It was not number one when I first knew it - it could not have been, for there was another house with a double-fronted shop between it and the end of the street, and at the other end, another resident claimed that his place was No. 1. It seems confusing, but there is a simple explanation.

Pontefract is an ancient town. Its centre was laid out on the early Danish lines, with a large open ‘Place’ or square (but in this case a triangle), with the principal houses facing upon it, their gardens behind extending out into the surrounding wilds. To this central area there were just four narrow entrances, one of them uphill from the south-east to arrive in front of the Town Hall, which faced imposingly west. This little street, though wide enough for only one vehicle at a time, being considered a principal approach to the Church of St. Giles and standing in the middle of the Place, not surprisingly came to be known as Gillygate (curiously, always pronounced with a hard ‘G’). Gate, by the way, is derived from the Danish ‘Gade’, a street, not a gate.

When my grandfather, Richard Holmes, the historian, came to Pontefract from Worcester in 1862, and took over a printing and stationery business which had been established in 1787, he found the premises – house at the front over the shop, works up the yard at the back – were next door but one to Gillygate. He avoided any numbering difficulty (if any such were realised in those days) by calling his house and the premises generally ‘Advertiser Office’, for he had not long been in charge before he set up a local newspaper, ‘The Pontefract Advertiser’. In this house, in the next 35 years, all his eight sons and two daughters were born and raised.

One daughter died in childhood, the other, in the style of those times, lived at home as a true ‘daughter of the house’; but all the boys in turn took some part in the business, either in the printing works or on the newspaper, or generally, both. In due course each went out into the world, most of them into either journalism, printing or paper.

So it was that my father, Oswald (named after the Northumbrian King who in 625 at Pontefract married Ethelburga, daughter of the king of Kent), having served an apprenticeship with his father, went to The Birmingham Post as a journalist. Grandma Holmes, by the way, used to tell with pride of an occasion when she went to Birmingham to satisfy herself as to her son’s circumstances. When they met, in the street, he was somewhat out of breath. ‘He had just stopped a runaway horse’, Grandma would explain, knowing well that even in those horsey days, not everyone had a son who had done that. And she was even more proud, years later, when he gained an award from the Royal Humane Society for saving a child who had fallen into Whitby harbour. Whilst in Birmingham, father heard of a vacancy on The Walsall Advertiser, a concern very similar to that of his father, and to that he moved. In Walsall he married, and there I was born in 1897 – ‘in the third hour of the third day of the third month of the third year of my parents ‘married life’, as he reported in a little circular in which he announced the event to his family and friends.

At the same time, his own father, at the age of 71, decided he would retire and devote his remaining days to the historical research he had been pursuing so assiduously during his time in Pontefract. Of the eight sons, Oswald was apparently the one chosen, or perhaps the only one able and willing, to take over.

Thus it was that in June 1897 I came to the Advertiser Office, Pontefract. Naturally there is little I can remember of that time, though it was not long before there were events of which I still have memories. One of the earliest, no doubt, was on a Sunday after-church visit (a regular weekly event), to Avenue House, a new dwelling in Banks Avenue, to which my grandparents, Aunt Ada, and Uncle Herbert moved when my father took over the Market Place establishment.

Grandpa was busy with his books, which lined at least one whole wall of the room he used as a study, when he called for someone to mend his fire. One of my cousins, (a little older than I) raced with me to respond, but he stopped her. ‘No’ said he, ‘let Frank do it, he does not make so much noise’. Whether I deserved it or not, that little piece of flattery has even remained comfortingly clear in my mind.

It could not have been long after that, that Aunt Ada took me to see him laid in a spare bedroom, awaiting the undertaker, for he died on 23 October 1901. I well remember the funeral too. Naturally the shop was closed for the occasion (and doubtless, according to the custom of the time, some of the neighbouring shops too) but, I was deemed to be too young to go to the funeral, though apparently I was old enough to be left alone, for left I was.

I must have found things a little dull, for I remember clearly how I wandered through the hall into the shop, where I came across a copy of Grandpa Holmes’s funeral service paper. When I found a paste pot and brush conveniently near, it must have seemed an obvious call to action; and right until the shop was dismantled when father retired in 1928, there remained this old service paper firmly stuck on the end of the counter, facing father’s little office at the back of the shop.

It was about this period that soldiers were returning from the Boer War. Like his father, my father was a corespondent for the Yorkshire Post, and from that paper he learned that a detachment of troop was to come to Pontefract Barracks via Baghill Station some time in the night. There was no time to arrange a civic reception but father did his best. Having passed the word to as many as he could, so that they could gather in the Market Place and cheer, he roused Fred Pickering in Bridge Street, a hairdresser who also sold fireworks. A couple of boxes of Bengal matches, however, was the best that Pickering could offer, and these father brought home. I was taken from my cot and allowed to watch him place a box on each side of the apex over the pediment of the shop front and set fire to the lot as the soldiers entered Market Place from Gillygate. And the marks of these two little conflagrations remained there until 1928.

Mention of the Boer War reminds me that I saw some of the troops pass through Baghill and this mental picture includes the detail that the carriages were so old-fashioned that the communication cord hung outside the windows, a very primitive arrangement.

Before we go any further it should be recorded that Advertiser Office became the end house on that side of Market Place in 1905 when the adjoining house and shop (of Galloway and Gill, ladies’ outfitters) were taken down and the top half of Gillygate widened to its present condition. (The demolition led to the discovery of a well which nobody knew had been covered by the flags of the scullery at the back of these premises).

