He was the first child of Thomas Leonard Rayner and Ada Mitchell. When he was born, Thomas was 30 and Ada was 24, they had been married for nine months and two weeks. Perhaps my father was a honeymoon baby, although I don’t think they could afford a honeymoon.
Thomas had avoided the First World War by failing a medical when he went to enlist in Kitchener’s army. He was turned down due to hypertension and was pretty dismayed by the diagnosis. I think he expected to drop dead at any time. As it happened, he lived to be 85 and, had he passed the medical, he may well have been killed in the trenches.
He was a boilermaker by trade and during the First World War, he worked at Cammell Laird shipbuilders in Birkenhead. My grandmother lived in Liverpool in Doon Street, Kirkdale. The story is that they met on the Mersey ferry (no tunnel in those days). She was being bothered by a couple of ruffians and Thomas stepped in and shifted them. My grandfather was only a shade above five feet and a very mild-mannered man, but I’ve no idea how big (or how rough) the ruffians were. I’ve no reason to doubt the story because my grandmother told it to me. My grandmother was as hard as nails and I was always surprised she hadn’t been able to sort them out herself.
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| The completed family in the garden at Robert Street. Pam is the baby and that will be Vi standing behind Ada. |
The First World War would have been a boom time for Cammell Laird, but work soon dried up after the armistice and I believe Thomas came back to Cheshire with his pregnant wife in the hope of finding work and they rented a cottage on School Lane in Hartford, Northwich.
They must have been quite worried about their future, but Thomas managed to get work at Brunner Mond, later ICI. My dad was born at 341 Manchester Road, Lostock, a house built by his grandfather and he was named Eric, possibly after my grandmother’s grandfather who was called Henrick Lemmer, and had come to Liverpool from Germany. Later, the family was able to move into an ICI rented house at 9 Robert Street, Castle on the other side of Northwich to Lostock, but perhaps only two or three miles away.
I remember the house very well. Thomas and Ada still lived there when I was a boy and my mother and I would visit regularly. As you walked through the back door, there was a toilet and a coalhouse, there was a kitchen with storage, a pantry, gas cooker and sink. The bathroom was alongside the kitchen. The living room had an open coal fire and a cast iron range, with an oven alongside the open fire. It always amazed me how grandma could wedge the kettle on top of the coals and iron grate. It always stood by the grate or half on, so the water was almost boiling for a cup of tea. There was a short garden which backed onto the embankment carrying the Chester to Manchester railway across the Weaver valley, first on an embankment and then a series of sandstone arches.
For a child, the surrounding area would have offered a playground and dangers. Just below them were the locks on the river and a wide flood plain. Across the valley was Sir John Dean’s Grammar School (where I went many years later). The west bank of the River Weaver was rolling farmland grazed by cattle and cut by a couple of deep gulleys and a flood plain along the canalised river. There was a small boatyard (Pimlott’s, I think) but it was mainly a rural landscape. My dad’s memories were of playing with a gang of other children, making camps on Twig Island (wherever that was) and, when they had some cash, buying nettle beer from an old lady who lived in one of the houses at the edge of the estate.
He also spent a lot of time in Lostock, where he had a grandmother, great aunt and great uncles, aunts, uncles and cousins in 339 and 341 Manchester Road. Those houses had long gardens (over 150 metres) leading down to Wincham Brook, where there was fishing, also greenhouses and livestock (chickens, geese and a pig). The two gardens were like a little farm. At 339, there was an orchid house and maybe 15 damson trees, plus apples and pears.
Tom and Ada had started a family pretty quickly, but it was another seven years before a second child came along, a girl who was named Joan. When Eric was 12, another sister, Pamela, was born and that completed his family.
Eric went to Castle Boys School. I was told he was smart and had won a place at grammar school, but his parents could not afford to send him. He was musical, playing the violin, also the clarinet and saxophone.
In his teens, he suffered a serious road accident which they feared may have killed him. He was cycling back to Castle after visiting Lostock. It was foggy and when he came to the crossroads at Northwich Station, he was cycling across when a bus went through a red light and hit him. He was carried, unconscious and bleeding, into the Lion and Railway Hotel where an ambulance was called to take him to Northwich infirmary. He recovered, of course, but his jaw had been smashed and he wore false teeth for the rest of his life. My grandma told me the bus company had paid compensation, but it had all gone to replace the carpet in the Lion & Railway, which had been ruined by the blood. I have no idea whether that is true!
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| Eric (front left) with the Bert Jarvis band |
Eric got a job first at the terracotta works off Leicester Street. He said it was hard work and hot. At lunchtimes, the men would sink five pints of beer. My dad said they needed it to replace all the fluids they sweated out during the morning. Oddly, some folk I worked with used to polish off a similar quantity, but they weren’t sweating in a terracotta works. Later, he became an apprentice plumber with Fred Whitehead, a Northwich builder. I think he liked the work and liked his employer. He always spoke fondly of his time there. He talked of having to push a handcart full of tools and materials up Castle Hill, a steep road up from the river. In his leisure time, he played in a dance band – clarinet and violin. It was called the Bert Jarvis dance band.
