Tom George’s early memories

At Market Lavington museum we have objects and photos reminding us of the time when bricks were made along the Broadway and there are many entries on our museum blog about the brickworks. (Just type brickworks into the search box on the home page at https://marketlavingtonmuseum.wordpress.com for several pages of links. We have already met Tom George (see Tom George), the son of the brickworks manager, in Flints and dollies and know that he has provided the museum with an interesting recording of his memories.

He was born in 1920 and lived with his parents and five siblings at Broadway House by the brickworks, which were well away from the village centre. (This photo of the house shows the Box family and so predates the time that Tom’s family lived there.)

His earliest memory is that when he started school, aged three and a half, his sisters pushed him up Ledge Hill in a push chair. From his earliest school days he only remembered the sand tray but recalled that, later, his class had a weekly test on a Friday, with twenty spellings and five sums. He and the teacher’s daughter, Sybil Perry, always did well in these tests.

Clay was dug by hand for making the bricks and the low lying areas created, on both sides of the road, filled with rainwater to create substantial ponds.

Tom said that the ponds were good for swimming in, but if you stood for a length of time the soft clay covered you in silt.

See On the clay pit for a picture of the eleven year old Tom on a raft. He recalled that the children had a raft built on five gallon oil drums which they used for poling themselves across the pond.