VIDEO: Ex-MP Joe Ashton’s book recalls bread and dripping generation

Joe's parents Ike and Nellie AshtonJoe's parents Ike and Nellie Ashton
Joe's parents Ike and Nellie Ashton
The Victorian days of clogs and women wrapped in shawls, trying to feed their starving kids, had gone. But in 1933, in October, it wasn’t much better for my dad and my mother, Ike and Nellie, writes former MP Joe Ashton.

I was born in Sheffield three days after my dad’s 19th birthday. He was on the dole which paid two shillings and ninepence a day – about 13p, providing he turned up at the Nunnery Colliery at 10pm every night to stand in for any miner that day who had suffered an injury.

But if nobody was missing, Ike then had to rely on the dole.

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The Nunnery pit was known in the area as ‘The Park’, where Park Hill Flats are now, and where the Sheffield Parkway leads out of the city.

Joe's parents Ike and Nellie AshtonJoe's parents Ike and Nellie Ashton
Joe's parents Ike and Nellie Ashton

Like most of the other pits in that area, it was owned by the Duke of Norfolk, who was then and still is now the premier duke in the peerage of England. A Catholic family descended directly from the Pope.

When I was born, the whole pit had been laid off, because the pit ponies had gone down with colic.

So my dad got nowt.

No dole, no hand out, nothing at all.

Three weeks after I was born, my mother Nellie went back to her job as a buffer girl, totally penniless.

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She had to stand up all day, grinding and polishing cutlery with pumice, holding the hot metal in her hands, paid by the dozen for knives and forks.

It was a hard, brutal life for kids, with an everyday diet of bread and dripping or thick condensed milk out of a tin, dipped on to every dummy.

A raw carrot or half an apple was a treat and a few chips.

As soon as a kid could walk or talk, he or she would be given a streetwise nickname.

My name was Joe, so the kids chanted: “Joe, Joe, sit on the po”, or “Joe, Joe, put your fingers up and blow!”

That’s how they nicknamed me Joe Blow.

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Which was slightly better than: “Mary Martin – always fartin’.”

I won’t repeat what rhyming nicknames were given to kids called Frank, Dick, Mick and Len.

Such taunts could haunt a child for life.

Many of the little toddlers never wore trousers or knickers whatever the weather. They just ran wild and squatted anywhere to pee or poo.

Running about with their bums naked was the tradition for toddlers in Birch Road and nobody seemed to take any notice at all.

Money was not for unnecessary luxuries.

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In actual fact, the fresh air was more hygienic than wearing filthy nappies or hand-me-down pants that were rarely washed or changed.

A kids’ favourite chant was: “You know last night and the night before three little kids came knocking at our door. One with a fiddle, one with a drum and one with a pancake stuck to its bum!”

In Attercliffe there were four cinemas. The Adelphi, the Regal, the Globe and the Pavilion.

In the dreary years after the Blitz, long before the end of the War, the entertainment business virtually shut down, except for pictures and pubs.

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