The life of Henry Hiley Part 6 - Henry's Grandparents' house in Walsden

In this post Henry talks about his grandparents' house in Walsden.

Sunny View, that's where the grandparents lived, they had an interesting house. Grandad had bought a property about 1923. The deeds - I'm sorry that we don't have a copy of the deeds – but they went back to the year of Trafalgar, 1805, and in 1805 there had been built into the hillside at Walsden this block of nine rooms, three by three. They just went back the depth of one room into the hillside. The shop had five of the rooms on the low road. There was the bakehouse built into the hillside. In the middle was the living room, very tiny, and then there was the shop. Above that two bedrooms belonging to that complex, over the bakehouse and the shop. They were still into the hillside – there was no way out at the back, quite solid, and then on the room over the shop, that was free-standing. That came out on to a steep back lane and that was the Grandparents' living room and above it they had the bedroom. Theirs was a two-room dwelling. That left two rooms still on the top floor and they were single room dwellings.

Henry's plan of the property:

The property in Walsden 
(155, 157 & 159 Hollins Road)

The first person I remember living in one of those was Aunt Clara, that was Father's Aunt Clara, and later Grandad went to live in that particular one and later again Mary took the other one, the third on the way up. She lived there for a short time after she’d come out of the convent at Burghwallis.

Mary's apartment
(One room dwelling no. 3 on Henry's map)

The property had been bought by Grandfather round about 1923/4. When he died it was left to his three children, that was Uncle Frank, Father and Aunt Annie. Eventually it came to belong to Father. It was let out. The shop was rented by Bert Hird. He was the uncle of Thora Hird, the actress. He had the five rooms. When Grandad died then of course no member of the family lived in any of the apartments but my father did eventually go back there and lived in the first, going up the hill, of the one-room dwellings. Mark you, my grandfather had moved up there before then, and he lived the rest of his life there after Grandmother died except for a day or two at the very very end when he went to Burnley and died at Aunt Annie's.

Sunny View on Top o' th' Hill Road
(The Grandparents' house)

My father would go there, into the property, after he gave up Glaisby Cottage and Barbara and I took over the tenancy of it. When Father was very ill he came to live with us in Windermere. Agnes took over the ownership of the whole property. She lived in the shop and worked the shop. She didn't do any baking. She just had John Kenneth with her and managed to make both ends meet by looking after the shop. All in good time she took in Mary. Mary lived in the top floor in the last of the one-room dwellings. I think that was it. Eventually Agnes sold the whole property and we, as a family, had no further financial interest in the complex.

I can't remember that any of those houses of Grandfather's had a water supply actually to the house. There would be a supply, a cold water tap, to Bert Hird for his baking and for the shop, but unusually at that time and in that part of Lancashire, or the West Riding of Yorkshire, (we were very close to the boundary between those two counties) in working class homes, Grandfather had a water lavatory. There was a little washhouse outside, very close of course, where there was a cold water tap and where Grandmother used to do her washing, and alongside it was a water lavatory and directly below it was a water lavatory for Bert Hird and his family, for the shopkeepers.

The property's flag roof seen from Top o' th' Hill Road
(Henry mentions this above)