I have mentioned previously about purchasing broken biscuits from Harry Marsh’s market stall, but not mentioned that in our house and no doubt in many other homes in the area he was known as ‘the broken biscuit man’. This was the oldest stall on Stockton Market, a business that was launched in the 1930s by Harry Marsh, for the sale of biscuits, sweets, cakes and confectionery. When I recall Harry Marsh market stall, I become nostalgic about him, his staff and stall, and are reminded of three very famous British biscuits makers, they are McVitie & Price Limited, MacFarlane, Lang & Co. Ltd, and Walkers Shortbread. McVities was from Edinburgh, and are famous for their ‘digestive biscuits’. Macfarlane, Lang & Co origins go back to 1817 when James Lang opened a bakery in Gallowgate, Glasgow, and a similar company history applies to Walkers Shortbread. The point I am making is the history of baking biscuits in Britain, sums up all that we love about the British Isles and its people, and, in some respects it is heart breaking that all the sacrifices our people have made to preserve and defend this Island, its customs and heritage appear to have got lost in the fogs of time and superseded by progress?. The question is will our grandchildren love digestive biscuits; will they walk across Victoria Bridge with a jaunty air, or attend Yarm Fair, or every Saturday Stockton market?
A few years late I know, but I’ve just read this post and the ‘broken biscuit man’ is my great great grandfather. I wonder if you know where there shop used to be in Thornbury, and whether you have any other information about this family?
My Nan Mary, Harry’s great granddaughter, is 94 now, and we were chatting about this over a glass of Green Ginger Wine! It would be fantastic if you had any other memories.
I remember once being in the market with my wife. We wanted some red gingham for curtains. It was an old ladies stall and she said she had the very material at home and we could go to the house after the market finished. She lived in a bungalow on Darlington Lane near to the Mile House. When we went in she had come from the front room and it smelled of pipe tobacco. She took us through to a bedroom where everything was stored and cut the material. We went back to the front room where we paid for the material. A clay pipe was laid on a coffee table. It was obvious that this lady lived on her own and she was the pipe smoker.
Not only were fruit & veg sold at the markets but many other goods including toys. One such stall was run by the Huggett family, lived on Durham Rd. Peter their son was in my class at Newham Grange, anybody know where he is now??
Peter Huggett is my cousin and is living in Edmonton, Canada. His sister, Joyce, died quite a long time ago. Their father and mother opened a shop on the corner of Leeds Street/Bishopton Lane selling wool and baby clothes.
I was brought up in a back to back street house in Stockton-on-Tees. They existed sure enough. It was Princess Street, off Garbutt Street by St Mary’s school. We were back to back with Hafron Street. The other side of Princess Street had a back street we didn’t. They were demolished in 1954 .
Following the theme of germs etc. my grandmother used to say..’you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die’….As a peck is a dry measure of a gallon I guess she meant that we had no need to worry about a bit of dirt.(One of her daughters lived to over 100!)
This brought back a memory from the Middle East in 1948. Doing a sweep for arms through a village that was just hovels with no paved area’s, a ditch down the middle doing the service of sewage, washing, dead dogs and anything else that could be piled in it. To my horror the kids were playing in that ditch, I said to the Officer I was driving how can they survive? He replied well many do not but those that do will live to a good age, immune to everything. We lived as did most back then in the war years from the garden and on local produce, we being lucky I had relatives who were farmers. Anything and everything went onto the truck gardens to fertilize the land including night soil from earth toilets in many cases. The vegetables did not arrive spotless (and tasteless) as they do today you had to wash it all yourself. When summer salad days arrived we would inspect our plates for green fly or caterpillars, they were not unknown in School dinners or the British workers canteens when I started work. You picked them off and ate the food, as dad would say extra protein. Many of us are still around from that era to bore you stiff on here so it must be true, build up the immune system when young and live to a good age.
Alistair, I’m sure you & your father are quite right about germs. Your body has to build up a resistance some how but if you don’t come into contact with many germs how can it do this. I’m 70yrs old & have always been fit & healthy, I had measles when I was a child but that was about it! We weren’t very well off as my dad was a brickies mate at the North Tees Power Station but my mother bought cheap cuts of meat so we had stew & dumplings regularly. So we certainly weren’t undernourished,and no junk food in those days!
