Sid Bithell's Memoir 'A Buckley Man'"

Buckley

1980

SIDNEY BITHELL "A BUCKLEY MAN"

Mr Bithell was born in 1912 in Buckley. The following account of his life in Buckley was written around 1995 at the behest of someone in the pub! The original script was processed for publication in the Buckley Magazine and this archive in 2008 with the help of his daughter, Mrs Julie Roberts. Mr Bithell was given a copy of his memoir which included images from the archive appropriate to his text.

My name is Sidney Bithell and I have been asked to give some information on my early time in my life, which I myself did not find very exciting. I was born in a place called 'Cheshire Lane, Buckley'. We then moved to a little cottage, one storey high. At this cottage I remember the first things that happened to me while playing in the fields outside the cottage. I got a thorn off the hedge stuck in my knee and I screamed the place down. My mother took the thorn out and gave me a big thick crust off the freshly baked bread and plastered it with syrup and said "There now that will make you better." I think it did!

I then remember my Uncle Joe who was ten years older than me taking me to Nursery School. Yes, there was Nursery School then and I must have been just three years old. My mother was working on ammunitions for the 1914-18 war. Of course they were not called Nursery Schools then, they were called the 'Babies Classes'. We then moved house again to a house on the main road, where I had another experience. I remember where a big black Labrador knocked me down and stood over me panting; his breath in my face; I was terrified. This dog was owned by the landlord of the Black Horse pub which was right opposite the house where we lived.

We then moved to the house where I lived until I got married and I can remember flitting from this one. I was about four or five years old. We moved the household goods on a horse drawn lorry; a flat-bottomed four-wheeled contraption with three seats on the front. I sat on the front with my mother and the driver.

Of course houses were very plentiful in those days in Buckley, which was a very industrial place to work. In my life in Buckley there were 11 or 12 Brick Making Works, three Potteries making Buckley mugs known world wide, a Pipe Works which closed when Plastic took over and of course the four deep shaft coal mines. Out of all those work places there is only one brickyard going now.

The population of Buckley was about 4,000 from all over the British Isles. They came to work in the coal pits, brickyards, potteries and foundries. The people then began talking in different dialects and in the end they spoke the Buckley dialect which was a mixture of Stoke, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, Welsh and a little Scouse. They may have taken a few Geordies because they came from Durham to work the coalmines.

There was a quiz on television a long time ago. It was a person who claimed he could tell where a person came from by the person speaking a sentence to him. A person from Buckley, Mr Dennis Griffiths, an Oxford educated man, spoke the Buckley dialect as a challenge. The man could not tell him from which part he came and he was the only one to beat the challenge.

Although there were only about 4,000 people in Buckley I can remember the names of 26 Pubs. The people of Buckley worked hard and drank hard. They had to because the work was very hard - all pick and shovel, up to their knees in clay and water, no pithead baths - only the tin bath in front of the fire or the rainwater tub outside the house. Hard times eh?

The first three houses we lived in had no electricity. We used candles and oil lamps, a coal fire for cooking and heating water for washing. There was no washing machine or fridge, no television but we did have a battery wireless or radio as they are called now.

My Grandmother, the best woman that ever breathed, in my opinion, used to bake her own bread, make black pudding and do washing and ironing for other people as well as cooking the local butcher's meals for him and looking after me, my cousin Martha Eaton who was about one year younger than me. She also looked after my uncle and very often a lodger who she would take pity on. They always stayed with us for a long time for they knew they were always well treated.

Gran used to say a lot of things which I have found to be very true. About carrots being good for your eyesight, too much salt not being good for you and aluminium being not good for cooking with. The only thing she got wrong was saying that eating crusts make your hair curly. I used to eat my crusts but my hair is still very straight but I do still have a good head of hair so perhaps she got it half right!

In our kitchen there was always a clothesline for drying clothes. When the clay hole men and Miners came home from work they would nearly always have wet clothes. They were never supplied with working clothes and then, there were no Wellington boots. They would wrap pieces of sack around the lower part of their legs to try and keep dry. The men in the clay holes worked in awful conditions, up to their knees in wet clay and water. Even if the weather was really wet they carried on working, for if they stopped they would not get paid. Their clothes would then have to be dried ready for the next day so the kitchen line was almost always in use. They had to leave their clogs and boots in front of the coal fire to dry out. The fire was never allowed to go out and there was always big cast iron kettle simmering by it.

Just imagine, no electric lights, no gas or electric cooker, no washing machine, TV, Fridge, Central Heating, Shower, Vacuum cleaner. You may think that it was hard going but in my younger days people were very helpful to one another. You could go out of the house and leave your door open, you would have no fear of 'muggers' and everyone looked after the others interests.

My school days were all right. I just made out about average but I was a little better at sport; running and football and I was very good at looking after myself. I was never bullied. They did try it on but I always came off best. There was mugging in my school days. There were boys who went to another Buckley school who used to terrorise some of my schoolmates.

They used to tell them to empty their pockets and they would take the contents. If they had nothing in their pockets they were told to bring something tomorrow or they would give them a good hiding. I used to tell my Grandmother about these things. She would say to me "Our Sid, if you can't beat that lot you are not a Bithell."

