Map of the area around Raby Road, drawn by Trevor (for his grandchildren?) in 1990

Chapter 12: Some personal reminiscences

In the preceding chapters I have traced the history of my family from the early part of the eighteenth century up to the present day, covering up to nine generations through its various branches. (The fact that my great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Gresley, could trace her ancesters in a direct line from Roger de Toeni, who fought at the battle of Hastings*, seems to have fascinated some members of the family in the past but in my opinion is of no particular relevance to the history of the Joneses themselves.) Personal recollection and anecdotes have been included to draw attention to the human side of the story and so add to what would otherwise have been a purely historical account. In this final chapter, as indicated in the Introduction, I have set out some of my own reminiscences of the days before the Second World War. They are presented from what is essentially a personal standpoint. but I hope they will nevertheless be of some interest.

*Editor's note: it was Roger's sons who fought at Hastings, see Appendix A.

My own memories go back 60 years to the end of the First World War, during the early part of my parents' married life at Stockton-on-Tees, and I have decided to start with a brief pen-picture of my home district as I knew it around 1920. In those days Raby Road stood in the midst of farm land half a mile or more beyond Lustrum Beck, which was the approximate boundary of the residential area to the west of Stockton. The road to Fairfield, which passed the bottom of the road and provided the normal access to the town itself, was no more than a fairly narrow country lane bordered by hedges and ash trees. In the fields to the south of Raby Road stood Oxbridge Farm, whose lands extended to the outskirts of Hartburn village. To the west was open country as far as the hamlet of Fairfield, where my grandparents had lived at the turn of the century, and beyond that indefinitely into the interior of County Durham: the only habitations (apart from two isolated houses further along the lane) were farms and one or two smallholdings. To the north were the cornfields of one of these farms, soon afterwards converted to pasture and now used as school playing-fields. To the east, in the direction of Stockton, the Fairfield road passed through the cornfields of Oxbridge Farm and Grangefield Farm, on the present site of the western Ring Road, as far as the ancient Ox Bridge over Lustrum Beck. Beyond the beck one mounted West Villas bank - much steeper and narrower that it is now - and thereafter, in rather less than a mile, came via Yarm Lane to the town centre and the High Street.

Probably my earliest memory is of being in the front garden of Raby House watching searchlights in the fields of Oxbridge Farm at the bottom of the road. It is no more than a fleeting picture, and beyond recalling the darkness and the moving beams of light in the sky I have no knowledge of what else happened on that occasion. That memory, and the equally brief recollection of my grandfather referred to in Chapter 10, are the only ones that certainly go back to the time of the First World War itself.

From the following year, 1919, several events come to mind. The- earliest of these was my mother's illness at the beginning of the year. I can see her lying in bed in the back bedroom at Raby House, which was lit by a small night-light after darkness had fallen, although at the time I had no idea that she was in fact seriously ill. In the following month we were visited by two New Zealand soldiers who were on their way home from France for demobilisation. One of them was said to be a cousin of my mother's (although I have never been able to trace the connection) and I recall him standing by our rear french door and dropping over my head a tall "Anzac" hat which came down to my shoulders. Then in the following July I went with my parents and my brother - who was still a child in arms - to sit on the balcony over Chamney's shop in Yarm Lane and watch the Peace Day procession marching along from the direction of the High Street. Other early recollections probably from the same year, are of watching horses and hounds proceeding to stables at the top of the farm path behind our back garden; and also of watching the glow in the night sky from Carlton ironworks, far across the country to the north-west beyond the tall masts of the war-time Admiralty wireless station at Fairfield. The hunting stables had ceased to be used as such not long after 1920, and the ironworks and wireless station had also ceased to operate in my childhood days. Finally, I remember being taken by my parents to see the "hirings" in Stockton High Street. I cannot put an exact date on this visit, but it must have occurred either late in 1919 or during the early part of the following year. The "hirings" as I recall them consisted for the most part of swings and roundabouts roughly where John Walker Square now stands, The time was early evening and the fairground was lit by flares and some electric lights. I can also see people standing on platforms similar to hustings. But whether they were offering themselves for hire in the traditional way in Durham and North Yorkshire, or whether some election was also in progress, I cannot say.

Raby Road being a rather isolated community during my early childhood, visits to the town centre tended to be few and far between. In September 1922 I started school in Oxbridge, but this was as far as I ventured unless I was being taken by my parents to visit a relative or see an early cinema show or pantomime. By the middle of the 1920s, however, I was going further afield, because by then I had joined Newtown primary school which involved a walk of nearly a mile to and from Raby Road, usually four times a day. Moreover, it was at this time that the town centre became more easily accessible with the commencement of a rather primitive bus service from the end of the road to the Town Hall. In May 1928 occurred what was for me a travel landmark when I went with my father on a day excursion to London, where my uncle Howell met us and acted as a guide round the West End. Another notable transport landmark - although of a quite different and spectacular kind - was the Railway Centenary of September 1925, one hundred years after the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. On the day in question all the family went by way of the field path to Hartburn village and from there over the Potato Hall fields to the present railway line from Darlington to Stockton and Thornaby. It was there, with many hundreds of other spectators, that we saw the wonderful procession of ancient and modern steam engines headed by Locomotion No.1. Three years ago, in 1975, the 150th anniversary was celebrated along the same historic stretch of railway. But the age of steam had already passed away and I do not think it had quite the same impact as the centenary celebrations of my younger days.

