A few weeks ago I
received a letter from Shirley Williams thanking me for sending her
an article I had written on her mother Vera Brittain. In the piece,
which appeared in May, I wrote of Vera’s taking her Oxford entrance
exam at Leek College one hot day in July 1914. She wrote of the
unpleasantness of the occasion the consequence of being cooped up
with “odiferious” 16-year-old students. In her letter of reply
the Baroness believed that the personal hygiene of teenagers had not
changed much in a century. It’s an opinion, which I challenge given
the range of deodorants available. But nevertheless this led me to
think of the olfactory landscape of North Staffordshire in the past.
One great change is the
absence of horses nowadays compared with 100 years ago the by-product
of equines would have been very noticeable as would have been the
absence of cars and exhaust fumes. People would have smelt of
carbolic, especially as soap become more widely available after the
1880s. There was the odour of camphor from mothballs on clothes
during the winter. My mother recalls clearly the smell of “Rinso”
on washing hanging in the alleyways in the 1930s. Industry would have
its own emanations. Smoke hung heavily in the air. Dye works gave off
a pungent fragrance. The smell of steam trains to me is wonderfully
evocative, other places would give off from less pleasing stenches. A
friend recalls the reek coming from a bone mill near to where he
lived in Silverdale. Slaughterhouses smelt of blood and the acrid
smell of scorched hide, but for my mother an unforgettable aroma was
that of roasting meat on the range. My own Proustian recollection is
that of hot Brown’s sausage rolls in Stoke market. Of cigarette
smoke during a football match combining agreeably with wintergreen.
And I do miss the smell of pipe tobacco in public places.
Certain places carry
with them unique bouquets. I always think of the pleasing reek of
Higson’s brewery- sadly gone- as you walked out of Lime Street
Station in Liverpool. When the wind was in the right direction
aniseed fragrance from the Uncle Joe’s Mint balls factory pervaded
the air of Wigan and catching a train in Worcester was made the more
congenial by the close proximity of the Lee and Perrin works.
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