September 12, 2010 INDEX
More video from September 19
God knows what they lived on
[00:00:00:20, So when you say you wished it on you. And how did he wish it on you?,
[00:00:07:00 ["Well, he always hoped that I could do it. It was a thing. I mean, he he was the man was a genius. But the one thing he couldn't do was stand up in public and talk. And he always hoped that I would be able to."
[00:00:23:07," When you say genius, what sort of evidence did he give for that?",
[00:00:28:17[" Well, as I've said already, the way he could add up his mathematical genius was terrific. And he was extremely clever man in many ways. And he was also extremely musical. It's when he was younger, he belonged to a club in Loughborough Junction, and they used to challenge him. They used to find all sorts of weird instruments and bring them into the club and challenge him to get a tune out of him, which he always did. He could play anything and he was extremely good at it."
[00:01:07:01," And didn't he didn't you tell me that he used to go and see these films or whatever, and he'd see a song, hear a song in the film and come back to the club and play it on the piano?",
[00:01:17:20[" Oh, yes, he could do that. It was he was a very talented with his with the music."
[00:01:27:02, So sorry. What did he do.,
[00:01:29:16[" Well, if he if you went to the pictures in those days, they used to before you went in tried to sell you a record of the. What do you call a record today, CD, of the. Music in the film, but he didn't need to because if he went to the film and heard it, he could come back to his club and play it for them on the piano. It was in his head."
[00:02:00:10[" I may be wrong, but I think in the 20s, they didn't sell very many records, they mostly sold sheet music. Yes, it was awful sheet music sold." , So would they have sold him a record of would they have sold him sheet music?,
[00:02:17:12[" Well, I don't know. I mean, I can only remember the time when they used to be records, but perhaps, as you say, there was before that was sheet music. So that's probably what it was"
[00:02:29:24, So he could sort of cheat. He could just go and pick it up and automatically play it.,
[00:02:35:07[" Yeah, of course, you've got to remember there was a lot of music halls then. So you could go to a music hall and someone would be singing or playing something live and he could memorize it and go away and play it."
[00:02:53:13[ The impression one has of the music hall is that they used to keep singing the same old songs time after time after time for years after year. So it wouldn't be very difficult to actually know.
[00:03:05:10[" Yeah, well, some songs were favourites, but various music hall people had a song that was their song. But you you went to the music hall, you were in there several hours. There had to be an awful lot of songs and things and dancing and all the rest of it. It wasn't all the old favourites. Had to be some new stuff all the time."
[00:03:32:04, And how do you think your father learned to play the piano?,
[00:03:37:03[ I think he just could I think you just tried it and he was he was able to pick it up and play because he could play any instrument.
[00:03:45:24,"But your grandmother wasn't a piano teacher or anything like that, I think.",
[00:03:51:13[" But I never met. I can't. Well, I probably did, but I can't remember my grandmother. But, yes, I think she was musical."
[00:04:00:06, And she she might have taught him, possibly yeah ,"but you did know, but you did meet your grandfather, didn't you?",
[00:04:08:09[" Yes, I knew. My grandfather. Well, " ,what was he like?," He was a. A very nice man. He was the president of his union. And. Extremely highly principled, chap. But he became so fat that he could hardly move, so they used to all have to come to him because he he went to a meeting once a long time ago, and he. SAT on the chair on the stage and the bloody chair collapsed, so he would never go to a meeting again. Cause he thought it made him look extremely foolish."
[00:04:58:15, And why do you think your your.,
[00:05:14:15,Why do you think your grandfather was fat?, Drinking. ,What did he drink?," Guinness,"
[00:05:27:10," I think that was quite rare in London in those days, wasn't it?", I don't know. I reallywhat do I know about it. It was before I was born and when I was a small child.
[00:05:35:03[ At.
[00:05:37:06[" I think the whole family were boozers, they were. You see, they spent their recreational time in the club. Rather than sitting at home, no wireless, no television in those days, so they used to go out to a club there was a piano and dad used to play the piano and everyone used. to have a jolly up, and of course, if all the time he was playing the piano, people would keep putting points on the side of it. So he used to get quite a few of I think my grandfather was the cerntre because he it was. all People of the same union mainly in clubs in those days and their families and of course,
[00:06:30:00 he was the president and he was, a very popular man, I dare say, he got bought a lot of beer."
