Memoirs of my grandmother Hilda Allis (nee Scurr):
The name “Scurr” supposedly comes either from Scandinavia, or from Scotland (there is a place in Scotland called “Scuir”).
I was born and brought up on the family farm, North Close Farm, which is on the road between Spennymoor and Kirk Merrington in the County of Durham in North Eastern England. There is a collection of houses near the farm – the whole area is referred to as either “North Close” or “The Bungalows” because the first houses built near the farm were bungalows.
My parents were Elena Annie (nee Foster) and John Reuben Scurr, who had red hair. They were married in the St John’s Church in Kirk Merrington, I think – if not it could have been at the Church in Ferryhill where my mother’s parents lived. My father had been born in the house where he we lived. His parents were Annie Scurr (nee Rudd) – I understood her parents had had a carpet factory at Barbard Castle) and Charles Scurr. I am not sure whether my grandfather Charles was born at the farm, the original farmhouse had become a cow byre and barn, there is a painting of it at the farm and Marian Lusby has a painting that is a copy of it. I think that he would have been born there. In the original house he was the eldest of 7 children, some of whom I knew as Aunts and Uncles but some I’d never heard of until Judith and Gwyn gave me a copy of the family tree, David has a copy now.
North Close Farm was originally part of a big estate, the Eden Estate, their big house being Windlestone Hall. They also had a large square pew in Merrington Church. They employed many local people, my grandfathers’ youngest brother Spencer started as an under-footman and rose eventually to being a butler in several big houses. I remember he was a butler to Sr. Miles Lamson, who was Governor General of Egypt. Later he was butler to a Turkish Princess, an ex-wife of King Farouk of Egypt. I’m not sure what happened to Great-Uncle Spencer – for a time he lived with my grandparents, I’m not sure how he died.
The Eden Estate was split up after the First World War due to financial problems because Sir William died during the war and Nicholas, the eldest son, was killed during that war. Tenants were given the opportunity to take out a mortgage and buy their farms which is what my grandfather did.
Anthony Eden, a younger son, went into politics and was briefly Prime Minister of England at the time of the Egyptian crisis. It was his handling of this which finished his career.
The Eden ancestoral home, Windlestone Hall, was a Prison Camp for dangerous German Prisoners during WWII. Afterwards it was a Maternity Home at one time and a school at another time – I don’t know what it is now.
When the farm belonged to the Eden’s, all the doors and outside woodwork was painted a bright blue. My grandfather changed this, he was very keen on tar, fortunately he didn’t tar everything. While he was alive the farm belonged to him and my father was a tenant, from what my father told me he was a harsh landlord. At one time my grandfather decided to paint the outside of the farmhouse with tar, fortunately he was persuaded not to and it was eventually painted it a creamy butter colour, my mother was ill from the paint fumes.
My grandparents (father’s parents) had 6 sons and my father was the eldest. Two younger brothers George and Sydney died within a month of each other in 1908, from diphtheria.
Spencer, the one next in age to my father, was killed in the First World War in 1918. The next brother, Charles, known in the family as Carl, married Winifred Awde of Spennymoor and the emigrated to New Zealand in 1924 with their two children Spencer and Barbara. They had two more children born in New Zealand, Marian and Douglas. Marian lives at Cambridge and Doug near Melbourne, Australia.
The youngest brother, Robert, was a captain in the Merchant Navy, he married Georgina and had two children, Mary (lives in England) and Judith (lives in San Francisco). Uncle Bobby died in 1937 after a fall down a Companion Way on a ship. The ship was in a European Port. I remember his coffin being brought to the farm and put in the drawing room until the funeral at Merrington Church. The coffin was very impressive, being made like two boats, one inverted over the other.
In my childhood I seem to remember that my mother was always dressed in black or brown. It was the custom then to wear black for a year after a death in the family and then brown for the next year. There always seemed to be some distant (to me) relative dying. I remember one time my mother had graduated to a dress in soft checks of pink, fawn and brown – my cousin Joyce Foster (now Harrison) offended her greatly by saying,
“Auntie Elena, isn’t that dress rather bright for an old lady?”
After my parents left the farm and went to live in a bungalow (single story house) across a field from the farm, my brother and his wife Shirley lived at the farm. My brother Charles and Shirley have 4 sons. John Charles, Alistair James, Andrew Erle and Michael Spencer (always known as Spencer). Andrew is married to Lynne and has one daughter, Megan. Spencer is married to Andrea and they live in the bungalow that was my parents. John was married briefly and is now divorced. My brother Charles died in 1981 before my father, who died in 1984. The farm now belongs to John, his mother Shirley lives there with him.
The farm used to be about 380 acres, but is now much smaller as quite a lot of the land was sold off for building sites and to another farmer. I understand that John leases out the fields that are left. He was trained as a carpenter/builder and is slowly restoring the house and some of the buildings. He has a job, not sure what, and he also does private work. Alistair works in a factory, motorbikes I think, he was in the Army for quite a while – 2 or 3 yours of duty in Northern Ireland. Andrew has a degree and works at something to do with paint I think. He lives in Spennymoor, not far from the farm, I’m not sure what Spencer and Andrea do, they live near and seem to keep an eye on Shirley and take her places with them. They live in the house that used to belong to my parents.
