Continuing Colin Greenall's study of life in and around the homes of the Sankey's lock-keeping families. This issue - Bradley and Newton Common Locks.
The following came out during a conversation with Mrs Woods (nee Tickle) who lived as a child at Bradley Lock, and later married the son of Mr & Mrs Woods from Newton Common Lock.
Mrs Woods recalls how her mother and father brought up herself and her brothers in the cottage at Bradley Lock. Her father improved their living standards by constructing a road from the cottage to Vitriol Square, enabling delivery vans to reach them with milk, coal and so on. He had three large greenhouses which kept them supplied with fresh vegetables and fruit throughout the year. In winter he heated them with coal slag found on the waste tips of the sugar works. For her summer holidays she would walk along the towpath to Winwick Lock, to stay with her auntie and uncle Mr & Mrs Hedgecock, and hitch a lift back home on one of the passing sugar boats - 'we knew all the boatmen by name in those days'.
When the old chemical works chimney was demolished in 1926, she remembered the cottage being evacuated because the chimney was in their back garden, near the house.
She also states that the railway company (the London Midland Scottish) which owned the canal paid the wife £4.10s a week for looking after the lock, while the husband worked elsewhere on the canal. They did not actually receive this money, but were allowed to live in the cottage rent-free instead.
Some of the events she relates are of a more sombre nature - with stories of patients from Winwick Hospital committing suicide by throwing themselves off the nearby Sankey Viaduct into the canal 90 foot below.
She recalled the night her mum and dad returned home after a night out at the Ship Inn, which stood near Newton Common Lock. It was a foggy night, and pitch black as they made their way over the swing bridge across the lock and past the keeper's cottage. Beyond the cottage the towpath descended a steep slope to a latch gate. After negotiating this gate, her mother somehow lost her way, and fell into the canal. Her father jumped in and pulled her out. When they arrived home soaked to the skin, young Miss Tickle asked if it was raining... for which she received a clip round the ear from her dad. Her poor mum spent the next three weeks in bed with pneumonia.
I also spoke to Mrs Woods' son, who remembered that his school pals always wanted to come and play at his house (Newton Common Lock cottage). Among their favourite pastimes were crawling through the overflow around the lock, and playing on the sunken boats (four wooden flats and an icebreaker) in the pound below. Another daredevil escapade was to climb up onto the viaduct and get inside the massive, hollow pillars through a trap door set between the tracks.
Another resident (1865 - 1881) of Newton Common Lock was Hugh Sankey. He is also recorded as residing at Bradley Lock in 1883, where he married three times and had twenty children.... Could this be the reason why the cottage at Bradley appears to be bigger than the others?
Next: Hey and Winwick Locks.
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| Above: Newton Common Lock Cottage featured in well-known early prints of the Sankey Viaduct, as in this of 1831, because it was close to the road, a good viewpoint. |
| Below: Bradley Lock Cottage - the large extension to the rear appears to be peculiar to this cottage. Some (e.g. Hulme, a single-storey building) were small in comparison. |
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