Our home, the house where I was brought up as the youngest of the three children of Samuel Rushton and Alice Green, all born between 1903 and 1905, was called Friends’ Farm. This was a working farm right up until after the end of the last war, and the farmhouse was the last dwelling on the left-hand side of Hala Road before the watersplash, as you made your way out of the village heading in the direction of Quernmore and the open countryside. My father, Samuel Rushton3, had actually lived and worked there since about 1885, but he himself was not from the Lancaster area, for he was born and bred in Farnworth, Bolton; he had been sent to Scotforth by his recently widowed mother as a fourteen-year-old straight from school, in order to breathe the fresh country air and thus get some protection from the smoky atmosphere of the industrial area where he had been brought up. In his childhood his health had always been rather delicate, and he suffered from anaemia all his life.
When Samuel Rushton arrived at Hala Road in 1885, Friends’ Farm had already been in his mother’s family for upwards of 40 years, firstly in the care of his grandfather, William Parrington4, and then William’s youngest son, Richard Parrington; usually known as Uncle Dick to us, my great uncle had been in charge of the farm since his father had died in 1875 – his elder brothers had long left the area by this time, and were making their living independently in Liverpool. Richard Parrington eventually offered a partnership in the business to his nephew and, when Samuel married Alice Green5 in 1901 and they took over the farmhouse, he himself moved over the road into Sandfield Cottage – see page 10. This was the last house on the opposite side of the road, slightly further down, adjacent to the beck and situated within a beautiful walled garden. Sandfield had been for many years the home of the editor of the Lancaster Gazette, Charles Edward Quarme6, his wife Alice and his three surviving daughters, spinsters, who lived on there for some time after their parents’ death. After the last surviving Quarme sister Anne Esther sold up (for £3,000, as I was told) and vacated the house, Uncle Dick, a life-long bachelor, took possession of the property and thereafter lived there in some style, as we perceived it, his domestic needs attended to over a period of forty years by a succession of housekeepers (some related to us, others not). The house had some land with it (about 20 acres), and this was then farmed as a single unit with Friends’ Farm.
All Uncle Dick’s long life of 86 years was spent in Hala Road; he never lived anywhere else, but did have occasion to travel away from home. At hay-time he used to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning and set off with a horse-drawn machine to mow the meadows; every year some Irish lads were hired to help us with this task, and we would ride on the carts or play in the hay in the barn. Most of these lads were unable to write, and we used to have to write postcards for them to tell their parents that they had arrived here safely. To hire his farm workers and domestic staff Uncle Dick would travel to the hiring fair at Ulverston – this was where he thought he could get the best workers; cattle, on the other hand, were bought at the market at Hellifield, brought to Lancaster by train and then driven all the way through the town from the Midland station at Green Ayre – this was common practice among farmers at that time, and no doubt caused a fair amount of disruption to the commerce of the town; of course, at this time the Lancaster cattle market7 was also situated in the town. Cattle droving ran in the family, for it was some years earlier that Uncle Dick’s two elder brothers were said to have driven their father William’s cattle all the way to Liverpool to market – it so happened that they then both subsequently settled there8 – but Dick sold his own cattle at the Lancaster cattle market.
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3 My maternal grandfather Samuel Rushton (1871-1945) was the second surviving son of James Rushton (1836-83) and Ann Parrington (1839-1929), the youngest daughter of Scotforth farmer William Parrington’s first marriage. James Rushton was from Bolton and, after their marriage, they settled in the Bolton area, where most of their children were born; he died in Bolton in 1883 and is buried at Walmsley Parish Church, where other members of our family also lie.
4 William Parrington (1804-75) had been born at Dent, near Sedbergh, but his family had spent some time farming at Aughton, before eventually settling at Quernmore. It was while they were at Aughton, that a number of his siblings died in tragic circumstances.
5 Alice Green, my maternal grandmother, was the eldest child of Joseph Green and Hannah Jenkinson, who farmed Union Farm, Stalmine. She came to Scotforth in response to an advert to keep house for Dick Parrington and ended up marrying his nephew Samuel Rushton, who was some years younger than she. She died in 1907, aged 42, leaving three infant children to be brought up by their father and his two sisters.
