Arthur Moore (b.1905)

I was born in 1905 up Hunter’s Row. There were four of us up Hunter’s Row but eventually there was eight of us. It was only a small place, kitchen and living room and two bedrooms.

The back bedroom where I slept, I’ve got a vision of lying in bed one night and I turned my head – I could see the wheel of the bells going round through the slit of the window of the church – and it’s never left me that hasn’t.

Church Walk cottages, between castle Street and Argents Mead

The cottages ran up by that wall of the church. I asked my brother once how many cottages there were. He said there was ten cottages. They were small, run right up. It were cobbled paths up to them and outside there was the water taps. No taps inside, no toilet, out the back you’d just got a kind of a sink and bowl. You had to go outside for your water.

I went to school when I was four to the church school. That was right near the house. I also went to church school on a Sunday afternoon. It were the Rev Horrell at the time, he was a big feller, six foot, well built, well thought of.

A typical school in Hinckley: Mrs. Whatamore’s School in 1903

The school is still the same now as when I went only there’s a bit been built on the Church Walks site. The front part on Station Road, where the playground is, is exactly the same as when I went. I reckon there were 40 of us in the class. 

I was in Miss Harris’ class and one day I ran away with my sister down Sketchley Brook. The man who comes to see where you are, he came down and fetched us back to school and Miss Harris, she’d got a bag of sweets and she fetched one out and gave me one and my sister one – she was like that, Miss Harris, she was lovely she was.

Station Road

Then I went into the higher classes in the same building. Mr. Taylor was the headmaster and Mrs. Mills was the teacher, and if you didn’t do anything right you were sent to Mr. Taylor and you knew what you were going to get – hand out, the cane. I know I’ve had the same and I went home and told my mother and she said, ‘Well you must have been doing something else or you wouldn’t have had it.’ You didn’t get no sympathy off your mother.

I can’t remember any serious illness but if I had a cold one of my aunts would put a brown tallow on a brown paper and slap it on my chest. It were cold – it used to be horrible. It cured it!

He (dad) as far as I know, worked for Parson & Sherwin in Station Road and then went to the coal mine. Parson & Sherwin was iron ironmongery, tools and everything like that. Then he got a job at the mines in Nuneaton, that made us leave. As my older brothers left school they came to work at Hinckley. I wanted the carpentry.

I used to go two days a week to the woodwork school but when I left school my father couldn’t afford to put me at it, five shilling (25p) a week as an apprentice for five years, so I had to go and get a job then. I drew my first weeks wages before I was 13.

I came to Hinckley to work at Johnson’s boot and shoe factory – I went in the clicking. I thought to myself, I’ve got to give up the carpentry so I might as well go into this trade, so I learnt the clicking right through, right through cutting swains down for the vamp (the top of the shoe). It were a thin material, woolly one side, material on the other. We had to dip it in this paste and then put it on the vamp. The foreman, he used to sort them out you see, it’d be the flimsiest vamp what I should have to put the swains down on.

I went from that onto fitting cutting – that was the lining of the shoe. I worked hard on that and when I’d been on it for about two year and the foreman brought me some leather skin and I had to cut the pattern. They shifted me from where I was next to an experienced man, you see, so I’d get the idea from him. He’d watch me, how I worked the skin up and the art of cutting that skin up was making less waste. I took the vamps up the backbone of the skin and worked the quarters – that’s the leg – up by the side of the vamp, or if you were making boot style you’d work that on the outside as well, so you got the worst part of the leather on the back you see, so the back strap covered a lot of it when it were stitched up. And that were the art of clicking – cutting the skin up so you made less waste – what they call, you know, good costing. 

They made ladies high class shoes there, such as pythons, snakeskins, lizards – they were little skins lizard was – they were awful to cut they were. I should imagine they came from Africa. Some of these python skins were nine or ten feet long. You had to put your pattern so the scale of the python run to the back. You had to follow that with the quarter as well – bringing it to the back. Anaconda was a big one, it was a yellowish colour with big black rings on it, all over, you see.

I went on a lot of short time and dole. Every time you seen a notice at another boot and shoe factory wanting a clicker I should go. I went to several firms, one at Barwell, Gearey’s – that’s closed down now – I finished back at Johnson’s. I’d been away about five years, you had to keep dodging about, whichever firm had go the orders.

They started dropping on short time so I started going round. A friend of mine says why don’t you try selling stockings, he says I can get you some five and six a dozen. So I started going round with stockings, Desford, Barlestone and all round there. Then one day my cousin said, ‘What about coming in and learning heads?’ – hosiery machines that is – so I said, ‘Oh I’d love that.’ He came down to my house and he says, ‘If you want to come and learn, one of the makers will learn you heads.’ So I said, ‘Lovely.’

