The edited transcript of a tape-recorded conversation Danny Howell made with Philip Howell at his home at Boreham Field, Warminster, on Saturday 24th February 1996. First published in Danny Howell’s book Wylye Valley Folk Volume One published by Bedeguar Books, July 1999:
Philip Howell said –
My grandfather, on dad’s side, Sidney Howell, was from Bapton. He worked on a farm at Bapton, doing general farm work, but he moved from there to North Farm, up behind Scratchbury Hill, at Norton Bavant. That must have been for Gauntlett’s. He was a carter for them. He’s been dead a good few years now. I was only small when he died and I don’t remember much about him. I think granddad died at Bapton. I think he went back there to live. My grandmother was Emma Howell. Her name before she married was Haines.
“My dad was George Howell. He was born at North Farm on 14th January 1895. He must have been born at North Farm not long after his parents moved there. Dad had two brothers and two sisters, I think. One of dad’s brothers was called Percy. Another brother, Fred, got killed in the Navy. He was on a ship and got drowned. I can’t remember the names of dad’s sisters.”
“Dad worked on the farm, alongside his father, doing odd jobs for the Gauntletts, but he joined the Army when the First World War broke out. He was 19 but he didn’t have a birth certificate. He wasn’t sure how old he was; people didn’t bother about that sort of thing in those days. He thought he was under age for the Army so he put his age on to enlist, but he was old enough anyway. He served in the Wiltshire Regiment.”
“Dad was stationed at Weymouth, before being shipped to France during the First World War, and that’s where he met my mother. Her name was Hilda Victoria Hackett. She was born on 17th July 1898 and was baptised [on the 7th August 1898] at the Garrison Chapel at Lichfield. Her father was a soldier stationed at Lichfield Barracks. He was a private in the 2nd Battalion King’s Own Royal Lancers. His name was George Henry Hackett. Her mother was Jane Hackett. The family was living in Weymouth, when mum met dad. Mum was working as a domestic, a maid, in Weymouth. Mum had two brothers, Frank and Bill, and two sisters, Edith and Irene. Later on, the family moved to Bristol. Edith is now Mrs. Kitley and lives in Warminster.”
“Dad came back from the war wounded. His foot was blown off in France and he lost his leg. He spent nine and a half years going in and out of hospital. He was only a young lad and his leg kept growing. The doctors had to keep on sawing bits off it; that’s why he had to go every so often to Roehampton Hospital in London. He had a leg fitted there and after a couple of months he’d have to go back and have it altered again.”
“Dad was a total wreck, by all accounts, when he came home from the War. His nerves had gone. It had been a bad experience. He married my mum after the War. They got married in Bristol, where mum came from. The wedding was at Shirehampton Parish Church, on 31st October 1920. Dad was living at the Tynings, Norton Bavant, at the time, and mum had been living at 36 Beanacre Road, Shirehampton.”
“Mum and dad must have lived at No.6 Boreham, on the Bishopstrow Road, for a while, after they first got married, but they later moved to Smallbrook Lane. We lived in the third one down in the rank of old cottages. That was No.5 Smallbrook Lane in those days. Our cottage faced Mr. Down’s field. Mr. Down had chickens and a cow and one horse out there.”
“Charlie Curtis lived in the first cottage, the one beside the lane. He was a foreman for the Warminster Urban District Council. There was a gang of men who laid tarmac and brushed the roads. It was all done by hand. They had a tar barrel with a hand pump on and they sprayed the roads and spread gravel on the top. As I said, Charlie Curtis was a foreman, and he was in charge of those men.”
“Oliver Warren lived in the one west of Curtis’s. He worked in St. Andrews, one of the big houses, on the Boreham Road. It’s now called Rainbow House and the Coventry family live there at the moment. There was Oliver Warren, Mrs. Warren and their sons, Frank, Fred and Sam. There was also one daughter. Two of the Warren boys were a bit older than me but Sam Warren was about the same age as myself. He went on to run the garage with Mr. Davis (Davis & Warren), up at Victoria Road. When the wife and I started our married life we lived in Upton House at Victoria Road. When we moved out, Davis and Warren had the house demolished and the garage was built there. The old house is gone now. The Northfield Toyota Garage is there today.”
“The Orchards lived in the little cottage in between Charlie Curtis and us; the second one. Mrs. Sarah Orchard was a very old lady when I knew her. I don’t ever remember Mr. Orchard; I presume he must have died before I was born or when I was very little.”
“Sarah Orchard had a son called Khyber. He was a chauffeur and he’d drive for anyone, on a freelance basis. He finished up as chauffeur for Miss Southey at Sutton Veny. That was Colonel Southey’s sister, down at the bottom end of Sutton Veny, at Duck Street, at Drove House, on the right hand side, round the corner, up on the bank. Khyber Orchard married my aunt Edith (mum’s sister) and they lived on the other side of Duck Street, in Springhead Cottage. I think in those days that belonged to Miss Southey. My mother’s father finished up living in Sutton Veny. He came from Bristol to live there with my aunt.”
“Khyber Orchard was living and working at Sutton Veny when there was foot and mouth disease about. There were that many cows went down with foot and mouth in the Sutton Veny and Norton Bavant area, hundreds, that they had to get blokes, anyone who was fit and able, from anywhere to help burn the carcasses. It was that bad. The burning went on for weeks and weeks. You could smell it in Warminster. There were rows and rows of cows that had to be burnt and buried. Wood was brought from the Longleat Estate to fuel the fires, and it was soaked in paraffin. They used tractors to drag the cows on to the fires. Khyber Orchard was one of the blokes who helped with burning the cattle. He was burning the cows and he caught a chill and got pneumonia and he died. He left a wife and two children, Evelyn and David. It was a terrible time for them.”
“David was a carpenter and joiner but he left the building trade and became a taxi driver. He bought a taxi business from Dick Voysey at Broadway Garage. Mr. Voysey had two Humber Hawk cars but he gave things up. David bought the business and he drove one car and I helped out, driving the other.”
“David lived on the corner of Pound Street and West Parade but he emigrated to Australia. He’s out in Australia now. Khyber’s widow, my aunt Edith, married Arthur Kitley afterwards. He lived at 22 The Dene. He worked on the Council. Mrs. Kitley is still alive. She’s 89. She now lives at 23 Smallbrook Road. That’s where she and Arthur moved to but he died in 1979.”
“As I said, we were at number 5 Smallbrook Lane, the third one, and the Day family was in the big one at the far end. Orchards were one side of us and Days the other. Mr. Jimmy Day worked in the gardens for Miss Bradfield at Oaklands, on the Boreham Road. He retired from work, and dropped dead on the day he retired [9th May 1932]. He finished work, at Miss Bradfield’s, at five and by six o’clock he was dead. He collapsed in his own garden at Smallbrook Lane. I saw that happen.”
“After he died the Earney family moved in there. They were a Codford family but they had been on a farm at Pertwood. They arrived on an old hay cart pulled by a couple of horses, with all the furniture and stuff piled up high. The kids and all were on there. There were seven children but their mother had died some years before. Frances Earney was the oldest child, and there was Bertha and Dorothy, and there was also Eddie and Bill. I can’t remember the names of the others. Mr. Earney had been working on a farm at Pertwood but when he came to Warminster he went to work as a gardener for George Stratton at St. Andrews, Boreham Road. I used to see him going through the hedge at the back, into the garden of St. Andrews.”
“Mr. Neat lived in the thatched cottage which is now tiled, which faces down the lane towards the old sewage works. That was used as a pottery in more recent years when Bell Pottery moved there from Deverill Road. I can’t remember what Mr. Neat did for a living. Mr. Down, who ran the Wagon Works next to the Yew Tree, lived in Wheel House at the Wagon Works, but he owned that thatched cottage, and he eventually came to live there.”
“Every morning and afternoon, at the same time, Mr. Down used to come up through the village and along Smallbrook Lane, to the two fields next to the thatched cottage. Mr. Down had those two fields and he kept some chickens, a horse and one cow there. He used to come every day, morning and afternoon, and take that cow into a shed and milk it by hand. Then you’d see Mr. Down going back down the lane carrying a pail of milk. He’d take the milk back to Wheel House. He only had the one cow but he had different cows, about four, over the years.”
“I was born on 15th November 1921. I wasn’t born at Smallbrook Lane, although our family was living there. I was born in Bristol, because mum went back to her mum’s for the birth. I was brought back to Smallbrook Lane as a babe in arms.”
“I had three sisters. Margaret was the oldest of the girls; she was born in 1922. Sylvia came next, in 1923; and then Josephine, in 1924. We were all brought up at Smallbrook Lane. There was the four of us all under five.”
“Margaret joined the Wrens and met an army officer in Weymouth. His name was Frank Foster. Margaret and Frank live in Weymouth now. Sylvia married a chap called Midcalfe from the 57th Tank Corps that were at the Barracks in Warminster. They lived in Hertfordshire to begin with but Sylvia has since passed away. Josephine is now Mrs. Nicholson. Her husband, Bob Nicholson, was stationed in the Depot at Woodcock, in the cold store behind the military bungalow opposite Kingdown School. The cold store was a brick building (all the rest were built of concrete) and they kept food in there, the Army rations. Bob was in the Pioneer Corps and he used to dish out the food from there to the troops who were stationed around the area. At that time my family were living at 38 Woodcock, near to the cold store, and Jo used to meet Bob on the corner. They got married and squatted, to begin with, like us, in one of the huts at Boreham Camp. Then they went to live in one of the thatched cottages under Scratchbury Hill at Norton Bavant. There were four cottages there but there’s just the one there today. They were called Middleton Cottages. Jo and Bob lived in the first one. The top cottage caught fire. Jo and Bob later moved to a council house in Norton Bavant. They lived there for a few years and he died not long after he retired. He had been working, after the Second World War, for the D.C.R.E., going round doing building work and repairing the married quarters.”
“We were all brought up at Smallbrook Lane. Ours was only a small cottage, one room at the front, a little scullery and two bedrooms. It was nothing more than a one up-one down.”
“Mother cooked on the open fire or on a paraffin stove. Mother got the coal off Charlie Maddock, who came round with a lorry once a week. We would get wood from down Smallbrook Lane, whatever we could find, or we would get waste bits from Mr. Down at the Wagon Works. We gathered wood from wherever we could. A man called Charlton, from West Street, used to come round selling paraffin. He only had one arm. Mother cooked mostly stews. In later years mother had a range in the scullery but that was much later, not long before we left Smallbrook Lane.”
“Mother did the washing in a copper boiler. It was all joined in with the range and used the same chimney. The water was outside and there was a long brick drain which ran behind all the houses to carry the used water away and into the fields at the bottom of the garden. The washing was done by hand with a few soap flakes. Monday was washing day. Most people did their washing on Mondays.”
“They’ve put a bathroom in that cottage now, but our toilet was down the bottom of the garden. There was one loo there for each cottage, among some horrible smelling bushes. I can remember them as plain as day. Mother used to put an oil lamp in the bay window of the cottage so we could see to go down the garden path at night. If it was a windy winter’s night mother used to have to come down the path to collect me, to bring me back, because I was always too dead-scared to come out. The noise of the trees creaking was terrible and I hated it. It was a bucket toilet and it would be emptied out on to the garden. We had a fairly big garden at Smallbrook Lane, with vegetables. The toilet was a very basic set-up. There was a bit of board with a hole in, over the bucket, and you parked your backside on that. Most people tore up newspapers for toilet paper but we couldn’t afford a newspaper, so we tore up old bags and anything like that we could get hold of. It was just the same when I first got married. Young people don’t know a thing about it today.”
“As I said earlier, dad was off work for nine and a half years with his injury, and when he started work again he couldn’t go back on the farm. Mr. Neville Marriage, who had Boreham Mill, gave dad a job mending sacks. I think Mr. Marriage took pity on my dad when he came back from the war injured. Mr. Marriage was a good chap and he did quite a lot of good round Boreham. Dad must have got the cottage at Smallbrook Lane through Mr. Marriage, because it was owned by Miss Bradfield, who lived at Oaklands on the Boreham Road. Miss Bradfield and Mr. Marriage were both magistrates and knew each other quite well. They were friends of one another. And Miss Bradfield’s father, Edward Bradfield, had been the miller at Boreham Mill before Mr. Marriage. My father must have had a look at the cottage, and Mr. Marriage probably said to Miss Bradfield something along the lines of ‘Let George have it.’
