Eagle Centre: Taking a trip down the streets where we lived in the Eagle Street area

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Today, as the old Eagle Centre makes way for the new, it is almost impossible to imagine that a few decades ago that area was once occupied by a mass of tightly packed, back-to-back houses where people struggled in appalling conditions to bring up their large families. But there are still some former residents who recall with fondness a childhood which may have been deprived of material possessions but was never short of love and good neighbours. Pat Parkin talked to one of them.

Jack and Irene Gill on their golden wedding anniversary in 1992

Jack Gill, aged 17

SEALED WITH A KISS: Jack married Irene on a snowy April day in 1942 at Derby Cathedral after courting her for four years. He met her when he kissed her under a piece of mistletoe one Christmas in Derby

MANY older Derby people still recall childhood days spent in the tiny back streets of the Eagle Street area.

And yet, despite the hardship and deprivation of overcrowding, no heating or electricity, and outside lavatories shared with several neighbours, most memories are of loving homes and caring parents who worked hard at teaching their children right from wrong, honesty, good manners and the importance of education.

One of them is Jack Gill (86), who now lives in Littleover but spent his early years in the Eagle Street area – which stretched from The Spot down to Cockpit Hill and The Morledge until the Eagle Centre was built.

“It was tough but we had happy times,” he said. “I have so many memories and I wanted to share them because it is a history which is fast disappearing as the older generation passes on.”

Born in 1920, his father, Frank Gill, died when he was five and he and his mother, Edith (nee Milnes) moved to Devonshire Street. It was a tiny house where water came from a standpipe in the yard, which serviced six houses, and was taken inside in a pot jug and basin. Heating came from open fires made with wood begged from local businesses.

There was no electricity and a single mantle gas lamp lit the living room. Cooking was on two gas rings and there was no oven. With no baths, families used the public slipper baths at Full Street, when there was money to pay for them, and six families shared three outdoor lavatories.

“So far as I know, there were no such things as toilet rolls in those days – people used newspaper – and, if you couldn’t afford to buy a paper, you’d have to rely on the friendly neighbours. Council sewage men came around once a week to open the sluice and clear out the trough or, if there was no sluice, they’d take away the sewage in a horse-drawn cart.

“They were hard times but I can’t ever remember being unhappy. My mother had a club foot and a short leg but worked very hard.”

The main streets leading down from the Spot were Borough’s Walk, Castle Street, Devonshire Street, Eagle Street and Bloom Street, where Jack’s father’s family lived. This was a cul-de-sac with a small jitty entrance from The Spot. One side of the entry had a side door to the Cheshire Cheese ale house and on the other was Eaton’s jewellery shop.

When Jack was 10, he and his mother moved into a mansion.

“Well,” he laughed, “not quite – it was in the same area, No 24 Borough’s Walk – but it felt like a mansion after the last house.”

It had a sink and water on tap in the kitchen, a gas stove, a copper for heating the water and a black-leaded grate. Washday meant getting up two hours earlier than usual to go out and beg orange boxes from a local factory to make sticks for the fire to heat the water.

But they were happy childhood years and Jack spent many hours with his pals, playing on the nearby Little Meadows, now Pride Park.

“It was a haven of wild life and just wonderful. There were tadpoles, frogs, newts, bird’s nests, caterpillars. We had a great time. Mind you, when I returned, it would often be the belt for me because I had spoiled my clean boots in the muddy ponds but that didn’t do me any harm.”

He recalls that “the mansion” had a kitchen table which was scrubbed once a week and a newspaper was used as a tablecloth.

“We had no key to the door, just a drop latch on a piece of string through a hole which had been drilled high up in the door so children couldn’t reach it.”

Summers were, of course, always hot and flies were everywhere, so houses had sticky fly tapes hanging above the table in the centre of the room. The local pork butcher’s shop suffered similarly and Jack remembers watching countless bluebottles flying about as he stood in the queue waiting to be served.

“Every Tuesday they sold savoury ducks made from the accumulated odds and ends, left over after the meat was chopped. They were very popular and you needed to be in the queue really early.

“Frequently, there were clutches of fly’s eggs in clusters of 40 to 50 on the bacon. Nowadays, germs of any sort are disastrous but we must have built up a resistance to them, although I did get diphtheria when I was about nine.”

He has never forgotten the shop’s pork dripping: “It was so delicious it was almost to die for. One to two inches of thick brown jelly at the bottom of the basin. It really tickled the taste buds. I have not seen anything like that for a very long time.

“When we moved to Borough’s Walk, I always remember most breakfasts were a chunk of lard heated in a frying pan and a thick slice of bread fried in it. The bread was an inviting yellow-orange colour and nice and crunchy to eat.”

Bass’ open-air baths were a favourite leisure spot and Jack and his pals would often spend an afternoon swimming there, returning after it closed to climb in for a night-time swim, too.

The highlights of his youth were trips organised for the town’s underprivileged children. They would spend a day at places like Coxbench, which to him seemed miles away.

A couple of times, he and about 20 other youngsters were taken on holiday to Syke’s Home at Skegness (later known as Derbyshire Children’s Home).

“Mr Sykes would take us on the train from Friargate Station. He always gave us marmalade sandwiches. We’d never had anything like that and we really couldn’t eat it,” he said.

Many people would help out the hard-up families. Jack remembers visits to the Police Boys’ Club in Full Street where policemen, under the supervision of Inspector John Payne, gave their time to teach them how to box and fence and play darts and chess.

When he was a teenager, Jack met local girl Irene Simpson, one Christmas Eve when he had a piece of mistletoe in his hand and was larking around in town, offering to kiss all the girls.

“I kissed Irene at the corner of East Street and that was it. We courted for four years and married on a snowy day in April 1942 at Derby Cathedral, when I was 21 and she was 19.”

Jack worked at Leys Malleable Castings as a labourer but wanted to better himself. So, at 25, he went to night school at Derby Technical College and promotion at work followed.

He became a supervisor, foreman, senior foreman and, eventually, head foreman, also serving as an ambulanceman at Leys and trainer of the factory’s football club.

He and Irene had a son and daughter, followed by three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

After Jack retired in 1983, they travelled together widely until Irene died 18 months ago.

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