Recorded Memories
Nellie Skelton remembers
I first started to work in the men’s hosiery in 1928
| First in the warehouse doing all kinds of jobs. The wage was 10 shillings a week. One job was putting transfers onto the toes of the socks with a hot iron to tell the size. After some time I was asked to learn the XL machines on which the socks were made. When I had learned I had three machines on my own. At that time we were making some long black cotton ones with white tops for the workhouse. The cotton was so hard that it broke a lot of needles which we used to pay for out of our wages, half-a-penny each which was a lot out of a small wage. We mostly made wool socks we used to turn ready for the linkers. We also wound our own waste onto bobbins and use it again. We were not paid for these jobs. In the early thirties we were short of work. We had seven weeks on the dole as we called it then. We had to walk into Hinckley three miles to sign on three times a week for seven-and-sixpence. |
(The original account was written by Miss Skelton)