[00:06:35:21,So this was sort of workingmen's clubs were they. ," Yeah, " ,and this was the workingman's club in Loughborough Junction.," I think it was called the Liberal Club, but I'm not sure. " ,"Absolutely, yes. And liberal clubs, quite a few of them escaped when the Liberal Party, ceased to be a mass membership organization. ",Yeah. , So it could well have been taken over by and by ,the working men , what did your grandfather do for a living? ,He was a printer.
[00:07:11:00 ,What sort of printer was he?, I don't know ,"he was he was a compositor, ",was he? I don't know.
[00:07:17:09, And did he ever tell you anything about his job?,
[00:07:21:20[" No, not really. He he worked for the stationery office and a lot of it was top secret."
[00:07:31:01, Didn't he say something about all these rules that he had for spelling things?,
[00:07:38:13[" Oh, he used to lecture me about spelling because I couldn't, and that was a disaster as far as he was concerned, and he had had a reason why everything was spelled the way it was a sort of a rule. Yeah, but I can't remember what they were."
[00:07:57:23, And. Do you remember him before he retired?,
[00:08:04:21[" I don't know. I used to go I mean, it was. Sort of a duty thing, even after my father died, my mother used to take me to Loughborough Junction to see my grandfather. It was all I can remember going to see him. I think I can remember when my father was alive, because I can remember vaguely going into the club with them "
[00:08:31:08, Can you remember Uncle Jack?,
[00:08:35:01[" Not really. Sort of a big bluff, sort of a man is what I feel, you know."
[00:08:45:14," Well, I think one time you told me that his his father was, your grandfather was astonished that such a big military man could have sort of died died of a sort of chill or a cold or something.",
[00:08:59:13[" Yeah. Yeah. So he got the flu, I think."
[00:09:03:06[" It was quite amazing, " ,"but this was, this wasn't in the flu pandemic, was it? It was a long time after that.",
[00:09:13:00 [" I think so. it was about the same time as with father, only about a year between them." , I think I think I think there was 18 months between the two. ,
[00:09:19:14[Was there? You could be right. ,But didn't didn't your grandfather have sort of two sons who died in 18 months?,
[00:09:30:05[" Yes, I think that's right. Yeah. And his daughters lived on."
[00:09:36:08," Yeah, and your mum was not so fond of his daughters. ","No, she thought they were common. I think they were just Londoner's. " ,"Yeah, and she didn't she didn't come from London, ","no, she came from Norfolk."
[00:09:57:24, And what was her background then?," A small village called Banham my grandfather was a, worked in the Brick field's. Until he got a rupture and then God knows what they lived on, the parish, I think, but by that time there was, I think, nine nine girls and a boy or something like that. And the older girls were out to work in service by then. And they used to bring money home to sustain the rest of them. " ,And did you ever go down to Banham?,"Oh, yes. Every year we used to have a holiday in Banham, even when I was little boy, when my father was alive." , And what was it like in Banham? ,"I liked it, it was very different for me. It's such a little market. Well it wasn't even a market town. A little teeny town, you know, village, I suppose you might call it hardly anything of it. The only thing That ran up the roads was dogs. There was, of course in those days, there were no cars. There was a. We used to get off the train. In Eccles and. Get a chap would take us into horse and buggy bringing us back to Norwich, err Banham,"
[00:11:26:05, and you got off the train in Eccles.," Yeah, " ,what was Eccles?,
[00:11:29:06[" I don't know, it just seemed to be a stop for the train " ,"and so the train would sort of go to Norwich or somewhere like that, ",Norwich had to be it was the LNER London to Norwich and then ,at Norwich got a small feeder line to Eccles. ,"No, no It passed through Eccles on the way to Norwich."
[00:11:50:12," Oh, I see. And I think you got off at Eccles. ",Yeah. , And then you got a small,horse and buggy Yeah. ,That must have cost a few pennies to get a horse and buggy all the way to Banham ,
[00:12:11:12["that I suppose so, but.. When my father was in work, but later on that day, there was a coach, once a coach started running the coach ran to Banham."
[00:12:24:20, And did you were there any of the other sisters still living at home in those days?,
[00:12:31:03[" No, not when we first used to go down there." , Didn't Mabel live at home that she ,"Mabel came home eventually. But in those days, Mabel was the, was in service with a judge. Judge Engelbach, I remember that name well in Dulwich."
