Tape 30
Miss Lucy Croxall was born in 1903, and her older sister Miss Eva Hayes (nee Croxall) in 1893, They were interviewed on 27 February 1978, when they lived at 44 Collingwood Road, Witham.
They also appear on tape 29.
For more information about them, see notes on the Croxall family in the People category.
The original recording of this interview is held at the Essex Sound and Video Archive. To listen to the recording, please contact them at ero.enquiry@essex.gov.uk or 033301 32500.
[???] shows words that are not clear enough to interpret and so have had to be omitted.
[?] after a word shows that its interpretation is not certain.
Later explanatory additions by JG or the transcriber are in square brackets [e.g. explaining locations etc.]
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Continued from tape 29
Side 3
[Confused noises at beginning, talk about WRVS et al, not noted]
Q: ……you were talking about your father and the work or something…….?
Miss C: Oh, I was saying of when Father opened the – bring gas into a main, and the house…. And of course that was all done by hand, there were none of those jumping things, you know, electric things. It was all done by hand. You dug out, well, all the trenches were dug by hand. And then the word went round that the – you know the new main was going to be dug. And there used to be a queue at the office, men wanting a job. [???].
Q: What work was there?
Miss C: There was only the – there was a glove factory, and the tan office. Blyth’s Mill. Because Crittall’s wasn’t there at the beginning. Not at the beginning. And agriculture. Only just for the women and that.
Miss C: Oh, and Cullen’s and Cooper Taber. They were seeds. And other than that there was just domestic work. There was no Crittall’s, was there? No, there was the glove – Cullen’s, Cooper Taber, tan office, Blyth’s. Of coures some of them went off to Chelmsford and places like that. But Witham was really purely residential.
Q: [???]
Miss C: And of course, gardening, you know, odd jobbing like gardening and that sort of thing, didn’t they. Yes.
Q: And the glove factory was mostly women, was it?
Miss C: Yes, I think it was. Pinkham’s, women there.
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