William and Janet Clark's Children - Janet - Later life of Janet and Luke

This very gracious photograph of my Grandma Janet Dent was taken in the late 1950s, we call it the "Queen Mother"  photo, taken by a Newcastle professional photographer. 

Janet Dent

Restored

Grandma was a great letter writer with a very distinctive 'hand', you always knew from the envelope that you had received a letter from her.  She sent this letter to me when I moved to the Northumberland Fishing village of Craster.  This letter was sent in January 1978 some six months before she died in July 1978. I was so sad that she died two months before my one and only child was born, her only Great Grand Child, but at least she did know I was going to have a baby. 

Page 1

"Jan 26th 1978   15 Eldon Place, Lemington NE15 AQA

My dearest Pauline I have just received your lovely and interesting letter.  I have not been able to get you out of my mind. I do miss you popping in with Dorothy and your Mam, but it is nice to know that you will be seeing Dorothy and Ian as there must be a lot a work in such a large house. Even my house keeps me going every day until about"

Page 2

"3.00pm and then I wonder if I have got everything done before I sit down.  It's a life, but once you get the house done to your liking you feel ever so much better in your mind. So it's nice to get help, and I do hope you and Allan will be happy in your new home.  Just at this moment your mum and dad will be at poor Albert's funeral.  He wasn't very old, I feel sorry for your dad as it was his only brother - my heart"

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"My heart goes out to them all at this moment as it is 11:30 am.  I hope God will comfort them all.  I had your mum and dad yesterday Wednesday, and while your mum gave me a lovely bath your dad went round with the vacuum cleaner, doing all the carpets.  William didn't like him doing that - so of course he got put in the back of the car.  Now dear look after yourselves and keep the house nice and warm.  I feel glad to know you are"

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"making friends, its nice to know you're having coffee mornings and that you can get all you want at the little shop, even the papers.  But don't ever feel lonely, and that you get to Church Sunday morning with Allan.  Ellen sends her love.  We are getting snow today, we had just got rid of the last lot.  I hope it all gets down and away before Dorothy  has to visit you.  Ellen has come in to post this letter for me, so here is my love to you always. From your ever loving Grandma x x x x x    
ps thanks for your letter I was so pleased X"      

How lucky I was to have such a lovely Grandma.  

 14 Haven Hill Craster Northumberland

Grandma wth her sister Ellen and son Billy Dent taken outside her bungalow at 15 Eldon Place Lemington. 

 1970s 15 Eldon Place Lemington Janet, Ellen & Son Billy Dent

This is Janet's writing slope which she did use.  Shortly after Luke died, Gregson Street (where she lived in Scotswood) was burgled. When the burglars found the slope they used a screw driver to prise it open to see if there was anything of value inside, thereby, cracking the top and damaging the inside. After that Janet felt unsafe and moved to an 'old folks bungalow' in Bells Close, living nearer her sister Ellen. My mam inherited the slope and then me. 

Grandma's Writing Slope

Interior of Janet's Writing Slope

Gregson Street in 1908 Janet & Luke's (Final House) at very top - No 13

This photograph was taken a short while before Luke died at the age of 68 in 1958

