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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Radio Northampton Action Desk on behalf of Norman Mason and has been added to the site with her permission. Norman Mason fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Houses lit by gaslight. Coal or coke fires for heating. No central heating. No bathroom. No inside toilets. All windows and doors fitted with blackout screens and curtains. A yard of ten homes served by just three outdoor taps for drinking water. No water laid on into the houses. Water stored for using in homes in buckets. Three wells to provide water to wash in. Toilets around 30 yards from the houses, each serving two households. No flush toilet systems. Water to flush toilets was drawn from the wells and had to be hauled up from the well with a long pole and chain via a galvanized bucket.

Barns were also 30-40 yards from the houses and each had a brick built copper for the weekly washing of clothes, also used for the purpose of boiling water from the well for use in the zinc bath tubs for a weekly bath, often in the barn in warm weather, but usually in the living room in front of the fire. This entailed carrying water from the well to the copper, then carrying it from the barn to your house and then emptying the zinc bath via the water bucket down one of three drains near the outside taps and wells.

The families that lived in the yard all got on together reasonably well (not much choice when you had to use the same toilet facility).

The families in the yard at the time included: The Sergeants at No 1 Jubilee Street, The Herberts at No 3, The Sharmans at No 5 and The Bodfish’s at No 7. The other 6 in the row on Kettering Road were: Mrs Waddington at No 65, The Masons at No 67, The Balls at No 69, The Berrys at No 71, The Bransons at No 73 and the Brichfords at No 75 next door to J T Butlins Shoe Factory.

One of my regular jobs was to go round to the factory each week to collect a sack of clicking leather off cuts which were used together with some newspaper to light the fire under the copper in the barn, and sacks of off cuts from the making room and press room of sole leather bits. These were then used to keep the copper fire burning until either mum had finished the week’s washing or the water for bathing was boiled. Coal was stored in the barns for the house fire and had to be broken up into small pieces for use on the fire and carried to the house. Coke, which was obtained from the Council Gas Works in Evison Road was also stored in the barn and used together with the slack coal dust to keep a good fire to warm the home.

Mr Ball at No 69 worked at the gas works and I used to go along with his grandson, Arnold and we were allowed to sometimes shovel coking coal into the retorts, which were used to make the gas which supplied the town.

(Arnold was a couple of years older than myself and was quite big for his age. He could not wait to join the forces and went to the recruiting office in 1944 and lied about his age. He was accepted and was posted with a unit to Italy. Sadly, he was hit by a Mortar Bomb and was only identified by his identity discs. He was then only 17 years old).

We were sometimes allowed to use the long rakes to pull the Hot Coal residue from the retorts into large metal barrows and wheel it out into the yard where it was left to go cold and be sold as coke.

The yard is now the site of the Gloucester Court Sheltered Accommodation, their car park was the site of the retorts. Their was only a narrow access between the outside of the retorts and the council tar plant which provided all the tar material required for maintaining the town’s streets and footpaths in much better condition than they are kept today in 2005. The access led down into what we always called ‘Doctor’s Field’. It held a footpath through from Evison Road to the Kettering Road opposite Jubilee Street. It was in that field that the council built houses in 1939, which were one row plus a crescent shaped group which was called Westfield Place. It has now been extended and is known as Meadow Road.

Brachers allotment field was across the road from Butlins at the bottom of Kettering Road. It had two entrances, one opposite the Jubilee Street junction and the other further down the road. The plots were set out in 10 pole sections and stretched from Doctor’s Field down to the Slade Brook. Most families rented an allotment plot in the 1940s, a necessity being to grow your own food. Some people built hen runs and huts to keep hens to make sure they had eggs for their families; one or two even kept pigs in sties. I had to help to dig and tend to our plot, which was the fourth one in from the field gate across the road.

Ena Wallington, the corner shopkeeper in Jubilee Street had a plot; it was the first plot in on the right hand side of the cart road in the top gate. She had a summer house set into the hedgerow dividing the allotments from Doctor’s Field and used to make good use of it in good weather, as the shop had no back garden. She mostly grew salad crops and flowers, which were then sold in the shop.

In recent years the allotments were decimated by the building of the A14 and the huge roundabout in Kettering Road. The Slade Brook was also re-aligned, to accommodate the road.

Jubilee Street was a great street to live in with its terraced house families being all very good neighbors. My fellow children of the street had great fun playing hide and seek with so many different places to hide; the street lamps were all masked with blue paint, so only a glimmer of light was visible.

One boy, younger than me, had a talent for entertaining. He was discovered by Caroll Levis and went into show business. Jimmy Smith is known as Jim Dale today; star of stage and screen and living in New York, USA.

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