This is about my father John William Lonsdale born in Nelson, Lancashire on 7th July, 1896. The story might be of interest to anyone from the area, especially those who used to work in the mills nearby the baker’s shop on Southfield Street, up until the mid 1950s.

Before the First World War in 1914 John (Jack) was training to be a textile designer in the family business of textiles. The family running the business was the Taylor family – his mother’s side of the family. Her brothers ran and owned it. When the war started my father joined The Royal Field Artillery and served in Mesopotamia, The Holy Lands and Egypt. He survived the war and on returning home he discovered that the business had collapsed along with many others.

So with a depressed economy, the 1920s General Strike, and ahead the ‘Hungry Thirties’ there were very few opportunities for him to be a textile designer and so he found himself working as a labourer on the local roads. He was only given one week’s work in every three, resulting in poverty and hunger for himself and his wife and children.

However two of his sisters had married two of the brothers of a local Baker and Confectioner called Mr. Ingham, who owned a shop on Southfield Street, Nelson.
Mr. Ingham offered my father a full time job and taught him all the necessary baking skills including how to knead two loaves at a time. He worked hard and persevered at the job. When Mr. Ingham retired my father was able to purchase the business with a mortgage type arrangement with the Inghams.

A number of my family members have worked in the shop: my sister Marian worked there full-time from about 1934 and became a very skilled baker. I can remember delivering bread to various houses assisting my sister Dorothy who did it regularly.

The shop in Southfield Street, Nelson was sited near to many mills and produced a great choice of savoury and sweet products. As well as bread there were tea cakes, meat and potato pies, meat pies, fruit cakes and fancies, bilberry, apple tarts, and mince pies which many people said were the best in Nelson, and I think the pastry was the best I ever tasted.

In the latter years of owning the shop my mother did a lot of work in the way of chocolate fancies. Chocolate was still rationed until about 1954 but cakes with chocolate on were not rationed so were very popular and sold well. Good old Ma.

By the mid-1950s my father was advised to give up the strenuous and hard life of a baker for health reasons, so he and my mother went to work in the mill – a daily routine which they both loved.

My painting depicts early mill workers going past the bakers shop, 134 Southfield Street.