When I were first married I lived with the wife’s grandparents, well, her grandma. I lived with them for quite a while until her grandma died, and the of course her mother tried to do a little bit of bossing about then you see so I says to the wife, ‘Well, I’m getting out, I’m going to try and get a place of our own.’ So I saw a house to let on Mill Hill and I went there. It was, I think, five shillings a week to rent. Then we went from there – ‘cos we always wanted a little bit better house – down to where I live now, that was in 1937, at ten and six a week, that were a new house, three bedrooms semi-detached. It was only another five shillings extra you see and the wife was in work and I was in work at the time…well, dodging about, one thing and another.

Simmons, he were selling them for £850 for a start and then he got within two houses of where I lived and he stopped selling them. Eighteen months went by and…he says he’d put £250 on ’em – £1,100. I think there was a boon in building then, and of course the hosiery, there was plenty of work, everybody on full time, Atkins was going on, they were coming from out of town you see and living in these houses.

Regents Street

Ron Milton (b.1907)

Margery Milton (b.1912)

In 1912 I should be five, when we moved to Priesthills. I think the house was built and my dad bought it new, no-one else had lived in it…I think it was built by Greaves, local builder. It was a real family house, front room and a living room, a biggish kitchen, which was called the maid’s kitchen originally and a scullery off. There was a long passage from the back of the house right through to the front door with a separate staircase up and one thing we had which a lot of people as that time did not have was a bathroom – we were very lucky.

There was a big bedroom at the back over the kitchen and the two other bedrooms and a box-room with a long landing. It was a biggish house and it still wasn’t big enough for a family of eight. We had to sleep top to toe, the four lads did. I know I had to get up, when I was about seven or eight to light the copper fire and get the water boiling for the washing. Washday was always on a Monday and it was an all day job. You had a mangle that you had to turn. The family was ten including Mum and Dad.

Things were washed, they were rinsed, blued, starched, then they were mangled and they were hung out ‘cos there was no other way of drying them.

You had a knob of blue that you put in the water to get the whites whiter – it was in a sort of little bag that you had to squeeze into the water until it was sufficiently blue. All that’s incorporated in your soap powders today – so they say. There was a big line in the scullery from one end to the other. You’d lower it down, put the clothes on and then pull it up again.

Quite frankly I haven’t got a lot of memories of my father, I saw very little of him – he went in a room by himself for a lot of the time. Those days children were seen and not heard. Outside, no doubt about that. In Priesthills Road there were waste spaces where they built on eventually and we used to have that to play on. They left you on your own, you could be in those days…you had to be in by nine o’clock at night.

These letter boxes, you’d tie a bit of string to the handle, walk some way down the road, someone would come to the door and there’d be no-one about of course. Just larks, nothing really serious. Where we lived, at the bottom of the garden there was a fence and over that was the fields so when there was hay-making we used to go and play in the fields among the hay. And a bit further on the station…just over the bridge was another field and at the bottom of the fields was Sketchley Brook. Oh yes we used to – summer – take a bottle of water or a bottle of pop and something to eat and go and spend most of the day down there.

Derek Clarke (b.1924)

It was a poor area, we used to live on the Derby Road and you’d got the Victoria Street, Mill View, Charles Street, and there was a little passage then into John Street. And then the hosiery factory at the side of my home, that was pulled down and made into the fire station. Then at the back of the church they dug a reservoir so that we’d got two reservoirs, one up Mill View and the other one was up Leicester Road where it is now.

Derby Road, Hinckley

He (Dad) was a baker, on the Co-op. It used to be very nice…the bread was made at Druid Street and the Co-op was in Bond Street. There was the grocery shop on Bond Street and you’d come into the back of that and there was the bakehouse for the Hinckley Co-ops. There was a bakehouse for the cakes and confectionary, that was in Castle Street.

It was all more or less within a mile, from Leicester Road down to Butt Lane, down to the centre of Hinckley and down to the railway station. You knew everything – you knew it all. Hinckley itself was little tiny houses in a clump. It was all little…squares, a little square there…and there…if you took from Leicester Road right the way through down to Coventry Road…the railway comes straight through the middle.

Now from the railway you’d got the Sketchley Dye works, but from there up to the top of the hill there was about two big houses. You come further along up into Burbage you’d got a few medium big houses, then you got into Burbage and that was only more or less Burbage Road, Hinckley Road, and you’re coming back into fields again, just farms, that was all it was. You could spit that way, spit the other and you’d near enough done the lot!