One of the reasons I was never bullied at school was this; one of my schoolmates, Bert Williams, had two brothers and they decided to buy two pairs of boxing gloves. They only had these a short time because their mother told them to get rid of them. They gave them to me to look after and I eventually bought them.

We used to box in the loft of the Pied Bull. I became pretty handy with the boxing gloves but my Gran never complained, she knew I was only going to protect myself and not go around looking for trouble. The gloves were not soft leather, like they are today but canvas. This meant that it was easier to get cut with them and it was hard to get the blood off them. A certain lad from another school used to terrorise some of the lads in my school. One day he stopped me to try it on. I stood my ground and the only thing he got from me was a good hiding. I left him in the road unable to stand up.

I carried on to school wondering how he was. An hour later in school there was a loud knock from the big steel knocker on the front door. My seat was positioned just behind the door and I could hear everything. Mr James Tyson, the Headmaster came to the door and before he could ask her what she wanted, she shouted, "The Bithell's lad has hurt my boy and we've had to carry him off the road into the house." The Headmaster replied, "If the Bithell's lad, as you call him, has hurt your boy he has deserved it. Now get away from this door at once." Mr Tyson never ever cracked on to me that the boy's mother had complained about me. He knew that I had struck a blow for the school and cooled the bully down a bit. He must have known that I had heard it all from my seat behind the door, but I suppose he must have agreed, in a quiet way, with what I had done.

I had a lot of tussles with the bully after that but he never beat me. It ended up with him setting his elder brother on me after I had been to the pictures one night. Fortunately a patrolman was close by and walked me home then warned the brother off. I must say that I enjoyed a good fight but I can honestly say that I never ever looked for one.

At school I did have the cane a few times, but I always fought bigger boys than myself, but when you fought both got the cane.

I had some good mates at school but they all seemed better off than us. There was T.J. Hopwood, the Underground Managers son, Ken Gregory whose father owned the Mineral Waters and Pickle Works, Arthur Johnson, whose dad was the Post Master and clothes shop owner, Phil Nicksons, his dad owned the Cross Keys and Will Davidson whose dad ran the Pied Bull. They must have thought I was good enough to mix with their sons and I also think they respected the way my Gran was bringing me up.

As I was saying before, my Gran used to make her own bread. She was about 5ft 2ins, but very straight. She used to make the dough in a Buckley mug. She would then place the mug and dough on her head with a towel placed on her to help balance the Buckley mug and dough and she would walk a half mile to the communal bakery to cook it in the ovens. It was my job then to go and fetch the baked bread. I would have to go twice and I used to love doing that. I can still taste that lovely crisp fresh bread. I would eat nearly half of it before I got home and Gran would say "There's been a little mouse at this." That Buckley mug and dough must have weighed about 40 lbs and Gran used to balance it on her head and walk that half mile; 5ft 2ins and about six stone - marvellous.

There was no sliced bread then and you could cut it any thickness you liked as long as you had a good sharp knife. We used to sharpen the knives on the doorstep or the windowsill which were very often made of stone. You could see where the people sharpened their knives; it would be worn into a hollow. That was when you cut thick slices of bread to make toast and put a good lot of pork fat on it with a sprinkle of salt. We used to go to the Pork Butchers for a cup of 'Pork Dripping' as we called it. We used to pay one penny for it and it was lovely. Gran used to make oven roast potatoes and my mouth still waters when I think of them.

My first part time job was at a place called The Old Hall. It was a cinema cum Music Hall. Later to be called the Tivoli Theatre and Picture House. There was a wide variety of shows held with Comedy, Variety and Opera, the most famous probably being the 'Omara Opera Company', which always played to packed houses. The variety shows were great! I remember one with a strongman act. It was billed as, "Can you Lift Her", and entailed a lady about 30 years of age and about 5 ft 8 ins and 9 stone. The challenge was for you to lift her off the stage, as high as you could by holding her under the armpits. Many men and sometimes women tried to lift her for a price of £5 and failed. Only one succeeded that night and he was Bob Smith the landlord of the Black Horse. He never had any trouble in his pub after that night!

There were some strong men in Buckley at that time and no one could work out why they had failed. Some said it was to do with magnets and others claimed that it was "Mind over Matter".

The job I had was selling sweets, chocolates and popcorn to the audience. I did that for about one year and they then offered me a job on the limelights. These were lights that were made with carbide and I had to shine the lights onto the artists when they did their acts. We were on a platform above the stage and you had to be very sure what you were doing. You see there were two of us, one each side, so we had to make sure we did not leave the artists in the dark. Wages were 70 pennies per week. While I was on this little job they got the electric in. The place, until then, was run off carbide lamps and paraffin lamps. We also had to help the artists in their dressing rooms, which had no heating, bare floors and no hot water. My mate on the other lights, who died before he was 16, used to help out and it was the first time I ever saw the top half of a naked woman. They used to come to the dressing room door less than half dressed and we had to get the water from an outside tap.

There was one thing that happened with the little job that made me a little street wise. This so called mate I was working with used to say to me on the Saturday night when the show was finished, "You can go now Sid. I'll see to it now." Me thinking he was doing me a favour! What he was doing was taking all the tips the artists left for the both of us - until I was put wise to it! But the poor lad did not have much luck. He was a great footballer - 16 years and gone with meningitis.

