My memories of Skelmersdale by Christine Moss

Memories of Old Skelmersdale

Top o’ Lane and T’ Miners
By Christine Ross

My great grandfather Charles Campbell worked down the mines in Skem, he married in 1876 at St. Anne, Ormskirk he and his wife were both from Ireland. My grandfather William Campbell, worked down the mines also and was so badly injured that he could not work again. The story goes that he tried to stop a run away wagon from injuring a workmate and took the blow himself. I don’t exactly know what his injury was but he had trouble with his stomach from what I have heard. His son (my Uncle James Campbell) likewise worked down the mines in Skem and later the fireworks factory in the powder shed. We always had great guy Fawkes nights! My mother told me that you could hear the changes of shift as the clogs could be heard coming through the streets. She also told me that there was a knocker up who rapped on the upper bedroom windows to get folk up in time for work. Uncle Jimmy told of how the men would spit into their flasks or leave their false teeth in their lunch boxes to guard their food, that sort of thing.

My Uncle James Campbell lived to the right of the first entry upon turning left at the top of Sandy Lane. At the back was a cobbled yard with a row of toilets with whitewashed walls to serve the houses, the toilet paper was last weeks newspaper. The front door opened straight out onto the street and in the early years of my life say 1953 his home was lit by a gas mantle. He kept chickens at the back and each Easter he would take us (my brother and I) into his sheds and let us see the creatures huddling around the lamps/feed bowls keeping warm. He supplied us with our Christmas chicken.
His house overlooked the football field on the other side of the road and his son William played for Skem, but in what team I could not say. I do remember watching him from the bedroom window of course. This was quite a regular pastime for the males of the family upon a Saturday afternoon.

Under the stairs they kept an accordion which had belonged to my grandfather who would play all evening long on summer nights and my mother told of how many neighbours would gather around the front door when the “Campbells were having a party” as they called it. The stairs in that home were closed off by a door which had a latch and the stairs were very steep. Of course there was no bathroom in the house. My uncle and aunt were moved to the new housing development in the 60’s? when the High Street was demolished. In my mothers youth they always kept dogs and one in particular was suspected of stealing a neighbours chickens. He had his comeuppance after a fall of snow when the owner followed his trail back to his kennel!