Danny Howell writes: These next recollections of mine, are about the heating we had in my family’s home, at 57 The Dene, Warminster, when I was a child in the 1960s:
In the winter there used to be regular frosts. Mother and father would talk about Jack Frost being about again. There was no double-glazing in the windows at our house at The Dene. You’d wake up in the morning and find frost all over the window panes – both outside and on the inside. You couldn’t see out because of the frost crystals. It was a favourite thing of mine to use one of my fingernails to scratch a drawing or write words in the frosty layer. I would draw Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, or write my name. It would be thick enough with frost all over to do that. You don’t get so many frosts in the winters these days; the winters are definitely milder now.
The heating in our house at The Dene during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s was basic. Very basic. There was an open fireplace in the living room and that was about it really. There was no central heating or radiators. There was no electric heating and no gas. The fire was lit, every day in the winter, usually about four o’clock in the afternoon. Father usually lit the fire, or if he was at work, then mother lit it. The fire was made by crumpling up some pages from an old newspaper. My parents bought the Daily Express on Mondays to Saturdays and they had the News Of The World on Sundays. When the newspapers had been read they were not thrown out. They were kept so that the pages could be used to light the fire or for lining the floor of the budgie cage in the kitchen. When it came to lighting the fire the crumpled-up newspaper was put in the bottom of the fireplace. On top of this were put some small pieces of wood and on top of that some larger wood, split logs was placed, and a few cobs of coal were placed in between the logs. The fire was lit with matches. The matches were kept on the top shelf of a cupboard in the kitchen. As a child I was forbidden to go near the matches. Father and mother always had a box or two of Blue Cross matches in the cupboard for lighting the fire. They always bought the Blue Cross ones, because there was a incentive to do so – nationwide an official of the Blue Cross match company, I suppose he was an agent or representative or someone similar, would call randomly at people’s front doors. If he called on you, by chance, and you could show him that you had a box of Blue Cross matches in your home, then you won a prize (some cash I think). Not that I ever remember this happening to my parents or anyone else locally for that matter. I can remember that particular promotion quite well, it was talked about quite a lot by my parents and their neighbours (same as my grandparents used to talk about the Lobby Lud newspaper challenge from many years before).
The wood for the fire was acquired for free. My parents never paid for logs or firewood. During the winter, father would go up the lane from the Dene to Primrose Wood (Temple’s Plantation) north of Home Farm. Or he would go along to the next wood, Long Wood, or the strip of woodland behind where the Beehives were. Father would go up there, to any of those places, and pick up a large fallen branch or a couple of smaller ones. He went up to Primrose Wood every other day or every three days to get wood. He would carry the branch home on his shoulder. Sometimes, well, more often than not, I would go with father and I would carry a small branch home too. The wood was mostly beech, but there would sometimes be some ash. I don’t suppose for one moment that father had asked if he could help himself to the branches. He wouldn’t have been the only one helping himself. I think local people had been taking wood from there ever since the days when people were living in the old huts of Boreham Camp. Bert Legg would have had a say in what went on with regards Primrose Wood, because that was part of Home Farm which he was renting from the Temple family. I don’t recall Bert ever taking anyone to task for gathering wood, and the Temple family lived away, in America I think. But then father and others only gathered fallen branches. I think Bert Legg allowed fallen branches to be taken but he would have said something if he had seen anyone cutting trees down. I think there was an unwritten rule that you were not to cut down or damage trees but you could help yourself to anything that had fallen.
It was the same as when us children built our big Dene community bonfire for Guy Fawkes Night. Every year we went round to Home Farm and knocked the door and asked Mr. Legg if we could use the south east corner of what was known as the Ploughed Field, near The Dene, as the location for the street’s bonfire. At the same time we asked if we could drag branches and rotten tree trunks out of Primrose Wood. Bert’s response was always the same: we could use the corner of the field provided we cleaned up everything up and left it tidy afterwards, and we could help ourselves to any timber, provided it was fallen or rotten. We were not to cut or damage any of the trees. Bert Legg was very good to us like that. We children were very grateful to him, and because he let us do things like that, we always respected him and thought of him as a kind friend and a good man. Looking back, I realise just how marvellous he was to us, and I still have great admiration for Bert. He’s now in his mid-90s. I wonder if he knows how much we children thought of him, and how revered he still is to me?
