Life on the Move

By Eric Bates

This book is about a Yorkshire miner’s son who moves around the world in ships and planes. He seems to defy convention and succeeds where other people fail. Within these pages is a life of satisfaction in achievement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528997492

Eric Bates

Eric Bates was born in Yorkshire in 1928 to a father who was a WWI veteran and a miner. His father died early, and Eric moved around during WWII, then joined MN in 1945 at age 15. He joined the RAF and served as MT fitter in Singapore and as a pilot in the Cold War and the Middle East. He then migrated to Australia, serving four years as a pilot in RAAF at Edinburgh, South Australia, and then in Queensland.

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About the Author

Eric Bates was born in Yorkshire in 1928 to a father who was a WWI veteran and a miner. His father died early, and Eric moved around during WWII, then joined MN in 1945 at age 15. He joined the RAF and served as MT fitter in Singapore and as a pilot in the Cold War and the Middle East. He then migrated to Australia, serving four years as a pilot in RAAF at Edinburgh, South Australia, and then in Queensland.

Dedication

Thanks to Ruth Carter and Ivan Lees, fellow residents of

Langton Park Retirement Village.

Copyright Information ©

Eric Bates (2021)

The right of Eric Bates to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528997485 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528997492 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Chapter 1

Boyhood

Eric Bates, born on 7th June 1928 at 33, Briar Rd., Skellow, a mining village in Yorkshire, near Doncaster. I seemed to be destined to keep moving all my life and so, even though I was too young to know, I was moved with the family just around the corner to 24, Elm Rd., where my two sisters, Olive and Beryl, were born in 1929 and 1931. The move to 24 was maybe to a larger three bedroom house but I don’t really know the reason. It might be that grandpa, George Bates, joined us and it’s the place where my memories started.

Dad, Samuel Bates, and mother, Eunice Ethel Chambers, married in 1918. Dad was discharged from the army as a Sergeant Gas Instructor having served at the front in the trenches. He worked at the Bullcroft Colliery, a deep underground coal mine. He worked shifts at the coal face with his gang hewing the coal with picks and shovels, loading the coal into little wagons towed by ponies. There were stories of the wooden pit props creaking and groaning; warning of pressure that could lead to a fall of coal and Dad had suffered a broken leg in one. Terrible things happened to men caused by the coal dust, and Mum’s brother, Uncle Sid, had a dreadful chest, making him a total invalid. I can remember him sitting in a chair gasping for every breath, red-faced and small. His wife was a lovely person, and I can remember spending time at their place, sometimes overnight.

New Skellow village was specially built to house the workers at the mine. It had modern two-storey housing with wide lit streets and pavements with gutters. Houses were fitted with electricity for lighting, but there was no hot water system or power points. There were individual coal-fired units and an open fire in the lounge, and the kitchen had a large open copper and a very comprehensive coal-fired cooker with top and oven. There was a movable trivet on the side of the open fire in the kitchen. On it sat the large iron kettle for the washing up water and the brew of tea in a teapot. Coal was supplied free; delivered in sacks by the men humping them on their backs. The sacks were made of heavy material with thick rope handles and the men had leather aprons which extended over their shoulders. It was a long way from the cart on the road to the coal house but the men didn’t seem to have any trouble delivering several sacks and emptying them for us. It wasn’t too far from the back door; however, it was far enough for Mum especially when it was pouring with rain. There was a hammer in the coal house and the broken coal was loaded in the coal scuttle to carry inside by the fires. It was a constant chore especially in the winter; however, we were lucky to have the facility to stay warm and to provide the domestic hot water.

The bathroom had running water but only cold, like the sink and copper in the kitchen and so all water had to be heated in the copper or on the stove in the kitchen and carried to load the big bath. All these things needed attending to and I remember seeing Mum cleaning the ashes from various ducts and trays with brush and rake. The ashes were spread on the garden paths to cover the ground and avoid the muddy shoes.

Dad came home from the pit, coal blackened, in his dirty working gear and had his bath in front of the kitchen fire in a tin bath, with hot water ladled from the copper. I can still see Mum scrubbing his coal blackened back. This was a daily event and the tin bath was used in the kitchen because the bathroom was further from the hot water. It’s incredible when one thinks of all these men walking home in their dirty clothes. Then after his bath, I suppose, the dirty clothes had to be washed ready for the next day. The tin bath was in the days before the installation of baths at the mine and I can remember the blackened miners streaming out of the pit from underground. Some of them headed for the local called the Moon which was only about 200 yard from the cages. Mum had a job as a barmaid there for a while and Dad spent some time there too, quenching his thirst having spent hours in the bowels of the earth in warm moist conditions.

Mum made bread with flour and yeast in a large ceramic mixing bowl, kneading with the water and yeast. Then it sat in the bowl until it was raised and it was cut into lumps of dough and put into the oblong bread tins. After a further time rising, the dough was put in the oven to bake into the lovely home-made bread with crunchy crusts. It was just another chore which she handled gracefully using a large cloth, popping the bread out on to the large wooden kitchen table to cool.

