My grandmother, Mary Ann Walton, lived at No 1 Clinton Street, Leamington Spa. She is pictured standing by the lamppost in the attached photograph. The cobbled terrace had a small fore-garden to each house and every house had a well under the front room (possibly a rainwater/roof collection well). Number 1 was the end house and the only one in the terrace with the front door at the side of the house. All the other front doors were on the left of the bay windows and were seldom used. Everyone came and went via the back, where there was an alleyway with a very high wall to the left and the backs of the houses on the right. See location map dated 1887 at the end of the article.
When I was a child I was sometimes taken back to Clinton Street to visit my parents’ friends who lived further down the row. The back garden had a low fence and a central concrete path leading to the outside toilet, (just a plank of wood with a hole cut in the centre). Then you entered the house through the scullery or kitchen and went into a small living room with a fireplace, crowded with dining room furniture, easy chairs, and cupboards. This was where everyday life was carried on. A door off this room opened on to a steep dark, narrow staircase. The front room was kept for best. The only time I was allowed in was to look at an ornate grandfather clock.
The undated photograph shows my grandmother who was first widowed when her husband, a railway man, died, and in October 1890 she married my grandfather, John T Walton, who was also a railway worker, a guard. John Walton died aged fifty in a railway accident in September 1910, leaving her widowed a second time with three sons under the age of sixteen. My father, Arthur Percy Walton, born in March 1894, was the oldest, followed by Douglas in 1896, and Stanley in 1898. Stanley and Douglas were both choirboys at All Saints Parish Church, and all three boys were pupils at Bath Place School. Sadly, Douglas died when he was just sixteen.
Mary Ann lived at no 1 until her death in the autumn of 1935, and when my parents married in 1940, they made their home there too. They lived at Clinton Street throughout the Second World War and had several lots of soldiers billeted on them. My father had been wounded in France in WW1, shot through the hip, which left him with one leg shorter than the other. As if that were not enough, like many others, he had trench foot, too, – and the ship bringing him back to England was torpedoed on the way back! During WW2 he worked as a railway guard and was a member of Leamington Home Guard. He lived to be over eighty, and died in 1978.
Jennifer Ingram.
Photograph © J Ingram
Reproduced from a LHG Newsletter
Location map