My grandparents (Scurr) lived just across a field from us. I have no memory of them ever looking after Charlie and me, or taking us anywhere or giving us a present or sweets but perhaps they did. Grandma Scurr lived at the farm before she died, she did once give me some money. My mother and she did not get on, Grandma, who was very outspoken, said that a teacher would never be any good as a farmers’ wife!
My Mother’s side of the family:
My mother Elena Annie Foster was born on 7th September 1890, the eldest child of George Arthur and Annie Foster. George was a builder and as far as I know they lived at Waterhouse in County Durham. Originally the surname was spelt Forster; I’m not sure when or why the letter R was dropped. Annie Foster nee Raper – her family came from the Scottish Border Country and was connected to the name Anderson (or Henderson?), I never knew this grandmother, she died from Pernicious Anemia before my mother married. In those days people with this condition had to eat raw liver, the only form of treatment. I don’t remember my mother talking much about her. My mother had a sister, Mary Annie and a younger brother, George Arthur.
Mary was at Waterhouses at first, and had 3 miles to walk to school – she took sandwiches for lunch. When Mary Annie was 7 years old (1900), they moved to Murton Collery, near Seaham harbour, where I think Uncle Arthur was born, 8 years after Mary Annie. Grandma Foster wasn’t very strong and lost a baby between Elena and Mary Annie. Grandpa Foster was told not to have any more children. They then moved to Ferryhill, somewhere down by the station, then moved to a Calliery house on 16 Brunel Street in the area not far from the road to Merrington. Grandpa was foreman at Dean and Chapter Collery and made very good money during the WWI years, 7 pounds a week. When grandpa retired, the bungalow was built by uncle Arthur and grandpa, and Mary Annie’s husband did the plumbing. I think it got uncle Arthur restarted in the building trade. Grandma had Pernictous Aneamia and was ill for years. Elena and Arthur had private education and Mary Annie was kept at home to look after them all, and left home in her twenties to join the VAD after the boy she was engaged to was killed in the war. The family moved into the bungalow in the 1920’s – Elena, grandma and grandpa. It wasn’t long before grandma died, at only 51 years old. After that Elena married and grandpa went to live with them and grandpa kept doing all the repairs to the farm gates etc. He was a very good carpenter and made most of his own furniture.
Auntie Mary was a nurse and married Ryland Kimbrey during the First World War, he was a Sergeant Major invalided back to England. Uncle Roy came originally from Jersey in the Channel Islands but after they were married he found a job in the Spennymoor area, they lived not all that far from us. He had an allotment garden and grew tomatoes in the summer and wonderful chrysanthemums in the winter for Christmas. He used to win prizes for them at flower shows. They had three children, Margaret (known as Peggy) who died in infancy, Arthur, who joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a Territorial and was killed in Belgium on the retreat to Dunkirk, and May, the youngest, who became a nurse, trained at Sunderland General Hospital. I’m not sure where she was nursing when she met her husband Ralph Miller. He was in the Merchant Navy and was in hospital with some tropical disease which he had caught when at an African Port. I was a bridesmaid at their wedding, with Ralph’s sister, Doreen.
Ralph became a captain; they lived in Liverpool and near London, and had two daughters, Hazel and Diane. After a number of years May got tired of being on her own so much so Ralph came ashore and got a managerial job on the docks at Liverpool. They bought a house at Aughton, near Ormskirk in Lancashire. Their two daughters both married, Hazel had 2 children, Charlotte and Thomas, and Diane had 5 or 6 children, Paula, Debbie, Gemma, Stuart, Ben. Diane had Polio when she was small, May nursed her at home. When the children were old enough, May went back to work as a nurse. Her husband Ralph had a heart attack and died very suddenly a number of years ago, I can’t remember when. She came to visit us in 1997 for a month, I think she enjoyed it.
My mother’s brother George Arthur Foster, always known as Arthur, was a builder. He married Emma Craggs, a member of a large farming family living in the Sedgefield area. Uncle Arthur was very quiet and Auntie Emma very talkative, in some ways Robin used to remind me of Uncle Arthur.
In the early 1920’s, my Aunt and Uncle went to Australia, first to Adelaide and then overland by train to Perth – a 3 day journey. They had relatives from the Gargett family who lived in Perth, but they only stayed there one or two years. My Aunt was homesick for her family and couldn’t stand the heat and the sand flies. When they returned to England my Aunt kept in touch with the family there and I met some of them on my return journey to New Zealand in early 1969. I kept in touch with Addie Tatum but have not heard from her for 2 years. Uncle Arthur built several houses near the farm; they lived in one of them, across the road from the farm for a number of years. Then he built houses at Sedgefield and they went to live there.
Their daughter Joyce was born while they still lived near us, I think. I remember playing with her and I remember her biting my poor brothers’ little chubby arms. She was younger than me and older than my brother Charles. Their son Arthur was born when they lived in Sedgefield.
My uncle had a car he used to take my mother, brother and I out for the day, at weekends. He also had a caravan and we had a tent. We used to go away on holidays with them, I remember going to Redcar, Filey, and the summer before the war we went to Loch Lomond. Three things I remember about this holiday: one, I got badly sunburned; two, Arthur, standing on a bank above me, threw a rock and gave me a large lump on my forehead, and three; we were taken to a café to lunch – something that hardly ever happened. There was sliced ox tongue to eat, which I thought was horrible, I’ve never eaten it since.
