A Century of Memories – the memoirs of William Rigg - Memoirs Publishing

William

Rigg A century of memories

maggie Rigg

William

Rigg A century of memories

William

Rigg A century of memories

Edited by Chris Newton

MEMOIRS Cirencester

Published by Memoirs

Memoirs Books 25 Market Place, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 2NX info@memoirsbooks.co.uk www.memoirsbooks.co.uk Copyright ŠWilliam Rigg, May 2011 First published in England, May 2011

ISBN 978-1-908223-09-8

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of Memoirs.

Printed in England

Preface

I began writing this narrative of Dad’s memoirs in June 2005 after a two-week period recording conversations with him about his life. This footage has formed the basis of these memoirs. As soon as it was done I wrote an initial document containing all the story material. Since then I have redrafted it several times, adding to the stories when further conversations have revealed more information and detail.

I have not been alone in gathering information. My two sisters and brother have been able to clarify and add to the memoirs from stories Dad has recalled to us all time and time again.

In February 2011 events made me realise I needed to speed up the writing process and endeavour to have a finished piece of work to be ready in time for Dad’s 100th birthday in June 2011.

In the main the stories he remembers are from the years 1915-1947, and the memoirs focuses on these years, apart from an account of his work history which runs up to 1979. Dad seems to have very lucid memories of that period and stories come into his mind more readily than the years following. So this book is a portrait of a period in someone’s life rather than a full biography.

I have placed the memoirs, more or less, in chronological order. I have tried to make them a congruent and honest account of his stories and I have quoted him verbatim as far as possible, omitting only the odd word or two where it has been repeated unnecessarily. The quoted passages are in some cases composed from several things he said on the same topic at different times. This is to keep the stories fluid and organised. I hope I have done justice to his stories.

When Dad talks about his past he becomes quite animated, almost as though he is reliving those times again and can see them as if they had happened yesterday. You may imagine him chuckling or looking intense as he speaks, and often tapping his walking stick.

William

Rigg A century of memories

Contents

CHAPTER 1

A Cumbrian childhood

Page 1

CHAPTER 2

Poverty and survival

Page 7

CHAPTER 3

A stepmother’s cruelty

Page 12

CHAPTER 4

Classroom and playground

Page 19

CHAPTER 5

Nellie and Bill

Page 24

CHAPTER 6

A working man

Page 29

CHAPTER 7

Driver Rigg 2125235

Page 38

CHAPTER 8

Peace and homecoming

Page 48

CHAPTER 9

After the war

Page 52

Introduction

I have written this book over the past three months by talking directly to my father over many hours and recording his comments as faithfully as I could. I hope readers will agree that it provides a vivid and illuminating record of life for a child born into poverty in England in the early years of the 20th Century who went on to fight honourably for his country and to successfully raise a family of his own.

The period covered by the book encompasses the two great wars of the 20th century, so I feel Dad’s reminiscences of his wartime service will be of particular interest.

Dad’s account of his childhood makes harrowing reading for those of us who have never known poverty. His account of the way Sarah, his stepmother, treated him and his brothers and sisters is reported faithfully at first hand. Sarah died some time ago, so of course she is not here to defend Dad’s memories of those times. Her own children would probably have a different view of her, because by all accounts she treated them better. We should remember that her life must have been very demanding, the family were poor, her husband drank and gambled and was often out of work, and she had 13 children to look after. Perhaps she was just trying to do her best in very difficult circumstances. However I do not condone her ill treatment of her stepchildren.

Maggie Rigg, June 2011

Acknowledgements

My thanks to my sisters Dorothy and Pearl and brother Dennis for their contribution to Dad’s stories; to June, Jeff, and Christine, for their encouragement and support; to Alvina for her previous genealogy work on ancestry dates, which gave me a starting point with some family birth dates; to Don who helped with the photos; and to Chris Newton at Memoirs Books for editing and re-ordering my writings.

Dedication

At Dad’s request, this book is dedicated to his family.

Chapter 1

A Cumbrian childhood

Thomas Rigg was born in 1876 in the town of Haslingden in Lancashire, north of Manchester. His wife Annie Askew Hall, born in 1881, was from the village of Dalton, also in Lancashire. They married in 1906 in Haslingden and had five children, John (known as Jack), Maggie, Tommy, William and Dorothy.

William Rigg, Thomas and Annie’s fourth child, was my father. He was born on 29th June 1911, when Thomas was 30 and Annie about 25.

Tragically, Annie died in October 1914 at the age of only 34, when my father was three years old and Dorothy still a baby. Dad has no memory of his mother and knew nothing at the time about the cause of her untimely death. After she died, it seems Thomas never spoke about her again.

In 1916 Thomas remarried, to Sarah Doris Trothear. Sarah already had one child, a daughter named Doris, who was about 6-12 months old when she arrived in the family home.

Following their father’s remarriage, the five children managed to maintain contact with their maternal grandmother Eleanor and their grandfather Joseph, although this had to be managed in secret. Dad speaks of his grandparents with fondness. He also mentions several aunts, one of whom cared for Dad’s younger sister Dorothy as a baby.

Thomas and Sarah soon had a daughter, Alvina, born in 1916, and in the years that followed the family grew to 13, including Doris. Thomas and Sarah’s children were Alvina, Jimmy, Harold, Violet, Herbert, Mary and lastly, in 1929, Gladys.

“I have just one photograph of my mother Annie. I was never told how she died. I had three Aunts, Aunt Tib, Aunt Barbara, and Aunt Dora. I

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Chapter 1 don’t know where he met our new stepmother… she was an ordinary looking woman, not glamorous in any way. From what I knew she was glad to find somewhere to live, because her father had kicked her out because she was having a baby.

“I remember when she came to the house for the first time she was carrying the baby in her arms. I was sitting on the wooden sofa, and she threw a biscuit at me, as though it were a treat, you know. I think she was trying to get on the right side of me. Anyway that was the beginning. We’d a rough bringing up really with her. My father wasn’t much better to allow it.”

Violet died at the age of three, when Dad was about 15, causing him much grief. He was very fond of her, as he was to a greater or lesser degree of all his siblings.

“Violet was poisoned eating rotten apples. He (the greengrocer) left these apples lying around, so the story goes. She was a lovely little girl and when she died I remember sitting there crying, with her shoes in front of me, and Margaret (Maggie) came and took them off me and threw them away. Herbert was the one who went to Australia or New Zealand and shot himself in the foot to try to get compensation, and they sent him home.”

Dad remembers his father having a variety of jobs, which had included working in the army in India and grooming horses. At some point they moved to Egremont in Cumbria, presumably so his father could find work.

The job he most clearly remembers his father doing was mining for iron ore in Egremont, an area well known for its high-quality haematite ore.

He worked in the mines for a penny a shift until the depressions of the 1920s when many of the mines in that area were closed down. This was due not just to the depression but also to the shortage of shallow deposits of iron ore. Many miners were left without work. Until recently Florence Mine remained open as a tourist attraction and education centre.

‘My father was an iron ore miner until the pits all closed down and he

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Chapter 1 was out of work. They (the miners) all used to meet, standing at the street corners, on the dole.”

The family lived an impoverished lifestyle in a rented house at number 5 Briscoe Road, Egremont, which is still standing today. The house was sparsely furnished with just the basics, yet there were four bedrooms, with the children sharing up to three in a bed. He remembers wearing a nightshirt in bed.

“There’d be two beds in a room - there’d be Tommy and Jack and myself head to foot in one bed. In the same room in another bed were Herbert, Harold and Jimmy. This sleeping arrangement meant we could share stolen bits of food under the covers. My sisters shared another room in the same fashion, with their stepsisters.’

Sleeping arrangements such as this were probably quite common at the time. Like most children, Dad saw sharing a bed with his brothers as not just good fun, but good sense. You could keep warm and share food under the blankets, though one might imagine that as the children grew older privacy became more of an issue.

The toilet was in an outhouse at the bottom of the garden, so if you had to go at night you had to use a chamber pot kept under one of the beds. With up to six children sharing a room, the pots must have been almost overflowing by morning. Emptying them would have been a precarious task. The children had to carry them down the stairs and through the house to the toilet in the back yard.

Bath night was a rare occasion. Dad was bathed in a round tin bath, in the same water his father had just bathed in!

He clearly remembers one item of luxury, a sewing machine which stood in the hallway and which he believes belonged to his mother. It was sold after her death. The kitchen sink was made of stone and was only about two to three inches deep. It was called a ‘slop stone’.

Clothes were washed in a boiler and rinsed in two ’dolly tubs’. Water was boiled in a bricked-in copper boiler with a lid, over coals. Once heated the clothes were dropped in and washed using a posser, a copper bell-

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Chapter 1 shaped device with holes at the sides and at the bottom, attached to a broom handle. You grasped the handle and pressed the posser up and down on top of the clothes to squeeze out the dirt. Dolly tubs were made of tin or wood and were about the size of a beer barrel.

Once they had been washed, the clothes would be lifted out with wooden tongs and dropped into the first dolly tub for a rinse and then into the second for another rinse. There was no wringer, so the water had to be squeezed out by hand. I imagine that clothes washed in this laborious fashion would need to be thoroughly dirty before they were deemed ready for the Monday washday. The washing took a whole day, and no washing was done on other days. There is no mention of an iron, nor ironing the clean washing.

The same boiler would be used for making a stew, by boiling a sheep’s head with any vegetables that were available – unappealing, not to say unhygienic. There was an oven on one side of the fireplace, where bread would be baked, six to eight loaves at a time. Dad recalls that a stone (14lb) of flour would make up to eight loaves. These would be stored together in a long stone container with a lid.

At the other side of the fireplace there was a boiler for heating water.

Dad says this was never used; drinking water was boiled in a kettle.

He often talks about feeling ashamed of his appearance and how it made him feel different. This must have had an effect on his self-esteem and confidence. Many families in the area lived in poverty, yet Dad thought he stood out as being even poorer than the rest, and therefore inferior. “‘My clothes were shabby hand-me-downs. I had a friend from a wellto-do family - I think they were in the timber trade – he had these big lorries that carried trees, all horse driven, and he invited me to his birthday party. I went but I didn’t enjoy it - well I did, but I felt ashamed of what I was wearing – an old jersey, short pants and galoshes.” (Galoshes were Dad’s word for daps or pumps, rather than wellingtons.)

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Chapter 1 Dad adds that he was unable to take a birthday present to the party, but nevertheless was made to feel very welcome by the family. I imagine that he was very well behaved, kind and polite, and these characteristics would have been more than enough to compensate. His regular preference for sitting at the back of the church is another example of how he wanted to hide so that his waif-like appearance wouldn’t be noticed. He also hid to get out of the way, and to keep warm.

“I used to sneak into church and sit in the back row before the service had started and stay there until just before the service finished. Then I would creep out before anyone could see me wearing my raggedy clothes.

I wore an old jersey and women’s black holey stockings fastened with a garter.”

In fact, he would creep in to join any church service that happened to be in progress. One he mentions in particular was in a meeting house of Rechabites, a Friendly Society which promoted abstinence from drinking alcohol. He also went to Oddfellows, another Friendly Society, The Salvation Army and the Methodist church. As a young boy Dad can’t have cared about or understood the beliefs of any of these religious establishments – he just wanted to creep in at the back unnoticed and stay without being challenged.

There were several accounts given by Dad about being without shoes.

The story goes that there were not enough pairs of footwear in the household to go round all the children. The shoes available had to be shared, presumably with siblings who had roughly the same shoe size.

