Scrap Book Project – Hillmorton

The family settled in Hillmorton in 1960 when Dad took up a new job at the Rugby Rural District Council (created 1894, abolished 1974) and we moved from Hinckley in Leicestershire, about fifteen miles away.  In those days Hillmorton was only a small village and although there was no discernable boundary from the town it was undeveloped and had only a fraction of the population that it has today.

We moved into a brand new bungalow at number 47, The Kent that was one of the first new developments in the village at that time.  It cost £2,000.  All around there were exciting places to explore and play and there was lots of time to do so because parents were not nearly so paranoid about children wandering off to enjoy themselves in the 1960’s as they are today.  In those days it wasn’t uncommon to go out in the morning and only return home when empty tummies demanded that food was required and there certainly weren’t search parties out looking all over the place.  It’s a shame that these days children are confined to their back gardens or have to be taken back and forth to school by car because there was so much more fun when young lives were not subject to so many restrictions on movement.

The house we lived in was built on an old tip and over the back was a big hole perfect for sifting through and finding old junk and behind that was ‘The Bank’,which was a strip of trees and undergrowth that was good for playing jungle war games.  A narrow path ran from Sandy Lane to Tony Gibbard’s garden at no. 37 where two trees, one large and one small, were converted into tree houses and frequently doubled up as a Lancaster bomber and a Spitfire fighter.  You certainly had to have a vivid imagination to achieve this childhood fantasy transformation.

What is now Featherbed Lane used to be Sandy Lane which was an unpaved track and in the adjacent trees was a long abandoned car that in our imagination we converted into a Churchill Tank.  Beyond Sandy Lane was the ‘Sand Pit’, which was a bit of a forbidden zone on account of the large number of rats that lived there.  Mum didn’t like us going there and with her exaggerated warnings of how they would either dash up your trouser leg and chew your penis off or alternatively take a flying leap and rip your throat out was enough to make you think twice about venturing too far inside.

A few years later they built some houses on the sand pit and a lot of them fell down quite soon after because of inadequate foundations in the soft sand.

Further down the road there were some derelict old terraced houses that had been condemned by the Local Authority that we convinced ourselves were haunted, they were knocked down a few years later and some Council flats built there to replace them.  These days they would be boarded up and made secure but in the early 1960s they were left open so we used to go inside and frighten ourselves half to death exploring the empty rooms looking for their secrets.

On the road down to the Locks and the Oxford Canal there was the site of the old Hillmorton Manor House that lay in ruins surrounded by dense undergrowth of trees and vegetation.  This is where Constable Road is now.   Around the Manor House the bigger boys in the village had constructed a scramble track (a sort of pre-BMX thing) where we had bike races and pretended to be the Brandon Bees motorcyclists.

This wasn’t my favourite game I have to say because I used to prefer to go down to the canal and mess about on the locks.  This is where my best pal David Newman and Gary James lived and his parents allowed us to build a camp in an old outbuilding in the garden.  The canal was an incredibly dangerous place really but of course we didn’t realise that at the time.  During the summer we used to wait at top lock and offer to open and close the locks for passing canal craft in the hope that we would receive a few pennies for our labours.

School was about three hundred metres away and to get there we had to pass what was euphemistically called the ‘corn field’.  There never actually was any corn in it of course it was just a piece of uncultivated land with long grass that was waiting to be developed and it wasn’t long before the Council built a clinic and some houses on it and took away another useful recreation site.

At the back of the school was the Elder Forest, which wasn’t a forest at all just an area of overgrown vegetation with a predominance of Elder Trees.  That’s all been grubbed up and built on too of course now.  Given the shortage of playing space it’s hardly any wonder I suppose that today children have to stop at home and watch the TV or play computer games and are denied the pleasure of real play!

Scrap Book Project – Motherhood and Apple Pie

It seems to me that life in the  1950’s and early 1960’s was fairly routine, had a comforting sense of security that was permanently guaranteed with little suggestion that things were ever likely to change.

Britain was booming, dad had a steady job, we lived in a nice house, the sun always shone at weekends and in this life the most constant of constants was my mum.  She was there in the mornings to pack us off to school and there again in the afternoon to welcome us back home.  Meals were always on the table at the same time every day, clothes were always washed and ironed and smelled fresh and the house was warm and comfortable.

My mum wasn’t any different from anyone else’s mum of course because this was the way things were.  Mums didn’t go to work because they stopped at home and were full time housewives, there were no working family tax credits, there were no bleeding heart feminists.  Men had the jobs and provided for the family, made all the big decisions and generally ruled the roost and women took care of all the domestic matters like cleaning, laundry, baking and haberdashery.  This was the way of things, it had always been this way and it always would be and so it was until the 1960s when we started to let our hair grow, wear denim and generally start to challenge the post war basis of British society and way of life.