[00:12:51:16," And she came to a bit of a sticky path at one stage, didn't she?", [
[00:12:55:11[" Well, I don't know. I can only guess because I wasnt allowed to know things like that. " ,"And the thing that you guess is,", I guess that there was an illegitimate child. ,The child died. ,"Yes, I think so. Yeah."
[00:13:12:04," Well, or maybe it was maybe it was went to an orphanage",Yeah it could have been adopted or something.
[00:13:17:24[ I don't know.
[00:13:19:03[ It's. It.
[00:13:24:06[" Was always something that was talked in hushed whispers If I was about t I wasn't allowed to know anything sordid like that," , and what was the cottage like?," The cottage was had one room downstairs with a large pantry which went out and jutted off from it. And if you went out of the back door, turn right and right again. You in what they called the shed and the shed."
[00:14:02:08[" Was I? I tried to make it architectural, backed up to where the, to the pantry wall, so it was quite big and in the shed was a copper and stove that both of which were. Fired by wood wood burners. And my grandmother had two little oil stoves that she used to use frying pan or the kettle. And That was about it."
[00:14:40:09," Now, these days, we would think of a copper as a policeman, what what what do you think of as a copper?",
[00:14:47:00 ["A copper is is a boiler to boil your clothes in. I think that it was called a copper because lots of them were made of copper, but this was a brick built one."
[00:15:01:20, And it's just a little wood fired stove that heats up water.,
[00:15:07:02[ Yes. And when the water and you boil the water and boil the clothes in it
[00:15:13:21,"And how on earth did they get the wood, because Banham wasn't in the middle of a forest, was it?",
[00:15:21:05[" No, I think they used to get sold the would I think, but I can't remember, to be absolutely honest, but they obviously didn't go around chopping down trees, so they must have been sold the wood somewhere" ,well they had men come round to sell them things like fish and. ,"Yes. Yeah. There were people that came round. There was. One chap had a tricycle with a box on the front and he used to sell. Clothes, I don't think he sold clothes but he sold material, and he used to shout out 'any length you like, any length you like'. And, you knew, he was outside waiting for you."
[00:16:07:16,And did they did they go out and buy a lot of material to make dresses out of?,
[00:16:12:08[" Yes, its how they made, how they got their clothes."
[00:16:17:09, So it was all handmade clothes until. When do you think they would have started buying clothes in shops?,
[00:16:24:13[ I should think when they went to London.
[00:16:27:24, So so your mum wouldnt have made her own.,
[00:16:32:01[" Not once she got to London, I don't think so. She probably had to make em when she was in Banham because I don't remember there being any shops in Banham that sold clothes even in my day."
[00:16:43:18, And did she make clothes for you?,
[00:16:48:07[" I don't know. I really don't know. But you you've got to remember that it was so different then. The people who lived in Banham hadn't been to the next village in the whole of their life. Most of them because the only way they get there was walk. So it was. It was a very isolated kind of community, they didn't didn't trot down to Norwich to do some shopping or anything, . " ,"but your great grandfather, I don't know when he died and whether you can remember him or not, he used to live in a village four to five miles away, and he used to cycle",
[00:17:30:14[ Yeah. ,You remember him at all?,
[00:17:32:12[" No, I don't remember him. But he was a very I remember that he was held in great respect " ,when you lost your mum certainly had a great deal of respect for him.,
[00:17:44:20," She always said he was a very clever man. Yeah. Which to me suggested he probably gave the money, gave the family some money,",More than likely yeah
[00:17:56:03," But as you said, there wasn't any any obvious source of income once he was not able to work in the brick fields",
[00:18:01:21[" No, no. Well, I. I think they got money off the parish. The parish. No, I don't know where the parish got money from, but the expression you lived on the parish, was in those days?"
[00:18:18:01," Yeah, they called it outdoor relief.Yeah. But I mean, I wouldn't have thought that they were poor enough for that.",
[00:18:27:11[ I don't know. Didn't have any money.
[00:18:30:13, But did anybody have any money in those days, you had to go and buy some bloody food.