There was no house-building during the war so my uncle did repairs and also worked as a brick layer, building a big ammunition factory at Ayecliffe, he also was a member of not the Home Guard, but something to do with the Air Force and plane-spotting. Somehow he was allowed a petrol ration so we still were taken out for a day sometimes at the weekends, often to High Force, near Barnard Castle – probably strictly illegal. My Dad could never go with us because of having to be there to milk and to deliver the milk.
After the war my uncle bought a farm at Great Smeaton, near Northallerton in Yorkshire, he and his son Arthur farmed it. Arthur married Margaret and they had 3 children, Ruth, Paul and Michael. Paul visited us briefly on a tour of New Zealand. He is married and he and Michael run the farm. I heard recently that they have sold their dairy herd and have dry stock and poultry. They find all the rules and regulations coming from Brussels – European Common Market – difficult to cope with.
My cousin Joyce was a Domestic Science teacher, she married a farmer, Henry Harrison, and they farmed near Great Smeaton too. They have three children, Alan, who now runs the farm, and Kathleen and Jean, all married. They also have sold their dairy-herd, not sure what exactly they are doing now.
My grandfather Foster was a lovely person, I remember him well. He lived at our house for the later part of his life. He was very good at repairing and fixing things. He had made a clock with a Fretwork surround, kept in a large glass case – I understand that it is now in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle. I remember him taking me to Church in Merrington, he left a peppermint sweet on the pew for me to eat when he went up for communion. He used to shave with a cut-throat razor and sharpen it on a razor strap. Of course, children have to try everything, I tried the razor on my face, it bled quite a lot so everyone knew what I’d been doing! Granddad had a stroke and died suddenly when I was aged 5 or 6, and Charley about 3. My mother missed him greatly.
CHILDHOOD
I had a very happy childhood – at least my memories of it are happy, though I used to be in trouble some of the time.
Being brought up on a farm prior to WWII seemed marvelous to me, I didn’t realize how hard it was for my parents during the depression. We lived on a farm and to me we were rich, this was far from the truth. The farm belonged to my Grandpa Scurr and Dad paid rent to him. Apparently at one point the rent was due and Dad didn’t have the money. He asked Grandpa to wait for the money, he said, “No”. So Dad had to sell his flock of sheep at a bad time in the market and when he took the cheque to Grandpa he gave it back and said he would wait! Dad told me this, along with more of his history which I may put in elsewhere, when I went back on a visit in 1976.
The main things that kept the family going were the milk round, delivering milk morning and evening to the houses which had been built in the area near the farm house. Also the butter my mother made, the dressed chickens and the eggs she sold to these houses. I remember having 1 or 2 dozen eggs to deliver and falling over, returning in tears with broken eggs dripping out of the carrier – my mother was not well pleased!
There was a big washhouse, also a dairy built on the side of it. The separator for separating the cream from the milk was in the washhouse. The cream was in the churn for making butter, a big barrel on a stand was also in the washhouse, the lid of the barrel clamped on tightly, there was a viewing glass set in the side of the barrel so that one could see whether the butter was forming, there was a handle on the barrel and one of my jobs was to stand there turning the handle round and round and backwards and forwards until the butter formed, a very boring job! So I used to stand there with a book in one hand – it probably took longer because of having to stop and turn a page frequently. After this, making the butter into butter pats was fun but usually my mother took over. The particles of butter were squashed together then put in a wooden trough and rolled with a roller that had edges – not round and smooth – to squash out the liquid, salt was sprinkled onto it and rolled again and when it was the right consistency it was weighed out into ½ and 1 lb lots, then each lot was patted and shaped with two sort-of wooden paddles, then wrapped in butter paper ready to be sold.
During the war we weren’t allowed to sell butter, but my mother still made some in a small glass churn for ourselves and friends and relatives. Milk was rationed and we were only allowed to sell people their ration even if we had surplus milk – utterly ridiculous, but a fineable offense. We were supplied with tins of Carnation unsweetened condensed milk to sell to customers if we didn’t have enough cows’ milk. This didn’t happen very often so we used to have it on tinned fruit at Sunday afternoon tea, a great treat. My mother had stocked up on tinned fruit before the war but it was not enough for 6 years.
When I was very small my father delivered the milk in cans (big buckets) with lids which he carried from door to door. A measuring can hung on a bar inside the can and he used to pour the milk inside the housewife’s’ jugs. Then we progressed to bottled milk with 1 pint and ½ pint bottles, sealed with cardboard lids. To deliver these we had a sort of pram arrangement specially made, 2 levels of crates which could be slid in and out, a metal cover over the top, 2 wheels with inflatable tyres, 2 feet at the back to rest on when it stopped which cleared the ground when it was pushed.
All the houses had very long driveways and garden paths. It was exasperating to get to the door to find a note, “no milk today,” or “2 pints extra” and you had only brought the usual. Or to find a weeks’ supply of empty bottles and be unable to carry them all in one go. One house in particular, Adam’s, never washed their bottles and saved them for a number of days – he was a solicitor and they considered themselves very superior people! There was a long walk down the road from the last house at North Close to the “Waterhouse” so called because the pump to get the water up the hill to North Close and to Merrington also, was housed there. Fortunately they kindly asked for milk to be delivered only in the morning. It was my job from going to grammar school at age 11 and maybe before then to do the weekend deliveries, usually helped on Saturday morning by my Dad or one of the men because that was when they collected the money. A horrible job at some houses. When I was an older child I did it by myself. I did get pocket money for doing this job, also for working in the fields at hay time and harvest – wheat, oats, barley and potatoes. During the war there were 2 hours extra daylight in the evenings, the clocks were put forward 2 hours, double summer-time. Consequently a lot of the farm work couldn’t start until after the dew had dried – my mother had to send morning and afternoon tea to the fields, the later was very substantial because everyone worked late. Charlie and I used to have the job of taking this to the fields.