Looking back now I can only imagine that by today’s standards life for a housewife must have been bone crushingly boring, driven by routine with none of the modern distractions that we take for granted.  No day time television or the shopping channel, only half an hour of ‘Watch with Mother’ around about lunch time, no telephones so no one to chat to except the next door neighbour, no car to nip to the shops and no shops to nip to anyway and no house full of modern appliances to make life easier around the home.  I think there was a ‘Young Wives’ club which met during the day in each others houses on a rotating basis and later on Tupperware and Avon parties in the evening when we had to stay in our bedrooms but these didn’t strike me as being especially exciting.

Days had a reassuring routine about them where dad got up first and fixed the boiler and started the fire and then made the first pot of tea of the day.  Loose leaves not bags of course because until 1964 with the introduction of the perforated bag less than three per cent of tea sold in Britain came in teabags and now it’s hard to imagine what life would be like without them.

After tea in bed mum would get up, get our clothes ready and then prepare the breakfast, which was generally cereals in the summer and porridge oats in the winter, sometimes a boiled egg or just simply toast with a smear of tomato sauce or marmite for the brave.  She would see dad off to work on his push bike and then finish getting us ready and then shoo us off to school.  These days children get driven to school or the Council pays for a taxi but we used to walk, it wasn’t very far and it was quite safe.

The school crossing patrol man in the picture was my Granddad!

And then with the house to herself mum set about the chores.  Monday was traditionally washing day but in the days before automatic washing machines this meant hand washing and firing up a gas boiler and two or three loads of washing to manage.  No spin drier either so wet clothes had to be put through the mangle to get rid of the excess water and then without tumble driers, hung out on the line to dry.  Getting clothes dry was fairly straightforward on fine days but was a real problem if it was raining or in the winter when linen and clothes were hung around the house and in front of the open fire in a race against time to get them aired.

Preparing food took up a lot of every day because there were no convenience meals and everything had to be prepared from scratch.  There was complete certainty about the menu because we generally had the same thing at the same time on the same day every week, there were no foreign foods, no pasta or curries and rice was only ever used in puddings.

The main meal of the week was Sunday dinner which was usually roast beef, pork or lamb (chicken was a rare treat and a turkey was only for Christmas) served with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, which for some reason mum always called batter puddings, and strictly only seasonal vegetables because runner beans weren’t flown in from Kenya all year round as they are today.

We had never heard of chicken tandoori, paella or lasagne and the week had a predictable routine; Monday was the best of the left over meat served cold with potatoes and on Tuesday the tough bits were boiled up in a stew (we would call that bouef bourguignon now) and on Wednesday what was left was minced and cooked with onions and served with mash and in this way one good joint of meat provided four main meals with absolutely no waste.  Thursday was my personal favourite, fried egg and chips and Friday was my nightmare day with liver or kidneys because I liked neither (and still don’t!)  I complained so much about this that later I was allowed the concession of substituting sausage for liver but I was still obliged to have the gravy (which I didn’t care for much either) on the basis that ‘it was good for me!’  If we had been Catholics then we would have had fish I suppose but we didn’t have things out of the sea very often except for fish fingers.

On Saturday we would have something like a home made meat pie or pudding or very occasionally a special treat and dad would fetch fish and chips from the chip shop, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper and covered in salt and vinegar.  Later on I used to have chips on a Wednesday night as well when David Newman’s dad picked us up after wolf cubs and took us home in the back of his battered blue van which smelt permanently of stale batter.

After main course there was always a pudding which was usually something stodgy like a treacle pudding with golden syrup, spotted dick (suet pudding), bread and butter pudding or jam roll.  There was always lots of jam in our house because my Nan worked at the Robertson’s factory in Catford in London and I think she was either paid in jars of jam or bought it at a discount, I never knew which.

Mum was in charge of shopping of course and had the housekeeping money to spend.  This used to involve a lot of lists I seem to recall because there wasn’t a lot of money and she used to complain about ‘five week months’ when the money had to be stretched out further and with no credit cards she had to be careful to make it last between monthly pay days.

Shopping was completely different fifty years ago and wasn’t nearly as easy as it is today when one single car trip to Tesco is all that is needed.  For a start we didn’t have a car so it really wasn’t possible to transport all of the weekly shopping home in one go.  On market day mum would catch the Midland Red R76 into town to buy fresh vegetables and then later in the week she would go into town again to go to the butchers and the International Stores which until Fine Fare arrived was the only big food store in town.  She had to go shopping twice a week for the simple reason that we didn’t have a fridge so keeping stuff fresh was a bit of a problem, especially in the Summer.

