MEMORIES OF WINDSOR HOLIDAY FLATS
When we closed the 70 year old business at Castleford in 1977 I tried to obtain employment with the Coal board as a central heating trouble-shooter and then applied to several firms to become a manufacturers representative. Unfortunately my age (44) and my diabetes counted against me and we decided to seek a holiday business. We had quite a lot of experience of caravan sites, having used them on holiday, and searched for a suitable site to buy. We went to Harrogate, Torquay, Caernarfon, Lincoln, Scotland and other places but were put off by the asking prices, likely income and distance from family at Castleford.
We saw Windsor Holiday Flats, 20, Prince of Wales Terrace advertised in the Yorkshire Post and went to have a look. The building was owned by a Frank Sickling and had obviously been neglected but appeared to have good potential. Given the choice I would have preferred to stay in dear old Castleford but we had been forced to close down by the County Council who were prepared to destroy our business and put 25 people out of work in order to widen the road. After careful consideration we decided to take the plunge and move to Scarborough.
We took over the flats from Mister Sickling on September 2nd 1978 and moved into flatlets number 9,10 and 11 on the second floor along with daughters Jane, Clare and Frances, Julie having gone to Sheffield University. We had a few sleepless nights as the full realisation of what we had let ourselves in for dawned on us.
The deeds for the flats made very interesting reading. There was a bundle of papers about two inches thick. The site had been part of a cow pasture and there were details of tenant farmers going back to 1750. The area was known as Elder Ridgeley’s pasture.
With the business, we took over a very sprightly 78-year-old lady named Mrs Burton, who lived on the floor above us. When standing in the hall at the bottom of about 80 stairs Mrs B used to volunteer to go to the top by saying “ Save your legs, I’ll go”. She had been responsible for greeting holiday visitors and collecting the weekly rent from the other tenants for several years. We could not do anything without Mrs Burton knowing about it, she seemed to be around every corner and, if you were painting a door, she would stand between you and the door, whilst talking away. We learned that Mrs B was the daughter of a pawnbroker in Hull and that her home had been bombed and she moved to Withernsea, only to be bombed out again. Mrs Burton informed us that, after signing the contract, Mr Sickling had removed several carfuls of bedding and other equipment from the store cupboards.
Also in the building lived Ron Young in room 16 on the top floor, Valerie Bennett in room 17 and Norman Halder occupied rooms 18 and 19. Valerie worked as a flat cleaner in the holiday season. Ron who had been a silver waiter was permanently un-employed and often the worse for drink, he regularly posted some of his dole money to a sister in Hull early in the week and she promptly posted it back to him. This enabled Ron to save some money for food. Norman worked at a fish and chip shop on the sea front.
We were at the end of the holiday season and had at least some income from the bookings, which we took over, plus the rents from the top floor tenants who paid from £6 to £8 per week.
The new venture meant that we had to put our new house at Hillam on the market. We had put a lot of planning and much hard work into the house but felt that we could not run the business in Scarborough whilst living in Hillam. After a few weeks we bought a 3-bedromed semi-detached house and moved into 39, Throxenby Lane with the family. Jane obtained a job at Tricolos Italian pizza restaurant in Eastborough. Clare attended Scalby School and Frances went to Newby Primary School.
During the winter months Margaret and I worked in the holiday flats from 9.30.am until 3.0pm, fitting in with school times. We faced a mammoth task, re-decorating and re-furnishing the flats, starting with the worst ones. I learned new skills in joinery, plumbing, plastering, carpet-fitting, electrical work to name but a few. We regularly attended the house contents auctions at Chapman’s and Ward Price’s and gradually up-graded all the carpets and furnishings in the whole building. We spent a lot of time carrying wardrobes and other furniture up and down the 100+ stairs between the basement and the attics. I was amazed at Margaret’s ability to recall all the furniture and it’s location in the building.
We employed an electrician named Brian Dowell who re-wired the whole building from top to bottom with my assistance, moving carpets and furniture, a job which took a couple of months. He also re-wired our house at Throxenby Lane.
The hot water boiler in the back garden flat had been connected to the wrong type of cylinder, it became badly scaled up and it was necessary for me to replace both the boiler and the huge galvanised steel cylinder, taxing my plumbing skills, fortunately I had the help of a strong wife. We found that the basement wooden floors had developed dry rot and we had to pull them all up, one room at a time, then lay an 8” layer of clean brick hardcore “blinded” with sand and then a thick sheet of polythene. I rigged up a chute from old corrugated iron sheets and had the ready-mixed concrete shot into the basement from street level. I barrowed and shovelled the concrete and Margaret levelled it off with a flooring trowel. Fortunately we had learned how to do this work when replacing the floors in our cottage at Hillam. This task took up most of the winter.
The building was constructed in 1865 and all the windows were the original sliding sash type and none of the upper sashes would open, making a section of each window inaccessible for cleaning. I bought a dozen knots of waxed sash cord from Alfred Colton in Leeds, who had supplied us for many years at the Castleford shop and set about the task. We removed all the sashes, replacing the putty and some panes of glass (which was ¼” thick), painting the window frames and the sashes, fitting sash cords and re-hanging the sashes, ensuring that they slid freely and making it possible to clean the windows properly for the first time in years. Some of the windows lacked sash weights but I managed to buy some from fishermen in the harbour, they used them to weight their crab pots and had a selection in various weights. It took us a few winters to complete this task and the job became quite hazardous as we moved up the building, the windows at the top were about 60 feet above the ground and I had to stand on the window sill to reach the top of the frame. We ended up with a building on which all the windows were repaired and painted without scaffolding, which would have cost about £1.000. A worthwhile D.I.Y. job.