This limited their attendance in school, or indeed going out at all. He also says that it was his job to clean ‘rows and rows of shoes’ before going to bed, so they must have had a reasonable number of shoes, at least at times.

On one occasion when he was out playing in the street with his friend, they were hauled in by the local policeman and taken to the police station.

They both thought they were in trouble. In fact, for the first and possibly

5

Chapter 1 last time during their early years, they were to become the owners of some new clogs.

“One day my friend Aiden and I were going to school and it were pouring down and we were playing in the gutter with matchsticks, having boat races. The police collared us and took us to the police station. We wondered what the hell we’d done wrong, but they took us across to Clogger Morson (the local shoe and boot maker) who owned the house we lived in - I don’t think he ever got his rent. You could see them down in the cellar cutting the soles for the clogs, and the police had us both measured for a pair of clogs. That was the first pair of decent footwear I had in my life, apart from galoshes.”

The policeman gave them the clogs on the condition that if he and his friend were found trying to spark the irons or ‘corkers’ on the soles by deliberately scraping them along the ground, the police would ‘pull them up about it’ and might ’box their ears’. The police were able to draw upon the ‘police fund’ for the clogs and were keen to ensure that the donated footwear was kept in good condition. Sometimes Dad and his friend were also given breakfast at the police station.

6

Chapter 2

Poverty and survival Dad considered himself as a child to be a ‘weakling’. By that he means that he was physically weak, because he was undernourished. It is not easy to hear of him being virtually starved throughout his entire childhood, with much of his mind on his empty stomach. However, the Rigg family were not alone in their struggles to feed themselves. The rest of Great Britain was also suffering the effects of the First World War (1914-18), when there were severe food shortages. This was partly due to panic buying and stockpiling at home, which in August 1914 caused some shops to sell out of food. Once people settled down into a routine there was enough food available until 1916, when Britain had only six weeks of wheat left, and the true impact of the war on families became obvious.

Rationing was introduced in 1918, and for some foods it continued for several years. Everyone in the household was allocated a ration book, which included coupons for meat, butter and margarine, sugar, jam, bacon, lard and tea.

Sarah must have struggled to make the rations stretch. One wonders how much bread she could afford to bake and how long she tried to make it last. Bread was made by hand and would have taken a considerable amount of time out of each day. With 13 growing children to feed, it was eked out by the slice. Based on what Dad says about Sarah treating her own children better than her stepchildren, one can’t help wondering whether they were also better fed.

“When we did eat at home there was no such thing as bread put on top of a plate and you’d help yourself. You got a piece of bread put beside you and perhaps an egg between two of you now and again, and that was a treat. My stepmother used to bake and on the day she baked she’d put it

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Chapter 2 in a bowl and Tommy used to pinch a loaf and take it up to bed and we ate it under the blankets when it was fresh, ‘cause she didn’t miss one.”

Whether the missing loaf was noticed or not must have been of minor importance to these children, whose hunger overcame any sense of selfcontrol or fear of punishment. It would have been a case of every child for themselves. Regularly dad and his brothers stole from a neighbour’s farm. They waited until it was dark before setting out.

“After dark I would creep into a neighbouring farmer’s field and take turnips, which would then be cooked for tea after school. We also used to dig for potatoes with our hands and then cover over with soil and flatten it afterwards.”

These were cooked and eaten without any accompanying meat, butter or spices to make them tastier. Another addition to his diet, which Dad and his friends called ‘bread and cheese’, were assorted free foods from the hedgerows and copses.

“We ate nettles wrapped in sour dock, and we’d eat hawthorn leaves and the pips of hawthorns when they were ripe. The hawthorn leaves were pure and good then because there was no traffic. Clean and sweet they were, lovely to eat, we’d eat them by the handful.”

Free school meals had been offered since 1906 and these proved a life saver for Dad and other poor children, even though the food was insubstantial compared to the school dinners and other food widely available today. Dad recalls that he regularly ate breakfast and dinner provided by Egremont Town Hall. The children who qualified would walk there for the meals carrying their own mugs and spoons from home.

The class teacher was responsible for choosing who had free school meals. The criteria were simple. If your father was out of work and you hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning, you qualified. About three quarters of the children in Dad’s class were eligible.

“You were given a ticket by the teacher if you qualified for these free

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Chapter 2 meals. The monitor or teacher’s pet would collect the tickets and give them to whoever was in charge at dinner time, and then they would be given out again for the following morning, if you forgot to bring your ticket in or lost it, there would be no breakfast. Breakfast was a basinful of cocoa and some bread cut into chunks. The dinner menu never varied and was a bowl of soup we called “pig’s piss and pepper”. At Christmas we were given an apple, an orange and some nuts in a paper bag.”

He tells me that the only decent meals he and his siblings ate were cooked by his maternal grandmother, who slipped her grandchildren into her house in the same street for a meal occasionally. They had to slip warily back home afterwards so that their stepmother didn’t notice they had been fed elsewhere.

“You see, my grandparents lived lower down - two or three houses lower down - and of course my stepmother didn’t want us going to our grandmother, but she used to get us in if she could and give us a feed, but we hadn’t to be caught, we weren’t supposed to go there... my father should have stood up to that, shouldn’t he?”

Perhaps these occasional meals and the contact with his grandparents were the only things to look forward to. Once Tommy was working however, his earnings began to make a small difference to their eating habits. Dad chuckles as he reflects upon his own and Tommy’s mischievousness.

“We used to go to a fish and chip shop on North Road beggin’ and if we were lucky we’d get a bag of scraps. We would bring them home and eat them under the bedclothes. Sometimes we were lucky - we’d get a bag of scraps with crumbs of batter and bits and pieces of chips.”

At the age of eleven or twelve, Dad would be sent out to buy a pint of skimmed milk before the start of each school day. It was an uphill walk of about three quarters of a mile off the main road. On arriving at the farm he would hold the can he’d carried from home under the spout of the milk separator until it was full, and then paid a penny for it. On his return he would drink some of the milk and then water down the rest. In the winter,

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Chapter 2 when the days were shorter and the mornings bleaker, he recalls being ‘scared stiff’ of the dark.

Hunger was constant for Dad and his siblings throughout their early lives, with food always at the front of their minds. Any opportunity that arose for a chance of eating anything edible, at whatever cost could not be passed by. When his oldest brother Jack was about 10 years old he got caught for stealing a tuppenny chocolate bar from a machine.

“You see, Jack and a chap called Wally Preston, my Aunt Barbara’s son were caught getting a chocolate bar out of one of those chocolate machines you see on the station. They’d found a way of getting the chocolate out.

He only got one bar.”

This childish misdemeanour got Jack, as the elder of the two, into serious trouble. He was detained for two years in an ‘Industrial School’ in Cockermouth. These were schools established by voluntary contributions mainly for ‘vagrant and neglected children’ who had not actually been convicted of theft. Children sent to these schools were clothed, fed and taught.

When I heard Dad’s account of this I felt a sense of disbelief that such a young child could be given a two-year sentence for what today would be considered to be well within the lesser realms of petty crime. However, Jack probably did himself a favour by stealing that chocolate bar, as he would at least have been fed and clothed adequately during his attendance at the school. He learned to play the cornet, and on leaving the school he joined Egremont Town Band.

Dad recalls going to band practice with Jack to a place called Tarpot, because it was ‘lovely and warm’. Jack would play on the street and Dad would accompany him to collect whatever money came his way.

“We were really hard up and he went playing in the street and I went collecting. The first thing we bought was a loaf.... we didn’t get much.

They had this band and they played at a local sports day at Bigrigg and

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Chapter 2 my Dad took me and Jack played Colonel Bogie. Every time they played Colonel Bogie afterwards or he heard it on the radio, my dad started crying. In years to come, whenever my dad heard that tune he would cry with pride for Jack.”

Dad and Jack spent a lot of time together, until a family crisis apparently tore them apart; Jack left home because he believed he had fathered one of Sarah’s children. Apparently a letter from Jack was found on the mantelpiece implying that he was the father of the child she was then carrying. She was heavily pregnant at the time. Dad doesn’t recall any details of the furore that must have ensued between Sarah and Thomas. Whether his father chose not to believe the rumour or ignored it remains a mystery. Yet one imagines there must have been uproar.

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Chapter 3

A stepmother’s cruelty

As the family increased the household must have become even poorer.

Sarah marginalised her stepchildren and frequently used them as scapegoats. Dad tells us that when she moved in with them she ill-treated all her stepchildren and was consistently neglectful and callous. He gives several examples of this. His brother Tommy was struck with an oven shelf and Dad was beaten for losing some change.

“I saw her bend an oven shelf over Tommy’s back for taking a loaf. I wanted to step in and help but feared she would do the same to me. On another occasion I was beaten for losing a ten-shilling note (the equivalent of today’s 50 pence, though worth a great deal more then), which was the change from buying yeast, margarine and flour from Lipton’s. Later I found the note in the lining of my short trousers and gave it her, but she never said a word of apology. She lost her temper with us all. She favoured her own children and I learned in later years that she told them not to speak to us. This was a bit difficult, given that we were all living under the same roof.”

This kind of ill treatment was normal for Dad, Dorothy and Tommy.

Dad offers no such examples for Maggie and Jack, though they may have escaped her inexcusable behaviour because they were a little older, or perhaps they stood up to her.

Maggie told Dad that their father had once been told by Sarah to punish her for something she had done wrong. Instead he took her into a room and told her to pretend she was crying as though she was being punished.

Had the children been brought up like this today it is likely that they

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Chapter 3 would have been taken into care, or at the very least put on the child protection register. Although the NSPCC was founded in 1884, it was nearly 50 years before the Children and Young People’s Act of 1933 came into force. By then Dad would have been 22.

Dad has vivid memories of the way Sarah treated his youngest sister Dorothy, who was tormented even more than the other children. Her story is heartbreaking. All the other children went on to live fairly normal lives once they had left home. Dorothy was just over 12 months old when her mum died and her Aunt Tib (Tabitha?), who lived in Lancaster, looked after her for a time. She had no children of her own and was prepared to look after her as her own and perhaps adopt her.

Dorothy appeared to be quite happy living with her aunt, but when Sarah came on the scene her stepmother ‘agitated’ for her to be returned to the Rigg household. Sarah also had her own young child to care for.

Dad firmly believes his stepmother was trying to give the impression that she genuinely cared about Dorothy. This was apparently not true, as Dorothy was often on the receiving end of her stepmother’s bullying. She was regularly beaten and generally treated harshly throughout her young life. Dad says that on one occasion Dorothy was hit across the forehead, suffering severe bruising and cuts. She was told to cover the injury with her hair.

Sarah eventually had Dorothy put into a workhouse in Whitehaven.

Dad feels his father was to some extent responsible for this. He wonders what sort of a man would allow this to happen to his own daughter; clearly he failed to protect his own children.

“He couldn’t have been up to much to see us being knocked about the way we were, especially sending Dorothy to a workhouse. I mean what sort of man would stand by and see her sent to a flaming workhouse.

When I came home at term time I said ‘where’s Dorothy?’, he said ‘she’s in Whitehaven Workhouse’. I said, ‘what’s she doing there’, so I went and

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Chapter 3 got her out and took her down to Ulverston hirings ‘cause there was nothing else.... only milkmaid jobs for women and farm work for men.