My dad was a sociable animal. He loved gossip, loved stories and he enjoyed music. I’m guessing as a plumber with workmates, going into different houses and playing in the band at the weekends, his life would have been pretty good.
He and a friend from Whitehead’s immediately went to enlist in the RAF. It must have seemed like the glamorous option. Eric’s friend was a painter and they took him, but told my dad there was no call for plumbers … sorry. He joined the Local Defence Volunteers, the Home Guard, and they exercised with broom handles because they had no rifles. By the time we were a year into the war, they had rifles and, after the fall of France, they were on invasion alert. They manned a sandbagged redoubt overnight at the junction of Moss Road and Castle Street. They had a Boys anti-tank rifle which was pointed up Chester Road (because that’s the way they expected the Germans to come) and my dad said they were very confident that they’d stop anything.
The Boys rifle fired a large steel bullet which could pierce 22mm of steel plate. It had a long barrel (36in) and had a magazine with five bullets and a bolt-action firing mechanism. Its kick was fearsome and I guess it was a pretty effective weapon against lightly armoured vehicles.
Eric was called up when he hit 21. It’s one of the things on my list to properly research his wartime experiences. I know that he spent some time in Northern Ireland and that, at some stage, he volunteered to be a glider pilot. “Why the hell did you do that?” I asked him. He said because everyone volunteered. Luckily, he wasn’t selected.
Military service and warfare was the reason most men travelled anywhere. Until then, Eric would have gone as far as his bike or a bus would take him. He had family in Manchester and Liverpool, but foreign travel was unheard of and, anyway, foreigners were not to be trusted. So Northern Ireland must have seemed quite exotic to my dad. To him, the fight for Irish independence would be seen through the imperialist lenses he was offered. Like many of his generation, he considered the Irish to be troublemakers.
He was infantry (not a good place to be) but at 5ft 3in at least he’d find it easier to keep his head down. Normandy was his first taste of action. He was in the Northumberland Fusiliers and I believe he landed on Gold Beach (Arromanches) on D+3 (June 9, 1944). I know that he drove a bren gun carrier and was armed with mortar and Vickers machine gun. At some stage, he was transferred (I may be wrong) to the 2nd Battalion, Middlesex Regiment. He fought in the bitter battle for Normandy and then through a freezing winter in Belgium, was pulled in to reinforce during the Ardennes battle and then crossed the Rhine in a Buffalo. He ended the war in Hamburg, a city in ruins. He was shocked by the devastation and staggered to see a Woolworth’s sign still intact on the front of a ruined store. After VE Day, he was sent to Palestine as a peacekeeper and added Jews and Arabs to the list of foreigners not to be trusted. I’d call him a xenophobe these days, but the only foreigners he’d ever met were trying to kill him, so I guess we need to cut him some slack. He did get leave in Cairo and got to see the Pyramids.
After the war and Palestine, he returned to Cheshire and never set foot abroad again. I would have liked to have taken him to France one summer, I should have made the time to do so.
They rented a house on Manchester Road and, on November 7 1949, his daughter and first child Margaret was born. Around this time, Eric decided to go it alone. He left Whitehead’s and started out as a self-employed plumber. It must have been a bit of a gamble, but my dad was a good networker and was able to get enough work. There was something of a building boom going on with council houses being built in Weaverham, Lostock Gralam, Leftwich and Rudheath.
I was born on July 18, 1953, named Eric Thomas after my father and grandfather, and the same year, they had moved from rented housing to 339 Manchester Road, the former home of his great uncle Tom Rayner. I was born in the back bedroom of the house, that was where I took my first breath.
As I grew up, my memories were of breakfast at the kitchen table, making toast through the grille of the Rayburn range, family Sunday lunches and my dad’s overalls hanging behind the door. They always smelled of putty.
I know now that my parents’ marriage wasn’t perfect. My dad had a string of girlfriends and my mother certainly knew of at least one widow that he kept comforted. He played in his band (called the Meltones) on Saturday nights and, on Sundays, had a regular gig at Lostock Club playing with a pianist and drummer for dancing and backing to club singers.
He had a number of cars, which would have been essential for his work. There was a Hillman convertible, which I can remember only for it boiling over between Macclesfield and Buxton when we were going to visit his cousin (my Aunt Eileen). There was also an Austin pick-up, a Morris 1000 van (with the floor falling out), a Ford Anglia van (36 TU) which was bought new, a Ford Anglia Estate, a Minivan and a Morris 1100 estate. They were all, always filled with tools and bits of pipe.
We had a telephone early (a line shared with another house a little way down the road). The number was Northwich 3352 and I often had to answer the phone and take messages. Where was he? He’d promised to come that day but hadn’t turned up – that was a typical inquiry. There were always burst pipes, especially in winter.
In 1963, a particularly hard winter, almost all the pipes in all the houses of the street were frozen. When they thawed, he was rushed off his feet fixing bursts. Another winter, when I was about 14, there was a heavy snowfall and a quick thaw which brought down almost all the cast iron spouts in the road. I was able to help replacing them with grey plastic ones.
