Following on from our look at my Uncle's cameras and photographic stuff yesterday, here is a record of just some of the things we found on our first visit to his house in Rochdale. I have known this house all of my life. It was my grandparents' house and Uncle Geoff lived there until 2002 when he moved to Blackpool to be closer to his brother, my father, and the rest of us. Despite much prompting over the years, the house in Rochdale remained full of stuff that he had told us he had got rid of and other stuff that we knew was still there. I hadn't seen the house since 2002 and was not really prepared for all that we found... I'll just stress now that it is now empty.
Fran and my brother admire the garden which has somewhat overgrown and come seeking warmth through the kitchen door...
On top of the sideboard were my Grandad's glasses with a locket containing photos of my grandparents. My Grandad, John Burke for whom I was named, died in 1973, my Grandma, Annie, followed at the ripe old age of 90 in 1988. The photos come from a single group photograph taken at their wedding in 1921.
The 1950s family washing machine was standing in the corner of the room. The Hotpoint Electric Washing Machine had a modestly disreet little on/off switch modelled on the gear lever of a Morris Minor...
I hadn't seen it since the 1950s and was amazed at how small it was. The last time I saw it I could not see over the edge...
Upstairs in what had been my Grandma's bedroom, we were preparing ourselves for finding things that might trigger an emotional reaction. What we were not expecting was a massive hank of human hair. Probably my grandmother's but it could also be from some other relative. Explains where my daughter's red hair comes from. Hmmm... not the milkman then... An old toffee tin contained more examples of my family's ability to produce long flowing locks. What the heck happened when I was born...?
Phew! My Grandad always shaved with a cut throat razor until late in life when his hand was becoming unsteady. Quite sensibly he placed his razors in their boxes and left them for his grandsons to find some 50 years later and wonder what the heck to do with them.
This is a wooden box with poker work design on top. Poker work was exactly what it sounds like. The fireside poker was placed in the coals of the fire until glowing red hot and was then used to char or burn a design in the wood. Perhaps the trend started with the Spanish Inquisition, whose inquisitors would practice on chunks of wood whenever Protestant or heretics were unavailable... Unfortunately the wood had suffered over the years and had the consistency of soft cardboard...
It contained my Grandad's spats. White leather covers for his shoes. Watch a 1920s/30s gangster film to get the idea.
The house was four storeys, with both an attic and a cellar. Traditionally the places where people left junk. Y-e-s... Sorting through some of this was in turns amazing, hilarious and totally gross. One massive box of textiles material had a can of liquid furniture polish under the first layer. It had rusted through and all the bottom contents were soaked in a dark sticky substance that I couldn't immediately identify. I of course had found it the hard way...
There was so much paper. In the 1930s when paper was the medium for lots of play - drawing, writing, battleships, paper aeroplanes etc. - my Grandparents must have kept and stored as much as was humanly possible. There were blank cards from rotary filing systems. There were sheets of blank invoices from various places of work. There were lots of schoolbooks kept for the blank pages still in them. Not just Dad's and Uncle Geoff's school books... They must have asked school mates if they could take their books at the end of each school year...
Uncle Geoff was the first in the family to get into hi-fi. Here is a 1950s Leak valve amplifier. Top left is the pre-amplifier for it. Bottom left is a radio FM tuner. Bottom right is a 1930s Bakelite radio
A "Princess Mary" Tin from Christmas 1914 with the countries: Belgium, Japan, Russia, Montenegro, Servia, and France inscribed on it. A fund was set up by Princess Mary to provide a Christmas gift from the nation to every person in the King's uniform serving afloat, overseas or having been wounded.
From the attic to the cellar. Here my Grandad had his workbench. An engineer by trade he not only had tools; he made tools! There were lots of examples: boxes of files, nuts, bolts, dies and taps for making nuts and bolts...
On the floor was this metal box, looking suspiciously like an ammunition box... I looked it up on the Internet. It is an ammunition box, used to transport four 25 pound shells during World War II. We opened it very carefully...
Oh, what a disappointment!
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