Measures sold all the implements and things in the blacksmith s shop and I got to buy just the basic things in the blacksmith s shop so I could start

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Stanley Lowis, Marshchapel 17/07/2013 Interviewed by Derek O Connell, Development Officer, Learning & Information Services. Village Voices Project Manager.

1 Stanley Lowis, Marshchapel 17/07/2013 Interviewed by Derek O Connell, Development Officer, Learning & Information Services. Village Voices Project Manager. SL I was born in Grainthorpe in 1920 and my family had been Blacksmiths there for 200 years before I started to have a go. DO Really? SL Yes and then I went to learn my trade with a man at North Sommercotes. I didn t learn it with my father because he said we cant teach him his trade at home because we can t afford to pay him anything. So I went with, you ll not know Mr Raymond-Cordwell. He d got a lot of land at North Sommercotes and that s where I went and learnt my trade. Then on D Day, I shouldn t have done this but I did, I came to work here because really I was on directed labour you see because I wasn t in the army and I wasn t suppose to move, but somehow I got away with it. Anyway I came down here on 6 th June. I hadn t got married then. I came down here for 5 or 6 weeks and we got married and lived in that cottage with the flowers in the front garden near the garage. The man who lived there before was the Blacksmith and he was retiring and I thought there was a chance here and it would be nice in the village so I applied for a job with J K Measures from Croft, Skegness. He bought a lot of land in Marshchapel and eventually he got Mr Raymond Cordwell to come here and manage it for him at the same time. I came in the June and he met Mr Raymond Cordwell at the farm and I don t know any prices or conditions or anything like that, but he let him have the farm. As I was here he sold all the Blacksmith s shop. It s just there and its still there. They eventually started to farm. It d be the October. J K

2 Measures sold all the implements and things in the blacksmith s shop and I got to buy just the basic things in the blacksmith s shop so I could start work say like anvil, the vices, the forge. Mr Cordwell said, don t buy anything you don t want because I haven t got much money. His Dad had set him up with a little bit of money. 10,000, that s what he told me. Unbelievable. DO So how old would you have been at that time? SL I d have been 24. Of course with that man retiring they wanted someone to take his place. I got the job but Raymond Cordwell he was still working for J K Measures and he daren t take me on because R E Cordwell was Raymond Cordwell s uncle and he said I ll get into trouble off him if I take you on. Anyway he eventually set me on and that s how I came to be here and as soon as things began to settle down and we got the turnover I started doing any Blacksmithing that was necessary at the time because he was doing buildings and he wanted ironwork and all sorts of things making. He hadn t much like. I build his trailers. 4-wheel trailers, 2-wheel trailers. Made his arrows and all I could do. I was there about 2 or 3 years and I got another lad from the village and I taught him the trade and then I got 2 or 3 more apprentices and we carried on like that. Always very busy. DO Did you only have one apprentice at a time? SL Oh no I had more. Yes it was hard work that was. If you get an apprentice they re not much use for a start you know because they don t know the name of the tools or anything like that. I wouldn t do it again. Its too much hard work and anyway I did it that time. The time I was there I had about 5 good apprentices. Then I had different ones that came in to get a bit of experience on different things that came to be repaired to see what can be repaired and what can t be repaired. Farmers sons from up the hills came in. All that was there when I was there was the old type bellows blowing the fire and then eventually that was taken out and replaced with electric blowers. DO What year would that have been? SL About 1946 I think. We had travellers, and dealers come from all around to sell materials to the Blacksmith such as anvils and drilling machines. I had to build it up from scratch and it took a long time and eventually I got power. You d be sat there and it d be thumping away. SL - Anyway that was taken out when I was finished. Then they built that building there from my workshop because my workshop at the front was no good for the work that I was doing so they built a big workshop at the back and they put some lifting gear in and I made the roof for it. They were all second hand things because you couldn t buy metal very easily during the war because all metal was used for ammunition. The garage now, well I have it for my car. It s been let off because it belonged to Burton College at Lincoln and then they rented it back. DO Was there competition between the two blacksmith s?

3 SL Well not really because he worked for himself and I worked for a weekly wage for Raymond Cordwell so it was a bit different. DO - So how what you did kind of reflected the changes in the village and in the different agricultural jobs that were done. SL Well it changed from horses to tractors and all the implements that the horses used were useless behind the tractor. It just used to pull them to bits because the tractor was very powerful. And all the tractors that came on the job were all open-topped and they bought one from a firm from Spalding and it had a cab on it and the boss said to me can you make a cab like that and I said yes I think so I made all the cabs. Now they are wonderful things. They ve even got radios in but the one s I had was just to keep the weather out. So I made all these tractor cabs. Then we started getting grain dryers. I had a lot to with them. Put the first grain dryer in at The Elms up the road there on the corner. It was a very happy place to be as Mr Cordwell s house was on that corner. There was a lot of dust from that dryer and it used to go in the house so Mrs Cordwell didn t want it there no more. It was a terrible place in there for dust and the boss said, can you do anything about this dust? I, so I put a pipe in and a blower and blew all the dust out and a lot of it went towards the house. Anyway that was there for a few years and then they started growing all these peas. They had the ordinary peas for a start and they used to dry them and then they went on to freezing and I was involved in that, pea viners and all those sort of things and I started at North Ray up at North Thoresby. I had a lot to do with that although he did get a manager in. He was older than me and he worked for Pickerings at Manchester so he had all the brain and the pea elevators. He used to bring me pieces of scrap from an old elevator and said can you make a thing like that and I said yes so then it come along here and it went up there and then it come round the top and took these trays with all the peas in and it blanched and cooled and washed then eventually they got a flow freezer and they went down to London and bought a lot of material from the docks. St Mary s dock I think. They d got this building there but it was more than our boss wanted so he sold his neighbour so much of that. I was on holiday at the time so he took one of my apprentices down there to see before it was pulled down so I had no idea how to set about putting it up and eventually he wanted me to start putting it up. I said its too big for me. I can t do that and I hadn t seen what it was like anyway so they had to get another firm in from Market Rasen and but I did help to gat the place going as far as getting the pavers ready to put in the back but then I didn t do any more because I just wouldn t take it on. I had a lot of work to do anyway. I think some of it has gone to Boston or somewhere now. The boss didn t buy a lot of new stuff because he didn t have the money. He bought a big thing for cooking. They had to cook peas you see. They came in and washed them and cooked them and then they were put through the freezer, flow freezer so they were