If she forgot something or needed it urgently there was a village shop and a couple of times a week Mr Tuscon’s mobile shop passed by.  The milk was delivered early in the morning by Anderson’s dairy and then the baker came by in the Sunblest van a couple of times a week.

During the day there was cleaning to do with an inefficient old fashioned vacuum cleaner that made a lot of noise and mostly rearranged the dust around the house rather than suck it up like a Dyson and then there was dusting and polishing to follow up.  The kitchen sink was scrubbed with Ajax or Vim and in between cooking and baking the gas oven had to be cleaned down as well.  There was a lot of baking because Mum used to make all of her own cakes and pastries; Christmas cakes, Birthday cakes, jam tarts, jam sponges and iced fairy cakes and then at the weekend fresh cream horns, puff pastry vanilla slices with raspberry jam (I said there was a lot of jam) and butter cream meringues for Sunday tea.

Cooking and cleaning were important jobs and so too were knitting and dress making because mum was also responsible for making sure we were all well turned out.  For me one of the earliest efforts was a little suit made out of last year’s curtains and later on there were home made jumpers and cardigans, hats and scarves and for herself and my sister home made dresses and skirts.

They weren’t especially fashionable of course but then we didn’t notice this in the days before children’s designer clothes.

Compared with today home life in the 1950s and 1960s was much simpler and I wouldn’t say this for sure but probably happier too because of it.  These days we talk about children suffering from stress but there was no such thing when I was a lad and one of the main reasons for this was that inside the family home we had a happy, safe and comfortable life and while dad played his part in this of course (he did the decorating, looked after the garden and cleaned our shoes once a week) this was mainly down to Mum who made the house a home.

Scrap Book Project – Granddads

I suppose I was fortunate because for the first twenty years of my life I had the privilege of having and knowing all four of my grandparents, five if you include my great grandmother who lived to a grand old age.  There were boys and girls at school who had one or two missing even when we were quite young so although I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time I was privileged to know them all.

I recall my granddads really well as we lived with them for a while, visited them frequently and every year one or the other of them would come on holiday with us.

This is really unfair I suppose but grandad Ted was always my favourite because he seemed to have a better understanding of children.  Going to visit him was always something to look forward to.  He was the one that I remember had all of the patience and the unlimited time to spend for hours in the back garden at Cleveleys Avenue playing cricket (it might only have been ten minutes for all I know but my memory tells me that these sporting sessions lasted as long as a test match) or taking me to the brook with a fishing net, or fiddling about on a Norfolk beach in rock pools and flying kites on the beach.

He was about forty-five when I was born and must have had a job but as far as I can recall he was always around when I was a child.  He could drive a car and used to take us to Groby Pool near Leicester to feed the ducks or to Bradgate Park to see the deer and he liked football and cricket and was a safe and reliable grandad to be around.  He took us on holiday to Lincolnshire and Norfolk and everyone seemed to like him.  Granddad Ted died on 17thMay 1975 and it was a shock because it was unexpected and sudden and we were making plans to go on holiday in a month’s time to Devon.  He was the first granddad and also the first close relative that I knew to die and I think his funeral was probably the first that I ever attended.

Grandad Ernie was quite different.  He was Londoner and worked as a bus conductor on the old London double-decker Routemaster buses operating from the Catford depot in South London.  I can still remember him in his dark blue London Transport uniform with his red conductors badge and his leather satchel slung over his shoulder walking home from work in a jaunty sort of way all along Barmerston Road back to the flat my grandparents lived at, at number 50.

Grandad Ernie liked to have a drink (or two) and would always give my dad (who was a hopeless drinker) a headache after a night out and he used to smoke forty Embassy cigarettes a day until the doctor told him to quit or die.  He spent a lot of time sitting in his favourite chair watching the horse racing on the TV and didn’t seem to have any particular interest in children.  He was a really nice man but he never quite seemed to have the time for or the understanding of children that grandad Ted used to have.  He was generous and kind but just didn’t seem to have the time to spend with us on all of the trivial things that the other one did.  He like history and reading and he bought me a book about Winston Churchill shortly after he died and I like to think that perhaps I inherited my own interests here from him.  Granddad Ernie died two years after Ted in 1977.

  

Scrap Book Project – Great Grandparents

I sometimes wonder just how many photographs there might be of me – probably thousands!  When I was a boy my dad had a camera and recorded all the big family moments, Christmases, birthdays, holidays and so on, later I became interested in photography and had a succession of cameras as I was constantly updating and improving my photographic equipment and these days there are digital cameras and mobile phones taking millions of images every day.

