20260126 1030 Recording NR

The speaker reflects on his life story, inspired by his son John's suggestion. He plans to dedicate his story to his children and his wife, highlighting their support and role in his achievements. He shares details about his family background, including his mother's family's involvement in brass casting and his father's experiences in World War I and as a painter and decorator in London. The speaker was born in London but later moved to Watchet with his family, emphasizing his mother's influence on their living arrangements. Despite not learning much from his father's trade skills, he appreciates his family's history and memories. And two or three years ago, I was home ill, and John said to me, Dad, why don't you tell the story of your life? Put it on tape and I'm sure that it could be interesting. It's only now that I'm home ill again that I thought of John's words and decided that in my free time I would do just that. In telling the story of your life, or writing a book perhaps, one usually dedicates it to someone. So the first question is, who do I dedicate it to? The answer, obviously. To you, my five children, and to you, Peanut, my wonderful wife. Without whose help and wonderful attitude, the interesting things that I've done in my life would not have been possible. I have lived a wonderful life. I've done the things I've wanted to and I've enjoyed doing them. Thank you to all of you. And so, here is the story of my life. First, a little background. My parents, Bessie Chichie, was an old Watchet family. Her father was a wheelwright and had his own small business in Watchet. He used to go out mending water wheels and also doing brass founding. That was brass castings for the local paper mill at Watchet. And that was a job which was also performed by his brother, Uncle Bill, and by his father, old John Chichie. So, this trade has been in our family for a very long time. Actually, his small factory that he worked in when he retired was closed and was taken over by my cousin, Bill. Bill had no use for the factory at all. He himself was a hired car driver and a very good mechanic. And so, he locked the door of the factory and it stayed locked from somewhere about 1930 until 1975 or 6, when Bill suddenly had the wonderful idea that he wondered if the contents of this factory would be of use to the nation. It was accepted by a Conservancy people and it is now held at Glastonbury, where it's going to be finally assembled and shown as a small factory, how a factory used to live. It was water-powered and the whole system was run on water. I know very little about it, I was very young at the time, but one of my greatest interests in those days, as a young boy, was that they had a yard. We used to watch them pouring the melted metal into the castings. The main interest was the yard because in the yard was a small butcher shop and abattoir and we used to, as very young children, watch the sheep, pigs, bullocks being killed. And we just took it for granted, it was accepted as part of our life. But the main interest still was not the killing, nor the factory, but the fact that the butcher had a butcher's bike and it was on that bike, riding around the yard, that we ourselves, first of all, learned to ride a bicycle. That is a small background of mother's family. Father, Charles Edwin Smith, was a Londoner, he was a real London cockney, and he had a brother and a sister, a brother, Fred and a sister, Nell. They themselves had children, Fred had a daughter and a son, and Nell had one son, Arthur, who we have had some contact with over the years, but we've had no contact with him now for perhaps 10 or 15 years. So, that was my father. His father, old Granford Smith, as we called him, lived with us for some time, actually died in our house at Portland Terrace, number 2 Portland Terrace, and is buried in Watsons Cemetery. My father was injured in the First World War. It wasn't serious injuries in the sense of losing limbs, but it had necessitated a very long hospital treatment. He was injured about 1917, and he had lots of pieces of shrapnel in him. In fact, it was only in 1939 that the last piece gradually worked out of his body. He was completely unaware it was there until a lump formed, and when that lump was open, it was found to be a piece of shrapnel that had been in his body for over 20 years. He himself spent about two years in hospital as a result of this bomb or shell exploding near him, and was eventually patched up, and was reasonably good, except for one finger missing, and one leg was permanently in a caliper. He could only potter around very slightly without it. He had lost all the muscles in that leg, and the leg was now assisted in all his work and his mobility with a caliper. As a result of this, he had a very small army pension, which didn't amount to only a few shillings a week, because pensions were based on the illusion of a limb, an eye, an arm, a leg, and were graded accordingly. And as he had lost no limbs, he only entitled to a very small pension, but he was permanently in pain with his disabilities. Strade was a painter and decorator, and in his workings in London as a young man, where he had come into contact with many famous people. I well remember him telling me that the technique of decorating a wealthy home was for artists to go in, first of all, and to draw the entire layout of the room that had to be decorated. The owners would probably either go to their country mansion, or take a cruise, holiday abroad, and then the decorators would