[00:18:35:06["I mean they didn't have to buy everything because they grew a lot in the garden. But even then, you've got to buy the seeds and seed potatoes and things "
[00:18:46:21," Well, they did do some work because, for example, your mum talked about gleaning in in the fields. All the kids would have the day of school so they could do clean gleaning.",
[00:18:58:20[ Yeah. ,They must have earned some money for that.,
[00:19:02:05[ I don't think they earned money. I think they took the gleanings home and used them.
[00:19:07:22," Sorry, I thought they use the gleanings for some kind of agricultural process.",
[00:19:13:04[" No, no, no, the gleanings.... just up the road was a mill. And if you took your gleanings to the mill, he'd mill them for you and keep a percentage."
[00:19:26:21[" The rest of it, that was your flour " ,"and what was a cooperative mill, or was it something that somebody owned ","somebody owned it and I mean,"
[00:19:43:23, the gleanings very poor quality. You have to do a lot of work to get anything out of them.," Well, I don't see why they would be poor quality, it was only the the wheat or the barley or whatever that hadnt been picked up. It was just the same as all the rest, except it was lying on the ground."
[00:19:56:05," I got the impression that the men who harvested the fields took out all the good stuff, and the gleaning was just any old rubbish that they couldn't be bothered to take.",
[00:20:09:02[" No, it was it was a very crude business. I mean, you'd got a horse pulling a cutter which cut the wheat down, then you'd got blokes coming behind picking it up and tieing it into bundles. And what they called stooking it; standing the the bales of wheat up, leaning them against each other and letting the straw dry out a day or two and then they would all be picked up by another horse and cart and taken to the mill. But it wasn't they didn't go raking round raking up the bits where they hadn't collected, you know, there was stuff on the floor."
[00:20:56:22[ On the ground ,you didn't you didn't see these horses in the streets. You said you only saw the dogs.,
[00:21:04:17[" Yeah, horses didn't walk about the streets; horses were either in the stables or out in the fields working."
[00:21:13:19," So nobody had any horse transport, nobody had.",
[00:21:17:09[" Oh, yes, the the. Squire had a horse and buggy"
[00:21:27:07[ But I suppose People like the baker must have had a horse and cart to get round the village.
[00:21:38:02,"I know somebody who was a milkman, not then but in 1939 or something like that, and he had a handcart he they wouldn't give him.",
[00:21:50:15[" Yeah, I remember the horse and carts when I was a boy in London, United Dairies and the Co-op and horse and cart." , But what I'm saying is,"oh excuse me, that they had bottles in Norfolk. What he did was he came round. I think it was a little it was like a little buggy little.He had a couple of churns on it with a ladel, ladels in the top. And you took your jug out and said you wanted a pint and he dipped it in and poured it into your jug"
[00:22:29:12," And this this cart, what could have been a hand cart, that he pulled it along himself.",
[00:22:35:12[" I don't think so, no. I think he had a pony or something like that, " ,so you saw the odd pony about.,
[00:22:44:12[" Yeah, " ,but there would have would have been no coal merchants. And if everybody was burning wood. The coal merchants needed big horses,
[00:22:53:02[" Yeah, no, I don't remember. I don't remember coal at all in Norfolk I mean in London there were coal. Horse and carts"
[00:23:05:15,"Well, they did have coal dad because somebody talked to me about coal coming in at that station that you were talking about, Eccles. Yeah, but I don't think go as far as Banham",
[00:23:17:06[" Well, I don't know. You see, once I was born, we only went down there in the summer. So in the summer you wouldnt be using a lot of coal would you?"
[00:23:26:24," Well, you might use it if you had a coal burning stove. You might might use it for your cooking.",
[00:23:33:13[" Yes, that's true. But then you see again, I wouldnt have known because you would during the week, they would use the little oil stoves just a bit to boiling up potatoes and frying and things like that. And it would only be she made her own bread. But when she baked her bread, she'd make it in the big oven and once a week or whatever it was when she did the washing it would be done in the copper, but it would be a regular everyday thing."
[00:24:05:06, I thought you said they were wood stoves not oil stoves,
[00:24:08:15[" No, she the copper and the oven were woodstoves, but she had two little oil stoves, which were about that big. Which, had paraffin oil in them and a little flame," [" yes, they had two small oil stoves about that size."
