From Christine Bate’s document titled William Porter.doc
This is the story of William Henry Porter
Childhood, early work history, World War I service, railway experiences, enjoyment of music, radio
William Henry Porter, my father, was born in August 1900 and thus he was born during the reign of Queen Victoria who died in 1901. We always observed Father’s birthday on August 31st although his birth certificate said August 30th. His mother said she “knew when he was born”. His mother called him Willy, Mother called him Will, and he was called Bill at work. I don’t know much about his childhood. He attended the village school in Dalston and left at the current leaving age of 13. One schoolbook has survived; his drawing book with comments by the teacher. Father wrote in beautiful copperplate handwriting and had a wonderful signature that he used all his life. He had a habit of making practice movements with his pen before he began to write, and that too stayed with him.
Harry Porter, my grandfather, was the signal-man at Dalston. Station on the Maryport to Carlisle Line and the family lived in Station Cottages until he died in 1930. I don’t know when he began to work for the railway. John Green found that he had worked in the cotton industry before that, as had many of that part of the family.
After Father left school he was apprenticed at Buck’s in Carlisle. This company made men’s custom dress shirts and Father was apprenticed as a cutter. He talked mostly about what the boys got up to at their dinner break. Several times he told about going up onto the roof and dropping a parcel wrapped in brown paper onto the pavement below. He and his fellow apprentices then watched as passers by noticed the parcel and were undecided whether to pick it up and take it, often looking both ways before deciding.
Right at the end of World War I, Father was “called up” on his 18th birthday. The days of the volunteer army were long gone by then. Although the Armistice came just two months later, on November 11th 1918, he was in the army for some time and would have been there longer except for the fact that he was given an early release on medical grounds. Father had become friendly with a doctor and I suppose he had been given some sort of health-related assignment, and this doctor authorized Father’s discharge because he detected a heart murmur which both of them knew was benign. However, I think that he was really never easy about it, because he was such a hypochondriac and this may have been the beginning of his concerns.
A little digression. Now I think about it later, I have realized that Father must have been some kind of medical orderly while he was in the army, and thus was well enough acquainted with the doctor for him to help Father be demobbed (demobilized) sooner than he would have been. Father’s interest in medicine endured for the rest of his life. When he was employed by the LMS Railway, he became a “St. John’s Ambulance” man and was given one extra day of holiday in return for keeping up his qualifications through an annual examination and being available to give first-aid or help in any medical emergency on duty. He had a St. John’s badge with an added bar with the date on that was attached underneath it for every year of service. One time, he and Mr. Kendal, a neighbour down the road, were sent with a wheelbarrow to bring back the body of an Indian student who was staying with Dr. Sen, our doctor, and who committed suicide on the railway lines near Canklow Sheds. Father was a party-leader at the First Aid Post in the Miner’s Welfare Hall at Canklow during WWII. This meant that, as well as going to his job on the railway, he was on duty at the First Aid Post for assigned periods in his “spare” time and had to report for duty whenever the air raid siren sounded. Mother was therefore alone at home with us during the air raids. Father also drove a special train that went to the site of train crashes in the area. It consisted of a large crane on a flat bed goods wagon and several closed goods wagons. After one event, when he had been called out to a crash,he told me that, if ever I was in a train crash, I should lift up my feet above the level of the seat.
Father was friendly with Mother’s older brother, Joe, and that is how my parents met. Since Dalston and Cardewlees were small villages some distance outside Carlisle, any free time was spent around the villages. They went for lots of walks, often along the river. The village boys swam in the river Calder, but when Father was a boy he was not allowed to because some time ago a boy had drowned there.
After Father was discharged from the army, he came home to Dalston to find that,, in spite of assurances that his job at Buck’s would be there for him when he came back, it was not so. He did any work that he could find and, at one time, worked at unloading coal from goods wagons, called freight cars in the US. This was in the day of manual labour with shovels. This was a time of much unemployment and families used what influence they had to find work for their sons. Unlike Mother’s brothers, Father had little help. At one point he is said to have been given the opportunity to apply for a job as a policeman but was dissuaded by his mother: “Oh Willy don’t do that. A policeman is nobody’s friend.” Eventually, someone “put him forward” to work for the London Midland and Scottish Railway, or LMS, as a clerk in the offices in Carlisle. It may not have been called the LMS at that time because there was a time later when smaller railways amalgamated. In spite of Father’s beautiful copperplate handwriting, he did not like working in an office all day and so he applied successfully to become a cleaner as a first step towards working “on the footplate”.
