The World of Work
Employment
The main employers in the town during this period were F.J. Reeves Sawmill, Tucker’s Sweet Factory (in what is now Castle Court), Harrison’s Bacon Factory (on the site now occupied by Morrisons’ supermarket) and the Creamery (next to the railway station). All are now closed, the most recent closure being the Creamery (latterly run by Dairy Crest). Alan Langmaid recalls leaving school at 16, and all his contemporaries wanting to go into one of those employers. Alan, instead, applied to become a junior reporter on the Totnes Times, and found himself the only applicant. Andy Langford remembers Totnes at the end of the 1960s as being a very different place than today in terms of employment. “It seemed like it was very possible to make your living by picking up short term bits of work in all sorts of different places. It was very busy from that point of view. There were lots and lots of different occupations you could get involved in”.
There appears to have been a distinct generation gap between the generations that had lived through the War and times of austerity, and those who came after them. One of the ways this manifested was in the work ethic of the older generation. Alan Langmaid paints a picture of this:
The one thing that differentiated the pre-war generation from the post-war generation was the war itself. You could see the resentment and the anger in the attitude and feelings of the people who had fought in the war or been through the war. They might not necessarily have fought in the war; they might have been at home in the very austere environment, in fear, because nobody knew until the end of the war who was going to win it. You could see the resentment for the younger post war generation; there were beatniks, there were teddy boys, there were mods, rockers… it was all running away from them, they had lost control of the world, all they had fought for, the values they had fought for.
Recalling Vera Harvey’s earlier statement that “people worked so hard in those days”, these interviews provide some fascinating insights on a time when people’s work was much more physical, and they were much more fit, strong, and able to do it. Alan recalls, from his time working at the Totnes Times in the late 1960s, the chief compositor in the print room, a man called Bill Baker. Alan was 16, and by his own admission, skinny and somewhat scrawny. Alan continues; “’there y’are boy’ he said, ‘lift that!’ There was this page in this steel frame with all this lead type, and I couldn’t even lift one corner! He just slid it to the edge, on its side, on his shoulder, and marched off to this machine. He was 72. Everyone had that attitude. They worked continually. They didn’t know how not to work”.
Val Price recalls her father’s approach to work. “He left for work at 8am every day, was back for lunch at 1pm, back out to work at 1.50pm, and, unless he stopped for a haircut on the way home, was back by 5pm. When he got home from work he’d start doing things, cleaning shoes, painting doors, putting up wallpaper and so on”. She remembers the central role played, in the life of the town’s men, by the humble garden shed. “It’s what Dad’s did”, she told me, “they hovered in sheds with glue pots, hammers and things. They mended things, put them back together. He once made me a farm with all the animals, and a dolls’ house”.
As a child Marion Adams inherited this work ethic. She had to get up every morning and light the fires and do her jobs around the house, and as a young teenager she used to work on Saturdays on a farm near Velwell (near what is now the Steiner School). “I used to be dropped off on the bus, walk along a lane about a mile and a half to the farm, work all day, walk back, and get the bus back home! Long day! But that’s just what you did”.
Muriel Langford recalled how she coped with raising 4 children, running a home, gardening and so on, with few of the appliances and amenities people are used to these days. How, did she find time to do everything? “The time is there. I had 6 mouths to feed. You just get on and do it. In terms of doing the washing by hand, the sewing by hand, it was very satisfying. You think “I can cope. This is good”.
Skills
One of the questions asked in compiling this oral history, was what skills people had in the period in question. In general, people were more able to turn their hands to a far wider range of skills than today. Muriel Langford lists her skills as washing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, needlework, making and repairing clothes. Vera Harvey lists cooking, sewing and a general thriftiness, “I never bought anything unless I could pay for it”. Marion Adams lists her skills as cooking, looking after animals, knitting and sewing, gardening, picking fruit and vegetables, adding, “we didn’t just sit down at the table and expect to be fed, you helped”. Val Price however, admits that she had few such skills. “I couldn’t sew, I could knit a bit, I wasn’t too bad at painting and decorating, but I didn’t need to cook because I married a chef, and I went out to work”.
It is interesting to observe how much more exposed people were in their daily lives to skilled tradesmen and craftspeople. Unlike today, where many of the skilled craftspeople and workshops are on the industrial estate, for children and young people until the late 1960s, exposure to the working world was a fact of everyday life. Andy Langford recalls how educational a walk home from school could be at the age of 9.
On Mondays on the way back from school we’d go round and look in the little mews at the top of town, turning left round the back of Harris’s, that used to be the slaughter house for Masons the butchers. We could all go and stand in there and watch them eviscerating sheep! We used to like to do that; it was like a favourite activity! Or, you could go right, down the road to what is now the guitar workshop and you could look in the forge, and watch, don’t remember his name, great big bloke, hammering big bits of metal. Then you could come all the way home up to the top of Longcause, and see the wheelwright, on the junction at Longcause. There was a guy there rebuilding wheels.
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