Not required for this widening was a strip of land increasing from nothing at the corner to about ten feet where 13 Gillygate is now, and this strip Oswald Holmes bought. Adding to this his stable, old kitchens (one with a copper for washing and another for brewing), and other bits, he brought about the building of the shops and two houses now on the combined area. The official numbering of the house as no. 1 came in the early twenties.

The reference to Pickering reminds me of a feature of his establishment. At one end of his salon he had a wooden wheel, with a handle, fixed to the wall. From it went a light belt to a wooden shaft in bearings on the ceiling, and from this hung another light belt. Having finished a haircut, Pickering would signal to his lather-boy, who promptly applied himself to the handle of the wheel, the hairdresser took up a cylindrical brush with a two-handled spindle, fitted it to the hanging belt, and the customer was subjected to a brisk brushing all round.

In talking of local shops I should record those of the brothers Cleave with Arthur the chemist, with Reverdy, tobacconist, on his right. Reverdy had a pair of light brass scales hanging from the ceiling over the counter, on which the scale pans rested until required. When loaded, the whole device was lifted by the string, a balance achieved, and the pans let down to the counter. Cigarettes, by the way, were sold by weight. His shop equipment included a gas burner standing up a foot or so from the counter, with a small flame permanently ready for customers to light their pipes.

The two shops were ultimately combined and taken over by Percy Clayton, chemist, from whom they went to Pontefract Industrial Co-operative Society. For a period after this, Arthur Cleave sold pianos and music from a shop two or three doors west of his former premises – and his laugh resounded across the Market Place with a strength rivalling that of the piano which he often played in his shop doorway, or even on the footpath.

It would be wrong to permit these recollections of two or three small shops to obscure the main industries. Malting was for long a big thing, with malt houses in Micklegate, Northgate, North Baileygate and Front Street, but they are all closed now.

Coal mining, however, continues to be of great importance in the life of the town, and although I never worked at a colliery I know more of the Prince of Wales Colliery than many local folk did, for my closest friend at school was the son of the engine-wright there, and I joined him on many strolls round the colliery.

Great quantities of bricks were produced in the adjacent kilns (favourite haunt of many of those with ‘no visible means of support’) as well as glazed earthenware drainpipes. The colliery fitting shop we found fascinating, and so was the fan driven by half a dozen heavy ropes connecting it to a massive horizontal steam engine, but the winding engines topped everything for us.

The Haigh Moor shaft was the smaller and shallower with the older engine, steam of course, and lovingly embellished with painted curly-wurlies on suitable surfaces; but the Silkston was larger and deeper, with a more modern engine. In each house, however, it was an equal thrill to hear the bell signals, see the engine man perched in his solitary pulpit, move the controls and then watch the winding drum move, slowly at first, gain speed, and slow as the indicator showed its position near the top or bottom, and come to rest with its chalk mark (corrected daily) at the pointer.

My friend and I were taken below a time or two, accompanying the horse keeper on a Sunday or a bank holiday, and I can remember well how the cleanliness of the stables impressed me, and the brightness of the ponies too. At the other extreme, on one occasion, we climbed to the very top of the headgear, where I was daft enough to step through the spokes and stand between the two great wheels, just to be able to say I had done so. Fortunately nobody called for a cage either up or down during those few mad moments.

It was through this school friend that I went down a pit in a bucket. His father had moved to Ingleton where a pit was being sunk in great hopes of rich coal. The bucket on a rope which served to bring out the excavated material also carried men up and down, so down we went, the bucket swinging gently as we went. Damp and dirty it certainly was, and I had great sympathy for a man we passed a few feet from the bottom, sitting in a sling of chains attached to the shaft wall, controlling a pump to keep the bottom dry for the men steadily digging to deepen the shaft. Coal was duly found, but not enough, and the project was abandoned.

It was probably on a working day that we had a chat with an engine driver in the colliery sidings, and it was this which led to a ride on the footplate as far as the bridge over the road at Parkside, where the driver stopped the train specially for us to dismount and walk home.

This was not my first unconventional train ride, for I would not have been more than about ten when father heard that one Saturday night a wagon in a coal train had jumped the rails and had damaged chairs and sleepers for a distance towards Ackworth before it pulled other wagons off as well and stopped the train when some of them went over. Next day, father, taking me with him for the walk, climbed the embankment at East Hardwick road bridge, and we walked along the line to the scene. As he finished his enquiries and we stood aside for a slow moving goods train going in our homeward direction, father asked me if I thought I could run as fast as the train. ‘Yes’ I answered, and then, when the guard’s van came along, he set me running with him after it and hoisted me on to the narrow platform at its back and clambered up himself. The astonishment of the guard when he saw us was equalled by my puzzlement as to how we should get off. Luckily and quite by chance, the engine was stopped for water at Baghill, and all ended well.

Not all the miners living in Pontefract worked at the Prince of Wales Colliery, though probably did the majority of those living in the houses of Well Close, the true name of the district between Tanshelf Station and the low end of Sessions House Yard. Well Close was doubtless so named because of the spring there, which I have an idea was a help to the tannery, but a hindrance to the builders of the Alexandra Theatre (built 1906 on the site of the tannery but demolished in 1973 to be superseded by Kikos Night Club).

Where they came from I cannot say, but at five o’ clock in a morning I have soon a queue right from Tanshelf Station gates to the booking office of men entraining for Featherstone, or possibly beyond.

