RECOLLECTIONS of PONTEFRACT

PART TWO

by FRANK H. W. HOLMES

Typed by him in 1971

PAGE TWO

Soldiery and the fair were far from being the only features of the streets of Pontefract. Four or five times a year we had a race meeting in the park, with crowds arriving by train at both Baghill and Tanshelf stations. Those from Baghill, having walked up the hill to the town were greeted by numerous wagonettes with raucous drivers shouting "course way six" – an expression I heard a great many times before I discovered it to be an invitation to race goers to ride to the course for a fee of sixpence.

The girls from the ‘cake chambers’ took time off from their work with ‘the Spanish’ (a term arising from the import of liquorice extract from Spain) to line the streets, each with a basket of tins of Pomfret Cakes with which to tempt the visitors to the town.

Near the Buttercross a race tipster (probably dressed in jockey’s silks) would try to sell his recommendations. An escapologist would invite a bystander to pinion him with chains from which, with severe struggles, he would eventually escape, to go round with his hat before the crowd dispersed. Or a performer with a bottle of paraffin would blow a fiery jet skywards before he likewise passed round with outstretched hat.

The Town Crier, who functioned also as Mace Bearer and Town Hall Keeper, was a fairly frequent feature of the streets. In his official black cloak with broad yellow braid, a black and yellow tricorn on his head, he would pause at suitable points, sound his bell vigorously, and announce that the park lake would be open for skating that afternoon, or the contents of such and such a house would be sold by auction at noon that day, or a concert would be held, and so on.

Less formal entertainment was supplied occasionally by an itinerant German band, probably no more than five or six strong, but usually acceptably melodious. Sometimes a one-man band would appear, a drum on his back (with a string to his knee), cymbals between his shoulders (one fixed and the other attached to one elbow), a mouth organ fixed from his chest to rigidity in front of his mouth, and possibly even a violin.

A Russian with a bear which he led on a chain, would have the creature dancing with a short pole which the man carried for the purpose, the performance concluding with each taking a pull at a bottle of beer, and then the inevitable outstretched hat.

The years of which I write saw the height of the ‘tingalairy’ – a mechanical piano, hand-driven, mounted on wheels, and more often than not operated by a couple of Italians, plus, sometimes, a monkey wearing a little red fez and trained to walk or climb to the end of a long light lead and put a little tin cup before passers-by or people drawn to their house-doors or even to first-floor windows. (The true barrel-organ was a different thing altogether and had just about disappeared before my time). Sometimes the second man in the party (for two were required to push the heavy piano) would provide a rhythmical tattoo to a suitable tune, using a couple of pairs of spoons or maybe bones.

There was other music in the streets too. Errand boys went about whistling (many quite skilfully) and their elders (or at least some of them) sang in good harmony as they ambled home from the pubs.

One summer afternoon, early in the age of the charabanc, two of these vehicles drew up, one behind the other, opposite our house and facing the Town Hall. On the front seat of the leading vehicle, up stood one of the passengers, called to the rest (both lots), and conducted them through quite a little concert – all apparently spontaneous and certainly very pleasant. Some church choir outing no doubt, though we never learned for sure. There was somewhat similar but organised public singing at Christmas, when the parish church choir – between thirty and forty strong – toured the town and sang carols at the homes of leading members of the congregation. The Methodist singers went even better , for they mounted a piano (or was it a harmonium?) on a dray and visited their leaders’ homes during Christmas Eve.

All this seems to indicate the spirit which led to or accompanied the foundation of Pontefract Music Festival in 1903. This movement had widespread support, with numerous choirs and soloists attending from most of the towns and villages within reasonable reach – by train, horse, cycle or on foot. In the town itself, flags were flown and competitors with their badges or perhaps rosettes were prominent in the streets.

