Bricks (3)

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

Interviewer: Can you remember seeing the bricks made? Presumably they were hand made were they?

Mr Woolley: Yes.

Interviewer: Can you describe them?

Mr Woolley: In those days, well I saw them working in the brickworks, obviously they were very old sheds, and probably one man or two men would be working at a bench and they would have a mould made of wood, and one man would get a huge lump of clay, slam it down on the mould and cut it off with a bow cutter, which was a bent piece of metal with a wire across and they used to cut it across, pat it down with a, like a cricket bat, to make it solid in its thing, turn the mould upside down, the brick would drop out and they would put it on one side onto a palette.

Interviewer: Were these named bricks?

Mr Woolley: They usually had, in the mould at the bottom, they usually had... it was in the mould they had it cut so that it registered which ever brick yard it was. No doubt that would be South Leicestershire Brick Works.

Interviewer: This clay, was that a by product of the mining industry?

Mr Woolley: No, no, it was separate quarry next door to the colliery. I don’t really know which came first, whether it was the colliery or the clay works. But in Beveridge Lane, which has now almost been filled in by the coal board, the quarry has been filled in, but that was the source of the clay where they used to make the bricks from.

Interviewer: At that time the Ellistown clay pit didn’t exist?

Mr Woolley: The South Leicestershire one existed but I’m not sure about the one at the top end of the village which was now Ellistown pipes. This was the South Leicestershire Brick Works next door to the colliery. You’ll see now there’s a tremendous amount of work going on where they’ve almost filled it in, and the coal board have got some coal preparation plant there where they collect all the coal from the Heather outcrop. And there was my grandfather, Sam Adams, and his brother who used to live next door, Walter Adams, and they were two brothers who used to work in virtually shifts and keep the thing going.

Interviewer: Were they brick burners from Derbyshire?

Mr Woolley: They come from Derbyshire.

Interviewer: They were brick burners there before?

Mr Woolley: Yes. In those days it was a highly skilled job, brick burning.

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