Nellie Dawson
Little buns, scones, all sorts of small cakes, and we sold them for four for thre’pence ha’penny. That stands in my mind plain you know, four for thre’pence ha’penny! You wouldn’t get that now.
Interviews: 1920 - 1929
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Audrey Clark
When I started my first wage I got was, I think it was twenty-five shillings – one pound five shillings (£1 5sh), just a bit better than the other, but it was very low wages…I worked there for two and a half years and then I was sort of called up for some reason, although it was a textile mill I couldn’t stay there. It was a case of either going into the army, into the WVS or the land army or, because I’d passed in physics and chemistry in my school certificate, I got a job at ICI.
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Jean Houlston
I don’t know why I didn’t take any exams because I had bad eyes for one thing and I think that was the reason, so…but I loved Burnley Road School like Dorothy did.
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Dorothy Tonge
I was born in one of the cottages, and I don’t know what happened but they wanted us out of the cottages, and I went up Banks, right at the top of the hill until I was four and then me mum and dad worked at Westfield Mill
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Mary Kershaw
I had friends locally, we went on holidays camping with the Guides and…holidays with my parents and I left school as I say at thirteen and a half and went to training school in Hebden Bridge that was if you wanted to be in an office you needed to have short-hand and typing and book-keeping
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Margaret Greenwood
There was these two old ladies walking along and there were another young woman walking past and she were covered in spots, and one of these ladies said to the other ‘wonder what’s the matter with ‘er?’ and this other one says ‘I expect ‘er’s been in some mack of a muck ‘oil and ‘er’s no bound to tell!’
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Kathleen Priestley
Well you had to go up Heptonstall Road, through what they called a ginnel and on to Wood Street, and it was on top of another house – there was a house underneath.
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Harry Cummings
Well I’d eight brothers – well seven brothers and sisters, and we lived in a two-roomed house; mother and father slept downstairs and the rest of us slept upstairs with a blanket or something across the room to keep the lads away from the girls, not for any other reason, just to keep them separate.
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Elsie Duerden
My dad liked bowling and he were dead keen on it. My mother used to take me to the silent pictures and you could go in what was the Co-op – they had two or three halls upstairs and those were silent films. The talking films had just come out, or you went to the Picture House and I, ooh thought it were wonderful watching people talk.
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Dennis Vickers
If it wasn’t for my sister, I wouldn’t have anything; she used to buy us things for Christmas. We used to have an apple, an orange, one present and that was it. It was a red apple, I always remember that – a red apple; I think she used to polish it and make it look a bit better you know.
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Colin Greenwood
Well here, Pickles’s foundry there was and they used to make wood patterns for the mouldings you know that they put in damp sand, and about five o’clock every evening they had a square chimney sort of thing and they’d tip the metal out into these moulds that they’d made, and the sparks used to come out of it – it was just like a firework display.
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Norman Windle
You’d no calculators, you’d no mobile phones, you’d no…you didn’t take an exam and see all the information on the exam sheet, you had to know it, and if you didn’t you were in trouble
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Charles "Ken" Green
My childhood was extremely happy. One thing as the years have gone by…well I knew this as most people do from some time ago, but you just realise how hard working your parents were. I don’t think they could stand the pace nowadays really! [laughing] But my childhood was extremely happy.
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Erika Bowker
We had good neighbours. And our children thought, I use to take them to Hardcastle Craggs, they had chicken pox and I didn’t want them to pass anything onto other children, so I took them to Hardcastle Craggs every day after their nap.
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Richard Redman
corduroy is woven, and was woven, by weavers who produced the fabric but this didn’t look anything like the corduroy that has a pile now, because when it’s woven the threads that form the pile are just long loops in the flat cloth, so it has to be first of all cut. In the early days they did this with hand knives and they used to push the knife up each race.
