'I was born on July 28th 1923, above my Grandma Eden's shop at the corner of Church Street and New Street, in Bentley. My parents were James and Maria Parkinson. I was baptised Kathleen Olive.
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| Ann Eden (Kathleen's Grandmother) |
We had two counters in the shop*, one was for general serving and the other held the scales; the base was a thick slab of white marble. The weights and mechanism were of brightly polished brass. Smaller scales were used for sweets and yeast. Flour was delivered in bulk and needed weighing into one stone white bags. Sugar went into blue bags of one or two pounds.
On the shelf behind the counter would be several cards of home health remedies. There would be Castor Oil, Carter's Little Liver Pills, Aspro, Fenning's Fever Cure, Germolene and other treatments. Essential items were gas mantles and firewood. We sold donkey stone, used to give the finish to the edge of the doorstep when it had been scrubbed. In summer flypapers were needed; the packet pulled out to about 18 inches and was coated with a sticky substance that attracted flies, and kept them there.
A determined effort was made to exclude me from the shop, but sometimes a sweet representative would enquire, 'Is your little girl in?' then I was allowed to watch him open his case, and see all the sweets in different compartments, before getting a sample of the latest line. Once a week I served a customer with one Oxo cube, which she got with her order. One day I heard her mention pepper to Grandma, so to be helpful I rushed to the pepper that was in a large round tin. By standing on tiptoe, I could just reach, but the lid was loose, and I tipped it over - soon everyone was sneezing. I was brushed down with a hand brush and a bicycle pump wafted the pepper away from my eyes. On another occasion, the lid had been lifted off the flour bin, I climbed onto some firewood bundles to look inside - I leaned too far and fell in.
Shopkeepers were invited to the yearly Trade Fair in the Corn Exchange [in Doncaster]. When I was five Grandma took me with her; I enjoyed it so much, that she took me again the next year. I recognised the sweet travellers, and had a few samples. We were seeing more cars on the roads, and to keep up with the times, Rowntrees came up with 'Motoring Chocolate' - the first flick book I ever had - when I flicked the pages I saw moving images of a dapper little man wearing checked trousers. He climbed into his open topped car and drove off.
Sharpe's Toffees, in their adverts usually showed a parrot on a perch, and beside him a man in a morning suit, wearing a monocle. There they were - they were there, the man and a real parrot. the fair must have been held in spring or autumn because we arrived in daylight, but as the light faded, it became time to watch the fountains which were set up at the opposite end to the entrance, just where the steps go up into the market hall. When it was dark, the fountains began to play, lit by changing colours of electric light bulbs. It was like magic.
A corner shop was a very busy place. On Mondays, Grandma and Mum were up at 5am to light the copper fire, and set up the mangle, peggy legs, wash board and zinc wash tubs, so that the washing could be hanging on the line before the shop opened. On wet Mondays, the washing steamed as it dried round the open fire cooking range. By bedtime, everything had to be ironed and the two flat irons heated alternately over the hot coals. Tuesday was bedroom day, but on Wednesday it was half-day closing for our shop, which allowed a trip to Doncaster, and afternoon tea at Parkinson's cafe on the High Street. There was regular bread making, but Thursday was baking day for cakes, with some to sell. Extra cleaning was done on Friday, when the black cooking range was treated with Zebo that looked like black boot polish. The brass fire irons and the cutlery were polished with metal polish. On Saturday, a farmer on his way to Doncaster market would call to take Grandma with him in his pony and trap, where she would buy farm eggs and butter to sell in the shop.
* Listed in Kelly's Directory of 1927 as 'Eden, Annie (Mrs), grocer, Church St.'
Shops, The Cinema And Bellowing In Chapel
The variety of shops on Bentley High Street catered for many needs. I loved Sill's Penny Bazaar where they sold cheap toys. From the newsagent came my weekly comic, Chick's Own, and Grandma had her magazine with Pip, Squeak and Wilfred on the page for children. The most magnificent shop was the Co-op, where a metal container took the money along wires to the cashier and returned with the change (if you stand across the road today you will appreciate what an asset this building was). Close by was the Coliseum Cinema which was the Saturday afternoon venue for children, when many of us went to the 'Penny Rush'. We entered by a side door and paid one penny to sit downstairs. We usually saw the next part of a black and white cowboy serial. As there was no sound, captions appeared. Sometimes there would be a Charlie Chaplin, a Laurel and Hardy or an early cartoon - Felix the Cat.
