LITTLE LONDON, RAWDON IN THE 1930's
Written by C M Harper in 2005. This is an extract from a longer piece about Rawdon and Mr Harper’s family, and we are very grateful for permission to include this fascinating insight into life in this part of the West Riding back in the early 20th century.
Little London in the 1930s was a completely self-contained community, and had absolutely everything that a village needs. Little London had a pub, a chapel, a school, a post office, a doctor’s surgery and there were lots of shops.
There were two butcher’s shops, one next door to where I was born, and which was owned by George Hardcastle, and another on Micklefield Lane, which was owned by Emsleys. At the bottom of Lombard Street was one of those traditional, old-fashioned grocer’s shops the likes of which are now long gone. As you went in the door, you were met with the delicious smell of freshly ground coffee, and there were legs of ham and sides of bacon hanging from the ceiling, and sawdust on the floor. Very little was pre-packed in those days and most things were sold loosely. Butter was delivered in little barrels, and there used to be a huge block of butter behind the counter. The grocer, a man named Wilf Hewitt, would cut off as much as you required and pat it into shape, using little wooden paddles. If you wanted a pound of sugar, it would be scooped out of a sack and weighed out into stiff blue paper bags. Although most people baked their own bread in those days, nevertheless there was a baker’s shop in Little London, at the junction of London Lane and Micklefield Lane. This was owned by Bert Harris, who also used to breed Labrador dogs. Jack Cole had a greengrocer’s shop at the junction of Apperley Lane and Micklefield Lane, where the traffic lights are now, and produce could also be obtained from Tom Newbould’s nursery garden at the bottom of Whitelands, opposite my grandfather’s house. Tom Cockroft had a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s on Apperley Lane, opposite to the Princess, and Mrs Johnson had a front-room sweetshop in Princess Street. Jack Batty had a cobbler’s shop on Apperley Lane, next door to Ben Finch’s garage, which is now a used car showroom and Alf Lacey owned a blacksmith‘s forge at the top of Warm Lane. Ben Finch operated a taxi service as well as doing car repairs, and on his forecourt, he had two manually operated petrol pumps. If anyone stopped for petrol, he would place the hose in the filler cap and slowly wind a handle at the rear of the pump. He would wind this for two full revolutions to deliver a gallon of petrol, then he would wind the handle back and start again. It took rather a long time to get a tank full.
In the 1930s, most of the houses in Little London had gas lighting, electricity was just beginning to arrive. A wireless set, as radios were called in those days, was full of large valves, which required more power to operate than could be provided by a torch battery. Without electricity, one needed what was called an accumulator, which was rather like a car battery, but about half the size and made in heavy duty glass. These usually came in pairs, one would be in use while the other was being re-charged at Ben Finch’s garage. Sadly, every single one of the places that I have mentioned has now closed down, and there is absolutely nothing left in Little London now, apart from the pub, and I understand that even that was struggling a bit.
Children started school at the beginning of the term in which their fifth birthday fell, and as I was born in December, my very first day at school was on Monday 4th September, 1939. Those of you with a memory for dates will know that war had been declared on the previous day, but nobody told me. On my second day at school, I was sent home and told to come back in January. This was to allow time for air raid shelters to be built, but not knowing anything about a war, I assumed that it was something to do with my age, being not yet 5 years old. I went to Little London School, which has now closed, but the property is still there. In Micklefield Lane there are two large stone gateposts with a yard inside, which used to be the school playground, and the toilets were outside in the playground. There were two classrooms at Little London School, which were on different levels, reflecting the slope on Micklefield Lane.
Entrance to the school was via the lower level, and as you went through the door, there was a lobby on the left where we could hang our coats. There were about six washbasins in the lobby, but I never saw anyone using them. The children used to tell each other that if you swore at school, you would have your mouth washed out with soap and water. I don’t think that ever happened, but, as kids, we believed that it would. In addition to desks and chairs, the lower classroom had about 20 little camp-beds on which the infants had to lie down every afternoon. After about an hour, the teacher would tell us to get up quietly, and file into the upper classroom, but if anyone was still asleep, we were told not to disturb them, but to leave them there. One day I woke up and found myself completely alone. This classroom also contained a huge rocking-horse, which was about twice as big as I was at the time. I had often longed to have a go on this rocking-horse, and this was my opportunity, so before returning to the other classroom, I climbed up and had a damn good rock, which I really enjoyed. I spent 2 years at Little London School before moving on to what we used to call the big school, which was Littlemoor.
