|
|
|
|
|
|
Mr Joseph Hakes
This painting by Stan Clark is of Joseph Hakes emptying
the toilet buckets on his round in Bugbrooke. He had a small barrel of
creosote that he soaked squares of sacking in, and he used these to help
carry the buckets to the cart. He also had a yoke for the times that he
had to carry the buckets a great distance, such as all the way from the
bottom of Gilkes Yard. He worked for Harry Gilkes who had a contract to empty the buckets and when
the cart was full it was spread over those fields within the village
farmed by Mr Gilkes. One of these fields was the first on the right past
the railway bridge down Ham Lane, on the way towards Corn Hill. Another
field was up Camp Hill opposite the eight council houses on the Gayton
Road, where we once lived. He usually did this job at night-time and so
was nick-named (amongst other names) the midnight cart. The smell was
unbelievable! During the Second World War years, because of a dispute, Mr Hakes stopped
doing this job in the dark hours of the evening, and John Gilkes and his
brother Harry started doing this job for a short period. There was no
street lighting so it was quite a problem to see what they were doing or
where they were walking. Many a time the men doing the job would trip and
fall over the edges of the paths and leave quite a smelly old mess, and
sometimes they themselves would fall in amongst it! I remember coming from school during lunch times and walking up Camp Hill
back home for dinner, as we called it in those days. We had to pass Mr
Hakes with his horse and cart and the smell would be somewhat strong. It
was not so bad in the winter months, but in the summer with all the flies,
it was something else! It used to attract the birds like swallows, swifts,
and house martins wherever the cart went, as well as to the fields where
it was emptied. One winter when we had a slide on the ice that went from the top of Camp
Hill to the bottom, Mr Hakes came up the hill with the horse and cart and
walked onto the slide that was covered in snow. The air was not only blue
with the smell, but with language as well. During these very cold winter
spells, the contents of most of the buckets were frozen solid as most of
these closets were out in the cold well away from the houses. When it was
deposited on the open fields the cart left lots of bucket shaped ice
sculptures on the ground. Another thing that would happen when all this effluent was tipped out across
the fields was that the different coloured pieces of newspaper would dry
out and would go wherever the wind had the mind to blow it. The Chronicle
and Echo paper was normally greyish white, but they produced two other
papers. One was pink in colour, and the other was a green sports paper. I
spent hours as a child cutting papers up and threading the squares onto a
piece of string for use in the toilet!
Stanley Joseph Clark
|