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| Bentley Co-op |
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| The Coliseum |
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| Felix the Cat |
At the far end of the High Street, on the rounded corner leading into Arksey Lane was John Playfair's grocery shop. Even now, it is still called Playfairs corner. Although nobody remembers why.
The Wesleyan Chapel was on High Street too. I made a start there at the age of four. Every year preparations began early at all the Sunday Schools for the Anniversary Sunday. On the Sunday morning we paraded through the streets wearing our very best clothes, stopping at various points to sing. The piano came with us on a horse drawn dray and money was collected along the route. In the afternoon we assembled in the Chapel, sitting on rows of wooden shelves that stretched from the pulpit to the organ. We sang and said recitations - the first time that I said a poem I was five and very nervous. At the rehearsal I spoke so quietly that the Superintendent told me that I must find my biggest voice, so on the day, I bellowed so hard that everybody started to laugh.
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| Wesleyan Chapel, High Street, Bentley |
Mud Pies and Making A Living
Over the road from where I lived, were two old farmhouses. In one lived a girl called Doris [Burkitt]. She was older than me, but I loved to get across to play with her. Her Dad was a coal merchant, and kept his horse and dray in the old farmyard buildings. The old farmhouse must have been impossible to maintain. There were four rooms on the ground floor, and four doors to the outside, three bedrooms led from an upstairs landing, but another room was reached by a wooden ladder in the kitchen. The only water supply was a pump at the long stone sink, but there was a flush toilet in an outside building.
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| Church Farm, where Doris lived |
In the yard dangers were all around, but I found it a wonderful playground. They were usually fattening a pig, so an outside copper was lit to cook the food and a big knife-sharpening wheel stood nearby. Under a hedge a collection of tin cans, broken bricks and glass had accumulated and we raked out the bricks to set out the plan of a house. The word 'pretend' was not in our vocabulary. We used the word 'reckon', so it would be, 'Let's reckon this is the kitchen, and I ask you what we are having for dinner'. We made mud pies using the old tin cans. Scenarios were planned and acted out. When we put on our little nurses' outfits the whole house became our hospital. We played all over the premises and nobody ever stopped us, except when we were about to jump from the stable roof.
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Bentley's blind mat-maker, Frank Hemsworth
From a newspaper cutting kindly supplied by Tracy Phillips |
Near to the other farmhouse was a wooden hut. The door was usually open, and just inside 'Blind' Frank would be making doormats. He lost his sight in World War One. He liked people to greet him, so we always spoke to him as we went by. The rag and bone man was a regular visitor, and occasionally a man with a hurdy gurdy music box would come. He had a monkey on his shoulder, and as the man turned the handle the monkey held out a metal cup for pennies. A tinker came round offering to mend holes in the iron cooking pans that got burned out on the coal fires. He seemed to use two metal washers fastening one inside, and the other on the outside of the pan. A pedlar called at the shop with a tray of buttons, needles and other sewing things. My Mum always bought something. She would say "They are all trying to make a living".'
High Days And Park Days
'One week of every summer was 'Feast' week when Tuby's brought their roundabouts and sideshows into the field behind where Doris lived. My Dad always gave me a shilling, so as soon as we were inside the gate, we bought some brandy snap and soft balls on elastic. Some of the fairground people were allowed to use the toilet in the farmyard, and in return we got a free ride when things were just starting to warm up on Saturday afternoon. At night when I had been put to bed, I could hear the music and the shrieks of fear and delight of young women as the fairground youths spun the Waltzer faster and faster.
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| A typical Waltzer ride |
The same field was bounded by a railway line. Many extra trains brought crowds to the St Leger Races. Often the trains had to queue to get into Doncaster station. These trains were from the north, so it had become the custom for children to gather in the field to wait for a train to halt. We shouted 'Hotchy, Scotchy, throw us a penny'. The passengers would lower the carriage windows on the strong leather straps and throw out coins, which were caught mostly by the big boys.