There are now so many images that we discard many, delete them and simply throw them away.

It wasn’t always like this and I have some precious old photographs of my family, my parents, grandparents and great-great grandparents which tell a different sort of photographic story.  There aren’t hundreds of pointless snaps of them but instead just one or two which give an insight into who they might have been and my family heritage.  Why did they take these pictures?  They couldn’t post them on Facebook or share them through a blogging site – they were taken as personal mementos for themselves and their close families.  So what might they think now when they are uploaded onto the internet for the whole world to see, which is a place that they were never meant to be.

My great grandfather Charles Edward Petcher was the fourth of seven children born in 1884 to Francis and Ellen Petcher and he had three brothers and three sisters.  He married Maria Weston and they had two children, my grandfather Lawrence Edward Petcher in 1909 and a daughter, Mary, who died of tuberculosis at the age of about twenty.  In the picture above he looks old and worn down but he was probably no more than forty-five years old sitting in his deck chair and enjoying his back garden.

Charles was a coal miner who worked for the Desford Coal Mining Company at the Desford colliery which was part of the North Warwickshire coalfields and the closest pit to the city of Leicester.  It was a relatively modern mine that had only began production in 1902 so, and I am guessing here of course, it is likely that he started work here when he was about eighteen years old.  I don’t know exactly how long he was a miner for but certainly later on he was a policeman in the city of Leicester. My dad’s brother and my uncle Peter was inspired by that to later become a Leicestershire policeman himself.  Desford colliery closed in 1984.

Charles and Maria lived in Desford in the early part of the twentieth century and would probably struggle to recognise it a hundred years later.  They would have been most familiar with the old part of the village consisting of High Street, Church Lane, Main Street, Chapel Lane, Cottage Lane and part of Newbold Road but not the modern developments all around it.  Desford had a hosiery industry and in this picture of Maria at the garden gate I wonder if those wrinkled woollen stockings were made in a local factory?

Desford has both an industrial and an agricultural heritage and the great majority of villagers were engaged in agriculture until at least 1700, farming arable strips in four Open Fields of the parish, and pasturing their animals on the low lying meadows by the streams. In 1760, however, by private Act of Parliament, the thousand acres of the Open Fields were enclosed, and the new fields hedged and farmed separately.

Some of these new large farms were owned and farmed by the Hill family and this is where my family history finds its way in because Florence Lillian Hill was my Great Grandmother, mother to Dorothy who married Lawrence Edward Petcher in the late 1920s.

Scrap Book Project – Job Referencies and Employment Records

When I took possession of the Scrap Book I was intrigued to find details of a life that I had never known or appreciated. This really shouldn’t have come as a great surprise because there are many dimensions to a life but the only one that I was fully familiar with was in his role as my father. In what many would describe as an ordinary life this was a task that he excelled at I have to say!

But beyond the responsibility of being a parent I wonder what else he was like. I have been looking at his old employment records and these have revealed some interesting and important clues.

He was educated at Wellingborough Grammar School in Northamptonshire (Sir David Frost is a famous old boy) during the years of the Second World War and I can only imagine that this must have been a huge distraction for the country with a corresponding lack of attention paid to educational standards. This must have been good fun if you were a pupil then but it didn’t lead to a fistful of GCSEs to help you set out in life.

The school in line with the custom of the time, was selective, which meant that an entrance examination had to be passed to get a place. Until 1945 the school charged fees for attendance but following R. A. Butler’s great Education Act of 1944, all places became free of charge. The eleven plus exam and secondary education obligations were also introduced in the Education Act.

According to school records, in summer 1947 Dad was in the fifth form remove (the school tried at this time to push the brightest boys for School Certificate in four years, Dad was clearly not in the bright boys form and took the usual five years). This extra time didn’t help a great deal because in summer 1948 he was in 5B (unexamined fifth form class) and sadly he didn’t manage to get the School Certificate. The School Certificate was not like GCSE but was a group certificate and you had to do well in five subjects, miss on one and tough, you got nothing, this is what must have happened to Dad because no school certificate is mentioned when he left in the Autumn of that year. The following term, he left to join his father’s business, a grocery store at 110 Higham Road, Rushden.

After Wellingborough Grammar School his own CV tells us that he did more studying at the South East London College of Commerce and the Leicester College of Art and Technology. None of these educational establishments exist any longer and although there is an interesting old boys web site for the Wellingborough Grammar School I can find nothing about the other two.

His first real job was as a Film Librarian working at Jessops in Leicester and then in June 1950 when he was eighteen years old he started his National Service in the Royal Air Force at the Air Ministry in London.