This brings to mind two other railway occasions. One was when from Tanshelf railway bridge I saw a train for Wakefield come in and on stopping, instantly dip towards the platform as every compartment was simultaneously boarded by a crowd of returning racegoers. The other time was during Hitler’s war and also involved returning racegoers. It was at Baghill where the last of the crowd of intending passengers had to be literally pushed by a large woman porter into a train already well occupied when it arrived from the York direction.

Reverting to those much earlier times, my mind carries a cameo of a concert in the Assembly Room, where tremendous applause was aroused by ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’, and similar patriotic songs, one of which was sung by a soldier in khaki with a realistically blood-stained bandage wound dramatically round his forehead.

Concerts and plays in the Assembly Room (then comparatively new, at about twenty years old) were quite a feature of life in those long pre-radio days. (And where today would anybody expect to be admitted for ‘half price at half time’). Lighting of this imposing building was chiefly by two rings of numerous fish-tail gas burners up near the ceiling. These flames were usually lowered during the performances and if by chance the pilot light went out, great was the stir when the caretaker brought in his wax taper on the end of what seemed an enormously long pole, and restored the illumination. There was a row of fish-tail burners for footlights, and similar yellow lights round the hall and on the stairs.

Probably one of the most notable events in the Assembly Room in its early days was the annual ball for supporters of the Badsworth Hunt. The Town hall, with its minstrel gallery, was naturally the place for this before the Assembly Room was built alongside it, providing more generous accommodation for the actual dancing; whilst the Town Hall, with its lights suitably shaded and numerous armchairs set amongst tactically disposed screens, was allotted to those ‘sitting out’. Spectators (and chaperones) had the Assembly Room gallery, and refreshments were available in the Council Chamber, downstairs, near the Mayor’s Parlour (now degenerated into the caretaker’s office).

At the height of its popularity the Hunt Ball brought into the town the nobility and gentry from a wide district, and their horses and carriages, besides filling all the available stabling, were often lined up in the middle of Horsefair and Market Place. In its later days the Hunt Ball was followed the next evening by the Farmers Ball, who thus had the benefit of the elaborate decorations and flowers installed for the aristocracy, though they did not necessarily have two bands, playing alternately as did the hunt folk, most of whose men incidentally attended in hunting pink (scarlet to ordinary people like you and me).

In my boyhood, of course, motors were almost unheard of, and as late as 1912 when my father-in-law came to Pontefract, there were barely half a dozen cars beside his own in the town.

Horses were the universal means of carriage and traction. Many a stir was caused in the town by an unruly animal, or a horse ‘down’. In the latter case the usual procedure was for someone to sit on the horse’s head to keep him from struggling whilst the driver unharnessed the creature and then, probably with the help of bystanders, withdrew the cart or trap (possibly with one or more of its shafts broken), leaving the horse to regain its feet by its own efforts.

Amongst the horse population, the animals working from Baghill and Monkhill railway stations were stalwart specimens. Those from Monkhill could each mount the rises to the town drawing a four-wheel flat wagon (commonly called a ‘lorry’ or sometimes a ‘lurry’), but those from Baghill required an extra ‘trace’ horse to help with a heavy load up the steep part of Southgate. On the return journey, especially if well loaded, the lorry would be stopped at the top of the hill and the driver would apply an iron skid pan, a device which was chained to the lorry and put under a back wheel which could not then revolve, thus giving the vehicle in effect, three wheels and a skid – a simple but very effective braking system.

As both these stations were a good distance from the town centre, the two principal hotels, the Red Lion and the Elephant, each sent a bus to meet trains, generally the Red Lion to Baghill and the Elephant to Monkhill. If both, or any two vehicles arrived simultaneously, one at each end of Gillygate, the upper one had to withdraw until the other had emerged, for two vehicles could not before 1905 pass in the upper half of Gillygate.

There was some distribution of domestic coal supplies from Baghill Station by horse-drawn tipper carts, of course, and those which used Gillygate doubtless had the same passing difficulty as the hotel busses. The deliveries from Tanshelf had not this trouble, and in most cases from either place a coal cart would be accompanied by, as well as its driver, a man hoping to be given the job of putting the coal into the customers cellar or coal-house. For this service his reward might be sixpence or perhaps a shilling, but as a ton of coal probably cost under a pound including delivery, a shilling was by no means insignificant.

The shoeing of horses was quite a business, and there were several farriers in the town. There was a busy one at Town End facing Southgate, another in Southgate at the bottom of Post Office Yard (which faced the Infirmary), one in the Crown and Anchor Yard, and one in Trinity Street, at each of which I have spent fascinating minutes watching the proceedings and smelled the unforgettable odour of scorching hoof as the farrier fitted a shoe to an animal, sometimes placid or sometimes protesting.

A couple of saddlers too had busy shops – Walker in Cornmarket and Chapman in Beastfair, and Brewster near the old church did much repairing of agricultural machinery, for the town was important in providing the many services required by the farmers of the district.

Pontefract in my boyhood was a considerable agricultural centre, which explains why it had so many public houses, for the journey on foot or on horse from the outlying villages could take so long that midday sustenance and often overnight accommodation was a necessity. It has been said that the sun could not shine without casting the shadow of the church on a public house.

The Starkies’ Arms (Middle Row), Mail Coach (Cross Street), Cross Keys (Church Lane), Crown and Anchor (Beastfair), could well have come within that range, but all have gone since I was a boy.