When Father came home from work, wearing his uniform clothes, he first of all took off his peaked cap and his wool serge jacket and then his medium weight cotton serge jacket that he wore over his own waistcoat. The he took off his bib and brace overalls that he wore over his trousers. In winter he had a topcoat too and for rainy days a heavy oiled cloth raincoat. He washed in the kitchen at the sink and his work clothes hung behind the kitchen door. In the early years there was only a bath in the upstairs bathroom. Later, there was a painted chest with a plastic bowl on it. You drew the water from the bath taps, washed, and then threw the water into the bath to drain away. You cleaned your teeth leaning over the tap end of the bath. Father always washed at the kitchen sink and I well remember how he washed his face with his hands and then swept them around the back of his neck. The miners, who got really dirty, often bathed in a galvanized bathtub in front of the fire. Their clothes were often sopping wet when they came home because they had been working the coal-face in water.
After washing, Father put on a collar and tie (collars were detachable in those days. They were secured at the front and the back with collar studs, hence the cry, “Where’s my collar stud?) He then put on his at-home jacket and sat in his chair until his meal was ready or read. Since he worked such odd hours to fit in with the schedules for the goods trains, he often had meals at odd times. When he was “on nights”, Mother used to take a big mug of tea and something to eat upstairs to him while he was in bed. It was a big mug with the Greek key pattern around the top and pink rosebuds on the body of the mug. In the daytime, he usually sat in his chair to the right of the fireplace to read the paper or listen to the radio. He smoked for much of his life: a habit he acquired in the army but he never had much money for cigarettes and anyway Mother disapproved. Money spent on cigarettes was not available for other needs. Father smoked Park Drive or, when in dire need, Woodbines, a working man’s cheap brand. Mr. Foster next door smoked Kensitas cigarettes and Sheila and I loved it when we were given the embroidered flowers on pieces of fine cotton lawn or the “Henry” cartoon cigarette cards that came in those cigarettes. The Fosters had no children. At times, Father made his own cigarettes, rolling them in a little machine with wooden rollers and a wide band of rubber that held the carefully positioned strip of tobacco. Then the rollers were closed together by pushing on a lever at the side and a Rizla cigarette paper was inserted in the small gap between the rollers, rolled in carefully and, just as the last part of the paper was about to disappear, it was licked and rolled in.
Father enjoyed music, an interest that Mother didn’t share with him. Mother had piano lessons as a child and on very infrequent occasions could be persuaded to play “The
Camp of the Gypsies” by Franz Behr, but she clearly did not have real talent in this area. Father had played the organ at the chapel they attended in Dalston and was given a clock with an engraved plaque when he left. Chapel meant a non-conformist place of worship other than Roman Catholic. In other words, not the Church of England. Many chapels were Methodist but I don’t know what the one in Dalston was. Father continued to be interested in music, played the piano quite well and belonged to a choral society in Bradford that one time sang Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Hiawatha”. I well remember the score that he still had. His favorite to play was “You Shall Hear How Paupukeewis and the handsome Yenadizzi Danced at Hiawatha’s Wedding.” My favourite was “On Away Awake Beloved”, and I am still moved when I hear my CD of Webster Booth singing it. His favourite time to play the piano was late on Sunday morning when Sunday dinner was nearly ready and I can clearly recall Mother’s irritation when she called him to the table and he finished the piece he was playing before coming to the most important meal of the week.
