Nostalgia: Bleak winter was all about keeping warm

Published on Saturday 3 January 2009 10:07

If you think it's chilly now, just be grateful the weather's not as bad is it was in the winter of 1947 when Arctic conditions gripped Britain in January and February. Reader FRANK FERRI, 73, now living in Newhaven, but then a resident of Leith, remembers what it was like – while our pictures show it wasn't just that year which had its share of cold snaps.

I WAS only 12 but I remember it well. Icicles a couple of feet long dangled dangerously from roofs of buildings and external water pipes. Plumbing services were overstretched and impossible to come by and supplies of fuel such as coal, already difficult to get due to post-war shortages, were affected by the weather.

Even if coal was available it was hard to deliver because it was distributed by horse-drawn carts. I remember seeing Clydesdale horses – those poor beasts were used intensively to transport goods all over the city until the late 50s – as they struggled to keep their feet from slipping on the compacted snow on the slightest of gradients.

I used to wander all over the place trying to get some form of fuel to burn such as fruit crates from the grocers, or as kids we would raid our local cooperage to get discarded broken barrels. The houses were freezing.

It was not uncommon that winter for people to rip up pieces of linoleum from areas of the floor that would not be seen, such as under furniture. In desperation, we would roll up sheets of newspaper into a tight twist to emulate firewood, but that was not much good.

One day, with my father being at work, my mother in desperation asked me to take the pram and go to the coal merchants for a bag of coal – she could not go herself as there were two other children to look after at home, my brothers, aged one and five.

I took the pram, which also served as a means to carry the washing to the wash house in Bonnington Road. I went to the local merchant's coal yard in Coburg Street, just off Great Junction Street. The coalman loaded the pram with a one hundred weight bag of coal and I proceeded to make my way home pushing my precious cargo, with pleasurable thoughts in my head of a warm glowing fire and hot water for a spell.

Well, that poor wee 12-year-old was not prepared for the journey home to Ballantyne Road. I now had some idea how these poor Clydesdale horses must have felt as my feet slipped on the ice as I tried to push the load up the hill.

In those days keeping chimneys clean was quite expensive and few of the working classes could afford a chimney sweep. The solution was simple and dangerous.

I've seen my father wrap a bundle of newspaper around the shaft of a broom, set the paper alight and push it up until soot, dry as tinder in the chimney shaft, caught alight. When the fire was well under way, the chimney would make an eerie roar for quite some time until it extinguished itself. What was not realised was that this fire could have spread to the flooring joists all the way up the building, thus putting the whole tenement at risk. The fire services were frequently called out. Needs must when the devil drives in hard-up times.