Pyenest Street

Pyenest Street, apart from being home to all these families and many more, plus the then thriving businesses was also a busy thoroughfare. There were always people passing along, from first light the window tapping "Knocker Upper" with his long stick reminding those who used his services that their day had begun, to the lamplighter attending to two very old gas lit street lamps.

 

the Bedford Works from a 1898 OS map
the blue line to the left is the Trent & Mersey Canal

four of the huge bottle kilns of the Ridgways Bedford Works

 

When the factory hooters started sounding at Ridgeway’s Cauldon and Bedford works, Twyford’s Cliffe Vale factory and many others in earshot, we could recognise each individual one. The scene was set for another busy day. With the almost total absence of motor vehicles the street was soon alive with people, real people not faceless ones hidden away in their cars. Front doors would bang as the occupants left to join the others on their way to the factories or to the bus stops. 

The gates to the Borough yard opposite would open and the first of the horse drawn carts would soon arrive to pick up the road building materials that were kept there. The mechanics at Bassett’s on opening would push out motor cycles onto the pavement to give more room inside to work. Through the open gates at Leese’s corn merchants the first lorries were being loaded for trips out into the country. At Brown Brothers tyre distributors and motor factors, stacks of tyres each individually wrapped in brown paper were being sorted and across the street Mr Bassett unlocked his hand-cranked petrol pumps in readiness for his first customer. 

The two shops would have opened earlier to catch the passing trade in cigarettes and matches and the very house-proud would already be out sweeping the bricks and wiping the overnight dirt off the windowsills.

 

All this activity was followed by a quieter interlude until it was the turn of the children making their way to school. We all walked, at first singly and then in groups as we neared our respective schools, parents only accompanying their children on rare occasions such as the first day at a new school or if something was wrong and usually to the child’s acute embarrassment. During our absence the street life continued. A steady stream of street traders, either horse drawn like the coalman, baker, greengrocer, fishmonger, rag and bone man and in summer the ice cream man blowing his trumpet or on foot, the man who sold line props or the women selling watercress and the occasional street musicians, beggars and gypsies.

I particularly recall the two elderly ladies who sold milk from a large churn mounted on two cycle wheels, which they pushed around the streets in all weathers. The churn could be pivoted to fill a stainless steel bucket; this was carried to each customer’s house to fill a jug left on the doorstep with the required amount, by means of pint and half pint measuring cans. This really was fresh full cream milk!

the wharf buildings of Pyenest Street alongside the Caldon Canals 

In the 1930s the canals were still much in use with a very busy wharf in Cliffe Vale. For the Boatees and their families the shops at Howard Place offered the nearest and best selection of goods and Pyenest Street was the shortest route to them, so we often saw what we thought of as rather strange frightening people passing by. Women in long skirts, colourful scarves and shawls, men in corduroy trousers and waistcoats and ragged children all wearing clogs. 

There was one old lady who we cruel children would watch for; her face was disfigured by a harelip and cleft palate. This meant she talked so oddly that it was almost impossible to understand her. We called her "Minnie Nick Knock" and from a safe distance would call after her, "Minnie Nick Knock, Minnie Nick Knock," and would sometimes be rewarded by her turning on us as if to give chase - naturally we beat a hasty retreat. Children it seems have always had a streak of cruelty in them.