4 separate and before that they came out in a frozen block. That wasn t very good because it spoilt them. Then they decided they would go into pigs so they got a herd of pigs but they did smell. A lot of people didn t like it but they were still a lot down here let out to another farm from Yorkshire. The Grandsons of Raymond Cordwell didn t like the smell so they got rid of them when he died. I had a lot to with that. I used to go to the Smithfield show. The boss used to go on a Monday. If there was something there that was useful he would ring one of the managers up because there was several managers on the job and they d maybe give me a ring at nine o clock at night and say can you get ready for six o clock in the morning. The boss wanted me and these managers to look at a new idea I d got so we went down to Smithfield. We went down several times afterwards for other new ideas. They used to get me to go down with a pencil and I bit o paper. He asked me if I d seen anything good and I said, I, I ve seen a few things. Like the things for lifting bales up and that sort of thing. He says, Can you make that to fit on them tractors? I, I says, I can. That s what I ve been sent here for. I took a few measurements. Built it up a bit. The best thing that happened to me when I was working there, was that instead of welding everything together in the fire, I was given a welding machine. He had a friend at Skegness where he used to take his car to get serviced and he told him about me and he said, you aught to get him an electric welder. So he got me an electric welder and I also had to have the oxy acetylene tank as well. You could cut metal that thick with this oxy acetylene. We finished up with two or three welders. It was a big help to me that was. I knew how to make things in the fire but I also knew how to make them in pieces and weld them together with an electric welder instead of in the fire. DO Which method do you think was best? SL Which method? Well from my point of view the electric welder was because it was a lot easier for me and of course I learnt how to do it. There weren t many around here that could do it and a friend of mine had a pal down dock and they used an electric welder down dock and my boss said, go down there and they ll show you how to use it. Then if the boss saw anything that had been discarded from stuff like drainage he got it for little or nothing. Then we had a firm from down south put a dutch barn up 40 feet high to house the dryer. I said to him one day where do you want this dryer putting? He picked this stone up and said that s the measurement. The building had an archway to support it. Anyway it was elevated up in a big pit outside. Lorries used to bring the grain in and the elevator would take it up and put it in top of the dryer and then it would come down the dryer. When it came out the bottom there was no more than 16% moisture. You couldn t store it you see. Even at 16% it was a bit dodgy. Anyway we had that to do and when that was working alright and its coming out the right moisture it had to go up another elevator. They bought a conveyor belt to go from one

5 end of the dutch barn to the other. Then when you were off loading, you dropped it in the sides of the dryer. That was the storage like. That was conveying it from here to the other end. Then when the time came to sell it they used to put it back on that conveyor and take it along to the end of the building into some big tanks on 20 ton lorries and I used to take it through to the merchants. That s what I did there and others did it as well after me. I ve been left since DO That s when you finished blacksmithing? SL Yes, 64. I was made redundant. DO Really? SL Yes and he said if I don t make you redundant you ll not get any redundancy. I said well that s a bit of a surprise. I never thought I d be made redundant because I was fit enough. DO So what year was you born? SL DO And you started Blacksmithing at the age of 24. SL No before. I started with Mr R E Cordwell. He was Raymond Cordwell s uncle. DO And that was in Marshchapel? SL No that was at North Sommercotes DO Then you moved to Marshchapel when you were 24 SL I started up when I was 17. I ll just tell you this bit. I started when I was 17 and then the war broke out and I was in the second lot of people that had to sign on so I went to him one day and said, I ve been wondering if I aught to volunteer. If I have to go in the army it would be a good thing if I could go in and use my trade, because the army wanted everything didn t they? And he said I don t want you to do anything I want you to just leave it to me. Oh, I said, I ll just leave it to you. Well the papers came and I went and had a medical and I was classed as directed labour. They wanted me on the farm to repair agricultural implements to feed the troops. DO Was it called a reserve occupation? SL I, that s right. That was where the dodgy bit came in because I left him you see. I d got a girlfriend and we d thought we d like to get married. The bloomin old house he had in Sommercotes. I said I m not going to live there anywhere. He said, fair enough. He realised that because R E Cordwell said, it isn t Stan that s the trouble it s that there lass! He was never married. He had a housekeeper. I got on well with him. In the war time things were very difficult and we was short of food. We were hungry. I don t know how my mother coped. I had two brothers and two sisters and she were really struggling to feed us. Very hard.

IN: So you came to Munising when you were six-years-old and you ve been here ever since?

IN: So you came to Munising when you were six-years-old and you ve been here ever since? Interview with Brynhild Mitchell 7/07/2009 Munising, MI IN: To start off can you tell us your birthdate please? BM: November the 24 th, 1903. IN: November 4 th, 19 BM: 24 th! IN: 24 th, I m BM: Oh yes!