The Wood Yard

By Maggie McKay

It is a truth, widely acknowledged, that our senses are at their sharpest in childhood. And early memories, of quite specific sights or sounds, often remain our whole life through. One is peculiar to the place where we lived in the Market Place. All along one side of our garden was an old red brick wall and next door was ‘Hares’ wood yard’, and the sounds, which I loved, and which to this day are a happy recollection, were those of the hammering, the whistling and even singing, of the men who worked there and who were busy building poultry houses, gates, ladders and all things wooden for their customers. Even the scent of all the fresh wood wafted over the wall. The sounds were so cheerful that they could make a child playing in the garden next door want to sing too.

So, who were ‘the Hares’ and how did their wood yard come into being? Well, there had been Hares in Market Deeping since at least the beginning of the 19th century. The grandfather of the founder of the joinery business was Daniel Hare, who was a shoemaker. His son, William, was a man of many parts which included, at different times, being postman, coal merchant, and agent for the Midland Railway Company! William had eight children and one of these was son Ernest, born in 1878, in Church Street, Market Deeping. Ernest had only the basic, elementary education which was first offered to all the country’s children in the Foster Education Act of 1870. This meant seven or eight years of schooling beginning at the age of five. Ernest attended the Endowed School, for boys, in Church Street. The education may have been elementary, focusing on the three Rs, Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, but it turned out generations of young people who were literate, numerate and whose handwriting competence would put many people today to shame. Moreover, if you could count, could weigh and measure then you also had some of the most crucial requirements necessary for setting up any kind of independent business.

When Ernest left school he was apprenticed to a local carpenter and joiner but early on he must have had the first stirrings of ambition, for he moved away to work in Skegness – perhaps living by the sea engendered in him ideas of freedom and expansion, of a time when he might be able to be his own boss. However that may be, he at any rate stayed in Skegness for more than ten years but made a brief visit back to his home town to marry, in October 1901, a not-quite-local girl, Harriet Smith from Newborough. They made their home in Skegness where their three sons were born between 1903 and 1908.

In 1911, however, the family returned to Market Deeping and they set up home in the Market Place (where Double & Megson are today). Ernest launched his own joinery business and he advertised it with the model of a five-barred gate displayed in his front window. At first he may have used his garden for a workshop, to which there was access through the archway at the side of the house. (This was enclosed in the 1980s and now is the indoor entrance to Double & Megson’s). However, the firm was doing well and room was needed for expansion. By a stroke of good fortune, and just two doors away, a larger piece of land appeared on the market and Ernest bought it. This was then the property where Ernest and his three, now grown up, sons established their joinery workshop and wood yard and built up such a successful business that their workforce, to borrow a line from the song, could “whistle” and even sing “while they worked” – to my delight as a child on the other side of the wall! By the 1950s, when I was hearing them, the firm was employing more than 50 men.

Ernest’s ambitions had not stopped at his joinery business, however. It’s easy to forget it now but until the 1930s at least there were very few cars on the roads; owning a car was for the relatively well off, so some form of public transport was essential in order to be able to visit even the nearest towns. Before WWI much transport was still dependent on the horse but, after the end of that war, by 1919, motor-driven buses started to appear. Ernest saw that the Deepings needed a bus service to local towns and in 1920 he

bought five buses and set up the Primrose Bus Company. They ran a service to Peterborough and Bourne and also summer excursions to the seaside. When not in use the buses were parked in the Market Place and a petrol pump and tank were installed in the archway that led from the Market Place to the joinery workshop and wood yard (now the archway beside Dominos). However, Ernest’s foray into the transport business was destined to be short-lived for, in just a few years, it became a very competitive business with profits squeezed very low. The last straw was when one of his buses was stopped by a constable and was found to be overloaded. Brought to court the company was found guilty; Ernest was fined £1 and his son, Ted, who was driving, was fined 10s (50 pence in today’s coinage!) Shortly after this, in 1925, the buses were sold and Ernest decided it was best to concentrate on the business that he and his sons were skilled and truly masters of, and that trade served them all, and the Deepings, well for the rest of their working lives.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, the senior Hares, Ernest and Harriet, lived in their house on the Market Place, and the joinery workshop and wood yard was just two doors away (where the shops behind Dominos now are). Their three sons, Frank, Ted and Sid, eventually married and moved, though not far away. As Ernest became older his sons gradually took over the running of the firm, each one being in charge of a different branch of the business.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, and up into the 1950s, the Market Place was the central hub of Market Deeping: all the services and many of the businesses were there, from Police Station to Chemist, the doctor (whose surgery was part of his house, on the corner of Stamford Road), Post Office, pubs that offered accommodation, butcher’s (where the butcher even did his own slaughtering on the premises) draper’s shop, sweet shop and Tea Room. The properties were all family homes as well – everyone knew everyone and a strong sense of community prevailed. This was certainly reflected in the way the Hare family lived their lives. Ernest, for example, took a very active interest in wider village affairs: he was on the Parish Council for a number of years, and likewise on committees representing organisations such as the Boys’ School, the British Legion, the Bowls Club and the Social Club. Moreover, when Ernest died, in 1954, his Will revealed that he had been an employer who valued the long service and loyalty of the men who worked for him. All his long-serving workmen had been remembered: foreman Bert Tunnicliffe received a lump sum of £50 as well as £1 for each year of his service, and this legacy, £1 for each year of service, was accorded to eight others of his employees, namely, George Branch, “Tucker” Burton, George Holland, Alfred Camm, Kenneth Briscoe, Sidney Clare, Dennis McShane and Butch Hare.