Much went on in the streets besides the foregoing. There were rag and bone collectors of course, but there were frequent appearances during the season of a man (a hunchback I think) on a light flat cart, with a barrel of herrings, calling "fresh herrings – two a penny". Like his fish, that man and those days have gone; so has the man bearing a basket with a white cloth covering oatcakes, muffins and pikelets (home made); so has the itinerant knife grinder who had a square wooden frame carrying his grindstone, to be driven by a treadle attached to a large diameter wheel which served the dual purpose of power transformer and transport, for the operator moved his plant from place to place by tipping it up and using it like a barrow with two of its feet as handles and its wheel to carry the weight.

Milk distribution was from a churn, which the small man carried and the bigger operator took round in an open-backed low-floored light cart. In each case, the liquid was ladled out in a tin measure with a handle hooked to hang on the inside of the main container. Incidentally, I once heard a farmer declare that he had ladled milk into every possible type of domestic container except one – whereupon his companion promptly added that he had even delivered it into one of ‘those’ when he had called on a wife who had no jug or basin available.

A wooden box and two wheels from old clothes mangles (the kind with a heavy iron frame and two wooden rollers pressed together by a compound leaf spring adjusted by a hand wheel above) sufficed to serve an old woman who hawked scouring stone, the soft local sandstone used to ‘whiten’ doorsteps and window sills. The last time I saw her, she was gathering her material from the cliff off Wakefield Road, opposite Banks Avenue, but she seemed to go out of circulation with the decline of ‘whitening’ in the early twenties.

Horses were for long the mainstay of transport, and although industrious gardeners (or boys acting for a small fee on their behalf) did much by brush, bucket and shovel to keep the streets clean, dust was a problem. In dry weather, therefore, the watering cart was a familiar sight, though whether it did much good is distinctly problematical.

Cleanliness of the streets was not much assisted by the practice of spreading used bark from the tannery in Tanshelf on the footpath adjacent to houses where an inmate lay ill, so that he should not be disturbed by passing footsteps, the sound of which was quite deadened by the tan.

The Tanshelf district by the way, was so named centuries before the tannery was set up, which had nothing to do with it.

Nor was public cleanliness much assisted by the removal of domestic refuse. Practically all the shops in the town had their owners or managers in dwellings above or behind them and each had its ash pit usually with an earth closet (often a two-seater) above it. From time to time the householder was notified to leave his yard door unfastened and some time during the night a gang of men would shovel out the contents – all of it – and barrow it into a heap in the street, to be shovelled thence into a horse-drawn tipper cart and wheeled away to be finally spread in some field outside the town. The area involved in the heaping was sprinkled with a disinfectant powder, but no-one could claim the system to have been very hygienic.

It could well have been the growth of this system as the town itself grew, which led to such pollution of the local underground water, that the Tanshelf waterworks had to be closed and a new well and pumps developed at Roall (seven miles east), and later others at Eggborough and Pollington in the same locality. It is worth noting that during Hitler’s war, when water supplies like other services were at risk from bombing, water from the Tanshelf well was found to be fit for use and emergency pumping apparatus was installed. By this time of course, the town had rid itself of ash pits and earth closets.

Incidentally, in the early days of the Roall works, a breakdown now and then led to the bringing back into use of the Elizabethan pump at the Butter Cross, which was served by a very ancient pipe through Ropergate and Wakefield Road from the stone ‘Waterhouse’ opposite St. Bernard Avenue, where headings gathered water from both sides of the Wakefield Road valley. The waterhouse disappeared in the thirties, and now a tap in the pump box supplies water from the town mains.

It is believed to have been about the 16th century that the liquorice plant was brought to this district, which was long thought (erroneously) to be the only place in the country where the plant could be grown, and the early years of the 20^th century found several firms active in the production of sweetmeats based on liquorice.

Of the many firms engaged in this trade, only Dunhills and Wilkinsons now survive, each in alliance with a big group. Robinson and Wordsworth (in Wordsworth’s Yard) did well and moved to new premises in Ferrybridge Road not long before their demise. Ewbanks (in Friarwood) and Hillabys (in Back Street) each developed considerable outputs, but each became a part of one of the sweetmeat giants, and their Pontefract works were closed. Henry Gundill (in Southgate) early gave up the business, and Addingley near Baghill likewise retired; but it was fire which put an end to some others.

