Interview about village life, women and politics and the Urban District Council.

Lilian Johnson remembers her family moving from Oxfordshire to New Bradwell and how they ‘were treated in the village very much as strangers… they used to look at you with more or less suspicion till they were quite sure’. Moving into an established, village community she had to be careful what she said ‘Oh yes that’s my aunt, that’s my cousin or my cousin married their sister… I suppose that’s because people couldn’t travel’.

In the village there were no buses, ‘if we came into Wolverton to the market on a Friday it was on a carrier’s cart… The one horse jogging along, the seats each side of the brake’. Other villages also relied on the carts for transport and costs ranged from three pennies to sixpence a journey.

Trains ran into Wolverton and a ticket was ‘only tuppence halfpenny from Wolverton to Castlethorpe’. The station was at Castlethorpe, not Hanslope the railway’s preferred location, because of local farmer’s resistance to sell land, ‘it was all done privately it wasn’t government so there was no such thing as … Compulsory purchase’.

General reference to the subject of railways, how they were talked about when she was at school and how some street names in Wolverton were named after influential people connected to the railways.

She recounts her experience of being a young married woman and living in this area (c1914), ‘…of course it was unheard of for women, going to work’, unless they were widows or had big families. The work itself was ‘jolly hard’ usually ‘doing all the scrubbing and cleaning in larger houses’, as there ‘wasn’t the scope for women… and even teachers were not allowed to teach if they married, not in Buckinghamshire’.

New Bradwell, at that time was a very small town with streets of houses built by the railway company. Later many streets of new housing would be built on land that was known locally as ‘Queen Anne’s Bounty’ land and building on this site required a special dispensation from the ecclesiastical authorities. Mentions the living at St. Peter’s and why ‘they have to hold a service… even now to keep it they had a service this year even though there’s only the walls left’. Some land designated ‘Queen Anne’s Bounty’ for ‘poor people’s allotments’ was also re-developed, although new allotments were provided by the Radcliffe Trustees.

As a young woman she was an enthusiastic member of the women’s section of the Labour party, canvassing and attending conferences, and was well placed to witness women’s changing role in politics. Mentions a few exceptional women who were good public speakers and how women generally were looking to the Labour party and the unions to provide better working conditions and wages for their husbands. Later she became an Urban District Councillor and was proud to have been personally involved in three areas that she felt were of lasting value, comprehensive education, local libraries and the swimming pool, areas that she discusses in detail during the interview.

Politics, politicians and class differences are referred to throughout the interview, brief reference to Ramsey McDonald’s ‘defection’ to the coalition, Oswald Mosley, fascism, socialism and capitalism. Talks about electioneering on behalf of the area’s first labour candidate John Scurr, although she was too young to vote herself. Refers to building up Labour Party funds, the introduction of the tote and naming new schools after local farmer’s fields.

After the First World War, the men came home and were disillusioned, they ‘found no jobs waiting for them’ this she thinks is one of the reasons men left Wolverton to find work in Eastleigh, Coventry and Derby.