1930’s general | Yesterday Remembered

Stitched up by the never-never

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Fill up the tank

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Memories of a Medway mudlark

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I RECALL my father telling me about an event regarding my maternal grandfather’s car. Probably in 1938, while driving, my grandfather was negotiating a slight hairpin bend in my home town of Dalton-in-Furness. As he did so he brushed against a child, knocking the little one over but not causing any injury. This upset my […]

Thirty year’s service

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The preacher, my father, said: “He wants a ran-tan-tanning. That’s what he wants” after the Sunday morning service when a young lad had a fit of the giggles during his long-winded sermon. He often said this about anyone who misbehaved in the 1920s and 30s. “He’d have had a ran-tan-tanning if he’d done that when […]

A Ran-Tan-Tanning!

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When I was 12, a cousin of mine returned home to Birkenhead from India, where he had served in the Army from 1924 until 1932. During his first stroll around the town since leaving, he told me that at times he thought he’d lost his way because so many familiar sights from his boyhood had […]

Changing times on the banks of the Mersey!

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Latrine? What a funny word.” As I spoke I looked up for guidance from my friend Frank. He stood several inches above my four-foot-nothing and, shaking his great mop of flue brush black hair, said despairingly: “It’s a sort of lavatory, stupid, and we have to dig it.” This was an early introduction to camping […]

My First Camping Trip

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A Promise in a Cup!

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When Holidays Were a Privilege

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In the 1920s and 30s a farmer’s wife often had to pay the household bills by her own efforts. Cash was almost non-existent. It was well known that some farmers left one large stack of corn in the farmyard as long as possible, so that they could tell their creditors that they would get paid […]

Making Ends Meet

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A Holiday to Remember

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High Wycombe as I knew it in the 1930s was a country market town with no theatre but four flourishing cinemas, the smallest of which was the Grand. Despite its name, the Grand had become a flea-pit in the wrong part of town, and although jettisoning its ancient projectors and installing the latest models, it […]

Get Your Coat on, Son. We’re going to the Majestic!

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Oxford Before the War

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Listening to a group of schoolgirls talking about their exotic holidays spent in Spain, Italy and Greece made me recall my own childhood holidays in the 1930s. We were lucky to get one at all in those lean times, when there were no holidays with pay. My parents, brother Tom and I lived in the […]

Family Holidays in the 1930s

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Lancashire winters were dark and bleak in the 1930s. The foul smell of stale chimney smoke remained trapped in the still fog-filled air of industrial towns, lingering until fresh winds blew it away. Snow was intermittent and frost frequent. We were warm children both inside and out as we walked to school. Mother had prepared […]

Lancashire Winters in the 1930s

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