Father would go up to Primrose Wood at weekends or on weekdays during the late afternoon. If he came home from work at the REME, having finished the day shift at 4.00 p.m., he would go then. That gave him about half an hour to an hour to get some wood, get it home and saw it up, before it got too dark. Having carried or dragged the wood back home from Primrose Wood, father would have to saw it up. The sawing was done in the back yard, outside the back door. Father had a homemade sawing horse. He had made it himself. The branches were sat on that and cut up with a bow saw. It was an old bow saw, one he had been using for years, but the blades were changed every so often; he usually bought a new blade at the beginning of winter. He would go to Corden’s, the ironmongers in the High Street, Warminster, to buy a blade.
There was always a regular ritual that took place whenever you bought anything in Corden’s shop. Charlie Corden, the proprietor, who looms large in my memory, when offered the purchase price of something you were buying, would always mention the price and then make some comment as to how he thought the price seemed a touch too much. He would then give you back some of the money you had put in his hand. He always did that, without fail. Quite remarkable really, but I guess it was a shrewd move on his part, because you were sure to go back and patronise his shop again when you wanted something else in the ironmongery line. I loved going into Corden’s shop. It seemed so magical to me, with its uneven wooden floorboards, the old-fashioned drawers containing nails and screws and hooks and things, and stuff everywhere, including tin buckets and tin baths and tin watering-cans hanging from the ceiling. And Mr. Corden himself, like something out of Edwardian times, and his wife, who also served in the shop, with her face all painted up with rouge. I was fascinated by them. I really delighted in going in that shop when I was a child.
Bigger logs for the fire at home were split in half or quarters with a small axe. It was never referred to as an axe. My parents always called it “the chopper.” Father used to keep it sharp. I wasn’t allowed to use the chopper, for safety reasons, but I was allowed to saw the smaller branches. I enjoyed doing that. I found it fun and it kept you warm. The sawn logs and the chopped logs were stacked up in the back yard and covered with a small sheet of galvanised tin. The tin was to keep the rain off them. They were taken from the little stack to the fireplace, as and when we needed them. My mother kept a brass bucket near the fireplace and there were usually a few logs in that, ready and waiting for burning. The thing I remember about those logs was that because it was fallen stuff, the bark was very often covered in lichen or a maybe a bit of fungi or moss. I do remember that the wood, being beech, burnt quite well.
The coal was purchased from Birds & Bryer Ash, the coal merchants, at Station Road, Warminster. They would have had lorries delivering but father went and collected what he needed. I suppose it was a bit cheaper if you collected it yourself. He didn’t have an account with Birds & Bryer Ash. He paid for the coal, with cash, as he collected it. He would buy one bag at a time. He would cycle up to Station Road and bring the bag of coal back on the crossbar of the bicycle. The cost of coal would have been expensive, and to help make ends meet, the coal was used sparingly. A bag was made to last a long time. The fire was mostly wood, and a few cobs of coal would have been rationed out, just to give that extra bit of warmth.
The fireplace consisted of a grate – it was made of metal, iron I should think, and it had like a little grid at the bottom for drawing the air up through and there was a flap that lifted down like a shelf. I’m not sure what the purpose of that flap was. It wasn’t used as a shelf. I can only think it was to stop any hot embers or burning splinters from falling out into the room. Below it, round the front of the fireplace, was a tiled floor surround with a wooden edge. I know that wooden edge used to get very hot, and my parents, particularly my mother were always cautious about sparks or bits of ember coming out beyond this on to the carpet. Actually, there was a homemade rug, a thick green one, in front of the fireplace, on top of the carpet, and mother was always checking to see it was okay. My parents owned a fire guard. It was made of metal and featured small grids. This was always in front of the burning fire.
I mentioned that shelf part of the grate just now. I have particular reason to remember it. I can recall having a toy fire engine, and it must have been a good one because you could fill a little tank on it with water, and you could pump the water out through a little bit of grey toy hosepipe. One afternoon, after I had got home from school, and the fire had been lit, I put the toy fire engine on the shelf part of the grate and pumped some water from the toy engine on to the burning fire. My mother walked into the room and saw me doing that. She got cross, not because I was putting the fire out but because she didn’t want me to burn myself or my clothes. She told me off. I never did that again.