move in, everything would be stripped out, the place would be entirely redecorated according to the instructions received, and the furniture and everything put back according to the artist's drawings, so that to the people returning, everything looked exactly the same, and within exactly the same positions as they had left them. The whole place had been cleaned and redecorated, but in fact they were virtually unaware of it, except of course there could have been new colours used in the decoration. He told us of one occasion when he visited the Duke of Norfolk's estate to decorate there, and going down the drive with one of his colleagues, they saw a scruffy old gardener there, and the colleague had a chat with the gardener and said, I understand this funny old bugger owns this place, and of course he was talking to the Duke of Norfolk at that time, they had no idea he was so scruffy just doing a bit of gardening. As well as painting, decorating and upholstering, he did gilding, and the old and large pallet knife that I use at home, and that I treasure very much, was my father's pallet knife, and it must be almost a hundred years old now, and the pallet knife was used in the gilding work as a knife to lift the pieces of leaf gold onto the work. One of my greatest regrets is that I never learned very much of any of this work from my father, painting, decorating or upholstering, and it's all things which in life has been needed. We've managed, I've done a bit of decorating, I've done a bit of upholstering, and we've got a reasonable home together. But had I learned the art of doing it, then I'm sure it would have been much better. One of the interesting points of the art was the fact that he used to, when he was upholstering, all the nails were held in his mouth, and I never even learned the technique of passing one nail at a time out to the tip of the mouth for hammering in. Nowadays, of course, most of this is done with pressure guns. And so, to myself. I was born in London, in Wilson Green, November the 18th, 1920. My father had taken his wife, Bessie, whom he met actually in Bristol, she was working there as a parlour maid, for a firm who had moved there, people who had moved there from Watchett, an old Watchett family, and she was working there as a parlour maid, and he met her there as a member of the hospital. He was in his hospital blues, as they were called, the uniform of a patient of the military hospital, where he was having treatment. He met her there, they were eventually married, they went to London to live, and I was born in London. Within six weeks of being born, my mother decided that she didn't like London, and she was coming home. And throughout her life, I think my mother was the dominant member of the family, so She had her way, and my father left London and came to live with us at Watchett. We started our life, obviously, as most people do, living with their parents. My mother's parents lived at Severn Terrace, and they lived there with them for a few years. My brother Reg was born at Severn Terrace in 1922, and I well remember the story my mother told them. He was born on the 10th of March, and they looked out of the window into the field, which is in front of their houses, and it's still in front, it's now a school playing field. They looked out, and there was a donkey, wasted in snow, that morning, the 10th of March. So, it's snowing this morning, which is the 9th of January, 1982. We've got as much snow as we ever expect to see at 9 o'clock this morning, and in 1922, they had it on the 10th of March. We eventually moved to No. 2 Portland Terrace, and it was rather a pity. My mother had always decided that she didn't like No. 2 Portland Terrace, and so it was never a real home to her, in that she didn't like it. She was always going to move. It's a bad thing, I think, this, and we have never adopted that attitude ourselves. Where we have lived has been our home, not somewhere that we didn't like and that we would move from. She never did move. She lived there all her life, until she finally came with us for the last two or three years of her life, but she must have lived there, I should think, from 1925 until probably 1965, 1970, somewhere about 40 years, all the time quite determined that she didn't like it. Portland Terrace was quite a nice house, actually, as houses went in the 1920s. I remember my father telling the story. He rented this house from a Mr. Joe Chidgey, who was a builder in Wachette, and he applied to Mr. Chidgey for this house, and Mr. Chidgey says, well, what rent are you prepared to pay me? My father said, I'm prepared to pay you seven shillings and six pence per week. That today would be thirty-seven and a half new pence per week's rent. The answer he got from Mr. Chidgey was this, I have been offered a pound a week to rent this house by someone else. My father's reply, typically a Londoner, a very fast thinker, I will offer you a pound a week also, but I will pay you seven and six pence. And he got the house. And so we moved into number two, Portland Terrace, Wachette. To describe us, we were considered to be, quote, respectably off, not well off, no one was well off, we were very, very poor, but we were better than most in that our front door led into a passageway. It led into a passageway, and at the end of the passage were the stairs leading upstairs. The sitting room, nice room probably, twelve feet square, and the kitchen. And again, probably about eleven by twelve square. From the kitchen, we led to a little scullery. This had