Left:
circa 1921
Jasper Woodhouse a
Pig-minder aged two.
He was the son of
Alice, the daughter
of Tom and Bessie Woodhouse.
|
Jasper
remembers:
when he was a Bakers boy in the
early 1930s
"I didn’t work all the time, till I left school. Mr Holmes delivered
round Cley and Wiveton in a van, and I used to bike home from school and take
the bread up Cross Street every dinner time, but sometimes I used to work all
night. I soon learnt how to do it: we used to have big troughs on the floor,
and there was one in the middle where he used to make it all. He used to put
10 stone of flour, three big parts of water, four ounces of yeast and 1lb of
salt. Sometimes we forgot to put the salt in, and that went hard. It used to
lay all night. There would be flour bags all around the troughs on the floor
and sometimes when we came back it had ris up and pushed the lid up and some
of it laid on these bags. That used to be a job!
In the morning we’d cut it off with a trowel, put
it on the table, and weigh it all off (when I was out on the round I
used to get stopped by the inspector sometimes to see whether that was
the proper weight of loaves), three-quarters of an hour in the oven:
we’d fill all the bread tins up and put them all in the oven till
it was full.
The faggots took about 10-15 minutes to burn, old smoke used to come
out of the chimney! When the bricks all round the oven turned white,
that’s when the oven was hot enough, and then we had to clean the
ashes out. We had a long pole with a chain and a sack on the end of it
and we used to go down to the dyke—‘the Crick ‘ we
call it—and put it in the water and wet it all, then bring it back
and clean the ashes out with it. There was only about a dustpan of ashes
left."
[The above, is a bit from the book: 'Salthouse the
Story of a Norfolk Village']
Above The
Bake house and the Dolls House when Jasper worked there
as a boy for Mr Holmes who was the baker then,
Above:
The Bake house, now called 'the Old
Bakery', and the Dolls House today. |