Before going to bed at night my parents always made sure the fire was out. The next day my father or mother would clean out the grate. There was always a little brass stand kept by the fireplace. On the stand were three hooks. A little brass dustpan hung on the middle hook, while on one side hung a poker and on the other side hung a brush. It was an unusual brush in that consisted of a hollow brass tube. Inside the tube was a rod. At the top end of the rod, above the tube, was the handle. At the other end of the rod, inside the tube was the brush itself. If you pulled the handle up, most of the brush went inside the tube. If you pushed down on the handle the brush poked out. By pulling up or pushing down on the handle you could adjust how much of the bristles of the brush protruded out of the tube. This is what my mother or father used for cleaning the grate. The ashes were taken outside and used on the vegetable patch in the garden. I can remember seeing the small cloud of dust that used to blow across the garden as the ashes were tipped out of the dustpan.
About once a year the chimney had to be swept. My parents didn’t pay a chimney sweep. They couldn’t afford that. I can remember two chimney sweeps in Warminster. There was Maurice Berridge, or “Sooty Berridge”as he was known by everybody, who lived at 29 The Dene, and there was a Mr. Hudd who I think lived down Warminster Common. They were the two well-known ones. My father cleaned his own chimney. He had a brush and a set of rods which he kept in his shed. He would fix up a cloth up round the fireplace, to catch any falling soot, otherwise it would have spilled out on to the carpet. He would then screw the rods together, one by one, until the brush made it up to the chimney pot on top of the chimney. That’s when I had to play my part. Father would get me to go outside, beyond the front gate, on to the pavement on the opposite side of the road and I would have to shout, to let him know, when the brush had got to the stage of poking out of the top of the chimney. The front door and the living room door would be left open, so that he could hear me shout. He would know then that the brush had made it to the top of the chimney. He could then wiggle the brush up and down the chimney to clean it. Job done, the soot was taken out of the grate and the hearth, wrapped up in the sheet, and thrown on the vegetable garden out the back. I can also remember seeing the cloud of soot as this was done. Everybody used their soot on their gardens. It wasn’t wasted. My father would often go and clean the chimneys of neighbours too, for free, to help them out. Or some neighbours would come and borrow father’s rods and sweeping brush, and they’d do their own chimneys themselves. My father would let them borrow the kit for nothing. He was very good like that.
I don’t remember our chimney ever catching fire, but I can remember that chimneys in the neighbourhood sometimes did. If a chimney was on fire, you could normally smell it first and then you’d see the smoke. If someone spotted a chimney on fire they would knock the person’s door and tell them. The person would either deal with it themselves by pouring some water on the fire in the grate and hoping the situation would ease itself, or, more often than not, they would phone the fire brigade who would soon come out and deal with it. Jim Morris, who lived opposite us at The Dene, at No.55, he was in the fire brigade. And I think Eddie Lucas, at No.53, was in it too. Later on, Jack Butcher, who lived at No.53 (after the Lucas family had moved out of the Dene and gone to live at Beech Grove, Warminster), he was in the Warminster Fire Brigade. In those days the firemen had a bell or a buzzer in their homes, usually in the hall behind the front door, to alert them that they were needed on a fire call. The bell would go and they would rush off to the Fire Station. Many a time I saw Jim Morris come rushing out of his place to go to a fire. Of course, us boys in the street, would be interested in any fires and we would go off on our bicycles to see if we could see what and where the fire was. We were lucky if it was nearby. I can remember seeing several chimney fires, over the course of time, at Boreham Field. The last time I saw a chimney fire at The Dene, must have been about 1975, when Jack Butcher, who, as I just said, was a Warminster fireman, had his chimney on fire! The fire brigade came out and after the fuss was over Jack took a photograph of the firemen stood next to the fire engine. I can remember him doing that.
Of course, the wood and coal fire we had at our home in The Dene, only heated the living room, or the front room as we called it. My parents did buy a paraffin stove-cum-heater. Again this was for use in the winter. It basically consisted of a part in the bottom that you poured the paraffin into. Sat in this was the wick which you lit with a match and the position of the wick was controlled by turning a little wheel. Above this was a tube, with a little door that had a tiny glass window in it. Through this window you could see the little blue flame burning. At the top of the tube was a metal grid on which you could sit a kettle or a saucepan if you wanted to. I can remember this paraffin heater being used in the kitchen sometimes if mother was working out there. But more often than not it was placed and lit on the landing, at the top of the stairs, in the evenings, to warm the first floor of the house before we went to bed. Of course it was dangerous really because if it was knocked over it would have set the house on fire. The toilet for the house was on the first floor and was accessed off the landing. If in the winter, when the heater was lit on the landing, I wanted to go upstairs to use the toilet, my parents would always say: “Go careful when you go past that heater. Don’t knock it.” If I had been given a pound for every time one of them said that, well, I would have been a very rich boy. The paraffin used in that heater was pink. Actually I think the brand name was Pink Paraffin. My father purchased the paraffin from Stiles Bros., in the Market Place, Warminster. There was a Stiles. Bros van that went round delivering. Actually they had two of them at the same time. Both were painted pink and had an advert for Pink Paraffin painted, in black lettering, on the sides.
