From time to time I post here what I consider some of the
more entertaining tales by which my family commemorate our quirkier ancestors.
I’ve grown a little wary of doing this, since some of the comments I’ve
received make it pretty clear that the authenticity of these stories is a
matter of some doubt, that the tales are sometimes thought to be faked for the
viewing audience.
Not so. If I had the strength or the moral fibre I would
protest – I might even expostulate, if I knew how. If I had the imagination to
invent this stuff I would be quietly pleased. This does not preclude the simple
possibility that a bunch of lies has been handed down the family over the
years, of course, but, though the tales may have been polished in the
retelling, I believe they are substantially correct. Anyway, here’s another one…
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A surviving "cowhouse" in the south end of Liverpool - this one at Aigburth/Sefton
Park - these were still a common sight when I was a kid, though few of them were still
working dairies. Typically, in their heyday, these places were run by people with a farming
background - i.e. who knew one end of a cow from the other |
Recently, while I was visiting my mother in hospital, we had
a lengthy conversation about Great Uncle Jim. My mother remembers some of these
old characters with astonishing clarity and detail, and a lot of affectionate
humour. Since she cannot always remember where she is on a given day, or why,
we have to cherish the good bits of her memory, I think.
Now then. Let’s go back just a little. Great Grandfather
George was my father’s father’s father (which is a straightforward idea, if
tricky to say), and he was a moderately wealthy market gardener (vegetable
farmer) near the small town of Rainhill, in Lancashire. He was a tenant farmer,
and his business was run very efficiently by his wife Ellen, who was not a
local woman – she came from somewhere further south – possibly Gloucestershire,
as I recall.
The big problem was George’s thirst. Things got to a point
where he would set off with his horse and cart all loaded up, on a Saturday morning,
to take the produce to Warrington Market, and the horse would bring him back on
Sunday, drunk and penniless. Every rum-pot in Warrington knew where to cadge a
drink if George was in town. He was a celebrity, of a sort.
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| Brickmaker's Arms public house, Warrington, c1900 |
Ellen did a remarkable thing for those days – sometime
around 1895 she decided she had had quite enough, and left her husband, and
went to the nearest city (George is believed to have died in Warrington workhouse
eventually).
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| Warrington workhouse - old George is in an unmarked grave somewhere here |
She and her teenage sons moved into Liverpool with what little
savings she had scraped together, and she opened a dairy (a milkhouse or “cowhouse”,
as they were known, with a couple of cows and everything) in the vicinity of
Hill Street, Toxteth. The idea of a dairy in such a location seems very
far-fetched now, especially in post-Derek Hatton, modernised Liverpool, but
such things were common in those times (non-UK readers who do not know about
Derek Hatton are congratulated on their good fortune). The sons were Jim (the
elder) and Ike (Isaac, my granddad), and they were up before dawn every day;
they milked the cows, and delivered the milk in the neighbourhood – filling
customers’ jugs from churns on their handcart.
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| A Liverpool milk-float - not Ellen's - the Anfield Dairy looks rather up-market |
I believe the dairy did reasonably well, the hand barrow was
replaced by a horse-drawn cart, and eventually Ellen sold up and retired, and
Ike got himself a job in what was the then brand-new electrician trade, and he went
into business converting houses to electric lighting – subsequently he was a
foreman with Mersey Docks & Harbour Board, in the Electrical Workshop at
the docks, and he (of course, since he was my paternal grandad) married and
raised a family.
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| Toxteth - c1900 - not very rural - this is Wilson Street, at the Dingle |
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| ...and here is a supper bar in St James St |
Jim never married – he missed the countryside and he
returned to his roots (literally?), working on a few farms in Lancashire and
Cheshire before acquiring a smallholding at Willaston, in the Wirral Peninsula.
My dad could remember episodes from his childhood when all the family went for a
working holiday on Jim’s farm at harvest time – the women, girls and infants slept
in the farmhouse, while the older boys and the men all slept in a big shed,
which was freshly painted out with bitumen each year to keep the fleas down – sounds
pretty fancy – must have been great for the Liverpool catarrh, you would think.
Dad always treasured the memory of these childhood visits, and throughout his
life was fascinated by farming and the countryside. He remembered an incident
when he must have been about five or six, when Jim’s carthorse, Samson, got
overexcited and pushed its way into the back kitchen. There was no room for the
horse to turn around, and the women in the house ran screaming while Jim
confronted the monster. He punched it on the nose, and the astonished horse
backed smartly into the yard – unfortunately, Samson was now wearing the
doorframe and the beams across his shoulders, and most of the kitchen promptly
collapsed, but my dad always saw this as a great success for his uncle, despite
the collateral damage. You can see that, as a hero figure, an uncle who punched
carthorses was a cut above a dad who fixed people’s lighting.
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More like the thing - Willaston Village, Wirral, around the
same date - Jim had a smallholding at Nine Acres, not far from here |
So this is shaping up to be an idyllic tale of Old Uncle
Jim, who ran a lovely farm in lovely Cheshire, where the sun always shone, and
where disobedient horses were disciplined promptly and with terrible strength.
The truth is, Uncle Jim was a bit mad.
Jim knew for certain that any stranger who came near his
farm was up to no good. One weekend he intercepted the collective gentry of the
local hunt (yoicks!), who were crossing his land, and told them that if he saw
them again he would shoot them. They dismissed him airily, as you would expect,
and two weeks later he fired a shotgun during a hunt, allegedly at them, and
was arrested. He spent a little while in prison, and then some time in a mental
institution.