been built on as a lean-to, virtually, part of the house. I would imagine that originally when the houses were built, you had the front room, and the scullery was the kitchen. Now, the scullery had one big disadvantage, because when it was originally built, as I say, the scullery was the kitchen, there was a small yard, again, somewhere about twelve feet square, and in that yard was the toilet, the lavatory, and a small courthouse. To get into the toilet, you would originally have had to go out the back door, across the small yard, and into the toilet. But now, the toilet was built as part of the scullery, so that we had a small room. On the left, as one went into the scullery, there was a recess in which the copper stood. That was the means of boiling water and washing your clothes. Next to that was the toilet, and in front, on the right, was the gas stove, a small table on which all the cooking and preparation was done. Next, again, was the back door into the yard, and an old-fashioned stone sink, with no drain and, of course, only cold water. Anything else would have been considered, in the 1920s, a very great luxury. Upstairs, on the first floor, there were two bedrooms, the front bedroom of which was a beautiful room, it must have been fourteen or fifteen feet long by twelve feet wide. The back room, again, would be about eleven feet square. Then, up the flight of stairs again, to the two top bedrooms, and again, about eleven feet square in the back, and this lovely, very large bedroom in the front. And, on the landing itself, my father had built a square cupboard, which was used as a wardrobe and a brush cupboard, with shelves on the top, which held our usual winter stock of jams and preserves. So that, by average standards of that time, we had a very good house. Four bedrooms, perfectly dry, nice bedrooms, a sitting room, passageway, a kitchen, and outside, a back scullery. One or two disadvantages, there was no back entrance to it. Our backyard backed onto the sidewalk of another house, so that everything went in and out of the front door. The dustbin had to be carried out from the small backyard, it had to be carried through the kitchen, through the passageway, and put outside the front door. And everything came in the same way, so the coalman, delivering his coal, had to come in the front door, down the passageway, and through the kitchen, into the backyard. So, to deliver coal in those days was really hard work. It was brought by horse and cart mostly, until vans came on. Portland Terrace itself was not accessible in any case. So, it consists of a long row of houses, 15 houses, and the nearest one to get to the terrace for deliveries was to the top end, so that the coalman to come to us had to carry his 100 weight sack of coal on his back, past 15 houses, and then negotiate our front door etc. to deliver 100 weight of coal. It must have been very hard work in those days. It was brought cheerfully, and delighted to bring it. The cost per 100 weight was somewhere about 2½ new pence a 100 weight. Not a lot of money by your standards, a hell of a lot of money by our standards. If one could be earning £2 a week in those times, you were very lucky indeed. It was a strange thing that the coalman, as well as being our coalman, because he did a country round, he was always booked to supply us with a Christmas tree. So, Teddy Duveridge, as he was told, always brought our Christmas tree. It would vary, it would be a fir tree one year, sometimes it would only be a nice big branch of holly, and quite often we had a holly Christmas tree. Top end of a holly bush, a nice big holly Christmas tree, not necessarily a fir one. And of course we had no electric lights on him in those days. We had little holders in which were put candles about three times as large as Christmas cake candles, as wedding cakes, as birthday cake candles. And they were lit very cautiously and very quickly blown out again. We weren't so obviously aware of fire risks in those times as we are now, but we had real candles on the tree which were lit for only very short periods under supervision. That was our means of lighting our tree. And so it was, living at Portland Terrace Water, that my brother and I were brought on. There were only the two of us, my brother Reg and myself. My father, he was employed by Chippett of Willetton, James Chippett and sons of Willetton, who were builders and decorators, and my father worked for them as a painter and decorator. And when I say worked, of course he only worked when there was work available, otherwise he was unemployed as were many, many other people. Unfortunately, he had his bad leg and he had to walk the two miles to Willetton every morning so that he had this leg caliper on which squeaked every time he took a step and he would squeak away enough to walk to Willetton to start his day's work. A bottle of cold tea and some sandwiches to see him through the day. Quite often he would be home again at half past ten. What's the trouble, Charlie, my mother would say? No work today. We have been sensible. And of course if you were sent home, you weren't paid. So there was no pay, no work. He did upholstering for local people in his spare time. If anyone could afford to have anything upholstered, then he would do it for them. One time he did try to set up on his own as an upholsterer, but of course the times were much too bad to really get very much out of upholstering as a living. As children we had a very good childhood. We both attended Wachette Council School, and traffic and