, the air raid sirens started to sound, they started
to run and the wheel came off the pram ! Luckily my granddad fixed it, and
they reached safety - Stoke on Trent however was not a prime target for
bombing despite having the Shelton Bar steelworks and managed to largely
escape the damage that other cities suffered, so I never had to use my
Mickey mouse gas mask (though I still have the silver disc engraved with
my name and address which I wore) and the years passed relatively
peacefully.
My
grandparents rented house, 44 Bath Street near the town centre of
Hanley, was a typical two up, two down terraced house, overlooked by a
bottle oven from the small pottery factory in the next street -on days
when ware was being fired you could reach over the garden wall and feel
the heat from the oven walls! The house had no bathroom (the outside
lavatory was at the end of the backyard) and was heated by coal fires
with most of the cooking done in a range at the side of the fire. The
scullery had a brownstone sink and a copper for washing clothes, and the
odd mouse or two, but it was a cosy home and we enjoyed our time there -
when my father returned home in 1946, they went back to the comparative
luxury of Abbey Road with its bathroom and front and back gardens (but
no central heating of course) where my parents lived for the rest of
their lives. I was an only child, my mother thinking that after a five
year gap she didn't want to start raising children again, and she had
gone back to work in the pottery industry when I started school. Due I'm
sure to the war years, there were a lot of families living near us with
only one child.
The above photo shows the area I grew up
in; the City Council in their wisdom changed the names of many streets in
the Potteries in the 1950s and Abbey Road was one of them, 118 Abbey Road
becoming 680 Leek Road which didn't have such a nice ring to it. Leek Road
(A52) runs from Stoke towards Leek and is shown on the photo marked in
dark blue, with Ivy House Road (marked red), running off it. My home is
the 4th house from the left in the row starting opposite the junction, my
best friend June lived next door but one in the next block of four. The
short road curving to the left off Leek Road is Howard Crescent, and the
house on the opposite corner was run as a general store, Mrs Baileys. The
next building and land to the left of the houses was the blacksmiths and
light engineering shop of Salt and Cartlidge, where you could watch the
blacksmiths hammering away at pieces of red hot metal, (Barry Cartlidge
was to become my first husband in 1961), then Snows garage, then a firm
which sold I think tyres, then the bungalow and land belonging to Freddie
Lewis, scrap metal dealer; Mr Lewis kept two fierce Alsatian dogs which
terrified us local kids but after negotiating safely past the dogs we
gained the footpath which led to the fields of Berry Hill and the delights
of the River Trent, which is the waterway snaking its way behind the
houses joined at Ivy House by the Causley Brook which starts on Wetley
Moor.
The Trent was a favourite playground, being in its infant stage
narrow enough to jump over at some points if you had the nerve and could
stand the wrath of your mother if you got a soaking; there was also a
large patch of very marshy ground where we would cruelly send the unwary
and from where they would emerge covered in mud and in some cases minus a
shoe which had got stuck in the marsh. Berry Hill also had many coal waste
tips a little farther afield and if we were feeling particularly
adventurous we sought these out and spent our energy running and sliding
down the dangerously moving steep sides of the tip ! Yet I never remember
anyone being injured from any of these activities. Fishing for tiddlers
and newts and picking wildflowers were safer if tamer pursuits - we would
spend all day in the fields and only go home when hunger
drove us.
Crossing Causley Brook on the photo is the Biddulph Valley Railway
line, (marked in yellow) and the line with carriages on is the Bucknall
Branch line, in those days Bucknall Station was still in operation and we
often set off on holiday from there, my mother once memorably getting
locked in the loo on the station when the train was waiting to depart !
The line marked light blue on the photo is the Caldon Canal, which one
crossed on Ivy House Road by means of a primitive wooden bridge, literally
in those days just wooden planks with no side barriers, and raised for
canal traffic by means of pulling or swinging on two wooden arms - this
was a source of amusement to us kids and a favourite game was running
across the bridge before two strong boys could raise it and deposit you in
the canal ! Needless to say that the bridge was long ago replaced by an
electrically operated one.
Between Leek Road and
the canal, in the middle of the photo on the left, is the engineering
works and foundry of R. Goodwin and Sons, the entrance to which opened
on to a world of clanging metal, roaring fires and flying sparks. To the
left of that can be seen Beech's haulage yard, which stretched to the
Limekiln. Bottom right is part of J. & G. Meakin's Eagle Pottery Works
(now demolished) where ware could be
seen being loaded onto barges on the canal up to the 1950s. On the other
side of the canal is their staff recreation field, and behind that and
fronting onto Leek Road opposite the houses was the shawdruck (waste tip
for spoilt ware). This was another happy hunting ground for local kids;
scrambling up the shawdruck we searched for cups, saucers and anything
else that was not too damaged to use as "tea sets" for dolls parties -
the odd cuts and grazes from broken ware were considered a light price
to pay for the prize of finding a coveted teapot (usually without lid),
and we never considered that there may be rats lurking among the debris
(I never saw one).
Happy days ! If these pastimes palled as we got older there were always
the tennis courts of Hanley Park, Northwood Park or Bucknall Park, all
within walking distance, and the cinemas of Hanley with their Saturday
matinees beckoned. Things changed, were replaced and Health and Safety
became an issue, but I remember that above all my childhood was FUN and we
were never bored."
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