6 Charles Edward Quarme had been born at Plymouth in about 1796; his wife Alice was from Falmouth, Cornwall. Before taking on the Lancaster job he had been the editor of a Preston paper, and their eldest children were born there. The family probably moved into Sandfield in the middle 1840s. In 1877 he produced ‘A Narrative of Queen Victoria’s Visit to Lancaster in 1851’. Charles and Alice Quarme had four daughters and three sons. He died in 1879, aged 84; she in 1887, aged 87.
7 The cattle market (North West Auctions) moved from its site by the canal off Thurnham St to Wyresdale Road, Golgotha, in the 1960s.
8 George (1828-93), the eldest brother, became a Liverpool cowkeeper for a few years about 1860, when the trade directories and 1861 census show that he was living in Pembroke St and carrying on this occupation there; he ended his days, however, in Bolton – he and his family also buried at Walmsley parish church. John (1834-1903) became a publican in Scotland Road, where he was assisted by his sister Agnes; later he became a partner in the Liverpool brewing company of Harding & Parrington and also of Joule’s Brewery, Stafford; he did well from these businesses, and latterly lived in a grand house at Roby Mount, Roby.
Sometime before the Great War Uncle Dick was elected to the Rural District Council and he also represented the Council on the Board of Guardians of the Poor of the Lancaster Union. These positions would have introduced him into the circle of the “great and the good” in Lancaster society, though we would not have judged him as an obviously sociable person – to our mind he did not have many friends, and he certainly did not talk to us about such matters. He did, however, go to visit Miss Gardner in Scotforth Square9 and the Miss Singletons, Margaret and Alice, in Bowerham Road10; they used to visit him too, and one of these ladies, I am certain, would have married him, had he only asked – but by this time I suppose he was a confirmed bachelor. He did not have a lot of patience with us kids, but when I left home and went to live in Scotland11 in the late 1920s he asked me to write to him, which I did, and he wrote back; we kept up a correspondence over several years, until I left Scotland. He was also interested to hear what I was doing on the committee of the LGGS Old Girls. Every year on Christmas Day Uncle Dick gave a family party, to which we Rushtons were invited, together with the Hodgsons from Fern Bank – Aunt Jane was one of Dick’s sisters, his favourite, and her husband John Hodgson, a corn miller, was our favourite uncle; there were three Hodgson children12, two boys John and Charles and a girl Muriel, all quite a few years older than us, with whom we kept in contact over the years – strangely none of the three ever married, so that branch of the family eventually died out.
Sadly, my mother died before I was two years old; and my father never really got over this loss. Consequently we three children, James, Lilian and I, were brought up by one of father’s sisters who came over from Bromley Cross, near Bolton, to ensure that we did not go completely wild; in fact it was the younger sister, Mary Agnes Rushton13, usually known to us as Polly, who took the brunt of this, and lived with us for many years; the elder sister Grace had to go back to Bromley Cross to look after her mother, but she used to come over to stay with us occasionally, as did Grandma Rushton, Uncle Dick’s half-sister, herself. Dad’s youngest brother Joe used to come to stay with us every Easter, and Uncle John and his wife Cis too used to come each June during the Bolton holidays.
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9 The 1901 census shows Mary E Gardner (39) at Oaklea, No 6 West Road, Scotforth; she was living there as the daughter of John Kew Gardner (81), farmer; also here was her unmarried brother John WK Gardner (42), farmer’s son. By 1911 her father had died and Mary Eleanor was acting as housekeeper to her brother, who now described himself as a market gardener. The 1939 register finds Mary E Gardner living at No 6 Portland Terrace, Scotforth, (same address) with a widow Elizabeth Hodgson as her housekeeper.
10 In 1911 Margaret (42) and Alice Singleton (39) were living on their own means at No 37 Beresford Terrace with their brother Mark (51), a stone mason; ten years previously they had all been living at Ivy Cottage, Springfield St, with their widowed father William Singleton, a retired builder.
11 Having graduated in Chemistry at Manchester University Eve took up employment with the Nobel Explosives Company (later part of ICI) at their plant at Ardeer, Ayrshire.
