A photograph of a 1930s dust cart which was given to the Teesside Museums Department by Stockton Cleansing Department in 1969. The Stockton Borough Coat of arms can be seen on the door.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
I have vague memories of one of these carts driving through Thornaby Cemetery, but even better memories of the round dustbins with fluted sides made from galvanised steel everyone had in those days for containing household waste. I seem to think you had to buy your own, they belonged to the houseowner, and when they were ‘banged’ on the dustbin wagon sides to be emptied they got dented. These dustbins when filled with coal fire ashes where not that heavy. As a boy of 13, I could pick one up with no bother. It wasn’t the picking up that needed strength, it was changing your body position for the second lift ‘to lift it up higher onto the wagon’ that took strength. Which reminds me that I was never able to carry a 1cwt sack of coal, so how our ‘coal men’ delivered coal day-after-day in all weathers carrying it down back street on their backs to the individual coal holes or sheds was amazing. Some coal deliverers used to wear a coal sack on their shoulders to protect themselves with. My mother used to order 4 bags of coal for 6/- bag, @ 24/-. She had me count the bags to make sure they delivered the right amount.
By law every coal wagon used to carry a pair of scales on the back and you could ask to see the bags weighed but no one ever did. The 56lb weights they used on these scales were popular with market stallholders to hold down the canvas sheets they used on stalls to keep the rain away. These square(ish) weights are still about and fetch today £10.00 each. Even more expensive are the big brass weights butchers used. For some unknown reason I miss looking at new coal when it was delivered from the mines all black and gleaming , I miss the ‘blue bags sugar was sold in, I miss seeing girls in shops adding up your bill by hand, and when you went to ‘the allotments’ I miss hearing the pigs grunting, or looking at their eyes and ears, the white hair on their backs, their slavering mouths covered in froth and their curly tails. I am so appalled at the way pigs are treat, I would gladly sign a petition to remove pork and pig meat from our diets. No more piggeries is a good cause, ‘it’s certainly an about time cause.’ Pigs deserves a law to be passed granting all pigs the right to respect and humane dignity, the same could be said off caged chickens but thats going way off topic.
Yes I remember these carts being used in Weymouth around 1934_1939. No steering wheel just 2 levers on the dashboard.
Frank Mee asked for some feedback from the museum service. I was with the Teesside Museum Service in its latter years, but I dont remember this vehicle being in the collection. But I do remember the bloke who appears in the cab in the photo. He looks like John Teesdale, who was in charge of the Museum’s display team, working under the direction of the curator Geoff Watson.
Graeme, Shelvoke why did I not remember that? we even had them in the Army as fire tenders and other specialist vehicles. I was Armart Armoured Vehicles so did not have much to do with soft skin vehicles apart form a long line of new Bedfords all with broken head gaskets or so the resident fitter said, he was waiting for spares. I told one of my fitters to harden the head bolts down to 108 torgue and the infantry got their trucks back pronto.
The truck pictured did have a small engine as one side handle was the gear box and the other the steering, a bit awkward to handle I would think although they did not move very quickly.
On seeing the modern versions and recognising them straight off I think my brain must have been out of gear in previous comments.
The rather large SD on the front panel gives the game away. It is a Shelvoke and Drewry Freighter Dustcart, probably a Mk11 from post 1945. More information can be obtained here http://www.shelvoke-drewry.co.uk//Preserved.html
I was too young to remember anything of the the pigmeat collection although I ought to have been aware of it. My great aunt Maggie Davidson owned the Regal Fish and Chip shop opposite the Modern, and my Aunt Mary lived over the shop. My mother used to cut up the fish during the day and serve during the evenings. There would have been a lot of food waste to be disposed of.
Back in St Annes Terrace, which was the best street in old Portrack, we had a reasonably large back garden and we used to keep chickens and ducks in a hen coup. Much of our food waste would have gone for the hens and ducks. But my recollection is that because of rationing there wasn’t that much left to throw away. Certainly not like these days, in which despite refrigerators, sell by dates cannot be trusted.
I don’t know from where Tommy Bear got his waste food for making pigswill. My guess is that he had torely on the local butchers, bakers and piiemakers, etc, because had sold off a lot of land to Blacketts for quarrying for bricks. He apparently owned some waste land between Portrack and Tilery, which bordered Blackett’s “clay hole” (The Claggy as it was called).
In the early fifties he put a hige corrugatted fench round this waste land and used it as a a market garden.
