Joseph Edward Trevor Bowen was born in Hill Ridware, 13 December 1923. At the time of these interviews, he was the oldest male resident born in the village. His father was Joseph Bowen and his mother, Flora Windsor. He was always known as Trevor. He had one older brother, Douglas Harry, born 10 January 1921, a younger brother, Clifford William, born 28 April 1927 and a younger sister, Jean Olwen, born 27 February 1938. By the time of these interviews, only Cliff was still alive.
Trevor’s parents came from the Welsh Borders, near the Shropshire boundary. His father had worked on a farm but when work became scarce in the 1920s, he decided to move to look for work and somehow arrived in Hill Ridware. Douglas had been born in Shropshire in 1921, but Trevor was born in Hill Ridware. At first his father had worked for Billy Froggatt, at Wade Lane Farm. And then, in 1926, he went to work at Brereton Colliery. They lived in one of the cottages known as The Orchard belonging to Billy Froggatt. Trevor said that when they lived there, it was two residences but later there were three. He thought it had probably been one large house a long time ago. Sometime after they moved out it became one house again. It was sometimes known as Orchard Stud Farm. It had a foaling yard at the front: an exercise yard in front of the loose boxes where the foals were born.
When I asked if he helped on the farm he said, ‘Well my family were “bonded” to Billy Froggatt from Wade Lane farm and in order to live in their house at a reasonable rent, as each of us children left school, we were pledged to work for a year for Mr Froggatt. Douglas took his turn first and then it was my turn. In those days you left the village school when you were 14. You didn’t have to wait ‘til the end of term so I left before Christmas in 1937 and there wasn’t any further education in those days unless you were a farmer’s son! Billy, who was Richard’s grandfather, was a big horseman and he often went to Ireland to buy horses for breeding.
‘When I was at school Mr Smith was the headmaster. We called him E.J. The school was one building divided into three rooms by two wood and glass folding screens. Miss Balance taught the juniors at one end.
Mr Smith taught the seniors in the middle and Mrs Stokes taught the infants at the other end. I remember the attendance officer, Mr Billy Stokes. He was Mrs Stokes’ husband and we were all a bit afraid of him. When we got to be in the senior class, we were given jobs to do such as going down the stoke-hole to fetch the coke for the fire. The girls might have to fill the ink wells. Another job could be to ring the school bell at ten to nine in the morning, at one twenty after dinner and at four o’clock at the end of the day. One of the lessons I really liked was gardening. From school we went down Pipe Lane [School Lane] and across the fields at the bottom, where the bungalows [and footpath] are now; across the main [Uttoxeter] road, through a gate by where Doug Brown lives [the last house on the right], but it was before those [council] houses were built; across the fields to where there were allotments nearly at Mavesyn Church. We were supposed to go back to school when we heard the school bell ring, but we didn’t always hear it!
‘When I was at school, my friends were, Les Berkshire, Cyril Ridley, Cyril Collins and Reg Greatrix. If we did wrong, we were punished. I suppose it depended on how serious our “crime” was. One punishment we boys didn’t like was being made to sit by a girl. I remember that sometimes dances were held in the school for grown-ups at the weekend and the floor had an extra polish for that. Well, some of us got the cane for sliding on that polished floor. Another time we got the cane was because me and Reg Greatrix hid in the hedge by Fred Derry’s yard to catch a glimpse of Miss Smith, the headmaster’s daughter, as she walked her dog. We got six of the best the next day. I don’t remember girls getting the cane.
‘There were separate playgrounds for the boys and girls. The infant boys moved into the boys’ playground when they were about six or seven. There were also separate entrances into school for boys and girls. The toilets were outside. The girls’ toilets were a row of covered cubicles but with no doors. There was no proper sewerage or main drains at that time so the large buckets had to be emptied into a big wagon from the council that was sent to collect it. In winter they often froze over.
‘There was no playing field at school when I was there. I don’t remember what we did in the way of physical education. The field you use now belonged to Mr Webster at The Cottage.
‘We didn’t have a kitchen at school when I was there so the village children went home for dinner. The children who came to school from Blithbury had to walk across the fields, although some of them used to come on their ponies and tie them up by Hammonds opposite the old school. So, they would bring sandwiches and maybe even those from Pipe and Mavesyn brought sandwiches.
‘In those days families used to go to church regularly on Sunday morning, then in the afternoon we children would go back again for Sunday school. Looking back, my parents weren’t overly religious but I think we were sent so that mum and dad could have a bit of time to themselves. My brother Cliff was in the choir. When we were older, we would have jobs to do. Me and Cyril Collins sometimes rang the church bell or pumped the bellows for the organ. I carried on going until I left school.