SCHOOL AND PHYSIO SCHOOL
My mother taught me a lot before I started school, I don’t think that I could read but I soon learned when I got to school. I could knit, not well but better than the ones whose knitting I had to share at school – we never got the same piece twice.
I went to Kirk Merrington Village School when I was 5, where my mother had been the Infant Mistress, so all the teachers knew me, so they all expected me to do wonders and I never dared be naughty because they would tell my mother about it. The school was still in use when we were there in 1988.
I really enjoyed school. I could have a bus-ride to school in the morning, but I had to walk home for lunch and walk back again to school again after lunch, and walk home again at the end of the day, which was about a mile. When my brother started school, because he was supposed to not be as big and strong as me; we went to school on the bus in the morning, walked home for lunch, went back to school on the bus, but then he had to wait for me coming out of the school. The infants got out earlier than the rest of us. And he was supposed to wait for me, but with my brother Charlie you never knew what he would do and I used to spend the last part of the day worrying about where he’d be when I got out of school, and walk home with him, because there would’ve been trouble if we hadn’t been together.
When I was ten I sat scholarship to go to the local grammar school, Alderman Wraith. I have to say that when I was at the village school I was often referred to as the teacher’s pet, I didn’t think I deserved that – but I wasn’t all that popular with the others because the teachers all knew me and knew my mother. Anyway, I had to sit the scholarship when I was ten. I sat the first part of it, which was written questions, and you sat that at your own school. And then if you passed that you went to the local grammar school to sit the second part. There were two of us passed from our school to go sit the second part, and we had to answer multiple choice questions. I had to go to the grammar school, and I heard that I’d passed that. You had to be ten before the first of August in the year that you were going to go to school – and my birthday was the 29th of July so I think I was actually about the youngest person in the school when we first started.
We started in the September of 1939, just after the war had started which made things very different for the school – they were in the process of building a swimming pool and that was never finished while I was at the school. When Dunkirk happened and all the soldiers came back from Dunkirk, we were moved out of the school and a lot of the soldiers came into the school. We had individual desks and we had locks on the desks and, although I had a lock on my desk, I left my fountain pen in my desk and it got pinched by the soldiers because it was getting hard to get fountain pens and all sorts of things.
I was in 1A, there was A, B and C and didn’t really have any significance where you were put in A, B or C. But at the end of the first year they sorted people out into A, B and C, and I stayed in the A – never one of the top ones – my friend Margot, who I still keep in touch with, she was one of the top ones and got prizes. I wasn’t very good at exams.
I used to play netball, but I didn’t like the netball they had there. I played hockey, hockey was the main game I played – I was the school hockey captain – I ended up in the 6th form as a Prefect and the Vice Head Girl of the school.
We had boys and girls at the school – we had the boy’s cloakrooms at one end of the school and the girl’s cloakroom at the other end of the school. There was boys’ stairs to the boy’s cloakroom and girls’ stairs for the girls to go up. But when we had to go outside to the science labs we had to go through the boys’ cloakroom and they’d be off getting changed out of their sports gear. The only place that you had to get changed for the gym was the cloakroom – and we did gym in the gym school hall. The girls wore a green t-shirt and navy-blue runners. All the boys wore stripes, and they’d make excuses to go through the hall when the girls were having gym. But we had lessons together – only our gym and sports lessons were taken separately.
The boys would sit on one side of the classroom and the girls would sit on the other side. There were thirty in a class. The boys were called by their surnames and the girls were called by their first names. We didn’t have corporal punishment, we got lines. We didn’t have detention because nobody could be allowed to miss the school bus to go home because there wasn’t any other way to get home, so we didn’t have that kind of detention. If you got sent to the Headmaster, the worst thing that could happen to you – we had a conduct mark in our reports and it was excellent, and if you really got sent to the Headmaster it would be put down to very good and then to good and then to bad, and you could be expelled after that, it was really very bad. One of the first things my mother ever looked at on my school report was to see what my conduct mark was. If the boys got sent to the Headmaster you never actually ever found out really what happened, but they used to talk about “getting the bat” – that’s all they ever said, they “got the bat” – so you had visions of them bending over and being wholloped with a cricket bat. I’m not sure whether that happened or not.
I did school certificate at the age of 15 in the 5th form – I did 8 subjects. I did Biology, Chemistry, and Physics – English was counted as 2 subjects because you did English Grammar and English Literature, I did Mathematics, French and Geography. You had a pass, credit or distinction. I had 5 credits and 3 passes.
I went into the 6th form, that’s first and second year 6th. I did Biology, Chemistry as the main subjects and Physics and Maths as subsidiary subjects. They were quite different from 5th form – I had been good at Maths and Science, I was very good at that – but I didn’t have sense enough to tell people I couldn’t do them at 6th form. I failed one and passed one, I think. But I enjoyed my time in the 6th form. By the time I finished grammar school the war was over.