Janet and Luke in his 'smoking jacket' circa 1958 - he smoked a pipe

Restored

I wrote the following about my Grandparent a few years ago

Memories of my Grandparents Luke and Janet Dent

The Dent and Clark family were all small. Grandpa was very quiet, slim and with a good sense of humour.  He liked his house to be extremely clean and tidy, as it always was.  Grandma used to say that he would come in from work (Vickers Armstrong’s factory) at Scotswood and would run his finger over the mantelpiece checking for dirt and dust.  Grandma and Grandpa were much better off financially than my mam and dad.  My Grandfather was very careful with his money.  He held a tight reign on the finances, but always ensured that my Mother and Grandmother were well dressed. They had a very comfortable home.  There was a lovely chintzy sitting room with a china cabinet full of nice things, a piano that their son, William, Uncle Billy was ‘made’ to learn, but eventually it became something that he absolutely loved.  He told us that he used to get very upset at having to do lessons when his friends were outside playing.  When he was on leave from the Merchant Navy Billy would go into the sitting room for hours on end and play his piano often along with Fats Waller records and other jazz artists .  My sister and I used to sit entranced, as he was as good as this recording - Uncle Billy was  a very good pianist.  As a child Grandma would let us sit and plonk for hours on the piano, I loved it.  I remember when I was about 11 or 12 they had a television in this room and Grandpa’s favourite programmes were wrestling and Harry Corbett's Sooty and Sweep puppets, he used to sit and laugh his head off.

My Grandmother Janet was brilliant, she was very interested in what was going on in the world, although she never believed that the Americans actually landed on the Moon!  

She died of cancer at the age of almost 90 in 1978.  I was pregnant with my daughter Elise at the time and remember I was very sad not only at losing her, but that she did not live to see her Great Grandchild.  I can remember her telling me that when she was about 45 (probably in the menopause) she was stunned when she went to the doctor because she was not feeling too well and found she was having ‘Billy’ there was nearly 15 years between my mother and her brother, the much loved boy. There was too much of an age gap for my mother and Billy to ever have a close relationship. I don't think Jennie was pleased about the late addition to the family as she was given the job as his unpaid nanny.  Grandma told us that one day she was told to take him for a walk and actually dumped him and the pram and left him.  “Naughty girl” was the words used by Grandma. From then on my mother no longer looked after Billy and went out and got herself a job.

Grandma had two brothers William and Albert and three sisters Elizabeth Mary and Willhemena as well as two ½ sisters Hilda and Ellen.  Her mother married again on the death of her first husband William Clark b 1881. 

Willehemina married William, Will Kearton, a joiner.  They lived in Darlington, I can remember we visited once, and again compared to us they lived in a very nice house.  They could be described as upper working class.  They had a son and daughter, Edith and Tom.

I remember my mam telling me she was ill in hospital and Tom Kearton visited her with his mother Willhemina.  He picked up one of my mother's knitting needles and accidentally poked her in the eye, luckily no lasting damage was done  

Aunt Ellen was described as slow, but she wasn't, she was profoundly deaf.  In in those days they did not have the means to properly educate people like Ellen.  She never married, and was, for many years, ‘Matron’s Maid at the Fleming Memorial Hospital in Newcastle.  I knew my Aunt Ellen quite well as my Grandma Janet kept close contact with Ellen; I suppose she ‘looked after’ her, so often when I visited ‘Grandma’ as a child and as an adult Ellen was often at her house.  She wore a big NHS hearing aid which squealed and squeaked as I remember.

My Grandmother’s sister Mary, who is referred to in the letter married Tom Gibson who became a manager at Vickers Armstrongs.  She died having her 13^th child.  I can remember my Grandmother telling me that ”‘he’ was told if she had any more children it would kill her – the baby was buried with her”(I suppose that was a women’s lot at this time) but my Grandmother was not impressed. It is notable that my Grandfather and Janet had only two children some 15 years apart.

Hilda is very interesting, my Grandmother described Hilda one day as a ‘very naughty girl’.   I think Hilda was a good time girl which was not the done thing in those days.  Anyway, she met a young Peruvian studying at Armstrong’s College in Newcastle called Carlos de Terry.  Carlos was so besotted with her, he left her the money to sail out to Peru, Hilda spent this money, but undeterred he sent her tickets instead. Bravely Hilda sailed to and married him.  

Carlos was a Geologist/Mining Engineer and Hilda became a Peruvian, with, I suppose, a life-style that she could only dream of.  In about 1923.  