everything else of course was at a very, very different pace in those days. I want to remember that it always seemed a mystery to me how things happened. For instance, we would be playing our games, and games would change almost overnight, so that one minute we would all be playing marbles, and then the next day marbles were finished and conkers were in. There weren't many conker trees in Wachette, actually, and so two or three of the boys who lived in the country, they cornered the conker market, and we used to buy our conkers for them from, say, several for a halfing, or something like that. And we played conkers, and of course it was quite a game, those conkers, whilst they were available in the autumn, they were pickled, and cooked, and baked, and all sorts of things to make them hard and strong, and to go on winning until eventually the supply of conkers ran out, and I suppose this is what controlled our doings and the games we played, because the next thing would appear, conkers would finish, and hoops would be out. Now we all had our hoop, hoop and a crook. Hoops themselves must have stood probably about two feet high, which I ought to sort of visualize now, because they always seemed to be very big things to us as little children, a hoop was quite a big thing. It was a metal hoop, made by the local blacksmith, and you had your hoop and your crook, and off you went to school with your, wheeling your hoop. And, of course, there was virtually no traffic problem, so you could run after a hoop, if it ran away on the downhill, you could go careening after it without any problem at all. And it was a great means of travelling, if you were tired and you didn't want to walk anywhere, you had your hoop and your crook, and off you went, and you travelled like lightning, because the hoop forced you to move quickly. So, really, it was quite useful from that angle. But our hoops, and then of course the next thing would happen, the hoops were forged to make them circular, and the join would go. So your hoop would be out of action, because it was broken at the join. The next thing then, of course, was to take it down to the blacksmith, and hope that he wasn't busy shooing horses at the time, and if he wasn't, then he would mend it for you, for a very small sum of money. He put it into his fire, got the fire going, and welded the join together again, so that your hoops would... and then the hoops would vanish, just as suddenly as they had seemed to appear, and we would be on to another game, for a short period. So this is how our games occurred. We attended school, as I say, and I think we enjoyed school very much. It was very much, obviously, more basic than it is today, when one doesn't learn the things that we learned then. We learned our tables parrot fashion, we all sung them out until we had them off by heart, and I still think that was quite a good way to learn the tables. We all knew them, and we could remember them, and we still can. It's always been a great passion to be able to quickly know that nine-sixes are fifty-four, and two-me. Well, how did we spend our evenings? Evenings? Ha! That was entirely different than it is today, because, of course, I can just remember oil lamps, and they had really already gone out of fashion, but we always had one available and I think usually it was lit as a special treat for us. Imagine lighting an oil lamp as a special treat. Gas fittings were already installed in our house in Portland Terrace, so the sitting room and kitchen was lit by gas light, and the scullery, we had a candle, and we had candles to go to bed with. We liked to light by night, and so a lamp, an oil lamp, was made for us. It consisted of a Horlicks jar with a hole in the centre in which the wick was, protruded from the centre of the lid. The lid was filled with paraffin, the lid was screwed on, and this wick was lit to give us a small flickering light during the night, and this was quite something. So we had a light in our bedroom all night, and a candle to go to bed. One of the silly things of going to bed was the fact, or at least I think it's very silly now, and we didn't at the time, you know, but we had a chamber pot under our bed, and so we went to bed. The last thing we did, we undressed, the last thing we did before we got into bed was to use our chamber pot. So we carried all the water upstairs in ourselves, instead of going to the loo, and it was brought down again by another in the morning. It always seemed a stupid thing to do now, but it was regarded as the normal procedure. You had your pot, and you went upstairs, and you used it. Of course, we had other relatives, Auntie Elsie, who you all know very well, Uncle Jack, who you might not remember quite as well. Uncle Jack was also a mechanic. He worked at the paper mill for some years, and then, in the Depression times, he moved to Cardiff, and worked in the paper mill there for most of his life. Auntie Elsie, she eventually married Uncle Eddie, who you all know very well. And who else did we have? Granny. Granny was still living at 7 Terrace and Grandfather for quite a while. Granny didn't live too long, but Grandfather did, and he eventually came to live with us at Portland Terrace. We were number two Portland Terrace. Number seven was Grandfather's sister, Auntie Annie, and Uncle Bill Norman. And they had one son, Cousin Bill, who I referred to earlier as having given over the factory to the Conservancy people. And he had a sister, Annie. Annie was a schoolteacher at Washford, and Uncle Bill, Cousin