Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

12 My dad maintained that some he made up but I noticed that after he was 80 years old Dad also made them up! The point about being a signalman is that grandfather ended his working life with a pension of 50p a week in a huge house and could not downsize. So he seemed to spend a lot of his time walking the streets collecting wood to saw into smaller pieces for the fire. This was not sufficient to keep them warm so they would take a stone hot water bottle to bed, retiring early each night. My parents took food and drink and maybe coal to help them. In particular a pint of milk as I liked their pasteurised milk and was allowed to drink it. Edith, however, liked to drink rum, which I imagine was expensive so my mum was not her biggest fan! Mum would make egg custards to take down for them to eat. Ironically after grandad died Edith was able to move to a bungalow but I do not remember visiting her. Maybe mum’s brother Jabez William (named after grandad) kept in touch. “Edith came to our wedding and I gave her my bouquet.’ Thomas had been born in Basford, Nottinghamshire, in April 1898. The 1901 census shows Thomas (aged three and the second youngest of eight children, of whom six survived) living at Whighay Nook Cottage, 58 Annesley Road, Hucknall Torkard, a mile or two from Newstead. His eldest brother, Frank, was at that time an above ground worker at the pit (probably Hucknall) at 14. After Thomas moved to Newstead some of his brothers continued to live at Hucknall until the property there was knocked down to make way for a railway bridge. In 1911 the census shows Thomas (now 13) still at school but his five brothers all working in the pits. Thomas’s father (also Thomas) was, like Enid’s other grandfather, a railway signalman. In 1924, Thomas married Mabel Alice Amos in the Methodist Chapel. If she was not the girl next door, she was living in the same village in 1911, and Youth Enid’s mother and father, May and Len Turton.