The early years

I was three years old at the commencement of the Second World War in September 1939. My parents became anxious to move us away from this particularly dangerous area to somewhere slightly less in the line-of-fire. Accordingly we moved, in December 1940 to Wellington, in Shropshire, or, to be more precise to an area known as The Humbers. There we were accommodated in the Wharf House, which you may have guessed was located beside a wharf. This building marked the end of the “Humbers Arm” of the Shropshire Union Canal, where it met Humbers Lane at right angles.

I have recently discovered, through the internet site of Richard Foxcroft (www.telfordsites.co.uk) that on the far side of the road, continuing the line of the canal, there was, when the canal was in use, a railway line, which ran to Donnington.

The house was not connected to much in the way of services. Our water we collected from what I believed to be a spring, at the end of the canal, close to the road. My sister, Gladys, however, tells me that this was a tap, although she does agree with the location. I must bow to her superior knowledge in this case. She is, after all considerably older!

I do remember my mother collecting water for laundry from the brook which flowed past the back door. Gladys, once again, tells me that the primitive toilet was placed directly over this brook! Upstream? I’m not sure!

My elder sister, Betty inscribed her name indelibly in the family folklore during our stay here. The story goes that Betty, about sixteen at the time, was preparing to boil a kettle on a Primus stove which was standing on a table. This device had a small circular reservoir for methylated spirit, above which was a burner. The main, circular fuel tank, held paraffin which was pressurised by an in-built hand pump. The pressure forced the paraffin upwards, through a jet to the burner. Lighting of this device was effected by a match applied to the meths, which heated the burner and vapourised and ignited the paraffin. So much for the theory!

It seems that Betty had over-filled the meths reservoir and the spirit had overflowed down the stove and onto the table-cloth. She now applied the match! In seconds the stove was engulfed in blue flames, and the table-cloth was adding to the blaze! Betty took one look at this situation and knew precisely how to cope. She gathered up the flaming mass and went, like a bat out of hell, out of the house, across the grass to the canal bank, where she commited the whole lot to the muddy water.

Weatherwise, the two months we were in this area was about the worst time we could have chosen. We arrived on December 12th 1940 and departed on February 17th 1941. During this time there was heavy snowfall and the canal was frozen over at some point. It was quite usual to see swans and ducks alighting on the water, but they seemed incapable of recognising the solid surface of ice. Perhaps the poor things, swans in particular, were commited to the landing and were unable to abort. They came down in the usual way, flared out just above the surface and put their feet forward whilst beating backwards with their wings. Then they hit the slippery ice and all hell broke loose as they slid to a panic-stricken halt, in a jumble of wings, legs, tail-feathers and neck. They then gathered themselves and, with as much dignity as they could muster, began to slip and slide across the ice to their intended destination. It was really quite sad to see such an elegant aerial approach descend in seconds into such terrestrial pantomime!

A short distance away, on the far side of the road, lived a Mr and Mrs Jacks. Later in the war, in 1944, we met these people again in a different part of the same area, when we went to stay with them, in order I think to gain some respite from the ‘Doodle-Bug’ campaign which was being waged mainly against the South-East. They had moved house and were living at Lightmoor, near Coalbrookdale. The house in which they now lived was being very firmly nudged from behind by a slag heap, which had been produced by the local, worked out iron mine. Quite where these noble people housed the close on a dozen ‘visitors’ who descended upon them is a mystery to me, as it seemed to me to be an ordinary terraced cottage!

We kids explored these grass-covered heaps, which extended to a considerable height above the houses. Up on the top were several brick-built domes, with a circular hole in the top. These were about four feet high and covered the ventilation shafts of the mine workings below. Stones which we dropped down could be heard bouncing off the sides, before splashing into the water of the flooded subterranean tunnels.

Not far down the dusty track, which ran parallel to a single track railway line, one came to Lightmoor Platform, so insignificant a “station” as to not even qualify as a “halt”! Close to this was a junction from which one line led to Little Dawley and the other to Horsehay, trains having come from Wellington. (I think I have correctly described the juxtaposition of these places, but if locals or railway “buffs” tell me I am wrong, then I will gladly stand corrected!)
There was also a roof tile factory close by and for a long time after our visit to to the area we would look on the back of any tiles we came across, often to find the word “LIGHTMOOR” impressed in the clay.

Mr and Mrs Jacks lived in the house at one end of a row of about ten and the whole row was noticeably lower at their end as, so we were told, they were sinking due to the mining activity below. Whatever the reason for this subsidence, it is certainly true that the cellar was three feet deep in water.

I am sure that all this landscape has long since been swept away, to become part of the connurbation of Telford.
This process of regeneration had already begun when we were there. I clearly remember seeing, on a walk to Little Dawley, bulldozers levelling the blue-grey slag heaps which scarred the horizon. I know we all yearn for times past and say that modern urban planning leaves brick and concrete jungles, but these man-made mountains were the most dreadful of eyesores and we all remember Aberfan.

One small memory I have of that visit to Little Dawley, is of a yellow and black enamelled advertisement bearing the legend “Wrights Coal-Tar Soap”, high up on the wall of a building.