Fleckney In The Past, What Life Was Like During the Early 20th Century

As Part of the Books Connect 2 Project A number of group reminscience sessions for village members were held. Below are some of the stories about life in Fleckney that were talked about by village members.

The Hunt Comes To Fleckney. Picture Taken on Main Street Circa 1925

"When the hunt used to come to Fleckney you used to get half a day off from school to go to the meet. If you weren't careful, some of the children hadn't used to come back and the next morning they were made to stand out at the front of the school and given the stick across the hand. There was always someone who played truant. I remember seeing old Percy (the headmaster) chasing them over the chairs in the classroom."

"We didn't have no play, only at playtimes, we didn't play with sand like they do now, we had to do our work. Our headmaster, Mr Ailes, he wasn't a very nice head teacher really, He'd make us do compositions and if anybody had put in silly things he'd read it out, he'd make the person come out in front of the class and make you read it so all the children would laugh at you. It was really awful because if you did anything wrong it stayed with you for the rest of the time you were at school."

"Years ago, in the playground, the teachers would send one of the children down for an orange rope from the grocers shop to split the playground into two during the summer and we used have blocks of cricket wickets, one for the girls and one for the boys and two different balls, one for the girls and one for the boys. When you hit the ball whoever caught the ball got to bowl it at the person batting, but everyone always used to try and hit it into the pond."

"We did have real discipline at school, that's why the schoolmaster wasn't liked. We had a quarter of any hours play in the mornings and then one of the teachers would come and blow the whistle in the playground and each class would line up against the wall and we all had to march into school in turn with the little ones first and low and behold, if you looked out over the railings when you got back in school you'd have a bumped back from a teacher. You really were disciplined, but I don't think it hurt us at all. We were taught right from the beginning. We started school at the age of five and we did lessons from the age of five and did reading from the age of five. We did arithmetic, writing, and poems right from the age of five, we didn't have no play."

Rhyme taught at school

"We were taught when we five about the pussy willow and we learned a poem that we had to recite to one of the teachers that had retired. All of over us had to say"

I know a little pussy
Her coat is silver grey, she lives down in the meadow,
and never runs away,
she always was a pussy,
she never was a cat,
her name is pussy willow now what do you think of that.

"Now, I remember that from when I was five and we learned it in the end school room, it was the only room in the school to have an open fire but also we had a stove, very primitive it was. Anyway, we were taught well and up to now I've never had a calculator in my hand, I still work through my head and I don't bother about anything like a calculator."

"The arithmetic taught in Fleckney primary school was anything to do with the local industry. Children were taught the type of maths that they would need to use if they went on to work in shops, agriculture or the hosiery business."

"From Fleckney, when you got to the age of 11 you had to have a day at Kibworth Schools because there were no facilities to do home economics or woodwork in Fleckney. You had to walk to Kibworth to learn how to do cookery. We used Kibworth Grammar School and the girls used to do cookery and the boys did wood work. We had to carry our ingredients all the way from Fleckney to Kibworth whether it was hell, rain or snow. We were frightened to death of Miss Hulland as well as she was so strict. Then a few months later we'd go back to Kibworth Grammar to learn how to wash, so we had to take a basket of dirty linen."

"Mothers never worried about you walking anyway hell, rain or snow and sometimes it would be almost dark by the time we got home in winter, but they never bothered about us going. It seems hard, but everybody did it, it's stood us in good stead though, walking everywhere. We were only little children."

"The first bus to run to Leicester was Johny Pebdy's and he lived at the house next to the pond and he had a blue bus. You had to book to go to Leicester. It would be a fortnight before you could get there because everyone in the village would have booked. Mind you, you could get a suit in Fleckney in them days which shows you how much the village catered for. You could get boots and shoes, there were three fish shops, a shoe shop, we had milk delivered twice a day, morning and night with the old bucket. Years ago everybody used to have water buts in the yard, because we'd got no piped water, and we used to save the water for washing from the rain. The fella who used to bring the milk at night for us, nine times out of ten we'd catch him dibbing the water ladle in our water to top up his milk. Many a time he'd do that, that was Mr Toon, and he used to come round with a horse and cart and Mr Arnold Deaton used to do the same and we used to rely on them."

"When we were kids there was no gas, electricity or water, no buses into Leicester. There were seven lorries though that would go out to the neighbouring villages delivering provisions. It was said that you didn't have to leave your house, you could get everything delivered. Everything used to be on tick and the women used to have everything on tick so that when the old man got paid at the end of the week the women would come and pay the shopkeeper and start a new week."

"Many of the houses used to share a water supply. Our house was quite lucky, there were ten cottages and we had to use the one well, and it was a proper well, not a pump. We all had a galvanised bucket in those days, not a plastic one and we used to have to hook it over the well. We'd go down as children and walk to the end of the last house and hook the bucket onto the well hook and sometimes we hadn't used to hook it on right and it would be lost down the well. We'd have to go and tell poor mother, and mother couldn't afford a new bucket so she had to borrow from the neighbours and then every other Sunday the men from the cottages would have a session of getting the buckets that were lost down the well back up. That's how life used to be, helping one another."

It wasn't only milk that had to be delivered to Fleckney. In the early days bread, meat and vegetables would have been delivered to your door by horse and cart. By the 1930s motorised vehicles were beginning to take over. The picture above shows Callaghans Bakers Van from Kibworth delivering bread to Mr Gardiners grocery shop on High Street (Where the Dolphin Fish and Chip shop stands today).