“Miss Bradfield owned all the cottages in the rank at Smallbrook Lane. When I was about 14 (1935) Miss Bradfield wanted to get rid of the cottages and she asked dad if he wanted to buy his. She offered it to him for £300. Poor old dad never had three hundred pence, let alone £300. The rent was four bob a week. There was an agent with Butchers, the builders, a chap with glasses; I can’t think of his name, but it might have been Francis or something like that, and he was like an insurance agent for builders and they used to collect the rents for Miss Bradfield. He used to come round each week with a book and dad would pay him.”
“I used to see quite a lot of Mr. Marriage, because I used to go down and sit with dad in the shed opposite Boreham Mill when I was a kid and talk to him while he was repairing the sacks. Then I’d walk back with him at night when he finished work at five. Dad earned about five bob a week. 90% of it went on the rent.”
“The shed dad worked in was opposite the Mill, over the other side of the Bishopstrow road, where the Beeline coach depot is now. There was a shed there, from where the gateway is now (where the coaches now go in and out) to the river. A ditch ran alongside it (the ditch is still there) and about halfway along there was a little wooden footbridge reaching from the roadway, over the ditch, into the little doorway of the shed. That’s where dad worked, in there. It was all dark in there. There was no electric light and there were no windows; only the daylight that came in through the door and that wasn’t much. The lorry would pull up outside the door and tip all the old sacks off and dad would repair them as best as he could so that they could be used again for carting grain or meal. Dad would sit on a pile of old sacks in there. There was no chair to sit on, and the rats would run around, in and out, between his good foot and his wooden leg. There were literally hundreds of rats in there. No sooner did dad mend the sacks than the rats would start gnawing them again. They were the old hessian sacks. Dad had a big sack needle and he mended the sacks with coarse string. If he had a sack with lots of holes in, more holes than sack, he’d cut that up and use it to patch other holes in sacks. He got paid on piece work. He got paid about four bob for every hundred sacks he did. A hundred sacks is a hell of a pile. You think about it.”
“I reckon dad was happy doing that. He’d come to terms with his injury. He was happy go-lucky but his leg used to play him up something rotten. He couldn’t walk very far. He had this artificial leg and if he walked too far the stump used to bleed terribly. It would get blisters and sores on it.”
“The shed was made out of galvanised sheets. It was exactly the same as it is now. It’s the same shed. It was painted black in dad’s time; now it’s painted red. Dad worked in there from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon during the week and he did some Saturday mornings if needed. He took a bit of bread and cheese with him for his dinner and he stayed there all day. He didn’t go home to dinner; I suppose that was because of his leg. In the winter he’d be froze stiff. It was a ghastly sort of a job. In the latter years he did the sacks in a shed in the garden at home. A Mr. Love, an old chap, drove a donkey cart for Marriage’s, and he used to bring the sacks round. Mr. Love lived in a little cottage on Boreham Hill, where Mr. Still later lived [33 Boreham, now 148 Boreham Road].”
“There were two Loves at Boreham. There was a chap called Georgie Love who lived at 3 Park Cottages. He used to go into town, with his piano accordion and play for money in the pubs. He’d come home, through Smallbrook, past the Sewage Works and come along the lane, playing the accordion all the way, at 11 o’clock at night. Even in the middle of winter. He’d had more than enough to drink but he could still play beautiful. That’s how he used to earn his wages, by playing his accordion in the pubs. He didn’t go out to work.”
“The other Love was a chap who drove a steam roller for Barnes, the steam roller firm, at Southwick. He also lived in one of the cottages on Boreham Hill [number 30 Boreham, which is now 154 Boreham Road]. That was Frank Love. His name was really Francis Stuart Love but he was always known as Frank. He was a nice man. He used to ride a motorbike. They used to leave the steamroller wherever they were working, and he’d go backwards and forwards from home to wherever the steam roller was, on the motorbike. He’d go off at three o’clock in the morning to get the steamroller fired up. They went around doing tarmac, doing sub-contracting. They would move from place to place.”
“The steam engines when they used to come through Boreham, used to take on water from the stream beside the road, on the crossroads side of Park Cottages. There was a bit of a flat bridge over the stream there. It’s still there but it’s all overgrown now. During the Second World War the Army used to park tanks in there. In my days you could see the stream quite clearly. The fair engines used to stop there as well to take on water.”
“Warminster Fair was after Salisbury, and the fair engines had to come through Boreham on the way. They always used to stop there and we kids used to watch them filling up with water. That was like something different for us kids to pass the time with.”
“When I was a boy the piece of ground on the corner of Boreham Crossroads, which is all overgrown now, was ordinary low-lying water meadows. There was like all ditches across it to drain it into the river Wylye. That meadow used to get very waterlogged in the winter. It was always flooded. It was just the same in the meadows behind the Wagon Works. Different farmers used to rent the meadows at different times. Bazley, from Boreham Farm, had it for a time and a chap called Ledbury had it for a while. Two or three different people had it until it got overgrown.”
“Jim Gard, who was the manager of Boreham Mill for Mr. Marriage, lived in the house next to the Mill. He was a nice chap. He was very smart; he wore a grey suit.”
“The stables were to the left of the house, between the house and the Mill. I can remember the stables burning down. The Fire Brigade came out. Albert Dewey, who had a farriery business at Emwell Street, was the Captain of the Fire Brigade. They came out with a tender and they pumped water out of the river Wylye to douse the fire. It was no good, the stables burnt to the ground. I was about 5, 6 or 7, when that happened. I don’t think they replaced them. The horses were kept in fields up behind the mill. They were big horses. Mr. Marriage employed two or three carters. I think one of them was called Sturgess.”
“Mr. Marriage ground all sorts of meal for animal food. I can remember going down the Mill and watching all this grain coming in. It would go up to the top and then all down through the chutes, between the mill stones, and into the sacks. It was all powered by water. When the work in the mill was finished the hatch was lifted and the water came round under the first bridge (the one closest to Boreham Crossroads), and when the mill was working the water came under the second bridge (the one nearest Bishopstrow).”
“I went to St. John’s School to begin with. I was five when I started there. Miss Lander and Miss Lyons were the schoolteachers. Miss Lander was a toughie. She was the headteacher. I wasn’t frightened of her but you had to watch your p’s and q’s. You couldn’t play her up at all. She was pretty strict but she wouldn’t let any of us be put on. If someone started pulling you about she’d sort it. There was no nonsense as far as she was concerned. I went to school with Hatchy Butcher who went in the Navy, George Gilbert who used to live at the top of East Street, Joan Gilbert who lived up by Holly Lodge, and the Norris’s who lived next to the Yew Tree.”
“One or two of the kids going to St. John’s were very down-trodden and were poor and sickly-looking. They were given cod-liver oil, free of charge, every day. That was horrible stuff. It was poured out of a damn great big jar on to a spoon. And these kids had it spooned down them. It was horrible creamy stuff. I had it once and it made me sick as a dog.”
“I was fairly lucky, because as a kid I used to do different jobs for people, helping them out here and there, like on the farm. Through that I was given different things, like a few apples, and what have you, and that made a lot of difference to what we had to eat. Quite a lot of people helped us in that way and we respected them for it.”
“The school day began with an assembly each morning at 9 o’clock until about ten past. We had to sing along to the piano. We had a hymn and then we had our lessons, maths, p.t. and all that. The classroom was very overcrowded. There were 45 of us kids in one room. That was one class. And there were about 40 kids in the other class. We sat at double desks, with lift up seats and iron sides. We had exercise books and wrote with pencils. We didn’t have ink or inkwells. The walls of the classroom were bare, apart from the odd picture. There was a great big tortoise stove in the room. Mr. James, who lived next door, looked after St. John’s Church and he was also the school caretaker. He used to come in and put the coke in it.”
“There was a big lime tree in the school playground. It was a great big lime tree. I can remember the school railings; there was one bent out and you could get through there instead of going through the gate. That was like that until quite recently. We never used to go out of the playground. I used to go home to dinner and come back.”
“I had to wear glasses because I had an accident when I was a year old. I fell out of a high chair in the cottage at Smallbrook Lane and I went over the top of the fireguard into the fire. I burnt my hand and I nearly lost all my sight in one eye. Mr. Hicks, who ran a taxi, and lived next to where Hibbs’ antiques shop is now, took me to hospital in his car. Dr Kindersley saw to me. He had a go at it. I don’t know what he did with it.”
“When I was at St. John’s School the school doctor came and had a look. He said ‘You’ve got a lazy eye.’ I said ‘No, it isn’t a lazy eye, I had an accident.’ Miss Lander said ‘You’ve got a lazy eye and you’ve got to make it work. You should have a pad to go over your eye and really your mother should make it.’ Mother said she wouldn’t make a pad because I had been burnt in an accident. Miss Lander disputed this, she said ‘His eye will work if we put a pad on.’ So she made this pad out of a little square of material and some tape, and put it down the side of my glasses. She said ‘Wear it.’ She tied it round and I couldn’t see a thing. For good measure she gave me a clout round the earhole and sent me home. I got past the School House where Mr. James and his daughter Mary lived. They used to look after the Church. But further down the road I walked smack into a telegraph pole opposite Miss Bradfield’s. It was near the turning for Rock Lane. I broke my glasses and cut my brow above my eye. That made it worse than ever. For years I was taking bits of glass out of my forehead as they slowly worked their way out. Sometimes if I rub my brow now I can make it bleed where little tiny fragments of glass are still in there after all these years. Oh yes. Just on my eyebrow. There was certainly a to-do between my parents and Miss Lander over that episode.”
“Miss Lander knew best or so she thought. She and her sister were a couple of old maids. One stayed at home and looked after the house and the other one was the schoolteacher. They lived in a house called the Nook along Smallbrook Road. Miss Lyons, the other teacher at St. John’s, was also strict but she was nice. I liked school but I didn’t have a favourite subject. I didn’t like sports but I enjoyed gardening.”
“I remember one day I had been out playing somewhere and when I got home, mother was breaking her heart; she was really breaking her heart. Father and mother must have put in for some financial help, because of dad’s disability. We were having a struggle getting by. Mother had a wind-up gramophone. It had been given to her by her mother in Bristol. It played little tiny records and we used to play them. We all used to sing along while we were sat round the fire in the evenings. I was as happy as a sand boy to do that. The gramophone was on the table in the room, covered up by a piece of cloth, to keep the dust off. What happened? The means’ test man called. He looked around the room and he lifted up the cloth, uncovered the gramophone and said ‘What’s this?’ He made mother get rid of that. She had to. But we never got any financial help, none at all. Mother didn’t get anything, not for donkey’s years. She got something late in life, but that wasn’t so long ago. That was way after the Second World War.”
“When I was 11 I left St. John’s and went to the Avenue School. The first day I got there I got the cane. Four of the best. I hadn’t been there five minutes. The school playground wasn’t finished. They were laying tarmac. I came out of the cloakroom and I had to turn right to go to a classroom and I jumped across the corner of the playground between some pillars. There was a manhole there and I jumped on to the manhole, one step on to it and another off. Mr. Dewey, the headmaster, came out of his study and he saw me. ‘Come here, come here,’ he said. He gave me a right old rollicking. I had four of the best. That was a good start. He had it in for me after that.”
“Sometimes I went home to dinner but mostly I had school dinners. We had to go down to the Close for them, to the County Secondary School, behind the Palace Cinema. The dinners were alright but they were nothing special, just the usual.”
“The Avenue School went on a trip to Thoulstone, near Chapmanslade. We walked out there to see a plane that had landed in a field. That was Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus. We walked out there to see that and we thought it was wonderful. It was a two-winged plane with windows down the side. If you had £2, which was a hell of a lot of money in those days, you could go for a ride in the plane. I couldn’t go up, my parents couldn’t afford that. Two or three kids did. Doug Carter, who is now a butcher at the High Street; Sam King, the policeman’s son; and Bella Dewey, Mr. Dewey’s niece, went up. It took off, flew towards Bath and turned round and come back and landed. We watched that and then we walked back to the school. You’d take your life in your hands walking along the Bath Road today because there’s so many cars speeding along there, but when I was a boy you could walk along there with very little danger.”