12 The Hodgson children continued to run their family business after their father’s death (in 1926), until Muriel, the company secretary, died in 1955. I do not remember Muriel, but John and Charles were regular visitors to my parents’ home in Bowerham Road, and vice-versa.
13 The 1911 census shows the situation. Samuel Rushton (39) was a widower with three children: James (8), Lilian (7) and Evelyn (5); also living here was his unmarried sister Mary Agnes Rushton (Auntie Polly) (37), born at Farnworth (Bolton), Lancs, acting as housekeeper. There was also a house-servant Elsie English (19), from Barrow-in-Furness, Lancs.
We were brought up by Dad quite strictly, I would say, in the Victorian tradition, but it was nevertheless a very happy childhood. For instance, on bonfire night Dad would give a party for the village children – the children of his milk-round customers – and he would be in charge of the pyrotechnics, made more effective by the judicious use of a small amount of paraffin! What would we think of that now? We also had our own friends and, with them, we would explore the fields and the lanes, investigating the wild flowers – we knew all the names – and birds’ nests; this was our escape from the discipline and chores at home. Dad was quite severe with my sister Lilian and me. He would not let us go to the parties we were invited to by our friends. They all went to the Lancaster annual dances, but we were not allowed to go. Likewise, they went to the annual show of the Lancaster Amateur Dramatic & Operatic Society, but again we were not allowed. Later, however, after Uncle Dick was persuaded (by his housekeeper, Louie Daniels14) to allow us the use of part of a paddock for a tennis court, the place became the meeting point for all our friends from far and wide. We also visited our friends from school, and thought nothing of cycling quite long distances to meet up with them, which was all right provided that we were not late back – to ensure that we were not out late we were not allowed to have lights for our bikes – there was no cycling without lights in those days!
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14 Louie Daniels (1884-1966) kept in touch with the Rushton girls over a life-long friendship; she was from Ruabon, near Wrexham, the second daughter of Edward and Louisa Daniels. In 1923 she married Tom E (Ted) Davies in Greenwich and they went to live at Dollis Hill in north west London, where the Rushton girls visited them. On being widowed she returned to live for a time in Fern Bank, Scotforth; subsequently, around 1960, she moved again to Sefton Road, Chester, to live close to her nephew Graham Daniels in Hoole Road; she died at Chester in Spring 1966, aged 81.
As for schooling, there had been a dame school in the village where all the Parrington children, including Uncle Dick, had received such education as had been generally available in my grandmother’s generation. There had also been a church school in Scotforth Square which had received such a bad report from the inspectors some time about 1870 that the church authorities had responded by closing it down and building a new school on Scotforth Road, not far from St Paul’s Church, which pre-dates it by a few years – this school opened in 1879 and has since gone from strength to strength. Most of the children from Scotforth village went there. Just after the turn of the century, however, a new council elementary school opened at the Greaves, which is the school we three went to until we moved on to the Girls’ or the Boys’ Grammar School respectively. None of us actually got scholarships – I was in the scholarship class at Greaves, but I insisted that I start at the Girls Grammar School with my sister Lilian, when Dad decided that it was time for her to start; so I never took the exam. Once into the more rigorous learning regime much of our social activities with friends in the village began to be curtailed, but instead we established new friendships with children from further afield through school, some of which have lasted a lifetime.
