Madge Dodds

Madge’s husband came to West Cornforth from Barnsley when he was eighteen. He came to West Cornforth with a shot gun and a fishing rod. He worked at the pit and was an excellent fisherman. When he wasn’t at work he was fishing, and when he wasn’t fishing he acted as game keeper at the wood and helped out on Rickinson’s farm. The additional work provided food for their family of six.

Tommy has a clear memory of being on the farm. Jack Ormston had a hanger there for his plane. One day Tommy was with his father when his dad was helping Jackie get the plane out of the hanger. Jackie gave Tommy and a little pig a flight round the field. A flying pig in Cornforth.

Madge and her husband had five daughters and then Tommy. Older than Tommy, his sisters, like many village lasses, had to move out of the area for work. Two went to Leeds, one to Crawley, one to Blackpool and another to Surrey. Madge went to visit her daughters in the south. The journey took two days.

Madge worked at home raising her family. Work at home was hard. Madge was house proud. One job Tommy remembered her doing was cleaning the brass fire irons every week.

Madge’s father had married twice and Madge had a step mother and step siblings.

Madge was widowed in 1947 when her husband was killed in a mining accident at the pit.

Her husband’s death hit her hard. Her husband was buried under a tree in Holy Trinity Church. Rain, hail or blow every Sunday Madge took Tommy to her husband’s grave where his mother talked for hours to her dead husband. Clearly heartbroken, this weekly ritual disturbed her young son but they never discussed it.

Money was tight. Madge lived on the minimum permanent relief as compensation for her husband’s death with an additional two and sixpence for Tommy. Tommy can remember his mother asking him to go and see his grandfather who had a greenhouse. His grandfather gave him tomatoes to supplement their diet.

Madge never had spare money and hoped, when her father died that she would be able to cash in an insurance policy that she had paid into on her father before he remarried. Cashing it in required her step family to sign and for whatever reason they failed to do so.

Madge died in the mid 1950s.

Tommy Dodds July 2016