“When I was a kid, when I finished school in the afternoon I used to walk out towards Norton Bavant, to meet the milk cart coming in from Gauntlett’s farm. Mr. Gauntlett’s mule cart used to come in to Warminster from the farm, and I’d get a ride on the cart. Depending on how early I got out of school, the further I’d get towards Norton Bavant to meet this cart on the way in. Mr. Pople was the driver. He lived in one of the cottages at North Farm. He was about 30 or 35, of average build, clean shaven, and he wore a cap. He wore hobnail boots when it was fine and Wellington boots when it was raining. There would be six or seven churns, big tall ones, up on the cart. The milk had to catch the quarter to five train at Warminster Station. It was taken to Trowbridge, where the Wiltshire United Dairies had a depot right next to the Station.”
“The cart used to go in the morning for the 8.12 and then come in again in the afternoon. If I wanted a ride on it in the morning I had to get up and run out towards Norton Bavant, leaving home at about quarter to eight in the morning. I used to have a ride on it and I used to like that. The old mule used to trot along steady. You can’t make a mule go any faster than he wants to. Sometimes the mule would stop to go to the loo, and it didn’t matter how much you hit it or shouted at it, it wouldn’t move on until it had stopped going to the loo. The road from North Farm to the main road was pretty rough. When the churns were full and the cart was coming into Warminster it used to come down the road, and over the railway bridge, but going back, with empty churns, the cart used to go up the road to Middleton Farm, under the other railway bridge, and then go on up the old track past Middleton to meet the North Farm road up behind Middle Hill. It used to cut up through that way on the home journey.”
“When the Co-op bread van used to come round our way I used to help the bloke by taking the loaves of bread into the cottages. I can remember taking a whole basket of bread to one house in the winter in case it snowed up. I never got any wages. I used to help the bloke just to get a ride on the cart.”
“I can remember when a couple of boys, who were starving, pinched a loaf of bread out of the Co-op cart. It was delivering bread to the houses along Smallbrook Lane and when the Co-op bloke was in one of the houses, one of the boys pinched a loaf. The back door of the cart had been left open. The family was starving and they had no money, so the boys had to pinch it. They had to. Anybody would in the same circumstances. The boys were, before long, apprehended and they were both taken away. They were sent to a home in Frome for five years. That was the Oakfield Road Boys’ Home. When they went away they were ever so rough and ready. When they came back, five years later, they stood up straight and when they spoke to adults they said ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam.’ They had been instilled with discipline. And they both made good in later life.”
“As children we looked up to the schoolteacher and the vicar. We respected them. My parents weren’t particularly religious. They didn’t go to church, well, not for the services. Mother might have gone in St. John’s Church occasionally and sat there quietly but she didn’t go to church on Sundays like a lot of people did. We kids went to Sunday School and I was in St. John’s Choir. The Reverend Horace Wake came down home and asked my mum if I wanted to go. Horace Wake was a good man. He was a very nice sort of chap. There was never any trouble with him, not ever. He lived in the house called Patmos, on Boreham Road, next door to Mr. Bush. During the First World War Horace Wake had been captured by the Turks and he lost an eye. Through him I went to Sunday School. Mother let me go because she thought it was the right way to bring us up.”
“The Sunday School was held in St. John’s Parish Hall. We met there at ten o’clock and we listened to passages from the Bible and played a few games. At 11 o’clock we were taken to Church, for a service until 12 noon. Then we went home for a bit of grub. We went back to Sunday School in the afternoon. We had a little service at Sunday School at three o’clock and then the Reverend Wake, at half past three, would take about a dozen of us choir boys for a walk round the Marsh or down the town Park. It was just a walk, to give us a bit of exercise, and Reverend Wake would talk to us and tell us things.”
“After Sunday School I used to go to choir practice at St. John’s. I started off at the lowest position, standing nearest the altar. As various other boys left I moved up, until I got to the top position, on the left hand side of the little cubicle as you faced the head of the church. There were men and boys in the choir. Norman Titt and Charlie Titt from up Imber Road were in it, and Dick Burden, and Percy Miles from Boreham. We used to have choir practice on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.”
“During the latter part of my time with the Choir, a Mr. Conway, who was the Manager for Marshman’s at Boreham Mill, was the choirmaster. I used to have to pump the organ for him on Saturday afternoons. It did make a hell of a noise. Mr. Conway always wore a nice suit and his hair was combed straight back. He was in his mid to late fifties. My dad was working for Marshman’s then, at Boreham Mill, and Mr. Conway would say to him ‘George, send your boy up to the Church on Saturday to pump the organ for me.’ I got threepence for doing that.”
“I also joined the Scouts. That was the 1st St. John’s Warminster Scouts. Again that was through the Reverend Wake. He took us all to Guernsey on an outing. He took about 40 of us. We went by train to Weymouth and then we went across the Channel on the St. Patrick. We came back on the St. Helier. That was a coal-fired steam boat. We had a summer camp on Guernsey. We had to pay to go. It was about 30 bob which was a lot of money. It was more than what my dad and mum could afford, so my gran helped pay. I didn’t miss out as a kid.”
“My parents used to take me and my sisters out for walks. We’d go various places like up the Leg And Stocking or Copheap Lane. There were seats where we could sit and dad would point out different things. We knew what was going on locally, and we knew about things in Bristol because gran lived there, but I knew nothing about the rest of the world. I didn’t know America existed until they taught us things about it at the Avenue School. It didn’t matter because we were never likely to go to those places. You didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of going anywhere like that, unlike today.”
“Well, now I’ll tell you something, I didn’t go to Salisbury until I was well into my teens. I cycled there on my bike, with a mate, and when we got there we thought we were on the right road to come home but we weren’t and we finished up in Southampton. We didn’t know where we were until somebody told us. We had no idea. They showed us which way to go for Warminster. We were so late coming back, my mother had set out from home, walking towards Salisbury to meet me. God knows where she thought she was going to look for me if she couldn’t find us. Woodcock Road didn’t get as far as Boreham Crossroads in those days, so mother had to come out of 38 Woodcock, where the family were then living, and head back towards town, and then go up Chancery Lane to get on the Boreham Road to get in the direction of Salisbury. We didn’t care. I was as happy as a sandboy doing anything like that. When I got back the nuts on the front wheel of my bike were all loose where the roads had been so bad. I can remember that as plain as day. You wouldn’t dream of riding a bike to Southampton today because of all the traffic. We hardly saw a soul when we cycled there that time.”
“As a child I was able to wander freely about places at Boreham and Smallbrook. We were never told off by anybody. We saw loads of wildlife. There used to be plenty of swans on the river Wylye. I could walk along the riverbank and get six dozen moorhen eggs just like that, as easy as pie. I’d wander along and come out at Smallbrook, at Penny’s Park as we used to call it.”
“Four of us kids used to get about together. That was Jack Hicks from Princecroft, who lived with Mr. Neate at Smallbrook Lane, because he was from a big family and there wasn’t enough room for all of them at Princecroft; Hector Hicks from the shop at Boreham; Alan Haskell from the house next to the shop; and me.”
“From Mr. Neate’s cottage at Smallbrook Lane to the Pumping Station at Smallbrook there was nothing in between. There was a big pump house at the Sewage Works and Mr. Maxfield lived there with his wife and children. One daughter went to the Avenue School with me. The pumphouse was near the lane, and there was a little work room and Mr. Maxfield’s accommodation. That was Bert Maxfield’s father. He was alright. He was a little chap. Later on he gave up living at the Pumping Station and moved to West Parade when they built the houses there.”
“There were about five buildings altogether at the Pumping Station. They were built of red brick and had wire cages in the windows. The kids used to throw stones and try and smash the windows. The sewage came in pipes from town and run into big pits, like filter beds with bars across. Mr. Maxfield had to scoop it out of the big pits into like big railway trucks which he pushed down some tracks, and he spread the sewage out into the fields. He tipped it up in the fields and spread it about. The water was then allowed to run out into the river. It was an awful job. When the wind was in the right direction the smell used to waft across our place at Boreham.”
“Going down the lane, there was a river on the left which is now dried up, and on the right hand side was a little ditch with a fence of iron railings alongside, with a wood up behind. That river that ran alongside was the overflow water out of the sewage works which ran into the watermeadows where it was all channelled about. It’s a children’s playing field now. You can still see one of the huge pipes there today. All the waste water used to run down the other side of the lane, not the river side, then under the road and come out into the field. There was nowhere else for it to run. When it was a frosty night you could smell it inside our house. It was terrible at Smallbrook.”
“When people ate tomatoes the seeds used to go right through them and would end up going through the sewage works. Where Mr. Maxfield emptied the sewage out on the fields, the sewage used to dry out and the seeds would germinate. We kids would go out there and pull up the tomato plants. We used to sell them to people. It was easy enough to sell them; they used to go like hot cakes. Nobody ever asked where we got them from. They were beautiful plants, far better than you could buy in a shop today.”
“We used to go swimming in the river. Where the footpath goes now, that used to be a very wide river there, like a big lake. I can remember when I was a kid standing there watching the fish. The water used to go through a grating in the pumping station and out the other end. The water used to rush down through there and the fish went through too.”
“There was a Mr. Pope who lived at Trevena, the big house at the top of Boreham Hill where Mr. Hunt lives now. Mr. Pope was a retired gentleman. He used to do a lot of shooting and fishing. I can remember him coming down to dad with a bucketful of fish he’d caught. Then we had fish, fish, fish for ages.”
“I can remember most of the people who lived on Boreham Hill. Coming down the hill, Bill Syme’s father lived in a house below Trevena. He worked for Mr. Marriage at Boreham Mill, but later on he lived at Park Cottages and he worked at Bishopstrow Mill in the finish. Bill Symes lived in the end house of the rank there, someone else was in the middle, and a boot repairer lived at the other end. He had a little tin shed where he did cobbling and boot repairs. His name was Mr. Marshall and he had an artificial leg. He had been injured in the First World War.”
“Coming down a bit further is Melville Cottage, where Percy Miles, who was the foreman in charge of the staff for Mr. Marriage at Boreham Mill, lived. Further down lived Philip Still. His wife was Mrs. Fitz’s daughter. Philip Still worked in the Labour Exchange, with Mr. Pullin. Coming down again was where Frank Barter lived. I can’t remember what he did. Then there was Mr. Macey who worked for Mr. Marriage. He was a chauffeur/gardener. He would cross over the road and go along a bit to a gateway in the wall, which is now bricked up. That was the back entrance to Heronslade, the house where Mr. Marriage lived. Mr. Macey used to go into work that way. He was a little chap, about five foot five, about the same stamp as yourself. He’d get about in a pair of leggings. That’s Arthur Macey’s dad. Mr. Marriage had a car like a big Humber. Mr. Macey’s wife was called Lilian. Mrs. Parker lived in the house next to the shop. Mr. Macey, Marriage’s chauffeur, lived there at one time but he moved to the first house on Boreham Hill, the one I just mentioned. Also along there lived Mr. Love, Mr. Day and a Mr. Ferrett.”
“When I was a boy I used to help out Mr. Dowding at Smallbrook Farm, by raking by hand round the fields during haymaking time. I’d get a few pence from Mr. Dowding for doing that. I spent my pocket money at Mrs. Fitz’s shop, where Boreham Post Office is now. I used to get down there and wait for the shop to open so I could buy some sweets. I’d get a penn’orth of this or a penn’orth of that. The shop inside wasn’t very much different to what it is today. The counter was on the right hand side just as you went in. On the left hand side, where Mr. Ogden has got his freezer for the ham and stuff today, was a living room. It was a very dingy, eerie shop, and Mrs. Fitz and her daughter used to creep round in there. They sold some groceries, not very much, because Mrs. Hicks, at the other shop, did more of that. Mrs. Fitz was tall and slim. She had a fair trade there.”
“When I didn’t have any money, I’d go and sit outside the other shop, Mrs. Hicks’s, where the antiques shop is now. There used to be a verandah outside that shop. We used to sit there. I used to play with Mrs. Hicks’s son, Hector. He later lived along the Boreham Road but he’s dead now. He used to go in the shop, when it was closed, and we’d push open the letter box and he’d poke some sweets out. They kept lots of sweets and greengroceries in there. It was a very interesting sort of shop. It was a long shop. Hector’s father, Percy Hicks used to run a taxi. He’d park the taxi outside, in the road. He had just the one car.”
“There were two houses between Mrs. Hicks’s shop and the Yew Tree. The one next to the shop was Mr. Haskell’s. He now lives at 108 Boreham Fields. He went in the navy. The other house, the one next to the Yew Tree, was where Mr. Norris, a self-employed painter and decorator lived. He had a big family. One of the sons, Ron Norris, now lives just down the road from us, at 150 Boreham Fields.”