After that I never heard anything about her and I drifted further and further away. She got a job in Preston and that’s the last I saw of her. The next I heard was after the war when she was in Carlisle, in the Garlands.

It was all done by our stepmother.”

Workhouses were places where people who were unable to support themselves were offered very basic accommodation and employment. In 1913 they were renamed poor law institutions, but they continued to maintain their ill reputation and stigma and hauntingly lived on for many years afterwards.

Dorothy was apparently taken on by a household, but what followed is unclear. We do know she ended up incarcerated in what we would now call a psychiatric hospital. These places were commonly known at the time as lunatic asylums. They were often viewed with suspicion, and those who were admitted were perceived as being ‘disturbed’ rather than having a mental illness as we see it today. Some were quite small, accommodating around 40 people, while others had as many as 3,500 patients.

At first Dorothy was a patient at an asylum in Nottingham. While still a young woman she was transferred to Garlands, near Carlisle in Cumberland, where she spent most of her remaining years. She died in 2001 at the age of 88.

I recall visiting her at Garlands when I was younger. She had her own tiny room, which was like a prison cell with bars at the window. No furnishings or pictures decorated the room and the only furniture was a single iron-framed bed. There were no light switches, and the single light bulb was covered by a cage.

To this day we do not know why Dorothy was sent to this institution.

Several ideas have been offered by Dad and others, one being that she set fire to a property and subsequently spent a short time in prison. Another

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Chapter 3 theory is that she had a baby out of wedlock, which at the time was considered an unforgivable disgrace. There were also suspicions that her ill-treatment had given her brain damage.

It does seem she had a learning difficulty, and she did have a baby, who died at the age of about six months while Dorothy was in Garlands. It is unclear where her child was being looked after, but it was probably kept at the family home.

I am told by a reliable source that often the patient records of those admitted to asylums gave the reason for admission as nothing more than ‘feeble minded’. That probably covered many states of mind, including having a learning difficulty, as we would put it today. How these patients were treated for this ‘disturbed’ state is anyone’s guess. Recent legislation makes it impossible to access patient medical records for 100 years, so perhaps we will never know the truth. Had Dorothy been born a century later she might have been placed in a purpose-built home within the community, if indeed she would have been admitted to an institution at all.

A few years before she died, Dorothy was moved into a small supportive community home in a little Cumbrian village called Silloth. Dad remains sorrowful about Dorothy’s life, tucked away and imprisoned as she was.

In later life she wanted to be allowed to live in the outside world, but I was told that by then she would have been too institutionalised to be able to adjust.

Dorothy’s story is a tragic one. No-one will ever know to what extent her problems were caused by her stepmother’s ill treatment, but it seems likely that it was at least a contributing factor.

Sarah seems to have intimidated her stepchildren, giving them tasks just to make them look and feel stupid. Dad mentions one typical chore: “The path leading from the kitchen door to the back lane was bordered with cobblestones, which we were frequently made to weed using a table fork.”

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Chapter 3 Another of the tasks expected of him as an undernourished 12-year-old was to push a wheelbarrow downhill to Egremont sidings to collect coal.

He had to do this once a fortnight. Dad says the uphill journey back with a wheelbarrow full of coal was unbearable, though he would sometimes be helped by a sympathetic passer-by.

He had to do these tasks before he set off on his walk to school, a further three quarters of a mile. The coal had to be paid for and was often ‘on strap,’ which meant payment could be settled at a later date.

“She used to send me - I wasn’t really fit to lift anything, I were a bit of a weakling - down the street to borrow a wheelbarrow and I’d go down to the station, the goods yard – the coal yard where the coal wagons used to come in - it was all coal then, there was no central heating or anything like that. There was coalmen all over the place and you’d go to the wagon when the coalman was filling his bags and weighing them out and he’d have half a hundredweight of coal. It was downhill all the way with an empty wheelbarrow, but coming back it was uphill all the way - many a time somebody’s taken the wheelbarrow off me and taken it as far as they were going, to help me.”

At one time Dad told me that Sarah had locked him and his brother Tommy in the attic and left them without food or water for what seemed to him like days. Eventually his sister Maggie brought a ladder to release them from captivity. It is not certain how long he was actually locked in the attic, or what happened when he was eventually rescued. He seems now to have forgotten this memory.

Dad recalls that when his father was out many ‘strange men’ would visit and he wondered what Sarah was up to. “She was having it off with other men, I think so when I look back and think about it” he says. Perhaps this was the only way she could feed all those children as well as herself and Thomas, who seemed to be often out of work. He was known to be both a drinker and a gambler. Dad admits she had a hard job but believes she shouldn’t have taken it out on them, as children.

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Chapter 3 “She didn’t like us any of us and she told her own family not to have anything to do with us children. Alvina told us that, and she made it plain she didn’t like us.”

Although Dad remembers much about his stepmother, he says very little about his father, even when questioned about him, except to dismiss him as useless. One occasion when his father did earn his affection was when Dad had pleurisy, which he states proudly is the only serious illness he has ever had. At that time the cure for this intensely painful lung condition was to place hot poultices on the chest. A poultice was a hot soft cloth pad impregnated with some substance that was thought capable of curing the complaint. The North Americans used mashed pumpkin, but perhaps more commonly, bran and other cereals were used. In Dad’s case his father and sister applied poultices infused with linseed oil.

“I remember having pleurisy and my dad and my sister Maggie were up all night putting linseed poultices on me - I was off school a while.”

It is remarkable that this was used in a poultice as well as in putty.

Linseed oil contains many healing properties and can be used to improve a number of symptoms including digestive disorders, constipation, rheumatism and burns. Often it is infused with water, or in the case of burns, made into a paste. It is also edible and is eaten in parts of Europe with potatoes and cheese.

This isolated memory seems to offer Dad some evidence that he was loved, if only fleetingly, by his father. After his illness Dad recalls sitting on the steps of the house in Briscoe Road chatting to his father and being asked when he was going to “put flesh on his legs”. Dad would have not been able to give his father the honest answer. The real reason was of course that he was malnourished, and he could never gain weight until he could be fed adequately.

One day his father went to work without his ‘bait tin’, the oval container which carried his lunch (it was made of tin so that the mice couldn’t nibble their way inside). Dad remembers walking in his short school trousers to

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Chapter 3 the pit on his way to school. Dad lived at the north end of town and Florence Pit was at the south end, so it was a long walk. When he arrived with the bait tin he was taken all the way to the cage to hand it to a miner who was about to go down.

Like other family members, Dad was a regular customer at the pawn shop in Cleator Moor, where he would repeatedly pawn his father’s suit, the only available item. He would walk the two and a half miles from Egremont to Cleator Moor and back again, often with Jack or Tommy.

He was crying, perishing cold and hungry into the bargain. He remembers the distance as being about seven miles rather than the two and a half it actually is. Even so, a five-mile round trip is quite a distance to a young child, and to him it must have felt like a half marathon.

“From Egremont to Cleator Moor’s a long way. That was the nearest pawn shop. I remember the suit - it was a brown suit and he never wore it, I think he just used it for the pawn shop, brought it in and brought it out again... it was cold and I was perished and I was crying.”

I would challenge anyone not to feel moved by the thought of that little boy walking all that way crying with cold, hunger and exhaustion.

Dad doesn’t say how much the suit was pawned for and whether it was worth the walk, but I suppose it must have been enough money to keep them in food for a few days.

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Chapter 4

Classroom and playground Whatever toys might have been around during Dad’s childhood, he doesn’t remember ever having any of his own, and in fact states emphatically that he didn’t know what a toy was. Yet there were some moments of fun and enjoyment, and although he might have been short of toys, he was never short of friends to play with.

He mentions a few games he and his friends played. It appears they were quite resourceful. Playing football first meant making a football.

There were several ways of doing this. You could make one up out of old rags and tying it with string, or using a pig’s bladder blown up through the stem of a clay pipe. Or you could just use an old tin can.

“We were never bought toys and we had to make our own games.

‘Peggy’ was our own invention. To play, all you needed was a brick which you put on the ground and a peg which was balanced so that it hung over the edge of the brick. Then all that was needed was a stick to hit the peg as far as you could. The winners were the players who could hit their pegs the furthest. Tops and whips were also common at that time.”

Dad recalls that he could play the ‘bones’ – in fact he still can. These were two pieces of wood held between the fingers of one hand and shaken rhythmically to make a beat. Evidently everyone in his school played them, and it was something that was almost second nature, and as common as marbles.

He also remembers playing with a hoop and crook and various games with cigarette cards. At night they often played hide and seek.

For this family, Christmas was in no way a festive season. There were no treats, toys or other presents, special food, or indeed celebration of any nature, apart from one Christmas when Dad recalls his elder sister

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Chapter 4 Maggie’s boyfriend, Joe, producing a couple of rabbits at the last minute for Christmas dinner. That seemed like real magic.

It is a wonder that Dad and the other children survived this ‘rough and hungry’ upbringing. In fact it taught him to be resilient and resourceful.

He had no choice but to adopt survival techniques, though his dishonesty never went beyond stealing vegetables.

It seems astonishing that he has lived to such an age, given that he was half starved throughout his early years, right up until the age of about 14, when he left home. I have also wondered how he was able to parent his own four children successfully, given that he had such damaging experiences himself.

At the time Dad started school, boys and girls attended separate infant and junior schools. Children started at five and continued to the age of 14, the minimum leaving age. Only if they had passed the entrance exam to the grammar school would they continue their education past the age of 14.

Class sizes were probably larger than today. There might have been as many as 50 children in each class. They learned reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as history and geography. Dad refers to the different classes as ‘standards’ one to six rather than years.

He started at Bookwell Boys Infant School in Egremont in 1916, aged five. The school was built on a hill, with the infants’ department below and the junior school on higher ground, accessed via some steps, which Dad recalls vividly. The classroom was furnished with tiers of long desks, with benches or forms to sit on. At the front of each desk was a groove where you kept your pens, pencils and chalks. It is uncertain whether each child had their own inkwell. In the infants’ department work was done in chalk on a slate – far removed from the resources available to schoolchildren today. There would also be far fewer reference books.

Teaching styles have of course changed dramatically over the last century and learning is now far more inspirational and experiential. Dad talks of teachers strolling behind the children as they worked and looking over their shoulders. He goes on to say that they would think nothing of 20

Chapter 4 ‘boxing your ears’ if you misbehaved. Imagine what would happen if teachers did this today.

There appears to have been a general lack of inspiration and encouragement from Dad’s teachers. Their priorities seemed to be more about enforcing strict discipline, and his clearest memories are of being frightened by them.

“My memories of schooldays were horrible.... teachers were frightening.

A teacher would box your ears if you were doing anything stupid. If you did anything wrong in the class you’d get the cane over your hand, sometimes both hands.”

Like most children, Dad preferred some teachers to others. He still remembers the names of several of them. Mr. Hutchinson and the Headmaster, Mr. Wood, were his favourites, while Mr. Bezanko was dreaded by all. This was because he was a very large man with a short temper. Dad describes him as “having the build of a rugby player - he’d shout at and clout anyone who behaved out of line.”

Corporal punishment was an accepted form of reprimand in those days, with beatings across one or both hands being common practice for breaking the rules. Talking in class or “doing something stupid instead of paying attention” were punishable actions. Dad got the cane himself occasionally, but has no recollection of what he did to deserve it.