The flush toilet in the bathroom, near the back door, had an elevated reservoir with a hanging chain which started the most amazing gurgling and rushing noises. At the back of the coal house was a pigeon loft, which Dad had built, with nesting boxes and perches. There was a landing platform on which the males strutted and cooed. It allowed them to return for the corn which he used to attract them home after a short flight around the local area. He had tumblers as well as homing racers and there were lots of eggs and bald chicks which slowly developed into ugly bundles covered in pin feathers. The rabbits, bred in hutches at the back of the house, fed the family and were baked into delicious pies. The garden was long and Dad grew plenty of veggies and there were always plenty of potatoes kept in a pie built of straw and soil to keep the frost out. There was rhubarb grown under an old bucket upside down with a hole in the bottom, so as to keep the sticks white and tender. The celery was heaped with soil as it grew and was always white, tasty and tender. The cauliflowers and cabbages needed the outside leaves folding over to keep the hearts firm and white and tender. The surplus vegetables were fed to the rabbits and we went out collecting dandelion leaves for them. Dad, a busy man spent lots of time in the garden and we had lots of good grub.

Wash day was a big job for Mum who boiled the whites in the copper and had to transfer them steaming, with big wooden tongs, to the ribbed washtub. In that time there was no detergent, and the clothes were rubbed vigorously on a corrugated rubbing board with a block of Sunlight soap. She moved them to and fro and up and down with a wooden peg-legged posher. In a way, I suppose it was a similar action to the modern washing machine, manpowered of course. The spin drier replica was a wooden rolled mangle to squeeze out the water before hanging them on the line out in the garden. I can remember turning the rollers for her and I can still see the flattened sheets coming out and folding into the large cane wash basket. I was very impressed by the design of the cogs that turned both rollers simultaneously in opposite directions. Dishwashing was done in the low enamelled clay sink in an enamel bowl using the hot water from the kettle.

The position of the kitchen sink and the bowl is burned in my brain with the memory of poor old Mum vomiting into it, after having all her teeth pulled because of infected gums. The tooth puller had to come twice; first pull the top then the bottoms, each time with ether on a cloth to reduce the pain of the agonising procedure. It was such a shame since it was only because cleaning teeth wasn’t normal then. She had such lovely teeth and was only about 35 years old. Then, of course, I assume she had false ones to bed in on the raw gums. I do believe that the standard practice was to fit them early to help shape the gums. OUCH!

The bathroom was near the back door and was plumbed with cold water needing the hot to be brought in by buckets from the coal-fired copper. I can still remember Aunt Caroline, Mum’s youngest sister, washing us all together in the bath and then; hello, girls were different.

Grandpa George Bates lived with us and worked as a farm labourer. I can remember taking his snap (sandwiches) to a local field near the primary school where he was hoeing weeds from the long rows of greens. He lived in the small front bedroom and we kids slept in the big second bedroom at the back. During my recent research into family history, I discovered that his wife (my grandmother), Rosannah, died suffering from TB and exhaustion from giving birth to the last child, Rosannah, who was recorded on her birth cert as born dead and then living. She was boarded with someone and so far I haven’t been able to discover who. Just like Dad and his brother, they were scattered all over Walsall. She eventually married a widower named Smith and lived in Walsall having two children, Rosannah and Samuel Cyril. It took me a while but I eventually found Rosannah Smith’s marriage to a man named Horan and she had given birth to eight children who all lived in Walsall. Grandpa seemed to move around after his wife’s death and I found him with distant relatives living with his son, Dad’s brother, George, who migrated to Australia in 1913. Dad was living with another distant relative on the other side of Walsall. Mum and Dad, when they married after the war, gave Grandpa a home with us in Skellow. Both Dad and his brother were small but strong and seemed to be literate as was Mum, who came from a family of mining engineers.

In 1916, Dad, Samuel, was recruited by the Mayor of Nottingham into the Bantam Battalion Sherwood Foresters Notts. & Derby Regiment, along with lots of other undersized men who had been previously rejected. They were needed to replace the horrendous casualties that occurred in France. Uncle George had the same thing happen when he was rejected by the Australian military and then was allowed to join up and quickly sent to France. He and Dad met up again as he attended a blacksmith forging course in Walsall before returning to Australia. Mum was in service in Nottingham at the time, as a nursemaid and I suppose she met Dad there and arranged to meet after the war. They married in 1918 at an address in Carcroft adjacent to the Bullcroft colliery, where several members of Mum’s family were living and employed at the mine. Her family had a long history working in mines some of them open-cut, in the coal industry in Derbyshire. Grandpa Chambers (Mum’s father) was employed at the mine and was in charge of the winding gear which transported the miners in cages down the shaft into the bowels of the pit to the seams of coal. They must have been allocated a house in the new estate built by the mining authority at Skellow where I was born, 10 years after their marriage.

Despite the history of depression in those years, of which I have no memories, I have the impression that those early days in Skellow should have been good days. Although there was a time when Dad had a leg broken in a mine accident, I suppose there was mining compo. I have a vivid memory of Dad coming down the road on crutches with a leg encased in plaster and running up to him and him still able to sweep me up for a hug. He was on his way back home after a visit to the local Working Men’s Club. It was one of the perils of the sort of mining he was engaged in that there were plenty of falls at the coal face and the broken leg was the result of one of them. He died, with kidney failure, when I was only eight years old. He must have been suffering an agonising back pain which would have been made worse by his hard labour at the coalface and was probably contributed to by his war service in the trenches. I have been told of Dad losing control to the demon