I was a very good lad. I went to the Church Lads Brigade, called the CLB. There we were taught to march and drill, to play the bugle and also to play sport, football, cricket and boxing. I was not very good at cricket. I did not find out until I was 42 and went to have my eyes tested that my eyesight was terrible.

When we went camping with the CLB to Rhos-on-Sea, a very big camp with about 8 Brigades from the Wirral, Liverpool and Chester, all sleeping in army bell tents, there were the usual competitions, football, cricket, running etc. This all suited me very well.

There was a big shield for the sports tent who got the most points. It was running very tight between Heswall CLB and our lot. There were two last races to be run, the half-mile and the one-mile. I won the mile and was second in the half-mile, beaten by a member of the Liverpool Harriers called Cooper. All the other runners were wearing spikes or running shoes and me in my socks. We won the shield, the first time Buckley CLB had ever won it and I don't think they ever won it again. I also won a thick leather belt which I always used to wear for work. After we had won the shield the officer-in-charge, Colonel Marsden, asked me if I ever did any running. I told him that my job was too hard to do anything like running. He told me that I had beaten some of the best runners on the Wirral and to "Think about it". (The next time we met was nearly 20 years later when he turned up in charge of the Steelworks Home Guard).

The Buckley CLB was run by St Matthew's Church where I was very much involved.

A member of the choir there was a man called Fred Birks, also a member of the CLB. He went to the 1914 war and was killed in action while performing a great act of bravery. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. Buckley CLB, as a result of this, were presented with 12 rifles by his old brigade, "The King's Royal Rifles". These rifles were lethal but we used to go to the clay holes to play with them. We were careful, but it wouldn't be allowed today! Whenever we were inspected by Colonel Marsden he would always ask about our "Lethal Weapons".

We were a happy lot in the CLB but then we discovered girls! We started to drop away.

The people that were really nice to me were those that were pretty well off. I think they thought that my Gran was doing a very good job with me and my cousin Martha. She kept us nice and clean and I went to church twice, sometimes 3 times on Sunday. I was in the church choir. I was altar server. I went to Bible class. I used to blow the wind for the church organ and I was in the Church Lads Brigade and I did not smoke. I even used to jog 70 odd years ago.

When you go back to the candle and paraffin age you had a lot of people making a nice living out of it. Nearly every shop would have candles and candlesticks. A lot of hardware shops would stock paraffin and you would be able to take a bottle and get whatever amount you wanted. Of course you could always smell the paraffin shop. They would sell the lamp wicks and lamp glasses which would break if you turned the wick too high. Then you had the family who had a thriving business with paraffin. They used to come from door to door and farm to farm with a tank full of paraffin, lamp glasses, wicks, candles, matches, wicker spills. That business kept about three families and left them well off. They used to be called Harry the Oil, Bob the Oil and Lottie the Oil (sister).

Then there were the grocers who made their own bread, cakes and pies. Every one of them had their own speciality. Iredale's had a very nice meat pie. I know because the butcher that supplied the meat that I delivered to him was the same one my Gran used to cook dinners for and it was always the best cuts.

There was Balshaw's bread which had its own special taste. There were about six shops in Buckley that baked their own bread and they all had specialities. There were special days I would look forward to. Pies from Iredale's on Thursday, cakes from Griffiths', Daisy Hill on Saturday, bar of Cadbury's chocolate and comic from Bubbles on Friday and I can't remember missing that once.

Then there was the Palace Picture House and it was not much bigger than a house. Silent films at first and then 'Talkies'. There were wooden chairs in the 'chicken run', that's the ground floor and chairs with arms upstairs, that was Saturday afternoon matinee.

As Buckley was built on clay and coal it left a lot of deep holes in the ground and these then filled up with water and many children and sometimes young men used to go swimming in these water filled holes which I am afraid took a few young lives. I learned to swim there. In some places it was black with the depth and where the water was very deep it was very cold even in the warmest of weather. There were shallow little pools which you got to know and of course they would be warmer. Then came the Buckley Baths in 1927 and they were the first in Flintshire. You could have a private bath there for 9d and it was the first really hot bath I ever had. I do not remember any house in Buckley that had a hot and cold running water bath before 1927. All the schools used to come to Buckley Baths and the Council are now trying to get them modernised. The first inside bath we had was 1939 when we went to live in Nant Mawr where Brian was born.

The clay pits or clay holes that were left after the clay was extracted to make the bricks used to very often have seams of coal in them and whenever there was a coal strike we would go and dig for these seams of coal and then sell it or give it to the people who could not afford to pay. Of course you always took a risk of being buried in clay or rock because we were not coal miners and we very seldom took the right safety measures.

The Brickworks bosses did not encourage this so they tried everything they could to stop it. We used to sneak in when it was dark and when the clay workers had finished their shifts. But when there was a coal strike on Gran always had her best lot of coal in the coalhouse. 'Our Sid' seen to that!

Gran always used to say. "Pay the rent and the coalman". When you think about it this made a lot of sense. Coal was essential for life, it was used to heating the coal-fired oven that Gran used for baking bread, cakes and stews. It was needed for the fire to boil water, frying, heating the iron and for toasting bread. There was nothing nicer than to sit by an open fire and watch Gran put the poker in the fire and then put it into her glass of Guinness, when she had one. She used to say that it put iron into you.

