My father, Lawrence (Lol), was born in the village of Newhall in September 1911. The youngest child of Albert and Annie Harvey, he was the apple of his parents and two elder sisters’ eyes.
He always had a love of gardening, and as he grew up, he spent many hours tending flowers and vegetables in his father’s garden. I remember as a child mistakenly helping him weed the piece of garden dedicated to flowers. In his absence, I diligently pulled out all the tiny green shoots and put them on the compost heap. On his return from a gruelling day at work, I proudly showed him my efforts. He wasn't pleased. I had pulled out all his prize seedlings that he had spent hours planting in precise uniform rows, the previous day. Needless to say, I forfeited my sixpence pocket money that week.
His second love was machines, and when he finished his schooling at the village senior school, he went on to Derby College where he took his School Certificate in Engineering. He passed his exams with distinction, and took up his first post with Post Office Telephones. I can hear him now telling me how he was expected to get behind the wheel of one of the huge Post Office lorries without having one lesson on driving. It was because of this incident that he changed jobs, and he often said that this was also the cause of his never learning to drive a car.
Whilst attending college, he met the love of his life, Lucy, whom he later married. My brother was born in 1935, my sister in 1940, and I was born in 1946.
Before the start of World War Two, Dad worked for a Burton company, Thornewell and Warren, where his expertise in engineering took him all over the country. During the war, he serviced vital machinery that enabled the mines to carry on producing coal. Although I was born just after the end of the war, I can still remember sitting on the cross-bar of his old bicycle as he trundled over the meadows to the nearby steaming pit banks. Here he would scramble to gather what few lumps of coal he could find, so that we could have a fire the next week, because he and Mum had no money left until next pay day.
One of his proudest achievements at this time, was to collaborate in the production and installation of the first bottling plant in the nearby Burton brewery of Worthington.
After a brief change in employer with FNF (Fine Needle Frames), he returned to work at Thornewell’s (later to become Briggs’s).
It was while he worked at Briggs’s that some of my most vivid memories of my father are embedded in my heart. We never had much money in those days, and the highlight of my week was for Mum and I to journey on the bus every Saturday to Burton, where we would meet Dad from work. Often we had to wait for an hour or more, and if I close my eyes I can still smell the grease and heavy machinery that so typifies an engineering workshop. When we finally left the yard, my treat would begin. We went to Woolworth’s, and there we stood in line with hoards of hungry shoppers, awaiting a delicious hamburger. No MacDonald’s this, but a succulent mix of sausage meat, herbs and breadcrumbs, topped with delicious fried onions, and served in a soft white roll.
His work still took him all over the country, and it fell upon Mum and us kids to look after his three greenhouses. Most of the time, the task of stoking up the coke fires that heated the greenhouses, and watering the hundred or so pots of chrysanthemums, was left to me. I didn't mind the stoking, but I hated the watering. Every spring, Dad used to acquire a hessian sack filled with sheep's manure, which he would settle in the bottom of the watering tub. It was into this smelly gunge that I had to plunge the battered old zinc watering can, in order to water his beloved plants. Still, the results of our combined labours was stunning, when, come show night, we proudly stood in Burton Town Hall to receive the prize monies he so richly deserved for his flowers. All the hours he had spent, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, tenderly brushing each individual petal of each bloom, into place the night before the show, were worth every penny of the one pound prize money.
Because I accompanied Dad to these shows, it’s no wonder that my love too is for the chrysanthemum flower. One year Dad won a bronze medal, and he and I hid on the balcony of the Town Hall show room, so that we could see which exhibits the judges chose. If ever we had been seen, Dad would have been banned for life. The sheer excitement and danger of what we did is etched in my memory.
After Dad was made redundant from Briggs’s, he went to work for the National Coal Board, where he tested to destruction machinery that was to be used in mines. We moved house on his fiftieth birthday, September 23, 1961, to live on a newly built Council estate. We could only take one of the three greenhouses, but here at last, he and Mum had escaped from the poverty trap of Parliament Street. Vegetables gave way to beautiful garden landscapes, but he still grew his beloved chrysanthemums, albeit fewer in number. He still exhibited at the Town Hall, but was never to win another medal.
At 57 he was again made redundant, and he went to work for Pirelli, and it was here that he became seriously ill following a heart attack. His body may have been broken, but never his spirit, nor his wicked sense of humour. At sixty three, he took early retirement because of his ill-health, and in 1983 he and Mum moved house, to live in a lovely little bungalow in The Crescent. Down to one small greenhouse, he still grew a few plants, and still propagated cuttings gathered year after year, from his first pots of chrysanthemums, back in the dark days of Parliament Street.
Banned from smoking, he was often caught standing at the front gate, hand surreptitiously in his cardigan pocket, guarding a smouldering nub-end. It was only when his pocket caught fire, (more times than I can remember, actually) that he admitted the dastardly deed.
My Dad died in 1985, aged 73, in the village he had lived in all his life. I still miss his friendship, his love and his wonderful sense of humour. But as long as I can smell the aroma of a chrysanthemum flower, I know he is close by my side.
After Dad retired, my son asked him to recount some of his experiences, and recorded these on tape. Unfortunately the tapes were lost and with them a slice of history. I shall be pleased to hear from anyone who has first-hand knowledge of Newhall during World War Two or any period up to 1960.
In 1996, I wrote a poem entitled The Show. I would like to share it with you. Click here to read the poem.