Generally Dad got average marks for his schoolwork of seven or eight out of 10. He was, however, singled out for his good handwriting. There was no automatic way of copying documents in those days; carbon paper had been invented but would not have been available to schools, so every copy had to be done separately by hand. Dad was one of several pupils selected to copy out letters addressed to the parents of children who were absent. If a pupil did not attend the morning session, a letter would be taken to their home that lunchtime by one of the pupils, asking parents for an absentee note.

“I was always picked for best writing - you were allowed to write so

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Chapter 4 many. There were about ten of you picked and it was up on a blackboard what you’d to write and they (the teachers) would perhaps give you six to write or even more.’

By the time Dad started school, the First World War was under way.

For a young boy living up in Cumbria, the war probably had little impact on life - apart from food becoming even shorter.

He does recall a woman teacher sitting behind her desk crying. Dad wanted to go up to her and ask what was wrong, but stopped himself, thinking it wasn’t his place. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his own neglect, he could still be sensitive to the feelings of others. Only on reflection some years later did it occur to Dad that the teacher was probably crying because she had lost someone close in the war.

In terms of school sports, Dad mentions only football. He remembers that the school had a tarmac-covered playground within the school grounds and a football pitch for use at the other end of the town.

“We were marched through the town to use the football pitch. We wore whatever we had on, there was no kit and we played in whatever shoes we were wearing, which for me were my galoshes.”

Try to imagine kicking a football with the toes of your shoes worn to a thin membrane, or with holes right through them. This would hardly encourage a child to play well, if at all.

I don’t remember Dad ever mentioning playing any sport once he left school. But he does recall one event when the town was able to have some fun - Crab Fair Sports Days.

“There used to be Crab Fair Sports at Egremont, I think they still have it. They went up the street with a horse and chariot throwing apples out, and there used to be a sheep on a greasy pole. Anybody that hit it got the sheep. And there was a little roundabout for kiddies and you turned the handle. I remember working there one day - I got sixpence.”

Crab Fairs date back to as long ago as 1267, and one is indeed still held in Egremont today. Named after crab apples, they are one of the oldest sports fairs in the world. Today the fair offers many activities, including

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Chapter 4 gurning competitions, cycle racing, talent shows and horn blowing.

Apart from such occasions, Dad’s schooldays appear all in all to have been rather bleak. Despite this, he seems to have made good progress with the subjects he was taught and when he reached the age of 11 he was one of the children put forward to take the entrance examination for the local grammar school. But it was not to be. His teacher asked him if his parents could afford to buy the school uniform he would be required to wear if he did gain entry. Dad knew such a thing would be impossible. He left school at 14, denied the opportunity to further his education by simple, grinding poverty.

Dad would also like to have learned to play the piano – he was inspired by a neighbour who played, who invited Dad into her house to listen. But the chance to continue his education is the opportunity he misses most.

When I asked him if he could go back and change just one thing in his life, he says that he would have liked the chance to go to grammar school, as he believes his life would have taken a very different route.

“I might have been an officer instead of just a driver,” he says, with laughter. “Oh well, your life’s laid out for you.”

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Chapter 5

Nellie and Bill After leaving school, Dad spent six or seven years working on a variety of farms. The last one was Jackson’s at Little Eccleston, where he was earning £1 a week. This was where he met Mum, Nellie Wareing, when he was about 23 or 24.

Dad says Nellie was not her real name - she was actually called Betsy Ellen - but she was never referred to as anything other than Nellie. Born on August 16 1915, she was the eldest of eight children and was working in domestic service when they met. Unlike Dad she had grown up in a farming family where there were no food shortages to speak of, but neither were the family well to do. They were working on neighbouring farms, and Dad recalls their first meeting with great affection.

“Nellie worked for Cowells’ and I worked for Jacksons’. She did general housework and some of the lighter farm tasks, like washing freshly-laid eggs and grading them. She might also have helped with the milking of the cows. Like me she lived in, earning her keep and a small wage.”

Women as young as 14 would go into service after leaving school.

These jobs were usually in large houses or farmhouses where they lived in and took on mainly household duties which varied from house to house.

The work was hard and there were no modern appliances, which made it much more labour intensive. The pay was low and usually time off was limited.

“It was usual to have one day off a week, though sometimes you might be lucky enough to have an extra half day. If there was something being shown in the institute in Eccleston, we might have gone there to see a slide show - I forget now, it was a long, long time ago. She was with a pal of hers and I was with a pal of mine. That was the first time I had any close

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Chapter 5 contact with her. I had a bag of Liquorice Allsorts and I offered her one and she wouldn’t have it. Anyway we did get together and I used to go to the other farm (where Mum worked) to babysit for them. They said she could ask me down if she wanted, so I used to go down and sit in the other farm with her. Little did we know we would spend the next 35 years together and have four children.”

They got on well together and met as often as they could. Dad tells of a night when he arranged to meet Nellie but fell asleep because he was so tired. He doesn’t remember whether he nodded off before or during the date. Not a good start to any relationship, but it didn’t stop them embarking on 35 years of marriage.

Dad was accepted immediately by Nellie’s family. My grandmother, Gertrude Wareing, was a bread, cake and pastry cook and she made sure that he would never go hungry again. He remembers her making potted pork from a pig killed on the farm.

“There was bacon and ham - out of this world, not like it is today - and sausages. If you killed a pig you could have good meals for a week – offal, pig’s cheek, brawn, bacon rolls.”

During their courting days Dad and Nellie would often babysit together at the farm where Nellie worked, or go out on Dad’s motorbike, a secondhand Francis Barnett. They would also walk out together, often accompanied by Mum’s younger sister Pearl, my auntie, who was then about three or four. Dad recalls giving her piggybacks when they were out walking.

Eventually, after some months, Dad plucked up the courage to invite Mum to go on holiday with him, to stay with his sister Maggie and her husband in Mansfield. Encouraged by my grandmother, they had no hesitation in going away together for a week.

“She agreed and we spent our first week away together. I recall I bought her a pretty silk scarf which she treasured for years. We went out together for quite a while. I used to go to her house and I was accepted there.”

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Chapter 5 It was a whirlwind romance, and Dad and Nellie got married within little more than a year of meeting. Granny seemed to be keen to see her eldest child betrothed as soon as possible, and was visibly pleased with Bill as a suitable match. She had even been heard to say “Thank goodness for Bill Rigg.” In fact Mum was in the very early stages of pregnancy when they married, so there may have been more to Granny’s attitude than we have been told.

“Eventually we got married at Kirkham/Wesham Registry Office - it’s a hospital now. That was in September 1936 - I was 25 and she was 21.

The reception was at Fisher’s Slack. I can’t remember how many were there - all the sisters, Betty, Mary, Gladys, Joyce and Pearl. Tommy and his wife Grace were also there.’

Mum’s family had moved to Fisher’s Slack farm cottage in Elswick, Preston, and after they married they lived there for two or three weeks before they were able to move into what was known as Bond’s Cottage.

This was a little two up, two down house which they rented from a family called Walley, for whom Dad worked occasionally. It was not their ideal home, but it was probably a better option than sharing with my granny and granddad and Mum’s seven brothers and sisters.

The way Dad describes it, the cottage was practically derelict by today’s standards, but this was common at the time. The roof leaked in countless places, and when it rained they had to position buckets and bowls to catch the water. There was no water or electricity. The single coal fire would have heated only the hearth and the immediate surrounding area, leaving the rest of the house freezing cold in winter. Almost certainly the furniture was all second hand. But this happy young pair of newly-weds must nevertheless have been excited at the prospect of living in their own home, and Mum would have drawn on her unlimited resourcefulness to do her utmost to make it comfortable.

“We had no running water and our toilet was at the bottom of the garden. Rainwater was collected in a big tank for washing, and we used a

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Chapter 5 pump in the next door front garden for our drinking water. The only thing going for it was the price, at seven shillings and sixpence a week. They used to come and change your batteries every Saturday night - you had a wet battery and a dry one for your wireless.” The batteries were very heavy and would have been either taken to a garage or wireless shop for recharging every 2-3 weeks or, in this case a collection, so I imagine there would have been a collection by the local garage- probably by horse and cart to do the exchange The toilet, or privy as it would have been known, was in a small shed in the front garden and there was only one entrance to the cottage, at the front of the house. Oil lamps rather than electricity lit the rooms.

Mum and Dad lived in Bond’s Cottage for about two years, during which time my older sisters were born, Dorothy in 1937 and Pearl, named after Nellie’s sister, in 1938. He recalls that Dorothy was born in Preston Infirmary. The family then moved to Highcross, between Poulton-le-Fylde and Blackpool.

While he was working on the local sewage scheme, Dad noticed a house for rent. He thinks he was able to secure the tenancy because he was earning what he considered to be good money at the time. Although his boss was ‘quite tight’ over business affairs, he offered him a driver and one of his vans to help with the move.

Dad describes moving to High Cross as “like moving into heaven - hot and cold water, electricity and a bath and a proper toilet inside the house.”

Number 3 Kerslea Avenue became a real family home, and a haven after Bonds Cottage. It boasted two bedrooms, a bathroom with toilet, a sitting room, dining room, kitchen and a front and back garden. There was a coal fire in the dining room, which was the only heating in the house apart from special occasions like Christmas when a fire would be lit in the sitting room. There was running water, electricity and gas, but it was cold in the winter months and frost would cover the insides of the bedroom windows, making them glistening white.

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Chapter 5 The floors were covered in lino (linoleum), which was freezing to bare feet in winter, but Mum made rag rugs for every room to make them more comfortable. An old square carpet, with a pattern that was so faded you could hardly see it, covered the floor of the sitting room. Dorothy and Pearl, as young children, painted it with their paintbox paints to try to bring out the pattern.

After the war two more children arrived, myself (25/02/47), and my brother Dennis (17/11/48).

Mum was delighted to move into a home like this, with running water and an inside toilet. They had to pay double the rent of their former home, at 13 shillings a week, but they both loved it and were glad to move.

Dad is clearly moved by this memory. “She (Nellie) was a lovely person - she was the best of the family and really glad to get away to the house at Highcross.�

Mum and Dad were married for 35 years, until she died in 1971 at the age of only 56. Whenever he refers to her now, some 79 years after he first met her and 40 years after her death, it is with great affection. His memories of her have not faded with age. He still sheds a tear or two when he refers to her, or thinks about her. She was clearly the only real love of his life.

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Chapter 6

A working man

Dad’s teenage years seem to have been lost in the struggle to survive.

He does not give them the slightest mention. In 1925, at the age of 14, he went straight from school into a job as a farm labourer. He probably found his first farm job through word of mouth. At first he worked on farms close to home.

“At that time there was little in the way of work. With some of the pits closing down, there was only farm work. I started straight from school, earning five shillings (25p) a week and my keep. As soon as my 14th birthday arrived I left school and went straight to the farm, but I was hauled back in to finish the term.

“I had no decent clothes for farm work - she (his stepmother) used to send her offspring up to sub (borrow against) my wages before I’d earned them - half a crown on a Wednesday and half a crown Saturday, which was lot of money in those days, two or three loaves of bread, so then that was five shillings a week until the term ended, but I suppose it helped the other children, it was getting near the term end then you see.”

From Martinmas (the feast of St. Martin on November 11) to Whitsuntide, the farmhands ploughed and manured the land (muck spreading) and did the sowing. Then from Whitsuntide to Martinmas they thinned turnips, pulled up potatoes and harvested the hay (haymaking).