Then I went to Physio School. Why did I go to Physio School? I nearly didn’t. I first though that I was going to do agriculture because all the time during the war in my school holidays I worked on the farm. I always worked outside – I didn’t like indoor work like washing up and housework, and I wasn’t allowed to do any cooking because my mother could make the rations go a lot further than I could have. We had Domestic Science at school but I think we were supposed to be given the ingredients by the school, but somehow we had to take it from home, and a lot of the time I didn’t take it because my mother said we couldn’t spare the rations. If you did take something and you cooked scones or something, the boys were all around and they conned you out of it so you hardly had anything to take home because you were sort of being friends with the boys.
I don’t keep in touch with my friends from school except Margot, but through her I hear about various ones. I keep in touch with Dorothy who used to live across the road from us, and I knew her before I ever went to the grammar school. One famous occasion, she wrote to me two or three years ago and asked me if I remembered it. We were upstairs playing with dolls and scissors and dolls clothes and things. Suddenly, my mother, like an avenging angel, charged into the room and said,
“Dorothy Stevenson, go home! Hilda, go to bed!” My brother had got our scissors, gone into her bedroom and cut his hair off close to his head, his lovely curls – and gone downstairs and said,
“Do I look nice now, Mum?” And Dorothy wrote and asked me if I remembered that. I do, vividly.
As well as working outside I used to deliver the milk on Saturdays and Sundays to local houses. I used to work in the hay field, the harvest field, picking potatoes in the school holidays.
I was brought up on the farm before the advent of Combine Harvesters – we didn’t have a tractor until after the war started. Part of the farmyard and a big Dutch barn and haybarn were full of stocks of wheat, oats, barley and hay. Because of the danger of fire (particularly children playing with matches) my mother showed us how to make a fire outside. We cleared a patch of grass on a lawn away from house, trees and stacks, and built a small brick fireplace with bars across to rest a ‘Billy’ on. She brought billy cans and we made tea, coffee, toast and probably baked beans – we had a lot of fun.
There was a swing on this lawn – you could swing really high. There were many trees in the garth and plantation, particularly a big sycamore and a very big silver birch – you could see for miles from the top of them. I don’t know whether my mother realized how high I used to climb.
Before the war the Spennymoor Golf Course was on the farm. The Club House was not very far away from the farmyard, they must have paid rent to either my father or my grandfather. The greens were fenced and our cows, sheep and horses still grazed on the land. The course was divided by the main road. Some of the greens were built up quite high. My brother, his friends and I had a great time playing cowboys and indians on and around them – they made good forts, although strictly against the rules.
As the war progressed more land had to be used to grow food so the half of the course across the main road was grazed by the animals. After the war my Dad didn’t want the Course back so one was made on the Page Bank Rd out of Spennymoor.
I had always wanted to have a pony. When I was quite young men, perhaps Gypsies, used to try to sell my Dad Shetland ponies. One he had on trial kicked me so I stopped wanting a pony.
When I was about 13 I got a Handy Hunter pony called Molly who had a well-trained army style. She responded to commands such as “walk, march, halt”. I discovered having a pony was not the same as in storybooks. She had a mind of her own. If she didn’t want to be caught I couldn’t catch her. She ran in the field with the cart horses (Shire horses). I would go out with a dish of oats to try and catch her but she would get on the far side of the big horses. They would try to get the oats, and if I tried to chase them away they would turn around and kick. It often ended with the men having to drive all the horses in to catch her, which didn’t make me very popular. I could catch her myself if the other horses were working, but on the weekends they often were not working, and I was at school during the week. She was sold when I was away at Physio school.
We didn’t have a car until my brother got his license and got a car. I had a bike, which a lot of kids didn’t have and they wanted to have lots of rides. I would bike to the village school.
My very earliest memory is of when my brother Charles was born. We were both born in the house where we lived. I was 2 yrs and 7 months older than him. I remember being taken upstairs to visit the new baby, and I remember hiding when the doctor came because the maid had told me that he would take the baby away if I wasn’t good. I hid in under the armchair amongst Dad’s dirty boots, in the corner of the kitchen. When I was very small if my mother wanted to go out I would stay behind happily if the maid wore my mother’s pinafore.
I used to get a halfpenny pocket money on Friday to spend on the way back to school after lunch. A local Grocer used to do his deliveries then and give us a ride to the village in his car. We seldom spent our money at his shop; there were better deals at little sweet shops.
I went to Physio School in Ancoats Hospital in Manchester, which in hindsight I realize wasn’t a very good school. There was the Head, Miss Hilton-Royal, who always had to be called by her double-barrel name, and there was one other one, Miss Gorsewood, and they were really the only instructors we had. And we had lectures from outside lecturers. But really learn the practical way of doing things from the students up above us, which isn’t a very good way to learn, because if they’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem. We were students, but we actually did most of the work in our Physio department. We had Wednesday afternoons off, but we had to take turns working Saturday mornings. We used to go the Manchester University for anatomy lectures and physiology lectures.
The students now would laugh – we were not allowed to go to the hospital in slacks, we were not allowed to wear makeup, we were not allowed to wear nail-varnish, we were not allowed to have long fingernails – and heaven help you if the Head decided she’d go check up on what you were doing! You had to have your hair up above your collar, so a lot of the time we wore those horrible hairnets like Ian Sharples wears in Coronation Street. We wore white coats in some things, but we wore grey shorts and white blouses with a collared neck and a tie, and most of the time we had to wear long stockings with these shorts in the days of suspender-belts, so that when you bent down all the people behind you could see your suspenders – which was ridiculous! We were occasionally allowed to wear socks. We had a grey blazer with a badge.
