After Smart’s wool and dress shop, the next shop was Burton’s Stores, which sold food and general groceries. As a little boy, of course, I did not realise that this was just one shop in a chain of many hundreds, stretching across most of the East Midlands, and in particular, the area around Nottingham. Still less did I anticipate the fact that one day, I would spend my entire working life in the school where the founder of the firm, Frank Burton, had received his education, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Here he is, ten minutes after he won the Gold Award in “Waxed Moustache Magazine” for December 1886:
Here’s Burton’s Stores today:
Just past Burton’s Stores was Shepherd’s the Chemists where, one day in the late 1950s, I was treated for the severe forehead cut which I suffered when I fell over on the pavement outside the shop, near the bus stop. Here’s the Chemists today:
Conceptually, the last business in the High Street was the Post Office which was just past the chemist’s. It was run by Ernie Chell and many is the First Day Cover I purchased from him over the years of the late 1960s and 1970s. Here is a first day cover from the early 1960s:
And here is the Post Office today, its presence in this rapidly decaying village guaranteed by government hand-outs, as was recently revealed in the local newspaper:
Next to the Post Office was the motorbike shop, which we as little boys always thought was the home of the Woodville Chapter of the Derbyshire Hell’s Angels. Now its changed its orientation and is home to “Chaps” and “Swishhh”:
Opposite was Dytham’s Dairy, which delivered milk to most of the area. Now it is home to “Timber Town Trophies whose opening hours are on their website“:
Beyond that on the right was the road which led up to the Infants’ School and to Woodville Secondary Modern, the destination, alas, of so many young people of the village over the years. More striking, though, before its demolition in the late 1950s, was the vast bulk of the Wesleyan Church, which, in the vision of a five or six year old boy, towered as high as a medieval cathedral. Like the products of so many of the local pipe works, it was of a dark, reddish brown, made of bricks which may well themselves have had a partially glazed surface:
Beyond this was Leese’s furniture shop, which, despite its distant location at the top end of High Street, survived as a business for many years after I left the village.
Here is the shop today. Closed at 11 o’clock in the morning:
I was simply amazed at the economic desolation of Woodville today. So many shops were derelict. Presumably that is why everybody voted for Brexit. It was hoped that this gesture would be a punch on the nose of our politicians who have allowed the life of the ordinary working man in the north and Midlands to degenerate to an unacceptable standard. He no longer has any pride in what he does, and that is wrong.
I suppose the slogan will have to be “Let’s make Woodville great again”. Or at the very least, nice to live in.
One feature of life in the 1950s which has disappeared for ever from Woodville, and indeed from the whole of the rest of the country, was what used to happen at the end of every single working day, as all the factories closed down at five o’clock in the late afternoon.
Every single works, every single factory, had its own siren or hooter which would be sounded loudly in the still calm of the evening. From my Dad’s own back garden, he would have been able to hear perhaps as many as ten different factories closing down for the day, one after another.
Each hooter had its own distinctive note, and this, coupled with the direction the noise was coming from, meant that, with practice, every single one could be identified. Every night too, they would sound in the same order, a few seconds apart, and it was therefore possible to anticipate Outram’s, say, or Knowles’s or Wragg’s, all finishing work for the day.
Pretty much the same thing used to happen at the end of every lunch hour, as the managers and owners tried to bring their tired staff back for the afternoon. This was always less impressive, however, as invariably, the end of the midday break was always slightly different by at least a few minutes for every single factory.
I could only find a single factory hooter on Youtube. Listen from one minute onward:
Youtube also features the really unusual work of composer Arseny Avramov who created both a “Symphony Of Factory Sirens” and a second “Symphony of Industrial Horns” in 1922, using the various factory hooters of Baku in what was then the Soviet Union.
John Knifton 