During the early 1920s our games and entertainments tended to centre on the road itself (which was almost completely free of traffic) and the surrounding fields. It was here that we enjoyed the usual children's games throughout the year, supplemented by ice-skating and tobogganing in the winter months. My main interests, at that time and for many years afterwards, were football and cricket. My interest in football began in about 1926, when I first attended matches at Stockton and Middlesbrough - usually, but not allways, with my father. Middlesbrough's record-breaking season of 1926/27, and several that followed, left me not only with the lasting memory of Camsell and Pease in full cry but with one of a less enjoyable nature. On Boxing Day 1926, in a record crowd of over 44,000 to see a vital game against Manchester City, I was one of some hundreds of children who were forced on to the pitch when the barriers collapsed at one end of the ground. There were a number of casualties; and although one tended to look back on the incident with a fair amount of boyish boasting, it was frightening when it happened. As for cricket, I recall the thrill of seeing the great West Indian all-rounder Leary Constantine (now Lord Constantine) playing as a guest for Stockton against the rest of the local cricket league, This was in an annual charity match which was always played to a full house on the Stockton cricket ground, quite close to Raby Road. During his visit Constantine stayed at the home of one of our neighbours who was the club captain, and if the weather was fine he could often be seen in the garden talking to his host's family. One other entertainment of a different kind also comes readily to mind. During the 1920s Felix Corbett organised a series of annual celebrity concerts in Middlesbrough Town Hall. My parents went to quite a number of them but my mother was unable to attend one of the concerts and I went with my father in her place. It was my great good fortune that the celebrity on that occasion was Rachmaninov. I cannot say that my musical appreciation at that age enabled me to do justice to what I heard, but I clearly recall the tall and rather gaunt figure of the great pianist and composer walking on to the concert platform. I retained the programme for this performance for a number of years afterwards, but unfortunately it has not survived. However, it was something to be able to say in later years that one had seen and heard Rachrnaninov perform in person.

Finally, there were the seaside and country holidays that marked the summers between the wars as something different from the daily round of home activities and school. Despite difficult times during the late 1920s and early 1930s, we were fortunate that our parents managed to arrange summer holidays for us throughout the twenty or so years up to the outbreak of the Second World War. The first holiday I remember was one spent at Borrowby in 1919. This was not because of its association with the Pearsons of the previous century, of whom I had then heard nothing, but mainly because I chose to taste some new distemper on the day we left Raby Road and was violently ill for some days afterwards. Two years-later, in the memorable dry summer of 1921, we spent a month at Osmotherley in a cottage which still stands immediately opposite the church gates. I believe it was this holiday, above all others, that left with me an abiding love of the moorlands of North Yorkshire which I still visit every year. We reached Osmotherley by horse and trap from the little wayside station of Trenholm Bar, which stood with its level-crossing gates about five miles to the north, alongside what is now the A19 trunk road. Not a drop of rain fell after the Saturday evening of our arrival, and before the end of the holiday the sheep were having to be brought in from the hills as the streams and ponds dried up in their usual summer feeding grounds. In 1923 we spent another hot and dry month's holiday at Robin Hood's Bay, then a remote fishing community tucked away at the foot of the North Yorkshire cliffs. We stayed in a cottage in Albion Street, just off the tiny village square. My memories of this holiday are of our many picnics at Mill Beck, further along the bay, the "communal" bakery (long gone) where we took our bread to be baked, and the small brass band that played on Sunday evenings in the cobbled square near the slipway to the beach. After an exceedingly wet holiday at Seaburn in the mid-1920s we settled on Marske-by-the-Sea for our holidays for five successive years from 1927 to 1931. Marske was then little more than a village of small stone-built houses and shops, with a fine beach which stretched to Saltburn two miles further down the coast and was the venue for the pre-war Yorkshire Motor-Cycle Speed Trials. In our first year there Marske lay exactly on the line of the total eclipse of the sun. Shortly after six o'clock in the morning of 29 June 1927 we stood on the sandhills just outside the village and watched the shadow of the eclipse sweep down the hillside from Upleatham and heard all the birds go silent as the darkness fell. It was close on seventy years since Mary Eleanor Jones had stood with her parents on the hill above Ddol Trefechan and gazed on Donati's comet in the autumn sky of 1858: and, as on that earlier occasion, it was the experience of a lifetime. The five years at Marske were followed by eight at Saltburn, where we stayed with the Cotton family. It was, I recall, with some forebodings that we were all together for the last of these holidays in August 1939. The forebodings turned out to be well founded for on the Thursday following the end of the Saltburn holiday, while I was spending the third week of my holiday at Raby House, I received a telegram from the Air Ministry recalling me to London. Ten days later the Second World War had broken out and the years covered by these reminiscences had come to an end.

Appendices