This sounds awfully exciting but I suspect that it probably wasn’t. From 1949, every healthy man between the ages of 18 and 26 was expected to serve in the armed forces for a minimum period of eighteen months. Men were exempt from National Service if they worked in three ‘essential services’, which were coal mining, farming and the merchant navy, so not film librarians then! I’d like to tell you that he was a fighter pilot or a commando or something thrilling but the plain fact is that he worked at the Air Ministry in London in the office as a clerk/typist whose job was ‘the compilation and maintenance of officers’ and airmens’ records and documents’. I can only imagine that this was exceedingly dull but it prepared him for life in the public service as a local government officer.

He must have enjoyed it however because he completed over two years and his discharge paper of 13th July 1952 says that his conduct was exceptional and his ability was very good, he was described as ‘smart’ on a scale of ‘very smart’, ‘smart’ or ‘untidy’ and he was summed up as ‘a very reliable and efficient clerk who has done good work and helped in the tuition of others’. I can understand that because he was always the most helpful person with lots of patience when dealing with other people – sadly I didn’t inherit that characteristic.

The records now reveal that he was doing a bit of moonlighting because if he was discharged on 13th July 1952 it is interesting that he started work with Lewisham Borough Council in South London two weeks earlier on 1st July 1952 as a general clerk. I think Mum’s Aunty Glad got him the job because she worked in the staff canteen and was good terms with some of the senior staff (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and she put a good word in for him! He stayed there for six months and when he left the Town Clerk, Alan Milner Smith, wrote of him “I found him to be an intelligent boy…and a thoroughly satisfactory officer”, I wonder how well he knew Aunty Glad.

He left Lewisham and a week before his twenty first birthday and took up a new appointment at Leicestershire County Council as a general clerk in the Common Services Section of the Education Department where he stayed until May 1957.

In that time he got married, I was born, and he bought his first two houses. I think he must have been a sociable chap because he was enthusiastic in running the County Offices football and cricket teams and he kept meticulous records of games and performances from 1953 until 1956. From my own experience I know that he was a well liked man and the Supplies Officer F E Collis wrote in a reference in March 1957 “ he is very popular with the staff and an enthusiastic member of the office football team” he also said, in an old fashioned sort of way, “I have found Mr Petcher’s work perfectly satisfactory and he brings to it an enthusiasm which is all too often lacking in junior officers today”. I imagine F E Collis was about a hundred years old and remembered what administration was like in the days of Baden-Powell and the Raj!

In May 1957 he left Leicestershire County Council and took a job at Hinckley Urban District Council as a Land Charges and General Clerk. He bought his third house, Lindsay, my sister, was born in October and he cycled to work and back every day, a distance of about ten miles, later he got a moped but I seem to recall that it wasn’t especially reliable and sometimes he had to push it all the way home so he went back to the push bike.

This wasn’t sustainable of course so in 1959 they sold up and we sensibly moved to Hinckley to be close to his work. That didn’t last long either and he left Hinckley on 31st December 1960 and moved to Rugby Rural District Council and that’s how we came to move to Hillmorton.

I especially like his reference from F J Warren the Deputy Clerk of the Council who described my dad as “a useful, promising and reliable member of staff… I cannot speak too highly of his integrity and desire to give satisfaction” and he added in a quaint sort of way that you would never find today “he is of pleasing appearance and courteous to all with whom he comes in contact”.

That’s how I remember him too!

The End of the Year and the Start of a New Blogging Project

And so 2012 and another blogging year comes to an end and thank you to everyone who visited, passed by or just dropped in by accident when looking for something else and increased my page hits by 87% from 100,671 views in 2011 to 188,500 in 2012.

Throughout the year I have been reviewing old posts and reblogging and in that time I have managed a post a day for the entire year.  I have added new pictures, corrected mistakes and changed some text in response to feedback.

But I cannot do that again next year so I have identified a new project.

When my dad died I took possession of a box of papers and mementos which included a scrap book and several exercise books with yellowing dog-eared pages which included notes and stories of things that were important to him and what he liked to write about and keep a record of.

This box of old books is now one of my most treasured possessions and I return to it regularly for inspiration.  It is a record of his life that he recorded and archived and I feel privileged to possess this box of history.

It occurred to me one time that if my dad had had access to the internet and to the opportunity to share these things with others through a wider medium then he would surely have been a blogger and because I hoped that in twenty or thirty year’s time my own children might like to know about me in the same way – but I don’t want to keep scrap books or written journals – then I decided that the appropriate modern equivalent to the scrap book would be through blog posts.