[00:24:31:04, Your dog's got asthma.,
[00:24:35:21,oil stoves," yes, about that big and on those, they did frying and the boiling the kettles and things of that nature and the the weeks wash would be done in what we called the copper. It was an old boiler, which was the water was heated with wood. And the, when she made her bread, she did the big old oven that was heated by wood."
[00:25:05:21," All right, so could be could we do that again, And what were the oil stoves like?",
[00:25:14:06[" They were about that big, quite small oil stoves, but they were used for the for the frying and the boiling of kettles and things like that."
[00:25:26:14, Right. OK.,
[00:25:27:23[" Our grandmother, a little Bustley lady who."
[00:25:33:09[" I really, really thought the world of she was a wonderful little woman and I remember her very well she was."
[00:25:43:22[" She used to make a fuss of me, she used to make a lot of wine, she'd make wine out of anything, she go along the hedgerow and pick things and come back and turn them into wine. And. When I was a little boy, she used to let me have a glass of wine and my mother used to say. You shouldn't give that to him, you know, and she's say it's got water in it, it's all right and she turn to me, and say no, it hasn't. I really loved her. She was a lovely lady. " ,And what sort of wine did she make rosehip wine? ,"Rosehip, Sloes, Rhubarb, potato,everything you could think of " ,"rhubarb, wine is quite difficult to make because it's really acidic."," I well, on the, we had a long, she had a long garden at the top of the garden was the lavatory and the well and between them was a large. A group of rhubarb bushes which grew every year and were enormous, and that was the wine. She made Sloes wine from sloes that she gathered from the hedges. She made rhubarb, wine, potato, wine, practically anything that she grew in the garden. She could turn into wine."
[00:27:23:22,What did she have to have demijohns or did she have stone jars or what?,
[00:27:30:01[ Bottles Lots and lots of bottles and.
[00:27:35:06[ The.
[00:27:37:06[" She filled them in the bottles and you had to be careful about how tight you, corked them because as they fermented the corks blew off. And then after a certain amount of time, they it was fit to drink. I think she used to filter it, but I'm not so sure about that, but.there was this year's lot that you didn't drink and next, last year's lot which you did. " ,And some people like uncle arthur were a bit more cavalier with that ,"uncle arthur would sneak down in the night when he was staying there on holiday and collect the nearest bottle and get it down him, which often meant they found him in the morning lieing on the floor because he was drinking this year's instead of last year. But I think he mainly drank it because they told him he shouldn't."
[00:28:38:02," Yeah, I'm sorry, but the dog",
[00:28:43:22," Ok, um, and did he ever, you know, cause any of the bottles to sort of pop up open in the late at night?",
[00:28:55:24[" I don't I don't I don't think so, I don't know. You see a lot
[00:29:00:00 of the what I know about uncle arthur and aunt Rosa and Victor and Jean being down there was just tales because we weren't all down there at the same time because the cottage wasn't big enough to contain us. So we would take turns in going to visiting grandma."
[00:29:21:18," You did actually live with Rosa and Victor, didn't you? At one stage, ",
[00:29:27:02["we had a very large house in knollys rd in West Norwood, London, which my aunt rosa and them, had the upstairs and we had the downstairs."
[00:29:42:19, And did they move in after your dad died?,
[00:29:45:14[" No, we all moved in at the same time we decided because. It sounds weird now, but. They lived in rented houses, rented flats, and we were always it seemed to me, its not true, but it seemed as though we were always moving because they found a better rented flat to live in."
[00:30:12:04[ And they found this house in. Knollys road 100 knollys rd and ,dogs got asthma.,
[00:30:23:11[" They lived 100 knollys rd and they had the upstairs and we had the downstairs and we lived there until during the war, we lived there from for quite a few years."
[00:30:36:21," But you differentiate between knollys road in the places that you rented. Sure. You rented knollys rd, right?",
[00:30:43:24[" Yes. Yes, we did. Rent knollys rd But it was a joint enterprise. You see it was the two families rented the house."
[00:30:51:18," So what you're saying is that previously you kind of rented rooms in a house, knollys road. You got the whole house.",
[00:30:57:24[ Yeah. Yeah. When we lived in before that we lived in.
[00:31:03:16[" Fifty nine Lansdown hill and the owner of the house lived in the downstairs, we had the upstairs flat, the upstairs half"
September 12, 2010INDEX