When I was deemed old enough I had to fetch the milk. Carrying a little milk can, I left by the side gate, and walked down New Street to Wagstaff's on Cooke Street corner, passing the never to be forgotten steamy, soapy smell of Bentley Laundry. Over the road I could see Lewis Massarella's farm, which often had an ice cream stall at the gate. Andrew Massarella lived just a little further along the same road. They had beautiful ice cream vans with paintings inside the roof, and in good weather one was always to be found in Bentley Park. Above the Askern Road gateway to the park, in a trellis work of tree branches were the words 'Miner's Welfare'.
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| Early Massarella's ice cream van |
The park has been of immense benefit to Bentley. Near that gate was the park keeper's house, and behind it were greenhouses where he nurtured the plants for the lovely flowerbeds. Every night at dusk he used to lock all three entrances, and open them again at daylight. He cared for a wide domain; there were swings and seesaws at the Cooke Street end, a goldfish pond, sand pits, bowling greens, and grass and hard tennis courts. On summer evenings, the hard courts were lit by fairy lights and used for ballroom dancing. Most Sunday evenings I was taken by my Mum and Dad to the bandstand to listen to various visiting colliery brass bands. Eventually the Pavilion was added. The Mill Dyke flows by the Pavilion; it has a big fat partly submerged pipe that countless children have walked across and fallen in! When I fell in, I was wearing my best white Sunday shoes.
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| Bentley Park and bandstand, 1925 - 1930 |
School Days And The Gloops Club
When I was five, I began at Cooke Street School. Inside the main door was a room with a rocking horse that was known as the babies room - sadly I never had a ride on it because I was too old. Further on past the cloakroom, a large room was partitioned by a wooden screen into two classrooms, I began in the far end. However when April came round and we formed our usual class lines in the playground, the top class was led off into the Junior School. All the other lines moved over. The teacher said, "Now you have all gone up [a class]". This meant I had a different teacher.
An older girl wore a close fitting woollen hat all the time and I asked my Mum why. She said that the girl had to have her head shaved because of ringworm. When her hair began to grow it grew curly, so I wanted Mum to shave mine so that I could have curly hair but of course she wouldn't.
Shrove Tuesday seemed to be chosen as the beginning of spring. Children arrived that day with marbles, whips and tops and shuttlecocks and battledores, which is a very basic version of badminton. Ring games provided fun that needed no equipment.
We played all the popular games such as 'The farmer wants a wife' and 'Poor Mary'. Now that I was at school, childhood infections caught up with me, and I was laid low by measles, whooping cough and finally diphtheria, which landed me in Conisborough Isolation Hospital. No visitors were allowed, and it was ten weeks before I saw my parents again.
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| Conisborough Isolation Hospital |
A near neighbour began inviting a few little girls to play in her house one evening a week. I think it was connected to the Sheffield Star newspaper, because we became the 'Gloops Club'. As our numbers swelled we moved to meet in a room above the Druid's Arms pub. It got packed, so little ones like me were allowed to stand on tables at the back. Sometimes a group of actors came to the Coliseum on a Saturday afternoon to present a comedy show about Gloops and Grandad. We laughed from start to finish.
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| Gloops Club memorabilia |
New Village Life
When I was seven, my Grandma Eden died and my Mum wanted to leave the shop. My Dad worked in the fitting shop at Bentley Colliery, and he took on a newly created job. Mechanisation was increasing and he was to head a small team of workers to ensure that the machines were in tiptop working order, so that nothing could halt coal production. He needed to be on call, therefore, we must live near the pit. Starting with number one, a row of eight houses began at the pit gates. When we moved into number seven, it was the first house that we ever had with electricity. Mum was able to have an electric iron, but as there were no sockets, she stood on a chair to remove a light bulb and plugged in there. I became a pupil at New Village Girls' School. I was unable to see as much of Doris now, so I began to make new friends.