Donny Wardle was our milkman. He had a smallholding up Junction Road where Harpers Nursery was. He got all his waste food for the pigs from Sparks Bakery. In the field nearest the road where the pigs were were they left silver wrappers.
Donny Wardle used to keep his pigs at the Summervill Farm, which was opposite the Tesco at the Horse and Jockey. I bagged the pig muck up in the pens and Donny delivered it for my garden. Donny’s sheep were kept in the radio station field at Hardwick before you got to the BP Garage.
He must have kept the pigs up at Summerville after Harpers took over that part of his smallholding. As I stated that the remains of the wrappings were there to observe.
Further to the pig swill question, Fred you would remember a private collection, depending on your age near the end of the war or later, some people would feed their pigs any rubbish.
The Wartime National collection was collected by the local Corporations then all taken to Darlington where all the works canteens Army and RAF camps plus the residue from Market Gardens Farmers Fields Bakeries and other sources sent their waste. The whole would be mashed and boiled then compressed into blocks, these were sold back to the breeders broken up and added to the rest of the feed. This would also have the ration of corn feed added fish meal was often very cheap so pigs would be fed fish meal until a month before killing then ordinary pigswill but you could still taste the fish.
Farmers would have plenty of waste vegetable matter as did my Father from the garden, from the fields after potato picking, we would pick over the field getting bags of missed potato’s enough to last the winter out. I boiled those with greenwaste in a large boiler at the back of the stable and those potato’s scrubbed clean would often end up inside me with a bit of home made butter. I added the waste cake and lemon curd after I had my fill and it had cooled, a boiling would last around a week.
Six years of war saw many new ways of doing things and your Corporation Dust men became adept at picking out scrap metal waste food cardboard paper glass and anything else with a recovery value, they were tough hard men with a hard often smelly job but as it is today they never missed and bang on time, not a job I would ever have wanted. Also it was tradition to tip them at Christmas as I still do for the good job they do.
I did a little more digging and discovered that Karrier 1908 to 1928 made all kinds of trucks chassis including a small one with a small petrol engine and side control.
Lister small tugs were in production back then with a single cylinder engine, they could have been adapted although that is guess work.
Scammel then took over some of the marques including the three wheel Mechanical Horse which although the ones I drove both army and railway were Bedford engines could be Commer and other makes.
As they also made the large recovery six wheel drive vehicles I drove in the Army they were obviously a versatile company. I do remember the large Scammels with large Gardner deisel engines six speed crash gear box through a gate although in later years we got even larger machines with Meteor Engines and a multitude of gears.
The picture shows possibly a Karrier type small chassis probably produced by some other company and with it being side handle control I still think it could have been electric after all electric vehicles had been on the go since 1904.
I will be visiting the Library next week as this has whet my curiosity, there should be some books on it somewhere.
As hoped Frank Mee has thrown a lot of light on the construction of Stockton’s dustcarts.
However, Frank’s pigswill is not what I remember. That which was made by Tommy Bear in Portrack, produced the most revolting smell I have ever come across. I think it was because it was made from waste meat from pigs!
I hope, however, that Frank will confirm that the phrase ” its pigswill” was applied to apparent statements of fact, that were, in fact, complete and obvious rubbish. This extremely useful metaphor has disappeared along with pigswill, which because of the foot and mouth epidemic a few years back, is now no longer permitted to be made from waste food.
The Karrier, a three wheel truck tractor with Bedford Engine and gear box, was mainly used by the Railway Delivery and package Department. The trailers were special in that they could be coupled and uncoupled from the cab.
As you pressed the uncouple switch and drove away a set of wheels sprang down as it left the fifth wheel (connecting plate on the tractor), when reversing to pick up the trailer the rails on the fifth wheel picked up the extra trailer wheels tucking them away, you then put the tractor in forward gear and gently checked you were fully connected.
Those tractor trailers could turn 180 degrees in a street so were handy for local deliveries, not quite made for the week I had on them delivering ammunition from Middlesbrough to Catterick. The following week they got me a proper Volvo tractor but it meant I had to connect everything by hand outside the cab and wind the trailer wheels up too.
The Karrier could well have made the dust cart pictured but the bodies were attached and two small steering wheels at the front, there were electric vehicles around at the time although, as with the very modern small cleaning trucks you see today, they could have had a small engine.
With my interest in trucks of all kinds I would like more information.