‘I remember as even a small child I would go off for the day with friends with a “picnic”, well a sandwich anyway. Sometimes we would go the five pits, which is behind what is now Chadwick Crescent, to fish. We would have a stick with a piece of string and a bit of bent wire for a hook. No one worried about you being away for so long in those days. Another place we went to play was what we called the “water forest”. This was before Mavesyn Close was built and before the fields were flooded by mining subsidence. I’ve no idea why they called it the water forest. It was just a bit of a scrubby field and a few trees.
‘As kids we were afraid of Mr Derry. He was a “bit of a tartar” and his wife was also quite frightening to children.’ Trevor laughed as he said he couldn’t understand why they were really afraid of her when all she did was wag her finger at them. ‘Mum would send me to their farm for milk but I preferred to go to the Mottram’s, as they were less scary.
‘I clearly remember their daughter, Lucy, and her aunt, Mrs Mottram, going to Rugeley in their pony and trap, taking milk, butter and eggs and such like to sell at market. They never went without their Sunday best bonnets on. Later they caught the bus. I think the first bus service started in the village before the war. It was the Green Bus Company from Uttoxeter run by Charlie Wheildon. The bus came through the village picking people up and taking them on mystery tours because you never quite knew where it was going to go before reaching your destination.
‘When I was still living at home at The Orchard, we used to bath in a tin bath in the front room. One day old Mrs Sharples [Beatrice] came to talk to my mum and dad pushed me, still in the bath, under the table pulling the table covering down to hide me. She stayed for possibly over an hour, talking and drinking tea. Anyway, the water was stone cold when she left and I was chattering and blue with cold.
‘When I left school, there was no secondary education unless you were a farmer’s son and paid to go school or were clever enough to pass to grammar school. So, after I left school, I went to work on Billy Froggatt’s farm as I said. When my year was up, I wanted to do something else so I got a job building the new council houses on the main road. That only lasted two weeks though. I had to leave because I was too young to be insured, although that didn’t stop me going to work at the brickyard at Colwich.
‘Out of school boys and girls never really had much to do with each other until they were older and became “interested”. I think maybe I was a “bit of a lad” as a youth, so when we were older there were different places around the village places where me and my pals would meet up and “hang out”, chatting, whistling at the girls and smoking, although I never smoked. One place was by the Chad sign post which was in the middle of the road in those days at the junction of the main road and Pipe Lane [Uttoxeter Road and School Lane]. Sometimes we hung around Mabel’s stile which is by the village hall, although that wasn’t there then, or the stile by what is now called Monk’s Cottage. We sometimes went down to the stile at the Rake End part of the village and another place was outside Avondale where there was a bench that Mr Jones put the milk churns on. There was a bit of a brick wall near to where the bungalows are at the top of Church Lane where we used to sit too. This was known as “the courting corner”. Mind, I don’t really think we did anything really bad.
‘We didn’t have any police here. There wasn’t a lot of trouble in the village in those days, but if there was any disturbance someone had to go to Handsacre to fetch the local bobby, who would come down here on his bicycle. During the war Joe Hammond and Dick Meanley were Special Constables. After the war Len Gair, who was the landlord at the Chad, was the Special.
‘Kiff’s café was a popular place in the 1950s.If we had a spare bob or two, we might go there. It was a wooden building set back a bit behind the Post Office and was run by Bessie Kiff. Cyclists would stop there on their way through the village and there was a Darby and Joan Club for a number of years. They had whist drives, beetle drives and other such socials.
‘Before I was old enough to join the army, I joined the Home Guard. I remember one time an Italian prisoner of war went on the run so we were called up by Sergeant Harry Tregay to try to find him, although I don’t remember what happened. I think he had only gone for a walkabout and just came back. We did a lot of drill practice in the old school and marching on the main road outside the Royal Oak and also at Phillips’ farm at Blithbury. We regularly went to the headquarters at Rugeley for drill practice. For the duration of the war Ridware Hall was requisitioned by the War Ministry as a billet for Army officers. Italian prisoners of war were also kept there. It was empty at the time as Colonel Churchward had left and Henry Broadway Griffiths had bought it to do it up.