Maureen do not worry about the possible health hazards of not washing your hands before eating your chips. I am convinced that it was just this exposure to germs and bacteria that has given me an apparent immunity to bug related ailments. We ate carrots and other root vegetables straight from the ground, apples and pears straight from the tree or ground if windfall, no washing or disinfection etc.
My father, a General Practitioner in Stockton, was of this school of thought that a little bit of dirt did you no harm and helped build up an immunity.
I’m afraid so Mary as most of the dogs that wandered around Tilery in those days mainly ate bones which produced a lot of calcium in their droppings! What scares me is the fact that we would go to the chippie, buy a bag of chips & eat them without unwashed hands Ugh!
You should have been a comedian Brian you gave us the best laugh of the day! Can anybody else remember chalking on the pavement with bits of ‘chalk’ we found lying about? Years later I was horrified to find out I had been drawing with calcified dog poo!
We may be wandering a bit off topic here, but I see that two-up/two-downs in Hallifield Street are selling for around £80,000 these days. Dad bought No 36 for £140 cash in 1950, not long before he left the navy. At that time it had a tap at the end of the yard, a scullery and in the back room, a kitchen range on which all the cooking was done. With a bit more saving and a council grant the house was modernised with a proper kitchen, gas cooker, bathroom with hot and cold running water and an indoor toilet. Total cost in 1952 – £740, or about a year’s pay for a working man, of which the improvement grant provided £300. I suppose they’ve now got central heating to go with the rendering, new roofs and double glazing, but they’ve certainly appreciated in price. I wonder if a petty officer seaman could leave the Royal Navy after 12 years service today and put down 60% deposit on an £80,000 house, using cash saved out of his pay?
The National Trust has restored four back to backs in Birmingham if anybody wishes to see what they were like. Admission is by guided tour only and pre-booking strongly advised.
Yes there were back to backs in Stockton, I know this because I helped my friend Dennis Goldsbrough deliver coal when on school holidays. Goldsbrough was a Norton coal merchant with his yard in Summer House Square off Norton High Street moving later to Woodbine House Station Road and also a bay at the coal chute sidings at Norton Station, along with Skipp, Geldart, Fletcher and others. In my last year at Richard Hind I would go out with Dennis on the truck and help deliver on the odd day. Coal was rationed and some folk could not afford their ration, Goldsbrough kept a "Tick" book with what was owed, if it got too much then he would refuse to drop or do what we called a half bag, enough to light a fire and cook a meal. Some of the houses I can still picture with no back street so we went in the front and tipped in a corner box near the fire place. Dust went everywhere although we did try to tip it cleanly, it was very difficult trying to get one hundred weight of coal in an open topped bag off your shoulder into a small box. Those housewives had very little but they kept the houses spotless. Some of the houses were in the Major Street area some off Portrack Lane and some on the Gas house area. We did not deliver to every house, it depended who they were registered with, we did see quite a few though. Most of the time we went down the back streets and chucked the coal in the coal house, it did not matter about creating dust. As two strapping lads hauling coal we got quite a few offers to drop in the extra bag over the ration and some of those ladies had a rough sense of humour, I had my eyes opened, but more so at the poverty some people lived in. Coming from a large house with garden in Mill Lane, Norton I could not believe such large families could live in such a small space. What may not be known is that during the war the coal sorting was hit and miss, there could be quite a bit of stone in the coal. One of my jobs on filling the coal scuttle for the night was to sort out the stone, at times it was quite a pile. If I missed any we would be sitting quietly when there would be a loud crack and bits would fly all over the room, a quick scramble to make sure none of it was afire and my pocket money reduced so it made me very careful. My Father was taking steam coal to factory boiler rooms all around the area with his truck so when he was up the garden I would be onto the truck and fill a couple of buckets of good steam coal. Dad would never do it but would know what Mother and I were burning. If we had left the loaded truck outside instead of putting it in the garage the truck would have been empty the next morning. In wartime needs must.
So, Alan Wheallans lived in a cardboard box under the Moor Tunnel? A detatched cardboard box? He was quite well off. We shared ours with two other families, and when we walked around the lake at Ropner Park the ducks threw bread at US!
