Recorded Memories

Lilian Coley Interview. December 1997.
 

Work and family in an industrial village 1917-1961:
‘I happened to get a bit quick…don’t you think that’s a lot of money for a girl your age…’

 
'If there was a smash-up there would be aggro all round'
 

Lilian was born in October 1904 and still lived in the house she was born in at the time of the series of interviews between December 1997 and September 2002. There is some repetition but not enough to exclude any of the interviews conducted over the five years. Lilian began interview by talking about the cottages with the long windows, which had been situated on Almeys Lane and these long windows would have let in light and so beneficial to the stockingers who worked the knitting frames producing stockings which were knitted flat. Lilian started work at Norton and Bradbury, Keats Lane, Earl Shilton, at the age of 13 in 1917. She worked on the S&G knitting machines and then on a machine which knitted the top of boys socks. There was no price list for this job and at the end of the first week she had earned £3. 9s. 0d, a lot of money for a girl of 15 and her bosses decided to give her £2.10s. 0d a week. She was eventually put back on the S&Gs which knitted the socks, not the tops. If she had bad yarn then there would be a smash-up and ‘aggro all round’. They were happy days but also frightening ‘expecting a young girl straight from school to operate one of those machines’. At 21 she went to learn the welting, quite different to working on the S&Gs. At this time they were welting artificial silk stockings - the end of the stocking was rough and it had to be turned down. They had a steel contraption to put rough part of stocking in and the welting machine was ‘something like a sewing machine’. The reason for leaving Minard’s after nearly 30 years (Lilian was 47) was a lack of work and a number of operatives were sent to Toon’s. Lilian didn’t enjoy her job there and after a month left and went to work at Nicholls & Wileman on the fully fashioned seaming but after 10 years left because of the strain on her eyes. Her brother-in-law was working at Bird and Yeoman, Hinckley Road, Earl Shilton and this is where Lilian spent the last four years of her working life, putting folded tights into boxes. She really enjoyed working at Bird and Yeoman’s, making lots of good friends and remarking, ‘this was the easiest job I’d had and the most money’. A reason for leaving was that she was able to help to look after her mother who was 94.

Lilian had been taught to work the S&Gs by her cousin Dora Coley. She’d had a very sheltered upbringing and worked in an alleyway with three machines each side and the older woman she worked alongside used ‘some big swear words’ when the machines had a ‘smash-up’ and this language horrified Lilian. Similarly when she worked alongside a man working XLs, he would put his hands on his hips and ‘said all the bad words he could think of to this machine’, adding that ‘it got that it didn’t distress me at all…I didn’t adopt it, mind you’. Lilian was brought up in the local Baptist church and she remembers going to church as a young child ‘and my chin were level with the pew’. Lilian didn’t think she was suited to working the S&G machines from such a young age and she wasn’t mechanically minded. She walked across the Hall Yard or Hall Park as it’s called now to work and then across the road to Keats Lane. And while walking across the park would often think, although it was a bit sad to think like this, ‘this won’t last forever, I shall be up there…’

There was a lot of farmland surrounding Earl Shilton and her one grandfather had worked on local farms such as the Hewitt and Folly Farm. She was told that her grandfather had died by eating too many mushrooms. He had been picking them every evening and bringing them home to be cooked. Holidays were quite short in those days, one week in August, two days at Christmas and the same for Easter and Whitsun. Her mother, before she got married worked in the B&S for a Mrs Coley, she was no relation.