Vocal Voices

I was watching on one of the minor channels where historian Lucy Worsley was playing the part of a kitchen maid in, I think, the Tudor period. There she was stoking the fire, putting a kettle on the grate to boil water, whilst a young lad turned the spit to cook the roast.

Fast forward to the late 1950s early '60s. We had a coal fired York range and back boiler in the living room. It had a hot box to one side as an oven with a thick metal plate to keep a pan on, and on the other side a swing out grill for the kettle. I can remenber tying newspaper knots for to start the fire with a bit of kindling, and dad holding a full sheet at the front of the hearth to "draw" the fie.

It seemed that not too much had changed in 350 year, but boy have we moved on in the 50 years since then.

Frank, I was still knotting and plaiting newspaper for my Nan's fire in the 1990s. I loved her coal fire, she used to get a load of coal either free or at a subsidised rate as the widow of a miner.

I can remember my Nan had a range and a tap at the front for hot water
If had houses with coal fires and had to use newspaper platted to start it or those fire lighters that smelt of petrol
On good thing we burnt everything on the fire loved logs
Pine cones not very good when somebody opened the door and smoke came back down the chimney
And all the smog

This is so true - we had a coal fire when I was little, no other heating in the house apart from a portable paraffin heater for the bedrooms then was only lit when we were ill

I haven't lost the knack of making firelighters out of folded newspaper, or using a sheet of newspaper held across the front of the fireplace, to make the fire 'draw'

BTW Frank I like the history stuff Lucy W does, was it on BBC4? I've seen a couple of her series on there

Workingman wrote:. We had a coal fired York range and back boiler in the living room. It had a hot box to one side as an oven with a thick metal plate to keep a pan on, and on the other side a swing out grill for the kettle.

I wonder if that is what originally would have been in the flat I now live in. It's a 1950's build and a block of four maisonettes - I'm in a downstairs one. The two downstairs ones only had three rooms in total; bedroom, living room and bathroom - no separate kitchen. The upstairs ones had a separate kitchen in the space where the downstairs one had the staircase.

I often wondered how many people would have originally lived in that space and how they did their cooking

This has brought back a few memories for me. In my schooldays we had a black iron fireplace complete with oven.
but no hot water or central heating. We didn't even have a bathroom - there was a built-in bath in the kitchen with
a lift-up wooded top, and water had to be heated on the gas stove. Mother used to put the metal plates out of the
gas oven into our beds to warm them up in winter. We suffer from chilblains a lot, but I recall how lovely it was to
take your shoes off and rub your toes on the coconut-matting hearthrug, The loo was outside - a safe haven for the
daddy-long-legs. We had no TV, washing machine, fridge, phone or electricity, but we did have gas, which was more
the we had in the house I was born in.

Kaz wrote:This is so true - we had a coal fire when I was little, no other heating in the house apart from a portable paraffin heater for the bedrooms then was only lit when we were ill

That was like our house, a new build council house when we moved in in 1970 with just a coal fire. Mom and Dad had central heating put in four or five years later but even then there were no radiators put in the two smaller bedrooms or the bathroom. I hated Winter there, especially as the house was on a hill and not shielded from the elements by anything, and it was still the same when I moved out in 1991 though they had had double glazing fitted by then. There was a wall-mounted fan heater in the bathroom and a portable fan heater that Mom would come and put in my bedroom when she woke me but I was constantly nagged to turn it off because of it eating electricity

Ours was a 1930s council house, one of those pebble dashed ones It felt big to me when I was little (we moved from a single roomed flat, the four of us, although J was still a baby) but with hindsight I think it was tiny (front door into a tiny hall, straight into a small living room which you had to go through to reach the small kitchen which had a tiny bathroom straight off of it, no loo in there, the loo was on its own, off the porch between the back door and the porch door! It was freezing out there in winter, especially if you needed a wee in the night! One double bedroom, one large single (mine) and one tiny boxroom which was eventually J's although we shared mine for a few years when we first moved in

They pulled those houses down when I was 17, and rehoused mum, dad and J in some more modern houses with central heating about 1/4 mile away. I moved out to live with my b/f soon to be my first husband!

We had one of those new-fangled fancy gas cookers in our kitchen in the 50's - largely because, I think, my D used to work for a company that manufactured them ....

We had two coal fires (I think we only used to regularly light the one in the back living room though, as the front room was the posh room with the best furniture and fancy knick-nacks to entertain visitors). The front room actually had a piano. I could even sort of play "Side Saddle" with one finger ..... do you remember it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJpCzQC2sG4

The chimney in the living room used to worry me as a youngster, I was always afraid our budgerigar was going to disappear up it when we let him out for his evening flight ...

Sometimes we used to visit Nan in a village near Petersfield - two up and two down terrace with steep stairs, steps down to the kitchen at the back - and an outside privy. Freezing!

Cor you were posh Ossie

I remember side saddle