Snow Memories

The weather recently has caused all the headlines with much harking back to previous winters with lots of a snow.

The years that are most invoked as the worse in living memory are 1947 and 1962/63, I remember them both.

In the winter of 1947 I was aged 14, in my last year at school. Rationing was in full swing, indeed I believe some things such as meat were in shorter supply than they had been during the war which hadn’t been over long. We, that's me, my Mum and Dad, brother Kenny and little sister Doreen lived in a little terraced house in Lamprell street, Old Ford, Bow, E.3. not far from Victoria Park. Another brother, Michael was yet unborn, he made his appearance in 1948.

They were tiny little dwellings, a little yard out the back with a toilet and a, as yet, undismantled Anderson shelter, my parents grew a few tomatoes and kept some hens and a cockerel. We had plenty of eggs even in the war, I remember my Mum making the fowls food with potato peelings and something called Karswoods, we hated the smell. When neighbours were ill my Mum would always give them some new laid eggs. The cockerel would generally disappear at Christmas, not for our table, my Dad would generally swop it with someone else’s, we couldn’t eat our own.


Me and Kenny slept in the same bed in a little room overlooking the yard, it was called the off-room, as I never saw it written down I always assumed it was called the Orphroom. There was no room for a fireplace, just room for our bed.

The other rooms had fireplaces in them, little tiny grates, they were never lit as coal wasn’t that easy to get. Our coal merchant was called Speller. My Mum liked him, he seemed kind and venerable with a white moustache and he seemed quite old but he must have been strong, him and his assistant would carry bag after bag of hundredweight's of coal on their backs into countless households. They would be pulled off a cart led by a faithful old horse that looked as venerable as Mr Speller himself.

The room we used as a living room was called the kitchen. It had a cooking range that was kept black-leaded by my Mum. The fire incorporated in the range was miniscule, it threw out very little heat and we boiled our kettles and did the cooking in the scullery an adjoining room with a boiler with a little fireplace in it to heat the water, a cold water sink with and a gas stove. So primitive but none of us had seen any better so we were happy enough. There was a tin bath hanging in the yard where the toilet was.

Even in a normal winter it was pretty cold in these households. I remember my Dad would get a flat iron and warm it on the hob and then go and iron our cold sheets before we got into bed. Hot water bottles were pre war luxuries, everything was short in those years including rubber. So in 1947 a labour government was trying to overcome the most horrendous shortages, Sir Stafford Cripps, the labour chancellor telling everyone that they would have to tighten their belts even further, the Coal fields in the midst of Nationalisation with Manny Shinwell the Minister of Fuel being determined that the mines would be the hub of our industry and then all this snow fell and divided the country into half. No lorries or trains could get through to the South with precious coal supplies, the National Grid not fully operational, and everyone told they could only use their electric fires three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. That was all right if you had electric fires, we depended on coal and wood for our fires and plenty of blankets at night.

Even clothes we had to make do as best we could. I had an overcoat and Russian boots, as we called wellingtons, and a pair of mittens and what I thought of as a pilots helmet made of leather with ear muffs. I used to go to a yard somewhere near Roman road with Doreen's pram and fill it with Tarry logs. These were wooden bricks that had been used for roads and tarred over they made the most marvellous fuel.

What with lack of food, warmth, clothing how did we survive? From what I remember quite happily. We played snowballs and lots of games in the street and most people seemed very happy to me, grateful that the war was over and the future seemingly bright. How the grown ups felt I’m not sure but I don’t remember them grumbling much.

I also remember 1962/3. In October 1962 I took the ‘Two Puddings’ Pub. It was my first venture into business. It was a busy place a music house weekends and lots of food at lunchtimes. It was a big old place with a fire in both bars that I kept lit in winter, both fires attracted the customers who would hog them sitting or standing round them in cold weather, we had central heating of a kind that had been old in the thirties but it was inefficient, George my old Pot man would light it in the morning and pile it with coke, he was the only one who understood it and if he had a day off no one else could master it. Christmas 1962 it started to snow and never stopped till March 1963 and that was such a miserable time for me. The plumbing, the central heating, and the electric's were all ancient and needed redoing and that year I had eighteen burst pipes, flooding the pub and the next door shop completely one unforgettable day. The brewery would send me their builders to help and me and my wife and staff would spend days clearing up, that was in the days, fortunately, when the brewers would help you as much as they could at a drop of a hat and never charged anything for it.

Somehow, despite losing my cleaners who gave up in despair, that winter passed and even during that time not many people moaned, I even got better cleaners who delighted in getting stuck in, it did seem a cheerier more together world then, perhaps this recent reminder of what a winter should be like will make us all a little bit more understanding of hardships suffered in other places. I must say that in this world living with warm houses, too warm sometimes, warm cars, warm trains, warm shops we don’t ever get really cold, although I’m old now and would probably die of hypothermia I feel a little nostalgia for the days when getting inside in front of warm fire was a real luxury after being out in the cold all day.