Recorded Memories

Charles Davenport Interview. March 2001.

‘All liberals…Hinckley Co-op and chapel minded…all hardworking…looked after their fellow men’

[Women] ‘they had their own money, sometimes it was more than the men and so they had a certain amount of independence’

[Women] ‘they had their own money, sometimes it was more than the men and so they had a certain amount of independence’. Women could earn good money, sometimes earning more than men, working in the local hosiery and knitwear factories compared with women living in mining and heavy engineering areas – women in this area had ‘a certain independence’. Women from Nuneaton came to work in Hinckley. In the Hinckley area there were more often than not two wages being earned, although there could be bad times in the industry. Mr Davenport also commenting that ‘there wasn’t the poverty in this area compared to that found in mining and heavy steel areas’. Charles was born in 1925 and went to Hinckley Grammar School and took his school certificate at age 15-16. He didn’t go to university – it was taken for granted by his teachers that he would join the family business and he ‘never looked back’ – ‘I was the office’. He joined the company at age 16, this was during the war and he joined the forces at 18. His grandmother continued to do the books gradually doing less and less until her death in her 80s. His grandmother was originally from Hawick in Scotland, her father being a machine setter-up and they eventually came to live in Leicester where she met her future husband, Arthur Davenport, Charles’s grandfather. His grandmother was cremated which was unusual in the early 1940s. The minister at the Great Meeting chapel had been able to arrange for 16 Jewish refugees to leave Germany and to help them find employment and one of these women became a maid in his parent’s house – she arrived in June 1939 and it was the first time that Charles had seen someone who was very frightened, he was 13 at the time. He feels that when he was growing up he had a good family upbringing with a stable background which children don’t necessarily have these days – growing up in single parent families. Years ago factories didn’t have to advertise for workers – there was always someone – sons, daughters, neighbours – no need to use the labour exchange. The faster an operative worked the more he/she could earn. There was always a joke – workers at Manchester Hosiery – ‘if it rained on Monday morning at 11 o’clock, the women would all disappear – get the washing in’ because they lived in that area. During Mr Davenport’s working life ‘you knew your work people, or a lot of them, and they knew you’. It was countermen who usually experienced short time during January, February and March. The stock room would be full but until the orders came in the final finish could not be completed and it was the countermen who did the final finish – ‘the get-up’ for Woolworths for example. We looked at various photos Charles commenting that the backwinders’s ‘weren’t too high up in the hierarchy…they were just winding’. They didn’t need the skill of a stitcher or a mender. Charles’s grandmother had worked as a mender and she could cut a man’s sock in half and she could join it back together perfectly. .