One, at the bottom of Horsefair, went up very early in my life, and one at the top of Northgate not much later, followed by the destruction of one of the buildings of Ewbanks, a firm which lost part of its premises through German incendiaries many years later. Hillaby’s works however, probably made the biggest blaze, with a dozen windows on each of three or four stories all spouting flames simultaneously – and scorching the doors on the opposite side of the street.

I had a rather closer association with the fire brigade that fell to most civilians, for father was chairman of the town’s Baths and Fire Brigade Committee, though it was not through this that I went to see so many blazes, either as spectator, reporter or photographer. Farm fires were fairly frequent. One of the earliest I remember was at Parkside Farm, which was struck by lightening, and the accompanying rainstorm was so sharply bounded that although the road near the farm was almost flooded, a score or so yards nearer the town, the road was quite dry.

Other big blazes I remember were of a picture framer in Rochford Court, Corn Market, buildings at the C.W.S. South Baileygate (where I relieved a fireman while he went for his supper) and a malthouse in Northgate.

But my earliest association with fire appliances was in very early boyhood, when some testing or a demonstration took place of the then newly-delivered Merryweather steam fire engine. This had been connected to the mains near the Assembly Room front, and hoses laid to jets down Horsefair. Faster and faster was the engine pushed, and higher and higher went the jets-but the strain became too much for the hoses, one near the engine burst, and I had to dash home across the road for a complete change of clothing.

This engine, it may well be remembered, lived in the centre space under the Town Hall, accompanied by a hose dray and a handcart, the latter for use in the town centre where mains pressure was adequate for any but high buildings or big blazes. This handcart I have helped to push, and can confirm that it was a good load for three or four men. The alarm would be brought to the fire station by a runner or a horseman (or, in later times, a cyclist) who broke a glass in the engine-house door, extracted a key, ran to the church, unlocked the belfry entrance, and there sounded two bells, the ropes of which had been left hanging there – provided the ringers had made the appropriate change when their duties had finished on the previous Sunday evening. This discordant clanging usually brought out the firemen, either from home or from their work, and also horse-keepers who swiftly took the animals from their normal duties and raced to the Town Hall, where the first suitable arrivals were hitched to the engine and the next to the hose dray. Meanwhile, the firemen would have lit the ready-laid fire under the boiler, and usually there was plenty of smoke from the chimney as the engine left for the blaze, where it would arrive with steam up ready for action.

Later, when the possibilities of the telephone system became better appreciated and trusted, a caller would telephone, and as father’s position was widely known, the exchange operator could think of nothing better than to telephone the alarm to him. As he was not always available, one of our shop girls would accept the message, run down the yard to the printing works and pass it to me. So it came about that many a time it fell to me to break the glass over the switch, for the siren, which had by this time been installed, set it howling, and open the engine-house doors.

Considerably before this period, the old steamer had been condemned, on the grounds that its boiler was unsafe, and it was too old-fashioned to be worth rejuvenating, so a motor-driven appliance took its place. I well remember riding on this on one of its first calls, which was to a Knottingley glassworks. The bad state of the road as a result of neglect during the Kaiser’s war had not by then been remedied, and from where I sat amidships (in the open, of course) I could see the front axle and the near side spring. Presently I noticed that one of the bolts holding these parts together had broken, and there was at least one uneasy passenger on this vehicle as it thundered along with its solid rubber tyres bouncing in and out of the potholes.

About this period, some members of the Corporation began to feel that out of town fires should be the responsibility of the local authority in which they occurred, and it was therefore decreed that Pontefract Brigade should restrict its services to the borough only. This decision had curious consequences, and one incident gave rise to the following verses from my brother Gurnie which appeared in the Leeds Mercury, as follows:

THE BACK-FIRE BRIGADE

‘Twas midnight in old Pomfret,
The town was quiet and still,
When rest was rudely shattered
By a hooter loud and shrill.
The sound was one of warning
To firemen bold and brave,
Who soon turned out their engine
Life and goods to save.

