Money on't Table - Grit, Work and Family Pride , livre ebook

September Publishing - Corinne Sweet

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130 pages

English

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Their parents worked as miners and lace workers, but by the mid-twentieth century new opportunities beckoned for the children of the Midlands.'Walking up Quarry Street, Albert felt a huge surge of pride. His first pay packet. He'd earned it all himself. His heart nearly burst out of his chest as he placed the money on the kitchen table in front of his mother. She picked it up, smiled briefly, and then said, "It's not a lot, but it'll do."'Derek, Betty, Albert, Pauline, Doreen and Bob came from families where every penny counted. Education meant sacrifice, and even children had to help their family through illness, poverty and disaster. Leaving school as young as thirteen, they went to work at the Great British companies Boots, Players and Raleigh. Their new lives took them from cigarette packing, sewing machine piecework and selling rubber 'prophylactics' to places their parents could not have dreamt of - fitting lingerie, working on the Queen Mary and even becoming a director at Boots. Following the loves and losses of six young men and women, Money on't Table is the true story of building new lives and a new Britain.

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Publié par	September Publishing
Date de parution	25 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910463550
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in 2017 by September Publishing
Copyright Corinne Sweet 2017
The right of Corinne Sweet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The photos of Derek Happs, Betty Allsop, Albert Godfrey, Pauline Braker and Doreen Rushton belong to the contributors. Derek Happs and Pauline Braker s photos were both taken for Boots publicity campaigns. The photo at the beginning of Bob Cox s story is a magazine plate from 1954, courtesy of The Advertising Archives.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder
Typeset by Ed Pickford
Printed in Denmark on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Norhaven
ISBN 978-1-910463-54-3 eISBN: 978-1-910463-55-0 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-910463-56-7
September Publishing www.septemberpublishing.org
To the Potters, Haynes, Marshes, Ordishes and Rogers who made me feel very at home in Nottingham
Particularly, for Corinne Haynes and in loving memory of Albert Haynes
Contents
Preface
Derek Happs
Betty Allsop n e Nichols
Albert Godfrey
Pauline Braker n e Astill
Doreen Rushton n e Ward
Bob Cox
Final Thoughts
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Preface
Nottingham: The Heartland of England
N ottinghamshire, 1930. A county in the Midlands right in the centre of England, bounded by Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire. A rural county, yet with a heavily industrialised city at its heart. Nottingham was known for its tightly-packed, soot-encrusted, red-brick back-to-back terraced houses; smoke curling over cooling towers, barges on canals, trams and buses cutting through cobbled streets. Narrow lanes led to industrial yards and huge factories, and teemed with street sellers, and horses and drays led by cloth-capped workers. People made their way around town on foot or pushing sit-up-and-beg bicycles.
In the thirties, when this book begins, Nottingham was renowned for its manufacturing, and for three household names in particular: Boots the Chemist, Players cigarettes and Raleigh bicycles. There were other industries as well, names like Avery, Austin Reed and - in nearby Derby - Rolls-Royce. It was the heartland of England and chimed with national pride.
The Industrial Revolution transformed Nottingham from a graceful garden town in the 1750s to a place of dark satanic mills. Partly due to its geography, Nottingham became rapidly overpopulated and crowded. Built on a network of sandstone caves (locally it is known as the City of Caves), Nottingham had soggy meadows to the south and a sandstone crag to the west, upon which Nottingham Castle had been built after the Norman conquest. Established in 1796, the Nottingham Canal brought coal and other heavy goods to the city. In the 1820s alone, 3,000 back-to-back artisan dwellings were built. In a time of Empire and world export, Nottingham could produce and produce. However, it was often at the cost of the worker s health and welfare as working and living conditions were cramped and dangerous.
Industrialisation increased with the advent of steam. In 1829, George Stephenson s Rocket hailed the railways, and Netherfield, north of the city, became a railway frontier town. Steam engines were used in factories to speed up production, too, as mechanical looms replaced traditional hand weavers - who had worked at home around rural Nottinghamshire in this poorly paid domestic industry for two hundred years (William Lee, in Calverton, had invented framework knitting in 1589, and in 1750 there had been 1,200 frames), churning out lace, hosiery and textiles.
The rapid expansion of mid to late Victorian Nottingham gobbled up the surrounding countryside and villages, and turned them into factories with more badly housed workers. Slums were created in places that had once been rural idylls. In 1897, Nottingham became a city with nearly 250,000 inhabitants caught in an increasingly rigid class structure of owners and the owned.
