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Phil Bell was born in 1949 in the Ancoats district of Manchester.
Lomas's scrap yard was where everyone took their spoils, mainly lead, some copper and bits of brass. You could pick lead up from the demolished house's that littered the periphery of the city.
My granddad said the council did more damage to the well being of the people than Hitler did during two world wars. Up-rooting and splitting families and pushing them onto estates miles from anywhere. Ripping communities from their foundations, never once asking did they want to go.
Compulsory Purchase was where the council would make you sell your house for what they thought it was worth and give you a rented council house in return.
People had lived together as a community for five generations, if a child was naughty they wouldn't hold back, they would tell the family in question, they could tell them because they knew them well enough to enable them to do so, because they were part of the neighbourhood. Shoving them onto housing estates was akin to a prison sentence to the majority.
What they left when they moved, we rummaged through. Most was useless to trade with but metal wasn't. Lomas would take it, they paid a lot less than anywhere else but no questions were asked.
Ancoats Gold that's what lead was, and the best lead picker was my cousin Billy Bell. He was pushing his wooden box on wheels picking lead and whatever else with Tommy Gibbons when he was only seven. He was a veteran at ten.
We would sit around a fire burning lead until it melted, and then we would pour it into sand moulds. Our Billy didn't, no one ever saw him melt lead. He didn't need to as he had his own strategy.
He started to work for Billy Lomas in his yard. His co-conspirator Tommy Gibbons would push the trolley full of lead to the yard at least three times a week, no one could fathom out where he was getting the lead.
One night I saw him on the canal near the back wall of Lomas's scrap yard, he told me a secret never to be told to anyone else. Cross my heart and hope to die.
He knew Lomas had been ripping him off for a couple of years, so he asked if he could work for him, he said yes and paid him peanuts and thought he was being clever, except he wasn't as clever as our Billy.
Billy had spent the first three months digging the bricks out of the back wall on the canal-side to make a hole and replacing them every night to disguise what he had been up to.
Tommy Gibbons came in with the scrap lead, Lomas paid him a lot less than the true worth, Billy took it from him and stacked it at the back of the yard near the wall. Tommy went around the back of the yard on the canal and being careful not to be seen the bricks were taken out and Tommy took the lead out, put it back in the wooden trolley ready to take it back again.
This went on four times a week for three years. Billy had a Post Office Savings Account with £700.00 in it when he was twelve! That was why you never saw Billy stripping or melting lead. There must be a moral to this tale, although I cannot think of an apt one!
Phil Bell, Greater Manchester, 2001
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