‘Anyway, as soon as I was old enough, I volunteered. I went to Caterham first for 12 weeks training. At the end of that I came home on leave. I think I only came home one more time before being demobbed. I was away from home for four years and I was in the 4th Tank Division of the Coldstream Guards. I was a tank driver, one of a crew of five. On one occasion we were hit by gunfire and three of the crew were killed. There were other near misses too. I got hit by shrapnel but not seriously injured enough for hospitalisation. When the war was over my unit had a month’s leave in Austria and before we were sent home in 1946, we went back to Germany and did border patrol duties. My brother Douglas was in the Grenadier Guards but Cliff was too young.
‘I remember some of the girls in the village. Doreen Fenney who had a crush on me and Gladys Brown. I can’t remember who was sweet on whom, but she wrote to me during my time in the army. When I got back home, I found she had married Charlie Johnson.
‘When I came home, I had to find work which wasn’t very easy and I had a number of short term jobs. One was doing the piling on the canal from Alrewas to Burton on Trent. While I was working on that, so was a previous Italian prisoner of war. His name was something like Luigi Wrappa. During the war he had worked on the farm for Fred Derry. I can’t remember who he married but he went to live in Alrewas and he never went back to Italy. I also worked on filling the crater left when the Hanbury Dump went up, although it was never completely filled. When that work was finished there was no dole, so I had to find or be found work. Sometimes I worked for Mr Greatrix on the gravel lorries, or for Len Gair delivering coal. I also did a stint at the Armitage brickworks and tarmacking airfields at Hixon and Fradley. Eventually I got a more permanent job at Cannock number 5 Pit in the early 1950s. I had a break from working at the pit of about six months at the time when my eldest daughter, Alison, was ill. We thought that it was best for me not to work down the pit as it worried her so, and so I went to work at the “potbank” in Armitage. This work was horrendous as I worked ten day weeks with one day off between [he worked ten days at a time with one day off in between]. Worse than down the pit! Anyway, sadly, Alison died and when Lea Hall opened in 1960, I went to work there until I retired in 1985.
‘I married Jean Allen in 1948. Her family had moved out here from Birmingham during the war like evacuees. Jean was the aunt of Pat Ashmore who married my brother Cliff. Pat’s family had a general store on the main road where Woolley’s shop is now. Jean and I were the first people to live in the pre-fabs in Pipe Lane. They were factory built after the war to ease house shortages and were called Airey houses, after the man who designed them. We signed a 25 year lease as the houses were only “temporary”! And I’ve been here ever since: over 61 years. Our neighbours were Charlie Poole, the Sammons family and Gladys and Charlie Johnson. Pipe Lane wasn’t much of a proper road until the 1960s when it was widened and footpaths put in, probably when the bungalows down the road were built. There had been two cottages at the bottom. Len Harvey lived in one of them.
‘There have been a number of shops in the village in my time. When I was a lad the Post Office was at Rake End run by Mr and Mrs Woodvine. When it closed, maybe late 40s or early 50s, the “new Post Office” was opened. I don’t know if she was first, but I remember Mrs Kiff. She got held up by gunmen you know. Mr Ashmore from Birmingham opened a shop in Pipe Lane. It was like a green grocer. He used to sell vegetables from Birmingham market. This became Bell’s when Mr Ashmore opened his shop on the main road. Even the blacksmith, Horace West and his wife, used to sell sweets and ice creams. Mrs Causer sold a few groceries from the corner house at the top of Pipe Lane opposite the Chad. There was a post box in the wall here too. Obviously now there is Alan and Sheila Woolley’s store.
‘My parents moved from The Orchard to what had been the Post Office at the Wade Lane, Rake End junction in the 1950s when the ‘new’ Post Office opened. Mum renamed the house Briar Cottage after the large briar rose in the garden, because she got fed up with people calling it the Old Post Office. The Orchard became a single house, probably when Edward Froggatt and his new wife moved in the late 50s or early 60s.
‘Sometimes dances were held in the back room at the Chad, perhaps for special occasions such as royal jubilees or New Year. It was good for dancing because it had a proper sprung floor.
‘The Clubhouses were at the Rake End part of the village. It’s called the White House now. In my day it was two tied cottages for workers at Rake End Farm. There was a central passage way with living quarters for two families to the left and right. Previous to that, it had been owned by a Friendly Society – The Manchester Oddfellows – which is where it got the name Clubhouses.
‘Charlie Mottram and Jos [John] Holland were in the Manchester Oddfellows Society. Frank Mottram, Charlie’s son worked in the foundry works in Rugeley. There was a lot of industry in Rugeley then [in the 1920s and ‘30s], such as the tannery works, tin works and Keys the clothiers’.