At the end of each six-month ‘term’ there was a week-long break called term week, during which hiring week took place. This was when the farmhands gathered as their contracted term with one farmer ended to be hired out to another, usually for another six months. These fairs had started more than 600 years ago, after the Black Death led to a shortage of farm labour. “ I’ve stood in hiring markets between Carlisle and Ulverston. There

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Chapter 6 was Carlisle, then Cockermouth, then Whitehaven, and a smaller hiring market in Egremont, but the biggest one was Ulverston. It’s a car park now.”

It is not difficult to picture a hiring fair from the details Dad describes.

Farmers would stroll around asking the potential new recruits questions to find out in which areas of farm work they were skilled. When Dad explains this process it is as though he is reliving the hiring process and is standing waiting to be asked questions and chosen by one farmer or another.

“Men used to stand in one place and the women further up the street in another. The farmer used to come to you and say, ‘are you for hire?’; ’yes’ you’d say. ‘What can you do, can you plough lad? Can you milk?

Where’ve you been before - how long were you there?’

“Farmers would look at you as though they were buying a cow and they would also ask how much you wanted to be paid for the term, which was six months. I finished up with seven pounds for the term, which was not so bad, in fact it was top wages in those days.”

Eventually Dad became confident enough in his abilities as a farmhand to negotiate the wage he felt he was worth. Over the next six or seven years he worked on several farms, yet he would often be kept on by farmers for longer than six months. This was quite usual if employer and employee got on well. If you were being kept on, there was of course no need to go to the hiring markets.

“If it was a good place and you liked the people you worked for, and you liked the boss and well fed and he liked you, by the time the term comes to an end he’d start asking you what you were thinking of doing next term. He’d say ’do you fancy stopping on?’ and then you’d negotiate a wage there and then. Perhaps you’d be mucking out or doing something in the fields when he asked you. Then that was it, you didn’t have to go to the hiring market.”

After the hiring the farmer had an obligation to meet new farmhands

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Chapter 6 at the station, offer bed and board at the farm, and then at the end of the term, if he wasn’t keeping you on for a further six months, take you back to the station. Dad would carry all his possessions in a tin box. It contained his working clothes and very little else.

You weren’t normally paid till the end of your agreed term, so ‘subbing’ wages was common, with the amount borrowed then being deducted from your pay. One thing not included in the deal was your laundry. Once you were on the farm it was up to the farmhand to seek out someone in the local community who would undertake their washing and negotiate a price, payable at the end of the six month term. It was usual to pay around 10 shillings for six months for this service.

By the time Dad started going to the hiring fairs, the Agricultural Wages Act of 1924 had made their role much less critical. This legislation set minimum wages for farmhands, so there was no longer any need to negotiate a wage in the openness of the marketplace. Yet the fairs were still a useful and well-used feature of the rural labour market.

At one time farmhands had been able to ask for whatever wages they wished, but an Act called The Statute of Labourers put an end to that.

The Act meant that both men and women had to accept the old rates of pay and be hired in public, so that underhand deals could not take place.

By 1814 these old laws were repealed, but hiring fairs continued. By the time Dad was at the end of his farming career he recalls that the hiring fairs were no longer of use. By then he was getting a weekly wage of one pound. It was not until the 1960s that the fairs were phased out completely.

The fairs also gave the farmhands an opportunity to spend their money.

There were merchants and entertainers, ‘card sharps and all sorts of dodgers’, as Dad calls them, waiting to take your hard-earned cash. These would be people who had marked cards or dealt from the bottom of the pack, to give those who played the worst possible odds. I wonder whether his suspicions were well founded.

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Chapter 6 At the second farm where he was hired, Dad describes the way horses were used to thresh corn. Dray or draught horses were commonly used to operate agricultural implements. One way farmers would use horses was to walk one or more of them on a large treadmill, with a surface made of wooden slats linked like a shackle. The circular motion from the treadmill was then conveyed to a cog mechanism, and then to a pulley which could be fastened to the machine.

“My second farm was in Wasdale Head and the farmer’s name was Anthony Gibson. There was a threshing machine up in the loft and the horse was on the ground fastened to a long pole with a rope and walking round and round to drive the threshing machine. If the farmer opened the window the horse stopped. Every time the horse passed the window he’d look, he was feeding the corn into the thresher.”

At this farm Dad tells me that he was in a position to supplement his income in a small way by working for a few hours at the weekend. He was clearly prepared to do anything to earn even the smallest amount of money.

“It was at this farm that I was able to make a bit of extra cash on a Sunday. I would open the gate for tourists wanting to pass through the sheep field by car. For this I made sixpence a time. Bearing mind that not many people owned cars in those days I did not make much out of this.”

In this century it is hard to imagine someone driving a car through a sheep farm being described as a ‘tourist’. Whether this is Dad’s terminology or a general term used 70 years ago is uncertain, but what is certain is that the few travellers passing through the sheep farm provided Dad with an opportunity to increase his income in a small way. Sixpence was known as half a shilling, half a bob (a bob being a shilling), or sometimes a tanner. These coins were first minted in the reign of Edward VI and continued until decimalisation in 1970, when the intention was that they would be withdrawn from circulation; in fact they remained legal tender until 1980.

Dad recollects another job as a farmhand where his main task was

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Chapter 6 thinning turnips. During his time at this farm he undertook what must have been back breaking work for a few pence. Even in those days three pence didn’t buy a lot.

“I worked at one farm in Cumrew where I went thinning turnips at night in summertime for threepence (just over 1p) for a hundred yards.

You’d do several hundred yards - threepence didn’t buy a lot. You were on your hands and knees doing it, this meant wearing sacking around each knee tied with binder twine (used to bind corn sheaves) top and bottom and kneeling down for hours on end.”

By this time in his farming career Dad felt not only that he owed nothing to his stepmother but that he did not earn enough to hand over part of his wages to someone whom he disliked. He felt no obligation to pay for anything other than his keep when he returned to the family home.

He and his brother Tommy decided to rebel.

“I was the first to rebel because we were going home at the term end and we were handing our money over to her (Sarah) so this particular term on the way home I said to Tommy, I’m not giving her any money. I’ll pay for my week’s lodging, but that was the end of me giving her any money at all.”

After this time Dad’s farming work started to take him many miles from home. He returned only once more, in 1933 when his father died.

After this decision, things started to improve for him financially. At one farm, while he was working for Al (Harold) Stobbart, he started to realise that there was more to life than work. He was about 17 at the time.

Compare this to young people today, who would be out and about socialising at a much earlier age.

“I’d been there, oh I think about three months, and I could see this bus going to Carlisle every Saturday you know, and local lads on it and girls.

I fancied a trip into Carlisle, big city, big day, lovely, so I thought I’d ask the farmer for a ten-shilling sub. I got the 10 shillings and bought a bus

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Chapter 6 ticket. The first thing I bought was a banana. Then I went to the pictures - I think I saw Harry Lauder at the theatre or Will Fyffe, anyway I saw them both there in due course. I got the bus back. When I got back the farmer was surprised that I’d already spent the 10 bob, he said ‘as tha spent that 10 shillings?’

It is worthy of note that a banana was a treat to Dad, although this fruit was little known in England until after the Second World War. Imagine someone on a night out today choosing a banana as a treat!

Harry Lauder and Will Fyffe were both popular entertainers of the time. Harry Lauder was a Scot, famous for his songs Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ and Keep Right On To The End of the Road. He was a superstar of his day. Will Fyffe was a music-hall star who made 23 films and recorded 30 songs, probably the best remembered being I Belong To Glasgow.

In 1929 the world sank into economic depression. The Great Depression went on for the next decade, severely affecting the rural economy. In Cumbria the number of people employed in agriculture declined, which is probably the reason why Dad’s farming career came to an end in around 1932-33.

On finishing his farming career Dad went on to work for a subcontractor with Lancashire County Council. This job involved working as a ‘lengthman’ for a man called Jack Bond, mowing roadsides with a ‘one horse mowing machine’ along the boundaries of Preston and Lancaster. A lengthman was responsible for keeping an agreed stretch of the grass verges. The horse would be stabled at the end of this length and another lengthman would take over the next strip of road with another horse. This is another job in which Dad worked at weekends to supplement his income.

Subsequently he worked on a road-widening scheme at the top of Mains Lane, which was close to what was at the time known as Five Road Ends.

Close by was the Wyre Hotel, Poulton-le Fylde.

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Chapter 6 “There were two of us with horses and carts belonging to Jack Bond.

He was the subcontractor for Lancashire County Council and he had two lorries and two horses and carts. There were navvies on the job filling the cart. Our job was to fill the pond with soil off the road after the navvies had filled our carts. Every part of the road-building process was done by hand - the first layer of the road was rubbled down by hand. We did the whole road for two pounds a week.”

In other words, once the rubble had been dumped by the lorries, the workmen would lay it by hand across the road surface wearing protective gloves. After this there was a process called ‘nobbling’, which meant filling in between the rubble with smaller pieces of rubble. On top of this went two layers of ashes, which were steamrollered. This procedure was then repeated. Finally, tarmac would be steamrollered on top. The four layers would then be about eight inches in depth.

Dad recalls that because of this laborious process those roads are still as they were and have never ’ailed a thing’. This seems a little optimistic.

Any road laid as long as 80 years ago will surely have been dug up many times, possibly widened and even excavated. However Dad has great faith that anything of the era he helped to build was far better than that of today, and that’s probably a fine way to remember.

After this job Dad was, unusually, out of work for a short time. He recalls that in those days, if you were out of work and went along to the ‘Labour Exchange’ (today’s Job Centre) you had to take any job that came up or your dole money, commonly referred to as ‘Lloyd George’ or National Assistance, was stopped. There was no DHSS or NHS, though in November 1911 the National Insurance Act 1911 had brought benefits for the first time. This Act, proposed in 1908 by David Lloyd George, is credited for laying the foundations of modern social welfare by implementing the social welfare reforms of the Liberal Government of 1906-1914. That was why dole was known as ‘Lloyd George’.

Then Dad heard about a big sewage scheme being started behind the

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Chapter 6 Wyre Hotel, around the outskirts of Poulton-le-Fylde in Lancashire. He went along every morning in the hope that he would be offered work, and one day he was lucky enough to be picked. Dad was paid 1s 2d an hour for this work.

“In those days an Irish ganger would come and look and say ‘you, you and you can start’ and that was it. This particular time he didn’t seem to want anybody and we were turning away and this Irishman shouts ‘you fella, you fella!’ That’s when I started earning a weekly wage of two pounds a week, properly you know- that was navvying.” (Navvy was an abbreviation of navigation, the term used for the canal-building projects which were carried out in the 19th and early 20th centuries with the aid of thousands of manual labourers.)

Another worker started just after Dad, and the ganger said he was ‘no good’. Dad stood up for him and told the ganger ‘Give him a chance and let him get some food inside him.’ The ganger, a spokesman for the firm W D Hodgsons of Otley, allowed the worker to carry on. Dad was clearly prepared to stand up for others. Of course, he understood the effects of hunger on anyone involved in manual labour.

The job Dad was employed to do involved digging up tarmac after the trench had been chalked out and the compressor had raised the tarmac.

Using a pick and shovel they would then start digging it out. Once the hole was large enough, timber men would move in and shore up the sides to ensure that no-one was buried alive by the trench caving in.

Dad mentions a ‘boning rod’ used to determine levels. This very simple device, named after an Old English term for slope or angle, is still used today thousands of years after the tool was used by the Ancient Egyptians, though laser levels are now more commonly used.

