Station Road

I can't remember any serious illness but if I had a cold one of my aunts would put a brown tallow on a brown paper and slap it on my chest. It were cold - it used to be horrible. It cured it!

He (dad) as far as I know, worked for Parson & Sherwin in Station Road and then went to the coalmine. Parson & Sherwin was iron ironmongery, tools and everything like that. Then he got a job at the mines in Nuneaton, that made us leave. As my older brothers left school they came to work at Hinckley. I wanted the carpentry. 

I used to go two days a week to the woodwork school but when I left school my father couldn't afford to put me at it, five shilling (25p) a week as an apprentice for five years, so I had to go and get a job then. I drew my first weeks wages before I was 13.

I came to Hinckley to work at Johnson's boot and shoe factory - I went in the clicking. I thought to myself, I've got to give up the carpentry so I might as well go into this trade, so I learnt the clicking right through, right through cutting swains down for the vamp (the top of the shoe). It were a thin material, woolly one side, material on the other. We had to dip it in this paste and then put it on the vamp. The foreman, he used to sort them out you see, it'd be the flimsiest vamp what I should have to put the swains down on. 

I went from that onto fitting cutting - that was the lining of the shoe. I worked hard on that and when I'd been on it for about two year and the foreman brought me some leather skin and I had to cut the pattern. They shifted me from where I was next to an experienced man, you see, so I'd get the idea from him. He'd watch me, how I worked the skin up and the art of cutting that skin up was making less waste. I took the vamps up the backbone of the skin and worked the quarters - that's the leg - up by the side of the vamp, or if you were making boot style you'd work that on the outside as well, so you got the worst part of the leather on the back you see, so the back strap covered a lot of it when it were stitched up. And that were the art of clicking - cutting the skin up so you made less waste - what they call, you know, good costing.