The last house where I lived with Gran was about 20 yards from a slaughterhouse where one of our butchers killed his animals and I am sorry to say I was very often asked to help. I would be about 12 years old. When I think back, I don't know how I did it. I won't go into detail but it was gruesome. It also had its rewards. You see, Gran used to make black pudding to sell and they sold very well. She had to get the ingredients from a butcher who sometimes makes and sells black pudding, so she was in opposition. 'Our Sid' had to help this butcher and I in return would get some blood, skins and fat to make them. I have helped Gran make many pounds of them. The old Buckley mug comes into it again!

The ones we had were about 20 to 26 inches high and about 14 inches across the top. We used to put all the groats, blood and fat into a mug and stir and then out of another Buckley mug we would take the skins that had been soaking in a good lot of rock salt. Of course they don't use skins now. It's a kind of plastic. Anyway, if Gran did not sell all her black pudding at the door she would go to the Black Horse Pub on a Friday night and sell them. They were noted as the BEST.

The same butcher, Edward Rogers, used to come to our door and ask Gran, "Could I borrow your Sid? I'm fetching some sheet from Mold Market", where they sold cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry. This was mostly in school holidays time and there were odd times after school. We then would get in a trap, a two-wheeled vehicle, and go to Mold Market and of course we had to walk back driving the sheep along the main road over four miles. There were quite a log of turns and roads leading off the main road so you can imagine the time we had!! Edward Rogers in the horse drawn trap and me at the back, front and side trying to keep the sheep on the way to Buckley. Of course there was not the traffic on the roads then as there is now but it was still a very hard time to get the sheep from Mold to Buckley. It's no wonder I am fairly fit now.

I had done more work before I left school at 14 years of age than some of the lads leaving school now will ever do at all in their lifetime. I am sorry to say that!

The street lighting in Buckley in my school days consisted of paraffin lamps and gas lamps, about the same as one another. Of course we had our own Gas Works and it supplied gas for about half the people.

The trouble with the gas was that they could only get it to travel through the gas pipes if it was going up hill. They reckon it was to do with the pressure. Anyway, where they could not get the gas to go they put paraffin lamps which needed lighting at dusk and putting out about midnight. The gas would only have to be lit. Then the gas in the houses was metered and fed pennies, which were a lot bigger than they are now.

These meters had to be emptied and the man who did the job was a School Attendance Officer. I think he also had shares in the Gas Works! He had a big bulbous purple nose from drinking whiskey I think. Anyway he used to go round emptying the meters in a four-wheeled horse driven cab with a driver for the horse and believe me I felt the weight of one of the bags of coppers one day and I could hardly pick it up. He needed a four-wheeled cab to take the weight of the copper pennies.

We used to go to the Gas Works for bags of coke. Coke is what was left after the tar and gas had been taken out of the coal. In fact it was cinders and it always made a nice cosy fire.

In the 1926 General Strike the miners who were on strike opened up these "Out Crop" pits all over Buckley. Three were opened up in a 50 yard area behind the Cross Keys pub, (that's the one I worked in), and another two in the garden nearby.

The two in the garden did not find the old working where I worked, but had to work harder for their coal than we did. We had a lot of old tunnels to pick from, left by the old miners years before. If there was any easy coal anywhere in the tunnels, we would get it and risk the roof falling in on us.

Lorries would come to buy the coal from all over the country just to keep factories working and would take anything off you that would burn. The last night that I worked we changed shifts at 5.45 in the morning. There were six of us working the mine, two to wind the coal up the shaft, one filling buckets at the bottom of the shaft and three miners cutting the coal. It was these three that almost caused a tragedy. As they worked they were pulling the pillars out. These pillars of coal had been left in the original workings to support the roof of the mine and took the place of wooden pit props. As the strike was nearly over by now these three were going for every bit of coal they could find, including the pillars. It happened just at the change of shifts. At 5.45 the men left the pit to make way for the new shift and by 6 o'clock the roof had caved in burying all tools, wheelbarrows, picks and shovels. By a miracle no men were killed but the pit was closed. The strange thing is that by keeping the factories going like this with little 'private' mines all over the place the miners defeated the object of the strike. They had defeated themselves! Remember though, there was no help then if you were out of work, no dole, no state benefits, nothing. This was very nearly a disaster for me at the start of my working life.

There were many coal mine shafts in Buckley and they were never capped or filled in; they were left with a wall around the top or spiked iron railings, which was very easy to climb or bend. These pits were always a danger; they were also very handy to put any unwanted rubbish or in some cases, dead pets and perhaps other bodies. Although these old pit shafts were left open, I never heard of anyone falling in one, for they were deep and it used to sound half full of water. When you threw a stone down one, it was seconds before it hit the water.

When the last Great War was on (1939-45) there was the 'meat ration'. The butchers were always being pressed for a bit more than the ration quota. It was leaked that you could always get a little bit extra from 'so and so'. Anyway I think he was investigated and it was found out he was putting the skins and other uneatable produce from the animals down an old pit shaft, so there was no check on what he had slaughtered. The young man who did odd jobs for him must have been whispering too loudly. He was our pub pianist, he could only play by ear, but he made a nice easy life for himself, no regular job, meat off the butcher, beer free for playing the piano and nearly all his clothes were given to him.