With a little stretching, however, this range still includes the Cartners’ Arms (a bare dozen feet from the church tower), Muscroft’s Beastfair Vaults, White Hart (Shoe Market), Flying Horse (formerly Corporation Arms, Salter Row), Windmill (Woolmarket), Tankard (formerly the Central Hotel, belonging to Pickersgill’s), who had the only brewery in Pontefract, facing the old church, Red Lion (Market Place), United Kingdom (Market Place), Elephant (Market Place), and Muscroft’s Market Place Vaults (claimed to have had the longest bar and most doors into its yard as compared with any pub in Pontefract, but recently rebuilt and named the Borough Arms).

Extend the church shadow to a couple of good stone's throw and you would reach also the Blue Bell (South Gate), Malt Shovel (Beastfair), Green Dragon (Corn Market), Blackamoor Head (Corn Market), Horse Vaults (Horsefair), and Nags Head (Ropergate); and there are several more only a little outside the central area. Besides these, the Pineapple (Gillygate) has been converted into a shop, the Black Boy (Market Place) has become a branch of the Halifax Building Society, and the Curriers Arms (Shoe Market) has been bought by the council and was demolished in 1973 for part of the new library to be built where it stood.

The two hotel buses were not the only links between the stations and the town centre. People walked more readily then than now, and those who had luggage often accepted the services of men who, perhaps out of work or even unemployable, carried it for them or brought it on a handcart. These were particularly useful to commercial travellers who brought large hampers of samples to show to the drapers and other shopkeepers.

These travelling salesmen did not always use hampers too big to be carried, for some of them had ordinary travelling bags (often made of carpet, hence ‘carpet-baggers’), or simple brown paper parcels which they carried. ‘Japanese baskets’ were also in common use. These were made of strong split straw or cane, or some similar material woven into a rectangular shape and supplied in nests so that any two adjacent members of the set could be fitted one inside another to make a light case with double thickness sides, the whole held together by a pair of loose straps.

Incidentally, one traveller I remember carried not only a travelling case in each hand, one or both of them with a parcel strapped to it, but a packet of small samples in each of the pockets of the flowing overcoat he always wore. And he continued to call at our shop until well into his eighties.

It should not be thought from the preceding paragraphs on the pubs of Pontefract that there were hardly any other shops, for there was probably a greater variety then than ever since. Our own shop had stationery, newspapers, pictures and frames, handbags, jewellery, household ornaments, children’s books and games. At Christmastime we gave up the downstairs sitting room behind the shop, and set it out as a show room where it was my duty, and joy, when I was old enough, to take charge and sell large quantities of Christmas cards, loose and in boxes.

We had rivals in the stationery in Fred Marshall, whose premises faced imposingly down Horsefair, and in Ralph Atkinson at the bottom of Beastfair, each of whom also did printing, the former himself and the latter through his brother Walter in Star Yard. Ralph had his shop at the corner of that yard in Beastfair. William McGowan came a little later and had his workshop in Belks Court, off Corn Market.

There were none of today’s supermarkets. Directly across the Market Place from us, Edwin (‘Teddy’ to almost everybody) Heckingbottom sold greengrocery, poultry and game, and as parking (even at that narrow corner) was no problem at all in those traffic free days, he kept a pony and light flat cart almost all day in front of his shop, ready for his shop-boy (or perhaps, even then, a young woman) to jump aboard and make a delivery.

In the middle of Market Place, south side, was a Vaux Bros, who ranked amongst the leading grocers; with Alfred Wilkinson (almost next door), Richard Husband (at the foot of Beastfair), though he called his place (next to Ralph Atkinson) No. 1 Market Place until an official numbering of the premises in Market Place and elsewhere in the early 1920’s, Thomas Wordsworth (a few steps further up) and George Hemmant (next door above).

The Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Almanac published in 1839 by John Fox and Son (predecessors, though not the founders of the printing business taken over by Richard Holmes in 1862), has a long list of fairs and shows eight for Pontefract. In 1877 however, an edition of the Almanac published by Richard Holmes has a revised and much reduced list which shows Pontefract as having only four fairs, the last mentioned being described simply as "Statutes, 1st Thursday in November".

All the other fairs in Pontefract had evidently faded away, but for many generations ‘The Statutes’ (‘Stattis’ colloquially) was an accepted fixture for the first Thursday after All Saints Day (November 1st), St Giles, patron of the church in Market Place (All Saints being the old parish church) having no day allotted to him in the calendar of Saints. Its name was based on the belief that this fair in the streets was authorised by a Statute (an Act of Parliament), but in 1925 the obstruction, noise and general upheaval gave rise to so much complaint that the Town Clerk, Mr. F. M. Farmer, made enquiries and then declared that no such Statute existed. Thus, for 1926 and thereafter, the Corporation allowed the showmen to use the streets for one day (Thursday) and no more, but offered instead standings for the full week in the fairground, between Headlands and Salter Row. And thereto the fair was banished, until after a year or two in the park it was moved to the car park, which took the place of the former cattle market near Baghill Station. The original aim of the fair was to bring together the farmers and the men and women of the district, seeking to be ‘hired’ for the ensuing year. Having been engaged and having thereupon discarded the straw in the button-hole by which they had indicated their availability for hiring, the young men and maidens would hasten to spend their ‘fastening pennies’ and what else they could spare on new clothing etc. and the rest on the amusements which made up the fair.

