Winter

[eric]

According to the newspapers, this last month has made it the coldest winter for 120 years! and here we are with our central heating, storage heaters, electric and gas cookers, instant hot water, Duvets, thermal underwear etc. Imagine what it must have been like 120 years ago for the working man in Victorian Keighley. Probably no running water, the communal tap would soon have been frozen, the lav at the end of the street or wherever would have been frozen, Anyone lucky enough to have a fire would have been in one room, (I wonder if they all slept in that room when it was very cold?) The damp houses would have ice on the inside walls, clothes would be padded out with old newspapers, shoes would be lined with cardboard or whatever they could find to plug the holes. It's scary just to imagine what it would have been like, I wonder how many people died from hypothermia? Would that have been given as a cause of death? I wonder if anyone reading this had ancestors who died from what could be termed as "Winter Ailments" attributed to severe cold?

[melanie lisa]

Hello Eric, As a child in the 60s I remember getting up on a cold winter morn and shivering as I stood on cold linoleum! Now because of our electrical comforts I shiver when I get out of the shower and that's with the heating on............I would never have coped in back in those days!

[Admin]

Hi Melanie & Eric

I was a child of the 50's....we were lucky enough to have a car so Dad had two sump heaters (used to keep the oil thin I believe) one was placed under the car the other was put in the outside loo (also home to my white mouse) I hates going....naturally we had guzunders for during the night.
In the morning the windows would be frosty up from top to bottom and I would scratch pictures in the frost.....
As you say.....how did cope........?
Jan

[Andy Wade]

I never knew outside toilets because I was only three when we had to move out of the back to back house in Halifax because the whole row was condemned, luckily my parents managed to scrape enough money together for a deposit to buy the boss's house as he was moving up market. He saw something in my Father and after a year he was promoted to chargehand and eventually became shop floor manager of a metal fabrication works. (Many years later he started his own business with another lad, an old school friend who had served his apprenticeship alongside Dad as a sheet metal worker).
Our house was a pretty posh semi detached with two coal fires and a back boiler, no heating anywhere else and I remember my dad coming home with a strange metal box which he'd made up at work. It had three black light electric bars in the bottom and wooden rails at the top for hanging towels inside and a mesh screen to stop the towels falling on to the bars below and a metal lid on top. This stood on the landing. We shivered on the cold bathroom lino but the towels felt wonderfully warm. We always got dressed in the bathroom before venturing out on to the landing and into bed which had hot water bottles in.
I remember Jack Frost had drawn wonderful patterns on the inside of the bedroom windows every morning and we used to scratch our names in the frost. The milk must have been delivered very early in the morning because it was regularly frozen and poking out of the top of the bottle with the foil cap perched on top (I remember cardboard caps too, but not when they changed to foil).
When not frozen, the foil tops almost always had holes pecked in them by the blue tits and I remember watching them do this one morning. The birds never do this now and I wonder if it was a learned behaviour that has been lost because they never do this to our milk in Oakworth and never did when we lived at Pickles Hill, which is a bit more out in the sticks than Oakworth. I wonder if they still do it in Halifax? Maybe it's a consequence of the rise of the supermarkets and larger plastic milk containers that never get delivered by any milkman?

Talking of milk and supermarkets...
ASDA was originally ASsociated DAiries and the name was formed from the first two letters in each word. I remember the old Associated Dairies symbol being identical to ASDA's (but a different colour). The supermarket formed in 1965. I would have been 7 years old then.

[malcolm]

Wot? - u never had 'tippler' toilets, using the best quality "Keighley News" instead of the latest "Izal" - either would get damp and that caused its own problems.

No worry about 'global warning' then, more 'global freezing'.

You could also push it(the tippler part) with the clothes prop if it froze & got stuck!!! - no call to Dynarod then.

Oh happy days. - you know -we never had it so good!
m

[Andy Wade]

Don't get me started on Izal toilet paper. Oh, the paper cuts you could get from that...

[harrier]

If you lived in Hainworth Lane Ingrow, to get to the toilet, you had to walk up the lane, down the snicket into Ebaneezar Square and round the corner! If the toilet tippled while you were sat there it used to scare the living daylights out of you, if you were a kid. For those that don't know, a tipple toilet flushed when the water in a tank somewhere, filled just enough to cause the centre of gravity to alter, the tank tippling over and releasing the quantity of water. Daily Mirror was the toilet peper of choice.

[holycroftschool19]

We had a fire range in our house. That kept the sitting room warm. My dad used to hang a pariffin lamp in the outside toilet to stop the cistern frezzing in frosty weather.

[malcolm]

By gum, were you posh!!! - Cistern ehh!.

A York range - to be 'blackleaded' regularly, cat loved it.

but it wasn't the only creature to enjoy the range....... blackclocks!!!!!!! - Cockroaches - that disappeared when you jumped on the flagstones...

And a boiler that fastened to a tap on the gas stove - it was lit and boiled the water for washday or 'bath night' in the tin bath' - Not good in winter!!!!

[barcrofter]

Here is a new one, our mother used to keep our pyjamas in the range side oven to keep warm, no bathroom until I was about 6.

[eric]

Hee Hee! We were lucky, when we lived at 98 Malsis rd in the early 60's and when we moved up to Oldfield in 64, we had a coke fired Aga! it was grand on a cold winters morning! The house on Malsis Rd had radiators back in the late 50's, fed from a boiler under the garage but I can't remember it actually working. but we were tough in those days! (and it helped if you had the ability to get dressed in bed!)
As for the milk and the blue tits, there are nowhere near as many blue tits around these days, there habitats of holes in walls have been destroyed by cavity insulation, modern cement etc, plus the dramatic increase of corvids (Crows, Rooks, Ravens Magpies) which raid the nests and eat the young.

[barcroftlad]

This is getting like the four Yorkshiremen by Monty Python! Good though.Things were a bit grim on't Barcroft when we were nobbut lads eh Barcrofter? We had to go across the street to the row of toilets and in the summer we had to try to avoid the nettles which grew over the path. You just had to go a few steps over 't cobbles! Cheers.