Evacuated from East Leeds to None-Go-Byes-Farm

Evacuated from East Leeds to None-Go-Byes-Farm.
None-Go-Byes is a salubrious farm and leisure complex today but not so eighty years ago in 1941 when I was evacuated from the bombing expected in Leeds to stay with my mother’s sister, Nellie, who lived in one of the pair of cottages that were located within the farm yard at None- Go-Byes.
It amazes me that I can remember things that happened eighty years ago but March 14th was an iconic night in the history of East Leeds and one which is hard to forget for it was the night of 14/15th of March when a string of German bombs hit Richmond Hill School and the Woodpecker Pub. The resultant ‘bang’ was so loud it rattled our Anderson Shelter door at Knostrop.
(Between August 1940 and August 1942 there were 87 alerts 9 air raids, 77 people killed, 327 injured and 763 properties damaged in Leeds)
Illustrated History of Leeds

After that my parents decided it would be more prevalent to evacuate a young child to ‘the country’ for that is where None-Go- Byes was perceived to be. Now I see on today’s website the address for the farm is given as, Otley Old Road Horsforth, but then it rather seemed to be in the middle of a host of districts my aunt said it was Carlton, But we went for fish and chips to Yeadon, the bus turned around at its terminus at Cookridge and the kids went to school in Bramhope, I think I even told my mates I had gone to live in Otley it being the Otley Old Road.
There were no cars about or rather no petrol for the cars during the war, my dad was a bus driver and had a motor bike and sidecar as you can see in the picture, he must have got his petrol for that from somewhere, perhaps he had special dispensation to allow him to get to his bus the first thing on a morning before other buses were running? (I apologise or these pictures showing me, sorry they are

In the farm yard with the big green gate and Mr Barstow’s big house behind
The only ones I have of that time and must have been from on an earlier visit before the evacuation as I’m only a baby on them and I wouldn’t have remembered so far back.)
So Dad got a transfer from Donnisthope Street Bus Depot to Headingly Depot to facilitate the move. Anyway it didn’t seem as though it was going to be a good idea anyway for the very first night we were in the cottage the Germans dropped a flare right outside on the road evidently looking for the giant Avro Aircraft factory which was just up the road but camouflaged to look like a field with cattle grazing on it.
This is an account of how life transpired for me at None-go-byes
A family by the name of Firth had the farm at the time, they had a daughter called Annie, she was about my age, and we would play together. If she is still alive, she will be in her eighties now! I also recall they had a live in labourer called Joseph. There were two cottages; the first cottage housed a couple called, Lynes. They set about building their own house (physically themselves) a couple of hundred yards up the road. I see there is a beautiful house on the site now but that certainly wasn’t the result of their endeavours, they gave it a good try but materials were hard to come by during the war and over the years they seemed to make little progress.

The story itself starts even earlier, 1919 in fact, for it was then that Walter Ward (born 1888) and a soldier of the First World War brought his bride, Nellie (born 1887) who he had met and courted during his leaves, to None-Go-Byes. They had married on his demob from the army and Walter had secured a job with Mr. Barstow who lived in the big house, which stood in the yard beyond the big green gate. I’m unsure as to Walter’s duties but the cottage went with the job and he and Nellie moved in. The location was far more isolated than it is today and the conditions far more primitive than the parental home in Leeds. Nellie was one of five sisters and four brothers and they naturally worried for her well-being, being so far away and living in such primitive conditions. To make sure she was OK they would make regular visits.
I only arrived on the scene as a baby in 1937 but my earliest recollections are of all the walking it entailed when we went to visit Aunt Nellie. For a start it meant two buses the second of which turned at the terminus near the post office at Cookridge, perhaps it still does? We would walk the rest of the way but this was only the start of the walking, for we would usually go for another walk when we got there, perhaps to the little wooden bungalow which sold homemade lemonade at the top of the hill or sometimes all the way to Yeadon for fish and chips out of the paper. Alternatively Nellie would have a great meal waiting for us on our return cooked on the oven range that invariable included the world’s best Yorkshire puddings – dinner plate size.
There was no doubting the cottage’s primitiveness though. There was a dry toilet at the side of the cottage, a ‘double seater’ it had a large hole for adults and a smaller one for children – I suppose it was so they would not fall through? I hated it. The cottage had neither gas nor electricity, nor of course a telephone, when darkness fell a smoky oil lamp would be lit, which was the only light. The only water came from a tap in the yard, which always tasted of iron. The accommodation consisted of a sitting room and a scullery. Upstairs there were two small bedrooms. A tiny window in the gable end lighted the first, which had to be passed through to reach the other. I can’t really remember how we washed but imagine it would be by filling the scullery sink with water from the tap outside and airing it by water from the big iron kettle that always sang merrily on the hob above the open fire.