Set slightly back from the road by a small cobbled area and a patch of grass, Friends Farm house was a very old two-storey building, which we were given to understand dated back to the seventeenth century and had once been a coaching inn. I am not quite so sure, however, as to the truth of this matter, as it did not lie directly on a coach route, but there was a stable attached to the west end of the house, adjoining the mission. It was certainly much older than most of the houses in Hala Road, which were largely Victorian. It was L-shaped, built in two parts, so there were separate staircases to the upstairs quarters. There was just the one tap serving the whole farm, which was in the ‘back kitchen’15 – there was an old hand pump in the back yard, but I cannot remember it ever working. As with most ordinary houses of the time, there was no bathroom or inside loo; the privy was some distance from the house across the back yard, next to a large lilac tree in the garden beyond. We did all the washing, including ourselves, in the back kitchen and had to use our chamber pots in our bedrooms, if we were caught short at night. There was a large table in the main kitchen, where we all sat down together for our meals, and cooking was done there on an old range at the side of the fire, which normally provided all the heating for the house; this room was the centre of activity, as it could be quite cold elsewhere. Of course, there was no electricity in the house in those days, and for most of our time there we had to rely on oil lamps or candles for our lighting. Imagine the joy when, eventually, we were able to say ‘goodbye’ to the dirty old oil lamps, after we acquired a gas supply to provide our lighting. There was an old piano in the parlour, which I used to play occasionally – not very well I have to say – and cupboards either side of the fireplace. This was where Dad kept his books – volumes on farming and history; he also had a set of the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott – there was also a desk where he dealt with all the paperwork that comes with the running of a family business. Dad’s visitors would be entertained here too – the fire would be lit for them; some of our Bolton or Liverpool relations would come and stay from time to time either here or at Sandfield; very occasionally our Pilling relatives too (my mother’s family16), though we tended to go to theirs in the summer holiday. We looked forward to these visits, as the atmosphere always seemed to be more relaxed, when others were around. As a wedding present Dad had given my mother a symphonium, a sort of clockwork gramophone with perforated steel disks, which played some of the tunes of the day; very occasionally this treasured German piece of furniture was opened up and permitted to provide some musical entertainment for our guests.
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15 The ‘back kitchen’ was actually a front room, on the right as you entered the house from the road; it ran from front to back of the house, and you could enter it directly via the back door; off this room was the ‘far kitchen’, used for storage. The main kitchen was at the back of the house, beyond the parlour, which was the front room, to the left of the front door. The main stairs were between the parlour and the kitchen and the ‘men’s stairs’ at the rear of the back kitchen.
16 The children’s mother came from a large family, which included many cousins, and they used to spend a good part of the school summer holiday at Pilling staying with their maternal grandparents the Greens at Union Farm, Stalmine, and with their Jenkinson relatives at Head Dyke and various other farms in the area.
Upstairs, Dad had the main bedroom at the front of the house, above the parlour; it had a restricted view up and down the road, as the buildings on either side (the mission and our barn) were situated further forward. We kids had rooms at the back – above the kitchen and overlooking the garden – I had to share with my elder sister Lilian, while my brother James got his own room. Auntie Polly had her own room too, but eventually she left the farm, her job done, when Lilian finished school; she took herself back to her mother in Bromley Cross, Bolton, and at last we two girls got our own rooms to ourselves. The outcome of these changes was that my sister then became my Dad’s housekeeper and took over from Polly the domestic side of running the farm. This could be quite onerous for a teenager, especially when there were seasonal labourers living in to be dealt with.
The holding was a dairy farm which together with Sandfield eventually amounted to about 80 acres and supported a milking herd of some 20 Ayrshire cattle; for a time my father had a milk round and every day he used to hitch up our horse Dolly to the milk float and set off with two kits on board to deliver the milk to all his regular customers in the area. In the days before we had milk in bottles they, the customers, brought out their own jugs, and Dad would measure out the milk for them using a pint or half-pint ladle. Dolly, a chestnut, was a very docile animal, well suited to the job and not at all frightened by the traffic, not that there was very much in those days: she knew where the customers were and where to stop, without instruction. There were other horses too for the heavier work on the farm, ploughing and so on. We also kept sheep, and my brother James had some hens of his own; selling the eggs gave him a bit of financial independence and, with the proceeds, he eventually acquired a motor bike, which he used to explore the area and link up with his friends. On the farm there was also our dog, Floss, who was our pet rather than a working dog. Between the house and the Mission were stables for our horses, while on the other side, across the yard, was a large stone-built barn containing a shippon to house the cows at milking time and through the winter, and more stabling for the horses, with storage for hay in the loft above. We kids must have spent a lot of time in that hayloft, as it was always warm and dry up there. Farm machinery and carts were accommodated under cover of a more recent timber structure that I can only describe as a sort of large car-port. To the rear, beyond the garden, were a couple of small orchards, and then there was the paddock of just over an acre between the farm buildings and the beck.
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