In keeping with my theme of ‘New Light Through Old Windows” I have decided that my project for 2013 will be to take a page at a time and find a memory story that leaps from the page.  I am not going to post every day because that becomes a bit of a chore just now and again when I am satisfied that I have a story.  Sometimes these will be revisited and recycled and sometimes they will be new.

I hope that readers will still continue to drop by?

Granddads

I suppose I was fortunate because for the first twenty years of my life I had the privilege of having and knowing all four of my grandparents, five if you include my great grandmother who lived to a grand old age.  There were boys and girls at school who had one or two missing even when we were quite young so although I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time I was privileged to know them all.

I recall my granddads really well as we lived with them for a while, visited them frequently and every year one or the other of them would come on holiday with us.

This is really unfair I suppose but grandad Ted was always my favourite because he seemed to have a better understanding of children.  Going to visit him was always something to look forward to.  He was the one that I remember had all of the patience and the unlimited time to spend for hours in the back garden at Cleveleys Avenue playing cricket (it might only have been ten minutes for all I know but my memory tells me that these sporting sessions lasted as long as a test match) or taking me to the brook with a fishing net, or fiddling about on a Norfolk beach in rock pools and flying kites on the beach.

He was about forty-five when I was born and must have had a job but as far as I can recall he was always around when I was a child.  He could drive a car and used to take us to Groby Pool near Leicester to feed the ducks or to Bradgate Park to see the deer and he liked football and cricket and was a safe and reliable grandad to be around.  He took us on holiday to Lincolnshire and Norfolk and everyone seemed to like him.  Granddad Ted died on 17^thMay 1975 and it was a shock because it was unexpected and sudden and we were making plans to go on holiday in a month’s time to Devon.  He was the first granddad and also the first close relative that I knew to die and I think his funeral was probably the first that I ever attended.

Grandad Ernie was quite different.  He was Londoner and worked as a bus conductor on the old London double-decker Routemaster buses operating from the Catford depot in South London.  I can still remember him in his dark blue London Transport uniform with his red conductors badge and his leather satchel slung over his shoulder walking home from work in a jaunty sort of way all along Barmerston Road back to the flat my grandparents lived at, at number 50.

Grandad Ernie liked to have a drink (or two) and would always give my dad (who was a hopeless drinker) a headache after a night out and he used to smoke forty Embassy cigarettes a day until the doctor told him to quit or die.  He spent a lot of time sitting in his favourite chair watching the horse racing on the TV and didn’t seem to have any particular interest in children.  He was a really nice man but he never quite seemed to have the time for or the understanding of children that grandad Ted used to have.  He was generous and kind but just didn’t seem to have the time to spend with us on all of the trivial things that the other one did.  He like history and reading and he bought me a book about Winston Churchill shortly after he died and I like to think that perhaps I inherited my own interests here from him.  Granddad Ernie died two years after Ted in 1977.

 

 

Family History, Great Grandparents (1)

I sometimes wonder just how many photographs there might be of me – probably thousands!  When I was a boy my dad had a camera and recorded all the big family moments, Christmases, birthdays, holidays and so on, later I became interested in photography and had a succession of cameras as I was constantly updating and improving my photographic equipment and these days there are digital cameras and mobile phones taking millions of images every day.  There are now so many images that we discard many, delete them and simply throw them away.

It wasn’t always like this and I have some precious old photographs of my family, my parents, grandparents and great-great grandparents which tell a different sort of photographic story.  There aren’t hundreds of pointless snaps of them but instead just one or two which give an insight into who they might have been and my family heritage.  Why did they take these pictures?  They couldn’t post them on Facebook or share them through a blogging site – they were taken as personal mementos for themselves and their close families.  So what might they think now when they are uploaded onto the internet for the whole world to see, which is a place that they were never meant to be.

My great grandfather Charles Edward Petcher was the fourth of seven children born in 1884 to Francis and Ellen Petcher and he had three brothers and three sisters.  He married Maria Weston and they had two children, my grandfather Lawrence Edward Petcher in 1909 and a daughter, Mary, who died of tuberculosis at the age of about twenty.  In the picture above he looks old and worn down but he was probably no more than forty-five years old sitting in his deck chair and enjoying his back garden.

Charles was a coal miner who worked for the Desford Coal Mining Company at the Desford colliery which was part of the North Warwickshire coalfields and the closest pit to the city of Leicester.  It was a relatively modern mine that had only began production in 1902 so, and I am guessing here of course, it is likely that he started work here when he was about eighteen years old.  I don’t know exactly how long he was a miner for but certainly later on he was a policeman in the city of Leicester. My dad’s brother and my uncle Peter was inspired by that to later become a Leicestershire policeman himself.  Desford colliery closed in 1984.