My entertainment as a child more or less consisted of playing with the buttons out of the button box or with the many lovely cats, which were always around. I remember in particular one called ‘Smuts’, after the First World War general. Walter seemed content, on a winter’s evening after work, to sit smoking and looking into the fire. He had cultivated a beautiful little triangular garden across the road close to where the stream passes under the bridge, where he grew mainly flowers but also made the best dandelion and burdock I ever tasted. Sometimes on a bright early morning we were privileged to gather wild mushrooms from the field behind the garden. I have never known mushrooms to smell or taste so sweet. In the event the family had no need to worry about Nelly’s well-being, the couple lived in that primitive cottage for over forty years and had a great marriage.
Mrs. Firth, the farmer’s wife, kept chickens as well as cows in the field behind the cottage, sometimes she would let me help her feed them and collect the eggs. The bran she fed the chickens had the most wonderful aroma too, if ever I catch the smell of chicken bran, even today, I’m transported back to None-Go-Byes. When Mr. Barstow died his widow provided Walter with a small pension and they remained in the cottage. He then began working for the Council Highways Department. One of his jobs, which I find incredible now, was to walk all the way to the traffic lights outside the Darnley Arms at the top of Pool Bank and blank them out at dusk on the weekends, when the Council wasn’t working, so that they could not be seen from the air. Then he had to walk all the back to None-Go-Byes again! Later at school age and living back in Leeds again my mates loved to accompany my on bike rides to Aunt Nelly’s. It was a great day out I used to ride my little bike through town up Woodhouse Lane, Through Headingly, Lawnswood, Cookridge and then along Otley Old Road, I wouldn’t fancy doing that today, we were always welcome. Walter died in 1960. After that Nelly moved in with her daughter at Bingley until her death in 1970. I lost track of whether or not anyone else lived in the cottage after Nellie, for I was in the army myself (National Service).

The Wards had a son Laurie and a daughter, Muriel (Peggy) born in 1923. Peggy is the one with me on the concrete in front of the cottage in the photograph at the back, taken about 1938/39. The pair of them: Peggy and Laurie, attended Bramhope School in the 1920s/early 30s. They had to walk there of course and went by way of the ‘the Tips’, passing the airshafts of the tunnel. (I once climbed up the outside of one of those airshafts to look down, it was about thirty foot across at the top dwindling to a tiny ring at the bottom with miniature lines and smoke starting to curl up from the bottom and green slime all up the walls, it gave my nightmares)
They took their shoes off and walked to school in their bare feet so they wouldn’t get their shoes muddy and be told off at school. Bramhope School was not just an infant school at that time; it was for infants, juniors and seniors too. They attended the same school from five to about thirteen when they were put to work
Peggy had a curious tale to tell, which always intrigued me, of how she had been walking with a younger child in the Round Wood – not sure where that is? She had heard horses approaching at the gallop and pulled the child into the trees for safety. The tale goes that she heard and felt the wind of the horses as they passed right in front of them but there was nothing to be seen. Peggy worked at the AVRO during the war where she met her future husband. After they were married, they lived for the rest of their lives in Bingley. Peggy died in 1997 but not before she had made a nostalgic trip back to Bramhope School which brought her to write a little poem about Bramhope remembered; the original of which I have in script on a wall at home and a copy I have included here at the back. Not much to show as a lovely family passes from living memory?

‘Click’ to enlarge writing

When I look back, I’m amazed that we have progressed so far in one lifetime from those primitive conditions to our comfortable modern living. Can you imagine life now without electricity and running water? Can you imagine kids walking across the fields to school in bare feet today? Yet in some ways perhaps we have not really progressed at all, for in-spite of those primitive conditions there was a magic about rural living which we seem to have lost.