The Life of Henry Hiley Part 11 - Victoria Street neighbours

Today we return to the memoirs of Henry Hiley and an account of the family's neighbours on Victoria Street, Littleborough in the 1920s.

The Hoyles were a great family. We called Mr Hoyle Mr Pip Pip. He worked for the council. He must have gone to school. School for him would finish when he was twelve, twelve and a half, yet on a Sunday afternoon when there used to be Shakespearean plays on the wireless he would sit and listen to them. Jim Hoyle worked as a secretary in one of the local mills, only a tiny mill. He wasn’t old enough to be called up into the Army until 1916 so that he had 2 years in the Army during the first War from 1916 until the Armistice in 1918. He’d served in the Royal Corps of Signals.

There was Maggie, we always called her Maggie. Later she didn’t like that name. She wanted to be called Margaret. She was a grand lass and she was a schoolteacher and I do believe that when Mother was very very ill and realised that she was shortly going to die that she wanted Father to marry Maggie. It never came off. She went and married Roy Godber and we liked him as well. We were often next door with the Hoyles, 74 Victoria Street. We used to play plenty of card games – Rummy and Snap and Casino, beggar my neighbour, lots of them. We used to play Ludo at home, and then we played Snakes and Ladders of course. Jim, I remember, used to like his egg fried in butter but ever he came across a blood spot in the egg he wouldn’t touch it.

No 76 Victoria Street – that’s where the Dixons lived. There was Johnny Dixon, he was the postman, and he used to like to take our dog with him on his rounds. The dog was called Paddy, a little wire-haired fox terrier, that was the guardian of us children. In fact it was so loyal to us children that if it thought anybody was threatening, particularly me, it would bite. And in fact it had to go away. I remember it going to a place in Todmorden. The Dixons had Doris, she was not very bright, and Freda, she was a buxom wench. They might both have worked in the silk mill at the bottom of the street. I don’t know.

The Parkers, they were in no 78, they were a nice family. I can’t remember Mr Parker but I remember Mrs quite well. And then there was Fred Parker. He was a postman. There was Harry Parker. He worked in an office I think. There was Emily. She was a weaver and there was Sarah. She worked in the Co-op café. She used to bake tea-cakes and cakes and suchlike.

And then the bottom house of the 5 houses in the terrace, that’s where George Henry Howarth lived. He had something wrong with his arm. I don’t know what it was. We were quite friendly and often if they had plenty of people in the house George Henry would come up and borrow a form, a bench, which if there were plenty of customers waiting their turn in the shop they would sit on this bench. George Henry would borrow it and take it down to his house so that the people who came could be seated.

It used to happen in our family particularly, there was a routine to the week, a sort of set routine to life then. Often on a Sunday we would go to Walsden for dinner. Probably take a tramcar up to Summit and then perhaps walk along the canal bank until we got to Uncle Frank’s. We might even go on the railway train. That was an excitement going through Summit Tunnel.

There weren’t always enough seats for us all to sit to our dinner so one or other of us had to stand up to eat. I of course being the youngest always had to stand up. It didn’t seem to matter all that much.

(I remember now that Freda Dixon worked as a scivy, she was a housemaid of some sort with one of the big families, one of the millowners’ families, the Harveys.) 

The photo below is of Victoria Street in 1970. The end house no. 72 (no longer a pie shop!) is where Henry and his family lived. Then, moving down the street, the inhabitants of the houses in the early 1920s were: no. 74 (the Hoyles), no. 76 (the Dixons), no. 78 (the Parkers) and no. 80 (the Howarths), all mentioned above.

The next photo was taken on 2nd September 1945. It shows, from the left) Harold Hiley (Henry's father), Roy Godber, Mary Hiley, ?, Edith Hiley, Agnes Hiley, Margaret Godber, Alec Fletcher.

Margaret (Hoyle) lived next door at no. 74 and married Roy Godber. Mary, Edith and Agnes were Henry's sisters. Alec was a friend.