The business was left to Ernest’s three sons in equal shares and it continued to prosper throughout the 1950s and until 1963 when the brothers decided to retire, and the land was sold. The shops behind Dominos, Pound Stretcher, the Co-op Petrol Station and the car park now occupy what was Hares’ joinery workshop and wood yard. Perhaps if you stand there late at night and close your eyes you may still hear a ghostly hammering, or whistling or singing of some old melody of an earlier era coming through the darkness.

Frank, the oldest son, and Ted, the second, lived their whole lives in the Deepings – Ted was living at 9 Godsey Lane when he died in 1979; Frank was living at Maxey House, Deeping Gate, when he died in 1994; while Sid, who had lived for many years in Stamford Road, moved to Brackley in Northamptonshire in his last years and he died there in 1991. Thus for more than 40 years, from 1920 to 1963, the Hares had been major employers in the Deepings and long after that they remained committed and loyal supporters of the village.

Footnote: The full name of the oldest son of Ernest and Harriet Hare was, John William Frank b.1903; the second son was George Edward Cecil b.1905 and the youngest, Sidney Smith Hare b.1908. As far as I know they were always known locally as Frank, Ted and Sid. Seaside outing with the Primrose Bus Co. 1920

A ‘Football’ Memory, and the Hare family, recalled after the recent successes of our national team in the European Championship competition.

The Hare brothers were supporters of the most prominent of our area’s football teams, namely Peterborough’s ‘The Posh’. It is in connection with this interest that I retain my only personal memories of them. This was because my grandfather, Arthur Newton, was a supporter of The Posh too. He had been the next-door neighbour of the Hare family, and, on the other side, of their wood yard, for 40 years, and the family were long-standing patrons of his sweetshop (and of The Imperial Café until it closed in 1947). Some of the family would come into the sweetshop regularly, once a week at least, and there would be an exchange of local news and, always, some talk of the current state of play with The Posh and an analysis of their position in the League tables. At that time the Peterborough team were in the fourth division, but always hoping to be promoted to the third. The fortunes of the team were thus a subject of common interest between my grandfather and the Hares, and, more than that they performed a material and kindly service to him, for the Newtons never had a car (I don’t even think my grandfather had ever owned or ridden a bike). Sid Hare did have one and, like my grandfather he had a season ticket for the stand at The Posh’s home ground (where, ironically, you could sit!) Thus, it became the custom for Mr Newton to get a lift to the London Road football ground every Saturday afternoon of the football season.

When I was about eleven or twelve, sometime in the mid 1950s, I became a keen supporter of The Posh too and indeed the holder of a season ticket on the stand, whereby, thanks to the Hares we got a lift to the game on Saturdays. This also happened to be a year when The Posh did quite well in the qualifying rounds of the FA cup and so it was that I found myself, the only child, and only girl, in a railway carriage full of Deeping fans of The Posh, some Hare brothers and my grandfather, on our way to Swindon where ‘our’ team were to play Swindon Town. A great event of course, and yet I have to confess that my brightest recollections of that day, more than 60 years ago now, are not of the match itself, but in fact of the train journey from Peterborough to Swindon. This was because to me the journey itself was a highlight of the day. The compartment was crowded. The men, all of my father’s or grandfather’s generation, were in high spirits and ready to enjoy everything. There was nothing coarse or raucous about it; there was simply much good-humoured laughter and joking and chat. That, in fact, is my chief memory of the day of the match between The Posh and Swindon Town – and just one other thing: I learnt that the flask of tea that my grandfather always had with him to the football matches contained not only tea but a shot of rum! I do not remember the result of the football match. Are there any of the older generation in any of the Deepings who have any memories of this era of ‘The Posh’? Or who also travelled to Swindon on that day long ago...?