“Mr. Dolman was the landlord at the Yew Tree. My dad didn’t go to pub. He never drank. He liked to make his own cigarettes when he could but he didn’t go to the pub. They used to get a good crowd at the Yew Tree. Next to the Yew Tree was a space with a big building and that was used for storage by the pub.”
“Next to there was the Wagon Works, owned and run by Mr. Alfred Edwin Down. He had a big trade. He had plenty of work at the Wagon Works. He used to make big farm elevators as well, the big ones that folded out. Plus all the flatbed wagons and carts. He did that for all the farmers around. I can remember watching him putting a rim on a wheel. He’d get the iron all red hot and drop it on the wheel, and when it was on he’d pour cold water on it to shrink it tight. That was to hold it on. He had a bit of a blacksmith’s shop there to do all this.”
“Mr. Down made and repaired all the carts for Mr. Marriage at Boreham Mill. Mr. Marriage had his wagons painted yellow and he had his name painted on the sides and the tailboard. They used to build double, four wheel carts, with big high backs, for Marriage’s Mill. Mr. Marriage had three wagons and six horses. Two horses to a wagon.”
“Mr. Down lived in Wheel House, which was also the Post Office at that time. There was a big wheel painted on the side of the house. At the right of the Post Office was a long shed with double doors. The shed went as far as the stream which ran behind there. That’s where, inside that shed, they used to make and repair all sorts of carts and wagons. There was Mr. Down and two other men, one of whom was a young lad, an apprentice. Mr. Down also sold petrol. They had one petrol pump there. Nobody seemed to worry about who was waiting to be served. It was all very slow and casual. Very slow indeed.”
“Mrs. Down used to work in the Post Office. The Post Office was a room inside the house. I used to go in there regular. It was like a little pigeonhole room with a desk. You’d ask for some stamps and she’d go to the drawer and get them out. It was very different to how a post office is run today. Mrs. Down was a nice, little, grey-haired, old duck. She was very nice to speak to, very friendly, and very well-to-do.”
“On the Crossroads side of the Wagon Works were Park Cottages. There were, and still are, four cottages in the block. In my younger days Albert Penny, Mr. Field, Mr. Love and William Denton lived there. The damp coming off the water meadows used to play on people’s health. Mr. Penny used to get bronchial trouble quite often because of it.”
“I used to go up with Mr. Penny’s son, Frank, up into the allotments next to Chatley (what is now Hillside) to help him. One day he stuck his prong into my foot. He was pulling up sprout plants and he stabbed the prong in to get the roots out and it went into my foot. There were a few choice words when that happened but I was alright.”
“The house by the allotments was originally a store shed for Mr. Oliphant who lived in Chatley. That was a carriage store. Mr. Oliphant kept his horse and trap in there. I didn’t see Mr. Oliphant very much. He was of big build, he was a tubby sort of chap.”
“Mr. Field, who lived at 2 Park Cottages, was a postman. I can remember getting his hat up the side of my head because I used to poke fun at him. He was a big fat bloke and I used to torment him. I said to him ‘You won’t catch me.’ He was going to punch my head because I was a cheeky little devil. As I ran away his hat fell off. Postman’s hats were hard. They had like a ‘mudguard’ at the front and a ‘mudguard’ at the back (a peak and a neck flap), with a flat top. His hat fell off and I stopped running away, turned round and poked fun at him again. That made it a damn sight worse. Because, what he did was run up to his hat, in a rage, and he kicked it. He worked his boot at it and it came flying through the air. The flat top caught me in the side of the face. Wop! It nearly knocked my head off. I got another hiding off mother when I got home because my face was all red. I can remember that as plain as day. And I never said anything to Mr. Field after that.”
“Next to Mr. Field was Bill Symes’ father. He lived in No.3 Park Cottages. He was on for Marriage. Next to Mr. Symes was Mr. Denton, and he was the gardener at the Grange.”
“Nearly opposite Park Cottages, on the other side of the road, behind the wall, was Boreham Farm, where Mr. Bazley lived. There were nut trees behind the wall of Boreham Farm, and apple trees up in the garden.”
“Bazley had a big staff. Alf Reed worked for Bazley and he lived in one of the thatched cottages, down what is now the bottom end of Woodcock Road. Mr. Parham lived in the other one and he worked for Bazley too.”
“It was a big farm. I used to get threepence to help them break the ground up for crops in the springtime. That’s how I used to spend some of my spare time, doing things like that.”
“The road up from Boreham Crossroads, what is now the lower end of Woodcock Road, didn’t really come any farther than the farm. One track went to the farm, and the other was a lane way that came up through to Battlesbury. If you come out of what is now the fish and chip shop at Boreham Fields, there’s an old tree trunk in the grass. That tree was cut down not so long ago. That was in the boundary line from there across to the farm; the road used to come round there, from that tree and come out at Boreham Crossroads. One road went behind the thatched cottages and another went in front of it. The one behind went down through the farm, and the other went past and spread out and up to the railway bridge and over to Battlesbury.”
“Where St. George’s Close is now, at the back of the Dene, was a quarry in the woods. That was in use when I was a boy. They used to get chalk and stone out of there. I think that belonged to the Temple family. Anybody that wanted any stone would go in there and dig it out. They used to use the stone for paths. There used to be a stone path where our garden is now. Our garden is very stoney. There used to be like a bit of a railway track in the quarry with little dumper trucks on for pushing the stone out. They used to get black and white flint stone out of there.”
“There wasn’t much traffic going along Boreham Road when I was a boy. It was mostly timber carts from the Warminster Timber Company. Six or seven horses pulling big tree trunks on huge four-wheel wagons. They used to stop by the stream near Park Cottages and let the horses have a drink and a rest, ready to go up Boreham Hill towards Warminster. We had simple pleasures as kids, watching things like that.”
“Christmas was nothing special. We used to hang our stockings up and get an orange. That was all. I usually went to my granny’s at Bristol. I caught the train at Warminster. It was five bob return to Bristol, which in those days was a lot of money. Gran used to pay for me to go.”
“Mr. Marriage sold Boreham Mill about 1929/1930 to Marshman’s. Dad had been working at home, in the shed in the garden, mending sacks for Mr. Marriage but when Marshman’s took the Mill over, dad went back to the Mill to work for them.”
“There was a big tall building next to the Mill, on the little plot of ground between the road and the Mill. It was a big square building that they kept a lot of grain in. There was a high privet hedge all round it. That building was on the left as you drove in towards the Mill. It was painted green and there was a sign painted on there which said ‘Marshman’s Mashes.’ I can remember that.”
“Mr. Conway was in charge of the Mill and he also ran Marshman’s shop in Warminster Market Place. Their shop was next to the Anchor pub. Mr. Conway was very strict with regard the starting times for work. My dad worked for Marshman’s, at Boreham Mill, until my family moved from Smallbrook to Woodcock. I think that was about the same time as Marshman’s gave up the mill and their shop in the Market Place. The shop was later used by Welch & Arnoldi’s as a secondhand furniture shop. It’s now Thresher’s, selling wines and spirits.”
“I was 14 when I left the Avenue School. I started work the next day at the Chair Factory at Imber Road. Major John was in charge. It was absolutely terrible. How anybody could stick working there I don’t know. It was terrible. Old tin sheds, well, they weren’t sheds, they were shelters. All these machines were working away and they were dangerous; ever so dangerous. And the only heat there was, was off cuts from the bits of timber being burnt in old tar barrels and oil drums. They used to throw bits of wood in there and it used to smoke and stink.”
“All I did all day was carry chairs or parts of chairs to various machines around the factory. There was quite a few blokes working there. I got three shillings and threepence a week. I took that home to mother and she kept the lot. I worked from six o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night. It was a long day and it was terrible. I had to put up with it. I had no choice. The School Attendance Officer got me the job. I got it because dad had been injured in the War and the Chair Factory was something to do with the Ex-Serviceman’s Industries.”
“Major John was in and out of the factory all the time. He lived at Woodcock Road. The foreman lived in Thurleigh House, which is in the middle of Hudson & Martin’s yard now. Major John was also involved with the timber company and also the creosote and charcoal factory which was next door. A lot of men worked at these factories but times were tough. There were no unions then. You had the job and you did it, no matter what, or you got out.”
“I didn’t stick it very long. When I wasn’t carrying chairs from one part to the other, in all the wet and the mess, they put me on a flock machine. Big bales of waste cotton were delivered in and I had to put it through a machine which was terribly dangerous. It had like a big paddle wheel with rows of spikes, and as this paddle wheel came round it combed all this waste cotton and shook it up. There was all rubbish in it, bits of metal and all, from the cotton works and the weaving sheds. That’s what they stuffed the chairs with. I had to put it through the machine, to tear it apart and fluff it up, ready for the chair seats. It used to come in big bales, ten foot square or more, and it was my job to cut ’em apart and push it in this machine. There were no guards on the machine. There were no guards on the woodwork machines too, and the chaps would work those machines with all the saw blades and cutters uncovered. Water dripped through from the roof on to the machines and all the electrics. It was very crude, ever so rough. They would never get away with it today.”
“It got to the point where I wouldn’t go to work at the chair factory anymore. It was too dangerous. One Monday morning I went and knocked on the door of Jefferies’ glove factory at Station Road and asked if there was a job going. Miss Lil Prince, who worked there, gave me a job.”
“All the gloves were hand made at Jefferies’. Some were made in the factory and others were made by out-workers at home. There were a lot of girls working in the factory. For them, it was either work in a factory or go in domestic service. If you went in domestic service in those days you lived in and you didn’t come home. You were a skivvy for who ever owned the house you worked in. If a maid had an afternoon off she had to be back in the house by four o’clock to get the tea for the people. Oh yes. That’s how it was. Girls would go to a factory to work or they went into domestic service. If you didn’t work you didn’t get any money, and if you didn’t have any money you didn’t eat. If you got the sack, well woe betide you, because you didn’t get any dole like today.”
“I worked behind the cutters in the factory, getting the leather ready. The skins of leather were put into wet sacks and rolled up. It was then left for a time, while the cutter is working on the previous skin. The cutters worked at big square benches and they wouldn’t leave the benches. They would work there, all the time, cutting the leather with shears. They would shout across to me and another chap (a chap called Prince, who I think was from Crockerton) when they wanted the next skins. We dipped the sacks into a big tub of water out the back. We’d get it really soaking and then we’d squeeze it out, and we’d put the skin in the sack ready for cutting. They would cut the tranks, the fourchettes and the quirks out of this leather, but while they were doing that the next piece of leather, the next skin, was soaking, ready to be used. It used to cut better when it was damp. They were always one skin of leather ahead.”
“The trank is the front and the back of the glove together. They got the leather and stretched it out and cut round a pattern. The pattern was made of some kind of cardboard and hardboard stuff. They laid that out on the leather and cut out as many as they could from each piece of leather, being as economical as they could, but missing any flaws in the leather. The fronts and backs were then paired up so they both matched. You then had to cut the fourchettes and the quirks out of what was left over. The fourchettes are the pieces that make the sides of the fingers. They were the same length for any finger. They were stitched round. The quirks are the bits where the base of the fingers meet, and that was like little diamond shaped pieces. The gloves were lined. It was all done on piecework. Everything in the factory was paid for by piecework.”
“After a while my job changed, because I cycled round, taking all the out-work round to Westbury and other places on a bike. I got fourpence a mile and I did 12 to 14 miles a day. The bike I used had been in a shed for about ten years. I saw it in the shed and I asked Mr. Jefferies if I could use it and he agreed that I could. I had to do it up first. It was as rusty as a horseshoe and I had to sort the tyres out. He charged me about a pound for the bike. I had to pay for the bike and I couldn’t pay for it straight off, so Mr. Jefferies deducted so much from my wages over a period of time. Although I was using the bike to do work for him, he didn’t let me use it free, I had to pay for it! And there was Alfie Jefferies and his brothers, who owned the factories, getting about in their big Daimlers. Still, they were the bosses and we were the workers. We knew our place and we just got on with it. Same as if you got a rap on the knuckles for doing something wrong, so what? You couldn’t do anything about it. You just carried on. We didn’t think about it being them and us. What was the point? We had no way of getting to their position, so we didn’t think about it; we just earned what we could so that we could live within our means. That’s how it was.”
