CULVER ROAD
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To help create a mental picture of life during the war, I have been asked to give more details of the house where Olive and Eric lived. Culver Road is located on a small estate of house built in the late nineteen thirties by several local building firms.
It is a brick built, end of terrace built by a company called Sheriff. His houses were considered to be better built than some of the other houses built by other companies. All the houses had decent sized front gardens and rear gardens. 2 Culver Road even had a side drive on which, after the war, a garage was built, one of the few on the estate.
The house originally cost around $400 but with wages around £3 a week that was no small sum. Home ownership was still not the norm with renting being the usual option for working people.
Olive and Eric moved to the house in 1936 and furnished it with furniture from chain stores popular at the time. The layout of the house can be seen from the attached diagrams.
On the ground floor life mostly was lived in the kitchen/living room. The sitting room was used mainly at weekends or if visitors arrived. Heating was by a small coal fire in each room.
The kitchen had a sink, draining boards and a Revo electric cooker, very modern for it's time, most people still used gas. The was a small table with four wooden chairs and a small arm chair where Olive took a 'nap' every afternoon. A pantry to store food was attached to the kitchen. One luxury was the Marconi console radio which stood on the floor and which provided entertainment every evening and news of the progress of the war.
The sitting room was furnished with a large sideboard in highly glazed veneers, a matching table and four heavy wooden chairs, a brown three piece leather covered suite and a standard lamp. French windows opened onto the garden. Later in the war a steel Morrison 'table' air raid shelter was squeezed into this room. This was a metal table everyone hid under and was supposed to provide protection if the house collapsed.
Upstairs was a bathroom which did not include a toilet, that was outside in a brick outhouse. Not until the nineteen sixties did it get moved inside ! The boys bedroom had a cot for the baby and a single bed, a dressing table and a wardrobe. Olive and Eric's room had a matching bed set of double bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers and dressing table all in a art deco style plus a lloyd loon chair and matching linen box.
Not a palace but well furnished especially compared with the terraced houses which most relatives lived in. The war put a stop to this movement of people out of the terraced streets into larger, spaced out estates and not until the fifties did it start to recover
Top of Page CULVER ROAD THE HOUSE LAYOUT
UPSTAIRS
Black-bathroom, dark blue- boys bedroom, light blue- landing,
red-girls bedroom, green -main bedroom, yellow-staircase
DOWNSTAIRS
Red-kitchen/living room, light blue-pantry, purple-alcove with
coal hole under stairs, green-stairs, yellow-hall blue-sitting room. www.OliveandEric.com
copyright Keith Mason 2005