When I was in Physio School I boarded with some people in Stockport, near Manchester. I used to travel there on the tram, which was okay most of the time but sometimes when it had been snowing and it was all melting, and I was trying to get to the trams and the traffic was going past – it wasn’t like in Melbourne where the traffic gives way to the trams, you took your life in your hands to get on.
Some of the time I traveled by train – the station the train came into was the London Street station. We all used to walk up and Ancoats was the slums of Manchester. There was one house that we all used to hold our breath and rush past because the smell from it was atrocious. Then they started pulling a lot of the slum houses down and built new houses. When I went back in 1968, my friend took me back to Ancoats and the houses were beginning to look like slum houses again.
I passed most of my exam, but I wasn’t very good at the practical side – we never did any practice, practical examinations. We had to go down to London for the final, into this enormous room that had wires and Junction leads going everywhere. I was a nervous wreck. I went to work as a student – Hilton-Royal had decided to send some of us to Pinderfields Hospital, which was a chest hospital – and a funny old hospital. Some of us went there and took turns, went for a certain length of time and I got to stay there after I failed my finals. I took them again, this time to Leeds, which was much easier and I passed. This big hospital, a lot of miscellaneous huts that the army had put there, was attached to a Psychiatric hospital.
These huts went off a long corridor, closed in on one side but opened to the weather on the other side. Wards of people with TB spine, wards of children with polio, wards of men with mining injuries because it was a mining area, a lot of children with congenital problems, hips and Polio – people with TB spines were kept lying on plaster shells for months and months and months and years – they laid on their backs most of the time and were turned over at regular intervals. Some of the ones, that belonged to the surgeon, Mr. Pain, who looked after them, stayed there for about 5 years like that.
There was a women’s and a men’s ward, and there was a chest unit where they had TB chest people with Tuberculosis. So there was no wonder that after we worked there, when I had a TB test here, I had antibodies so I didn’t have to have an injection. Because everyone went to Pinderfields to work at the chest ward, to get the chest experience, you had to do all the rotations on all the other rungs before you got to the chest hospital. Once you got to the chest part, when people had done their 3 months or whatever there, they left.
So after that I went home for the first time since I was 18, and I worked at Dryburn Hospital in Durham – I took the bus from Home to Spennymoor, and then from Spennymoor to Durham, and it used to get me there too early. It was while I was there that I got this idea to go to New Zealand. It was really because my brother said he was going to New Zealand for a holiday to visit our relatives here. And I thought, well I’m not having him coming back from New Zealand saying, “When I was in New Zealand I did this, that and the other.” I didn’t have any money – I was like some of my descendents, spending my money on clothes. So I decided to apply for a job, and I applied for a job at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Rotorua, so I was accepted for there, and then I came to New Zealand and that’s another story.
NEW ZEALAND
I had to have smallpox, cholera and yellow fever vaccinations before coming to New Zealand. I was under bond to the Health Dept. of New Zealand for 3 years. My mother encouraged me to go to New Zealand, I’m sure in later years she wished she hadn’t.
The last thing I handed in before leaving England in 1953 was my food ration book (food was still rationed even though the war ended in 1945, although sweets, clothing and shoes were off the ration by then).
The ship to New Zealand docked at Curacaa in the Dutch West Indies and at Colon at the beginning of the Panama Canal. We had a day at shore at each of these places to visit the shops. The passage through the Panama Canal was very interesting going up through a series of locks.
I arrived in Rotorua at 7.30am 23rd February 1953. I was met at the bus depot by my cousin Barbara and Ernie Hapnes and their daughters Carol and Judith. They were wonderful to me. My boss Pauline Pole also met me. She looked at her watch and said we start work at 8am. To say that I was gobsmacked would be putting it mildly. I told her I hadn’t had much sleep, hadn’t eaten and hadn’t washed. “Allright,” she said, “you can go with Barbara and be at the hospital at 1pm.”
When I went up to the Nurses Home where I was allowed to stay until I found myself a flat there was mail waiting for me from home, and if I could have got back on the ship then I would have! After several weeks I was told to hurry up and find somewhere else to live. Cynthia and Nan (both from England), who I met at the Nurses Home, decided to come flatting with me. Nan had lived in New Zealand for about three years and knew all about it. We divided the work into one week cooking, one week housework and one week off.
One Saturday night, Nan, Cynthia and I went went with 3 guys that Nan knew to the dance at the Hall at the Waipa Village (there was a dance most Saturday nights). Theo had called in to see what was what, and asked me to dance. He was a very good dancer. He eventually asked me to go to the dance at the Ritz Ballroom the following Saturday. Theo worked as a mechanic at the Waipa Stark Mill and lived in a Workman’s Ht at the Hostel, getting all his meals at the cookhouse. He owned a 1928 Essex car in which he called for me at the flat. His friends Mr. And Mrs. Pont (I always knew Mr. Pont as Win) sold refreshments at the Ritz Ballroom. They were friends in Indonesia, and had their children Freddy and Ria with them. Wim was a sergeant in the Dutch colonial Indonesian Army, Theo was a sergeant in the Dutch Army. They were both there until Indonesian Independence.