Then they started and they put all the Brookside area of the town. That now, Burbage, is bigger than what Hinckley is. Brookside, Westfield Road, all them for our pleasure time. We’d start at Butt Lane and you’d go through the common into Barwell, Rogues Lane, down into Ashby Road, down into the Stoke Road – once again that was all fields and you came back into the main road into the town. You’d done it in the morning. You’d walk round all those fields you wouldn’t see a soul, all you’d see was cows, sheep and goats.

Childrens Summer Festival at Barwell

The whole flower estate – they are all called different flowers – that’s all top side of Burbage – that was one big rose garden. They’d got every colour, every size, and there was another at the top of Coventry Road, Burbage. They were nurseries, believe me they were beautiful. If you went from the station along the road and came to the back end of what we used to call rose gardens, it was absolutely one perfume…absolutely gorgeous, you could smell it from the fields.

Near The Anchor Inn, Burbage

My dad had got an allotment up Leicester Road. Up there there was no houses just a few big ones in the Butt Lane where the toffs live. Anyway, we’d got trees – apples, pear and there were four plums – of course me and my four brothers, we had to dig it with my dad. Soon as it come fruit time we’d pick it and you’d take it round to the church goers. ‘How much are the plums?’ ‘Four pence a pound.’ And you’d have Victorias like that, beautiful things, gorgeous plums. Then we’d got the pear tree…it was as high as this building, massive, and my dad had to go Jeffcotes the builders to borrow their big ladders…and they’d say come on you get up that tree, get up that ladder and of course I was the littlest and I had to get to the bloody top there and they used to put a belt around me and I used to lean back. Onto a basket, two strings…lower them down, my brothers would lay them out into – we used to have wicker clothes baskets them days. You didn’t go and buy this that and the other – you bartered.

My dad worked in the bake-house but my mother wouldn’t have bread from there. Mr.Oxley in Derby Road he was a baker, he’d got a little, well it was a big round at the finish. We always went there, it was red hot that bread, red hot, and they always used to put a cross. They were 2lb loaves and you could guarantee my mother she’d walk straight into the kitchen, pull the top point off, cut it in half, slap of butter, ‘There you are my lad, that’s your breakfast.’ It’d go round the family. Every morning I’d got to go from Mill View down to Victoria Street, get the bread and come back, and I used to love it because I could put me hand round here and it were red hot.

St Peters RC Church, Priory Walks

Willy Fireman, he lived up Leicester Road, and I had a little job that I had to run off when I lived in Leicester Road. I used to go through the Priory Walks into the Queens Park. Now the fire station was in the Queens Park where the Technical College is on the top of Spa Lane there…well at the time I’m talking about, when I was a little kid, they used to keep the horses in the field in the back of John Street and as soon as they’d got a fire anywhere this old boy used to jump on his bike, run to John Street, bring the bloody horses round to London Road, pick the fireman up, then go around to the fire. Well anyway then they progressed to a Meriweather…the old boy he said, ‘I’ve got gout, I can’t walk, tell the fireman there’s a blaze at such and such a place.’ I had to run all the way down Priory Walks into the Queens Park – there was a crew sitting there like, you know, but there was no bloody phones – and I got there, ‘You’ve got a fire at such and such a place, you’ve got to pick Mr Peacock up down Leicester Road ‘cos he’s got gout.’ Of course there’s running around, he gets into this fire brigade, he comes round London Road, into Leicester Road.

Whether or not he were talking and not looking where they were going but the bloke who were driving the fire brigade he missed it and he went straight into a house . The front room was about three foot lower…you had to go down three steps…of course the bloody firemen went straight the way down. They had to fetch the fire brigade from Leicester and when they came back the place was flat, burnt out completely. The fire brigade was still in that bloody front room.

Queens Park and bandstand

I went down to the dole, met another friend, this time round he says, ‘I’ve just been down the post office for an appointment, they’re waiting for somebody down there if you want it.’ So I went straight down and…from there I went right the way through until I was 60. For a start off I was sorting and delivery, then I went into the army, then I got blowed up, come back into the post office again and Bob’s your uncle. I finished up driving and delivering Sharnford, Wolvey, Aston and Wyken, that was on the rural run.

You see the girls in Nuneaton always came to Hinckley for jobs and all these hosiery factories at Hinckley, the girls used to sort of fight for the jobs there and undercut the girls at Hinckley so that could get better jobs. When you talk about undercutting I mean on John Street there was a biggish factory there and they used to have three busloads of girls from Nuneaton, well of course…there was a lot of animosity between the two towns really. But I mean it was only the fact that the girls wanted the jobs and they were satisfied to move out of the area to get them, you know.

St Peters RC Church – inside the church