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| Bentley New Village School |
Until we moved I had never seen the pit, and now we had a constant plume of black smoke passing over our house. We heard the shunting of coal trucks, and the tramp, tramp, tramp of the heavy boots of the miners at the three shift changing times. We saw the long line of men as they moved up the gantry towards the pit cage. The shifts were marked by a buzzer that had been a siren on an ocean liner. If there were three prolonged blasts at 6pm, it signalled that there would be no work the following day because sales of coal had fallen
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| Bentley Pit with the row of houses (left) in which Kathleen lived at number 7 |
From our house we could see the newer pit offices, which formed one side of a hard surfaced quadrangle with the older offices inside. These offices had pay windows where the men collected their wages on Fridays. If the men were going to work, they brought their wives with them to take the money home. It was a tremendously busy scene. Harry Teale, well known for making humbugs, came to sell his wares for a few pennies a bag. In contrast to all this activity, the evenings were very quiet. Children played games in the pay yard - wickets were chalked on the wall for cricket, and we rode our bikes round, safely away from the road.
Only a short time after we moved there, we heard that passengers alighting from the trolley bus at Victoria Road had stepped ankle deep into water. The 1931 floods had begun. Dad was called out to maintain the pumps to prevent water going down the pit. The water just lapped our front doorstep. Many people in Toll Bar were moved and lived in our school. We were told to go the Bentley High Street School every afternoon, but some of us were cut off by the water until a man came with a horse and cart. He took us across the water to the 'Tinnings'. This was the name given to the corrugated iron fence that stretched along a cricket pitch on one side of the road and a football pitch on the other. It was painted in a washed out green, and was the most boring part of my walk to and from school four times a day. We often played marbles along this stretch, but one player had to run ahead to stop the marbles from going down the grates.
Sometimes Dad had to pass on messages to some of his team. One Friday night in November 1931, he went into the time office, and was met by an anxious clerk who said, "Can you help me? They have just rung from below ground to say that there has been an explosion". Dad helped him to alert the rescue services, the Colliery Manager and the Colliery Agent.
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| Bentley Pit disaster 1931 |
When he came home to Mum, she rounded up the neighbours to fill and light their copper fires so that hot water would be available if needed. Word began to spread. The two grocers on Victoria Road sent free supplies of tea and sugar. I watched from my bedroom window as a crowd of anxious people built up, filling the road outside and spreading into the pay yard. It was a silent waiting crowd that sometimes parted to let a vehicle through. Forty five men lost their lives. It was at school on Monday morning that I learned that the father of one of my friends had died. In the playground everything was hushed - girls gathered in little groups and spoke in whispers. It was some time before games were played, but gradually skipping ropes appeared, and the older girls organised skipping games with chants like 'All in together girls' and 'Raspberry, strawberry, gooseberry jam'. As we moved into spring there were ball games again.
Without the shop, our home life was more relaxed. Mum and Dad took me into Doncaster once a week to the cinema, or to the Grand Theatre. We acquired our first radio - it was just a piece of black metal with dials on the front. I listened to Children's Hour every night. when my aunt made up a foursome, I was taught to play whist, or sometimes we played Ludo.
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| Doncaster Grand Theatre |
Behind our house was Daw Wood where I played with a group of children at jumping ditches, and that caused more dirty shoes. We organised backyard concerts with songs and dances. We all wanted to be Jessie Matthews, the London star of stage and screen. We charged a half penny or one wrapped sweet. The cinema was having an increasing influence on our lives. We collected what finery we could to be posh, and we played at 'Swanky ladies'. My weekly comic now was Film Fun.
When I was given a blackboard and easel and a post office set, playing at schools and offices took over. There was a severe Head Teacher in my early days at New Village School, but when she retired, a young ambitious lady took over. There were 60 girls in my class and we were kept very much to our desks, but now we had a gramophone for country dancing and there were painting lessons too. We had a sports' day, with little prizes, and in our final year we did a play for our parents to watch - normally parents never set foot in school.
We were coached well for our eleven plus exam. It was a bumper year, with a record number of passes. In September 1934, twelve of us went to Doncaster High School in Waterdale. Our horizons had broadened, and the make-believe of childhood was left behind.'
The End
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Many thanks to Barbara Dickinson for information and family photos.
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This is priceless, absolutely wonderful. I am so pleased Barbara has made her mother's memoir available through your website and that it is so well illustrated. It makes us realise what we take for granted as the norm of everyday life soon vanishes. I was born two years before Kathleen married, her parents were my next-door-neighbours throughout my childhood. I remember them all with great affection.
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