I Remember, I Remember...Number 5, Brades Row -- by Susan Price

A washing dolly

My mother hated me saying that I was born in a slum, but I was.

 

Brades Row was a terrace of houses at right angles to the surfaced road into Oldbury. The front doors opened directly onto ‘the track’ which was exactly that — an unpaved dirt track leading down from the rough fields of scrub and hawthorn to the road. On the other side of the track stood a row of ‘brew-houses’ or ‘wash-houses’: the names were interchangeable. (‘Wash’ was pronounced with a hard ‘a’, as at the beginning of ‘acorn.’) The wash-houses were of damp, blackened brick. They contained a large stone sink, a pump, and a boiler with a fire-place underneath. This was for heating water for the laundry.

It took all night for the boiler to heat the water. Some of the hot water was poured into a tub, which was where the clothes washing was actually done, the clothes being pounded in the hot, soapy water with ‘a dolly’ (see right.) The short legs went into the water and the person doing the laundry (almost always a woman) held the cross-bar at the top and thumped the legs up and down. It was hard physical work -- as was fetching buckets after bucket of water from the pump and emptying it into the boiler in the first place.

 

(There was a memorable incident where my father, looking for somewhere to keep the frog-spawn and tadpoles he'd collected from the brook, put them into the boiler his mother had laboriously filled. Late that night his mother unknowingly added her boil wash to the frog-spawn, lit a fire under the boiler and left it to its long, slow job of bringing the water to a boil. Next day, she mashed her wash about with a long wooden tongs -- and found it to be coated in boiled frog-spawn. She was not at all happy and, shortly after, neither was my father.)

But, back to the wash-house. I seem to remember there was a mangle too, for squeezing water from the clothes. My grandmother washed clothes in this wash-house, and so did my mother. The wet clothes were hung on a line in the garden to dry or, if it was raining, hung around the house where they dripped on people and made them miserable. They could take days to dry. Everybody hated 'washing-day.' There were music-hall songs written about how much they hated it. Washing-day meant a poor dinner because too much time and energy had been spent on laundry and it usually meant an exhausted, snappy wife or mother. Days of drying washing in a small house heated only by a coal fire meant, as my father told me, being often startled by the cold slap of a wet sheet round the back of the neck.

 

Beyond the wash-houses was a stream, the Brades brook (where the frog-spawn came from.) It ran under the road and emptied into the canal behind the Brades Tool factory. (The gate of ‘the Brades’ with its huge clock was opposite the end of Brades Row.)

The above illustration shows the Brades Steel Works, which was established by 1796 and exported tools all over the world. Draw an imaginary line up from the 'W' of 'Works and you come to the main gate, with its clock tower. Brades Row was later built directly opposite that main gate at right angles to the road.
  Behind the factory you can just see the canal which brought raw materials to the Brades and took away finished tools. My mother lived in fear of me toddling past the Brades to fall in the canal and drown. It looks a long way to toddle, to me.
  The Brades Steel Works has long since gone. And Brades Row, where I was born, is an elusive place. In this drawing, it hasn't yet been built and I can't find a later photograph that shows it. My father was born in Hallam Hospital but brought home to 5 Brades Row in 1928 and they were old, slum houses then. Soon after my family left, in 1959, the 'Row' was demolished.
  This link takes you to a site with information about The Brades (which was named after Saint Brade, the saint of Sandwell Abbey.)

The Brades brook had flooded the track and houses on more than one occasion. Some people in the row tried to keep the banks of the stream built up, to prevent this. There were water voles living in this stream in the middle of the industrial Black Country. Dragon flies too and sticklebacks. My father used to watch them all. His interest in 'natural history' was life-long.

Behind the row of houses were long strips of garden and beyond the garden wall there were wild, scrubby fields where sometimes cows and horses roamed. There was also a pig-sty.

Inside the houses… What can I remember? The floor of the kitchen was of bare stone flags because I remember playing with a wind-up toy on them: a spanish dancer who whirled in circles until she met the edge of an uneven flag and then she stopped and buzzed, or fell over.

 There was an old-fashioned kitchen range instead of a fireplace: the fire was built in the range. But I think there was also a gas-stove in one corner.
            There was no running water in the house but I believe there was a large stone kitchen sink. Water had to be fetched in heavy buckets from the wash-house across the track. They were special enamelled buckets, with lids.

 

There was no electricity in the house. It was lit by gas-lamps. My grandparents had lived there before my parents, renting it from ‘Shanksy’ who owned the whole terrace and came himself to collect the rent. (Was I really told that he came on horseback?) Since my grandparents were good tenants, he gave them the chance to rent a large flat in another building he owned, a ‘coal-master’s’ mansion he had divided up. He was happy to accept my mother and father as the new tenants in 5, Brades Row.

I’m told that while my grandparents lived there, my grandmother refused to enter the house first if they returned to it after dark. This was because, when the lamps were lit, there was a rush of cockroaches across the floor and down the walls, to their hiding places in cracks and crevices and she couldn’t stand their scuttling.