“The bike eventually fell apart and then I used my own bike which I got after I had been at Jefferies’ a while. I had bought a bike for £4 19 shillings and sixpence. I had saved up for ages and my gran had helped me. I bought the bike from Mr. Watts, who had a shop in Bristol. He had a little tiny shop which sold radios and bikes and anything he could make a bob or two on. It was only just down the road from my granny’s house. My aunty used to work in a dairy in Lower Shirehampton and the shop was just across the road from there. It was in West Town Lane, on the corner of West Town Lane and Avonmouth.”
“The man delivered the bike and he went back to Bristol. He got home sooner than expected and caught his wife in bed with another man, one of their neighbours. The bike man did no more than get in his car and go to Avonmouth, on the Hallen Road, and he set fire to himself in his car. He committed suicide and that was the end of him.”
“I’d go, on the bike, to Westbury, Dilton Marsh, Upton Scudamore, and Norton Bavant, taking the parcels out. And I’d go to Warminster Common, to Mrs. Holton at South Street. There was five dozen gloves tied up in a bundle. Wrapped up in brown paper. They used to put the names and addresses on and I’d deliver them to the houses. Then I’d pick up what I’d delivered a couple of days before.”
“It wasn’t a bad job. It was quite a change after the chair factory. Then they started standing people off. The Depression was on and they started laying people off. Things got tough.”
“Mr. Jefferies had factories in Warminster, Westbury, Midsomer Norton, Radstock and Southampton. He used to go round in a Daimler car. Chauffeur driven. Les Mizen was one of the chauffeurs. Eddie Garrett was another. Alfie Jefferies used to go round all the factories checking up on things. He lived at Upton Lovell and his garden backed on to the river Wylye.”
“When we were on short time, with hardly any work, we had to go to Upton Lovell. We were taken out in a car or a van and dumped there and we had to clean out the river Wylye, because Mr. Jefferies used to fish his stretch. He’d sit there fishing or watching the ducks. We had to clean the weed and the rubbish out of it. We had to take our clothes off, strip off our bottom half and wade out there and do that. We had no choice. You either did that or tried to get some dole and there wasn’t much hope of that. I was only at the Glove Factory for about a year, but it seems longer than that, before I went to Bristol.”
“My sisters and I had started growing up and the cottage was too small for us all at Smallbrook Lane, so I was moved from Smallbrook Lane to Bristol to live with my grandparents at 36 The Beanacre, Lower Shirehampton. That was a different life there.”
“I went to work on the docks at Bristol, doing what they called strapping. You’d hold up your union card and took what jobs came along. Maybe carting bananas about or carrying coffee beans and that was a terrible job. That was very hard work. I’ve never worked so hard in all my life. It wasn’t full time. If work was going, you took what was available, and when there wasn’t any work you waited about for something to happen.”
“Then I worked on the railway in the dockyard, doing number taking and stock taking. All the wagons used to come into the old dock and we used to sort them out. There were ten different tracks. They used to come from all round the area into Avonmouth. Some were loaded with goods and some were empty. We were responsible for the transfers. They used to shunt them on different tracks, and off they would go to different parts of the country. There were tankers for the Shellmex Oil Company. All the labels had to be taken off and logged and new labels done. All the chits had to be seen to. I did that for a long time, until I had to go for a medical and I failed on account of my eyesight, so I had to pack that in.”
“I had been on nights and I’d go home and have a bit of a sleep but later on in the day I used to either walk up to the centre of Bristol and ride back on the bus, or I’d ride in on the bus and walk home to Shirehampton, which was about four miles, because I couldn’t afford the bus fare both ways. One day I came back on the bus and I was sat there, downstairs. I was watching the conductor and I thought I don’t know but I could do that job; that looks all right. So when I had to finish on the railway I went down to the bus depot at Avonmouth and asked if there was a job as a conductor. I put on a collar and tie and made myself look smart. They said ‘Yes, there is a job, come back in the morning and see us.’ So I went back the next day and saw the man. He said ‘Where did you say you come from.’ I said ‘Warminster.’ He said ‘I thought you said that.’ He said ‘There’s a job going at Warminster, would you like to take it?’ I said ‘Yes.’ So, he rang up and got the information. He said ‘Go to Bath and see the foreman and the chief inspector, they’ll give you the gen.’ Warminster came under Bath Depot. That was the Bath Tramways. It was originally called the Bristol Tramways And Carriage Company but Bath Tramways was part of the same company.”
“I came back to Warminster to work about 1937, 1938. My family had got a house at Woodcock, next to John Wallis Titt’s. They moved into one of the Council houses when they were first put up. They put up twelve houses. My family moved into the fourth one down from John Wallis Titt’s. That was 38 Woodcock but it’s known as 38 Woodcock Road now.”
“It’s funny but when I was a nipper and my family was living at Smallbrook Lane, a gipsy used to come round the doors, telling fortunes. Her name was Gipsy Sheane. I think she came from Upton Scudamore. They had tents and caravans in a field out there. She used to come regularly to our place at Boreham. She used to tell us all what was going happen. She told my mother a brand new house would be built and how mother would have first choice on this house. That came true, because when the Council built the new houses at Woodcock my mother had first choice on which one she wanted. She chose 38 Woodcock.”
“After leaving Marshman’s, at Boreham Mill, my dad was on the dole for nine and a half years, until about 1947 and then he got a job with the D.C.R.E. He was an attendant at Boreham Camp and he also worked at the Barracks. Just before you go into the main entrance of the Barracks was a little wooden hut, and he was there, looking after the summer camps. He had to go round, tidying up, and making sure no one squatted in any of the buildings. There were lots of sheds and the Army didn’t want people getting into them.”
“Although I had got the job on the buses at Warminster, I didn’t move back in with the family at 38 Woodcock until later. I still lived with my granny in Bristol and I rode on my bike to Warminster and back each day. It took about two and a half or three hours to ride to Warminster in the morning. We started work at 6.25, so I had to leave Bristol about quarter to four in the morning. I never used to see a soul on the way. I went via Midford, so it was all up hill and down dale.”
“The bus depot was in Nutt’s Yard. The main entrance to Jefferies Glove Factory was off Station Road, up a drive way, with Nutt’s Printing Works on the left. That’s Warminster Press today. You went up that drive. On the right hand side was a galvanised fence, behind which was Birds And Bryer Ash’s coal yard. Up the end of the drive, at the back of the coal yard, was a rank of big high garages. They were all owned by Jefferies. The first three were used for buses. One was a bus belonging to J. Button of East Street. The other two were buses belonging to Bath Tramways. When I started they only had one bus but later on they got another one. The next garage was a shed for Wheeler’s flowerpots. That’s where they kept all their stone pots. The next one was used by Jefferies’ carpenter, Mr. Roberts. He used to make the racks and the packing cases for the Glove Factory. He also made the benches for the glove cutters to work on. The next garages were Major John’s, who had the Timber Company. He had two cars and he used to keep them there. The next three garages were bus garages used by Cornelius Brothers. That was a real hive of activity there but it’s all gone now.”
“Harry Wait, who lived in Melrose, at the High Street, a few doors up from where Woolworths is now, was the bus driver. Later on he lived at George Street. He was the brother-in-law of Dick Cornelius who owned the coaches. When I started on the buses there was me, Harry Wait, Stan Weston (another driver) from Devizes, and Ray Stevens from Corsley was the other conductor. There was one bus and four staff (two drivers and two conductors). I had to belong to a union or they wouldn’t take me on, so I became a member of the Transport And General Workers Union.”
“I had to go to Bath and get kitted out with my uniform and collect a money bag and a sling. I had an hour in the office, being told how to issue the tickets, how to make the sheets out and how to do the waybills. Then I had a day’s training before starting. If you got in a mess about anything you had to ask the driver. He helped you sort it out.”
“My first route was Warminster to Frome and back, on the hour, every hour. That was No.54 Service. We started in the morning at 6.25. As I said I had to ride my bike from Bristol in the mornings. The thing that used to get me was, in the winter time, when the weather was bad, you’d get soaked if it was raining. You were soaked before you started work on the bus. There was no stove to get dry in front of, at the Depot. There was nothing at all. You just had to let the wet sweat out of you while you were working. That’s why I’ve got rheumatism now. I’ve got it terrible in my knees. In those days you never thought anything about it.”
“Before we took the bus out we had to clean it. There was no cleaner. The driver Harry Wait and I were the cleaners. We had to brush the bus out. We had to work Sundays as well but on Sundays we started later, we didn’t start until quarter to two. So, we gave the bus a good clean on Sunday mornings.”
“The bus came out of the Depot and went up to the Barracks. We used to drive into the coalyard at the Barracks and turn round in there. Then we’d come back down the road and stop at the sentry box, opposite the camp hospital. That was our first stop. After a short time we had to drop the troops off outside the barracks, then the barrier would be lifted and we would go round in front of the guard room and turn round in the triangle and come back out again, because it was too dangerous to back out. There was a lot of traffic about. We stopped near the Naafi and then the bus came down Imber Road, past the Married Quarters, to the next stop by the old milepost outside Firbank Crescent. The next stop was outside the Drill Hall. Then we came down East Street and stopped in the Market Place, outside Talbot’s Cafe.”
“The next stop was at George Street, then the Obelisk and then outside the Cock Inn at West Street. Then we stopped at Bugley Farm, Folly Lane, Park Gates, Upper Whitbourne, Sinnels Lane which was down in the dip where you can turn left to go to Temple, then Corsley Corner and then Corsley Heath.”
“There were two stops at Corsley Heath when we first started. They were the Reading Room and the Royal Oak. They’re near enough right next to one another but these old country folk wouldn’t walk any further than they had to. Mind, you had a long enough walk if you lived in Corsley to get to either of those stops, particularly if you had to walk up the hill from Whitbourne Moor. In the finish we had just the one stop, in between the Reading Room and the Royal Oak. The next stop was at the White Hart, at Lane End.”
“Then we stopped at Rodden Down, you went down the dip and over the little bridge and up the other side, to the corner by the turning to Friggle Street. There’s a few houses there. The next stop was by the fork in the road, just before you went over the river into Frome. Then we stopped at Wallbridge, by the cafe, just past the entrance to the Station, where there’s a petrol garage now. The next stop was at the top of Bath Street. Then we went down into the Market Place. We went up North Parade and turned round in the turning for Welshmill. Then we came back to Frome Market for the return journey.”
“Harry Wait, when he was the driver, didn’t bother about going up to the top of North Parade to turn around. He used to quickly drive into Cork Street by the Angel pub in the Market Place. He used to dive into there and back out but that was illegal really. He’d say “Go in and order two drinks.” I’d get the drinks while he was turning the bus round. We’d have a drink before setting off back to Warminster.”
“The buses were changed over, every night, at five past ten, at Frome. They would bring out a clean bus from Bath, filled up with fuel, and we’d have that for the next day. And then it was swapped again at night. The buses were green and cream.”
“The fare from Warminster to Frome was tenpence single or one and six return. There were a lot of tuppeny, threepenny and fourpenny fares. One old duck from Corsley used to do washing for the Portway House Hotel at Frome. Her name was Eva Slade and she lived between Lane End and Geyes Hill, in what is now the Forester’s House for the Longleat Estate. She used to come out with a basket of washing she’d done and give me threepence to take it to the Portway House Hotel and bring back a basket of dirty washing for her to do. I had to drop it off in the doorway of the White Hart at Lane End. The doorway faced out on to the road. It’s all been altered now. The landlord of the White Hart was Reg Joynt and he let us do that. Mind, if we left anything on the side of the road it would be there for days. No one thought about stealing that sort of thing.”
“I’ll tell you a story about the late Lord Bath (6th Marquis), the one who died a couple of years ago. His sons used to go to the Grammar School at Church Street. They’d get on the bus at Corsley, wearing their red caps, and they’d travel in. One day I told them off for messing about on the bus. I gave one of them a clout. That was the one who was Lord Weymouth then, but he’s the present Lord Bath now. The old Lord Bath came and saw me. He said ‘Why did you hit my son. What did he do?’ I told him exactly what happened. I said ‘I can’t have any messing about on the bus because it’s packed with passengers and some people have to stand up.’ Lord Bath gave his son, Alexander, the one who is Lord Bath now, a clout in front of everyone on the bus. He said ‘I don’t think you will have any more trouble now, but if you do let me know.’ Those boys were as good as gold after that.”