In the 1970s, when Stiles Bros. had finished with the vans, they drove them up Grange Lane to the old rubbish tip, which we called Spooks (also referred to as Spooky Tip and Spooky Wood), at the back of the Dene, and they dumped them in there. There’s lots of old cars and things dumped in there. All the cars and rubbish were later covered up with soil and what was a hole in the ground for the tip, a former sand pit, is now levelled but you can still see where it was. It’s now a bit of unused ground, all overgrown with brambles, in the corner of one of Legg’s fields at Home Farm. I know those two Stiles Bros. vans are buried there because I saw them dumped there. In years to come, if “archaeologists’ excavate that patch they’ll find those vans and lots of other discarded things.
We didn’t have our paraffin delivered by Stiles’. Again, because it was probably cheaper, my father went to Stiles’ shop and collected it. My parents knew Mr. Steven Stiles, the proprietor quite well. When my parents had got married in 1947, they moved into one of the old army huts at Boreham Camp, where they and lots of other young couples, all desperate for somewhere to live, had squatted first, and then rented when the Warminster Urban Council accepted responsibility for housing them. Those couples relied on local traders supplying them with goods and sundries. Steve Stiles had been one of the first shopkeepers to deliver things to the residents of Boreham Camp. No doubt, Mr. Stiles saw it as an opportunity for increasing business, but he was very good to my father and mother and others. He provided a lifeline.
Father had a paraffin can with a little tap on it. He purchased a can-full at a time. They filled your can for you at Stiles’ shop. Father also trimmed the wick for the heater. That was a regular job and I can remember him doing that in the kitchen. Stiles Bros. were not the only people selling paraffin in Warminster. There was also a Mr. Mullens who came round delivering paraffin. I think my parents might have bought some off him at one time. On the whole though, I think they were loyal to Mr. Stiles, because he had been very good in the years previously, as I just said, delivering paraffin to my parents and other families when they had first set up home in the old army huts at Boreham Camp.
That paraffin heater also came in handy when there were power cuts. Mother had an electric cooker, but when there was a power cut, either because of snowfall or a tree falling down somewhere, or the power-workers going on strike, she used the paraffin heater to boil water for making tea or for cooking something in a saucepan on top. You could use the heater for boiling eggs in a saucepan or heating up a stew in a pot. At least we were able to have a cup of tea or something hot to eat when the electric was off.
There was also another brand of paraffin available and that was Esso Blue. That was advertised on television quite a lot. I can remember that advert even now. It went: “Bom, Bom, Bom, Bom, Esso Blue!” And then, later on, they did a different advert with the Smoke Gets In Your Eyes tune, but they changed the words to: “They asked me how I knew it was Esso Blue, I of course replied with lower grades one buys, smoke gets in your eyes.” Esso Blue was a paraffin which burned smoke-less.
During the 1970s my parents did away with having a wood and coal fire. They bought a two-bar electric fire for the living room, and father fixed a board in the opening of the chimney to block it off. At the same time he boarded off a little cubby hole to the right of the chimney. He got some brick-pattern wall paper and pasted that over the area under the mantelpiece. It was only this year [2009] that the brick wallpaper was taken off. The electric fire which replaced the open fire was usually stood in the hearth but it wasn’t permanently fixed. You could move it about the room or to other rooms, to wherever you had an electric socket nearby. It was still basic but a vast improvement on the old open fire, because father no longer had to go out collecting wood and the grate no longer had to be cleaned. That two-bar electric fire had a fake coal fire, made of plastic, below the two bars, and a lighted bulb under the fake coal fire gave the impression the fake coal fire was glowing. That two-bar electric fire was used for a long time until my mother bought a new electric fire, one that was permanently fixed in the hearth and it included a convector heater at the top for blowing warm air out into the room. And that was used for a long time too until my mother decided to swap over to a gas fire. This in turn was replaced for another new gas fire last year [2008].