Theo and I, Cynthia, and Nan and her boy friend used have picnics and go rabbit-shooting at Reporoa, and go trout-fishing (at Trout Pool, Lake Tarawera and Aratiatia).
I would visit my cousins Barbara and Ernie, and they took me to visit Auntie Winnie and Uncle Carl Scurr at Waihi and to visit Roy and (my cousin) Marian Lusby at their farm at Galatea. Roy had got the farm in a soldiers ballot after he returned from overseas at the end of the war. Ernie was a baker, but after the war his health was not good so he gave up baking and worked in the Rotorua Council Offices. Barbara had trained as a hairdresser and used to cut my hair, although after the girls (Carol and Judith) had grown up she worked at various other jobs instead.
My brother came out to N.Z before Christmas 1953, and met Theo then. Theo and I, Nan, Cynthia and Charlie all went for a trip up North in January 1954 – to Auckland, then up the East Coast – Opononi, Ninety Mile Beach, Kaitaia, Russell and Pahia.
Theo and I eventually got engaged and bought a section at Holden’s Bay on Robinson Ave.
THE QUEEN ELIZABETH HOSPITAL
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital was on the shore of Lake Rotorua looking out to Mokoia Island. At first I worked in the Rheumatology side. I asked to be transferred to the Cerebral Palsy Unit, because I had been interested in treating Cerebral Palsy in England. It was like a boarding school, the children there were from all over New Zealand and they went home only in the Christmas school holidays. The children were schooled in the morning, and taken out for various treatments. In the afternoons they rested, went for walks and played games. The children who couldn’t walk sat in a long cane basket on wheels, which the Physio’s would push – their favourite place to go was to the Government Gardens to feed the ducks. After they left the unit some of them went to ordinary schools or to university, others unfortunately ended up in institutions. I was very sad to leave in November 1955 when I was about 6 months pregnant with Robin. Eventually the concept of the unit changed, and it became an assessment centre where the children stayed short-term.
WEDDING
The section we bought at Holden’s Bay needed to be cleared. Theo’s friend Jack Angell lived across the road and helped to clear it, along with his other friends. They then built a two-room bach towards the back of the section – in theory this was to be turned into a garage when the house was finished in the front of the section. There was a rain-water tank, and a shed with a chemical toilet beside it. We would wash in the Blue baths, or in Lake Rotorua when it was warm enough.
The wedding was at 12pm on 20th November 1954 at St. Luke’s Church. Robin and David were baptised there, and Gary was baptised in Raglan. The Wedding Reception was held in the lounge of the flat where I lived – it was small, just family and friends. Jack Angell was best man, my cousin Barbara was Matron of Honour, Carol and Judith (Haynes, now Harris and Nichols) were flower girls. Nan, Cynthia and I did the catering. Ernie made and decorated a beautiful 2-tier wedding cake for us. We went to the Government Gardens for the wedding photos. We went on a camping, fishing tirp to the Taupo area for the honeymoon.
AFTER WEDDING
Robin was born 01/02/1956. Before Robin’s birth Theo had seen an advert for the sale of a fishing business, something that he had always wanted to do, in Raglan. We went there to see the owners – quite a journey in those days, a very windy and steep road out of Rotorua and an unsealed road with a lot of bends over the deviation from Hamilton to Raglan. Theo decided to buy the business. The owner Pop Gurnell was going to work with him and show him the ropes literally, so we sold the section and bach. Theo went and I stayed with Barbara and Ernie for 2-3 weeks until Robin was born, and then for about a week after. I was pretty clueless about babies. In those days one stayed in hospital for 7-10 days after the birth, learning about breast-feeding, baby care and bathing. By the time all the nurses had given me different advice I was terrified at the thought of taking him home. Fortunately Barbara was a calming influence, and she had made a couple of little outfits for him.
In 1956 it was very difficult to find permanent places to rent in Raglan. Theo had found a little two bedroom house on Robert St. for 15 shillings a week. He borrowed a truck and with the help of friends moved our furniture and two cats (“Speke” and “The Other One”) to Raglan while I stayed with Barbara. It was a horrible house – outside toilet with nightsoil can changed once a week, one rainwater tank full of mosquito larvae, no hot water, a cooker that didn’t work, and a bath. We bought a zip water heater to heat the water but there wasn’t enough pressure from the tank to fill it. We bought a quick, one ring, heating element on which I did all the cooking and heating water. There was a tub and copper in an outside shed with a dirt floor – lots of flees in the dusy. I used to boil the copper to do the washing and sometimes my next door neigbour Mrs. Dent let me use her washing machine. I had to take the washing home to rinse because she couldn’tspare the water. Fortunately the shed had a rainwater tank and I had a handringer – but things were never really rinsed properly. The garden was a jungle which the cats loved, rats climbed the peach tree into the rook and lots of slaters lived on the inside walls – a sign of damp. Robin had croup when we lived there.
Our next door neighbour Mrs. Jin Dent, an elderly lady, was very kind to me – said I needed some young friends – and invited me and Ann Boyliaa to afternoon tea. We got on quite well together. Ann said, “You must come and visit me sometime,” so sometime later I took my courage in both hands and phoned her,
“You said for me to visit you, when shall I come?” After that we became good friends. Her husband Peter worked in the Commercial Bank of Australia in Raglan and eventually he was transferred and they moved away, although we kept in touch. Before she left Raglan Ann had got me involved in the Anglican Young Wives Group and the Kindergarten – actually a sort of Play Centre.