“The Bath family lived at Sturford Mead then. I used to have to take some fish out on the bus, from Fishy Vallis’ shop at George Street, to Sturford Mead House, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d park the bus on the road outside and dash into the garden with this fish. I’d leave it, as arranged, in between the roots of a big beech tree just up the drive. The maid used to come out about half past ten and collect it from there. One day she couldn’t find the fish. It had gone. When I came back through on the bus the maid was waiting to see me. She wanted to know where the fish was. It transpired that the next door neighbour had seen me putting the fish in the roots of the tree and she pinched it. She got into trouble over that.”
“Of course I got to know most of the passengers. After a while I knew who was going to get on where and where they would get off. You could tell what day it was by what passengers you had. I got to know who they were and what they did. We heard everybody’s news from who was expecting a baby to who wasn’t. Sometimes, if someone did something unusual by getting off at a different stop, it used to make you wonder. You’d get thinking why did they get off there and I wonder if his wife knows he’s getting off here? That sort of thing. If you played along with the passengers and had a joke with them, you got on alright. If you tried to boss them or show your authority then that didn’t wear with the passengers. In the early days no one ever tried dodging paying their fare but in the later years, more recently, people used to try it on. If it was Wednesday, which was Frome Market Day, the bus would get packed but people took it for granted I would let them on. They’d say ‘It’s alright, Phil’s on, he’ll let us on.’ If it was another conductor they’d say ‘Oh, it’s not Phil, no chance of squeezing on there.’ When people heard I was getting married, we got hundreds of gifts from passengers who knew me. They were little gifts, not big ones, but hundreds of people gave us things.”
“Things were alright during the Second World War. There was rationing but we never went without. The black-out was on and we had to keep the curtains drawn at night but that was no hardship. I was made an A.R.P. street leader for the area around the Council houses at Woodcock. I was in charge but I was never home and there was no deputy. I was supposed to stand outside John Wallis Titt’s and wait for something to happen. There was no training. No one told me what I had to do in the event of a bomb dropping. I just had to look intelligent! There weren’t many men about, well, only a few old ones and they wouldn’t have been able to run fast enough if they had seen or heard a bomb coming. I didn’t have any kit. I didn’t even have a tin hat. Nothing at all. Not even a band to go on my arm to say I was an A.R.P. official. As it happened, Warminster didn’t get any bombs. One dropped out Corsley and one dropped down the Leg And Stocking somewhere. That’s all.”
“At one period I came off the Bath Tramways because when the Second World War was on I was directed by an essential works order to work for the Wilts & Dorset bus company. What happened was, Bill Martin who worked for the Wilts & Dorset joined the R.A.F. I was directed to Salisbury to do his work. Stan Weston’s wife, Stella, did my job on the Bath Tramways and when she left to have her son David they got a girl from Sutton Veny to do the job. That was Kath Goddard. I had failed my medical for the Army. So I worked on the Wilts & Dorset for two years while Bill Martin did his National Service. I worked on the Trowbridge to Salisbury route. That was No.24 Service. The Wilts & Dorset parked their buses in Button’s Yard at East Street. There were two double-deckers and a single-decker. They were fuelled at Endless Street in Salisbury. I suppose there were about eight in the crew.”
“When I finished my stint with the Wilts & Dorset I started again with the Bath Tramways and that’s when I met my wife to be. The first week back I met her. Her name was Hilda Maud Beckett and she was from London. She was a dressmaker and she worked in the West End, doing court dressmaking. Due to the bombing she went to work closer to her home, for C & A at Islington. Her home had got bombed out and she had gone to live with her sister for a while. Then she joined the Women’s Land Army. She was working on a farm at Corsley and lodging with Jack Wright, down the bottom of the hollow behind the Reading Room. I met her when she got on the bus to come into Warminster. The bus was at Park Gates, by Mrs. Ham’s bungalow, when I first spoke to Hilda. I said ‘Hello,’ and I saw her a few more times on the bus and then I asked her out.”
“The first time we went out we went to an Ensa show at Crabtree on the Longleat Estate. That was an R.A.F. base. Hilda had changed out of her uniform into civvies but I turned up in my bus conductor’s uniform. I said ‘I hope you don’t mind me being in my uniform but you can get into the show for free if you’re in uniform!’ It cost sixpence to get Hilda in. She said ‘Why didn’t you tell me, I could have come in my uniform and got in for nothing.’ The show was very good. It was put on by some Polish people but they spoke very good English. They did a few turns. One of the huts was used for the show. Another hut was done up as a church. I’d heard about this show from the people on the bus. There were loads of people there watching the show. They had walked in from all over the place to see it. That was the first thing we went to. Then we didn’t go anywhere for months until we went to a pantomime in Bath. We usually went Dutch, I paid for myself and Hilda paid for herself. Neither of us had much money.”
“Hilda and I decided to get engaged. We went up to London to see her sister. I didn’t see her mother until we were married. Her mother and father had separated, so I didn’t have to see the old man. His name was Alexander Robert Beckett. I never met him. Hilda’s mother was as good as gold. She was a sweet old soul. Hilda was 23. Hilda said to her mother something about whether she was old enough to be married or not. Her mother said ‘The thing is, if you’re going to get married, get married and make the most of it but don’t forget it’s your decision.’ As for the facts of life we didn’t know any. We learned that as we went along.”
“That was the first time I’d been to London. It was the 22nd of May 1943. I couldn’t get over how high the buildings where. The houses there used to be private houses for the elite but they were split into flats. We got our engagement ring in London, from Triggs at Clapton in East London. They’re not there now. The bloke tried to do us out of ten shillings. He said the ring was £10 ten shillings. That was a heck of a lot of money. We said ‘Yes.’ The little price ticket dropped off the ring on to the floor. Hilda could see it, through the glass cabinet, on the floor. It said £10. Hilda asked him to check the label. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
“About 18 months after meeting we got married at St. John’s Church, Boreham. That was on 16th December 1944. The vicar who married us was the Reverend Walters. Hilda was working for Farmer Whittle then at Princecroft Farm (which is built on now) and she had been living at Mrs. Summers’ at Pound Street. It was about the third house up, on the right hand side, not far from Molly Butts’ shop. Hilda was staying at my parents’ place, at 38 Woodcock, when we got married.”
“We got our wedding ring from a shop in Frome. Hilda borrowed a wedding dress. She used to lodge in Dilton Marsh, in a place opposite the church, when she first came to Wiltshire. The lady she lodged with had a son who got married just before we did. His bride loaned Hilda her wedding dress and we gave it back to her afterwards. We had a white wedding. I had a suit, a Burton’s 50 bob suit and that was a good one. A suit lasted a lifetime in those days because I was wearing my bus conductor’s uniform most of the time. The weather was terrible on the day. It rained like the hammers of hell up until the time we came out of the church. Prior to going to church Hilda spent the morning on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor at Upton House, Victoria Road, where we were going to live. My best man was my brother-in-law, Harold Midcalfe. The Wiltshire Times, from Trowbridge, took the wedding photos. We had two pictures taken outside the church, on the grass, at the west end.”
“We had a reception afterwards at the Bath Arms, in the Market Place, with just a few friends and family present. You could only have your reception at the Bath Arms if you had been a drinker at the Bath Arms. We didn’t drink at the Bath Arms, we didn’t drink beer anywhere, but George Whittle, who Hilda had worked for on the farm, he did and he got it for us. So, we got our reception in his name. George Whittle organised it all and we paid for it. The wedding breakfast came to £7. The whole thing came to £10 15 shillings. That was three weeks’ wages. What food we didn’t eat there we brought home with us. Everything was rationed. We brought it home in the silver dishes. I think the wedding cake came from Butcher’s at Silver Street. He had a bakery down there. We went back to my mother’s house, at Woodcock, and then we walked from there up to Upton House. It poured with rain and we got absolutely soaked through.”
“We didn’t have a honeymoon. We just had some time off work. The day after the wedding we went to Northwich to stay with Hilda’s mother. She had come down to Warminster with Hilda’s sister for the wedding and they had got lodgings for the time they were here. We went up to Northwich with my mother-in-law, Hilda’s sister Ethel and her boyfriend Harry (they weren’t married then). The place we stayed at had been a bakery at one time. There were only two rooms there and we were all penned in together. Hilda, Ethel, and their mum, slept in one bed. There was a board up in the attic. So we got that down and put some blankets and cushions on there, and that’s where I slept with Harry. That was our honeymoon! The room I slept in with Harry was the one that had the old baker’s oven in it. We spent two or three nights like that and then we came back to Warminster.”
“With Mrs. Smith gone we had to get out. Mr. Jones moved out to a hotel. We had been thinking about moving, beforehand, and already had it in mind to take a cottage at Corsley. We had seen a farmer, Mr. White, out Corsley and he said we could rent Rose Cottage at Leigh’s Green if we wanted to. Hilda was expecting and there wouldn’t have been enough room at Upton House. So, we went up Button’s Yard, hired a lorry and moved our stuff from Upton House out to Corsley. Harry Ball, who worked for Button’s, was the driver, and his brother, Percy Ball, was his assistant. The lane was narrow outside the cottage and they couldn’t park right outside, so they had to park up the road a little way in a bit of a lay-by. They had to carry the furniture from there. Harry drove the van and did all the heavy lifting. Percy only carried the small stuff, but he was always there first whenever we brewed up a cup of tea. We noticed that.”
“We set up home at Upton House at Victoria Road. It was an old farmhouse and it was a fairly big place. Along the floor of one of the passageways was a groove where they used to roll milkchurns along years ago. The house was built of brick and stone and had a slate roof. It was two storeys and the rooms were high. There was an old well out the back with a pump. There was no garden, just a bit of a yard with a couple of garages. Davis and Warren demolished the house, after we left, to make way for their garage business. The house was about where the shop and showrooms of the Northfield Toyota Garage are now.”
“Upton House was owned by a man in Frome, who had a jeweller’s shop there. It was a little shop up one of the side streets. King Street, I think but I’m not sure. He let Upton House to a Mrs. Smith and her daughter Queenie. They said we could rent two rooms. So, we had one room downstairs and one room upstairs. We paid Mrs. Smith our rent and she passed it on to the owner in Frome. After we had been there a while Mrs. Smith took in another tenant, a Mr. Jones, and he was a printer. He was the owner of Nutt’s Printing Works at Station Road. Mr. Jones took that over from Mr. Nutt but he traded in the old name. Mr. Jones rented a room at Upton House. We all shared the kitchen. Mr. Jones and us were both paying rent to Mrs. Smith. We were at Upton House about a year. We got up one morning, I went to work and Hilda went into town. When she came back she found Mr. Jones’ things were on the front doorstep. She hadn’t been in the house long when Mr. Jones came in. He wanted to know why his stuff was on the step but Hilda didn’t know. When Mr. Jones and Hilda looked for Mrs. Smith they soon realised she had gone. She had dumped Mr. Jones’ things on the step. She had left with Queenie and gone away, somewhere near Brighton, and they opened up a boarding house.”
“It was just as well that we had the offer of that cottage at Leigh’s Green, otherwise God knows what we would have done. It was an old place. There was nothing out there, no electricity or no gas. It was one up-one down and all very basic.”
“I used to finish work late at night and then I’d have to ride home on my bike to Corsley. I took home the money off the bus with me in a little canvas bag. I’ve still got one of the old bags. I couldn’t cycle up Half Mile, between Bugley and Park Gates, so I’d get off and push the bike up there. I’d pass the soldiers who had missed the bus as we had come through earlier. They would be staggering along the road, having had a few drinks, and they’d shout ‘Goodnight’ to me as I passed them. Little did they know I was the conductor of the bus they’d missed earlier. No one thought of robbing me with that money.”
“I’d count the money when I got home. It was nearly all pennies and halfpennies. I’d fill out a bank slip for paying it in. There were two slips. One went to the bank and the other went to the bus company at Bath. You had a book of bank slips. The amount of money could vary from day to day. Wednesdays was Frome Market Day and a lot of people would travel on the bus, so we’d take a lot of money that day. Then you’d get some Sundays when it would be pouring down with rain and not many people would venture out, and the takings would be down. I took the money into Warminster the next day and paid it into Barclays Bank. The Bank didn’t open until ten o’clock. So I’d knock on the door at half past nine and they’d open it and take the bag in. They’d give us an empty bag back. Then we’d take the ten to ten bus off to Frome.”