I suspect there are a lot of us out there who lived in the two up and two down houses. I lived on Suffolk St where the majority of the houses were like that. No hot water, outside toilet, cobbled backyard, coal house, place for the hand ‘posser’ and wringing machine with a midden. We also had a bomb shelter in the backyard for the first few years of my life; seems to me they removed it in the late forties early fifties. I was scared to death to go in it, I was convinced it was full of rats… maybe it was! We also played cricket in the back street with a bucket for a wicket, but couldn’t play on Mondays… wash day. I was, and am, proud of my upbringing/heritage so much so that I wrote a song about it for my children, who have taught it to their children, who sing it but don’t quite know why. I will bore you with the chorus:
" I’m a Stockton lad born & bred.
I’m an Oxbridge lad when alls done and said,
I was raised on English jam and bread,
And what’s wrong with overcoats on the bed?"
If you want to hear the whole song you will have to look us up next time you are in California and hear my grandkids sing it.
I don’t think that there were any true back-to-backs in Stockton, unless these were the ones that were near the River, and were pulled down in the 1930s. Back-to-backs are where there are two streets of houses, in which the back wall of one house forms the back wall of the house in the adjacent steet.(They were still in existence near Leeds University) in the mid-eighties.In such cases there is not even a back door to the house, just a front. Nuturally, back-to-backs were very badly ventilated, and any washing would have to be hung across the street. Ken Sawyer or Frank Mee may be able to advise on the back-to-back situation.
Like the comments of Bob Irwin and Jim McCurley I was born in a two and two down. Not only no hot water in the house, but no water anywhere, except one solitary tap at the bottom of the yard.
Burning copies of the Gazette piled round it in winter soon thawed out the pipes.
Still it was progress, before that we lived in a cardboard box under the Moor tunnel.
Maureen, there is still evidence today of the middens in the old houses that are still standing. My house (Victorian) has a garden and at the wall to the back alley was a midden and the doorway is now bricked up, of course with different shade of brick. On the opposite side of the alley the houses have no gardens and the midden was actually in the house. Again the cavity being bricked up.
You were lucky if you had a dustbin, in our street in Tilery we had a midden in which we’d throw our rubbish. When the dustman came he had to climb in through a door in the wall & shovel the rubbish out!
I am pleased to read William Charlton`s comment about trying to eat a banana with the skin on. I tried the same stunt when my mother presented me with my first banana on returning from a long queue at a grocer`s shop. Needless to say I was not too impressed with the taste of bananas until I was made aware that the skin had to be removed. I believe my mother`s comment was something like Captain Mainwaring`s "Stupid boy". I was born in 1938 and like other kids brought up in the war had no idea what foodstuffs not produced in Britain tasted like until they gradually became available again after the war. I can remember seeing posters advertising Fyffes bananas still on the billboards during the war but kids of my age had no ideas what they tasted like and, more importantly, how to get into them. Stockton market was indeed a wonderful place and after the wartime restrictions were lifted you could get almost anything there.
The outside toilet. I remember in winter, the lead water pipes bursting. We made our own burners (paraffin lamp)to keep off the frost. An old treacle tin with the loose lid. We made a hole in it, pushing through thick string which reached into the paraffin, soaking it and it slowly burned through the night with a small stream of black smoke coming off it.
My Gran lived in such a house in Chalk St for 70 years until the area was redeveloped in 1970. As you say, no bathroom and an outside loo. The only source of hot water was a scary gas-fired "Geyser" above the kitchen sink. Yet she still preferred it to her modern bungalow in Hardwick. S & D stood for Shelvoke and Drewry.
I too was brought up in what Peter Newell refers to as a ‘Coronation Street’ house, as were many, many others. Two up two down, drafty as a wind-tunnel, no hot water, no bathroom, outside toilet pipes freezing up in the winter, soot falls every few months, the lot. In the long run it didn’t do me any harm; perhaps it even made me appreciate life’s finer things a bit more. As kids we didn’t know the difference anyway and I’m sure we enjoyed life as much as kids from ‘better’ neighborhoods did – maybe we just had to try harder.
In answer to the question posed by Peter Newell about people living in ‘Coronation Street’ style houses. They did manage quite well. I was brought up in Portrack in such a house, a two up and two down with the loo outside in the backyard. No hot on tap other than via a gas geyser. There was a back street between ourselves and the neighbours and at the time Stockton Corporation had small, specially built dustcarts that could manoeuvre down those backstreets in order to empty the dust bins. No wheelie bins then, that had to be placed by the kerbside. The dustcarts were built by a company with the initials S&D. Washing would be hung out to dry on lines stretched across those back streets.