And this is the Nottingham we remember (after Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men). We think of cricket at Trent Bridge, a gentleman s game enjoyed also by the working man. We think of whirring pit heads with black-faced miners, Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, lace and textile factories, boot and shoe makers, munitions works and blacksmiths, brick makers and steelworks. It is a hive of industry, a mass of shops and market stalls, with hardy workers toiling endlessly to earn a crust.
Nottingham remained a heavily industrialised city during the two world wars as it produced steel, iron and munitions. Women were commanded to take over men s jobs and then were returned to the hearth once the wars were over. Great poverty and hardship ensued for the women who were widowed or remained forever single.
Between the wars, the 1926 General Strike and the Great Depression of the 1930s hit Nottingham extremely hard. Two or three hundred starving men lined up for one job or walked miles to Leicester or Derby to try to get work. It was a desperate time for ordinary working people, who had no welfare service or reliable contraception to help keep their families healthy and small. Religion and pubs provided some comfort, although many people were Methodist teetotallers, who preached abstinence when it came to the demon drink.
Post-Second World War Nottingham was all about modernisation. Although the city had been bombed, many of the old factories and landmarks were still standing. From the 1950s onwards, there was a plan to sweep away the Victorian slums and replace them with high-rise buildings. Sadly, although people got indoor toilets and electric light, they lost the city s industrial heart when it was replaced by one-way systems, retail parks, concrete and glass, all in the name of progress. The destruction of whole areas of Nottingham, such as St Ann s and Radford, dismantled whole communities. Streets, churches, social centres and pubs were swept away and flattened. The landscape, culture and community were changed forever, tipped into new-build anonymity. Joan Wallace, a local writer, describes the traditional, vibrant, working-class Nottingham life in her book Independent Street , a depiction of her home in Radford pre-demolition. It s tough and rough, but there s a feeling of interconnectedness and community despite poverty and deprivation.
In 1958, Alan Sillitoe s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning shocked the country with its realistic portrayal of factory life. Based on the author s time working at the Raleigh , it depicted the hard-drinking, womanising, godless life that ensued from being a man chained to the production line. The book encapsulated industrial alienation .
Nottingham is now a post-industrial city of the digital age. There are no mines left and only one 400-year-old lace framework factory: G.H. Hurt s in Chilwell, which recently supplied handcrafted shawls to Prince George and Princess Charlotte. The lace factories are gone, and museums (especially the Museum of Nottingham Life) are the only reminder of its glorious, fine-filigreed past.
Raleigh bikes were outridden in the marketplace by the Chinese, Taiwanese and Koreans, and the factory closed in 2002, moving production to the Far East. Players cigarettes also choked in 2014, laying off its last 544 workers in 2015 after the nation gave up nicotine or took to vaping. Boots the Chemist, still a high-street name, was bought by American giant Walgreens in 2014.
Nottingham s story epitomises that of industrial Britain in its shift from being a jewel in the Empire s crown to being a warehouse and importer of goods from elsewhere. Nottingham still has some light industry but, like the rest of the UK, it is focused more on service industries now. In a post-Brexit world, it would be hard-pressed to produce goods to export as it did in the nineteenth century.
However, there are still some amazing older people in Nottingham who can speak about their lives and times working in the now disappeared factories. This book is about their gritty stories and we follow a portion of their lives, from 1928 to about 1960. They have a lot in common: they all grew up in hardship, the nature of which we can hardly imagine today. The toilet was at the bottom of the yard, they had no running water, no central heating or even electricity in some cases, and certainly no TV, phone or other mod cons. It was a time of deprivation and hard work, but it was also an era of community, of sharing and caring, and learning to make do on very little.
In 1930, Boots had their main, purpose-built headquarters in Beeston, Raleigh had a huge factory in Lenton and Players was in Radford. Each one had thousands of employees working in their main plants, warehouses and other outlets throughout Nottingham and beyond.
Labour was cheap and plentiful. The six men and women we ll meet were used to hearing about jobs on the social grapevine (street corners, local shops, the pub, at the work bench, family gossip), and many workers would leave a job one day and get another the next. The hunt was on constantly for that little bit of extra pay. For the six in this book, they knew they had to bring home money to add to the family coffers. There was no credit, they had to earn hard cash and save it, spending it mindfully and frugally. Make Do and Mend was espoused by the government in the Second World War, but it was also the motto of these workers. There were no fancy foreign holidays - simply a day off in Skegness, a couple of days at Mablethorpe or a week at Great Yarmouth, if they were lucky.
All the events in this book are based on recollections of real-life events. Where necessary, I have recreated scenes and dialogu