Memories of Grandad's Garden: Sepia Saturday

This week's Sepia Saturday prompt photograph  shows a young girl in a garden, c.1920s.  My grandfather's front garden in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire  was the  setting for many a family photograph over the years.

Here is my mother Kathleen Danson, c.1930's modelling one of her dresses in the front garden of my grandfather's house.  Mum left school at the age of 14 and was apprenticed to a tailor.  She set up a small dressmaking business from the home, working on an old Singer treadle machine. She was still sewing her own clothes  and making a patchwork bedstread in her 80's, and I often think that "Happiness is Stitching" would be her motto. 

My grandfather's house c.1950 - a family home 1926-2001

Grandfather was William Danson (1875-1962), son of James Danson and Maria Rawcliffe. In 1907 he married Alice English and they had five children - Edith, Kathleen (my mother), Harry, Billy, with baby of the family Peggy, born after the First World War. Alice died in 1945 and I never knew her.

 

The family moved into the semi-detached house in 1926.   I still have the receipt for the deposit of £67. It looks quite a big house in the photograph, but, with only three small bedrooms, it must have still been a squash for William,  Alice,  three daughters and two sons.

 

The front door had a round stained glass window which I thought was very posh.  Half way up the side wall was a small hatch door which revealed the coal shute where the coal men emptied  their sacks down into a small cellar under the stairs. My uncle Harry (a joiner)  much later took on the hard task to clear it all out to create a much needed "glory hole" and utility room.   He also modernised the kitchen and installed French windows in the living  room at the back of the house. 
 

The side trellis gate was later taken down and a driveway created to take my uncle's motor bike and side car, and later a car.  Grandad's hen house at the back then became the garage.  

The large gardens were my grandfather's and later my uncle's pride and joy - with floral displays in the  front and  productive vegetables and fruit  grown at the back. 

 

Another outfit of Mum's 

 

A unique phonograph as the only one I have of both sets of grandparents William & Alice Danson and Albert and Mary Weston, taken in the garden after my parent's wedding in 1938

A

             Sisters Peggy, Edith and Kathleen Danson  with their mother Alice  c.1941

 

1941 and my father is setting out for war service in the RAF.  Here with Mum on the right and her sister, my aunt Edith on the left

                                             My aunt Edith with a little podgy me c 1944.

 

My brother and I in my long dress for the local Gala Day, c.1951   

Full circle  - my mother with my uncle  Harry, c.1990s.  The death of Harry in 2001 marked the end of the house that had been a family home for nearly 80 years.  

****************

Sepia Saturday gives an opportunity for genealogy bloggers  

to share their family history and memories through photographs

 

  Click  HERE to see how other Sepia Saturday blogger 

have related their garden tales.