Here was me, working my guts out for coppers in the Brickworks. The hours we worked were 7.30 am to 5 pm with half an hour dinnertime 12.30 PM to 1.00 pm and you had to be there at 7.30 am or you could be sent home again. We would get to work and first thing we did in the winter months was to light the paraffin lamps. They were made of cast iron and called 'ducks' as they were the shape of a duck. They used to smell the drying sheds out. Of course we only used them in the winter for the dark mornings and nights as there was no electricity.

The first job I had was taking the bricks off the 'brick press' and believe me, it was a very busy job, up to 4,000 bricks a day off one press. All these bricks were handled, not machine made. The machine that made the clay was steam powered and it was maintained by a man called Jack Heywood from Merseyside. He was also a mechanic and 'first aid' man and when I had the misfortune to have half an inch cut off my forefinger whilst taking the bricks off the press, he attended to me. They took me to the engine room along with the pressed brick which had the part of my finger in it and whilst he was seeing to my finger one of my bosses' cockerels pecked the piece of finger out of the brick and ate it - the evidence gone. There was no hospital so I had to walk to the doctors which was about one and a half miles away and then I went straight home. I was off work for four weeks and there was no compensation. I only got 4 shillings a week. He did me a favour, my boss, he let me 'brush up' instead of 'take off' until the finger got hardened off and the sad thing about my accident was that my uncle Ted Evans was teaching me to play the piano. I don't know if my accident was for the best, but I was getting a bit fed up with the piano. Anyway I was getting to do all the jobs on brick making and also getting a little back-hander from my boss. We would have to line up for our wages every Friday night and he would give me 12 shillings and six pence per week and then he would pop two shillings in my hand and whisper, "Don't tell anyone". He knew he was doing alright out of me.

I was of course getting older and that meant moving to another job at the brickworks. I went onto working with the kiln setters. These were the men who placed the bricks in the Kilns to be burned or baked hard, which was a skilled job. When the setters, that is what they are called, placed the bricks in the kiln, the bricks are just green clay, soft and very easy to break so they have to be handled with care and this brickworks was called the 'Metallic Brick Yard'. It only made facing bricks which had to be handled with care because the face of the brick was all you would see on a building and they did not want finger marks on them. The boss was very strict about this. My job then was to pick the green bricks off the heated floors of the drying sheds, and sometimes you could not bear your hands on those floors, place the bricks on a wheel barrow and wheel them to the setters. I have loaded barrows of bricks for four setters and until four years ago I never realised how much weight I had been lifting when I picked up those unburned bricks. A barrow loaded with fifty 3" bricks would be over 500 lbs in weight and we were setting 4,000 to 4,500 bricks a shift. I often wondered why I have such a good back and why my arms are bout 2" longer than the average man. I also think I know why I could always look after myself. I had a longer reach.

I used to get home from the brickworks and Gran would have my tea ready. It was nearly always roast potatoes done in the oven in pork dripping. I loved them, crisp and full of fat. Very often I would drop asleep before I could eat it. Then I would find myself on the couch with my 'clogs' off. I don't know how Gran managed to get me onto the couch, but she did.

I then started to go out with lovely little Doth. The funny thing is that Doth went to the same school as I did and she only lived 200 yards from me. I never really remembered her as a schoolgirl. We went together for nine years against a lot of opposition from Doth's family. You see she was the only breadwinner, but her mother did relent in the end. She did say to me "Our Sid, I am sorry, thou has been the best in the end". She was a hard woman and she did not want me for her son-in-law because I never had a trade, she said. But I had a heart and I was not idle or work-shy. Although I say this myself, we were a very trendy couple. People used to watch us for the 'fashion of the day'. We even went on holiday to the Isle of Man in 1934 and again in 1935 before we were married. Of course if you went there, you were going abroad. France and Spain were not like they are now. We also bought the same bicycles - dropped handled sports bikes in red.

I can remember going to Gresford when that terrible Pit explosion took place in 1934 with the loss of over 360 miners. We went there on our red bikes and there were hundreds of people there. It was a day I will never forget. The Salvation Army Band was there and they held a service at the pithead for the owners. The Government had decided to seal the pit because there was no hope of getting any live miners out. It was very sad!

Another thing that stuck in my mind about Gresford was that nearly every morning when I was going to work, I would meet this miner coming off the morning train. He did not seem a very happy man, but he was working nights all the time. Anyway, I used to say "Good morning" and sometimes he would answer me and sometimes not.

The morning before the disaster he spoke first, "Good morning old son, how are you?" he said. He had never been as nice as that to me and it made me feel really good all day. The next day he never made the train home, he is still down Gresford Pit. What made the loss of life so great was that Wrexham were playing Chester at the Racecourse and there was a lot of rivalry then. A lot of Wrexham supporters changed shifts to the night shift as the 6 am to 2 pm shift would stop them getting to the match on time and those who changed shifts at the pit, all died.