In the years close before the Kaiser’s war, when the fair was still being held in the streets, and although it was only supposed to be on Thursday, some of the amusements were in full swing in, for instance, Cornmarket by Monday evening, and most of the rest by Wednesday evening, whilst all continued to operate until Saturday night (with scales of charges and length of rides varied according to the day and time of day). Nevertheless, nothing but possibly a few marks on the roads remained by the time the church people were assembling on Sunday morning.

At the height of the festivities there would be a portable ‘big top’ type cinematograph at the top end of Cornmarket with a gaily decorated and powerful mechanical organ at its front, and a shallow stage built out in front of that. On this a couple of vivacious dancing girls would perform to suitable music, each presently taking charge of one of the two pay boxes, and by their proximity, thrilling the lads as they rolled up to pay their two pence and pass inside, where they would be asked for another penny for the privilege of sitting on the front seats, which were no more comfortable than the others, being merely narrow boards, but with back-rests, which the others had not.

In the wider part of Cornmarket there would be a roundabout (a set of cocks and hens), and perhaps a miniature of the same, but slower for children. Fat women, dwarfs, two-headed chickens, five-legged rabbits, a flea circus, a boxing booth, a man with a weighing machine (who guessed his customers weight and made no charge for his services if he guessed outside five pounds of what his scales ultimately showed), a shooting gallery with celluloid balls bouncing on jets of water as targets, sundry try-your-strength and various other catch-penny schemes were all spread round the streets.

Horsefair would usually have another large portable cinema. Beastfair would be lined on both sides with small stalls – hoop-la for instance (a table spread with small prizes to be won by any who could encircle them with one of three hoops lent for two pence), coconut shies (with extra heavy coconuts perched temptingly on the very back edge of the cup-shaped tops of short posts), darts stalls offering a prize for the player who threw a dart into an ace of spades fixed amongst the rest of the pack on a board behind the array of prizes on offer. Throwing or rolling a penny onto a table ruled with squares only fractionally larger than the coin, was a scheme which came in later. Always a popular draw was a girl on a perch which collapsed and dropped her into a bath when a thrower of the stalls wooden balls succeeded in hitting the little disc which formed the target in the net hanging before her to protect her from direct hits.

The central attraction of the whole fair was the switchback in the space between the Buttercross and Ropergate. It may be that such things still exist, but in its hey day a switchback was a most ornate affair, with eight (or was it ten?) gondola-like chariots swinging over four humps and four dips arranged round another powerful, and not entirely un-musical mechanical organ, which formed the centre-piece of the appliance.

On the other side of the Buttercross another set of cocks and hens operated, and smaller attractions filled the rest of the space there. One year there was a mountain glide, the top of which the youngsters reached by flights of steps, carrying a doormat on which they slid down a polished trough with humps and hollows, to land on a mat at the bottom – where some of the lads congregated in the hope of a glimpse of what the girls were wearing but did not display in normal activity.

A haunted castle in Market Place consisted of a series of passages with skulls flashing in the darkness, wobbly floors (some of which groaned or whistled eerily), hanging strings (also in the darkness) and other horrors – with somewhere along the way, a grating in the floor through which emerged a fierce upward blast as the unwary customer passed over it, illuminated by a sudden bright light.

Further along Market Place a small circus, about opposite the market hall, had a hand-driven mechanical organ, usually operated by the lion-tamer in his leopard-skin, but only to be glimpsed through a misplaced curtain as he filled one of the several parts which the staff of these travelling enterprises were each required to play.

It would not be proper to record the Statutes without mentioning that for years, the principal operator was G. T. Tuby of Doncaster (of which town he was for some time Mayor), who regularly donated his takings on Monday (or was it Tuesday?) evening to Pontefract Infirmary, long before the NHS was set up.

Another point is that some people found the mode of construction, erection and dismantling of the apparatus of greater attraction than the use of the devices themselves. Not everyone realised that the popular cocks and hens, for instance, carrying thirty or more people, provided a quite complicated ride, for the seats not only rose and fell, but did so with a surge forward at the top of their stroke, and retardation at the bottom, at the same time gently swinging outwards in unison, as the platform beneath them increased its speed as it rotated about the engine, which drove it and the funnel which supported the device, passengers and all. The magnificent road engines, gaily painted and with much decorative brass work, brightly polished, and a dynamo mounted in front which drew the trains of heavy wagons conveying the shows and rides from fair to fair, never failed to catch the eye of the mechanically minded, whether in transit or stationary as power stations.

At an earlier period, lighting of the fair was by paraffin flares, which were no more than a little tank feeding the fuel through a bent pipe, to a burner which vaporised the liquid in the heat of the flame which it maintained. As science progressed, these flares gave way to a more sophisticated system carrying a mantle, heated to incandescence by a different type of burner, but it was not much later that all these gave way to electric lights, carbon arcs in the bigger places and incandescent much like the modern bulbs for general use.

Of course, it was not only the show-people whose lighting improved as time went on. Fred Marshall had light for his premises from a gas engine and dynamo in a basement. England’s the ironmonger’s in Market Place, had a similar installation in a warehouse behind the shop. Husband had another in his back areas, serving both his Market Place shop and house, and his branch in Newgate at the other end of Star Yard. The biggest private power station of this type, however, was at the Alexandra Theatre and even this would sometimes miss not a single beat when extra heavy stage lighting was called for. The ‘Alec’ by the way, had a bigger stage than Leeds City Varieties.

