Scope and Content
(00 mins)
Vera was an only child. Her father was in the Army and her mother died when she was just over two years old. She was born in Plantation Road, then lived in a large house belonging to the local council at the top of Baker Street, with her grandmother. When she was young there was still farm livestock on sale on market days (Tuesdays) kept in pens near the Post Office – flocks of sheep and cows and pigs. She loved to hear the auctioneer’s voice. Public houses were open all days on market days. Saturday was the ordinary market day.
She started school when she was three, at the infant school in Baker Street, next to the British Boy’s School. The infants had to have a sleep in the afternoon, for about an hour, to help them cope with the time at school. Mrs. Beck was her teacher. After the age of seven, she moved to St. Andrew’s Church School. In Church Street. There was a school house where the headmistress lived.
Vera’s eyesight was not good but the teachers helped her to cope. She left the elementary school at fourteen and took a job working for a Mrs. Dancer, to look after her boy. She was used to a family, since her father had remarried to a woman who had three children, a daughter and two sons. They had all moved a council house in Broomhills Road, off Heath Road.
(10 mins)
Broomhills Road was close to the sand quarry called Chamberlain’s Barn. When the workers were not there, local children used to play there, where there were large lumps of sandstone. They would jump down the cliffs. None of her family worked in the pits. Her father died when he was thirty-two and Vera’s stepmother had a hard job bringing up four children. The local vicar, Reverend Hill, used to help and mother did housework for others in order to help keep the family. Vera used to do cleaning for a Mrs. Tutt on Saturdays as a child, for three (old) pence pocket money. She used this to pay to attend the local cinema for tuppence and buy a pennyworth of sweets.
She remembers the Leighton Buzzard Light Railway that used to run from Double Arches and a boy who used to stop the traffic when the train was crossing roads, as at Vandyke Road.
(15 mins)
The boy lost his foot, after an accident, and had a special artificial one made which enable him to continue working. Leighton Buzzard was known for its sand industry, employing men, and its laundry, giving work for women. Vera earned six shillings a week looking after the boy, then, just before the age of fifteen, she moved to work in a laundry as an ironer. It was very hot there. Gas irons weighing about six and a half pounds were used. Work was from eight in the morning until six at night, with one hour for a midday meal. On Saturdays they worked until twelve noon. Pay was ten shillings a week. Vera met her husband to be when he moved to Leighton Buzzard with his mother. She was fifteen when they first met and they became friendly through his sister who also worked at the laundry. She was seventeen when he proposed to her and she accepted. He was three years older. They married at the register office in Linslade. They did not have any honeymoon because they could not afford to holiday, but they did have a very long and happy marriage. They moved to live in a small, terraced cottage in Bryant’s Row, Heath and Reach, close to his parents. There was no gas, electricity or running water in the house. Candles and paraffin lamps were used for lighting. The oven was built into the fireplace. And that was the only heating in those days. Water came from a well outside. Water was kept in bowls in the house. The houses belonged to a Mr. Ray, the owner of the sandpits. Each had a large garden at the back. They were close to the sandpit. Her husband’s father had always been a ‘dobber’, as the sand labourers were called. They were happy there and after two or three years they started a family but the whole row of houses were pulled down to accommodate more sand extraction and the workers were given council houses at Reach Green. Whereas they had only paid three shillings a week for the rent of the tied cottages, they had to pay seven and sixpence for the council rent. Her husband worked on piecework, removing topsoil before sand extraction, and earned thirty-six shillings and ten pence a week.
(25 mins)
The farm at the bottom of Bryant’s Row did carry on working during the Second World War. They also used to serve tea to cyclists. Vera’s husband, Arthur, was looked after by his mother in Leighton Buzzard until the First World War broke out and then he went to live with his father and grandmother in Bryant’s Row. His father and his uncle Harry worked in the sandpits. Harry was killed in the sandpit at the bottom of Bryant’s Row, when the sand slipped away and took him down the hill where he hit a wagon on the line there It was particularly hard on Harry’s mother, who had lost sons in the Great War.
(30 mins)
Arnold’s owned a sandpit in the area, at Stone Lane, as well as the one at Double Arches. Opposite that one was the pit owned by Garside. It was usual for boys to work in the local sand pits. Arthur went to a church school in Heath and Reach, on Bird’s Hill. The headmaster was very strict and if boys misbehaved; he would tell them to go out and cut a stick out of a hedge and then he would hit them with it across their bottom. Playing truant from school was quite normal and boys would often climb up into a tree and sit there in the woods so that they could see what was going on around them and at school.
Arthur started work for Arnold’s at fourteen years of age, fetching the skips to be loaded and looking after the Shire horses which pulled the skips to and from the pits. After some time, Arthur left Arnold’s and went to work on a poultry farm for a while, thinking he might better himself. But he went back to the pits when he was about sixteen. He was about seventeen when he went loading, on piece-work pay.
(35 mins)
There are photographs of the old ‘sand dobbers’ (labourers) these days at Page’s Park Station and Arthur Shales is shown as the main dobber. The ‘untopper’ took away all the topsoil down to the level of sand, prior to excavation. The soil was used to make hills Workers doing this were paid per yard of soil cleared. They worked in all weathers. Others workers work on piece-work, loading trucks with sand. Arthur was known to be a very hard worker. Other piece-workers were Messrs Pantling, Turney and Endersby. Vera, when working for John Dickinson’s in Leighton Buzzard, earned more money than Arthur.
