From Christine Bate’s document titled Cocks and Hens.doc

MY EXPERIENCES WITH COCKS AND HENS

Ways to school from Whitehill

Brinsworth village

Contrast with country life in Cumberland

Coal delivery

Gardening

Medical care

I have always loved that slightly pungent, slightly nauseating smell of a hen house, probably because my encounters with hens were always positive experiences and bring back good memories.  

When I walked from Whitehill to the Council School at Brinsworth, there were several options as to the route to be taken on any particular day.  Going down the Main Road meant walking past the pit pony field, down a steep hill where the causeway was narrowly fitted against a solid high rock wall,  then past other fields to the Parish Hall, taking a left on Duncan Street and going straight along to school, if that was ever possible for me.  The diversions were the corner shop where linseed liquorice and chlorodine lozenges were sold, as well as sherbert suckers, caley and other sweets.  Half way along Duncan Street there was a small shop in someone’s front room.  These were miners’ houses and the accommodation was limited to a front room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and a box room upstairs.  At the Duncan Street shop they sold Palm Toffee with the P on the wrapper formed like a palm tree and it always looked like Talm Toffee to me.  

The second option was to go Down the Old Lane.  There were no causeways, or causeys, along the Old Lane but there were ditches that I preferred for my route.  When I had my wellingtons on, this was my favourite method of making my way down the curved road, interrupted by only by one house. This house was especially interesting to me because it was a detached house of a different design from all the “Council Houses” on Whitehill. At the end of the Old Lane was a pond belonging to Brinsworth Hall Farm, a historic building made of local sandstone that had been blackened by years of pollution from the pits or coal mines.  At the pond, the lane joined Narrow Lane and led right to the school. There is a house on the site of the pond now, I wonder what happened to the water. 

Finally, there was “Down the Fields”.  The path began just beyond the Middleton’s house, the current Brinsworth equivalent of a stately home.  This was the biggest house I knew and the Pit Manager, Mr. Middleton lived there. It was built of grey stone and presented a blank face to the road.  However, there was a lovely garden inside the high wall and I remember going to a Mother’s Union tea there with my mother and her next door neighbour Mrs. Foster.  I still have a photograph of the occasion.  Mrs. Middleton used to send a tray of bunches of violets to Sunday School for the children to take home on Mother’s day in Lent.  Unfortunately, since I had an older sister I never went forward for a bunch; one bunch per family was the rule.  Now I am getting to my point.  The path down the fields made a sharp turn and went along the back of Duncan Street, past the allotments where many families kept hens.  

The allotments behind Duncan Street were very scrappy looking, mainly because any sheds or hen houses were made of scrap lumber and the wire netting was often bent, it could be called recycled.  However, the gardens were productive and many people in those days relied on garden produce for vegetables and some fruit such as strawberries.  There were also hens in many of the back gardens up Atlas Street.  It was appropriately referred to as “up Atlas Street” because the street ran up a steep hill beside the railway lines. Since it was the only street there it looked very out of place, just as the pit dumps too were obviously recent and incompatible additions to the landscape. At the bottom of the hill, on the main road, stood the Co-op, the local food emporium, where “the change hummed on wires” as Dylan Thomas put it.  Duncan Street and Ellis Street, two parallel streets seemingly planned  on a whim by someone who took a ruler to the local layout, were named after two district councillors. The houses on the three streets were built for miners, except for a few at the loco sheds end of Ellis Street and they were built for people who worked at the Canklow Sheds where Father worked.    

As to the hens, they were not very noticeable, almost all were Rhode Island Reds, but the cocks were what drew my attention.  One clear memory is of being up Atlas Street on a Sunday morning with the cocks crowing and the smell of roast beef permeating the atmosphere.  Sunday dinner!  The men were in the pub as soon as it opened and came home when it closed at 2:00, so dinner was timed to coincide with their return in many households. It was an important meal because it was the only day when the men were home and also the day to cook a roast of meat. The main meal for the rest of the week was leftovers on Monday, then stew, offal, fish or something from the pork butcher such as pork pie or sausage. Tripe was a favourite food for many, but not in my family.     

Going “North” showed me that hens were not always kept in squalor.  In Cumberland, the grass was green, the dew was fresh and the air swept into the lungs bearing all kinds of country scents. Among those scents was the familiar acrid smell of hens and henhouses, but this time, the hens were out, scratching at the ground, looking for illegal places to lay their eggs, and watched over by the cockerels.  Nana Meg, my aunt’s mother, lived at Hayton, a good long walk from Brampton Junction and we went by train from Low Row.  The house was built of warm yellowy sandstone and had quite low ceilings.  I spent very little time in the house when we visited, preferring to be out in the orchard where the hens ran free, helping to collect the eggs.  What particularly interested me was the water supply.  Across a cobble-stone walk from the kitchen door was a row of stone outbuildings and inside one of them was a large stoneware container that looked like a cross between a small pond and a large shallow sink.  A spring fed into the pool and the overflow disappeared from the side of this building.  One year I was there with my cousin and we asked if we could have an apple from the tree.  To my great disappointment I was told “No”, because Nana Meg didn’t know whether it would give me a stomach ache.  Helen ate her apple.  Nana Meg’s husband was called Hugh, he was a pleasant but taciturn man.  I wanted to call our third son Hugh but Geoff used his power of veto and I recognized that my father would have had problems with saying the name because he could never put the “h” on at the beginning. 

This morning I walked to the farm in the Open Space and, as usual, peeked in the small wire protected window that allows you to peer into the henhouse, almost as a voyeur peers into houses.  Like so many henhouses I have known, it’s a lean-to with nesting boxes at the left and perches at the right, and straw on the floor. One of the golden hens was pacing up and down chuck-chucking as if she was feeling broody and after all, what can one expect on a bright sunny January day in California?   

Coal delivery: 

We had our coal delivered to the road outside the house until bagging the coal in hundredweight bags became the standard in the late 1930’s.

Mother favoured coal from Treeton pit because it burned clearer and had less ash, and usually asked out coalman, Mr. Mussum, to bring half a ton at a time. When the lorry, or truck, had unloaded, we had to bring the coal up to the coalhouse by hand, using buckets since we didn’t have a wheerbarrow and no neighbour had one that we could borrow. It was a great pleasure to do the final sweeping of the coal dust when the job was done so that the road was left clean again.  

We also had manure delivered by the load onto the road outside too and this leads to a whole new topic: gardening.  Gardening was not easy on Whitehill. The house was new when Mother and Father, moved in as newly-weds and the estate or development was built on a field that had been uncultivated and used for hay for many years. The soil was heavy clay and just miserable to work, particularly for someone coming from gardening in the Carlisle area, in the Eden valley that had dark, friable loam. 

They moved into the house in September1926 during the slump, or depression. The miners were on strike and the houses, built for the miners, were made available to other families because miners had no money for the deposit or the rent. Father lent the three weeks deposit to two of his railway friends before he married and became as poor as they were.

We had a gas meter for our gas cooker when I was small although in 1926 the whole house was gas-lit. The meter was under the sink in the scullery, you inserted a penny and turned a key very like a roller skate key. When the penny ran out, the gas flame on the stove went low. Every month the meter man came, opened the box at the side of the and read the gauges. He then spilled out all the pennies, counted them, took enough to pay for the gas used and gave the other pennies back to Mother. She put them away and so had a hoard of ready pennies.  She also had a purse tucked away and saved up for the quarterly electric bill; three months was a long spell of time between payments. 

Dr. Sen. Surgery. On his  panel. Broken collarbone. Sheila’s bike accident. Mother’s scarlet fever (in section on Mother?) stitches in chin.