We moved from Robert St. to a house at Raglan West which still had an outside toilet and some rainwater tanks, but had lovely hot water for the bath and a smal electric cooker. Gary was born when we lived there.
Next we lived in Bankart St. in Harvey Wrights’ old house – scrim walls and lots of bores and once again an outside toilet, rainwater tanks – but hot water and plenty of space. A big sunny verandah at the front was great for the children to play on, the house was very cold. David was born while we lived here. The boys used to fish off the verandah with toy rods and occassionally caught a fish! Theo used to sneak up and put a srpat on their lines. We had a washing machine with ringer by the time we got to this house.
We bought the section at 7 Park St. and built a house. This was arranged through State Advances by capitalising the Child Benefit for the 3 boys and paying the rest off at 3% interest for 25 years. Here we had town supply water – some of the first to have it, and a septic tank so we had an inside flush-toilet, although the drainage was a bit dicey at times. Later this was changed to the town sewage system.
Robin, Gary and David attended the Raglan District High School to School Certificate level, then boarded in Hamilton to Attend Melville High School for 6th and 7th Form. All three ended up as Dux of Raglan High School in the 5th Form – David was a prefect and Head Boy.
At one time while living here Theo kept pigeons and used to put them in races, taking them to Hamilton Friday evening to be ringed, then they were put in baskets with other peoples’ pigeons, put on the train and sent down to be released at a designated station on the Saturday morning. Then on Saturday they would wait for the pigeons to come home, be caught, and the ring put in a special clock. Theo had to go into Hamilton with the clock to the pigeon club to see whose bird had won.
When we first moved to Raglan we were so hard up that Theo got a job at the Manapouri hydro project as a mechanic. He was at West Arm and working on the machinery building the Wilmot Pass road over to Deep Cove. He worked there for three months, the firm Bechells paid his airfare there and back, and they fed their workers very well. While he was away the car was sitting unused in the driveway (we hadn’t built the garage by then). My friend Dorothy Wield said to me, “Theo is o good, you have to learn to drive” and set off to teach me. Another friend, Ida Lind, had the boys at her house while I was having lessons at the kopua (camping ground). When Theo came home he made me drive to and fro whenever we went to Hamilton, I didn’t drive in Hamilton. Eventually I sat and passed my driving test.
We moved into the house in Park Drive when David was 4. After he started school I got the job of supervisor at th local kindergarten/play centre held on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the Union Church Hall. Mothers had to take turns at being a helper – 2 of us with 20 or more children would not be allowed now. I had been on the Kindergarten Committee and I had a turn as President of the Committee prior to being supervisor. The only fence between the palying area and the footpath and road was a psychological barrier, a rope strung between electric fence posts which were fitted into concrete blocks in the ground. This was put up and taken down every morning. Sometime after I gave up being supervisor, the Kindergarten was allowed to put a building in the grounds of the school which has been enlarged and extended and is now a proper Government Kindergarten with qualified teachers open 5 days a week.
WAIKATO HOSPITAL
In 1969 I applied to the charge Physio, Gillian Gorrick (English trained) of Waikato Hospital for a job. I went on a months trial, working part-time Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8am-4pm, with a half-hour lunch break. I had to learn ultra-sound treatment, micro-wave machines and treatments, indications and contra-indications. I had to take a written and practical examination and I passed. I was expected to supervise the students even though they knew more and were far more up-to-date than I was. Weeks later I approached the Charge Physio to ask whether I had passed the trial – apparantly I had, but no one had mentioned it. I only worked part-time because full-timers were expected to work week-ends and be on call at night and do scary things like working in the Intensive Care Unit where they did sunctioning and other things I hadn’t been trained to do.
The other area I never ventured into was neurology, because the treatments were new and quite different to the little I had learned in training. In the 14 odd years I had been out of Physio the whole concept had changed dramatically. I was fortunate to work in a Physio teaching hospital for the 3rd year students – I learned much from them, the tutors, and the young staff.
Eventually I became the Senior Physio in the Outpatients Department, specializing in Musculo-Skeletal problems – neck, back, hips, shoulders, ultra-violet treatmetns for skin conditions, treatments and exercises for Pelvic Floor problems.
I used to drive to work and at the end of 1969/beginning of 1970 I had an accident on the way home and wrecked the Vauxhall Velox car and demolished a grate and a power pole. I hurt my neck and knee. It was in the days before seat belts, so I was very fortunate to not be more seriously injured. I think I must have fallen asleep. That may have been when all my neck problems started.
I used to deliver the flounder Theo caught to the fish shop in Victoria St. The fish were packed in cream cans and put in the boot of the car. If Theo wasn’t home, I had to pack the fish. They were kept hanging in a big Frig in the garage. I delivered the fish to the back of the fish shop before 8am. Because the fish shop wasn’t open and the cans were heavy the men from the butcher’s shop next door used to lift the cans out of the boot for me. After work at night I used to go and collect the empty cans. Eventually Ivan stopped buying the fish – Theo was catching too many for him to deal with – in the end the shop closed. Theo was then selling the flounder to Hartstones in Raglan.
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MY ANCESTOR PHOTOS 