Alan Wealleans, I never thought you ever were a grumpy old man but I did think that you were a brilliant woodwork Teacher that was a dab hand with a bit of wood, and over the years I bet there are a lot of joiners out there that you taught there trade. Going back to Stockton Market, I remember so well of it as every other sat it was our treat to have udder and tripe with vinegar and onions followed by Spark’s fresh cream cake. Never mind a bag of sweets – we got broken biscuits from the stall instead, then the trip into les Browns toy shop. Beyond the High Street it looked like Coronation street with back to back houses and I often wondered how anyone could live in them because they had no gardens.
First banana I tasted was in 1946 aged 7yrs. I was with my father walking down Station Road Billingham when we passed the fruiterers with a big crowd outside, when my father asked what was happening he was told bananas were on sale. When my father give me one to eat I tried to eat it with the skin on which caused much laughter in the crowd, great days even though we had just come through the war.
Stockton Market in the 21st century is a pale shadow of one active there in the 19th century.
In the area of the shown photo there was a plethera of quality fruit and veg stalls (there are some still today). Between the town hall and shambles we had tripe, seafood and stalls catering for pets and animals, including baby chicks, hens and family pets. Health and Safety wouldn’t have this today.
Now, in the foreground, we have stalls selling plastic goods coming all the way from China that folk buy but don’t really need.
They are bright and colourful and small children want them.
No, I am not a grumpy old man – I’m just telling the facts as they are.
The market garden beside Lumleys belonged to Tommy Elcoate, who also had a stall on Stockton market. The track to his house was sited on Darlington Lane facing the houses which back on to Norton Recreation Ground. After the Glebe land was sold off for housing in the early 1960s I believe Tommy, a very nice chap, went to a farm up Blakeston Lane.
Banana deprivation Ken. Todays youth would think we were odd talking in that way but like you I suffered from that during the period 1941 till 1945.
Towards the end of that time I remember Miss Allen coming into her classroom at H.T. School with a black banana and a knife which she proceeded to use to cut the fruit into 45 tiny pieces and gave all of her J1 class a taste of the fruit.
An isolated few had never seen one before.
Bob and Ken, Yes this does stir my memory well about the shortage of foreign fruit during the war. It was dried bananas for most people including me during the actual war.
Some people still managed to get fresh fruit they were known as “black marketeers”. I can still hear the stall holders calling “Fyffes Bananas and get your canaries here”, that was before the war, you never see “canaries” today. I still enjoy Fyffes but most places sell stuff I have never heard of and with no taste. The Jackson Walker carrot was another favourite fresh from the tub on the way to the Freddy Nattrass school. I still have my own teeth and love a fresh carrot to chew today.
Lumley’s is another veg stall. It later became Fox’s when Walter Fox married one of the Lumley daughters. There gardens were opposite the Frederick Nattrass top school gates. There was also Sharpes but they did not grow their own veggies. Another Fewsters and I think Medds from Hartburn as well. My Grandfather Jackson Walker always prepared his veggies at his home premises (mainly washing carrots, parsnips and raddiches) and making them into bunches. Everything was freshly picked in between market days.
Just one of several potent reminders of the Stockton High Street market in my memory from childhood pre WWII, during it and then post war & upto leaving Stockton in August 1957.
I have been explaining to my elder daughter as to why I continue to enjoy bananas be it for breakfast, lunch (dinner!) or tea. It is because of the disorder those of us growing up in late childhood & early teens suffered from know as ‘banana deprivation’!
Nearest to the Town Hall on this photo were the many excellent fruit & vegetable stall, prime for us as a family being Walkers’. That should draw J Norman Kidd and several others. Someone is related by descent to John Walker of Norton, his stall always having excellent vegetables from his land.
I have been trying to recall other fruit & veg stall holders. Was Edwardsons or Edmundsons one of them?
