Wildrose Arts

Interviews: 1940 - 1949

• 

  Stuart Gibson

  The job situation down there was pretty hopeless and my father and his brother-in-law it were, my uncle, they decided that they’d to do something about getting some work so they got a train to Manchester. When they got in Manchester they asked where there was work and they were told t’best place to go was Luddendenfoot, so they caught a train through and got off at Luddendenfoot.

• 

  Peter Thomas

  Well nicknames were again something that were more for the older generation – there was a reason for this actually I think in many respects. There are certain surnames that are very common, particularly Greenwood for example and Sutcliffe, and they often gave nicknames or what was called by-names to differentiate certain branches of Greenwoods.

• 

  Glenda Gibson

  We’d a big lounge, a hallway, a staircase where we used to slide down the banister [laughing], slide down the stairs on a tray straight through the hall! The kitchen was sort of a keeping kitchen with a round stone roof and stone slabs, and a wash kitchen with the old washer and rubbing board.

• 

  Geoff Garner

  I left school when I was fourteen, started work on the farm where I stayed till I was twenty-one and then I did various jobs travelling round the country on building sites, whatever was going.

• 

  Ann Kilbey

  It would be the younger ones. I don’t remember going to the cinema much. I can remember going into Halifax once or twice when there were cinemas in Halifax, but perhaps it was the isolation – you didn’t go out much. I go out a lot more now.

• 

  Jake Gomilny

  Well, of course Kiev is Ukraine, but at the time Ukraine did not exist as a country. It was part of the Soviet Union, so technically speaking, she was referring to, the country does not exist any more technically speaking.

• 

  Dougie Mansfield

  We moved to Hebden Bridge when I was five year old which was 1952. My father saw Lumb Bank advertised in the Exchange and Mart, came up, saw it, came up on his own, saw Lumb Bank, bought it for seventeen hundred pounds [£1700] and then came back down to Croydon and sort of shipped us all lock stock and barrel up north, and I think it’s my earliest memory – is the day we moved from Croydon. I’ve no recollection of anything major in Croydon so I cannot remember living in Croydon and we used to opposite the airport next to a main road, on Brighton Road

• 

  Frank Stoker

  I went to Berlin and went through the Berlin Wall when the Berlin Wall was standing. I went through Checkpoint Charlie, one of the American checkpoints into the east of Berlin, that was exciting and I’ve been to Russia, to Moscow and to the Central Asia Republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, that was exciting and we took the Chinese border.

• 

  Ralph Thornber

  Well that was a business that I started. I’ve Townson Thornber fuels….I don’t know how long ago we started it, it was about ’89 and then I sold it to Shell and I carried on working for fourteen years which….I thought it would last fourteen minutes, but, and then I decided I’d had enough and since then they’ve sold it to someone else, but it’s still about and it’s basically the same people as we had.

• 

  Tom Greenwood

  Well I grew up on the farm and I always say I knew how to do a day’s work by the time I was ten years old [laughing] because it was part of the….part of the growing up, dealing with the cows and horses and hay making and things like that.