Old Times - Old Timers (21 January 1977)

I suppose that if these weekly notes have any intrinsic value it is that on occasion they add perspective to current affairs.  I owe this ability, such as it is, to my extensive – though thoroughly unco-ordinated – reading and to the fascination which old men and their memories have always had for me.

I caught the bug in my teens, largely owing to my acquaintance with a man of our textile town who was then in his 90s.  Scores of reeking woollen mills and warehouses jostled each other for space about a beck (the Yorkshire and Scandinavian word for a stream) which was largely culverted and which stank to high heaven with industrial effluent.  There was also a perpetual din, among which the clatter of tramcars was prominent.

My acquaintance had made his money in that environment, but in his old age he saw and heard none of those things.  He remembered a clear and sparkling beck purling its way down to the main river between grassy banks, as other more fortunate becks still do in the Dales.

He saw a few handloom weavers’ cottages clustered around the ancient parish church and moot hall, and then a few outlying farmsteads, with sheep grazing on the surrounding ridges.  And the most pervasive sounds he heard were the bleating of those sheep and the songs of peewits and skylarks.

I myself knew another old man who had been a handloom weaver all his working life and the house where I was born had originally been designed for hand weaving in the upper chamber.

Today, as I look on what is happening to North Bucks, I find myself experiencing similar feelings.  Elderly natives of this district must be experiencing them much more strongly.

After coming to Bletchley I was greatly interested in and aided by the memories of such men as Mr Joe Fennell, Mr Oliver Wells and Mr Harry Dimmock.  Mr Fennell had exceptionally wide interests.  For instance, he was both a founder of the Co-operative Society and the local Conservative agent.

Pensions are much in the news today.  In 1950, Mr Fennell told of a remarkable case.  He himself entered the telegraph office of the LNWR at Bletchley in 1872 and retired as chief of the department in 1920.  He told how, up to 1870, the Electric Telegraph Company supplied clerks, linesmen, etc. to the railways and the Post Office.  Then, in that year, the railways and the Post Office bought out their sections from the Telegraph Company, some employees going to the railways and others to the Post Office.

The Telegraph Company was good to its former employees and the departmental chief at Rugby, Mr J Lister, then aged about 35, was granted £1 a week pension.  This might not sound so great today, but in those days it was nearly twice the weekly wage of a labourer.  Mr Lister stayed on the railway until he was 68.  He then received another pension of about £3 a week and he continued to draw both pensions until he died at the age of 101!

An interesting case during my time here was that of Mr Simon Peter Godfrey, of Newton Longville.  Mr Godfrey joined the Metropolitan Police in 1883 and served at Vine Street and Bow Street until 1895, when he was promoted sergeant and moved to Cannon Row.  In 1899 he was made station sergeant at Paddington, where he completed “25” in 1908.  He held the 1887 Queen Victoria Police Medal, its 1897 bar and the King Edward VII Police Medal.

For the next 16 years until his retirement in 1925 he was an NSPCC officer.  He had married a Newton girl in one of the village chapels in 1891 and on his final retirement they went to live there.

They had been married 58½ years when she died in February, 1950.  Unfortunately, I have lost a note on how long he survived her, but at that time, aged 88 and still able to read and write without glasses, he had been drawing his Metropolitan Police sergeant’s pension 44½ years!

Another remarkable old man was Mr Henry Dundas Ballantine, who died at Bow Brickhill in November 1946, aged 96.  He was a Scot, an old soldier and could remember seeing as a boy a Scot’s regiment returning from the Indian Mutiny.  In his early days he sang with the Edinburgh Choral Union and a week or two before his death listened to a broadcast of “Messiah” with a score he himself had used in 1872.  He also solved a crossword puzzle the night before he died.  But what fixes him in my mind is not any of these facts, nor the circumstances of his pension – which indeed I do not know.  It is my knowledge that he actually witnessed the execution of the last man

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