SIR - Dr Paul Jennings’s fascinating article (T&A) February 21) on the once thriving Wapping district of Bradford brought to mind my forebears connection with this area.
Harry and Lily Stott, my great-grandparents, lived on ‘The Landings’ around 1930. Their son, Charles Henry Stott, was born in 1907 at 501 Bolton Road, at its junction with Wapping Road, and he attended Wapping Road Council School where his father had earlier, in 1898, laid the tiles in the school baths. He and my grandmother Ivy Tordoff, who met at Jeremiah Ambler’s mill on Cape Street, were married at nearby St. Chrysostom’s Church, and took a rented house in Lawson Street where only the former church hall building survives. Sheila Stott, my late mother, was born in 1933 in this street of back-to-back houses.
My grandfather earned 22 shillings and sixpence a week when the mill was on ‘short time’ during the 1930s, and fifteen shillings of this meagre income was assigned to the rent!
Dr Jennings refers to the frequency of ‘drunkenness and violence’ in what was unmistakably a bit of a rough area. My grandparents were teetotal, but regaled me with gleeful tales of Saturday night ‘chucking-out time’ at the Delvers Arms where boisterousness would often turn into fisticuffs on the pavements. They also recalled the very lively political debates which took place in the church hall.
I learned to swim at Wapping Road baths. This was the first elementary school swimming pool in the country and pioneered by Margaret McMillan, the most famous member of the Bradford School Board. The fact that this national historic landmark lies derelict is a local scandal, and its high time the Council took an interest and instigated positive action to get it and the whole of the Wapping School site restored.
John C Jackson, Long Meadows, Burley-in-Wharfedale
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