When my mother was six, during the slump, Hilda persuaded my grandparents to emigrate to Peru, telling them there was plenty of work.  They sold up and sailed to Peru.  My mam could just remember going through the Panama Canal. She loved 'Uncle Carlos’ who called her Juanita.  I have an ancient tennis racket hanging on my sitting room wall which he inscribed “to Jenny” on one side and “Uncle Carlos 1924” on the other.  Peru did not come up to expectations, returning home after a short while.  They had to set up home again, which I am sure was not easy.    Grandma and Grandpa needed a home and bought pieces of second-hand furniture often from large old houses, which must have been cheap in those days; she bought some very nice antique pieces of furniture like the very old bookcase which I still have.

Sadly Carlos died reasonably young.  Hilda came ‘home’ once when I was about 13 around 1959, and stayed with my Grandmother who lived in Scotswood at the time. She looked and acted very ‘Spanish’/Latin American with her black hair pulled back with a centre parting (I now realise it must have been dyed at her age) she spoke English with a broken accent.  She never had children. I remember she took my sister and I to see Cary Grant in “An Affair to Remember” at the ‘pictures’ in Newcastle, but we never felt comfortable around her, she would say in front of us ‘look at their eyes they know far more than they are letting on’ or words to that effect; which was not true, as we were extremely naïve; we were just terrified of her.  She embarrassed my Grandmother greatly when they went out to shops as she would pick up fruit and taste it and then put it back, not quite the done thing in Scotswood at the time.  Grandpa Dent used to laugh a lot at the way she went on.  She went back to Peru, and that was the last time we saw her. Grandma and Aunt Ellen used to occasionally write, but I don’t know what happened to her.  She never married again, but Grandma said she became a 'kept woman'.

Unfortunately I know nothing about Grandma's brother William or her sister Elizabeth Clark.

My Grandfather Luke Dent was a boiler/pipe-man in Vickers Armstrong.  I have his 40 year retirement certificate (framed) on my dining room wall.  He retired at about 68 in 1958 after 40 years service (he lied about his age).  Unfortunately within a few months of retirement he had a massive stroke and died shortly after, never regaining consciousness.  

Grandpa Dent fought in the first world war. I think he was wounded but was one of the lucky ones who survived, unfortunately, but understandably he never talked about it.  He was what was known as a runner, someone who ran between trenches with messages etc, highly dangerous.  Whole generations of men and what were literally boys were killed - statistics say there were about 26,000,000 dead in the ‘war to end all wars’.     

Luke and Janet lived in a few houses in and around the Scotswood area, their last house was at the very top of Gregson Street, (they were demolished in the 1960’s or 1970s I think).  These were terraced houses built on a very steep hill - this house was built right next to or on a railway tunnel. The vibration and noise when a train passed through was unbelievable.  The toilet was outside in the yard, there was no flushing mechanism there was just a big hole into the main drains.  When we were very small my sister Dorothy and I, on visits to Grandma and Grandpa always had to have an adult with us (in case we fell down the toilet).

Their next door neighbour in Gregson Street Scotswood was a Spinster called Evelyn Storey.  Evelyn knew “Auntie Molly” (nee Gibson - the daughter of Mary, Grandma Dent's sister).  Other neighbours I remember were Jackie Farrar, and Billy Wheeler.   

Dorothy and I used to "get messages" for Grandma, i.e. buy odd items of food etc from a shop on the corner run by a lady called Annie Buckle. It was a dusty place, and Annie always had a chat with us, she was small and rotund and very friendly.

After visiting Grandma and Grandpa we used to wait for the bus home in the windswept and freezing corrugated iron bus shelter just before the old Chainbridge over the Tyne.  We would get the 44 Venture bus from Newcastle that picked us up at Scotswood through Blaydon, and up the very steep Summerhill to Greenside. The Chainbridge was originally built for horse drawn vehicles but as people became more affluent the amount of traffic greatly increased and eventually it was replaced because of the traffic jams it caused and obviously before it fell into the Tyne.  If the bus had to stop the bridge bounced up and down.  There were times when you could see the river through quite large holes in the tarmac

The Old Corrugated Iron Bus Shelter Scotswood - The Ord Arms in the background

New Scotswood Bridge opened in 1967 the old Chainbridge opened in 1831