There were no doubt other private power producers in Pontefract. I remember that at the workhouse in Skinner Lane alongside the laundry, there was a high-speed vertical two-cylinder steam engine (and boilers with automatic stokers) driving a dynamo. And the laundry which until recently was in a yard off Newgate, had a similar installation. What the liquorice works and bigger places had I cannot say.

Street lighting, when I first noticed it, relied on gas and fish-tail burners (in which two tiny jets of gas impinged against each other so as to produce a flame resembling the shape of a fish’s tail, yellowish in tinge, much of its brightness arising from the carbon and other impurities in the gas). Next came first upright and then inverted incandescent lights, dependant on a Bunsen type of burner (using pre-mixed air and gas now better purified than formerly) to heat to incandescence a fine and very delicate woven fabric of some material which, on being newly put in place, had first to have burnt off it the protective substance, with which it had been impregnated in manufacture, so that there remained for use a mere fragile shell of ash which would break up at little more than a touch. These mantels it might be noted, were made almost exclusively in Germany – with inconvenient consequences in the early days of the Kaiser’s war.

In the early years of the century much went on in and around the streets which is never seen nowadays. There was, for instance, the clatter of clogs about five in the morning and again in the afternoon as the miners went to and from their work. Clogs were common footwear for workingmen, and for many women too. Most men wore caps, though some of the older and perhaps more dignified ones, affected a billycock (or bowler), whilst for women (as distinct from ‘ladies’), a shawl over the shoulder (and over the head as well in bad weather) was the universal, plus an apron.

Butter really was sold in the Buttercross on market days, with eggs, poultry, and similar light farm produce, with about a shilling as an average price for a pound of butter or bacon or a dozen eggs, and 2/- or 2/6 for a hen. I kept a few hens myself in our yard. One of them once escaped and took refuge under a tram standing at the terminus opposite the market hall, but I managed to catch it when the conductor poked it out with the bamboo pole with which he swung round the tram’s power conductor arm.

In those more tranquil days there were many other happenings now long discontinued. Drunks and fighting dogs were common place, and fighting men were by no means unknown too; whilst I have seen more than once a man belabouring his sobbing wife outside one or other of the towns ‘common lodging houses’. There were three or four or more of these – one in the middle of Gillygate which made way for the Palace Cinema in 1925; another occupying the two stone houses which faced each other in Southgate at the bottom of Smyth Street; and one near the bottom of Horsefair on the north side. When this was demolished by the way, in the 1930’s, it could be seen to be half-timbered with a brick casing.

And that reminds me that when about 1938 property was demolished for the construction of Lower Beastfair (which curiously has been named Valley Road though it is not in a valley and does not even lead into a valley), an adjoining building at the end of Ropergate was revealed to have been built at a time when there stood next to it a building in which the timbers of its framing had projected so as to be embedded in the building subsequently constructed beside it.

Whilst Saturday was the general market day, Tuesday was the day of the cattle market (near Baghill Station). Each brought much activity to the streets. On both days many shops had displays of their goods on the pavement at their fronts, or perhaps on tables on the roadside. This was particularly the case with those places which served the farmers – with cattle troughs, poultry pens, drinking vessels, farmers tools and implements and the like, and there were many shops which had displays outside their premises on other than market days too. A string of boots hanging by a shop door left no doubt in the mind of the passer-by as to what the shop sold, but today, few but the vegetable shops seem to have continued the custom of the shop-front display.

There was no mistaking cattle market day, for from an early hour there would be animals driven through the streets, with drovers and dogs frequently failing to prevent their charges straying into the wrong streets, or into a yard, or even into a shop.

And for not a few of these creatures, their journey to Pontefract was their last, for there were at least three slaughter houses right in the town. Wilson Clayton had one in his yard off Market Place, Austwick killed pigs between his shop (and house) and the Pineapple Inn in Gillygate; but the one in the Pig Market was practically a public one, for it opened directly into the market, which was a convenient snicket between Market Place and Back Northgate, through which I passed directly to and from the King’s School.

The ‘entertainment’ thus provided was much deplored by Mrs Nicholls, wife of the Rev. Thomas Howey Nicholls, head of the King’s School, who was unable to have it restricted. She is, however, understood to have had rather more success with her request to Walter Smith, proprietor of Bon Marche at the corner of Finkle Street and Horsefair, whose window displays sometimes included articles of feminine underwear that Mrs Nicholls felt might undesirably affect boys of the school who passed that way.

The King’s School boys were by no means all from Pontefract. Many came from Castleford, from villages in the district like their fathers to the towns market, and there was a daily contingent from the east, as far as Goole. They came to Monkhill by a Lancashire and Yorkshire railway train, which arrived a few minutes after eight, leaving them time for a leisurely walk to school at nine.

Their return was preceded by two expresses from the west towards Goole and Hull, so they knew when from the school playing field they had seen the first express pass, it was time to set out for Monkhill for the slow stopping train. And if, by chance, they mistook the second express for the first, they knew they would have to run to catch their own train. Others came by train to Baghill from Ferrybridge, Ackworth and elsewhere.

