Jelma Bates
Jelma Bates’s Gallery can be found here
[TRACK 1]
[Zelma has a strong Yorkshire accent so this is reflected in the transcript]
This will last for about an hour – if you want to stop before that, you can do.
Interviews: 1930 - 1939
-
-
Allan Stuttard
I can’t remember much about t’war, I know it never seemed to bother me that me brother was at D-day and I can’t remember – you know it didn’t seem real to us kids, you know...
-
Josie Greenwood
Me father was the greengrocer in the village, me mum was just me mum…it was the war years and food was short. Me mum used to go snaring rabbits for us to eat. She was a marvellous cook, so we never ever went short of food because we’d have nettles for vegetables and as there got more of us, we’d have cow’s heart and sheep’s heads for us tea, and wonderful things like that you see!
-
David Fletcher (2)
There wasn’t an estate agents in Hebden Bridge so we set up a volunteer estate agency and we gave all the information away for free. We just had a sheet of properties that were on the market with a guide price against it and the contact details of the people that owned it, and you know, when you look at it today with its estate agents – there just weren’t any at that time – and then the fourth part was the big problem buildings. What do you do with buildings like Birchcliffe Church and Sunday School, like Nutclough Mill? Like you know, these we saw as places where we might get new forms of employment in time and we – although we were trying to attract new people – didn’t want it to become a dormitory area and so that was the strategy.
-
David Fletcher
Well my father came to Mytholmroyd; he bought into a small corn merchant’s business in Mytholmroyd and so he was working very hard to try to get that established. 1933 was a critical year for him because one of his major customers went bankrupt and it almost took him with them, so it was a pretty tough time and they’d just moved into this new house, a semi-detached house on Caldene Avenue. Caldene Avenue at that time was just rubble, it wasn’t a tarmacked road.
-
David Fletcher (3)
Bridge Mill is a terrific building. It’s the oldest building in Hebden Bridge by a long way. There is actually a written record of it having consent to impound the river. Sir John de Thornhill, Thornhill near Wakefield I imagine, was given consent by the Prior of Lewes, Sussex on behalf of the Lord of the Manor, to impound the river and construct a mill on the Wadsworth bank of the stream between the township of Wadsworth and the township of Heptonstall, and this is recorded in the city archives in Leeds and the date was 1314, you know, nearly two hundred years before the stone Hebden Bridge Bridge was built.
-
David Fletcher (4)
I’ve got four years and I’ve got a couple of those before I’m there and then there’ll be some teething problems I expect because it’s a kind of….it’s a new sort of thing and of course I work with the Alternative Technology Centre and their water power people have got this water power scheme, and Alternative Technological Centre are in another mill that we bought – I bought it with a friend jointly to save its life, you know, save it from demolition. Bought two on the canal bank and sold one of them to help to pay the other one.
-
Joe Whitehead
Our house was a farmhouse, or ex farmhouse. Me grandparents that came from Halifax on mum’s side of the family, and grannie’s husband died and she bought a farm on the hillsides of Blackshaw Head, mainly I would think to get away from the loss…..and then she moved to Blackpool, and when she moved to Blackpool me father and mother got married and they lived in the house for a few years actually, about five years. I was born after they’d been married about fifteen month, they got married late, my mother was twenty-nine, father twenty-nine……that sums that one up really.
-
Margaret Walton
I went to St James Church of England School, Mytholm, in Hebden Bridge and for the last twelve months we went to what was Central Street then, because in the July as I should be leaving at the Christmas, they put the age up to leaving school at fifteen from fourteen and Calder High School wasn’t finished, so quite a lot of the small schools, we all had to go down to Central Street for the last twelve months so I just went to those two schools.
-
Peter and Mona Trafford
My family? Well I’m one of six. I’ve four brothers and a sister..I lived on a farm and I had to work. When I used to come home from school I’d to get changed and get stuck in to some farm work – hay time, milking when I was old enough, milking cows by hand….generally….helping out on the farm you know.
-
Ruth Round
Well one major event was I had to go to hospital because I had scarlet fever…..and I had to go to Todmorden to hospital….and I couldn’t have visitors for a month, so that was pretty hard. It was a major event in my life.