My father drove a bug as they were affectionately known around 65-68, I think they had 2/3 man crew. I didn’t think they were electric though they were controlled by handles on either side of the driver. I remember him around the streets of Richard Hind when I walked to my gran’s for dinner. John might be right that they were new in the 50’s but I think they were in fact second hand & certainly had another life when Stockton sold them to, I think, a power station for transporting fly ash from the furnaces . Its a shame that the museum did not keep the one they were given. I never got a photo of dad in later life with a bug, though I have one of him with the modern pale blue compacter around 1970.
I certainly can remember horse-drawn carts in Thornaby when I was young.
The back Streets had rounded brick corners so the driver could manoeuvre both horse and dustcart easily. Doesn’t time fly and memories are wonderful…
Was the cab and motor section of the dust cart a three wheeler that could be decoupled from the truck? This would have given the manoeverability to get round the backstreets of Stockton. I am asking this because a company called Karrier, of Hudderfield, was manufacturing dustcarts of this type in the 1930s.
Pigmeat was made by boiling up wastefood for a couple of days and resembled a thick white slop, with the most disgusting smell imaginable. Tommy Bear, a small holder and coal man (merchant) had a collection of sheds at the bottom of St Annes Terrace in Portrack, where he used to keep pigs, so that’s how I know about this.
The reason John thought the machine was new would be because Stockton Corporation took good care of their vehicles. Most were actually hand painted in the Stockton livery which always looking smart.
New vehicles were hard to come by in the late forties early fifties and most vehicles on the road for transport would be ex-military. I drove some old trucks, one was made by Armstrongs Newcastle in 1936, it had a Swiss Saurier engine and I could leave most ex-army trucks standing, 1930’s Leyland and Scammel were the heavy transport until the Diamond T’s started to be used. We had to use what was available, none of it was new.
The pig waste was a special bin at the end of each street and all waste food went in, that was collected taken to Darlington boiled down and sold back to the pig keepers. My Father would not use it, so ours got waste Jam and Lemon curd from Pumphries plus waste bread and cake from Sparks collected with our own truck and I did the cooking of the veg and potato’s mixing the rest from large steel drums, the pigs loved it and the taste was great, those fed on fish meal tasted of fish.
I would really like to know more about the machine in the picture.
The wagon pictured was to get down the back alley’s behind the street houses, some of those back alleys were long, the metal bins had to be carried to the end then loaded into side loading trucks. Ordinary trucks with a metal body, a canopy over the top with opening sections and two back doors that opened to empty the load, they could be loaded both sides.
A lot of the bin rubbish would be ashes from coal fires and heavy, the binmen hoisted the bin on his back then had to hoist it even further to tip into the wagon, as a section filled they would close that section of canopy and start on the next, a heavy and at times dirty smelly job.
The bigger wagons could not get down some of those backs and being side loaders would have been impossible to load hence having to take all the bins to the end.
The Small truck pictured made the job much easier and I am sure was around in the thirties, yes it did not have normal steering, it was a handle beside the driver which makes me think although not sure they were electric.
Some feed back from the Museum as to make would help for those of us interested…
I lived in terraced housing that had a back alley which was long, us being halfway down the street. When the bin men came with their side loaders, the bin men carried a tin bath (like) with handles on both sides. They emptied the contents into this container and 2 men then carried it to the top of the street. They then went to the other end and did the same procedure… Probably the bins closest the bin lorry were man handled.
Are you sure it was 1930’s? I remember them being new in the 1950s because my dad drove one when he worked for the cleansing dept. they didn’t have a steering wheel but had two handles in the cab one either side of the driver in which to steer it.
I have a vague memory of horse drawn dust carts that were operating in Portrack in the late 1950s, so I wonder if John Meadows is correct. Frank Mee will know!
The other point is that these were really “dust carts snce about a third of the contents of a dustbin was made up of ashes from the coal fires. The rest would be vegetable peelings and bones.There was not much paper. Most waste newspaper was used for lighting fires, toilet paper substitute, and fish an chip wrappiing paper.
Because hot ashes might be dumped into the dustbins, these were made of corrugated galvanised iron….. anyway polyethylene and PVC did not come onto the market until the late fifties. The ashes and weight of the dustbin made it a heavy lift for the dustmen.
The vegetable peelings and food like was placed in a seperate compartment at home and each week, maybe twice in a week a chap who had a smallholding at the rear of Station Road would come and collect it for his pigs. We called it ‘pig meat.’