Charles and Maria lived in Desford in the early part of the twentieth century and would probably struggle to recognise it a hundred years later.  They would have been most familiar with the old part of the village consisting of High Street, Church Lane, Main Street, Chapel Lane, Cottage Lane and part of Newbold Road but not the modern developments all around it.  Desford had a hosiery industry and in this picture of Maria at the garden gate I wonder if those wrinkled woolen stockings were made in a local factory?

Desford has both an industrial and an agricultural heritage and the great majority of villagers were engaged in agriculture until at least 1700, farming arable strips in four Open Fields of the parish, and pasturing their animals on the low lying meadows by the streams. In 1760, however, by private Act of Parliament, the thousand acres of the Open Fields were enclosed, and the new fields hedged and farmed separately.  Some of these new large farms were owned and farmed by the Hill family and this is where my family history finds its way in because Florence Lillian Hill was my Great Grandmother, mother to Dorothy who married Lawrence Edward Petcher in the late 1920s.

Monopoly and other Board Games

Monopoly is a board game named after the capitalist economic concept of owning everything and the domination of a market by a single entity.  It is said to be the most popular board game in the World and it is estimated that since the game was created, more than one billion people have played it and Games Magazine has included Monopoly into its Hall of Fame.

When I was young we used to play Monopoly quite often as a family but I quickly learned what a tedious and pointless game it is.  Sometimes a game could go on for hours without anyone ever winning as it became a mind numbing procession of Scottie dogs and racing cars following each other around and around the board with the only real excitement being when a piece started to approach Mayfair and Park Lane (depending on whether you owned it or not) which after three or four hours would have a couple of red hotels sitting on it and a slavering landlord waiting to demand an extotionate rental charge. Come to think of it, Monopoly is probably partly responsible for my left wing political leanings!

Dad always scrupilously looked after his possessions so even in the 1960s we were still using his own school boy edition which had real wooden houses and the eight classic pieces to move around the board; a Scottie dog, an iron, racing car, thimble, wheelbarrow, top hat, a cannon and a boot.  I have never begun to understand what sort of a mind would have come up with that rather absurd selection of items and I doubt if anyone could ever satisfactorily explain the randomness of it.  My favourite was the racing car, my sister liked the Scottie dog and we always gave mum the old boot but I don’t think she ever grasped the significance of this.

Games would generally start with a great deal of enthusiasm but after an hour or so without any real progress the horse trading used to start with the selling and swapping of real estate.  When everyone had a piece of the action and had assembled a land portfolio then there would be a flurry of property purchasing activity and little green houses would start to spring up all around the board.  Someone would start accumulating a pile of money, someone else would begin to run short and start to rely on passing go as often as possible and someone would just get tired of the whole thing, go deliberately bankrupt and simply give up.

Sometimes we had the sense to put a time limit on the game and just see who had the most money after say, three days, and then declare them the winner.  Curiously the banker more often than not seemed to win and I think this was because as everyone around the board slipped into a coma then it was possible to sneak a note or two from the bank into their own personal account! I know I did!  In fact the only time these games became anywhere near exciting was if someone got really pissed off and trashed the board in the middle of the game but usually it just petered out, no one really cared who won or lost because they were just glad that the whole thing had come to an end.

We used to play other games as well, when I was old enough dad taught me how to play chess but I could never beat him and years later I taught my own son how to play and now I can’t beat him either.  A game of chess could take a while as well sometimes but draughts was alright because that could be over quite quickly.  When I was really young snakes and ladders was always good fun and so was ludo before it was modernised and spoilt with the pop-o-matic dice in the perspex bubble.  Later we liked to play Cluedo and then I remember becoming obsessed with Scrabble and later Trivial Pursuits.  These days we don’t play many board games anymore because most people seem to prefer a games console or a Wii board.

Ivan Petcher March 1932 – October 2003

When I took possession of some personal possessions of my Dad I was intrigued to find details of a life that I had never known or appreciated. This really shouldn’t have come as a great surprise because there are many dimensions to a life but the only one that I was fully familiar with was in his role as my father. In what many would describe as an ordinary life this was a task that he excelled at I have to say!

But beyond the responsibility of being a parent I wonder what else he was like. I have been looking at his old employment records and these have revealed some interesting and important clues.

He was educated at Wellingborough Grammar School in Northamptonshire (Sir David Frost is a famous old boy) during the years of the Second World War and I can only imagine that this must have been a huge distraction for the country with a corresponding lack of attention paid to educational standards. This must have been good fun if you were a pupil then but it didn’t lead to a fistful of GCSEs to help you set out in life. The school in line with the custom of the time, was selective, which meant that an entrance examination had to be passed to get a place. Until 1945 the school charged fees for attendance but following R. A. Butler’s great Education Act of 1944, all places became free of charge. The eleven plus exam and secondary education obligations were also introduced in the Education Act.