I have mentioned previously about purchasing broken biscuits from Harry Marsh’s market stall, but not mentioned that in our house and no doubt in many other homes in the area he was known as ‘the broken biscuit man’. This was the oldest stall on Stockton Market, a business that was launched in the 1930s by Harry Marsh, for the sale of biscuits, sweets, cakes and confectionery. When I recall Harry Marsh market stall, I become nostalgic about him, his staff and stall, and are reminded of three very famous British biscuits makers, they are McVitie & Price Limited, MacFarlane, Lang & Co. Ltd, and Walkers Shortbread. McVities was from Edinburgh, and are famous for their ‘digestive biscuits’. Macfarlane, Lang & Co origins go back to 1817 when James Lang opened a bakery in Gallowgate, Glasgow, and a similar company history applies to Walkers Shortbread. The point I am making is the history of baking biscuits in Britain, sums up all that we love about the British Isles and its people, and, in some respects it is heart breaking that all the sacrifices our people have made to preserve and defend this Island, its customs and heritage appear to have got lost in the fogs of time and superseded by progress?. The question is will our grandchildren love digestive biscuits; will they walk across Victoria Bridge with a jaunty air, or attend Yarm Fair, or every Saturday Stockton market?
Hi Bob!
A few years late I know, but I’ve just read this post and the ‘broken biscuit man’ is my great great grandfather. I wonder if you know where there shop used to be in Thornbury, and whether you have any other information about this family?
My Nan Mary, Harry’s great granddaughter, is 94 now, and we were chatting about this over a glass of Green Ginger Wine! It would be fantastic if you had any other memories.
Best wishes
Amy
One of the Alborns (Ken) refered to by Anon on 30/04/2010 was my grandad. His brother had a stall close to the town hall and was called Ronnie.
I remember once being in the market with my wife. We wanted some red gingham for curtains. It was an old ladies stall and she said she had the very material at home and we could go to the house after the market finished. She lived in a bungalow on Darlington Lane near to the Mile House. When we went in she had come from the front room and it smelled of pipe tobacco. She took us through to a bedroom where everything was stored and cut the material. We went back to the front room where we paid for the material. A clay pipe was laid on a coffee table. It was obvious that this lady lived on her own and she was the pipe smoker.
Not only were fruit & veg sold at the markets but many other goods including toys. One such stall was run by the Huggett family, lived on Durham Rd. Peter their son was in my class at Newham Grange, anybody know where he is now??
Peter Huggett is my cousin and is living in Edmonton, Canada. His sister, Joyce, died quite a long time ago. Their father and mother opened a shop on the corner of Leeds Street/Bishopton Lane selling wool and baby clothes.
Another fruit and veg stall was Alborn’s; he had a brother selling his fruit and veg at another stall near the Royal Oak pub.
I was brought up in a back to back street house in Stockton-on-Tees. They existed sure enough. It was Princess Street, off Garbutt Street by St Mary’s school. We were back to back with Hafron Street. The other side of Princess Street had a back street we didn’t. They were demolished in 1954 .
Following the theme of germs etc. my grandmother used to say..’you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die’….As a peck is a dry measure of a gallon I guess she meant that we had no need to worry about a bit of dirt.(One of her daughters lived to over 100!)
This brought back a memory from the Middle East in 1948. Doing a sweep for arms through a village that was just hovels with no paved area’s, a ditch down the middle doing the service of sewage, washing, dead dogs and anything else that could be piled in it. To my horror the kids were playing in that ditch, I said to the Officer I was driving how can they survive? He replied well many do not but those that do will live to a good age, immune to everything. We lived as did most back then in the war years from the garden and on local produce, we being lucky I had relatives who were farmers. Anything and everything went onto the truck gardens to fertilize the land including night soil from earth toilets in many cases. The vegetables did not arrive spotless (and tasteless) as they do today you had to wash it all yourself. When summer salad days arrived we would inspect our plates for green fly or caterpillars, they were not unknown in School dinners or the British workers canteens when I started work. You picked them off and ate the food, as dad would say extra protein. Many of us are still around from that era to bore you stiff on here so it must be true, build up the immune system when young and live to a good age.
Alistair, I’m sure you & your father are quite right about germs. Your body has to build up a resistance some how but if you don’t come into contact with many germs how can it do this. I’m 70yrs old & have always been fit & healthy, I had measles when I was a child but that was about it! We weren’t very well off as my dad was a brickies mate at the North Tees Power Station but my mother bought cheap cuts of meat so we had stew & dumplings regularly. So we certainly weren’t undernourished,and no junk food in those days!
