Henry's Tour of Littleborough in 1986 (Part 1)

The last post of 2023 promised more about Hileys of more recent generations. 

One of the features this year will be some excerpts from the memoirs of Henry Hiley (1919-2007), starting with his earliest recollections of his childhood in Littleborough.

The first series of posts will be a description of a tour of Littleborough which Henry undertook in the summer of 1986. He wanted to revisit some of his childhood haunts and show me the places where he spent his time and played as a boy. He is looking back at Littleborough after a period of about 60 years.

The photographs shown were all taken on that trip. Henry's descriptions are shown in italics.

72 Victoria Street, Littleborough

I was born in the ‘front’ bedroom, above the shop on 10th January 1919. The shop was also the bakehouse, the warmest room in the house after the old black gas stove was replaced by a magnificent coke fired, double-tiered oven.

I slept in the garret, the room with a skylight, reached by a wooden ladder from the ‘back’ bedroom. The ‘far back’ bedroom got its daylight through the window on the right. It was over the kitchen. We used to bathe on most Fridays in a tin bath in the cellar under the shop. 

The back door and living room

The front of the house was stone but the back was a poor brick. Here is the living room, where all the work was done, and all the daytime family activities. The back door led straight into the kitchen. All through the 1920s we had to go across the yard to the pail closets. We shared with the Hoyles next door. In the 1930s, water lavatories, one for each house, were built. This red brick is not the original.

The rent used to be 14/10d a fortnight, collected by the milkman, who worked for Tommy Clough, the landlord. To pay for the new lavatory our rent was put up to 15/10d a fortnight. (74p to 79p, just under 40p a week).

The back yard was an open space, common for all five houses in the row (Reheboth Place).

The garages

Business must have been good, so my father bought a 12 h.p. Morris Cowley tourer, with a bullnose radiator and a hood which folded back. That was in 1926. He started selling pies wholesale, and my brother, Sam, would take them out. 

The wooden garage, with an asbestos roof, stood until the mid 1980s but had been replaced in September 1986 by the garage on the right. The other two went up soon after ours.

Just visible above the grey painted garage is the window of the back bedroom where Edith and Mary usually slept. Agnes had the front back bedroom. The rooms are all unimaginably small. Brown Street is on the left.

Henry outside the old slaughterhouse

At the top of Victoria Street, opposite the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, was an open space where the street lads collected to play their games. A great attraction was the slaughterhouse where Milner Eastwood’s pigs were killed. We used to watch through a crack in the door as they were poleaxed, their throats cut, then scalded, scraped, eviscerated and hung. 

We were keenly aware of the relative skills of the slaughtermen, and were delighted to be given the pig’s bladder to blow up and use as a football. It used to last a game or two.