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Ken Stewart Interview

Reading time: 8 min(s)

Lived at:

Ken Stewart lived at 14 Lower Mill Bank Road and Rawson Farm from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Interview date:

Ken was interviewed by Ruth Beazley in 2014.

I was born at number 14 Mill Bank Road in 1921. Later I lived at Rawson Farm. Me dad worked as much as he could but most of the time he were on the dole. He worked in the munitions industry in Copley and in 1926 there was the General Strike. There were me mother, me father, me sisters and me younger brother. My mother had 27 shillingsThis is equivalent to £1.35 in today’s money a week to keep us. That included rent and everything.

Ken Stewart with his friends at a Scout Camp in Derwent Water in the 1930s

Ken Stewart, Joe Taylor, Edward Platt, Cyril Hellowell and John Wadsworth at a Scout Camp in Derwent Water in the 1930s

It’s hard to explain what it was like in those days. It was a good thing when ma got paid. She would buy two stone of flour and two stone of potatoes. That was it. We never saw fruit. We never saw sweets and we made our own toys.

Between the wars in the 1930s it was shocking. There was a chap called Cheapjack. He used to come with a horse and a cart with fruit and veg and I used to wait over the wall by Berry’s shop. He would stop to sort things out and if he thought things were going off he would throw it over the wall onto the dump. So I’d take as much as I could back to me mum. It’s unbelievable.

I once followed a chap along the road. He was peeling a Jaffa orange. He threw the peel on ground and I picked it up and ate it. I was hungry and it was as if me body was saying ‘Get some of that. It will do you good.’ That is just how bad it was.

I never had a jacket. I went to Mill Bank School summer and winter in short trousers and you had to go out in all weathers. You know the steps up to Mill Bank school, we used to squash ourselves into a corner to keep ourselves warm. I don’t know how we survived.

We made our own toys; bows and arrows and spears, everything we had a go at. We had no garden so there was nowhere to grow anything and we didn’t go far. We used to get a bicycle wheel and a piece of stick. We would run all the way to Cottonstones just playing and making do with what we had.

Berry’s Corner shop sold everything including fish and chips; chips to watches. When the bus driver stopped at the corner he’d shout out ‘Woolworths’.

I was friends with Arthur Smith. We would hang out around the fish and chip shop and play billiards in a top room and chalk our cues on the plaster ceiling.

Albert Berry were also a photographer. One day Albert said to me ‘This bloke [who sold his fish] has let me down again.’ And I said ‘If you like I’ll try to sell it for you’. They were tuppence a piece and I got a shilling commission. Off I went with a big a creelA creel is a wicker basket usually used for carrying fish or blocks of peat. There was fish then paper then fish, and in no time I went back and said ‘Give me some more’, and he said ‘Do you want a job?’

Soon I had saved me money and bought a bicycle. The shop in Sowerby Bridge was flabbergasted when I went with all that cash in a sack ‘How has he got this money like?’

There were few opportunities to earn money as a child except haymaking from Jo Holroyd at Sauterhouse Farm and Johnsons who lived at Cottonstones. Alan Johnson was my mate. He was about 9 years old when he ran down the lane and the bus killed him. The Mill Bank bus was running by then every hour as far as the Redann. Then it turned round and came back again. Mr Bateson started the little black bus service in early 1930s and then John Hurst took over. I never went on the bus; well not often. I couldn’t afford it.

We did not have a wireless for a long time. My father had a push bike and there was a pannierA pannier is a basket, bag or box attached to the sides of a bicycle on the back. Me dad and me rode from Mill Bank to Cheshire for a wireless. He strapped me and the speaker on the bike and we came all the way back with them. You had to have a 120 volt battery and an accumulator. As we came back through Oldham there was this big fat policeman. He shouted ‘Come on lad peddle like hell’.

I loved the radio and listened to Children’s Hour, Uncle Mac and music. It was not like music today. I liked waltzes and Glenn Miller.

Mrs Smith lived on Lower Mill Bank Road. She had a lad called Arthur. He was a year and a half older than me and he was more advanced with technology.

He had an uncle who visited one day and in his Yorkshire accent, he said ‘I brought thee some paether and shot’. Well, I don’t know why we did it but Arthur and me tried to make explosives.

First off we got a length of tube and when we put it on the fire. It went ‘Pop’. Then we got a chemical – it was this compound – and we put it in the tube and put it on the Bunsen burner in Mrs Smith’s cellar where she had a brand new bath. There was four of us down there: we all cowered down and waited. There was a huge explosion and the new bath became a colander straight away.

Mrs Smith came down the cellar steps. She was really going at it ‘You threw me out of my chair’ she said and gave us all a clip round the ear. We never dared go there again. It shook next door as well. It was a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves.

At the end of Mill Bank near the chimney [Lower Lumb chimney] there were garages. Hellowell started working with a horse and cart for the council. He lived at Turn Lee Farm and he used to bring our milk. Josh Holroyd was at Sauterhouse and Rawson Farm and Joe Waterfall was the landlord at The Anchor pub. The Gledhills lived at Damside.

I went into the cotton mill in Ripponden when I was 17 and sold fish at night. Then I was with a family at Copley for four years before I joined up in January 1941.

I served in the Navy during the war. One lad got placed in bomb disposal and lost his legs. I’ve seen some action and been round the world. I came back because the ship had to go for repair.

I was on HMS Lothian when there was a mutiny in Sydney. We joined the American 7th fleet. We had supplies and everything except money and the last place I went was Bougainville to oust the Japanese.

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