Cresswell, Thomas Jobb, Isaac Dance and Joseph Braithwaite, friends since schooldays and now young foundrymen together, liked to share a packet of Wood-bines and sit on the causey edge to divide them: one passed between the four while they sat talking, the remainder tucked behind their ears for safekeeping. Betsy heard them divvying up their spoils and making plans for the following day.
By 1911, my great-grandfather was foreman of the brickyard just below the Wheeldon Mill Plantation, with a motley crew often beneath him, men and boys; Dick, the collar-and-tie man with a watch chain spread across his chest, they, hoisting up their oldest clothes with leather belts or knotted rope. Come Tuesday evenings, a fresh collar was needed, plus braided cuffs and ceremonial apron. My great-grandfatherâs âelevationâ to grocer (a silent title if ever there was one) led to him joining the Buffs. For more than forty years, Dick was a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, being admitted to the organisation shortly after leasing the shop. Tuesday night was Buffsâ night. Rain or shine, he picked up the attaché case containing his regalia and walked to his lodge meeting at the Angel Inn.
Sometimes, Annie and Eva accompanied him, on their way to see the latest extravaganza at the picture palace, Whittington Moorâs first. It was all a bit makeshift, really â literally, a hole in the corner affair â in the clubroom above the stables for the Queenâs Hotel. A bedroom held the projector, with a gap knocked through the wall into âthe auditoriumâ, its rough and ready nature and flickering screen part of the excitement of the new. Until the cinemaâs premier status was usurped by the Lyceum, Annie regularly took Eva (she eighteen to my great-auntâs ten), the Nash girls clipping up the steps in their ankle boots, with their chosen sweets for the evening â a handful of mint humbugs, toffees, or whatever else they fancied from the shop. They chatted to the publicanâs young son, Joe, who liked to assist the projectionist (an early exercise in hand-eye coordination that may have come in useful: Joe Davis was later World Snooker Champion.)
This new-fangled world was all very well, but Betsy much preferred Variety: frock coats, moleskin titfers and all that frothy colour; young girls strutting across the stage, or else picking their way daintily like cats. Some women claimed they only liked theballads, but Betsy enjoyed the stronger numbers too: the Marie Lloyd imitators, hand on hip and winking â oh, the sauce they got away with in those songs.
It was a case of either muck or nettles for the corner shop in the years before the First World War: if there wasnât a slump, there was a strike. Everyone in the neighbourhood suffered. Some strikes were more memorable than others, and in the hot sticky summer of 1911, with temperatures soaring higher than at any time during the previous century, one set of workers after another withdrew their labour: dockers, carters, miners; on and onâ¦âIt Is War,â the headline boomed when railwaymen stopped work in August. By the end of the month, the Derbyshire
Courier
had even stronger news to report: the Chesterfield Riot.
The Battle of Chesterfield, a brief but bitter skirmish, started when a Saturday-night crowd surged from the Market Square down to the townâs Midland Railway Station and overwhelmed the handful of policemen posted there in the aftermath of the strike. The shriek of police whistles and sound of truncheons cracking heads preceded the arrival of Mayor (and industrialist) Charles Paxton Markham to read the Riot Act to those hurling bottles, bricks and stones. Megaphone authority got him nowhere â Markham was forced to take cover behind a fence â and police reinforcements were helpless before a crowd of some 2,000 (5,000 according to one enthusiastic observer). The whole town was said
By 1911, my great-grandfather was foreman of the brickyard just below the Wheeldon Mill Plantation, with a motley crew often beneath him, men and boys; Dick, the collar-and-tie man with a watch chain spread across his chest, they, hoisting up their oldest clothes with leather belts or knotted rope. Come Tuesday evenings, a fresh collar was needed, plus braided cuffs and ceremonial apron. My great-grandfatherâs âelevationâ to grocer (a silent title if ever there was one) led to him joining the Buffs. For more than forty years, Dick was a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, being admitted to the organisation shortly after leasing the shop. Tuesday night was Buffsâ night. Rain or shine, he picked up the attaché case containing his regalia and walked to his lodge meeting at the Angel Inn.
Sometimes, Annie and Eva accompanied him, on their way to see the latest extravaganza at the picture palace, Whittington Moorâs first. It was all a bit makeshift, really â literally, a hole in the corner affair â in the clubroom above the stables for the Queenâs Hotel. A bedroom held the projector, with a gap knocked through the wall into âthe auditoriumâ, its rough and ready nature and flickering screen part of the excitement of the new. Until the cinemaâs premier status was usurped by the Lyceum, Annie regularly took Eva (she eighteen to my great-auntâs ten), the Nash girls clipping up the steps in their ankle boots, with their chosen sweets for the evening â a handful of mint humbugs, toffees, or whatever else they fancied from the shop. They chatted to the publicanâs young son, Joe, who liked to assist the projectionist (an early exercise in hand-eye coordination that may have come in useful: Joe Davis was later World Snooker Champion.)
This new-fangled world was all very well, but Betsy much preferred Variety: frock coats, moleskin titfers and all that frothy colour; young girls strutting across the stage, or else picking their way daintily like cats. Some women claimed they only liked theballads, but Betsy enjoyed the stronger numbers too: the Marie Lloyd imitators, hand on hip and winking â oh, the sauce they got away with in those songs.
It was a case of either muck or nettles for the corner shop in the years before the First World War: if there wasnât a slump, there was a strike. Everyone in the neighbourhood suffered. Some strikes were more memorable than others, and in the hot sticky summer of 1911, with temperatures soaring higher than at any time during the previous century, one set of workers after another withdrew their labour: dockers, carters, miners; on and onâ¦âIt Is War,â the headline boomed when railwaymen stopped work in August. By the end of the month, the Derbyshire
Courier
had even stronger news to report: the Chesterfield Riot.
The Battle of Chesterfield, a brief but bitter skirmish, started when a Saturday-night crowd surged from the Market Square down to the townâs Midland Railway Station and overwhelmed the handful of policemen posted there in the aftermath of the strike. The shriek of police whistles and sound of truncheons cracking heads preceded the arrival of Mayor (and industrialist) Charles Paxton Markham to read the Riot Act to those hurling bottles, bricks and stones. Megaphone authority got him nowhere â Markham was forced to take cover behind a fence â and police reinforcements were helpless before a crowd of some 2,000 (5,000 according to one enthusiastic observer). The whole town was said
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