“The cottage at Corsley wasn’t very satisfactory. The downstairs ceiling was the upstairs floor. We had an old-fashioned iron bed with brass knobs on. One night we went upstairs to go to bed and we were just stood there, we hadn’t even got in bed, and suddenly a leg of the bed disappeared through the floor. We had to scrabble around out in the garden to find some bits of wood and bricks to shore up the hole in the floor. We couldn’t do much for giggling. The next day we went and saw Mr. White but he said he wasn’t going to do anything to the cottage so we moved out and squatted in one of the huts at Boreham Camp in Warminster.”
“We had heard on the grapevine that the huts at Boreham Camp were empty. The Americans had been there during the War but they had gone. Two or three people had already squatted and we thought we would join them. We hired a lorry from Button’s and moved. My father was supposed to be the camp attendant, keeping the squatters out. We waited up the road until we saw him going off somewhere and then we dived in there and got a hut. We were there quite a while before he discovered us. He thought we were still out Corsley. He saw red when he found out. He said ‘You’ll get me the sack, doing this.’
“We took a hut over the back, not far from the railway, about where the bottom end of the little rifle and taining range is now, just east of Battlesbury Bridge. The hut was number 105. There were six huts just there. Sylvia Maitland, that’s Mrs. John Eyles, was one of our neighbours there. And the Whites and the Hurrells also lived near us.”
“The other side of the railway line was a little circle of willow trees. There was a sewage farm there. There was a little pump house there with some plant in. A little stream ran down from the top end of Imber Road to there, it went under the railway line and on through Temple’s wood. The stream is still there. The sewage ran down the stream to the pump house. It was a bit unsavoury.”
“Bill Edgington used to clean out the sewage and he used to come over to talk to us. He lived in a cottage in Bishopstrow, nearly opposite Mrs. Hallett’s shop. It must have been about the fourth or fifth house along on the right hand side as you go towards Sutton Veny Common.”
“We really had nothing to begin with. There was a tortoise stove in the middle of the hut. There were what we called the elephant huts, near what had been the prisoner of war camp. Those elephant huts had been used for storage sheds. They were big tall huts made of concrete and covered over with cork and tar. We used to get the wood and cork off them and carry it back to our hut to burn in the stove. The stove and the chimney used to get red hot.”
“The prisoner of war camp was empty; the prisoners had gone but some of the huts, six or eight, were still there. A lot had gone. The fence around it was about six feet high, that’s all. It wasn’t a high security place. The prisoners used to help out on the farms and they were trusted. They were Germans and Italians but they had gone by the time we moved in to Boreham Camp.”
“We used to spend most of our spare time over at what had been the old coal yard at the camp. We’d dig the ground up because there was coal buried there. Where the lorries used to back into the coalyard they would spill coal and that had got churned into the ground by the wheels. Hilda would take a pushchair over and we’d fill some sacks and push them back to the hut on the pushchair. Lots of people got there scavenging a bit of coal.”
“We had a standpipe outside the hut, which Sylvia and us shared. There were no proper toilets. We had an Elsan toilet, and we had a tilly lamp for lighting.”
“We had a standpipe outside the hut, which Sylvia and us shared. There were no proper toilets. We had an Elsan toilet, and we had a tilly lamp for lighting.”
“The huts down by the line had to be knocked down. By that time the Council had taken the huts over. They started charging rents and were then responsible for supplying electric and water. We didn’t have any, so we had to move.”
“We moved to number 58, near where the Naafi was. It had been the living quarters for the Naafi. The person who had lived in that one before us had kept a goat. When we opened the door we nearly got blown backwards by the smell. Hilda spent nearly every day scrubbing the floors to get rid of the smell of the goat. It was a big place with lots of little compartments. At the end of our hut was a room big enough to put four buses in easily. It had been the dining hall of the Naafi. We didn’t do anything with it, we couldn’t afford to.”
“I built a run and we kept some chickens. One night I went out to shut the chickens in their shed and a fox jumped down off the roof of the shed. He jumped onto my back as I bent over to shut the door. He scrabbled over my back and ran away. That gave me a fright.”
“We had a tap outside the hut for our water. We had a toilet and a range. We had to take our rubbish up to the top road and the dustcart used to come and pick it up. We had electric. The cost of the electric was included in the rent. We paid our rent, and I think that was about ten shillings, at the Council Offices in town. The Offices were somewhere near where the traffic lights are today, opposite the turning for Weymouth Street.”
“We went into town to do our shopping. Hilda shopped at Walker’s Stores. Some tradesmen came round the camp delivering. Cocky Robbins, from Silver Street, came round with a horse and cart, selling fruit and vegetables. The milkman was Mr. Ledbury, from Corsley. He came round drunk one day and hitched his foot up in some wire. He tripped over and all the money fell out into the grass. Birds And Bryer Ash delivered coal. We used to buy paraffin, in our gallon can, from Stiles’ or Corden’s.”
“It was fun living in the huts. Our neighbours, when we lived at No.58, were Mrs. Prince, Mr. and Mrs. Stan Buck with their two children, Frances Earney, Mrs. Lewis, and the Barnetts. May Prince was an Irish woman, with a broad Irish accent. She later went up Princecroft way to live but she’s dead now. She used to push a bicycle about. Her daughter lives at Boreham Field now.”
“My sister Jo lived at Boreham Camp as well, opposite Arnoldi’s. Mrs. Arnoldi lived at Boreham Camp, with all us squatters. Her husband was out of the R.A.F. Mr. and Mrs. Arnoldi moved to Marshman’s old shop in the Market Place and started a furniture shop. She’s living now, in Mrs. Bowie’s old house, at Rock Lane.”
“The other side of the Camp were Bazley’s fields going up to Battlesbury and next to him was Gauntlett’s land. There used to be two steam engines ploughing Gauntlett’s fields. One engine would get each side of the field and drag the plough across, backwards and forwards, with a cable.”
“We were the first to leave Boreham Camp for Boreham Fields. That was built in 1951. That had been one of Bazley’s fields. Woodcock Road used to finish at the Council Houses by John Wallis Titt’s. From there down was two rows of elm trees with a footpath in between. Bazleys had the fields on one side (the south side) and Silcox’s had the fields on the other side. There was a five-bar gate where the entrance to the Sports Centre road is now. That was the end of the pathway. Beyond that was just fields with a footpath and a cart track going in a straight line to Temple’s wood. That track was in a dead straight line. You could walk down there but there were five-bar gates across it every so often.”
“Holdoways, of Westbury, built Boreham Fields. They were Woolaway pre-fabs which they bolted together and they were up in a couple of weeks. We moved into No.90. We were offered the house on the end, No.89, but that was only a two-bedroom house. We needed a three-bedroom house. We’d already asked for a three-bedroom house, because we had mother-in-law with us. She had been living with us at Boreham Camp. So, we moved into the one next door. That was the show house and it was a right old mess where people had been in and out.”
“We had started a family before we moved out of Boreham Camp. We had two children. Jean was five. She was born in January 1946. Raymond was a year old. He was born in September 1950. They were both born at Trowbridge Hospital. We didn’t get any family allowance for Jean but we did get a bit for Raymond towards the end. It wasn’t a lot, about five shillings. Although she was the oldest, Jean can’t remember much about Boreham Camp but Raymond can.”
“Raymond now works for Cuprinol in Frome but he used to be a carpenter for Butcher’s. He worked for himself for a little while and then he went up to Scotland to work for George Sassoon. He stayed at Mull for a couple of years. We went up to see him. It was a beautiful place. When we got there he was digging up potatoes in a field of stones. When we wanted to have a bath we had to use a bath in the middle of one of the rooms. The water came down from the mountain stream and had all brown leaves and bits of stick in it. There was a Petter engine for providing the electricity. The cottage door was always open. Outside were sheep and deer wandering about. It was a wonderful place. The landscape was beautiful. It was a lovely house. You could look out the window and see the lake. There was a telephone box up the road and someone put beautiful flowers in that telephone box every day, and a candle in a candlestick. One of the women did that. She dusted it and wiped the windows clean. There were only about five people living nearby. Mr. Sassoon’s mother used to live up there. Raymond went up there to modernise the kitchen and repair things. He put a sink unit in and all that sort of thing.”
“After that, Raymond worked on Lundy Island for a couple of years. That was another lovely place. He now does carpentry for Cuprinol. They make different panels and they treat them with wood preservative and leave them at different places, like up on Snowdon, for six months or so, to see what happens to them. That’s how they’re tested.”
“Jean worked for the Gateway supermarket in Warminster for a few years. She later worked for Cowles the chemist until she married Mr. Bob Taylor. He was a carpenter for Butcher’s the builders. He’s now a prison officer and lives in Bristol.”
“I became a bus driver and I did driving for a few years. That was driving a single decker. The staff, in my latter years on the buses, included Stan Bridewell, Mr. Bryant from Westleigh, Georgie West, Stan Weston, Harry Wait, Percy Bundy, and Jock Wilson. Others came and went. There was ‘Tich’ Isaacs. He was partly deaf and he later went bus driving and was living in Devizes. Alec Corp was another conductor. He was a London bus driver but he came down here to get away from London. He gave up driving and became a conductor. He was a good lad. His son, Bernard, has got his own woodworking business at Woodcock Trading Estate now.”
“When the buses used to park up by Warminster Railway Station I used to see Bill Sloper up there with his taxi. He used to pick up passengers when they came out of the Station. He had a Humber car. He never ever polished it, not from the day he got it new, and it had plenty of dents in it where he hit things. Bill Sloper was very casual about people paying their fares. If he saw a passenger fumbling about with his wallet or her purse, he would say ‘Oh, that’s alright, pay me when you see me next time,’ and by the next time it was all forgotten. If everyone had paid him he would have been a very rich man by the time he retired. He was a good man. I used to see him driving up Station Road, dawdling up the middle of the road, waving to everyone he saw and shouting ‘Hello Sir,’ or ‘Hello Missus,’ to them. He was very popular.”
“About 1952, Dick Cornelius bought a brand new Austin car. He was going to run it as a taxi. I went up to Birmingham to collect this car for him, from the Austin works. I can remember the number of that car, it was OPD 411. I can remember that as plain as day. Dick asked me to help out with a bit of taxi driving in my spare time.”
“The first job we had to do with the car was Glyniss Silcox’s wedding. That was the 30th of July 1952. While I was driving her and her husband John Whitfield from St. John’s Church to the Town Hall, where they were going to have their reception, both back tyres on the car went flat. They were the wrong size tyres and they weren’t strong enough for carrying loads. I had to drive the car, with the two flat tyres, down to the Motor Company at George Street, to get them pumped up. Then I returned to the Town Hall and took the wedding couple back to Chestnut View, the bungalow where the Silcox family lived, at Woodcock. The tyres wouldn’t stay up. Dick had the tyres changed. He suggested to me that I have the car for a week, to run it about, to get it settled in. So I took the family on holiday to Devon. Hilda’s mum came with us. We went to different places in Devon like Torquay and Brixham.”
“I did a fair bit of taxi driving for Dick Cornelius and I used to help him out with driving his coaches; again this was in my spare time. There was a taxi rank in those days outside St. Laurence’s Chapel, at the High Street. Three cars used to wait for passengers there. The cars belonged to Dick Cornelius, Frank Hill and Bert Cuff. Bert lived up the side of Hepworths and he used to work at the Reme. He was a tall chap and he used to wear size 14 shoes.”
“Eventually I finished with Bath Tramways and I came off the buses. I went to work for Butcher’s, the builders. That was in the 1960s. I came off the buses because I failed my double-decker bus driving test. They were getting rid of the conductors and that left just drivers. It was the start of driver/conductors. It wasn’t just that. They were changing everything about. It was going to pieces. The way it was being run was getting mucked about. I got laid off. I didn’t get any redundancy. Bath Tramways didn’t pay any redundancy out in those days. They never paid sick pay neither.”
“I hadn’t worked solely on the Warminster to Frome route during my time with Bath Tramways, because they extended the service on from Frome to Bath. That was No.53 Service. And at another time they did Warminster to Frome, and then through the villages from Frome to Radstock (Mells, Great Elm, Holcombe, Highbury, Stratton On The Fosse) and then from Radstock and Peasedown on to Bath. That was No.64 Service.”
“The only thing that upset me about working on the buses, was during the war years when the blitz was on. Every night, the people of Bath would get on the last bus, with all their worldly goods, and they’d travel to the top of Midford. They got off there and they slept in the fields, alongside the walls. They did that every night when the raids were on. They knew where they were going and where they were going to lay down. They’d get the bus back to Bath in the morning. Bath got very damaged in the war. The centre of Bath was near enough gone altogether.”