Tommy Nicholls, head for many years until his death in 1918, was a remarkable character. Each morning the whole school assembled for a prayer and a hymn and usually a little pep talk from himself. And with a little luck, a boy arriving after the hall door had been closed could wait just outside it until the end of assembly and mingle with the boys dispersing to their lessons and so escape discovery as having been late. Tommy also took a class or two himself. I had been at the school for only a few days when he had my class of seven and eight year olds in his study for a reading lesson. When, of this dozen or so, I proved to be the only one who could spell ‘expostulate’ (from Robinson Crusoe), he declared I should have a penny (a handsome reward in those days). Reaching into his pocket he found he had no penny with him and I thought that was the end of the matter. But no. A few days later when he marched in to take morning assembly, on the dais he diverted – in a puzzled, anxious, expectant silence by all present, walked straight up to me standing in the middle of the hall with the youngest ones, (for whom there were no places at their desks) and without a word, handed me a penny.

Despite the tendencies indicated by these incidents, Tommy was keenly interested in the academic activities of school life, and would make an unheralded visit to a classroom to see what was going on. Sometimes he would so participate as to take over from the master in charge. One occasion I well remember, when, having superseded the class master, he became so immersed in his subject (I forget what it was) that he over-ran the time for the lesson and the next class for this room arrived with their master to take their places. "Just stand along the wall there for a minute said Tommy. But his ‘minute’ ran on for another period and ‘recess’ arrived (to the great ‘relief’ of at least one of the boys) with the first class still at their desks and TWO other classes standing along the wall ‘for a few minutes more’.

Shop hours in my boyhood were very different from those of today. The general opening hour was eight, which frequently found a cluster of customers waiting for it. Few shops closed at midday nor closed before nine at night, later for some shops, especially at Christmas and similar times when business continued (as on most Saturdays) until not far from midnight.

Letters posted before 9.30 at the head post office (formerly in premises demolished in 1938, facing up Beastfair, but from 1915 in the present building in Ropergate) could be relied upon to be delivered in most parts of the country the following morning, including Sundays; whilst if bearing an extra halfpenny stamp they could be posted at around 10.00pm on the south-bound mail train at Baghill Station (no charge for admission to the station).

Mail could be posted at the head office up to 5.00am for same day local delivery, and I recall a resident in Mayor’s Walk complaining that a letter she posted in the local pillar box before 11.00am had failed to be delivered in Market Place by the 2.30 delivery that day.

Watches and clocks were not quite so plentiful in those days – long before radio time signals were introduced, and the parish church clock with Lord Grimthorpe’s gravity three-leg escapement (installed in 1887 in celebration of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee) was the town’s standard public timepiece, though the clock in the post office window was generally treated with respect as it was reputed to be set to GMT every morning.

Since a high proportion of the population lived within the sound of the church bells, the daily ‘time bell’ was a real convenience. It was sounded for five minutes before 8.00am, noon, 1.00pm and 6.00pm, marking the opening and closing of most peoples working spells.

At the other end of Market Place, over the Town Hall, there was a bell (cracked for as long as I ever knew it) struck by the old clock which was displaced in the 30’s by a commonplace electric piece of modernity.

Both these public clocks were in the care of a character named Samuel Joseph Stockleymoney, a Londoner who had settled in Pontefract, living at one time at the corner of Gillygate and Southgate, before the second Gillygate widening in 1912, and later in Horsefair. His comparatively cultured accent probably gained him greater respect than his apparent financial status seemed to justify, but he was certainly worthy of the respect he gained by his diving displays in the old swimming bath at the one-time waterworks at the junction of Halfpenny Lane and Back Street. Part of the wall of the heart-shaped tank can still be seen at the back of the water board depot at this site, though the machinery, chimney and water tower went soon after Hitler’s war (the wall went when Kwik Save was built).

I learned to swim in that little old bath, where I spent many happy hours before the present baths were opened in 1912 – when father took the first public plunge at the opening ceremony. I also joined with many others in the summers of 1913 and 1914 in the Park lake, which had one part made specially deep for swimmers, when in 1913 it was doubled to its present six acres. It was in that deeper part that I had the fiercest attack of cramp I ever had in or out of water, as I stretched up to put the crossbar on a water polo goal. At the other end of the lake, at the boat landing stage, other men fell into the water when they failed to climb a greasy pole with a ham at the top as a prize. This was part of some sports occasion of which the date and its other features have escaped me.

I do recall clearly however, another event at the lake. A parade and collection had been arranged on behalf of the RNLI with a lifeboat (of the pulling and sailing type) on a heavy horse-drawn carriage being the central feature. The proceedings were to include a trip round the lake for paying passengers in the lifeboat, but when the vessel reached the lake and was launched, it went straight to the bottom which was a couple of feet below the surface. This resulted in it having to be withdrawn and have the mud washed from its beautiful white surface.

In passing, I might mention that when the work of extending the lake had been nearly completed and the water level had been lowered, as I walked across the narrow dividing strip between old and new, I was surprised to find mussels established there, for I had always understood them to be purely sea creatures.

Now back to the public clocks. Stockleymoney was very proud of his charges and would willingly take an interested visitor to see (and help him to wind) the church clock, the accuracy of which he adjusted by adding or removing a penny from the pendulum bob. The Town Hall clock however, was very old and more difficult to control, so much so that it got me into trouble when it stopped one morning at 8.35 and thereby made me very late for school. My form master (a newcomer from some city) could not be persuaded that the clock on a Town Hall had been allowed to stop.

The Town Hall cracked bell, though normally it did no more than announce the hours, was heard on other occasions during the year. On pancake day it was sounded for a couple of hours before noon (with brief intervals when the ringer’s arm tired), and similarly on 1st May when those interested were invited to take up ‘gaits’ authorising them to run cattle or horses on the park pastures, a privilege for which they paid a fee to the corporation. Many a time, I, like other youngsters was given the treat (or at least the experience) of walking down to the park to see the cattle gathered and milked in the shed which, though dilapidated, stood until 1975 near the Girl’s High School. The pond at which the cattle watered was near the gate on the south side, but was filled in many years ago.