“They got the proper depth by using a boning rod - sometimes it was deep and sometimes it was shallow - it was real navvy work, pick-and-shovel work. They eventually got a machine. The firm were real tight, they used

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Chapter 6 to come round and if you had a small shovel they’d bring you a new bigger shovel to get more stuff on it.”

Dad mentions the apparent resentment of the English workers towards the Irish workforce, because they were offered some of the work the Englishmen thought they were capable of doing. Irish workers shored up the drain holes with timber, yet the English workers felt they could have done it themselves.

Once this contract ended, Dad got an extension to continue working on the sewers at Weeton Camp (then an RAF camp, but taken over in the 1960s as an army camp). He was still working for Hodgsons. All this work was manual labour and Dad tells me that he needed ‘plenty of fuel’ to keep going five or six days a week.

“I used to bring banana sandwiches and a prune pie, your mum would make prune pies in a dish and I’d take a full one. Sometimes I’d take corned beef sandwiches, but mostly banana sandwiches. The Irishmen there used to get a fire devil going.” (This was apparently a heavy iron brazier in which a fire would be lit to heat the tarmac by the roadside.)

“They’d put the shovel on and throw a steak on the shovel, and nip into the River Wyre Hotel for a pint, then come back and turn the steak over and eat it.”

On wet days the foreman would blow a whistle when the rain started and again when it stopped. The time between was unpaid, but the men still had to hang around and wait for the weather to clear.

Following this Dad worked at Weeton Camp, where he learned to drive a lorry for field work. This is where he was working when war broke out and he was called up.

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Chapter 7

Driver Rigg 2125235 On April 27 1939, with Britain on the brink of war with Germany, the Government introduced the Military Training Act, which stipulated that all men between the ages of 20 and 21 had to sign up for six months’ military training. The National Service Act which superseded it required all men between 18 and 41 years old to join one of the Armed Forces, and in 1942 the upper age limit was extended to 51.

There was special exemption to conscription for ‘reserved occupations’, which included dock workers, miners, farmers, scientists, merchant seamen, railway workers and some utility workers. Those occupations which contributed to the war indirectly were also exempt. By 1941 single women aged between 20 and 30 were being conscripted to work in the reserved occupations, so that the men in those jobs could be released to join the armed services.

Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3 1939. Dad received his call-up papers just over a year later, on October 17 1940, when he was 29. He first had to attend a medical in Preston, where he was declared to be in A1 health, and was enlisted with the Royal Engineer Corps.

By this time he was no longer farming. He had started to earn what he describes as good money working at Weeton Camp, and had two young children to support as well as a wife. The family were now settled and living at Highcross.

“You knew it was coming, everyone was being called up - young men and some of the older men. We weren’t interested in soldiering. The only thing we were interested in was getting the bloody war over and getting back home. We weren’t professional soldiers, we were conscripts. We had

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Chapter 7 our ticket and went down to Central Station and Dorothy and Pearl and your mum saw me off at the station. It was sad for us all. I felt horrible, but that was conscription you see. We were all in the same boat - there was no option. Whether we liked it or not, we had to fight for our country.”

It takes little imagination to picture Dad’s wife and daughters, no more than toddlers, saying their farewells alongside the other families. I cannot really know how Mum or Dad felt, but I imagine it must have been a mixture of apprehension and fear. After all, they must both have been aware that Dad might never return home alive, and that while he was away life would inevitably be more difficult.

Mum received financial support from the Government, but it was a pittance. My grandmother gave Dad a bible as a parting gift, and though I’ve never thought of him as religious he did take it along with him, together with a photograph of Dorothy and Pearl which accompanied him in each lorry he drove.

Following all the goodbyes, Dad just got on with it. He gives the impression when reminiscing that despite missing his family, he looked on the years that followed with a spirit of adventure. This could have been because they gave him the opportunity to travel. At that time, of course, there were nothing like the opportunities for foreign travel we have today.

Leaving Britain would have been an adventure in itself.

Dad insists that the high point of his travels was coming home again, yet he describes with some enthusiasm the start of his journey through the war years.

“They met us at Crewe railway station and gave us bully beef sandwiches and a tin of cocoa each, and we were driven off by truck to the barracks at Wrexham. First there were inoculations, everybody was fainting - it was terrible. Then we were excused duties for 24 hours.

“Our first experience of being on parade was an officer with a loud voice who bawled ‘There’s a lot of shit (meaning rubbish) in this wood and I want it all cleaning up.’ As we were all leaving to do this another corporal

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Chapter 7 called out ‘The last man reports to me.’ This meant that unless you were pretty quick you might end up having to clean their bloody shoes or some other personal task for him.”

Dad recalls that those early days were interrupted by one inspection after another. There were bed inspections and room inspections - anything that could be inspected was inspected. However, there were a few small bonuses. Although Dad already had some driving experience, he looked forward to driving instruction, because it took him away from the base.

He tells of going off with a corporal who knew the area and where the cafés were, and they would visit them for breaks. I’m not sure whether the best part for Dad was the driving instruction or the cup of tea in the café, but he really did enjoy the driving.

He goes on to describe a routine he remembers as WOFTB, which stood for Water-Oil-Fuel-Tyres-Bodywork. As a driver he was tested by the duty officer on a daily basis. There appeared to be two components to the test - first to know what the task was and second to perform it, under the heading of WOFTB. As part of his driver training Dad also learned map reading. “You were given a route to follow,” he says. “If you got lost you were in trouble.”

When Dad became one of the men allocated to bridge-building training, he was split up from some of his newly-found comrades. His memory of this time is rather vague.

“We had these bridging lorries - there were two sets. We went to a bridging site at Halton, near Lancaster across the River Lune. We went to these bridging training camps where we learned how to build bridges across the river. I think that’s where we split up. Instead of going back to our own unit we went up to Scotland, near Falkirk, and stayed in a tent there for a while near a big mansion taken over by the military.”

Dad considered anything connected with square bashing a waste of time and was happy when the training finished at last. There was a passing-out parade and then they were allocated to different units all over

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Chapter 7 the country. “A big chief officer on a white horse headed the passing-out parade. This was at Horsley Hall near Wrexham, where we did our training.”

After that he spent some time in Wales on manoeuvres, presumably waiting to be transported to wherever he and his comrades were going to be stationed next. He mentions that during this time he and Dick Sutton, a new buddy, sneaked off to help a local farmer with haymaking.

Dad was then allocated to the 51st Ireland Division and travelled to Scotland. His name and number were kept top secret until he left the UK, when he was to take part in what Dad describes as ‘real war activities.’

Photos of Dad at the time in his khaki uniform show what a handsome young man he was.

He sailed on The RMS Viceroy of India, whose home port was Glasgow. She had been converted from a cruise ship into a troopship. Dad and his comrades sailed in her in October 1942, arriving in North Africa in November. Later that month she was sunk by a German U-boat.

“During the voyage we were given our new badges, a yellow crescent on a black background. We were in 78th Division (nicknamed the Battleaxe Division). Once the badge was sewn on to your shoulder this would be your division for the next four to five years. My number was 2125235 and I was known as driver Rigg.”

The convoy was made up of a number of merchant ships and an even larger number of warships. During the first part of the journey Dad recalls Dick Sutton saying, “I can’t see this bloody convoy getting far”.

Apparently Dick “always looked on the black side”.

There were three brigades supporting the first-line troops of the 78th Division, the 11th, 36th and 38th Brigades. Dad and his comrades supplied bridge components to them wherever they were needed. There were three or four hundred men assigned to the purpose of building bridges. They included drivers, bridge constructors, workshop-

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Chapter 7 maintenance and field stores. The job was mainly transporting the components for bridges, which would be either small box girder bridges or Bailey bridges.

Dad has a keen memory of Bailey bridges, which were an invention of a civil servant named Donald Bailey who worked in the British War Office and whose hobby was making model bridges. After he showed models of his design to one of his superiors, it was agreed they were of a practical design for a real bridge, and the Bailey bridge was later chosen to be developed, tested and adapted for general use during the war.

Bailey bridges are portable bridges requiring no special tools or heavy equipment to build. The sections are small enough to be carried in trucks, but strong enough when assembled to carry heavy tanks. They are also very quick to construct. They are still used today in civil engineering to provide short-term access across canals, rivers and railway lines. Dad recalls that they were manufactured in what had been the Littlewoods football pools building.

Box girder bridges are made from prefabricated steel girders. Each side of the bridge is composed of three triangles bolted together. They could be transported in the same way as the Bailey bridge. During the war years the US 5th Army and the British 8th Army were responsible for building over 3000 Bailey bridges in Sicily and Italy, which totalled over 55 miles of bridge.

En route to their final destination in North Africa, Dad and Dick met their first personal challenge. They disembarked from the ship to board another vessel, the Ocean Wanderer, an American liberty ship. On board were all the lorries for transporting bridge parts. To board the ship they had to climb the nets hanging from the side of the ship into the sea – a daunting challenge. “I’ll follow you Bill!” said Dick.

Once everyone was safely on board, they headed to Malta. Overnight they changed direction towards the Bay of Algiers, passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, where all the American ships were joining up with the convoy. Dad knew then that they weren’t on their own.

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Chapter 7 “We started in Algiers in a little town called Bone. The first bridge we delivered was blown up. We didn’t have Bailey bridges then, just small box girder bridges. Over the next three years we travelled through Tunisia, Sicily, Taranto in Italy and Alexandria in Egypt. I can remember the volcano Etna eternally glowing on Sicily. During the journey we slept in the backs of our lorries, eating dried food with water added, or when we were luckier food from the cookhouse.”

On a drive to deliver two box girder bridges, Dad had to swap places with a man called Taffy Morgan, because Taffy had been put on a charge.

“Taffy Morgan was a truck driver like me, and we would normally take it in turns to deliver the bridges, doing alternate nights and then driving to the nearest port to collect the next sections. We had emergency rations on each truck, enough for one man for eight days or eight men for one day. Taffy Morgan broke into the rations on his truck and was put on a charge.”

This meant that Dad had to do Taffy’s delivery that night. He reflects what bad luck it would have been to have been killed while doing something which was not his turn to do. When asked when he felt in most danger, he said he never thought about it. “All you thought about was getting home as soon as possible,” he says.

While he was driving from Algiers in convoy, he remembers that there were Bren guns (light machine guns) on the leading two trucks and as they departed someone wisecracked “You’ll need those, mate”. He was right, as shortly after they’d left the main road to take shelter for the night, German planes attacked the road. Fortunately they were not hit.

Although there was some daytime driving, they drove mostly during the night to avoid being seen by the enemy.

“I was driving every day. You went as far as you dared in daylight... you had to sneak up to the site one at a time. The first lorry had the spare jacks and the miscellaneous stuff for the bridge. The second lorry had the

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Chapter 7 sides. My lorry carried the ramp up on one side and the ramp down at the other. I was the always last to leave, and then we’d to go back and reload ready for the night after.

“There were a lot of bridges in Italy. If a bridge was blown, there was no use repairing it because it was under observation, they’d shell it straight away. The surveyors came and made a diversion upstream or downstream.

It was easy making a narrow crossing, just to get the tanks across.”

At one point Dad and his army comrades were stationed at Sangro Station near the River Sangro in Italy when Dad had a terrifying experience. It did not involve capture or torture by the enemy, but it terrified Dad just the same.

There had been torrential rain and the ground was very muddy.

Having driven his truckload of bridge parts off the main road and through a wooded area, Dad was instructed by the officer in charge to follow another lorry down an extremely steep slope towards the bridging base near the riverside.

