Bricks (1)

Where there were brick yards there sometimes used to be terracotta works. Locally made plaques on buildings are very common in the Ellistown area.

Mr Woolley: I was born in Ellistown in South Street, at number 27. My mother worked at an elastic web factory in Coalville and I understand she made elastic web for Burgess’s. My father at that time, when I first began to remember, he was a coal miner and he worked at Ibstock Colliery. Since then of course he’s had various jobs at Measham, Ellistown and various other collieries, and most of these collieries I’ve been down anyway during the course of my lifetime. However, I was born in South Street next door to my grandmother’s, and my grandmother’s name was Adams, and my grandfather was a brick burner at the South Leicestershire Brick Works, and for many years he was a brick burner and I used to go and help him as a very young child, take his lunch…

Interviewer: Could you say what a brick burner is?

Mr Woolley: Well, a brick burner was the man - nowadays they do it all by electronics – but in those days a brick burner, he had a little hut on the top of his, on the kiln, the huge kiln, which have now been demolished of course, and every so many hours he used to have to go round the kiln, take the lid off the top of the firing hole where they had a heap of very fine coal slag, look down the hole into the kiln where the bricks had already been stacked, and by his sighting of this he could tell almost to a degree what the temperature was. And it had to be kept up to a certain temperature for a certain period of time so that at the end of that period the bricks were absolutely burnt as they should be.

Interviewer: How big were these kilns?

Mr Woolley: Well I should think the top, I used to go up there with him, we used to have to approach it by ramp from the floor level, it’d probably be 15 feet high and the diameter, a circular kiln this would be, looking more like a pork pie than anything if I can describe it that way, I would think it would be probably 30 feet across and 12 to 15 feet high.

Interviewer: And how many bricks would that kiln hold, have you any idea?

Mr Woolley: Well, the size of it I would think it would probably hold ten, 15,000.

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