Interview about railway connections, living and working in Wolverton, and collecting local history.
Dorothy Warren discusses family connections to the Wolverton Works and the railway and records her observations of childhood, local schools and life in Wolverton.
She comments on how the worker’s living in the outlying villages would walk five miles to get to the Works for six o’clock in the morning. The mishaps they encountered when clocks were seasonally altered or it was foggy, ‘they had to wander round, they couldn’t find the style to get out of it onto the canal bank’.
She notes that people who moved into Wolverton in the early days, well before the First World War moved into the small houses that were called the ‘little streets’. In her opinion second generation residents hoped that moving into the area would give their sons more opportunity to learn a trade, earn better money and have a better life.
She describes the types of housing in Wolverton, at that time, the quite large houses in Victoria Street, ‘except that they hadn’t got bathrooms, but then very few houses had in those days’. How they managed to live in one room and a scullery ‘from what I can remember you went straight in the living room… hardly any yard, just a little bit of back yard. You used to have to hang your washing across the back way’. She recalls Glyn Square’s houses, ‘miniatures of the better houses in Wolverton… Mrs so and so had fourteen children in that cottage… I mean where did they sleep then only in two bedrooms?… since the war they’ve built all these council houses so the houses are quite as good in the villages as they are in town’.
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