Recorded Memories

Maureen Smart Interviews. 1997 & 1998.

'Forty-six years working at Flude Hosiery from the mid 1940s.

Continually adapting to change and working as a factory union rep:’

'They’ll never cut out fully fashioned seaming, there’ll always be fully fashioned stockings – foolish!’

‘There weren’t much else [hosiery], they were quite clever but to have gone on to grammar school or ought like that, you’d have to pay and they [parents] couldn’t afford it’

Maureen talks about her family - both her parents had worked at Sketchley’s.

             Her father served in the IWW from the age of 17 and was gassed. He set up his own landscaping/market gardening business. Her mother worked at Davenport’s until she was 42 when her fourth child was born. She continued to work as a cleaner for Mrs Davenport who lived across the road from the family home. Her older sisters worked in munitions during the war and Maureen remembers as a schoolgirl going potato picking. Growing up in Hinckley Maureen remembers always wearing pure silk fully fashioned stockings to go out on a Saturday night. They queued for the pictures; went dancing to the George, the Palaise and Granby Halls in Leicester and the Co-op Hall in Nuneaton. Maureen also loved the theatre – rushing home from work at 6 o’clock to catch the 6.30 bus to Nuneaton to see a play at the Co-op Hall in Nuneaton. They went to London to see shows – she remembers everyone ‘sobbing their eyes out’ at the end of Carousel.