Countesthorpe Cottage Homes (1)

Number nine of the eleven Cottage Homes at Countesthorpe. Photo courtesy of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mr Gregory: When my father died my mother couldn’t afford to keep us at Rugby so through my relations got me into the cottage homes, Countesthorpe. They said it was a shame for John Gregory’s children to be in the workhouse so they said let us get him in the cottage homes, Countesthorpe. I should be 4 when I was in, until two years in, 1916 I think I came out. My mother married again and of course the law was then, if you’d got a father you weren’t allowed in the cottage homes, it was only people who hadn’t got a father. Number 4, master and his wife was Mr and Mrs Wallis, Mr Wallis was the cobbler, and I was the pet of the home. Matter of fact, Mr Buckingham the VC [Victoria Cross] was in the same home, but before my time of course. The boys was in the home up to number 5 and the girls was from number 7 down to number 11, but of course we went to school together and we played together on certain occasions, but not during the week. Out of the 11 houses there’d be approximately 15 – 20 [people] in each home. The food was just plain but we had plenty, matter of fact through the week it was mostly bread and dripping and cocoa, but Sundays we used to have a treat, bread and butter, piece of cake, and how we used to love the winter time to have the celery. I happened to come down with the measles, which they’d got an isolation hospital there. They’d actually got a flush toilet in the Infirmary and I well recall getting out of bed and using this toilet, and pulling the chain, and the chain after with the cistern filling seemed so long running I started screaming for the matron thinking the place was being flooded. She said, ‘No, Alfred you silly boy, it’s the lavatory filling up.’ That was the first flush toilet I’d ever seen, because in the homes, each individual home, they only had the pans, the midden pans which had to be emptied at night. We had two farms and well I remember as a field was put down for mowing we all had to go out stone picking, and we used to go potato picking, oh I can remember the back pain now, but if they caught you standing up, ‘You can’t pick potatoes standing up Gregory, get your back bent.’ That’s what you got.

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