Maureen do not worry about the possible health hazards of not washing your hands before eating your chips. I am convinced that it was just this exposure to germs and bacteria that has given me an apparent immunity to bug related ailments. We ate carrots and other root vegetables straight from the ground, apples and pears straight from the tree or ground if windfall, no washing or disinfection etc.
My father, a General Practitioner in Stockton, was of this school of thought that a little bit of dirt did you no harm and helped build up an immunity.
I’m afraid so Mary as most of the dogs that wandered around Tilery in those days mainly ate bones which produced a lot of calcium in their droppings! What scares me is the fact that we would go to the chippie, buy a bag of chips & eat them without unwashed hands Ugh!
In those days we didn’t have any toys- just improvised!
Oh no Maureen, is that what it was?!!!
You should have been a comedian Brian you gave us the best laugh of the day! Can anybody else remember chalking on the pavement with bits of ‘chalk’ we found lying about? Years later I was horrified to find out I had been drawing with calcified dog poo!
We may be wandering a bit off topic here, but I see that two-up/two-downs in Hallifield Street are selling for around £80,000 these days. Dad bought No 36 for £140 cash in 1950, not long before he left the navy. At that time it had a tap at the end of the yard, a scullery and in the back room, a kitchen range on which all the cooking was done. With a bit more saving and a council grant the house was modernised with a proper kitchen, gas cooker, bathroom with hot and cold running water and an indoor toilet. Total cost in 1952 – £740, or about a year’s pay for a working man, of which the improvement grant provided £300. I suppose they’ve now got central heating to go with the rendering, new roofs and double glazing, but they’ve certainly appreciated in price. I wonder if a petty officer seaman could leave the Royal Navy after 12 years service today and put down 60% deposit on an £80,000 house, using cash saved out of his pay?
The National Trust has restored four back to backs in Birmingham if anybody wishes to see what they were like. Admission is by guided tour only and pre-booking strongly advised.
Yes there were back to backs in Stockton, I know this because I helped my friend Dennis Goldsbrough deliver coal when on school holidays. Goldsbrough was a Norton coal merchant with his yard in Summer House Square off Norton High Street moving later to Woodbine House Station Road and also a bay at the coal chute sidings at Norton Station, along with Skipp, Geldart, Fletcher and others. In my last year at Richard Hind I would go out with Dennis on the truck and help deliver on the odd day. Coal was rationed and some folk could not afford their ration, Goldsbrough kept a "Tick" book with what was owed, if it got too much then he would refuse to drop or do what we called a half bag, enough to light a fire and cook a meal. Some of the houses I can still picture with no back street so we went in the front and tipped in a corner box near the fire place. Dust went everywhere although we did try to tip it cleanly, it was very difficult trying to get one hundred weight of coal in an open topped bag off your shoulder into a small box. Those housewives had very little but they kept the houses spotless. Some of the houses were in the Major Street area some off Portrack Lane and some on the Gas house area. We did not deliver to every house, it depended who they were registered with, we did see quite a few though. Most of the time we went down the back streets and chucked the coal in the coal house, it did not matter about creating dust. As two strapping lads hauling coal we got quite a few offers to drop in the extra bag over the ration and some of those ladies had a rough sense of humour, I had my eyes opened, but more so at the poverty some people lived in. Coming from a large house with garden in Mill Lane, Norton I could not believe such large families could live in such a small space. What may not be known is that during the war the coal sorting was hit and miss, there could be quite a bit of stone in the coal. One of my jobs on filling the coal scuttle for the night was to sort out the stone, at times it was quite a pile. If I missed any we would be sitting quietly when there would be a loud crack and bits would fly all over the room, a quick scramble to make sure none of it was afire and my pocket money reduced so it made me very careful. My Father was taking steam coal to factory boiler rooms all around the area with his truck so when he was up the garden I would be onto the truck and fill a couple of buckets of good steam coal. Dad would never do it but would know what Mother and I were burning. If we had left the loaded truck outside instead of putting it in the garage the truck would have been empty the next morning. In wartime needs must.
So, Alan Wheallans lived in a cardboard box under the Moor Tunnel? A detatched cardboard box? He was quite well off. We shared ours with two other families, and when we walked around the lake at Ropner Park the ducks threw bread at US!