In those days, our teachers were all middle-aged women, as all the men had been called up for military service. I can remember the names of all the teachers. At Little London, the teachers were Miss Beattie and Miss Simms. At Littlemoor, the teachers were Miss Verity, Miss Busfield, Miss Bauer and Miss Hickson. All of these ladies were middle-aged spinsters, but we have to remember that 25 years earlier, when these ladies would have been young girls in their prime, a whole generation of men had been wiped out in the first world war, and there wouldn’t have been enough men to go round.
In the early war years, we had to go to school carrying a gas mask, in a little brown cardboard box with our names on, and a piece of string to fit over the shoulder. The gas mask case also contained a little tin box in which we carried our “iron rations”. This was usually a bar of chocolate, or some other non-perishable items, so we would have something to eat if we were trapped in the air raid shelters. We never had fire drill when I was at school, in my days we had air raid practice. If the alarm sounded we had to crouch underneath our desks, and stay there until the teacher told us to file into the air raid shelters with our gas masks. The shelters were dark, smelly places, not very pleasant at all, but we never had an air raid during the day. They used to come at night time, just as we had fallen asleep. Mother would get us up and take us into the cellar with our gas masks, where we would listen to aircraft flying overhead. German aircraft had a distinctive sound in those days, which was quite different from our own, so we knew that they were German aircraft. We just hoped that they would fly a bit further on before dropping their bombs, which fortunately they always did and no bombs fell on Rawdon during the war. This was surprising really, considering that there was the huge Avro aircraft factory next to Yeadon airport, but fortunately the Germans never found it.
My childhood was spent in the blackout but I was too young to remember anything different. There was usually enough light to find your way around, and, with moonlight or starlight it was quite easy. The only problem was fog in wintertime. In those days there was no such thing as domestic central heating, and every house had an open coal fire. The smoke from hundreds of chimney pots would combine with the fog and produce what we used to call “Pea-soupers”, and in the blackout, there were times when you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. Children would often come to school with a huge bump, the size of an egg, on their foreheads, having accidentally walked straight into a lamp post. This was very easily done when the lamp post was only 2 or 3 feet in front of you. My lasting memory of the blackout is of cloudless nights, when the sky was filled from horizon to horizon with thousands and thousands of stars. Stargazing was a popular pastime in those days, but we used to get stiff necks through gazing up at all the stars, so we would lie down in a field, and try to pick out constellations and formations of stars. If we were lucky, we would see a shooting-star, which would suddenly appear, shoot across the sky and disappear, all in the blink of an eye. In reality, these would have been small meteors, or other space debris, burning up as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
Food was scarce during the war years, but we never went hungry. My father used to keep hens on the land at the rear of the house, and each spring, he would buy goslings and ducklings and fatten them up for Christmas. One year a duck managed to survive Christmas and became a family pet. Mother called it Jimmy and it would wander in and out of the house seeking tit-bits. It lived for years, but as it got older, it would lose the use of its legs occasionally, and we would have to carry it about until it could walk again. Mother said it was rheumatism, but I think it was just old age. We used to have an old stone sink, about 3 inches deep, in which the poultry could drink. Father would fill it using a watering can, but before doing so, he would stand the sink on its edge and wash out all the sediment. As he did so, the poultry would rush underneath to grab all the worms that had been exposed. One day, he let the heavy stone sink fall back without realizing that the duck’s head was still underneath. That was the end of Jimmy, but we did not have the heart to eat him.
When the war ended I was 10 years old and I saw a banana for the first time in my life. Prior to this, the only banana that I could remember seeing was a picture in a book. One evening, we all ran up Princess Street to see a street lamp that had been lit. We knew what lamp posts were as we had walked into them many a time, but we had never seen one lit before. It was only an old gas-lamp, but we would play for hours around it, fascinated by its feeble light after years of blackout. As the gas-lamps were replaced by electric lighting, which became more numerous and more powerful, without us realizing it, all the stars disappeared. Nowadays, even on the brightest of nights, it is not possible to see more than about a dozen stars. The stars are still there, but we can no longer see them, because of what is now known as light pollution, and it is a great shame that today’s children will never witness the wondrous sight of thousands of stars that was the norm in my own childhood.