It was pitch black and you were not allowed to use any lights on the vehicle. All you had to go by was a white spot painted on the rear undercarriage of the truck in front of you, so that you could just about see to follow it.

Dad could see a lorry in front of him, but what he didn’t know was that it was being towed by a bulldozer down to the safety of flatter ground.

They were doing a trial run to check whether it was safe enough for other vehicles to follow. Dad could see none of this, but on being told to follow the lorry he did his best to follow the white spot on the rear of the lorry as best he could. He drove down in a most precarious manner through the mud until he eventually got to the bottom.

“The officer in charge said, ‘right, follow that lorry’, so I followed the lorry as best I could and all I could see was complete darkness. When we got down to the bottom I saw that the first lorry was being towed by a bulldozer. The bulldozer driver came to up to me. He said ‘Have I been

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Chapter 7 pulling two of you?’ ‘No’ I said, I said, ‘I just followed him down’. ‘You deserve a bloody medal’ he said. When we went back in daylight two cars had come off the road and had been abandoned at the bottom.”

Dad thinks the officer had made a mistake in ordering him to make this extremely dangerous journey, and got into trouble from his commanding officer for it.

Another experience was particularly unpleasant. He was delivering sections of bridges under the cover of darkness and had turned off a main road down a narrower one, which seemed to be extraordinarily bumpy.

When he returned having dropped off his load, dawn was breaking, and he could see that the bumps he had driven over on the journey out were the bodies of German soldiers. There were about a hundred of them, shot by the allies. Some had been killed half way out of their slit trenches and left lying on the road. The bodies would later have been identified and moved by the Pioneer Corps of the British troops.

“It was terrible,” said Dad, “just terrible”. There was no suggestion in his voice that seeing the dead soldiers had brought any sense of victory or achievement.

As fast as the Germans destroyed the bridges, the British replaced them. They would look up or downstream for a suitable place to erect a new box girder or Bailey bridge. Captured Germans who were marched across a recently-constructed bridge could be seen shaking their heads in disbelief that it had been built so quickly. The bridges were nearly always put up at night, but during the army’s march across Termoli, on the east coast of Italy, one bridge had to be built in the daytime because the Germans were advancing and they could not afford to wait for nightfall.

“We pulled up and camouflaged up before offloading, and then we camouflaged up again. Then we had to go to Barletta on the coast to load up with timber to replace the bridge flooring that would be damaged by all the tanks and artillery crossing. At night time, we would sometimes

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Chapter 7 use the timber to make a shelter for protection overnight – not that it would have protected us.”

Before leaving Barletta with their new load of decking, Dad and his escort bought ice creams, a rare treat.

“We had two loads of planks, it was moonlight and we were speeding, and an officer stopped us and said he was going to put us on a charge. We told him what was on the trucks and why and he let us go. One of us said something and he said, ’Don’t argue with me’, but he let us go. He’d have been put on a charge if he’d stopped us.”

Delivering bridges was crucial and often dangerous work, and there were many moments in Dad’s army years where I am certain he feared for his life.

Most of the time his co-driver or escort was a chap called Jim Bone from Liverpool. Sometimes he would have what he describes as a ‘special escort’. These special escorts often carried rifles.

“I was returning from a bridge-building site when the shelling started.

I had a different escort in the cab from the usual one, and he was bleeding from his leg. He jumped out and I never saw him again. I waited behind a big hedge until the shelling stopped and then went for it. Cassino was in sight then. When I got back to base and examined the truck, shrapnel had gone through the bonnet and damaged the engine’s valve cover.”

Monte Cassino was the scene of a series of gruelling battles which took place in the early months of 1944, when the Allies were fighting to break through what was known as the Winter Line to seize Rome. It was a complex and lengthy campaign and casualties were appalling; the Allies suffered more than 55,000 men killed or injured.

Monte Cassino was an ancient and imposing monastery founded in AD 542, standing on a hilltop overlooking the town of Cassino and right on the Gustav Line, the German line of defence. Because of its historical importance, the German Commander-in-Chief in Italy had declared the monastery a neutral zone and ordered his troops not to use it for cover.

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Chapter 7 He had apparently told both the Vatican and the Allies of this decision. It had also been agreed locally between the Germans and the monks that they would not use the monastery for military purposes as long as the monks were still in occupation – they were invited to leave for their own safety.

Nonetheless the Allies believed the Germans had taken up defensive positions in and around the monastery, and the British refused to recognise the neutral zone. On the morning of February 15th 1944 Dad was leaving Italy for what he describes as two weeks of rest and recuperation (R&R as it was usually known) in Cairo. As he drove along the main road from Naples to Rome he passed below the monastery, and was able to look on as the building was reduced to a smouldering ruin by 1400 tons of bombs.

Many Allied personnel cheered at this spectacle, imagining that German troops were being killed, when in fact the opposite was true.

There were no Germans in the monastery. Only Italian civilians seeking refuge there were killed, along with some monks who had refused to leave.

Furthermore, because many of the bombs missed the target, many civilians and Allied soldiers were killed or injured far away from the monastery.

After the attack the Germans did take up positions in the ruins, which offered them some protection. It was not until three months later that a group of the Polish 12th Regiment found the monastery defences deserted and raised a Polish flag over the ruins. Eventually the Allies won through and recaptured Rome, but at terrible cost.

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Chapter 8

Peace and homecoming The events Dad describes must have been just a few of many adventures during these years. In his hundredth year he now finds difficulty in remembering and recounting all the lighter episodes of fun and camaraderie, and understandably he has forgotten some of the detail of the stories, along with the names of his many comrades.

During these travels, Dad had no contact with anyone other than his army comrades. There were no phones. The only contact the soldiers were allowed with their families was the two parcels a year they were allowed to send home. These parcels would have been exciting for those back home to open, and the contents must have seemed quite exotic.

Many of the items were gifts the family would never have set eyes on before, even in peace time. Dad recalls the contents of one of them.

“I came across some lengths of fabric which I made up into a parcel and sent by the American post office. They said we should do it like that, but Nellie had to pay duty on it - I don’t know whether it was worth it or not. I think she made dresses out of it for Dorothy and Pearl.”

The fabric had been found in a house in an Italian village where Dad and his comrades had gone to shelter from shell fire. The Americans had taken over the house and a cache of material was found stashed behind a temporary wall. The American soldiers offered the cloth to Dad and his comrades. They shared the fabric and each man sent his share home. Dad remembers it well - there was a length of red satin for Mum to make a blouse with, and two other types of material, one yellow and brown with an all-over print and the other red, white and blue.

“The only way we could measure it was on a chair. We opened it up and found out how many times it went across the chair. Then we divided that by how many of us were in the room.”

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Chapter 8 In another of his twice-yearly parcels Dad sent some almonds, still in their shells, liqueur glasses and a Swiss watch, a Roamer. Mum wore that watch for the rest of her life and passed it on to me after she died. It is still going today, 65 years on.

The soldiers could also send telegrams home at Christmas and at other times. One of those Dad sent featured a printed drawing of camels, which Dad had coloured in yellow, using dampened malaria tablets.

Dad’s time in the army lasted just over four years. Apart from brief visits during the early training days when he was still in England, he did not return on leave until the end of 1945, so he did not see his family for more than three years, from October 1942 until December 1945.

He was in Austria when the war came to an end, on leave from war duties and staying in a Hitler Youth camp at Seeboden, near a lake called the Millstättersee. Alongside the British army were many Russian soldiers and their families who had been fighting on the German side. Dad remembers them arriving on horseback. Many of the horses were ill or exhausted, but those which were still healthy were taken in and looked after by the army. As the war was now over, they were used by off-duty soldiers for recreational riding.

The alternative to helping with the horses was to go on guard duty, so Dad seized the opportunity to take care of the animals, ride them and loan them out to others. He was helped by a captured Bulgarian officer called Josef.

When it was time to return home, Dad and his comrades travelled by trucks across the continent in the 8th Army convoys from Villach in Austria to Calais. There were staging areas, where the troops camped overnight and were fed, at Innsbruck, Hulm, DĂźsseldorf, Sedan and Calais. Entertainment was sometimes provided. Dad mentions some competition between the staging organisers, with each trying to outdo the other. For example some staging areas put on entertainment, and in Hulm the troops were entertained by a female German singer.

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Chapter 8 “Each division that had taken part in the war in Italy was responsible for a staging area along the route to Calais. Each division tried to outdo the others, so it was a good, interesting journey, and you had a programme telling you about it, explaining the route as you went through each town, and then when you crossed the Channel there was a train waiting for you with a newspaper on each seat. That took you to London and then from London you made your own way home.”

He returned just before Christmas for a month’s leave. His time at home flew by and when it was over he had to make the return journey back to Villach. He had only a few more weeks to serve before being demobbed (retired from military service).

During his time in Austria Dad visited a factory in Spital where captured personnel were making toys. The soldiers were allowed to pick a toy for each child back home. Dad says they were good toys, and remembers choosing a clown on a flat piece of wood that rocked, and a painted wooden horse.

Spital was the main collecting place for Russian and Bulgarian prisoners. Many of these men were so desperate not to go home to Stalin’s brutal régime that they took their own lives, often by jumping off a bridge.

This final journey home was by train across Europe. Dad arrived in Aldershot, where he was discharged on March 27 1946. He was then given the ‘civvy suit’ which was handed to all soldiers on being demobbed. Once he had been given his civilian hat, he became Mr Rigg once again. He carried his demob suit in a box for the last leg of the journey home to Blackpool. That was the hardest part of the journey. “It had been smooth going from Austria to Aldershot, but it was bloody difficult to get home” he says.

In Blackpool he found that American personnel had commandeered all the available taxis, so he could not find one to take him home to Highcross. Luckily he was approached by an officer who asked him where he was going and then offered him a lift with him in his own cab.

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Chapter 8 Dad finds it hard to describe the homecoming. He does remember going upstairs to find his two little girls tucked up in bed. He had brought a big wooden box containing all the rations of chocolates and sweets he had saved.

“It was heaven - I couldn’t describe it. I remember going upstairs and Pearl opened her eyes and said, ‘Oh it’s Daddy!’ I’d saved chocolate bars from my ration for a while and gave them to Dorothy and Pearl. I was surprised they hadn’t all melted.”

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Chapter 9

After the war Once Dad was demobbed, he found it easy enough to find work again and was taken on back at Weeton Camp, this time stoking the boilers, which served the water for the operating theatres. He worked there for four years alongside German ex-prisoners-of-war who were on their way home from America. The workers were encouraged to invite the Germans home to spend Christmas with the British families, though Dad didn’t offer this.

Unfortunately Dad was made redundant from this employment.

However a neighbour who worked at the Labour Exchange managed to find him a job at Hawker Aircraft, based in Blackpool, and he worked there for four or five years. His job was in ‘goods inwards’, where he painted codes on to the various parts as they arrived. Hearing about this job in particular makes me wish he had been able to take up his missed grammar school opportunity. It sounds the most tedious of the jobs he‘d had so far and it must have been mind-numbing. No doubt he would just have got on with it, knowing that at least he had a job and could pay the mortgage on the house in Marton.

“I was there when they flew the first Hunter. Saturday morning they were all allowed to go and watch the test pilots flying it. Then we had an order for so many and the Labour government blocked the order, and I could see it coming so I applied for Salwick, with having my record at Weeton Camp and in the forces as well.”

