The Plantations

A Memory of Wigan.

Well not just for the 1930's but for twenty years after as well.  Memories come flooding back - not just for this picture but for Wigan itself.  I was born there in 1931 - in my grandparents home 38, Dicconson Street - a section no longer in existence although others that belonged to my gt Uncles do remain intact but in a sorry state compared to the days that I recall.  What I don't remember however is being removed from my pram - outside either Woolworths or Marks & Spencers (can't identify which from any of the photo's I've seen) when I was a few months old, by one of the Mill girls returning home from the Mill. Apparently after many hours searching by the local Police one of the other Mill girls said her friend had taken me home to show me to her mother - apparently her mother knew my grandfather's family and so there was no malice aforethought in the daughter's action!! Just a great deal of anxiety caused for my parents and grandparents for a good few hours.  
We were living in Essex during the war years and periodically would try to escape some of the bombing and spend a few months with my grandmother or friends of my mother. Times when I was enrolled in the local school - St Michaels School being the one in Wigan, where I learned to do fantastic embroidery apart from the usual 3 R's.  Haigh Hall and the grounds surrounding it known to us as the Plantations were a favourite place to visit after school - playing hide and seek amongst the trees,  catching sticklebacks and tadpoles in the streams, which we would carry home proudly in a jam jar, and sometimes a bunch of wild flowers for our grandmother.
Much earlier than this though I also remember the Lamplighter lighting the gas lamps along Dicconson Street and insisting that someone hold me up at the window so that I could see him at work. Being taken to see the first Belisha Beacon erected at the corner of Mesnes Street, or that's where I think it was. Those wonderful horses that drew the Coal Carts to the house - the acrid smell of the delivery men with their blackened faces and how they would throw the coal down a chute to the left of the front door after lifting the heavy metal manhole cover. The noise as the coal rattled it's way down to the lower basement. Only when the delivery was complete was I allowed to go outside and ask if I could look at the horsebrasses that the horses wore, which fascinated me even as a very small child, a love which has lasted to this day and a memory of these horses is brought to mind every time I look at my collection.    Mesnes Park and feeding the swans and the ritual cutting of the bread into small cubes before we went, each of us children carrying a good supply of them in a crisp brown paper bag. I also remember the Confectionery Shop at 23 Mesnes Street, owned by two of my mother's cousins Mary Lane and Alice James....the smell of newly baked pies and the taste of those Eccles Cakes and Baps - the creamy Eclairs and the Custard Slices......the clouds of flour encircling the bakers as they prepared the dough!! Although the shop does still exist today I believe it's no longer a bakery - a Delicatessen now I think. Also I remember how I envied the children taking part in the Walking Day processions in their pretty white dresses.   Oh! and so many more memories too of smaller villages we lived in or stayed in for a few months....Gathurst, Bispham nr Parbold, Ringley - a happy childhood in Lancashire.  
Yes, Wigan was a somewhat grimey industrial town in those early days, Mill girls in their shawls and clogs, the Miners in their helmets and boots and their blackened working clothes, their faces covered in coal dust by the end of their shift - long before the advent of Pit Head showers etc. - but there were places one could escape to right within the town and enjoy the feel of open air, space and nature. The open countryside was not that far away then, and the people in the town - the stall holders at the old Market, the tenants in the one/up one/downs that my grandfather owned where I would accompany him to collect rents or when he went to supervise the new washing-up sinks and water taps he was having installed in the cottages, were warm and friendly folk.   
Although from the photos I've received recently, there have been many changes and much of the old town seems to have been replaced - I still have happy memories of the Wigan of old, and am still proud to say I am a Wiganer, born if not entirely bred!!  Thanks for the memories these photos have revived on this extremely hot afternoon in Johannesburg, South Africa - it's a good long time since I was last in Wigan - 1952 to be precise!!