Historical Memories
Family, work and play in an industrial village:
'If you don't holler, we shall not foller'
'Mother lived until she was 98, such a lovely woman'
Lilian only remembers her one grandma and she was lovely.
Lilian was the ‘makeweight’ of a big family. She was the youngest of ten. ‘Mother lived until she were 98, ‘such a lovely woman…she made gorgeous soups…she were very particular’. As a child she seamed socks, Lilian seems to think they were baby socks and at this time a knitting machine called a ‘Niantic’ was used in the local factories. Families didn’t have much and a lot of men worked as farmhands, they were able to bring home something called ‘beastings’, a rich milk from the cow just after it had given birth. The milk was used to make a rice pudding. Mushrooms could be picked from the fields and potatoes would be given out by the farmer – ‘it was all wholesome food’. The butter was delivered by Mrs Hallam on a Saturday morning.The governesses at the ‘bottom school’ were Miss Witnall and Miss Walton, ‘one were thin and one were bonny’. She remembers attending housewifery and cookery classes at a building on West Street. They were taught cookery, laundry and to scrub floors. Ordinary classes included - composition and mental arithmetic. Lilian liked school until she and another girl, Hilda Wileman, were moved up to the sixth form in the middle of the year. Her favourite subject was geography, she loved maps and spent 30 years as Missionary Secretary at chapel (Baptist). She remembers buying an atlas which she had for many years. Lilian was able to leave school at 13 because she had made ‘all her attendances’. She had been ill as a child and had nine months off, when she was at the ‘bottom school’. She had picked up a ‘germ’ after crawling through barbed wire and ‘ripped me head’. Her mother eventually took her to see Mr Pridmore in Hinckley and he prescribed Clarkes Blood Mixture. There were no ‘openings’ in the B&S at this time and she was ‘lucky to get a job’ (all the family worked in the B&S). She didn’t feel she was suited to her job at Norton and Bradbury. Her mother worked from home and had a machine under the window in the living room. Her two older brothers and uncle set up business in Barwell and would bring work for Lilian’s mother. Her father had been a foreman tacker at Whitmore’s but Lilian remembers him working as a cobbler in a shed in the garden. He would have ‘a handful of tacks’ which he would put in his mouth.
Lilian left Norton and Bradbury when she was 21 and worked as a welter at Minard’s on the High Street, from there she was sent to Toon’s and put on the stitching but didn’t like it and got herself a job at Nicholls and Wileman where she worked as a fully fashioned seamer for 10 years and spent her last four years at Bird and Yeoman. Lilian commented, ‘I think time and motion is a mistake…everything goes so fast’. Not always like this. They sang at work but ‘didn’t idle about’. A friend of hers worked on the Maxim knitting machines. The ‘Norborough’ (Norton and Bradbury) chimney could be seen as you came up the hill into Shilton.
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Lilian's Interview
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