When cotton was the king

I left on a Friday -- Christmas, 1950 -- and mum had me working in a cotton mill the next Monday morning.

In the end, it got so the fluff was damaging my health, so I took myself off to the Labour Exchange, where they'd just set up a youth employment scheme.

I told them I needed to be working outside. What I needed was clean air in my lungs.

So they found me a job doing farm work. It wouldn't be in Bolton, though. It would be across the water -- in the Isle of Man.

I'd never been on a boat before, and when I got to the island, I found this posh chap waiting for me on the quayside. He was leaning on this broken-down 1920s jalopy and his name was McKay-Beck. It was him I'd be working for.

He'd been a Cambridge Don before the war, and then he'd been a secret agent -- working undercover in Nazi-occupied Crete.

That's what he told me, anyway.

I climbed into his old car, and off we shot, out of Douglas, and then on and on down these narrow leafy roads, winding away through countryside, until we veered up this private road and straight up this mountain and into a mist.

The farm was really out in the sticks. It was a beautiful location when the mist cleared, but they had no electricity, and you had to pump the water every day from a well.

It was a dairy farm with 2,000 egg-laying hens, which was a lucrative business because eggs were 10-bob-a-dozen in 1951.

In Bolton there was still rationing. Eggs were rationed. And chicken -- people don't realise now how rare chicken was. It was like gold.

For a Bolton lad to have chicken, it was another world. I felt I'd stumbled on the land of milk and honey.

From May to September they killed hens on the farm for the hotel trade.

And my job was to catch the hens -- 80 or 90 a week -- and, if they weren't laying, I had to wring their necks.

You could spot if they were still laying by the distance between the thigh-bones, so you had to feel them underneath with your fingers to measure this. Then I had to pluck them. I spent many a happy hour in the sunshine, plucking chickens.

Later, I was the warden up at Sharples Hall. My wife was the cook there as well. It was a live-in post -- we had our own flat and no bills to pay -- plus I got £10-a-week, which was a lot of money for 1955.

But the hours were long -- early starts, late nights. We'd get Thursdays off, but we were working Saturdays and Sundays.

Sharples Hall was this huge mansion just north of Astley Bridge. It had more than 50 rooms.

At one time, it had been the residence of the mill-owner, Sir John Holden, till he died in 1946, and then it had been bought up by the Combined Cotton Mills Company, which had 22 mills around Lancashire.

They had converted it into a hostel for immigrant labour -- for Italian girls, who'd been flown over.

Cotton was king, even in the 1950s, and the Lancashire mills were still crying out for workers.

My day used to start at a quarter-to-six in the morning, when I had to ring a big bell and it would clang all through the hostel.

Then the Italian girls would get up -- yawning and sleepy and muttering. With 52 single girls in the neighbourhood -- Italian at that -- you can imagine we got a lot of lads hanging around the hall.

I had to fix a big notice on the gate -- No visitors allowed past this point. In fact, no men at all were permitted to enter the grounds. I was the only man in a mansion-full of women. Poor me. And I was only 21 at the time.

To make myself seem a bit older -- more a figure of authority -- I used to wear a suit all the time. And I'd go through this act of pretending to be very stern.

Not all the girls were footloose and fancy-free, though. They were hard workers. And almost everything they earned was sent back to Italy.

They'd trot off down to the Post Office and stuff thick wads of cash into registered envelopes, and post it off to their families -- like I say, most of them were living in poverty in the poorest part of Italy.

The girls spent very little on themselves. They'd walk into Bolton rather than take the bus -- they thought the bus far too expensive.

On Saturday afternoons, they would stroll down into town -- down to the open market -- and ask the stall-keepers could they have the chicken's heads and the chicken's feet. They would get them given free and bring them back to the Hall and cook them up in big pots in the kitchen and have a party.

And everything went swimmingly for three or four years, until 1960, and then it was the time of Macmillan's "winds of change", and Africa and all that -- the new emerging nations competing with us with their cheap labour. And mills started to close left, right, and centre around Lancashire, and finally my employers decided to close the hostel down.

Most of the girls went back to Italy. A few married local lads -- I met one in Harwood only a few months ago, and we talked for an hour -- but most of the girls went home.