I suspect there are a lot of us out there who lived in the two up and two down houses. I lived on Suffolk St where the majority of the houses were like that. No hot water, outside toilet, cobbled backyard, coal house, place for the hand ‘posser’ and wringing machine with a midden. We also had a bomb shelter in the backyard for the first few years of my life; seems to me they removed it in the late forties early fifties. I was scared to death to go in it, I was convinced it was full of rats… maybe it was! We also played cricket in the back street with a bucket for a wicket, but couldn’t play on Mondays… wash day. I was, and am, proud of my upbringing/heritage so much so that I wrote a song about it for my children, who have taught it to their children, who sing it but don’t quite know why. I will bore you with the chorus:
" I’m a Stockton lad born & bred.
I’m an Oxbridge lad when alls done and said,
I was raised on English jam and bread,
And what’s wrong with overcoats on the bed?"
If you want to hear the whole song you will have to look us up next time you are in California and hear my grandkids sing it.
The only Coronation Street type houses I can remember with a small allyway were Alinson Street, Airton Street & Farrer Street.
I don’t think that there were any true back-to-backs in Stockton, unless these were the ones that were near the River, and were pulled down in the 1930s. Back-to-backs are where there are two streets of houses, in which the back wall of one house forms the back wall of the house in the adjacent steet.(They were still in existence near Leeds University) in the mid-eighties.In such cases there is not even a back door to the house, just a front. Nuturally, back-to-backs were very badly ventilated, and any washing would have to be hung across the street. Ken Sawyer or Frank Mee may be able to advise on the back-to-back situation.
Like the comments of Bob Irwin and Jim McCurley I was born in a two and two down. Not only no hot water in the house, but no water anywhere, except one solitary tap at the bottom of the yard.
Burning copies of the Gazette piled round it in winter soon thawed out the pipes.
Still it was progress, before that we lived in a cardboard box under the Moor tunnel.
Maureen, there is still evidence today of the middens in the old houses that are still standing. My house (Victorian) has a garden and at the wall to the back alley was a midden and the doorway is now bricked up, of course with different shade of brick. On the opposite side of the alley the houses have no gardens and the midden was actually in the house. Again the cavity being bricked up.
You were lucky if you had a dustbin, in our street in Tilery we had a midden in which we’d throw our rubbish. When the dustman came he had to climb in through a door in the wall & shovel the rubbish out!
I am pleased to read William Charlton`s comment about trying to eat a banana with the skin on. I tried the same stunt when my mother presented me with my first banana on returning from a long queue at a grocer`s shop. Needless to say I was not too impressed with the taste of bananas until I was made aware that the skin had to be removed. I believe my mother`s comment was something like Captain Mainwaring`s "Stupid boy". I was born in 1938 and like other kids brought up in the war had no idea what foodstuffs not produced in Britain tasted like until they gradually became available again after the war. I can remember seeing posters advertising Fyffes bananas still on the billboards during the war but kids of my age had no ideas what they tasted like and, more importantly, how to get into them. Stockton market was indeed a wonderful place and after the wartime restrictions were lifted you could get almost anything there.
The outside toilet. I remember in winter, the lead water pipes bursting. We made our own burners (paraffin lamp)to keep off the frost. An old treacle tin with the loose lid. We made a hole in it, pushing through thick string which reached into the paraffin, soaking it and it slowly burned through the night with a small stream of black smoke coming off it.
My Gran lived in such a house in Chalk St for 70 years until the area was redeveloped in 1970. As you say, no bathroom and an outside loo. The only source of hot water was a scary gas-fired "Geyser" above the kitchen sink. Yet she still preferred it to her modern bungalow in Hardwick. S & D stood for Shelvoke and Drewry.
I too was brought up in what Peter Newell refers to as a ‘Coronation Street’ house, as were many, many others. Two up two down, drafty as a wind-tunnel, no hot water, no bathroom, outside toilet pipes freezing up in the winter, soot falls every few months, the lot. In the long run it didn’t do me any harm; perhaps it even made me appreciate life’s finer things a bit more. As kids we didn’t know the difference anyway and I’m sure we enjoyed life as much as kids from ‘better’ neighborhoods did – maybe we just had to try harder.
