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My mother was English and my father was a Welsh miner. I was born in Swansea, says Dilys Fell. When my father died in the thirties my mother couldn't make ends meet, so we came to Devizes to be with her family.
My grandfather had been a coachman for a vicar in Old Park and when the vicar died he became one of the coachmen at the Bear Hotel. They had horse-drawn, and later motor buses for hire.
My grandmother lived in Sheep Street near to the Town School. It was much easier to live here with small children than in Wales at the time. Whenever my mother had gone for a job there, they hadn't given it to her if they heard that she had small children.
We had an old aunt who lived in Wedhampton who found us a cottage nearby, costing half a crown a week and so we moved. My mother used to go to confinements and so earned enough to make ends meet. I don't think that she ever got used to it here, but I loved living in the countryside.
From Wedhampton we went to Urchfont where we had a cottage opposite the Lamb Inn belonging to the Planks family, which was convenient because one of my mother's jobs was looking after Mrs Plank's daughter. People always seemed to treat us as outsiders, although later when we had a house in Potterne we enjoyed it much more because the people were friendlier.
One of my sisters worked for the Nivens in their house at Marden in the 1930's. At the start of the war some of the wealthier families were finding it difficult to get staff to help them in their houses, the days before the gentry came down to earth! Old Mrs Niven was heard to say, "I can't get maids anywhere."
I had done some domestic service, but right from a young age I hated it and felt these people were lazy and should do their own work. By then, anyway, I had found a job with a lady at the lodge house at Urchfont Manor who was setting up a goat farm and this was my start with working on farms and with animals, which I enjoyed.
Mrs Niven was so desperate to get anyone to cook for her that when my mother would occasionally agree to help she sent the chauffeur-driven car to fetch her!
My mother also worked at Urchfont Manor for the Pollock family in the late 1930's where she got two shillings for three hours scrubbing.
 | From:
Devizes Voices compiled by David Buxton
Tempus Publishing
ISBN 0 7524 0661 2
£9.99
For a complete list of local history books published by Tempus Publishing visit: www.tempus-publishing.com |
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