For the first couple of winters we took in several Arab students from the School of English on the Esplanade these provided some income towards the improvements we were making to the building. Mrs Burton kept an eye on them for us and referred to them as her “ brown sugars”. They were mostly from Libya and Saudi Arabia, They had their curtains closed all day, probably due to the intense Scarborough sunshine. During the winters we took in various other English lodgers, often people who were looking for a house to buy and several who had been to the flats for past holidays and decided to retire to Scarborough.
Mrs Burton introduced us to Brian and Dorothy Brown who owned the West Court Hotel just round the corner from us in West Street and they became good friends.
After a few years we decided that we needed to live closer to the flats and we bought the top floor flat next door at 21, Prince of Wales Terrace and I knocked a doorway through to give access, and fitted a one-hour fire door. We persuaded the remaining tenant (Ron) to move out and took over the whole top floor of no 20 and incorporated it in our flat, giving us two extra bedrooms and a darkroom for my photography. We had Velux roof windows fitted and had all the old slates stripped off both buildings and replaced with modern approved roof tiles. With the new set-up, we were now able to run the holiday flats much more efficiently. We had a cordless phone with a five-mile range, which we could use in all parts of the building, I wired an intercom from our flat through to the front door of the flats and we could then deal with problems and enquiries more easily. Our flat was served by a lift and we were now able to take cookers, fridges etc up the lift and then wheel them through next door. As we were so tied to the flats we rented a chalet halfway down the cliff overlooking the now defunct swimming pool. We took the cordless phone and the booking chart and were able to take bookings whilst enjoying the chalet. At about this time Mrs Burton, who was in her eighties, moved out and went to live near her daughter in York.
Margaret’s mother found it very difficult to manage on her own at Castleford, having fallen a couple of times, and we persuaded her to buy a flat in no 21, the same building as our own flat. We had not been able to go to see her very often and this move enabled us to keep an eye on her every day. Margaret/s sister Pat who had a flat in Leeds near to her work at the Infirmary had been looking after her mother but was finding it increasingly difficult.
The expectations of holiday visitors were going up all the time and we decided in 1985 that we should install more toilets and showers. We employed John Cappleman as plumber, Terry Darlow as joiner (on the understanding that I assisted him), and Messrs Teasdale and Witty electricians who would at the same time install a fire alarm system. We were not officially required to have a fire alarm but decided that we needed one and sought advice from the local fire service who were most helpful and drew up plans showing the necessary fire screens and fire doors. During this work we had to remove the original “dumb-waiter” which ran from the basement to the attics in a yard square shaft containing a wooden cage in which luggage had been transported to all levels. There was a continuous thick rope about 120 feet long and pulling on the left or right hand rope moved the cage up or down. This system was an obvious fire hazard and had to come out. The project took up the whole winter and I learned how to partition rooms, fit doorframes and hang doors. At the end we had nine more toilets, six more showers and an efficient modern fire prevention system.
The building, like many others in the town, was occupied by the military during the war, in our case by the Green Howards Regiment. When lifting the floorboards for electrical work, we found several love letters which the soldiers had received and also things like Woodbine and Players cigarette packets, brilliantine bottles. The Green Howards had several re-unions at the Southlands Hotel across the road but unfortunately we never met any of the former tenants. We also found lead piping from the original gas lighting system and steel wiring and pulleys from the internal bell system.
In 1990 we decided to take in student teachers from the North Riding College on Filey and accommodated four girls on the second floor from early September until the following June. This arrangement worked very well and the students did very little damage when they left, despite all the posters, and the extra income came in very useful. In subsequent years we took twelve students on the top three floors. When the students left in the summer we faced two weeks of very hard work cleaning and re-decorating their flats. Some of the students still contact us years later.
Over the years our family all moved away, Julie had gone to Sheffield before we moved to Scarborough, Jane went to Leicester to train as a nurse, Clare went to York University for a Genetics degree and Frances to Bradford University for a degree in computing. We were sad to see them go but they have subsequently set up their own homes in Sheffield, Southern Ireland, York and Cheshire.
In December1992 we moved to 17, North Cliff Avenue in preparation for our retirement. We sealed the door to the holiday flats and took four more students on the top floor of no 20 (making 12 in all) and let our own flat to Russell Baldwin the trombonist with the Scarborough Spa Orchestra for three summer seasons. In the new house I set up my darkroom in one of the bedrooms and Margaret pursued her gardening hobby, which she had missed for ten years. Margaret’s Auntie Muriel still living in Castleford, found it impossible to manage and came to live with us and later ended her days in a nearby nursing home.
We put the holiday flats on the market in the winter of 1996 but were disappointed at the efforts of the estate agents who made several mistakes in their brochure and decided to take the matter in hand ourselves. We advertised in the Yorkshire Post and produced our own typed details. We had much more response and managed to agree a sale to a Mrs Woolfoot of Leeds who planned to run the business from home. This would have been impossible but for our improvements over nearly twenty years. We handed over the keys in May 1997, after carrying out all the preparation work for the holiday season, and settled down to retirement.
We had built up a very good business and made a lot of friends in the process. Many couples came to the flats two or three times each year and we had a mailing list of over two hundred regular customers some of whom had come every year since we started. We were sad to leave the flats but at the same time relieved that we were at last able to travel where and when we fancied.