According to school records, in summer 1947 Dad was in the fifth form remove (the school tried at this time to push the brightest boys for School Certificate in four years, Dad was clearly not in the bright boys form and took the usual five years). This extra time didn’t help a great deal because in summer 1948 he was in 5B (unexamined fifth form class) and sadly he didn’t manage to get the School Certificate. The School Certificate was not like GCSE but was a group certificate and you had to do well in five subjects, miss on one and tough, you got nothing, this is what must have happened to Dad because no school certificate is mentioned when he left in the Autumn of that year. The following term, he left to join his father’s business, a grocery store at 110 Higham Road, Rushden.

After Wellingborough Grammar School his own CV tells us that he did more studying at the South East London College of Commerce and the Leicester College of Art and Technology. None of these educational establishments exist any longer and although there is an interesting old boys web site for the Wellingborough Grammar School I can find nothing about the other two.

His first real job was as a Film Librarian working at Jessops in Leicester and then in June 1950 when he was eighteen years old he started his National Service in the Royal Air Force at the Air Ministry in London.  This sounds awfully exciting but I suspect that it probably wasn’t. From 1949, every healthy man between the ages of 18 and 26 was expected to serve in the armed forces for a minimum period of eighteen months. Men were exempt from National Service if they worked in three ‘essential services’, which were coal mining, farming and the merchant navy, so not film librarians then! I’d like to tell you that he was a fighter pilot or a commando or something thrilling but the plain fact is that he worked at the Air Ministry in London in the office as a clerk/typist whose job was ‘the compilation and maintenance of officers’ and airmens’ records and documents’. I can only imagine that this was exceedingly dull but it prepared him for life in the public service as a local government officer.

He must have enjoyed it however because he completed over two years and his discharge paper of 13th July 1952 says that his conduct was exceptional and his ability was very good, he was described as ‘smart’ on a scale of ‘very smart’, ‘smart’ or ‘untidy’ and he was summed up as ‘a very reliable and efficient clerk who has done good work and helped in the tuition of others’. I can understand that because he was always the most helpful person with lots of patience when dealing with other people, sadly I didn’t inherit that characteristic.

The records now reveal that he was doing a bit of moonlighting because if he was discharged on 13th July 1952 it is interesting that he started work with Lewisham Borough Council in South London two weeks earlier on 1st July 1952 as a general clerk. I think Mum’s Aunty Glad got him the job because she worked in the staff canteen and was good terms with some of the senior staff (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and she put a good word in for him! He stayed there for six months and when he left the Town Clerk, Alan Milner Smith, wrote of him “I found him to be an intelligent boy…and a thoroughly satisfactory officer”, I wonder how well he knew Aunty Glad.

He left Lewisham and a week before his twenty first birthday and took up a new appointment at Leicestershire County Council as a general clerk in the Common Services Section of the Education Department where he stayed until May 1957. In that time he got married, I was born, and he bought his first two houses. I think he must have been a sociable chap because he was enthusiastic in running the County Offices football and cricket teams and he kept meticulous records of games and performances from 1953 until 1956. From my own experience I know that he was a well liked man and the Supplies Officer F E Collis wrote in a reference in March 1957 “ he is very popular with the staff and an enthusiastic member of the office football team” he also said, in an old fashioned sort of way, “I have found Mr Petcher’s work perfectly satisfactory and he brings to it an enthusiasm which is all too often lacking in junior officers today”. I imagine F E Collis was about a hundred years old and remembered what administration was like in the days of Dickens and the Raj!

In May 1957 he left Leicestershire County Council and took a job at Hinckley Urban District Council as a Land Charges and General Clerk. He bought his third house, Lindsay, my sister, was born in October and he cycled to work and back every day, a distance of about ten miles, later he got a moped but I seem to recall that it wasn’t especially reliable and sometimes he had to push it all the way home so he went back to the push bike. This wasn’t sustainable of course so in 1959 they sold up and we sensibly moved to Hinckley to be close to his work. That didn’t last long either and he left Hinckley on 31st December 1960 and moved to Rugby Rural District Council and that’s how we came to move to Hillmorton. I especially like his reference from F J Warren the Deputy Clerk of the Council who described my dad as “a useful, promising and reliable member of staff… I cannot speak too highly of his integrity and desire to give satisfaction” and he added in a quaint sort of way that you would never find today “he is of pleasing appearance and courteous to all with whom he comes in contact”.

That’s how I remember him too!