With Buckley having a lot of brickworks it attracted very many tramps. You see they cold always find a warm spot to sleep, for when the kilns were cooling off, ready to be set with the next lot of bricks, they would be nice and warm and as the floor of the kiln was made up of sand it must have been like sleeping on a nice warm beach. Of course they had to be away before the bosses arrived or the burner in charge of the kilns would very likely get the sack. It was not a very good idea to let the tramps sleep there because quite a few died there and that brought the police in and caused all sorts of aggro. Consequently there are a few unnamed graves in Buckley Cemetery to prove this. There was one Buckley born tramp, 'Teddy Banjo", I don't know whether that was his real name, but he was feared. When the mothers in Buckley could not get their children in at night, they would be playing around a very poorly lit street lamp or whatever, they would only have to say to them "Come in, Teddy Banjo's coming up the road", and it would be like saying the Bogey man's coming. Anyway, I don't think he did anyone any harm, but he was put in jail many times. He used to appear to hate policemen and when he started something they would call the police and when they came he would hold his arms back and say, "Let me get at him", but all he wanted was someone to grab his arms as if they were restraining him. They would put him in jail for the night and give him something to eat and let him out after breakfast. He was 'armless really, excuse the pun, until he wanted to be restrained

Talking of tramps, my Gran used to take lodgers in who would probably have become tramps if she hadn't. There was one who was a cobbler - a shoe mender. He taught me how to repair shoes and I could also make a pair of clogs which was a very good money-saving job. Not that we ever saved much money, and there was another who was a very good singer and although I never had a great singing voice, I could harmonise a little and later in life, my pal and I were very often asked to sing a little, after a few drinks. Then there was a couple who came from Brittany selling onions - strings of them. They stayed at our house nine years running only for about three nights at a time. They could speak a little English and only paid for the room. They would get their own breakfast - about four eggs each and a lot of bacon. I had never seen so many eggs eaten at one meal. They must have been satisfied at our house to come back nine times.

In the 1914-18 war, we lived off the main road which lead to the railway station. We knew when the trains came in and Gran would wait at the top of the little lane where we lived. She would be waiting for the soldiers coming on leave or from Chester Infirmary. It was pitiful, some wounded men on crutches and others with arms and legs missing.

They had walked from Buckley Railway Station up a steep 'one in four' hill. There was no ambulance to bring them home - they had to get home the best way they could. There were a few who came to see Gran after they had left the army and were, along with their awful injuries, trying their best to get on with their lives.

The 1914 war was fought in the trenches, on land, or at sea. It was a soldier and sailor war. The 1939-45 war was a war where the ordinary people, the towns and cities all suffered very much from the bombs and land mines that were dropped on our cities and dockyards. It was more a people's war where the people in these areas had to evacuate their children to towns that were supposed to be safe from the German bombs. We had two evacuees, lads from Birkenhead, just on the Wirral side of the River Mersey. You see Birkenhead and Liverpool had big dockyards and they were always being bombed by the German air force. We were well aware of that for they used to fly over Buckley nearly every night with their bombs of destruction to flatten the docks. Beside the two lads, we had another 'evacuee', a nine-month old baby called Brian. He was suffering from Yellow Jaundice so Doth had her hands full really without the two highly-strung lads. We had them all for about eight months and we never had one letter from their parents, no clothes or pocket money. They seemed to have been abandoned by them. They flooded the house twice; they used to go poaching after rabbits and were completely uncontrollable. Anyway Doth had to get a doctor's note to get them to another family. She could not cope. After about 12 months, we had two more evacuees and they were quite different. Their mother came every week with clean or new clothes and we kept in touch for quite a while after the war. We also used to go and see the destruction those German bombs did around Liverpool and Birkenhead docks. It was unbelievable, but they kept going and going and going. We all knew about the 'Scouse humour'; there is also 'Scouse grit'.

There were no washing machines or hot water in the houses, it all had to be heated on the coal fire in a kettle or in a coal-fired boiler in the wash-house, if you were lucky enough to have one. The hot water was then put into a "Dolly Tub" with the dirty clothes and then swirled around with a "Dolly Peg". Believe me, you didn't have to go to slimming classes to keep fit after using a dolly peg for a few hours. There was also a scrubbing board which fitted into the dolly tub. You would rub hard soap onto the board and then rub the clothes on the board until they were clean; this caused very sore hands, often rubbed almost raw with rubbing.

There was very little entertainment at night. Children would play outside by the light of the street lamps until bedtime. There was no wireless, no television and not much light, only candles, paraffin lamps, or, if you were better off, gas lights. The one highlight of the week was the Saturday Matinée at the cinema.

People used to go to bed early. This, I think, was probably the reason for so many large families with 8 or 10 children. There was one local family with 20 children (by two husbands). There was no such thing as family allowance but these children seemed to thrive and lived to a good age - one just died aged 99, two others are still going strong at 82 (the youngest) and 97.

For our water there was an outside tap which served four houses. Fifty yards away there were three rows of houses, about 40 in all with just one tap between them. This tap was in constant use and often there would be a queue. There was quite a bit of queue jumping and then the trouble would start, first it would be water flying around and then fists, especially on washing days. After washing, the drying, there were so many houses back to back that a lot of lines had to be shared. A row with the neighbours would often mean that the line would be taken down - and that would be the start of more trouble.

At the back of these houses were twelve pigeon lofts, all in the Racing Pigeon Clubs. It was an unwritten law that nobody hung washing out on Saturday afternoons because that was pigeon racing day and the washing would put the pigeons off from returning to their lofts to be "Timed In". The backs of the houses on Saturday afternoons was rather like Sunday. No washing on the lines and no children playing. The pigeon owners took over.

