Here Moston writer Dorrie Bridge goes back to the 30s when the middle ground was the way ahead even though it might grind you into dust…
Hightown or Lowtown? Dorrie tells of days when Middletown was the place to be…
I reach back to a period that not many people will remember. The 1930s.
Innocent little anecdote.
My dad came from a place called Hightown in the Cheetham area of Manchester. He was one of six brothers and a sister, brought up in a two-up-two down.
Good, loving family with a father who kept the wolf from the door. Dad left school at fourteen and went into a factory.
He married my mother and they moved into another two up two down in Moston, another working class area a few miles away. I was born in that house.
Mum had worked in the mill, ‘dancing The Charleston’ as she tended the huge looms. She was educated to the age of sixteen because her mother, who couldn’t read or write (‘her parents didn’t have the penny charged to send her to school’) decided to work cleaning in the mill to let her daughter get The School Certificate.
My intelligent, feisty grandma then went to the office in the mill and told them she wanted her daughter to work in the office, not on the factory floor.
The men unanimously said that as they were all men in the office it wouldn’t be ‘proper’ for a girl the work with them. So while she worked in the mill my mum took out a part-time insurance book with The Royal London.
When Gordon met her and they were courting he decided to get one of these ‘books’. He built it up and by the time he sadly died at just forty-six he was a branch manager (title, Superintendent) with The Royal London.
They decided that renting was a waste of money and bought a house – very few of the people in the l930s had moved out of working class rented property. I was brought up on one of the new posh estates.
As I grew up I looked at the neighbours I knew so well and realized that each of them was from a working class background, railway man, bricklayer, shop assistant, tram driver, and so on.
They were all working class but had Aspired, as had my brilliant, illiterate grandma when she kept her daughter in school.
Our middle-class, from lower middle-class to upper, were not to be sniffed at or patronized, they were, and are to be applauded. Read all the tomes and come at the definition from many angles, be it education, money, or any other circumstance – read them all, but middle class (with a few unfortunate exceptions) are borne of the backbone of our country, the working-class.
#moston #manchester #middleclass