Mother’s irritation had some basis. She told about how before Sheila was born, she went up to Cumberland to visit and when she returned home, she found that Father had bought a new piano on the “never never”, a Yorkshire expression for an installment plan. Each week, Father had to go up to Sheffield, a not inconsiderable journey, to pay the next installment. They were very poor at the time. I remember the shop, it was called Wilson Peck’s and was an important building with a rounded glass window on a corner very near the Town Hall. The piano was a black upright and stood in the sitting room. One evening, while Mother was pregnant with Sheila and Father was at work, a mouse ran along the piano keys and startled her. Many years later, Father bought a used Broadwood bird’s eye walnut piano that had a lovely tone. It was large and very handsome, but old-fashioned and had two elaborate brass candlesticks that Father removed. The screw holes were always visible. Sheila had the piano in Wolverhampton and I was always pleased to see it there when I visited and now it is at Wooten Hall Cottage and Ginny is learning to play the piano.
We had a “wireless” or radio quite early on. Mother talked about listening to a cat’s whisker radio round the table at Cardewlees when her brothers had made one. She told of everyone saying, “Shush” as each person tried to do the delicate task of tuning into the broadcast. However, by the early 1930”s we had a radio that was a piece of furniture about three feet high and stood in the corner of the living room. The wireless was powered by accumulators; batteries of a kind in heavy square glass containers about eight inches high with a carrying handle. They were very heavy to a child and yet I used to take one to the “Paper Shop”, that is, the newsagents in the front room of one of the houses in the middle of Whitehill Terrace on the Main Road from Catcliffe to Brinsworth. Here I handed the accumulator to Miss Smalley in exchange for a re-charged one. Miss Smalley ran the shop with her bachelor brother who delivered the morning papers and magazines that had been ordered. Looking back, I wonder whether those accumulators were filled with acid.
Once Father became an LMS employee, he kept that job for the rest of his working life. As I told earlier, he was not happy as a junior clerk and once he moved to the footplate that became his career. Any advances that he made had nothing to do with his ability or willingness to do the job. The day he signed on established his seniority and no matter how much studying he did or how eager he was to take on new responsibilities, he was always behind someone who had signed on before he did.
Father began at the bottom, as a cleaner. This entailed readying the engines for work, not only by cleaning and polishing, but ash boxes had to be raked out and the fire in the boiler started correctly and in good time to have the needed head of steam for the engine to do its work.
Although working on the railway had not really been a career choice for Father, he made the best of it. He was grateful that he had a job, even when he was working three days a week during the slump. I’m sure that his experiences of coming out of the army and not finding work and then surviving the poverty through the depression affected him for the rest of his life. Then there were his experiences during the Second World War. He was always somewhat pessimistic and extremely cautious. However, he was handsome, and always carried himself well. He loved us all and was able to express his affection. He was not much of a disciplinarian, that was Mother’s domain, and whereas she blew up and smacked us at times, Father tended to be “hurt” when we overstepped the mark and I found that much harder to bear.
While I was at the University of Sheffield from 1948 to 1952 and books were still very scarce, Father went down Charing Cross Road while he was on a “lodging” trip to London and found me an old copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It had a strange, pungent perfume, sweet and yet sharp that never wore off. I still keep it on the shelf in the office even though it is tattered and a bit loose on the binding. I was thrilled to have it. He later brought a Larousse History of French Literature from a London second hand bookshop that I still treasure.
Going “lodging” meant that Father worked a train down to London, spent the night in the
railway barracks at Kentish Town in the northern part of London and then worked a train back the next day. Father was always willing to learn new routes so that he could sign for them and go further afield, whereas many men preferred to work trains to the coal pits in the area or work in the shunting yards. He had a tin box with a domed lid to carry his food in. He took sandwiches and some bacon for his breakfast. The dome of the lid formed an extra compartment and the fastener was a metal pin that slid through slots. I well remember the foisty smell it had when he returned home. For regular days, Father took a sandwich and perhaps a piece of cake in a paper bag.
Seeing him come across the “middle” from work
The knocker-up
Going to the “Branch” to pay his dues.
Painting the sheds during the slump.
Links, signing for a road. Toton, Pontefract Roundwood Sidings Siverwood colliery
Coming home passenger
Mutual improvement classes
Health benefits – the Panel