Did no one suggest that?

’No, I never thought of it. I never thought of it. I’ve never though about it till a few years ago. I said, “If he’d have did that it would have changed everything.” He wouldn’t have had to travel to Easington Lane, changing buses. Sometimes he had a car used to bring him back, not very often.’

Didn’t he learn to drive?

‘Why nor! Drive! He couldn’t knock a nail in! How the hell he worked down the pit I don’t know. He was a stoneman, I think.’

So he’ll have worked with Matt Longstaff [my mother’s father]?

’Why, he was an Overman him, old Matt.’

So he would have worked through the General Strike?

’He would be working, he’s be getting paid.’

But they didn’t get on?

’No, why one’s a Catholic and one wasn’t. My father didn’t like anyone who wasn’t a Catholic and Matt didn’t like any bugger that was a Catholic--and that’s the way it was. “There’s only one good Catholic and that’s a dead bugger!” That’s the way he used to talk.’

Theodore Cottage

When did the family move from School Square to Theodore Cottage?

’Just after I went into the Army. I went into the Army from there, 43 School Square. Why, they were supposed to be Overmens’ and Deputies’ houses them. There was five I think. We lived in the top, 43, then there was Little’s, Thompson’s, another bloke’s and then Nettie Armstrong lived next door to the Police Station. Theodore Cottage? Originally it was one big house. There was the shop, like a baker’s shop.’

Did that become the chip shop?

‘Umm. Down below, there used to be old Hedley, he was a baker. There was like a flight of stairs down the back. But when it was a baker’s there was lovely smells used to come out of there.’

But it was a doctor’s house originally?

’Aye. They could have bought the lot for about 1,100 quid just after the war. But it would have had to come down, man, it was that old. It was strong enough, it had thick walls and all that. Upstairs in the loft, the bloody flies that used to come over! Were you never upstairs? You could open the loft and walk about. They could have made flats upstairs. There was dormer windows in the roof, the light used to come in. There was lights, you could switch the lights on when you went up.’

Who owned it?

’A bloke called Longstaff, he used to have a grocer’s shop just down below the Post Office. And Mrs Kirk who used to have the fruit shop next door up from the Post Office, I think it was

her brother, but I’m not sure. But she used to get the rent, that’s where my mother went to pay the rent, down there. Because he moved away. I think he tried to sell it a few times.’

NEXT: The Black Market and the Americans

Matt Longstaff, who was First Shift Overman at Thornley and Ludworth Collieries for many years. Born in 1876 in Hart Village, he worked as a miner from the age of 10 through to the end of World War Two and beyond. He died in 1954. This photograph would most likely have been taken at the turn of the century. When my mother was born in 1928, he and his second wife Violet (his first wife Hannah Longstaff, nee Gair, died in 1913) were living at 20 Park Street, Thornley. In 1938, they moved to 41 School Square and thus became near-neighbours of the Tunney family at Number 43, who had moved there from High Street several years earlier.