I have mentioned earlier, Edgar Taylor who lived with Shipley’s at the little farm. Now in common with a vast number of other people at this time in the thirties, Edgar was out of work.
One day he called to see mum and asked her if she would be interested in buying some soft soap (for floor cleaning), that he would be bringing round when he had a fair number of orders. Mum said ‘yes’ she would try a tin. She liked Edgar, as did most people, and when he said he had seen me recently, and had watched me grow from a tiny blossom into a ‘beautiful flower’, he was certain of a sale! I must point out that he was not saying this as part of his sales patter; his conversation was normally a bit flowery. However most people agreed to try a tin of the soap. The prices, said Edgar, ‘would vary according to the size of the tin, but none would be more than a shilling we then learned via Mrs. Shipley that Edgar and Enoch, (Mr. Shipley) were making the soap themselves, and therefore it would contain only pure ingredients!
Here I must digress for a moment to say that Enoch was a great reader. He loved to stop for a conversation, and within a few minutes would impart some little known fact that he had been reading about, and so he must have read that the main constituent of soap was fat
Thus was born the idea of creating a second little ‘Port Sunlight’ at the end of Shady Grove. Where to get the fat? They soon had that problem cracked. Edgar had an old car, and he came to an arrangement with a chip shop in Tunstall to take their spent fat off their hands. Chip shops those days made chips with dripping or similar good fat, not oil as nowadays. After a while the containers would be cleaned out and fresh fat put in. Well, there could not have been a long queue of people with a desire for old fat, so number one problem was solved. The next one must have been containers, what to put it in when it was made? Something cheap, very cheap in fact. They solved that too.
A few days after Edgar had been round booking his ‘orders’, Dad came in one teatime; he couldn’t speak for a while he was laughing so much. When he was able to tell us he said, “I was just coming down Shady Grove when I heard a loud rattling noise, it was an old man on a very old bike, and round his neck were umpteen strings of old tins, there were strings of them over the cross bar and the handlebars of the bike, how on earth he was riding the bike beats me, and he’s gone off down the lane towards Shipley’s.
‘Oh’.’ said mum, “I bet he’s taking them to Edgar to put the soap in” That was exactly what he was doing. He had been at the Marl Pits down Hassall Road, (where the dustbins were emptied), all day boring two small holes either side of the tops of the tins, then stringing them together to take to Edgar.
Where he came from we never knew, or how even Edgar had found someone willing to do such a horrible task, but he became a familiar sight wobbling along the road festooned with tins! The tins were all well washed out in Shipley’s kitchen, and when the enterprise finally got off the ground, a large tin that had contained either peaches or pears, when filled with soap was priced at a shilling, smaller tins were sixpence. Now, they had the fat, they had the tins, but there had to be something else. Of course, it had to smell like soap. A nice clean hygienic smell; the answer to that was obvious. The free Jeyes Fluid from down Well Lane. They were in business. I went to the farm one Wednesday afternoon for some eggs, it was a warm summer day, and the hens, (replete with bran mash and Indian corn) were doing a bit of desultory scratching in the field in front of the house, clucking contentedly among themselves. The goats were in the shadow of the hedge, industriously cropping the grass. A quiet, lazy, summer afternoon. I was invited in, and the scene in the kitchen was a great contrast to the peace and tranquility outside! In the corner the wash boiler was steaming, and giving off occasional ‘glugging’ sounds, as a mixture of fat and Jeyes Fluid was being brought to the boil. The whole place smelled like a highly disinfected chip shop, as the two smells struggled for supremacy. On the floor Mr. Shipley was kneeling down surrounded by a variety of tins, into which Edgar was pouring ‘soap’. On one side were some tins that had already set! They were all so happy. Mrs. Shipley was plying them with tea, her long links of beads chinking on the saucers as she handed it round. As she passed one to me she said proudly, “Edgar will be starting to bring the soap round on Friday.” Indeed he did, but unfortunately it was more trouble getting the ‘soap’ off the floor and the scrubbing brush than dealing with the ordinary dirt. They had certainly left out a few magic ingredients! Everyone muttered to each other saying, -“Oh dear, I’m not having any more of that soap off Edgar, it’s just no good, its like spreading grease on the floor.” I don’t think anyone told him off about it but his selling area spread out in ever widening circles. First the Potteries and Crewe, and about a year later, dad met him and said “are you still selling the soap, Edgar?” “Oh yes”, he replied “I cover a wide area, I’ve been into Wales, this week”. No mention was made of the fact that he could not sell to the same customer twice!
The building of the Ordnance factory at Radway Green saved Edgar. He applied for a job there, and it was his proud boast, in later years that he ‘cut the first sod’. I’m quite sure that was a bit of Edgar’s romantic fantasy, but he became a well-liked employee there until he retired.
Sadly though, things did not end so happily for Shipley’s. In the year 1938 to 1939, preparations for war were going ahead with feverish haste. When they started to build the Ordnance factory there had to be homes for the workers, and the place chosen was the fields at the end of Shady Grove, (part of the wood went too). Four houses were built first, and Shipley’s were housed in one of them.
One morning when I went to work, the farm was still there, empty and forsaken. During the day the bulldozers moved in, and in the evening a mass of rubble was all that remained of a lifetime of country contentment. When mum asked Enoch how he liked his new house, he replied sadly, “there’s too much chromium and not enough comfort.” They did not live very long after that, dying within a short time of each other. It was not said that they died from broken hearts, but I believe they did. Edgar was allocated one of the workers flats, and he lived in it until his death from a long illness, during which he was devotedly cared for by his friend.