Desford Colliery Village (1)

This photo is from a book produced by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England in the 1930s (but published after WW2) which illustrated the effects of good and bad development on rural Leicestershire. ©CPRE used with permission.

Mrs Harris: Well my father was a deputy at Desford Colliery. When he first worked at Desford Colliery we did live at Barlestone and they used to have to walk to Desford Colliery. Then they built some houses especially for deputies and officials, near to the colliery, and my dad was offered one of these, and I remember a morning in November, a very crisp morning, and Mum pushed the pram with the little children and I walked along the side. I’m not sure how they got the furniture over there but I know there was a wheelbarrow used for a sack of potatoes. We went to this house and we thought it was absolutely marvellous because we had a toilet just outside of the back door, where we used to have to walk right down a yard for the toilets at Barlestone, and we seemed to have modern facilities, but they wouldn’t call them modern facilities today! I think some of the highlights of my father being a deputy was at Christmas time when the deputies were given a brace of pheasants, and that to us was absolutely wonderful, because you didn’t have turkeys and that unless you were very, very rich, not in that day, and to us, a brace of pheasants, well, we were in heaven sort of thing.

Interviewer: Who gave those?

Mrs Harris: The colliery management, Desford Colliery management gave them to the deputies. They weren’t all deputies that lived down there, there were some electricians of course. In fact we used to have football teams, we had a field at the back of the houses. The men used to play the ladies at football, cricket, we had sports, there was a swing in the field, we used to have bonfires – you name it we had it, even to a party in the canteen on Boxing Day, and all the people down Heath Road, the menfolk paid ten shillings (50p) a week, which was a lot of money in that day, I think for the last two or three weeks, and then we had a huge party, the whole street, it was wonderful.

©EMOHA