The houses were also alive with mice who came in from the fields. Intermingled with them were white and patched mice which had once been pets, but had escaped and gone feral. My grandfather had a long-running battle with one black and white mouse he called ‘Micky Duff.’

A random mouse impersonating Mickey Duff. The original photo is to be found here, on Wikimedia.

 Other mice regularly fell into the traps Grandad set but Mickey Duff, easily recognisable by his pied coat, evaded them all. One cold, snowy winter’s day, Grandad was sitting by the fire when he saw Mickey run along the skirting board and enter the oven by an air-vent. Grandad leapt up, blocked the vent with newspaper, and turned on the gas. Several minutes later, he turned off the gas and opened the oven door to reveal the still corpse of his enemy. With a cry of triumph, Grandad seized the body, took it to the door and threw it outside into the snow. And Mickey Duff revived and rushed back into the house between Grandad’s feet. “I give up,” Grandad said. “Mickey Duff has won. He can have the run of the house from now on.”

With no bathroom, you washed yourself at the kitchen sink. You could even boil a kettle for a wash in warm water if you were nesh. But many people just took a towel across the track to the wash-house and washed over there in the icy cold water from the pump, using a big green cake of laundry soap, which was also used for scrubbing floors and so was full of bits of grit. Since every house had its own wash-house, it was a little more private than washing in front of the kitchen window — but biting cold in winter. I can dimly remember — or think I can — being put in the wash-house’s big stone sink by my mother and bathed there. In summer, though.

And toilets? During the night you used a chamber pot —known as a ‘gozunder’ because it 'gozunder' the bed. During the day you went out of the door and walked up the track to a row of brick built lavatories near where the fields began. There were 21 houses in the row and 11 lavatories. (Twenty-one, not twenty-two because ours was number 5, in the middle of the row, and it was bigger than the others because it had once been where the landlord had lived. So it had a back door and a front door. The other houses had all been divided into two. Only those at the back had gardens.)

You walked up the track, past the houses, to the lavatories. They had doors made of wooden planks with a metal latch. So did the houses, but the gap at the bottom of the house doors was smaller. There’s a Black Country expression: ‘He had a loff like a gleed under a doo-er.’  Loff — ‘laugh.’ A gleed is a small, hard ember of burned out coal from the fire.

Imagine a small coal from the fire, kicked about the floor until it lodges in the gap at the bottom of a planking door. The door is opened, dragging the gleed across stone-flags. The resulting, teeth-gritting sound is what the laugh was like.

So, no indoor plumbing. No electricity. Planking doors opening directly onto a dirt track. Small, cramped, damp rooms. Mice and cockroaches. I think that qualifies as a slum, Mum.

Sometime in the 1990s, a Tory voting friend of mine demanded to know why ‘I insisted on being so left-wing?' I mentioned my youngest brother being born prematurely and spending his first fortnight in the Queen Liz, Harborne, thanks to the NHS and then went on to describe the house I was born in.

 “What?” cried my Tory friend, rearing back. “You expect me to believe that you were born in a house like that? In 1955? Ridiculous!”

I laughed, then looked at her in disbelief as I realised that she wasn’t joking. She really believed that I was putting on the poor mouth, that there had been no one living in houses like that in Britain in 1955.

The ignorance of Tories never fails to amaze me. It's what allows them to vote Tory.

 

She probably believes there's no one living in poverty now, and that people only use food banks because it's fashionable.

Yes, I told her. I was born in a house like that. I lived there until I was four, but most of my relatives went on living in ‘houses like that’ and worse, for many more years. (I often stayed with one aunt and shared a bed with a cousin. We were forbidden to go near the window in the bedroom because both the floor and the ceiling above were unsafe. And if anyone wants to know why they didn't 'do something about it themselves,' it was because they didn't earn enough money to do anything about it. Everything that came in went straight out again on rent, food and clothes. That's why they were renting the damned house in the first place, instead of somewhere better.)

Just before the birth of the older of my brothers in 1960, the Labour Council found my family a council house to rent, a house which had electric light, taps that produced clean water inside the house, in the very kitchen and, upstairs, a bathroom with flushing lav. There was another lav outside and we didn’t have to share either of them with any other family (though we did share them with our own family, who sometimes came by for a bath.)

 
 Our council house had a garden too, front and back, and steps down to a pavement. With drainage. The rent was only twice what it had been for the slum and although my mother wondered how she was to make the money stretch, she couldn’t believe her luck. These council houses — good, solid houses which are still going strong after all these years -- were part of the huge socialist programme started by the 1948 Labour government, which also started the NHS. By the time we got that council house, the Tories had been voted in again, but strong Labour councils everywhere were continuing the work of improving life for people who had been too feckless to arrange wealthy parents for themselves.

 

I insist on being left-wing on these grounds alone. Contrary to the belief that people turn Tory as they grow older, I am still a socialist and every day I have to see Johnson lying as he sells this country off to his cronies reinforces my socialism. If, like an elderly friend, I live to be 104 I shall still, like her, be a socialist.