Heating
Keeping warm was a perennial problem in the days before central heating. Alan Langmaid describes winters thus:
From morning to night you were chilled right through to the bone. Even coming into the house you got warmer but never really warm. You’d go to bed cold and warm up in bed. You’d have a hot water bottle. It sounds romantically tough, but it was just the way it was, everyone was like that.
Most people heated their homes with coal fires, or with firewood if they could get it. Marion Adams recalls the peasouper fogs that the coal fires could generate in the winter, given Totnes being a town that sits in a natural valley. As a child it was her job to get up in the mornings and light the fires around the house.
Ian Slatter’s parents paid to put a grate into their fireplace in the early 50s, which improved the efficiency of their fire, but this was only 6 months before the Council decided to put free grates into all its Council housing. He remembers heading out with his father into neighbouring farmland to look for fallen timber for the fire. His father also had a small enterprise going making kindling for his neighbours. This entailed buying old railway sleepers from the railway company (he had to write to Swindon to get permission) which were then brought back one at a time to the family home, where Ian and his father would spend their evenings with a crosscut saw, cutting them into sections. Once he had cut them into 10 inch pieces (the size of most peoples’ hearths), “night after night he’d be out there with an oil lamp, chopping these sticks. People couldn’t get kindling wood, at least not those that wouldn’t go out and collect it, so he provided a basic service for kindling wood”.
In more rural areas, timber was more available as a fuel. For Douglas Matthews in Staverton, heating came from “log fires and log stoves”. In South Brent, for Margot Vickers, one had to be economical with the heating. “In 1950 in South Brent it was very cold, even in the house. We had an ordinary wood fire, in the big kitchen, we had our meals there and there were two easy chairs. We sat there, and the rest of the house you only lit the fire if someone was coming to visit”.
As electricity became more commonplace, the opportunity to move away from coal, fires and cleaning out hearths became very desirable.
Alan Langmaid recalls his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press.
She just wanted modern. She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything. She wanted automatic this, that and everything. So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building…. to a brand new house, typical of its time. Wooden framed, single glazed windows, open fire for a chimney, which she quickly replaced with an electric fire, “I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”. The winters were actually colder than the previous house. You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold. Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on. Electricity was cheap in those days.
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