But when they reached the outbreak
Their zeal received a check
The burning motor lorry
Was just across the beck!
The beck that marked the boundary
‘Twixt Pontefract and Ack-.
Worth – so the gallant firemen
Were forced to hie them back!

With heavy hearts they did so,
‘Twas such a lovely blaze.
In fact, with skilled attention
It might have burned for days.
But recently the Council
Had issued this decree:
If a fire is not in Pomfret
You’ll have to let it be.

The Council may have reason
For their proclamation,
But others may well smile at
Such a situation
Firemen having found a fire
Should then their life’s work spurn
Go straight back to their station
And let the darn thing burn.

Pontefract had other entertainment besides fires and fairs. For some years, a private enterprise leased the castle for a bank holiday gala. The normal admission charge (was it 2d or 3d, half price for rate payers?) was increased for these occasions, though even so it was not very much, and if the weather was favourable there would be a great crowd to enjoy acrobats, clowns, jugglers and similar music-hall turns, and of course, to ramble round the ruins, including the magazine under the lawn, and the stairways through the round tower, for at that time nothing was kept locked and inaccessible.

Frequently the big thrill of the afternoon was a balloon ascent and parachute descent, and one of these I remember very clearly. The balloon was the usual hot-air type, and for it a stumpy little chimney, possibly a yard wide and two yards high, was built in brick on the lawn, not far from the Porter’s Lodge, with a deep trench (reached by three or four steps) below it for the fire. In due course the empty balloon was hoisted above the chimney by ropes between two poles, and the ring at the end of the net enclosing the balloon secured to pegs in the ground, round the chimney. To this ring the parachute was attached and laid out on the grass.

When all was ready the parachutist donned harness attached to the parachute and the fire was lit. On the call being made, two or three dozen eager boy volunteers came forward and held open the neck of the balloon. As it filled with hot air it began to lift and the boys paid out folds of the balloon from the slack laid out on the ground near the chimney. In due course the poles and ropes overhead became unnecessary and were taken away, and the filling continued with the boys paying out the slack until the balloon was held down by only the thin rope threaded through the ring and the tops of pegs in the ground.

During this, with the balloon only half inflated, all should have waited for the completion, when the parachutist would have given the word to cut the thin restraining rope. However, a sudden gust of wind pushed the balloon over to one side, and the sight of this huge object apparently falling on them put panic into the boys on that side, and they ran smartly away. This one-sided strain broke a number of the lines on the main ring, and when the gust passed and the balloon regained its upright position, it put the balloonist’s assistant in a dilemma; cut the remainder and let the parachutist go up with barely half his complement of support lines, or douse the fire and defer the attempt? His instant decision was – CUT! – and away went the part-filled balloon with the man swinging below, looking down anxiously as another gust carried him perilously low over the Porter’s Lodge. However, all ended well and he came down safely in a field somewhere towards Featherstone.

‘Dancing on a boarded floor on the lawn’ was another popular feature of these galas. For this, a band in the rustic bandstand facing the lawn, having played mixed music in the afternoon, settled down to a succession of waltzes and the like. Then, when dusk had lapsed into darkness, came the climax of the day – a grand firework display with a variety of single items, two or three small set-pieces (on frameworks set up against the trees on the far side of the lawn from the terrace) and, finally, a fiery portrait of the King, with the National Anthem from the band leading to a general exodus. Great days, those were!

Another outstanding occasion would be a circus visit. The mere arrival of this was an excitement. Even the presence of men of colour was a novelty, whilst it was an ‘act’ in itself to watch teams of four of them with sledge-hammers swiftly driving in stake after stake with which to stay the ‘big top’.

Frank H. W. Holmes 1971.

<PAGE ONE

RECOLLECTIONS of PONTEFRACT

PART TWO by FRANK H. W. HOLMES

PART TWO

by FRANK H. W. HOLMES