The life of Henry Hiley Part 5 - Henry's Aunts and Uncles

Henry's father Harold had an older brother Frank and an older sister Annie. Another sister Agnes had died in infancy. Annie married Herbert Jackson and Frank married Martha Hannah Greenwood.

In this post Henry talks about visits as a young boy to his Aunt Annie and Uncle Frank.

Henry's mother Ethel died two months after Henry's 4th birthday.

Now of those four years I hadn't spent all four years at 72 Victoria Street, Littleborough. I take it that when mother was ill I was sent off for a few months, well I don't know for how long, to Burnley to my Aunt Annie and Uncle Herbert. Uncle Herbert was a parkkeeper at Ightenhill Park in Burnley. Annie was Father's older sister, Sarah had started nursing, Annie was still at school, at Burnley Grammar School, Willie - I don't know exactly what he was doing. I know I liked the house. I remember particularly there was a little pigsty quite close and I used to like to go and have a look at the pigs over the pigsty door and I used to love to see them crunching coke. I heard afterwards that for them to crunch coke, that was good for their stomach, almost like people with bad stomachs taking a charcoal pill nowadays.

This photo was taken on the occasion of Willis Jackson's wedding in Cheshire in 1938. From L: (Uncle) Herbert Jackson, Samuel Hiley (Henry's grandfather), Sarah Jackson, Ron Atkinson (who married Annie, Sarah's sister, (Aunt) Annie Jackson (nee Hiley)

Willis Jackson, Henry's cousin, receiving his DSc in Manchester

Whilst I was sent off to Burnley, Mary was sent to Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha Hannah. We all loved their house. It was called Bank Cottage. We always called it The Bonk and there was a big garden going down to the Rochdale Canal. Uncle Frank – I can't remember him growing vegetables, perhaps he might have grown a few peas, but he certainly grew flowers and people came from far away, well, from Walsden, to buy flowers from him. He kept hens as well. He had a greenhouse. He grew tomatoes in the greenhouse and always had one or two plants that produced yellow tomatoes. Those were a speciality. And the chickens – he used to hatch the eggs in his own incubator, then we children used to love to see the baby chicks pecking their way out of the shell looking pretty wet and sticky and bedraggled when they did get loose from the shell but quickly drying off under the lamp of the incubator and showing their fluffy, fluffy feathers.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha Hannah. Grace Annie (Henry's stepmother) is in the back

Bankwood Cottage, Walsden