(40 mins)
Dobber’s wives had to manage the household on their husband’s pay of thirty six shillings and ten pence per week. There were doctor’s bills to pay for (before the introduction of the National Health Service). A doctor would charge seven shillings and sixpence to go out to Heath and Reach in those days. Families had to try to save up small amount each week and budget accordingly to have something to cover the eventuality. There used to be a ‘doctor’s man’ who came round to collect instalments. Vera and Arthur moved to Thomas Street. From the sandpit at the top of the road there used to be a railway going down to the road where sand was tipped into carts drawn by horses. Lorries were later introduced to take sand all around the country. Arthur would often take a shepherd’s pie to work to heat up in a shed for dinner. Vera cooked it overnight for him. His other favourite meal was a cottage loaf and cheese.
(45 mins)
Arthur always gave Vera tea in bed before she saw him going off to work for a six o’clock start. He wore hobnailed boots, corduroy working trousers and any old jacket, plus a cloth cap to keep sand out of his hair. He would tie a leather band round each trousers leg, just below the knee, to stop rates from running up his leg, when they were disturbed at the workplace. There were no special safety helmets or other protective clothing or equipment. Monday was the family wash day and Tuesday the ironing day. There had to be a lot of shaking of clothes to try to get the majority of the sand out of them before washing in the large copper (heated by a fire underneath) in the corner of their kitchen. At the bottom of many of the workers’ long gardens was a pigsty where they kept their own pig. Mr Downham would buy them, when fattened, to provide fresh pork for the neighbourhood.
(50 mins)
Arthur was such a good worker that Arnold’s allowed him to carry on working after the retirement age of sixty-five up to the age of seventy, but in retirement he worked part-time and in the drying sheds instead of out in the element, digging the sand. The sand they processed there was special sand which was used to filter water and was even exported to the Sahara region of Africa, because of its unique properties. During the Second World War, there was an incident one day when an enemy (German) plane flying over Heath and Reach machine gunned the pits and men had to take shelter behind the trucks. Arthur made up his mind to go, with Mr. Kinner, into the Army to fight, following this event. In Luton, when Vauxhall Motors’ factory was bombed, Vera’s uncle was killed. Arthur was on his way to China when China fell to the Japanese forces and, fortunately, Arthur was landed in South Africa. He might otherwise have ended up as a prisoner of war in the Far East. He was sent to Ceylon as a gunner and helped defend the island for three years ad eight months. Vera never saw him in all that time. After the war end, he might have gone to occupied Germany but Vera wrote to Arnold’s and they welcomed him back into the sand pits.
(55 mins)
Arthur worked there until the age of seventy. He was offered a Foreman’s job but he didn’t want the power and was happy to be an ordinary ‘dobber’, until he took the ‘retirement’ job in the drying sheds. He was quite frequently asked to take the next day off because they felt that he had done more work in one day than some of the younger men had done in one week. Some men spend a lot of their leisure time in the pub and wives got tired of not seeing much of them. One woman, in protest, when she made up her husband’s ‘Bedfordshire clanger’ for his lunch (a pastry parcel of meat at one end and jam at the other) put dominoes inside, without his knowledge. When he came to eat the ‘clanger’ he got a surprise – a mouthful of dominoes. He had a laugh with his friends about it and it came to be referred to as the ‘dominoe dumpling’. It still did not prevent him frequenting “The Red Lion” public house in Heath and Reach.
(1 hour)
During the Second World War, Vera was working at the laundry, which was a reserved occupation but towards the end of the war, she got fed up with ironing and got a temporary, part-time job at Dickinson’s, paper company in Bassett Road, Leighton Buzzard. She was asked to stay on full-time and ended up working there until her retirement. She became a union representative and first-aider. She had no occupational pension, only a pension of ten shillings a week as a married woman. Arthur stayed on, working part-time, when he reached retirement age, because he enjoyed the job and felt it was his duty to do something.
(1hr. 5 mins)
Vera’s poem, written after a visit to where Bryant’s Row used to be and the shock of what it was like now, with barbed wire down the side of the pits and pits where there used to be lovely open fields and hedges, and spring water streams:
“Sand Quarry Poem”
As I grow older I often find memories activate my mind
Are things better or are they worse? Some think progress is adverse
In days gone by when mining sand all the work was done by hand
Men with shovels every day worked very hard for little pay
They worked hard from six till five; they earned enough to keep alive
They had a break to take their ease, time to eat their bread and cheese
One man I know paid with his life. He left a family and a wife
He was working with his brother who had to tell his grieving mother
The sun that scorched and wind that rages, they worked or got no wages
Men I know, names I could mention worked fifty years and got no pension
Over fifty years ago tenants all left Bryant’s Row
The houses stood upon the land that was needed for Heath’s precious sand
The houses were converted to stables with gargoyles decorating gables
Yuppies would have thought them handsome. They would pay a monarch’s ransom
Bryant’s Lane came to no harm. It still maintained its country charm
The birds, the flowers, the trees gave pleasure for all to enjoy in hours of leisure
Progress has taken its toll, barbed wire goes from pole to pole
The flowers and trees stood on the land what was needed for Heath’s precious sand
I often ponder and think “How grand if no one ever needed sand.”
(1hr. 10 mins)
Vera couldn’t believe the way it had all changed in Bryant’s Lane. But she accepted, as did everyone from that area, that sand quarrying was a necessary way of life.
(1hr. 13 mins)
End of interview
Summarised by Stuart Antrobus (29 January 2009)