Mayor’s Day (9th November, the local elections having been on 1st November) was another occasion when the Town Hall bell was heard, for it was generally sounded as soon as the new Mayor had been elected, though it could soon be augmented (or drowned) by a lively peal of the eight bells of the church. Mayor’s Day was usually marked by a ‘scramble’ in which the now head of the municipality scattered coins from the Town Hall balcony over the crowd below.

This event however, became very rough and in due course it died, though one Mayor softened it somewhat by a distribution of oranges and apples instead of coins. I have not been able to trace any trustworthy support of the story that one ‘joker’ in the municipal party tossed out a small shovelful of coins which were almost red hot.

‘Scrambles’ on less pretentious lines were not uncommon outside a home where a wedding was being celebrated, and sometimes, the first movement of the train which carried the couple away for their honeymoon was accompanied by two or three fog signals beneath their compartment.

The church bells rang out on many occasions besides those already mentioned, and of course, forty minutes or so on Sunday mornings and evenings, as well as a similar period of practice on Monday evening.

Parishioners of prominence were generally accorded a peal on their marriage, and the depth of a public figure could be marked by a ‘passing bell’. There seems to have been some uncertainty about the rules for this, for there were those who expected single strokes for a man and doubles for a woman; whilst others claimed that the proper thing was one stroke for every year of the deceased’s life.

The funeral of a person of importance could well be marked by a peal of muffled bells, the open tenor at the end of each round striking a sharp contrast with the subdued tones of the other seven. The former ring of eight bells was re-cast and augmented in 1920 to form the present ten-bell ring as part of the parish war memorial. Funerals seem to have been much more marked then than they are today, especially of public personalities. House blinds were lowered, shops closed, and many people – men bare-headed, lined the streets on the route from the church to the cemetery.

Many men lived in, or were, or had been connected with the Barracks, so that a military funeral was not infrequent – and always almost spectacular. Headed by a military band playing a funeral march, the procession would include a detachment of soldiers marching at funeral pace, and amongst them would be a firing party with reversed arms for a volley over the open grave after the committal. The march back to the Barracks, by contrast, was brisk, with the band setting the pace with more normal sounds.

Sunday morning church parade really was a spectacle. Headed by their band in full blast, two or three companies of men of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and of the York and Lancaster Regiment (so often miscalled the Yorkshire and Lancashire), marched by Wakefield Road and Ropergate to church, where a small party of Roman Catholics were detached and marched off to their own church, and at a later period some non-conformists similarly separated. The band left their instruments in the Buttercross with two or three of their number to look after them, while the men clattered into the galleries and the officers took places in the pews bearing a plate marked ‘Officers of the Garrison’. After the service with the band already in formation at the end of Ropergate, the troops ‘fell in’ on the space in front of the Buttercross and performed their ‘form fours’, the movements of which sometimes seemed to be too intricate for the newest recruits, to the chagrin of those in charge and the derision of old soldiers amongst the spectators. Then away to the Barracks.

One summer this parade was particularly impressive, for the two local battalions were joined by some Northumberland Fusiliers for several weeks. The contrast between the sounds of the visitor’s drums and fifes, and the more dulcet tones of the home sides silver instruments was quite striking, each seeming to set off the appeal of the others. On the parade ground at the Barracks the two bands joined in a musical half-hour before ‘dismiss’ and the bugles called ‘come to the cookhouse door’.

The occupants of the Barracks were prominent in the life of the town. The inn-keepers, of course, welcomed them especially, although a few of the men preferred the quieter atmosphere of the Soldiers Home, at one time in Ropergate and later in Southgate in a house now part of the premises of G. R. Smith Ltd, motor engineers (now Kwik-Fit offices after demolition) where tea and light refreshments were served by voluntary helpers under the leadership of Miss Chapman.

Somewhat similar facilities and parallel activities were provided in the Girls’ Evening Home in Salter Row in premises later absorbed into those of the Co-operative Society.

There was an annual reminder of the part played by the Y and L in the battle of Minden, when the date was marked by the wearing of a flower in the hat of each soldier to recall how his predecessors plucked a flower each from the gardens through which they passed on their way to the battle.

Another parade ought to be mentioned. Every Saturday and Sunday evening the Salvation Army met in front of the Town Hall under the balcony big lamp, and held an open-air service with a collection, before marching off via Salter Row, to their Citadel at the top of Front Street (demolished 1974). The military turn-outs on Sunday were not by any means the only parades of the day, for Sunday evening almost exceeded Saturday evening in its throng of young people who ambled to and fro in Ropergate, which their elders spoke of disparagingly, even disgustedly, as the ‘Monkey Walk’, though they themselves might well have been amongst the many whose romance began in Ropergate on a Saturday or Sunday evening.

Soldiery and the fair were far from being the only features of the streets of Pontefract. Four or five times a year we had a race meeting in the park, with crowds arriving by train at both Baghill and Tanshelf stations. Those from Baghill, having walked up the hill to the town were greeted by numerous wagonettes with raucous drivers shouting "course way six" – an expression I heard a great many times before I discovered it to be an invitation to race goers to ride to the course for a fee of sixpence.

Frank H.W. Holmes