In answer to the question posed by Peter Newell about people living in ‘Coronation Street’ style houses. They did manage quite well. I was brought up in Portrack in such a house, a two up and two down with the loo outside in the backyard. No hot on tap other than via a gas geyser. There was a back street between ourselves and the neighbours and at the time Stockton Corporation had small, specially built dustcarts that could manoeuvre down those backstreets in order to empty the dust bins. No wheelie bins then, that had to be placed by the kerbside. The dustcarts were built by a company with the initials S&D. Washing would be hung out to dry on lines stretched across those back streets.
Alan Wealleans, I never thought you ever were a grumpy old man but I did think that you were a brilliant woodwork Teacher that was a dab hand with a bit of wood, and over the years I bet there are a lot of joiners out there that you taught there trade. Going back to Stockton Market, I remember so well of it as every other sat it was our treat to have udder and tripe with vinegar and onions followed by Spark’s fresh cream cake. Never mind a bag of sweets – we got broken biscuits from the stall instead, then the trip into les Browns toy shop. Beyond the High Street it looked like Coronation street with back to back houses and I often wondered how anyone could live in them because they had no gardens.
First banana I tasted was in 1946 aged 7yrs. I was with my father walking down Station Road Billingham when we passed the fruiterers with a big crowd outside, when my father asked what was happening he was told bananas were on sale. When my father give me one to eat I tried to eat it with the skin on which caused much laughter in the crowd, great days even though we had just come through the war.
Stockton Market in the 21st century is a pale shadow of one active there in the 19th century.
In the area of the shown photo there was a plethera of quality fruit and veg stalls (there are some still today). Between the town hall and shambles we had tripe, seafood and stalls catering for pets and animals, including baby chicks, hens and family pets. Health and Safety wouldn’t have this today.
Now, in the foreground, we have stalls selling plastic goods coming all the way from China that folk buy but don’t really need.
They are bright and colourful and small children want them.
No, I am not a grumpy old man – I’m just telling the facts as they are.
The market garden beside Lumleys belonged to Tommy Elcoate, who also had a stall on Stockton market. The track to his house was sited on Darlington Lane facing the houses which back on to Norton Recreation Ground. After the Glebe land was sold off for housing in the early 1960s I believe Tommy, a very nice chap, went to a farm up Blakeston Lane.
Banana deprivation Ken. Todays youth would think we were odd talking in that way but like you I suffered from that during the period 1941 till 1945.
Towards the end of that time I remember Miss Allen coming into her classroom at H.T. School with a black banana and a knife which she proceeded to use to cut the fruit into 45 tiny pieces and gave all of her J1 class a taste of the fruit.
An isolated few had never seen one before.
Kids nowadays don’t know they are born!
Bob and Ken, Yes this does stir my memory well about the shortage of foreign fruit during the war. It was dried bananas for most people including me during the actual war.
Some people still managed to get fresh fruit they were known as “black marketeers”. I can still hear the stall holders calling “Fyffes Bananas and get your canaries here”, that was before the war, you never see “canaries” today. I still enjoy Fyffes but most places sell stuff I have never heard of and with no taste. The Jackson Walker carrot was another favourite fresh from the tub on the way to the Freddy Nattrass school. I still have my own teeth and love a fresh carrot to chew today.
Lumley’s is another veg stall. It later became Fox’s when Walter Fox married one of the Lumley daughters. There gardens were opposite the Frederick Nattrass top school gates. There was also Sharpes but they did not grow their own veggies. Another Fewsters and I think Medds from Hartburn as well. My Grandfather Jackson Walker always prepared his veggies at his home premises (mainly washing carrots, parsnips and raddiches) and making them into bunches. Everything was freshly picked in between market days.
Just one of several potent reminders of the Stockton High Street market in my memory from childhood pre WWII, during it and then post war & upto leaving Stockton in August 1957.
I have been explaining to my elder daughter as to why I continue to enjoy bananas be it for breakfast, lunch (dinner!) or tea. It is because of the disorder those of us growing up in late childhood & early teens suffered from know as ‘banana deprivation’!
Nearest to the Town Hall on this photo were the many excellent fruit & vegetable stall, prime for us as a family being Walkers’. That should draw J Norman Kidd and several others. Someone is related by descent to John Walker of Norton, his stall always having excellent vegetables from his land.
I have been trying to recall other fruit & veg stall holders. Was Edwardsons or Edmundsons one of them?