The house we lived in was attached to the "Feathers Inn", which was run by people called Beavan. For many years the cottages around the Feathers were called "Feather Cottages". I think the inn and cottages at one time were all one complex when the inn used to make its own beer. When a brewery began to supply beer the brew making buildings were converted into three cottages. One of these was my home for 20 years. There was a slaughter house about 40 yards away and in between there were four outside toilets, three for the cottages and one for the Feathers Inn. The toilets were "Dry Toilets"; there were no flushing toilets that I knew about then. These dry toilets were a real embarrassment. They consisted of a wooden frame and a seat with an oval shaped opening cut in. Toilet paper was squares of newspaper hung on a piece of string to a nail. The slaughterhouse attracted a lot of rats which would often get into the open backed toilets. You could hear them scratching below you which would mean you leaping off the toilet, finished or not! I solved the problem by giving the wooden framed toilet a good kicking before I sat down. With so many rats we always kept a cat. We got this one from Gran's brother who had a farm at Saltney. It was a smasher and actually killed 8 young rats in one day. She then brought the mother rat into the house which escaped. I have never sweated so much in my life as when trying to kill this huge rat with my working boots. Fortunately the cat caught it again and let it go outside and the Inn dog killed it.

People who did not have the luxury of Dry Toilets had to resort to "Wet Tubs". The night soil from these was almost always emptied at night with an iron horse drawn cart on two wheels. It was a dirty, smelly job and difficult work at night travelling around unlit back gardens. One of the 'Night Soil' men worked part time with me during the day, (he is still alive and now well in his eighties). He used to tell us a lot of tales, the best (or worst) being when he saw his mate rooting around the almost full tank with a stick. He asked him what he was doing onto to be told that he was looking for his jacket which had fallen into the tank. "It'll be no good now", he was told only to have the answer back, "I know that! But my snappin's in the pocket!!"

When the 1914-1918 War was on my Auntie Bess came to live with me and my Gran. Auntie Bess worked at the munitions factory at a place called The Compound. She used to make ammunition cases out of wood and brass nails. Auntie Bess was going out with Sergeant Fred Smith who was a lorry driver. Eventually they got married and went to live in a place called Prescot, about 12 miles the other side of Liverpool. When I was 13 I cycled there two or three times with two of my mates from Buckley on gearless, 'sit up and beg' bikes. It was hard work on the flat, never mind the hills! We used to cycle to Seacombe and get the ferry to Liverpool. We would then wait for a number 10 tram which we would then follow to Prescot. The road from the Pier Head was cobbled and by the time we reached Prescot we could hardly sit down. The round trip was about 66 miles, just to see Auntie Bess and Uncle Fred.

Rummaging in a chest of drawers one day, I came across a photograph of a good-looking chap with a moustache. I asked my Gran who it was but she said, "You don't want to know". Of course I wanted to know and then suddenly Gran said, "It's your Dad!".

It turned out that my Auntie Bess was my mother and Uncle Fred my stepdad. My real dad, so Gran told me, had left on a boat to America or Canada never to be seen again. My middle name Oxton is because my real dad's name was Samuel Oxton. He was from the Wirral and a stone mason who had been working at a local church, St. Matthew's.

My Gran took me and a cousin, Martha Eaton, in to live with her, because of this her husband left her and put himself in the Work House so that he wouldn't have to pay her any maintenance. My Gran survived by taking in washing and ironing, by taking in lodgers and by making and selling black puddings. If you were born out of marriage in those days you were a bastard and treated very differently to being a "Love Child" today, but I was loved.

All the time that I was at my Gran's we seemed to attract people with Biblical names, Isaac, Ebenesa, Joseph, Sarah and Martha, my cousin.

Isaac Powell was a cobbler who taught me to mend shoes. Isaac left us to live with Johnny and Jimmy Smith, the "Pentre". Johnny and Jimmy were both under 3 foot tall and worked at the pithead trimming miners lamps. These had to be filled with paraffin and serviced to last the men underground at least eight hours.

1926: The General Strike. Left school, started to work in what was called an Outcrop coal pit; a nightmare. We were lowered down this 70 foot narrow hole in the ground about four foot square on an old mangle roller with a piece of rope with a stick to sit on. The nightmares I had after that job! We got into come old work places that were hundreds of years old. There were old jackets and tools. It was weird for a lad going to his first full time job. I was glad when the strike was over. After that it was seven years in the brickyards called the 'Silica' and later Drury Brickworks. I moved from here to another brickworks, the 'Metallic Brickworks' where I worked until 1934. It was very hard work.

When the weather was bad, in winter, we would have to sign on the 'dole' as between Christmas and Easter all building work stopped and the works would be stacked high with unsold bricks. When I was off work I used to travel looking for work. This was the thirties when an awful lot of men were unemployed. I would try the employment officer, Sid Smith, at John Summers' Steelworks. Sid Smith would come to the top of the steps outside his office at 9.30 am and 2.30 pm. There would be up to 100 people waiting for him to appear. He would shout out what he wanted and no one was allowed on the steps until he had pointed them out. He would sometimes ask for any one who had worked at the recently closed 'Elm Colliery' and offer them a temporary job.