“We come through Corsley one night on the bus and a bomb dropped near us at Corsley Heath. It was a hell of a noise. It frightened the life out of me. Incendiary bombs were dropping in the road. I was conducting at the time, but Harry Wait, the driver, got out of the bus and was picking up the incendiary bombs in his bare hands and throwing them out of the way so that they wouldn’t catch the bus on fire. You could see the planes going over as plain as day.”
“When I was working for Butcher’s the builders I had to go round with Alec Pike doing odd jobs. I had a car, an old Ford, and we went out doing any little jobs that wanted doing. It was things like replacing odd roof tiles or repairing small walls or making steps. Alec Pike was a brickie and I went along with him as a labourer. He lived out Hill Deverill and I used to pick him up in my car at Longbridge Deverill and off we would go. I used to get a couple of pence a mile for petrol. We had a shovel and a bag of stuff in the back.”
“One job we had to do was in the lion reserve at Longleat. The lions had to have some shelters. The shelters were made out of old railway vans. We had to go and repair these vans after a while. We worked in the reserve with the lions walking around us, a little distance away. There was nobody with guns to watch over us. We had to drive the car in. We were told to get in the car quick and sound the horn if the lions got close. We put up a shelter, went out for dinner, and when we went back afterwards the lions were in the shed! We couldn’t get out the car to finish the job. We were on that job, putting those shelters up, for about a month or so. The cladding consisted of fibreglass in between sheets of wood. That was for insulation. After about a week we had a phone call to say some of the lions were poorly. Nobody had been in to see what had happened. The lions had been chewing the fibreglass like hay and it upset them. Alec and I had to go in and take it all apart. We had to alter it all. We replaced the fibreglass with sawdust from the sawmills.”
“I worked with Alec Pike, for Butcher’s, for 12 months or more until I got put off, about 1967. I finished up looking after the stores when Butcher’s were building the Portway Lane housing estate. Behind the Nag’s Head was all fields. When we went down there first, Puddy’s from Codford were gathering in hay with a rake for their horses. I was in charge of the stores for Butcher’s there. I did that for six or eight months but I got fed up with it.”
“One day a chap come along and told me about a job going in Westbury. That was as a tyre fitter for Unigate at the Ham. I had never done tyre fitting before, never in my life, but that’s where I went and that’s what I did. They had big 40 foot long trailers stacked with lorry tyres. I suppose I had 300 different lorry tyres in stock, of all different sizes. When a lorry came in from another depot for a service I used to take a good look round it and change the tyres if needed. Maybe they needed good ones on the front or pairing up on the back. I made sure they were alright for the lorry going out again. I used to change about 100 tyres a week. That was hard graft.”
“Then things got slack and I went on delivering vehicles all over the country to Unigate depots. They had a big set up and I’d go to places like Manchester and Norwich. Then they put me on delivering cheese, with a lorry, from the factory to the shops. I used to do that all round the country and then, one day, they said we’re going to give you a regular run. It was called the Sainsbury’s run. That was to Exeter, Taunton, Bridgwater, Weston Super Mare, and Bristol. It had to be completed by six o’clock in the morning. I left home at midnight. I enjoyed doing that. I was my own boss. As long I kept to the timetable they were alright. The cheese had to be in the last store, on the counter, by eight o’clock. So, I had to get cracking. We never had any breakdowns with the lorry, because it was always serviced regularly at Westbury. If any problems cropped up while you were out on the run, you told them when you got back, and things were put right before you went out again the next day. I always had the same lorry. It was a big Leyland. I had taken my H.G.V. licence. I drove for Unigate for seven or eight years. What happened was, they closed the Depot and moved things to Chippenham. I got fed up going to Chippenham everyday to start work.”
“I then went to work for Clarks. I drove a little van, collecting the stores, the moulds, the heels and heel tips, for the main factories at Shepton Mallet and Street. Chris Robertson was the foreman and he went to Australia. I worked for Clarks for a little while and then I got put off. I hadn’t been there long enough to get any redundancy money.”
“The next job I had was at Beswicks, at Imber Road, in Warminster. I didn’t go there to work full-time, I went there to help load a trailer. Mrs. Head, who lived on the front of Boreham Field, was the forelady at Beswicks. She came and saw me. She said ‘There’s a long trailer in the yard. We want somebody to load machinery up on to it. Do you want the job?’ So, I went up and had a look. Beswicks used to make fuses and they had a load of stamping machines, old ones, and electrical bits that had to go on this trailer. I did that for a short time. I did anything there that wanted doing but I was taken ill while I was there. It was a rough job and I got ill. I was home for a while and then I got a job with Pearce’s at Bratton, driving a Bedford truck.”
“They had various vehicles. They had milk trucks, collecting milk from the farms for the dairies. They had another truck doing deliveries for Avon Rubber. And there were other trucks delivering goods. There were about seven trucks in all and six milk tankers. I drove for Pearce’s until I retired. When I started there I drove anywhere round the country, staying out at nights. The first job I did was to deliver some larchlap fencing panels. They had to go to Manchester. They were already loaded up on a trailer at Melksham. The chap at Pearce’s said ‘Off you go, it’s all loaded, it’s all roped down, get up to Manchester as soon as you can because they’re waiting for it.’ Off I went. When I got to the other side of Lacock the driver of a car, a little Austin, behind me started beeping his horn at me. I wondered what the devil he wanted. I stopped. He said ‘You’ve put a dent in my car.’ I said ‘What do you mean, I haven’t touched your car.’ He said ‘No, you haven’t but your load has. Your fencing is scattered all down the road.’ This chap was very irate. The air was blue with his language. I had a job to see him for swear words. I had to go back and pick up all the panels. I went back to Melksham and loaded up with new panels. I roped it all on myself and made the delivery to Manchester. I reported what had happened to the boss and Pearce’s insurance paid out for the damage to the chap’s car. I always secured my own loads after that.”
“I worked for Pearce’s until I was 65. They were alright to work for. When I finished they said ‘Don’t you want to stay on?’ I said ‘No, I’m finishing tonight.’ I’d had enough of getting up at four o’clock at morning. That was the end of my driving career. I didn’t work a day over 65.”
“Hilda went to work at Raphael Tuck’s greeting card factory, up at Alcock Crest, in 1970. She worked on a machine sealing the cards to begin with but later went on dealing with orders. Colin Bowden, who is our milkman now, was working up there when Hilda started. Mr. Coward was the manager in charge of production. Hilda worked there until 1976 when the factory closed.”
“My mother died on 7th July 1973 and is buried at St. John’s. She was 74. At the end she didn’t know what she was doing, she got confused, and she went to Sambourne Hospital. That’s where she died.”
“Father had retired. His injured leg had got worse. He had great big boils on the end of stump. He had a wheelchair in the finish. We bought it secondhand for him. We saw an advert in the paper for it and it came from up north somewhere. It was a petrol driven one but it was old and it wasn’t very reliable. It was nothing like they are today. We had it a long time before we could get it to go. We took it all apart and cleaned it. He used it for a couple of years. Dad went to work at the Barracks one day in it, but instead of turning right at the end of Woodcock to go over the bridge and up Imber Road, it shot straight across the road and went down over the bank. He ended up in the Timber Company yard. He rolled over into the ditch. He wasn’t badly hurt but he got shook up. He wouldn’t ride in the wheelchair again after that.”
“He was taken queer and he was moved to Sambourne Hospital and that’s where he died on 25th September 1975. He was 80. He had been in the hospital a couple of weeks when that happened. He’s buried at St. John’s Churchyard with mother. If you go in the gateway on the corner, by the Rock, and walk up the path towards the Church, you’ll see their grave on the left just before you get to the Church.”
“We moved from No.90 Boreham Field to this bungalow [Bungalow 4, Boreham Field] in 1982. We moved on 2nd August 1982. Don Penny and his wife had lived here before us.”
“I don’t think much of the world today. At the present time things don’t look good. They say things go in cycles so perhaps things will come right again but it doesn’t look like it. All these politicians seem to be feathering their own nests. They start off with good intentions but they go astray. They don’t do what they promise. Years ago you didn’t hear so much about M.P.’s unless it was voting time. You never saw them until it was voting time. They would tell you how they were going to do all sorts of good things for you, you voted for them, and that was the last you heard until voting came round again. Then you voted for someone else because you never got any joy out the last lot, and it was just the same again.”
“We should never have gone in the Common Market. We should have stayed as we were, on our own, fighting our own battles, self-sufficient, more or less. We would be far better off. We’re giving millions of pounds to the Common Market and what do we get back? Nothing. We get the worst deal of the lot. We always have done. It doesn’t matter what country we’re up against we are always the one who has to give way. We always lose out to foreigners. Germany is doing exceedingly well. It makes you wonder who won the War.”
“We went on holiday to Spain. It cost quite a bit to go and the hotel was terrible. The English people sat on one side of the dining room and the Germans sat on the other side. The Germans ate first and the English later. What the Germans didn’t eat was then moved across on to the tables for the English. We found that out, because there was a strike by the hotel workers and we went down to the dining room early because we were going out, and we saw what they did. That’s perfectly true. The Germans had priority and we had second pickings. None of the tablecloths were changed or anything. And when our son, Raymond, wanted a drink he was told to go to the bar. When you hear these jokes about the Germans always getting all the sunbeds on the beaches, well, that’s true. We found out that as well. When we got down to the beach that was full up with ’em. We never got a look-in anywhere at all.”
“We went to Italy for another holiday. It was very nice but there was a strike while we were there too. First of all there was a taxi strike. We were walking about in Rome and we saw some soldiers. Then we saw a tank. We heard somebody say ‘I’m making for the hotel.’ So we said ‘What’s on?’ He said ‘It looks like there’s going to be a march here and it always ends up with a big riot. I’m off.’ So, we dashed off like mad for the bus to get back to the hotel. And when we got to the hotel there were piles of rubbish everywhere. The dustbin men had gone on strike!”
“We spent another week in Capri and then it was time to go home. Only trouble was, there was a strike by French air traffic controllers and we couldn’t fly over France. All around the perimeter of the airfield we had to take off from were crashed aircraft!”
“What had happened to them I don’t know but it wasn’t a very good advertisement. There was nowhere to get a cup of tea, everything was shut. The plane took off and in no time we heard ‘Fasten your seat belts, we’re going to land.’ You couldn’t see a thing outside, it was pitch black, and it was raining like the hammers of hell. The plane landed. It was so dark you could see nothing. No one had a clue where we were. To this day I don’t where we were. All of a sudden we saw two tiny lights and you could hear all this banging and clanging. They were re-fuelling the plane because they had flown so far out round France they had nearly run out of fuel. They weren’t allowed to put any lights on while they were doing re-fuelling. The funny thing was no one was scared. Then, after a while, it was ‘Fasten your seat belts, ready for take-off.’ Off we went. We got to Bristol Airport, at half past one in the morning; five hours late. So much for travelling abroad.”
“When we first heard about rockets and satellites, and aeroplanes, and all that, we just associated it with the Second World War. We thought those things were something to do with the War. That’s how it all crept up on us. Up until the planes flew over here, on their way to bomb Bristol, in broad daylight, we never really saw any planes. No one takes any notice of a plane in the sky today. It’s all taken for granted now.”
“I don’t think much of what’s on television. 50% of it is a load of rubbish. I suppose it’s all a question of what you want to watch. We like the nature programes and things like that but maybe the younger generation probably want something else.”
“There’s no fun today, not like there used to be. Anyone getting married now won’t have a marriage like we’ve had. They’ve had no experience of life to be able to make a decent go of things. If we wanted some fun we made our own fun, and if we wanted something we worked hard to get it.”
“Nobody wanted things years ago; today they want all these material things. We had no temptations, there was nothing like satellite televisions and what have you. We didn’t want those things because there wasn’t those things to have. You could manage when we were young without those things. Today you’re expected to have certain things.”
“I think old age pensioners get a fairly good deal now when you compare it with years ago. Most are better off than what they ever have been. Years ago you only had what you stood up in, but today most have got a television, which costs a couple hundred pounds, in the home and so on. I know we don’t get very much but it could be worse. If you were sick years ago, you got nothing; today you do get something. That’s the only reason it’s better.”
“If I could have my time again I wouldn’t change anything. I mean that. I wouldn’t change a thing. We had some very good times.”