That was one occasion where I was quite useful, but other times when I went out on jobs with him, I was less helpful. There was the time I was tasked with sawing through floorboards to lay some pipes and I sawed through the floorboards and the plaster lathes of the ceiling. That was embarrassing! Another time, I was given the job of digging a trench on Bates’ Caravan Park at Goostrey to lay mains sewage to a static caravan. I was digging alongside a hedge and thought I’d come to a thick root. I gave it a couple of good chops, only to create a geyser of water. I’d cut through the mains water pipe to one side of the site. I was like a Texan oil driller (only it was water, not oil). It was a quick job the join the two bits of pipe, but we had to turn off the water for the whole site and everyone was moaning.
Eric’s wife, my mother, died on February 6, 1965 from breast cancer. She’d had a mastectomy a couple of years before and, like the child I was, I’d thought “that’s it, sorted.” I hadn’t known she was going to die until a couple of weeks beforehand. It was so devastating for me that I didn’t really observe my dad and its effect on him.
The usual people were helping out. The great aunts next door, the same aunts that had looked after my dad as a child, were still helping out, sisters, mother, his brother-in-law Dick, many friends … They rallied around at the time and they did so for years afterwards. His sisters Joan and Pam did washing and cleaning, his mother came with Joan while she was still fit enough. My sister and I also had jobs (I was firelighter and keeper).
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| Our reduced family - me, my dad and sister at the wedding of dad's cousin Rae at Lostock Gralam. |
Rita Lamb, who came for baths a couple of times a week, was willing to cook as well as bathe and clearly saw me as a door to gain access. She asked what my favourite dinner was. I’d always enjoyed liver when my mum cooked it, but Rita Lamb’s liver was nothing like my mum’s. She shocked me by saying I’d have to move my bedroom when she and my dad were married because they’d have that room. I asked my dad if he was getting married. He said he wasn’t (I don’t think it has crossed his mind) and I didn’t see Rita in the house after that … perhaps she’d been told marriage was out of the question. A few years later, she married Harry Hulse, another widower, who lived next-door-but-one to us and I often stopped for a chat with her.
We saw a lot of Sybil and there were a couple of Margarets and an Audrey as well. These were the ones we knew about and there were others. It came to a head at his funeral when Sybil and the two Margarets were all in the same room. There were no fireworks, just smouldering resentment. Margaret Ditchburn was quite cross with me a few days later. She wanted to know why I hadn’t told her about the others and I said it wasn’t my job to sort out my dad’s complicated love life. For all I knew, they were aware of the others and happy with the shared arrangement. She clearly wasn’t and wasn’t, but I gave her a heavy chest of drawers and some crystal door knobs that were in the wash-house and she went away never to be seen again.
Sybil and Stephen were more trouble. They wanted to be involved in sorting things out, but didn’t want to be cleaning and clearing – that fell largely to Margaret (my wife). Eric’s will, witnessed by Rita Lamb a few days before he died, provided enough cash to pay Sybil’s mortgage so her house was hers and the rest was divided between my sister and I. Sybil and Stephen started a legal challenge to the will, thinking he should have a third share. I could see my dad’s thinking. He thought that Stephen would have to wait until Sybil died when her house would be his. As executor, I said it was my job to carry out the clear instructions in the will and I stood firm. I insisted the legal challenge be heard in Peterborough to make it harder for them to travel from Macclesfield and they didn’t bother to show up. Their case was weak, but it was a nuisance and did allow me to draw a line under Sybil and Stephen. I’ve not seen or heard of them since.
Before my mother died, dad didn’t come on holiday with us. There were a couple of holidays at Middleton Towers, but I was too young to remember much about them. It was mam who took us on holiday (to relatives in Yorkshire, or to Blackpool or to the Isle of Man) and it was her who took us on days out – Manchester, Chester, Liverpool, Sunday School trips to Rhyl, Llandudno or Southport. After she died, I did have holidays in London (with dad, Aunt Joan and Uncle Don) and also Blackpool (with Sybil). We had always been told dad was too busy to come …
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| Three generations of Rayners - me, my dad and my children - Sam, Max and Tom - at 339 Manchester Road. |
When I started work, when I married and started a business, when we had children, dad was clearly proud and very interested. He was massively supportive in helping with things like some cash for a car, buying me a typewriter. I was pleased that he could come down to Peterborough to spend a couple of holidays with us and I was pleased that he could come to see our offices in London when I was managing director of Central Press Features.
Eric died of a heart attack on April 15, 1992. He was 71. He died in his bed, hopefully without too much pain and discomfort. When my Aunt Joan didn’t see him that day and got no response from the phone, they called the police. They broke in through the back door and found him in bed. I had a call that day in London and my sister and I headed up that evening. I was out on a sales call and got a message to call Margaret urgently. I feared something had happened to one of my children and my first thought upon hearing that dad was dead was one of relief – it’s strange how life can play tricks on you like that.
I still miss my dad and I
wish he was around today to wish happy birthday and see how things worked out.
People do live to be 100 don’t they?
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| Eric at around two or three years old |
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| With his first grandchild, Becky |
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| At 339 Manchester Road probably around 1974 - my sister Margaret, wife Margaret and my dad. |
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