The Hawker Hunter was a British jet fighter plane of the 1950s and 1960s. Built by Hawker Siddeley, it was sold to 19 air forces across the world, including Middle Eastern countries, Chile and Somalia, in addition to the RAF. It is still used by the Lebanese air force today, but Hawker

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Chapter 9 Aircraft’s base at Blackpool is now closed down.

Dad went on to work at Springfield Nuclear Power station at Salwick, near Preston, for nearly 20 years, from about 1958 until about 1977. He always refers to this job as working at Salwick, rather than the name of the company. He remembers it as the most interesting he ever had, and speaks of it now with some affection. It was cleaner than most in which he had been involved and was more ‘intellectual’, which he liked. Certainly it was a closer match to Dad’s aspirations and job satisfaction than any of his others had been. It helps that he earned a ‘decent’ wage.

His role was that of a process worker, working alongside the scientists who were developing something known as ’the Loop’, with Dad monitoring experiments set by scientists and working closely to their instructions. The uranium rods were tested at different temperatures by turning heaters off and on and carbon dioxide was circulated to keep them cool, as there was no power station to use the heat generated to create steam.

He recalls working at a large panel of instruments and taking regular accurate readings at half-hourly or hourly intervals. He would then add specific, accurate measures of water, heat or steam. Dad took great pride in ensuring both during and at the end of his shift, when handing over to the next worker, that the needles on all the gauges were lined up as they should be. He had to wear a white suit, shoes and goggles to protect him from any radiation contamination and shower and change at the end of his shift before leaving. He describes this as an experimental, scaled-down working version of a reactor. He proudly believes he played a part in the first generation of nuclear power in this country using Magnox long rods.

Dad goes on to mention a scheme which encouraged workers to submit new ideas or designs for improving various processes. As a teenager I recall Dad drawing accurate examples of his new ideas, which were often used. He would be paid around five pounds for each idea implemented.

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Chapter 9 Some 50 years ago, this would have been quite an innovative scheme.

He tells me he was a committed worker and earned the respect of the scientists he worked alongside. He speaks proudly of the fact that when the experimental ‘Loop’ on which he had been working for some years closed down, he was the only process worker invited to the ceremony - all the others were staff, scientists and professionals. There is a photograph of that ceremony on page….

Dad worked shifts during this period, as he did for most of his life until he retired in 1977 at the age of 65. Yet he says he would have done another 20 years there if he could have done, because it was ‘very, very interesting.’

He laughs at the memory of the presentation made to him when he retired, because after all the years of reading dials, they presented him with an alarm clock, which he still has. There is a photograph of him being presented with it.

Of his working life Dad comments: “It was lovely, I enjoyed it. I’ve had a varied life, from a farm labourer at five shillings a week to the Atomic Energy Authority and all sorts of jobs in between.”

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Epilogue When Dad returned home from the war he arrived at Granny’s house to see a banner strung across the yard, made out of a sheet, with ‘Welcome Home Bill’ written across it. Like all his comrades, he had to undergo a period of adjustment to civilian life. He talks little about this period now, but that is not to say it was not important. After all, he had looked forward for four long years to being home and felt lucky to have been one of those who had been able to return alive.

Over many decades, until the organiser died, he continued to attend annual reunions in Glasgow with his wartime comrades, including Dick Sutton, Herbert Harvey and Tom Gladstone. Dad’s Certificate of Service for the time he spent as a driver during his war service carries a testimonial which says: “He is an expert heavy driver and has shown himself to be reliable and willing under all circumstances”.

From the war years on, Dad was a smoker of Senior Service or Players’ cigarettes. In fact while he was serving he was given a free tin of 50 every month, and he could buy more from the NAAFI if needed. He gave up smoking almost immediately when both his brothers Tommy and Jack died of lung cancer. His sister Maggie died some years ago. Dad continued to visit his sister Dorothy until her death.

One of Dad’s half brothers, Jimmy, spent all his army life in Burma before being released from service early because he was a miner. Sadly, he was killed on August 15 1947 in the William Pit disaster, when an explosion killed 104 men. Shortly afterwards Dad recalls Jimmy’s wife and child, also Jimmy, staying with them at the house in Highcross. His wife was pregnant with their second child, who tragically never saw her father. My sister Dorothy was instrumental in making contact with Jimmy, his sister Denise and their families within the last few years. They have since visited Dad and remain in communication with him today.

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Epilogue After two post-war babies, myself and Dorothy, had increased the family to four children, it was complete. They lived at Highcross until about 1958, when they were given notice on the rented accommodation they had lived in for nearly 20 years. They were able to buy a house at 4 Rough Heys Lane, Marton, near Blackpool. By the time of the move Dorothy was near to marrying and Pearl already lived in hospital accommodation, as she was training to be a nurse. Marton remained the family home until 1974.

During his working years most of Dad’s jobs involved working shifts.

Often he would be expected to help Granddad with haymaking or milking after completing a night shift at Weeton Camp. He also talks about doing paid odd jobs at a farm for the owner of the property they rented in Kerslea Avenue, saying that this extra cash, with earnings from gardening work and other odd jobs, helped them save towards the down payment on a mortgage on the home in Marton.

In his spare time Dad tended his allotment and enjoyed growing vegetables and gardening. Once their children had grown up, Mum and Dad started to have something of a social life and holidayed together, often in Devon or Cornwall.

For a number of years Dad owned a motor bike, the same Francis Barnett that he had taken my mum out on in his courting days. The bike had a unique engine note, so we always knew from 50 yards away when he was coming home.

One day he was much later than expected. There were no telephones apart from those in call boxes and in the homes of the few people who could afford one, and our household was not in that category, so there was no way he could have contacted us or we could find out where he was.

After we had all been worrying about him for what seemed a very long time he finally arrived, on foot. He had caught a wheel of his bike in a tram line and fallen to the ground, badly grazing his cheeks, his pride, and presumably his bike, but otherwise relatively unhurt. He has more recently done the same with the tyres of his mobility buggy on the railway line at the level crossing near to where he lives!

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Epilogue At one point Dad became the proud owner of a second-hand Hillman Minx. I recall him somehow securing a fan heater in front of the front passenger seats (this was before all cars had heaters) to keep himself and his passengers warm.

He also placed a blanket underneath the bonnet of the car overnight to keep the engine from freezing. On one occasion when he lent the car to Dennis he forgot to remove it, and frantically tried to contact him because he was worried that the engine would catch fire while his son was driving the car. Dad eventually gave up driving of his own volition some years ago.

After a period of ill health Mum died in 1971 of cancer. This left a big gap in Dad’s life. By all accounts Nellie had been the love of his life, and probably the only person to whom he maintained a strong attachment from being a young man right up until she died.

At this point all of us children had either left home or were on the verge of doing so. While he grieved for Nellie, he tried to rebuild his life again.

He was still only in his early sixties and obviously missed the company of both Nellie and his children. The house would have been dreadfully quiet and his life must have felt very empty apart from his work.

Dad then joined ballroom dancing classes at a local club where he met his second wife, Alice. He recalls how well they got on together. They married in 1974 and remained together for 31 years. In the early years of their marriage they travelled around to stay either in America or Germany, where his wife’s son-in-law was based in the US Army. They also visited California and Oklahoma. Although Dad loved his second wife, their relationship was truly tested by a sequence of events which included his wife’s daughter and several of his step-grandchildren living outside the law.

As the years progressed and both Dad and his wife became more frail and vulnerable with age, her family took advantage of them. Their lives became fraught with worry and concern for their health, safety and possessions.

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Epilogue Dad retired in 1976 from his last job, at the nuclear power station. But as with most people, retirement didn’t mean not working - it meant doing all the jobs he hadn’t had time to do when he was employed. He busied himself maintaining the home, doing small gardening jobs for older people in the locality and visiting his family.

A few months after Alice died in 2005, Dad moved to east Yorkshire, where he lives today. This was to be near to Pearl, my sister, who has been instrumental in Dad maintaining a high level of independence and living in his own home until very recently (February 2011). After the move, all of us children hoped he would live many years longer so that he could enjoy the last few years of his life in the peace and quiet he so much deserved after the many years of anxiety and stress he had experienced.

Last year, with my brother Dennis, Dad visited his birthplace and viewed the house which had been his childhood home. He returned to the school he attended as a child and met the head teacher, who later sent him copies of the school register from the period when he had been there more than 90 years before.

At a recent family celebration he surprised us all by accompanying my brother in a duet playing the ‘bones’, and in remembering some basic Italian from his war years.

Last year he was invited, alongside other Second World War veterans, to answer questions put to him by local primary school children. He talked to them about Bailey bridges.

Dad is very proud of his four children, nine grandchildren and nine great grandchildren, because they are his and because they are happy.

Dorothy, the eldest, had a varied working life. After she gained an Honours degree in archaeology, she spent time excavating and lecturing in further education until her retirement. She is now involved in charity work and organises and leads field trips. Pearl trained and worked as a paediatric nurse and ended her career looking after the elderly, including

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Epilogue Dad himself. Since retiring she has had three training manuals published.

In her spare time she enjoys golf.

Dennis had a career in special education until he retired in 2009 to allow himself more time for skiing, golf, gardening, playing the harmonica and being with his wife. Until I retired my own working life included supporting and counselling disadvantaged young women. I am now occupied with campaigning for disability rights, walking and learning to play the harp.

Dad is remarkable for his age, though he complains that he is unable to weed the garden or move as fast as he would like. “If only I could still run!� he will say.

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology and medicine, with support from my sister, practical support and a pint down the pub with Don, my brother-in-law, he still maintains a good quality of life. In contrast to the deprivation of his childhood, it is gratifying to know that as he nears his hundredth birthday he lives in comfort and contentment, and is loved by his family.

This is one story that does have a happy ending.

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Dad on his motorbike

Dad’s wedding, September 12 1936

Mum and Dad on the steps of their home

In Austria at the end of the war, 1945

On horseback at the end of the war

Dad (left) with an unknown comrade

A Christmas card Dad sent to my sisters during the war

Mum and Dad

West Bowers Hall

Dad (centre) at the closing-down ceremony of the 'Loop' he worked on at UKAEA

Dad's medals

1939-1945 star

1939-1945 medal

Italy Star

Defence medal 1939-45

African Star

Dad on his 99th birthday in June 2010

William Rigg was born into a humble Lancashire family in 1911, eventually becoming one of 13 children. His mother died when he was three and by the age of five he was having to put up with a stepmother’s bullying. Often sleeping three in a bed and sharing shoes with his siblings because there weren’t enough pairs to go round, he scarcely knew what it was to eat a decent meal. He would scrounge leftovers, steal turnips and potatoes to supplement the family menu and eat hawthorn and nettle leaves from the hedgerows. A bright child, he had to pass up the chance to go to grammar school because his parents couldn’t afford the uniform.

Despite all this Bill grew up healthy, happy and fulfilled, serving with honour in France, Italy, Austria and North Africa in the Second World, impressing employers in a variety of jobs from farm work and roadmending to process work at a nuclear power plant, and raising a happy and successful family. This book is published as Bill and his family celebrate his one hundredth birthday.

William

Rigg A century of memories

ISBN 978-1-908223-09-8

Published by Memoirs 25 Market Place, Cirencester Gloucestershire GL7 2NX

9 781908 223098 ISBN 978-1-908223-09-8

Tel: 01285 640485 Email: info@memoirsbooks.co.uk www.memoirsbooks.co.uk