Barrow takes centre stage in a new book by Katie Hutton, who drew on her family history to conjure up images of the town in the 1920s. The books also features a classic Lancastrian recipe from Lancashire Life.
I come from Carrickfergus, just north of Belfast, but my grandfather, who was from Killyleagh in County Down, spent most of his working life across the Irish Sea as a shipwright with Vickers Armstrongs in Barrow-in-Furness.
School holidays were regularly spent crossing over to stay with my grandparents, either by going to Stranraer, where the drive down seemed very long, or better, to Heysham. I loved going to Barrow. I loved the meticulous tidiness of my grandfather’s shed and the pride he had in all his tools. I have distant memories of his allotment, where he most enjoyed spending his time. I liked going shopping with my grandmother and the way she was constantly stopped by other ladies, with ‘Aw right, Norah?’
Barrow has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons, and jokes are still made about it being at the end of the longest cul-de-sac in England, the A590, but if you fail to make the journey there you’d be missing out on some really friendly people and places that compare with the best visitor attractions in the country.
An invariable treat for me was going to Furness Abbey, the magnificent Cistercian ruin on the edge of Barrow, built in that rich red sandstone, familiar to anyone who knows the area (the imposing Barrow Town Hall is of the same stone, and when Our Lady of Furness, the first Catholic church to be built in Barrow, post-Reformation, the foundation stone was brought from Furness Abbey). The Abbey, with its nearby railway station and hotel (both gone) feature in my forthcoming book, The Maid of Lindal Hall. Then there’s the castle on Piel Island (where the landlord of the pub begins his tenure by being crowned king by having beer poured over his head) and the Dock Museum. The shipyard is not what it was, the mass employer that swelled Barrow’s population in the 19th century, but its history and that of the steelworking industry is remembered there. I associate Barrow in the 1960s and 1970s with the distinctive taste of Marsh’s Sass, sadly no longer manufactured in the town.
In writing The Maid of Lindal Hall, which starts in 1920 with the arrival of little Molly Dubber, an orphan, at a Cottage Home in Roose Road, I drew on memories much older than my own. My father grew up in Barrow when there were seven cinemas in the town, with programmes that changed weekly. He would get a ticket for a cheap seat and then wriggle down the aisle in the dark, avoiding the usher, to get a more comfortable one.
And there were theatres; Dad remembers ‘blood tub’ melodramas like ‘Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber’ played by the aptly named Tod Slaughter (his real surname). Dad was in a gang led by a girl called Bill (her father had wanted a boy); her parents ran a lodging house for theatricals. Even war didn’t dampen my father’s spirits (the Barrow blitz was merciless – the target of course was the shipyard); he remembers with affection the farmhouse he was evacuated to at Great Ashby, near Appleby. He went back decades later to visit and the farmer’s two daughters immediately recognised him: ‘You’re our Brian’.
Lindal-in-Furness is a village near Barrow, marked still by the workings of the old iron-ore mines, but the house I have called Lindal Hall will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has visited Townend, the National Trust house further north at Troutbeck, with its eccentric carvings and a staircase that mysteriously runs into a dead end – the ceiling.
For my book, I have moved the house near the Abbey, so when Molly goes into service at Lindal Hall she goes for walks among the ruins. There is a terrible secret about Molly’s birth which her houhttps://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/food-and-drink/recipes/22570072.lancashire-recipes---butter-pie/se parents in Roose Road know but do not know how to tell her. If you have read one of my earlier books, Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill, set in Cleator Moor before World War One, you will recognise Robert and Annie in the couple who care for Molly.
And in Roose Road today you can still see what were the Cottage Homes, now private houses. These were offshoots of Barrow’s workhouse, designed to give children something approximating to a family life (though not everyone who grew up in Cottage Homes has good memories of their house parents). The workhouse itself has been demolished, but it survived up to 1993 as Roose Hospital. From 1904 onwards the Barrow Poor Law Guardians had the tact to put the address, 1 Rampside Road, but not the name of the workhouse on the birth certificates of those born there, to avoid stigma – a small kindness to children who hadn’t had the best start in life.
The Maid of Lindal Hall is one of the Memory Lane series of books published by Zaffre. These books always have a recipe at the end. In this case, it’s a traditional Lancastrian Butter Pie recipe that was created by former Lancashire Life food and cookery writer Philippa James.
READ MORE: Click here to see the butter pie recipe