When I knew him he was over 80, I guess, and I was a very
small child – if I had started school then I had only just started. Jim was
long retired - he gave up the farming,
basically because he was always too lazy to make any money. He then lived in a
council flat at Knotty Ash, Liverpool, which was many miles from our house, yet
for a while he regularly visited us around teatime on a Saturday – my dad used
to buy fish and chips for our weekend treat on Saturdays, and Jim was more than
happy to drop in, unannounced, and share. He always claimed that he had just
been passing, but a journey from Knotty Ash on the tram was a lengthy
undertaking, requiring much planning. He used to come via the Saturday market in
Garston, where he used to purchase crazy gifts for me – once a plaster figurine
of an Alsatian dog, daubed with gold paint, often a bundle of pencils which
only had about an inch of lead in each end, and once a framed picture of the
Pope (cut from a magazine) – interesting in their way, I suppose, but each of
them a poor swap for a decent plate of fish and chips.
Jim and Ike both had telephones installed in their homes –
neither had many friends, and they kept in constant touch by means of this new
technological wonder. I was once in my granddad’s house when he was on the
phone to his brother, and I remember that they both shouted so loud that I
thought they could simply have opened the window and communicated without
involving the telephone service. Like a lot of retired men of their era and
their background, they sort of lost their way a bit, having no useful role in
the community. Ike was desperate to fix stuff, to repair things, to be useful
and respected.
He repaired a handbag of my mother’s, and it was about twice
as heavy after he had fixed it, the new leather patches contrasted strangely
with the original material, and it would not open properly. It went in the bin.
He agreed to fix Jim’s alarm clock, which had stopped
working. After he had got it working, he quizzed Jim on why it had been so
rusty – he had had to strip down and hand-polish all the internals with oil and
carborundum paper – a lengthy job. When Jim explained that it had fallen in his
chamber pot one night, Ike said he was a dirty bugger, and they didn’t speak to
each other for some weeks.
Ike’s worst ever repair job was when my Auntie May brought
back a delicate silver bracelet from Spain – from the first foreign holiday any
of that family ever went on (if you ignore Uncle Les’s time in Tunisia and
Italy in WW2). He thought it looked disappointingly flimsy, and offered to
improve it for her – this involved very large blobs of extra solder at every
joint, and Auntie May was heartbroken, though it was definitely stronger – Ike
was getting a bit past it by then, if that is an admissible defence…
Jim lived on his own in his flat in Knotty Ash, and he got
very frail and very dotty. He still insisted on riding his bicycle, to
everyone’s despair, in spite of frequent blackouts. On one occasion a motorist
found him lying in the road, helped him up and stood him up in a shop doorway
to see if he was all right – Jim punched him because he felt that the motorist
must have knocked him off his bike. I believe that may have been the end of
Jim’s cycling.
For a while my father used occasionally to travel on his
Lambretta scooter (125cc) to visit Jim, to see how he was getting on, and
invariably found him to be cheerful, full of energy and completely bats.
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Lambretta 125, just like my dad's - that pillion seat was not
recommended for long distances - I still walk with a limp |
He was
making a fried breakfast one Sunday when my dad arrived, and Jim invited him to
share it, though there were no plates – the idea was they would both eat from
the frying pan, since this saved on the washing up. Needless to add, the frying
pan was never washed either. He also offered my dad some homemade bread to go
with it – he said that he had become very keen on baking, which he thought was
doubly useful since it kept his fingernails clean. My dad declined this
splendid offer. Uncle Jim asked my dad (who was, like his father, an electrical
man) to have a look at his radio, which hadn’t worked for a while. Apparently
it was a real museum piece – Jim hugged it and pressed his ear to the silent
speaker – he said that he was sure there was still life in it (actually, he
referred to it as “him”), and that he had heard “him” speaking sometimes when
he was in the other room. My dad swore that Jim had a length of wire from the
EARTH (ground) terminal on the radio chassis, and the other end was in a
plant-pot full of soil from his yard – I’ve never been sure about this – it
sounds too much like an Irish gag.
Ike had a severe stroke when he was about 75, and died
within a couple of days, but he died secure in the proud knowledge that he was
something of a local rarity, since he owned his own house (he had bought it
with the £500 he inherited from the sale of his mother’s dairy), and that he owned
the first TV set in his street; they had bought it so the neighbours could
watch the (1953) Coronation on it. Since he already had a telephone that he overcharged
the neighbours to use, this was the ultimate in Beating the Joneses. My
granddad was quite big-time – as a foreman in the electrical workshop, almost
unbelievable nowadays, he used to wear a waistcoat and a bowler hat. My lasting
childhood memory of him is sitting in his armchair, resplendent in waistcoat
and silver watchchain (which I have somewhere), with the cufflinks and
detachable starched collar removed from his work shirt, slurping a cup of tea.
Jim was well into his eighties when he died – his end was
unfortunate, solitary, and in some ways had a lot in common with his life. He
was boiling eggs on his gas stove in his little flat when he seems to have had
some kind of dizzy turn. The coroner’s inquest reckoned that the pan of water
boiled over, extinguishing the gas flame, and Jim was gassed while he was
unconscious.
That’s enough about that lot. I also might add, in passing,
that I have a relative from a different branch of the family, who was gaoled in
the 1970s for spying for the Russians – this is absolutely true, by the way. I
think I’m probably not allowed to say anything about this story, so I’ll leave
it for the moment. Just saying.
Things could get worse.