The jobs here were low paid and hard but getting even a temporary job meant that your name was on the 'Books' and I was determined to do this. One day I was waiting at the bottom of the steps and Sid Smith shouted for those who had worked at the Buckley Collieries, the 'Elm' or the 'Mountain'. I put my hand up and went into his office. I hadn't worked at either pit and the outcropping didn't count. It was the only lie I have ever told but I was getting desperate. Mr. Smith asked me what job I had had and for the name of my boss. I told him on the shaker, where the coal was sorted out at the top of the shaft and that my boss was John Thomas Hopwood who I knew from school and worked at 'The Elm'. Mr. Smith immediately replied that Mr. Hopwood was an underground manager. Thinking quickly I replied that because I knew him he had been the one to get me a job there. This must have satisfied him because I was taken on for a few days. The work was shovelling 'Blue Stone' and was very hard indeed. Ex-miners were giving up after a couple of hours but I was used to heavy work.

At other times we would be 'By-Turners', which meant that we would turn up to the rolling mills at the start of each shift and take the place of any member of the 'Mill Gangs' who hadn't turned up by 20 minutes into the shift.

This was all very temporary work but after a while I was given a job on the new part of the steel works at the 'Z' mill. 'Z' standing for Zensamir, a new Polish treatment for steel. I worked with a welder named Arthur Todd, a Scouser with no sense of humour, welding 10 foot long steel sheets together to make a long sheet about 200 foot long. This was then heated and coiled and then put into the 'Z' mill where it was stretched paper-thin. This was then re-welded to other sheets making a long continuous roll which would then pass through the galvanising plant. This roll of steel would go for weeks and would only stop for maintenance work. After working as a welder's mate I was then promoted to sheet shearer. In 1938 I was asked by my boss to cut some very long sheets but to keep it a secret. It turned out that these special sheets were galvanised and corrugated and then bent to shape to make the very first 'Anderson Shelter'. This was in 1938 so it looks as though we were getting ready for a war even then. The 'Z' mill had been brought out of Poland which was now under German control. Spare parts were impossible to get hold of and had to be made up. Very often production stopped and we were transferred to other parts of the works.

I registered at the Shotton Employment Exchange for Military Service but I was never called up as I was in a reserved occupation. Instead I joined the Home Guard and trained with the 19th Cheshire Regiment on the Dee marshes with live ammunition and even hand grenades.

A lot of women were now working at the Steelworks and they worked very hard but some of the heavy work was too much even for them. Because of this I ended up preparing scrap for the furnaces - a dirty, dangerous job. I never went back to the 'Z' mill but got promoted to the 'Top Press'.

There were four men working these presses, the crane driver, press driver, the Top Man" and me, the "Bottom Man". The "Top Man" was a little man called Tommy Roberts. Tommy was a nice man but didn't have the build; it was heavy work and was also piecework. If you didn't work hard at it you didn't get much money. He also had a bad chest and I had to help him out with the job a lot. I didn't mind, I was very fit and it was no problem. He came to work one day in a very happy mood, even though very much out of breath after walking from the station. When he recovered his breath he told us that his son's wife had just given birth to two little twin boys, they were blonde and lovely, but had to stay in hospital to gain weight. They were named Philip and Michael. After a while I was moved to another job in the steel works and lost all contact with Tommy. 23 years later this was changed when my daughter Julie married Michael who turned out to be one of the little blonde haired boys that Tommy was so pleased about all those years ago. Unfortunately, Tommy must have died soon after we lost touch for Michael couldn't remember him.

The job I moved to was scrap burning. There was a pool of "burners" and we were used to going anywhere we were needed in the works. One job was with a gang of shoetrees who had to replace rotted corrugated sheets. The sheets always had to be replaced in one day because German bombers used to come over nearly every night, bombing the docks of Liverpool and Birkenhead. If they had spotted a glare from the furnaces when they were being tapped they would have certainly bombed the Steelworks as well.

I had to burn off the steel bolts that held the old sheets in place. None of the other burners would touch the job as it meant working eighty foot high up and reaching the roof with ladders lashed together. I had to climb the ladders, (I had never climbed ladders in my life before this) and burn off bolts over my head. I used to be covered in showers of burning sparks, going all over me, down my neck, chest and arms and very often setting fire to my clothes. The sheeters were very helpful and would climb up the ladder behind me to give me confidence. For doing this job I got paid 2 pence an hour danger money. It worked out at about 14 pence extra per shift, added to the £3.05 shillings a week, this was in 1940.

I stayed in the Raw Materials department until I stopped working on 1 April 1971 with redundancy money of £1,480 for 35 years of service.

We had the same problems as now. There were the "Haves" and the "Have Nots".

The Tories owned nearly all the workplaces and would not permit Unions. If you mentioned "Union", you were sacked.

I was at the steelworks for 35 years and all because I had lied about working in the Buckley Collieries! Since then I have had a very happy retirement and have met a lot of people. I am now "knocking on" a bit!! If I live until the 1 April 1997 I will have been retired 27 years. I have enjoyed my retirement, but, of course, I miss Doth who I had known for 60 years and who I was married to for 50 years.

Author: Bithell, Sidney

Sid Bithell's Memoir 'A Buckley Man'"

Buckley

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