Reg Tero remembers, "To me, memories of Scarletwell Street were good in respect
of good
neighbours, always willing to help each other. When you talk about conditions it
was shocking.
I honestly don't know how some of the women survived down there. 'Cause for a
woman it must have
been a hard. They used to have the children at home. You hadn't got the
facilities, you hadn't got hot water.
You'd got a toilet about ten yards up the garden and you had to carry a bucket
of water with you every time you
went there. It was a regular occurrence there for suicides, mainly women. Not
the men. The men seemed
to tolerate the life. I know two or three women down there that either tried to
gas themselves or threw
themselves out of the bedroom window - but survived.
Reg Tero was living at No. 99 Scarletwell Street in the 1920's. "The underground
kitchen was unusable
except for a water tap with an old yellow stone sink. The living room at street
level also contained a gas
cooker and the front door opened from the street. The first bedroom was very
small; in this slept mother, father,
two sisters and myself. The second bedroom, above, was unusable and when it
rained father had to put buckets up
there to catch the water. How I remember Scarletwell Street was the
unemployment. The Good Samaritans came
round with clothes and shoes for the unemployed families. A fish and meat van
came round every week and gave
their wares free to the unemployed families."
John Stevens, "On one corner was a public house, 'The Crispin Arms'. On the
opposite corner was a butcher's shop.
On the diagonally opposite corner from the Crispin Arms was another pub, 'The
Gate'. 'This gate hangs well and
hinders none, refresh and pay and journey on.' That was the motto."
John Short, "Black Charley lived in one of the courts in Scarletwell Street and
he was jet black
and absolutely white his hair. But he was bent and he went round with a trolley
which was all tied up with ropes and
the wheels - instead of tyres, they'd got ropes on. And he used to get his
living out of dustbins, getting rags and bones.
His wife was a little white woman and they had a fair sized family and they were
all coloured."
Ron George was the son of Black Charley. He was born in 1917. His father died in
1926 and Ron had in his
possession a paper which gave the following information.
There was buried from the Northampton Poor Law Institution on Apr 28th, 1926 an
aged full-blooded negro
named Henry George who died from pleurisy. He had been an inhabitant of
Northampton for over thirty years and
was a well known figure as he went about his occupation in a very humble way. He
answered to the general sobriquet
of 'Black Charley'. Born in slavery of slave parents on an American plantation
'way down Tennessee', he was one of the
many who were freed by the United States Congress in 1863. He bore on his left
shoulder his brand of slavery.