Bill, sorry, Uncle Bill himself was a sailor. Cousin Bill was a taxi driver. He had one of the earliest taxis in the 1930s. He drove a hired car, and was a very good mechanic. He kept the car. He had two usually, and he had one stripped down, being repaired and overhauled. He used to take all the motors out and everything else himself. It was a much more simple job than it is today. And he kept his car in good order, and drove, yeah, never very fast, probably 20 miles an hour. And of course his first cars didn't have sliding windows like they've got now. They were open-tourers, and it was a soft roof that was put on, and then you had windshields made of celluloid, so that you had celluloid shields to go round the windows. They were very drafty affairs indeed. They did make a very wonderful trolley motorcar for my brother Reg, a pedal car, when he was six years old. RC6, I think, was the number on it. Reginald Charles. RC as Reginald Charles Smith, six years of age. And he had this pedal car, which they had made a boxcar, but it was a very, very good job. Worked by pedals, and he was very, very proud of it. Cousin Bill then helped a little in the factory and in the pantry, but his interest was wireless. And I remember as very young children, we would go up to Number 7 to visit Auntie Annie, my brother Reg and I, open the door, run down the passageway, and we would be greeted by And everyone would be grouped around Bill's wireless, a big affair of bulbs and wires with a huge horn of a speaker. And we would go in and say, what's the matter? And we would be greeted with the news, we think we've got something. And that was our first introduction to wireless. Probably about 1926, 27. We think we've got something. Now, if we switch on and it is less than perfect, we think we're very hard done gone. There, amid lots of oscillating and knob twirling and searching, they would eventually get some sort of a voice, some sort of music, coming out of this huge horn. Within a few years, obviously, the whole thing increased. And by the time we were young men, young teenagers, say 13, we used to then make our own wirelesses. And we were very proud of them. Very, very simple affair. Very fine wire, wired together. And a cat's whisper, as it was called. It was a piece of crystal with a wire on it, which was jiggled about until you could get sound. And the sound came through your earphones. You had a pair of earphones, and there was no batteries, no nothing else. Just this cat's whisper, and you could just pick up a little sound on these miniature wirelesses. We made them, actually, in matchboxes. They were made in Swan Vesta's matchbox, with the wires, and the cat's whisper, and a little music, or speaking, which we could get on them. But, of course, wirelesses moved very quickly into the 30s, when we bought probably our first wireless set. And they were run on very large Exide batteries. They were made by the ever-ready people. Quite a large battery, as big as this tape recorder on which I'm recording this information now. And, as well as a battery, a dry battery, they needed a wet battery, similar to a car battery, to make them run. It was quite an expensive job to buy your dry batteries, which were relative to our earnings. And the wet batteries had to be recharged every two or three weeks. So, they were carted off to the local garage, where they were recharged for you, for a nominal sum. The same way as you've got a battery charger for your car today. And, even into the 60s, the local garage here at Ninehead ran a service, especially for country people, where electricity was still in short supply. And, even today, it's not available for everyone, because of the cost of installing a connect line and farm stands. In the 1960s, Bradbeers, a local garage here in Friday Street, which is now F Page & Sons, the furnishing shop, Bradbeers ran their own delivery service to the country people, to collect batteries for charging, wet batteries for charging, and replace them with charge. People added one in use, and one on charge. So that the full electric service has only been used in the last few years. I think we could have been one of the first families in Watches to have had a wireless which removed the necessity of battery and the necessity of wet battery. It was worked on what, in those days, we called a triple charger. And I would imagine, again, it was very similar to a car charger, in that 240 volts went in one end, and the required strength came out the other end, to run the wireless on. That was the first move towards having all electric wirelesses. And, up to then, it had been a battery, similar to your small portable set today, but a huge battery, a huge battery, and a wet battery as well to supplement it. So our evenings as young children would be spent at mid-fire, telling stories, and of course the fire was very much a vocal point, and a special treat perhaps for tea would be toast. And there was a toasted fork always kept by the fire, and the toast was held in front of the embers of the fire. The bread was held in front of the embers of the fire to get it brown or various shades of smoky black. Obviously it had a flavour, especially of its own, good, bad or indifferent. But that was how toast was made, you toasted your bread. So, of course, again, in those days, to make toast, it was a planned manoeuvre, because the fire had to be set on an hour beforehand to make sure that it was glowing really red-hot, and not too dull, otherwise it was dull, it was smoky, you need a nice red-hot fire, and the bread was toasted for tea. And that would be tea, jam, cake, bread. Bread was baked, of course, by our local bakers, we had two or three local bakers in Waterloo, John Norman and Corby Besley. And again, Corby would be up most of the night baking bread, and would come around selling it by day. And he, again, so far as Portland Terrace was concerned, he had to carry a basket full of bread the whole length of the terrace to sell it. He couldn't get his transport any nearer than that pony and giraffe it was to start with, and eventually a van. And he would carry a basket of bread on one arm, and on the other arm he would carry a basket of fancy cakes. This was only a shallow wickerwork basket, I can well remember it, a square wickerwork basket, and all was covered with a green vase top. And in there were individual fancy cakes, sold at a penny each for seven or six pence. And of course, it was a wonderful day when you could afford to buy a fancy cake. But then, of course, you would only buy one each, and you would be going mad if you had taken advantage of the seven or six pence. Another thing that he carried, of course, which used to good, bread rolls, buns, fat cakes, which again were sold at six pence each, and of course that's two and a half newpence a day's rate. And the fat cake was usually a very nice large currant bun, which could be cut up into eight or ten portions, and was of very good value. Of course, invariably, they always said that there were very few currants, or very little fruit in the cakes, and he must have gone up on top of a tree-bill and thrown the fruit in. But that has always been the general complaint of bakeries, buns and cakes. So, he would come along, he would bring his fancy cakes, cream horns, cream slicers, he used to make a very nice sponge with a green marzipan on the top, cut in a triangle, and all the best fancy cakes at one old pence each. Another of our relatives was Aunty Frances. Now, Aunty Frances, she was married, a spinster, virtually a spinster aunty, quite a spinsterish type. Because my grandmother had a sister, Aunt Clara. Aunt Clara also lived at number 13 Severn Terrace, and of course we visited her at regular intervals. Again, a person who I wish I'd developed more and learnt more from her as a young person, but I didn't. She used to make sweets, homemade toffee, and she had a great big hook on the wall, which was there purely for the purpose of throwing this toffee over to pull it down to get the nice stripy lines on it. Because toffee is done by pulling it to make the stripy lines, and then she could make satin cushions and all the various toffees. Homemade toffees Aunt Clara made. She also specialised in homemade faggots. And Mother has always told the story of how her and Aunt Clara's daughter used to have to walk to Willetton to get a bit of soot or a special selected bone to make the gravy to go with the faggots. That was a two mile walk to Willetton just to help in the faggot production. And of course part of the walk was past the wood and as young girls you can imagine there was a lot of capers going on as to whether the woods were haunted and whether it was safe for them to pass them. So the evenings would consist of an early trip to bed, obviously as young children we went to bed fairly early, and as we got older of course wireless came in, we could listen to the wireless, and we also played games. Ludo, dominoes, and later as we got older we were taught card games. If there were four of us there we would play whist of an evening, if there were only two we would play dominoes or cribbage. Cribbage is an old bar game and was a very good game because it developed your counting habits. You were taught to count because the old art of the game was to make your cards add up to 15s, 10 and 5, 9 and 6, 7 and 8, 4, 1, 10, 9, 2, 6. All cards had to be made up to 15s, and for every 15 in your hand you gained two points. So it was quite an interesting and very useful means of learning to figure quickly, and it was a very popular game as we played, scored, played cribbage, dominoes, etc. and spent our evenings in that way. In the summer of course we had the memorial ground to play on, a good field which was quite near to us, well maintained in those days. Cricket, Watchet was a very, very popular cricket place because it had a very keen supporter of cricket in W.G. Penny who ran the men's outfitters in Watchet. A very keen businessman, a very astute businessman as well as a very keen cricketer, and it was through his abilities that we maintained a good cricket team. W.G. Penny, as I say, was a very astute businessman, and I well remember my parents saying at election times, someone would approach him and say, who are you voting for Mr. Penny, and his answer was always the same, same as you my dear, same as you. He never took any risks, he made sure that all his customers were satisfied. But he ran a very, very successful theatre shop, and as an adjunct to his cricket of course he had a little sports section selling cricket bats and balls and all the other things that went with cricket. We did some wonderful cricketing in those days, it was well supported, young men played cricket, they practiced in the nets, and of course one of the great cricketers that we produced from Watchet was Harold Gimlet. Harold Gimlet was a marvellous cricketer, and he eventually played for Somerset for many, many years. To go back to Besley the baker, he, as well as making his breading, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a very good baker, he was a